6

For a long while Aidan just sat on the ground, his gaze fixed on an odd pattern of rocks that seemed deliberately centered between his legs. Aware that no one in the sibko was allowed to comfort him, and probably did not want to, he ignored them by concentrating on getting his head cleared and on watching the rocks. His head stubbornly refused to clear, and his vision went in and out of focus. Whenever the rocks came into focus, he tried to look up to see what was happening around him and in the Circle of Equals, but the slightest movement of his head returned him to dizziness. The sensation was something like looking into firelight: everything became hazy and there was pain where intense illumination struck the retina. He would have tried to shake his head clear, but after doing it once, the pain it caused had nearly knocked him out completely.

The pattern of the rocks was irregular, which fascinated Aidan. He realized that if one were to isolate any group of rocks strewn across the ground of this exceedingly rocky planet, one would find any number of irregular patterns. The regular pattern would be the exception. Nevertheless, everything elseabout life was in such a fixed pattern that he never, until now, thought much about irregularities. Growing up in the sibko, days and nights were arranged, schedules were kept, a regular process of regular progress was meticulously noted and recorded so that a warrior's codex, his or her lifetime in a collection of data, could be maintained. If this entire process were to be significantly violated, Aidan was certain that the Clan would devise some other pattern to replace it. Patterns were all, all was pattern. Had not Dermot said that last week? The sibko itself was a pattern, created out of patterns in a gene, itself a pattern in a cell. Their differences were minimal, their similarities praiseworthy. A sibko joke: DNA means Don't Need Anything. (The use of the forbidden contraction seemed, to childish minds, a bit of rebellion, and they loved to say it.) They did not need anything because all was planned for them. Their lives were table arrangements, utensils in the right place, at the right angles next to a perfectly arranged set of plates. Training on Ironhold merely continued the regular pattern.

He could discover no pattern in the rocks, and that troubled him. With his training, he should be able to see the pattern in anything.He picked up one rock and placed it down again so that it formed a triangle with the two other rocks, so that there was at least one pattern amid the anarchy. But it didn't satisfy him, the triangle. It was more out of place than the irregular setup had been. Because he had formed it, he could not help but concentrate on it. Now the triangle was taking on too much importance among the other rocks. He picked up all three rocks and tossed them away, refusing to note where they fell.

The sounds coming from the Circle entered his consciousness, but he refused to look up. He did not want to see what was happening there, not even when it was Joanna who screamed in pain. Her pain gave him no satisfaction. By rights, he should want to see her writhing in agony on the ground. He should want to see her deeply tanned skin stained with her blood. He should want to see her neck broken or her limbs hanging uselessly. But those prospects were just as repulsive to him as was Joanna herself. He did want to see her dead, or even hurt.

What he would have liked would be for her to tell him that he had done something well. It was wrong, he knew, to wish for credit from anyone because after the nurturing stage came the warrior training stage; after the pattern, the pattern—and there was no praise for achievement. There was, in fact, only one achievement—the victory at the Trial of Position that waited for the few who survived the training to the end. By that time, praise was no longer necessary. Dermot had said that a kind word could alter the quickness of a warrior's response and that could mean the laser blast could catch you in the throat instead of your enemy.

A wave of surprise swept among the sibko, punctuated with gasps that were sudden enough to make Aidan finally look up.

Ellis now knelt on Joanna's chest. With terrific thrusts of her torso, Joanna was rocking Ellis while trying to squirm out from under him, but she could not dislodge him. A cruel look of triumph came into Ellis' eyes as he suddenly locked his hands together, shifted his body back along Joanna's legs. Bringing his hands down, he directed them at her head in what should have been a killing blow, or one that would at least have knocked Joanna out if it did not fracture her skull.

How she did it, Aidan was not sure, but instead of trying to avoid the blow, Joanna, whose arms were pinned, blocked it with the top of her head. In spite of the block, the force of impact of Ellis' hands against her head should have knocked her out and made it easy for him to dispose of her.

Joanna had always said she had the resources of the kind of mythic beast that, in Clan myths, came back to haunt heroes. Perhaps she did possess such power because, not only did she retain consciousness, but she took advantage of a slight shifting in Ellis' pressure on her torso to roll sideways and free one arm. She faked a backhanded punch toward his stomach, one whose weakness could not possibly have hurt Ellis. Nevertheless, in instinctive reflex, he moved to block it, and she opened her hands. Eluding his defense, and reaching above it, she grabbed the lower end of his leather tunic and pulled his close to her. In another situation, the move might have been that of a lover drawing to her the object of her sexual desire, but in this case it was the move Joanna needed to break Ellis' leverage. Artfully squirming through his legs as he struggled to regain equilibrium, she shot out the other side of his legs, rolled over, stirred up a lot of dust, and came up on the attack.

Ramming him from the rear, she knocked the already off-balance Ellis onto his face. He quickly curled up his body, however, and somersaulted to his feet, a maneuver at which Ellis had always been particularly adept. Unfortunately, Joanna anticipated it. She made no move toward him and instead scooped up a rock from the ground and hurled it at his head while she was still bent over. To Aidan the rock seemed to sail slowly toward Ellis' head, when in fact the missile was thrown with some force and speed. Later, he would remember this as the first of many moments in his life when movement around him seemed to slow down, to occur at some different speed from that of reality. There were times when he doubted that any change had occurred and attributed it to some dislocation of memory rather than time.

The rock caught Ellis, who was turning around at the moment and consequently stepped right into its path, on the side of his forehead, just above his temples. He blinked hard a couple of times after the impact, looking for a moment as though he might pass out, then he growled fiercely and charged at Joanna.

Until his last step, Joanna stood her ground, a look of arrogance on her face and a scornful smile on her lips. In a sense, the fight was over. She had won. All she had to do was finish Ellis off. She could have done that with a well-timed jab at his stomach or a strike to the side of his neck. Simple procedures would have done the job.

But Joanna eschewed simple procedures.

In a move that seemed to Aidan more dancelike than warriorlike, Joanna deftly sidestepped, allowing Ellis, who apparently expected some other response, to stumble his way past her. His attempts to regain his footing would have been comic to Aidan if he had not seen, and correctly interpreted, the killing look in Joanna's eyes. Joanna had often told the sibko that feeling her own killing look, at the time when victory was certain and disposal of the defeated only a matter of routine, was the greatest intoxication a warrior could know.