Chapter 21: Growing Pains (Angharad)
(~***~)
A large group of villagers was spread out between carefully pruned rows of bamboo when the children arrived at the 'self-defense training' they'd been invited to. They stood silently, waiting for instructions to begin. The elf and the dwarf followed their new housemates to take their places in the formation, picking up wooden staffs from a cart on their way in. They mimicked the other children, putting their staffs on the ground in front of them and standing quietly.
"What do we do?" Angharad whispered to the boy who had recognized them earlier.
"Just follow along," he replied, annoyed. It should be obvious once they started, he thought. Ginnar shrugged at Angharad and watched. Soon enough, the exercise did become apparent.
At the front of each section of villagers, a leader stood where they could easily be seen. One of the leaders hit a hollow length of bamboo, setting a rhythm, and they began demonstrating a series of movements in a unison that the elf thoroughly appreciated. She and Ginnar tried to follow along as best they could. It was clear most of the people here were accustomed to this. They all moved together – quietly, in this hidden place.
They patted their hands down their arms and their legs. They swung their torsos, letting their hands slap their sides. They widened their stance and shifted their weight from one bent leg to the other, moving their arms through the air in a motion that reminded Angharad of a tree's branches swaying in the wind. She loved this. This was so relaxing. Beside her, Ginnar was getting bored.
"What are we defending ourselves from, a stiff breeze?" he grumbled under his breath. Angharad glared at him to hush. To his relief, the leaders started to speed things up a bit. It seemed that had only been a warmup.
They began to move through a series of faster movements, each ending in a hard pose. This Ginnar could get behind. They extended one fist and then the other, holding the opposite one at their sides. Raised one arm, then the other, then both up and pushing down and out. They were mostly crouching – a wide stance with bent knees, though they moved from one side to the other from time to time. Angharad still didn't understand why this was self-defense.
It began to make sense when the leaders paused and started taking pairs of children or adults out of the crowd. The leaders demonstrated how each motion could be used as a strike or a block. Then they had the pairs practice striking and blocking against each other.
"Oh I get it now," she whispered to Ginnar.
A teacher nearby heard her whisper and pointed to the two strange newcomers, indicating that they should come to the front and try it. The teacher whispered to each of them a few tips about adjusting for opponents with different heights, then watched them as they took turns trying to hit each other or keep themselves from being hit.
"Ginnar!" Angharad whisper-growled to him after the fifth he walloped her on the forearm. "We are just practicing. You do not have to hit me like I am a sword on an anvil." The teacher interrupted them anyway.
"Pretty good first time," she whispered to them. "You're fast, but you're too gentle. Don't be scared to hit him, he won't get hurt. You won't learn just tapping," she said to Angharad. Ginnar stuck out his tongue at her where the teacher couldn't see.
"You're strong, boy. But you move like a machine. You need more flow. The motions aren't separate, they move from one into the next," she told Ginnar. Angharad made a face back at him behind her back. The teacher sent them back into the crowd, just in time for the next exercise.
This time everyone picked up their staffs. As they moved them from position to position, Angharad understood the purpose better. Each position was good for a strike or a block, and this is how you went from one to the next. She was starting to get excited. This was fun.
The teacher paired them with other students this time, matching them by height. Angharad practiced with the boy who had recognized them. Ginnar, with a wiry girl from the orphan's house who the teacher knew would take the redheaded boy's heavy strikes as an invitation to give as good as she got.
Angharad's sparring partner put his fist against a flat hand and bowed to her. She mimicked the motion, hoping she'd get a chance to ask what it meant later. They practiced the strikes and blocks mechanically at first, along with those around them. Then the teacher returned and encouraged them to try in real time.
It was soon apparent why they had been matched. The boy was fast. He grinned as he began, raining quick blows down on Angharad, expecting her to be too shocked to respond, as most of his new opponents were. To his surprise, the pale girl met him blow for blow, then turned back on him and hit him with a rapid sequence of strikes that made him work at fending her off, for once. They paused and he looked at her with wide eyes. The teacher smiled at the boy and said,
"It looks like you have company now, 'Lightning'. Don't sulk. You can't hone a talent without a challenge. The two of you are both fast. You'll make each other better," she said with a nod, before instructing them to go again. The boy scoffed and gave Angharad a curious look, eyeing her ears.
"The soldiers on the road were saying the two of you escaped from the menagerie. Are you even human?" he asked, suspicious. They'd heard about the Emperor's garden of oddities even in the outer provinces, the Emperor had made sure. It showed great strength and wealth to be able to hold so many magical beings captive. The boy had never met anyone as fast as he was before. It was his special talent.
"No," Angharad admitted. "I'm an elf. We're… not from here. But we can learn together. My father fought alongside humans in a big war in the West. A human was one of his dearest friends."
"Huh," the boy said, a bit skeptical. He didn't like sharing his special skill, but he'd heard the teacher. She was usually pretty smart. If practicing with the girl could make him a better fighter, that would be fine. "Let's see what you're made of then, 'elf'"
"Alright, let's do that," Angharad replied, grinning at him in what she hoped was a friendly challenge. They made a few more passes at each other, moving past the other students in a blur. The teacher corrected their stances a few times in between.
"You're good at this," Angharad said to the boy. He'd managed to give her a stiff smack on the arm that last time.
"Yeah, I've been doing it a while," he shrugged, trying not to act too eager about the compliment. "I want to join the fighting rebels when I'm old enough."
"Oh, they won't let us help?" Angharad asked. She sounded disappointed to him. The boy just shook his head. He was sympathetic. He was impatient to join, too. (She was still going to look like a child to them for another two decades, she knew. She worried she'd never get to help before her parents arrived.)
The teacher rejoined them, giving them pointers again. To Angharad she said,
"Good first day. Pay attention when we do positions tomorrow. You have good instincts, but your form needs work. And you need more grounding. Can I lift you?" the teacher asked. Angharad shrugged a 'yes', not knowing what that was about.
The teacher put her hands on the girl's hips and lifted her, trying to understand what she was seeing. This kid floated over the ground. She was shocked at how light the girl was – and they were almost the same height!
"I see," the teacher said. "You're really light. We'll have to think about how to work with that. Good for some things. Bad for others."
And with that, exercise time was over. Many of the children ran off eagerly. This was fine but breakfast was so much better. But Angharad wished she could stay. This was even better than dance. She wanted to do this all day, every day, forever.
"That was amazing," she said to Ginnar, who grunted. It was fun to learn to fight. But did it need to be so early?
He was happier when they had some food in front of them, although the meal was smaller than he might have liked. He wasn't going to complain. He could see how thin these people looked.
Over their breakfast, the children wanted to know about the newcomers. The girl who had sparred with Ginnar was whispering to a few others, when she called out,
"Hey! Redhead! What's your name, anyway?" Ginnar told her, but she gave him a weird look. "That's too hard. I'll just call you Rock. You hit like one!"
"Hmmph," the dwarf grumbled. Dwarfs did not usually go for nicknames, be he'd noticed a lot of the children around here had them. He'd been pretty sure he heard the teacher call the girl by a word he thought meant "cloud". If they were going to pick one, "rock" was a good enough name for a dwarf. [1]
"Fine," the dwarf conceded. "But I don't know why they call you 'cloud' when you hit back like an iron bar. Thundercloud, maybe." The girl grinned at him and chortled. She'd like being paired up with Rock-boy. The other kids usually complained that she was too rough.
"What about these two?" she said, pointing at Angharad and her sparring partner.
"East lightning and West lightning!" she joked. "You two go fast!" The boy called Lightning scowled. That was his name. He was the fast one.
"I already have an Eastron name, though," Angharad said politely, noticing her sparring partner's displeasure. "They call me Anhe."
"Peaceful water lily?" Lightning said with skepticism. She should have been called 'whirlwind'. Whoever thought she was peaceful? "Who gave you that?"
Ginnar was starting to have fun. It was nice to be with other children again.
"A green snake demon the size of a house gave her that name!" he crowed. The other children shrieked with surprise and demanded that their new friends Lily and Rock tell them everything.
(~***~)
Angharad and Ginnar followed the orphan herd to a big outdoor kitchen, where they all squatted in a circle around a few gigantic bowls.
"What are we doing?" Angharad asked, looking around impatiently. Nothing was happening.
"It's chores," said Cloud. "Everyone in the village has chores, including us. It's rice day."
All the children groaned. Angharad was about to ask what that meant when a few grownups came and handed out sacks. They left and came back with huge bags of rice, which they dumped into the bowls. The children started sifting through the rice.
"We have to pick all the little stones and stuff out," Cloud explained. "The faster we finish the sooner we can go to school."
Angharad and Ginnar copied the other children, grabbing a handful of rice at a time, picking out any stones, sticks, or husks, and dumping it into their sacks. Angharad looked at the mountain of rice they had to sort through and understood why the children had groaned. She'd never had to do chores like this in Valinor, she thought, feeling annoyed. The other kids were going much faster than them, she realized. She tried to speed up. Maybe it was less boring if it was like a game – who could sort through the biggest sack of rice? Not that she was excited about what they got to do afterward.
"You want to go to school?" she asked skeptically.
"Of course," said Lightning. "Do you want to be ignorant? The Dashing King says all the nobles want us to be as stupid as possible, so we're easier to trick. I'm not gonna let them trick me." The other children made noises of agreement, never looking up from their handfuls of rice.
"What do you study?" Ginnar asked. The children started calling out answers – history, writing, numbers, how to deal with money without getting cheated…
Angharad stared into the dry rice in her hand, feeling frustrated. That was well enough for these humans, but she didn't need to know any of this. She was going home to Valinor as soon as her parents came for her. Why should she learn the history of the Far East? Or calligraphy in the tricky Eastron characters? She knew enough to speak to people now. What more did she need? It would all be useless for the rest of her long life once she left. Everything these children chatted about was irrelevant to her.
She was thinking about their morning training. That's what she wanted to do – more of that. She wanted to learn how to fight and help defeat the Emperor and punish people like the Collector. The thought haunted her all the rest of the day.
The classroom was an open-air building right next to the training ground. As a grownup droned on about this and that Emperor from ages past, Angharad watched out the window at the rebel fighters training with knives, spears, bows, and even swords. She would give anything to go join them. Instead, she thought about what the instructor had told her that morning about where she needed work. There were some people practicing with staffs and spears. She decided to watch their form.
Ginnar could tell Angharad was not paying attention. He sympathized. He was hoping these parents she promised were coming would help him get home to his own people. If he could manage that, he would have limited use for Eastern history and language study as well. He supposed he could get involved in the jade and turquoise trades now. And the money bit, he paid attention to. Business was not so different here and at home. Plus, he didn't want to make waves. He wasn't entirely clear on why they were being welcomed so easily, which made him nervous. They had nowhere else to go and they were being hunted by a cruel ruler, so he figured they should be on good behavior.
Angharad floated through the rest of the day with her head in the clouds. So many of her family's most prized stories were about their brave deeds as warriors fighting against evil. She imagined herself joining that tradition now. She felt so much fury when she thought about the Emperor, the Collector, and especially that betrayer Eaben. She wanted to crush them. These other children were so young – five or eight or twelve years old. Maybe if she could tell the Dashing King how old she really was, and she could show him how well she could fight, he'd let her contribute.
At supper Ginnar engaged with the orphan children, trading stories and jokes until they were all comfortable with each other. Angharad was quiet. She didn't listen to the conversation. She didn't learn about their peers or share anything about herself. Ginnar was starting to get annoyed with her. She seemed to think their inclusion was guaranteed. That these random humans helping two foreign children of a different race, even while they were half-starving themselves, was obvious.
Ginnar knew what it was to be hungry. The dwarfs of the Glittering Caves had had more than one lean winter in the last few years. He wouldn't have been in this situation at all if that hadn't forced them into unfamiliar territory. If a few human refugee children had shown up on their doorstep they might have helped them out for a little while out of pity. But they would not have kept them and fed them indefinitely. In this world of men, they would need allies. But the elf was oblivious. She was picking at her food although it was only half-eaten. Unbelievable, while everyone else was hungry.
"Are you going to eat that?" he asked her, hitting her with an elbow.
"Hmm? What? Oh, this? No, I am finished," she said absentmindedly.
"Give it to someone else, then," he growled at her.
Angharad snapped out of her daydream and looked at her friend. He sounded upset.
"Do you want it?" she asked him. She didn't know why he didn't just ask for it. He was usually so direct.
"Uugh," Ginnar scoffed at her and took the remains of her already meager meal and held it up at their table.
"She isn't up for eating the rest, so who does it go to?" he asked the teenaged girl that appeared to be the leader of this rabble when the grownups were absent.
The girl looked at the food hungrily, but she knew she shouldn't claim it for herself. She pointed down the table at a small boy with dark circles under his eyes.
"He's been sick lately," she said. "He could use the extra the most." The other children didn't argue, although it was plain that their eyes followed the bowl down the table.
Ginnar looked at Angharad, hoping she'd caught on. She was looking at a stand of bamboo waving in the wind.
On the way back to the orphans' house Ginnar pulled Angharad aside to confront her.
"Will you pay attention? The people here are in a bad way and they are helping us for nothing. Do you think they will let us stay if we slack off on work and waste food during a famine?" he asked her, frustrated. Did she not know anything?
"What are you talking about? We are going to help them rebel against the Emperor, are we not? We are allies already," Angharad retorted.
"We are a couple of children that they have sent to the orphans' house, not a pair of seasoned warriors who will turn the tide in battle for them," he scoffed. "What help do you expect to give them? Other than the chores all the young ones do."
"I am going to show the Dashing King we are not like human children. We can help, I know we can," she insisted.
"Ridiculous elf!" Ginnar almost shouted at her. "If you know what is good for you you will not be so careless with your meals and at least pretend to pay attention during class. Be respectful!"
"I do not need those classes, and neither do you! They will be useless when we go home," she hissed back at him. "And why do you keep going on about food? Humans always eat so much food. There is always more than is necessary."
Ginnar looked at her in astonishment. "How little do you need to eat? Immortals! We had half a breakfast, tea, and a pittance of bean curd over rice porridge all day! I am hungry all the time and so is everyone else here! Did you never think to tell them to give you less so those who need it can have it?"
Angharad's irritation gave way to surprise. She turned over her memories of the day in her mind. The afternoon cup of tea had suited her fine. But the mortals around her, with their thin arms and pinched faces, had stared into their cups with stifled sighs. She could remember Ginnar being given extra meat in the menagerie as some sort of special dwarf diet. And she could remember what it felt like to be hungry after three days alone in the ocean. It had hurt.
"I did not notice what a hardship it is for you, I am sorry. Everyone has been giving me more than I need since I arrived. I did not think," the elf stuttered, feeling embarrassed.
"Well do think. Tell the cooks what you actually need and take no more than that. Or even better, take a little less and join the rest of us!" Ginnar fumed at her. "You looked like an ungrateful brat poking at your food while everyone else was wanting for more."
"I said I am sorry! I will tell them in the morning, I promise," Angharad told Ginnar.
"You had better," he shot back at her. "If you are not careful you are going to end up on your own. I am not going to go with you if they send you away for being worse than useless."
He stomped into the orphans' house with clenched fists. Angharad followed him, trying to think of how else she could fix it, only to be rebuffed again when they got there.
"There are extra beds, if nothing else," he told her. "We do not need to share anymore."
He climbed up onto a higher bunk, turning toward the wall to hide his face. They had been looking out for each other for a while now, but she had not even noticed that he was going hungry. He did not want her, or anyone, to see the angry tears that pricked at his eyes.
Angharad was hurt by Ginnar's sudden rejection, but what could she say? She lay down on the bunk below Ginnar, looking up at the wooden plank over her head as everyone settled down. Food wasn't the only thing they'd been shoving too much of down her throat in the world of men, she thought. She was done wasting half the night pretending to take rest she didn't need.
When the room was fully dark and the breathing of the mortals around her evened out, Angharad got out of her bed and left, walking in perfect silence as elves can. There was a half moon out, which was enough light for her to see by for her purpose. Angharad searched around on the ground until she found a bamboo pole that would work. Then, she began going through the staff fighting forms again and again, as she had watched all afternoon out the classroom window.
She would show them 'less than useless'.
(~***~)
Footnotes:
[1] Once again I don't want to butcher anything in a language I don't speak. From some research I think I understand the it would be common for children in China to have nicknames that don't carry into adulthood. I'm going to call a few of the orphan children by the as-translated nicknames I came up with for them rather than try to navigate the subtleties of naming them in Chinese.
