Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) (22 page)

From across the courtyard, he heard the sound of
heavy footfall as two boys crossed the space and were greeted with, “Seventy-seven,
seventy-eight.”

It only took a heartbeat for realisation burst on Aedan
and Peashot. They sprang from the ground and sprinted across the open courtyard
just as a large group of boys emerged at the other end, also at a full sprint.
The distance closed; it would be tight. Peashot was ahead, but Aedan’s bare
feet moved in a blur as he drew up. The other boys were taller, fierce-looking
contestants that pounded the earth in big strides. Wind hummed in Aedan’s ears
as he leaned forward and threw every last ounce of strength into his legs. He
passed the smaller boy and they shot between the finish markers to the sound
of, “Seventy-nine, eighty!”

His bad leg buckled and he plunged forward,
skidding and tumbling until he came to rest in a panting heap. He was only
dimly conscious of a growing riot of voices behind him. Something about
barefoot and rules. A horrible thought began to grow as one of the race
officials approached him.

“What happened to your shoes?” the official asked.

“I took them off on the last section of the
trail.”

“You were told to keep them on. It was one of the
rules.”

“We were only told that for the swim. Nobody said
anything about the run.”

The official shook his head. “You should have
known. You were meant to keep your shoes and will have to be disqualified. It
means that –”

“Silence!”

The voice was enormous, and quite familiar. The
courtyard hushed instantly. Osric was not shouting, just making himself heard.
Those near him backed away.

“Rules are presented before they are to be obeyed,
not after. Agreed?”

Everyone agreed except the boy who had raised the
objection. Osric fixed his eyes on him. The boy nodded quickly.

“No rule against running barefoot was made known.
Does anyone contest that?”

Nobody contested it. Osric walked away and
conversation resumed.

Aedan hobbled over towards Peashot. There were
several things he wanted to say, many of them barbed. The small boy’s defiant
screen was up, but Aedan had no desire to break it again. Finally, putting his
hand to the tender spot on his neck, Aedan grinned.

“Good shot,” he said, and lurched off to the
barracks.

The nurse removed the last of the bandages and Aedan
stared at the polished brass plate, shocked by his reflection.

“The top of your ear will not regrow I’m afraid. The
hair on the side of your head may, in time. But I doubt it. I think the best
would be to keep your hair a little longer to cover the damaged area.”

Aedan barely heard. He had not expected this. There
were scars that gave a kind of respectability, but this did the exact reverse. A
heaviness descended on him. How could he present himself in daylight? He looked
like a chicken half-plucked and part-mutilated. One of the younger nurses
walked into the room. He turned his head away in embarrassment, keeping the
ruined side hidden from her. The older nurse saw what was happening and
gestured for her young assistant to leave.

“This may be a difficult time for you, Aedan, but
you will be your own worst critic. Nobody will pay it as much attention as you,
and eventually not even you will notice. Besides, you are strong and healthy.
You have much that others don’t.”

On the way back to his dorm, words fluttered
around and behind him – singed, branded, scorched, roasted. Then there was the
innocent question of a child come to visit his father at the barracks: “Daddy,
what happened to that boy’s head? He looks so ugly.” The embarrassment of the
parents was almost more stinging than the curiosity of their child. The nurse,
Aedan was beginning to realise, had not really told him the truth.

The first eighty were back, following a two-day
rest. Aedan had spent most of the time sleeping and reading at Osric’s house –
his leg and ankle were so stiff and sore than he could not walk the day after
the race. He had been looking forward to the company of the others. Now he
dreaded it.

The groups had been rearranged and the only face
he recognised from his original dorm was Peashot’s. The reception from the
others was as bad as he’d feared.

“Wow! What happened to him?”

“You should have kept the bandage.”

“There’s a barber out there who needs to be tried
in court.”

“You forgot to toast the other side.”

“If I had a hog with a face like yours, I’d doc
its tail and – Ouch! Which snivelling son of a …”

Aedan stared in surprise. Peashot faced the big
boy down, his little tube still poised. It was Jemro, a beefy young giant said
to be as mean as he was strong.

For someone of his size, he covered the distance
at an impressive speed. Peashot ducked the first blow and landed one of his own
in a muscle-bound neck before the momentum of the charge carried him to ground.
He received only one stunning punch to the eye. The next stopped short when Aedan
grabbed a handful of blonde hair and tugged.

Jemro bellowed and leapt to his feet, catching Aedan
with a wild backhand that sent him reeling. Aedan’s bad right leg collapsed under
him, but he scrambled to his feet again. He was not afraid of boys like this.

“If you had a hog,” he shouted, “your manners
would make your mother unsure which one to feed on the floor.”

Jemro looked like he did not know exactly what Aedan
meant, but he understood the tone clearly enough. “Nobody insults
me
!”
he yelled, and charged.

Aedan backed away quickly, taking his weight on
his good leg and keeping his eyes locked on Jemro’s until he felt the wall
behind him. As the charge commenced, he narrowed his eyelids to slits and let
his features contort with the anticipation of pain. Jemro would crush him
against the wall – the eagerness in the big boy’s face was plain to see.

Then, when the distance between them was little
over a body’s length, Aedan dropped under the charge and felt the wall shudder with
a meaty thud and a clonk that had the percussive quality of a skull.

Jemro moaned. His trembling knees appeared unable
to reach a decision. Aedan assisted them with a good kick, dropping the bully
in a solid heap. He stepped back and waited, but the oversized boy only cradled
his head and whimpered.

Aedan hadn’t exactly thumped him; it hadn’t been a
fight in the traditional sense, but he didn’t think Jemro would be too eager to
start with him again. The chatter resumed as he walked back. Boys retold their
favourite moments of the encounter in excited voices. Aedan found his bunk. It
was the same one, and Peashot had his too.

“You don’t have to fight my battles,” Peashot
said. “I didn’t ask for your help.”

“I didn’t ask for yours. Why did you shoot him?”

Peashot thought about it. “He just needed
tenderising. When he started speaking like that I had no choice.”

“Why did you think I needed tenderising?” Aedan
asked.

“You reminded me of someone I knew, someone I
owed.”

“And now?”

“No. You’re alright now.”

“Good,” Aedan said feeling his bruised jaw. “I’m
feeling tender enough.”

The next month was one of study. At the end of the
month they would be examined on the knowledge they had acquired. Their characters
would then be reviewed and the final list of twenty names compiled.

The bombardment of information began on the first
day and covered history, law, navigation and cartography, foreign relations,
and war strategy. Giddard drew a few chuckles when he pointed out that the last
two subjects were not intended as a sequence.

Those who could not write sweated with the effort
of retaining information that now streamed from the masters. Giddard and Rodwell
took the classes of history and law respectively, and both proved to be
thoroughly impressive teachers, particularly Giddard. He could hold the whole
lecture hall in silence, retelling ancient chronicles in a way that brought
dead kings to life and stirred the dust of forgotten battles until they raged
again in the minds of his students.

Law was far more interesting than any had expected.
Rodwell, in his piping voice, presented the subject by making people the focus
rather than policies. He was careful to maintain a flow of interesting examples
illustrating how laws were applied to individual situations. Unfortunately he
also maintained a flow of frothy missiles, as those near the front quickly
discovered. It was a curious thing to see boys stampeding into his class only
to fill up from the back.

Aedan began to itch again with a returning hunger
for knowledge, a hunger that he had known back in the Mistyvales when his
mother had been able to teach him without interference. His father had exploded
at them one afternoon, accusing her of turning Aedan against him with her lessons.
By then, Aedan had reached the stage where he was conversant in two languages.
Kalry had also been taught Orunean, and the three of them had often shared long
conversations in the foreign tongue. Clauman, who had always sneered at the
idea of being taught anything by his wife, had seen these gatherings as a
personal attack, as if he were being shown up for his illiteracy, excluded and mocked.
It was during the last of these confrontations when Aedan had stepped in to
defend his mother, and learned to fear his father’s hands. After that, Nessa
had stopped teaching her son during the day and only risked short lessons at
night.

Now, without the looming dread of his father’s wrath,
Aedan’s mind stirred, looked about, and found itself eager. He scribbled notes
as fast as his hand would allow. Once, when the boys reading over his shoulder
began to distract him, he switched to Orunean, and was rewarded with their
frustration and eventual loss of interest.

Classes would end at mid-afternoon, and the boys
could spend the evenings as they chose. Most gathered to discuss and refresh
themselves on what they had been taught during the day, cudgelling their brains
to retain the growing mountain of material. Few could read or write. Some of the
literate ones kept to themselves, revising their notes in private. Others, like
Aedan, would read them out to the groups that quickly formed around them. It
was no labour to him – at last his company was widely sought, even if it was
only for the sake of what he could offer.

Peashot was seldom absent from these groups. Aedan
often noticed him repeating extracts to himself, and imagined his ears to have
the same foxy sharpness as his eyes.

Though they were not quite friends, there was a
growing understanding between them, a growing respect. There were friendlier,
politer boys, but there was something dependable about Peashot that ran deeper
than his manners – which were appalling at all times. Aedan realised it when he
imagined being in another fight. Though he wasn’t sure how, he knew that
Peashot would be the one to stand with him.

Not many in the dormitory could read, so Aedan was
regularly prevailed upon. Jemro objected on the first night, saying he would
smash the mouth of the next person who opened it, because he wanted to sleep.
There was a short lull and then an eruption of voices, individual boys finding
courage in the anonymity of the mass. Jemro was told, among other things, to go
sleep at the farm with the other lazy beasts, to go have a rematch with the
wall, and to go stuff his head into a compost heap and moan there. The upshot
was that he pretended to sleep while Aedan read, repeating sections that some
struggled with and adding a few bits of relevant information gathered from his
own reading.

Some proved to be adept learners, in spite of the
inability to use letters. One boy, Vayle, understood foreign relations in such
depth – his father being a sea merchant – that he was able to explain some
aspects in even more detail than the lecturer. He also seemed to be possessed
of a near-perfect memory, recalling any facts that had been too quick for the
pen. They assumed he was illiterate until he snatched one of Aedan’s more
poorly recorded pages and filled in the blanks. Vayle simply did not need to write
in order to remember.

When it was discovered that Aedan was apprenticed
to the great general himself, he was harried for inside information concerning
the exams, but Osric had foreseen this and forbidden Aedan to contact him until
the exams were over.

The weeks passed and the day approached. A stony-faced
clerk explained how things would proceed. All the exams would be oral. There would
be six rooms, one per exam. The boys would enter each of the rooms individually
where they would be asked a set of questions and their answers would be
evaluated.

The announcement caused an immediate outcry and
panic. What was the sixth topic?

The clerk would tell them nothing more.

Aedan was kept up late the night before the exams
with questions and requests to revise sections. Nobody minded. Even Jemro was
seen to be mouthing a few of the passages.

The big day arrived. It was a dark, icy morning, an iron
sliver of midwinter’s heart. The courtyard was buried under frozen sleet. Boots
stamped constantly. The same clerk instructed the group to line up according to
height. Peashot mumbled something and scraped his way to the front; Aedan was only
a few places behind. Once a boy was called, the rest would not see him again
until they had finished their examinations and were taken to a hall where they
were to wait.

Aedan watched as Peashot was called and led towards
the first exam. The shivering, stamping line watched in silence, but things got
noisy when they realised conversation was not forbidden. Aedan’s turn came
sooner than he had expected. He tried to calm himself as he was led along a
one-walled, open air passage to the first room. An official stopped him and
made him wait several paces short of a closed door. When the door creaked open,
the boy who had stood ahead of him emerged wearing a look of abject shock.

“Next!”

A dart could not have given him a sharper jolt. Aedan
scurried into the room where he was confronted by a large desk, behind which
sat Giddard, his lined face as hard as the morning’s ice, and two clerks who
were dipping quills and preparing to score the new candidate. Aedan suddenly
realised that Giddard was speaking – no – had finished speaking, and was
looking at him, apparently awaiting a response.

“I – I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening properly.”

“Not listening properly? That’s a poor start when
our purpose is to determine if you listened properly for the past month. I
asked your name.”

“My name is uh …” His name. What was it?

Giddard furrowed his brow.

The scribes frowned.

Thoughts scattered like rabbits under a hawk’s
shadow. There would be no chance of recalling anything now, not even a name.
What a way to leave. He would be known as Aedan the nameless.

Ah!

“Aedan, sir. Yes. Aedan. That’s my name. Aedan.”

The clerks frowned again and shook their heads as
they wrote.

“Very well Aedan, I have four questions for you.
Try to answer promptly.” He directed a meaningful look.

“Yes, sir.”