It was that outrage which finally snapped my trance. I dropped my baggage and charged forward carrying my easel like a three-pronged lance. An easel! You laugh! But no ordinary easel, this. For, combining the teachings of my various uncles, I had long ago designed this easel with a condottiere’s sense of art. Each of the legs came to a sharp point, edged like a razor. Furthermore—but that in a moment.
For now, let me say with all due modesty that I slew three of the scoundrels with a perfectly executed coup d’arrière tripodiste. Then, before their bodies had even hit the ground, I drew my sword from its cunningly disguised sheath in the upright of the easel. A moment later it was plunged through the back of the nearest poisoner, piercing his heart. A quick twist of the wrist to free the blade, and a moment later another poisoner was run through the back. Another quick twist of the wrist—
“Through the back?” you say. Certainly! Though I am an artist, I am also a most proficient swordsman. I was trained by my uncle Rodrigo from the time I was six.
“As pretty-faced and brash a boy as you are, Benvenuti,” he’d said to me (not without a sneer), “you’ll be bound to land in a duel by the time you’re sixteen. Some outraged husband, no doubt. So you’d best learn to use a blade at least as well as you learn to use a paintbrush.”
I was a good student, and even my uncle eventually admitted that I had the knack of swordplay. But his instruction was stern and severe. Many was the time I was soundly cuffed—even thrashed—for committing what my uncle Rodrigo considered the greatest of all swordsman’s sins.
Chivalry.
“Who d’you think you are, you little snot?” he would roar, applying the whip. “Some great lord of the land parading around with airs? You’re a wretch of an artist, you dolt! None of this bowing and posturing for the likes of you!”
Whimper and plead though I would, each transgression of my uncle’s code would earn me the full ten lashes. A stern regimen, but by the time I was seven I could recite the code in my sleep:
Whenever you can, stab ’em in the back.
Better yet, stab ’em in the back in the dead of night.
Best of all, stab ’em in the back in the dead of night while they’re asleep.
If you’ve got to stab ’em in the front, try a low blow.
If none of that works, then use all your skills as best you can, you stupid dummy.
My uncle would, I believe, have been pleased. The masterpiece with the easel. The next two, felled with a backstab. From then on, of course, my foes were alerted and I was forced to face them from the front. But the next two went down before my low blow—not without bestowing a look of great indignation upon me as they expired. A strange morality—set upon a woman with poisoned knives, but take offense at a sword through the groin.
Alas, after that it became sticky. Two more of the villains were dispatched by the woman before the poison began to take effect upon her. She half-collapsed against the wall, dropping her knife. Hissing with triumph, one of the men hurled himself upon her, blade high. Foolish move! Even as the impetuous hyena moves in too quickly for the kill of a wounded lioness. For the woman seized his throat in both hands and wrung his neck. A most horrible sound, really. She then flung the body at the others, bowling two of them over like tenpins. But that was her last gasp. She slumped to the ground, dead or unconscious.
In a frenzy, I forced my way to her side, in order to protect her now-helpless form from certain death. Six assailants were still left alive.
No, five. For as they came in upon me, I suddenly changed tactics and thrust high, piercing one right through the throat.
Unfortunately, my blade was momentarily caught in his neck bones as he fell, and I was unable to withdraw it in time to parry a blow from another. His knife sank into my side.