“Then,” he said, “it will be the axe, because it is what you have. I have held it, while you were sleeping. It is well balanced. It is light, and easy to wield. Hold it two handed, just like when chopping wood. And remember, you hold a unique weapon.”
He moved my hand up a little, and then the other down. “A unique weapon?” I asked.
“Most men hold their shield with the left hand. With your axe, it is easy to switch it to a left handed strike, easier than learning to use a sword with your left. And you have a swing that comes easy to their unprotected side.” He held his shield up to demonstrate. “Swing slowly.”
Like chopping at a tree from the left, I did, and I could see what he meant. He had to move aside to get the shield in front of him. “I’m making you move around,” I said.
“You’re controlling the fight. From the first swing. There are other things you can do with the axe. For example, you can swing it past them and yank back, getting their neck with the downward facing edge of the axe’s point. You can stab at them with the upward point of the blade. Spike them with the side away from the blade shaped so conveniently just like a spearpoint. Use the axe as a hook, to sweep them off their feet.”
There was more. And halfway through the slowly shown moves, I stopped. “You know a great deal about fighting with axes.”
Bojdan paused. “It’s a peasant’s weapon… and my first.”
“Why do so few use it then?” I asked. “Everyone has one.”
Bojdan thought about it, as if for the first time. “It’s not the weapon of a warrior, but of the low peoples. It’s for chopping trees and bramble, not flesh. That is what fighters say. Did the guards in Khaim work for their meals, or do nothing but soldier?”
“No,” I shook my head. “They only soldiered.”
He grinned, and warmed to subject. “So whether mercenaries or trained soldiers, it’s the people who hold weapons who choose what they use the most. And they are not the same people who farm. So the axe isn’t seen as a battle weapon.”
I understood. “And that is good for me.”
“Maybe,” Bojdan shrugged. “There are many unusual weapons on the field. People who spend their lives loving weapons bring their preferred lover to the field of play. But it is not those small things that determine a battle. That is decided by things that take place long before foes meet.”
I perked up. Bojdan commanded the fighting men of the caravan. It sounded like he had seen more combat than just scaring off bandits. “Like what?”
“It is how many soldiers are raised,” he said. “Your axe will do you no good against a well aimed arrow. But an archer would have trouble escaping the jab of a sword. And so on. It is the mix of weapons and people, and how many you wield. It is how fresh they are. How healthy. Valor and intention are good for the heat of a battle, but if you are vastly outnumbered, there is only so much bravery can do.”
I hefted the axe and thought about it. Bravery while charging the four Paikans had only gotten me beaten and left on the ground. “You need to win the battle before your first stroke.”
Bojdan grinned. “Yes. And speaking of strokes, right there is a sapling we can take back for firewood for the cooks. Remember, chop from your left, the tree’s right, to get past its shield.”
“What shield?” I asked.
Bojdan walked past me even as I said that and strapped his shield to a branch that jutted out enough to be used as a temporary arm.
“Get to it!” he ordered.
And I took on the small tree as if it were a raider, or as I now thought of them, a Paikan, swinging past the shield and biting the axe into the meat of the sapling’s bark over and over again, until it toppled forward and Bojdan yanked me out of the way.
“Never get so focused that you forget what else is around you,” he said, as the tree struck the ground beside us.
For four weeks we continued. Slow moving practices against each other, and fast ones when I faced more trees. Bojdan carved a blunt axe out of wood for me, swaddled with cloth, and a light wooden scimitar padded just the same for himself.
With these we dueled in the ever thickening woods beside the caravan. The road began to slowly move back away from the coast, into the foothills. The ever-present smell of salt faded away, and we stopped passing seaside villages.
Few towns existed here in the thick overgrowth, due to bramble. Only a few solitary homesteads fought back, alone, becoming trapped by the increasing thicket and bramble just miles north of the road.
Occasionally we saw dim figures watching us go past, and the guards fingered their arquebuses, but nothing ever happened.
For a big man Bojdan moved damnably fast, constantly bruising my ribs and shoulders as we practiced, even slamming the padded scimitar down on my neck with swipes of his practice weapon.
Every time he hit me he’d mutter ‘dead,’ in a toneless voice.
But by the fourth week, he stopped saying that and moved on to ‘maimed.’
After we fought, we’d run to catch back up to the caravan, sitting on the most rearward defense wagon, panting and catching our breath.
I slept in a bunking wagon, filled with slat beds mounted on the walls. Ten women shared the tiny space, but I hardly knew them, even after four weeks. Except for Anezka, who’d been there as I woke up from my bramble sleep.
I came to the wagon always tired after Bojdan’s training.
I would crawl right into my bunk and fall sleep.
Bojdan and his men never saw me weaken. I’d worked among men in the butcher shops enough to know their minds. To know that to show weakness, tears, or anything other than humor and rage was to invite judgment.
But alone in the bunks, when sleep failed me, and I was alone with nothing more than the sounds of snoring women and the darkness that pressed against me, then
I would sometimes surrender to tears as I thought about Set and Duram.
Because of that, I feared being alone with my mind. So I trained every moment I could, worked every second I could bear.
At first the women in the bunking wagon did not speak to me, or even meet my eyes, until the oldest, a lady with a leathery weathered face called Alka, asked if maybe I was fighting with Bojdan because I was not really a woman.
“I bore two children the Paikans took,” I told her. “Torn from me like the old healer tore them from my body when they both refused to come easily. Would you have me expose myself to everyone in here to prove you wrong?”
I grabbed the hems of my skirts as if to raise them.
Alka shook her head quickly, scandalized, and the younger girls in the wagon laughed at her. “Of course she’s a woman,” the one called Anezka said. “She is the Executioness, remember? Not the Executioner!”
I shook my head at Jal’s name for me. “Don’t call me that,” I asked. “I am just Tana.”
The women settled at Anezka’s berating. Anezka was, I had found out, a Quartermaster. The large mass of caravaners in the trailing edge provided the needs of the whole human train. Anezka and others like her handled accounting for supplies, and kept the trade goods under lock and key.
“There’s the Roadmaster,” she had explained once over a stewpot hanging from the balcony of the bunking wagon as we ate, “and then there’s the Quartermasters. We really run it all.”
The more I listened to the women chat in the wagon, the more I realized they were the grease that kept the caravan’s wheels from seizing.
There were questions and pieces of information constantly bandied around me between the bunks: whose aurochs needed better feed? How fast was the caravan going? By the way, Anezka had noted a couple days ago, the flour was getting low, if they didn’t get some barrels refilled, they’d run out in a week.
All these things and more these women knew.
Jal directed the caravan, but my bunkmates made the caravan a living creature.
And I was not one of them, though with the exception of Alka, they all treated me with careful
