Broken Crescent (22 page)

“I apologize. At most times Osif is not like this.”

“Why am I here?” Nate asked. “Who does Arthiz think I am?”

“You are here because Arthiz thinks you might aid our cause.”

“How?” Nate said. “From what I have seen, the only reason I am here is because I would probably be killed if I was anywhere else.”

Bhodan nodded. “You are here now.”

“How do you think I can help you?”

“Perhaps you cannot, perhaps Osif is correct. Perhaps you are a harmless animal, the way the ghadi believed the first men were.” Bhodan frowned. “But when the gods play their games, the result is always severe. If you have a purpose here, it is the Monarch’s preference that it serve us and not the College of Man.”

“What is it you want from me?”

“To be an acolyte. A soldier in the coming war.”

Nate unconsciously touched his face and thought of the scarring that these people went through.
Like hell, old man. You’re not cutting anything in my skin.

“What if I don’t want to be part of your little army?”

Yerith touched his arm. “Please—”

Nate shook off her attention. “Do I not get a choice in all of this?”

Bhodan gave him his skull-like smile. “Yes, you do. If you insist, we will keep you in a safe place as long as the Monarch believes you may be of use.”

“Like my cell back in Manhome?” Nate looked over at Yerith.

“I suppose,” Bhodan said. “Is this what you want?”

“What I want is to be sent back home.”

“Only the gods can walk between worlds.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“We will teach you as an acolyte, until we find something you cannot learn.”

“Can you do that without cutting my skin?”

Bhodan actually seemed surprised at the request. “Do you understand what I am offering?”

“Maybe not. But I do not want to be scarred. Is that necessary for me to learn what you want to teach?”

“No.” The vibe from Bhodan was odd. To Nate it seemed as if it was perfectly reasonable not to want his skin cut up. However, even Yerith looked at him with some surprise.
They’re almost acting as if the scarring was a fringe benefit. . . .

Maybe that’s how they saw it. They did act as if he walked into a job interview and said, “I’ll take the position, but please don’t pay me anything.”

Bhodan shook his head. “If you do not wish to pass through the . . .” He used a word Nate had never heard before. “It will be your decision. So you will train here?”

“Teach me whatever you want.”

“Good. I will show you to your room.” Bhodan walked toward the door.

Nate looked at Yerith, who looked even more lost than she had on the pier. “What about Yerith?”

“We have ghadi here that need to be cared for.” He addressed Yerith. “When Osif returns, he will take you to them.”

Bhodan walked out the door and waited in the hallway for him. Nate took a last look at Yerith, then he followed the blind man.

B
HODAN TOOK him to a room even less inviting than the one that he had left to come here. It was little more than an unadorned stone box, lacking even a door for privacy. There were only two pieces of furniture; a rough cot, and at its foot, a large chest about twice the size of a footlocker.

When Nate opened the chest, half of it was filled with the books that Yerith had given him. For some reason, that made him feel better about being here. His journal sat on top of everything.

Next to the books was clothing similar to that Osif had worn to meet them. Sandals, canvas pants, a robe with a vaguely Oriental cut, and a long sashlike belt. All of which was probably a good thing, given the state of filth his current clothes were in.

“You are a student here,” Bhodan said, “You will live as a student here.”

It took a little while for what that meant to sink in. Nate had his own idea of what a student’s life was like. His mental image of higher learning was so ingrained it even influenced his mental translation of the word “College.” However, to Nate, this College bore more resemblance to a military training base or a Soviet reeducation camp.

Shortly after Bhodan left him, a man with a long, carved staff walked down the corridor and stopped in his doorway. He stared at Nate and said, “You are a student here.”

“That’s what I have been told.”

The man slammed the bottom of the staff on the ground. The sound was like a whip cracking in the enclosed space. “You were not asked a question.”

Nate backed off a step.

“You will wear the clothes of a student.” He pointed at Nate with the staff. “Remove those rags.”

Nate’s immediate impulse was to mouth off to this guy. But trying to communicate in a different language gave his brain enough pause so he didn’t pop off the first thing that came into his head. Which, in this case was,
How’d you like to wear that stick, big boy?

Nate erred on the side of discretion and stripped, peeling the fabric off his body. Rings of gray marked him where the elastic of his T-shirt or jockeys had touched his skin.

Big-stick stared at Nate while he stripped, and if he had known the words, Nate would have mentioned something about the homoerotic overtones of what was happening.

Big-stick instructed him to fold his old clothes and place them in the chest, and take out his new uniform. Nate started to put the new clothes on, but was interrupted by another whiplike crack of the man’s staff. The metal-shod tip came uncomfortably close to Nate’s foot.

“I did not tell you to dress.”

Nate stood there, waiting.

“It is time for the baths.”

Big-stick wasn’t kidding when he said it was time for the baths. Not only were the baths communal,
every
student bathed at the same time. Nate placed his clothes on a stone bench at the edge of a steaming pool of water as more and more people filed by him. No one spoke as they filed into the room, though every single one of them, men and women, stared at him as they passed. Each of them took their clothes and placed them on the bench set into the perimeter of the cylindrical room.

The only folks who didn’t strip were a trio of men bearing staffs who clustered by the entrance. The only difference between them and the students was age—the students were all younger than Nate, the guards perhaps slightly older—and the color of the belt at their waist. The students, Nate included, all had plain black belts while the guards wore embroidered blue belts with silver and gold highlights.

Nate watched the others for what he was supposed to do. He had already screwed up enough first impressions to last him the rest of his life. The last thing he needed was a dozen new people to be pissed at him because he ruined their bathing ceremony.

Fortunately, as far as Nate could tell, there was no particular protocol involved. Other than the general silence, and a slight segregation of gender—men on one side of the pool, women on the other—everyone seemed to be free to proceed as they thought appropriate. All slipping in the pool in a semi-haphazard fashion.

Nate decided that he must have had the modesty beaten out of him, because he was slipping into the warm pool of the bath before he realized that he was more uncomfortable about how filthy he was in front of all these strangers than he was about being naked.

Even that discomfort faded when he slipped into the pool. It reminded him of how he missed showers, and indoor plumbing. His body slipped into the warm water and suddenly every muscle in his body tried to relax, dropping him so that he was only head and shoulders above the surface. He rested there for a few moments, floating. It was the most luxury he’d been afforded since coming to this world.

It was a few minutes before some order was imposed on the proceedings. Once all the students were in the water, one of the guards walked along the perimeter, using a hooked tool to drag lids off of cylindrical pits that ringed the edge of the pool. Once he had completed this task, everyone edged to the pit nearest them and withdrew a white cloth. Nate followed everyone’s lead, noticing that the holes ringing the pool were filled with water about twenty degrees warmer than the water in the pool itself.

Still unsure if he was engaged in something whose primary focus was ritualistic, social, or hygienic, he picked one guy out of the crowd and decided to follow his actions, dunking his head, and wiping each part of his body with the cloth.

For Nate’s part, it didn’t seem that he screwed anything up. At least no one came and hit him with a stick. Everyone washed in silence, and the stares he got were covert.

Nate returned the stares, a little less covertly.

Everyone here, it seemed, had been touched by the knife of the College. Nate wore the lone unscarred body. Men and women had, at the least, their faces marked. That made an evil sort of sense. If the College wanted to isolate you, keep you behind their mask, that would be the first place they marked.

Only in a few cases did the scars extend much beyond the head. Nate realized that he was seeing the neophytes, the people who did the scut work for the College. He also started to understand why Bhodan seemed surprised that Nate wished to stay unscarred.

The extent of the carvings was a measure of rank, it defined your place among the scholars and acolytes. Essentially, he had told Bhodan that he didn’t want any status at all.

When he was clean and back up in his little room he began wondering if he’d see Yerith again. That took his thoughts through a downward spiral, itemizing a long list of things he probably would never see again; Mom, Tux, indoor plumbing, stand-up comedy, ice cream.

Nate sat on the edge of his bed and tried to tune out the crowd noises around him. Unlike when Bhodan had first brought him down to this corridor of alcoves, the place was now thick with people. Rooms up and down this particular corridor were home to about a dozen other male students, and gave the place a feel somewhere between a dorm and a barracks.

Outside the baths, they didn’t try to hide the fact that they were staring at him. Nate tried to understand their whisperings, but it only frustrated him. He was still too new to the language to understand anything that wasn’t spoken directly and clearly. A quickly whispered conversation was no more intelligible to Nate than a coughing fit.

Nate was wrapped up in composing a mental list of his favorite restaurants, when someone decided to walk up and confront the stranger who had been dropped in their midst.

“So what, exactly, are you?”

Nate looked up at the speaker. The man had sharp features, and the scars on his face looped around his brow and down the edge of his nose like a large question mark.

Several responses occurred to Nate. As with the guard, the language barrier gave him enough pause not to use any of them.

“My name is Nate Black,” he said.