Jabone's Sword (12 page)

"I'm not swooning over anyone."

"Yeah, whatever." Jestia laughed and walked away. Kasiria watched her go, not without a certain amount of contempt and thought,
Who do you think you're ordering around? If I wanted her I'd have her with or without your permission. Giving people away, what do you think you are a princess or something? Swooning indeed . . . Oh my gods he is so beautiful and he would, should understand me. His own mother is a swords woman. Yes, but his mother isn't a Katabull, she isn't royalty. I have to stay focused, focused on my sword.

* * *

But in the next week she had little time to focus on anything other than the fact that her unit, seeing her friendship with the Kartiks, had something new to torment her about. They were supposed to be taking her commands and learning to actually live and work as a unit but they didn't listen to her at all.

The only joy she got were the few minutes she got to talk to Jestia and Ufalla before they fell to sleep and the moments spent sword fighting with Jabone.

They were at practice now and she was watching carefully as Ufalla beat the living crap out of Thomas, which was not only teaching her tricks she didn't know but was also warming her heart.

"Sergeant!" Captain Derek's voice broke into her thoughts. "Follow me to my office please." She nodded and followed him. As she walked in he said, "Close the door behind you." She nodded and did so, but she didn't like the tone of his voice. "Sit down Kasiria."

"Am I in trouble?" she asked as she sat down.

"Not really." He sat down across the table from her. "Kasiria, there is no doubt that you saved your troop the other day." She nodded silently. "But we both know that had your troop actually been taking orders from you, if they had been allowing you to lead properly, if they hadn't been spending more time taunting you than they were keeping an eye on the road, and if you hadn't let them distract you, that this probably wouldn't have happened at all."

"I have tried to make them respect me, but without my title . . . there is nothing to make them do so because I'm a woman and they are all idiots," Kasiria said hotly.

"I know it's not your fault, Kasiria, but even you have to admit that this is a problem that isn't likely to go away any time soon. You graduated at the top of your class and your skill with the sword is enviable. In fact everything about you says you should be a great military leader. The problem is that you aren't going to cure generations of ignorance fast enough to be allowed to lead your unit."

"What are you saying?" Kasiria asked carefully.
That I'm being demoted? That I'll have to take orders from one of my tormentors? I'd rather go home first.

"There is a group among us now that desperately needs leadership. Its members need to be taught more about our land and our people and our way of life, and quite frankly with all the trouble the Amalites have been stirring up I don't have time to teach them. While they will be hard to command, you would have no trouble gaining their respect. In fact I'm sure you already have it."

"You are talking about the Kartiks?"

"Yes. They have no problem with female leadership. Two of them are women and the boys . . . Well their mothers are both swords women. In their culture women are the same as men. I've watched you with them, Kasiria. While all the men seem to need to be beaten into submission in order to accept them and I break up a fight somewhere in the garrison between them and our people every day, you seem to at least be trying to understand them. You alone have a rapport with them."

"But . . . They can hardly be considered a unit. There are only four of them."

"You've seen them fight. Do you really think that's a problem?"

Not since I'm the Katabull
, Kasiria thought then said, "On one condition." Derek raised his eyebrows no doubt thinking she wasn't in the position to be asking for any special considerations. "I'm still a princess of the kingdom, Derek, and I've known you all my life. I think you owe me at least one concession based solely on that."

"What do you want?" he asked suspiciously.

"Move Jabone and Tarius over to where we are. Separate my unit from all the others. Put us together. It is their custom for both men and women to bunk together."

"Preposterous. Your father would never allow it."

"Then we won't tell him." She remembered what Ufalla had said the first night they'd bunked with her. "Ufalla's queer. I don't say that to shock you or to have you think ill of her, but it is true. That being the case am I any safer with her than I am with the young men? Besides as you said these young men have respect for women . . . "

"But . . . "

"It will help us bond as a unit and it will keep the men—both the Kartiks and our men—from being distracted by barrack posturing as they all stomp around trying to prove the ground they walk on is theirs alone."

Derek sighed. "The idea was to make them more like us, not you more like them."

"They will never fit in amongst the others. You know that as well as I do. Did Tarius the Black even before anyone knew he was a she, did she ever fit in? Was she ever part of the group?" Derek's silence answered her. "It wasn't until she had proved herself in a dozen battles that you even tried to understand her. These people are superior fighters in every way. They have already forgotten more than most of these men will ever learn. I don't want to ruin them by making them more like us. I want to make myself a better fighter by becoming more like them. Let them train the others, but let us carefully separate ourselves from them." She added sadly, "As you so wisely stated yourself, the men will never respect me. All things considered I think it far more likely that I will fit in with the Kartiks than I ever will with my own people."

"I'll give that what you say has a certain warped sense to it, Kasiria, but you are a princess of the kingdom and . . ."

"As such I will never be remembered after I am dead. I deserve to fight as you have so that someday people will tell stories about me." She stood up and grabbed an apple out of the full bowl that sat on his table. She shined it on her pants leg. "I'm going to go round up my new unit. You can tell my old unit about my reassignment. I'm sure they'll all be broken hearted."

* * *

Jabone couldn't say that he was too upset about the change in sleeping arrangements or having Kasiria as their sergeant.

He moved his cot over next to Ufalla's and Tarius put his on the other side of his.

He was glad to have his pack back together and happier still to have Kasiria as part of their pack even if she didn't yet know that's the way he would think of her.

"Tomorrow we will go on a field trip. You must learn about our plants and animals. What can be eaten, what can't. I have to teach you all about our country and culture in a very short length of time, and I think I can do that better away from the garrison," Kasiria said.

Jestia sat down on Ufalla's cot next to her and looked to where Tarius was still making up his bed for the night. "Tarius, tell us a story," Jestia begged.

"Yes Tarius," Jabone said, "tell us a story."

Tarius looked fleetingly at Kasiria.

"It's all right my brother," Jabone said.

"I have never told a story in this language.It might be clumsy and to tell one in our language would be rude."

"I'm shocked! My big brother actually knows what rude is," Ufalla said. "But then of course he would, he's practiced so much at it."

"Quiet, sprout," Tarius said. Jabone wondered how much bigger than him she was going to have to get before he stopped calling her that.

"Tell a story, Tarius," Ufalla urged. "What better time to learn to weave one in their language than now when it is just us?"

"What sort of story should I tell, of war, of great love, of betrayal?"

"Are not all the same in our history?" Jestia asked.

Tarius seemed to think about it only for a minute and then he started. "I tell the tale of Harris, a crippled servant boy who became a knight. The story of when he first met Tarius the Black, the Kartik bastard. Now there was in those days in the land of the Jethrik a Great War and Tarius had come into the land to go attend the Sword Master's academy pretending to be a man for the Jethrikian people did not believe that women should be allowed to fight . . . ."

As always Jabone was riveted as if he'd never heard the tale before as if he didn't know most of the players. The fact that Ufalla and Jestia had urged Tarius to tell a story and then were so quiet, and considering the story Tarius choose to tell, Jabone knew they were all as home sick as he was.

* * *

Kasiria had heard stories about them most of her life, but never this story, and never so well told. When he had finished she found herself clapping. She looked at Tarius. "You are a fine bard, Tarius."

Tarius blushed. "Thank you. I've had good teachers."

"So is that our Captain Derek that is your story's villain?"

"Aye," Jabone said. "One and the same. War changes men for the bad and the good."

That was the same rather confusing thing Derek had said about his youth, and Kasiria found herself wondering if Jabone was just repeating what he'd heard or if it was a common saying in the Kartik, something Derek had picked up from Tarius the Black.

"Well it's time for lights out," she ordered. They all went to their beds and Jabone blew out the oil lamp. It was then that she realized that she could still see because she could see Jabone walking across the floor without tripping over anything as he made his way to his cot as if he had already memorized the room. Maybe it just wasn't that dark. She closed her eyes and opened them again, but there was something different about the way things looked. She realized that it wasn't like seeing in the dark because there was a little light that made shadows, this was
seeing
in the dark, real seeing. Yet there was no light source that she could see. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. She could see everything in sort of a green spectrum but she could actually make out the faces of her companions. His face, Jabone's his dark hair looking all the darker against his white pillow.

It's got to be because of the Katabull thing. They see in the dark don't they? Damn Hellibolt he might have told me everything he knew.
She looked at her "unit." Any one of them could tell her, but if she kept asking questions weren't they eventually going to get suspicious? She blinked. Was he looking back at her? She looked at Jabone again and his eyes were closed.
Trick of the new eyes. Think about it. The ability to see in the dark, that couldn't be a bad thing for a soldier. So, now I'm the head freak of the freak brigade and instead of feeling like I've been demoted I feel like I've been reborn. I will teach them all about my country and they will teach me all they know about fighting and together we will prove them all wrong about us. That I'm just as good as any soldier in this army, better. Or I'll just admit—at least to myself—that the main reason I changed the sleeping arrangement is to keep Jabone close to me. That the main reason I don't care about my "reassignment" is that it means I get to be with him all day, every day.

The whole world, my whole world has changed in just a few days. That's the real reason I understand them, because we've all been thrown out of our comfortable places and forced to change or go back home with our tails between our legs.

* * *

Jabone waited 'til he was sure everyone was sound asleep and then he shook Ufalla awake. He put a finger in front of her lips and motioned her towards the door. She nodded and together they got up quietly and went outside.

Outside the barracks he said, "I've got to go to the privy."

"And I have to go with you? I'm freezing are you mad?"

"Come on I need to talk." She sighed and followed him. "Why do you suppose they've put her in charge of us?" he asked as they walked.

Ufalla shrugged. "I don't know, but you can't tell me you aren't glad."

"Do you think we did something wrong?"

"Are you kidding? Everything we do is wrong to them," Ufalla said. Having reached the privy Jabone went in and Ufalla stood outside the door much in the same way they had done back home. "They have rules about everything and most of them make no sense at all. Line up and be counted. What's that all about? And I wonder if any of them know how to just relax. They act like I'm some strange animal because I have breasts."

"Get this, when they have a dispute and they fight nothing is ever settled and they stay mad at each other," Jabone said.

"Then what's the point of fighting?" Ufalla asked in disbelief.

"Exactly!" Jabone said.

"I don't think it's what we did wrong though," Ufalla said thoughtfully, jumping from subject to subject because she just hadn't really gotten to talk to her friend that much and from foot to foot to stay warm.

"What do you mean?"
"I'm pretty sure she did something wrong and that's why she's stuck with us. Who cares? We all like her; she likes us. We'll be able to do what we want and deal with less crap."

"Right now I'm dealing with more crap," Jabone said, and they both laughed.

"Yeah, I don't know if it's their bad water or their bad food, but I've had the trots on and off ever since we got here," Ufalla said. "In fact when you get done I need in there and you can wait for me. I don't want to be alone out here. My father told me not to trust these men."

"And he was right. They are known to force women to have sex. It's common place with them. They do nothing all night but talk about sex. I don't think any of them have actually done it. And these 'cleaning rags,' what's that all about? Have they no suitable leaves? I hope they boil them to clean them. I'm done." He stepped outside and she went in. "You're lucky I warmed the seat up for you."

"I wouldn't call this stench you left behind you luck," Ufalla said with a laugh.

"Do you really think she likes me?" Jabone asked.

"I think she wants you to ride her like an animal. I don't think that necessarily means she likes you, but I suspect that she does," Ufalla said.