Adam
I went back into the hall and stuffed the rest of my breakfast down my neck. I was already regretting telling Phoebe about the books. Now I’d have to get her to promise she wouldn’t say anything when we got out. Bugger.
A bell tolled outside and the seniors came back in to get us all to line up and file out and go down to a field. Communication wasn’t great here and I didn’t have a clue what we were supposed to be doing.
When we arrived, other groups were practising what looked like various styles of martial arts. That looked a bit more like it. Lined up in front of us were a set of straw bales with pumpkin heads set up on poles.
Even as we got there I could see the Yorkshire man from the walk yesterday, talking to… I’d better get used to calling her Malaika; otherwise I’d use the wrong name at some point. He told us to sit down and not fidget.
How to describe him? He wasn’t an angry person, just very intense, but it worked out the same way – I didn’t think anyone would try to find out what would happen to fidgetters.
“When you’ve mastered the skills we teach here, you should be able to project your own energy in ways you can use to defend yourself.” He began. “Like this.”
He spun and slashed out at one of the straw dummies. It sliced in half along the diagonal as if cut by a sword.
“Or this.” He spun the other way and pushed a palm towards the dummy on the other end of the line. It shuddered visibly as if shoulder-charged by someone big.
“Or.” He did some gesture and a ball of flame shot from his hand and covered the dummy. He turned back to us, opened his mouth as if to speak and then turned back to the dummy, blew at it as you would a candle and put the flames out.
The cohort was gobsmacked; mouths hanging open all around. For myself, well, I’ve seen Kunetsuka Sensei do things that impressed me as much without having a quantum computer to put in the special effects.
“Now, before you reach that stage, you’ll find it useful if you’ve some object that allows you to focus and direct energies through. The traditional wizard’s wand is one you’ll practice with. Later.”
He drew one from his sleeve. “Its chief advantage is it’s light, which is important if you’re going to carry it all day, and easily hidden. Make no mistake though – it’s not a magical thing in its own right. The power comes from you. I’ve seen young Mages use twigs they plucked from trees as wands. So long as you don’t try to use Rowan wood, and so long as you can think of it as a focus, anything wooden’ll work. Mind, I’d leave your mam’s rolling pin at home or she’ll likely clip your ear for you.”
There were a few laughs, but I think they were being kind.
“The chief disadvantage, for you, at present, is it’s just a small piece of wood. You can’t yet do this…” He turned again to the dummies and blasted one clear out of the ground by flicking the wand at it. “And if you can’t, then a wand’s nowt more than a pencil you can’t even use to write angry letters with. Therefore, we begin our training with the staff. Chuck me that one, would you Max?”
The thing Max threw over to him looked like a broomstick, without the broom bit on the end. This looked interesting. Despite myself, I wanted to see what happened next.
“It’s a big bit of wood. No more useful for magic than a little bit of wood, however, it can do this…”
Again the swing, but this time he faced the dummy with the staff held like a snooker cue and stabbed it forwards in honte tsuki as he lunged. The dummy shook violently and dust rose again. Without pause, he back-stepped, side-stepped, changed his grip on the staff and swung it down like a sword against the side of the pumpkin head on the next dummy – naname uchi. The pumpkin exploded, but the pieces hadn’t all made it to the ground before he’d swirled, side-stepped round to stand in front of the next dummy and stabbed the staff backwards to hit it so hard it canted over at an angle – ushiro tsuki. Text book execution. Very neat. He turned back to us and the dummy slowly tilted and fell. Hub-cap-from-the-exploding-car syndrome. That dummy had watched too many films.
There’d been winces from kids around me when those blows went home, and I wasn’t sure they hadn’t been more impressed by the jo than the fire. Magic was magic, after all, and they couldn’t do that, but hitting things with sticks...
Jacob moved like a ballet dancer with a licence to kill. Those steps had flowed from one to the other, and, although he’d clearly hit the dummies hard enough to have broken bones, he hadn’t put a lot of effort into it – the staff had done most of the work.
“It’s not magic. It’s physics. Wood and muscle and correct movement and…”he nodded towards the dummies, “pain. Enough pain and your opponent won’t know or care you didn’t use magic on ‘em. They’ll be too busy suffering. Vere can be seen off with a well-used staff by a Duergar that doesn’t get charmed, and whatever you might have heard about chain mail and axes, they haven’t all got 'em.”
There were at least two questions in that last sentence I thought I’d have to ask someone about. No one else seemed puzzled though.
“Now, what we’ll begin teaching you today is a set of basic moves. These moves’ll prepare you for the next level. They’ll also help you start to feel energy moving. Without that feeling it’ll be hard for you to begin to project your own energies as magic. You’ll work under these seniors,” he nodded to a group of teens in dark grey that included Max and Xianjin, “They’ll teach you parts of the 31-step exercise that you’ll be working on this week and next. After a while we’ll put you onto sparring with staves that are specially adapted for it.”
He scanned us all with that intense look of his.
“I do hope you noticed I said ‘After a while’. A well-used staff can break a rib, or a leg, or a skull. So can a badly used one. You pay attention to the safety rules your senior teaches you and you remember - anyone playing silly buggers becomes my next assistant when I need to demonstrate on someone as can move – at least until I’ve finished the demonstration. That’s not a threat mind. It’s a promise. And it’s easy to check if I’m telling the truth. Think on it.”
How had I not known his Mages practiced with the jo? Had there been some photo somewhere showing this I’d missed? And how come no one’d ever mentioned this to me when they’d seen me with one later? Haru had never said anything about it and she’d know. Was it only here they did this, or had it appeared in one of the DIVs? Never mind. I’d talk about this with Phoe…Malaika later. For now I could have some fun. I’d have read his books if I’d known about this, just to see how much he knew, though surely he hadn’t known anything.
The seniors split us into groups of ten, sorted us out with a staff each and shifted us around the field so we were well spaced out from other groups. I noticed two things at about the same time This cohort was fifty strong and it didn’t include the girl I’d called a moo yesterday. Not a thing I was going to quibble about. The number hung in my head for a second, though. There was something about it.
Then the girl who was taking our group introduced herself as Aliya. Central Asian face, something like Russian in the accent. The original owners of all of these faces had to have been actresses, and they hadn’t been selected for ugliness, but Aliya was striking. She explained about spacing to ensure you couldn’t get hit by a staff that slipped out of a hand and repeated the warning about playing around with the staves.
For the next two hours, with breaks only to drink water, we did warm-up exercises, stretched and stepped through the moves of the drill. I could have done it in my sleep if the truth be told, but I tried not to make that obvious. Instinct again, but I just didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I’d probably get out of this place at the end of this day, so why bother?
Aliya did compliment me on the smoothness of my movements, though I’d been watching the others in the group and they were picking this up very quickly, with few of the mistakes a normal group makes when they first meet the jo. Were they programmed to learn at around the speed of the real player, I wondered? Aliya herself, or whatever was directing her, knew her stuff. Her own movements had a fluidity suggesting a lot of practice. A few of the moves she did at an extremely slow speed, like Tai Chi, and at that speed you see the rough bits better. She didn’t have any.
At the end of the two hours we had a toilet break. I went to a thing that looked like a barn, but was again one of the clean, un-modern facilities that I’d seen in the city inn. It was screened behind a small stand of trees. As I was walking back, but before I came into sight of the others, a staff prodded into my kidneys. Just enough to let me know it wasn’t an accident, but not enough to call it a blow. “Well, well,” came a distinctly Geordie voice from behind me. “It’s our twinkly, twinkly little Paddy star, isn’t it? What’s the name again little star? Brendumn? Or was it Brenda?”
Anyone who has ever walked into a school playground could write the script for this, I thought, as I pivoted around and yes, there they were, made to order. Three of them. Older than Brendan by about two years, maybe three. Standard issue bullies. A cliché, perhaps, but I’d been duffed up by a gang like this once in real life.
They usually come in one of two patterns. It’s either the shrimp with the brains backed up by two obvious thugs with only the muscles, or, as in this case, a muscular thug with brains backed up by two other obvious thugs with even more muscles. Bullies who don’t come in threes probably can’t manage arithmetic.
I hadn’t had time to run an I.Q. test on them, but they didn’t look like Nobel Prize candidates. Mind, that might have just been me being prejudiced. I was the one who was going to get humiliated or thumped here.
Three against one and the one younger and not as well trained with the staff each of us was carrying – this crew had no intention of being brave. Fair enough, but I was going to write the script this time. There were three other boys coming up behind the bullies. They hadn’t seen anything yet, but they could take part in my play.
“Hey lads? Do you want to try some advanced practice with this crowd?”
Nothing strange there for them, just some older students going to show us some tricks. They were up for it. My merry crew of thugs were a bit unsure now. This could be just a way of getting witnesses, in which case I was smart and they’d have to put off the intimidation. They weren’t sure, though, you could see.
“You make a ring around me about this wide.”
I held out the staff at maximum length and made a circle. They formed up while I turned slowly. I finished facing towards the middle of the thugs, with the extras behind me. They shouldn’t be any threat and I’d no plans to touch them.
“Okay, now it’s six against one, you can attack any time you are…”
Ready was what I didn’t want them to be. Thug number one got honte tsuki in the solar plexus, just hard enough to take the wind out of him. He folded up like origami and dropped to his knees. Step the right foot to the right, slide the left foot forward, swing the body round and deliver gedan barai, a sweeping blow, against the thigh of thug number two. He now had a dead leg and was hopping on the other one. I stepped forward and shouldered him off both of them.
One to go, but by now he’d had time to wake up. I reversed the grip on the staff, raised it like a sword and, yes, he went for it, and raised his own staff to ward off the blow to the head. Which I didn’t make. As his jo came down I did uke nagashi tsuki, parrying his down-strike, side-stepping to get out of line, and striking at his inner thigh. Too ambitious. I missed the thigh, so followed through by using the staff as a lever to take his leg out from under him in sukui otoshi. He went down backwards and landed heavily, knocking the wind out of himself. Done. And he wouldn’t call me Brenda again in a hurry.
I turned to the other three, about to thank them for their help. The two on the ends were shocked and motionless, scared numb by what they’d just witnessed. Made sense I suppose. I’d just knocked seven shades of good for the roses out of the bigger lads, what might I be about to do to them? The wiry, Indian-looking kid in the middle, however, was very pissed off.
He launched himself towards me with the obvious intention of putting some of my teeth in the corner pocket. I parried the thrust while moving aside and back and tried to tell him whoa.
He swung the staff like a cricket bat for my head. Again, not too difficult to parry, but I didn’t want to fight this kid. I was trying again to tell him to stop the demonstration of his sporting prowess, while he was trying to hit me in the crotch with a golf swing, when a voice snapped out.
“Quit that!”
I could say I obeyed the order, but to be honest, I didn’t have a choice. Every muscle in my body locked for a second and I couldn’t move. The cramp faded away as fast as it’d come on, but both of us had stopped fighting. We turned to look at the source of the voice. Jacob. Standing by a tree, the look on his face that same intense expression that got attention.
“You.” He snapped, looking at me. “Stop here, I want to talk to you. You three,” this to the younger ones, “Back to your group, I may want you later. And you lot,” this to the gang, who were picking themselves off the ground. “Hall. And wait for me.”
No one said a word, but moved off as quickly as they could. I stood thinking about how to describe my situation. The only word I could think of without four letters in it was ‘bad’, and that just didn’t cover it at all. I thought I’d just passed the audition for a starring role as a carpet about to get spring cleaned.
Jacob waited till the others were out of sight and then a few heartbeats longer to let them get out of earshot too. How to explain this one to him? Before I came up with an answer, or just admitted there wasn’t one, he spoke.
“Young Hadaway and his mates are known to me. ‘Nowt overt out of ‘em for a while, but still I tend to keep an eye on them. I can see which way those branches are growing, as it were, and they need training in a better direction. Now, what I just saw there was interesting. You knocked the snot out of those three, but you didn’t do ‘em as much damage as you could‘ve done, that was clear.
Young Hatim too. Has a very good fighting spirit and attacks right well, but he’s no idea of defence. You do. You were blocking him and not even trying, but you didn’t put him down like the others. Suggests to me you were facing six and fighting three and you’d reason for it. Like to share it with me?”
“I could read Hadaway and his friends like a road sign. They were ready for me to have a go straight away if I didn’t just wimp out and let them push me around. So I invited the others in to distract them. They weren’t ready for that, so I caught them off guard. They’ll think twice before they try again. On anybody, I hope, not just on me.”
He nodded. I’d never play poker against this man, his face might as well have been cast in concrete for all the information it gave out.
“I didn’t see any of that level of skill on the field before. Where’d you learn it and why didn’t you let on?”
“I’ve studied Aikido for a few years now with a really good teacher. He takes us through the drills with the jo and the boken. I didn’t want to show off in front of the others after yesterday.”
That was all close enough to the truth. I’d seen my teacher, Kunetsuka sensei, take on six black belts armed with jos when he had nothing. He took them apart. They weren’t trying to kill him, granted, but they were serious about the attacks they launched; mostly because they were pretty sure none of them would land. He’d had us sparing with weapons for over a year.
“If you were old enough to look the part, I’d have you teaching your mates as of now. When word gets out about this we may be able to do it anyway. We’ll see about making time for you to work out with some of the seniors, save you wasting your time on the knees-bend-arms-stretch stuff.” He paused again.
“Max given you the speech about bullying yet?”
I nodded.
“Tell him what went on here. You won’t likely see or hear anything after it, but he’ll have words with those that might think about testing out the newest gunslinger, if you know what I mean. Once he’s spoken to them, they won’t. Can you talk to those lads from your cohort and sort things out with them? Make sure that there’s no misunderstandings or hard feelings? Or do you want me to?”
“I think I can handle it, but if it doesn’t work out I’ll tell you.”
“Grand. Get yourself back to the practice then. I’m off for a slash.”
I walked back confused. There was too much here I didn’t really understand and I wanted to talk with Haru about. She was good at this stuff. Where did characters like Jacob come from? Surely not out of his mind. He wasn’t like any of the people here – I was ready to like them. Though the fact it was Mark Hadaway who was the villain was just like him. It’d nearly wrecked our friendship when he did that. Luckily, that lad didn’t look anything like the real Mark. I was going to have to talk with Phoe… with Malaika. I needed some clues.
But I wondered. Was it ok to duff up the bullies here? They were written like that. They didn't have a choice in the matter. Yes, I decided. If the alternative was me copping it, it was.
Bugger!
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