Jabone's Sword (4 page)

"What are you suggesting?" Jestia asked.

"My madra is ruler of the Katabull. The Katabull Nation has many ships which we use to fish with and to trade with the territories and the Jethrik. Why could we not be on one of the ships when next it sails to the territories? My madra killed her first Amalite when she was twelve. I am close to eighteen and have yet to know real combat. I have bested my madra, the greatest fighter who has ever lived, I am ready to test my skill in the real arena. We have all of us been trained to fight and you Jestia are trained in the magic arts as well. Why shouldn't we go to the territories, join with our Kartik brothers there, and go in search of these curs root them out and utterly obliterate them once and for all?"

"Yeah, now we're talking!" Tarius exclaimed. "I have been telling you this ever since we first started to hear the mumblings about the Amalite menace. If they will not let us go with their blessing then we shall go without it."

"I don't know . . ." Jestia started.

"You," Ufalla laughed. "You who run around the countryside whoring yourself out to any swinging dick for a laugh and drinking 'til you puke because you say you're bored, and now when we're talking a real adventure you've got cold feet." She looked at Jabone. "I'm in . . ."

"You . . . You're just a child. We don't need you. We need Jestia she's a witch . . ."

"She's also a whore." Ufalla never hid her disapproval of the way Jestia behaved. Jestia occasionally came by the Katabull Nation when she was on one of her "excursions," and they would go with her to Montero or some other near-by village and the four of them would just hit every pub in the village drinking themselves silly and having a good time 'til Jestia would go off with one man or another and then Ufalla would spend the rest of the night complaining about Jestia ditching them to tryst with someone she didn't even know. "But then perhaps having a whore along will make life easier for you brother."

"Why I oughtah," he raised his fist again and again Jabone pushed him back.

"Who are you calling whore, virgin," Jestia spat at Ufalla.

"I'm pretty sure I was talking to you," Ufalla spat back. To her Jestia was no one special, they'd been playing together and arguing their entire lives. They were friends. It didn't faze Ufalla one bit that Jestia was the princess of the kingdom she lived in. If she didn't want to be called a whore she shouldn't bed any man who walked past her.

"You ugly little toad, you're just jealous because no man would have you," Jestia hissed.

"I don't like men, remember, dumb ass?" Ufalla hissed.

"If no man would have you it's a sure bet that no woman would."

Jabone listened to them with only half an ear, more interested in hearing his madra weave yet another story. This one was about some battle that had taken place here. A small skirmish in which she and Harris and Elis had killed an entire contingent of Amalites by themselves.

He finally had to give up when the argument got so loud that it was a wonder that everyone in the room couldn't hear it.

"Gods, Ufalla! You are such a stupid, wretched little child," Tarius hissed.

"I'm a whole six months younger than Jabone and Jestia. I'm going. If you're all going then I'm going and if you won't let me then I'm going to tell our parents, everyone's parents," Ufalla swore.

"Why shouldn't she go?" Jestia now seemed to be on Ufalla's side which was common for their friendship. At each other's throats and name calling one minute, standing up for one another the next. "She's a better fighter than you are."

Tarius made an angry noise. "She most certainly is not."

"Quiet!" Jabone hissed. He turned away from his madra to look at them. "I am not sneaking away without telling my parents that I am going and neither should any of you. That would be the actions of a child, and if we aren't children why should we act like them? Listen to them, to all of them. They will all try to stop us but when it comes right down to it, we will go with their blessings. These are people who have lived by the sword and they will understand our desire. But perhaps if we can't even get along for a few minutes without fighting we shouldn't even think about going. We have heard these stories our whole life but I wonder if any of you have ever really listened. They didn't win those battles by fighting and arguing with each other. They won them because they worked together, always together, they trusted each other without hesitation. Your parents and my parents fought side by side, taking each other's council and direction, never doubting the others' ability or loyalty. They shaped the world that we have grown up in. A world that didn't have to fear death and annihilation at Amalite hands because they cooperated, not because they bickered amongst themselves like spoiled children."

They all mumbled but agreed that he was right.

* * *

Hestia and Dirk seemed almost relieved at the prospect of sending their middle child to the Jethrik to fight the Amalites. They saw it as her finally taking some real direction. At the very least it got her out of their hair for awhile, maybe even permanently.

Harris and Elis were more upset about their two oldest children leaving home than they were by what they wanted to go do.

Jena, Dustan and Arvon were resigned. Surprisingly, Jabone found that the one kink in his plan turned out to be his madra who he had assumed would be the first one to cave.

"Absolutely not!" she bellowed from where she sat on her throne just outside their dwelling, looking in that moment every bit the monarch that she was.

"But Madra . . ."

"No, I say! No, I absolutely forbid it. There is
no
discussion, Jabone. There is nothing to talk about. You will not go. You won't!"

"I am a grown man, Madra. I can go if I wish and you can't stop me," Jabone said angrily. His madra glared at him in a way that he imagined she had looked at hundreds of men just before she killed them, and he suddenly didn't feel quite so bold.

"You do not want to push that, boy. You do not want to push that at all. You will not go! There is no need for it, the problem is under control. Were the problem not under control then I would go and take care of it myself. I would not send children to do my work. I especially would not send my own child."

"We want to go, Madra.
I
want to go. I
will
go. You can't watch me around the clock. You don't command every ship or every crew in the Kartik. I will make passage one way or the other, with or without you.
I will go
."

She jumped up, quickly covered the distance between them, and stood toe to toe with her much larger son glaring up at him at which point he visibly shrank. "You will not go!" she said, catching and holding his gaze. "I forbid it! I am not just your madra I am your ruler. You will not go." She turned on her heel and walked towards the lake. It was the end of the discussion.

Jabone looked at his other three parents. "She can't do this."

"She's just upset, son," Arvon said.

"We're all upset," Dustan said, and ran crying into their house.

Arvon took a deep breath. "You're our only child, Jabone. It's hard for parents when their children leave and harder still for parents that have no other children."

"Why is she so mad?" Jabone asked Jena. Jena was silent. "Fadra?"
"Because she is Tarius the Black son, she knows she can't really stop you from going and Tarius can't stand anything that she has no control over. She doesn't want you to go, you're going, she can't really stop you, and she knows that, so she's mad."

"But you understand why I want to go?"

"Yes I do. You have my blessing. But it won't be easy to let you go." Arvon walked over and held his son. "I'd better go check on your father."

"Is he mad at me, too?"

"He isn't mad, son, he's worried." Arvon shot a glance at Jena and walked inside.

"Mother?" Jabone asked carefully. At that moment he couldn't be sure what she was thinking or feeling. She just ran over to him and held him. After a moment she moved away and looked up at him.

"Time goes by too fast. I knew this day would come; we all did. Tarius knows, too. It seems like only yesterday that you were born, took your first steps, fought for the first time, and now you're a man. Your madra . . . She taught you to fight, everything she knows, but she never wanted that life for you. You're her baby, our only child; she doesn't want you to go. She never wants you put in danger. And you think only of the glory of it and no matter how much we tell you how awful it is, you won't be prepared for what you'll feel the first time you kill someone. The first time you lose a friend. I know you won't be prepared because I wasn't. I'll tell you something else you don't know, that I probably shouldn't tell you. When we all went to the Amalite and the Jethrik to annihilate the Amalite horde, your madra did not want me to go. She hoped to leave me behind. She tried to tell me how hideous war was. It didn't matter to me then just like it doesn't matter to you now. I went, it was more hideous than I had imagined, but . . . I think what Tarius is forgetting is that if I had to make the same decision today knowing all that I know I would still go.

"Don't be angry with her. She loves you so much she doesn't want you to go. She certainly doesn't want you put into real danger."

"Talk to her, Mother. If you talk to her she'll listen. I don't want to leave with her angry at me."

She smiled at him and kissed his cheek. "You won't leave with her mad at you or you at her. That young man is where I put
my
foot down. I'll go talk to her. You wait here?"

He nodded.

* * *

Jena found Tarius not too surprisingly sitting in their son's favorite spot, crying like a baby. Jena sat beside her and put her arms around her.

"Why is he doing this?" Tarius cried.

"Because he's your son, Tarius, and it's in his blood to fight. There is no fight here . . ."

"I can't bear it, Jena. I can't bear to be separated from him. To not know if he's well or sick, alive or . . ." She couldn't bring herself to even say it. "These kids . . . They have no idea what waits for them there. They've never lived out of this village. Hestia's daughter is a joke. The girl paid no more attention to me than she did to any of her other instructors and she can barely sling steel. Tarius is as careless and reckless as his namesake without the natural gift, the strength, or the size. Ufalla, she's got a talent for steel just like her father, but she doesn't yet have the skill. They've not lived through what I had lived through by the time I was their age. They just don't get it. We fought because we had to. We fought so that they wouldn't have to."

"But they want to, Tarius," Jena said gently. "Our son wants this. He will be miserable if you make him stay here."

"He will be safe."

"True, but were you ever happy being safe?"

"I'm happy now."

"Because you've had that adventure. We made our own way, Tarius, no one handed us our life and said here it is. He wants to make his own way. This is their time, Tarius, and you have to let them—him—have it."
"Is it that easy for you, for all of you to just let go of our son, our only child?"

"We'll never let go of him, Tarius, and no it's not easy for me to watch him go. But I understand why he's going and so, my love, do you."

Tarius nodded. "Fine, but if our son must go then we will go as well . . ."

"He doesn't want us to go with him, Tarius. Jabone wants to be the hero of his own story. He doesn't want to spend his whole life in your rather large, all-encompassing shadow. You have to let him do this and you have to let him do this alone."

"But I don't know how, Jena," Tarius cried. "I don't know how."

* * *

Jabone watched with baited breath as he saw his mothers walking back from the lake. He couldn't see by Tarius's expression what she might be thinking and his Katabull senses had yet to help him in determining her moods.

She walked right up to him, not looking at him but at the ground. "So you're determined to do this thing?"
"Yes Madra."

"In spite of the fact that you are ripping your poor mother's very heart from her chest?" she said, pointing at Jena. He saw Jena pop Tarius in the ribs with her elbow. His madra finally looked up at him and he could see then that she had been crying. "It won't be as easy as you think." He nodded silently. "You are going to a foreign land with foreign ways. True many of the new settlers are Kartik, but most are from the Jethrik and there are still many Amalites there. Their customs are very different from our own. Even now the Katabull are barely tolerated. It is hard to wipe out the prejudices of many generations in one. Living a soldier's life . . . it isn't easy. When it rains you will get wet. When it's cold . . . and it gets very cold there, you will be cold. When it's hot you will be hot. Hunger and pain will become your constant companions and people you care for . . . they will die, and you will watch their blood spill into the earth. Both my father and your mother's father died in the Jethrik at the hands of the Amalite scum." She spat. "Do not, I pray of you my son, make us grieve for you as well."

She threw her arms around his neck then and held him tightly. Jabone felt the sting of his own tears. "I will not fail you, Madra. I will make you proud to call me son."

She kissed him gently on the lips then stood back and looked at his face. "I was proud to call you son on the day that you were born, and I will be proud on the day that I die, just take care that you make sure that I go long before you." She released him and walked off towards the house. To his memory his madra had never cried openly in front of him. Jena looked up at him and took his hand. Her own tears fell freely now.

"You have to understand, this is the hardest thing we've ever had to do." Her voice broke on a sob and he took her into his arms and held her. His resolve to leave home weakening with every tear his mother shed.

* * *

It seemed to Jabone that in the months that followed, his madra and fadra, Harris and Radkin and Rimmy were trying to beat them completely to death. They called it training, but Jabone called it sadism.