Chương 21: The First Form

The school hall on a Sunday was the emptiest place in Calder. Abe came up the two flights at five to two and found the doors propped open. Croft was already inside, laying four practice blades out on a bench like a surgeon setting out his tools. The chalk square from last week was still ghosted into the floorboards. Neither of them looked at it.

"You're early," Croft said, without turning around.

"You're earlier."

"I'm always earlier. That's the first thing I'm teaching you." He straightened up and pointed at Abe's feet.

"Shoes off. Nobody learns anything in boots." Abe took his boots off and set them by the wall, and he was glad Croft couldn't see his face while he did it, because Marek had opened with almost the same sentence back in October, in a different hall.

"Right," said Croft, and threw him a blade.

"Show me the grip. The one from Saturday. I've been angry about it for eight days." Abe showed him. Croft came over and looked at it from two angles, with his hands behind his back, the way Riddell looks at a ruined edge, and then he winced and let Abe see him do it.

"Who taught you this?"

"A bin lid."

"A bin lid," Croft repeated.

"Well. It shows. The bin lid should be very proud." He didn't fix it right away, and that was the first surprise of the afternoon. He walked a slow circle around Abe instead, looking at his feet, his knees, the set of his shoulders. The longer he looked, the quieter he got, and the quiet was worse than the insults.

"You plant," he said finally.

"Every time you get ready to do anything, you put your feet down like you're expecting the sea. Where'd you get that? And don't say a trash can lid." Abe looked at his own feet. They'd gone shoulder width apart, weight even, knees soft. Page fourteen, the stance his father had underlined. He'd done it in a yard, in the rain, in the dark, more times than he could put a number on.

"It's just how I stand," he said.

"It's how a wall guard stands." Croft said it like a boy naming a bird.

"It's lovely. It's completely wrong. A guard stands in one place all day, that's the whole job. You try that with a sword and you get hit." He stepped into the middle of the floor.

"Watch the feet. Nothing else. If I catch you watching the blade I'll start again." He ran the first form slow, with no power in it. For once there was no silver line and no crowd noise, just a boy in socks on a Sunday, moving like water finding its way downhill. His feet never stopped. Abe had watched this form for two months, but always from across the yard, and up close its secret was simple and enormous: there was no moment, anywhere in the form, where Miles Croft was standing anywhere.

"Again," said Abe, without meaning to. Croft ran it again, and then a third time without being asked, slower, calling the steps out as he went, and the names were sixty years old and worn smooth: the gate, the ferryman, the low tide, the turn.

"My great-grandfather named the steps," he said, coming to rest.

"The book says he was a poet. It also says he lost every fight he ever had outside a hall."

"Which one's the ferryman?"

"Third step. You'll meet him at Christmas, if your feet improve."

"The book," Abe said.

"The family book. Everybody who ever learned this wrote down what they got wrong, going back three generations." Croft said it like a boy mentioning that his family owned shoes.

"It says everybody grips wrong for a year. You don't get a year. Hand." Abe held his hand out. Croft took the wrist and turned the blade a quarter turn in Abe's fingers. He set the crooked knuckles along the flat of the grip instead of around the ridge.

"There. Your knuckle line points where the sword goes. Knuckle, point, same road." He stepped back.

"That's the whole correction. My family gets told that at six." He shrugged.

"Nobody ever showed you, so." The blade sat differently in his hand. It felt wrong at first, and then it felt better than it ever had.

"Now swing." Abe swung, and missed the nothing he was aiming at, and it still felt cleaner going past.

"Again." Then Croft taught him the gate, which was the first step of the form and the only one Abe was allowed to touch today. It was a half turn and one gliding step, and it looked like nothing when Croft did it, and it came apart entirely when Abe did. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

"You stopped," Croft said.

"Middle of the step. Why'd you stop?"

"I didn't."

"You did. Your feet hit the floor and just stay there. Like they live there now." He came around behind Abe, took him by both shoulders, and walked him through it like furniture being moved.

"Don't arrive. That's the whole step. Go again." Abe went again, and stopped again, and went again. Somewhere around the fortieth try, his feet forgot to plant for one whole step. It felt like leaning out over water, and Croft grunted, and from him that was practically a cheer.

"There. Horrible. Do that ten thousand times and it'll only be quite bad."

"How long did it take you?"

"I was six. It took a summer." Croft shrugged.

"You don't get a summer either." He swung again. Croft watched with his arms folded, working out how fast Abe was picking it up, and not liking the answer. There was nobody in the hall to see his face, so he let that show.

"Again. Stop turning your back foot. It's a floor, Abe. Nothing on this floor is coming for you. Again." They did an hour of it. It went fast. Abe's forearms had opinions by the end that they'd never once had about the bin lid. Somewhere in the middle, Croft's phone buzzed against the bench. Then it buzzed again, and kept buzzing, the small stubborn buzz of a feed argument that had been running for eight days and had found something new to be wrong about.

Croft walked over and turned it face down without looking at the screen.

"They're still arguing about Saturday," Abe said.

"They'll go on till December. Then they'll start on the board instead." Croft picked his blade back up.

"My father says fame's a dog. It follows whoever fed it last. Guard." They worked a while longer, and then Croft called a water break neither of them needed. He drank half a bottle in one go and sat down on the bench with his back against the wall bars.

"Have you seen Deepwater Nine?"

"No."

"Don't. It's terrible. My cousin's watched it four times, on purpose." He wiped his mouth on his wrist.

"There's a bit where a man goes into open water on his own and fights a tide beast and wins, and the entire cinema clapped. They clapped, Abe."

"People like a swim."

"People are idiots." Croft pointed the bottle at him.

"You want a proper blade, by the way. Not a school one. A real one's about three hundred marks and it'll see you out." Abe looked at the floorboards for a moment.

"Right," he said.

"There's a man on Gill Street. He's rude and he's the best in Calder, and if you say my name he'll be worse but he'll do it properly." Croft was already up and moving.

"Three hundred's nothing. Guard." Three hundred marks was most of two months of sweeping Riddell's floor, and it was almost exactly what a shopkeeper had counted onto a bench for him at half past two in the morning, and Miles Croft had said it like a boy reading out the time. Then he said what he'd plainly been carrying up the stairs all day.

"Understand something," he said.

"I'm not being nice. I don't care that they clapped. You get better every Sunday, and then I beat you when you're actually good, in front of everybody, and nobody gets to say I beat a boy who couldn't hold a sword. That's the deal."

"I know," said Abe.

"You said. Twice now."

"I'm going to keep saying it," Croft said, with dignity.

"Guard." Abe raised the blade.

"Your father sounds like your great-grandfather."

"My father would thank you for that, so don't ever say it to him. Guard. Feet. There." Abe thought about it on the walk home. Miles Croft was good at this, and everybody already knew he was good at swords, and it turned out he was good at teaching too.

"Your feet are a disgrace," he had said, and then, a second later, "move the back one two inches and it stops being a disgrace." Abe had laughed both times, and had moved it two inches, and it had worked. Somebody had taught Croft how to teach, the same as they'd taught him the form. At three they stopped. At least, Abe thought it was three. Then he got his boots on and saw the light going long and orange through the high windows, and Croft checked his phone and swore.

"That's four," he said.

"How is that four." Neither of them said out loud that it had been a good afternoon. Neither of them was ever going to. Croft packed three blades into his bag and looked at the fourth one, still in Abe's hands.

"Keep it," he said.

"Whatever you've been swinging at home has the balance of a spade, I can tell by everything about you. That one's a proper weight." He zipped the bag without looking up.

"That's the pair to the one you snapped. We've got about six more at home, so don't hit any more of my swords with it."

"I'm trying," Abe said. Croft laughed exactly once, like it had been surprised out of him, and went down the stairs two at a time. Abe stood alone in the hall for a moment with a Croft practice blade in his hands. There was a chalk ghost on the floor and orange light in the high windows, and fifteen days on the clock until the board read the whole year again. He had hated Miles Croft since the first week of term, and June had heard every speech about it, one of them with historical examples.

He was walking down those stairs carrying Miles Croft's sword. June was going to have to rewrite her speech. Nobody had said another word all week about the woman who came to the office asking after him, and Abe had stopped thinking about her somewhere around Wednesday. He carried the blade home on his shoulder, the whole way down the Corn Road, like the salvage men carry timber. Two women at a bus stop gave him a look.

He grinned at them, because it was that kind of afternoon, and one of them laughed and the other one didn't. The yard was cold enough that night to make his teeth ache, and Abe didn't care. He got quiet in about fifty seconds, and the world stopped, and he stood in the middle of the concrete with the borrowed blade and gave his hand the quarter turn. Knuckle, point, same road. Then he did it again.

Then he did it until the strangeness wore off, and kept going anyway, because if he kept at it long enough it would stop feeling like a correction and start feeling like his own hand. He worked the gate. He drew a chalk line of his own across the concrete, because chalk seemed to be how sword people thought. He walked the half turn along it until the line wore away under his socks. Then he drew it again. Don't arrive. It was a stupid instruction and his feet fought it all night.

A whole childhood of being his father's son, and a month of page fourteen, had taught them that their whole job was to hold the ground down. Croft was right. He planted like a man expecting the sea. Marek's correction had gone in inside a week. This one was going to take a great deal longer. His feet had stood like a wall guard's feet since he was seven, and Croft wanted them to be something else, one step at a time, in the dark, in socks.

He ate half a loaf sitting against the trash cans, and it was the cheap kind, and it always was the cheap kind now, and he had stopped minding about that weeks ago. Then he got up and drew the line again. Deep in the night he checked the bar, because he wanted to see this Sunday written down somewhere. Swordsmanship · Novice Lv 9 (2, 730 / 4, 050) Three levels since the duel. The sword had been the slowest thing in his life all month, a bar that crawled while everything else ran, and it wasn't crawling now.

Then he worked out the part he hadn't looked at yet. One hour with Miles Croft had moved that bar further than the four whole nights on either side of it. Abe stood in a stopped yard with his father's stance in his legs and another family's sword in his hand. He turned the sum over and could not make it come out any other way. So he drew the chalk line again, and started on the long work of teaching his feet that nothing was coming.