“Are you laughing?” he asked skeptically, watching her face closely. “Do you think I look…funny with my hair like this?”
“Perhaps that is what you would call it,” she answered. “I do not think it is quite the same for my people. But yes,” she said, considering the question, “you do look funny.”
Without warning she reached toward his face and grabbed the hair in front of his eyes. She cut it off cleanly with one of her claws in the time it took him to blink.
“This, you do not need,” she informed him. “Only that which flows down your back.” She regarded him for a moment, then nodded in approval. “Your hair is yet too short to braid. That will come later.” She ran a hand through his hair, her touch sending a pleasant tingle down his spine. “You must groom well every day. Your hair is thick, but will foul easily.” Then she turned her attention to the lock she still held in her hand. “May I keep this?” she asked.
“If it means something to you,” he told her, “you are welcome to it.”
She bowed her head to him and carefully placed the hair in a pouch that hung on her waistband, nearly identical to the one the priestess – and all the other warriors, he realized – carried.
“We should sleep, now,” she told him. She banked the fire and returned to her bedding.
Reza followed suit, stifling a groan from his protesting muscles.
“Tomorrow shall soon be upon us,” she murmured as she lay down.
He did not need further prompting. He buried himself under the thick skins, and was asleep as soon as he closed his eyes.
* * *
The days became weeks, then months, and Reza’s body grew toward the man he might one day become, if he lived long enough. He had already outgrown three sets of armor, and the seams on the newest were stretching at the shoulders.
Esah-Zhurah, too, was gradually changing as the shadows slowly lengthened toward winter in the planet’s extended seasonal cycle. Her body was filling out and becoming more powerful, her arms and legs rippling with lean muscle. She moved with the grace of a dancer, and he did his best to emulate her, learning how to move quickly and quietly. Her black hair grew ever longer. The beads attached to the ends now reached her waist, and the protuberances that were her eyebrows had formed into a graceful arch over her eyes.
After the furious hours of their normal training, the two often walked or ran long leagues under the ceaseless sun and cool, fresh air, and Reza felt himself growing stronger day by day. They silently challenged one other in undeclared races through the forest or up a hill, and while she often won, the margin was an increasingly small one.
As time went on, he and the other tresh began to build on the foundation that had come with the endless exercises and mock combats. Reza discovered with some surprise that they had something akin to team sports, with hardwood poles serving as swords, and he played them just as aggressively as his blue-skinned companions. While he often spent the nights nursing welts and bruises, increasingly he was able to compete on their terms, and his Kreelan counterparts were beginning to show him some degree of respect.
However, as Reza one day discovered, there was more to be found at the kazha than endless hours of fighting practice and nights filled with pain.
Late one evening, he and Esah-Zhurah were in the armorers’ chambers having their weapons and armor checked. While the duty armorer and her apprentices were busy with Esah-Zhurah, Reza happened to notice a lone armorer sitting alone at a small stone table in an adjoining room. She was quite old, judging from the length of her hair and the slight palsy that caused her neck to twitch. She bent close to her work, her eyes perhaps having grown weak from countless years (he still had no idea how long Kreelans could live) of such painstaking labor. A lamp hung close to the table’s surface, and he caught sight of what appeared to be a brush of some kind in her hand. His curiosity mounted as he watched her make a stroke on whatever was serving as her canvas, dipping the brush in a small container, then continuing to paint.
Without conscious thought, he wandered over to where the old woman worked, curious as to what she was doing. Lying on the table was the metal that would become a warrior’s ceremonial breastplate, and on it she had traced a design whose origins and meaning were beyond him, one of the runes in what he knew was the Old Tongue, but which he could not read. But the beauty and intricacy of the woman’s craftsmanship were universal. It was an ice-blue rune, arcing its way across the metal surface like an ancient scimitar, the colors used in its creation precise to render an effect that was almost three-dimensional, each shade and hue regulated and blended to perfection.
He stood quietly behind her as she slowly filled in a segment that would be the design’s center, fascinated by the steadiness of her ancient hand.
“If your hands hold the interest of your eyes, little one,” she said in a soft voice, startling him, “yours is it to try.” She looked up at him, her eyes milky with cataracts, so old perhaps that the healers could do no more for her. Or perhaps she did not want their help.
Reza, dumbfounded, nodded stiffly. The woman rose from her stool, her joints creaking loudly, and gestured for him to sit. She handed him the brush and proceeded to guide his hand along the trace of the rune with one hand, while supporting herself on his shoulder with the other. When she judged that the brush needed more dye, she guided his hand toward the appropriate vial. There were dozens of them, Reza saw, as well as a seemingly endless variety of hues the old woman had created by mixing other colors, placed with exacting care on the palette next to his elbow.
Time was lost to him for the rest of that evening. He had forgotten everything except the glowing design that was assuming its final form under his hand, with the old woman’s help.
At last, it was done. He had finished the last quarter of it by himself, with only occasional prompts from the woman. His hand was cramping from holding the brush, but he felt oddly triumphant. He had helped create something of beauty, and had not had to fight or be beaten to do it.
“Good is your work, little one,” she said as he held the breastplate up to the light for her inspection, her tired eyes still somehow able to see. “The priestess shall be pleased.”
“The… priestess?” Reza stuttered.
“Of course, young tresh,” she said, her nearly toothless mouth curling into a kindly smile. “Did you not notice its size?”
“No…” he said, shaking his head. But it was immediately obvious, now that she had pointed out the fact. The plate was nearly twice the size of his, if not larger. “No, I did not.”
“More observant should you be, then,” she advised. “Short is a warrior’s life, otherwise.”
“Of course…” Reza paused, looking at her helplessly. Her name, he thought. I should be able to figure out her name. But how?
“Pan’ne-Sharakh,” she said, as if reading his mind. “Her Children know each other by blood, human,” she said cryptically. “But it is also written here,” her fingers pointed in sequence to five of the many pendants that hung from her collar, “in the shape of the stars that are brightest in the sky when the Empress Moon is directly above. Look at the sky this night, and you will know the ones of which I speak. Their names your tresh shall teach you. They are the key.”
“Thank you, Pan’ne-Sharakh,” he said gratefully, bowing his head. “Thank you for your kindness.”
“I serve Her in my own way, little one,” she answered softly, patting his shoulder gently before turning back to her work.
He turned to leave, and found Esah-Zhurah standing in the doorway. He realized with a shock that she must have been standing there for hours.
She brushed past him to greet the old woman, bowing with reverence, and spoke quietly with her for a moment. Then Pan’ne-Sharakh slowly shuffled from the room, her back bowed with age.
“She seems to feel you have a talent for such work,” Esah-Zhurah told him, obviously surprised. “You shall develop that skill in addition to your others, but not in their ste
ad. Should you have the time,” she added dubiously. She gestured impatiently toward the exit. “Let us go.”
He followed her back to their little camp, looking at the stars in the sky.
And there they were, as the old woman had said they would be: the five bright points of light that would frame the Empress Moon when it hung directly overhead, the key to the names of Her Children.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The sword flashed down in a savage arc, the sun’s glow blazing from the metal as if the weapon itself was made of light.
Reza pitched himself to the right, dodging the blade, then kicked out with his left foot, his thigh like a massive piston that drove the air from Nyana-M’kher’s lungs and flung her to the ground. The few seconds of surprise his parry had given him was all he needed. Smoothly drawing the black shrekka from its holder on his left shoulder, he hurled the hand-held buzz saw and watched with satisfaction as it buried itself in the ground five centimeters from Nyana-M’kher’s head, showering her with sand from the arena’s floor.
“Enough!” called the arena’s umpire, a stocky warrior by the name of Syr-Kesh. A gesture of her hand made Reza’s victory official.
Reza collapsed on his knees into the sand next to Nyana-M’kher, who was also trying to get her breath back. She struggled to her knees, and the two of them bowed their heads to Syr-Kesh, Nyana-M’kher saluting as she did so. Then they both knelt there for the brief time that was allowed for meditation after one combat and before the next, a mental cool-down that the Kreelans considered an essential part of their routine.
Reza closed his eyes as his mind made the rounds of his body, sounding it out for damage and weakness, evaluating and relaxing each muscle in turn. Their combat had taken an unusually long time – nearly ten minutes, so evenly matched had they been – and his shoulders and legs ached fiercely from the duel. It had been the third one today for both of them, and this one had been Reza’s only win. He had lost the first match to a senior tresh in a spectacularly one-sided – and decidedly brief – engagement, and the other to a very young tresh who felled him with a lightning-swift cut to the legs that would have crippled him for life had the sword carried any edge.
In these moments, when he turned inward like this, he was amazed at how much control he was gaining over his body and his mind. With a handful of exceptions, notably in his mid-back and feet, he could flex each muscle individually, leaving those around it totally relaxed. His breathing and heart rate, too, were gradually coming under better control, and he found that he could hold his breath for nearly three minutes before he felt compelled to take a breath. Even then, he could force himself to breathe normally and keep his heart rate at a steady cadence, rather than take huge gulps of air as his heart raced to get oxygen back into his system and to his brain.
His fighting skills, while hardly impressive by Kreelan standards, had improved to the point where he was no longer the punching bag he had been when he had arrived. While he returned with Esah-Zhurah to their tiny camp each night bruised and often beaten, those who faced him in the arena treated him with respect for his cunning and tenacity, if not for his neophyte fighting skills. The days of underestimating the human, the human many of them had been convinced would simply wither away and die in those early days, were over. Reza had quickly come to understand the soul-deep importance of combat to the Kreelans, and had devoted himself to its study. He observed and mimicked the others, especially Esah-Zhurah, and invented his own tactics. He went over moves in his mind, awake and asleep, before putting them to the test in his waking hours.
And after the combat was finished for the day and they had eaten, Esah-Zhurah would lecture him for hours on the ways of her people, on the Way itself. Gradually, he came to understand that the Way was not just an ideology, a set of abstract concepts meant to structure their lives such as the laws of humankind sought to do, but it was also a physical thing. While he did not yet understand just how it worked, the Way was intertwined with their racial bloodline: when Esah-Zhurah described her people as the Children of the Empress, it was – literally – true. There was some physiological thread that bound them together in much the same way that ants or bees of a particular colony identified themselves and their functions as part of a much larger whole. But how this worked, he did not yet understand. Nor, surprisingly, did Esah-Zhurah.
“It simply is,” she had told him once. “Her will is as fundamental to us and as evident as is the air we breathe. I do not hear Her voice in my mind; I am not a telepath. But I sense in my blood that which She seeks for us, and I know my place in Her design.”
Reza had pondered those words many times since, with a vague sense of loneliness, and perhaps even jealousy, clouding his heart. For he did not know Her will, and he feared his own destiny within the strands of the web the Empress wove for Her people.
“Time,” Syr-Kesh called, and Reza’s reflection disappeared like sea mist blown clear by the morning wind. He bowed his head once more to Syr-Kesh before getting to his feet, walking to where Esah-Zhurah stood waiting for him near the entry to the arena. Behind him, several tresh frantically raked the sand smooth for the next contest.
“You did well, my tresh,” Esah-Zhurah said as he approached, and he bowed his head to her in respect. “Much better than I expected, especially without the sword on which you have so heavily depended to this time.” Reza ignored the barb, a ritual habit of hers that never failed to annoy him, but about which he could do nothing. A part of him hated her deeply, but another part, what he often hoped was the most human part, wanted her respect, wanted her to be proud of him. “But these practice sessions are as nothing compared to the Challenge you will face in four days. Your opponents here do not show all of their skill or their strength, they do not waste their energies here, as do you, but save them for the time when they will need them most.”
“What does it matter?” he asked angrily. “I can only do my best. If I am beaten in the first match of the first Challenge, then so be it.” He shrugged out of his armor, letting Esah-Zhurah open his black shirt to apply one of the writhing living bandages to the creased welt on his shoulder. Nyana-M’kher had brought her sword down on the joint between his shoulder armor and the metal backplate, pinching a hand’s breadth of Reza’s flesh into a puckering tear that had proved incredibly painful for the rest of the extended combat. “But one day,” he said, more to himself than to her, “I will stand in the final arena with the winning sword in my hands.”
“That,” Esah-Zhurah said as she massaged the oozing mottled mass of the bandage into the wound on Reza’s shoulder, her voice tinged with sarcasm that sounded all too human, “is a day I wish not to miss.”
Reza flinched as she pressed at the wound. A shudder of revulsion swept through him as he felt the amoebic mass of tissue begin to merge with his flesh, mysteriously healing it. It would leave a sculpted scar in its wake, a trophy of his tiny victory. He knew that whatever the thing was, however it and the things like it were made – or bred – it was infinitely beyond any comparable human technique he could imagine. The scope of wounds and injuries, even diseases that it could treat was apparently limitless. But having another living thing pressed into his flesh, and knowing that it would become a part of him, a perfect symbiosis, left him yearning for the cold touch and electric hum of the instruments and analyzers, the smells of ozone and alcohol, of the little clinic of House 48.
The pain made him think of the last, and worst, time Esah-Zhurah had punished him for anything. The only thing among the countless subjects they discussed that she adamantly refused to reveal to him was if there were any males in their society, and if so, where they were. On this one subject he could get nothing out of her other than, “You shall know when the time comes, if it comes,” and the subject would be considered closed.
The one time Reza had tried to push her on it, the last time he had asked about it, she had turned on him like a lioness defending her cubs. She had beaten him so severely that he missed nearly t
hree days of training, spending most of that time in the care of the healers as they reset the five ribs and one arm that Esah-Zhurah had broken in the course of his punishment. The healing process had been nearly as bad as the beating itself, especially when they held him down and forced his mouth open, pouring a wet mass of the undulating healing gel down his throat. It slid across his tongue like a wet oyster before pumping itself into his airway and then his lungs. In the moment before it stilled the pain of the jagged edges of the ribs tearing into his lungs and made breathing easier for him, he thought he would go mad at the thing churning within his body. Esah-Zhurah had chastised him afterward for being a coward, shaming her before the healers with his squeals of revulsion. Her words had burned themselves into his heart and mind as he lay in the infirmary for the next three days with her sitting next to him, back turned, silent. If she had heard him call her name, or felt his tentative touch, or sensed the silent tears he shed, she did not show it. Only when the elder healer had cleared him as being well and he had risen from the bed of skins had she addressed him, and then as if nothing had happened.
“There,” she said, closing his shirt. She helped him get his torso armor back on, the bandage throbbing uncomfortably. “Come. You have completed your three obligatory matches for this day, and I have something for you.”
“What?” Reza asked, his mind alert to the mischievous undertone in her voice.
“Patience,” she said, her eyes laughing at him. “You shall see.”
He followed her, and was surprised when she led him to the stable where the magtheps honked and snorted as they stomped about their enclosure. Reza’s nose quickly filled with their musky smell, a smell he had become quite accustomed to in his first few days here, when he had to sleep with the animals, chained to a post.
“What is this about?” he asked her.
“Tomorrow we begin our free time before the Challenge,” she told him. “From sunrise tomorrow to sunset the second day after that, we may do as we please.”
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