Way Of The Clans Page 2

  However, the characteristic that really set off the pair was their eyes—blue as the summer sky on the planet Circe and just as deceptive. As a Circe storm could seem to descend on the planet from nowhere, a swirling tempest preceded only by the slightest change in the serene skies, the calmness in the eyes of Aidan and Marthe when confronted by opponents was the lull that preceded their storms. That serene moment before they sprang into action often gave them the edge against an adversary of equal skills.

  Aidan shivered. Even in the thick garments he wore, the harsh wind blowing across the plain made him feel exposed. The other members of his sibko appeared to be shivering, too. They had been instructed that the only clothing they could bring to training camp was what they wore to the landing site. Some of Aidan's sibkin had put on a couple of extra layers; now he wished he had, too. The cold air discovered any ingress into clothing, any place where the material did not quite meet the skin, then rushed in to thoroughly chill every epidermal surface.

  "I do not trust any of those non-kin," said Bret, the smallest of the group. "Non-kin" was a term that differentiated their sibko from other sibkos and, for that matter, any assembly of people outside the sibko. These unkempt, ill-dressed, indifferent officers, for example.

  Bret's smallness had seemed to guarantee his early elimination from the sibko, but nobody had counted on his tenacity, courage, and the discipline that had made him exercise for hours every morning. Now he had a strong and muscular body, and the others relied on him for leadership, as much as fiercely independent sibkin could accept any leader.

  "They have planned something for us."

  "What, Bret?" Marthe said.

  "I do not know, but based on how vicious and unfeeling those who will train us are said to be, I suspect their casual indifference right now is a fraud to hide something devious instead."

  "I doubt they will make us stand here for long," Aidan commented. "It would not be Clanlike."

  "Clanlike? Are you being sarcastic?" Bret asked.

  He was, but Aidan did not want Bret to know that. Bret, who had no concept of the humorous, often commented that Aidan treated life too lightly. The smaller boy had been so intent on his own survival in the sibko, his own proof of kinship with the others, that he never understood a joke. Around a campfire, on hunting expeditions, his laughter always rang false, the laughter of a serious person trying to blend in with others by following their ways. The only jokes he ever told were ones he had heard from others. His nervous manner and the catches in his voice when he delivered punch lines made his listeners doubt his understanding of the joke's humor. The sibko needed Bret's shrewdness and quick decisions at those times when the entire group was being tested, so they excused his lack of humor.

  "Neg," Aidan responded. "I am being factual. We are not often allowed relaxation, quiaff?"

  "Aff. You know what I think? I think they are testing us right now. See the sidelong glances? They are assessing us, I am sure."

  "And at the same time agitating us, quiaff?" Marthe said.

  "We should try to look calm," Rena said. "Show we are ready for them, ready to be warriors." Rena was unusual among Aidan's sibmates. Though a bit overweight, like all the survivors of the arduous customs, testings, and retestings of a Clan upbringing, she was in good physical condition. Rena liked to use her unimposing appearance to catch people off guard. She could flip an attacker over her well-muscled back, then wrestle him to the ground faster than anyone else in the sibko. The wrestling was often a prelude to coupling, which she carried out with a similar athleticism. Aidan often let himself be tossed by her, in prospect of having the painful blows evolve into amorous caresses.

  "I believe Rena is right," said Bret. "Best to ignore them. How about a team-tussling session? You all up for it?"

  There was immediate agreement among the sibko's dozen members. Automatically splitting into their usual three teams, they squared off. Team tussling was both an exercise and a game that, Aidan had once noticed, harmlessly ritualized the kind of grand melee that occurred during a Trial of Position.

  Team tussling had developed naturally out of the sibko's intense gymnastic competitions. Once any such activity started, all members of the sibko wanted to be the best at it. In a tussle, they used acrobatic talents along with the combat skills they had been learning, it seemed, since they were trying to kick their way out of their cradles.

  The ritual began ceremoniously. Two members of each team formed a "chair" with their hands while another stood on or sat in it. Aidan was certain this beginning had originated from falconry. In a team tussle, the competitors were launched just like the birds. Bret stood on the surface offered by his team's quartet of thinly gloved hands, then his holders hurled him forward. He executed a single flip in the air, landing in front of Rena, who was thrown forward from a sitting position, rolled into a somersault, and then landed at Bret's feet just as he came down.

  This opening was well-ritualized by now. Rena grabbed at Bret's ankles. Bret anticipated the move and jumped aside, landing in the path of the first-out acrobat from the third group, a stocky, quarrelsome young man named Endo. He had entered the fray by leaping from his holders' chair onto his hands, "walking" a few steps, then flipping onto his feet just in time to give Bret a hard chop to the side of his head with hands that Endo had hardened with practice on any material he could find. Each member of the sibko had a fighting specialty; chopping with his hard-heeled, calloused hands was Endo's. Bret reeled sideways and encountered Rena driving her shoulder into his midsection.

  Aidan watched with the other members of his team, as always nervous and eager for the moment when they all could enter the battle. At one time, team tussling had been simply a boisterous free-for-all. Refinements had gradually been introduced until the game evolved into its present form, where—in imitation of the Clan's military bidding procedures—each team sent out its minimum effective force, one fighter, to do battle for a precise two minutes before the others could join in. If that single fighter was rendered ineffective by an opponent (a difficult task when there were three or more teams) or, as sometimes happened, was knocked out cold, that team was defeated and its other members were not allowed into the mock but hard-fought combat. This was the overwhelming fear of the tussler, that he or she would work up all the restlessness and energy necessary for a good scuffle and then be deprived of the chance to let it out. Aidan, not the best gymnast of his team, was unable to offer a stylish opening gambit for the beginning of tussling, and so rarely went out first. He hated these moments of being denied battle.

  Marthe, beside him, was equally restive. She liked a good fight as much as Aidan and never shied from it. In their sexual encounters, she had shown similar appetites, which was why she was, among all the members of the sibko, his favored partner for coupling. Unfortunately, others felt the same and getting to her was often more arduous than a team tussle.

  A sibko survived, they had been told often enough, on its ability to function as an effective unit as well as on the intensity of its internal competitions. A sibko member was always battling, on the outside and the inside.

  He looked over at Marthe. The back of her left hand was against her hip, and she was rubbing it nervously up and down against the rough material of her short trousers. The skin visible between her trousers and her high boots was prickly with goose bumps. He glanced down at his arm, which was also showing the effects of the cold. A few more seconds, and if Rena stayed true, he could get warm by mixing it up in the center.

  Rena almost got caught out by Endo, who, by throwing himself onto his back and kicking his legs high, knocked her off balance. Endo then rolled into the back of her legs and flipped her over his hunched back. She landed, uncomfortably, her head pressed against a large rock, her eyes less than clear but not dazed, her right arm under her body, her left flailing ineffectively. Endo, who moved quickly in spite of his stockiness, jumped on her and nearly pinned her, but his head was snapped back by Bret, who, by the rules of
the game, could not stand by and let one individual defeat another. In a team tussle, a physical exercise as much as a competition, it was forbidden to win by allowing your opponents to defeat each other. Inactivity was inglorious.

  The whistle-signal came from the Timemaster, in this case Dav from Endo's team. Screaming like hawks, the others ran, leaped, twisted, and elbowed their way into the melee.

  Aidan rushed right at Tymm, a clever but stolid in-fighter who could often be dazzled by diversionary tactics. At almost the last second before Aidan would have rammed into Tymm (and received a skillful defensive blow in response), he veered away, as if his choice for combat were someone else. He ran another three steps, stopped, and—without looking at Tymm—launched himself sideways while bringing up his elbow, making contact with the side of his opponent's jaw and sending him off balance. A quick kick to the back of Tymm's knee and he fell to the ground, where Aidan quickly placed his right hand firmly but safely against Tymm's neck to hold him down. This act, held for five seconds, signified Tymm's defeat. Aidan had no time to watch Tymm get up and slink away, for he had to cope with Orilna, the skinny but lithe martial-arts specialist. She was just a bit off with a chop to the back of his neck, and he merely stumbled a few steps, recovering in time to block her elbow strike, then deal her a just-barely slowed-down punch to the stomach. She took the blow well, not even doubling up, but her next attempt, a weak heel-palm strike, was obviously affected by his attack. Bending low, Aidan tackled her about the waist and wrestled her to the ground, his arm gripping her through her right leg, the back of his forearm against her chest. He was just about to do the five-second mock stranglehold on Orilna when a booming voice drowned out the sounds of the scuffle. "STOP THIS IDIOCY!"

  The voice had so much of the sound of command, the sharp consonants of authority, the drawn-out vowels of wrath, that Aidan froze in position, his hand reaching for Orilna's neck, his other arm still entangled in her legs. Orilna, too, like all the other sibko battlers, stopped fighting and tensely held still.

  Aidan looked up to see a trio of training officers, two of them with arms akimbo, the third gesturing wildly as he spoke: "Is this harebrained sibko, this fluttering nest of eyasses, so foolish as to think a demonstration of its belligerence would in some way impress us?" Eyas was the word for a hawk just taken from its net before it could fly. "You are children still, quiaff? No doubt you spit up your cereal and go behind rocks so no one can see you defecate. Has there been a mistake, comrades? Have they sent us a sib-nursery instead of a sibko on the verge of becoming warriors?"

  The officer to the speaker's left laughed raucously, a sound analogous to the roar of a sudden Circean wind. When she spoke it was in a voice that, if anything, was louder than her colleague's: "Freebirth! If these whelps are our training unit, I think I will make myself a bondsman to the laborer caste, because what use will be there in going to war? With novices such as these, we might as well bid for surrender as combat."

  The third officer started to pace among the sibko. Aidan saw that his fellow sibkin were like statues, each commemorating some fighting pose or other—fists reared back, struggle checked in sometimes absurd tableaux, legs locked in what seemed like physically impossible knots. He relaxed his grip on Orilna and sat back on his haunches. Orilna did the same. Some of the others shifted position.

  The third officer, a man whose complexion was so bad that he seemed a genetic anomaly for the warrior caste, made odd sounds of disgust in his throat. "You call this fighting?" he finally said in a gravelly voice. "This is horseplay. It is soft, too soft. You call your caresses punches? Go home and spend your days among the fields of flowers, coupling and quoting the pornographic sections of The Remembrance. Create a freebirth in a real womb."

  Aidan nearly vomited, so insulting and obscene was the third officer's last remark. Among warriors, any reference to freebirths or the freeborn was the deepest curse, the most profound of insults. To be born from the womb of woman was disgraceful. Male warriors could sire children with a woman from another caste, but the child would then be freeborn, a word synonymous with lowborn in Clan society. Warrior fathers never spoke to their freeborn children. There was no meanness in it; they were merely indifferent to their bastards.

  "You," the third officer said, pointing toward Endo. "What is that on your lip? Do you grow vegetables there perhaps?"

  Endo instinctively felt for the sparse group of hairs that he called his mustache. He was so proud of it.

  The second officer now strode among them. "Facial hair is forbidden for cadets," she said. "You will shave that off by tomorrow at dawn or we will pluck it off hair by hair."

  For a moment, Endo looked as though he were experiencing the sensation she described. Aidan ran his hand along the underside of his smooth chin, fearful that he might have grown a beard there and forgotten it.

  "Stand up!" the first officer suddenly shouted. "All of you!"

  All members of the sibko were on their feet within an instant, standing stiffly at attention.

  "I am Falconer Commander Ter Roshak, but until you are yourselves warriors, you are forbidden to refer to me by name or by rank. You may not, in fact, address me directly or refer to me when talking to anyone else. The same holds true for your other officers, Falconer Joanna." The woman officer nodded. "And Falconer Ellis." A grunt from the other male officer. "Falconer Joanna, explain semantic code."

  Ter Roshak was a tall man who held his left arm strangely. Slightly curved, but not in an anatomical way, it seemed to cling to the side of his body as if attached there by invisible wire. It barely moved as he spoke.

  Falconer Joanna, bellowing instructions, wove her way among the trainees. "You must give full attention to us when we address you, but you must not respond to us. If words must be delivered, you must couch them in indirection. You do not understand what I mean. I will demonstrate."

  Suddenly she stood in front of Aidan. She was a head shorter than he, but the difference in height diminished in no way the intensity of her gaze. Her eyes were blank, almost colorless, mean. Palms together, she held gloved hands in front of her face, tapped them against her chin. They were falconer's gloves, thick, decorated with sharp-pointed metal stars. The stars no doubt denoted some kind of military information, something about the military division called a"Star" in Clan fighting units, unless they merely represented the vanity of Falconer Joanna in some way.

  "You are a tall one, cadet, quiaff?"

  "Aff."

  "Aff? What do you mean?"

  "As you said, Falconer Joanna, I am tall."

  She slapped his face hard, using the back of her right-hand glove effectively. He felt the points of some of the stars dig into his skin. Her eyes stared into his, probing for a reaction. Except for the first startled moment, his eyes held onto their characteristic coolness. Long ago he had vowed never to let his guard down for anyone, in or out of the sibko.

  Falconer Joanna continued to glare into his eyes, without blinking. It was now a battle of self-control. Her mouth hardly moved as she spoke to him: "You spoke to me! You addressed me by name! You must respond to our direct questions, but never in any way talk to me. You must talk as if to the air. Do you understand?"

  "Yes. This cadet must talk to the air. As he is doing now."

  "You learn quickly, eyas. We weave among you cadets like the harsh, relentless winds of Ironhold," she said softly. "You follow our orders, immediately doing whatever we command. What is you name, eyas?"

  "Aidan."

  "Aidan. Put your arms around me, Aidan. Around my shoulders."

  He was about to protest, but realized that meant addressing Falconer Joanna directly, offering an independent comment, so he did what she said.

  "Good," she said. "A bit slow, but obedient. But you are like a tentative lover, holding your body away from mine. Come closer. Good. Your arms are strong, eyas, muscular. But I can take you."

  She brought her arms up through his and roughly broke his grip. She hit him in the s
tomach, digging her glove in deeply so that the points of the stars scratched his skin beneath the thick hide of his clothing. He doubled over, he had to, and could not blink back the tears that sprang into his eyes. But despite the pain ravaging his insides, Aidan looked back into Joanna's eyes, refusing to show her even a hint of it. She seemed ready to hit him again, then suddenly backed away.

  "You have falcon's eyes, cadet," she said quietly. "I will be watching you."

  Aidan cursed inwardly. His first minutes in training and he had caught the attention of an officer with a fierce temper and a strong punch.

  Nearby, Falconer Ellis was dressing down Tymm and giving him a series of punches on his arm and chest. Tymm looked about to cave in.

  Then Falconer Commander Ter Roshak strode into the middle of the group, bellowing: "Can we send these little birds back to their nests? My time here on Ironhold must have some meaning. I will not waste it on a doomed project."

  Up close, as close as Aidan was willing to look out the corner of his eye, Ter Roshak was an odd-looking individual. His face seemed made of jagged rock, with many signs of erosion. The eyes were hard to see beneath the overhanging cliff of his brow; his mouth a forbidding mountainside cave. Emphasizing the analogy of stone was the man's hairlessness, just a few blades of hair growing around his nearly shapeless ears, and none visible on his arms and legs, as if the ban on hair had included limbs as well as face. The falconer commander had seen more of life than Aidan ever wanted to, probably most of it in the cockpit of a BattleMech.

  "Shall we test them, Falconer Commander?" asked Falconer Ellis, his terrible voice eager for something. Aidan could not tell what, but he immediately dreaded it. The man's pockmarked skin, its apparent malleability a strong contrast to Roshak's hardness, reddened with anger, or perhaps it was merely the assault of a wind that seemed to get more turbulent by the minute.