CHAPTER SEVEN
Kasha leaned forward in her chair and shook her head in pure wonder. "You're how old?" she asked the nomad boy.
"Fourteen," Yuchai replied in nearly unaccented Trade-tongue, feeling worried. "Am I—am I learning too slowly?" He clutched his Ancas primer so hard his knuckles were white. Trade-tongue was very like the speech of Ancas, and he was making—he thought—reasonable progress in learning that language. But this business of equating sounds with marks on a page was very new to him. The idea that words could be saved, forever and ever, unchanged, had excited him so much he resented every moment not spent in learning how to decipher those marks.
"Gods above and below," Kasha laughed, her eyes crinkling at the corners. "Too slowly? Anything but that! You're learning as quickly as a very young child—and that's supposed to be impossible for a boy your age. You already speak Trade-tongue as well as I do, and you're learning Ancas as fast as I can pour it into you."
Yuchai relaxed, and sagged back into the pillows that had been piled behind him so that he could sit up. "It is that I have very little else to do except learn, gadjeia Kasha," he said. "And I—have pleasure in this learning. Besides, I certainly cannot practice the warrior arts from a bed."
Kasha snorted and made a sour face. "If I have my way you won't be practicing the 'warrior arts' at all, young man. You've too good a mind. I'd cripple you myself before I'd see you die by the hand of some stupid ox who happens to outweigh you by three times."
Yuchai felt a strange apprehension at her words. For so long he had wanted to be a great warrior like Jegrai—and yet the great warrior he admired would have been happier if he'd never touched a weapon. And now this fighting-woman who said the same thing; she was very good—he'd watched her at practice from his huge window, for besides the mountains you could look right down into the courtyard of the Sword-folk, if you stood—or in his case, sat—close to the edge. Would she do such a thing? To keep him a scholar—scholars were forbidden weapons. Was that her purpose, to see that he did not violate that law? He licked his dry lips. "That—that is similar to what Khene Jegrai tells me," he ventured. "But, forgive me, honored teacher, but Vredai needs warriors. Vredai does not need a man who is neither feeble nor crippled, yet who cannot raise a blade in his own defense—"
"Yuchai, do you really enjoy fighting?" she asked, her face gone quiet and very serious.
"I—I—the moving, like dancing, doing it well—I like that," he temporized.
"I'm not talking about that," she said, frowning. "I'm talking about fighting. Killing, trying not to be killed. Do you find that . . . attractive? Some do; acts on them like wine. Nothing sinful about that, nothing wrong, just the way some people are made."
"No—I—I haven't seen much of fighting, but—they always set me to guarding the Clan heart, the children, you know? The fighting got that far, once or twice. I—the closer it got, the sicker I got." He hung his head, admitting his shame, the weakness he had confessed to no one but Shaman Northwind. "When I closed, the moment before, you know, I almost couldn't hold my sword for wanting to throw up. But—Vredai has a Singer. They don't need another fool that can't even defend himself."
He colored as he realized that he had just slandered his own father.
"Did I say you shouldn't know how to defend yourself?" Kasha demanded. "Have you ever once heard me say anything like that? I'm no fool, Yuchai—your people are warriors by their nature. Wherever you go, there's likely to be fighting. There's no harm in knowing weaponry—every member of the Order knows bow, at least. I'm just saying you don't belong on a battlefield, except in a case of last resort."
"Everyone—in the Order—knows weaponry?" Yuchai's thoughts went whirling as if they'd been caught in a dust-demon. "But—except for those of the Sword, are you all not as Singers? Is it not forbidden among you for Singers to touch a weapon?"
Kasha's mouth twisted as she labored to disentangle that last sentence. "No, it's not forbidden!" she exclaimed when she had the sense of it. "Great good gods, we'd have been slaughtered a dozen times over if we held that rule! If a novice from one of the other chapters wants to spend his free time learning Swordways, that's his business. We've actually had one or two Masters that could have been both Sword and either Book or Tower by earned skill-level if they'd chosen to ask for the Sword badge as well as their own."
"You—have?" He felt rather as if he'd fallen on his head again.
"I take it that it's very much forbidden among your people."
"One must choose," he replied carefully. "The Singer must never touch a weapon; the Wind Lords favor the wise, but—you know that among us the wise one is almost sacred? It is a terrible thing for a man to raise his hand against a scholar; the Wind Lords will surely curse him for it. So—for a wise one to bear a weapon, to fight with a weapon—that is taking dishonorable advantage."
It didn't take his tutor long to fathom the meaning of that. "Uh-huh," Kasha said, nodding. "Yes, I see what you mean. It's like a whole man taking on one with no legs. The opponent of a scholar in a fight has a choice between being dead and being cursed."
"Exactly so," Yuchai said with a sigh.
"Well, we don't have that particular restriction, and it doesn't look like the Wind Lords have cursed us yet." Kasha settled back in her bedside chair and put her hands behind her head. "My friend, if you want to go trade bruises with me or anyone else in Sword and you happen to have landed in Tower or Book, feel free to come to us in your spare time. We're always looking for new sparring partners, and I'll wager you could show us a few things new to us. And if you don't happen to tell the Wind Lords—" she grinned "—neither will I."
Yuchai felt his breath stick somewhere in his throat. It took him a moment to get it moving again. "I may?" he asked.
"You may. But not at the moment." Kasha pulled one hand out and wagged an admonishing finger at him. "At the moment you can barely hold up that book, and it takes Zorsha to get you to the privy."
He felt a blush crawling up his face.
"So at the moment, my friend, you'd best keep your attentions on that primer."
He gladly buried his nose in the book, hoping Kasha hadn't noticed his blushing.
"So, if the world is round, like a ball, why don't we fall off of it?" the boy asked. "And if it's spinning, why aren't we flung off of it?"
Zorsha grinned. At first he'd thought this notion of Felaras's—to teach a wild nomad boy—was going to be sheer torture for both of them.
It was turning out to be sheer pleasure. The boy drank in everything Zorsha could teach as thirsty ground drank spring rains. There was such a need in him to know—sometimes Zorsha could almost see him physically beating against the walls of his limitations of language and understanding. And every day those walls crumbled a little more; one day there would be nothing to stop him.
"Because," he said, answering the question with an example, "we think, Yuchai, that when something gets big enough, it attracts smaller things to it—the way this bit of amber picks up a feather after I rub it with the silk."
Zorsha took an amber bead from the box of oddments he'd brought with him, and rubbed it vigorously with a scrap of silk cloth. He put a feather on the comforter, and brought the bead close to it. The boy watched, his eyes bright with intense fascination, as the feather leapt to cling to the bead.
The boy reached out and pulled the feather away, then let it go, and watched it return to the bead.
"We think," Zorsha said, "that the force I generated in the amber and the force that holds us on the world are similar, though not the same. We call the first 'electricity' and the second 'gravity.'"