Caius Britannicus wanted a new weapon, much stronger than the spatha, a cross between a spear and an axe, to be used by a man on horseback against men on foot. A chopping weapon, but he insisted it had to function like a sword."
"This is fine," Ambrose said softly, hefting the thing in his hand and moving his arm slowly through a gliding pass. "A fine weapon."
"I made a discovery about it, later—or, more accurately, about one of its fellows—and now I want you to help me discover if what I suspect is true. If it is, and I do believe it is, then there is something else we must do, you and I, in secrecy."
Ambrose was gazing at me in amusement, a half-smile upon his lips, and now he shook his head. "I do not even wish to ask. I know you'll tell me when the time arrives. In the meantime, how may I help you discover this truth?"
"Take this and give me that." We exchanged swords again, and now I began waving my long, curved blade through the air. I ended up holding it out to my right, inclined slightly upward from the horizontal, clenching the hilt firmly in both fists. Ambrose merely watched, awaiting his instructions.
"This is one of Varrus's best blades, Ambrose. He smelted the metal himself, and tempered it. It's quite superb. But of course, the one you are holding is quite probably the greatest blade ever made by any man, anywhere. Now, I want you to swing your blade as hard as you can and try to knock this one from my grasp. Don't be tempted to use the flat of the blade. It is essential that you use the edge. I have no tricks in mind, I promise you. But strike away from me, because there's no cross-hilt on this sword and Excalibur could take off my arm more cleanly than you could imagine. I will not move, nor will I try to deflect your blade in any way. I am simply going to stand here and hold out this sword, and I'll try to hold onto it when your blow falls. You understand?"
He nodded, stepped back and fell into his fighter's crouch again, concentrating on what he was about to do. When he unfolded again into swooping, powerful motion it was beautiful to behold, and I caught my breath as Excalibur's shining blade painted great, hissing swaths of brightness and glittering colours in the drabness of my quarters. Then Ambrose transferred all of his weight and momentum onto the ball of his left foot and brought that deadly scythe sweeping around to clash against the blade I held extended to my right. I had been awaiting the concussion and was set for it, my muscles braced against the shock that I knew would hammer them, but the thing was dashed from my grip as though I had no hold on it at all. The force of the wrenching impact sent me whirling away backwards and I fell to my knees against one wall as the sword I had held clanged hard against another and clattered to the floor.
Ambrose stood, astonished, as though paralyzed, his face blank with surprise, his eyes shifting between the blade in his hand and the sight of me, sprawling against the wall off to his side. As I moved to regain my footing, bracing myself against the wall with my outstretched left hand and shaking my right arm to banish the numbness, he finally rallied and moved towards me, lowering his sword's point to the floor.
"Merlyn, are you hurt? What was that? What happened here?"
I cradled my tingling right arm in my left, holding myself above the elbow, which felt numbed and dead. "I'm well enough, Brother, an A unsurprised. What happened here is exactly what I had surmised might happen." I nodded towards the long sword lying on the floor against the other wall. "Look at that."
He glanced downward, and I heard the hiss of his indrawn breath. The long Varrus sword lay bent and broken, its finely wrought blade twisted and misshapen. Before he could say anything, I spoke again.
"Check your blade. Is it damaged?"
He whipped Excalibur up, close to his face, and examined the blade closely, but I knew he would find no blemish. "No," he said, eventually. "It's not even dented."
I stooped and picked up the Varrus sword in my right hand, briefly aware of the painful tingling in my fingers as they closed about the hilt. A great, vee-shaped gouge almost severed the blade, the wounded metal glinting, raw and fresh and new-looking, among the rust that covered the rest of it. Excalibur's keen edge had struck deep, penetrating the metal of the other blade as though it were wood or lead, twisting and wrenching it out of shape with effortless force, then lodging firmly enough for the momentum of Ambrose's swing to rip the weapon from my clutching hands and cast it aside effortlessly, ruined and useless forever thenceforth. I held the broken thing up for Ambrose's inspection. Its long blade was twisted and bent far out of true in two directions: one where it had bent sideways around the impact of Excalibur's smashing bite, and the other in a tortured twisting of the very metal surrounding the point of impact, skewing it like wrought iron twisted in a forge. I dropped the now useless weapon to the floor.
"There is the reason underlying my playing with sticks, Brother. The need for practice swords ... or for one specific practice sword."
"I don't follow you."
"I know you don't, but you will. What you have just done defines and underlines my problem. There's no blade in the world that can withstand Excalibur. It cuts through other metals, without losing its own edge. It is unique, and that, I have decided, is its tragedy."
"Tragedy!" Ambrose's shout was a scoffing laugh. "What's tragic about it? The thing is magical and utterly unbelievable. No tragedy there, Brother."
"No, I agree, just as there was no weakness in Alexander's sarissas."
That wiped the smile from my brother's face. "What? There's no comparison. Where can the weakness lie in Excalibur? Most ordinary men, seeing what it can do—like cutting that blade in half—would swear it to be magic and live in fear of it. The warrior who carries it will be invincible, and the envy of the world."
"The king, you mean ... the king who carries it."
"Aye—" he broke off, eyeing me askance. "It is to be young Arthur's, isn't it? You have not changed your mind on that?"
"No, I have not. He is his father's son and heir to the Pendragon lands and kingdom in his own right. I have had no change of heart in any part of that. But I am concerned about training the boy to face the task he must, here in these hills, so far away from Camulod and from others who would bring out the best in him. And if he is to master this new sword of his, Excalibur, instead of merely swinging it, then he must have someone wielding a weapon fit to withstand his, against whom he can practice."
"Well, you will train him, won't you? He'll fight you, and Dedalus and Rufio and all the others. No shortage of trainers, I think."
"No, but you are still not hearing me. Excalibur's weakness is its strength, Ambrose! I have nothing with which to train the boy—no Excalibur against which he can swing Excalibur." I nodded towards the broken thing in the comer. "That was a superior sword, a Varrus blade. It was cut almost in half with one blow. How am I to train the boy to use the weapon adequately when there is nothing comparable to it? It won't ever be enough simply to train him with another sword, a lesser weapon, because then he'll be master only of a lesser weapon, lacking the refinement, the edge, the balance and the strength of this sword, this blade, this excellence."
As I spoke the words, I saw comprehension breaking in my brother's eyes. Almost immediately, he started to smile, and then his smile grew into a radiant grin as he subsided into one of my chairs, grounding Excalibur's point between his feet.
"What?" I asked him. "You can find humour in that? Why are you smiling? What is it?"
He swung the point of the sword up from the floor, holding it now above his head so that the weight of the hilt and pommel pressed into his lap and patterns of reflected light raced along the mighty blade that reared between us. "This thing, Excalibur. Did anyone work with Publius Varrus in the making of it?"