Mary Gentle (39 page)

I yelled out in anguish. “Dariole,
why?
”

Her sword caught the light, flashing forward.

I brought my Saxony rapier up and took her edge on the flat metal ribbon guards. No more than the triggering of instinct. The screech of sharpened metal against metal set my teeth on edge. I tasted blood—had bitten my lip, when the sword thrust clean through wool and linen, skin and muscle; piercing the meat of my thigh a span below my groin.

“
Dariole!
It’s
me!
Rochefort!” For a heartbeat I had hope that, yes, she had mistaken me for another man; that this was error on her part.

She flicked into a return; her sword going for my chest.

I shoved with my shoulder against the wooden wall, hard enough that impetus got me upright, balanced in a swordsman’s stance, all weight on my left leg. I parried, swords clashed; her guard catching and bruising my thumb-joint.

So close to death, salt sweat ran down into my eyes. I felt blood pooling in the leg of my drawers. Not the pulsing spurt of an arterial wound.
I am not a dead man standing here. Yet
.

“What are you doing!” I yelled, fending her off as the dark figure thrust, my other hand by instinct drawing my dagger.
And yet I cannot hurt her
. The wall at my back held me upright. “Dariole!
Stop!
”

The light caught on her blade as it licked out. I got a waft of the smell of blood, my own blood, that tightened my throat. She dropped her point swiftly under my hand and cut.

Cloth ripped across my belly as, with a frantic reflex, I slashed her blade out and away with my dagger. Every muscle tense, waiting for my stomach to fall open and spill intestines—

No pain.

In peripheral vision below, I caught the flapping of slashed wool below my belt, trunk-hose opened, stuffing leaking out.

She took a step closer. I saw her face in the brown-gold light. She frowned like a child engaged in school-work. There was not time to think that I was fighting to live: her sword cut back, curving up from the straw-strewn earth towards my groin.

I caught her blade under mine, forced it down—relaxed the necessary fraction that would bring her sword sliding up the length of mine in a rebound, and made the twist to catch it between my guard and cross-hilt, that must either disarm her, or break her blade—

She thrust her dagger-point into my ring-guards instead, ripping up the brown kidskin of my gauntlet; locked her hilt with mine, and kicked me hard up on the outside of my wounded right thigh.

Pain whited out my vision, my thought.

Pain in my hands did not tell me I fell; I was too disorientated to recognise the earth under me. Dagger gone, sword gone; wrenching myself over with a choked gasp, so that I did not lay on my butchered leg—

“You son of a bitch.”

The voice of Dariole, Arcadie de Montargis de la Roncière, hissed at me, I couldn’t tell from where. Ahead? Behind? I scrabbled with my left leg, to put myself against the wall and be defended.

I put my right foot down, to push myself upright.

Blood squelched in my boot. Pain shot through me from knee to hip, harsh enough to rip a scream out of my throat. I fell heavily back down.

“You never
told
me.” Dariole’s whisper filled the silence, after my shriek.
“You never told me he could use me as a hostage.”

Her voice came from beyond anger. I couldn’t see. Coming laggardly to the reason why, I wiped streaming tears of pain hastily out of my eyes.

Sunlight flooded the dusty shadows of the mill’s stables. I lay with my back to the wall. Past her now, closer to the exit. The light fell full on her.

She stabbed at my face with her rapier. A shaft of sunlight caught some brightness about her face—her teeth exposed in an expression that would be ludicrous in cold blood. A mad clown’s grin.

Grunting, without sword or dagger, I flailed wildly with my arms, praying the wool of my doublet might absorb some of the cut. Eighteen inches of her blade, from tip to near mid-point, dripped dark. I spasmed to avoid it.
“Dariole!”

Cloth ripped down my right arm. I could neither see, nor judge, nor get up from where I huddled. Her sword’s point skewered into my biceps, close by the healed scar that Fludd left.

I’m going to die here, I thought, with such perfect clarity that I was not afraid. Disturbingly, I felt relief. The death-wish of the professional duelist: it’s over, it’s done, I need not keep fighting, I can rest.

No, I have never given in to that.

The tip of her sword blade entered my focal distance and paused.

The brown shade in the stables only let me see the white of her ruff above her dark body. Light ran up her blade as she lowered the tip.

Calculations went through my mind unnoticed. Grab her sword and I’ll be gutted by the dagger from her off-hand. Kick her legs from under her, and a foot of steel goes into my belly. If I
can
kick.

“Rochefort,” she said.

I heard a ragged, raw, new edge to her voice, just in that one word. Her stance was economical. I saw the abandonment of any flourish that was not directly aimed at killing. By her face, it could have been a week since she last slept.

The automatic instincts of a duelist assessed her.
Sleepless, she’ll lack stamina; but she’s the more dangerous because half-crazed.
…

As Valentin Rochefort, the man and not the duelist, I wanted to push myself forward and sprawl on my face, at the toes of her boots.

You did not tell me.

She could have put her point into my throat and I would not have noticed. It was realisation that went through me.

I did not beg.

I choked out, “I’m sorry!”

Something in her expression altered. In the brown-gold light, I saw her lips pull back from her teeth, like a man eating something that produces in him the greatest disgust.

Sweating, feeling the weakness of my wound bleeding heavily, I managed to separate in my mind the young woman holding this sword from the last dozen inches of its length. Which is nothing more than plain English forged steel; a blade she may have picked up in any bladesmith’s workshop. Except that if I do not speak the right words to this woman, that part of this blade will be what painfully kills me.

Without thought, I reached out and closed my right hand around the blade, where it hovered in front of my gut.

Only my glove kept the edges from slicing open the webs of flesh between fingers and thumb. My breeches-lining was all that lay between her razor-point and the shrinking flesh of my belly.

“How could I ever have thought I
wanted
this?”

Not until I saw her face change did I realise I’d spoken aloud.

In that second we were as close as if we shared one mind. I saw her remembering the School of Defence and M. Rochefort defenceless, on his knees to her, his prick as stiff as his sword. I saw her see me, now; prostrate, bloodied, helpless.

Tension informed her voice; the same tension that made her shoulders taut, her eyes too wide, her smile disturbingly bright. She said, “You disgust me.”

I found myself making a noise part laugh, part sob. I have desired her to be suitably disgusted with M. Rochefort. Now that she is, I can only wish that she weren’t.

“I often disgust myself,” I said, my voice coming out choked. “Dariole.
Why?
”

Her expression took me into a different realm from other duels. I saw, not anger, spite, nor sadism, nor even the efficient joy with which she had killed on the Normandy beach. Now is no time for
mercy!
and
spare me!
and
please, mademoiselle, I’ll do anything!

“Please, mademoiselle,” I said gently, “why are you doing this?”

She looked down at me.

In the silence, a great fart cracked out of my breech.

It was loud enough to resound off the stable walls. I cringed. Every inch of me tensed, waiting for her sudden, scalding laughter.
What will she say? How will she mock me? Will she kill me out of sheer contempt?

Dariole neither laughed nor moved. She only continued to look down at me, sword in hand. A faint impatience appeared on her face.

I felt myself flare hot with an embarrassment not at all erotic.

Had this happened before, she would have laughed like a street-brat. Now, she looks at me in the manner of an adult regarding a tiresome child. And I am not moved by any physical response.

“I cannot even beg in a way that is fitting,” I got out. “Mademoiselle—yes. I should have told you Fludd might imprison you. I am sorry.”

Her face altered. My mouth and throat closed up. I thought her features twisted like a child before it weeps—then:
no, she is about to laugh
.

She did neither.

She removed her blade with one skilful movement. No pain went through my hand. I realised it was undamaged. Swirls of straw-dust swam in the sunlight as she took a step back, a white figure against black shadow.

“Imprison,” She said, slowly. “Robert Fludd might
imprison
me….”

I couldn’t name the emotion in her voice.

“Get up,” she said.

I fought to get myself up off the earth, clutching at my thigh. Both my weapons lay on the stable floor, yards away. With my back pressed to the wall, I got myself half-upright, hunched over; both hands pressing the cloth of my breeches-leg into the wound.

“You’re bleeding.” A neutral statement.

I nodded, staring at her, dizzy with loss of blood. My boot sloshed, filled to the ankle.
She can put her sword through me, I am disarmed, I can do nothing
.

She put her rapier uncleaned back into her scabbard.

The soft click of the friction-fit of steel and wood veneer made me physically startle, like an old woman when the wind slams a door shut.

Dariole walked forward. In reach. I could have struck her.

“Is this…” I found it difficult to speak, “…this pain. Is this how it was, for you, with Fludd? He wrote that you’d been hurt?”

Her lips thinned as she pressed them together.

Before I could realise what she intended, she stepped close and ducked her shoulder into the pit of my arm, hauling my arm over her shoulder and straightening up.

If I could have laughed, I would. Short enough that she couldn’t prop me fully upright, she supported me hunched over. I didn’t like to consider how much of my actual weight I did, in fact, need to lean on her.
And why does she aid me, now?

Without a word, she shifted her stance and pushed her shoulder into my chest, with her other arm about me; forcing me into a stagger towards the door. I abandoned the thought of weapons, the weakness of blood-loss washing through me. I smelled the delicate scent of her sweat. As we came within reach of the sunlight I could see she wore brown linen doublet and breeches, the colour making her face pallid and strained.

Under the lintel of the doors, she stopped, drawing a harsh breath. Her voice sounded metallic.

“Robert Fludd wants King James dead. That’s a good enough reason to keep James Stuart alive.
I
want Robert Fludd dead.”

Her tone did not shake or alter; her expression didn’t change. I searched her face, for one sickening moment not sure that this was Dariole.

I nodded down at the soaking leg against which I pressed my hand, trying to staunch the bleeding. “Do you want me dead?”

“I don’t know.”

The blank truth in that made me shudder.

“If you’re here….” The implications of her presence came to me sluggishly. “Dariole, there’s nothing to tie me to this lunatic assassination, now! I will find some way around Milord Cecil. We can
leave
here.”

She nodded her head in a vaguely north-westerly direction. “Go to Bristol. You and Saburo both. You can get ships. I’m staying here.”

“Here….”

She looked up at me, from under my shoulder. Her hair fell over her forehead. “You’re leaving. You got me into enough already. Just get out while I
settle
this!”

As her voice got loud, it grew higher, and wavering. I reached to grab the pillar of the doorway, part-supporting my own weight. “Dariole….”

She dropped her hold on me, stepping away.

“You know what?
This?
” She hauled the new, plain English rapier out again, brandishing it in the sunlight. Her face turned up to me, white in the light, gaunt and drawn. “
This
doesn’t matter. It’s a cheat. It’s not there when you—It’s nothing! It can’t do anything! Because I’m only one person, and where was it when I
needed
it?”

She took a step back, into the open yard. My left side felt cold. I tightened my grip on the door-frame, too late. I slid down to the flagstones, collapsing, blood from my thigh welling up over my fingers and soaking my gloves. Pain rose up, drenching me with sweat.

“You know what?” she snarled.

She turned and I thought the stained blade would go straight through my heart.

“
Fuck
this!”