With that, the old man whirled around and disappeared.
FOUR
The next day at nine o’clock, Alder appeared at the door of Wencil’s house. Wencil was standing next to the door, tapping his fingers impatiently. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?”
“To my academy.”
“But I thought this was your—”
“You see, boy, that’s your problem. You think too much. Close your mouth, listen, do what you’re told. That is the way one becomes a warrior.”
“So…uh…should I bring my weapons?”
“You can throw them in a lake for all I care.”
The old man began marching down the street, his cane clacking smartly on the cobblestones. Alder didn’t see the point of martial arts lessons if you didn’t have weapons. So he carried them behind the old man. Besides, he was very proud of all his training gear. He had spent every bit of what little money he had buying the fanciest wooden training weapons available at the academy. They were custom made for him from genuine striped pakka wood by a famous craftsman in another city. He oiled them every night so that they gleamed.
They walked down the High Street, out the north gate, and down the road. Soon they were out in the woods. Wencil was old, but he sure walked fast. Alder was feeling slightly out of breath. Suddenly the old man stopped, clapped his hands, together and turned around.
“Perfect,” he said.
“Where are we?” Alder said.
“In my academy, of course,” the old man said.
Alder looked around. They were in the middle of a stand of ancient kena trees. Beneath them was a fragrant mat of kena needles. It was a beautiful spot. But he didn’t see a building anywhere. “I don’t see it,” Alder said.
“This is it!” The old man spread his hands.
“But…” Alder frowned.
“Let me ask you a question,” the old man said. “Do you think battles happen inside academies? Do you think that knights fight on nice clean straw mats?”
“Well. I guess not.”
“Then why should they train there?”
Alder had never thought about it that way.
The old man looked around. “Brisk out here, isn’t it. Build a fire.”
“Okay.” Alder looked around. There wasn’t much deadfall on the ground to burn. He was going to have to go forage. “Let me go look around for some wood.”
“Why go to all that trouble? You could just burn those.” He pointed at Alder’s collection of beautiful wooden training weapons.
Alder stared. Surely Wencil was joking.
“Hurry up,” Wencil said. “Start the fire. I’m freezing.”
“But…if I burn my training gear, what will I train with?”
“The whole world is a weapon, boy.” Wencil tapped his temple with his finger. “A true knight fights with his mind.”
Alder hesitated. His beautiful weapons gleamed dully in the mottled light. The striped wood looked deep as a river. How could he burn them? He stalled, gathering some tinder and building a little blaze.
“They’re a little long for such a small fire,” Wencil said. “Break them up first.”
Alder had been told a million times that being a Bedoowan knight was all about doing what you were told. So he broke his weapons one by one over his knee and fed them into the fire.
“Ahhhh! That feels great, huh?” Wencil said, warming his hands over the little fire.
Alder said nothing. He couldn’t even speak, he was so angry and hurt. These weapons had represented everything to him. His hope. His future. His soul. His very identity. Without weapons, a Bedoowan knight—even a poor, pathetic trainee—was nothing.
When the fire had burned down to embers, the old man pulled a knife from his belt. It’s handle was intricately carved from silver, and the blade showed signs of great age. “Go to the riverbank,” the old man said. “You will find small trees sticking up out of the water. They are called ‘ipo.’ Do you know what an ipo tree looks like?”
Alder nodded sullenly. They were a runty little trash tree that grew in swampy areas along the river.
“Good. Then go and cut one for me. About this long.” Wencil held his arms out about three and a half feet.
Fifteen minutes later Alder came sloshing back with a piece of ipo wood, his boots full of water. He had been surprised at how hard the wood was to cut.
Just to spite the old man, Alder had chosen the knobbiest, ugliest piece of ipo he could find.
Wencil took the gnarled, homely stick from him, examined it carefully. You’d have thought it was a work of art the way he squinted and pored over it, fingering each minute imperfection.
“You chose well,” he said finally, handing it back to Alder. “Now break it over your knee and throw it in the fire.”
Alder wanted to punch the old man in the face. It had been a huge pain in the neck cutting the wood. And now he wanted him to break it? If he’d wanted firewood, he should have just said so. There were plenty of dead kena branches on the ground between here and the riverbank.
Alder tried to break the wood over his knee. It bent. But it wouldn’t break. Alder grunted and strained, turning red in the face and muttering angrily under his breath.
“Come on, are you that weak?” Wencil said. He sat down on the ground and crossed his feet. “Harder!”
Alder wrestled with the wood. He felt embarrassed and foolish.
“It won’t break!” Alder shouted finally. “It can’t be done.”
The old man cocked his head. “All of that firewood over there,” Wencil said. “How much did you pay for it?”
It took Alder a moment to realize what he meant by “firewood.” The silly old man was talking about Alder’s training weapons, so beautifully made and so lovingly maintained. “Close to a hundred pieces of silver,” Alder said through gritted teeth.
“And yet you broke them all without any great strain.”
Alder flushed. Now he saw what the old man was getting at. This junky, gnarled piece of ipo was stronger than all of those training weapons he’d been so proud of.
“In the old days,” Wencil said, “a Bedoowan knight cut his own piece of ipo on the first day of training. It was expected that he would train with that same piece of ipo for eight, ten, twelve years. If, during that entire decade of training, his weapon broke, it was cause for great shame. He’d chosen unwisely.” Wencil’s lip curled in disgust. “Now we pay others to make our weapons.”
Alder looked sheepishly at the ground.
“Being a Bedoowan knight is not about appearances, boy. Those were pretty pieces of wood. And they might have lasted a year or two. But in the long run, they wouldn’t have served you. To be a Bedoowan knight is to be like this.” He held up the gnarled stick. “A Bedoowan knight serves…not the king, not your commander, certainly not your own ego. A Bedoowan knight serves the realm. He serves the good of all the people in the realm—Bedoowans, Novans, even the despised Milago who toil under the earth to bring out glaze.”
Alder frowned. “But at the academy they say, ‘Novans bow, Milagos serve, Bedoowans rule.’”
“To be a Bedoowan is to be responsible. At all times. Not just for yourself, but for those whom you protect. To wear this”—he pulled back his cloak, revealing the hilt of his sword—“to wear this is to bear a great responsibility. You hold the power of life and death in your hand. It’s not for the faint of heart.”
“I try hard to do what I’m told.”
“Of course. A Bedoowan must do as he’s told.” The old man smiled craftily. “Except when he doesn’t.”
“But…how do you know when not to do what you’re told?”
The old man patted one wrinkled old hand over his heart. “You always know,” he said. “The question is whether you take responsibility for what is right. Or whether you don’t.”
FIVE
For the next six months Alder trained day in and day out. Wencil never took on any more students. He simply
led Alder into the forest and trained him from dawn till dark. There were no chores, no sweeping, no cooking, no fetching things. Just train, train, train.
At first Alder suspected that Wencil was a fraud or just crazy. Whenever he ran into anybody from the academy, that’s exactly what they said about Wencil. He was a quack, a liar, a lunatic, a has-been, a never-was. Some said he wasn’t even a Bedoowan. They had no shortage of insults. Everyone knew Master Horto was the only teacher qualified to instruct anyone in the deepest secrets of Bedoowan knighthood.
And yet Alder saw quickly that Wencil’s teaching was more practical, more…well…real than Master Horto’s. There were no ceremonies in his teaching, no complex formal exercises, no long dancelike routines, no elaborate drills, no arcane terminology. It was simple techniques, repeated over and over and over. And over. And over. And then those techniques were tested in practical, hard, relentless sparring. Unlike at the academy, where sparring was discouraged as too dangerous, too undignified, too “unknightly.”
Alder’s shoulders hurt all the time. His feet were sore. His hands grew calloused. His arms and legs were covered with bruises.
But one day he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and he realized that something had changed. His muscles were stronger. The layer of baby fat that had earned him so many cutting remarks at the academy had started to disappear. Even the shape of his face had subtly changed.
Each day as he dragged himself back to the castle, dirty and tired, he invariably ran into someone from the academy on the way home—often Eman or Neman. At which point he was sure to get teased.
“Nice stick. When are you going to get a real weapon?” “What are you and that crazy old man doing out there? Gathering flowers? Dancing with the fairies? Playing hide-and-seek?” The jokes went on and on.
Alder was too exhausted from his training to even reply. He simply shuffled back to his tiny, windowless cell in the castle, fell into bed, and slept.
One day Wencil said, “Why do you think they took advantage of you at the academy?”
“Because I didn’t have any money?”
Wencil shook his head. “No. It was because you didn’t take responsibility for yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“You showed up every day. You did as you were told. But you left your destiny in the hands of others. You were being lazy.”
“Lazy?” Alder spluttered. “But I worked hard. I did what they told me to!”
“It’s possible to work hard, and yet be lazy.”
Alder squinted, trying to puzzle out Wencil’s meaning. Wencil came out with this sort of infuriatingly confusing statement all the time. “Well…how?”
“If you work hard doing the wrong job, is it really work? Or is it some kind of fakery?”
Alder didn’t know what to say. He had never been one to question things very much.
“But…all the others had money! I didn’t. So they made me work.”
“They made you clean the floor and serve drinks because you let them.”
Alder didn’t understand.
“A Bedoowan knight doesn’t prove himself when things are easy. You prove yourself when things are hard. The ipo tree grows in wet, sandy, bitter soil, soil that’s too miserable for any other tree to grow. It grows slowly and painfully. Many ipo trees simply die and sink under the water. But the ones that make it? The ones that make it are stronger than any other tree. Because they have been tested.”
Alder nodded. He was getting it now. Sort of.
“You are destined for something greater than this.” Wencil pointed his gnarled cane at the castle. “These knights, they strut around, all puffed up with pride because they can tell a handful of Novans and Milago what to do. But this…this is nothing.”
“What do you mean?” Alder had always been taught that the castle was the center of the universe, the most important place on the territory.
“You’ll see,” Wencil said. “There is a great struggle going on in Halla. You’ll be part of it. But to play your part, you must be like the ipo tree.”
“Halla? What’s Halla?”
Wencil spread his arms wide, his cane in one hand. He swept them in a slow circle, taking in the river, the castle, the forest, the dark mouth of the glaze mine—seemingly taking in even the clouds and the suns and the distant, unseen stars. “This,” Wencil said. “Halla is all this.”
Alder looked around. He had never traveled more than a day’s journey on horseback from the place they were standing. It was hard to take what Wencil was saying all that seriously.
“I just want to be a knight,” Alder said.
Wencil laughed. “Of course you do. And for right now, there’s no point in worrying about Halla.”
“So when will I be ready to be a knight?” Alder said.
“Back in my day, you had to undergo an ordeal. A true ordeal. Now the ordeal is just a ritual.”
At the academy every prospective knight had to go through what was called the “Grand Ordeal.” It was not much of an ordeal though. You ran a gauntlet of the other students, who whacked you with padded sticks. The whole thing was over in about five seconds.
“What would a true ordeal be?” Alder said.
“Oh…I would say that going down into the glaze mines, finding a chamber marked with a star and retrieving a special ring—that would probably be the right test for you.”
“The glaze mines! But everyone says Bedoowans die if they go into the mines for more than a few minutes!”
“Well, it wouldn’t be much of an ordeal if you didn’t put your life in danger, would it? Besides, that’s just a tall tale”—Wencil frowned thoughtfully—“I believe.”
Alder swallowed. Was he serious? It made Alder a little mad that Wencil was making fun of him.
“What if I went right this minute?” Alder said.
The old man shrugged as if he didn’t care one way or the other.
“Okay! Fine!” Alder said. “I’m going.”
He started walking down the path that led toward the mouth of the glaze mine. “Don’t try to stop me! I’m really doing it! I’m going now!”
He kept hoping Wencil would stop him. He didn’t really want to be poisoned to death in some dark mine. But Wencil just smiled and waved, then looked up at the sky as if he were wondering whether it might rain.
The path to the mine was about a mile or two long. Plenty of time for Wencil to catch up to him and tell him it was all just a joke. After a couple of minutes Alder paused and looked back. Wencil was nowhere to be seen.
Alder kept walking, as slowly as possible, pausing now and again, pretending to stretch or adjust his pants. But each time he snuck a look back—no Wencil.
And the dark, forbidding mouth of the mine drew closer and closer. There were a series of small hills on the way to the mine. Each time he came into one of the little valleys, he felt better. Plenty of time for this charade to end. And each time he crested a new rise, the black hole grew larger.
As he walked, he thought of all the stories he’d heard about the glaze mines. The Milago were undoubtedly inferior beings to Bedoowan knights, but they did have some kind of strange capacity to withstand the poisonous gases in the mine. Gases that could kill a Bedoowan in a heartbeat.
Or so they said anyway. No Bedoowan had been into a mine for generations. So who could say for certain?
While Alder was having these gloomy thoughts, he came over the final rise before reaching the mine. Alder was pleased to see that there was a small knot of young men standing between him and the mine entrance. They were doing something—though he couldn’t make out what it was. Maybe, he thought, whatever’s happening here will give me a reason not to go into the mine.
As he drew closer, Alder recognized two of the boys. His heart sank. It was Eman and Neman. He had been serving guard duty with them regularly. And they had used every opportunity to torment him. The third boy was obviously a Milago—he had dark hair and the pasty white skin that marke
d him as someone who spent much of his life underground.
Eman had the Milago boy by the collar of his grimy, threadbare shirt. Both he and Neman were much larger than the Milago boy.
“What were you doing sneaking around near the castle?” Eman was saying.
“I wasn’t sneaking!” the boy said. “I was just gathering mushrooms for food!”
Eman pushed the boy into Neman. “Stealing the king’s mushrooms?” Neman said. “Oh, that’s a very serious crime.” He shoved the boy back at Eman.
“Did you just shove me?” Eman said to the boy. “Neman, did you see that? This little Milago just intentionally bumped into a Bedoowan knight! I’m shocked!”
“Hey, guys,” Alder said. “What’s going on?”
Eman and Neman turned. Eman rolled his eyes. “Hey, look who’s here!” he said with a big fake smile. “Thank goodness. We’ve caught a very dangerous Milago rebel, and we may need those scary fighting skills you’ve been picking up out there in the forest with Grandpa Wendy.”
“Wencil,” Alder said. “His name’s Wencil.”
Eman and Neman snickered.
“Whatever,” Eman said. “Anyway, we got it under control, trainee.”
Alder could have kept going. But the mine was scarier than Eman and Neman.
“Please,” the Milago boy said, appealing to Alder. “I didn’t do anything. I was picking mushrooms. Everybody in the village does it. There’s no law against it.”
“Is that true?” Alder said. “He was just picking mushrooms?”
Eman gave Alder a hard look. “I told you, trainee, we got it under control.”
Eman punctuated his speech by giving the much smaller Milago boy a hard shove.
“I don’t know,” Alder said. “To me? Looks like you’re just making trouble with the boy for no reason.”
“Oh, really!” Neman said, smiling coldly. “Let me get this straight, Alder. Are you—a mere trainee—supporting a Milago, over two full-fledged Bedoowan knights?”
Alder cleared his throat. “I, uh…” He could feel his heart pounding in his chest. He thought back to all the speeches Wencil had given about how Bedoowan knights were supposed to be defenders of the poor. “Well, uh, yeah. I guess I’m saying I think you’re just troubling this poor boy for no reason.”