The Long Sword(29)

            She caught me looking and turned away, a hot flush on her cheeks.

            I went back to practising the turning of the pommel with Juan. Miles just shook his head.

            Fra Peter put an arm around Miles. ‘Just practice what you understand,’ he said.

            Miles looked at the ground a moment. ‘I don’t understand anything,’ he said sullenly. I had never heard Miles be sullen. ‘My father’s master-at-arms says I am a very promising swordsman.’

            Fiore looked at the younger man – they were, after all, only two years apart. ‘I’m sure you are, to a provincial knight in rainy England.’ He looked at us. ‘You saw what Fra Peter has just done to me? Yes? And just like that, I am disarmed and dead. Yes?’

            Miles shook his head. ‘Yes.’

            Fiore frowned. ‘You know what the worst fault of most knights is? The one that kills them?’

            I wanted to hear this. So, it appeared, did Fra Peter. He stopped wrestling with Juan.

            Stapleton shrugged. ‘They don’t listen?’ he said.

            Fiore’s frown turned to a small smile. ‘That’s not bad. But no. It is that they think they are much better than they really are, and they are not careful. You have only one skin, Messire Stapleton. If you are careful with your blade, you can win many fights against men who should have killed you. Did you see what Fra Peter did to me? Really did?’

            ‘He turned your pommel strike,’ Stapleton said.

            ‘He used my arrogance against me,’ Fiore said. He smiled. ‘That’s how to win any fight.’

            Behind me, Sister Marie laughed. ‘Women would rule the world,’ she said.

            That was the day that I discovered that mild Sister Marie, the Latinist, was an accomplished swordsman. She fenced with Fra Peter after he had us secure all the views into the stable yard. She was tall for a woman, but had nothing like the muscle or the height of a belted knight, and her weapon was an arming sword, the sort of weapon I’d grown to manhood using with a buckler. I’d seen her with her sword and her buckler while we were crossing the bandit-infested passes east of Turin, but what of it? Most women who travelled had weapons, unless they were so rich as to have men-at-arms or so poor as to have only a dagger or an eating knife. Many nuns carried staffs or even cudgels to discourage rape and thievery.

            Sister Marie moved like a snake. I had never seen anyone move as she moved. She leaned well forward, so that whichever foot was moving, her weight was out in front of her, and her sword led everything. She passed forward and forward, changing from guard to guard, and it was all alien to me, but like a lethal dance.

            Fiore’s eyes shone. ‘This is very interesting,’ he said. ‘She appears to strike from out of measure, yet it is all deception. She dances forward offering a strada, but it is all a lie. She has no line. She engages where she wishes.’

            It was not so very different from the sword and buckler of my youth except that we tended to circle, refusing to take a guard until our opponent crossed some invisible distance. Sister Marie flowed from one guard to another, sword over her left shoulder, down by her left hip, up over her head to turn Fra Peter’s cut, and then she was in at him, her little buckler over his sword arm. He wasn’t having that, and he spun and kicked her and she leaped – and giggled. And cut backhanded at his arm. He covered with his pommel high and the sword falling over his hands, blade pointed at the ground to the right, and struck crisply with both hands and she covered with her sword and her buckler, a move I knew well. I suspected that if he’d cut with all his force, he’d have opened her head; even as it was, her buckler moved.

            Each of them tried to bind, but her sword, while quicker, was lighter, and as the edges bit into each other, Fra Peter turned her blade down and touched her very carefully on her forward leg.