Shaman's Crossing

I noticed that Spink’s hands had balled into fists on the edge of the desk. I glanced over at his face. He was pale. I looked down at the page before him, where he had attempted to solve the first problem. His small neat figures filled half of it, but had carried him no closer to a solution. His hands suddenly spread flat over his paper, and when I glanced up at him, his face had turned red. I didn’t meet his eyes; it only would have embarrassed him more. It would be better if I pretended not to know that he had no grasp at all of any math beyond arithmetic.

Captain Rusk erased the board and then immediately wrote another problem on it. He paused, tapped his chalk on the board, and said, “Of course, for most of you, this is a review of ground you know well. But I know a tower cannot be built upon a shaky foundation, and so I choose to test your foundations before we begin to add to your knowledge.” Beside me, Spink made a very small sound of dismay in the back of his throat. By an effort of will, I didn’t glance at him. Captain Rusk solved the problem on the board, step by step, for us. He wrote up three more, each of increasing complexity, and moved precisely through their resolutions, step by step. He was a good teacher, making his reasoning clear. Beside me, Spink’s pencil scratched frantically as he struggled to write an explanation of each step beside the problems he had copied. He was in over his head, drowning in concepts he’d never glimpsed before now.

I felt almost ashamed, as if I were flaunting my knowledge cruelly before him, as I was the first to raise my hand for the next problem, and the one after that. Each time, Gord had a place at the board beside me. Each time, his proof was leaner and more elegant than mine, though we had both arrived at the correct answer. And each time, as we returned to our seats, Captain Rusk assigned another set of problems to those who had not been among the first five to complete the problem. By the time he dismissed us, most of the class was groaning under an onerous burden of work that would be due by this hour tomorrow. We stood as our instructor left. Then, in the shuffle of students gathering their papers and books, I made my offer to Spink. “Let’s work through these problems together tonight.”

He did not protest that I obviously did not need the practice. Instead, he said quietly, his eyes downcast, “I would appreciate that. If you have the time.”

The other patrols left quickly. We waited impatiently for Dent, but another corporal arrived to take command of us and quick-marched us to our next class. I suddenly felt overwhelmed. It frustrated me that our destination was the same building we’d left only an hour and a half ago. Why couldn’t they have scheduled our Varnian class to follow our military history class, instead of making us rush back and forth across the campus? Only the thought that this was our last class before our noon meal sustained me.

We joined another patrol of first-years waiting in the classroom. It was our first unsupervised encounter with first-years outside of our own patrol, and after a few moments we began chatting and discovered that they, too, were new nobles’ sons. Their patrol was fifteen strong. We felt lucky to be in Carneston House when we heard that they were barracked in the top floor of Skeltzin Hall, where they shared one large open room with a single window at each end and gaps in the eaves large enough to admit pigeons and bats. They had been promised repairs before winter, but for now the evening winds off the river blew very chill.

We sat and talked, teacherless, for a quarter of an hour before Corporal Dent, very red-faced, came charging into the room, demanding to know what we were doing there and why we hadn’t waited for him. As we followed him into the hall and up a flight of stairs to the correct classroom, the other patrol’s corporal found his charges as well. They lectured us angrily about stupidly following a cadet we didn’t even recognize, and I came to realize that this had been a prank played upon Dent and his fellow, with us as ancillary victims.

We were late for the class and we received the blame for it. Mr. Arnis spoke to us in Varnian, saying that it was the only language we could use in class, to force us to become fluent more quickly. He added that if we thought we could disrespect him because he was not a military man, he would soon teach us our error. I understood the gist of what he said to us as he ordered us to take the last available seats in the back of the room. Only Trist seemed completely comfortable. He sat two chairs down from me, his pen moving effortlessly over his paper as he took notes. Before the instructor dismissed us, he had assigned us to translate the introductory passage of Gilshaw’sJournal of a Varnian Commander into Gernian, and to compose a letter in Varnian to send to our parents, telling them how much we had enjoyed our first day of Academy life. Because we had been late, he gave us the additional assignment of writing a formal apology for disrupting the class schedule. Someone in the back of the classroom groaned and our instructor permitted himself a small smile, the first sign of humor that any of our teachers had displayed.