Lessons with Master Merryen

1587-11-05
Fechtschule, Maraisbourg

Master Merryen of Maraisbourg was not what I expected. The Fechtschule in the Tanner’s Quarter smelled of sweat, chalk, and oiled wood. He was no greybeard. Five and twenty at most. When he took up a longsword his movement read like music I had never heard, graceful and expansive, each cut folding into the next. He smiled when I bowed and gave my name.

He asked for a measure of what I knew. I showed the master strikes that Lychenar had stitched into me: Zornhau, Krumphau, Zwerchhau, Schielhau, Scheitelhau. Merryen nodded, then pressed my feet into truer lines and set my hips to speak first. His developing strikes were shapes I had only glimpsed in the hermit’s worn Fechtbucher. He drew the Oberhau long into a chain, taught the turn from Krumphau into a forward thrust that hunts a retreat. Where the hermit was spare, Merryen spoke the why along with the how.

We spent hours on measure and tempo. “A good cut is a song,” he said. “Beginning, middle, end. Do not rush the chorus.” I cut at hanging sandbags, then at pell posts, then at a partner who made me earn breath. He showed wide steps that still kept me narrow where it mattered. By sunset my shoulders burned. The patterns sat warm in the bones.

On the second day he put a rapier in my hand. Slender. Unforgiving. It asked for a steadier wrist and a quieter heart. “Think of it as a sharp quill,” he said, passing me a blunted blade. “You have written stories. Now write your opponent’s fate in the air.” I learned four guards, the lunge, the counter-lunge, the parry and the riposte. My fingers found a different rhythm in the small turns of the hilt.

Evenings I walked back to my room tired and clear. Songs came slower, shaped by the day. Merryen spoke of printing and argued that steel should be taught the way music is, with pages and practice until a city hums the same refrain. I believed him. A new art was learning its words, and I had a place to stand inside it.