“Come here. I want you to see these.”
Nestled behind the candles at the back of the table were two artefacts I hadn’t noticed before. The first was around the size of a dinner plate but irregular, a fragment of something larger, a thin and delicate lattice cast from what looked to be bronze. Looking closer, I saw the latticework was actually made up of intricately interlinking oriental characters. The craftsmanship was amazing.
“It’s part of a shield,” I said staring closely at the lattice. “A word-maze shield.”
“Precisely,” Fidorous said. He reached into his dressing gown pocket and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. “Could you read this out loud please?”
It was a poem:
Standing on a cliff,
Among the pines and oaks;
Spring has come
Clothed in mist.
“Thank you. It’s beautiful isn’t it? Now if you could hold it carefully by the very edges of the sheet, and well away from your body, out in front of you.”
Not understanding at all, I did as I was told.
Fidorous took the second artefact off the wooden table.
The second artefact was much less impressive than the first, looking like an over thick and slightly curved ruler, about 14 inches long, fixed at either end with a simple bronze cap. When Fidorous picked the thing up though, I knew exactly what it was – a sword handle. A sword without a blade. Shotai-Mu. The doctor weighed the swordless sword in his hand and made a few experimental swings with it through the air, then - a sudden downward stroke, bringing the where-the-blade-should-have-been down fast through the sheet of paper I held out in front of me. I screwed down my eyes instinctively but when I opened them, nothing at all had happened. The paper page remained intact in my hands.
Fidorus brought the bladeless sword carefully to his side. “Read the poem again please.”
I did.
Or, I tried.
The rhythm snagged in every line. I couldn’t find the flow of the piece anymore, with my voice or in my head.
“What did you do?”
Fidorous motioned me towards the candles. “Take a closer look at the words.”
“There’s a slice in the text, in the actual print. The paper’s undamaged.”
“The meaning has been slashed.” Fidorous said “That’s why you couldn’t read it properly.”
“And that means – “
“Yes it does. We have the technology. Although," he considered, "a piece of paper with a poem written on it and a Ludovician shark are very different things. I doubt we could do much harm to it with that sword.” Fidorous placed the sword hilt back on the table. “And also, poems don’t fight back, do they?”