“Duun wants me to be in the gym by noon.”
“Ah.” She gave his leg a pat and got up. “But it’s 1759. The 19th of Ptosin. It’s summer out.”
He was suddenly , overwhelmingly conscious of the blankness of the school’s white walls. The falsity of the windows behind which (sometimes) was the noise of machinery. The world closed in on him like the clenching of a fist about his heart.
In Sheon the leaves would be green and the hiyi pods opening; the foen-cubs would come tottering out and hiss at the-
-curious country-folk children. Mon was the name of one. They owned his house now. They lived in its rooms. Sat by the fireplace on the warm sand, all together.
Mon. Mon. Mon. He hated that person.
The city closed about him. Imprisoned him. But it was his fault. All his fault. His difference caused it.
“Haras?”
“I can’t.”
Betan gave up and wandered off, went back to her desk and sat down cross-legged with her back to him. Thorn picked up the keyboard again and looked at the screen.
A message came to him. “BETAN: Well, tomorrow, then. I could answer questions, things that bother you.”
He watched it scroll by three times. His heart beat faster and faster. “B-e-t-a-n,” he typed, addressing the response. “Y-e-s.”
Thorn picked himself up and dusted the sand off. He bowed. “Yes. I see.”
“Again,” Duun said. It was not always that Duun stripped down to the small-kilt for practice. Duun did that today, so that his scars were evident, like lightnings through the gray and black hair of his body and his maimed arm, of one fabric with the scars on his face, so that they acquired a fearsome symmetry which Thorn had sensed in those years before he knew that they were scars, or knew that every man in all the world was not marked as Duun was marked, or had not but half a right hand, or did not smile after that permanent fashion, which Thorn knew now was enough to daunt any opponent Duun ever faced. It daunted him now. (He means to put me to it today. He has something in mind.) And it came leaping into his mind in one fatal rush that it had been a very long time that Duun had left him in peace. (Not to interrupt my studies-surely that was why. Or I’ve gotten better and he won’t try-)
That thought vanished in one missed attempt, in the far too lengthy offbalance moment he had to fall as Duun took his feet from under him.
Duun often grinned at such moments. This time he stood there with a dour face, signed no attack and watched with hands on hips as Thorn recovered himself from his drop-and-rise.
“Again.”
“Duun-hatani, show me that move to the side again.”
Patiently Duun showed him. Thorn bent himself to it and tried a trick in the midst of it, a joke.
Duun’s hands closed on him and dumped him to the ground. (He saw it.) Duun might have laughed, but Duun’s face never changed. Thorn hesitated on the safety of the floor a moment, looking up at him. (Gods. He’s got something in mind. Something’s wrong.) Thorn shook the dazzle and the thoughts and the day from his head and brought himself to his feet again, centered in the tightest possible focus, no thought to anything, no thought, no heartbeat but the beat of the dance, the light and the dust. It was not the city, it was Sheon’s noon, and the yard about them, and Duun faced him in purest simplicity.
Pass and evade, strike and recover and pass and turn.
“Better,” Duun said, and that one word ran down his nerves like fingers on the dkin. “Better. Take the offensive.”
No hesitation. Thorn struck and caught and Duun spun off across the sand, up again in a move that never stopped.
Counter again and attack.
Again.
Again. Thorn floated out of a kick aimed at his hip and struck.
His hands met flesh and he spun again in distress, in time to find Duun coming up again from the sand and a kick coming at him he only scantly evaded.