Harness Chapter 1: Sparring
By Michael Gernes
Orlondo swept his right leg back and elevated his poleaxe’s butt end above his head in his overhand grip. As he did, his foot harness’ plates softly clanked together. His stance angled the weapon’s head toward the ground, rather than levelling it up toward his opponent’s throat. But he much preferred the poise’s other advantages—defense and leverage. It interposed his weapon’s haft between his open left side and her sword. It also kept his left hand forward at hip level, ready to pivot into several strikes. There was a time he’d have been terrified for his exposed hands, but he’d learned to rely on his gauntlets to protect them.
He could just see the top of her helm. Its visor slit peered over the lip of her hand pavise, revealing a hint of brown eyes deep in shadow. She kept her swordblade angled around the shield’s edge and poised about shoulder height.
The blade’s tip quivered slightly as she shifted stance. She stood counterposed for an instant, before striding across the floor at him. One step, then another and she rammed the shield’s bottom edge onto his poleaxe’s head, momentarily holding it. With her sword now uncovered, she jabbed at his mail-gusseted left armpit. The diamond-shaped blade threatened to burst the rings and sink into him.
Orlondo denied his urge to step back and open more space between them. Instead, he stepped in. Twisting his trunk left, he rolled his right shoulder toward her. He rotated the poleaxe’s shaft vertically while extending his right arm across his body, pushing hard. Her blade snickered as it slid across the shaft, well wide of its target.
But her shield still pressed on his weapon’s head, trapping it near the floor. The momentum was against him as he felt the plates of his harness shift, riding along straps and lacing to carry his rotation even further. If he wrenched his poleaxe free to raise it for a strike, she’d surely recover faster.
In a heartbeat’s space, he chose differently. He planted his left shoe into the woven rush mat below, stepping back onto his right and rolling that shoulder with it. The poleaxe’s crescent blade was trapped outside the shield. But it’s back edge’s fluked hammer extended under her pavise’s ridged lip. So as his motion pulled the weapon backward, he pumped his left wrist and felt a tug of resistance.
He thrust his arms up, jerking the poleaxe’s shaft still farther into his rotation. She stumbled, her ankle caught by the hammer’s fluke. As she did, Orlondo rushed toward her again with a sudden, triumphant heat in his chest. His weapon’s head was still entangled, but she’d had to wing her shield and sword arms wide to keep from falling. So he punched his right arm into her, inverting his weapon again and pushing it hard against her to bowl her down.
But she was quick, even sprawled on the ground. With a muted clank, she slid the pavise up across her armored body, just as Orlondo stabbed brutally downward. Instead of plunging his top spike through her breastplate, gesso-painted leather fractured and splinters flew as the weapon bit only wood.
And then, he felt a cold hardness slither in beneath the hooped plate skirt of his harness, pressing its point painfully against the mail gusset laced over his groin.
Orlondo closed his eyes and breathed out a gasp. He felt cold sweat trickle beneath his arming doublet and run down his lower back.
“You were better today.” He heard the smile in her voice, though it was muffled from behind her visor. She let her sword hand fall back to the mat, the pressure withdrawing with it. “Now help me up. Paint mixer.” Delphia laughed.
———
Afterward, Orlondo slumped in the stretched leather seat of a foldstool. His borrowed helm and armor lay on the mat at his feet, steel glinting in the midday autumn sun. He breathed heavily as he felt a slight breeze in the studio’s little yard. It blew through the linen shell of his padded doublet, and he felt the cooling air against his sweat-slick skin. As he pulled his arming cap off to gulp more air, he ran a hand through the black curls of his sodden hair.
Delphia sat on her own stool, along the other edge of the mat’s corner. Not breathing nearly as hard as him as she took a pull from a wooden cup of water. Her servant stooped to refill it, offering her the diapered towel from his shoulder. She dabbed at the frontier of her scalp and tight, bronzed braids, then gestured for the man to hand a matching cup to Orlondo.
He drank deeply, and neither spoke for a minute. It was a fine enough thing to sit and cool, and feel the strangely satisfied rushing he always got in his chest and limbs after a spar. Though the actual need for Delphia to come and lend him a foot harness was rapidly waning. He’d already drawn every weapon play she’d shown him.
Finally, she spoke. “My mother says the book has sold well. She’ll order 100 more copies printed, but this time she won’t spend so much at the bindery. Who needs a board cover anyway for a fightbook that’ll be passed around grubby training hall hands? And why waste extra time with the Occhscene army burning its way up the Peninsula?”
She angled her face toward him. He’d studied and sketched her in silverpoint several times for the book, but her soft eyes and youthful, full cheeks still struck him as belonging in a portrait for some other station. But she was a fighter born to her parents’ mercenary household, the Company of the Hawk. A promising one, the city whispered.
“Does she send gold with these thanks? I could use both.” He laughed ruefully.
“She sends no thanks. But I do. For I’d have no book without your drawings. Or you to beat on.” She smiled. “Your studio-master gets his hundredth fees though. Doesn’t he pay you from those?”
“He doesn’t pay me. Not really. By guild rule I get my board and a pallet to lay my head. Though he has to pass along a few coins from time to time, or how would I afford to donate my trial piece to the masters’ board one day? Anyway, I should watch my tongue before it gets cut loose. Your friend looks like money.” He nodded toward the sparely built man standing in shade across the yard, who had watched them fight. He wore a sober, dark gown with a clerk’s satchel slung across his left shoulder.
Delphia turned to look, standing after a moment of sudden remembrance, then gesturing for Orlondo to rise.
“Oh, Counselor Cante, this is Orlondo, the apprentice we spoke of. Orlondo, the Counselor serves your city’s Lordship Assembly. When he’s not writing his own works.”
The man stepped precisely as he walked across the mat. He was clean shaven, though the dense shadow of his beard clung to the hollows of his cheeks. He nodded at Orlondo.
“To Battle in Harness Afoot. Not a title for poets maybe, Lady Delphia. But if I’m caught out at night in Premonta’s lightless alleys, your dagger lessons and his drawings might help even me to do more than grab my quill and run.” He smiled with thin, tight lips as Delphia laughed.
Orlondo stood by dumbly. Then he remembered to bow, feeling muscles starting to ache in his back, even with his armor off. He glanced back at the studio’s door and the trestle, wondering if he should invite the man inside or offer a drink he did not have.
Delphia solved his puzzle. “The Counselor and I have business down the way, I think.” She turned to go, her servant already stooping to repack the armor into its chests. “Until later.”
Orlondo pointed to her now gouged shield, “Your hawk’s wings are all ripped up. At least let me repaint them.”
She looked back quizzically, but he persisted. “For the next fight.”
She nodded, smiling this time, then followed the Counselor out of the yard.
— — —
Orlondo was not a shieldmaker. But as an assistant, he’d needed to learn a little about many trades, and how to steal time for many projects. So, he found himself a few afternoons later smoothing a new canvas down across the pavise’s glue-coated surface. Only a slight bump betrayed the plug he’d nailed into place.
A shadow fell across the workbench, and he looked up into the same hollowed face of the Counselor who’d watched his fight. Orlondo hastily straightened up so he could bow again.
“Counselor Cante. What do you wish from me?”
Cante studied him silently with those charcoal dark eyes, as if sizing him somehow.
Orlondo’s discomfort slowly grew until he ventured: “If it’s a commission, I need Master Solvi’s leave before we can speak of it.”
“I spoke with him yesterday, lad. Now I would talk more with you.” He reached out a fine-boned hand to rest on the new, blank surface of Delphia’s shield, shifting his gaze back after he did so.
Orlondo shifted on his feet, crossing his arms to grasp his biceps. He’d hoped the book would bring work, and a way out of the studio. But this didn’t sound like it.
“I think if I were just a lad, I wouldn’t want to waste the afternoon of a Counselor of the Republic. And now that Lady Delphia’s shield is drying, I have pigment to grind—for my master.” He turned his eyes sideward to shelves filled with pots.
Cante’s fine, rounded eyebrows raised up as he smirked. “It would be a waste only if you said nothing at being prodded.” He turned slightly away and toward the window behind Orlondo. “She didn’t say you had so much vinegar. Well, that’s useful too.”
He continued, still gazing beyond Orlondo. “No. I don’t wish to commission you for a piece so much as a service. For Premonta. Walk with me.”
Orlondo was bewildered for a beat and twisted to look over his own shoulder and through the window. But then he followed Cante out the door and into the sunlit afternoon. They walked down the cobbled Masons’ Way, moving the same direction Cante and Delphia had gone the day of their training fight.
Other folk moved in the street, walking between studios or pulling carts of goods. Cante smiled and nodded to several, but Orlondo noticed how they adjusted their pace to keep some distance. After a few beats, the Counselor spoke: “What do you know of the great harness Gatewatcher?” He nodded his head further down the street.
Orlondo’s gaze followed, toward the stone-arched opening of the Plaza of the Armoury. There, shadowed behind a slender tower and its sail-cloth awning, he could make out a massive humanlike form as tall as Solvi’s three-story workshop itself. As the canvas shifted slightly in the wind, sunlight caught and reflections flowed along the sculpted bronze curls atop its helm, and the mirror-polished steel of its shoulder plates. He’d loved the myth as a boy that gave the harness its name. Thyrorys the one-eyed giant, cursed to foresee his death but staying to defend the palisade.
“We did some silversmithing for its reliquary here only last month. I assisted.” Orlondo remembered. “But the investiture hasn’t happened yet.” He paused. Many assistants had been blamed over the years for shoddy work by their masters. “Is there some fault?”
“No,” Cante replied, still looking at the harness. “Your studio’s work was sufficient. What it requires is a bearer.”
Orlondo turned to look at the Counselor again. “Well, you must know many fighters to hire. I only know Delphia. Do you need me to testify for her? She’s at least as clever with a pen as with that sword.” He paused, remembering her appearing the morning of their last fight with a smile and two chests of armor. “I don’t think she forgets a friend quickly, either.”
They continued along a few moments before Cante spoke, their feet softly slapping the paving stones.
“Lady Delphia is a worthy combatant, and contracted to the Republic. But I want a born Premontan with some training at arms. Or, let us say, the First Citizen and the Close Council are persuaded this should be so. Also, I want one with a good craftsman’s eye—such as an artist.” Cante turned his dark eyes on Orlondo.
Orlondo shifted stride and opened his mouth. He’d been told once, years prior, that one of Solvi’s patrons noted his excellent work. That the man wanted to reward him with a handsome gratuity. But he’d only emerged into the alley to be pelted with rotted fruit parings by the other apprentices.
He walked on, eventually finding words. “I am an artist’s assistant, and if I am very lucky, I will make my mastership piece in a year or so. I learned some fighting, but only to draw poses better.”
Neither man spoke for a few moments. Cante turned his gaze back up the street, toward the workshop. “The Masters of the Guild of Painters and Sculptors can be fickle in those they raise up. And after seeing your book… well, I think your faces could use more practice, young friend. There are many with a small talent and no patron who remain assistants for life.
“Also, these days grow only more uncertain. Did you know the Occhscene King’s army has sacked Ulria? They say 8,000 citizens were slaughtered in the streets there, just for making him spend the cannon shot to break their gates.”
Orlondo drew in a breath. Ulria was ten days' distance by road from Premonta’s rolling, wheat-carpeted hills. The Occhscenes were sacking and burning their way north very quickly indeed. Their huge army—the biggest seen in the Peninsula in centuries—had only crossed the southern narrows a few months prior.
“So, you want me to fight Occhscene knights in the city’s beautiful, newest harness? For you and the First Citizen? I don’t even have the wealth to be a voting citizen in your republic.”
The Counselor’s amused expression faded, briefly. He gestured, right palm up, in a stock statesman’s pose Orlondo had once studied. “Our republic. I am raising a new citizen militia for it, with their own harnesses great and small. And we have our mercenaries, like Delphia’s company, in case I cannot buy peace from King Roul.”
They’d reached the archway to the plaza now. Orlondo hesitated a moment, looking up at the brickwork. Is it a way out, or a way in? Both?
Finally, he followed Cante through, spreading his arms with a shrug. “So why me, Counselor?”
Orlondo noticed how close the harness seemed now, just yards away. Scaffolding surrounded it, climbing up to the huge, tasseted plates of its waist. A treadle crane rotated atop the scaffolding, as armory workers lowered a rounded sabaton plate in place over one the immense, timber-and-gear “toes” of its crosslike feet. Craning his neck, he could just spot some of the silver foil he’d laid onto the reliquary with his own hands.
Cante was quiet again for a moment, then reached inside his cote’s slit collar, withdrawing a finely-chained, silver pendant of the Divine Well. His little smile returned as he fingered the cut sapphire gem at the circle’s center. “Because I need someone who can fight a little, but study and draw more. One who will bring his report back to me. One who will also not tell me only what I wish to hear, it seems. And because you will need this harness to protect you. If you find what I suspect you will…”