Nothing Left to Lose
Akadias din Starwind, Written by Misty
Posted on Wed, Jun 9, 2010 00:50 am
He analyzed the bargain every way he had ever been taught, but it was one so alien to his past and his present that he could not see how it could truly be just as the Tairen man presented it. There had to be some boundary on each side, and it had to be one that showed a basic level of trust: Theon could not go to Arwyn, might barnacles grow on her bloomers, and declare that he, Theon, was doing Akadias’ work if he was penning it in “his own hand.” That was a crime on both their records, and so, Akadias could not see the hidden catch in this gentleman’s agreement. It bothered him, but so far from the sea, and having never trained to become a Cargomaster, perhaps it was his own fault that he was so easily hornswoggled? He had had his choices, and his path had led him to the blade, and eventually, it would have possibly benefited him to seek to protect a ship as its Master of the Blades. Even if he were not chosen so, he would be a strong addition to the defense of any raker, darter, or soarer, and he had never before doubted that choice. A strong back, a quick mind, an unflinching will – those made a swordsman. Sadly, they didn’t make a master of bargains, and even as he put out his hand to seal the deal, he doubted that it could work out for the better.
A large part of him was, actually, hoping that the deal was false. While unafraid of hard work, toil, frustration and pain, Akadias had discovered a few things that terrified him. One was the constant insistence that he had to forget who he had been, and become some obedient, complacent creature of the Tower, content to live only to forward its ideals, dreams, and aspirations. To lose those last scraps of what it meant to be Atha’an Miere was akin to death: if he did not exist on the ships until he could earn his right to return with honor and in safety, then what life did he have? A borrowed existence that was contingent on rules kept and commandments minded – what life was that compared to the freedom of the stars and sea? As he glanced down at the sheet of paper that Theon handed him, staring again at those fifty-two shapes that made up the cursed alphabet, he felt his fingers clench. The paper wrinkled: Akadias flattened it carefully. If you fell overboard and someone handed you a length of line, you had to trust that it had been well tied off. It was stupidity or survival, and while he had not precisely been stupid in his rebellion – not that he saw it as such, he thought of it as a stance for his own basic humanity – he was coming to grim terms with the fact that his survival rode on the mastery of this new skill.
Bidding the other man farewell abruptly, Akadias turned away. He would honor his end of the bargain until the shorelapper broke his own word, and then…well, then Akadias supposed he would clean the bilges if he had to. The man had treated him like some kind of cawing sea bird, all talk and pestilence, but he had at least not argued that Akadias’ left hand was not meant to write with. Working his right from the remembered pain of lines painstakingly copied in the vain attempt to change a lifetime’s preference, he frowned down at the paper again as he paced the short distance to his own quarters. This seemed too simple, too easy: how could he learn from the exercise of etching these stilted shapes upon parchment? These weren’t even words, merely their smallest parts: ions of words, figments that formed every idea ever birthed through speech, song, or story. He knew enough of them to sing the moronic rhyme that every child knew – the letters in their order. These seemed correct in that sense. Suspicion kept whispering her theories to him as he bent to light the candle in the plain white dish with a chunk of flint and the steel of his belt knife.
He shooed her away, but she wouldn’t leave.
Choosing a stubby pencil from the collection of writing implements he had been given, Akadias sighed. Two pins held the sheet marked by Theon’s neat printing to the wall, and Akadias knew there was little time to be had before all lights must be extinguished. If he must be done by breakfast, and his personal honor insisted he must, then he must begin now. There was no way his unpracticed hand could yield letters as well-formed as the Tairen man’s, and Akadias, his mind glazed over by boredom before he hit the letter “D,” did not honestly try. When he had paired a Z and its minuscule twin, he rolled up the paper and stuffed it casually into a beaten, cloth-covered book. That was the first night. As he laid in his narrow, cramped bed, missing the rolling of the sea acutely, he wondered what the morning would bring.
By the time the breakfast bell had rung, Akadias was certain that Theon did not mean to show up. The night’s work clutched in one damp, perspiring fist, he cursed himself for nine kinds of fool. “The man that trusts a shorehugger is a fool,” he grumbled to himself, anger blossoming in his chest. He should have known better, anyway: the man had already insulted him the once. This had obviously been a false hope – and a false bargain. Why, if the man had been Atha’an Miere, Akadias would have been in the right to demand recompense for their failed – wait, there he was. He was easy to spot because he had the cane and the hobbling gait: whatever had happened to him? Akadias had heard a few rumors, most involving a spectacular fall from a horse and an improperly Healed leg, with the word “healed” earning its capitalized emphasis. The rumor had pinned a Novice as the healer, and Akadias had made a mental note to avoid Novices if he ever gained an injury severe enough to incapacitate. Healing was not a gift he’d ever seen amongst the Windfinders of the vessels he’d lived on: slashes had been sewn up with silk, concussions treated with headache powders, drowning resolved (or not) by the manual inflation of the lungs.
If the girl had been a bit more practical, Akadias supposed, watching Theon hobble toward a table, it would be as if the horse had never thrown him, or so Akadias understood Healing to work. If such a magical panacea existed for channeling, Akadias would let anyone at all apply it. He could picture the scene: being called to Candance Sedai’s office, being told that it had all been a mistake, being sent to the stableyards, then riding across to Illian – well, that part at least would be troublesome, as he did not know how he would afford such a journey. He had heard tales that said the merchant trains hired guardsmen, though, and he might fit that role very well. Hope swelled in his chest, hard enough to hurt, but it was crushed flat as he followed the limping man, tray in one hand and parchment in the other. A nod and a grunt between hasty bites – there was no time for conversation over breakfast – and he took back his work diary. Casting a curious glance over it, he frowned down at the neat ranks of words. The hand bore a passing resemblance to his own, if he were concentrating particularly hard and having good luck coordinating paper and quill and collection of bottles and wiping cloth and…well, it would certainly satisfy Arwyn, would it not?
It did not satisfy Theon.
His brow furrowed as he glanced over Akadias’ slipshod work, the other hand balancing his tray as they leaned agains the wall, screened from prying eyes by the milling queue for the morning meal, the Tairen man voiced his opinion. “It’s good that you have all the letters, but I want you to take more time on your next paper.”
“I don’t see the point in making each letter pretty,” Akadias returned. “You and I bargained for one copy a day – you didn’t say you wanted it to be pretty.” A petty revenge, but it was too difficult to explain the suspicion and the fear, or the nagging guilt he felt now that Theon had upheld his end of the bargain.
“What you give me, I will give you in return. Perhaps I will forge your hand half-heartedly in Arwen’s journal? I wonder if she’d notice…” Thrusting the journal back at him, the Tairen man shot his parting comment back over his shoulder as he limped away, joining a scar-faced male Novice already seated at a small table, “I want something better by tomorrow. No exceptions.” If Akadias had wanted to pursue him (which he did not – he was well aware of the consequences of being caught fooling Arwyn) the animation on the third man’s face would have given him pause. He’d only been here a few hours before he’d heard the rumor that the girls took “pillow-friends.” Was it to be expected that the men did, as well? Distaste curling his lip, Akadias discarded his tray of barely picked-at food. Oatmeal porridge so lumpy you wanted to ask for a knife and fork, salty biscuits without butter, and tea without honey – nothing he cared to eat. Dinner would be little better, and supper meager, but he kept his own counsel on the growling of his stomach.
What he would give for a different kettle of…well, fish! There had been a fish supper one night since his arrival, and his stomach churned miserably at the memory of the travesties visited upon perfectly decent halibut. Breading! Charring! Some green flecks that he had suspected were mold until someone said “oh that’s oregano.” And the worst part had been trying to separate the fish from the icky coating, only to find that they were fused as one! His stomach murmuring the praises of sea-fresh fish layered over a bed of rice, he shook his head. They couldn’t always serve food this horrible – he’d been told the majority of Novices were sent away, not buried in the graveyard due to starvation. Looking back one last time at the laughing men, his eyes narrowed as the Ebou Dari man’s gaze landed on his and laughter rang out again, a fresh scourge caused by loneliness’ leaded quirt.
They’re laughing at me, Akadias realized, and his fingers clenched so tightly in the clothbound book that he would be able to discern separate finger marks when he finally handed it to Arwyn, awaiting the final verdict.
“I’m so happy that you decided to work with me instead of against me,” the Accepted said, flashing him a smile that struck him as cretinous. Was she even daring to consider any possibility of him working against her in the more traditional sense? The stomach churned.
He faked a smile that he hoped was pleasant and blank, and fled.
That night, with the hammer still poised over his head, Akadias tried harder. First with his pencil, being careful to match directions and curves, and then with ink, which, while it did blot and run unexpectedly, was not a total accident. Theon accepted that page without much comment. And as long as he concentrated, Akadias found that it was easier and easier to write these letters: by the end of the first week, he had given up his penciled guidelines and was using just the pen. He still had trouble with the flow of ink from time to time, but nothing so dramatic now as his first attempts had shown. As he wrote his letters each evening, hunched over the table, lifted on his long thighs because the chair was too high and the kneehole too low, his mind chanted a happily murderous litany.
A is for abduction. He reasoned it was the first step, before any of the more colorful treatments he enjoyed picturing, such as that for the letter T – tar. If one took the Tairen man and upended him into a barrel of hot pitch, such as was used to patch the hull, how quickly would he die? Estimating this gave Akadias nearly as many hours of pleasure as the letter N – nails, or the letters C, F, and K. His creativity surprised even himself. “Keel hauling,” “cabbage soup,” and “fork” all had pleasant connotations if you pictured them in tandem with the hateful, complaining Theon.
On the final morning of their bargain, his page in hand, Theon said something different, although there had been plenty of the usual beforehand. “I think it’s time for the next lesson. Meet me in my quarters between Low and Full.”
In reply to A Pact Between Peers[show]/[hide]
Theon stared down at the scattered parchment and smiled. If it weren’t for the chores and the channeling, Theon might actually have been able to appreciate the White Tower. The bookwork – all of the recantations, the histories, the laws, the logic – all of that was so insignificant as to be almost negligible. Ten minutes into a Test that was supposed to last long into Second Low, he’d blotted his parchment, sanded it and gently blew over the dried lettering. Once he’d handed it in, Laraia Sedai regarded it with her pinched face.
Pinched was an appropriate description of Laraia Sedai. She was always looking at everything with a disdainful air, as if she’d suddenly detected an extraordinarily unpleasant smell. He’d met other Aes Sedai who displayed similar characteristics, but Laraia displayed hers, most notably, around men. Theon supposed it should have been strange, because she was of the White Ajah, and when it came to hostilities toward men it seemed to him that the Whites offered the least.
Well, them and the Reds, anyway. Theon could scarcely hold back his shock when – not once, but twice! – he’d received a nod of approval from a Red after he made a courtly leg, and the second came with a reassuring smile.
Not so Laraia Sedai.
“What is this, child?” She asked, her voice hushed.
“. . . it is the test, Laraia Sedai.” Said Theon. “All of the answers to your arithmetical equations are on the sheet, just as requested.”
She sniffed. So many women sniffed in the Tower, Theon found it rather strange. The trait was most prevalent among angry, ancient Aes Sedai, but it was frequently adopted by many of the seemingly younger ones. And, of course, most of the Accepted.
“Yes, I can very well see that.” She quipped. “You will take this . . . this answer sheet into the common room, and you will explain your work. All of it! And be certain, child, that if I am in any way dissatisfied, I will take you over the knee myself.”
Theon moved to return to his seat, and something pinched him. He jumped, nearly tripped, then turned to regard the Aes Sedai coolly.
“Yes, Aes Sedai?”
”You will take this test alone, child.” She declared. “In the back room.”
Theon did not argue. He simply dropped another bow, flourishing with his leg to the best of his ability, and scuttled away, his belongings in tow.
He returned ten minutes later, and Laraia Sedai was hardly pleased. She assigned him fifty more equations to do on his own time – and to be sure he showed his work – and dismissed him off-handedly, clearly at odds with his apparent lack of frustration. He gave her another leg -- his legs were getting much better -- and found a common room near the novice galleries.
Twenty minutes later, somewhere near problem number fourty-seven, the Sea Folk walked in.
“Can I help you?” Asked Theon, never once stopping his furious scribbling.
He watched as the black man set down two peculiar clothbound books beside his own, thick tome, dryly titled Arithmetical Applications in the Practical World. Around him, loose-leaf parchments with dozens upon dozens of mathematical equations – all of them problems derived from some peculiar yet surprisingly effortless numerical practice known as long division, or of its exact opposite, long multiplication. He finished up forty-eight, and decided to sand and blot the rest, scarcely paying attention to the man with the flush on his face.
“I was sent to you to be tutored,” He said gruffly. “In reading.”
“I see.” Theon replied, scooting backward and pushing out the nearest chair. “Well, you certainly don’t seem to have the Dark One’s own luck.”
The jest did not amuse him. Theon couldn’t help but think that very few things amused Akadias, which was, in part, why he so thoroughly enjoyed teasing the man.
“Should we start now, then?” Asked Theon.
The man fidgeted, looking back to the door.
“If you have the time.” He said warily.
“I can make the time.” Said Theon, pushing aside the freshly blotted and sanded parchment atop one of the first to have dried.
Theon looked over the first of the books that Akadias dropped atop the table and immediately recognized it to be a primer of some sort. It was a loathsome thing, all long strings of sentences with pictures to show what they meant. Had he been a man such as Jaryion or Akadias, ignorant of his letters, it would have confused him greatly. A picture of a brown fox ‘zipping over a white fence’ beside the string of strange letters would only have served to aggravate his confusion.
He tossed it aside, letting the clothbound primer slap against the sandalwood desk.
Much more interesting was Akadias’ own book, which was a flimsier contraption, also bound by cloth. Something he suspected that the Tower either produced quickly or bought in great bulk. Within it were hastily scrawled copies of some strange series of pictograms, under which were the letters on the primer. The scrawl was smudged and poor, written as if by someone holding someone else’s hand.
A quick glance at Akadias’ ink smudged hand – his left hand – explained why.
“Were you a swordsman before you came to the Tower?” Asked Theon.
Akadias nodded.
“And you wielded a blade with both hands, as most swordsman do?”
He nodded again.
“If you were forced to choose a hand in which to wield a blade, which one would it be?”
The man arched his eyebrow and looked down at Theon.
“What has that got to do with this?” Asked Akadias.
“Who sent you to me?” Asked Theon.
“Accepted Ar––rghwyn.” He replied, not even bothering to keep the contempt from his voice. “But she said it was Candance Sedai’s suggestion.”
He flinched. Arwen again. Why did that woman haunt him so?
“Likely she thought we’d make a fine pair.” He said grumpily. “Anyway, it’s Candance Sedai who matters. So, just answer the question.”
“I’m backhanded, novice Theon.” The reply was almost a growl. “I would use what shore lappers call my shield-arm.”
“And I suspect that it advantageous to you in swordplay.” Said Theon, as if he had not heard the flustered reply. “Here, it will be the opposite.”
He twisted in his chair and turned the man’s clothbound journal to the last page, pointing at the top left corner of the sheet.
“Most people do everything with one hand, but everyone writes from left to right.” He slid his fingers along the terribly scrawled lines as if in an example.
“If Arwen uses her other hand.” He held up his right hand. “Her sword-hand, let’s call it, then she is teaching you to write as she would write, and therein lies your greatest problem.”
The man looked as if he were stifling a sigh, and cast a glance back toward the door.
“Listen, man.” Said Theon, his voice strained. “We didn't get off to a good start, but there's not much to be done about that now that we're well past the pier. If you have an issue, take it up with Candance Sedai. Otherwise, hear me out.”
He drew himself up, his face somewhat dark. Obviously Akadias cared little for Theon’s words, but neither did he have any desire to pick a fight. At least, not here. Not yet. The Tairen could not help but feel a strange sense of distrust for the Sea Folk. Of dislike. The feelings, as he understood them, were mutual.
“This book is useless.” Said Theon, flipping it over. “Spend no more of your thoughts on this refuse. Before a man can work the rigging, he needs to know his knots. This book would have you raising the masts without a care or thought to the difference between boom and forestay.”
He found it strangely comforting that the otherwise foreign analogy was something that the Sea Folk man intuitively understood. Still, this did not make them friends.
“The bell will soon ring.” Said Akadias.
“Forget the bell.” Said Theon. “Why don’t we make a deal? A bargain, we’ll call it.”
He arched his eyebrow.
“Under what terms?” Asked Akadias.
Theon took his quill and hastily dipped the nib into a jar of alcohol, wiping it easily away on a scrap. Afterward, he took the very same scrap and began to write out the basic letters, each in capital and lowercase form. He spaced them carefully about and drew them almost in exactly the same proportions, creating seven rows in four columns. Every letter he wrote was almost precise enough as to be inhuman. In another life, Theon could have made quite a living, working as a scribe. The last row left two columns vacant.
“This is what you need.” Said Theon. “Keep all thoughts of that primer from your mind, and use this instead as your guide.”
He frowned.
"You're probably aware that these symbols are the whole of our lettering system.” Said Theon. “This is what I will ask of you; follow my instructions and forget all that Arwen has taught you, and in return I will do your work for her class. Every day, before your class with Arwen begins, come to me with the work I have given you. If it is done, I will do all of the work that Arwen has planned in her primer, and I will do it in your hand. You need only pretend to write for her."
Theon smiled smugly as the man’s face became a conglomeration of unreadable emotions. Mostly, he appeared suspicious, as if he were raking his mind for the downside. He took the seat, pouring over the sheet of paper studiously.
“Just this?” He asked incredulously. “One time a day?”
“For now.” Said Theon. “To begin with.”
“And then?” Akadias asked quickly, as if he’d spotted the catch.
“After ten days, I will see which letters you have the most trouble with, and I will give you a different sheet, which you will also do once a day. When you are comfortable writing the letters, we will write them on cards, and you will spend no less than an hour every day in my rooms, memorizing their name and purpose.”
“I see . . .” Said Akadias, mulling it over.
“Is it not better than working with Arwen?” Asked Theon.
“I suppose.”
Theon sighed.
“When this is done, only then will you understand the importance of this . . . thing.” Said Theon, tapping the primer as if in distaste. "But by then, this will be easy and insignificant."
That got the man’s attention, although he looked as if he were weighing out his options. Theon knew that Akadias would have little enough of those, and would come around sooner or later. The deal that he offered was nearly impossible to refuse.
“I give you my word, under the Light, that these sentences over which you now struggle will be as bilge stones to a deckmaster.” Said Theon. “Annoying, perhaps, but not in any way complex.”
After a pause, Akadias nodded.
“Very well.” He said, extending his hand. “I accept.”
Theon pursed his lips, nodding in approval, and shook his hand.
“Good.” Said Theon. “When is your next class with Arwen?”
“Tomorrow.” He replied.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” Said Theon, taking the primer. As if in an afterthought, he blotted and sanded Akadias’ journal. “At breakfast. Take this, and leave it to dry on your desk. Copy the sheet by the end of the night.”
The man grimaced, but nodded, and though he reclaimed his journal with delicate care, there was little in the way of interest on his face. He walked out quickly, and Theon suspected the man was thankful to be away.
That was just as well. He’d been ordered to teach – nobody said either of them had to like it.
