Jabone's Sword (9 page)

He realized that the table had gotten suddenly very quiet. He looked at the Kartik children who were suddenly looking around the room no doubt to see how they were supposed to behave, and he remembered Tarius's early days at the academy. To his shame he remembered how he had made those days harder for her. Like them she'd just been trying to fit in. Derek smiled. "It's all right to talk during dinner," he said, and the four Kartik youths smiled as if relieved. Harris's son immediately started rattling a mile a minute about how much bigger Jethrikian horses were and how he wanted to trade his horse in for one.

"You will fall right off on your stupid head,
big
brother," his sister said.

"Bigger horses eat more," Jabone said, making a face.

"You are like your madra. You make friends with horses and then you keep them 'til they can't carry your weight any longer and turn them out to pasture."

"A good horse is your best friend on the battle field," Derek said.

Tarius laughed. "No, the Katabull are your best friends on the battle field. Any warrior knows that."

Jabone glared at the boy and spat something back at him in Kartik.

"Do you see many Katabull then?" Kasiria asked, looking into her stew. Derek had never seen her act so shy; he guessed that the attack had left her badly shaken. That or she was intimidated by the Kartiks.

"Of course we grew up . . . " Tarius started, and Ufalla slapped her hand over her brother's mouth and spat much the same thing at him that Jabone had. He nodded his head that he understood, muttered something in Kartik, and smacked himself in the head. Derek laughed out loud because the only person he'd seen hit themselves in the head like that was the Kartik Bastard herself, Tarius the Black. It must be some Kartik thing or perhaps he'd just picked it up from her.

"We see a great many Katabull. They are respected in our land, revered," Jestia said, looking at Kasiria. "We don't shoot our Katabull through with arrows nor do we have them drug behind horses, they are in fact considered the most noble of the queen's servants."

"We treat them the same way here now," Derek said.

"No we don't," Kasiria said with passion. "We say we do but we don't. We fear them just like he does." She pointed at Jabone. And when she did all three of the other Kartiks started to laugh in an altogether unseemly way. Ufalla whispered something to Jabone and then even he started to laugh.

"That's right," Jabone said. "I fear and loath the Katabull."

Derek decided that these four Kartik youths couldn't hold their tongues in a bucket.

"Well I fear and loath them, too," Kasiria spat out, thinking it was the right thing to do. But then they stopped laughing and just glared at her as if she'd grown two heads. And Master Derek was looking at her and shaking his head no violently, so Kasiria knew she had just made a huge mistake.

"Have you ever met one?" Ufalla asked glaring at her now with real contempt in her eyes.

"No."

"She wouldn't know if she had," Jestia said, and her voice had that same quality of tone that Kasiria's father had when he thought he was speaking to someone who he considered to be well beneath him.

Kasiria didn't know why they had turned on her. Jabone was the one who had said something derogatory about the Katabull when Tarius had brought it up.
He was speaking in Kartik. I just assumed he said something bad. He must not have; he didn't. What an idiot I am. What do I do now? Just scream that I'm Katabull? I don't want everyone to find out because I was telling the truth about my people. And I can't make it happen so there is no way that I could prove it to them.

"I . . . I have never met a Katabull that I know of, but I'm sure I would like them," she said nervously. They all just continued to look at her like she had two heads. "I'm sorry, I don't know your ways or your customs and I think I'm trying a little too hard." She started to get up to move and Jabone grabbed her wrist.

"No stay," he said. "Obviously we are all having some problem with language and cultural differences. Just know that I didn't and would never say anything against the Katabull."

"I . . . " She looked down at his hand on her wrist and sat completely down. "I wouldn't either. I'm sorry for the misunderstanding."

"She
is
like your mother," Tarius said, and started laughing. Jabone slapped him with the back of his hand hard enough to knock him out of his chair to the floor, and the room became very quiet again. Tarius pulled himself out of the floor still laughing sat down and started eating again, so obviously this was the way they normally behaved around the dinner table.

"Have you all been training long?" Kasiria asked.

"Me not that long, a few years," Jestia answered. "But they're all sword babies."

A few years isn't long?
Kasiria wondered then asked, "Sword babies?"

"Yes, look." Jestia took Ufalla's hand and held it up. The little finger was missing. Tarius and Jabone also showed their fingers or the lack thereof.

"The bones of your fingers are in the hilt of your swords," Kasiria said,,a cold chill going up her spine.

"My friend Tarius also assumed that custom," Derek laughed. "When she first came to the academy and we all thought her male . . . We were not friends. Nor were Harris and I." He looked at young Tarius, though Kasiria had no idea why. "I was a cruel boy, an arrogant one. You can't tell now but I had a head full of red hair in my youth. It made me different and told anyone who looked at me that I had a parent born of the island. I came from a wealthy noble family and I was an embarrassment, an obvious bastard. That's no excuse for my bad behavior but it did make me mean. War has a way of twisting a man for the good or the bad. I fought under Tarius and beside Harris. They forgave me for my idiocy and I came to love and admire them both."

"These three were born to the sword," Jestia continued, and Kasiria noticed a certain jealousy had entered her voice. "They have always known what they would become. Their cords were cut with their parent's swords and they have been practicing every day since they could hold a stick."

"Didn't it hurt?" Kasiria asked looking at Jabone's hand.

"Oh yeah," Tarius answered, smiling brilliantly.

"And you've been fighting all your life?" Kasiria asked Ufalla.

"All of it that I can remember," she said with a shrug. "Our father and our mother are both sword slingers. I'm rather more interested in how you came to take up the sword, since I see no other women here."

"I just . . . for as long as I can remember it's all I've ever wanted," Kasiria said.

"Well I've got to go," Derek said. "Kasiria, I have set up lodging for you and Ufalla and Jestia in the old officer's barracks towards the back of the garrison. You boys will be bunking in the common barracks . . . "

"No." Jabone shook his head dramatically. "We are supposed to stay together," he said,indicating the four of them. "My madra said we would be together."

"On assignment you will be together, but our customs don't allow young men to bunk with young women."

They all started to talk in Kartik at once.

"Hold, hold, that's the rules," Derek said. "The girls and Kasiria will be fine."

"We aren't worried about them," Jabone said quickly. "We aren't like you. Our women can take care of themselves better than most of your men. We don't want to be separated from or kin in a strange land; that is against our ways."

"You won't be separated in the field, I promise you that. You may do whatever you please when you leave here, but in the garrison . . . They'll sleep in one barracks and you'll sleep in another.

* * *

The women had been given a small, empty officer's barracks on the edge of the compound close to the garrison wall.

Ufalla spit something out in Kartik as they were choosing their beds.

"What did you say?" Kasiria asked curiously, and more than a little put out.

"I said your rules could not be any stupider if they worked on making them that way," Ufalla said with utter contempt. "Your streets are full of crap and then you make rules like this."

"Well I can't say I disagree with you there. I've been fighting the customs of my own people most of my life. Do me a favor and speak my language. I'm afraid I failed miserably at my foreign languages classes and I don't want any more mix-ups like what happened at dinner," Kasiria pleaded with embarrassment.

"Oh you mean like when you thought Jabone had said something derogatory about the Katabull and then he did as a joke and you said the same stupid thing just to agree with him because you've got a burning desire for him?" Ufalla teased, and both she and Jestia laughed.

"Not that you're right, but you act like you don't care."

"Why would I care?" Ufalla asked with a shrug.

"Isn't he your boyfriend?"

Ufalla and Jestia both laughed even harder then, Jestia in fact actually rolling on her bed.

"Well I don't think it's that funny," Ufalla said, which just made Jestia laugh all the harder.

"What's so funny?" Kasiria asked, smiling now just because their laughter was sort of contagious.

"Jabone is my best friend, my pack brother, but I would never have a boyfriend."

"Because they would get in the way of your sword work?" Kasiria asked, thinking she understood where the woman was coming from. Ufalla stared at her in confusion, obviously not understanding what she was saying, and Kasiria realized why. They were Kartik; the girl had said both her father and mother were fighters so in her mind having a relationship wouldn't exclude her from fighting.

"No, dummy, because Ufalla's as queer as the Great Leader," Jestia laughed again and Ufalla shot her a look. "What?"

Ufalla spit something at her in Kartik and Jestia just laughed, shook her head and said, "Well it's pretty obvious."

"It doesn't bother me," Kasiria assured Ufalla.

Ufalla grinned wildly then. "It's why I said your rules are stupid." Ufalla laughed looking right at Kasiria. "Apparently they have separated us from the men to make sure our virtue stays intact, and the truth is mine and especially Jestia's virtue has already been spent by your standards and your virtue is much more likely to be defiled by me than it would by my noble friend Jabone."

"Now your little brother is another story," Jestia said, and they just laughed harder and now Kasiria laughed with them.

"When you say the Great Leader, you talk of Tarius the Black?" Kasiria asked carefully.

"Aye," Ufalla answered.

"Do you know her then?"

The two girls exchanged a look and then Jestia said, almost too quickly. "We have met her."

Kasiria sat down on her bed and then went ahead and lay down. "My father fought with her at the Battle of the Arrow, and in the Great War. He told such stories! I have always wanted to train with her. Many of the men that teach at the academy were trained by her, but they all say they have never been able to match her style. I would really like a chance to train with her. Do you know whether she still train fighters in the Kartik?"

"Aye," Ufalla said. "We will show you the Kartik style and you will teach us yours as your captain said."

They started talking about fighting and for the first time in her life Kasiria felt like she belonged. These strange women with their strange customs seemed more like kin to her than all her brothers and sisters.

* * *

"I don't like it," Tarius said,as they chose bunks as far away from the others as they could get.

"Nor do I my brother," Jabone said, agreeing with him for the first time in days.

They sat on their cots facing each other.

"Imagine," Tarius whispered lower, "your madra, my age, alone hiding not just her parentage but her sex in a room just like this." He made an angry face. "My father the great warrior cleaning up after a bunch of spoiled rich brats just like these."

Jabone nodded that had been just what he'd been thinking. The other men in the barracks were not looking at them with curiosity as much as with great loathing. "They fear us because we look different. That was what my madra meant, why the Amalites," he and Tarius both spit on the floor, "are causing them so much trouble here, so much more than in the Kartik-held Territory. "These people are afraid; they distrust that which looks differently than they do. But the Amalites look just like them so they don't raise their suspicion."

"I don't look different than they do," Tarius said with a air of self loathing.

Jabone smiled at him. "You must or they wouldn't be snubbing you in exactly the same way as they are me. You may have your father's coloring but you have your mother's features."

"You really think so?" Tarius asked with a smile.

"Of course. That's why you're so dammed ugly." They had a good laugh.

"So what's the big Joke?" A big fellow with a brutish set to his jaw asked from behind Tarius. "Spitting on the floor is that funny to you, because here in the civilized world we don't spit on the floor."

Now if Jabone had been on his own he probably could have said a few carefully placed words and the guy would have gone away, but Tarius . . . Well he never had known when to hold his tongue, and living in amongst the Marching Night he'd never had to.

"You don't spit in the floor but you throw crap in your streets. That's some civilization you've got there." Tarius looked the man up and down and added, "I doubt you ever spit anything out, fat boy."

"Why you! I ought to . . . "

"Shut your mouth and go away before you get your ass kicked." Tarius was up and standing on his cot looking down at the other man in one easy motion.

The guy swung at Tarius who easily ducked it and jumped off the bed slamming three fingers into the man's windpipe which sent him gasping to the floor.

One of the other men started to punch Tarius in the face and found his fist in the rather large hand of Jabone. Jabone smiled at the man as he twisted the man's arm so that he couldn't bend it and drove him to the floor. Another man dove off a cot unto Jabone's back and Jabone threw him over his shoulder to land on top of the man he'd just thrown on the floor. He grabbed the heads of two men running at him and pounded them together, sending both into the rather large pile of men gathering at his feet.