Jack Whyte - The Lance Thrower

It was one of those moments when everything seems to slow down and stop, as though the entire world were being arrested in its progress. The sun was at my back, a choice I had deliberately made, and I could see both Borus and Lorco squinting against its brightness as they tried to read my expression. But then, unexpectedly, I found myself looking beyond them, to where Duke Phillipus Lorco sat tensely on the high reviewing stand beside Bishop Germanus, gazing intently down at the tableau in the arena almost at his feet and at the picture his son made, crouched and determined, his attention totally focused on the task at hand here in the final stages of the afternoon’s competition. And as I saw the Duke, I also became aware for the first time of the cacophony of screams and shouts that surrounded the three of us who were left standing in the arena, only because it faded quickly into silence, in one of those strange and inexplicable occurrences that sometimes happen among the largest crowds. Now there was utter stillness, and into it came the thought, as clearly heard in my mind as though it had been spoken aloud, of how proud my friend Lorco would be to win this contest in the presence of his father, and how equally proud the Duke would be to witness his son’s triumph in front of the entire assembly of the Bishop’s School.

The thought was unexpected and unwelcome, and I thrust it away almost as soon as it occurred to me. But it would not go away, and then I found myself stepping down from my little knoll and nodding to Lorco. He nodded back and we both turned on Borus, whose face had already begun to sag with disappointment. He knew he could not possibly win against me and Lorco; he could not have won against any pair, by that stage, but Lorco and I were the primary favorites, and to fight us both would be folly.

“Yield.” Lorco spoke the word, and for the space of half a heartbeat I thought Borus might do as he was bidden, but then he showed us his true mettle and roared some kind of challenge in his own tongue, swinging his sword high and throwing away his shield at the same time to grip the weapon’s hilt with both hands as he sprang hard and to his left, directly at me. He almost caught me unprepared, too, for I had really expected him to yield and had already been planning my opening moves against Lorco.

The tip of his hard-swung weapon whistled by the tip of my chin so closely that I felt the wind of its passing, but I was leaping backward at the time. I landed awkwardly, unbalanced and unsteady, and most of my attention went perforce to leveling myself, but Borus was still pursuing me, almost on top of me, and a second heavy blow was already on its way toward my head. There was no time to think, but I knew I could not remain on my feet and avoid the descending sword, and so I simply gave way at the knees and rolled away as soon as I hit the ground.

The blow missed. I heard the sound of its passing and the grunt of effort with which Borus stopped the missed swing and tried to reverse it, but then I heard, too, the solid whack of what I knew could only be Lorco’s sword against Borus’s armor.

Came another grunt and a muttered curse and Borus sprawled on top of me, thrown down by the weight of Lorco’s attack so that his cheek came to rest against mine. For the briefest moment I felt the softness of his face and the warmth of his expelled breath in my ear, and I wanted to giggle like a girl. But I was already scrambling away from him, frantically grappling and sliding to where I could regain my feet and defend myself against Lorco, who was now as much my enemy as was Borus.

I was almost successful, too, but as I braced myself solidly on my sword, using it as a staff to push myself up to my feet, Lorco smashed it sideways with his own, knocking it out of my grasp and dropping me straight down again to bang my chin against the ground and drive my teeth into the edge of my tongue. I managed to lurch into an ungainly forward roll and spun around, regaining my feet in time to see Borus’s last stand. He had evidently hit Lorco as Lorco smashed my sword away, and now he had his sword above his head, still in a two-handed grip, ready to deliver the final blow. Lorco spun around and swung his sword, backhandedly, up into Borus’s groin.

Borus fell like a stone and curled himself into a ball, clutching at his injured parts. Lorco raised his head and slowly pushed himself up onto all fours, looking around for me. I was standing, but barely, spitting blood from my swollen mouth and gasping for air like a winded ox, telling myself disbelievingly that I had never, ever felt so tired. The sword in my hand felt like the heaviest burden I had ever carried, but I knew that I had one more thing to do. I had to finish Lorco before he could stand up again, and he was already rising unsteadily.

I hoisted my weapon and moved forward to claim my victory, and as I did so I saw Duke Lorco again, gazing down wide-eyed at his son, and my knees gave way and I found myself kneeling in the dirt, blinking up at my friend Stephan Lorco as he stood above me. I knew I did not have the strength to stand quickly enough and so I swung again, low and wide and as hard as I could, a hacking, horizontal slash at Lorco’s knees. His blade sliced down in an opposing blow and stopped my swing almost effortlessly, and I did not see the following stroke that hit my thickly padded leather helm and sent me flying sideways into darkness.

“Is he that good a friend?”

The question caught me unprepared, but Tiberias Cato was not the only one who would ask it of me in the time that followed. I had just picked myself up off the ground and begun to limp toward the medical pavilion and I had not even had time yet to realize that I needed to ask myself the same thing: was Lorco that good a friend that I would willingly sacrifice my chances of capturing all the triumph of the moment and winning a valuable prize simply to ensure that he might look as good as possible for his visiting father? Or was I deluding myself? Had I, in fact, sacrificed anything? Had I hung back and allowed Lorco to beat me, or would he have beaten me anyway? Apparently I had done something, and done it overtly, for Cato growled his question at me out of the corner of his mouth as he swept by me on his way to present the victor’s prize to my friend Lorco, and for a short space of time I was too taken aback to realize the import of his words.

I blinked blearily and swung around to peer after Cato as he strode to where the victor of the day stood spread-legged with exhaustion now that the battle was over. I could hear Lorco panting heavily from where I stood, twenty paces away, and I watched his chest heaving beneath his leather cuirass as he fought to regain his breath, his head dangling and his arms hanging straight from his shoulders. He was swaying on his feet, and he looked as though he might topple forward at any moment to measure his own length on the dirt of the arena, but Tiberias Cato marched right up to him and grasped him by the upper arm, then turned him firmly toward the spot where his father and Bishop Germanus sat watching from the reviewing stand.

I had seen that Cato was carrying a sheathed sword tucked beneath his arm, a long-bladed cavalry spatha, and as I watched him present it to Lorco, I began to appreciate what I had lost and felt the first tug of regret. The spatha was Tiberias Cato’s own sword, a superb weapon, probably one of the finest of its kind ever made. It had been bought for him many years earlier by Germanus himself, in Constantinople, shortly after Cato had signed up with the legatus as an Assistant Master of Horse, charged with teaching the garrison’s troopers some of the hew techniques and skills that he had brought back with him from the lands of the Smoke People, where he was raised. This was a distant eastern land, far beyond the boundaries of the Empire, a place where all people had straight black hair, skin of yellowish brown and strangely slanted eyes. Tiberias Cato’s father had traveled there as a merchant, taking his wife and young son with him in his unending search for new and exotic goods to trade, and when he and his wife died there of a fever, their orphaned son was brought up by the local tribesmen and lived among them until he achieved manhood and was able to go in search of his own birthplace and his surviving kinsmen.