Read Online Swordpoint by Ellen Kushner - Free Book Online

a street brawl, or to impress a lover; or servants eager to impress an employer for promotion.
    The name Vincent Applethorpe was not one that lived in legend.
    It should have. Applethorpe had been a brilliant swordsman. In his best days he would have given St Vier a good fight. But his name had been erased from the public lists too early in his career for his last fight to be made a public tragedy. Quite early on his arm was slashed in a gorgeous, unchancy bit of rapier-and-dagger work. The wound festered, and rather than lose his life he lost his left arm. He very nearly lost both: only the intervention of concerned friends, who carried him to a surgeon's while he was in a drunken stupor of pain and the fear of gangrene, got him under the knife in time to save his life. The choice, for Applethorpe, had not been an easy one. If he had died, he might have been remembered for his early triumphs. Swordsmen appreciate a glorious death. But inglorious examples of what really happens to one whose skill has failed him at the crucial moment, those they prefer to forget.
    There has been no great one-armed swordsman since Black Mark of Ariston, who lived two hundred years before Vincent Applethorpe was born. Black Mark's portrait hangs in the halls of Ariston Keep. Sure enough, one sleeve hangs ostentatiously empty. Swordsmen are full of the stories of his exploits. The portrait, however, shows a man of middle age, his hook-beaked face an impressive mass of furrows. And privately they'll admit that you need both arms for balance, sometimes even for the tactical advantage of switching hands. He couldn't have lost that arm until after he'd made his name as a swordsman. But the stories go on getting wilder.
    Ironically, Vincent Applethorpe had grown up in the southern hills, within sight of Ariston Keep. He'd never given it much thought, though, until he came home from the city half-dead in the bottom of a wagon. His sister was running the family farm, and he was supposed to be there to help her with it. Instead he took to disappearing frequently on long walks. He went to the Keep, and would stand for hours on a hill above it, watching the people go in and out. He never tried to get into the hall himself, just stood and thought about great one-armed swordsmen. His sister had hoped that he would settle down, marry and bring another woman into the house. He did wait until after harvest before dashing her hopes and returning to the city.
    Enough time had passed, he thought, for his face to have been forgotten. He set up his academy far from swordsmen's haunts, in a large attic above a dry goods shop. The ceiling sloped in, and it was stifling in summer, but it provided that rare city commodity, a stretch of unbroken space. After a few years there he could afford to move to a large hall built over a stable at the far eastern edge of town.
    It had been designed as an indoor riding ring, but the flooring was too weak to bear the weight of many horses. He soon hired a couple of assistants, young men he had trained himself who would never be swordsmen, but knew enough to teach. They could supervise the drills that went on the length of the studio, and keep the straw targets with their red patches in repair. Applethorpe was still the Master.
    He demonstrated the moves for his students, describing what he could not perform. So, ten years after his accident, at a time when he would have had to begin to consider abandoning the active swordsman's life, he was still in command of his career. And in his demonstrations he retained the fire, the precision of motion, the grace that made every move an explication of the swordsman's art, at once both effortless and imperative.
    Michael Godwin admired him with a less than scholarly interest.
    He could not yet appreciate the technical clarity of Applethorpe's movements, but he was thrilled by the Master's vividness - it was almost a glow he projected when he demonstrated a move. Lord Michael wondered if this