…or, Going Round In Circles
The teaching assistant, Dobbs, showed far less imagination and perception in pairing off the students who’d been assigned to the east side.
He seemed to be going by similar weapons, putting swords against swords and knives against knives. Nobody else had a throwing axe like mine, so I was set against an axe-wielding, blond-bearded dwarf dressed in leather with so many rivets and buckles that it was as much metal as hide.
“Alright, you two,” Dobbs said. “Let’s see what you can do.”
“Uh, hi,” I said to the dwarf, hefting my weapon.
“I am Badulf, son of Badwulf,” he said, giving a little flourish with his battle axe. It was a double-bladed job, with a handle that was almost as tall as he was. Dwarves could get away with long, unwieldy-seeming weapons, because of their low center of balance. “Of the Clan Oakenkeg.”
“Jamie,” I said, returning the gesture. “Son of Kevin.”
We squared off warily. Neither of us made the first move. We stood there, studying each other. I imagined he must have been thinking the same things that I was.
I had longer arms, but his weapon had a longer haft. If he swung it one-handed—and I was willing to bet that he could—he could beat me in reach. I probably had the advantage in reflexes and natural coordination, but he was likely far more skilled. There was a reason Callahan had given all the dwarves a pass to the advanced section. I would be faster on my feet, but his forearms were thicker than my neck.
He had no reason to take the offensive. While a charging dwarf was supposed to be a fearsome sight, a dwarf on defense could be a fortress in himself. He could stand there and make me come to him, and take my legs off at the knees as soon as I came into reach.
Throwing the axe wasn’t an option. He’d probably be able to deflect it, and even if he didn’t, a dwarf’s skull was not the same as a human’s. Nothing but the most dead-on of direct hits would have a chance of ending the fight.
“What the hell are you two doing?” Dobbs asked. “Fight!”
“We are,” Badulf told him, without taking his eyes off of me.
“Well, do it faster!” Dobbs said.
I faked a throw and then charged at him, the axe raised up by my left shoulder. I was watching him for his move, and when he lifted his axe, I veered to the side and slashed at him as I passed on his left. He twisted with surprising nimbleness, moving just enough to avoid my blade. I had a feeling this was more a matter of economy of movement than of me pushing him to the limit. I pivoted around on the slick grass as I skidded to a stop, facing him again.
I stood regarding him for a moment, then charged at him, my axe held in the same position again. I faked the start of the same swing, but then darted around on his right. This time, I nicked his arm.
On the next pass, Badulf was ready for my direction change and I didn’t get close enough to even swing. On my fourth go-round, I threw the axe and dived wide to the side. I had to roll to avoid an overhead swing as the dwarf briefly took the offensive, but he resumed his original stance when my weapon winged its way back to my hand.
“Quit messing around!” the teaching assistant barked. “Get in there and mix it up!”
I wanted to tell him to fuck off, that I was fighting to win, not for his approval. He’d asked to see what I could do, and I was showing him.
Still, if his style was anything like Callahan’s, I did not want to piss him off.
I barreled in straight on, once again watching Badulf. As soon as I was within range of his blade, I leapt. His axe caught me in the leg, the blade passing cleanly through my shin. It would have been a severing blow. It was so quick that the pain was actually slow in coming, though it flared intensely for a second when it did.
My axe buried itself in his chest. I bounced off of him and fell to the ground. He stumbled backwards, but kept his feet.
“You need a better defense than dodging away,” Dobbs said to me, raising his clipboard. “What’s your name?”
“Bowman,” I said. “James.”
He marked something down.
“Go practice with them till Coach finishes sorting,” he said, pointing to another group of students. “You need to work on feinting and deflecting.”
“I know how to feint,” I said.
“You know to feint,” he said. “Move it!”
Badulf pulled my spectral axe out of himself with a grunt and handed it to me.
“That was a good, solid hit,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
Dobbs had stuck me in a group of girls armed with knives and short swords. They seemed like an agile bunch, but they stopped fighting when I approached.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey,” one of them—a short, perky girl with really intense blue eyes and a short saber—said.
“So, what are we doing?” I asked.
“Just fucking around a bit,” she said. “Dobbs is a tool.”
“I noticed,” I said.
“Wanna spar?”
“Sure.”
The rest of the group resumed their fighting when we started. None of them seemed to be aiming “to kill”, but stopping their blows if they got through each other’s defenses.
Following Dobbs’s instructions, I focused on feinting and turning aside her blows. I was pretty good at parrying; that simply hadn’t been as good an option when faced with a dwarven battle axe as it was when my opponent was a slender human girl with a light blade.
We both did pretty well. My technique was rusty. Outside of school, all my practice had been private, mostly focusing on throwing at targets and swinging at the air. It was coming back to me, though.
“That’s a really pretty axe,” the girl said as we went through the motions of attacking and parrying each other.
“Thanks,” I said. I’d never thought of it in those terms, but it was clear I’d have to learn to take that sort of compliment graciously.
“Where’d you get it?”
“Well, my great, great, et cetera grandfather was a woodcutter,” I said. “And he lost his axe in—”
“Oh, is it a faerie axe?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. Again, that wouldn’t have been my chosen descriptor. It was my ancestral weapon, not a pretty faerie axe. “We think it’s one of the originals.”
“That’s neat,” she said. “Mine’s my grandpa’s infantry sword, from the Chaos Wars. Doesn’t do much, but it’s magical.”
“Hey, guys,” Steff said, joining our group. He was wearing a loose, faded t-shirt and jeans with patched knees, and a belt with a pair of daggers on them. The skin around his left eye was discolored and swelling up.
“Hey, sweetie,” the girl I’d been sparring with said. “What happened?”
“I think Callahan has a crush on me,” Steff said.
“You’re way psycho, Steff,” the girl said. “Why were you late?”
“Thought we were meeting on the south field,” Steff said.
“Hey, Steff,” I said.
“Oh, hi. You’re Margot’s friend, right?” he said.
“Marlot,” I said.
“Margot’s friend Marlot?” he asked, teasingly.
Though he was undeniably a man, there was something almost girlish about his smile. His long hair was definitely girlier than Iason’s, and it looked like his body was a bit softer, but he was broader across the shoulders and closer to my height.
“Marlot’s friend Jamie,” I said. “I was hoping I’d run into you again.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I wanted to ask you if you know an elf named Iason,” I said. “Iason Manblood?”
“Oh, yeah, I totally know him,” Steff said.
“Okay, because I—”
“Yeah, I know every elf, everywhere,” Steff said. “We all know each other, don’t you know? And we can tell what trees are by looking at them, and we come into human villages and steal little boys to ass-rape.”
“Oh, fuck off,” I said. “I’m part elf, too, you know.”
“Sure, you’re one sixty-fourth pureblood elven princess,” he said. “You and every other blond in the world.”
“Hey, ditch the attitude,” I said. “I just met this guy, and I figured that being in Treehome, you might know him.”
“Well, for your information, I’m not in Treehome,” Steff said. “I’m in Harlowe. I don’t know any of the elves that go here, and I don’t like the ones I do know.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, holding up my hands. “Sorry I asked.”
“Hey, do you two treefucking sissies want to quit flirting and pay attention?” Callahan shouted, and I realized we’d missed the end of the sorting. Dobbs was heading over to the beginner group, and most of the rest of the eastern group was already watching Callahan.
“I’m offended by that,” Steff said. “He’s not a treefucker.”
“I never said I was an elf, I said I had elven blood,” I told him.
“Alright,” Callahan said. “The first one of you fags who decks the other one doesn’t get a failing grade for the day.”
I didn’t have time to finish sorting out the meaning of the words before Steff’s fist hit the side of my face. I couldn’t say if he put everything he had into it, but it didn’t feel like he was holding back.
“Right,” Callahan said, moving right along. “Now that I have everybody’s attention, we’re going to get started. You’re here on this side of the field because you already know something about fighting. They say that experience is the best teacher. I’m going to give you the best learning experience you can get, short of going out and getting yourselves killed. I’m going to put you in fights with each other, throw you into situations that will test the limits of what I know you can do. The goal is that by the end of the year, you’ll be ready to jump into combat with any opponent. We’re not going to waste a whole lot of time on ‘technique’ or ‘form’. If I see you holding your sword by the wrong end, I’ll tell you.”
She started moving around the field, breaking groups up and setting them to tasks. One of the first people she grabbed was Steff. She ordered him to stand still and let three of the skirmishers practice their death blows. Maybe he was just putting on a front to piss her off, but he sure didn’t seem put out by this order.
“I saw a little bit of your hit and run shit on the dwarf,” she said when she got to me. “That’s not going to work against anybody who has a little bit of skill. You need to work on standing your ground enough to get in the good hits, even against a more powerful fighter.” She took some loops of leather cord off her belt, which unfolded into a hoop a yard across. She dropped it on the ground. “Stand here. For the rest of the period, you keep one foot in this hoop at all times.”
I stepped inside the hoop. Callahan whistled at a big guy from the skirmish team, who turned out to be a big girl when she got closer. She had a giant two-handed sword.
“I want you to try to hit Blingy-boy here,” she said. “Blingy, you work on dodging or parrying her blows for now. Let me see your axe.”
She held out her hands and I gave it to her. I half expected a backhand and a lecture about handing over my weapon, but then, I more-than-half expected retribution if I didn’t. She tossed it up in the air and caught it.
“Give me a downward chop,” she said to the short-haired female fighter, who obliged her with an overhead blow. She held my little axe with two hands like it was a staff and blocked the blow, then shoved it aside. “Diagonal swing,” she said, adjusting to a more normal grip, and this one she redirected. “Straight jab,” she said, and twisted aside. “Work on those,” she said to me, handing my axe back to me. “Your natural inclination is going to be to jump out of the way, so you need to focus on keeping one foot planted in the hoop,” she said. To my sparring partner, she said, “If he doesn’t, break his leg.”
The hulking fighter nodded.
I kept my foot inside the hoop, even when my opponent scored a hit, which was often.
I figured out early on that I could only block her blows outright if the attack was coming straight on and I used both hands. Otherwise, the force was enough to rip my axe out of my hands. It came back, fortunately. Callahan hadn’t made any provisions for weapon retrieval. Of course, she’d seen my axe come back the first time.
Callahan stopped by and halted our exercise several times, making us “replay” what we’d just done after giving one or the other of us a tip. I was slow in catching on to the fact that my opponent wasn’t just being used as a prop in my lesson. Her repertoire of attacks consisted only of really broad, powerful strokes. As I was getting better at defending against her attacks, she was getting better at landing them.
The jarring pain in my arms every time our weapons clashed faded quickly, as they were only spectral injuries, but by the end of the class period I was winded and sore from the effort of moving. I actually had to be faster to dodge by degrees than I did to throw myself out of the path of the sword.
“Good work, Blingy,” Callahan said to me at the end of class.
“Do I get a passing grade?” I asked.
“Did you hit Johnson first when I told you to?” she asked, and moved on without waiting for an answer.
