The conclusion of this chapter, finally! I can't stand fussing with it any more. I hope it works. All of you who are martial-artsy will find the training here pretty pathetic — but Piranha works strictly by improvisation.
It'll probably be a while before chapter 12 comes out, I need to take a little break and work on some other fiction. This blasted story has eaten up two years of my life, and I can't even publish it! (It's been educational though.) I also need to think over the remainder of this monstrosity and see if I can streamline it a bit. It's looking like another 12 to 14 chapters, horribly enough. (At this rate everyone reading this will have wandered off or died long before the finish. Oh well, what can you do.)
Thank you all for your comments, support and patience!
Rayman © UbiSoft Ent.
The rest © Rayfan
The Tormenting of Elly, Part Four
The cabin was fairly large, and Piranha – still grinning rather spookily at Elly, who stood transfixed where he'd left her – shoved the heavy wooden table and chairs out of the way beside the bed and cleared an open space on the floor. Then he returned to stand a few feet away from her and fix her with an evaluative eye.
"Yes," he said, thoughtfully, as she shrank away under his gaze, "Yes, it shouldn't be too hard. You're agile, you've got good coordination, and you're bright. All you need is some confidence."
Elly was literally panting now. She felt as though the air couldn't get down into her lungs, as though her pounding heart would smash through her rib cage at any moment, as though the entire room was closing in around her. Her wide eyes stared at Piranha helplessly. She couldn't speak; she could only faintly shake her head.
"I'm going to show you a few simple moves first, then we'll practice," Piranha said.
He waved at her to back up a few steps. He had a small, restrained, but slightly mischievous smile now that shot through her like an arrow. "Watch," he said.
He must have done some thinking on the subject, for the"moves" he demonstrated were broken down into a series of such simple elements that a five-year-old could have managed them. One was a stance, then a forward push with one hand, followed by the other hand, a little turn of the body, and so on. Added together, the whole sequence could be used to block an incoming opponent. "Okay, Elly, I'll do it again, and you follow along. Slowly now."
Elly tried. But at his first word, her eyes had begun to glaze over. She could hardly force her body to stir, it felt stiff and wooden, barely under her control. At Piranha's insistence, she began to imitate his motions, though she moved dazedly as if hypnotized. He bent forward, stretched out his hands; she did the same, mimicking him right down to his facial expression, as though she were nothing more than a reflection. He talked rapidly as he demonstrated, explaining the technique to her, its purpose, when to use it, what to watch for. She followed his actions, but her honey-coloured eyes were blank. She wasn't taking in a word.
After some repetitions, he got her to perform the sequence on her own. With much prodding and many reminders, eventually she managed to stumble mechanically through it a few times.
"All right," he said at last, going to the far side of the room. "That wasn't too bad, Elly. You see how simple it is? Now comes the fun part. I'm going to run up and attack you, and you deflect my attack with that same routine. I'll run right into your hands and you use my momentum to flip me to your right. I won't be using much force, it'll be easy. Ready?"
At the word "attack," Elly had tensed. As he crouched, ready to run, she turned pale.
"Okay, here goes," he said. And shot towards her at high speed.
Elly gave a little squeak and dropped to the floor, curled in a ball.
Barely in time to keep from falling over her, Piranha windmilled to a halt.
"Elly," he said, after a moment, "What's the problem?"
She only huddled tighter. She didn't move until, with a forcedly patient sigh, he took hold of her arms and hauled her back to her feet.
"Look," he said. "This is only for practice. I promise I won't kill you. Okay? We'll try it slower this time. Just do what I showed you, like this. See? Let's go, and this time, don't collapse."
He put her into position as if setting up a store mannequin and once again went to the far side of he room. He eyed her for a moment. She seemed to be teetering a little, as though not much was holding her up. He crouched. "Take it easy, Elly, there's nothing to worry about. Ready? Go!" And, at about half his previous speed – though still at a run – he came at her.
With a moan, Elly flung up her arms to cover her head and waited for the impact. Piranha shot past her to one side then leapt back in front of her, pulling her hands away from her face. "Stop that! Just do what I showed you!"
"I can't!" Elly cried, at last finding her voice in desperation. But Piranha was already racing across the room back into position. "Piranha! I can't fight!"
"You'd better," he snapped, and lunged forward.
She stood motionless as he charged, her arms dangling. He didn't slow down, his black eyes stayed fixed on her face. She didn't stir. A moment before the collision, he sprang up and flipped in a huge leap over her head and far past her. As his foot touched down on the floor, he twisted and surged again in her direction.
"Elly!" he shouted. "I will hit you! Do something!"
She only hung her head.
Piranha halted a fraction away. He took a step back and looked at her with disgust.
"Is that it, then?" he said. "You won't even try? Some pirate comes at you to cut you in half and you'll just let him do it?"
She lowered her head more, closing her eyes. He sighed again, an impatient huff.
"All right," he said. "All right. That was obviously too big for a first step. We'll take it easier." He snorted, taking hold of her arm. "No unreasonable demands – like forcing you to keep yourself alive."
At last Elly thought she understood why Piranha kept saying they lived in hell. He was about to prove it to her.
The lesson began again. This time, Piranha confined himself only to getting her to move her body around in ways she wasn't used to. He had her do stretching, turning, bending in different directions, and other actions that had nothing obvious to do with fighting. She moved stiffly, nervously, bewildered at the meaninglessness of what she was doing, but as he didn't show any signs of attacking or mention anything about defence, after a time some of the tension faded from her expression. Then he showed her how to fall and roll on the floor and jump up again without hurting herself. Once she caught on, in a tiny unadmitted way she could almost not hate doing that. By the time he ended the long session, she was daring to wonder if she might possibly live through this after all.
But as he was going out the door to start his much-delayed morning rounds through the ship, he told her, "Keep practicing. You should be much better next time I see you." And panic took hold of her again.
Now that Piranha had set himself this task, he seemed to become obsessed. He stopped his brawling in the bar, he didn't wander the ship at night anymore, indeed he could scarcely tear himself away from the cabin. Not only did he stay late in the mornings to work with Elly, and keep her going in the evening long past the point when all she wanted to do was collapse into bed, but he was liable to appear unexpectedly in the middle of the day and put her through her paces once again.
If she had been nervous of him before, now the sight of the ironic little grin that would cross his face when he was about to start another session filled her with despair. It meant that an hour later she would be bruised, aching, and far worse than that, agonizingly embarrassed. He seemed to take a sadistic delight in making her perform strange moves, weirdly graceful or sudden jerky motions that in themselves scared her. He forced her to learn a long series of stretches, bends, runs, sharp turns, flips, falls, dodges, jumps, and rolls, and memorize the sequence until she could go through it perfectly; then made her learn a different one, then another, always adding more difficult stretches and combinations, getting her to use more and more of the room and the objects in it, sometimes making her do quite silly things like jumping onto the bed and bouncing off it again, and simply ignoring any reaction on her part. Day by day, he would add on more varied and complex actions, demanding contortions sometimes that made her wonder if he really didn't realize that a human body couldn't do that. Until, after a while, she found that she could. In fact, she was developing better balance, coordination, and strength, which she hardly noticed until the day he turned the big wooden table onto its side and made her walk slowly along the narrow up-ended rim. To her astonishment she was able to accomplish it quite easily without falling. She had never in her life done anything athletic; indeed, she'd never seen anyone else do anything like that either. The only methods of fighting she'd ever seen depended on sharp or explosive weapons, a small repertoire of crude but efficient techniques, and brute strength; highly skilled training played no part in them. And the pirates certainly weren't about to take time off from drinking and gambling to practice tightrope walking.
For Piranha, although he fretted privately that it was taking forever just to get her up to the point where he could start training her, the preliminaries had moments of interest. In the beginning, he noted, her jumps and rolls and flips and so on were very stiff and awkward — most unlike her movements in unselfconscious moments, which were usually well-controlled, straightforward, with a compact grace. In time, going over and over the moves he taught her, she gradually became less nervous, and as she went through a sequence her motions became less forced, they showed less hesitancy and resistance. Day by day, doing her drills, as she followed her path around the floor it developed into something like a gymnastics routine, one motion flowing into another with a slightly hesitant but smooth suppleness that was quite pretty to see. If Piranha stayed very quiet and still, and she became so absorbed she didn't remember he was watching, she might even whisper a song under her breath to accompany that semi-dance. It was quite an entertainment. That is, until she paused at some point and caught sight of him grinning at her. Then her grace would abruptly vanish, and the next move was liable to land her sprawling on the floor.
When she had gotten so good at her drills that she could run flawlessly through a long sequence of moves that took her all around the room, repeat it any number of times, and also smoothly execute a whole series as he called them out to her — just when she was beginning to feel a faint, deeply repressed suspicion that the body control she was learning might turn out not to be the worst thing that ever had happened to her, he floored her again.
"Okay," he said, grinning like a predator about to sample some still-living snack, "Today you're going to add a partner to your ballet." He held out a plastic dowel he'd picked up somewhere – a long, thin, lightweight stick. "See this? Now remember the right-push you've been practicing? I want to you use it on this guy. Only, do it about ten times as fast, see?" With a mischievous look, he showed her the gesture she'd long practiced of pushing out with her hands and whole body, pivoting a little to the side. But while her motion had been slow and gentle, now she was startled to see the same motion as a fierce thrust to repel an attack.
Elly stared at him, horrified betrayal in her eyes. In all the preoccupation with accomplishing physical maneuvers, she'd almost forgotten about that business of fighting. Now her blood turned to ice. Her eyes fixated on the stick; she couldn't talk.
He put the stick into her hands and made her hold it out, and again demonstrated the simple move he wanted, being careful to do it much less aggressively this time. "It's going to come towards you slowly, you just knock it aside, that's all. Simple, isn't it?"
Elly stood paralyzed as he extracted the stick from her hands again and backed off a little. He eyed her dubiously.
"You get what I mean, Elly? Show me the right-push, the way you've always done it."
Robotically, her hands performed the gesture. But there was that glazed look in her eyes.
"Let's try it," he said. "Just knock it aside." And slowly, without any hint of threat, he slid the dowel through the air towards her as though it were somebody's arm.
It was as unbelievable to Elly as it was to him, that the moment he moved that harmless, completely symbolic enemy in her direction, instead of pushing it away she flopped to the floor with an anguished moan.
Piranha blinked. "What now?"
"Oh," she groaned. "I can't."
"Elly. You can brush aside a stick. I know you can do that."
"Not – not right now."
He closed his eyes, gathering together some shreds of patience. Then he took hold of her arms, as he had often done before, and set her on her feet.
"Elly. Look at this stick. Look at it. Can this hurt you? Even if I hit you with it, it'd just break! Come on, let's try again."
Elly had been staring blankly at the stick. But then at Piranha's words, she recoiled violently.
"No! You can't fight back! You mustn't! They'll kill you!" And she flung herself down again.
Piranha snatched her out of the air before she hit the floor. Instantly she went limp as though struck dead.
"For god's sake, Elly, fighting back — that's the whole point!" he protested.
Her head was moving slowly from side to side, her eyes remote. "No, no, no," she murmured, in a distant, dreaming voice, "Mother..." Her head drooped.
For a moment, Piranha didn't stir, as she hung in his hands. Then he sighed. He hauled her over to the table and dropped her into a chair. She huddled a little, eyes shut.
He sat down himself and put a hand over his face. Not for the first time, he had the feeling he'd plunged into waters far deeper and more mysterious than he'd ever known existed.
Perhaps she was right after all. Perhaps her utter inability to resist was better protection than any degree of fighting skill could ever be. Piranha knew all too well how wrenchingly hard it was to hurt anything so defenseless.
But he had decided to teach her to fight, and she was going to learn.
It wasn't in him to give up on a goal merely because it was impossible. Besides, it had become clear to him that she needed this training, needed it in some way that he never could have imagined when they began.
Beyond that, she wasn't the only one who needed it. Painful as it was, the process was doing something to him, too.
It took more time, everything took time, but with patient repetition and practice of the same old gymnastic sequences, Piranha gradually got Elly accustomed at least to the concept that the routines she had been doing were not completely unrelated to fighting. Although for a couple of days after that awful shock, she had appeared to lose all memory of everything he'd laboriously ground into her head, the routines were so much a part of her by now that despite her panic, after a bit of drilling she was able to pick them up again and get through them in a recognizable fashion. From there, it was a matter of pushing her forward, however delicately. Bit by bit, day by day, he prodded and cajoled and occasionally mildly bullied her into the most minute but cumulative advances. He couldn't drill with her directly – the sight of him approaching, even in slow motion, drove everything out of her head and she would simply give up. But after much practice, eventually she was able raise a hand to ward off the gentle approach of a stick, instead of collapsing. He concocted a vaguely humanoid dummy and forced her to face up to that, while he hid behind it and had it move towards her at snail-like speed. With each new thing, she instantly lost hold of everything she'd ever learned and collapsed back into helplessness; but then, forced to continue, she would revive and add another infinitesimal fraction of progress to that hard-won total.
None of this was accomplished without days when Piranha thought his head might explode. To see her having such unspeakable difficulty with something that came to him with so little effort was beyond frustrating, it approached torture. It was all the more maddening that now and then, in a rare unguarded moment, she might perform those scary moves of defence or attack with a sureness that told him she could learn everything he wanted to teach her; maybe already had. But the moment that ability surfaced, it would be gone again, as though it had frightened itself away.
Elly was perplexed, not to say guilty – given the way she constantly disappointed him – that Piranha's manner to her was becoming so much less abrasive. As though her relentless ineptitude was finally wearing down his rough surface. Even after finishing the last drill of the day, though he looked as weary and exasperated as she felt, he rarely gave way to impatience. But still he remained distant. As he sat at the table before going to bed, face averted from her in his usual silence, Elly couldn't feel at ease. Nevertheless, that awful drowning, blinding black miasma that had stifled all the air out of the room for the past months, she didn't feel that in his presence, either. She didn't know what to make of it. He must be hiding something.
Often they would go to sleep without a word, both of them sunk in their own thoughts. Whatever his might be, Elly's were desperate. Piranha could only be holding himself back with that same violence he had so often turned outward against others. So far, she hadn't managed to push him beyond all endurance. But her apprehension grew day by day, along with her guilty sense of disobedience. He was her master, she ought to do what he wanted her to; but she lived in fear of what he might want next. And of what would happen when, inevitably, she ultimately couldn't do it.
It was one of those rare practice sessions when everything did go well. For once Elly had performed flawlessly against the stick, she had pulled herself together to block the attacking arm of the dummy; miraculously, she had even managed to make some feeble semblance of an attack on it. Piranha, encouraged, decided to get her to stand up to himself without any buffer.
"Just push me," he said. He stood in front of her, his hat, jacket and vest off, looking as un-formidable as he could manage. "That's all, Elly. I'm not going to make a move. Just push me."
She glanced despairingly at her hands as though they'd been jammed onto her body as a prank and she hadn't a clue what to do with them. Miserably, she stood still and gazed at Piranha.
"Gears and grommets, Elly, just push me! You've done it before!"
"But we weren't fighting," she groaned.
"We aren't fighting now!"
"And you were—" She halted abruptly.
His voice dropped to its darkest register. "I was ... not Piranha?"
She lowered her head. He resisted a momentary urge to shake her. He gave a harsh sigh. "Like this," he said. Taking hold of her hands, he raised them up, her arms and body trailing inertly behind like spaghetti. He thrust her hands against his own chest, and then flipped back as though he'd been struck by a cannonball — almost forgetting to let go and nearly dragging her after him.
She recovered her balance as he rolled across the floor and lay there.
After a pause, "Pir-Piranha?"
He glanced up at her. "See what you can do?"
"I didn't do that."
He hopped to his feet. "This time, you will." And stood in front of her again. "Come on, Elly, you know what to do. Let me have it."
She rowed her hands ineffectually. "What if I hurt you?"
He choked back a gasp of laughter. "I wish you'd try! Come on now." And he closed his eyes, put his hands behind him, stood waiting.
There was a long, long pause. The moment was becoming more and more painfully ridiculous.
Then there was a sort of small breathy burst, and he was smacked backwards onto the floor. His lightweight body tumbled halfway to the wall before he stopped himself.
He looked up at her. She was on the floor again, cramped into a tight little knot of anguish, visibly shaking.
He got up and walked over to her. "Elly, are you all right?"
She only quaked harder. Elly rarely cried, but there were tears emerging now from the wrapped-up ball of her body, running out from under the hands clamped over her face, streaming down her arms and puddling on the floor.
"That was very good, Elly," he said, getting down on the floor to whisper close to her hidden face. "You should be proud of yourself."
She moaned in horror. He took hold of her arms to lift her up, but it was impossible to unroll her. "Elly?" he said. "Elly?"
It went on like that for a while. Though he spoke to her softly, pulled at her gently, he couldn't budge her. Those quiet sobs, the tears, the trembling, it was more than he could stand. He'd be hugging her and petting her like a child in a moment.
Forcibly he pulled himself back. He gave her a light pat on the shoulder and retreated to the table, where he sat quietly for the next fifteen minutes, until at last she uncurled herself and sat up, wiping her eyes and sighing. Timidly she glanced in Piranha's direction.
He met her look with a mild, wry smile. "Doing better now?"
"I – I don't know what happened to me... I'm sorry."
"It's all right. Come and sit."
They sat in silence for a little while. Then Piranha said casually, gazing off into the air, "You have talent, you know. You could do this stuff if you wanted to. That was a nice little whack you gave me!"
Elly, blushing painfully, croaked, "I – I'm so sorry–"
He looked at her directly and grinned. "No, no! What you're supposed to say is, 'HA! Take that, you annoying bastard!' " Her face went completely red, and she hid behind her hands. Still grinning, he added, "You know, I think you should actually say it. Go on, say it! 'You-annoying-bastard!' "
Behind her hands, Elly firmly shook her head.
He reached over and touched her arm. "Relax, Elly. Everything's fine. I'm pleased with you, got that? Very pleased. Now look, I have to get ready to leave. Why don't you do those cooling-down exercises, and I'll give you a break for the rest of the day."
She peered through her fingers. He smiled. She gazed at him with those earnest, worried, uncertain golden eyes; then a hesitant smile half-showed behind her hands.
He got up and went to wash and get his armoured vest and jacket and the rest of his equipment. Elly, a bit shakily at first, got up and began the familiar series of practice moves, the stretches, leaps, kicks, rolls, and all the rest of the actions which she instinctively turned into something between a gymnastics routine and pure dance. As she went on, she moved with more ease, with increasing confidence, in fact with more certainty than ever before. The faint humming with which she sometimes accompanied herself became stronger, firmer, and after a little while she was unconsciously singing out loud, a rather slow, melodious song with soft-sounding words in some foreign language.
Piranha, having finished dressing, was pressed up flat against the wall watching her, fascinated. He didn't stir, for fear of attracting her attention. Eventually, though, as she made a turn she noticed him looking at her, and she halted in embarrassment.
"Don't stop," Piranha said. There was a softness to his smile that she hadn't seen in a long time. "That was beautiful, Elly."
"Beautiful?"
"Your dancing. And your singing! You have such a pretty voice! How come I've never heard you sing before?"
She winced. "I didn't mean to —"
He walked towards her. "Where did you learn that song? It has such a strange melody."
"I don't know. It's always been there. I suppose I must have learned it on my home planet. Perhaps my mother. I don't even understand the words."
He said, "Do you know any others?"
"No..."
He looked disappointed. Then smiled a little again. "Maybe one day I could teach you some. From my planet. To hear you sing them with that beautiful voice, that would be... I would like that."
He stood still, abstractedly. Then shook himself a little. He went to one of the wooden chairs and sat down in it backwards, resting his hands on the back and his chin meditatively on his hands. Elly walked up to him, puzzled. He sighed.
"I really miss music, Elly. I can't tell you how much. I miss it like the sea air, the blue mountains, the starry curve of the night sky, all those... things."
"You like singing? The pirates play music and sing sometimes."
"Yeah, when they're drunk! That's not the kind of music I was thinking of."
"What other kinds are there?"
He looked at her with an odd, distant, almost trancelike melancholy. "There are instruments, Elly, that make sounds so sweet they would drop you in your tracks. And when there are dozens of them together..." He closed his eyes. A shadowy anger drifted across his face. "Damn that Anaconda... provincial backwater ... arrogant, ignorant jerk." Elly eyed him nervously; but the anger was gone already, the melancholy was back. As she looked at him, a sense of distance, of stillness, crept over her.
She felt surrounded by a dark softness, the warm, humid air of a planet. It was dusk, she was in a place she'd never been, though it felt utterly natural and familiar — much more so than the harsh, dirty ship that was the only world she knew. A little light breeze startled her; and it was as though she could hear trees rustling, soft sounds overhead and all around her, murmurous voices that reached into her like gentle hands pulling her towards an unremembered past. Her breath caught.
And then there was the faint sound of an instrument, of a soft, distant, whispered birdlike note, far out in the forest. Another echoed it, nearby, hidden in the trees, and then another picked up the tone, far off in a different direction; with all the sounds softened, magnified by the moist night air. Then the three joined together in a little musical phrase as though all were struck at once by the same thought; playing first in unison, then a simple harmony, inexpressibly sweet and stirring, that brought tears to her eyes. And as the phrase ended, from a different direction another, different birdlike instrument called, adding its voice from a long distance; and another, and another, and another...
In front of her, suddenly, he clapped his hands over his face. Elly, jolted out of that world, jolted back into their drab room, took a step back. He was silent, motionless, perhaps he didn't even know she was there; but anything might happen when he opened those eyes. She didn't want to be in their line of fire, she didn't want to see what they might look like when he returned. Quietly she slipped away into the bathroom and shut the door.
And huddled on the cold floor of the shower stall. It was still there in her head, her eyes, her ears, that mystic world, those soft, almost-heard sounds – not quite heard but felt, they still reverberated through her. Tears came to her eyes again.
"No wonder he can't bear to remember," she whispered. "No wonder he—" She wiped her eyes. The unimaginable life he must have lived, this mysterious, shifting creature who was so strange, so incomprehensible to her, and yet — for a moment, right now, she felt he was completely transparent, she understood him in the depths of her own being, even if she didn't know the words for what it was she knew.
She wanted to weep again, for the second time in an hour; for herself, for her own life, for the awful, claustrophobically limited narrowness of it, which for the first time was pitilessly clear to her. And for him too, with his enormous capacity for experience and feeling, to be crushed down into a life in which all experience, and every feeling, could only be a source of anguish.
She didn't go out of the bathroom. Dragged back from that distant place, he might be savage. But... the paralyzing terror she'd had of him for so long, it was gone. He was dangerous, no doubt of that; but she wasn't afraid of him any more. Suddenly she could understand his explosiveness; even feel a flicker of that fury, that agony, that outrage in herself. It had never occurred to her before to feel anger. That she might have a right to feel anger. To feel outrage — that her home world was long lost to her, that she barely remembered her family, that she didn't know her own language, that she had been cheated of her life for no good reason; and that so many thousands of others had been cheated. How many individual tragedies had been created by this ship, how many, each one as harrowing as her own. As his...
It was a startling thought. Fierce though he was, he was more like her than like Anaconda. He was more like her.
When she cautiously emerged from the bathroom, some half an hour later, he was gone. Probably not to return for a day or two, as was usual after any upsetting event. This time, though, she didn't feel the usual relief. She wished after all that she could have seen what his eyes looked like. How they might have looked at her. Whether that dark, whispering forest might have showed through in them.
[End of Chapter 11]