One King’s Way. Chapter 7, 8, 9
Chapter Seven
Shef stepped back a pace, his feet sinking into the soft mire. He twirled the peeled branch in his hand and eyed Karli carefully. The short man had lost his grin and gained a look of anxious determination. At least he had learnt to hold his sword right: edge and guard absolutely parallel with the line of his forearm, so that cut or parry would not be deflected. Shef moved in, swung forehand, backhand, thrust and sidestep, as Brand had taught him months before in the camps outside York. Karli parried easily, not quite managing to catch the light wood with his heavier blade, but well into line every time—the speed of his reactions was excellent. Still the same old problem, though.
Shef accelerated slightly, feinted low and rapped Karli briskly over the sword-arm. He stepped back and lowered his stick.
“You’ve got to remember, Karli,” he said. “You aren’t cutting brushwood. What you’ve got there is a two-edged sword, not a one-edged billhook. What do you think the second edge is for? It’s not for your main stroke, because you always slash with the same edge, to get your full force into it.”
“It’s for the back-flick,” said Karli, repeating his lesson. “I know, I know. I just can’t make my muscles do it unless I think about it, and if I think about it, it’s too late. So tell me, what would happen if I tried to face a real swordsman, a Viking from the ships?”
Shef stretched out a hand for the sword he had reforged, looked at its edges critically. It was not a bad weapon, not now. But with what he had had by him at the forge in the Ditmarsh village, he had not dared to do too much. The weapon was still all of one metal, without the blends of soft and hard that gave a superior sword its flexibility and strength. Nor had he been able to weld on the hardened steel edges that were the sign of a master-weapon—no good metal, and a forge that would not get iron to more than red heat. So, now that they had left the village, every time he had fenced with Karli using his ‘Gungnir’ spear like a halberd, the iron edges of the cheap sword showed notches, to be taken out with hammer and file. Yet you could learn from the notches. If they were at right angles to the blade, Karli was fencing properly. A bungled parry showed cuts and shirrs of metal at odd angles. None this time.
Shef passed it back. “If you faced a real champion, like the man who taught me, you’d be dead,” he said. “So would I. But there are plenty of farmers’ sons in Viking armies. You might meet one of those. And don’t forget,” he added, “if you’re facing a real champion, you don’t have to fight fair.”
“You’ve done that,” guessed Karli.
Shef nodded.
“You’ve done a lot you don’t tell me about, Shef.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Karli pushed his sword back into the wooden, wool-lined scabbard they had made for it, the only thing that would keep out the rust in the everlasting damp of the Ditmarsh. The two men turned and started back to the makeshift camp in the clearing thirty yards away, smoke trailing sullenly from the cooking fires into the misty air.
“And you don’t tell me what you’re going to do, either,” Karli went on. “Are you just going to walk into the slave-ring and let Nikko sell you, like you say?”
“I’ll walk into the slave-ring at Hedeby right enough,” said Shef. “After that, things will go as they will. But I don’t reckon to end up as a slave. Tell me, Karli, how am I coming along?”
He referred to the hours Karli had spent, in exchange for the fencing lessons, teaching him how to make a fist, how to strike straight forward instead of with the usual round-arm swing, how to step forward and put the weight of the body into a hooked punch, how to block with the hands and weave the head.