Sword-Shopping

 

 

CADET AJEWEN CHERIS and her civilian girlfriend Linnis Orua paused outside the shop. A banner of ink painted onto silk fluttered in the flirtatious artificial breeze. Orua had grown up on a station with less naturalistic ideas of aesthetics, and found this dome-city with its aleatory weather nerve-wracking. She was still spooked whenever there was a wind, which entertained Cheris because Orua had long, luxurious waves of hair that rippled beautifully. “We were always told to be aware of strange air currents as a possible sign of carapace breach!” Orua had protested when Cheris teased her about it.

“‘Blades for All Occasions,’” Cheris read. She had been saving for this moment throughout her first two years of academy, and practicing for it besides. Orua didn’t understand her fondness for the sport of dueling, but she had agreed to come along for moral support.

“Well, no sense in lingering outside,” Orua said. She grinned at Cheris and walked forward. The door swished open for her.

Cheris followed her in. A tame (?) falcon on a perch twisted its head sideways to peer at her as she entered. The falcon was either genetically engineered or dyed, although she wasn’t sure how she felt about either alternative: its primary feathers shaded from black to blood red, with striking metallic gold bands toward the tips. It looked horrendously gaudy and quintessentially Kel.

Orua was busy suppressing a giggle at the falcon’s aesthetics. Cheris poked her in the side to get her to stop, then looked around at the displays, wide-eyed. Her eyes stung suspiciously at the sight of all these weapons, everything from tactical knives to ornamented daggers with rough-hewn gems in their pommels and pragmatic machetes.

Best of all were the calendrical swords. Deactivated, they looked deceptively harmless, bladeless hilts of metal in varying colors and finishes. Cheris’s gaze was drawn inexorably to one made of voidmetal chased in gold, with an unusual basket hilt. It was showy, extremely Kel, and an invitation to trouble. Only a cadet who had an exemplary record and was an excellent duelist would dare carry such a calendrical sword. Besides, the lack of a price tag told her there was no way she could afford it even if she could, in honor, lay claim to such a thing.

Cheris sighed, then looked up into her girlfriend’s eyes. “I wish,” she said, her voice soft.

“Let me help you pick,” Orua said, pointedly ignoring the sales assistant who was watching them with his arms folded behind his back.

Cheris blinked. “I thought you didn’t know anything about dueling?” she teased. Orua paid more attention to the special effects and makeup on dueling shows than the actual dueling.

“I don’t know anything about dueling,” Orua said as the sales assistant’s expression turned imperturbable, “but I know a lot about you.” Her eyes became sly, and Cheris hoped that Orua wouldn’t get too specific here of all places. Orua grabbed Cheris’s hand and tugged her to a completely different display. “Look!”

At first Cheris wasn’t impressed by the calligraphy-stroke plainness of the calendrical swords in the case. Then she made out a faint iridescence on the metal, like that of a raven’s feather. She particularly liked the one whose textured design incorporated the first digits of the base of the natural logarithm.

Orua stooped to whisper right in Cheris’s ear, “Tonight I’m going to see how many digits of that number you can recite before I get you to—”

“I’ll buy this one,” Cheris interrupted, very loudly, and pointed.

The sales assistant smiled ever so faintly.

 

 

Author’s Note

 

I took a semester of Classical Fencing in college, which formed the shaky basis of all the dueling in the hexarchate setting. I kept things vague because there is only so much you can learn in one semester, and additionally I was not notably good at it. As I write this, I am once again a novice fencer, this time doing electric foil at the Red Stick School of Fencing. I’ve only been taking classes for a year, and I’m pretty sure I am literally the worst student in the Advanced Adult class. I’m still working on a functional parry in four (quarte)! But it doesn’t matter, in a way. Coming to fencing at the age of thirty-nine, I don’t expect to become good at a competitive level. I love the discipline of fencing and the tactics and the lore and the drills, and that’s why I do it. And who knows? Maybe someday I’ll score a touch.