Текст книги "Way Of The Clans"

4

Dermot, who read poetry in a halting voice that tended to obscure the import of the words, was now reciting a long segment from The Remembrance,the wonderful saga whose verses, simple on the page but resounding when recited by one who could convey the epic sweep of it (anybody but Dermot), described the founding of the Clans, how Nicholas Kerensky had restructured society after planets had been ravaged by those who thought land equated with power.

Nicholas Kerensky took over his newly won dominion armed with a plan to forge a new society out of the disparate populations that made up the Exodus survivors. By mining the resources of its own diversity and channeling the energies of its warlike inclinations, the reborn society would unify his people into a force capable of achieving his greatest dream—a return to the inner Sphere to reestablish the Star League, the form of government that had once existed there. Everything directly connected to the Inner Sphere was suddenly banned, while nationalistic ties to the past were discouraged.

The Clans themselves had their origins earlier, during Nicholas' exile on Strana Mechty, when he had reorganized his armies into twenty groups, or clans, of forty warriors each. Within each clan, Nicholas decreed smaller units, what another age would have called platoons. Each of these sub-units was composed of five warriors and was eventually termed a "Star," the image presumably based on the conventional five points in the usual star symbol. Later, when the Clans had grown to their present massive proportions, the star imagery was continued and much of the organization was still based on quintuple segments.

The reorganization of society involved resettling outsiders into the various clans, a move that tended to further destroy nationalistic leanings. (Dermot's voice was itself resettling down into its deepest, most boring register, the voice whose vibrations Aidan seemed to feel so deeply through his body that they gave him back pain).

As the class recited the names of the Clans in unison and in precisely clipped words, Aidan's thoughts drifted off again, even as he stayed right in rhythm with his classmates . . .

* * *

Only a few days before the sibko had left for the training cycle, Aidan and Marthe had gone grave visiting. First, they went to the grave of Warhawk, whom Aidan had buried just outside the cemetery fence, then marked with a stanchion so that he could always find the site again. Warhawk's death had been unfortunate, the result of a malicious member of another sibko who thought he could bring honor to his own group by flinging a stone at the falcon. If Warhawk had not lost the sight in her right eye in a brutal skirmish with a renegade hawk, she might have seen the stone coming and executed one of her incredibly beautiful swooping arcs away from it. But the shot had been true, and Aidan watched her seem to come to an abrupt stop in the air, then drop to the ground like a lead weight. When he found her, her body still, her neck twisted and seemingly stretched, he had gone into a rage, found Warhawk's murderer, and nearly sent him to his own grave. For a while, an unpleasant feeling between the two sibkos led to many skirmishes (which Aidan's sibko usually won, led by his fierce charges, his punishing blows), but the conflict ended abruptly when the boy who had killed Warhawk was himself slain in a fight within his own sibko.

Now, he found, it was difficult to tell exactly where Warhawk lay beneath the ground. The mark was still on the stanchion, but it seemed to Aidan that something about the ground had changed, that in some way its configurations had shifted or that the way he remembered them had altered. Now there was grass where none had previously been, and that complicated his search even more. He wanted to place his feet along the sides of the burial site, a silly ritual that he always performed during each visit to Warhawk, but this time it was impossible. As he stared at the spot where the grave might be, he fingered the edge of his leather vest at the place where Warhawk had often bit and nibbled. Bite marks were still there, rough and frayed to Aidan's touch.

"Do not be sad," Marthe advised. "We are leaving here soon and may never come back. If we do, the fence may even be gone or rearranged to suit new dimensions of the graveyard. We lose boundaries all the time, quiaff?"

Next they went into the cemetery and searched out Glynn's grave. Dav, the most artistic member in the sibko, had carved out a fighting sword on top of the grave marker, so it was easy to locate. In the shelter of a bushy tree, the sword seemed to thrust out of the ground, as if the corpse beneath was holding onto the hilt from inside the tomb. The shadows cast by the tree created the illusion of fresh bloodstains along the blade.

Standing silently by the grave, Aidan thought of Glynn's wasted death. One day a roving band of bandits had come too near the sibko, which was undergoing extended wilderness-survival training, camped in some geodesic domes abandoned by another sibko whose members had gone on to the next stage of their training. Gonn, an insecure military strategist at best, had panicked and set up a perimeter defense outside the encampment. It was clear to Aidan that the bandits might have passed them by if Gonn had not drawn their attention.

Aidan remembered lying on the ground, his hand tightly clutching the low-powered laser pistol that had become standard issue for the sibko after its tenth birth-noting. It could not kill, but it could cause extreme discomfort, as Aidan learned when Peri, the sneaky little runt of the siblitter, had shot him during a mock infantry exercise. The beam caught Aidan in the neck, sending a steady pain through it that was worse than any headache or muscle spasm he had ever endured. The pain made his eyes tear up and he fell to the ground. Peri, fearful that her toy had been set too high, ran over to him. When she saw that he was still alive, she laughed triumphantly. That was Peri's way; she exulted in her victories and let her victims know that she was happy to have defeated them.

In spite of his pain, Aidan had grabbed Peri about her legs, tipped her over, and disarmed her of the toy laser pistol, which he then held to her head. At that moment he had wanted to give her a headache the equal of the pain she had inflicted upon him. Fairness won out, however. Aidan accepted the skirmish victory as his due, sending the now-frowning Peri back to the assembling area with other defeated child-warriors, all waiting for their next turn in the battle game.

Aidan watched the bandits come toward the entrenched sibko. He could hardly make out the features of their faces, so begrimed were they with the dirt of the road that it looked as though they'd been wallowing in mud. Their clothes were mostly old and ripped, though here and there a bandit wore relatively clean, new-looking garments, probably booty from their most recent raid. The hair of the man at the head of the pack was tightly wrapped in a trio of short pigtails that bounced against his forehead with each step. Three pigtails identified him as the antikhan, a title that marked his rebellion against the warrior caste (he had no doubt been a disgraced warrior or failed warrior cadet). The word itself showed contempt for the rigid political structure of the Clans, each of whose leaders was called a khan, while the leader of all the Clans was given the exalted title of ilKhan.

Each member of the attacking horde seemed to grow in size as he or she came nearer. It was an optical illusion, Aidan knew, but the front ranks of the bandits were nevertheless populated by bulky, thick-muscles brutes who looked like warrior caste flush-outs.

Aidan, remembering Glynn's latest Mifoon adventure, took aim at the bandit leader's forehead and waited for him to get as close as possible before firing. Sibparent Gonn, who was in charge of weaponry training, had told Aidan that his main flaw as a marksman was that he was always the most eager to fire and most ready to fight in the entire sibko. Therefore, Gonn said, he should train himself to use proper caution. Aidan was now trying to be cautious, while his finger longed to pull the trigger and blast the bandit leader between the eyes. (According to Gonn, Aidan was one of the two or three best shots in the sibko, too).

He would have fired, and he would have stunned the leader and perhaps averted the attack if it were not for Glynn. No one ever had a clear notion of why she did it, though Gonn would later say the fanciful tales she told had chipped away too much battle armor from her mind, and that she probably thought she was some roving yojimbo out to save the local community from ravagers.

At any rate, Glynn marched past the line of sibko-defenders. With her height, she seemed like a giant stepping over ordinary people, especially with all the members of the sibko prone and looking up at her with awe. As though her long legs propelled her with a life of their own, she headed right for the advancing horde, which came to a halt at a signal from the tri-pigtailed leader.

The leader watched Glynn's approach, no doubt noting that the only weapon at her disposal was a sheathed sword that bounced rhythmically against her thigh just as his pigtails had danced against his forehead. He smiled, revealing surprisingly white teeth. With the rest of his face obscured by dirt and grime, the smile seemed to exist on its own, almost as if it floated in front of his face, an eerie smile without a link to anything else.

A few steps in front of the leader, Glynn stopped and said something to him. Her words did not carry back to the sibko, most of whose members now stood and, defying Gonn's cautioning, had begun to move toward the bandits. While not losing sight of Glynn and the bandit leader, Aidan chose one of the bandits, a surly-looking, stocky, bearded man on the right flank, as his quarry if a battle erupted.

The bandit leader's killing move was nearly undetectable. His right hand had rested in front of a scruffy vest, quite casually, then suddenly he had drawn a knife from somewhere in his clothing and raked it across Glynn's neck. Aidan got a sense of some blood spurting as Glynn fell, but by then his rage had taken over and he rushed toward the stocky bandit he had selected. As he came close, he realized he could get a shot at the bandit with his pistol, but he also knew he did not want that. It would be too easy. For his own sense of revenge, he had to make the man suffer.

The bandit came at him. He, too, had found a knife somewhere on his clothing and was brandishing it like a tiny sword. Knife or sword, no conventional weapon could frighten Aidan. In their hand-to-hand combat training lessons, he and the other sibko members had been well-drilled to respect a weapon but not to fear it.

Switching the pistol to his left hand, Aidan used it to deflect the downward arc of the bandit's knife. Before his adversary could recover, he grabbed the man's wrist with hands whose muscles had been strengthened by long calisthenic drills supervised by sibparent Gonn. Aidan had squeezed resilient materials, performed a dozen types of exercise ritual, hardened the skin in martial-arts demonstrations. As a result, he—like the others in the sibko– could do wonders with just bare hands. Aidan could feel the bandit's wrist break as he snapped it backward violently. The knife fell out of the man's hand. Kneeing the stocky man in the stomach and doubling him over, Aidan quickly snatched the knife off the ground and waited patiently for the man to straighten up. It would have been too easy to plunge the knife into the bandit's back. That would have been too much like a proper Clan death, the noble demise of a warrior who, even though a member of the bandit caste, could die in battle. But if the man were to die, there must be shame attached to it, especially after the bandit leader's almost casual slaying of Glynn.

As the bandit straightened up, he made a quick lunge at Aidan, who neatly sidestepped the man, sending him plunging forward and down, his face in the dirt. Ironically, it was Glynn who had drilled him in this very same battle-footwork.

Aidan stepped backward. He sensed, out the corner of his eye, a movement toward him. Another bandit, a short, thick-legged woman with fire in her eyes, raced toward him. Her fighting skills were no better than those of the man on the ground, and Aidan was able to strike the side of her head with the barrel of his pistol. He could have stabbed her, but he was saving the bandit's knife for its owner. She collapsed and he saw, as the fire in her eyes went out, that she would be at least momentarily unconscious.

Turning back to the bandit, he saw the man trying to heave his bulk upward. With no further reason to toy with him, Aidan kicked him in the side, sending him back to the ground. Assuming the look of contempt taught him by Gonn, he forced the bandit to roll over with further kicks, then stared into the man's now-frightened eyes. Aidan was revolted by the man's look of fear. Showing such emotion had no doubt contributed to this man's failure as a warrior, if indeed this particular freebirth had ever been a warrior.

Aidan did not care to savor the act of killing. It was necessary but repulsive to him. Quickly, he brought the bandit's knife down toward his face. The man tried to turn his head sideways, but Aidan knocked it back with his pistol, then he plunged the knife into the victim's open mouth, forcing it deep. The bandit's eyes widened in pain. Blood followed the knife blade out of the man's mouth, then—watching the horror in the dying man's eyes—Aidan finished him off. With the same casual, almost indifferent motion the bandit leader had used on Glynn, Aidan slit his throat.

Looking around him, Aidan saw that the battle was over and that they had won it. The survivors among the outlaw band were running from them, and the bodies of the less lucky were strewn about the improvised battlefield. Like Aidan, other members of the sibko were standing and surveying the damage they had done. Many of them hovered over the corpse of the bandit leader, who had more than the requisite wounds in his body to bring about an agonizing death.

For a moment, he saw the scene as it might have looked from the viewpoint of the enemy. The bandits had lost a fight with a raging horde of children.That would damage the pride of the survivors. It was the first battle, other than planned ceremonial skirmishes, that Aidan's sibko had ever won. And the cost of it was Glynn's death.

When Aidan arrived at the side of Glynn's corpse, where the sibko was assembling, his body was still trembling and his stomach still bouncing around inside his body from the exhilaration and disgust of his first killing. Looking at Gonn, he saw that lines of tears ran out of the corners of Gonn's eyes. Aidan could not tell whether they were angry or sad tears. No one ever could, or did, know what went on in the group leader's mind.

Their other sibparents had seen to it that Glynn was given a proper ceremonial funeral, marked with a few rituals that normally belonged to those who had attained warrior status. After the funeral, Gonn was severely reprimanded and removed from command over the sibko for having lost control of it at a key moment, even though the sibko itself was praised for its bravery. He was demoted to menial tasks, which he did desultorily. Then, one day, Gonn drowned in a river alongside which the sibko was camped. Some wondered if he had committed suicide, although direct suicide was rare in the Clans. Few clansmen or women ever chose to kill themselves, except through recklessness in battle.

Though Aidan had despised Gonn for his cowardice against the bandits, he nevertheless felt some grief upon hearing of the man's death. A few years earlier, a different kind of Gonn had taken Aidan under his wing—under his falcon wing, a catchphrase he used often—and helped with the training of Warhawk.