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“I could learn to hate that bell,” Alanna muttered as she gathered up her things. The older two boys laughed and hurried her along to the next class.
To her surprise, this one was different. The boys sat upright in their chairs, looking as if they were interested in what was about to happen. The walls were hung with maps and charts. A board with several large, blank sheets of paper fixed to it stood before the chairs. A box containing sticks of charcoal for drawing on the paper sat on the table beside it.
The teacher entered to friendly greetings. This man was not a priest. He was short and plump, with long brown hair streaked with gray, and a long shaggy beard. His hose bagged at the knee; his tunic was as rumpled as if he had slept in it. He had a tiny, delicate nose and a smiling mouth. Alanna met the man’s large green-brown eyes and smiled in spite of herself. He was the oddest mixture of disarray and good nature she had ever encountered, and she liked him on sight. His name was Sir Myles of Olau.
“Hello,” he greeted her cheerfully. “You must be Alan of Trebond. You’re very hardy to have made it this far the first day. Has anyone said what we try to learn in here?”
Alanna said the first thing that came to her lips. “The only thing I know is that I jump when I’m told to and I have no free time.”
The boys chuckled, and Myles grinned. Alanna blushed. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I wasn’t trying to be pert.”
“It’s all right,” Myles reassured her. “Your life here is going to be difficult. Our Code of Chivalry makes harsh demands.”
“Sir Myles, are you going to start on the Code again?” Jonathan asked. “You know we never agree that it asks too much from us.”
“No, I’m not going to ‘start on’ the Code today,” Myles replied. “For one thing, you boys won’t agree with me until the glamour of being knights and nobles has worn off and you can see the toll our way of life has taken on you. And for another, Duke Gareth has given me to understand that we are somewhat deficient in our coverage of the Bazhir Wars and that he hopes to find us more knowledgeable when next he stops to visit.”
“Sir?” someone asked.
Myles looked at Alanna with a twinkle in his eyes. “I often forget—not everyone is a scholar like me, and I tend to use obscure language. Therefore, to translate—Duke Gareth wants me to go over the Bazhir Wars because he thinks I spent too much time arguing the Code of Chivalry and not enough time on the history of Tortall and the history of warfare—which is what I am supposed to teach you.”
Alanna left the class thinking, something she seldom did seriously.
“Why the frown?” Gary asked, catching up to her. “Don’t you like Myles? I do.”
Startled, Alanna blinked at him. “Oh, no. I liked him a lot. He just seems—”
“Odd,” Alex said dryly. He and Gary seemed to be close friends. “The word you want is ‘odd.’”
“Alex and Myles are always arguing about right and wrong,” Gary explained.
“Actually, he seems very wise,” Alanna said hesitantly. “Not that I know many wise people, but—”
“He’s also the Court drunk,” Alex pointed out. “Come on—before lunch is over and we haven’t eaten.”
After lunch came an hour of philosophy. Alanna almost nodded off to sleep as the teaching priest droned on about duty.
At last Gary took her outside, down to the acres of practice courts and exercise yards behind the palace. Here was the center of training for knighthood. Alanna would spend her afternoons and part of her evenings here, going inside only when it actually rained or snowed—and sometimes not even then. Here she must learn jousting, fighting with weapons such as maces, axes and staffs, archery while standing and while riding, normal riding and trick riding. She must learn to fall, roll, tumble. She would get dirty, tear muscles, bruise herself, break bones. If she withstood it all, if she was stubborn enough and strong enough, she would someday carry a knight’s shield with pride.
Training was endless. Even once a knight had his shield—or her shield—he still worked out in the yards. To get out of shape was to ask for death at the hands of a stranger on a lonely road. As the daughter of a border lord, Alanna knew exactly how important the fighting arts were. Every year Trebond fought off bandits. Occasionally Scanra to the north tried to invade through the Grimhold Mountains, and Trebond was Tortall’s first line of defense.
Alanna could already use a bow and a dagger. She was a skilled tracker and a decent rider, but she quickly learned that the men who taught the pages and squires considered her to be a raw beginner.
She was a raw beginner. Her afternoon began with an hour of push-ups, sit-ups, jumps and twisting exercises. A knight had to be limber to turn and weave quickly.
For the next hour she wore a suit of padded cloth armor as she received her first lessons with a staff. Before she could learn to use a sword, she had to show some mastery of staff fighting. Without the heavy padding she would have broken something that first afternoon. As it was, she learned to stop a blow aimed at her side, and she felt as if she had been kicked by a horse.
Next she learned the basic movement in hand fighting—the fall. She fell, trying to slap the ground as she hit, trying to take her weight on all the right places and creating new bruises whenever she missed or forgot.
The next hour saw her placing a shield on a bruised and aching left arm. She was paired off with a boy with a stout wooden stick. The purpose of this exercise was to teach her how to use the shield as a defense. If she succeeded, she stopped the oncoming blow. If she didn’t, her opponent landed a smarting rap on the part of her she had left exposed. After a while they traded off and she wielded the stick while her partner headed off her attack. This didn’t make her feel any better—since she was new to the use of the stick, her opponent caught every strike she tried.
Feeling cheated, Alanna followed Gary to the next yard. Archery was a little better, but only a little. Because she already knew something about archery, she was permitted to actually string the bow and shoot it. When the master discovered she had a good eye and a better aim, he made her work on the way she stood and the way she held her bow—for an hour.
The last hour of her day’s studies was spent on horseback. Since Alanna had only Chubby to ride, she was assigned one of the many extra horses kept in the royal stables for some of her riding. Her first lesson was in sitting properly, trotting the horse in a circle, bringing him to a gallop, galloping without falling off and halting the horse precisely in front of the master. Because her horse was too large for her and had a hard mouth, Alanna fell off three times. The beast was impossible for her to control, and when she told
the riding master as much, she found herself ordered to report for extra study three nights a week, after the evening meal.
Alanna was staggering with weariness when the distant bell called them inside. She hurried with the others to bathe and change into a clean uniform. By then she was so exhausted she could barely keep her eyes open, but her day wasn’t over. Gary shook her out of a snooze and took her down to the banquet hall. He stationed her beside the kitchen door. From this post she handed plates from the kitchen servants to the pages and accepted dirty plates to hand back into the kitchen.
She dozed off during her meal. Gary steered her to a small library afterward, reminding her of the studying she had to do for the next day. He helped her with the poem, then left her on her own to deal with the mathematics. Alanna fought her way through three of the problems before going to sleep on the desk. A servant found her and roused her just in time for lights-out. She fell into bed and was instantly asleep.
Waking the next morning, Alanna moaned. Every muscle in her body was stiff and sore. She was speckled with large and small bruises. Stiffly she got ready for the new day, wondering if she would live through it.
It was like the day before, only worse. The mathematics master assigned her an additional four problems for that day, plus three more—punishment for the problem she had left undone during her nap the night before. The reading master informed her that since her oral report on the long poem was inadequate, she could put a longer report in writing—for the next day. The master in deportment gave her yet another chapter to read in etiquette and made her practice bows the whole period. The afternoon was hideous. Because she was stiff and aching, Alanna made more mistakes than she had the day before. She found herself with more extra work.
“Face it,” Gary told her kindly. “You’ll never catch up. You just do as much as you can and take the punishments without saying anything. Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t what they’re really trying to teach us—to take plenty and keep our mouths shut.”
