18 - Don't Sex Anybody

The first day wasn’t so bad, once they were out of the tub room, though one person... a healer... did ask him to take his shirt off.  No one else asked or told him to strip.

“You’ve recovered well from the poisoning,” the healer... Ardalan... said as he took his hands off Kyrus’s chest.  He tingled all over but it felt good.  What had he done?  “All your filters are working well, your liver is a bit overworked but that’s understandable for a Lainz...”

“What do you mean?”

“All that toxic dust in the air.  All your bio-mats get disturbed or broken and then you get the heavy metals in the sandstorms.”

“I... guess I see.  Bio-mats?”

“A crust of our old home.  Designed to make it easier for us to live here.”

“I see.”  It was odd, thinking that this wasn’t home.  Kyrus didn’t really understand it.  The home-star was a fairy story told to kids, or sick people, to give them hope that things would get better.

“You’ll need a few days before you settle in... don’t sex  anybody till it does.”

“Don’t sex anybody?”  Kyrus gulped.  “Um... sorry.”

The healer chuckled, wiggling a finger in one ear.  “I still have my hearing, good.  You Lainz.  People belong to themselves.  You aren’t going to have to ask anyone but the person you are interested in for sex.” Kyrus wanted to clap his hands over his ears and go la-la-la and actually had his hands over his ears almost in reflex.  In his frantic mental thrashing he nearly didn’t hear the healer continue.  “.. nd you don’t have any diseases to pass on.”

Kyrus only caught the last part of that.  “No diseases?  Oh, good.”  He certainly wasn’t going to ask what he’d missed.

“Come back in several weeks and we’ll do a follow up.”

“Yes.”  In a bakon’s arse he’d come back.

“I’ll just send along a reminder to Ilax the day before, for you.”  Oh, great, I’ll not be able to avoid it.

“You had a tooth going bad.  I’ll check that next time.”

“Thank you.” Light and Dark can I just get out of here?

Things got better after that.  Ilax took him over to the Unity where he got put on the roles as a long-term guest and student, and assigned to work in Honey’s, the ceekit for that part of town.  “You’ll like it,” Ilax said.  “Brakayus is Lainz and he’s the chef there.”

“A Lainz?”

“No, he’s Milar now.  But he was one of your Asses.”

“I... see.”

He also got signed up for snow shovelling and garden tending.

“How am I going to learn how to be a warrior with all this other work?” He asked, trying not to complain.

“You can only work at warrior stuff so long.  The best warrior is a well-trained one in all ways.” Ilax said.  “Besides, after four hours of training, a couple of meditation and a couple more of sit-down schooling to start with is plenty of war training.”

“Eight hours?  Straight?  In a row?”

“Of course not.”  Ilax grinned at him.  “You need time to eat and do your chores don’t you?”

Ilax hung a curtain across the warm alcove for his sleeping privacy, and the cat insisted on sleeping under his nose.

The second day was a lot harder.  Kyrus was handed a black stick taller than he was, banded in iron and told he’d be carrying it in class. He was assigned a running partner named Werfas, a green-stick fighter... a greenie whose staff was perhaps four feet long and painted green, with no iron on it at all.  “Werfas,” Elemfias barked.  Light and Dark the woman has a shouting voice that could tear the feathers off a warbird at twenty paces!  “Take our new bee-eater up the mountain... oh, half a dozen times.”

By the time they’d run up the shovelled paths and floundered a new path, beating it down every time they came, up to the Ancestor stones three times, Kyrus felt like his lungs were going to explode and melt down out his ass.   

As they came back to the school, Werfas... he was a big boy, with an unusually wide face for the typically narrow-featured Milari... He put his green staff across Kyrus’s path to stop him from turning and beginning the run again.

He’d been controlling his urge to cough by his will but the change of pace was like tripping and knocked him straight into a paroxysm.  He had to lean on his staff, coughing hard enough that he spat more than one green gob into the bucket that Werfas had pulled out from next the stairs.  “It’s all right,” he said.  “You’re Lainz and you’ve got to get the desert dust out of your lungs.”

“Y... you aren’t... going to start...” He bent over again, out of air.

“Calling you Snot dragon? Or Slimeheart? Rot guts? or Brick-spitter?  Nah.  Lainz spit and cough more than us Milari.  We’ve got more water in the air up here, don’t need to, even if the air is thinner.  Go ahead and clear that muck out of your lungs.”

Kyrus just shook his head.  Another boy just... saying such stuff instead of seeing him as weak and taking advantage?   

“You didn’t... try to shove me over there.”

“Nope.  Why would I?  Besides, Zon wants you to run when you’re up to it again.”  He set the bucket down and started walking up the path.

“But... that... I’m used to people taking advantage of weaker people...”

“That’s an owner’s kind of idea.  We don’t do that.”

Kyrus was managing to get his breath back, managed to settle in beside Werfas who was still walking quickly for how steep the slope was, even if he wasn’t running.  “You say owner like it’s a dirty word.”

“It is.” Werfas pulled his scarf back up over his nose and mouth.  “You’ve got your wind.  Lets finish this run.”