"I'm practicing, Doyen." She replied, indicating the target dummy. It had been hacked to pieces, with straw poking out everywhere. Her face was a beaming beacon of pride.
"Practicing what, exactly, child? How to ruin a perfectly good training tool?" he ran his hands over the ruined dummy, pulling straw out of one of the slashes in the burlap. "Not to mention a knife.." he snatched the blade from her hands, and held it up to his eyes. It was full of notches and scratches. To be fair, most of them had been there when she got her hands on it. But he wasn't about to give her the satisfaction.
"No, I was practicing my fighting." She stubbornly replied. Her face was no longer beaming but instead scowling. Everyone else had been practicing knifework, and she'd been stuck doing pickpocketing all day. Again.
The Doyen looked at her, and sighed. He shouldn't be surprised. She was young still, too young he had thought to teach about the blade. But, alas, it seems that too is beyond his control. Children.
"Okay child. Pretend this is a man." He indicated to the dummy. "How is he now that you have hacked at him like a mad cook?"
The girl squinted at the Doyen, expecting a trap.
"He's dead."
"Yes, precisely." The Doyen clapped. "Now... why have you made him dead?"
The girl was thoroughly perplexed.
"Becuase he was... evil?" She ventured.
"What is evil?" The Doyen immediately asked.
"It's... very bad. People who are terrible and do terrible things."
"Like killers?"
"Yes!" She agreed.
"But you have just killed this man."
The girl opened her mouth, and her mind caught up.
She closed her mouth.
"So you see this is a problem, little one. But, you are fortunate! You are learning from the Doyen. Take this." He offered her the blade, handle first. She took it gingerly, still thinking about the verbal trap she'd been caught in. "What have you in your hand child?"
Now she was really wary. But, alas, she could not see where he was headed, so on she moved.
"A knife?"
"Yes, good, top marks child! And lucky again you are, that you have a knife. For a knife is not some clumsy weapon like an axe, or heavens forbid a sword. No!" He moved around behind the dummy while he spoke, letting an arm drape across what would be its shoulders genially.
"No, no, this is a knife! A subtle blade, a tool not a weapon. With this you can be careful, you can be sure of your work. You can be quick, you can be precise!" And he produced a knife seemingly from nowhere, and with a strike like a snake he pierced the side of the dummy. He pulled his hand away slowly, leaving the knife buried in its side.
She looked back and forth, from him to the blade.
"This is a place that will not kill a man. Right away." The Doyen indicated. He took her hand, and put it on the handle of the knife sticking out. "Feel it's place. Memorize it. A knife that enters here, will bring a man great pain and much suffering, but he will live. And often, that is enough."
She nodded, and focused on the blade. She felt its place in relation to her arm, and her arm in relation to her legs. Every part of her she commited to memory. She would know how to strike here again.
"If you steal something child, you can always give it back. We are thieves, not gods. We make mistakes. It is known. So be careful, always, with what you take. If it is a life, which to take is not so hard a thing, you cannot give it back." He smiled at the little girl, and she nodded. Good.
Perhaps she will not be a killer like me, thought the Doyen.
No comments:
Post a Comment