12 - The School

The school was set into the brittle, razor sharp mountain rock, and the snow tunnels gave way to open streets and the plaza before the school.  It was the second largest building he’d seen in Milar, though when he thought back through his trek upcountry he’d seen other mounds of buildings in the bigger towns.

This building... the first and the oldest of the famous Milar war-schools... had peaked windows all around top like a half-circle of eyebrows, each one mounded with snow, giving the building a surprised look. On the plains this building could not be built into the mountainside like the original, but the back of it could be plated with sod.

The doorway had its rows of hooks just inside to anchor safety lines should the snow start again in this most volatile of water seasons, before it was all sucked away south.  It was warm inside and Kyrus put up his outerwear where Ilax pointed.

The hallway behind had a row of doors, and as they stepped in, one of those doors burst open, letting out a gout of steam and several children, wet, squealing, shrieking with laughter, apparently in the middle of a water fight.

They have enough water that they can use it so?  I suppose when there’s manheights of snow outside.  Many feet of snow… they have enough.  But… they’re… naked.  Not just face-naked.  Naked naked.  And that person… that… um… Kyrus had to turn his back on the scene.  That person was a woman and was also naked. And wet. And had soap on her all over.  “You rapscallions!  Get in there and get rinsed or you won’t be allowed to come to class tomorrow and tomorrow we are doing first weapons!”

“Sorry, Zon.  Sorry, Zon.”  A chorus of apologies and the lot of them apparently trouped back into the wet room to ‘rinse off’.  Except the woman who, when Kyrus peeked and then covered his face with his hands, still stood in the door holding it just off her body.  “Ilax… and my new student.  Why don't you wait in a tub?”

“Thank you, Elemfias.  We’ll do that.”

“We will?”  Kyrus just couldn’t help the squeak that finished that sentence, as if his voice were just breaking.

“You convinced me to teach you.  Start doing that now.”

“Yes, Zon.”  Kyrus set his teeth and smiled, as practiced as any sex worker in Lainz.  Don’t ever let anyone see what you really feel.   

Ilax led him into and through the great teaching hall.  From inside, the peaked-eye windows showed the Milari mastery of glass by letting in light and keeping heat inside in a ring of clerestory windows. Other narrow, two story windows, placed prudently between stone buttresses allowed an odd, sliced view of the valley and part of the city below even with their bottom thirds obscured by white. It was warm enough inside even though Kyrus had not yet seen a brazier or a fireplace.  How do they keep such a glass-filled room warm?

Below the windows was the round training ring. In the middle a ring of lighter wood marked out a separate space on the palee, smooth wood floor worn to silky softness by generations of bare feet. “The floors will need refinishing soon to knock down the rippling bumps of those knots,” Ilax said. “They wear down slower than the rest of the floor.”

He turned to the stone wall that was actually inside the mountain and opened another purplewood door.  “The weapons and training equipment is stored in those closets there,” he said and unlocked a door that was apparently for adults or teachers only, backing onto the wet room.  At least they’d come all the way around behind.

There were a number of pools and shallow pits dug out of the rock, with water running from the highest and shallowest… and hottest from the bubbling and steam rising out of it… to what looked like cooler and cooler puddles.

“Mind the stairs here… someone dropped a bench and chipped the step, it hasn’t been smoothed yet and it’s razor sharp.”  Ilax stripped off his clothing as he spoke, indicating a set of steps into a middling pool that roiled and the water from higher up made it foam.

Kyrus tried not to swallow his tongue and took his own clothes off.  Ilax stopped him as he did and took him by one shoulder. Kyrus braced himself.  Is this where we talk about payment for all these lessons?  “You never mentioned you’d been in knife fights.”

“How can you tell?”  The scars on his side were faint.  Sand sickness was worst inside, not scarring much on the skin. It had been just after his mother had fallen the worse sick.  He’d run under Stinking Shadow’s boys and had made enough money to keep their rooms in the Basin.  “It was with a Lainz gang.”

“I see.”  Ilax looked at the thin, faint scars.  “They look like stone knives, and if I know anything about Lainz Basin life, coated with toxic sand.”

“Sick sand, yeah.”

“You’re lucky.  And fast.  That’s good.”

“It was dumb luck.”  Kyrus didn’t want to talk about it.  He’d gotten cut up by two Sunfire kids and had been almost as toxic sick as ma.  It gave him some real understanding of her talk of being unhooked from here and now.

Ilax just nodded thoughtfully and waved him into the water and Kyrus sank down into the heat up to his chin.  It was the first time he’d really felt warm all day, since he’d been pried out from behind the stove by the call of breakfast.  And he could pretend he was being modest since he was covered to the chin, but the surface foam just wouldn’t cooperate and kept drifting off to float down to the next pool.