The Knight

“There isn’t any oath. I made it up. I just wanted to make you and Pouk here understand how I feel. I—if I take a sword now, I won’t ever get the one I’m hoping to get, and if I don’t get that one, I won’t see the person who might get it for me. So no swords. Not any kind. Can’t you show me some axes? What about that double-bitted one with the yellow tassel?”

“There ain’t no ax that’s a sword!” Pouk insisted.

Mori’s eyes gleamed under his shaggy brows.

“What about this?” It had a long handle and a narrow blade. I picked it up: and swung it over my head. “A cutting edge on one side and a hammer on the other, so it’s an ax and a mace, too.”

“If I say you’re a knight an’ th’ skipper sees you with that, he’ll laugh us both ashore!”

Mori laid his hand on my shoulder. “Will you listen with patience, Sir Able, to what an older man has to say? I am no knight, but I’ve had years of experience in these matters.”

I said that I would be glad to hear him, but that I did not want a sword.

“Nor will I ask you to take one. Hear me out, and I’ll tell you of another weapon which, though not a sword, is as good in some respects, and in others better.”

I nodded. “Go on.”

“Let me first address the utility of swords and axes. The ax is like the mace in that it finds its best employment against heavy armor. It will split a shield—sometimes—in the hands of a man as strong as you are. But let a man in light armor, or a man in no armor, fight an axman, and he will kill him inside a minute or two, if he has a good sword and knows the use of it. As for that war hammer, it would be valuable indeed on horseback against another rider. But for a man afoot—a man aboard a ship, for example—well, you might be better off with an oar or a handspike.”

Pouk grunted with satisfaction.

“Socially, too, your man is quite correct. A sword is preeminently the weapon of a man of gentle birth. A man who bears one, who meets another similarly armed whom he thinks no gentleman, may challenge him, and so on.”

I tried to nod as if I had known it.

“May I introduce a hypothetical? Say for the sake of argument only that your man and I conspired to introduce a sword among your baggage. A sword so cleverly concealed that neither you nor anybody else could see it. What good would it be to you, do you think, when you boarded your ship?”

“Not any. When I found it I’d drop it in the water.”

Pouk groaned under his breath; Mori said patiently, “Before you found it, Sir Able.”

“If I didn’t know I had it, it couldn’t be of use.”

“Would not captain and crew acknowledge you a knight?”

I shrugged. “They will. But not because of a sword they never saw.”

“Now we come to it. It is the seeing of the sword—the perception of it—that matters. Not the sword itself. Look here.” Mori limped across the room, and from the table farthest from the door picked up a richly trimmed scabbard of white rayskin holding a weapon with a hilt of hammered steel. “What have I here, Sir Able?”

I knew there was some trick, but I was clueless about what it was. I said, “It looks like a sword. It’s on the short side, I’d say, and from the way you picked it up it can’t be very heavy. The blade’s probably narrow.” I waited for him to say something, and when he did not, I asked, “How are you fooling me?”

Mori chuckled. “As to its weight, I’m not as feeble as I may look to a man your age, and I’ve spent many a busy day forging blades.”

Pouk had gone to check it out. “You’re sayin’ it ain’t a sword at all?”

“It is not.” Mori carried the weapon, still sheathed, back to me. “It’s a mace, a mace of the Lothurings who live where the sun sets. I doubt that there is another on this side of the sea. Will you draw it, Sir Able?”

I did. The heavy steel blade was four-sided, only slightly wider than it was thick; its edges had never been sharpened.

“When it came into my hands,” Mori said, “I thought it the strangest thing I’d ever seen. But I dug out an old great helm, one that was dented and had lost its clasp but was still good and strong. I set that helm on the end of a post and tried the mace you’re holding on it, and came away a believer. Two ceptres’ weight in gold, if you want it.”

Seeing my expression he amended his price. “Or a ceptre and ten scields, if you’ll promise to come back and let me know how it served you.”

“We’ll take it!” Pouk declared.

Chapter 16. The Western Trader

This here’s Sir Able o’ th’ High Heart,” Pouk explained to the mate of the Western Trader. “Him an’ me’s wantin’ passage to Forcetti.”

The mate touched his forelock to me. “You’d be wantin’ to share a cabin, sir?”

I said I would have to see the cabin first. The cold squall that had come into the harbor to announce autumn had made me pull up the hood of my new cloak already; now a gust of rain wet it, and the Western Trader jerked at her cable, rolling and shuddering to let us know exactly how she felt.

“Foller me, sir.”