This opening was well-ritualized by now. Rena grabbed at Bret's ankles. Bret anticipated the move and jumped aside, landing in the path of the first-out acrobat from the third group, a stocky, quarrelsome young man named Endo. He had entered the fray by leaping from his holders' chair onto his hands, "walking" a few steps, then flipping onto his feet just in time to give Bret a hard chop to the side of his head with hands that Endo had hardened with practice on any material he could find. Each member of the sibko had a fighting specialty; chopping with his hard-heeled, calloused hands was Endo's. Bret reeled sideways and encountered Rena driving her shoulder into his midsection.

Aidan watched with the other members of his team, as always nervous and eager for the moment when they all could enter the battle. At one time, team tussling had been simply a boisterous free-for-all. Refinements had gradually been introduced until the game evolved into its present form, where—in imitation of the Clan's military bidding procedures—each team sent out its minimum effective force, one fighter, to do battle for a precise two minutes before the others could join in. If that single fighter was rendered ineffective by an opponent (a difficult task when there were three or more teams) or, as sometimes happened, was knocked out cold, that team was defeated and its other members were not allowed into the mock but hard-fought combat. This was the overwhelming fear of the tussler, that he or she would work up all the restlessness and energy necessary for a good scuffle and then be deprived of the chance to let it out. Aidan, not the best gymnast of his team, was unable to offer a stylish opening gambit for the beginning of tussling, and so rarely went out first. He hated these moments of being denied battle.

Marthe, beside him, was equally restive. She liked a good fight as much as Aidan and never shied from it. In their sexual encounters, she had shown similar appetites, which was why she was, among all the members of the sibko, his favored partner for coupling. Unfortunately, others felt the same and getting to her was often more arduous than a team tussle.

A sibko survived, they had been told often enough, on its ability to function as an effective unit as well as on the intensity of its internal competitions. A sibko member was always battling, on the outside and the inside.

He looked over at Marthe. The back of her left hand was against her hip, and she was rubbing it nervously up and down against the rough material of her short trousers. The skin visible between her trousers and her high boots was prickly with goose bumps. He glanced down at his arm, which was also showing the effects of the cold. A few more seconds, and if Rena stayed true, he could get warm by mixing it up in the center.

Rena almost got caught out by Endo, who, by throwing himself onto his back and kicking his legs high, knocked her off balance. Endo then rolled into the back of her legs and flipped her over his hunched back. She landed, uncomfortably, her head pressed against a large rock, her eyes less than clear but not dazed, her right arm under her body, her left flailing ineffectively. Endo, who moved quickly in spite of his stockiness, jumped on her and nearly pinned her, but his head was snapped back by Bret, who, by the rules of the game, could not stand by and let one individual defeat another. In a team tussle, a physical exercise as much as a competition, it was forbidden to win by allowing your opponents to defeat each other. Inactivity was inglorious.

The whistle-signal came from the Timemaster, in this case Dav from Endo's team. Screaming like hawks, the others ran, leaped, twisted, and elbowed their way into the melee.

Aidan rushed right at Tymm, a clever but stolid in-fighter who could often be dazzled by diversionary tactics. At almost the last second before Aidan would have rammed into Tymm (and received a skillful defensive blow in response), he veered away, as if his choice for combat were someone else. He ran another three steps, stopped, and—without looking at Tymm—launched himself sideways while bringing up his elbow, making contact with the side of his opponent's jaw and sending him off balance. A quick kick to the back of Tymm's knee and he fell to the ground, where Aidan quickly placed his right hand firmly but safely against Tymm's neck to hold him down. This act, held for five seconds, signified Tymm's defeat. Aidan had no time to watch Tymm get up and slink away, for he had to cope with Orilna, the skinny but lithe martial-arts specialist. She was just a bit off with a chop to the back of his neck, and he merely stumbled a few steps, recovering in time to block her elbow strike, then deal her a just-barely slowed-down punch to the stomach. She took the blow well, not even doubling up, but her next attempt, a weak heel-palm strike, was obviously affected by his attack. Bending low, Aidan tackled her about the waist and wrestled her to the ground, his arm gripping her through her right leg, the back of his forearm against her chest. He was just about to do the five-second mock stranglehold on Orilna when a booming voice drowned out the sounds of the scuffle. "STOP THIS IDIOCY!"

The voice had so much of the sound of command, the sharp consonants of authority, the drawn-out vowels of wrath, that Aidan froze in position, his hand reaching for Orilna's neck, his other arm still entangled in her legs. Orilna, too, like all the other sibko battlers, stopped fighting and tensely held still.

Aidan looked up to see a trio of training officers, two of them with arms akimbo, the third gesturing wildly as he spoke: "Is this harebrained sibko, this fluttering nest of eyasses, so foolish as to think a demonstration of its belligerence would in some way impress us?" Eyas was the word for a hawk just taken from its net before it could fly. "You are children still, quiaff?No doubt you spit up your cereal and go behind rocks so no one can see you defecate. Has there been a mistake, comrades? Have they sent us a sib-nursery instead of a sibko on the verge of becoming warriors?"

The officer to the speaker's left laughed raucously, a sound analogous to the roar of a sudden Circean wind. When she spoke it was in a voice that, if anything, was louder than her colleague's: "Freebirth! If these whelps are our training unit, I think I will make myself a bondsman to the laborer caste, because what use will be there in going to war? With novices such as these, we might as well bid for surrender as combat."

The third officer started to pace among the sibko. Aidan saw that his fellow sibkin were like statues, each commemorating some fighting pose or other—fists reared back, struggle checked in sometimes absurd tableaux, legs locked in what seemed like physically impossible knots. He relaxed his grip on Orilna and sat back on his haunches. Orilna did the same. Some of the others shifted position.

The third officer, a man whose complexion was so bad that he seemed a genetic anomaly for the warrior caste, made odd sounds of disgust in his throat. "You call this fighting?" he finally said in a gravelly voice. "This is horseplay. It is soft, too soft. You call your caresses punches? Go home and spend your days among the fields of flowers, coupling and quoting the pornographic sections of The Remembrance.Create a freebirth in a real womb."

Aidan nearly vomited, so insulting and obscene was the third officer's last remark. Among warriors, any reference to freebirths or the freeborn was the deepest curse, the most profound of insults. To be born from the womb of woman was disgraceful. Male warriors could sire children with a woman from another caste, but the child would then be freeborn, a word synonymous with lowborn in Clan society. Warrior fathers never spoke to their freeborn children. There was no meanness in it; they were merely indifferent to their bastards.