Mercenary And Paladin (2)

We came to the drill yard at Camilla’s heels. It fell short of the outer bailey’s training yard I had seen before, but the inner keep’s drill yard still had room enough and to spare for several dozen men. The soldiers sweating through the day’s drill went rigid the moment their commander appeared out of nowhere.

“Ryan Cavelon, attached to the Second Order’s doctrine training section! Wh-what brings you here, Commander?”
“It’s nothing. Carry on with what you were doing.”

The instructor had asked it stiff with nerves, and Camilla waved it away. The one floundering there was, ironically enough, the older of the two.

…Is there any measure as meaningless as age?

The pointless thought surfaced out of nowhere and drew a hollow laugh out of me. Going on about age, now of all times. Perhaps a memory out of a past life several hundred years and more behind me had caught me off guard.

“And this man beside you…”

Oddly enough, the instructor’s eyes had gone not to Camilla and not to Drick, but to me. The reason, I supposed, was the church armor I had been going about in ever since Walter cut my old leather armor to ribbons. Armored head to foot with the helm matched to the rest, I looked for all the world like a paladin of the Talios church.

“Ahem!”

Camilla asked her question without a word, with nothing but a glance at me for a cue. Was it all right to make my identity known? I answered the same way, in silence.

No.

“This is a fellow who’s just joined the order. I’m teaching him this and that along with the doctrine, so pay it no mind, instructor.”

Camilla had no gift for lying. A knight order’s commander, personally squiring one rank-and-file believer about: not even a dog would have believed it. But her position was high enough to make it stick all the same. If Camilla said that cats danced and dogs sang, everyone else had to believe it. That was the sort of post a knight order’s commander held.

The drill yard’s instructor looked to have something worth saying, but the mouth only opened and closed without letting a sound through. We passed by and made for a corner of the yard.

That corner had been set aside for sparring, by the look of it. The sand-laid floor was level, and weapons lay along one side, wooden swords among them. Camilla picked one of them up.

“Take your pick, whatever suits you.”
“Well kept, these.”

Drick ran a hand over one of the sparring swords, carved out of wood. Even to me, who knew nothing of the craft, the wood was plainly of the finest quality.

“For your information, the paladin’s trial uses iron swords. They make it as close to a real fight as they can. If you’d rather, I can take you on with a live blade right now.”
“No, this’ll do.”

Camilla snorted a laugh. She had already taken up a wooden sword and settled into her stance, in her basic gear but dressed comparatively light.

“Come at me whenever you’re ready.”

Drick worked his grip open and shut a few times, moved lightly on his feet, and finished readying himself for the bout.

“I like that, lady knight. Straight to the point.”

Drick sprang forward with no signal at all. In an instant the sword swept across in a level cut, aimed at the left shoulder of Camilla, who had not moved. Rather than block it meekly, she struck his sword hard aside.

“Ngh!”

Having forced his stance open, Camilla brought her sword down. Drick barely caught the blow falling toward his collarbone. The crack of wooden swords meeting rang out loud, and her blade came on after it.

With only a little exaggeration, in the blink of an eye Drick was beaten hard enough to raise dust on a rainy day. He pulled himself clear quickly enough, but the hits I could actually see numbered more than ten.

“You’re satisfying to hit.”

Camilla read Drick’s movements completely and managed the distance between them. He gave a step back, she took a step in; he closed hard, and she drifted easily out.

A distance where Drick could not reach and Camilla could.

Working artfully into that very small gap, she was in some ways more of a monster than Walter.

Camilla’s sword curved and knocked Drick’s blade upward. His whole upper body lay open in the same instant. At this rate her sword would land clean in his side, and Drick flung himself back in a hurry to get clear of it.

But Camilla did not swing.

“An opening, you see—”

Instead she leapt high and hauled her sword up over her head.

“—sometimes makes a bigger opening still!”

Drick’s head was perfectly exposed to that attack, come a beat late. A sword with all of Camilla’s weight behind it, impossible to block. It struck the flaw within the flaw, an attack that was the very textbook of veteran craft.

“True enough.”

For an instant Drick vanished. The movement was fast enough to make it feel that way. He had waited for Camilla to commit to a large motion, then spun his whole body in a single stroke; inside her guard in a flash, the sword came out of the spin.

— VWOOOSH!

Drick’s blade ripped the air apart. Camilla had ducked her head under it, the first evasion she had shown.

“An opening begets an opening. You do a fair line in openings yourself, lady knight.”

The big retreat had been an opening Drick gave on purpose. The moment the sword came down, Camilla went for his head exactly as he had intended, and he turned his body neatly and let the blade past. And the attack that flowed on out of it like water proved that he too had not survived this long on luck.

At what Drick had said, Camilla’s mouth split into a grin wide enough to tear.

“That’s it! That’s how a fight should be! The paladin lot lean on brute strength and swagger about with it!”

She laughed out loud and swept her sword up at an angle. Drick slipped it with nothing but a movement of his head and drove his sword in at her solar plexus. Camilla caught the blade in her bare hand and kicked him hard away. Flung down and losing his sword into the bargain, Drick let out a laugh of pure disbelief.

“Give over leaning on brute strength and swaggering about with it.”
“Forgotten already? I’m a paladin too.”

Drick caught the sword she tossed back to him and got up unsteadily.

“Well, isn’t that impressive!”

Their bout went on a good long while. For most of it the picture was Camilla hitting and Drick being hit, but every so often the sword he swung threatened her keenly enough to bring even Camilla out in a cold sweat.

Before long the two of them had become the drill yard’s own entertainment. One of the soldiers who had crowded in muttered.

“That’s got to hurt…”

I could not hold it in any longer, and a laugh escaped me in spite of myself. Drick had taken such a beating that he had swollen up all over.

“Shall we call it there?”

Camilla laughed as well at the sight of Drick’s face, so at odds with his own easy voice.

“You’re not bad, though. At this rate you won’t be going about getting thrashed anywhere else.”

Dusk was just beginning to catch on the horizon. Camilla with her refreshed face, Drick with his pretense of composure, the soldiers ringed around them: every one of them dyed yellow.

“So a knight order’s commander is nothing so special after all.”

Camilla, on her way to put the wooden sword back, checked at that.

“What? Obviously I was going easy on you.”
“If that had been you in earnest, you’d have more to be ashamed of.”
“I’ve been taking you on as a mercenary up till now, mind.”
“I’m sure you have.”

Camilla was a veteran who had become a mercenary young and lasted a long time at it. Which meant, in the common phrase, that she was an ill-bred sort. Her eyes flashed at Drick’s needling.

“Shall I take you on as a knight order’s commander, then?”
“I’d welcome it.”

Drick grinned and raised his sword.

“Come at me whenever you’re rea—”

— THWACK!

Camilla had come around behind him at a speed the naked eye could not follow, and she clouted him across the back of the head. Drick pitched straight over, and a small cloud of dust lifted around him.

“Pipsqueak, getting cocky with me.”

Camilla stood there huffing and glaring down at the unconscious Drick.

“…Commander of the Third Order.”

Those were the first words I had spoken since we came into the drill yard. And to think the moment would come for a reason as childish as this.

“Ah — well, this is…”

Under my gaze, Camilla hauled the fallen Drick onto her back. Wherever her gaze landed, the crowd parted in a rush, and Camilla, floundering, watched my face for a cue.

She looked so much like a puppy that needed letting outside that a laugh kept leaking out of me. I nodded and gave her leave to go. Camilla vanished like a loosed arrow with Drick on her back, and I set off walking after her.

“Ah…”

The instructor, standing in among the crowd, put out a hand and then slowly lowered it again. The look in those eyes begged me to explain something, anything, but I said nothing at all.

If a knight order’s commander was a post that made nonsense into sense, then the apostle above her…

…could be short on common decency to whatever degree he pleased, could he not?

A few days went by after that. From what I heard from Kalen, the search for Pindel Morein was proceeding smoothly.

The sudden sealing of the walls had people grumbling no end, or so it went. But what could they do? The walls belonged to the church, and the church was a body that could put a blade to their throats this very moment. If you valued your life, you had no choice but to keep your complaints behind your teeth.

Kalen, by the look of it, was being called here and there by the guard corps these days and had not a moment to breathe. It had got so that his face was harder to catch sight of than the church branch head’s.

I, on the other hand, was passing the idlest days I had known in a long while. The church saw to the search on its own, so in the end all that was left me was tending my rusted sword, or taking walks about the outer bailey, or the like.

For lodgings in Pirberk the church had turned over the finest room in the inner keep. I had no particular reason to refuse, so I was using the room next to Walter Schneider’s.

“Brother, a little higher up.”

Drick reached a hand around behind his back and pointed at the wound. My own hand was smeared thick with something. An extract drawn from the bark of an aspen, mixed into animal fat.

In short, a salve for pain.

“Don’t you ever get tired?”
“Of course I get tired. But I’ll not give it up until I’ve landed one on that woman’s face.”

Ever since the hiding he took in the drill yard, Drick had been challenging Camilla at all hours. That suited me well enough, since it spared me having to spar with her myself, but Drick was in a state you could not look at without wincing.

Eladin came suddenly to mind. The one who used to spread salve on me just like this, on any day I came back hurt.

‘How careless of you. And you a paladin, no less.’

‘…And did you lend anything to my becoming a paladin?’

‘Naturally. If I did not lend it, who else would?’

It had gone faint now. The voice that spoke to me then, the feel of the hand that stroked over the wounds, felt like something that had happened to another man entirely.

‘Can a god not heal even a wound like this?’

‘If such a thing were possible, I should be a god of healing rather than of dominion.’

Only one thing.

That look she turned on me, that alone.

That look, sorrowful enough to make my chest ache, was for some reason branded into my mind.

‘…Would that it were so.’

“Brother.”

Drick was on his feet, the shirt he had taken off back on. The salved wounds looked to have been wrapped in bandages.

“Something the matter?”
“No.”

I rose from my seat. As though beating out dust long settled.

“It’s nothing.”

Drick’s paladin’s trial was drawing nearer by the hour. I had agreed to be his sparring partner again today, so I could hardly go on sprawling about in my quarters.

I set off.