The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [46]
“Hold it straight out,” Bingle said. “Like this.”
He straightened Quentin’s elbow and brought his arm up parallel to the deck. Quentin was holding the thing at full extension. He could already feel his muscles starting to cramp.
“Point it straight forward. Keep it out there. Long as you can.”
Quentin was expecting further instructions, but Bingle calmly went back to his isometrics. Quentin’s arm stiffened, then glowed with pain, then caught fire. He lasted about two minutes. Bingle had him switch arms.
“What do you call this style?” Quentin asked.
“The mistake people make,” Bingle said, “is thinking that there are different styles.”
“All right.”
“Force, balance, leverage, momentum—these principles never change. They are your style.”
Quentin was pretty sure his knowledge of physics exceeded Bingle’s by a couple of orders of magnitude, but he’d never thought of applying it that way.
Bingle explained that rather than practice a single fighting technique, his technique was to master all techniques and to deploy them as the circumstances and terrain required. A single grand meta-technique, if you will. He’d wandered Fillory and the lands beyond for years, seeking out martial monks in mountain monasteries and street fighters in crowded medinas and extracting their secrets, until he became the man Quentin saw before him: a walking encyclopedia of swordsmanship. Of the oaths he had made and broken, the beautiful women he had seduced and betrayed to obtain these secrets, it was best not to speak.
Quentin switched arms again, and then again. It reminded him of his days as a semi-pro sleight-of-hand magician. The beginning, the laying down of the fundamentals, was always the worst part, which he supposed was why so few people did it. That was the thing about the world: it wasn’t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn’t expect. To take his mind off it he watched Bingle, who was now stalking the deck, staring accusingly ahead of him, whipping his own blade in a complicated pattern, drawing ampersands and Kells knots in the air with it.
A frigid spitting mist was blowing in from the ocean. He could see After Island clearly now; they’d be landing soon. He decided he was done. He should at least change out of his pajamas before he set off in search of the golden key.
“I’m knocking off, Bingle,” he said. He placed his practice blade on the deck next to Bingle’s other two. His arms felt like they were floating.
Bingle nodded, not breaking his own rhythm.
“Come back to me when you can do half an hour,” he said. “With each arm.”
He performed a spectacular no-handed roundoff that looked like it was going to take him right off the forecastle deck, but somehow he swallowed his inertia just in time to stick the landing. He finished with his blade jammed between the ribs of some imaginary assailant. He withdrew it and cleaned the blade on his pants leg.
That was probably a few more lessons down the track.
“Be careful what you learn from me,” he said. “What is written with a sword cannot be erased.”
“That’s why I have you,” Quentin said. “So I won’t have to write anything. With my sword.”
“Sometimes I think I am fate’s sword. She wields me cruelly.”
Quentin wondered what it was like to be so unselfconsciously melodramatic. Nice, probably.
“Right. Well, there won’t be much cruelty on this trip. We’ll be back at Whitespire pretty soon. Then you can go check out your castle.”
Bingle turned to face the wind. He seemed to be living out some story of his own in which Quentin was just a minor character,