I have said before that the King kept all manner of arms and armours in there. So in we went. The Fox was sitting by the bedside; why, or with what thoughts, I don’t know. It was not possible he should love his old master. “Still no change,” he said. Bardia and I fell to rummaging among the mail, and soon to disputing; for I thought I’d be safer and more limber in the chain–shirt which I knew than in any other, and he kept on saying, “But wait—wait—now here’s a better.” And it was when we were most busied that the Fox’s voice from behind said, “It’s finished.” We turned and looked. The thing on the bed which had been half–alive for so long was dead; had died (if he understood it) seeing a girl ransacking his armoury.
“Peace be upon him,” said Bardia. “We’ll be done here very shortly. Then the women can come and wash the body.” And we turned again at once to settle the matter of the hauberks.
And so the thing that I had thought of for so many years at last slipped by in a huddle of business which was, at that moment, of more consequence. An hour later, when I looked back, it astonished me. Yet I have often noticed since how much less stir nearly everyone’s death makes than you might expect. Men better loved and more worth loving than my father go down making only a small eddy.
I kept to my old hauberk, but we told the armourer to scour it well, so that it might pass for silver.
19. XIX
On a great day the thing that makes it great may fill the least part of it, as a meal takes little time to eat, but the killing, baking and dressing, and the swilling and scraping after it, take long enough. My fight with the Prince took about the sixth part of an hour; yet the business about it, more than twelve.
First of all, now that the Fox was a freeman and the Queen’s Lantern (so we call it, though my father had let the office sleep) I would have him at the fight and splendidly dressed. But you never had more trouble with a peevish girl going to her first feast. He said all barbarians’ clothes were barbarous and the finer the worse. He would go in his old moth–eaten gown. And when we had brought him into some kind of order, then Bardia wanted me to fight without my veil. He thought it would blind me and did not see how it could well be worn either over or under my helmet. But I refused altogether to fight bareface. In the end I had Poobi to stitch me up a hood or mask of fine stuff, but such as could not be seen through; it had two eyeholes and covered the whole helmet. All this was needless, for I had fought Bardia himself in my old veil a dozen times; but the mask made me look very dreadful, as a ghost might look. “If he’s the coward they’d make him,” said Bardia, “that’ll cool his stomach.” And then we had to start very early, it seemed, for the crowd in the streets would make us ride slowly. So we had Trunia down and were all presently on horseback. There was some talk of dressing him fine too, but he refused this.
“Whether your champion kills or is killed,” he said, “I’ll fare no better in purple than in my old battle order. But where is your champion, Queen?”
“You shall see when we come to the field, Prince,” said I.
Trunia had started when he first saw me shrouded like a ghost; neither throat nor helmet to be seen, but two eyeholes in a white hummock; scarecrow or leper. I thought his starting boded well how it would taste to Argan.
Several lords and elders waited for us at the gate to bring us through the city. It’s easy to guess what I was thinking. So Psyche had gone out that day to heal the people; and so she had gone out that other day to be offered to the Brute. Perhaps, thought I, this is what the god meant when he said You also shall be Psyche. I also might be an offering. That was a good, firm thought to lay hold of. But the thing was so near now that I could think very little of my own death or life. With all those eyes upon me, my only care was to make a brave show both now and in the fight. I’d have given ten talents to any prophet who could have foretold me that I’d fight well for five minutes and then be killed.
The lords who rode nearest me were very grave. I supposed (and indeed one or two confessed as much to me afterwards when I came to know them) they thought Argan would soon have me disarmed, but that my mad challenge was as good a way as any of getting him and Trunia both out of our country. But if the lords were glum, the common people in the streets were huzzaing and throwing caps in the air. It would have puffed me up if I had not looked in their faces. There, I could read their mind easily enough. Neither I nor Glome was in their thoughts. Any fight was a free show for them; and a fight of a woman with a man better still because an oddity; as those who can’t tell one tune from another will crowd to hear the harp if a man plays it with his toes.
When at last we got down to the open field by the river there had to be more delays. Arnom was there, in his bird–mask, and there was a bull to be sacrificed; so well the gods have wound themselves into our affairs that nothing can be done but they have their bit. And opposite us, on the far side of the field, were the horsemen of Phars, and Argan sitting on his horse in the midst of them. It was the strangest thing in the world to look upon him, a man like any other man, and think that one of us presently would kill the other. Kill; it seemed like a word I’d never spoken before. He was a man with straw–coloured hair and beard, thin, yet somehow bloated, with pouting lips; a very unpleasing person. Then he and I dismounted and came close and each had to taste a tiny morsel of the bull’s flesh, and take oaths on behalf of our peoples that all the agreements would be kept.
And now, I thought, surely now they’ll let us begin. (There was a pale white sun in a grey sky that day, and a biting wind; “Do they want us to freeze before we fight?” I thought.) But now the people had to be pressed back with the butt–ends of spears, and the field cleared, and Bardia must go across and whisper something to Argan’s chief man, and both of them must go and whisper to Arnom, and Argan’s trumpeter and mine must be placed side by side.
“Now, Queen,” said Bardia suddenly, when I had half despaired of ever getting to the end of the preparations, “the gods guard you.”
The Fox was standing with his face set like iron; he would have wept if he had tried to speak. I saw a great shock of surprise come over Trunia (and I never blamed him for turning pale) when I flung off my cloak, drew my sword, and stepped out on to the open grass.
The men from Phars roared with laughter. Our mob cheered. Argan was within ten paces of me, then five; then, we were at it.
I know he began despising me; there was a lazy insolence in his first passes. But I took the skin off his knuckles with one lucky stroke (and maybe numbed his hand a little) and that brought him to his senses. Though my eye never left his sword, yet I somehow saw his face as well. “Cross–patch,” thought I. He had a puckered brow and a sort of blackguardly fretfulness about his lip, which perhaps already masked some fear. For my part, I felt no fear because, now that we were really at it, I did not believe in the combat at all. It was so like all my sham fights with Bardia; the same strokes, feints, deadlocks. Even the blood on his knuckles made no difference; a blunt sword, or the flat of a sword, could have done as much.
You, the Greek for whom I write, may never have fought; or if you did you fought, most likely, as a hoplite. Unless I were with you and had a sword, or at least a stick, in my hand I could not make you understand the course of it. I soon felt sure he could not kill me. But I was less sure I could kill him. I was very afraid lest the thing should last too long and his greater strength would grind me down. What I shall remember for ever is the change that presently came over his face. It was to me an utter astonishment. I did not understand it. I should now. I have since seen the faces of other men as they began to believe, “This is death.” You will know it if you have seen it; life more alive than ever, a raging, tortured intensity of life. Then he made his first bad mistake, and I missed my chance. It seemed a long time (it was a few minutes really) before he made it again. That time I was ready for it. I gave the straight thrust and then, all in one motion, wheeled my sword round and cut him deeply in the inner leg, where no surgery will stop the bleeding. I jumped back of course, lest his fall should bear me down with him; so my first man–killing bespattered me less than my first pig–killing.