The Nameless Accounts: Basic Training (5)
On our first day, we were taken down into the pits of the city, a layer under the abodes of the high priests. They were just in scent of us, and I suppose the blood and demon-musk was supposed to encourage us. If so, we needed it.
Basic training was, in a word, hard. Here were all these untrained youth, some of them never having touched a weapon in their life, sheltered by the priestesses who had borne them, while others were criminals like me, with no knowledge outside of the tunnel intersections we lurked in. All of us would have to be trained to fight, and not only fight, but to follow orders, march like a real army, and to survive in the wild outside the underground Reaches. There was a lot of turnover those first few cycles, and the smell of blood only grew stronger from above us.
I don’t know how I ever managed it. I’m not the most athletic sort, and I never was. It is similar to the old cliche of just placing one foot in front of the other. You never looked up, never raised your head into the streams of scent coming from up high; you only focused on taking one more step. And finally, you were somewhere worth all the effort.
I do remember our first lessons on you Surfacers, though. How ironic it is to think back on them now. You see, many of us had never been told what a Surfacer looked like, let alone having seen one for ourselves. The newer recruits only got to see drawings, pawing a glowing crystal between us as we marveled just as much at the colorful paint on the page as we did at what it was supposed to be depicting. I remember Surfacers always had this insane snarl painted on their faces, like some Tarithian storybooks will depict wolves. I wondered if it hurt to hold your lips so stiff like that, all hours of the cycles.
Our lessons on you had little to do with your culture, your intelligence or your spirit, but instead on how best to slay you — your pressure points in the collarbone and wrist, the weak spots in your bright armor, your mobbing tactics on an open field, and of course, how cruel you were to the akor’mari you captured.
Does that surprise you to learn? It seems to me that tyrants come first with ignorance, and then with fear. Either way, I would not be relaying this to you if those lessons had truly sunken in, I suppose. Maybe that is a blessing, for I now live where so many others of my kin have died.
In those days, they would have called what I do now as my failure. Seekers always carried around a small berry, a very poisonous one that grew in the darkest parts of the Bataklik forest. If you were caught, you were supposed to swallow this berry, which would kill you near instantly. It was an honor, though not as much of an honor as escaping, so I’m not sure how many akor’mari truly did it in the end. Nor do I wish to know. Our instructors said we had to do this because the torture the Surfacers would submit you to would make you lose your mind and betray your people.
Now, I wonder if it was because they knew akor’mari would start to have second thoughts about our predicament as a kin if they stayed among the Surfacers for any length of time.
It was rumored the older students got to work with real Surfacers in the training rings, and even had some as “pets”. Whatever that word means to you. Whether or not that was true, I never found out for myself.
You see, the Seekers in Bataklik were getting hit hard by Yeni warlords. A great migration was coming down on Yeniden from the north, some say by an ancient shadow of dread, and some say by our sworn enemies, the wuyon’mari, before that race went soft and lived in Avaliet. It is past your short memories, I suppose, and the full reason never reached the ears of the akor’mari. All we knew of it was that the warring pushed the Yeni of the Fertile Swathe up against our highest territories in the Bataklik. Even the Seekers still in training, like me, were called out to defend our homeland.
