He laid his ears down. “Dammit, Ellud.”
“You want to work off something else than that, Duun-hatani?”
“Rescue me from fools.”
“I’m trying to. From one I used to love, Duun.”
Duun stayed still a long, long time. Grinned finally, and felt the scar pull at his mouth. Laughed once shortly; Ellud looked alarmed. “Gods,” Duun said, “I’m drowning, and someone has a rope.”
Ellud looked the more disturbed. His eyes showed whites.
“I own the world,” Duun said. “Women don’t see my scars, my charge adores me, and my last friend calls me a fool.” He laughed again, flung his feet down to the sand and stood up. “I cherish that,” he said. And left.
Young muscles strained, knotting and stretching under a hairless, sweat-drenched back: the arm held, and Thorn hauled himself upward on the exercise bar, up and down, up and down. Duun walked up on this in the gymnasium, walked up quietly on the well-trampled, sweat-pocked sand and stood there with arms folded a while. Finally Thorn’s efforts flagged, became an upward struggle. In perverse humor Duun landed a swat on a vulnerable backside, claws out, and Thorn flinched and made the lift, then dropped, turning in the movement. Gasping then for breath, but bright-eyed with the morning and his health. Duun pursed his mouth. “Not sore, is it?”
“No.” And a little wariness crept in. Duun studied him. Thinking. Thorn had gotten easy; and now Duun was thinking, and looking at him that way, and that was cause enough for wariness. There was a great deal in this place where things went on behind the walls, where Thorn waked to find himself adrift in the night sky, and stifled a scream which would have brought Duun’s swift disgust. So Thorn turned on the stars each night himself, and walked dizzily to his bed, and flung himself down and made himself look up, about, lying wide-limbed as he had lain on a summer hillside, undefended against the sky that slowly turned. He remembered how it felt to fly. Remembered the land turning giddily under his sight, and the shifts of weight, the falling-feeling amplified by height enough to turn cattle into insects and valleys into folds of cloth. And the dark and the stars took him and whirled him until that flying sensation was back, and he lay there deliberately, overcoming his fear, and going to sleep with it. Some fears Duun set into him for a reason; at this one Duun would laugh, Thorn felt that this was so-and Duun’s scorn was worse that the heights, worse than any falling. He hoped now for Duun’s approval… the quickly hooded glance, the tightening of the mouth-for such small things he worked, but they had meaning. The slap that stung- that was a joke; Duun joked with him, and dared him, and that meant-meant perhaps an end to Duun’s restraint with him-Duun’s pity. Duun’s -(he felt)-disgust with this place and what had brought him to it. (Forgive me, Duun-hatani. Forgive me for all of it. For us being here. For me being helpless and disappointing, and, gods-don’t be angry, Duun.)
Duun poked him in the belly. Hard. Thorn withstood that. He centered himself, expecting-some sudden move. A blow that could take his head off. Because Duun knew he could turn it. Thorn thought of that. Suddenly he was not thinking of the blow; timing-sense deserted him and he shivered, flinched, knowing it. And Duun saw that too.
“Where’s the mind, Haras?”
Thorn centered himself again. Duun walked around behind him. Thorn’s ears strained. He listened to the soft sound of Duun’s tread on sand. His own rapid breathing dimmed his hearing and endangered him. He did not move until he heard Duun on his left, then turned his head, pursuing the movement which teased the tail of his eye.
Slowly Duun extended his right hand toward Thorn’s face-(Attack?) Thorn’s heart jumped and in a critical moment the hand had passed his reaction-point and he let it, let Duun touch his jaw. A two-fingered grip settled gently on either side, where no one’s hand belonged but his teacher’s, but the slow-moving hand too quick for him if he should move. He was vulnerable to that. He knew it. He cherished it. When Duun discovered weaknesses in him he attacked them, but this was the allowable one, this one was his safety that kept the games all games. Duun never took that away. Duun’s dark eyes were on a level with his own, poured force into him, like the dark of night, like the dark and all the stars in which he whirled and perished.