Chapter 42: A Victory Costs Something

Osric registered it flatly, the way he would have registered a river being too deep to ford.

Not braver. Not harder. Better. He does it correctly and I do it the way I learned it in a wall of men, and out here on flat ground with room to move, correct wins.

So it has to be short.

He went for short.

He came in low and fast with everything he had, four strikes in about three seconds, driving off the back foot and taking the exchange to the man rather than waiting on it: a cut at the shield edge to move it, a thrust at the armpit, a hard chop down at the knee, and then the whole weight of his shoulder behind the shield to put him off balance.

Any two of those would have finished a man in a shield wall.

The champion took the first on his boards, turned the second aside with the flat of the sword, stepped his leg back out of the third, and absorbed the shoulder without moving his feet more than nine inches.

Then he hit Osric in the face with the rim of his shield.

It came out of nowhere and it was extremely well done, a short flat punch of the boss and the rim together, and Osric's head went back and something in his nose gave and the whole world went white and hot for a moment.

He got his shield up on instinct and the sword came down on it and split the top board and he was on his back foot and going backward and could not see out of his left eye for blood.

Somebody in the crowd made a noise.

He got four paces of ground back by pure obstinacy, wiped his eye with the back of his shield hand, and set himself again.

Right. Short's not available.

That was the moment the fight changed, and both men knew it, and neither of them said anything.

What came after was not the sort of duel that anybody puts in a song.

It went on. That was its whole character. It went on and on, past four minutes and past eight and past what anybody standing on that hill had come to watch, and it got uglier and slower with every exchange, and the three hundred people round the ring stopped making any noise at all.

The champion could not finish it.

Nobody had expected that, least of all him. He had come out to kill an old serjeant in three minutes in front of a crowd and had been given a man who would not go down and would not stay away and could not be hurt through mail in any of the places he was hitting.

And Osric could not hurt him back.

That was the horror of the middle of that fight, and he would think about it for years. He hit the man perhaps a dozen times in eight minutes. He hit him across the shoulder, twice, and the plate turned it. He hit him on the upper arm and the fluting shed it sideways. He got a good clean cut in on the outside of the thigh above the knee and the tasset took it and the man did not even shift his weight.

There is a particular despair that comes over a man who is landing blows and achieving nothing, and Osric had felt it once before, on a wall at nineteen, and had hoped never to again.

So he went for the gaps.

That was all that was left, and both of them knew it, and it turned the whole business into something closer to butchery than to fencing.

The armpit. The inside of the elbow. The back of the knee. The four inches of throat above the gorget and below the helm. Osric hunted those four places for the next several minutes with everything he had, and the champion defended them, and every failed attempt cost Osric a little more of what he had left.

They came together twice at the halfway point and could not get apart.

The first time they went shield to shield with their boots slipping and stood there straining like two oxen at a stuck cart, close enough that Osric could hear the man breathing inside the helm and could smell the oil on the plate, and they broke apart when the champion got a knee up into the mail over Osric's belly and Osric went back three steps with his stomach cramping.

The second time was worse.

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They collided and fouled and both went down.

It was not a throw. Neither of them did anything skilful. The champion's foot went into the badly filled depression six paces from the middle, which Doran had told Osric about at first light, and he stumbled, and Osric was already coming forward and could not stop, and the two of them went into the frozen earth together in a crash of steel that the whole hill heard.

What happened in the next twenty seconds had nothing to do with the old form.

They rolled. Osric got his forearm across the man's throat where the gorget met the mail and leaned, and the champion got two fingers into the eyehole of nothing because Osric wore no visor and simply drove his gauntleted thumb into Osric's cheekbone instead, hard, twice. Osric hit him in the side of the helm with his pommel and it did nothing. The champion got a hand round the messer's crossguard.

Osric bit him.

He got the man's wrist between the plates where the gauntlet met the vambrace and put his teeth into it through the mail voider like an animal, and the champion made a sound and let go, and Osric got a knee under himself and shoved off and staggered up.

The champion came up a half second later.

Neither of them said anything. Neither of them had breath to.

Somewhere in the crowd a man began to be sick.

They fought on.

The next stretch was the worst and Osric could afterward remember very little of it. He knew that at some point his shield had lost its lower third and that he had gone on using what was left. He knew that the blood out of his nose had run down inside his mail and had begun to go cold. He knew that his arms had passed the point where they burned and had arrived at the point where they simply did not do what he told them at the speed he told them.

He knew that the champion had begun to make a small noise on every second breath.

That was the first good news of the morning.

He's tiring. In that plate. In this cold.

Which means he'll want it finished now, and a man who wants it finished takes a risk.

He gave him a risk.

He let his shield come down. Not far, and not obviously, and not for long: a hand's breadth for about a second and a half, on the fourth exchange after the fall, when a man who is tired and wants to be somewhere warm is looking for exactly that.

The champion took it.

He came in beautifully, and he came in fast, and he committed his weight to a thrust at the gap above Osric's collarbone that would have gone through the mail and the man and out the back.

And Osric was not there.

He had rolled his shoulder out of the line and let the point go past him, and got his shield edge up under the man's extended arm, and for one entire second the champion was over-committed with his weight on his front foot and his sword arm out straight and his shield swung wide by the momentum.

Osric put the messer into the inside of the elbow.

It went in about four inches through the voider and turned on bone and came out again, and blood came after it in a hard spurt that went a good way across the frozen ground.

The champion made a noise inside the helm.

The sword did not fall, because the fingers still worked, but the arm dropped and did not come back up cleanly, and everybody on that hill saw it.

Somebody in the crowd shouted something at last.

Now.

Osric went after him.

He got four blows in, on a man who was giving ground for the first time all morning: the shield rim into the front of the helm, a cut at the wounded arm that landed and did more, a boot into the man's knee that did nothing at all, and then a hammering downward strike that the champion caught on his own shield and that drove him onto one knee.

And Osric could not finish it.

His arms had gone. He got the messer up for the stroke that would have ended it and it came down about a third slower than it needed to, and the champion

turned it aside with the boards and came up off the knee into him and drove him back six paces on the shield.

Then the counter came.

It was a low strike, sharp and controlled and beautifully done even one-armed and half spent, and it snapped in under Osric's mail skirt and into the meat of his thigh, three inches above the knee.

The pain went up his leg like a struck bell.

His footing faltered. His weight went onto the bad side and the bad side did not want it, and he lurched, and his guard came down about a hand's breadth.

The champion saw it.

He stepped in and raised the arming sword for the finishing stroke, high and clean, all of it correct, and he did it with an arm that was pouring blood down onto his own boot, and he did it anyway, because he had been trained by somebody who paid for it when he was fifteen.

And Osric let go of the messer.

It fell out of his hand and hit the ground and he did not watch it go, because he was already stepping in.

He went inside the swing.

There was no room to do anything else and no time to do anything better, and all of it depended on what he had understood about the man in the first thirty seconds: that he had been trained beautifully and had never once in his life been fought by somebody who did not care what the fight looked like.

The stroke came down and Osric took it on the shield, high on the boards, and it split them and drove his own shield edge back into his shoulder hard enough to numb the arm to the fingers.

And his free hand went to his belt.

The dagger was narrow and old and had a bone grip worn smooth over about thirty years of exactly this, and it came out of the sheath the way something comes out that has been drawn ten thousand times in the dark and in the wet and in a smoke-filled ruin.

Osric came up under the raised arm, chest to chest, close enough to smell the oil on the man's plate, and put the point up under the gorget where the throat is and drove it in through the mail and the leather and everything behind them.

The champion stopped.

It was very sudden and very complete. The sword came out of his hand and fell. His weight came forward onto Osric, and Osric held him up on the blade a moment, and their eyes were about six inches apart.

There was no hatred in the man's face. There was only surprise, and a kind of terrible ordinary confusion, and Osric looked into it and held his gaze and did not look away, because a man owes another man that much and it costs nothing.

Then the weight went, and the champion went backward onto the hard-packed earth, and lay there with one leg folded under him.