Asked about it afterward, neither man could pinpoint the occasion when the next degree of challenge actually emerged. It simply turned out that one day, instead of spinning their third blades, the two men had begun matching their twin blades against each other, testing each other's defensive and offensive skills. From that time on, they never played three blades again; they pitted their skills against each other, and those skills became formidable. No other would have dreamed of standing against either of them.
Sitting beside Ambrose, I told him how the contest had evolved. "That's what gave me the idea for the new sticks." Ambrose merely glanced at me, wide eyed. "The forward leap," I continued, knowing that he had not understood me. "The leap from one sword to two, then to a third, and then to this. For more than a thousand years, men learned to use those wooden swords to perfection. Their weight—twice that of their real, iron swords—meant that the men's arm muscles were huge and agile. Their real swords felt like feathers in their hands, and with them, they conquered the entire world. Gladium and scutum—short-sword and shield. Nothing in the world withstood them for a thousand years. With your gladium in your right hand, your scutum in your left, defending your squad-mate on your right while the man on your left defended you, you were invincible— a Roman legionary. That lasted for longer than a millennium. And now they're obsolete, within the space of our lifetime. The legions are all gone. Their troops are scattered, their techniques abandoned, and their short-swords useless without that man defending on your left, without the legion's hierarchy, traditions and discipline.
"Now men use longer swords, but they don't use them well, because there is no discipline for using them. There's no way of training to fight consistently with them, because there's no consistency in the swords themselves. They're long, but they're all of different lengths and weights, and even shapes. The old techniques of training—one man facing a wooden post, practising cut, thrust and stab—won't work with these long swords. The longer blades demand a wider swing, and therefore they deliver less precision in attack. There is no organized technique for them, no ritual defence, no skilled, detailed procedure of attack.
"And then one day I saw Ded and Rufio using two swords each, two hands, flashing and displaying skills the like of which had never been seen before, by me or anyone. Two hands, two blades—twice the speed, twice the weight and twice the skill. And in my mind I saw, all at once and without warning, a longer stick—a staff—twice as heavy as Excalibur, requiring twice the effort to control its arc and thrust and stab."
Ambrose was staring at me now, paying no heed to the men below, who had stopped fighting and were laughing now together, bent over and wheezing for breath, still unaware of our presence above them. "And?" he prodded.
"And I spoke of it to Dedalus and Rufio." I shrugged. "We made some practice pieces, from some unseasoned wood, then dried some others in a kiln, experimented with the length and weight, trial and error, and evolved the prototypes you saw and used today."
A shout of raucous greeting from beneath told us our presence had been discovered. Ambrose glanced down and waved, smiling, but then turned back to me. "But you used two hands on the stick. You would not do that with a keen- edged sword, not without losing your fingers."
"No, I would not, but a stick is not a sword. These staves of ours are weapons in their own right, as well as practice swords. And as weapons, they have advantages that swords don't have—weight, heft and bluntness. They are clubs, bludgeons as well as swords. Let's go down. We can talk more of this later, with Ded and Rufio. I promise you, you will find great pleasure and great usefulness in this. The simple fact of working consistently with these new things—we have no name for them, we call them simply staves— improves everything in which a fighting man might seek improvement, afoot or mounted: balance, dexterity, weight distribution, strength of arm and leg and wind."
Much good did come of what Ambrose would learn that day, but that day itself was not the time best suited for the learning of it. Ambrose and I ended up, stripped to our loincloths and "assisted" by a highly jocular quartet of sawyers from Ravenglass, working in the saw-pit, occasioning great merriment to all who came to watch, as everyone made sure to do. The saw-pit, as we princes of Camulod discovered, was a humbling place, constituting a rite of passage all on its own.
I know that saws have been around forever, ever since the first men learned how to shape and sharpen metal and make it do what they required of it. The story of the making of the first saw blade is one long lost to history, but, once discovered, the secret swept across the world. Saws earned their place among the most widely used of tools and implements: first they were used on wood, to shape round tree trunks into straight-sided beams, and then eventually, with the development of stronger metals, they were used for cutting certain kinds of stone. Saws became so commonplace that people who were not sawyers seldom took note of them. It must have been similar, therefore, it seemed to me, with saw-pits: they were common things, but seldom noted and widely ignored. Most men might live their lives in ignorance that such things even existed. I know now, however, from my own experience, that no man who has worked in a saw-pit could ever forget or ignore the existence of such places.
Consider the felling of a tree. It has grown to maturity in its own place, while endless generations of men have lived and died, and its heartwood is sound and solid, the finest, strongest material available to men for building their constructions, from huts to barns to houses and great halls, and from wagons and wains to galleys and the great biremes, triremes and quadriremes of the now vanished Roman trading fleets. The time arrives for the tree to be felled, trimmed and fashioned into lumber, squared and planed and shaped to men's requirements. The axes bite and chew, and after time has passed and sweat and toil and keen-edged blades have done their work, the tree falls crashing to the ground. Now the limbs and branches are removed, and the great tree is sawn into log lengths. That part is easy. The difficulty comes in transforming the logs, which are cylindrical, into squared beams or planks.
Thus was the saw-pit created, and it is among the simplest, most functional workplaces in the world: a pit beneath a system of cradles and pulleys for holding logs. Each log is laid above the pit and sawn lengthwise, by teams of men using long, heavy, double-handed saws. One man stands above the log, the other in the pit beneath, and they change places frequently, since the man on top must work harder than the man beneath, pushing downward on the cutting stroke and pulling up on the return. Nevertheless, the man below spends all his time waiting for the moment when he can climb above, because below, he is constantly enveloped in the sawdust from the cutting above. His entire body is a seething mass of relentless itching caused by the sawdust, and the sap it contains, adhering to his sweat-covered skin, clogging his eyes, ears and nostrils, and clinging densely to every hair on his tortured body.
Sawyers love to see a novice approach the pit, and they take intense delight in pointing out how much less work there is in being beneath, and then in gulling the raw newcomer into a rash commitment to remain below for longer than a normal man can stand. Hence the jocularity of our quartet of assistants and the hilarity with which the others all came to watch as Ambrose and I laboured mightily, and sweatily, beneath the constant, clinging, aromatic cascade that blinded us and blocked our nostrils and our mouths and drove us to our knees, coughing and spluttering among the mounds of yielding, treacherous, foot-fouling and sweet-smelling oaken sawdust.