The Breaker of the Oceans, Chapter 39

The sand had gone from morning gray to a flat tan under the noon sun. Heat lay on the yard without shimmer or haze. The air held smoke from cookfires that drifted down from the walls and caught in hair and cloth. The benches were full. Men stood in aisles and between posts. The ring ropes cut a square inside the chalk circle and the chalk was already scuffed from the bareknuckle bouts.

Marshals carried in a crate of staves and set it by the weapons rack. Ashwood, straight and sound. The ends were banded with twine to keep the grain tight. They were all the same length from tip to tip. An Einherjar in black held the crate steady while the marshals lifted the sticks out one by one and took down names in a ledger. Each fighter signed a line with a thumbprint in soot and wine. A steward marked wrists with a charcoal slash.

Stephan Shield rolled his shoulders. The ribs he had taken in the morning felt stiff but held. The split skin over his knuckles had stopped leaking. He lifted one stave, turned it, and put it back. He lifted another and found the grain true from end to end without knots. He knocked the ends on the sand once and felt the line of it run through his palms. He spun it through his fingers just enough to know the weight. He handed it to the marshal to mark.

The staff sat right in his hands. The first thing he had ever learned was a staff. He had stripped bark from a sapling with a dull knife when he was hardly tall enough to carry it and swung it until his arms shook and his back ached. It had never left him. He had iron in his own staff now when he traveled. Steel ends and a steel core. He kept it in his own baggage under lock. Not today. The marshals had set the rules hard. Wood for all. No hidden iron. No spikes. No nails. No edges. He had watched them break a stave over a post before a bout to prove it to a man who argued.

He wrapped a strip of linen around the fore-end for grip. He used no gloves. He nodded to the marshal and stepped back.

Halfdan of the Einherjar stepped in from the east gap and took a staff with one hand without looking at it. Thick across the chest and legs, no wasted flesh. A white line ran from the left eyebrow to the ear. The eye below it was dark and set deep. He lowered the stave once to check flex and then held it flat across his thighs. He did not acknowledge the benches. The Einherjar by the crate did not move.

Tubaro of the Summer Isles ducked under the rope and paced the ring once without a staff. He had dark skin and hair braided tight to the skull with thin cords wound through it. His shoulders were broad and his waist narrow. A puckered scar ran along the ribs on his right side that had been sewn a long time ago and healed hard. He took up a staff from the marshal, rolled it under the palm and brought it up. He tested one end with a short jab into open sand and nodded to himself.

Tengu of Yi Ti took his place without sound. He wore plain trousers bound at the ankle and a sleeveless tunic. His arms were lean and cut. A thin strip of cloth tied back his hair. He chose a staff and held it at one third and two thirds with a grip that shifted without looking. His feet set shoulder width with the toes pointing just off line. He watched no one else.

Mavori of Asshai came last. Yellow skin tight to bone. Teeth stained brown. His eyes seemed to carry a film over them. He did not blink often. His staff lay in his hands without weight. He licked his lips once and looked from one face to another. When he smiled it did not reach his eyes. He moved to the far corner of the square and stood with the stick resting across the back of his shoulders.

Men on the benches leaned forward. The boy who had been dragged back by a guard earlier sat on the lowest step with his chin on the rail and did not blink. The crier did not need to call names. The names had already moved through the yard on their own. A woman from the Stormlands who had choked a man in the bareknuckle bracket stood with arms crossed and watched the staff ends and where the hands went.

Hela Greyjoy stepped forward on the lower level of the platform and raised one hand. Her hair lay black against the plates at her shoulders. Green showed once in her eyes and was gone. Her palm turned down.

“Begin.”

Halfdan moved first. He walked straight toward the center. Tubaro angled in and set his staff low to guard his legs. Mavori drifted along the far rope with the stick still across his shoulders as if this were a stroll. Tengu did not twitch until Stefan took his first backward step.

Stephan did not meet the press. He gave ground toward the corner nearest the north post and let the three draw into one another. He set his feet light and kept the staff balanced across his body at waist height. He had seen Tengu fight once in the morning when the man had come into the ring to watch Bao. He had felt his own chest tighten without reason when he watched Tengu turn a wrist and a grip die in the stand of one motion. He had marked that and no more. The others were strong. The others were quick. Tengu had no spare motion. Stephan did not want him behind him for even a beat.

Halfdan met Tubaro at the chalk line. The first sound in the ring came when their staves struck at equal measure. Halfdan drove the end in a straight line for the chest and Tubaro caught it on the middle and slid the line away and answered with a short snap to the knee. It struck hard and the thump of it carried. Halfdan did not flinch. He brought the other end down toward the collarbone. Mavori stepped into reach with a horizontal cut aimed at Halfdan’s temple. Tubaro ducked out on the far side and Halfdan let the cut ride over his head. The ends whipped air and the wood sang. Mavori bared his teeth and pressed in. The first tangle had started.

Stephan took another step back and kept Tengu in front of him. They were alone in their corner. Dust lifted with each pivot and settled on boots and cloth. The sun sat high above the yard and there was no wind now that reached the ring. The sounds of men and meat and steel faded down to breath and footfall and the small sounds a stave makes when a hand adjusts on it.

Tengu’s eyes did not leave Stephan’s hands. His staff moved without jerks. The end drew small arcs as if marking points in the air. He settled into a guard that set one end forward and the other high behind his shoulder. The rear hand floated on the wood with fingers open. Stephan brought the staff vertical in the center and let the tip hang over his right shoulder. He watched the hips and not the eyes.

Tengu struck without sound. No flare. No feint. The front end blurred from still to motion. It drove for the face in a straight line. Stephan turned his stick and caught the thrust a handbreadth in front of his brow. The wood rang sharp. Tengu’s rear hand slid down and his front hand rolled. The line of the thrust became a cut and came for the side of the head. Stephan dropped the tip and raised the butt and met the strike on the last inch of the staff and sent it off the line. The block shook his wrists. He stepped off to the right on the outside foot and drew his own end for a jab to the throat. Tengu’s staff was there to knock it aside before the thrust had reached full extension. He countered with a butt-end to the ribs. Stephan absorbed it with elbow and forearm and a twist of the waist and felt the thud run through muscle.

They were inside each other’s reach in a breath. The ends blurred and then stopped and then blurred again. There was no pause between clash and reset. Tengu slid his hands along the staff as if the wood were greased. He shortened the grip and turned cuts into jabs and jabs into hooks. Stephan rode the line with blocks that caught and slid and angled. He tried to answer on the quarter beat. Tengu had already moved.

Two exchanges and Stephan wore a line of heat in the side of his neck where the end had skimmed him. Another exchange and the top of his shoulder went numb and then burned as blood returned after a butt-end had dug in. He landed his own strikes. A short hit to the hip that jarred something in Tengu’s movement and drew the breath out through his nose. A downward chop to the forearm that made the rear hand tighten. Neither settled the matter. Tengu’s footwork did not falter. His heels never crossed. His weight never emptied a foot at the wrong time.

Stephan tried the strike he had taught to boys in small towns for coin. He brought the staff to the shoulder and drove the long end in a chest-high line and at the last inch of travel he dropped his hands and raised the butt three hands for the chin. Most men raised to block the first and left the second unguarded. Tengu did not block the first. He stepped inside the line of it and lifted his front hand and his staff’s butt rose under Stephan’s hands and caught on the web between thumb and forefinger and levered. Stephan’s right palm broke from the wood. Tengu twisted. The staff spun in Stephan’s left hand and the grip went wrong and was gone. The stick flew out and hit the sand. It bounced once and rolled to a stop.

There was no cheer from the benches. The sound from the aisles rose and then cut off. The marshals did not move. The fighters in the other half of the ring did not pause. The measure of the bout had not yet changed enough to carry a sound to the wall.

Tengu did not press with a killing stroke. That was not allowed. He drove the butt for the stomach. Stephan folded his elbows in and turned his body to the side and the blow scraped down the ribs and tore cloth and skin and air went out of him. He stepped back to cut the angle and found the raised stone he had marked earlier. It caught his heel. He did not go down. He felt it under the boot and swore at himself in a breath and moved off it and got his feet under him again.

Tengu advanced with the staff coming high for a descending cut. Stephan raised empty hands and feinted left with shoulders and hips. Tengu did not bite. He changed the cut to a straight stab and it struck empty air as Stephan vanished from the path. Stephan did not step back. He stepped in with his left shoulder lowered. The moment passed in a beat without thought. He wrapped both arms around Tengu’s waist and lifted the ground a finger’s breadth with his legs and drove forward.

The impact took both of them. There was no skill in that body change. It was meat and bone and weight. The ends of the staff caught between them and made a harder lever under Tengu’s ribs than any clean strike had done. They hit the sand and rolled and the staff snapped out from between their bodies. Stephan’s forehead met Tengu’s chin. He did not aim for it. It came in a line born from the angle of how they fell. Bone met bone. The crack of it drew a hiss from men in the first bench and someone clapped a hand to his own jaw by reflex. Tengu’s arms loosened for half a beat. His eyes lost focus. Stephan’s head rang once and a white flash swam at the edge of his sight and then he saw again.

He planted a knee on Tengu’s forearm to pin it. He drew back his right hand and turned the fist down and drove a short punch into Tengu’s temple. He did not turn his hips. He put shoulder and arm into it and the knuckles found the soft bone behind the eye. Tengu’s gaze went somewhere else. His breath left him in a thin sound. His body shuddered once. His head rolled. He went still with breath quiet and steady and eyes closed.

Stephan sat back and the world came into focus. His lungs pulled air in hard and it burned. Blood ran warm under his tunic where the butt had raked him and he pressed the heel of his palm to it for a moment and felt nothing broken under the tenderness. He rose as the marshal reached them and put a hand under Tengu’s shoulder. Stephan stepped away without looking down again. He scooped his staff off the sand as he moved.

He turned in time to see Tubaro lower his end and Halfdan fall with arms gone slack. The strike had landed on the side of the head above the ear. The sound had been a dull crack that carried into the upper benches. Halfdan’s knees hit the sand first and then the rest of him went down heavy. His staff slid out of his hand with a thin sound. The marshal was already moving that way. The Einherjar at the crate was on his feet without any change in expression. He did not need to move. Two others were already at the rope to lift Halfdan clear as soon as the marshal opened the way.

Mavori lay near the east rope twisted on his side. His eyes were open and rolled up to white. His mouth hung open and a thin line of spit strung from lip to sand. The end of his staff had splintered and lay near his hand. Blood clung to his lower teeth where someone had driven wood into them. No one stooped to him yet. He breathed. His chest rose and fell in small jerks.

Tubaro stood in the center with both hands on the staff. Blood ran from one nostril and trailed over his lip and down his chin. The scar at his ribs had split open at one end. He drew in air through his teeth and pressed his mouth tight to stop the blood from running into it. His eyes looked clear. He checked the benches once and then looked for the next man.

Stephan stepped toward him without hurry. His legs felt steady. The ache in his side had settled to a wide dull burn. Tubaro’s stance shifted to a lower guard and he set the staff wide to cover more line. There was a catch in his step when he moved the right foot. Stephan had seen where Halfdan had struck him earlier. The knee had taken a turn when they had reaped each other and Tubaro had come down with the leg torqued. He carried it now.

They closed to a reach where both could strike and Stephan opened with a forward thrust to the chest. Tubaro parried down and out and answered with a counter toward the knee. Stephan lifted that leg and let the blow sweep under and came down with the foot square and drove the butt toward Tubaro’s hip. It landed and Tubaro’s face went flat for a breath and he stepped to relieve the weight on that side. Stephan pressed. Tubaro kept guard and struck when he could with short counters. He had good hands. The strikes came from the elbows without telegraph. He was hurt and he had not given up ground to wait for mercy.

Stephan feinted at the head and Tubaro raised the end to block. Stephan let the line drop to the right and brought the other end low and inside. He swept at Tubaro’s ankles. The stick took both at once as the man shifted his weight. Tubaro’s feet left the sand and he went down hard with no time to break his fall. The back of his head struck and his eyes rolled once and stilled. The marshals were already moving in. Stephan backed away with the staff held vertical to show no further strike. He stopped when he reached the center.

The yard began to make sound again as if someone had lifted a hand from the mouth of a drum. Coins went from palm to palm. Men shouted names to friends across aisles. A few Summer Islanders on the east wall stood up and argued with each other and then sat back down. The Einherjar lifted Halfdan under the arms and ankles with care and slid him through the gap and out to a stretcher. Halfdan’s eyes had come back. He kept them on nothing. His breath came slow and cold. A healer cleared the ear with a cloth and checked for blood.

The marshal raised his hand to Hela. He looked up to the platform. She had not moved far from the rail. She looked at Stephan and smirked, which drew quite a lot of looks, especially from her father, Lord Valon Greyjoy. Hela Greyjoy didn't seem to mind. She lifted her hand again and brought it down. 

“Winner. Stephan Shield.”