Mary Gentle (5 page)

He must have drawn while he was being hurled across the room, impossible as it seemed. He didn’t wipe his face. The nearest he got was a jerking flick of the head that sent food sliding out of his eyes. And he came back fast enough that I barely had time to get my rapier into my hand.

There were the usual cries of “take it outside!” that occur whenever there is a fight in Zaton’s, and the cook clapped the kitchen-hatch shut. It was no duel, just a brawl, and I had enough confidence in the outcome to wonder if I could afford to buy the company a drink to apologise for spoiling their leisure.

Five seconds later I was fighting for my life.

That is not a new experience for me, but it’s rare. Most swordsmen are simply not as good as I am. Even then, with my reputation, I was out no less than once every month, and I either downed my man or forced him to recant. I know men and I know swords.

The boy had me fighting at top-level within heartbeats. Benches went over, tables skidded back, men dodged; but I couldn’t trip Dariole backwards over any of the obstacles. If he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head, he had amazing peripheral vision. And he drove me around the dining-hall like a dog herding sheep in Andalusia.

My fault was that he had had the initiative ever since the first blow, and the fight was too hard and fast: I couldn’t take it back from him. His edge came cutting in, his point thrust low and hard, and he caught my free hand and drew blood in the first minute. It never occurred to me that we might stop: this was no formal duel. Never mind first blood; it might not stop the first time one of us ran the other through.

When he pinned me up against the wall, uninjured, I understood that he wouldn’t kill me. Otherwise why bother to pin me there? I stood jammed back against the stonework, hands down at my sides, not dropping my weapons, but unable to do anything for the rapier-point that stuck under my ruff and made a dull burning ache at my throat.

“Sully’s dog!” he said, grinning and panting—too plump to move this fast without over-exerting himself, I suppose. His face was still stained with cream and sauces, and I anticipated something bad, not liking the humours of adolescents. If he had run me through, it would have been disastrous, but something I could remedy if I lived through it. Nothing holds young men back from what—to a mature man—may seem attractive but unwise actions.

Dariole had not been the only partaker of pastries; they were a delicacy at Zaton’s, and there were tarts and flans abandoned on the tables. He pinned me right-handed with his blade, and, left-handed, picked up such a pastry and ground it into the crotch of my breeches.

I let him—I had no alternative—but I don’t think I have hated like that since
I
was sixteen.

When word got about that, not only had I been defeated, but I had suffered a catastrophic affront to my dignity, I found myself challenged three times in one day, and a dozen times in the week.

Having killed two and put the rest in hospital, the challenges died down somewhat, but my hatred didn’t. I hated the boy Dariole with the insensate, bitter loathing we can only feel for someone who has bested us. Tell the story to myself as I might, I couldn’t tell it any other way but that it ended with my losing a fight and being humiliated.

That he could have killed me—that I had felt, however momentarily,
fear
of him—I could even less forgive. I took every occasion to fight him again, and looked a bully as I did so: a grown man threatening a mere boy. A number of inconclusive bouts were interrupted by the authorities. Each time, the plump young man grinned at me as if
I
had been rescued.

The fact was that with the initiative not on his side, or not lost to me, I had skill enough to kill him—but I could not prove it. The interference of some provost intent on keeping the King’s peace did not rescue me, but him.
But I could not say so
. Because the only time we had fought to a conclusion, I had been the one to be beaten.

Laughter followed me. I was aware of it. I tried ignoring anything that did not demand a duel, and those men that did, I sent home wounded or killed, in bloody-minded satisfaction at my own skill. But “Sully’s black dog” followed me too, and I do not think I have ever had so mortifying an experience as when the Duke called me in to explain to him, in person, exactly how I came by this sobriquet.

Therefore, when it seemed I must leave Paris—who knows for how long—and now that he and circumstance positively
invited
me to it—I could not leave without killing Dariole. I
had
to.

It was not a fight to watch (although my contention is that none of them are); it was unspectacular, except for that final error that all swordsmen foresee—the one that is getting them killed.

The boy put my point safely past his face, too quickly for a common duelist’s skill, but I by that time remembered him to be uncommon.

At the same moment he brought his left forearm up, braced, and took the impact of the pistol on it without a flinch.

And at the same time as
that,
he thrust in time with me, the tip of his blade leaping for my sternum, and stepped in and kicked me in the belly.

I confess now that I had no expectation of his doing it. He was a young man, not yet grown to his full height or weight. He must have realised that in physical grappling, he would be at the greatest disadvantage; that he must rely on the forty-four inches of steel in his right hand or I would pummel him into blood-pudding. It was the greatest shock of my life—and I can claim only that my mind and attention were back with Henri and Ravaillac—when I parried his blade but he succeeded in putting the toe of his riding boot into my gut.

A hand-span lower and pain in the stones would have blinded me. Even so, I gasped for breath and bent forward. And, in seeking to correct, over-corrected: I jerked too rapidly away and back.

One of the pieces of debris left on the stable floor was a two-wheeled cart, with rakes and sacks piled up against the extended shafts. It happened too fast and with too much inevitability for me to stop. I lodged the calf of my leg up against the concealed wooden shaft, fell backwards over it with the boy all but in my arms, and couldn’t shorten my sword to stab him, or grab my dagger from my belt.

I caught my balance as I brought my other leg back—then continued in the fall, as I twisted salmon-like, away from the dagger-stab he threw into my face.

It is not always an advantage to be a tall and heavy man. Something cracked against the back of my head as I slammed down, full weight, to the floor. Dazed, I smelled feathers and chicken-dung, the unswept remains of horse manure, human sweat (the latter mine); and my eyes filled with dazzles.

There,
I had time to think, in less time than it takes the heart to beat. One misjudgement,
one,
and then fourteen inches of sharpened steel in the guts or heart—

A great weight crushed my chest. I thought, dimly,
This is how a thrust through the lungs feels,
and then realised there was no penetration, only weight.

I opened my eyes, and saw through one of them. My left eye was black. No: black shot with sparks of red and white brilliance.

Something pressed against eye-socket and ball, pressed flat—
the blade of his dagger,
I realised; freezing for a second as the tip of his knife poked into the place between eye-corner and nose. A sharp sinus-pain went through my head.

“You
lose,
messire,” a voice said, so close to my ear that I felt warm, moist breath on my skin.

The words were not easy for me to make sense of, stunned as I was. All my skin was tight with the anticipation of a thrust and my death. I felt the boy’s body hard on top of mine, felt that his free hand moved while I was still knocked half into unconsciousness—that he dragged my right hand out of the hilt of my sword; that my arm was pushed behind me.

It could only have been seconds before it became clear to me both what he was doing, and that he had succeeded. He pushed both my hands under me, rolling my body to either side by my shoulders. I lay on my back with my own weight pinning my arms.

His dagger point still pressed against my eye; did not dig into it. I was not dead.

“You lose,” Dariole repeated, sitting back up, straddling my chest and stomach. His weight was warm and damp with sweat, his face flushed, and the sunlight from outside made a dusty aureole around his hair. His chest rose and fell under the dirt-smeared doublet. He panted, “How about that, Rochefort?”

Idiot, not to have killed me!
I thought, all my mind coming back to me. He pinned me, but, yes, even a year after our first encounter, he had only a young man’s weight and strength. For that very reason, he needed to stay at the full extent of his reach, and fence. And now he sat on my sternum and belly, thinking the threat of a knife in my eye enough to subdue me.

A man can live with one eye. A man can
fight,
still, with one eye, although vision is different; I might even train myself to be no less of a duellist. Half blind is better than dead.

I concentrated, so as to go from immobility to attack in a heartbeat without any tensing of the muscles that would warn him—and he shifted where his plump buttocks pressed down into my belly, glancing behind.

“Oh, now,” he said softly, in a different voice. “Will you look at that.”

The focus of a man’s mind is a strange thing. I had been aware solely of the concentration of the fight, of his knife-edge where it threatened to slice into my eyelid. I had not consciously felt the heat and solidity of his body, or of mine.

Now I was, all in a second, aware of how I lay helpless under him. That I could rip his arm from his shoulder-socket for the price of an eye was not in that moment relevant. I lay on my back with the cold of the flagstones seeping through doublet and trunk-hose at my shoulders and pelvis. My hands were trapped under me by my own weight. And the boy’s warm solidness rested on my belly; weight shifting as he moved his left hand to grope down under the seat of his breeches, where his buttocks pressed against the pit of my stomach.

He put his hand on my prick, through the velvet and linen of my hose.

Every muscle in my body tensed. What held me back from throwing myself up from the floor and beating him bloody was not the knife. The focus of the duel fell away from me. My face must have gone instantly scarlet, since I could feel the heat of my skin.

I could neither face nor deny the fact: inside my breeches, my cock was standing up taut where he put down his gloved palm.

You must understand that in the court of our previous King, Henri III, in which I grew up as a young man, my reaction would not have been unusual—under other circumstances. M. Dariole, haloed by the sunlight, reminded me vividly of that King’s louche young men, far more interested in their own company than that of the Queen’s women-in-waiting.

If panic seized me, at that moment, it was because these were not those other circumstances.

“Now will you look at that?” Dariole repeated with a wicked child’s leer, looking back at me in a complete travesty of lust. I suppose my expression must have been something to behold, because the false face broke and he burst out laughing.

And I suppose that any other man, or any man not as I am, would at that point have freed his hands, at the cost of one eyeball, and used them to strangle the life out of M. Dariole. Dariole was slight; it would have been little harder than wringing the neck of a poached rabbit. But I did not do that. I froze, under the insignificant weight of him, staring up at his face.

“You’re not going anywhere, you know,” he said confidently, and with the fingertips of his left hand, set about unhooking the front of my hose.

I am a gentleman; I am used to servants dressing and undressing me. To be pinned to the stone floor of a stables, however, and to have the fabric wrenched at by a boy who giggled as he did it—who laughed with such joy and malice that humiliation held me frozen still—was an indignity that I could not have conceived of.

He undid my linen under-breeches, and took out my stiff prick in his hand.

A man’s cock is such a small amount of flesh compared with all his body. And yet everything changed with the shame of it being bared to the open air—and the still-greater, overwhelming shame of its response. I forgot Sully, Henri, the panicking streets of the capital; forgot everything but this ignominy.

The cold air on my flesh, and the disgrace of such nakedness, should have wilted the member in his grip. And it did not. I grew stiff as a man on the point of congress with a woman, and with such confusion in my head that I could have roared out blasphemies, hit him, or wept, with equal ease.

“You could get out of this,” the boy said, as if he could read the thoughts behind my blank face. “I’d have your eye, but you could get up, and you might even kill me. But you’re not going to, are you?”

“I’ll kill you,” I got out. “So that you can never tell any man what happened here—”

“I’ll call men in from the street.” He spoke with not a fraction’s hesitation. “What do you think, there might be a crowd to see the great M. Rochefort on his back with his prick hanging out—oh, whoa! You
liked
that one!”

His gloved fingers were tight around me, and I could have sobbed like a boy. Between shame, confusion, and the sensation of weakness that flooded my muscles, I was for the first time completely at a loss. I did not know what to do.