by M. L. Brown
Tarkka left the room. Kana bowed and said, “I must return to my work. If you should desire anything, speak to Aidan. Farewell.”
My companion returned a few minutes later. “This way,” he said, one corner of his mouth turned upward. I followed him through a door, down some steps and along a corridor.
“Welcome to the Rovenian Legion,” he said.
I found his tone discouraging. He sounded too much like a Roman emperor telling his gladiators to have a good time in the arena.
5
LANCE ELIOT LEARNS THE MEANING OF PAIN
TARKKA HALTED BEFORE AN open doorway. Unable to come to quite so precise a stop, I collided with him.
“What’s this?” boomed a voice like thunder. “Such clumsiness, Tarkka.”
Tarkka glowered at me and addressed the speaker. “Allow me to introduce you to Lance Eliot, your student.”
The thunderous voice uttered an exclamation I will not record here.
“Lance Eliot, this gentleman will be your teacher,” said Tarkka.
The person standing in the doorway didn’t look like a gentleman. A long pale scar split the stubble on his left cheek, offsetting a patch over his right eye. His uncovered eye glinted the lead color of a bullet. He was a giant of a man, and though he must have been in his late sixties, he had the hard muscles of a prizefighter.
“What have I done to deserve this?” he demanded, shaking a massive fist under Tarkka’s nose. “I was told I had a pupil to instruct. Why has Kana sent me this weak old woman?”
I felt compelled to defend my honor. “Weak old woman?” I cried.
“A weak, shrill old woman.”
“Now listen here—”
“No, laddie, you listen to me,” said the man.
I listened.
“I don’t want to teach you, but I owe Kana a favor and can’t get out of it any other way. So shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you. Be off with you, Tarkka.”
Tarkka scuttled away, leaving me to eye my new instructor with trepidation. After a minute or so I decided to risk breaking the silence. “Well,” I said, my voice an octave or so higher than usual, “shall we begin, sir?”
“Don’t call me sir,” growled the man. “My name’s Aidan. You can hang yourself if it isn’t good enough for you.”
I assured him it was quite good enough.
“How much do you know about the Legion?” he asked.
“Not much.”
He put a hand over his eye and muttered, “Pelea help me.” Then, removing the hand, he said, “All right, we’ll start at the beginning. Come in.”
I entered the room. Swords of all shapes and sizes lay on the floor in gleaming rows. Bows and quivers hung from wooden racks. Staves and spears leaned against the walls, maces and axes lay in great heaps, snares dangled from the ceiling and miscellaneous weapons of war filled the corners. There was enough weaponry in that little room to equip an army.
“The Legion is divided into seven units,” rumbled Aidan, selecting a metal staff. “There are scouts, legionaries, infantry, lancers, archers, laborers and medics. I’ll start with the scouts. They use these.”
He hurled the staff at me. I had just enough time to put my hands in front of my face before it hit me like an omnibus. With a muffled noise, something between a gasp and a curse, I fell to the floor.
“Get up, laddie,” he bellowed. “If you can be knocked down by a stick, there’s not much hope for you.” Using the staff as a crutch, I pulled myself to my feet. “Scouts use staves,” he continued as though nothing had happened, “because they’re easy to carry and are useful for crossing rough terrain.”
“Not much of a weapon, though.”
He glared at me. “Not much of a weapon,” he echoed. “Are you daft?”
“It’s a stick,” I protested. “It doesn’t even have a sharp edge.”
“Give me the staff,” he said. I threw the weapon as hard as I could in his direction. He caught it effortlessly, gave it a twirl and assumed a combat stance. “You see that chair?” he asked.
I nodded, and then started as the chair exploded into wooden splinters. He withdrew the staff from the wreckage and laughed. “That’s what a staff can do,” he said, pointing to a particularly large fragment of chair. “Pity the soldier that gets a whack in the ribs. Have you anything more to say?”
I shook my head.
“Excellent,” he said. “Scouts seldom see battle. Their purpose is to reconnoiter and observe enemy movements from a distance.” He took something from a shelf and held it up. It looked like a coin with a serrated edge. “Do you know what this is?”
“No idea.”
“This is a shuriken, laddie. You see that chair?”
I nodded, expecting its imminent destruction. Aidan made a casual flicking motion with his hand. The shuriken flew across the room and stuck in the wooden seat. “Wonderful little things,” he said. “If your aim is good enough, you can kill a man in three seconds from fifty paces.”
He made another flicking motion in my direction. A shuriken whizzed through the air an inch from my left ear. “Please don’t do that again,” I said in a small voice.
My instructor chuckled. “All right, laddie, I’ll be kind to you. No more shuriken. Now catch.”
He sent a sword rocketing in my direction and began a long lecture on Rovenian legionaries.
Legionaries were the most flexible and adaptable unit of the Legion, serving as policemen in cities and soldiers in battle. They were expected to travel quickly, fight under all conditions and plan their own tactics in combat. Each legionary carried two swords: a long sword called a katana, held in the right hand and used for attacking; and a shorter sword called a wakizashi, held in the left hand and used chiefly for deflecting attacks.
I might have been bored by his lecture had he not made a point of tossing weapons in my direction as he spoke. When he finished his description of legionaries, he stooped and lifted a massive mace. “Infantry is the next unit of the Legion,” he said. “Catch.”
I leapt backward. There was a splintering crack, and the mace skidded to a stop at my feet. “You were supposed to catch that,” he growled, retrieving the weapon. It left a star of splinters where it had impacted the stone floor.
“Sorry,” I squeaked.
Infantrymen carried heavy weapons: claymores and maces and battleaxes. Unlike quick, agile legionaries, infantrymen were slow and powerful. Clad in steel armor, they waded into the thick of battle and dealt sweeping strokes.
“I was an infantryman once,” said Aidan reminiscently. “Then I turned sixty and the administrators of the Legion forced me to retire from active service.” He then stated his frank opinion of the administrators of the Legion, which is not worth recording.
Dismissing old memories with a sigh, he went on to describe lancers, who rode hunds and fought with long swords and lances; archers, who shot arrows from defensible positions; and laborers, who were responsible for military chores such as carrying supplies, tending hunds, cooking, managing war machines and chopping wood. The last unit of the Legion consisted of medics, Curamancers whose magic restored health to injured bodies.
“That’s the Legion,” he concluded, twirling a battleaxe.
I seized a katana. “Let’s get started.”
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Brandishing a sword.”
“Put it down.”
“What?”
“Put it down and come with me.”
I reluctantly dropped the sword and followed him down the corridor into a large empty room. A thick carpet, worn and faded, covered the floor. My instructor stopped in the middle of the room, turned and said, “Attack me.”
“Beg pardon?”
“I’m not putting a weapon in your hands till you can fight without one. Attack me.”
I was not an aggressive fellow. I had never been good at personal combat, or even at rugby. Cards and darts held far more appeal for me. Now Goliath’s long-lo
st twin beckoned me to stroll up and belt him. I hesitated. He cleared his throat impatiently. Resigning myself to injury, I charged.
With a shout I swung my fist at his jaw—missed completely—and staggered, unbalanced by my wild punch. He tripped me with his foot and stood over me, apparently torn between frustration and amusement. “You’re going to do better than that, laddie,” he said. “Get up. You’re going to try again.”
I tried again, and again, and again. He occasionally paused the routine to make me do pushups, sit-ups or laps around the room. “Faster,” he cried as I made my nineteenth circuit of the room. “My grandmother is quicker than you.”
At last I came to a halt, dripping with sweat, lungs burning, the taste of blood strong in my mouth, heart pounding in my chest like a hammer on an anvil. “Attack me,” sang my instructor. I lurched forward with my fists upraised. On reaching him I stopped, gave a shuddering groan and bent over with my hands on my knees.
“Please,” I gasped. “I’ve never hurt so much in my life. Can’t we take a breather?”
“If you’ve never hurt worse than this,” he said, suddenly serious, “you don’t know the meaning of pain.” There was a moment of silence. Then he laughed with a return of his fierce jocularity. “Of course we can take a breather. I think it’s almost time for lunch, anyway.”
The word lunch was health to my body and nourishment to my bones. When the bell clanged to summon the soldiers to the dining commons, I raced out the door and down the corridor with a speed that astounded my instructor. “Now that I know you’re capable of moving so fast,” he said, shoving his way into the lunch queue behind me, “I’m expecting you to run your laps with the same enthusiasm.”
Lunch was not an elegant meal, like those French dinners that look too artistic to eat, but a satisfying, English sort of meal: bread and sausage and vegetable stew. Tarkka sat at our table, eating with the concentration of a surgeon and steadfastly ignoring me. I didn’t mind. It’s sometimes a relief to be ignored.
We ran another few laps after lunch, despite my protests that physical exercise has a deleterious effect on the digestion. “We’re soldiers, laddie,” said Aidan. “We can’t be hampered by trifles like digestion.”
My progress was slow but steady. By the end of the day I was almost keeping pace with my instructor. As shafts of evening light slanted into the room, he knocked me down with a blow somewhere beneath my solar plexus. “That’s enough for one day,” he said as I lay gasping on the ground. He pulled me to my feet, and then gave me a thump on the back that sent me plummeting downward again. “You’ve done a fair job,” he said. “I’ll see you in the foyer of this building at dawn tomorrow.”
“At dawn?” I whimpered.
“Any later and it’ll be thirty laps for you. You can find your own way back to Tamu’s place, can’t you?”
“I think so. See you tomorrow, then.”
I left the military headquarters and crossed the street. The sun was setting. Its light bathed the city, turning gray stone to shining brass and gold.
As a boy I had read stories of golden cities in the heart of the Amazon. I had dreamed of exploring jungles and finding lost civilizations. How funny, I mused, that I should find my city of gold just when I had abandoned my dreams and become a sensible grownup!
I returned to the house and banged on the door. It was opened by the butler. “Good evening, sir,” he said. “You’re in time for supper.” A wonderful smell of beef and onions wafted through the open door. I lost no time in moving to the dining room. Tamu sat with his servants, munching salad with the ponderous solemnity of a tortoise.
“Welcome back,” he said. “Where have you been, my friend?”
“The Legion,” I said. “You inspired me with your tales of adventure. I have become a legionary.”
He laughed. “You are a wonder to me, Master Eliot. Please sit down and eat.”
I threw myself into an empty chair, seized a fork and dug in.
Tamu introduced his servants as I ate. “It is unusual for servants to eat at the same table as their master,” he admitted, “but it seems selfish not to share my table with my friends.”
The meal was superb. It began with a salad, which contained a number of interesting vegetables I had never seen before. Then there was mushroom soup and warm bread, followed by a roast wallowing in onions and carrots. The only thing I didn’t like was kimchi, a pungent dish consisting of cabbage soaked in some strong liquid (I suspected sulfuric acid) and fermented until its alcohol level reached that of vodka. Had any of the kimchi fallen to the table, I would not have been surprised had the tablecloth caught fire.
We finished with a quivering sort of custard (rather like the Spanish dessert called flan) and tiny cups of sweet wine. I finally lay down my knife and fork with solemn satisfaction, like a conqueror laying down his weapons after a victory.
“Roderick will prepare a bath for you,” said Tamu. The butler slipped out of the room. I thanked my host, bid the company goodnight and trudged up the stairs to my room. The lamps had been lit and a clean pair of pajamas laid out on the bed. I had just removed one shoe when a familiar cough made me start.
“Your bath is ready, sir,” said the butler.
I suppose you’ve heard of culture shock, the disorientation a chap feels when thrust into a foreign environment. I suffered many jolts of culture shock in that first week in Faurum. To enumerate them individually would require many additional pages—and as I happen to be dying at the moment, I haven’t got time to write many additional pages—but I will mention one of the things that jolted me most.
Indoor plumbing had yet to be invented in Rovenia.
An impressive network of sewers ran beneath the city, or so I was told. Citizens minded their business in outhouses, which typically stood a respectable distance from other buildings. Baths were taken indoors. I could never have guessed how many steps it took to prepare a tub of bathwater. Water had to be drawn from a local well or reservoir, carried to the house, heated in kettles and poured into the tub. Most houses had an adjoining bathroom, a literal bath-room, set aside for bathing.
The butler led me to the bathroom. A slab of green soap and a folded towel lay on the floor next to a stone tub like a small swimming pool. It was brimming with hot water. Few things in my life have been quite as wonderful as that bath. Long hours of training had left me bruised and exhausted, and as I slipped into the water I felt like I had gone to heaven. Only when the water was lukewarm did I heave myself out of the tub and go to bed.
I could hardly move when the butler woke me the following morning. “What time is it?” I croaked.
“Six of the clock, sir.”
My mouth was too dry for me to curse, so I said nothing.
The butler coughed, but I was too sleepy even to jump at the noise. “Will there be anything else, sir?”
“Fetch me some blackroot, would you?”
The butler glided away and returned with a steaming cup. I drained it in two gulps. The stuff blazed its way down my throat and burned in my stomach like vitriol.
“Will that be all?” inquired the butler.
“Absolutely,” I gasped. “Thank you, Roddy.”
There was no time for breakfast. A faint glow had begun to spread across the sky. I would have to move fast to reach Aidan before dawn.
I burst out the front door, dodged a hund-drawn cart and ran up the street, down a flight of stone steps, along a plaza, through an alleyway, down another street, past a row of shops, the length of a park and into the foyer of the military headquarters. The secretary stared as I bent over with my hands on my knees, gasping like a fish out of water.
“Welcome to the headquarters of the Faurum Police and Militia,” she said, setting down her pen. “How may I help you?”
“I’m fine, thanks,” I wheezed, then stumbled through the door and down the corridor toward the training room.
My instructor clapped his hands as I staggered into the room. “You made it. I�
�m right glad to see you, laddie. You’ll start with thirty laps.”
“I’m—not—late,” I protested between gasps.
“I know you’re not. If you’d been, it’d have been sixty. Now get moving.”
It’s incredible how much the human frame can take. Halfway through the morning I was convinced my heart would pound its way out of my chest. If my heart wasn’t the first thing to go, it would be my lungs. My legs could hardly hold up the rest of me, yet I managed to reel through bout after bout with my instructor. Our fights always ended with me on the floor, clutching whatever hurt most, while he offered suggestions for improvement.
He wasn’t very encouraging, though not for lack of trying. “You’re doing fine, laddie,” he yelled every time he knocked me down. “Another few weeks and you’ll be really fit.”
At last, when time seemed to have broken down completely, we stopped for a rest. “The second day of training is the hardest,” he said. “From the third onward, it gets easier and easier till it’s as painless as breathing.”
At that moment, my attempts to breathe were causing me a great deal of pain. I tried to scoff, but didn’t have enough breath.
It was a long day. At lunch I could hardly eat. Tarkka inspected me with his maddening half-smile, apparently satisfied with my physical breakdown. I was able to rest for an hour or so after lunch as Aidan explained the basic strategies of unarmed combat. Just as I was beginning to relax, he said, “I’d swear this dingy little room is getting smaller every day. Let’s get out into the fresh air.”
I was too tired to put up a fight. First we ran to the crest of the hill. Then we descended to the city wall. Then, to my utter dismay, we scaled the hill at a run. Physically speaking, I have never felt so close to death. Aidan decided to finish our session after the run. I think he had finally noticed that I was wavering on the brink of collapse.
“Tell you what, laddie,” he said, sounding a trifle apologetic. “That’s enough for one day.”
I thanked him and trudged back to Tamu’s house. It was my intention to change my clothes, eat something, have a hot bath and then tumble into bed and never get up again.