The unsettling thought occurred to me that given the situation of war between Hamal and Vallia — an eventuality I dreaded — my duty would be to kill this Strom Lart in any way I could, duel or no duel. But I had already made up my mind not to kill him, for affairs of that nature tended in Hamal to drag on with potential litigation and all kinds of entanglements. The situation baffled and infuriated me. All manner of common sense attitudes are scattered to the winds in wartime. How could I conceive of Nulty, and Chido, and Rees, as mortal enemies? Was this not a situation similar to that which made of my friends Tilda the Beautiful and her son Pando the boy Kov of Bormark my enemies through the hostility of Pandahem and Vallia?
Stupid, stupid. .
The duel had been set for late evening (all the murs of Kregen have their own names, varying with the seasons, of course), and at last I roused myself, had a meal, bathed, and, again, hurled the other boot at Salima as she purred in with a sponge to scrub my back. I dressed carefully. Around my waist I wrapped the old scarlet breech-clout. With that drawn up and buckled I donned a fresh frame of mind. Over that I wore a fine white ruffled shirt, dripping with lace. A pair of dark blue trousers, strapped under my boots, concealed them completely. I slung a fur-trimmed satin jacket of a lurid green color over my shoulder by its golden chains, rather after the fashion of a hussar’s pelisse. The rapier and dagger I selected were a matched pair given me by Delia. They were superb weapons. I had declined the Trylon Rees’s kind offer of a set of his own weapons. Most of the rapiers in use in Ruathytu had been purchased in Zenicce, part payment for vollers, probably, and were of good quality. My friends of the House of Eward were fine swordsmiths. Soon the Hamalians would be forging rapiers themselves, although the armories were hard at work turning out thraxters and stuxes for the army. But these two, the Jiktar and the Hikdar, the rapier and main-gauche, were of pure Vallian make, superb. That thick-bladed knife I always refer to as my old sailor’s knife, for all that this specimen had never been to sea, went as ever strapped over my right hip.
“Now,” I said to my wavering reflection in the mirror. “To sort out Strom Lart. And, sink me!” I burst out, all to myself, puffed up with anger and bile. “If he tries to be clever I’ll skewer him, by Makki-Grodno’s diseased left eyeball!”
In the event I had to be clever myself, for as I entered the dueling hall, and saw the eager faces of friends and enemies, and heard the bets being called — a fatuous business, that, with the bets on just what Strom Lart would do and how he would do it, and the artistic execution of his designs — I realized it would still pay me to preserve my cover. Chido was there, but Rees was not well enough to attend. Casmas the Deldy was there. He had brought his passionflower, his lily of desire, the china doll beauty, Rosala of Match Urt. She looked dreadful, I could see, beneath the paint and powder. Casmas, I saw at once, had been unpleasant to her.
When a noble family falls on hard times and they plan to recoup their fortunes by marrying off a beautiful and nubile girl of the family to a fabulously wealthy moneylender, they do not much care for the girl to ask strangers to rescue her. Her family, those prideful, hard-eyed, hard-lipped men I had seen outside
I remember the duel that followed with some warm affection. I clowned about, as I had done in alley-fights with Rees. At the last moment my blade would flick across, as though purely by chance, and deflect Lart’s thrusts. I stumbled about, and flailed the rapier as though it were an ax, and retreated with my legs twinkling, and slipped so clumsily as to let Lart stagger past barely missing by a whisker the blade that had no intention — then — of sinking into his vitals. I needed to keep clear of public entanglements with the confoundedly pedantic laws of Hamal.
The crowd yelled and hullabalooed, and I had plenty of time to take my eyes away from Strom Lart and his bloodthirsty swashbucklings to look at Rosala. She sat frozen like a lump of black ice — black ice, despite her whiteness.
Chido was beside himself, yelling: “Keep him out, Hamun! Bladesman! Bladesman!”
Strom Lart’s followers were chanting also, and the din built up into an inferno of sound. Having clowned around long enough, I decided to finish the thing. Lart had skill, of that there was no doubt. But he did not have the experience that might have told him I merely toyed with him. As I was not acting the part of a master swordsman baiting an inferior, toying with him in that sense, but, instead, acting as though I were in terror of my life and only managing to keep alive by the most atrocious series of passages of good fortune, I fancied the keen eyes of the master swordsman from Ponthieu, Leotes, might not have penetrated my antics. Leotes stood at the side, limber and lithe, his dark handsome face intent on the bout. I marked him. I took care when the climactic point came that Strom Lart’s gross body blocked Leotes’ view.
Lart rushed, using a quite clever system of connected passes (all the terms of Earthly fencing could be brought in; suffice it to say Lart used a passage linked by a strict discipline taught him by swordsmen from Zenicce), and I yelped aloud, and twisted, awkwardly and with smooth subtle cunning, and then stepped back, my left hand high, withdrawing the blade from Lart’s right arm. His rapier, snared by my dagger, snaked up alongside my dagger, and my rapier snaked up, also, through his arm. He dropped his main-gauche before he dropped his rapier.
For a single and fleeting instant, as I recovered, I let my point hover at his throat. I looked into his eyes. I laughed at him.
“How easy it would be, Strom Lart!”
“You — you-” he gobbled. He held his arm and the blood was already dribbling between his fingers. I swung away.
The judges declared the duel ended in blood and honor and we could collect our winnings and go home. Casmas was so exuberant he actually came up and slapped me on the back.
“By Havil, Amak! You have done me a good turn this day! No one expected you to live! And the bets
— all the lovely golden deldys — you are to be congratulated, Amak Hamun!”
Casmas was raking in the deldys. He had made a killing here if no one else had. I did not reply. Chido was wringing my hand and bubbling, quite forgetting to collect his winnings from Casmas. I willingly allowed them to carry me off in triumph to a late supper. Casmas, who lived in a sumptuous villa, but not in the sacred quarter, excused himself, smirking, saying his passionflower awaited. Rosala’s family went with Casmas. They were brilliant, foppishly dressed men, yet hard and flint eyed.
We settled down to serious drinking, Chido, Nath Tolfeyr, Tothord of the Ruby Hills, old fussy Strom Dolan, and others of our cronies. We missed the Trylon Rees, for the Numim was acknowledged the leader in all our escapades.
“Let us go to him and turn him out of bed, and tell him the news!”
“No, no!” I shouted weakly. “He needs his rest.”
“He’ll rest all the better when he hears, Hamun! Come on!” And Chido and Nath Tolfeyr laughed and yammered and would not listen to me, and so we trooped out into the night, ruffling it in our cloaks, with our rapiers swinging, beneath the moons of Kregen.
Well, I will not weary you with our antics that night as we traversed the sacred quarter, hunting trouble. A spirit of adventure, sheer mischief, floated in the warm air.
We ran yelling with laughter from the watch, and they, despite the strict rules and laws of Hamal, were never so anxious to catch us. We drank from bottles, and we lost stupid old Strom Bolan, who fell down the steps into a dopa den, and yelled at us as he staggered up that since he was down here he would stay, and crack a bottle or two of dopa, and we yelled down that he was a fool and an onker; he hiccupped and pushed through into the den and we, cursing him for his folly, left him and pressed on to Rees’s villa. Well, as I say, we were young and high- spirited, for all that our ages would have made us appallingly old on this Earth, and we roused Rees and he roared his joy at our news and fresh bottles were brought.
By the time I slipped away the Maiden with the Many Smiles floated serenely above, and the Twins were eternally orbiting each other midway down the western sky. The light was far too great for the kind of enterprise on which I embarked, but I would not wait.
I insist I am not a man puffed up with pride. Pride is for fools. But I knew then, as I swung off for Casmas’ luxurious villa in the shining quarter — a select area of secluded villas tucked into the southwestern corner of the city between the Walls of Kazlili and the Black River — that this fraught emotion I experienced, which led me into harebrained schemes, was as near to baffled pride as I care to admit.
I unslung the bright green pelisse. I took off the white frilled shirt. I stripped off the dark blue trousers and the boots. Clad only in my old scarlet breechclout, with rapier and dagger belted to my waist, with my sailor’s knife over my hip, I stalked off. I had the sense to throw the great gray cloak over all; but it was touch and go, in my
