Beyond Binary Read online

  His mother did not look up from rolling out her pastry. They lived in the country; things died. And her son did not seem particularly upset. But then, he seldom did. She was raising him not to be afraid of anything if she could help it.

  “The man in the orchard.”

  Octavia St Vier carefully put down her rolling pin, wiped her hands on her apron, and tucked up her skirts. At the door she slipped into her wooden clogs, because it was spring and the ground was still muddy. The boy followed her out to the orchard, where a man lay still as the grave under an apple tree, his hands clutching tight at something on his chest.

  “Oh, love, he’s not dead.”

  “He smells dead,” said her son.

  Octavia chuckled. “He does that. He’s dead drunk, is all, and old and probably sick. He’s got good boots, but they’re all worn out, see? He must have come a long way.”

  “What’s he holding?” Before she could think to stop him, her son reached between the old man’s hands to tug at the end of what he clutched in the folds of his messy cloak.

  Like a corpse in a comedy, the old man sat suddenly bolt upright, still gripping one end of the long pointed object whose other end was in her son’s hands. It was the end of a sword, sheathed in cracked leather. Octavia was not usually a screamer, but she screamed.

  “Rarrrrrr,” the old man growled furiously. It seemed to be all he could manage at the moment, but his meaning was clear.

  “Richard,” Octavia said, as carefully as if she were back at her girlhood elocution lessons—though this was not the sort of sentence they had been designed for—“put the man’s sword down.”

  She could tell her son didn’t want to. His hand was closed around the pommel, encircled itself by a swirl of metal which no doubt had its own special name as well. It was a beautiful object; its function was clearly to keep anything outside from touching the hand within.

  The old man growled again. He tugged on the sword, but he was so weak, and her son’s grip held so fast, that it only separated scabbard from blade. Octavia saw hard steel emerge from the leather. “Richard….” She used the Voice of Command that every mother knows. “Now.”

  Her son dropped the sword abruptly, and just as abruptly scrambled up the nearest tree. He broke off a branch, which was strictly forbidden, and waved it at the sky.

  The old man pulled the weapon back into his personal aura of funk, rags, hunger, and age. He coughed, hawked, spat, repeated that, and dragged himself up until his back was to the apple tree’s trunk.

  “Quick little nipper,” he said. “’Sgonna break his neck.”

  Octavia shielded her eyes to look up at the boy in the tree. “Oh,” she said, “he never falls. You get used to it. Would you like some water?”

  ∞

  The old man didn’t clean up particularly well, but he did clean up. When he was sober, he cut wood and carried water for their little cottage. He had very strong arms. He did stay sober long enough to spend all of one day and most of the next sanding every inch of his rust-pocked blade—there was quite a lot of it, it was nearly as tall as the boy’s shoulder—and then oiling it, over and over. He wouldn’t let anyone help. Richard did offer. But the old man said he made him nervous, always wriggling about like that, couldn’t he keep still for one god-blasted moment, and get off that table, no not up into the rafters you’re enough to give a man palpitations now get outta here if you can’t keep still.

  “It’s my house,” Richard said. “You’re just charity.”

  “Am not neither. I’m a servant. That’s what it’s come to. Fetch and carry for madam your mother, but at least I’ve got my pride, and what does she want all those books for anyway? And where’s your daddy?”

  It wasn’t like he hadn’t heard that one before. “She left him behind,” he said. “He couldn’t keep up. She likes the books better. And me.” Richard lifted a book off the shelf. He was supposed to ask permission first, but she wasn’t around to ask. “There’s pictures. Animals’ insides. Inside-out. See?”

  He found a particularly garish one. Last year he’d been scared to look too closely at it, but now that he was big it filled him with horrific delight. He thrust it suddenly up into the old man’s face.

  But the old man reacted a great deal more strongly than even a very horrible picture should have warranted. As soon as Richard shoved the book at him he jumped backwards, knocking over his chair, one arm thrown back, his other arm forward to strike the book from they boy’s hand.

  Quickly the boy pivoted, drawing his mother’s book out of harm’s way. He had no desire to have his ass handed to him on a platter, the official punishment for messing up books.

  The old man fell back, panting. “You saw that coming,” he wheezed. “You devil’s whelp.”

  He lunged at him again. Richard protected the book.

  The old man started chasing him around the room, taking swipes at him from different angles, high, low, sideways . . . It was scary, but also funny. There was no way the old man was going to touch him, after all. Richard could always see just what he was aiming for, just where his hand would fall—except, of course, that it never could.

  Not a screamer, Octavia let out a yell when she walked into the room. “What in the Seven Hells are you doing with my son?”

  The old man stopped cold. He drew himself up, carefully taking deep breaths of air so he could be steady enough to say clearly, “Madam, I am training him. In the art of the sword. It cannot have escaped your notice that he has an aptitude.”

  Octavia put down the dead starling that she was carrying. “I’m afraid it has,” she said. “But do go on.”

  ∞

  Richard practiced in the orchard with a stick. His best friend, Crispin, wanted to practice too, but Crispin’s parents had impressed upon him that lords did not fight with steel. It wasn’t noble; you hired others to do it for you, like washing dishes or ironing shirts or figuring accounts.

  “But it’s not steel,” Richard explained; “it’s wood. It’s just a stick, Crispin; come on.”

  The old man had no interest in teaching Crispin, and anyway it might have gotten back to his father, so Richard just showed his friend everything he learned, and they practiced together. Privately, Richard thought Crispin wasn’t very good, but he kept the thought to himself. Crispin had a temper. He was capable of taking umbrage for days at a time, which was dull, but could usually be resolved either in a fistfight or an elaborate ritual apology orchestrated by Crispin.

  Richard didn’t mind that. Crispin was inventive. It was never the same thing twice and it was never boring—and never all that hard, really. Richard was perfectly capable of crossing the brook on the dead log blindfolded, or of fetching the bird’s nest down from under the topmost eave by Crispin’s mother’s window. He did get in trouble the time he climbed up the chimney, because chimneys are dirty and his mother had to waste her time washing all his clothes out. But Crispin gave him his best throwing stick to make up for it, so that worked out all right. And Crispin’s other ideas were just as good as his vengeful ones. Crispin was the one who figured out how they could get the cakes meant for the visitors on Last Night and make it look like the cat had done it. And Crispin was the one who covered for him the time they borrowed his father’s hunting spears to play Kings in the orchard, when they forgot to bring them back in time. They never told on each other, no matter what.

  Crispin’s father was all right, except for his prejudice against steel. He winked when the boys were caught stealing apples from his orchards, and even let Richard ride the horses that were out to pasture; if he could catch one, he could ride it, that was the deal (as long as it wasn’t a brood mare) and Crispin with him.

  Crispin’s father was Lord Trevelyan, and had a seat on the Council of Lords, but he didn’t like the City, and never went there if he could help it. Every Quarter Day, Trevelyan’s steward brought Richard’s mother the money her family sent from the city to keep her there. A certain amount of it went right b
ack to town, to be spent on books of Natural History the next time Lady Trevelyan went there to shop. Lady Trevelyan was stylish and liked theatre. She went to the city every year. She did not buy the books herself, of course, and probably would have liked to forget all about them, but her husband had instructed that they be seen to, along with everything else the estate required from town.

  What mattered was that the money came, and came regularly. Without it, his mother said, they would have to go live in a cave somewhere—and not a nice cave, either. “Why couldn’t we just go live with your family?” Richard asked.

  “Their house is too small.”

  “You said it had seventeen rooms.”

  “Seventeen rooms, and no air to breathe. And no place to cut up bats.”

  “Mother, when you find out how bats can fly, will you write a book?”

  “Maybe. But I think it would be more interesting to learn about how frogs breathe, then, don’t you?”

  So she always counted the money carefully when it came in, and hid it in her special hiding place, a big book called Toads and their Discontents. There were some pictures of Toads, all right, but their Discontents had been hollowed out to make a stash for coins.

  Shortly after the latest Quarter Day, the old swordsman disappeared. Octavia St Vier anxiously counted her stash, but all the coins were still there.

  She gave some to him the next time he came and went, though. It had been a beautiful summer, a poet’s summer of white roses and green-gold grain, and tinted apples swelling on the bough against a sky so blue it didn’t seem quite real. Richard found that he remembered most of the old man’s teaching from when he was little, and the old man was so pleased that he showed him more ways to make the pretend steel dance at the end of his arm—Make it part of your arm, boyo!—and to dance away from it, to out-guess the other blade and make your body less of a target.

  Crispin got bored, and then annoyed. “All you ever want to do is play swords anymore!”

  “It’s good,” Richard said, striking at an oak tree with a wooden lathe flexible enough to bear it.

  “No, it’s not. It’s just the same thing, over and over.”

  “No, it’s not.” Richard imagined a slightly larger opponent, and shifted his wrist. “Come on, Crispin, I’ll show you how to disarm someone in three moves.”

  “No!” Crispin kicked the oak. He was smart enough not to kick Richard when Richard was armed. “What are you stabbing that tree for?” he taunted. “Are you trying to kill it?”

  “Nope.” Richard kept drilling.

  “You’re trying to kill it because you’re scared to climb it.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Prove it.”

  So he did.

  “The black mare’s in the field,” Crispin told him when he’d hauled himself all the way up to the branch Richard was on, by dint of telling himself it didn’t matter.

  “The racer?”

  “Yah.”

  “How long?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Can we catch her?”

  “We can try. Unless you’d rather play swords against trees. She’s pretty fierce.”

  Richard threw an acorn at Crispin. Crispin ducked, and nearly fell out of the tree.

  “Don’t do that,” he said stiffly, holding on for dear life. “Or I’ll never let you near our horses again.”

  “Let’s get down,” Richard said. He eased himself down first, leaving Crispin to follow where he couldn’t be seen. Crispin got mad if you criticized his climbing, or noticed he needed help. The rule was, he had to ask for it first, even if he took a long time. Otherwise he got mad.

  Crispin arrived at the bottom all covered in bark. “Let’s go swimming first,” he said, so they did that. On the way home, they discovered Crispin’s little sister unattended, so they borrowed her to make a pageant wagon of Queen Diane Going to War with the garden wheelbarrow and the one-horned goat, which didn’t turn out as well as they’d hoped, although that wasn’t their fault; if she’d only kept still and not shrieked so loud, nothing would have happened. Nonetheless, it got them both thrashed, and separated for a week. Richard didn’t mind that much, as it gave him more time to practice. All that stretching really did help the ache of the beating go away faster, too.

  The old man was going back to the city for the winter, where a body could get warm, he said, and the booze, while of lesser quality, was cheaper, if you knew where to go: “Riverside,” he said, and Octavia said, “That’s a place of last resort.”

  “No, lady,” he gestured at the cottage; “this is.”

  But when she handed him the money, he said, “What’s this for?”

  “For teaching my son.”

  He took it, and went his way, just as the apples were ripening to fall. He came back the next year, and the next, and he stayed a little longer each time. He told them he had a niece in Covington, with four daughters ugly as homemade sin. He told them the Northern mountains were so cold your teeth froze and fell out if you didn’t keep your mouth shut. And he told them the city was crazy about a new swordsman, De Maris, who’d perfected a spiraling triple thrust the eye could hardly follow.

  “Could you fake it?” Richard asked, and the old man clouted him (and missed). They figured it out together.

  Octavia gave him more money when he went. But maybe that was a mistake, because then he didn’t come back. The old fellow might have just dropped dead, or been robbed, or he might have spent it all on a tearing binge. It hardly mattered. But she had meant him to buy a sword for Richard with it, and that mattered some.

  So she went up to the Trevelyan manor, to see what could be done. Surely, she thought, they had plenty of swords there. Nobles owned swords, even if they didn’t duel themselves. There were ritual swordsmen you hired for weddings, and, well, guards and things.

  The manor servants knew her, although they didn’t like her much. They were all country people, and she was a city girl with a bastard son and some very weird habits. Still, it wasn’t their business to keep her from their lord if he wanted to see her. And so she made her best remembered courtesy to Lord Trevelyan, who was at a table in his muniments room doing something he didn’t mind being interrupted at. Octavia St Vier was a very pretty woman, even in a sun-faded gown, her hair bundled up in a turban and smudges on both her elbows.

  “You’ve been so kind,” she said; “I won’t take much of your time. It’s about Richard.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Lord Trevelyan good-humoredly. “Has he corrupted Crispin, or has Crispin corrupted him?” She looked at him inquiringly. “Boys do these things, you know,” he went on. “It’s nobody’s fault; it’s just a phase. I’m not concerned, and you shouldn’t be, either.”

  “Crispin doesn’t really like the sword,” she said.

  His tutor had taught him about metaphor, but he realized that wasn’t what she meant. He also realized that this poor woman knew nothing about boys, and that he should, as his lady wife often told him, have kept his mouth shut.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “The sword.”

  “Richard loves it, though.”

  “I hear that he shows promise.”

  “Really?” She said it a little frostily, as her own mother might have done. “Have people been talking about it?”

  “Not at all,” he hastened to assure her, although it was not true. People did notice Octavia St Vier’s rather striking boy—and the drunken swordmaster talked in the village where he got his drink, pretty much nonstop. But he just said, “Crispin’s not as subtle as he thinks he is.”

  “Oh.” She smiled. She really was a very pretty woman. The St Viers might be a family of bankers, but they were bankers of good stock and excellent breeding. “Well, would you help me, then?”

  “Yes,” he said, “of course.” It was her eyes; they were the most amazing color. Almost more violet than blue, fringed with heavy dark lashes….

  “I’d like a sword, then. For my son. Do you have any old ones you don�
�t need?”

  “I can look,” he said. He leaned around the table. “I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to stare, but you’ve got a smudge on your elbow. Right there.”

  “Oh!” she said, when he touched her. His thumb was so large and warm, and, “Oh!” she said again, as she let herself be drawn to him. “I have to tell you, I haven’t done this in a very long time.”

  “Ten years?” he said, and she said, “Fourteen.”

  “Ah, fourteen, of course. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Yes, he’s just turned thirteen. And may I have the sword?”

  “You,” he said gallantly, “may have anything you wish.”

  ∞

  Richard’s mother brought him a sword. It was a gift, she said, from Lord Trevelyan—but he wasn’t to thank him for it; she had already done so, and it would only embarrass him.

  Richard did not ask permission to take the sword to show Crispin. It was his sword now, and he could do as he liked with it. He had already polished it with sand and oil, which it badly needed. Truth to tell, Lord Trevelyan had had a hard time laying his hands on a disposable dueling sword. There were battle swords in the old armory, each with a family story attached. There were dress swords for formal occasions, but he knew Octavia would not be content with one of those. Nor should she be. The boy deserved better. For the first time, Trevelyan considered the future of his unusual tenants. Perhaps he should pay to have the boy trained properly; send to the city for a serious swordmaster—or even have the boy sent there to learn. Richard St Vier was already devoted to Crispin. When Crispin came of age, he might have St Vier as his own personal swordsman, to guard him in the city when he took the family seat in the Council of Lords (a burden Trevelyan would be only too happy to have lifted from him) to fight Crispin’s inevitable young man’s battles over love and honor there, even to stand guard, wreathed in flowers, someday, at Crispin’s wedding. Trevelyan smiled at the thought: a boon companion for his son, a lifelong friend who knew the ways of steel….

  Crispin was tying fishing flies. It was his latest passion; one of their tenants was the local expert, and Crispin had taken to haunting his farmhouse with a mix of flattery, threats and bribes to get him to disclose his secrets one by one.