"Stop calling her Soaeaeodemo!" Ros-Starn said. "That's yet to be proven. That she knows the prayer is irrelevant! Every child among us knows it."
He's talked enough, Alexandra thought. I've got the key to him. I could immobilize him with a word. She hesitated. But I cannot stop all of them.
"You will answer to me, then," Alexandra said, and she pitched her voice in a twisting tone with a little whine in it and catch at the end.
Ros-Starn stared at her, fright visible on his face.
"I'll teach you agony," she said in the same tone. "Remember that as you fight. You'll have agony such as will make the run sheffes a happy memory by comparison. You'll writhe with your entire...."
"She tries a spell on me!" Ros-Starn gasped. He put his clenched right fist beside his ear. "I invoke the silence on her!"
"So be it then," Trek-Jush said. He cast a warning glance at Alexandra. "If you speak again, Soaeaeodomo, we'll know it's your sorcery and you'll be forfeit." He nodded for her to step back.
Alexandra felt hands pulling her, helping her back, and she sensed they were not unkindly. She saw Alexei being separated from the throng, the elfin-faced Em-Cro whispering in his ear as she nodded towards Ros-Starn.
A ring formed within the troop. More glowglobes were brought and all of them tuned to the yellow band.
Ros-Starn stepped into the ring, slipped out of his robe and tossed it to someone in the crowd. He stood there in a cloudy gray slickness of a stillsuit that was patched and marked by tucks and gathers. For a moment, he bent with his mouth to his shoulder, drinking from a catchpocket tube. Presently he straightened, peeled off and detached the suit, handed it carefully to the crowd. He stood waiting, clad in loincloth and some tight fabric over his feet, a crysnozh in his right hand.
Alexandra saw the girl-child Em-Cro assisting Alexei, saw her press a crysnozh handle into his palm, saw him heft it, testing the weight and balance. And it came to Alexandra that Alexei had been trained in prana and bindu, the nerve and the fiber---that he had been taught fighting in a deadly school, his teacher men like Grady Ukrainia and Gustav Vasa, men who were legends in their own lifetimes. The boy knew the devious ways of the Bala Garrasaid and he looked supple and confident.
But he's just fifteen, she thought. And he has no barrier. I must stop this. Somehow, there must be a way to....She looked up, saw Sarghoam watching her.
"You cannot stop it," he said. "You must not speak."
She put a hand over her mouth, thinking: I've planted fear in Ros-Starn's mind. It'll slow him some---maybe. If I could only pray---truly pray!
Alexei stood there alone now just into the ring, clad into the fighting trunks he'd worn under his stillsuit. He held a crysnozh in his right hand, his feet were bare against the sand-gritted rock. Ukrainia had warned him time and again: "When in doubt of your surface, bare feet are best." There were Em-Cro's words of instruction still in the front of his consciousness: "Ros-Tharn turns to the right with his knife after a parry. It's a habit in him we've all seen. He will aim for the eyes to catch a blink in which to slash you. He can fight either hand; look out for a knife shift."
But strongest in Alexei so that he felt it with his whole body was training and the instinctual reaction mechanism that had been hammered into him day after day, hour after hour on the practice floor.
Gustav Vasa's words were there to remember: "The good knife fighter thinks on point and blade and shearing guard simultaneously. The point can also cut; the blade can also stab; the shearing guard can also trap your opponent's blade."
Alexei glanced at the crysnozh. There was no shearing-guard; only the slim round ring of the handle with its raised lips to protect the hand. Even so, he realized that he did not know the breaking tension of this blade, did not even know if it could be broken.
Ros-Starn began sliding to the right along the edge of the ring opposite Alexei.
Alexei crouched, realizing then that he had no shield, but was trained to fighting with its subtle field around him, trained to react on defense with its utmost speed while his attack would be timed to the controlled slowness needed for penetrating the enemy's barrier. Despite constant warning from his trainers to not rely on the barrier's mindless blunting of attack speed, he knew that barrier-awareness was part of him.
Ros-Tharn called out in ritual challenge: "May thy knife chip and shatter!"
This knife will break, then, Alexei thought.
He cautioned himself that Ros-Tharn also was without shield, but the man wasn't trained to its use and therefore had no barrier-fighter inhibitions.
Alexei stared across the ring at Ros-Tharn. The man's body looked like knotted whipcord on a dried skeleton. His crysnozh shone milky yellow in the light of the glowglobes.
Fear coursed through Alexei. He felt suddenly alone and naked standing in dull yellow light within this ring of people. Prescience had fed his knowledge with countless experiences, hinted at the strongest currents of the future and the strings of decision that guided them, but this was the true-now. This was death hanging on an infinite number of miniscule mischances.
Anything could trip the future here, he realized. Someone coughing in the troop of watchers, a distraction. A variation in a glowglobe's brilliance, a deceptive shadow.
I'm scared, Alexei told himself.
He circled warily outside Ros-Tharn, repeating silently to himself the Bala Garrasaid litany against fear. "Fear slays the mind...." It was a cold bath washing over him. He felt muscles unite themselves, become poised and ready.
"I'll sheath my knife in your blood," Ros-Tharn snarled. In the middle of the last word he pounced.
Alexandra saw the motion, stifled an outcry.
Where the man struck there was just empty air and Alexei stood now behind Ros-Tharn with a clear shot at the exposed back.
Now, Alexei! Now! Alexandra screamed it in her mind.
Alexei's motion was slowly timed, beautifully fluid, but so slow it gave Ros-Tharn the margin to twist away, backing and turning to the right.
Alexei withdrew, crouching low. "First, you must find my blood," he said.
Alexandra recognized the barrier-fighter timing in her son, and it came over her what a 2-edged sword that was. The boy's reactions were those of youth and trained to a peak these people had never seen. But the attack was trained, too, and conditioned by the needs of penetrating a barrier shield. A barrier would repel too fast a blow, admit only the slowly deceptive counter. It needed control and deception to go through a barrier.
Does Alexei see it? she asked herself. He must!
Again Ros-Tharn attacked, ink-dark eyes glaring, his body a yellow blur beneath the glowglobes.
And again Alexei stepped away to return to slowly on the attack.
And again.
And again.
Each time, Alexei's counterblow came an instant late.
Alexandra saw a thing she hoped Ros-Tharn didn't see. Alexei's defensive reactions were blindingly fast, but they must each be timed at the precisely correct angle they would take if a barrier were helping deflect part of Ros-Tharn's blow.
"Is your son playing with that poor fool?" Trek-Just asked. He waved her to silence before she could respond. "Sorry; you must remain silent."
Now the two figures on the rock floor circled each other: Ros-Tharn with knife hand held far forward and tipped up slightly; Alexei crouched with knife held low.
Again Ros-Tharn pounced, and this time he twisted to the right where Alexei had been dodging.
Instead of faking back and out, Alexei met the man's knife hand on the point of his own blade. Then the boy was gone, twisting away to the left and thankful for Em-Cro's warning.
Ros-Tharn backed into the middle of the circle, rubbing his knife hand. Blood dripped from the injury for a moment, then stopped. His eyes were wide and staring----two blue-black holes---studying Alexei with a new wariness in the dull light of the glowglobes.
"Ah, that one hurt," Trek-Jush murmured.
Alexei crouched at the ready and, as he had been trained to do after drawing first blood, demanded: "Surrender!"
"No!" Ros-Tharn cried.
An angry murmur arose from the troop.
"Hold!" Trek-Jush called out. "The lad doesn't know our r ule." Then, to Alexei: "There can be no surrendering in the sorodde-challenge. It is a duel to the death."
Alexandra saw Alexei swallow hard. She thought: He's never killed a man like this---in the hot blood of a knife fight. Can he? Will he?
Alexei circled slowly right, forced by Ros-Tharn's movement. The prescient knowledge of the time-boiling variables in this cave came back to plague him now. His new understanding told him there were too many swiftly compressed decisions in this fight for any clear channel ahead to show itself.
Variable piled on variable---that was why this cave lay as a blurred nexus in his path. It was like a gigantic rock in the flood, creating maelstroms in the current around it.
"End it now, lad," Trek=Jush muttered. "Don't play with him."
Alexei crept farther into the ring, relying on his own edge in speedh.
Ros-Tharn backed now that the realization swept over him----that this was no soft outworlder in the sorodde ring, easy prey for a Szgany crysnozh.
Alexandra saw the shadow of desperation in the man's face. Now is when he's most dangerous, she thought. Now he's desperate and can do anything. He sees that this is not like a child of his own people, but a fighting machine born and trained to it from infancy. Now the fear I planted in him as come to fruition.
She now found herself in a sense of pity for Ros-Tharn---an emotion tempered by awareness of the immediate peril to her son.
Ros-Tharn can do anything....any unpredictable thing, she told herself. She wondered then if Alexei had glimpsed this future, if he were reliving this experience. But she saw the way her son moved, the beads of perspiration on his face and shoulders, the careful wariness visible in the flow of muscles. For the first time she sensed, without understanding, the uncertainty factor in Alexei's gift.
Alexei pressed the fight now, circling but not attacking. He'd seen the fear in his opponent. Memory of Grady Ukrainia's voice flowed through Alexei's awareness: "When your opponent fears you, then's the moment when you give fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That's the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal error. You're being trained her to detect these mistakes and use them."
The crowd in the cavern began to mutter.
They think Alexei's toying with Ros-Tharn, Alexandra thought. They think Alexei's being needlessly cruel.
But she sensed also the undercurrent of crowd excitement, their enjoyment of the spectacle. She could see the pressure building up in Ros-Tharn. The moment when it became too much for him to contain was as apparent to her as it was to Ros-Tharn---or Alexei.
Ros-Tharn leaped high, feinting and striking down with his right hand, but the hand was empty. The crysnozh had been shifted to his left hand.
Alexandra gasped.
But Alexei had been warned by Em-Cro: "Ros-Tharn fights with either hand." The depth of his training had taken in that trick en passang. "Keep the mind on the knife and not on the hand that holds it," Gustav Vasa had told him time and again. "The knife is more dangerous than the hand and the knife can be in either hand."
Alexei, on the other hand, had seen Ros-Tharn's mistake: bad footwork so that it took the man a heartbeat longer to recover from his leap, which had been intended to confuse Alexei and hide the knife shift.
Except for the low yellow light of the glowglobes and the murky eyes of the staring troop, it was similar to a session on the practice floor. Barriers counted for nothing where the body's own movement could work against it. Alexei shifted his own knife in a blurred motion, slipped sideways and thrust upwards where Ros-Tharn's chest was descending---then away to watch the man collapse.
Ros-Tharn fell like a limp rag, face down, gasped once and turned his face towards Alexei, then lay still on the rock floor. His dead eyes stared out like beads of blue glass.
"Killing with the point lacks finesse," Ukrainia had once told Alexei, "but don't let that restrain your hand when the opening presents itself."
The troop rushed forward, filling the ring, pushing Alexei aside. They hid Ros-Tharn in a frenzy of huddling activity. Presently, a group of them hurried back into the depths of the cavern carrying a burden wrapped in a robe.
And there was no corpse on the rock floor.
Alexandra pressed through towards her son. She felt that she swam in a sea of robed and stinking backs, a throng strangely silent.
Now is the terrible moment, she thought. He's slain a man in a clear superiority of mind and muscle. He mustn't grow up to enjoy such a victory.
She forced herself through the last of the troop and into a small open space where two bearded Szganys were helping Alexei into his stillsuit.
Alexandra stared at her son. Alexei's eyes were bright. He breathed heavily, allowing the ministrations to his body rather than helping them.
"He took on Ros-Tharn and there's not a mark on him," one of the men muttered.
Em-Cro stood at one side, her eyes focused upon Alexei. Alexandra saw the girl's excitement, and the admiration in the elfin face.
It must be done now and quickly, Alexandra thought.
She compressed ultimate scorn into her voice and manner, said: "Well-l-l, now----how does it feel to be a killer?"
Alexei stiffened as if he'd been sucker-punched. He met his mother's cold glare and his face darkened with a rush of blood. Involuntarily he glanced towards the place on the cavern floor where Ros-Than had previously lain.
Trek-Jush pressed through to Alexandra's side, returning from the cave depths where the body of Ros-Tharn had been taken. He spoke to Alexei in a bitter, controlled tone: "When the time comes for you to call me out and try for my birdo, do not think you will play with me the way you played with Ros-Tharn."
Alexandra sensed the way her own words and Trek-Jush's sank into Alexei, doing their harshest work on the boy. The mistake these people made---it served a purpose now. She searched the faces around them as Alexei was doing, seeing what he saw. Admiration and fear, yes. In some, loathing. She looked at Trek-Jush, saw his fatalism, knew how the fight looked to him.
Alexei looked at his mother. "You know what it was," he said.
She heard the return to sanity, the remorse in his voice. Alexandra swept her glance across the troop, said: "Alexei has never before slain a man with a naked blade."
Trek-Jush faced her, shock in his face.
"You dare call what I did play?!" Alexei said. He pressed in front of his mother, straightening his robe, glanced at the dark place of Ros-Tharn's blood on the cavern floor. "I killed him because I was forced to, not because I wanted to."
Alexandra saw belief come slowly to Trek-Jush, saw the relief in him as he tugged at his beard with a deeply veined hand. She heard muttering awareness spread through the troop.
"Oh, so that's why you requested his surrender," Trek-Jush said. "I see. Our ways our alien, but you'll eventually see the sense in them. I thought we'd admitted a scorpion into our midst." He hesitated, then: "Thus, I shall call you lad nevermore."
A voice from the troop cried out: "We must rename him, Jush."
Trek-Jush nodded, tugging at his scraggly beard. "I see strength in you, like the strength beneath a pillar." Again, he paused, then: "You shall be known among us as Mar-Vall, the pillar's base. This is your secret name, your troop name. We of S'yetche Tobr may use it, but none other may so presume....Mar-Vall."
Murmuring went through the troop: "Good choice, that.....strong....bring us luck." Alexandra sensed the acceptance, knowing she was included in it with her champion. She was indeed Soaeaeodemo.
"Now, what name of manhood do you choose for us to openly call you?" Trek-Jush asked.
Alexei glanced at his mother, back to Trek-Jush. Bits and pieces of this moment registered on his prescient memory, but he felt the differences as if they were physical, a pressure forcing him through the narrow door of the present.
"How do you call among you the little mouse, the mouse that jumps?" Alexei asked, remembering the pop-hop of motion at Simen Basin. He illustrated with one hand.
A chuckle sounded through the troop.
"We call that one niaeb'd'd," Trek-Jush said.
Alexandra gasped. It was the name Alexei had told her, saying that the Szganys would accept him and call him thus. She felt a sudden fear of her son and for him.
Alexei swallowed. He felt that he played a part already played over countless times in his mind....yet.....there were differences. He could see himself perched on a dizzying summit, having experienced much and possessed of a profound store of knowledge, but all around him was abyss.
Again, he remembered the vision of fanatical legions following the green-and-black banner of the Romanovs, pillaging and burning across the universe in the name of their prophet Niaeb'D'd.
This must not happen, he told himself.
"Do you wish that name, Niaeb'D'd?" Trek-Jush asked.
"I'm a Romanov," Alexei whispered, and then louder: " It's not right that I give up entirely the name my father gave me. Could I be known among you as Alexei Niaeb'D'd?"
"You are Alexei-Niaeb'D'd," Trek-Jush said.
Alexei thought: That was in no vision of mine. I did something different.
But he felt that the abyss remained all round him.
Again, a murmuring response went through the troop as man turned to man: "Wisdom with strength.....Couldn't ask more....It's the legend, all right....Lekom or-Goeb....Lekom or-Goeb...."
"I'll tell you something about your new name," Trek-Jush said. "We are pleased with your choice. Niaeb'D'd is wise in the ways of the desert. Niaeb'D'd creates his own water. Niaeb'D'd hides from the sun and travels in the cool night. Niaeb'D'd is fruitful and multiplies over the land. Niaeb'D'd we call 'teacher-of-boys.' That is a powerful base upon which to build your life, Alexei-Niaeb'D'd, who is Mar-Vall among us. We bid you welcome!"
Trek-Jush touched Alexei's forehead with one palm, withdrew his hand, embraced Alexei and murmured, "Mar-Vall."
As Trek-Jush released him, another member of the troop Alexei, repeating his new troop name. Alexei was passed from embrace to embrace through the troop, hearing the voices, the shadings of tone: "Mar-Vall.....Mar-Vall....Mar-Vall." Already, he could place some of them by name. And there was Em-Cro who pressed her cheek against him as she held him and said his name.
Presently Alexei stood again before Trek-Jush, who said: "Now, you are of the Icrvom Badvema, or brotherhood." His face hardened, and he spoke with command in his voice. "And now, Alexei-Niaeb'D'd, tighten up that stillsuit." He glanced at Em-Cro. "Em-Cro! Alexei-Niaeb'D'd's nose plugs are as poor fitting as any I've ever seen! Did I not order you to see to him!"
"I hadn't the makings, Jush," she said. "There's Ros-Tharn, of course, but....."
"No more!"
"Then I'll share one of mine," she said. "I can make do with one until...."
"No, you will not!" Trek-Jush admonished. "I know there are spares among us. Where are they? Are we a troop together or a motely band of barbarians?"
Hands reached out from the troop offering hard, fibrous objects. Trek-Jush selected four, handed them to Em-Cro. "Fit these to Mar-Vall and the Soaeaeedomo."
A voice lifted from the back of the troop: "What of the water, Jush? What of the literjons in their pack?"
"I know your need, Spar-Trak," Trek-Jush said. He glanced at Alexandra. She nodded.
"Broach one for those who need it," Trek-Jush said. "Watermaster----where is a watermaster? Ah, Bog-Hosh, care for the measuring of what is needed. The necessity and no more. This water is the dowser property of the Soaeaeodemo and will be repaid in the s'yetche at field rates less pack fees."
"What's the repayment at field rates?" Alexandra asked.
"Ten for one," Trek-Jush said.
"But...."
"It's a wise rule as you'll soon see," Trek-Jush said.
A rustling of robes marked movement at the back of the troop of men turned to get the water.
Trek-Jush held up a hand, and there was silence. "As for Ros-Tharn," he said, "I order the full ceremony. Ros-Tharn was our comrade and brother of the Icrvom Badvema. There will be no turning away without the respect due one who proved our fortune by his sorrode-challenge. I invoke the rite----at sunset when the dark shall cover him."
Alexei, hearing those words, realized that he'd plunged once more into the abyss----blind time. There was no past occupying the future in his mind----except---except----he could still sen se the green and black Romanov banner waving....somewhere ahead....still see the dzhikhad's bloody sabers and fanatical legions.
It will not be, he told himself. I cannot let it be.107Please respect copyright.PENANAmgokZMug0R
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