"I am always quiet. It is my brand. Vic charges extra for it."
"You're Lyon quiet. Different quiet. Who died?"
Sabine turned her head. Priya had learned, across six years, the taxonomy of her silences, and there was no arguing with the taxonomy. "Nobody died. Etienne telephoned on Sunday."
"Ah," Priya said, in the tone of a woman receiving the whole story in one syllable. "And how is the old sword?"
"Seventy-four and complaining about his knees and his students in a single breath, as if they were the same limb. He asked if I am still teaching 'the big American boys to run away in an organised fashion.' I told him I prefer to call it defensive movement education. He said—" she shifted, involuntarily, into the dry, Lyonnais cadence of the old man, the consonants going home to France ahead of her "—he said, 'Sabine. Running away is a perfectly good education. Armies pay for it. Just be sure they run in the correct direction, which is sideways.'"
Priya laughed into her water bottle. "He's well, then."
"He is well. He is also—" Sabine searched for it. "He asked whether I fence. Not teach. Fence. With a weapon, at a person, for points, like before."
"And you said?"
"I said the club does not have a piste and the sabres would frighten the insurance. It was a good joke. He laughed. Then he was quiet, and he said, 'You were one touch from the team, chérie. One touch is not a verdict. It is weather.' And then he talked about his tomatoes for ten minutes, because he is a Frenchman and he would rather discuss agriculture than be caught being kind twice in one call."
Priya let that sit without touching it, which was one of the great skills of her friendship. The open mat rolled on. Somewhere across the hall a heavy bag swung and complained on its chains.
One touch from the team. Sabre is the fastest of the three weapons and the least forgiving, and Sabine had fenced for France in world cups for five seasons, ranked at her height eleventh in the world, which earns a respectful nod in salles and absolutely nothing anywhere else. And in the spring of the Olympic year, in the qualification tournament for the last place on the French team, she had fenced the bout of her life against a teammate she liked, and lost it fifteen-fourteen — and the fourteenth touch, hers, the tying touch, the one she had set up over three patient phrases of footwork, had landed, and she had known it had landed, and the referee's light had stayed dark. The appeal showed the apparatus registering nothing: a fault in the body cord, a ghost in the wiring. The rules of fencing are older than electricity and colder. The referee cannot award what the machine does not confirm.
She had not raged. That was the thing people found strange afterwards, her teammates, the journalists who came sniffing for the human story. She had shaken hands. She had congratulated. She had gone home to Lyon and sat in Etienne's salle until midnight with her mask in her lap, and the old man, who was sixty-six then and had coached her since she was fourteen, had not offered her a single consolation, which was his form of respect. He had hung a fresh target on the wall and said, "Again," and they had worked until the caretaker locked up around them, and at the door he had said the thing she had carried across an ocean and into a fight gym in Texas like a stone in a pocket.
Never be where the blow was aimed.
It was not one sentence of his teaching. It was, in some sense, all of it. Sabre fencers talk about distance the way sailors talk about weather — as the medium everything else happens inside — and Etienne's entire school, built over forty years in a cold salle with a leaking corner, was a philosophy disguised as footwork. Do not parry the blade that has already missed. Do not answer the feint. Do not stand in the address where the attack was posted. The fencer who is always where the blow was aimed is a correspondent in a war: he receives everything, faithfully, and it kills him. The fencer who is never there cannot be written to at all.