Powers Read Free Page A

sometimes real fits, screaming, hitting out wildly or tearing at his own clothes and body. Coming into adolescence now, he seemed to be growing together. His furies had calmed down, and he was making an excellent athlete of himself. All his thoughts were about the army, being a soldier, going to fight with Etra’s legions. The army wouldn’t take him even as a cadet for two years yet, so he made Hoby and Tib and me into his army. He’d been drilling us for months.
    We kept our wooden swords and shields in a secret cache under one of the big old sycamores in the park, along with the greaves and helmets of leather scraps Sallo and I had made under Torm’s direction. His helmet had a plume of reddish horse-hairs which Sallo had picked up in the stables and sewn in, so it looked quite grand. We always drilled in a long grass-alley deep in the grove, right under the wall, a secluded place. I saw the three of them marching down the alley as I came running through the trees. I snatched up my cap and shield and sword and fell in with them, panting. We drilled for a while, practicing turning and halting at Torm’s orders; then we had to stand at attention while our eagle-eyed commander strode up and down his regiment, berating a man here for having his helmet on crooked and a man there for not standing up straight, or changing his expression, or letting his eyes move. “A shoddy lot of troops,” he growled. “Damned civilians. How can Etra ever defeat the Votusans with a rabble like this?” We stood expressionless staring straight ahead, resolving in our hearts to defeat the Votusans come what might.
    “All right,” Torm said at last. “Tib, you and Gav are the Votusans. Me and Hoby are Etra. You go man the earthworks, and we’ll do a cavalry attack.”
    “They always get to be the Etrans,” Tib said to me as we ran off to man the earthworks, an old, half-overgrown drainage ditch that led out from the wall nearby. “Why can’t we be the Etrans sometimes?”
    It was a ritual question; there was no answer. We scuttled into the ditch and prepared to meet the onslaught of the cavalry of Etra.
    For some reason they took quite a while coming, and Tib and I had time to build up a good supply of missiles: small clods of hard dry dirt from the side of the ditch. When we finally heard the neighing and snorting of the horses, we stood up and hurled our missiles furiously. Most of them fell short or missed, but one clod happened to hit Hoby smack on the forehead. I don’t know whether Tib or I threw it. It stopped him short for a moment, stunned him; his head bobbed strangely back and forth and he stood staring. Torm was charging on, shouting, “At them, men! For the Ancestors! Etra! Etra!”—and came leaping down into the ditch. He remembered to whinny as he leaped. Tib and I fell back before the furious onslaught, naturally, which gave Torm time to look around for Hoby.
    Hoby was coming at a dead run. His face was black with dirt and rage. He jumped into the ditch and ran straight at me with his wooden sword lifted up to slash down at me. Backed up against bushes in the ditch, I had nowhere to go; all I could do was raise my shield and strike out with my sword as best I could, parrying his blow.
    The wooden blades slid against each other, and mine, turned aside by his much stronger blow, flicked up against his face. His came down hard on my hand and wrist. I dropped my sword and howled with pain. “Hey!” Torm shouted. “No hitting!” For he had given us very strict rules of how to use our weapons. We were to dance-fight with our swords: we could thrust and parry, but were never to strike home with them.
    Torm came between us now, and I had his attention first because I was crying and holding out my hand, which hurt fiercely—then he turned to Hoby. Hoby stood holding his hands over his face, blood welling between his fingers.
    “What’s wrong, let me look,” Torm said, and Hoby said, “I can’t see, I’m