Chương 67: The Scrap One

The famous Croft gate was still waist-high and still green, and the latch still stuck. Abe lifted it and pushed at the same time, which is the trick, and it gave, and he was up the path before he thought about how he knew that. He had been up this path once, on Christmas Day, in a brushed coat with his hands empty. The house at the top of it was farmhouse-big rather than mansion-big, and the barn behind it had stopped being a barn a long time before Miles Croft was born.

Saturday the seventeenth of January was a hard white morning with no wind in it at all. He came up the hill at half past seven with a canvas roll under his arm and half an hour to spare, because he had not managed to sleep past five. Croft's mother opened the door before he knocked.

"You're early," she said, delighted about it.

"He's been up since seven and he has cleaned the barn twice. Twice. He has never cleaned anything in his life."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry, it's the best thing that's happened here since the phone." She stood back to let him in.

"His father's got the phone people coming Tuesday, so we are all being very careful about what we say near it." The way through to the barn goes along the back hall, past four doors. Abe had been down it once, behind Croft, on Christmas Day, carrying a plate he had not been allowed to carry. The third door was shut.

"Don't go in there in boots," Croft said, going past it with a gym bag over his shoulder and not looking at it.

"That's the book room and my mother will actually kill you. There's a rug in there older than the town."

"Right."

"You've been in it, haven't you. Christmas."

"For a bit," Abe said.

"It's freezing, that's why we never sit in it. Dad won't put a fire in because of the paper." Croft got the back door open with his foot.

"Barn's warmer. Barn's got a stove in it, which is the one useful thing anybody in this family has ever done." Then he went out into the yard. Abe followed him past the third door without looking at it, and it took everything he had. The barn was the thing he had come for and he had not known it until he stood in the doorway. It was longer than the school gym and it was empty. Somebody a hundred years ago had laid a plank floor down the whole length of it. Somebody since had sanded it flat.

There was a line of chalk down the middle of it, walked away to nothing in the center and still bright at both ends. Forty feet of clean floor. More. Abe's yard was six feet across at the widest point. It had a drain in the middle of it and two trash cans he had to move before he could start. He had run the Croft first form in that yard about four thousand times. He had never run it at speed, because there was nowhere for the speed to go.

"Right," said Croft, from behind him.

"Get your coat off."

"Show me the thing," Croft said. Abe unrolled the canvas on the bench and Croft went very quiet, which he did about twice a year. The scrap one was a flat bar out of the salvage yard at Riddell's, cut down at one end to take a handle. Abe had put the edge on it himself in October and had put it back on nine times since. The handle was two strips of belt leather and electrical tape. The blade was not straight. There was a shallow dish worn into the flat where he had sharpened one side harder than the other.

Croft picked it up without asking and stood there weighing it in his hand.

"This is dreadful," he said.

"I know."

"No, you don't know, because if you knew you'd have thrown it in a river." He turned it over.

"It's not even the same thickness all the way along. It's heavier at the tip than it is at the guard. Which is the worst possible way for a sword to be, before you ask."

"I wasn't going to ask." Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"You've been swinging this since October." Croft put it back down on the bench, carefully, with two hands.

"Go and get your school one."

"You said bring the scrap one."

"I did say that." Croft looked at the bar for a while longer.

"Yes. Fine. Bring the terrible one, obviously bring the terrible one." They fought at nine, and it took four seconds. Abe had told himself on the walk up that he was not going to open with it. He was going to be sensible about it and let Croft find his range and turn the morning into proper work. Then Croft came off the line at him fast and grinning, and every hour Abe had ever spent in a stopped yard put his feet exactly where they wanted to be. The first exchange went the way the first exchange always goes.

Croft's blade went through the place Abe had been standing. Abe's forearm was across Croft's chest by then, and Croft's weight was on the wrong foot, and then on no foot. Then Croft was flat on his back on a hundred year old plank floor with a flat bar out of a scrapyard resting on his collarbone. The barn made a noise like a dropped door. Abe stood over him with his heart going, sure for one horrible moment that he had hurt him. But Croft was already laughing.

He laughed until he had to roll onto his side to do it properly, and then he got up on his elbows and pointed at Abe with the whole of one arm.

"Again," he said.

"Miles."

"No, again, right now, don't you dare stand there being nice about it." He was up on his feet with his hair everywhere and his face absolutely alight.

"I said you wouldn't. I said it out loud in a corridor and about nine people heard me. Again." They went again. It took four seconds. They went a third time. Croft came in low and sideways and tried to be somewhere Abe had not planned for. It took four seconds, and Croft was laughing before he finished going down.

"Right," he said, from the floor, to the roof.

"Well. That's that." Then they worked, and it was nothing like the still. It was nine ten in the morning in a cold barn, and there was another person in it. Every second of it ran at the same speed as everybody else's seconds, and he could not get one of them back. Croft got the chalk out. He drew a line on the boards and made Abe stand on it and then told him, at volume, exactly what his back foot was doing.

"You're square. You've been square all morning and you got away with it three times because you're faster than me, and one day you'll be square in front of somebody who isn't slower than you." He kicked Abe's ankle three inches out.

"There. That. Do the form from there." Abe did the form from there.

"Again. Slower. Stop, your weight's gone forward on the fourth. It always goes forward on the fourth."

"How do you know it always does?"

"Because I've watched you do it four times in five minutes, Dolan, I'm not a magician." Croft walked around behind him.

"That's my great-grandfather's fourth, that is. He'd have had you outside." They did the form eleven times. On the seventh one Abe got to the end and realized he had run the whole thing at full speed without arriving at a wall. He stopped in the middle of the barn with his chest going and looked at forty feet of floor behind him with his own footprints on it in chalk dust.

"What," said Croft.

"Nothing."

"You're doing a face."

"It's a big room," Abe said. Croft looked at him like he had said it in another language, though he did not ask, and went and got the water. At eleven Croft's uncle poked his head in on his way past and watched one bout with a mug in his hand.

"That boy's feet are better than his hands," he said, and went.

"That's the one who does the wall at Ketton," Croft said, and he was pink about it.

"Twenty two years, and he has never told me one single thing about me was better than any other thing." Then they went again. They ate at half past twelve at a table with nine people at it, four of whom Abe could not have named, and there was so much food on it that he stopped being able to look at it directly.

"So what's the plan?" Croft's father said, sitting down opposite him.

"The plan?"

"After the summer. Everybody's got one, and I like hearing them, because they're all wrong." He was cutting bread while he said it.

"Miles's plan is that something will turn up. That is not a plan, Miles."

"It's worked so far."

"Go on then, Mr. Dolan. What's yours." Abe thought about the kitchen wall at home with two numbers taped to it, and a drawn face beside the big one that his sister had put there when she was twelve so that anybody doing the subtraction would have to look at a joke while they did it.

"Money," he said. Croft's father laughed and passed him the bread. It came at about half past one, in the middle of the eleventh form of the afternoon, with Croft standing four feet away telling him his shoulder was late. Set Stance · Apprentice Lv 8 (0 / 12, 800) Abe stopped dead in the middle of the floor.

"What," said Croft.

"What. Is that a screen? You've gone all blank, that's a screen."" Set Stance."

"Up?"

"Up one."

"Off my floor?" Croft went around him in a full circle, both arms out.

"Off MY floor. Off my great-grandfather's fourth position, which I taught you, at my house, on a Saturday, for free."

"You've been shouting at me for four hours."

"That is what teaching is, Dolan." He was walking away and coming back and walking away again.

"Four thousand times in a yard and nothing. Four hours in here and it moves." He pointed at himself with both hands.

"Me. That was me." Abe stood there and looked at the box a bit longer than he needed to. That skill had gone up twice since October, both times in his own yard at home, both times for hours he could no longer count. It had been a flat line since the first week of December. Four hours, in real time, with somebody in the room. They finished at two because the car had to leave at two.

Croft's father drove, at war with nothing at all for once, and Croft sat in the back with his gym bag between his knees and talked without stopping from the gate to the main road.

"Right. You know how these competitions work."

"A man at the fitting told me in December."

"Then I'll skip it." He had the roll of canvas across his lap and he had not asked whether he could carry it.

"Gault will have gotten you an exhibition, because Gault is not stupid."

"Right."

"Everybody in that hall is a realm above you." Croft had his eyes shut now.

"And you're the only one on the sheet anybody has read about this week. They're going to stare at you all night. I want to watch."

"You're coming in."

"Obviously I'm coming in, I've been to a hundred of these." Croft put his head back against the seat.

"You've been to one." The road came down off the hill and turned north, with the water flat and gray on their left the whole way. Croft went to sleep somewhere before the first bridge, with the canvas roll across his lap and both hands still on it. Prescot was forty minutes off.