The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [167]
He had hoped to obtain a position of strength from which to issue an ultimatum. He had misread Simon. The flash of a sword was the first thing he saw, before he heard the lady’s muffled scream. Gregorio jumped aside, fumbling for the hilt of his dagger as Simon came towards him, his whole blade unsheathed and gleaming. “I believe,” said Simon, “in protecting the reputation of my family in my own way. With honour. With my own body. Not in some clerkly battle with ink. Bolt the door.”
“No,” said Katelina.
Simon turned his head. Gregorio swung himself over the table behind him and landed halfway between Simon and the door just as Simon, setting hands on a chest, sent it sliding to crash against the door timbers. Then he straightened. “Now!” he said.
“Honour?” said Gregorio. “Sword against dagger?”
He thought Simon was past thinking, but then the other man smiled. Without turning his eyes he said, “Fetch the other one.”
“No!” said the girl Katelina again.
“Then he’ll have to fight with a dagger,” said Simon.
She looked at him, and then ran to the door from which she had entered.
For the moments she was gone Gregorio stood, feeling foolish as well as frightened. He said, “What will this solve, my lord? Men know I am here.”
“And they will know how you died,” said Simon. “You came to kill me, on orders from Nicholas. Ah. There is the sword. You can fight, a little?”
“Enough,” said Gregorio. Anger, filling him, suddenly burst past his guard. He said, “You conceited fool, what are you doing? Here’s a little girl ruined, her family sickened with sorrow. And instead of facing up to it like a man, you blame others. Nicholas is worth ten of you.”
The sword came past his throat as he spoke the last words. He got his own blade hurriedly up, and it caught Simon’s the time it came for his belly, and the time it came for his heart. He stumbled over a chest, felt the steel sear through his forearm and parried, again, the point that came to his head. He crashed into the wall and, ducking, got himself out of a corner. He had called upon himself all Simon’s passionate anger, and there was no more time, now, for words.
A bookish Lombard lawyer was no sort of match for a man trained in the martial arts: an expert jouster, a practised swordsman like Simon. Gregorio fought, because he did not want to die. He fought defensively, escaping where he could; parrying where he could. It seemed to go on longer than he thought possible. The girl, breathing noisily, was crouched like a hare by the windowseat. The main door was blocked. The room became littered with overturned stools and cushions and tables; the shards of a firescreen, the crumbs of a bowl. A brass pitcher tolled to itself in a corner and then was kicked aside with a clang. He thought the noise alone would bring rescue but no one came; no one called. Gregorio thought he was fit, but Simon had spent all his life tending his bodily skills. And now, as he tired, Simon feinted and leaped, and although Gregorio caught the blade with his own, the impact drove him staggering back to the opposite wall.
Further along, and still partly open, was the door to the inner room. The chamber beyond it was silent. Gregorio thought, as he went down on one knee, of trying to fight his way along to get through, and then wondered what good it would do. Enlarge the battlefield slightly. Make it possible, even, to run away with Simon spearing his back. He knew Margot was going to be extremely cross as it was, and he ought at least to leave her with some impression of the statement he was trying to make, and why he was trying to make it. Simon, meantime, was preparing to make his own final statement with both hands on the hilt of his blade.
With a weakened left arm, he couldn’t parry that sort of stroke. Gregorio flung himself to one side and rolled, and half got to his feet, but knew very well it was useless. With masterly ease, Simon altered his grip, and the slant