This is life, the way things work. All these things, Rictus knew. But he had been taught well, so he took his father’s spear in both fists and ignored the pain and started thinking about how to kill these smiling men who had come about him.
With a short, yipping yell, the first bounced in to attack, a high-coloured face with a black beard framing it, and eyes as bright as frosted stones. He held his spear at the midpoint of the shaft, and thrust it at Rictus’s collarbone.
Rictus had grasped his own weapon at the balance-point, a short arm’s length from the butt, and thus had a longer reach. Two-handed, he clapped aside the point of his attacker’s spear and then reversed the grip of his own—all in a movement which was as beautiful and fluid as the steps of a dance. As his own spear spun, it made the other two men jump backwards, away from the wicked edge of the aichme, the spearhead. Two-handed again, he lunged with the sauroter, the lizard-sticker they called it, a four-sided spike of bronze which was the aichme’s counterweight. It struck the black-bearded man to the left of his nose, punched through the thin bone there for the depth of a handspan before Rictus jerked it out. The man staggered backwards like a drunkard, blinking slowly. His hand came up to his face, and then he sat down hard on the sand as the blood came spurting from the square-sided hole in it, steam rising in the cold air.
Another of the three screamed at this, raised his spear over his shoulder and charged. Rictus had time only to throw himself aside and went sprawling, his spear levered out of his grasp as the aichme plunged in sand. As he got up the third man seemed to rouse himself also, and stumped into the fight unwillingly. He was older, a greybeard, but there was a black calm about his eyes. He moved in as though thinking about something else.
Rictus rolled as the second man’s spear stabbed the sand at his side. He got his arm about it and clamped the spearhead against his injured ribs, the pain scarcely felt. Then he kicked up with both feet and one heel dunted his attacker in the groin. The man’s cheeks filled. Rictus came up off the ground at him, climbing up the spear-shaft, and butted him in the face with all the strength left in his torso. The bronze of his helmet rang, and he was glad of it for the first time that day. The man fell full length on his back and coiled feebly in on himself and the red ruin of his face.
A moment of triumph, so brief it would not even be recalled later. Then something seized the horsehair crest of Rictus’s helm from behind.
He had forgotten about the third man, had lost him in his brief, bloody map of things.
The crest-box grated against bronze, but the pins held. A foot thumped into the hollow of Rictus’s knee. He tumbled backwards, his helm askew so that he was blinded. His feet furrowed the sand uselessly. Someone stood on his chest, and there was a grating noise, metal on metal, as a spearpoint lifted the chin of his helm, slicing open his lower lip as it did so.
The older man, the greybeard. He had hair like a sheep’s pelt on his head and his eyes were dark as sloes. He wore the old-fashioned felt tunic of the inner mountains, sleeveless, ending above the knee. His limbs were brown and knotted with blue veins over the bunched muscles. One handed, he raised the aichme of his spear until it rested on Rictus’s throat and pricked blood there.
When Rictus swallowed the keen spearpoint etched fire on his throat. He felt the blood flowing more freely from his side now, darkening the sand under him. It was trickling down his chin also. He was leaking at the seams. He breathed out, relaxing. It was done. It was over, and he had done something to make them remember him by. He looked up at the washed-pale blue of the sky, the fading of the year’s glory, and the oyster catchers came piping back into it to resume their places on the strand. He followed their flight as far as he could with his eyes.
The older man did also, the spear is steady in his fist as if it had been planted in stone. Behind him, his two companions were thrashing in the sand, struggling and hooting with sounds that seemed barely those made by men. He glanced at them, and there was naked contempt in his face. Then he stabbed his spear in the sand, bent, his foot pushing the air out of Rictus’s lungs, and yanked the helm clear off the younger man’s head. He looked at him, nodded, then tossed it aside. The sword followed, flicked through the air like a broken child’s plaything.
“You lie there,” he said. “You try to get up, and I finish you.”
Rictus nodded, astonished.
The man poked his finger into the bloody lacerated hole in Rictus’s side, and Rictus stiffened, baring blood-slimed teeth. The man grinned, his own teeth square and yellow, like those of a horse. “No air. No bubbles. You will live, maybe.” His eyes sharpened, danced like black beads. “Maybe.” He see-sawed his bloody hand in the air, then slapped Rictus across the face. A blunt forefinger with a filthy, over-long nail tapped Rictus on the forehead. “Stay here.” Then he straightened, using his spear to ease upright again and grimacing, like a man who has been remonstrating with a child.