🚀 go-pugleaf

[[Continued from Part One]]




     My apprenticeship had begun.  That day he taught me guards and blocks,
and reinforced them with painful stings of his own willow branch, cutting
into my flesh with each sweeping stroke.  I learned that it is not how
firmly you hold you stick... your *sword...* but instead it was the angle
that made the difference.  A strong blow could be turned aside with a
gentle touch.
     Weeks turned into months, with hours of practice each day.  My hatred
for Gabrielle melted like snow in the spring as the Red Cat made me a
fencer, a swordsman, a killer.  The Red Cat smiled more now, as he taught
me to smile, to purr and to strike.  As he remade me.
     My sister, naturally, grew to resent me as I had her.  His sexplay
with her had not lasted long -- an untutored girl of fourteen could expect
no more, and my training made a difference.  Today, looking back on those
happy days, I know he would have left us the moment she had gotten with
child.  But now he had a reason to stay, and so she would not be permitted
that child.
     The Red Cat was canny, though, and saw that resentment before it could
become murderous as it had with me.  He took her into the woods one day, as
he had taken me, leaving me to practice on my own.  That night they
returned, and I saw a fire in Gabrielle's eyes and a smile in the Red
Cat's.  Gabrielle had not flinched when she fired the pistol.
     Bon c'est bon.  He had two apprentices now.  The master of pistol and
blade taught his craft to a child split in twain.  Gabrielle's marksmanship
and understanding of firearms and weapons grew like weeds in the garden we
had forgotten -- the Red Cat got our food now, and we did not ask how.  We
simply studied and learned, growing strong and fast and deadly.  I learned
to hunt deer and even bear armed with a smallsword.  Gabrielle could shoot
a sparrow at two hundred yards.  And through it all, the Red Cat watched
and smiled.  Perhaps we were the only family he had ever had.  Certainly he
was Father and Mother to us, in a way the old man and woman and their
hateful brood had never been.  The village around us faded to nothing -- we
never walked its streets, we never bought newspapers or sweets.  We lived a
life from the past.
     And he rewarded us well.  In our sixteenth year he brought me swords,
long and short, curved and flat, bladed and point.  I trained with them,
learning what blade was truly mine, even as I mastered them all.  To
Gabrielle he brought rifles and pistols, modern and antique, loads and
powders.  Our lives oriented on the kill, the predatory, the weapon in our
hands and the weapon in our hearts.  And we slowly learned that the latter
was the true weapon, the true stroke of death.
     The Red Cat brought wine one night, and we drank, we three.  "You both
have learned well," he said, which was praise indeed, from a man who did
not give it.  "And may this education serve you in these too modern days."
     "What do you mean," Gabrielle asked, puzzled.
     "I mean you are both this night adult.  Eighteen years of age, tall,
strong and willful.  You both have taken to comment and question, when the
children you were would accept without word.  And I have been one place too
long."
     "But..." I said, half-rising.
     "No," he said, cutting me off.  "Do not speak, Antonie.  Do not speak,
Gabrielle.  Listen.
     "I am the Red Cat.  I walk the night, and take what I want.  I wanted
a drink, five years gone, but ended up taking both of you, and this house,
and these five years of your lives.  I do not apologize.  I have recast
you.  Made you both strong.
     "I owe you nothing, and never have.  But I admit I have liked you
both, a very great deal.  But it is done.  The Cat must walk.  And you two,
I give this -- I, the Red Cat, who never gives.
     "I give you back your lives, which I took.  From this day forward, you
are your own, kittens no longer."  And he drank, and Gabrielle and I knew
he spoke true.
     The rest of that night is a haze.  The Red Cat was not one for
conversation.  In the morning, he was gone, leaving us our weapons, and new
clothing.  For me a black tunic and breeches like his, and black boots.
For Gabrielle the same in blue, cut to a woman's form.  He left us, cats in
our own right, but not Red.
     I have never considered the sobriquet "Le Chat Noire."  I fear I would
have been laughed away.
     We sat in the room that day, eating food that we did not buy, sitting
in chairs that had been cast off by the Red Cat.  Was it his?  Or Armand's?
Armand had not once sought to reclaim his property.  Was it ours?
     "So," Gabrielle said.  "How do we live now?"
     I looked out the window at the land that once, a boy named Antoine
Dumarque had tried to make grow.  And in my mind's eye I saw the farm
beyond it, still for all I knew being run into the earth it came from by
boorish kin and old men.
     "We can take, as *he* did."
     "He came here and took it," Gabrielle said.  "If we stay, we are
picking at his leavings."
     I nodded.  "Then we leave."
     Geneva stopped by, moments ago.  She brought tea and companionship.
There are those who believe we hate one another.  There are those who think
us lovers.  There are many fools in this world.  In the flush of rebirth, I
had attacked Geneva, even as Drake attacked me.  Kittens in a box,
scratching at one another to reach their mother's teat.  We are kits no
longer, and Geneva and I are understand, and that is all.
     She was concerned.  I was melancholy, as we approach the threshold of
our zenith.  The love she holds for me has nothing to do with our bodies.
She is good to me, and I try to be good to her, and the tea was excellent
as always.
     Geneva understands these moods, even though Gabrielle appears immune
to them.  Geneva too is from France -- from south of Paris, a dirty gutter
of a city street hole her loathsome sister escaped and pulled her out of as
an afterthought, years later.  And so Geneva understands me, and I
understand her, though she does not see why I feel so tired, at the end of
this year.
     We went to a city, and there we were lost almost immediately.
Wandering the streets fairly in a daze, staring at buildings, automobiles,
people wearing things we had never seen.  We would have -- all these things
were in our village if we had known to look -- but our world was woods and
the home of the Red Cat.  It is natural that we would be picked as prey --
a man and woman dressed out of the Renaissance, one wearing a sword and the
other open pistols.
     In our case, it was a gang of ten, and they approached and surrounded
us as the day gave way to a night without the sounds of the forest.
     But Gabrielle and I were not frightened.  Not in the least.  We were
made to prey, not be prey.
     They made animal noises -- to Gabrielle, and to me too, I suppose.
This would not be sex to them, but pain.  A pain they would drink.  Pain
has never been my intoxicant, nor my sister's.  We were taught to use it as
a weapon when we must, but we took no pleasure in it.  They made threats.
We told them we would go about our business.
     One of them opened a folding knife, and they cackled.
     Our response was sudden, and total.  Gabrielle shot the one with the
knife, and with her other hand shot one across from him twice, once in each
eye.  For a half-second they were shocked.  That half second let be draw
and cut down and thrust, taking two out myself.
     Then they moved, two running, four coming at us.  I took three of them
fast, covering Gabrielle while she fired both guns in hand simultaneously,
kicking with her foot to distract the fourth attacker, knocking him down.
He rolled, getting to his feet -- he was good, this one.
     I drove my blade through his throat.  Gabrielle shot him in knee,
groin and heart.  It was nearly simultaneous.
     "Hey!" came a cry, and we turned.  Two police, and one in a car.
     I ran for the car.  The police moved to intercept, and Gabrielle
fired, two head shots clean.  I leapt, swinging my blade in an arc that
shattered the police car's windscreen and showered the last with fragments.
He was shouting into a radio -- with an underhand throw I threw a knife
into his eye and it was done.
     Gabrielle ran to me.  "Did he call for help?"
     I nodded.  "They will have our descriptions," I said.  "We must flee."
     She nodded.  On the way, I shattered a butcher's window and we got
food which we carried, and on the outskirts of the city Gabrielle took wine
and bread from a merchant.
     "They'll be looking for us," I said in the woods, some eighteen hours
later, as we rested."
     "We look distinctive," she said.  "We shall have to take clothing."
     "They will look for twins, a man and woman," I said.  "I will not
surrender my sword, but it marks us."
     Gabrielle nodded.  "We shall have to leave, then.  Alone."
     I nodded too.  "And rejoin each other?"
     "Eventually."
     I drank wine.  "Your weapons are easier to conceal," I said.  "You can
travel more easily, and take ships.  I shall have to go over land."
     "Where will you go?" she asked.
     "I do not know."
     We stayed together three days more, and then we parted on a road in a
light rain.  I made my way West, she went North.  En route, I took a car.
By the time its clutch gave out,  I knew how to drive the next one I took.
I was careless, then.  Some I left alive, others I dumped next to the road.
     I was truly little more than a savage then, of course.  Raised by a
man who took what he wanted, when he wanted.  Taught nothing but the sword
and how to kill, and this in the Twentieth Century.
     But I listened.  I read newspapers.  I stopped in libraries, and I
waited.  Always, I looked for mention of fencing.  I saw sport I was
uninterested.  Academies d'Armes that taught a pale imitation of my art.  I
went to a few, and tried their flimsy irons.  I excelled, of course.  What
was a game to them had been my life for years.  But I sneered at them.
     "You sound like you should go to Heidelberg," one of the Matre D'Armes
said to me.  He had two scars on one cheek, and one on the other.
     "Germany?" I asked.
     "Yes.  They teach things there.  Quietly.  Academies that have been
outlawed but exist nonetheless.  Yes, you should go to Heidelberg."
     I asked him, more quietly, "did you go there?"
     He drew his finger over one of his facial scars slowly.  "I did not
*say* that," he told me.  I had respect for him.  The next day I took a new
car and turned myself towards Germany.  I did not kill so many at that
point -- I had wanted to confuse my trail, somewhat, and I had followed my
progress and Gabrielle's in the newspapers as we went.  A trail of the
dead, acting as signposts.  Her dead had led towards England, mine had led
towards Austria.  So, I assumed she would go somewhere other than England,
even as I went to Germany.
     In one of her more lucid moments, Weasel asked me what death meant to
me.  I told her it was the moment -- that single point where two people's
lives joined and burned.  She said it sounded like sex.  She was so wrong.
Sex is an affirmation.  Two people coming together and making something in
unison.  Death is when two people come together and clash with sound and
fury.  The quietest of deaths is a moment for the soul to cry.
     And besides, the dead body is of no interest to me or any real killer.
To take joy in death is to take joy in the art of *dealing* death.  My
sister and I debate the aesthetics of her weaponry -- which can kill so
many, so fast, and my far more personal approach.
     I was told in prison that I was a Serial Killer.  That seems
ridiculous to me.  I don't look for people to kill.  When I do kill, it is
always for a reason -- even if that reason is "I need your car and I cannot
let you identify me."  If I must be typified, it is that I have been
trained and taught for this, all my life, and it has liberated me from the
bonds that fetter those who claim to be better than I.  Their claims mean
nothing to me.  And if I like the hunt, and the kill -- what of that?  Some
surgeons like to perform surgery.  Some accountants (I am told) like to
practice accountancy.  I am a killer.  I like to kill, particularly when it
is satisfying to me.
     And so, speaking not a word of German, I found myself ultimately in an
Academy for Gentlemen.  A school devoted to the fine art of the blade.
There were a dozen of us, all cocky, all pushing and jockeying for position
and pride.  We were Egoists.  Fencers who fought with blade and
personality.  None there knew how many had fallen to my sword, and I did
not elect to tell them.
     It was a nice life.  I learned German and read and studied and began
to learn something of the world.  And as I did it, I found myself learning
something of the sword as well -- something that surprised me.  But as good
as the Red Cat had been, he did not know all there was to know of the
blade.  And we fought with different swords there as well.  Heavier ones.
True longswords, and a time with claymores that forced me to alter my
style.  But nonetheless, I learned quickly.  I was used to these things.  I
grew cannier and faster, good with both hands.
     Less than a year after my arrival, I started to fight student duels.
     The sun is down now, and our new blood have started a fire and are
cooking.  They are forming a bond, it seems.  This is good.  One must trust
those they fight with.  And it is a good sign.  Perhaps I see shadows where
there is only light.  Perhaps these new Gods are human, too.
     Such a fragile thing, humanity.  What does it mean to those who fly,
who rain death from their arms or eye or mind... or from a blade made of
themselves?  I do not know, I suppose.
     I am getting more philosophical.  Which means it is time for bed.  But
I do not wish to sleep.  I do not get tired often now.  My nervous system
is far more acute, and my muscles work with terrific speed to match my
reflexes, and there is something in me that refreshes me quickly.  I need a
truly hard fight to feel truly fatigued.  My only exhaustion seems to come
from emotion, not exertion.
     And yet... I remain tired.  Tired in what passes for my soul.
     The Master of the School was called Ogden.  He was a good sort.  He
did not laugh often.  He felt the sword was serious business, and I cannot
disagree.  I do not know where the money for the Academy came.  Parents
sponsoring their children?  Graduates funding from afar?  I do not know.
At the time I did not care.  And I felt alive in the student duels... the
students were good enough to give me serious competition, and that made the
fight infinitely better.  Indeed, I was willing to duel without the kill.
     Perhaps you do not know the student duel.  It's really rather
straightforward, and hideously illegal.  The blades are real, and sharp.
To all appearances, the duelists are trying their best to kill one another,
and look well like they might succeed.  To all appearances, at least.  In
reality, the fight is to the touch, generally torn clothing and perhaps a
bit of blood.
     And, of course, facial scars.  These are something of a badge of honor
-- they say "I have been bleeding in a true fight, which you could never
dream of."  They come from flicks of the blade.  True panache -- you tell
your opponent then that you could kill them if you wish, but you will
merely scratch them instead.  Graduates of student academies tend to wear
their scars like medals of honor or fraternal badges.  There is a certain
superiority that they give the bearer.
     I fought many student duels.  I preferred them.  But my guard was my
strength, in those days.  It was damnably hard to cross.  So my face was
clean, though my opponents were not.
     Ogden officially opposed student duels.  Which meant he attended all
that he could, mediating.  Watching.  And often watching me.
     One day, he came up behind me.  "You're very good," he said quietly in
French -- German had come easily to me, but I still had a dialect.
     "I try, sir," I replied.
     "Almost too good."
     "What do you mean?"
     "The others... they have begun to fear you.  They say you take this
too seriously.  They say that you believe you cannot lose."
     "I can lose," I said.  "Just not to them."
     Ogden smiled at that.  "A good answer.  The fencer who believes his
guard can't be crossed sets himself up for disgrace.  But you've learned
well.  Who was your teacher?"
     "Le Chat Rouge."
     Ogden's eyebrows raised.  "Interesting.  I didn't think he was the
type to take on an apprentice."
     "He chose to."
     "He is a killer."
     "Of course.  We all are, aren't we?"
     Ogden slowly stopped.  "What do you mean," he asked.
     My own eyebrows raised.  "We train with weapons.  It is why we're
here.  Obviously we mean to use them on occasion.  And when we do--"
     "The Art of Fencing is the art of swordplay, and gentlemanly
behavior," he rebuked.  "Even in the days when the law was the sword,
Knights were not killed in duels.  They stood, dusted themselves off, and
toasted the victor."
     "Knights, yes.  Swashbucklers fought to the death."
     "You are no Cyrano de Bergerac."
     "I know."  I smiled, walking away from him.  "I have a very good
looking nose."




[[Continued in Part Three]]

--
Beta-Cit Eric Alfred Burns  | Takes more than Combat Gear to Make a Man,
<sabre@awenet.com>          | Takes more than a License for a Gun.
http://www.eyrie.org/~sabre | Confront your Enemies, Avoid them when you can,
Writer Type, Poet Boy       | A Gentleman will walk but never run.
Maine Expatriate            |  				--Sting