Andrew Hartley - Act of Will

“All right, all right, I’m sorry,” he laughed, coming after me. “We’ll start now if you like.”

“Can I see your sword?” I asked.

He reached for the left one but I stopped him.

“The other,” I said, indicating the one with the amber stone in the pommel. He seemed to hesitate for a split second and then handed it to me. It was heavy, too heavy for me to use, though not as heavy as I had expected.

“What’s this?” I said, touching the stone with my fingertip.

“Nothing,” said Orgos. “Decoration.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“I’ll get a pair of spears. Better start there.”

As he got a couple of spears out of the wagon and bound their tips with cleaning rags, I wondered why I didn’t believe him. Decoration? Orgos? That didn’t sound right. And there was something else: a vague and unsettling memory.

A flash of light.

I looked at the amber gem, and, as the sun caught it, it seemed to glow with exactly the same inner fire that-crazy though it sounded-I thought had somehow incapacitated those Empire troops back in Cresdon. I considered the stone, then told myself not to be so bloody stupid and put it out of my head.

I couldn’t help thinking that the spears were less glamorous than the sword I had hoped for, but Orgos assured me it was a good place to start. The spear was light and required more dexterity than strength. In my current physical state that was a good thing, as he had so penetratingly observed. I stood legs apart as he told me, and grasped the shaft with both hands.

“All right,” he said, “now face me and do as I do. Grip the spear like this. Fists outwards. Your right hand a little further down. Now lunge at me. Good, but make it a smaller movement. The bigger and more obvious the lunge, the easier it is to anticipate and the harder it is for you to recover. Always get back on both feet with your weight evenly distributed like this. Right. Now try that lunge again and recover. Good.”

So it went on, and I suppose I made progress, and I actually enjoyed it so much that I didn’t realize how late it was getting until the minuscule wound in my thigh began to throb faintly. I also didn’t notice Mithos and Garnet watching from the fireplace, or hear what they had to say. I learnt fast and my reflexes were quick, so they should have been fairly impressed. Orgos was pleasantly surprised and said so. I was flattered, even if he was just encouraging me. Still, it would take more than a bit of training to make me into the stuff of heroes. They couldn’t train me in honor and bravery and the other “qualities” that would one day get them all killed.

Of Renthrette’s views on the matter I heard nothing, but I strolled around the camp, spear in hand, and occasionally brought up the matter of our sparring when we were all gathered together to dine. Whenever I did so she would give me a long indifferent look as if to say that she knew she was supposed to be impressed and wasn’t; then she would go back to her slow, meticulous brushing of the horses’ tails or whatever the hell she was doing. But I knew her resolve was weakening. She wasn’t the first to have tried to convince herself that I was some kind of repulsive and despicable rodent. I’d read the literature on such things. I’d written some of it.

Orgos, anxious to improve my other skills, encouraged me to sit on a horse, but I felt so high and ridiculously unbalanced that I could not be persuaded even to have him walk the beast round the camp. I sat on it; that was all. As far as I was concerned, that was progress enough for one day, or indeed for several. I don’t trust things with more feet than me. Come to think of it, I don’t trust things with fewer feet either. If it doesn’t look like me, I find it suspicious, and if I ever met someone exactly like me, I would trust him still less. Trust is a highly overrated commodity, I think.

By the sixth day, the wound on my leg had vanished. On the eighth day I noted a distinct weaving of grass in the hot earth, and by evening there were trees again. Earlier on in the same day I had been gratified by a glimpse of the famous Hrof ostrich. It had been a good four hundred yards from the road, but you couldn’t mistake that leggy ball of feathers powering up and down the desert on those clawed, pinkish legs of tight muscle and sinew. I think I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t seen one, since in my former life it was the only image that mention of the Hrof lands might have called to mind. By the late afternoon of the ninth and, somehow, longest day, we could see the distant flashes of light and color from the rooftops of Stavis. And still the Empire hadn’t got me. We, and more particularly, I, had made it.

On the last day of our journey I got a clearer view of Stavis and it, or rather one aspect of it, came as something of a shock. Stavis sat astride the river Yarseth only a couple of miles from where it emptied its brown, unsightly waters into the sea. I had known this before, but being presented with the reality of the thing was a different matter. The Yarseth was merely a dark and drowsy worm, but at its mouth was the ocean, and there the sparkle was like the billion shards of some immense fractured mirror. I had never seen the sea before.

It was loathing at first sight. I’m sure there are many well-traveled and broad-minded individuals who are accustomed to the ocean and don’t even recall their first glimpse of it. I, having weaseled my uneventful way into a shabby, provincial adulthood within a twenty-mile radius of the supremely shabby and provincial town of Cresdon, was neither well-traveled nor broad-minded. The sight of that near-infinite expanse of water scared the living daylights out of me, leaving me feeling not so much inadequate as nonexistent, and I found myself glancing at it furtively every few minutes to make sure it was still there. It was.

At least you could walk on the Hrof. Back in the golden age of Mrs. Pugh and her cockroach-ridden hovel, I had some nagging doubts about the very existence of the sea, as if I was preparing myself for someone to confess that the whole ludicrous “area of salty water” thing was a story to frighten children. The sea had been like magic and dragons or peace and liberty: mythically fictitious. But there it was, huge, vibrant, and glittering smugly to itself. I spent the next two days undergoing what you might call an ordeal by confrontation.

Stavis itself didn’t help. The road brought us gradually into a sprawl of white-plastered buildings and a population of every racial type imaginable. Here was a Cherrati trade enclosure hanging with silk; there were the people I knew only-and quaintly-as snow folk, from farther north than any map I knew of, selling seal pelts and buying iron spear tips by the sackful. Verone herders with their smelly okanthi rubbed shoulders with Dranetian silver dealers and Mesorian glass merchants. The sea drew all races, and in Stavis they met and bartered, calculated their profit and loss in a dozen languages and a hundred dialects. And rather than feeling like one of the ingredients in this great cultural stew, I merely felt left out and longed for the familiar pettiness of Cresdon.

Our passage through the city was marked by a sudden darkening of the skies until the clouds swirled violet and cracked with electrical flashes. When the rain came I ducked into the wagon and stared out of the back as Stavis’s international cross section ran for cover and the raindrops bounced eight inches high off the Empire’s new-laid pavements.

The Empire had been here only eight months. In that time, Orgos assured me, little had changed, except that prices had gone up, taxes and soldiers had appeared, and the Diamond Empire was looking fat and pleased with itself. The populace adapted by marking up their cod, herring, and sailfish prices until the only people who were really any worse off were distant trade partners and, of course, the very poor. So Stavis, with the usual economic sidestep, kept everyone happy. Everyone who mattered, anyway.