Bob had begun by galloping in the wake of this charge, but soon caught up and found himself in the middle of it—close enough that he could see the faces of those English Papists, Persons of Quality all, and watch them think as the attack bore down on them. Some seemed ready to die for their faith and rode forward with a certain look of calm ferocity that Bob admired very much. Some stood their ground—not, Bob thought, out of courage but out of terror, as rabbits freeze when the hawk flies overhead. Some wheeled and ran. But a contingent of three riders, who had been situated toward the rear, turned away and rode south in a way that looked purposeful to Bob.
Bob knew what they were doing: first, preserving their regimental standard (one of the three riders was the standard-bearer). This would enable them to erect the colors on a high place later, so that the scattered squadrons and stragglers could converge on it and reform into an effective battalion. Without that scrap of cloth they could never amount to anything but lost Vagabonds. Second, they were going to the other wing where Sarsfield was commanding the bulk of the Jacobite cavalry, and apparently doing a very good job of it; in a few minutes they would come back at the head of several regiments.
Bob out-stripped Ruvigny’s cavalry in an instant when they galloped into the Catholic squadrons and stopped to duel it out with pistols and sabers. French Protestants fighting for the King of England crossed blades with English Catholics fighting for the King of France. Bob, having no personal interest in their quarrel, rode through them all like a cannonball through a bank of smoke and discovered himself in open country pursuing the three riders.
The standard-bearer was moving slowest, and gradually falling behind. Bob almost had him when the fellow chanced to look back; then he let out a yell and spurred his horse forward. The two officers in front, perhaps eight lengths ahead of him, looked back to see their standard-bearer in trouble; he could not defend himself without dropping the colors. As this happened Bob got a direct view of their faces and realized for the first time that one of the two was Upnor.
After a brief exchange of words, Upnor drew back hard on one rein to wheel his mount around, while the other officer shot ahead to get the message out to Sarsfield. Bob—who had a lot to keep track of—heard a loud crack and assumed a pistol had gone off. The standard-bearer, four lengths ahead of Bob, faltered. Bob looked again for Upnor, but he had vanished! Then in the corner of his eye he saw the standard-bearer coming up fast—having brought his mount nearly to a stand-still while Bob was still at a gallop. Bob had no time to do anything but stick his spadroon out. The blade struck something hard and the weapon was wrenched out of his grasp, and he was nearly thrown back onto the horse’s croup. What saved him was that this had all occurred just short of a declivity in the hillside, a little water-course running straight down into the bog, therefore straight across their path. Both Bob’s horse and that of the standard-bearer had seen it coming, and in the absence of orders to the contrary, slowed down.
Bob recovered his equilibrium just shy of this gulley and shook his hand frantically in the air a few times. It felt as if it had been stung by a bee. Lacking another blade, he drew out his pistol, which he had put out of his thoughts until this moment because it was useless while galloping. But now he was standing still, as was the standard-bearer, no more than four yards away from him.
The standard was hung from one end of a full-length pike so that it would rise to thrice the height of a man and be visible above a teeming battlefield. While galloping, the bearer had held it nearly horizontal, like a jousting-lance, in his left hand, while using his right to hold the reins. Bob had overtaken him on the left and he had reflexively raised up the pike-staff to parry Bob’s blow; Bob’s spadroon had cut into it at an angle about a third of the way from the top and come to a stop, wedged into the wood.
The standard-bearer now raised the pole to vertical and planted it, leaving Bob’s spadroon high in the air and out of reach. Hugging the pike against himself and his horse’s ribs to steady himself, he drew out a pistol of his own. He was a beautiful blond English boy of about eighteen and Bob shot him in the head. He was wearing a steel cuirass to protect his torso and so it was the head or nothing.
A light misty rain had commenced and the late afternoon sun had gone out like a snuffed candle, leaving gray twilight. Bob looked down the gulley, drawn by an anguished noise, and saw Upnor’s horse thrashing around with a broken leg. Then he saw Upnor clambering up out of the gulley intact. The crack he had heard before must have been Upnor’s horse breaking its leg when it tried to stop and wheel around in the wrong place.
Bob had discharged his only pistol and there was no time to reload. The standard-bearer had squeezed his trigger involuntarily and fired his pistol into the air. Bob dismounted, staggered on cramped legs over to the standard, and threw it down. He glanced over at Upnor, who had got himself up above his horse on the brink of the watercourse and pulled out a pair of pistols, one in each hand. He aimed one at his horse and pulled the trigger; Bob saw the white sparks from the flint, but it did not fire—the pan had gotten wet.
Upnor now gave Bob a sort of appraising look. Bob planted his foot on the pike at the place where his spadroon was lodged in it, and pulled up on the end until it snapped; then he came up with the weapon in his hand. The Earl of Upnor took one look at it and then, with no hesitation, aimed his other pistol down into the ditch and put his charger out of its misery. He dropped both of his pistols, turned to face Bob, and drew out his rapier. For being something of a traditionalist in these matters, he had not yet adopted the more fashionable small-sword.
“Sergeant Shaftoe,” he said, “since we last met, your brother has achieved even greater infamy than he had then. Now the Battle of Aughrim has been lost. I am not likely to see the sun rise again. But I can at least thank Providence that she has placed you in my power, that I may salvage something of the day by sending the brother of L’Emmerdeur to Hell.”
“I phant’sied ’twas you who were in my power,” Bob muttered.
Upnor cast off his cloak to reveal a shining steel cuirass underneath, with a vest of light mail under that.
“Not at all chivalrous,” Bob observed.
“On the contrary, nothing is more characteristic of the chivalric classes than to put on armor and go round ridding the country of rebellious Vagabonds—as your own cavalry is demonstrating!”
With a wry tilt of the head, Upnor pointed toward the lower slopes of the hill where King William’s cavalry was hunting Irishmen, frantic to kill as many as they could before they lost the daylight altogether. The Earl was a sophisticated man who enjoyed this irony, and wanted Bob to share it with him.
“Enough talking,” Bob said, raising his guard to his face. “I did not come here to make friends with you.” And he snapped the blade down and away, completing the salute. Upnor took half a step forward, raising the rapier to a guard position, then made a little show of remembering his manners and acted out the faintest memory of a salute. He was so dexterous with a sword that he could convey certain qualities, such as sarcasm, simply through nuances in his movements. Bob now stepped towards Upnor, hoping to back him up against the brink of the gulley; this also situated Bob on slightly higher ground.
“It’s about the girl, isn’t it? Abigail, my pretty slave,” Upnor exclaimed. “I had forgotten.”
“No, you hadn’t.”
“Tell me, do you believe that killing me will help you repossess her?”
“Not really. She’ll pass to your heirs and assigns, and I will kill them.”
Upnor did not like this very well. “It is revenge, then,” he concluded. He spun on the ball of one foot, ran down the bank for several yards to build up speed, then leapt across to the opposite brink. “In that case you are obligated to pursue me—so I am entitled to choose the ground. Come over here, Sergeant!”
Bob backed up for a few paces to get a running start, but by the time he was ready to make his leap, Upnor had moved back up to stand directly across fro
m him, rapier aimed out into the space above the stream, positioned to impale Bob in mid-jump. “You hesitate a second time! You could have cut me down before I jumped across,” Upnor said reproachfully.
Bob did not see fit to dignify this with a reply. He sidestepped up the bank; Upnor tracked him until he stopped. Then the Earl turned his head sideways and cupped his hand to his ear like a bad actor. “Hark! Patrick Sarsfield’s cavalry is approaching, I do believe!”
“Those sound like Danish hooves to me.”
Upnor made a sound like heh-heh, a completely unconvincing simulation of a laugh.
“Why are you playing message-boy, my lord? Why is not St. Ruth doing his job?”
“Because his head was carried off by a cannonball,” Upnor responded. He brought the back of his hand to his mouth, pretending to cover a yawn. “It is a dull sword-fight so far,” he complained.
“Let me across and it will become exciting soon enough.”
“No, it is that you lack passion! A Frenchman would have leaped over by now. Perhaps it would help if I told you that I have fucked your sweet Abigail.”
“I assumed as much,” Bob said levelly.
“And you…haven’t?”
“It is none of your business.”
“It is all of my business, as she is my property, and I broke her maidenhead with this rapier, just as I am about to break yours with this one! So do not be coy, Sergeant, I know you have not enjoyed Abigail. Perhaps you shall, one day. But be sure to bring some sheep-gut. I am afraid that I, or one of my friends, have given her a nasty social disease.”
Bob jumped over the ditch at this time. Upnor backed away and let him land safely, but then closed in on him quickly, twitching the rapier with his right hand and now drawing a dagger with his left.
“Don’t look at the poniard, silly man,” Upnor chided him. “You must fix your gaze upon your opponent’s eyes—just as Abigail Frome stares into mine when I am pleasuring her.”
Bob, reckoning that this was enough, wrapped his right arm across his body, drawing the blade back in position to let go a hay-maker. Part of the plan was to convince Upnor that his predictable taunts had actually made Bob angry. So Bob let out a bellow as he launched himself toward Upnor while letting go a mighty backhanded swing.
This was something he had practiced for a whole month with Monsieur LaMotte. Upnor’s light blade could never stand up to a scything attack by the heavier spadroon, and so he had little choice but to drop his blade and step back to let it whoosh by. But Bob’s forward rush would bring him into dagger range. So Upnor drew his right foot (which had been foremost) back, while pivoting on his left, turning sideways to let Bob charge past him. At the same time he raised his left hand so that he could plunge the dagger into Bob’s ribs as he went by.
All of which went according to plan except for the last bit. For instead of rushing by standing up, Bob had planted his feet and dived forwards, so that his trunk was too low to receive Upnor’s dagger. The back-handed cut had flung his body into a twisting movement from his left to his right, and so as he hurtled past he was spinning to face his opponent’s legs. Bob’s left arm and shoulder went through first, extended to take his impact on the ground. Then his head, and the right arm and spadroon trailing along his body. As soon as his left elbow struck the peat he curled that arm around and caught Upnor’s right leg, trapping it against his body.
Upnor needed that leg to take his weight as he moved backwards, and thus had no choice but to fall down, even as Bob was getting his own knees under him. Upnor knew that to fall on his stomach was death, so he spun and landed on his arse and rolled up onto his back, his legs going straight up in the air. If this were a Parisian Salle d’Armes he might have turned it into a backwards somersault and come up fighting, but this was nearly impossible in a stiff cuirass. So Upnor’s legs and arse reached apogee and then came down again. He was going to come up forwards. He planted his right elbow to push off against the ground but kept his guard up with the left, keeping that dagger pointed in the air. Bob had now got up on one knee and managed to take a swing at it. He fully intended to take Upnor’s hand off at the wrist, but either his aim was bad or Upnor reacted with exceptional speed, because instead the blow struck the dagger’s handle just behind the guard, right where Upnor’s thumb and index finger gripped it, and ripped it loose from Upnor’s hand. It whirred off and vanished in gloom and mist.
Upnor did a sideways roll away from Bob and came up angry. “You are a cold, cold, cold-blooded knave!” he exclaimed. “I think you do not care about Abigail at all!”
“I care enough to win this.”
“You have been practicing against someone who knows the rapier,” Upnor said. “Tell me, did he show you this?”
Bob liked to sit in a meadow and throw bits of bread to the birds. He had done this once with a flock of some hundred pigeons who had, once they’d gotten the general idea, surrounded him and waited patiently for him to throw out each scrap. But presently a sparrow had come along and begun to collect evey last crumb that Bob tossed, even though it had been one against a hundred. Even if Bob lured the sparrow to one side, then threw the morsel to the other, the little bird would come across like a flash of light from a signal-mirror and wend its way among the stumbling pigeons and pluck the bread right out from under their open beaks, which would snap together on thin air.
Bob now learned that he was a pigeon and Upnor a sparrow. One moment he was certain that his spadroon was about to take Upnor’s leg off at the knee, and the next, the Earl was somewhere else, and the point of the rapier was headed for Bob’s heart. In desperation he pawed at it with his left hand and diverted it so that it got him just under the ribs on the right side and passed out his back. As Bob fell back, his flailing left hand struck the guard of the rapier, a swirl of silvery bars, and his fingers closed around it. This would prevent Upnor from drawing it out and stabbing Bob again and again as he lay on the ground. Bob landed flat on his back, preceded by that part of the rapier that had gone all the way through him, and found himself pinned, nailed like Jesus. Upnor was pulled forward and ended up staring down into Bob’s face from not far away.
“Lung?” Upnor guessed.
“Liver,” Bob said, “or else I could never do this.” He inhaled and then spat at Upnor’s face, but it came out as a feckless spray.
“’Twill be a slow-festering wound then,” Upnor said. “I will gladly supply you with a quicker death if you will be so good as to let go my weapon.” He glanced up for a moment, distracted by the sound of hurtling cavalry. “Sarsfield,” he pronounced. “Let us finish, I must go to them.”
Bob turned his head sideways, just to get Upnor’s visage out of his sight. He saw a queer thing silhouetted against the deepening gray sky above the hill: a fellow in a gray coat perched on a pole above a ditch, not far away. No, he was not perched, but swinging across it, a matted ponytail trailing behind him like a profusion of battle-streamers from a regimental flag. It was an Irish infantryman, pole-vaulting across the ditch. Coming to the aid of Upnor, his English overlord. He would probably have a dirk or something to finish Bob off with.
“When you go to the next world,” Upnor said, “tell the angels and demons that we know everything about your infamous cabal, and that we will have the gold of Solomon!”
“What the bloody hell are you talking about!?” Bob exclaimed. But before answering, Upnor peeled Bob’s hand off the guard, pinky first. He planted his foot in Bob’s stomach and stood up, yanking the blade out.
“You know perfectly well,” he said indignantly, “Now go and do as I have instructed you!” He aimed a death-blow at Bob’s heart. Bob put his hands up to slap it aside. Then a large object hurtled across the sky and smashed into the rapier’s guard, crumpling the bars and sending it spinning away.
Upnor staggered back, gripping a damaged hand. Bob looked up to see a bulky figure in a ragged muddy gray coat, gripping eight feet or so of pike-staff: the same bit that Bob had broken off the
cavalry standard.
Bob levered himself up on his elbow and rose to a seated position to find the cool, level gaze of Teague Partry directed his way. Teague had a head like a cube of limestone, and brown hair pulled back tight against his skull, though many strands had come loose during the day’s fighting and been plastered back with mud. His blue-gray eyes were set close together, redoubling the intensity of his glare.
“What d’you think y’are, a character in a friggin’ novel, Bob? Can you not perceive that the gentleman is wearin’ armor, and knows more concernin’ swordsmanship than you ever will?”
“I perceive it well enough now, Teague.”
Upnor had, during Teague’s scolding of Bob, gone over and retrieved his rapier. He held it now in his left hand, advancing crab-wise toward Teague.
“Look out, Teague, he’s as dangerous with his left as he is with his right—”
“Bob! You make too much and too little of him at the same time. As a ’fencer he’s a caution, ’tis plain enough to see, but in the larger scheme, Bob, what is he but a friggin’ tosser wavin’ a poker around in the dark.” By this time Upnor had advanced to within about eight feet and so Teague gave his stave a toss upward, gripped it with both hands at the end, and with a grunt, swung it round in a long arc parallel to the ground, catching Upnor in the side and flattening him. Upnor made a grab at the end of the staff, which had ended up hovering over his face, but his movements were cramped by his steel cuirass, which now sported a huge dent jabbing deep into his side. Teague withdrew the stave, shifted his grip so that he was holding it in the middle, raised it up above his head, and began to execute a series of brisk stabbing motions, with the occasional mighty swing. These were accompanied by metallic bashing sounds and screams from Upnor’s end of the stick.