"Now, do as I do. This is very simple." I held my arms outstretched towards him, my stick grasped easily in both hands at its ends. He did the same, and I beckoned him towards me until our fists were touching, knuckle to knuckle. Then I raised my arms vertically over my head, feeling my stomach flatten and the flexor muscles of my shoulders stretch, and I watched Ambrose closely as he copied my movements exactly. This was a flexing movement I found easier now than I had a few months earlier, when I first began these exercises. In the beginning, I had cramped quickly, my muscles unused to the contortions to which I was suddenly subjecting them. Now, after months of practice, I was more supple, much more flexible, and I knew Ambrose would already be feeling the strain in his shoulders.
"Comfortable?"
He nodded, the slightest hint of perplexity in his eyes, and while his head was yet dipping I released my left hand, whipping my long, heavy stick around to the right and down from above my head to whack loudly against the thickened hide of his heavy cuirass, sending him reeling but unhurt, releasing his own left hand from its grip on his stick so that his right waved aimlessly, still clutching his "weapon." Before he could recover, I leaped in close and whacked him again, this time with an upsweeping, backhanded blow from left to right that took him viciously beneath the right shoulder, rattling against the covering over his ribs and once again forcing him to fall back. Even as he went I was on the move again, gripping my stick firmly now in both hands and driving the end of it forward, hard and fast, my weight solidly behind it, to strike him clean above the breastbone so that his balance was undone at last and he fell on his rump. As soon as he was down, I leaped back and crouched, facing him, holding my stick firmly in a two-fisted grip, one end pointed unwaveringly at his head.
He sat sprawling backwards, his hands out-thrust behind him. His stick lay on the ground beside him. After a long, silent time, he pursed his lips and began to rise to his feet, his look one of quiet determination as he sought and found the stick he had dropped. Then, holding his weapon like me, in a two-fisted grip, he began to circle me warily, his eyes on mine, waiting for an opportunity to strike a blow of his own.
I moved with him, fading backwards, balanced easily on the balls of my feet, and then I feinted rapidly forward and to my left before snapping back to where I had been. But Ambrose, my wily brother, was not gulled and did not react; he was content to wait. He and I had fought before and he knew many of my patterns, as I knew many of his. In this contest, however, I was confident of winning, for I had been practising this new technique for months, whereas he had never seen it before now. Ambrose was no man's fool, however, and least of all mine ... we were much too alike. I soon saw that we might circle here all day, but that he was not going to commit himself to any attack without having had some opportunity to study the proper moves. Finally I made a throat-clearing noise and nodded to him, coming to a stop.
"Very well, go ahead. I won't move. Hit me."
He looked at me quizzically, his expression sceptical, eyes twinkling. "You won't move at all?"
"I won't move while you're deciding where to hit me. After that, I'll move. You won't hit me."
"Huh." He straightened up and spun his weapon inward, one-handed, so that the end of it came to rest beneath his armpit, and I knew immediately, instinctively, what his next move would be.
Ambrose routinely wore a long, slender sword, modelled on the Roman cavalry spatha, designed purely for stabbing men on foot from the back of a light horse. The spatha was admirable in its originally intended use, but as a fighting sword, for brutal, toe-to-toe conflicts, it was worse than useless. Its blade was overlong and too slight, so that it would bend and even break when used against a better-tempered weapon. In the earliest days of Camulod's conversion to cavalry, Publius Varrus, the Colony's master armourer and my own great-uncle, had designed longer swords than the spatha, with broader, stronger, better- tempered blades. This was the sword Ambrose preferred. Its length and construction almost dictated its use, in terms of technique for a man on foot—hence my foreknowledge of what Ambrose would do next.
Sure enough, Ambrose renewed his stance and his two- handed grip, his knees bent, right foot slightly ahead of the left, his "blade" pointed at my sternum. He froze, his eyes locked in total concentration before he grunted and whipped into a blur of action, his weapon sweeping up and then around above my head and down again in a backhanded slash designed to cut the legs from me. I knew the arc of his sweep, I knew the point at which it would change course and be converted to a stabbing, jabbing lunge before being whipped upward again into an overhand, vertically dropping chop.
Without removing my eyes from his I dropped my "point," sweeping my blade strongly, backhanded, to block his downward slash. Then, before he could reverse into his stab, I grasped my stick in both hands, leaving a space the width of my chest between them, and pushed into his stab, sweeping my hands high and forcing his thrust upward, to graze my face and shoot above my head while I reversed the grip of my right hand, dropped my arms and shoulder and rammed the thick end of my weapon solidly against his ribs, knocking him sprawling for the second time. This time, however, before he stopped rolling, I was above him on one knee, the end of my stick pressed against his neck.
He made no effort to move, content to lie there panting until his breathing had returned to normal, by which time the silence had stretched long. "Shit," he said, eventually, and made to sit up. I heaved myself backwards onto my feet and helped him up, then stood watching him as he dusted himself off and rubbed ruefully at his buttocks.
"Now you know."
"Aye." He looked at me askance. "Practice swords, just like the old Roman ones, but new, and better. When did the idea occur to you, and what occasioned it?"
"Come with me and I'll show you."
I led the way back up the steep hillside towards the west gate of the fort, a distance of little more than thirty paces, and from there we went directly to my quarters. Shelagh and Ludmilla were leaving as we arrived, having delivered, according to Ludmilla, a box of new-made papyrus sent to me from my supplier in Camulod. I politely invited them to stay, but was secretly pleased when they declined. I moved, immediately on their departure, to open a large packing crate that lay against the rear wall, and from it I pulled the smaller case that held Excalibur. I opened the case, withdrew the sword itself and passed it, hilt first, to Ambrose.
"Here. Now I need your help, so swing it a few times. Get used to the weight and the feel of it again, because I'm going to want you to use it in a moment, to demonstrate a point."
As he began to swing the massive weapon, making the light flicker along its long, gleaming blade, I turned again to the larger crate, this time pulling out a long spatha-style sword. It had a boss between the hilt and the blade, in the style of the Roman gladium short-sword; there was no hint of a cross-guard of any kind. Beneath a light coating of reddish-brown discoloration too fine to be called rust, it looked like a fine weapon, very slightly curved, the tip of its blade broadened, flared and slightly elongated, keen- edged and almost leaf-like. Ambrose stopped what he was doing, holding Excalibur's blade vertically as he stared at me and the sword I now held. I reversed my grip and extended the new sword to him and held my other hand out at the same time for Excalibur. We exchanged weapons and he immediately brought the blade of the new sword up close to his eyes, scanning it minutely, pressing the ball of his thumb against the edge of the blade.
"I've never seen this before. Where did it come from?"
"From the Armoury in Camulod. It's a Varrus sword, one of the original prototypes he made with Equus when he was redesigning the old spatha. Before I was born, and years before they discovered the secret of the stirrups,