Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

“Eldest of eldest, you are as dead as a strip of sundried massi meat,” declared the drill leader, a skinny, cynical male named Juksal. “Or you would be, if we were fighting with spears with real points. And the rest of you,” he called to the crowd of males watching the fight. “What does this teach you?”

“Not to get caught between two males,” his audience chorused.

Juksal feigned deafness. “Did I hear some runnerpests chirping? I asked, what does this teach you?”

“Not to get caught between two males!” This time it was a shout.

“All right,” Juksal said grudgingly. “You budlings know what to say, anyhow. Do you know what to do so that won’t happen?”

“Form circle!” the males shouted.

Fralk yelled with the rest, but all the while was thinking that what he really wanted to do was kill the accursed drill leader. Any other time, any other place, Juksal would have widened himself the instant he saw Fralk and stayed widened till the younger male was gone. Not, Fralk added to himself, that Juksal frequented places where he would be likely to see him.

But here on this practice field, because he had managed to live through a few brawls, Juksal had clanfather’s authority over the group of males in which Fralk found himself. He used it, too, and seemed to take special delight in making Fralk the object of his lessons. Fralk ached after every one of them.

He knew he had to learn to fight. As the male in charge of the boats, he would be going across in one of the very first ones. He did not think the Omalo on the other side of the gorge would greet him with hoots of delight. He even realized that being singled out this way by Juksal might earn him his comrades’ sympathy and make them more inclined to protect him than if they thought of him as a pampered noble. Maybe Juksal thought he was doing him a favor.

Maybe, in fact, Juksal was doing him a favor. That did not make him hurt any less, or like the drill leader any more.

“All right,” Juksal suddenly screamed. “You’ve just spotted eighteen eighteens of Omalo, all running toward you! Don’t justtalk about your stinking circle-make it, or you’re dead males.

Now, now, now!”

Predictably, a good deal of waste motion and rushing to and fro followed. The band of males got into their double ring a lot faster than they had the first time they tried it, though. Then Juksal had been screaming that they should have brought along a tray of relishes so the Omalo would have something to eat them with. Now all he did was turn yellow. Since he seemed to be yellow about half the time, Fralk doubted he was very angry.

“All right.” The drill leader swept out an arm. “They’re that way, and there aren’t as many of them as you thought at first. Matter of fact, there’s more of you. Go poke holes in ‘em.”

A few of Fralk’s companions were veterans of border clashes with other Skarmer clans-the two who had set on him were of that sort. More, like he, had never seen action. They shook themselves out into a crescent-shaped skirmish line and rushed in the direction Juksal had shown.

“Yell, curse it!” the drill leader shouted at his warriors.

“Make ‘em want to void right where they’re standing!”

Fralk yelled as loud as he could, feeling foolish all the while. Soldiers were necessary things for a clan to have, but as eldest of eldest he had never expected to be one himself. But then, he had never expected Hogram to conceive of planting a new Skarmer subclan east of Ervis Gorge.

Every time he was tempted to imagine himself wilier than the clanfather, he broke a mental fingerclaw on the hard ice of that fact. The Great Gorges had been barriers between great clans as long as there had been great clans. Thinking of one as anything else required a leap of imagination beside which Fralk’s own schemes were as so many tiny runnerpest budlings.

“Come back, the lot of you,” Juksal called, breaking into the younger male’s musings. The band reversed itself. “All right, enough for the day. Fling your spears at the targets and then knock off.” As if suddenly remembering to be harsh, the drill leader added, “Try to scare ‘em if you can’t hit ‘em!”

Neither of Fralk’s casts hit the leaf stuffed massi-hide target. Neither missed by much, though. He consoled himself with the thought that if the target had been a male caught in a volley, maybe he would have dodged someone else’s spear and been brought down by one of these.

He was also glad none of the humans had been watching. They did watch the Skarmer males drill fairly often; the sound of their picture-makers clicking away had become a familiar part of the exercises. At first Fralk thought they were filled with awe at the might and savagery of the Skarmer forces.

Most of the males still thought that. Juksal certainly did; whenever a human came around, he urged his warriors to show the strange creatures how fierce they were.

But Fralk, unlike his fellows, had learned to read expressions on the humans’ strange, boringly colored features. When the corners of their odd mouths curved up, they were amused. Fralk did not know why the Skarmer drills amused them, but he was sure they did.

Well, he thought, still feeling the ache under one arm, he’d like to see how a human would fare, attacked by four spears at once. Attack a human on the side where he had no eyes and he was yours-he wouldn’t even know he was in trouble until he was dead.

Fralk stopped. A couple of human concepts he had been having trouble with suddenly made sense. Right and left had given him no problems; they were just opposites of one another, what he thought of as three arms apart. But behind…, behind was the direction where humans had no eyes, the hidden direction. Made as they were, poor strange creatures, no wonder they needed a special word for it.

Behind… it even had a weird kind of logic to it, or at least economy, which to Fralk’s mercantile mind was about the same thing. Like those of any reasonable language, Skarmer prepositions classified objects through their relative distance outward from oneself. Sometimes that led to clumsy ways of thinking and of speaking: Juksal, for instance, was closer to Fralk than the male named Ising, but farther from Fralk than the one called Kattom.

How much easier to say-and to think-that Juksal was behind Kattom. And how much easier to wish the miserable drill leader were behind Ising, and behind a good many more males as well, so he could neither see nor bother Fralk anymore.

Fralk knew what wishes were worth. If wishes were all that mattered, every starving tenant farmer would become a clanfather overnight. Most times, Fralk knew that too well to need to remind himself of it.

But wishing Juksal would disappear was too pleasant a thought to slap down. Fralk’s eyestalks quivered with guilty pleasure as he walked back toward Hogram’s town.

Reatur had left a piece of hide with some writing on it in the mates’ quarters. It had been there a few days. Most of the mates paid no attention to it. A couple scribbled on the blank parts. Then Lamra rescued it. She could not read, not really, but she did know that the written signs had sounds that went with them and knew what some of those were.

If you made one sound, and then the next one right after it- why, you’d just said ice! That was what those two signs had to mean! Ice! Lamra was so excited at her discovery that she stared at the hide with all six eyes at once, paying no attention to anything going on around her. She might have heard the door to the mates’ chambers opening, but if she did, she ignored that, too.

She was taken by surprise, then, when Reatur asked from right beside her, “What do you have there?”