‘Well, he’ll just have to wait. I need these men to help guard my caravan,’ she said lightly. ‘After we reach Hervor, I’ll be sure to send them back, and you can prosecute them then.’
The captain didn’t appreciate her tone. ‘The Duke is sovereign in these lands, my Lady, and his orders are that these men lay down their weapons and come with us.’
‘No law makes a Duke sovereign of the roads,’ I said casually. It was one of those phrases I’d heard the Lords Caravaner use periodically, so I thought it might light a spark. ‘Furthermore, the likelihood that the Duke would pursue a crime perpetrated against Lord Tremondi – who, I should tell you, despised the Duke immensely – is about as low as the chance that you plan to let the caravan go along its merry way after you take us. What, pray tell, is the Duke’s interest in this caravan?’
‘Shut your mouth, tatter-cloak,’ the captain said, his voice tight with self-righteous fury. ‘My Lady,’ he began again, ‘it would ill suit your purposes, whatever they might be, to make an enemy of Duke Isault.’
There was a pause. I had to admit that was a very good point, and a solid counter to my legal argument that they didn’t actually have any jurisdiction over the caravan routes.
‘Very well,’ the Lady said from her carriage. ‘Trattari, you are hereby ordered to lay down your weapons.’
Well, now this was a bind. Brasti and Kest looked at me for instruction, but I wasn’t sure what the right move would be. Technically, we were the Lady’s employees. If she told us to drop our weapons, we had to drop our weapons. Also, we were trapped between the men the Duke had sent to arrest us and the caravan guards who hated us.
Captain Lynniac smiled. ‘Wise choice, my—’
‘However,’ she continued, ‘Trattari, if you go with these men and abandon this caravan, I will consider you to have breached our contract and ensure the Caravan Council knows of your failure to fulfil your contract.’
Brasti turned and stared at the closed carriage. ‘What? You’re saying we have to lay down our weapons but not get arrested? What are we supposed to do – fight them barehanded?’
‘My Lady is wise and just,’ Captain Lynniac said.
‘Of course, any of my men who wish to assist my tatter-cloaks are welcome to do so,’ she said, as if in passing.
Captain Lynniac’s eyes darted to the rest of the caravan guards, but not one of them made a move. That just made him smile more. He really did look familiar when he did that. Where had I seen that smile?
‘Well, boy,’ Feltock whispered in my ear, ‘there’s a lesson in here somewhere. Can’t tell you what it is, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out eventually.’
The captain’s men laughed. Brasti looked confused. I tried desperately to think of a way out of this, and Kest just smiled, which only made things worse.
‘Kest,’ I said slowly, ‘considering we are the very definition of damned if we do and damned if we don’t, would you mind telling me why in the name of Saint Felsan-who-weighs-the-world you’re smiling?’
‘Because,’ he said, dropping his sword to the ground and unrolling the bottom of his coat sleeves, ‘now we get to play cuffs.’
You have to understand how the sleeves of a greatcoat are constructed. The leather of the sleeve is itself quite formidable and can save you from a lot of damage. Oh, you could pierce it with an arrow if you get enough force behind it, but even a fairly sharp blade won’t cut into it. But the cuffs at the end of the sleeve, those are something different. They contain two carefully carved bone pieces sewn into the leather itself. They can take a hit from just about anything – Kest believes that they could even block the ball from a pistol, but we haven’t yet had occasion to test his theory.
There are occasions in the course of a travelling Magister’s duties where he or she might not be able to draw a weapon, either because the physical space is too tight or because, for one reason or another, you don’t actually want to carve up the person who is attacking you. For these situations, the King demanded that we be able to defend ourselves even if we were weaponless. So you unfold the cuffs of your coat and loop the leather strap attached to them to your two middle fingers. You now have a way of parrying swords, maces or other weapons that might otherwise do you harm. That is, of course, if you move really, really fast and don’t miss any of your blocks.
When we practised fighting like this, which, thank Saint Gan-who-laughs-with-dice, we did a lot in the old days, we called it ‘playing cuffs’.
‘This isn’t going to work, you know,’ I said to Kest as I flipped my cuffs over and pushed my fingers through the leather loops. ‘They’re going to get smart and use those crossbows to pick us off at a distance.’
‘You’ll figure something out,’ he replied.
‘Figure it out soon,’ Brasti said. He was probably the best bowman in the civilised world, but he rarely won at cuffs. I was pretty good at it. Using rapiers as your primary weapon, you have to learn precision, and I was never much good with a shield, so cuffs wasn’t a bad alternative.
But being good at cuffs wasn’t a strategy. The first part would be easy enough – get them to fight us up close so that their friends with the crossbows couldn’t get a clear shot. Even if we could hold them off, though, this Knight and his men would soon get tired of being made to look bad. If they couldn’t get us with swords, eventually they’d just pull back and let the crossbowmen do the job. If only our ‘comrades’ in the caravan guard had been better disposed towards us and kept their own crossbows on our opponents, we’d have stood a better chance. Unfortunately, just then they were rooting for the other guys.
‘Is there a plan?’ Brasti asked, looking at me. ‘Because if there’s a plan, then I’d love to know what it is, and if there’s not and I get killed going hand-to-sword with a bunch of Duke’s men, then I may start to lose respect for you, Falcio.’
I did have a plan. It might have sounded like a terrible plan at first hearing, but it really was not as bad as all that …
‘Sir Knight, before we begin, may I say something?’ I called out.
‘Last words? Remarkably prescient for a dog.’
‘I just wanted to say that all Dukes are traitors, all Knights are liars, and the road belongs to no one but the caravans.’
Captain Lynniac growled, and he and his men charged us.
Brasti said, ‘Please tell me that wasn’t the entire plan?’
‘Stop talking,’ I said, beating the first blade out of the way as they came upon us like a thunderstorm, ‘and start singing.’
I took Lynniac’s blade on my right cuff, using a tight circle to beat it out of the way as I sidestepped to my left. The secret to playing cuffs is that you have to pair every parry or sweep with a complementary movement of the feet, otherwise you’re likely to end up with broken hands and wrists from the force of the blows.
The first man behind Lynniac tried a thrust to my midsection while the Knight himself tried to get his blade back in the air for a down-stroke. I slid back to the right and let the thrust go right by me and kicked Lynniac in the chest before he could ready the blow. In my periphery, Brasti was using both hands in a downwards block to counter a thrust from a war-sword. I could already hear Kest in my mind chastising Brasti for poor technique: you never want to use both hands to block a single weapon as it leaves you vulnerable to the next man. I didn’t bother checking on Kest because – well, he’s Kest and that would just depress me. Instead I started the song, which, after all, was the core of my plan.