Mountains, Knives, and Ideas
The next day passed much the same as the previous, plodding along the dirt track that served as a road with the shadow of the mountains growing ever longer. The ground grew harder under them as the cold settled into it, and as it sloped gently but inexorably upwards, their pace slowed. They camped in the evening on a relatively flat space by the bend of the trail, before it turned to head into the Thasryach Pass itself, ending the day at a considerably higher and chillier point than where they started.
Regardless, once camp had been made, Allystaire produced a pair of sheathed knives from one of his saddlebags. Both had glittering gems, one blue, one green, set in the hilts. He handed one to Gideon, who held it at arm’s length as though he expected it to bite him.
“First rule,” Allystaire said as he stepped away, “is never look confused, even if you are.”
“So the first rule is deception?”
“Not as such, though a little skulduggery in a knife fight might go a long way,” Allystaire said, reaching out and adjusting the boy’s fingers so that his hand was wrapped around the knife, the hilt squarely in his palm. Gideon resettled his fingers uncertainly.
“Now, we are going to keep the sheaths on for now so that nobody gets cut, but in future, you are going to have to learn what it feels like to swing the blade. Spread your feet.”
The boy looked at him blankly.
Allystaire leaned forward, placed a hand on the lad’s shoulder, and nudged his feet apart with the toe of his boot. “Spread your feet. You do this because you do not want to be knocked over easily.”
“You would knock me over no matter what I did,” Gideon pointed out.
“No reason to make it easier for me.” Once the boy’s feet were spread out to his liking, Allystaire regarded Gideon with a careful eye. “Hold on to the knife tight enough that no one can take it from you.” He waited a moment, as Gideon’s fingers moved on the hilt, before he darted forward and lashed out, one hand grabbing the boy’s wrist, the other prying the knife from his hands. The boy frowned at him, and Allystaire offered him the knife again, flipping it around and extending it towards the boy hilt first.
Gideon took the knife, and set his lips in a thin, tight line, wrapped his hand firmly around the hilt, and extended his arm uncertainly.
Allystaire crouched slightly, leading with his left foot, keeping his own knife obscured with his left arm. “If it comes down to knives, you have to be willing to accept that you will get cut.” Cold, that’s true of almost any fight, he thought.
Even as this occurred to him, Idgen Marte snorted from where she watched, lounging upon the cold-stiffened grass. “Don’t listen to him, lad. Only dullards get cut.”
The boy mimicked Allystaire’s stance, and even started to mirror the much larger man’s movements, slowly shuffling side to side.
“The important thing to remember,” Allystaire said, “is that if he can cut you, you can cut him.” Unless he’s got a bow. Or a crossbow. Or is wearing good plate. Or is ahorse. Or knows how to hold a shield. Stop pretending. You’ll get the boy killed.
Allystaire suddenly lunged forward, bringing the edge of his sheathed weapon across Gideon’s upper arm, while seizing his knife hand around the wrist.
“Why are you not trying to cut me?” Allystaire shook his head and stepped back. “Again. Do something with the knife this time. Whatever comes naturally.”
Once more, Allystaire lunged forward, only to suddenly duck as Gideon’s sheathed knife flew haphazardly through the air, tumbling end over end and sailing over his head.
“What in the Cold was that?”
Torvul and Idgen Marte, meanwhile, were doing a poor job of stifling their laughter.
“You said do whatever came naturally. So I did.”
With a sigh, Allystaire retrieved the knife and handed it back over. “Gideon. This is a knife you stab with. A knife you cut with. Not a knife you throw. Those are mostly useless, unless you want to spend several years doing naught but learning how. Even so, they have to be specially made. What is more, never throw the only weapon you have except at desperate need.”
“I’ve seen you throw your hammer,” Idgen Marte quipped, smirking.
Allystaire turned to her, his face tight with anger. He raised his right fist, and said, “You have also seen me beat a man to death with this. So my rule about not throwing the only weapon you have stands.”
Idgen Marte studied Allystaire closely for a moment, staring hard into his face as much as the light would allow. The laughter melted from her dusky features, and she nodded. Allystaire turned back to Gideon.
“Now,” Allystaire said, “Your best bet with that short of a blade is to let your man get himself stuck on it. Again.”
Once again, the sheathed blade held forward in his hand, thumb pressing just at the very base, Allystaire lunged. Gideon stood his ground, knife held tentatively before him. The boy did nothing.
The big man sighed, then gently prised the knife from the boy’s hands. Gideon lowered his eyes to the ground and said, “I have failed. I will accept punishment.”
“Punishment?” Allystaire tilted his head, brow furrowed.
“Yes. Bhimanzir believed that punishment hardened the mind and the body against future failures.”
“You might have noticed that Bhimanzir is dead.”
“Yes.” The boy lifted his head, eyes narrowed. “Meaning?”
“Meaning we do not do things his way. Not now, not ever. No man ever won a fight the first time he held a blade. We just have to figure out what it is we can teach you. Torvul, surely, can teach you the rudiments of the crossbow.”
“The bows you have in these lands being barely worthy of dwarfish hands, rudiments is all I could possibly teach,” the alchemist put in.
“And Idgen Marte, no doubt, could teach you something. About skulking or backstabbing, perhaps.”
“We call that ‘fighting smart,’ not that he’d understand it,” she said, briefly hooking her thumb at Allystaire.
Gideon nodded seriously, almost solemnly. “If this is what you ask of me as my new masters, I will do it.”
There was a jumble of voices, as Torvul, Allystaire, and Idgen Marte all rushed to protest. Allystaire waved them silent with an upraised hand, and said, “Nobody here is your master, Gideon. You have no master any longer. That is in the past.”
“Yet it is only natural for men to sort themselves into masters and servants. So said the Eldest.”
“Eldest?” Torvul hopped to his feet, more sprightly than usual.
“The first sorcerer,” the boy said. “Also the name given to the head of any given coven of sorcerers. Some accounts among the scriveners of the Concordat conflate the first Eldest with their own Georthg the Wise, yet that seems entirely unlikely given certain known facts about Georthg’s life, distant though they are from our own days.”
“You and me are gonna have a lot of nice long chats, boy. Starting tomorrow.” The dwarf looked to Allystaire and said, “Provided it fits with your ‘knightly training,’ that is.”
You couldn’t make this boy a knight if you had a decade and a yard full of the best men you taught to help. The thought came unbidden to Allystaire’s mind, and perhaps bitterly, but not, he knew instinctively, entirely without truth.
“Knighthood is a foolish and stultifying tradition,” the boy suddenly said, “and I have no wish to take part in it.”
As Idgen Marte and Torvul laughed again, Allystaire forced a grimace into a flat, calm expression. “I have no wish to make you a knight, but I do want to keep you alive between here and Thornhurst, and if you should happen to pick up the odd skill that helps me do that, so much the better. To that end, you,” he said, pointing a thick finger at Gideon, “will rise with me, a turn before everyone else, starting tomorrow.”
The boy’s back suddenly straightened and his nostrils flared. “You contradict yourself. Just now you told me you were not my master, and now you speak to me as though you are. Which is true? I owe you, but I will not be misled.”
Allystaire blinked in surprised, but slowly nodded. “You are right, lad. Let me amend my statement—should you wish to learn things, the staff, the crossbow, the knife—I will be awake a turn before everyone else, and I will teach what I can to you. Not an order. A request.”
Gideon nodded, mollified, if only slightly. He turned and went to seek his pile of blankets, close to the fire, next to Bethe’s. Torvul busied himself retrieving the stone disks he had set in the fire, using his thick gloves to slide them under each pile of blankets. Then he trundled himself towards his wagon, with a brief backwards glance at Allystaire and Idgen Marte and some grumbling in his own language.
Allystaire stared into the gathering darkness, while Idgen Marte turned her face towards the moon, a curved silver blade in the far sky.
“Boy’s right. About knighthood. Still, I expected you to cuff him.”
“Two years ago, had a lad of twelve spoken to me that way in the yard at Wind’s Jaw, I would have done worse than cuff him,” Allystaire said, grimly.
“Twelve?”
“In Oyrwyn we start them young. Twelve would be old enough to put on his first armor and take his first real blows. He would have had a sword in his hand at five, six summers, depending on his father.”
“And you had the training of them?”
Allystaire turned to face her, his lips pressed thinly together. “There was no one better at it. Not in Oyrwyn, not anywhere. Understand that I do not say this with pride, not in the way I might have done once.”
“So what would you have done to a lad of twelve, for the back-talk?”
“The first time? Mayhap I would just cuff him. If it kept up, there would be a good deal of running. In armor, carrying rocks, holding a shield above his head, that kind of thing. If it kept up after that? Into the yard with me, gambesons, and blunted swords.”
“Cold,” she swore, and let the word hang in the air. “You’re a hard man, Allystaire.”
“I was,” he admitted. “Perhaps I still am. I come from a hard business, a hard country. And a line of hard men, so far as I know.”
“Coldbourne,” Idgen Marte murmured. “Did your grandfather choose the name, or was it given him?”
“Came with the fief and the Hall. Still, I often wondered if the Old Baron’s father gifted him that estate on purpose. As the Succession Strife rolled on, there was no shortage of empty Seats.”
“Why do you lot keep fighting over a throne none of you could hold?”
“Lionel’s generation, and mine, we were born to it. A man is told ‘this is what we do and this is who we fight’ by his father, his Baron, by every piece of the structure he helps prop up, he comes to believe it.” He paused and turned back to her. “That is no excuse. I know that now. I have no idea how to stop them, even if I had the army to do it with.”
“Give them a k—”
“Do not finish that thought,” he snapped.
“I didn’t mean you. Cold, but you’d be a horrid king. Worse than the Rhidalish.”
“Oyrwyn fought for the Rhidalish kings, you know. For or against, does not seem to matter much today,” he admitted. “The Vale of Kings is naught but a ruin now, and what bits of valuable land surrounded it have been snapped up by Innadan, or Machoryn, or Damarind. Every once in a while a pretender shows up, but why one man over another, anyway, even if one could prove his patrimony? Strength is so often an accident of birth; Her words. So is kingship.”
“So is knighthood—which is precisely why it is foolish.”
Allystaire was silent a moment, his eyes searching the darkness that was now nearly total in the wood around them.
“That is true. And yet, mayhap it is just how we go about it. The idea of knighthood, Idgen Marte, that is not so foolish. It could mean something, if only we went about it the right way.”
“What in the Cold do you mean, the idea? A rich man gets to stay rich so long as he’s willing to put on five or six stone of steel and clobber other rich men?”
“Well, that is one kind of knighthood. What about knights in stories? What did they do?”
“Mostly kill things. Monsters and brigands and other knights.”
“Aye, but it is not the what that matters. It is the why. I have heard a few songs in my day. Reddyn the Redoubtable, Reddyn of the Red-Hand. Cold, if half the stories have an ounce of truth it would be more like Reddyn-the-Red-to-the-Elbow. But why? Like other knights and heroes in stories, he did it so that other men, women, children—some that he knew, many that he did not—could sleep well by their fires and never worry about the darkness surrounding them. He did it without asking them for their links, or the fruit of their labors, or their daughters. If knights did that, could be made to do that? Then the idea would not be half so foolish.”
Idgen Marte absorbed his words in silence. Finally, she spoke, smiling wryly. Though it was too dark to read her face, Allystaire could hear it in her voice now, he knew it so well.
“If knights could be made like you, then yes. The idea would have merit, as you say. But, Ally, they can’t. The path you walk is a narrow one. Most men would founder.”
“I might.”
“You won’t. And even if you did, I’ll be there behind you to set you right.” She clouted him companionably on the shoulder, then turned away. “Enough with foolish talk. Wake me in two turns.”