Fight Like A Girl Read online

  Triggen had stuck to drinking his tisanes, always ready to chat by the cookfire with whoever might be passing. The young warrior looked formidable, shirtless in a leather jerkin.

  The man called to fight him looked distinctly nervous. Unlike the warrior who’d face Letsis. He could barely restrain a laugh.

  Acuri called out the rules of engagement. “Find clear and level ground. Square off and fight on the count of three. Best of three touches if nobody yields but I don’t want anyone maimed. We’ll call witnesses to agree on a victor if there’s any dispute.”

  The crowd scattered into fighting pairs, eyeing each other warily, surrounded by knots of eager onlookers. Acuri took Erlin’s chopping block for a stool. “I’ll take a stack of those griddle cakes, and find some honey to go with them.”

  Erlin ignored him, watching Chellan stalk off. The snake was glancing sideways at a bull-necked bruiser from Ensaimin. Did he wonder if Acuri had palmed that particular token, setting him up against someone forewarned of his strengths and weaknesses? The two of them had barely exchanged a glance, still less a friendly word this morning.

  “Did you hear me?” Acuri snapped.

  Erlin looked levelly at him. “Did you pay me?”

  Acuri’s lip curled but after a breath, he tossed a silver mark onto the turf. Erlin made no move to fetch it. When Korose took a step, he stilled him with a glance. “You go see the bouts. Come tell me all the news.”

  He had been planning to watch at least some of the fights himself. Not now, and leave dead-eyed Acuri unwatched around his tents. Not with all the camp’s gamblers’ stake money hidden beneath his wagonload of sacks.

  Erlin fetched more firewood from the stack by the water butt. When he returned, Acuri was holding out a silver mark. Erlin didn’t need to look to know it was the one he’d thrown onto the grass.

  He served the man a handful of griddle cakes, expressionless. “No honey.”

  He’d barely had time to wonder how Acuri would respond when the first roars indicated a sword bout was already over. The chagrined loser trailed back to the fire after the crowing victor, both surrounded by friends and strangers offering congratulations and commiseration.

  Erlin left Acuri collecting the winner’s potsherd while he went to the wagon to fetch his ledger of wagers. Soon they were both too busy to quarrel over cakes or honey.

  The tourney was half done, by Erlin’s reckoning, before Korose reappeared. Dismay and elation chased each other across the lad’s face like clouds scudding across a bright sky.

  “Triggen just took two wounds—” he began.

  “Sorry to hear it.” Erlin made sure not to show his elation. A lot of men had just lost their stakes.

  “But Letsis has won again.” Korose shook his head in wonderment. “Though barely,” he allowed.

  “Really?” Once again, Erlin kept his face impassive.

  Though it wasn’t long before he could express his amazement as openly as anyone else. The skinny girl came back time and again, to tell Acuri she’d won. Several times she had to shout to make herself heard above the men arguing over what they’d just seen.

  “She’s no skills. She’s just lucky.”

  “She’s quick and that counts for a lot.”

  “He slipped, that’s all there was to it.”

  “Too soft-hearted to skewer a pigeon, the fool.”

  Korose was the first one back when the tourney was down to the final four. He raced up, barely stopping short of the hearth. “She did it!”

  “Well, well.” Erlin feigned astonishment, then concern. “What if she fights Chellan next?” Much as he disliked the snake, the man’s formidable skills had seen him safe through the tourney.

  “Will she—” Korose broke off as the horde of mercenaries surged through the tents to the fire.

  A circle formed and Chellan faced the girl. So he had won his last bout. But Erlin noted the blood smeared on his arms. He’d taken a few flesh wounds on his way to victory.

  To be fair, so had Letsis, from the stains on her shirtsleeves. But she looked a different girl to the timid waif who Erlin had seen cowering around the camp these past few days.

  Not that Chellan had noticed. He took a rag from Acuri and wiped his arms clean, scowling. Whatever he said provoked his supposed ally into a hostile sneer.

  Letsis had barely taken guard before Chellan launched a storm of blows. Not that any hammer-stroke touched her. Letsis didn’t bother trying her strength against his with any show of locked hilts. Chellan barely made contact with her deftly parrying blade. She dodged, nimbly retaliating with thrusts to slice Chellan’s wrists or knees.

  Recoiling robbed Chellan’s swordplay of power and rhythm. Now he was on the defensive. Darting ever quicker, Letsis forced him backwards, unbalanced. A cry rose from the crowd, somewhere between a groan and elation, as her questing blade sliced into his forearm.

  “Yield?” She grinned.

  Chellan didn’t even answer before assailing her. He didn’t even allow her to take a proper guard. The crowd’s murmur turned concerned as everyone saw her forced back towards the fire. That was hardly fighting fair.

  That wasn’t the worst of it. Erlin guessed Chellan’s plan an instant before the snake ducked low and snatched up a burning stick with his free hand. He threw the searing brand at Letsis, provoking a howl of protest.

  Breath caught in Erlin’s throat. But Letsis was quick enough. She dodged it. More than that, she denied any instinct to parry the flames with her blade. What threat was mindless wood, after all? Instead she lunged, her sword thrust at full stretch.

  Chellan was caught unawares, already coming forward to follow up his advantage. He was an instant too slow to realise she wasn’t cowed by his unexpected assault. Her blade bit deep into his thigh.

  Now the crowd’s cheer was all congratulation for Letsis. Chellan’s dishonourable ploy had robbed him of all sympathy. She stood still for a moment, before turning to Acuri and winking at him.

  Stooped, clutching his wound, Chellan gasped. “Shithead!”

  “What?” Acuri spat.

  “You’re in it together, you and her?” Chellan staggered forward, sword raised.

  Acuri drew a dagger, teeth bared.

  The surging crowd closed around them before Erlin could see who landed the first blow. Then the throng parted just as quickly. Some were heading for their tents. More were escorting Letsis towards Jartan’s wine wagon for a celebration. Chellan limped off in one direction, more bloodied than before. Acuri stalked towards the river, hand pressed to a wound in his side.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Erlin turned to see Triggen smiling at him.

  “Come to collect your winnings?”

  “Whenever suits you best.”

  Erlin cocked his head, contemplating the younger man. “So she’s your lover?” He realised that was wrong before the words left his mouth. “Your sister?”

  “Big sister.” Triggen’s grin widened. “Taught me everything I know.”

  Of course. Why else would he have wagered such a sum on her? Erlin chuckled despite himself. “Including how to fight like a girl? Precious few men can do that so well.”

  Triggen spread innocent hands. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Erlin nodded. “As you wish. Come and see me tomorrow morning and I’ll pay you what I owe.”

  He watched Triggen stroll away. Would Letsis have won without her brother’s aid? Perhaps, but it would have been a far closer thing without Chellan’s suspicions distracting him.

  “He fights as staunchly as any man.” Korose was still defending Triggen.

  Erlin briefly considered explaining. Maybe later, when Korose had some chance of understanding how devastating spreading calculated rumour and starting precisely targeted gossip could be. Those tactics could undermine the strongest men and their alliances, like a tunnel dug under a castle’s foundations.

  Erlin never underestimated women, with or without swords in their hands.


  The Women’s Song

  Nadine Andie

  There was a familiar scent hanging in the air. After training bouts, the arena always smelt like this: a little like skin, a little like the salt tang of bodies and blood, and a little like the throat-tickling char of newly burned magics. Tey’dor wiped his face and shoulders down with a rough rag. It reddened as he wiped. His breath was still coming heavily, in jags and heaves, and his flesh prickled with sand. He arched his back, bowed his head, and pressed the fingers of his empty hand into a sore spot, where a blow had taken him below the shoulder-blade and pushed the wind clean out of him. It was a pleasure-pain, this probing of injured flesh with still-trembling fingertips. But this queasy sensation of pushing against tenderness was familiar too, and as his breathing fell back into its old, easy rhythm he allowed himself the smallest of smiles. The smell, the ache, the blood-red rag knotted between his fingers: they all meant one thing.

  He had survived another fight.

  Tey’dor lifted his head. The low sun distorted things: for a moment, he could see only long, purple shadows spilling out across the yellow floor. Earth, sand, blood, and shadow. Then his eyes began to make sense of the scene; he saw the other recruits of the Ma’chek scattered across the arena, the Masters they had just fought alongside them, the newly-conscripted boys running barefooted across the hot ground, bearing their water-pails and wash-cloths. Precious few of the recruits were standing. One was vomiting, his agony plain for all to see as he knelt in the dust. His Master was bent over him, murmuring something, a hand placed on the boy’s heaving shoulders. Another boy was being lifted and borne away: he wore the ashen look of one who had spent too much magic in the fight, and his eyes were glassy and hollow.

  “Can you walk?” The voice came from behind him.

  “I can.” Tey’dor turned. He shielded his eyes against the sun.

  From somewhere within the glare, a figure emerged. The calm movements of an elder. A strong body wrapped in the brown hide garments that the Masters wore, the uniform that protected and shielded the skin in battle. The dark, close-cropped head and flared cheekbones of his own Master, Vey. “Then you are stronger than some. Or more fortunate,” the Master said. No smile, but one dark brow flickered. “And perhaps more than fortunate. It was a competent battle, and you have made my bones ache with your casting. Come.”

  Tey’dor scooped up his cloak from the floor, and handed his rag, heavy and blackened, to the small boy who stood alongside them, averting his eyes, holding out his pail. The boy’s hands, he saw, were shaking as he took the thing. Vey dismissed him with a single gesture: two fingers, raised in the air. As the child ran from them, Tey’dor sighed.

  “Yes, you were,” the Master said.

  Tey’dor felt, rather than saw, the Master’s glance. “I was what, Master?”

  “Once so young. And skittish, too. Nervy around your elders. Was it you who dropped the High Commander’s goblet at dinner service, not five years ago?”

  “And the High Commander whipped me well for it.”

  “As well you deserved. You left a stain on his cloak that looked like a bungled assassination attempt. But you learned. And grew.” Master Vey paused, and gestured. Beyond them, seated above the tunnel that led down into the dark warrens of the training school, were four men, cloaked and hooded against the sun. Their green cloaks were huddled together, and they had paid scant attention to the Masters and boys who were passing from the arena into the darkness. But as they reached the archway, Master Vey made one, simple sign in the air. The casting hung before them for a moment, reddish and thickening, and Tey’dor felt a new pulse in his temples, hard and strong.

  The green hoods turned.

  Tey’dor stared into the hollows.

  The casting blurred, shifted, and then vanished, and for a long moment he felt the pressure of the four against his mind. He had felt it before, long ago, on his recruitment day. The heat, even as the sun set and the air cooled around him. The sweat prickling on his brow. The questioning, like insects scurrying within his skull: Are you grown strong?

  Have you learned humility?

  Have you learned obedience?

  And the last question, as full of fear as it was full of wonder.

  Are you ready to be made a man?

  Then, suddenly, gaspingly, the pressure was gone. It was withdrawn as quickly as it had come, and the four hoods turned from him and then there was only the pressure of the Master’s hand on his shoulder, leading him into the mouth of the tunnel. In the sudden darkness, with his other senses sharpened, Tey’dor could hear the whispering of feet on sand and something else, soft but close: the sound of voices, singing, from behind the high wall that bounded the left side of the training school. It was a complex melody, in many parts. At dusk, if you found a still place and listened hard enough, you could always hear the song from the women’s school that welcomed the night.

  Aside from training rides into the surrounding country, Tey had not seen a woman or girl since his selection, five years before. He had taken time to listen to them, though, in still places. He wondered, for a moment, before the shadows of the tunnel opened again into the blaze and racket of the robing rooms, if he truly understood the ceremony that awaited him.

  A cheer went up as they stepped into the light, and the soft music of the women was lost. The other boys had seen the assembled council, seen his strength in the arena and his power in the fight. The stamping of feet began, leather-soled combat boots drumming their respect and honour on the yellow stone of the floor. He lifted his head. It was a ritual that he had taken part in many times, and it always said the same thing without words.

  You will achieve ascension.

  The council has decided.

  Tomorrow you will go out from here and go through the ceremony, and be made a man.

  *

  It was not considered right to discuss the nature of the ceremony. Older boys shushed younger boys - the young ones newly recruited, with the bravado of selection still in their blood, and with their voices cracking and swooping- when they dared to make their crude jokes. Masters glanced at older boys – the older ones with just enough sense to turn their ribaldry into veiled suggestions – and quelled them with little more than a raised eyebrow and a heartbeat’s shame. So the younger boys learned, and the older boys learned more, and the Masters kept their counsel.

  Nonetheless, boys talked. They said, you go into a room with a girl. They said, they train them; that’s what they do in the women’s school, they train at it like we train at men’s work. They said, there is nothing but a bed, in that room. They said, you have to prove that you are a real man, a complete man, that you can take her. They said, she wears no clothes, or, sometimes, they said she wears only a robe and nothing more, or they said that she comes dressed in fine women’s garments: they could have said anything at all, boys as they were, who had not seen an unclothed female form since they had run bare-bodied around the edges of a watering-hole with their sisters and their neighbours’ sisters, when they were small. The boys in the training school were not supposed to sully their bodies with anything that might detract from their training: poor food, smuggled wine from a bribed trader, poor hygiene, or the other, less savoury vices that can lead young men into temptation. Their bathing and sleeping arrangements, in shared rooms with ten boys splashing or sleeping side-by-side, and a Master always by the door, existed to guard against moments of private indulgence. Nevertheless, it was a rare boy indeed who did not at least conjure the image of the ceremony to mind in his own quiet moments, if only in the hopes that his imaginings would give him vivid, heated dreams.

  As he walked through the hushed street, sun beating down on his hooded head, and the heat intensifying beneath the ceremonial robe he had been given before leaving the boys’ compound, Tey’dor glanced left to right at the escorts in full military uniform who flanked him, at the few other people who passed them, and at the wooden doors and low-slung windows that punctuated the
long, connecting avenue between the training schools of the boys, and the girls. His mind racing, he tried to remember Master Vey’s words. What he must do, and what he must not do, and what he must say. The rules of the ceremony. His Master’s tone had been sombre. Tey’dor muttered the formula to himself as they walked, until one of the escorts silenced him with a swift gesture: no speaking, not until he entered the chamber. More doors. An archway. A cool, shaded passageway. A quick, sharp smell of lemons.

  Then, suddenly, the escorts came to an abrupt halt. One of them knocked three times, heavily, against a wide, wooden door. It opened, inwards. Behind it was another hooded figure, a dim vestibule, and another opening, this one covered by a rich, amber curtain. No one spoke, but the hooded figure gestured.

  Tey’dor drew in the longest, deepest breath of his life.

  *

  He raised one hand to the curtain, stepped out of the darkness, and over the threshold.

  There she was, seated, cross-legged, on a raised platform in the centre of the room. She was cloaked. Hooded. Her hands and feet were tucked neatly away: only her eyes were visible, and only her eyes moved, and they danced over him rapidly as he pushed past the curtain and then let it fall, with only the softest of sounds, behind him. Her stillness unnerved him. He glanced away from her as his eyes adjusted. The chamber was broad and round, sparely furnished, cool, and dim, lit by oil lamps which hung from four high poles embedded into the walls. He had entered beside one, its shifting flame deforming the shadows that spread in dark pools around his feet. The floor underfoot was not stone. It was hard and dry, swept clean but with the gritty sense of dried earth that was familiar to him: it felt like the floor of the arena. Disorientated, he took another step. The long robe made him clumsy, and he clutched at it with both hands.

  She lifted her head. She stood, stepped precisely and steadily across the platform, and descended three wooden steps until she was level with him. Her form was concealed completely by the robes, but he was aware that she matched him for height, and that she was barefoot. She paused, then put both of her hands to the cowl of the cloak, pushed at the heavy fabric, and then lifted her hands away. The hood fell slowly, moving under its own weight.