The Tactics classroom was an airy space, helped by the fact it was high up in a corner tower of the Academy’s main group of buildings. Despite being as granite gray as the rest of the rooms, the high windows caught light and air, and the individual desks and chairs for each student were far enough apart not to crowd. This was different from Preparatory, which had crowded them together on sturdy benches that stretched across wide, heavy wooden table-like desks, with endless scratches and marks from bored students and worn-smooth divots for pens, ink, sand and other writing materials.
It meant that, immediately, it became clear to the group of twenty five or so students that Esras, Maoilin, and Enda were a group – and a confident one, as they sat in the front corner of the room, where one of the gently curved walls had been polished flat almost from floor to ceiling.
The cadets found their seats with nervous observation of one another. None of them had seen the ollamh, either standing outside, or in the room, but they remained so quiet that they heard his footsteps approaching up the stairs, only after all of the class had come in.
Their ollamh had black hair streaked with gray, bundled at the base of her neck in a soft knot, and sun-darkened skin cut across with wrinkles. Her face was more like a desert floor than one worn with age, as it seemed to have no expression, but for the piercing of her gray eyes, which looked through you, but for what? To see nothing? To strike you down? She had the heavy build of a fighter, but moved more lightly than their swordplay ollamh had, and said nothing as she walked into the silence and started writing on the great slate.
The majority of the cadets felt terror grip them at the illegible maps of symbols being drawn, but it took Esras only a moment or two to realize they were more complicated, but essentially similar to the ones they had used to map battles and positions at Prep. She drew three groupings, then tucked her chalk in a worn and whitened pocket on her jacket and turned to face the class.
Pointing to the first drawing, she said, “You are trapped on the low ground, while your enemy has the high. Your forces are hemmed in by forest, and the baggage has come too close, weakening your archers and pinning you in place to defend your only source of supplies. If it is destroyed, you are destroyed. Your opponent has the high ground, and heavy horse that far outnumber yours, the mobility to destroy you and then some. Why do you win?”
Silence reigned. Finally, one of the students cleared his throat. “Because you enemy makes a mistake?”
“Wrong,” the ollamh said, her voice even. “You win because it rained the day before.”
She moved to the next set of symbols, far more organized than the first. “You have successfully surprised the enemy while they were gathering supplies, and inflicted a serious defeat. A second force – smaller – has approached and engaged, and also been defeated, but they are able to retreat back to their camp. You have pursued them there, but when you arrive, the camp appears to be unready to fight, and in disarray – but you’ve fallen for this trick before. It is probably an ambush. You withdraw from the camp to consolidate your forces after a long pursuit, but the camp issues a counter-attack, scattering your forces. Why do you lose?”
The pause was shorter this time. “You were over-cautious?”
“Wrong,” she said. “Your forces lacked discipline.”
The next set of symbols was a crowded, narrow mess. “An army vastly larger than yours has invaded your homeland. You met them on the field, and narrowly avoided being overwhelmed. Your retreat was organized, and you have met with reinforcements in a narrow valley, where your forces are concentrated and easy targets for your enemy’s ranged weapons. You and your allies are destroyed, killed to the last soldier, and the enemy marches on. Why do you win?”
Enda answered this time. “I don’t know, ollamh. It seems like a loss.”
“That answer is insufficient,” the ollamh said, again, with an even voice that still seemed to cut Enda. “Only answer if you know the answer.”
“I disagree with the assertion,” Enda said. “It was a loss.”
“Wrong, but an answer,” the ollamh said. “You succeeded in the delaying the enemy long enough for your Capitol to be reinforced for defense.”
The ollamh walked back to the first figure, laying a chalky hand under it. “What battle is this?”
They had returned to longer pauses. Finally, she pointed at Enda. “Uwe Tiarnach at Bottle Hill, during the Founders’ War?”
“Wrong,” she said. “It’s the Riannan at the Falls, during King Loth’s War.” She moved down. “This one?”
“Was it… was it Bagnan? During that… the, uh…”
“No,” she said. “Lord Lonan’s Deception.”
She moved to the third, and before she could ask, Esras tried his luck. “I would imagine that could be a number of battles – the Gap, the Pass into Adineh, there are more than a few that could fit the description as we’ve been given it.”
He could read nothing from her face, except the feeling that he was being read. He felt the start of a sweat breaking out. “But this is one. Which is it?”
“Is it possible to guess correctly?”
“It is.” She didn’t smile – or did she? He doubted it; it was wishful thinking, as she turned to address the whole class. “But does it matter?”
An active silence fell this time, as it was clear she would demand an answer, but…
Somebody finally voiced it, “What do you mean?”
She returned to the first drawing and pointed again. “What is the rain?”
“In terms of tactics,” said somebody Esras decided he was going to have to pay attention to, “the rain is an outside consideration – it can’t be controlled or predicted reliably.”
She moved to the next picture. “What is discipline?”
“Within your control,” piped up another student.
“Is it?” She asked, revealing perhaps the first facial expression of the day when she raised her brows at him. He seemed to recoil, but eked out a, “Well, yes.”
“Do you train? Do you know how long you’ll have the soldiers in your command?”
“It’s more in your control than the rain,” Maoilin said.
She moved to the final picture without acknowledging Maoilin’s answer, so he threw out another one, “That’s not tactics – that’s strategy. The tactics were sound, but the win was based on the overarching goal.”
“And what is your answer?” she asked him. Maoilin’s mouth opened slightly, brows knit, but nothing came out. She turned to the rest of the class. “What is the answer ‘I don’t know’ to your Tactics ollamh?”
One of the cadets who had spoken before – said ‘over-cautious’ as his answer – said, “A…uh… a tactic?”
“Maybe,” she offered, and it was like the room let out a sigh. She turned to Enda, “did you have a goal?”
“I…uh,” Enda had started to answer before he had an answer – an automatic reaction to being singled out – and now he fumbled.
“He did,” she answered for him. “But how big was the goal? Was the goal to say something, to say something different, to not be corrected, to be corrected differently? Was the goal to be praised, to be right, or to start a much longer battle, to evaluate his ollamh and gain more of an understanding than he was being given of how the class would function? How big was your goal with your answers?”
She let them ponder this for a moment, but then went on, moving slowly down the board, over each picture in turn, her statement so brief they were treated to long moments of listening just to her steps.
“This is not a Tactics class.”
They were all very still. Somebody finally twitched – to reach for a book? To ask a question? To double check his schedule?
“A Tactics class would be about small things. You would learn what it means to envelop. How far an arrow flies, how that controls how far your army reaches when it kills. A tactic would be to open the gates to your camp, to force your enemy through a narrow valley, to defend your baggage. But if you do not consider the rain, you will fail. If you do not take into account your enemy and its nature, understand your history and your enemy’s history, you will fail. If you do not know how to move your supplies, you will fail. And you will fail if you don’t know whether to win or lose.”
She stared them down, levelly, the same way you might stare at moving water or a field of flowers, almost as if they weren’t there.
“Shouldn’t…” one of the cadets began quietly, and when her eyes fixed on him, they seemed to grant him some kind of relief, “shouldn’t we always try to win?”
“Yes,” she said. “But you won’t. It will rain. Your baggage will catch up. Your army will break. You will be made to give answers to questions you don’t know the answers to. You will counter with questions and be drawn into traps. You will be outdrawn, outmaneuvered, outfought. Other will be quicker, smarter, bigger. They will have answers you were never given, and it will hurt you not to have them. You will make the right choices and you and all of your soldiers will die and whether you win or lose will be up to people you hate, or don’t know, or never met, far away, who think nothing of you, or everything, or again – nothing.”
She looked them over again, a scythe of a gaze. “Everything is Tactics. One day, you will have Strategy classes, and you can pretend to have control, ideas, goals, and the means to achieve them. But for now, nothing is in your control. Advantages are as fleeting and empty as unfairness. You will march, attack, and live, and march, attack, and die. Your goal is to make more choices than your enemy, because that means you have lived longer than them. Make the choice that fits the moment, hope the moments add up, know that they won’t, and your choices are illusions. Understand how far an arrow flies and how rarely it kills and fire it anyway – that is the point of the arrow but not the point of its firing. Later, you will learn strategy, and logistics, and at some point they will even start to say they’re teaching you command, but everything is Tactics, first, essentially, always, and all the time. Even in your other courses.”
She turned towards the board again, starting to write a symbol key, the tapping chalk instantly undergirded with the sound of dozens of cadets flourishing pen and paper.
Esras was going to start on the symbol key on his own paper, but found himself writing a few short sentences first, his unwilling face pulled into a frown.
Everything is Tactics. Nothing is in your control. Advantage is fleeting.
Well, he would see.
Obviously, Swordplay couldn’t be a book-based class. He had realized that. Yet, something of Dominicus’ father’s words echoed in his head – that this was a school, that he was here to learn – and it seemed entirely wrong to be a school without books. Maybe if he got more books, it would start being less like Hell, and more like a school.
But, obviously, that wouldn’t be swordplay. He could bet that it wouldn’t be Grappling, either. Things had gone so well in History this morning – there were books – and Weaponry had really been a pleasant walk around and a lot of staring at enormous numbers of deadly things and learning where they went in the deadly things closets. Why would Swordplay be any different from Weaponry? Surely, swords were weapons.
Well, he had been warned, hadn’t he?
Two times, thus far, Dominicus had received unsolicited advice from weird Ainjir in positions adjacent to, if not of, authority over him. The first had just been unwelcome, but the second was unwelcome and uncomfortable.
What’s more, the second was right. That meant, he was quickly coming to realize, both were perhaps actually genuine, which made all that worse. He wondered if he was going to have to get used to it.
He wondered if feeling was ever going to return to his limbs.
He wondered if the ollamh (the Ainjir word for skola, except with extra meaning: fuckhead, apparently), were allowed to kill them.
And the sky was so fucking blue.
“Hello, down there? Sally, sally, too tired the boy?”
He wondered if it was a very great sin to think about killing the ollamh.
“Want to go back to see if they’ll let you chop vegetables, instead?”
The ollamh’s grey head popping into view in the obscenely blue sky was an insult to God. He had made both, but whereas the sky’s emptiness revealed its beauty, the ollamh had taken the empty man-shape he had been given and filled it up the personality of several whole assholes.
Dominicus sat up, and everything spun, which delayed him actually getting to his feet long enough, apparently, he deserved to be jabbed in the shoulder with a practice sword. They had already been warned that toying with the swords – treating even the wooden blades as if they were not sharp – would get them expelled from the class. So, apparently, that didn’t apply to the ollamh. Or perhaps Dominicus was now expected to wallow on the ground in pantomime injury, like children playing pretend.
“Come on, now, almost there!”
The rest of the class were laughing, a few of them quite hard. He wished he could see the faces of at least the ones laughing hard, because then he would know who the worst ones were, but didn’t know what would happen if he saw any of them. It was a coin toss, between consuming shame and self-defeating fury.
He was outnumbered here. He knew that. He would always be outnumbered here. He knew that – had known that long before arriving, too.
Back home, he had always been the one to drag Catillia away and say ‘no, no, we’re outnumbered,’ and she was the fool always going back. Now, he was stuck here. He wished he had a Catillia to drag away, but now, in addition to being outnumbered, there was nowhere for him to go.
Dominicus got up, stumbling as he reached his feet, and the laughter increased.
“There we are, boy – as if landing on your ass so many times addled your brains. Now turn–”
Dominicus turned to face ollamh Corin.
“Pick up your… weapon,” ollamh Corin said.
Dominicus walked over to where his practice sword had fallen, flung out of his hand the last time he had been thrown. Bending made him wobbly, but he got it, and walked back, again, to face the ollamh.
“Set.”
Dominicus tried to bend his knees as the ollamh bent his, doing his best to imitate the stance he had, so far, had only seconds to observe before–
“Ha!”
The start call – and Dominicus, knowing only that he knew nothing more than last time about what he was supposed to do, tried stepping in this time. The ollamh laughed, slapped the practice sword out of his grip, then barreled into him, shoulder-first.
Dominicus hit the ground hard, skidding on the grass, but managed to stay sitting upright. He felt the tip of the ollamh’s practice sword resting on his shoulder, against his neck, tapping gently.
“I think we’ve had enough demonstrations of how not to do it,” he said, staring down at Dominicus. “Don’t you?”
How not to do what, exactly? Because he hadn’t recalled being taught anything, yet, but–
Keep your mouth shut. Practice not asking questions.
So he pressed his lips shut and stared up in wonder that shit could stand piled that high.
Noticing the gesture, and perhaps reading the thought behind them, the ollamh raised his brows. He tapped the end of the sword against Dominicus’ cheek, and Dominicus pushed it away.
“How dare you,” the ollamh said, jovially. “I’ve already explained that these are dangerous weapons, and are to be treated as such. Get out.”
Ollamh Corin smiled as Dominicus walked away towards where the class had dumped their bags. Then he turned to the rest of the class, as if Dominicus ceased to exist, at his command. “Some just aren’t cut out for swordplay – it’s an art, a challenge to both mind and body…”
Dominicus, grabbed his things, but had no idea where to go. He didn’t know if he was allowed to leave. No one had explained anything, and still tired from the ridiculous circus of yesterday, he was ready either to scream his defiance at this obvious test of the limits of the word asshole or throw himself off something suitably high that he would be allowed to lie down for a while.
At least he hadn’t thrown up. Barely. The first time ollamh Corin threw him down with an elbow to the stomach bile had burned his throat and tainted his breath and it was then he knew he was not being taught in this class, he was being punished. For what, he didn’t know.
Throwing up would have made it worse, though. The painful seconds swallowing and coughing, wet-eyed, were laughed at instead. Don’t show weakness – Like wolves, they pick off the weak.
Fatigue won out over anger, and he found a tree that seemed far enough away from the class to be ‘out’ to sit under. How did one even ‘get out’ of an outdoor class, stoldi’mus? Technically, he was scheduled for another hour or so of this, so surely sitting here was permissible?
Digging in his bag, he pulled out his ‘Guide’. The Guide, however, had proved useless thus far and was likely useless here, too. Anyway, right now, the Ainjir words rather swam before his eyes.
Thinking, for absolutely no logical reason, that it might be easier, he took out the schedule to look at that, instead. Maybe he was hoping it had somehow changed from the eight times he had checked it this morning, and he was, in fact, not doomed to remain in Swordplay for another hour or more. But not only had it not changed, deciphering the code it was written in had not gotten any easier.
Reduced to watching as he sat, he could see ollamh Corin demonstrate the technique for standing, for holding the sword ready, then patiently walk through the ranks correcting the forms of all the little Ainjir assholes still in his class. They weren’t ready for throwing, apparently.
You have Corin, the tall man in the dorms had said. Swordplay will be difficult for you. Be prepared.
‘For you’ – that was specifically what the tall man had said. Swordplay will be difficult for you. He had thought, this morning, that it was just an average sort of insult, terrifying in its suggestion that all the Ainjir would already know how to wield swords, but no. They stood as idiotically as he had stood. They dropped their weapons when the ollamh slapped the tips with his hand, never mind using his own wooden sword. He poked their feet around and shoved their shoulders and they landed on their asses and he helped them up, the complete futuor a-madra’. Swordplay will be difficult for you.
But yes, thanks to that strange man, he was not as unprepared as he could have been. He still didn’t know his name or what a dorm warden’s duties were – that did seem like something that would be in his Guide, and if it was, he couldn’t find it, because the fucking thing was in order of ancient whims, apparently.
After this morning’s torturous waking ritual, he had assumed this capacity was as some kind of live-in overseer, but maybe he was also some kind of counselor. These could both be true, as everything the officials had so far done seemed meant to torment them and the tantalizing sense that they could somehow prepare for that torment made it worse, didn’t it?
He didn’t even want to be here.
Even in the sunlight, under the tree, this caused a new low of fatigue to roll through his body. This was the first proper rest he had since coming through the gates, and it wasn’t even on-purpose resting. It was fucking dickhead-induced resting.
But dickheads abounded. And only some were his classmates.