Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1)

by Jonathan Renshaw

  The boys’ eyes danced through the racks that lined the walls, singling out weapons that called to them.

  “Perhaps one of you will choose a miniature crossbow or blow-dart.” He looked at Peashot, who dropped his eyes and tucked the tube back into his sleeve.

  Aedan decided it would be unwise to underestimate this man.

  Dun had them sit down on the cold stone floor, and paced as he spoke.

  “Unlike soldiers, marshals are not sent out with the direct purpose of fighting, but the reality is that you will often be opposed in your duties by violence. It is never for you to pick a fight, but if one is unavoidable, you are to win it because the knowledge that marshals carry during their duties is the kind of knowledge to save entire cities. You will be trained by many marshals over the years, each an expert in his weapon. When I say weapon, I expect you are all looking at the sharp and shiny tools around you. What is the biggest problem with all of these?”

  “They can rust?” a large boy offered.

  “A small problem.”

  “Many of them are heavy?”

  “Another small problem.”

  “They can be dropped?”

  “Ah. A big problem. A thundering big problem. Complete dependence on these tools is potential disaster. What then is the solution?”

  “Learn to run really fast,” said Hadley.

  Everyone laughed.

  “Why are you laughing?” Dun demanded. The noise died down. “There is most certainly a good time to run, just as there is a bad time. When the nation has more to gain by your getting away and living than by your standing proud and dying, then you run. Any argument?”

  The boys shook their heads.

  “Good. So, what weapons cannot be dropped?”

  “Fists.”

  “Yes, though not my first choice.”

  “Elbows, knees and feet.”

  “Good. We carry many weapons around with us.” He began to indicate shoulder, elbow, palm, fist, knee, and so on. “But I have left something out. It is the one weapon each of you carries that can defeat anything in this room.”

  Aedan touched his head.

  Dun nodded and motioned to the stacked walls. “We will train you to use all these with perfect standard forms and combinations. But we will never allow you to fall into that lazy confidence in which your mind shuts down and you apply set motions like a donkey circling the mill. You will be taught to think beyond the conventions. Constantly. Everything around you can be used as a weapon to your advantage, even your opponents themselves. As marshals, your first weapon is your mind, and this you will exercise every time you enter these halls. A basic example: Let’s say that one of you is armed with only a staff and is attacked by two soldiers in heavy armour. The unthinking approach would be to stand and hack it out, applying perfect technique, hoping that the staff holds together and that you are fast enough to parry blows from two sides. Now what might a thinking man do?”

  “Run,” Kian reminded him.

  “Fine, but let’s assume you had to defeat them.”

  There was a brief silence. The whirring of thought was almost audible.

  “Men in heavy armour move slowly,” Aedan said. “They are protected, but they are also clumsy and they get tired quickly. I’ve seen a badger kill a snake by dancing around, always just out of range of the strike, waiting for an opportunity.”

  “Good. How could you dodge two at the same time?”

  “Maybe circle them in a way where one always shields you from the other? You’d have to move quickly though.”

  “That is an excellent suggestion, and it happens to be one of the exercises you will be given during the week. There are dozens of possibilities to each encounter, and circling might not always be the best solution given additional factors such as treacherous ground. What is important, though, is that during any encounter your mind is as active as a mouse in the larder. That’s enough talk. Everyone on your feet and follow me.”

  They filed into another large hall that was like the first, only that all the weapons here were wooden or strapped with protective leather, and the floor was covered in an assortment of beams, blocks, sand bags, and wooden constructions of unknown purpose. Ropes and ladders rose to platforms and walkways just under the frighteningly high roof. Mounds of hay made potential falls less than fatal.

  “Break into pairs about the same height,” Dun said, his voice rising to a new level, “and one from each pair collect a sand bag.”

  Aedan and Vayle were roughly the same height. Kian chose Peashot, Lorrimer found another tall boy who was still a head beneath him, and Hadley stepped up to Warton with an easy smile. Warton had no choice.

  “I don’t encourage you to punch freely,” Dun began, when they were all paired up. “The bones in our hands can break more easily than we would like. There are better ways to strike an opponent, but a punch is still the most natural reflex, so you may as well learn to do it right.”

  He demonstrated in slow movements how to begin with stance and to throw not just from the shoulder but from the feet. He paused at various stages in the movement to point out the line of force from ground to target. He showed how to strike with the thumb folded away, fist lined straight, and the wrist tensed to avoid the all-too-easy buckling.

  “Think of the motion as a spear being driven home.”

  Once they had all practiced the movement slowly under his scrutiny and correction, they were told to put some weight and speed into it. It wasn’t long before a few knuckles were skinned. The sandbags had rough surfaces.

  He then showed them the palm punch which he recommended over knuckles, and something he called the thunderslap – a movement that looked like someone throwing a stone and ended with the base of the hand striking the target at numbing speed. Last for the day were the elbow strikes – forward and backward.

  While Dun’s execution was smooth and powerful, the results on the floor were a motley misery. Knuckles and elbows bled owing to poorly aimed, skidding impacts. Every now and then, a boy holding a bag would totter and drop to the ground clutching an arm after his partner had showed more enthusiasm than accuracy. Some demonstrated surprising skill. Hadley and Warton were in equal possession of sturdy limbs, though Hadley’s fluid grace and easy confidence were not to be matched. But even he was breathing hard by the end and showed more than one pink knuckle.

  “Enough. Bags down.”

  The exhausted boys dropped the bags with trembling hands, only too happy to be sent to the safety of their books. “Three laps of the blue course: balance beams, ropes, jump, sandbag-haul, climbing wall, crawl and sprint.”

  They groaned.

  Dun smiled and picked up a short whip. “Anyone need encouragement?”

  The first lap was enough to make them realise that this was a different world to the army course. The beam was round, the ropes smooth, the drop from the platform high and the hay shallow, the wall had grips that all sloped the wrong way, and the sandbags were heavy. Aedan was the last to finish. Resting his leg over the past weeks had eaten away at his fitness. It was obvious he was the weakest in the class.

  As they collapsed onto chairs in the first classroom, they wore a general expression of shock.

  “Ah,” said Giddard, walking in. “I see you’ve had your opening class with Dun. Enjoy the introductory pace while it lasts. In a few weeks you’ll be laughing over these easy days.”

  He seemed unaware of the mute, staring disbelief.

  “You have each been issued with books that you will find in your shelves when you return to your dorms,” he continued. “During the classes, I expect you to take notes. The seven of you who are not yet literate will attend an additional class every night in order to catch up. You will need to work very hard indeed if you wish to progress to second year with your companions. For now, I recommend that you listen and file things away in your minds as best you can.”

  The lesson covered the discovery of gold in the north and the founding of the first
village, later to grow into the great city of Tullenroe. Giddard explored the formation of society, how the freedom from homeland administration was reined in by the need for a perceived cultural stability. Several interesting questions were put to the class, but apart from some soft whimpering, they had little to say.

  Law followed. Rodwell gave a second introduction to the subject, stressing that the detail would never reach that of the full-time legal administrators on the far side of the campus, and recommending deference to them in any legal matter – local, regional or foreign. He then launched into the lesson with passion, spit flying and pelting the first two rows. But neither his shrill voice nor dancing chins were able to draw much response.

  In navigation and cartography the boys were given a demonstration of perspective error when the class was split in half, taken to the tops of two opposing buildings and told to map the ground ahead of them. When they returned to the class, the crude maps were lined up in two rows. In almost every case, the drawings from opposite sides disagreed significantly. Understanding the problem was crucial to the reading of potentially faulty maps, and the drawing of accurate ones.

  Kollis’s love of foreign relations stood in bold contrast to his feelings for domestic ones. He spent a good deal of the lecture glaring at Aedan, challenging him to just open his mouth and provide cause for a whipping. Aedan ignored him. With his skinless knuckles and elbows, he was simply too uncomfortable to bother with the silly man.

  They broke for lunch and this time Peashot came very close to finishing his bowl – a beef-and-lentil stew. He even made it more than halfway through his small barley loaf. Lorrimer was on hand to assist. Little was said at the table as hunger towered supreme. It resulted in unrestrained, squelchy chewing and desperate gulping. Aedan noticed the matron looking around, writing down a few names, no doubt for some remedial classes in table manners. Marshals, as ambassadors, were apparently not permitted to eat like farmyard animals.

  They were given an hour to relax on the central lawns where hundreds of students stretched themselves out in the sun or pursued games across the broad space. They found a shady spot, and before Aedan knew it, someone was kicking him awake. “You’ll be late if you don’t stir.” It was Peashot. The others had already gone. Aedan wobbled to his feet and was barely able to walk. His mind was awake, mostly, but his limbs were still drifting in some gentle dream and wouldn’t respond properly.

  The next class was war strategy. It proved the most interesting of the day and woke him up quickly. Skeet explored the details of the sea attack on Stonehill, the abandoned coastal fortress. The fortress was one that was soaked to its spires in mystery; there were aspects of the defences that still eluded understanding. Speculation, of course, held far more interest than fact, so the boys were altogether caught up in the wondrous strangeness of it all.

  Woodcraft was a new topic for some, but Aedan had to keep from rolling his eyes at the simplicity of the information. His father had taught him well and had him building shelters and rigging snares by age four, tracking by five, and able to navigate and fend for himself comfortably by six. Nevertheless, he found Wildemar to be one of the more fascinating of the masters. He looked rather like a mongoose or a squirrel with his bristling hair, sharp eyes, and movements so fast and unexpected that conversation behind his back was discovered every time.

  Languages surprised them with a re-appearance of Giddard.

  “In this class we will cover the introductions to six new languages that you will all learn with fluency acceptable to ambassadorial conversation. I see by your faces that you consider this to be a lot, and indeed it is far too much for a single class, which is why, after a few months, many classes will be presented in foreign languages. Every master can speak all six proficiently and at least three with native fluency. There is one at the academy – though you are not likely to meet him – who speaks thirty-seven with proficiency and fifteen with native fluency.”

  Mouths gaped.

  “In time you will be allocated days of the week on which only a certain language may be used. Breaching this will result in punishment. We will arrange for you to begin spending dinners with foreign families who are connected to our headquarters. There you will learn not just the language but the manners and finer points of behaviour. As marshals you are to look and sound at home in the courts of any of the six major peoples connected to us by trade or threat.

  “Understand,” said Giddard, clasping his hands before him and leaning back against his desk, “this is not like archery where a slight drift from the centre of the target is expected and compensated for on the second attempt. On foreign soil you cannot afford or correct a slip like ‘I would like to eet your family’. Only one letter is missing, yet an ambassador who makes errors like that is likely to go missing himself.”

  The class was beginning to like Giddard. He had the look of a peach that had spent winter on the tree, but there was a young and ready humour that ran just under the aged surface.

  “Unfortunately, it gets more complicated than just being correct. There are different levels of society and while doing any, shall we say, infiltration work, you will need to understand those levels in order to get the language wrong in the right way.”

  The faces that had lit up at the mention of infiltration now grew puzzled.

  “Let me explain. Think of our own city. Compare ‘Might I trouble you for a draft of water?’ with ‘Could you be swingin’ a chug maybe o’ tha’ there wa’er for us?’ We recognise immediately the different classes. The second request is full of errors from structure to unpronounced consonants, but they are the right kinds of errors, errors a native speaker of that class would make. No native speaker, regardless of class, would have made that first mistake I gave you. That is the kind of error – and there are limitless possibilities of them – to betray a foreigner. Understand?”

  The puzzled expressions faded.

  “Just like a weapon, a language is used in many ways, and you must be comfortable with the basic forms. So pay attention during the social outings. They could one day save your life.

  “Culture, too, is treacherous from subtle tell-tales like approaching someone across a class divide in Lekrau to the mortal offense of moving a hand behind your back during a conversation in Vinterus. In Orunea, people greet with a kiss on the cheek. Try that in Sulea and you’ll have your lips removed. Look one of their married women in the eye and you’ll have your eyes removed too. I’m sure you can understand how diplomatic overtures between those two nations have never met with great success. Neither nation cares much for the ways of the other so negotiations are normally doomed from the outset.

  “The academy exists in part to prevent such disasters. Castath’s walls are not the highest, but we have used knowledge to secure many years of peace. So, with that in mind, let us begin with your first additional language.”

  Giddard launched into the basics of Orunean, the language Aedan’s mother had taught him, the most common second language in Thirna. There were three others who knew the language in the class. Kian, as Aedan had earlier discovered, was a native speaker, having lived most of his life in Rasmun. For them it was like being taught how to crawl.

  The final class of the day was field surgery. The boys’ eyes opened wide as they trickled into a large room filled with medical diagrams, weird models that looked like they belonged inside bodies, strange tools that made the young apprentices uncomfortable, and girls wearing hooded expressions that made them even more so.

  Mistress Gilda, a short, plump woman with a lively, dimpled face bounced to the front of the class and called for attention.

  “Ah, boys, we are so pleased to have you here! Rumours of the dashing new apprentices have been drifting through our section, distracting us horribly. It is so nice to finally meet you. Seeing as you will be spending a lot of time here, I suggest that you all introduce yourselves while I prepare the specimen.”

  The boys’ discomfort soared to alarming levels. They had
individually encountered girls before this, but never twenty of them at once; and those strange, amused looks did not help. Aedan eyed them with open suspicion. Something was afoot. He could feel it.

  Hadley was the first to break ranks and approach the enemy. He bowed with polished gallantry as he gave his name and asked theirs, even managing to say a few idle nothings that produced tinkling laughter.

  Other boys began to shove and show off and laugh loudly to demonstrate they were not insecure or self-conscious, and that they didn’t care what anyone thought of them. They glanced repeatedly at the girls just to make sure that the message was being received.

  Aedan kept very quiet. He was suddenly ashamed. Even though none of the boys had made any more comments about his melted ear and singed temple, he dreaded the attention of the girls. He knew their eyes would wander across to that side of his face with morbid fascination; he knew that many of the other boys would be forgotten by the end of the day, but he would be remembered by all as the burned lizard. He drifted behind his classmates to the back wall where he found Lorrimer trying to shrink away, his great ears burning.

  “Hope they leave us alone,” the tall boy whispered.

  Aedan nodded.

  Many of the others appeared to be having a jolly enough time, some of them drawing together into talkative groups, Hadley’s being the largest. Aedan and Lorrimer looked as uncomfortable as they felt.

  “You two at the back there!” It was Mistress Gilda. Aedan’s gut turned. “I’ll have no one hiding. Oh, oh, you must be Aedan.”

  She bustled forward, caught Aedan by the elbow and dragged him to the front of the crowd.

  “Here girls, this is the one I was telling you about, the one that Sister Edith treated.”

  She turned Aedan so his bad side faced them and lifted the hair. There were a few sharp intakes of breath among the girls.

  “Now do you remember how we discussed the scarring process and how the skin that forms is different to what was there before? This is an excellent example. Can you see how the new skin has a thin and shiny appearance and how there’s been no hair regrowth in this area?”