Worldshaker 01; Worldshaker

by Richard Harland

  He came fully awake and swung off the bed.

  She pulled a face at the sight of his clothes. “What’s that you’re wearin’?”

  “Isn’t this right?”

  “You’ll get hot.”

  “Better than a jacket and shirt.”

  “Yeah, but not as good as bare to the waist.”

  Col was shocked. Strip off in front of her? Unthinkable!

  She saw his reaction and grinned. “Okay. Take off yer shoes and socks, though.”

  Col eyed her bulky Menial uniform. “What about you?”

  She sniffed. “Trainin’ you ain’t gonna make me hot.”

  However, she did remove the padding from her uniform: rolled-up lengths of cloth. Col removed his shoes and socks.

  She nodded. “Now we take turns at trainin’. Right?”

  “Right. Me first.”

  “Why you?”

  “I thought of it first.”

  “So?” She shrugged. “Okay. Stand in front of me.”

  She made him poise on the balls of his feet. But she wasn’t satisfied.

  “You’re too stiff. Don’t be so controlled about everything.”

  “I’m doing what you tell me.”

  “You gotter loosen up. Give yerself a good shakin’. Like this.”

  She flung and flopped her arms, legs and head in every direction.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Just do it. Let yourself go.”

  “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Know what’s wrong with you? You’re not just stiff in the body, you’re stiff in the head.”

  Col still thought it was ridiculous, but he did the all-over shaking for several minutes. Perhaps she wanted to make him act like a fool…

  “Better. Now we start with defence.” She thought for a moment. “I know.” She turned to his antique wardrobe and opened the door.

  Of course, she remembered the contents. She selected one of his ties, dark blue, embossed with a gold P for Porpentine.

  “Try to stop me hitting you,” she said, and flicked out at him suddenly with the tie. He raised his arm, but the tip caught him a stinging cut on the cheek.

  “Hey! That stung!”

  “Block it.”

  She danced around him, wielding the tie like a whip. He tried to ward off lashes from all sides.

  “Don’t get angry,” she warned. “Ignore the pain. Stay balanced.”

  He was soon hot and sweaty, and smarting in a hundred places.

  “Dodge, but don’t dodge too much,” she said. “Be prepared for the next blow, and the next after that.”

  After ten minutes, he was hardly conscious of what he was doing. The practice went on and on, until every move seemed to have happened a dozen times before.

  “Okay, you’re gettin’ the idea,” she said, and stopped. “Now stay still and watchful. Open and alert. Like this.”

  She stood motionless on the balls of her feet, but with a kind of vibrating readiness. Col remembered what she’d said once before: Keep your mind wide and your senses open.

  Suddenly, her arm swept up and the tip of the tie nicked him on the shoulder.

  “Hey, you never said…”

  “This is fightin’. You don’t get a warnin’.”

  For another ten minutes, she made him stand in a state of readiness. At unpredictable moments, she would launch into another attack; sometimes, three lashes one after another; sometimes, nothing for a whole minute.

  Finally, she delivered a non-stop barrage of blows, striking almost faster than he could see. He whirled this way and that, until his feet tangled and he fell to the floor.

  He looked up, beyond embarrassment. He was panting and running with sweat, while she wasn’t even breathing heavily.

  “I was better, wasn’t I?”

  “A bit. Not much.”

  “I only lost my balance right at the end.”

  “It’s more than balance. You put too much effort into the way you move. You gotter unlearn old movements before I teach yer new ones.”

  “I’ll unlearn them, then.” Col stuck out his chin. “What next?”

  “My turn.”

  He didn’t want to stop, but he didn’t argue. Riff went across to his bookcase and selected a book: Heroes of Empire: True Tales for Boys. She sat on the bed and he sat beside her. He was very much aware that his bare arm was only inches away from hers.

  He’d never considered how to teach reading, but he supposed you began with the sounds of the separate letters. He pointed to the h, e, r and o on the book’s title page.

  “Huh…ee…arrr…oh.”

  She repeated the sounds with an exact echo of his pronunciation, through every letter of the alphabet. She had a real talent for mimicry.

  It was a different matter when he pointed to the letters without saying the sound himself. She squinted at the print and made wild guesses. She couldn’t believe that such similar-looking letters could go with such different sounds.

  “But this one’s the same as that!”

  “No, this one’s got an extra bit sticking out at the bottom. See?”

  “Oh, that! That’s nothing!”

  He had to keep telling her to take her time and study the shapes more closely.

  “I never thought readin’ was so slow!” she huffed.

  She went to the other extreme, pronouncing the letters with exaggerated deliberation.

  “Now you’re making it sound stupid,” he complained.

  “Well, it is stupid.”

  She remained supremely confident. When she finally managed to produce most of the right sounds for most of the right letters, she turned to Col with an expression of triumph. “Told yer I was a fast learner. I’m nearly readin’ already, ain’t I?”

  He shook his head. “We haven’t even started on words yet.”

  “Oh?” Riff looked blank. “There’s more?”

  Col held back a biting reply. “Just concentrate on learning this first.”

  He kept her pronouncing sounds for letters until she was perfect every time. Then it was his turn for training again.

  Riff closed the book reluctantly. “Okay. We’ll do something new.”

  “Attack?”

  “No, still defence.” She stood facing him. “Look into my eyes.”

  Her eyes were so large and brilliant, it seemed too personal to look right into them. This is a training exercise, he told himself. But he found it hard to concentrate.

  “Always watch your enemy’s eyes,” she said. “Soon as anyone means to hit you somewhere, their eyes get ready for it first.”

  “Even you?”

  “Yeah, even me. Watch for a tiny, tiny movement of my eyes.”

  She reached forward suddenly and tapped him on the elbow.

  “Did you see it comin’?”

  “Mmm.” Col wasn’t sure what he’d seen.

  “Try and block me. By watchin’ my eyes.”

  She tapped him on his shoulder, the top of his head, his knee. Not once did he pick the movement in advance, not once could he block her.

  “You’re not tryin’. Watch harder.”

  She jumped forward and back, hands shooting out at him. Some of her taps were more like punches.

  “Worse and worse.” She stopped after a while. “You’re goin’ backwards. What’s wrong with yer?”

  Col knew what was wrong, but he couldn’t tell her. It wasn’t only the effect of her eyes, it was her physical closeness. She came right up against him when she tapped him. He could even feel the warmth of her breath on his face…

  “You need another good shakin’,” she said. “Do it again.”

  Once more, she demonstrated the rag-doll flopping and flapping. Col flopped and flapped so hard he could barely hold himself upright afterwards.

  “That’s enough. Now watch my eyes.”

  He found it easier this time. It was true, her eyes always flickered towards their target before her hand shot out. He stopped wondering what else w
as in her mind and thought only about where she intended to strike.

  “Much better,” she said after twenty minutes. “Now my turn again.”

  For Riffs second turn, Col tried to get her to put sounds together to make a word.

  “Eee…em…puh…eye…arrr.”

  Under his instruction, she said it faster and faster, but she still couldn’t merge it into a single word.

  “Empire,” he told her at last.

  “Empire? Oh, empire. You say it a funny way.”

  Col realised the size of the problem. His teaching was right for Upper Decks pronunciation, but Riff had a different accent.

  “You’ll have to learn to say it like me,” he said. “I can’t teach you any other way.”

  There was another problem too. “What about the eee at the end?” she asked. “Empire-eee?”

  Col tried to explain that the letter e didn’t always sound the same, and sometimes didn’t sound at all.

  “So how do you know?”

  “You just do.”

  “Phuh! So it doesn’t work!”

  “What?”

  “Your system. I make the sounds like you tell me, and then you say they’re wrong.”

  “It works most of the time. Do you want to do this, or not?”

  “Yeah, we got a deal. I just thought you’d be a better teacher.”

  Col gritted his teeth and turned to a full page of text. For the rest of Riffs turn, he tried to pick out words that sounded the way they were spelt. After a while, he began to suspect that his system didn’t work even most of the time. Teaching Riff was proving to be just as hard as learning from her.

  At the end of her second turn, she yawned. “I reckon we’ve done enough for one night. You need to practise what I showed yer.”

  “How?”

  She pointed to his full-length mirror. “In front of that. Practise keeping yer balance. What about me? What can I do?”

  “Practise letters and sounds. You can borrow Heroes of Empire.”

  “Nah, too big. I’ll just take a bit of it.”

  She took hold of a page and ripped it clean out of the book.

  “Hey! No!”

  “What’s the matter? You’ve still got plenty of pages left.”

  “There’ll be a gap in the story.”

  “Uh?”

  It was too difficult to explain, he decided, and too late anyway. “Forget it.”

  Riff folded the page and slipped it into a pocket of her Menial’s uniform. She put the padding back in her uniform too.

  “Same time tomorrow night?”

  Col nodded.

  “Sleep well. Practise hard.”

  “You too.”

  He stared at his cabin door long after it had closed behind her.

  ∨ Worldshaker ∧

  Forty

  They met for midnight training sessions all through the week. Riff had new things to teach every night: how to avoid an attack from behind, how to duck under a blow, how to cope with several simultaneous attacks. For the simultaneous attacks, she used rolled-up socks, which she threw at him two, three or four at a time. They moved his bed back against the wall to make more space.

  Col improved steadily. He would never acquire Riffs acrobatic agility, but his co-ordination was better and he was lighter on his feet. When they went back to the tie-flicking exercise one night, he was surprised at the speed of his own reactions.

  Riff made progress with her reading too, though never as fast as she expected. Col devoted a great deal of thought to better ways of teaching her. He worked out how the sound of a particular letter was often influenced by its position in a word and other letters that came before or after it. Riff still had problems spotting clusters of letters in a word, but she was very sharp at switching from Filthy pronunciation to Upper Decks pronunciation.

  “I do believe I shall be a most refined lady reader,” she told him in a perfect Upper Decks accent, wafting her fingertips with an elegant gesture.

  He thought less and less about the Riff of his daydreams, more and more about their training together. He grew used to talking to her, sitting on the bed beside her, even making contact with her when he blocked her blows. Working towards practical goals, she became somehow real and familiar – as well as prickly, impatient and competitive.

  She was tight-lipped about her spying activities, and he didn’t try to quiz her. She could explore and plan as much as she liked, but she couldn’t do anything without the numbers for unlocking the door to Bottom Deck. The only question he asked was about the Changing Room.

  “Have you found that room? You know, where Filthies get changed into Menials?”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in it?”

  “I don’t.”

  “So why ask?”

  “Because you haven’t found it, have you?”

  “Not yet. But I will.”

  Their training sessions together were the one bright spot in his life. His days at school were at best dreary and at worst threatening. The hostility towards him was building up.

  Every break time, he saw the Squellingham group doing the rounds, talking to groups of boys they would normally have had nothing to do with. He knew he should try to talk to other students too, make an effort to counteract the rumours. But somehow he couldn’t be bothered. A stubbornness was growing in him, a spirit of resistance. He was sick of the whole world of school.

  His marks in tests went downhill too. Now he scored below the elite group, though still above the rest of the class. He wondered how long it would take before Mr Gibber dropped him below the climbers and crawlers.

  Meanwhile, the campaign against impure thoughts continued. Mr Gibber managed to introduce the word ‘filthy’ into every lesson: there were filthy countries, filthy adverbs, filthy fractions and filthiest reflex angles. He treated Col as a blank space in the classroom that he was quite unable to see.

  At the end of the week, he nearly went a step too far. He had taken to hiding behind the blackboard and jumping out to fire sticks of chalk at pupils he suspected of harbouring impure thoughts. All of the grindboys and most of the crawlers and climbers had been hit at least once. On Friday, he got so carried away that he jumped out and took aim at Col.

  Col saw him. “Don’t you dare!”

  The tone of authority might have come from Sir Mormus himself. Mr Gibber lowered his arm and went very red in the face.

  Then he bounced back. “Of course not! The grandson of our Supreme Commander! How could I think of it? No such grandson could ever have impure thoughts.”

  Col shook his head, not sure how to respond. Mr Gibber began to put on a performance, capering around and throwing out his arms.

  “You have to excuse me, please. I’m only a humble schoolteacher. Who am I to doubt the thoughts of a Porpentine? Not on the same level at all.” He struck his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I was forgetting my role in life. Miserable, wretched nobody that I am! Pathetic, insignificant worm!”

  Now that he’d discovered his role in life, he began revelling in it. “Yes, a pathetic, insignificant worm!” He appealed to the class. “What am I, boys?”

  “A worm, sir!”

  “Louder, louder!”

  “A worm, sir!”

  Mr Gibber struck himself so hard on the forehead that a spare stick of chalk fell out from behind his ear. For a moment, he appeared to have trouble focusing.

  Then he went to sit behind his desk, wearing a smirk of self-satisfaction. He lifted up the wastepaper basket and tickled Murgatrude for the rest of the afternoon.

  The confrontation was over. Col had the feeling that he’d lost in the end, even though he’d won.

  ∨ Worldshaker ∧

  Forty-One

  Col expected all his time on the weekend to be taken up with social events. But Grandmother Ebnolia’s list of engagements had recently thinned out – and the same had happened to the other branches of the Porpentine family. There was troubled discussion after dinner in
the Northumberland Room.

  “The Ollithorpes cancelled their coffee morning’. ‘We didn’t receive an invitation to the Sprouds’ at-home’. ‘The Tremencys made excuses to put off Sunday luncheon’. ‘No choir practice at Lady Hallidom’s’. ‘No children’s games at the Trumpingtons’’. ‘We’re being treated like pariahs. Something has to be done.”

  Ebnolia smiled and bobbed. “It’s only temporary’. ‘Not if the Squellinghams can help it, it’s not,” boomed Sir Mormus. Everyone turned to him. “They’re behind it all. Sir Wisley is impossible.”

  After Sir Mormus’s boom, Ebnolia’s voice was a tiny birdlike twitter. “Is this the Executive meeting, dear?”

  Sir Mormus nodded, visibly struggling to contain himself. “He outmanoeuvred me. When we make landfall on the coast of Burma, we can head for Hong Kong by way of Siam, or Singapore by way of the Malay Peninsula. We’re low on coal and we need to re-stock. I planned for Singapore.”

  “You weren’t outvoted?” Leath Porpentine exclaimed in horror.

  Sir Mormus’s face had turned an ominous shade of puce. “We’ve read a signal from the Prussian juggernaut that says they’re heading towards Hong Kong from central China. If they get there first, we’ll have to wait while they re-stock. No trade for a week. But Sir Wisley said we ought to have the speed to arrive before them, and no one dared to say otherwise.”

  “You were outvoted,” groaned Leath Porpentine.

  “No, I wasn’t outvoted.” Sir Mormus looked like a volcano ready to explode. “I had to back down before I could be outvoted. I could see Haugh and Fefferley were going to vote against me.”

  “What about Turbot?” asked Rumpley Porpentine. “Surely the Chief Helmsman would side with the Supreme Commander?”

  “He could have gone either way. Self-serving coward! He knows the Singapore route is best. But his wife influences him to be ambitious for his family. He’ll switch over to Sir Wisley if he thinks it’s in his interest. I couldn’t take the chance. I had to turn around and support the Hong Kong route myself.”

  The Porpentines fell silent, their faces grim.

  “Turbot is the key, isn’t he?” asked Ebnolia.

  Sir Mormus grunted in the affirmative.

  “So we need a bribe.” Ebnolia stood thinking, muttering, tapping a dainty finger against her chin. “An offer that the Squellinghams can’t match. We’re still the most important family on this juggernaut. Mmm…yes!” She fluffed herself out triumphantly. “I have a solution!”