‘What, are you blind? We said five men. Men.’ I pointed with my left rapier at the smallest of the group, the one carrying the spear who looked a lot like the one with the double-knives. ‘That one’s barely a boy. His mother will weep, and I don’t need to have his drunken, cow-born half-piece whore of a mother muttering curses in my name at night. I have enough trouble sleeping without that on my conscience.’
The spearman swore at me. ‘Call me boy? You bloody tatter-cloak, I’ll show you who’s the boy here.’ He barrelled at me with his spear, not realising that the point of my left sword was already in line with his chest. I used my right blade to knock aside the tip of his spear as it came towards my belly and he stopped with the point of my sword six inches from his chest. He tried to pull back, but I used the same trick on him as I had with the constable earlier: I stepped on his spear. But he was a lot stronger, this one, so he kept a grip on it. Stronger, and dumber. I did a little stunt Kest and I used to practise as boys and ran right up the length of his spear, forcing him to drop it to the ground and letting me get within a foot of him, then I shifted my hands around so the points of my rapiers were aiming away from him and struck him on both temples with the pommels. I didn’t have to do it that way, but I had a plan, and that required that I really embarrass him.
Spear-boy dropped like night in winter and I started talking to his unconscious body. ‘Now don’t you go telling your whore mummy that you got beat up at the caravan today.’
I heard a yell from my right side and turned to see Double-knife coming at me. So I was right about that, at least, and now big brother was going to come and save the family honour. If there was one thing I’d learned in life, it was that honour just gets you into trouble.
Double-knife had good technique, though. He had the look of a rigger, the one who keeps the wagons repaired. A lot of riggers tended to be former sailors who for whatever reason couldn’t get work on a ship any more.
He kept in close so I couldn’t make use of the reach of my rapiers. If you’ve ever seen a sailor really go at someone with knives, you know the idea of parrying is preposterous. The knives are moving too fast and by the time you’ve parried one thrust, you’ve grown four other holes in your belly. You have to thrust into the attack and take a few cuts to the arm. The only problem there is that you can’t do that up close with something as long as a rapier – thrusting becomes impossible. But I’ve been fighting double-rapier since I was eight, and I have a few of my own tricks. If you’ve got limber wrists and you’re willing to grow a couple of scars, you can windmill the blades fast enough to give your opponent twice as many cuts as he gets on you.
I’ll give the man his due: judging by the white scars all over his forearms he obviously wasn’t afraid of being cut. Or maybe he was afraid of being cut, but was also really clumsy. Whatever it was, he soon realised he was getting the worst part of the deal, so he changed his style, binding my right blade back and trying to come in under my left to get at my neck. It almost worked, and I had to take the pain of leaning all the way on my wounded leg. But then I saw my opening and since I was already putting all my weight on my bad leg, I decided to take a chance.
Knife fighters tend to ground themselves hard: they fight with both feet flat on the ground, and only move to step in on you. They never think about protecting themselves against anything but their opponent’s blades and the occasional head-butt, so it came as a complete surprise to him when I rammed the heel of my left boot as hard as I could just below his kneecap. I heard a crunching sound, as satisfying as the contented sigh of any lover, as his knee broke, and he tumbled down next to his brother. Bless you, Saint Werta-who-walks-the-waves; your children are as thick as boards.
The captain ran over to his man just as the two men with war-swords started towards me.
‘Leg’s busted,’ the captain said. ‘He won’t be much use to us now.’
The lady in the carriage laughed. ‘That’s one of yours for mine, Trattari.’
‘Damn, Falcio. You’re losing us money now, you realise that?’ Brasti said.
I muttered a curse in his mother’s name and tried to shake off the pain in my leg as the swords came at me. Fighting two swords is obviously more than twice as hard as fighting one, but that wasn’t what was bothering me; I was more concerned that the man with the axe didn’t come with them. I wasn’t foolish enough to believe that I could keep baiting them into fighting me one at a time – so why would he not take advantage of the situation and come at me from behind?
I put the questions out of my head and focused on the two men in front of me. One was blond and slim, and the other was black-haired and burly, with a beard reaching halfway down his chest. I decided to call them Blondie and Blackbeard. Not very original, maybe, but I wasn’t planning on knowing them for long. They were both around the same height, which was good for me and bad for them. Fighting men of different heights means having to change your own stance all the time, which I couldn’t have done with my injured leg.
‘Ifodor, Falcio, use ifodor,’ Brasti shouted needlessly. Maybe he thought he was helping.
‘Yes, I’ve heard of it,’ I shouted back. Ifodor is a technique Greatcoats use to fight against two swordsmen; it literally means ‘enclose the blades’. It involves a lot of forearm strength, and you have to be ambidextrous to do it. I would have found the suggestion somewhat less insulting if I hadn’t been the one who taught Brasti how to do it.
Imagine two opponents, each of whom wants to outflank you, so they try to move apart from each other and circle towards you in an attempt to get either side of you. You, on the other hand, clever fellow that you are, don’t want to let them get on either side of you because it means you’ll get killed. So you step backwards, and occasionally follow the same circle towards one of them, so that the other is slightly out of reach of you, and now you’re only fighting one man for a moment and you have a chance to eliminate one enemy. Your opponents, on the other hand, bright fellows that they are, don’t want you to do this, so they keep adjusting their footing to keep you at equal distance from them, putting you in an arrow-head position with you at the point and them at the sides of the triangle. This sounds elegant, but in reality it mostly looks like two men jabbing repeatedly at one man who is trying his best to bat aside their blades with roughly the same amount of grace as a cow trying to step on a mouse.
And then we come to ifodor, enclosing the blades. You have to wait for the perfect moment, when both your opponents, through the natural rhythms that gradually bind all men together, suddenly try to thrust low at the same time, and when this happens, if your blades are in an upper guard position you can circle them downwards and enclose each of your opponents’ blades with one of your own. Now comes the tricky part: you’ve got both your opponents’ points out of line and your own swords on the inside. You flip your points up and step straight forward, keeping your blades in contact with the lower half of their swords – and thrust your points into their bellies.
Ifodor is a hard technique to perfect, but it’s devastatingly effective, and I was just about to do it when I heard Kest cough and realised I was about to kill two men and end up either dead myself or working for free. At the last second, I dropped the points lower to hit their legs. I got Blackbeard, but missed Blondie by an inch. Fortunately for me, he tried to sidestep and got his left leg tangled up in my blade. I pulled it hard and fast across his inner thigh and heard a collective gasp from the men in the crowd as I scored a wicked cut just below his nether region. I pulled my right blade out of Blackbeard’s leg with a twist that sent him down and got the point of my left rapier just under Blondie’s chin.