The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Outside, on Little Trendy Street, she turned left, tucked her hands into her pockets, and began to walk. (A towny or a tourist would have called the narrow road Little Clarendon Street, unaware of the separate, insiders’ geographical nomenclature known only to students and faculty.) The street, by whichever name, was dark and touched by mist. Gus shivered.

“-some change, please?”

A small youth, scarcely bigger than Gus, was sitting on a blanket in a doorway, with a black retriever curled up on his lap.

“Sure.” Gus had very little money-now, or any time-but perhaps that sharpened her senses in some way. She knew real, desperate poverty when she saw it.

She handed over some coins.

“Thanks, miss.”

“No problem.” She liked the American sound of that: like something from the movies. “Take it easy.”

She walked on.

Something…

Usually, this close to the city centre, the streets were safe. But there was a rustle as she passed the bushes by Wellington Square, and she stopped. Her skin prickled-

Then a heavy hand grabbed her sleeve.

“Hey, chickie. Should we be out after dark?”

Stink of breath, close to her. Gus choked.

And another voice, slimy, behind her: “Gimme, now!”

Help me!

Fear paralysed Gus’s throat, her mouth wide but silent, like a dying fish. Her mind would not process what was happening as big shapes manhandled her. Gus was utterly helpless.

I don’t want to…

“Hey!” An echoing voice.

Sound of a dog, barking.

“Bitch-girl.”

Impact on her face. Spurt of warm blood in mouth.

Then they were gone, vanished into the thickening fog, while she sat back, stunned, on cold paving-stones. Beside Gus, the young homeless man squatted, careful not to touch her.

“Are you all right?”

His dog growled at the departed muggers once more, then looked at Gus, stopped, swallowed wetly, then licked her face.

LONDON, 1844

St. Catherine’s Dock is dark. Two figures hurry across the cobblestones: Aldo Guillermi, muffled against the cold, carrying a cane which he is careful not to tap against the ground, and his sister, Maria. The baby, wrapped in her shawl, is silent.

“Aldo, we will be late. If it sails, what of our baggage?”

“Hush. They won’t throw it off.”

“But…”

“It sails, and we sail onboard.”

But their voices carry, and dark figures step from the shadows behind a pile of netting and crates. There are three of them, big and burly, with short heavy jackets over their tunics, and heavy belaying-pins in their hands.

“Well, mates.” The first one spits a long stream of something dark onto the dockyard stones. “We’ve found a new friend, looks like.”

“No.” Guillermi raises his empty left hand, placating. “Sirs, I cannot. We’re about to sail.”

“ ’At’s what I said, innit?”

Press-gang? Or worse?

“I’m sorry.” Guillermi adjusts his grip on the walking-cane. “I don’t understand. Could you repeat that, please?”

“You deaf, or what? I said-”

The cane whips down and up, in an instant: downwards, across the leader’s right hand, then uses the rebound to arc backhand across the man’s face. His belaying-pin clatters on the cobblestones.

“Maria, go… ”

They are almost upon him, but Guillermi sidesteps, leading them away from his sister.

“Get ’im.”

A fencing-lunge, and he stabs the cane’s point into a second attacker’s throat, followed with a savate side-kick into the lower ribs. The man doubles up, but his mate has already seized Guillermi’s arms from behind, the grip unbreakable.

Strike like lightning…

Guillermi snaps his head backwards, feels the crunch of broken nose against the back of his skull. Stamps downwards, arcs his elbow back-impact-and spins away.

… and roar like thunder.

Charlemont’s never-forgotten words, as he drove his students to fight, scream now in Guillermi’s brain.

“Yaaah!”

His warrior-yell startles all three attackers. A circular fouettй, a whipping kick into a thigh muscle, and the first is down, leg paralysed. Guillermi spins to one side-half-heard: “I’ve got ’im”-then his heel takes another in the throat, quicker than thought, in a beautiful revers. Then an arcing series of la canne strikes drops the leader.

All three men are down.

A civilized man would stop now, but a soldier knows better. If his attackers have other weapons, this is the moment when they will use them. So Guillermi-as has been drilled into him-does not stop, but whirls and stamps onto ribs, onto heads, whips the cane downwards again and again, until the threat is gone.

He began training in le savate with spoiled young gentlemen, in a somewhat effete salon, during his Sorbonne days. But he moved on to study with the huge powerful champion Charlemont, who regularly lifted small cannon barrels overhead, and whose instruction was practical and deadly. In later years, Guillermi practised in the sun-drenched south, in the dockyard style of rough Marseilles, where sporting rules have never applied.