'You used to travel alone and now you are second in command to a tribe of two hundred.'
'That's right.'
'I will not fight you.'
'You insist upon meeting our master Sol?'
'Certainly not!'
Tyl controlled his temper with obvious difficulty and turned to Sos. 'What now, advisor?' he demanded with irony.
'Now you take Tor's advice.' Sos didn't know what the beard had in mind, but suspected it would work.
'I think his weak spot is his pride,' Tor said conspiratorily. 'He won't fight if he thinks he might lose, and he won't put up more than a few men at a time, so he can quit as sqon as the wind blows against him. No profit for us there. But if we can make him look ridiculous-'
'Marvelous!' Sos exclaimed, catching on. 'We'll pick up four jokers and shame him into a serious entry!'
'And we'll assign a core of chucklers. The loudest mouths we have.'
'And we have plenty,' Sos agreed, remembering the quality of heckling that had developed during the intense intergroup competition.
Tyl shrugged dubiously. 'You handle it. I want no part of this.' He went to his tent.
'He really wanted to fight himself,' Tor remarked. 'But he's out. He never laughs.'
They compared notes and decided upon a suitable quartet for the circle. After that they rounded up an even more special group of front-row spectators.
The first match began at noon. The opposing sworder strode up to the circle, a tall, serious man somewhat beyond the first flush of youth. From Sol's ranks came Dal, the second dagger: a round-faced, short-bodied man whose frequent laugh sounded more like a giggle. He was not a very good fighter overall, but the intense practice had shown up his good point: he had never been defeated by the sword. No one quite fathomed this oddity, since a stout man was generally most vulnerable to sharp instruments, but it had been verified many times over.
The sworder stared dourly at his opponent, then stepped into the circle and stood on-guard. Dal drew one of his knives and faced him-precociously imitating with the eight-inch blade the formal stance of the other. The picked watchers laughed.
More perplexed than angry, the sworder feinted experimentally. Dal countered with the diminutive knife as though it were a full-sized sword. Again the audience laughed, more boisterously than strictly necessary.
Sos aimed a surreptitious glance at the other tribe's master. The man was not at all amused.
Now the sworder attacked in earnest, and Dal was obliged to draw his second dagger daintily and hold off the heavier weapon with quick feints and maneuvers. A pair of daggers were generally considered to be no match for a sword unless the wielder were extremely agile. Dal looked quite unagile-but his round body always happened to be just a hair out of the sword's path, and he was quick to take advantage of the openings created by the sword's inertia. No one who faced the twin blades in the circle could afford to forget that there were two, and that the bearer had to be held at a safe distance at all times. It was useless to block a single knife if the second were on its way to a vulnerable target.
Had the sworder been a better man, the tactics would have been foolhardy; but again and again Dal was able to send his opponent lumbering awkwardly past, wide open for a crippling stab. Dal didn't stab. Instead he flicked off a lock of the sworder's hair and waved it about like a tassel while the picked audience roared. He slit the back of the sworder's pantaloons, forcing him to grab them hastily, while Sol's men rolled on the ground, yanked up their own trunks and slapped each other on shoulders and backs.
Finally the man tripped over Dal's artful foot and fell out of the circle, ignominiously defeated. But Dal didn't leave the circle. He kept on feinting and flipping his knives as though unaware that his opponent was gone.
The opposite master watched with frozen face.
Their next was the staffer. Against him Tor had sent the sticks, and the performance was a virtual duplicate of the first. Kin the Sticker fenced ludicrously with one hand while carrying the
