'Your master?' Nico glanced up.
'Yes, Baracha. I understand you already met.'
'Your master judges others quickly, it seems.'
'He supposes we will likely fight, you being a Mercian and I being an Imperial,' explained Aleas, observing him with lazy, intelligent eyes. As Nico forced himself to return the young man's confident gaze, he found himself thinking: An Imperial? I'm actually standing here face-to-face with the enemy. Strange that he does not seem so terrible.
'So,' said the other, 'how does it feel?
'I'm sorry?'
'Standing here, conversing with a foul Mannian?'
Nico considered the question. 'It feels fine,' he said at last. 'Though in truth I'm somewhat hungover just now, so it may be hard to discern any true discomfort.'
Aleas's smile was genuine. 'Then well met,' he said.
CHAPTER TEN
A Desertion Nico tried to settle into his new environment, though at first it was not so easy.
There were nine other apprentices at the monastery, and all of them male. It was not that women were barred from the order – according to the other apprentices, they were simply never recruited, nor put themselves forth for recruitment.
Not surprisingly, all these young men spoke the common tongue that was Trade, their speech peppered with words and expressions from the older – and sometimes still native – languages of their homelands. Nico was pleased that almost the first thing he learned at the monastery was a variety of swear words he had never heard before.
Each morning the young men awoke well before first light and washed themselves in the communal washroom alongside the other silent Rshun of the order. Then they sat in the candle-lit dining hall, with the sun still not yet risen over the mountains to the east, and ate a simple breakfast of porridge and dried fruits accompanied by a choice of water or chee. The apprentices had to make the most of this fare, for their next and only other meal of the day would be dinner in the evening. Often they slept hungry, the food barely enough for their requirements. It was as though the Rshun wished to encourage the theft of foodstuffs. For certain, they did not condemn such activity, only admonished the apprentice who was clumsy enough to get caught in the act.
Straight after breakfast, it was off to whatever lesson was scheduled first for that morning, the young men's faces brightening along with the early light of dawn. For Nico, the rest of the day would comprise a confusing jumble of instructions quickly forgotten and lessons barely understood in terms of what purpose they might serve.
The evening meal, when it finally came round, was a relief like no other. He would sit and eat in numb exhaustion, thinking of nothing but his bunk.
The apprentices hailed from various corners of the Empire, though there was a surprising lack of tension for all the cultural differences between them. Still, Nico prepared himself for the worst, having never been overly sociable as a child. As a boy he had attended the local schoolhouse, and knew how his peers looked upon his solitary nature and his quick tongue when provoked.
But not so here, it seemed. Those few most likely to pick on him – big Sanse with strength on his side, fierce little Arados with the most to prove to the others – hung back for some reason. At first, Nico thought it was simply the strictness of monastery discipline. After a week or so, he realized it was something more than that. He realized they were somewhat in awe of Ash, and in return a portion of that respect rubbed off on to Nico himself, as the first apprentice Ash had ever taken on.
Those first early weeks of training were to be the most difficult. In a way the glamour that seemed to surround Ash, and therefore in a lesser form Nico, began to work against him. Nico felt as though he had a reputation to uphold, one that he had done nothing to gain – save for this assumption by the other apprentices that he must have something special about him for Ash to have chosen him in the first place. Yet he did not feel very special. He did not know why Ash had chosen him, though he suspected it had little to do with his abilities.
Nico would have told them as much, the truth of it, but each time he tried to, he found some inner resistance stopping him. He had begun to enjoy his minor celebrity. The others treated him with a respect he was barely familiar with after living rough on the streets of Bar-Khos and, before that, sharing a cottage with his mother's succession of indifferent lovers. He had found that he was standing up straighter than ever before in the presence of others. He would now meet their eyes and not so readily look away.
And so, in those early days, he tried too hard to impress, and because of this eagerness only made himself more inept in the trying.
He fumbled during his cali lessons – the style of sword-fighting practised by the Rshun, and designed for confronting multiple opponents while always advancing, never moving backwards. He would wheeze to a dead halt during his fell running, vomiting from the sheer exertion of it; broke two fingers in unarmed combat and cried from the shock of seeing them bent out of shape; lost his temper with the frustrations of oni-oni, a test of the reflexes that involved the contenders trying to slap each other across the face every time a gong was struck. He even fell off while riding a zel, not once but twice – nearly snapping his neck in the process.
However, Nico distinguished himself in other activities, enough at least to preserve his reputation with the others. He flipped and jumped and climbed like a natural during the acrobatics classes; performed especially well in acting, requiring the use of subterfuge and disguise; grasped quickly the basics of breaching, in other words breaking and entry; remained undiscovered for hours in tests of stealth and concealment; excelled at archery, in which he did in fact have much ability, having both a natural eye and a great deal of experience from shooting birds for his mother back home. And, most especially, he shone in ali, the combined arts of evasion – otherwise known as running away – in which Nico found himself particularly talented.
Under different circumstances Nico might have expected to suffer from homesickness, longing for the familiar streets of Bar-Khos, or even for his mother's cottage. But for an apprenticing Rshun there was, simply too much to learn and practise for his mind to dwell on such distracting thoughts. Only at night would a sense of isolation oppress his spirits, but even then not for long, since he was usually so weary that he fell asleep in minutes.
He saw very little of Ash during this time. It seemed the old man did not get involved in training the disciples. Neither did he offer personal instruction to his own apprentice, perhaps intending instead to train Nico only in the field, where it was said that the learning ceased and the knowing began.
Overall, the old farlander kept himself to himself, rarely seeking out his young protege at all. It seemed almost as though he had discarded Nico at the first opportunity to present itself.
Nico was stung more than he would ever admit by this apparent desertion.
*
'Whet your knives!' Holt bawled over the heads of the ten apprentices gathered in the courtyard on a sunny day filled with wind. Instantly they bent their heads to the task.
Nico did not move, today. Instead he watched what the others were doing. Particularly he kept his eye on Aleas who he had already noticed tended to get things right first time. After a while, grasping a wooden practice knife in one hand and a steel carving knife in the other, he began to shave a fresh edge into the curved piece of wood that had been left blunt from its last usage. A guppy, they called this type of practice knife, perhaps because of the fish it resembled. The weapon lacked a point and was made from a piece of wintervine, a rare hardwood that normally grew on the sheerest of wind-exposed cliffs and, for some reason, only flowered in the depths of winter.