Friends (2013) - Adams, Robert

“Overtip the bartenders?”

“C’mon, Felix. Be serious.”

“Sorry. How then?”

“Act like you expect it, dummy. Act like you’re used to giving orders instead of taking them. You know, a little arrogant.”

Which made perfect sense to me. iwas already a little arrogant, feeling as good as I did.

So, anyway, that’s how Lanny and I managed to get in trouble before anything even started.

Like I said before: no excuses.

An hour later they came around the trees riding at a slow walk. They looked tired and dusty and out of breath. About like Smada. Only these guys were a helluva lot less impressive. For one thing, Smada had been a big guy. Hard to tell when somebody’s sitting a horse, but I’d guessed he was at least six three and two hundred fifty pounds or so. These guys were short. Five eight tops. We probably outweighed them by twenty pounds each.

They didn’t even look particularly suspicious when we stepped into the road and held up our hands to stop them.

But why should they have been scared? They had no way of knowing how stupid we were.

They weren’t too bright, either, thank God. They were off their horses and gratefully guzzling from the wineskins we offered before even asking who we were. I tasted the wine myself in turn. We had left with Robert Mondavi Table Red.

This was something awful and realistic. The riders seemed to like it well enough.

And then the shit started.

It didn’t take much. One second we were all standing there smiling and drinking and the next second there were swords flashing in the sun. We didn’t even get around to mentioning about taking their horses. We just introduced ourselves and told ’em who we worked for.

Gordon, the only one whose name I got, choked on his swig of wine. He stared at us.

“Trebor Smada?”

“The same,” replied Lanny smugly. “We’re his personal guards.”

And then the one closest to me, not Gordon, had his sword out and was swinging with both hands right at my head, and I ducked instinctively and yelled, “Hey, watch it!” and stepped inside his guard and grabbed his wrists and said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing, prick?”

And you know what? He just stared at me for a second. Totally unbelieving. But why shouldn’t he be surprised I hadn’t just immediately attacked back at him? He didn’t know anything about stupid twentieth-century young-punk parking-lbt slugfests. He didn’t know anything about would-be posturing machismo. He lived in this world. If you fought then you fought. And if you won you lived and the other guy died.

In his world you didn’t spend twenty minutes first standing around saying, “You better watch out, buddy, or else,” while you took turns shoving each other in the chest until other friends came in to pull you two apart.

He was going to kill me. Just like that. And the fact that I didn’t seem to know that startled him. Which is probably why when he ignored my idiotic grip on his wrists and flicked his blade at my face he didn’t do it hard enough to cut my head off.

But his edge cut the shit out of my cheek. I stepped back and put my gloved hand up there, where the cheek stung. My glove came away bloody, and I lost it.

Which is what saved my life. I could just as easily have run away screaming. Instead 1 got mad and lived.

My sword was suddenly in my hand, bigger than his, and so was I, and swinging at him. There was a burst of sparks and a godawful clang I’d never heard before outside of a movie, but 1 didn’t stop to think about it—I just swung again, swung so hard and missed him so completely that 1 lost my balance and fell forward just as his first thrust sliced through, not my skin, but my hair.

That scared me. It also pissed me off. I growled and screamed and leapt to my feet, swinging again as hard as I could. He blocked me easily enough, parried me well the second time, but I was just too strong for him. Too strong and too mad and too scared and too adrenaline-zapped to be stopped. I broke down his guard with the sheer force of my blows. Broke his guard and then a rib and then when he stood there staggering I laid into him with both hands toward his throat, but I was too excited and too a-jumple to get it right. My blade got turned in my hand, and the flat of it hit him in the nose with a mighty whack and he sat down right where he was and keeled over.

I stood there a second puffing and staring until I heard a groan and a clump and saw Lanny tripping backward over his own feet, his sword flying over his head, and Gordon above him bracing his back foot for a quick thrust, and somehow I was right there behind him and slamming the hilt of my sword against the back of his neck, only I missed this time, too, and there was a truly awful crunch as the pommel bashed a hole in the skull and he died before he could fall.

Then he did fall, and I stood there, knees wobbly, until I sat down with a sudden plop and looked at the sight of that mashed gray and bloody head.

“Lanny! Lanny, I think I killed him!” I wailed, and the tears were already coming to my eyes.

Lanny was a lot cooler. Always had been. He was already back on his feet and retrieving his sword before he said: “Don’t worry. He would’ve died anyway.” Lanny shoved the body over with his foot, and 1 saw the blood. Lanny had been doing pretty well after all. The man’s thigh was cut almost to the bone. What do you call that artery? The femoral?

1 got pretty sick. After that I stayed crouched there beside the road on my hands and knees while Lanny made purposeful movements around me. I wanted to help, knew I should, but just couldn’t stand to look at them right then, particularly after seeing that my guy was a lot more than knocked out. Seems I’d driven the nose straight back into his head.

Shit.

Istayed out of it until Ifelt Lanny pressing a cloth against my bloody cheek and putting my hand up to hold it there. It stung from the wine he’d soaked it with. But that made sense. Alcohol to kill the germs, like in the movies. And fortunately, the resulting infection wasn’t serious.

I didn’t really have it together until a few minutes later when we were already astride the horses, and moving down the road. Lanny’s voice was sort of a dull irritation at first until I started paying attention to the individual words and realized he was trying to bring me out of the shock by reminding me of the point of the whole deal.

Such as: We had wanted to be here. We had wanted to kick ass. We had.

Plus: They had started it.

After a while it started to work, bless him. He got me calmed down and then coherent, and then even I started to look back with satisfaction on what I’d done. Only then, when I realized I’d broken every fencing rule I’d ever known and still gotten away with it, did I get really scared the way I should have been all along.

I had to stop my horse and get sick again. Lanny sneered and looked disgusted, but an 'hour later he had to do the same thing.

But that seemed to work it out of us, damn our silly hides. That seemed to settle us down. A couple of hours later, I’ll be damned if we weren’t grinning and cocky again. Incredible.

“Wait a minute!” Lanny said suddenly, and pulled his horse up short.

“What?”

“We were set up! Smada set us up.”

My reply showed how it had been done. “Huh?” I muttered.

“And we fell for it! Dammit! We were so busy trying to impress him we didn’t even see what he was doing. He wasn’t hiring us. He was using us to slow down whoever those guys were that were chasing him. Don’t you see? He was running away from them. And he suckered us into buying him some extra time.” He stared at me, his face furious with anger. “You get it, Felix?”

I did. Too late. Way too late. But 1 got it. Finally.

“Hey!” I burst out. “We’ve got to get off this road. If there are any more and they find those bodies in the ditch ...”

Lanny was way ahead of me again. “Not only that, there’s Smada.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“He said he’d meet us down this road. I guarantee you that means he’s on another one. We gotta go cross-country until we find him.”

“Okay. Which way?”

“Guess.”

And I did, and once more dumb luck (or, thinking back on it, maybe something else) worked. We not only found the other road, we came across it at the inn with Smada’s horse corralled outside.

Along the way an odd thing happened. I asked Lanny if he was sure we wanted to find Smada. He looked at me fumty and said of course we did and I let it go. Because it was true. I really did want to find Smada. Supposedly to teach him a lesson for messing with us. But in my heart I knew better, and so did Lanny, though neither of us admitted it.

We wanted to find Smada. But not to fight him. We wanted to find him to brag about what we’d done.

See what I mean? We were slow learners.

The fight started when, somewhere knee-deep into the party, I turned to the innkeeper and asked to use his phone. Don’t know what possessed me to do that. The thing is, there was this dude standing at the bar between Lanny and me when I said this, a real jerk this guy, and . . . well, as soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized how silly it was, being where we were and all, and Lanny did too, and we looked at each other and started laughing. And this obnoxious dude, who had been spoiling for a fight all night long, thought we were laughing at him , and the next thing 1 knew I was fighting again.

Which was okay with me. The guy had pissed me off long ago when he’d been messing with Smada, and even though I was just stumbling into it more or less unexpectedly, it was all right, it was okay, I was ready.

Thinking back, we stumbled into the whole mess. And then stumbled from one step to the next. Like the inn, itself.

Thinking back, we didn’t enter that inn at all. We dove into it headfirst. Dove into it like it was the ultimate hot tub, steamy smoky air and spilling wine and healthy fun-smelly wenches and roaring fires and roaring laughter and loud music and barking dogs and gritty cool stone floors ideally positioned to catch you when you fell over with a mug to your lips.

It was a wonderful place. Truly. Exactly as I’d always imagined such a place to be. I mean exactly. Which shoulda made me wonder, only I was too busy having fun to think to be scared.

We didn’t have any trouble with Smada. We stomped in to confront him, and there he was, pillowed in a corner like a sultan with wenches framed all about him and servant types fetching and carrying. And the first thing anybody said was me saying: “What happened to you?” Because lying there like that instead of astride that huge mount of his he looked so, I dunno, w«formidabie.

Underrating Smada was, without doubt, one of the major mistakes we made. Bad as it was, though, we managed to compound it later on.

The argument we had stated our intentions of having never got very far. For one thing, our hearts weren’t much in it, and for another . . . well, he looked so goddam jolly there on those pillows filling his hands with whores and his belly with wine. We didn’t want to fight him. We wanted to join him.

We did.

Smada, reading us like a book as always, laughingly pointed out that it was we who had begun by trying to con him, which was true. And it was we who had begun the day without a cent but had ended it safe, healthy, blooded, rich (from the coins Lanny had taken from the bodies) and mounted. So what had we to complain about?