In my last two blogposts, I shared the beginning and middle parts of Chapter 1 of Long Way Home, a novel I started nearly thirty years ago. Today I’m bringing you the chapter’s final scene. It’s an action sequence describing the duel between the protagonist, Andris Rohansi, and his opponent Willem Cartstairs, in the fictitious sport of equindo.
I remember conscripting a couple of my riding friends to help me craft this scene. I knew nothing about duelling, on or off a horse. Neither did they. I think we might have used a yardstick in the absence of a sword. I do remember we quickly figured out the all-important rule of handling a yardstick or a sword on horseback: don’t accidentally whack the horse with it! As I recall, our giggling efforts attracted quite an audience. My horse, Lancer, was not impressed.
Anyway, for better or worse, here is the duelling scene that finishes Chapter 1 of Long Way Home. (For those of you who haven’t read the preceding parts, Andris’s wife is highborn lady Florinda d’Isford. She has chosen to fly to the family chalet with her lover and an entourage of friends, rather than attend her husband’s equindo match.)
Long Way Home — Chapter 1 (continued, part 3)
Faydrin was jigging with anticipation when the trumpets called Andris from the warm-up ring to the main arena. The dim tunnel under the stands was the place where Andris’s pulse always got away from him for a moment or two. He checked Faydrin to a prancing walk and sucked in a slow breath, dismissing the familiar scents of sand and dust and sweaty horse as he harnessed the adrenaline deep into his center and settled into that profound connection with his horse that was his trademark and personal edge out there under the lights.
— That thing about him which the Bryners wanted to label as psi.
The trumpets blared again – his cue. The stewards, the security people and the paramedics scurried out of his way, pressing up against the passageway walls. He drew his saber and gave Faydrin his head.
The horse surged forward.
There was the familiar sensation of space as he emerged from the tunnel and the Hippodrome’s main arena engulfed him, its sprawl of raked, floodlit sand stretching in every direction. The announcer’s voice cadenced at the edge of his awareness: “…familiar face here tonight, ladies and gentlemen: from the House of Isford, five-time Silver Sword winner, our mainlander contestant, Andris mein-ser Rohansi!”
Applause. Yells. Whistles that shrilled along the nerves. Faydrin stiffened and lunged upward in an exhuberant buck. The crowd roared approval. The tension in the air was like high-voltage crackling. This was the moment when the bookmakers would be feverishly closing the last-minute bets. The Thanksgiving match was the highlight of the season and this crowd wanted to see points scored, it wanted spectacle and action, no holds barred.
Willem Carstairs was keeping his black horse at center-arena with difficulty. The beast was humping its back and shaking its head from side to side, trying to escape the bit. White froth flew from the corners of its mouth. “About bloody time,” Carstairs griped when Andris drew rein opposite him. “Waiting for you is like waiting for my lady friend to dress for a party.”
“If it was you instead of that black lunatic in charge,” Andris returned, “you wouldn’t be in such a damn hurry.”
The barbs – too quiet for the crowd to hear – held no rancour. Andris let his reins loop over Faydrin’s neck and flipped up his visor. Carstairs didn’t dare take such liberty with the black horse. He transferred the reins to his sword hand before raising his own visor. His hazel eyes glinted with light-hearted mockery. “You won’t stay cocky for long, Rohansi. I’ll have you unsaddled so fast, you won’t know what hit you.”
He could have made some snide remark about Florinda’s absence from the stands – Andris could see the Isford box from here and it was empty, a deserted island amidst the packed banks of seats — but viciousness was not Willem Carstairs’s style. Carstairs hadn’t been privileged with family wealth to smooth his way to First Level Duellist. He had made it to the top through hard work and personal charm, and by strict adherence to the Common Sense Rules for Success: treat your sponsors like gold and offend no one. Besides, his own “lady friend” wouldn’t be here tonight either. Andris had met her once — a quiet, pretty girl who adored Willem and refused to attend any of his matches because she couldn’t bear the possibility of seeing him hurt.
Forget the empty box, Andris told himself. He pasted a smile on to his face and said, “Talk is cheap,” but he was aware that his focus had tilted. His mind felt like an antique lens-camera that had fuzzed out on a carefully planned shot because something huge and close had moved into the view-finder. It was Florinda he saw, Florinda as she’d looked that day back on the mainland, slender and summer-eyed, blond tumble of hair, elegant in red jacket and black, waist-hugging skirt. She’d studied him through the glass and he’d thought with surprise, my God, she is gorgeous. It would have been easier, somehow, if she’d been ugly…
Easier not to wake up beside her one morning and realize that he’d fallen in love. Easier to watch her go back to Yuri Ootan.
Stop it! he thought angrily as he faced Carstairs under the glare of the Hippodrome lights. She is who she is and you can’t change it.
He became aware that Faydrin had his ears pinned to his skull and was snaking his head towards Carstairs’s black horse, teeth clacking peevishly. Andris touched him with the spur and gathered him back into the rein. Time to get this God damned show on the road. He and Carstairs saluted each other, sabers snapping upward and down in purposeful, glinting arcs. No more banter. Carstairs’s gaze was flat and focused now. Andris felt his own heart thud against his ribs. Easy, man, he told himself. Keep your temper out of this. With a flick of the wrist, he locked his visor into place.
The starting buzzer blatted.
Before the echo died, Andris had his opening: Carstairs’s black maniac squealed and went on to its hind legs. Not Carstairs’s idea, that. Andris could hear him cursing as he spurred the beast and whacked its flank with the flat of his saber to get it back to all fours. Into that confusion Andris propelled Faydrin. He closed sword-side to Carstairs. Carstairs’s sword-arm was still angled back and down, leaving his whole body exposed and vulnerable: a beginner’s target, easy score, big points. Andris slashed past the black horse’s plunging neck.But Carstairs was good. He saw it coming, lunged desperately sideways, his saber flailing in counterbalance. Instead of pinning his breastplate dead center and raising an explosion of red fireworks, Andris merely scratched him. There was a fizzling seam of crimson sparks. A boil of color came from Andris’s own armor, a green hot-spot just behind his elbow that foamed outward and swallowed his arm in sequinned brilliance while pain like jagged lightning echoed up through his skull.
God damn it! he thought savagely as his lower arm went numb. Carstair’s flailing blade had caught him quite by accident. The stabbing in Andris’s head subsided. He felt the saber slide from his deadened fingers. Sweating, he jammed the weapon against his thigh with his wrist. Without the damned saber, he might as well concede the match here and now. Dimly he was aware that the crowd was screaming. He did the only thing he could do: dropped the reins, ditched his shield in the dirt, and snagged the saber with his left hand before it got away from him entirely. Carstairs could have picked him off with ease in that moment if he hadn’t been too busy lurching himself back into the saddle. It had been luck, sheer luck that he’d landed the cut in the first place.
Time out, Andris thought. Guiding Faydrin by leg and weight, he swung into a wide, careful circle around the black horse. From elbow to fingertips, his right arm was dead. He wasn’t bleeding; with the modern armor and the touch-field sabers, it was rare to draw blood any more. The point of the sport was to feed the mob’s lust for spectacle and gambling, not to get killed. Sometimes, though, it happened that a duellist was badly hurt. Sometimes, there was a death. Andris knew that this remote possibility never ceased to feed the crowd’s dark heart. He listened to the screams and felt guilty hunger resonate in the echoes.
Don’t get your hopes up, he thought cynically at them. I’m not about to be fodder today.
Carstairs nudged the black horse into a canter and spiralled out to meet him, plainly aiming to jam him against the boards. Andris touched Faydrin with the right spur, sent him in a hard sideways shove at the black horse — a damned dangerous move without the protection of a shield. Carstairs slashed at him. Their sabers met with a skreet of synthalloy and a crackle of white light. The storm-smell of ozone enveloped them. The horses bumped and jostled each other, teeth flashing like yellow tusks, the whites of their eyes gleaming like the ice-rings that haloed the twin moons at midwinter. This was a muscle contest, Carstairs grunting as he tried to steam-roller his blade past Andris’s block, the two touch-fields hissing and whitely phosphorescent, bright enough to show Andris a brief glimpse of Carstairs’s grimacing face behind his mesh visor.
Again, Andris jabbed Faydrin with the spur. The horse slammed sideways hard enough, this time, to unbalance the black. There was a moment of bruising pressure
(another flashing, jackhammer echo thudded through his brain)
as Andris’s leg was crushed against Carstairs’s, then the black horse floundered, Carstairs’s attack fell apart, and Andris pulled away fast, scoring with a flare of blue sparks on Carstairs’s upper arm on his way out.
The scoreboard showed 10-8 for Carstairs. Andris cursed. That cut he’d taken in the opening seconds of the match had cost him big time. He tried to wiggle his fingers, felt them crackle with a giddy flush of pins and needles that reverberated through his gut with unexpected nausea. Bloody hell, he thought savagely as the pain zinged onward to his brain with enough sawtoothed intensity to send him floating. What the hell is happening to me! He sucked in a quick, hard breath through his nose. Beneath him, Faydrin slowed and stopped. Andris blinked. The pain melted and gravity reasserted itself, and with it came the thud of hoofbeats. Carstairs! Flash-picture of the black horse cannoning down on him, nostrils flaring red, Carstairs poised over its neck, saber aimed straight at his heart.
Without conscious thought, Andris lifted Faydrin (look Ma, no hands!) into a rearing, twisting turn right in Carstairs’s path. The black horse flung its head wildly and dodged. The saber-thrust intended for him skated off Faydrin’s neck armor which fireballed with red-mauve sparks. Faydrin’s ears flattened. With an angry, grunting squeal, he lunged at the black horse. Both beasts reared, striking with their forelegs. Carstairs cursed and sawed ineffectually at the reins.
There was the glint of spotlights on jointed plates of horse armor, and the sensation of a pile-driver thudding into meat somewhere very close, and the turbulence of surfing a bucking, tossing wave. Then Faydrin dropped back to all fours and Andris got his injured hand moving enough to gather up the reins. His fingers felt weak and watery, as if someone had sutured on a mechanical limb and forgotten to lubricate the controls. Elongated and skull-like, the black horse’s face scissored towards him. Its white-rimmed eyes burned with black, mindless vacancy.
“Pull him back!” Andris yelled at Carstairs, and beat at that snaking head with his saber, to hell with the points it was going to cost him. With a flare of green sparks, his blade thwacked across the beast’s face-armor and startled it enough that Carstairs’s frantic sawing at the bit finally had some effect. Carstairs spurred the black horse into a tight spin away from him. Andris let him go and reined Faydrin towards center-arena… towards his shield, beckoning within the bright cone of a spotlight.
–Something wrong, a shortness in Faydrin’s stride. He leaned from the saddle and — oh damn! — saw blood sheeting down the horse’s leg, courtesy of that black maniac. You weren’t supposed to let that sort of thing get to you. You were supposed to keep your temper out of the duels. But suddenly his breath was sticking in his throat. The sand and the lights seemed to recede behind a shimmering red film.
And the pain in his skull blossomed again, vicious and drill-like, almost as if his brain-core were shorting out.
He blinked and shook his head. The crowd, he suddenly realized, was screaming. He glanced over his shoulder and found Carstairs closing on him. Damn it, Rohansi, get your act together! He dug the spurs into Faydrin’s sides. The horse wobbled, — keep it together, old son, just one more minute –– then steadied and powered forward. Andris was acutely conscious of the sculpted muscles coiling and reaching beneath him, the shortness each time the injured foreleg touched down, the thudding of Faydrin’s heart against his legs. He heard his own breath, whistling in his ears. Carstairs saw where he was headed and changed course to intercept him.
Time telescoped. The black horse’s breath huffed closer and closer, booming like a bellows. Its hoofs kicked up sand in miniature explosions. Carstairs was like some alien creature, his finned, fantastical visor twisting the light into a dozen swimming angles, his saber sweeping upward in a broad, hungry arc…
Faster! Andris closed his legs and Faydrin stretched in a final spurt of speed. Andris dropped the reins. Now came the trick from his boyhood, the game he and his brother Bren used to play, ducking from their ponies’ backs for some object placed in the grass, an old sack or a bucket or (once) a brassiere they’d pinched from the servants’ laundry… The hard part, tonight, was to wedge the saber against the pommel while he hooked his fingers down into the gullet of the saddle. Then it was swing downward, cling to the horse with four precarious fingers and a heel, stretch the damn crippled arm towards the ground and grab up the shield. His fingers closed on its rim, held. The thing came up in a spray of sand. Then with a wrench he was back in the saddle.There was no time to slide his hand through the handles. Carstairs was on him. Andris used the shield as a club to beat off Carstairs’s saber; and in the same moment, he slammed his own saber in a cross-thrust at the guy, coming in under his guard, lighting up his breastplate with a constellation of sparking red telltales.
That for my horse, you bastard!
And then the time-buzzer was honking, the crowd was shrieking, and the scoreboard was pinging frantically amidst the mayhem — the numbers dissolving into meaningless hieroglyphs that hung in frozen suspension as the seconds ticked by…
Faydrin stumbled. Andris secured his grip on the shield and reined to a halt. The pain still crawled around his skull in corrosive threads. With fumbling fingers he cracked the hinges on his helmet and pulled it off.
The pain stopped.
Dismounting, he took an unsteady breath and shook the sweat from his hair. His eyes traveled the faces at ringside; found Moëse, and held her gaze, his mouth set in a thin line. She nodded faintly and moved towards the exit tunnel. Good. She understood that he was in trouble. He dropped his helmet in the sand and bent over Faydrin’s injured leg.
There was blood. Skin flapped and raw flesh gaped where the black horse’s shoe had caught Faydrin’s forearm. Andris reached to clamp off the flow but Faydrin rolled his eye and threatened to lunge away.
“Do not!” Andris told him sharply. He cupped a hand across the horse’s flat nose, felt hot pungent sweat slicking under his fingers, and willed Faydrin to be still.
And Faydrin subsided, his eye white-rimmed and worried as Andris eased his palm over the wound.
Carstairs was circling his black horse some distance away. Around them, the crowd’s roar ebbed into expectant silence. Still no score on the board. The judges must be having trouble deciding on the legitimacy of that final move of his. If you touch the ground, you’re out: that was the rule. Swinging down like that to snatch up his shield… It would spark arguments over technicalities, precedents, judgements past, future legitimacies. The seconds dragged into a minute. Two minutes. Faydrin sweated and bled into his fingers. Up in the stands a low mutter started, the kind of restless noise that crawled disturbingly through your gut.
A gaggle of coveralled medics hovered at ringside, not daring to invade the arena until the winner was announced. Andris could see them trying to gauge the seriousness of the horse’s injury from the three-dee close-ups at their station. He let his eyes wander over the rows of packed humanity, over the number of Hippodrome Security uniforms quietly shifting closer to ringside. He wondered if it really was a Bryner web in his helmet, or something else…
It wouldn’t be the first time someone had tried to arrange who won and who lost a match.
Or to devise an accident for their spouse.
God, he refused to believe that.
Carstairs came toward him on the black horse. He was still wearing his helmet, no sign of discomfort. He flipped up his visor. “How bad’s the leg?” he asked.
“Messy. I don’t think it’s crippling.”
“Damned black idiot.” He scanned the stands. “What the hell’s the holdup? We pay those judges to make up their minds, not to sit around drinking tea.” And then, his voice lower, “I don’t like this. The crowd’s getting a temper.”
The PA system interrupted him. Crackles and drumrolls. “Ladies and gentlemen, the winner of our Thanksgiving Match…”