Chapter 2-3
1067 Words
Ezhya would be here. At some time, of his own choosing. And I’d deal with it.
“Anything going on?” I asked Veyada.
“Time for training.”
I protested. “But we already had a walk this morning.”
And walk was quite an understatement for the mad scramble up a loose rocky incline with a bag of rocks on my back that he had made me do not once but twice.
“You need to gain more strength. You’re still weak.”
With a sigh, I heaved myself off the couch. It was true that in the last couple of years of my life I had become fairly disgusted with myself at how lazy I had become. With the laziness had come a certain softness of the body, and most of that had left me under Veyada’s training that he’d started after we came back from Tamer. He seemed to be keen to give me the full military treatment. To what aim I didn’t know, but Veyada rarely did anything just for fun.
Thayu assured me that she would be fine, so I went to the bedroom, changed into my outdoor training suit—a body-fitting one-piece, with tough patches on the knees and elbows—and followed Veyada out of the house.
“What are we going to do?”
“We’ll have another wrestling session.”
For the past few weeks, he had seemed quite keen on those. First he had me wrestle inert opponents like bags filled with sand. I was required to punch them, to pick them up and carry them across the room, flip them over my shoulder and lift them above my head.
Then he had switched me to wrestling him.
Veyada was quite tall, but he wasn’t one of those Coldi power machines, mountains of muscle and flesh, like Deyu had become.
He was Coldi however, which meant he was naturally stronger than me.
Or I should say, he was stronger than I had been in my normal human form.
The first time we engaged in a wrestling match, his body had hit mine with the full force of his strength, and I hadn’t fallen over. I had been so surprised by that I’d let him pick me up and slam me onto the mat.
After a number of days of daily sessions, that didn’t happen anymore. These days, our strength was much more evenly matched.
He dragged the mat out of the storage room that normally seemed to hold items for simple maintenance on the vehicles in the courtyard: brushes and dusters to remove desert sand from nooks and crannies, a few rubbery panels, cutting tools and pots of adhesive to repair the caterpillar traction bands.
The wrestling mat was made of a smooth dark material that got very hot in Asto’s unrelenting sunlight and, if anything, my efforts in wrestling Veyada sprang from determination not to end up on the mat with any exposed skin.
We grappled. He tried to push me over and trip me up, but I managed to block him until he left me an opportunity to swing him over my hip onto the mat.
“I win.”
He grinned, getting to his feet. “You’re becoming too good. I have to get you a different teacher.”
“But I am not training to be in the military.” I slapped dust off my suit leg.
Veyada picked up one corner of the mat and I picked up the opposite corner.
A couple of Asha’s people had been watching us. They now went back to whatever they had been doing before.
We took the mat back to the storage room, never quite managing to get it off the ground. The black material was so hot that I had to keep swapping hands.
We dumped the mat in the corner of the room.
“Do you think this is what the military does? Wrestling?” Veyada asked.
“It has to be in the basics of the training, isn’t it?”
On closer consideration, what was the need for wrestling when you had thousands of electronic weapons at your disposal?
Veyada said, “I’ve never been in the military but those who have tell me the first thing a prospective soldier learns is to blindly trust the military structures and associations. Fairly soon after signing up, all recruits get to do something that would kill them if it wasn’t for their new military association. They learn to put their lives in the hands of others. Without that, you never have a military. They don’t start off their training with fighting. Many of them never pick up a weapon.”
“Then why is it that you’re so keen to train me?” Because it couldn’t just be for my health. This went beyond that.
“Do you remember when we were on our mission to Tamer, how we came into the craft that would take us to the planet and you had a tussle with the pilot?” His dark eyes met mine.
I nodded. I remembered that well enough. I remembered the overwhelming urge to attack him, and how I had managed to push the man into the wall, thus winning the confrontation, to my own surprise.
“That is why,” he said.
“Is this to settle dominance disputes? Are there going to be that many?”
“Probably not, but your instinct is firing like that of an adolescent boy. I don’t want you to lose any fights that you don’t need to lose.”
And with Veyada, that could mean anything.
While strolling back into the house, I asked Veyada if he had heard of the house in the valley, and told him that Asha wanted us to move there. And I added, “I’ve agreed, because it’s very nice.”
“You do know it’s not just a house, right?”
“It’s a historic recreation, as far as I can tell.”
“Yes,” he said, in that infuriating way that indicated there was more to it that he wasn’t telling me. “I’m sure we’ll find out a lot more about it.”
“You agree with us going?”
“It’s not up to me to agree or disagree. You’ve already committed.”
“But do you think it’s a stupid move?”
“No. What will happen will happen. But it will be interesting.”
“Can you all just stop being so infuriating? If there is anything I need to know about this move, or about the house, or anything else, can you please be up-front with it and tell me?”
“There isn’t anything. I could speculate on why the house was built, or why Asha wants us there, but it would be nothing but speculation. There are many possible issues. None that stick out to me as important right now.”
Trust your superiors. That was all.
Shut up. Do as you’re told.
- Writer
