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Yusuf had been born a merchant's son. What he could remember of his childhood was largely vague sense memory, glimpses of now near forgotten faces and places. He could recall that the horse he rode to accompany his father's travels was a hot blooded creature, but could not recall the shade of its coat. He dreamt of his father's hearty laugh even after a millenium, but not the way his eyes must have squinted in mirth, the smell of his mother's hair, but not the color of the hijab she favored. His childhood had been a peaceful, happy one, he knows without doubt.
He vaguely remembers the first blade he ever possessed. His father had given it to him for Eid. It had been a small thing, of no use for defense or attack, but rather made for utility. The hilt had been made of smooth bone, and had had an inscription carved into the side. The knife had served him from a time before he shaved, until he was over three decades of age.
He had spent twenty four years accompanying his father along their trade routes. He remembers less the goods they sold, and more his fascination with the sprawling cities and deserts and skies. He remembers how the world felt endless, fathomless.
Yusuf remembers their arrival in Jerusalem, the last time they would cart their wares into its walls. He remembers the tension, steadily breeding in its tight alleys. He remembers noticing the guard on the walls grow in number, noticing how the once radiant city seemed to grow still in anticipation.
He remembers the grief of his father's sobs, but not gnarled hands that must have grasped Yusuf, to beg him to leave the city, to return home to his mother and sisters. He remembers the ache in his heart as he watched his father begin the journey home without him.
The first time he lifted a proper blade, a blade made for murder, he remembers the uncerntainity in the way he gripped it, the fear and the disgust at the thought of taking another mans life.
The Turk he had bought it from called it a Kilij. The blade was bent up at the end, and sharpened on the curved side. It was heavy in his hand, a foriegn part of his body, a mirror to how he remembered the heaviness in his heart.
The memories of the time spent training and waiting for the arrival of the frank army were eroded by time in Yusuf's mind. The days were spent in the heat and dust, sweating as he was instructed with a score of other young men blended together.
The army came, and with it came stories of its deeds. The horror of such tales burnt away any reluctance to use his kilij, and left something bitter in his mouth. The franks that camped outside their walls were no innocents.
They battled and skirmished outside of the city for several months, until the heat of summer scorched his face and back, and his blade became almost too hot to hold. The franks were weakened from travel and hunger and exposure, and Yusuf wet his blade on their lives. They were like mere pests in the glorious field of Jerusalem, and his fellow defenders rejoiced at their easy victories.
He remembers the day the ships arrived, and the weeks that followed are both forever burned in his memory and a blurred series of harder and more ruthless fights, and the franks were no longer just simple pests easily put down.
Most of all, he remembers the fight before the walls were breached, against an invader that wielded a straight sword and shield like a butcher.
He remembers dying for the first time.
They had fought for minutes upon minutes, hours upon hours, seconds spreading into years, until the invader had wrenched the kilij from his fingers, and plunged his sword between his third and forth ribs on his left side, through his heart. The invaders snarl turned to shock when Yusuf grasped his small knife from its place on his belt, and swung it in an arc that ended buried in the franks neck. The small knife that he’d carried throughout his life was lost in the slick of their blood as they fell to the earth.
The second, third, fourth, tenth deaths were fuzzier.
They fought to the exclusion of all else, and then between one death and the next life, the invader had fallen to his knees in desperate prayer, and the city was screaming.
He remembers the fall of Jerusalem in horrifying clarity.
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.
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The first word of Arabic Nicolo remembers Yusuf teaching him is “sword”. The word was foriegn on his tongue, just as the heft of Yusuf’s curved blade was foriegn in his hands. Nicolo recognized it as being of beautiful craftsmanship, the metal marbled and engraved near the hilt.
Nicolo knows few things better than he knows Yusuf’s blade, even after a millennium of wear and refurbishment.
They sat cross legged across from each other, knees bare inches from touching. Their flight from Jerusalem and its blood-soaked streets had left little energy or time or want to speak to the other, but as they sat beneath the desert sun in bloody and shredded clothes, they began to speak in slow and halting words.
Yusuf told him of his blade, which he called both a sword and a kilij, and shook his head when Nicolo called it a scimitar. Nicolo listened, and was entranced. He carried no blade of his own, having left the knightly, straight edged sword of his bloody pilgrimage to rust in the dust. He had not had any attachment to the sword, which had been little more than sharpened metal.
Nicolo had been excited, the first time his father had allowed him to lift his sword. He had thought the way the bright Genoan sun had glinted off the cold metal to be beautiful. His brother had been the one to teach Nicolo the sword and shield. His brother had been almost fifteen years his elder. It had been play, largely, pretending to slaughter each other in dramatic and theatrical ways, and was the mark of his childhood before joining the monastery. Nicolo’s brother had left on pilgrimage ten years before Nicolo had left the priesthood to follow, and then the slaughter he found was nothing but deadly serious.
Nicolo refused to pick up a blade after they fled Jerusalem. The thought of bearing a weapon after the violence he had enacted on a holy city, on innocents, made shame and guilt and self loathing burn in his chest and heart. He didn’t have the words to explain his turmoil and reluctance to Yusuf, but he seemed to understand regardless.
They travelled aimlessly together for many, many years. They spent nights staring into the vast desert sky, and Yusuf taught him the constellations and stars. They went from speaking haltingly about their surroundings and possessions, to speaking at length about theology and philosophy and poetry and art and whatever caught their attention long enough to warrant discussion. Yusuf spoke about his family, the village he grew up in, the trade routes he used to travel. Nicolo responded with stories of his own homeland, of the rich food his mother had cooked, of the books he had read in secret at the monastery.
They talked about Jerusalem only in the small hours of the morning, after their fire had died down to embers, their soft words weighted under the force of Nicolo’s guilt and Yusuf's grief.
They dreamt often of two dark haired women, women who died and lived and fought and lived and died, and their travelling became a search as Yusuf started to recognize landmarks from his childhood in their dreams.
The women found them not far from Baghdad. They approached their campfire well into the night, and Nicolo couldn’t help but think them angelic. They spoke with accents Nicolo had never heard the like of, and Yusuf had to translate for him at first, with how strangely they spoke. They talked the entire night, and into the next day, until they were interrupted by bandits descending upon their small camp.
The fight was short and explosive. Andromache and Quynh fought both fluidly and savagely, and Nicolo was in awe of their prowess as they cleaved and slashed at their attackers with axe and saber alike. Yusuf seemed equally impressed with their skill, and before the last bandit had even hit the dirt, he was stepping forward and asking for their mentorship. They laughed at his eagerness, and oh how Nicolo remembers Quynh’s laugh, high and clear, delicate in a way that didn’t reflect the brutality she was so easily capable of inflicting.
They moved their camp away from the carnage of the fallen bandits. Yusuf grinned and laughed and chatted with the women as they trekked, and Nicolo not for the first time felt affection for his companion burn in his chest. It was when Quynh and Yusuf had walked ahead that Andromache stopped him.
“Do you not have a weapon?” She asked, having spoken the words slowly, as one might have to a child. Nicolo thought of her own weapon, an axe with a circular head, a labrys, he thought she called it. He was disgusted when he found himself admiring it.
“No. I do not fight anymore.” He responded. Her eyebrow arched, and she had snorted before moving to catch up with Quynh.
That evening, Quynh had asked Yusuf to spar with her, and there was something in her and Andromache’s eyes that made Nicolo uneasy. Something predatory.
They faced off, Quynh with her saber and Yusuf with his kilij. Quynh striked first, an arc towards Yusuf’s exposed side that he had blocked, before countering. They sparred, exchanging blows, but the speed of Quynh’s sword and body had kept growing faster, until she was little more than a blur when she moved. Yusuf was panting, and struggling to keep up the furious pace she had set. He had stumbled, just slightly, and then Quynh’s saber was embedded in Yusuf's throat and-
Yusuf gurgled, and Nicolo was by his side before he even hit the dirt. His hands fluttered around Yusuf’s open throat, and he was sobbing, and his knees and hands were slick with the blood that wouldn’t stop pumping out of his throat, and Yusuf’s eyes were wild and terrified and he was clutching at Nicolo’s shirt and-
He fell limp, and Nicolo screamed as Yusuf died, drug his body into his arms, rocks him as prayers fell from his lips faster then tears down his cheeks. Quynh was laughing, and oh but Nicky misses her, even with her capacity for cruelty. A hand gripped his jaw, forced him to look into the eyes of Andromache.
“If you want to keep him alive, you will fight.” She said it, and it left no room for argument. She forced a sword into his blood slick hand, and left him to clutch Yusuf's corpse.
As Yusuf’s throat began to knit itself closed, Nicolo thought that he would murder entire armies, nations, to keep Yusuf alive, safe.
Yusuf lurched back to life with a gasp, and he grabbed at Nicolo, and Nicolo grabbed at him and they kissed, desperate in the way their mouths moved together. It was the first time they had done so, just as it had been the first time Yusuf had died by a blade not wielded by Nicolo.
They cradled each other as they discussed the future that night, whether to trust those strange women that killed too readily. They debated until the sun was almost about to rise, and Yusuf did the first prayer of the day. Andromache laughed at him, and Nicolo glared until she stopped, and joined Yusuf in his own silent prayer.
Let staying with these women be the right decision.
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They had been travelling together for almost two hundred years when Yusuf found it.
They were in Rome, much to Nicolo’s grumbling. Yusuf had gone to have his kilij’s hilt repaired, as the tang of his blade had been beginning to wiggle in a way he knew meant it would come completely from the hilt if he didn’t get it fixed. The smith's eyes had bulged slightly when Yusuf had unsheathed it. It was more than three centuries out of date then, and the kilij wouldn’t have been a common sight in Rome even when it was popular in the east. Yusuf had grinned at the man's appreciation of his blade.
He wandered the man's small shop as the smith began examining the damaged hilt. The stock was mostly mundane, but Yusuf paused over the swords. He always had. He knew his Nicolo had an eye for weaponry, and couldn’t miss the way his eyes tracked over Andromache’s labrys, Quynh’s saber, his own kilij. Nicolo had gone through many blades and shields over the years, and had mostly wielded the sort of simple swords the smith’s shop had laid out.
One blade in particular had struck his eye. It was long, longer than most popular swords at the time. The metal hilt was elongated, with room for two hands to grip comfortably around the supple black leather wrap. The fuller was narrow, and only extended perhaps a fifth of the way down the blade. The pommel was beautifully shaped, and the end of the blade was a point, rather than rounded. It was gorgeous.
Yusuf lifted it, tested its heft.
“How much?” he called to the smith, who glanced up from his work, surprise evident on his face.
“What, the longsword?” he had asked. Yusuf had nodded, watched the blade gleam in the faint light of the shop, smiling.
Yusuf left the shop with a very significantly lighter coin purse, and with two blades in hand. He buzzed with excitement as he walked back to the room he and Nicolo had shared.
“It calls your name, my heart, I couldn’t possibly leave it to rust in a lesser man’s hands,” Yusuf said as he presented the blade to Nicolo as soon as he was through the door, and Nicolo laughed at his urging to examine it.
Nicolo had sighed in appreciation for the smooth leather scabbard as he ran his hands over it. Yusuf waited, held back his grin as his love unsheathed the sword with a small gasp.
“Yusuf,” he had whispered, “what is this? I’ve never seen it's like!” He looked away from the blade with difficulty and wide eyes.
“A kind of Italian longsword, or so the smith said,” Yusuf had responded, grinning. Nicolo looked back to the sword, but his face fell slightly.
“I… I don’t know how to fight with it, though, Yusuf,” Nicolo’s disappointment was tangible.
“It is a new discipline, the smith claimed. We will find you a teacher,” Yusuf had assured, and Nicolo had nodded, and then was grinning once more, stepping into Yusuf’s space to lavish a searing kiss on him, murmuring a reverant thank you into his lips.
Nicolo began his instruction with one of the best teachers Rome has to offer the next day, and Andromache complained that he had never worked so hard under her tutoring. Yusuf just smiled.
The teacher announced that Nicolo had been his most promising pupil to date, and Nicolo had come back from his first day grinning and sopping with sweat. He had ravished Yusuf in their bed that night, and Yusuf remembers thinking that he ought to buy his love swords more often if that was his response.
Nicolo does not start out clumsily with this new discipline, as he had had centuries of swordwork to cushion the learning curve of his brilliant new weapon, but it was still several hard months of adjustment until he was able to once more keep up with Yusuf when they sparred. Even Quynh, who had always held the weapons of Europe in general disdain, had asked to be instructed with it, so great was Nicolo’s joy in the blade.
Years later, long after they had moved on from Rome, Nicolo sat down beside Yusuf, and handed him a small parcel with a quiet smile. Yusuf tugged away the paper and was left speechless, a rare thing.
“Eid Mubarak, Yusuf,” Nicolo said, and pressed a kiss to his temple.
It was a small knife, and was achingly familiar. The hilt was bone, and was inscribed with a prayer, one of Nicolo’s. It wasn’t the same knife, but Yusuf swept Nicolo into his arms regardless, pressed kisses to his cheeks and nose and chin and anywhere he could reach, thanking and praising him in equal measure between kisses.