Academic Exercises (33 page)

“Because the talent is so rare among women.” I nodded. “And the late onset, too.”

“Nine years,” she said. “When he died. It fitted rather nicely. Don’t blame yourself for not suspecting.”

“I should have,” I replied. “You got out of breath on the stairs, which should’ve told me you were at home there, not an intruder. You saw the stairs as the staircase up to the appointments office, when I got this job; you took that from my mind. You couldn’t do rooms; then, as soon as I teach you, you’re a natural at them. You played on my vanity. I hadn’t realised I still had one.”

She laughed at that. “Of course you do,” she said. “You think you’re amazingly brilliant, but your life’s been ruined by your father. Which is largely true,” she added. “That’s something we have in common.”

“You took him in there,” I said, “when we went there together. You left him there to wait for me. I should’ve known when you said you’re colour-blind.”

“Silly of me,” she said. “Maybe I wanted you to guess, so I gave you a great big hint.”

I looked in my cup but it was still empty. “Was that the deal?” I said. “You’d take him back, and in return he’d let you through? After he’d murdered me?”

She looked down at her hands. “If that was the deal,” she said, “why did I leave you the knife?”

I took a deep breath. “I think that question is the reason we’re having this conversation,” I said. “Otherwise I’d have blown you away with
philon hetor
the moment I got back.”

She looked at me, again. “I must have changed my mind,” she said.

“I suppose you must,” I said. “How did you find me?”

“Wasn’t easy,” she said. “You disappeared into obscurity, it took me most of the nine years just to track you down. I wanted to use someone else, but he insisted. He said he didn’t have a right to take anybody else’s life. Just yours.”

“He always was a very ethical man,” I said. “And a great one for rules.”

“Well?” she said. “Will you? You owe me, for the knife.”

I thought about it. “I’m not sure I know how.”

“He did. He told me. I can tell you.” She grinned. “It’s not too difficult, actually. Even you should be able to manage it.”

I thought: about him, my life, under-achievement generally. I thought: I am my father’s son, and he left unfinished business. And the rules: the rules don’t apply to me.

The door wasn’t locked. He was in his office.

“Had a good time in the sticks?” he said, not looking up from his paperwork.

“A bit boring,” I replied. “But thanks anyway.”

He looked up. “You’re welcome,” he said. “How were the dogs?”

“Very much as you’d expect,” I said. “I think I might get myself one, for the company.”

He nodded slowly. “And the mentoring,” he said. “How did that work out?”

I shrugged. “She wasn’t suited,” I said. “She’s given up. Gone home.”

“Ah well.” He shook his head. “Probably just as well. There isn’t really a place for women in the profession.” He uncorked the bottle on his desk, poured himself one, offered me one. I refused. “Really,” he said, “there ought to be a rule about it.”

“Quite,” I said. “Well, thanks again. Please bear me in mind when something else turns up.”

I left, down the stairs, out into the street. My two weeks’ work had earned me forty shillings. I spent one of them on a bottle of hundred-and-fifty proof. Sadly, like the rules, I found it didn’t apply to me.

War is a great generator of ironies. My all-time favourites are the patent infringement lawsuits brought against the US government after World War I by the German arms industry. The US, desperate to upgrade its antiquated rifles and ammo when it entered the war, had copied the Mauser bolt action and the German-designed spitzer bullet to create the Springfield rifle. The German patent holders won the suit, and the US had to pay royalties on every rifle issued to and every bullet fired by their armed forces during the war. I’d put that in a book, but nobody would believe it.

A milder irony lies in the fact that, in 1917, George S Patton, pioneer of modern mechanised warfare, designed a sword for the Army. He was only a young lieutenant at the time, but the weapon he came up with was, by all the arcane criteria of swordsmen and swordsmiths, more or less perfect, the best sword ever issued to an army. It was a light, slim thrusting sword for cavalry use, wonderfully balanced, an ergonomic marvel, and if it was ever drawn in anger, I can find no record of it. The peak of perfection is reached only when the instrument itself is entirely obsolete, and the designer was the father of the impersonal hell of modern mechanised war.

Patton didn’t just design a sword, he also wrote a user’s manual, setting out a standardised training program for swordsmanship in the US cavalry. The approved method is refreshingly simple; you hold the sword at arm’s length, point it at the enemy and gallop. That’s it. Patton deliberately declined to teach any defensive parries; the cavalry swordsman is basically just a bullet fired at the enemy by his commanding officer, and there’s no need for a bullet to defend itself.

A sword is a piece of metal, usually flat, usually with a point, an edge, or both. You can cut with it, or you can thrust. If killing is your priority, the thrust is your friend. You’re much more likely to kill with the point than the edge. But if you want to stop the fight as quickly as possible, the edge is probably a better choice. Swords work by inflicting a combination of shock and damage. A stab can damage you fatally but shock you so little that you don’t realise you’ve been hit; you can carry on with the fight, kill the other guy, walk home and only find out you’re dying when you take your coat off and see the blood. By contrast, a severed arm stops most fights, even though it may not kill you, and the pain and shock of a heavy cut will neutralise an opponent even if he’s wearing armour and his skin remains unbroken.

The thrust is generally a safer manoeuvre to undertake. Thrusts are straight lines. Cuts tend to be arcs. Basic geometry dictates that the thrust takes less time, and needs less elbow room. You can poke a lethal hole in someone with comparatively little effort. To have any useful effect, a cut needs strength behind it, calling for big movements of arm and body. In making these movements, as often as not, the swordsman leaves himself open, presenting an inviting target for the thrust.

So the point has it, and the edge is nowhere. Maybe, if the other guy’s fighting in his shirt. If he’s wearing armour, the thrust suddenly loses its appeal. All wearable armour has gaps, weak points, joints, into which the skilled swordsman can poke his point, assuming the other guy is kind enough to hold still. But a sword light enough to be usable won’t punch a killing hole through one-sixteenth inch steel plate, the average thickness of medieval armour. Instead it’ll bend, possibly snap like a carrot. A cutting sword, by the same token, won’t slice easily through plate armour (1). What it will do is transmit enough blunt force to scramble brains and rupture internal organs. The function of the sharp edge is to cut into the armour just enough to stop the blow glancing off and dissipating its force into empty air.

The geometry of swords is a matter of compromise. Thin needle-sharp points penetrate best but are too frail for business purposes; if they hit bone, armour or the other man’s sword, they snap off or bend. Broad, thin cutting edges cut best, but are similarly weak. To cut, you need the most acute angle possible. The edge of a blade is a wedge forced into a gap of its own making; the thinner the edge, the less force required to drive the wedge in to the required depth. A razor blade cuts better than an axe, but you couldn’t chop down a tree with one, because it’d buckle under the force of your blow. Cutting swords tend to be wide, to make the wedge as long as possible. Thrusting swords are the same wedge turned through ninety degrees; they need to be narrow. They also need to be stiff, or else they’ll bend, like a modern fencing foil, rather than penetrate. Cutting swords should be flexible, capable of giving way and springing back under the tremendous force of impact. Stiffness and flexibility are governed by the blade’s cross-section. Nearly all double-edged swords, for example, have a cross-section roughly like a squashed diamond; the flatter the diamond, the greater the degree of flex. You can compromise by making the faces of the diamond concave arcs instead of straight lines. This accentuates the central rib, imparting stiffness, while reducing the angle of the edge, promoting flex. By a happy coincidence, it’s also the angle you get if you grind a sword lengthwise on a wheel rather than planing it down with a flat stone or a file.

The earliest swords were double-edged. It’s easier to forge them that way. When you beat out an edge, you spread the metal, like spreading butter. The side you hammer on spreads, the other side doesn’t; therefore, the blade tends to curve, giving you the distinctive profile of the sabre and the scimitar. Trouble is, if you beat the edge out enough to make it thin enough to cut, you get rather more curve than you want, so you have to keep stopping and straightening. This process is hellishly awkward, as the blade tends to buckle and distort. You flatten it out and you think you’re home and dry, but as soon as you heat the thing up and quench it, during the heat-treatment stage that gives the blade its flexibility, the distortions you’ve so carefully beaten out of the steel somehow come back, and you end up with something looking like a two-dimensional corkscrew designed by M C Escher. In comparison, a two-edged sword is a piece of cake. You hammer on both sides, spreading the steel evenly. The blade stays straight of its own accord, giving you nice, wide cutting edges and a stiff central rib.

Forging steel is all about spreading. A billet of red-hot steel is like a tube of toothpaste (with the cap on, of course); you can squidge it into the shape you want. If you pinch the edges, you raise the middle. If you squash one end thin, you fatten the other end, as toothpaste is forced backwards. A desirable quality in swords is
distal taper
; wide and thick at the handle end, tapering gently and regularly, narrow and thin at the point. Distal taper should come naturally as you work your red-hot flat-rectangular bar into a double-edged blade. You start at the point end and hammer your rectangular bar on the edge. This makes it narrower, but also thicker, as material from the edge is forced into the middle. So you flip the bar over onto its side and pound on the flat side, squidging your steel toothpaste up the tube. Then turn it back on the edge, to narrow it some more; then on its back, to thin it. As you work up the blade from point to hilt, you decrease the rate at which you draw it out, to get your taper. When you’re done, you should have a nice icicle shape, with a rectangular cross-section. Then you beat out the edges to turn the rectangle into a diamond. Compared to making a single-edged sword, it’s a walk in the park; and the customer gets the added bonus of a spare cutting edge, so that when he’s blunted his sword bashing it on some guy’s helmet, all he has to do is flip it round in his hand and he’s back in the cutting business again.

The ancient Greeks were passable architects, not bad at sculpture, literature, philosophy and mathematics; they were
fantastic
metalworkers. They made a kind of double-edged sword that distal-tapers the wrong way—narrow at the handle end, widening up as far as the centre of percussion (if you lash out instinctively with a sword, the place on the edge that contacts the target is the centre of percussion) and then narrowing sharply to give a usable point for stabbing with. That’s good design. A curved edge cuts better than a straight one, which is why swordsmiths went to all the extra trouble of making sabres and scimitars. The Greek leaf-shaped blade has the advantages of the straight two-edged sword, but has curved edges, which cut better. Even more impressive was their other major sword type, the
kopis
or
machaera
. It’s a single-edge curved sword, but the sharp edge is on the inside of the curve; your basic hook, or sickle. This is sheer misery to make but works exceptionally well, since the concave curve tends to pull the cutting edge into the target, giving you a slicing action. The
machaera
is, in fact, the only pattern of sword still used by the military for killing people. Alexander the Great took the
machaera
to India, where the local smiths copied it. Nearly two and a half thousand years later, the Gurkha mercenaries employed by the British army still carry and use the
kukhri
, which is basically Alexander’s sidearm of choice, but these days they’re made in Nepal out of recycled Mercedes lorry springs.