“Not much, sir. I’m better at other things.”
“What things would those be?”
“Battle games, sir. And academics.” This was Mr. Weathereye’s word. Mr. Wyncamp just called it schooling, but this place seemed to call for Weathereye kind of language.
“That’s interesting,” said the captain. “A word of advice, if I may.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Pick some sport, don’t care what. Something you hate the least, maybe. Claim it. Make that yours. It’s useful to have while you’re here. Something you can do in the games for your Row or your House, whether it does you any good or not. Understand?”
“Swimming, sir?”
“Of course, swimming. You like that?”
“I’m fairly good at it, sir. And mountain climbing.”
“When you say mountain climbing…”
“Cliffs, sir. Straight-up places. Places other people don’t usually go.”
“Hmmm,” said the captain, swerving the vehicle to head back the way we had come. Outside the cadets’ mess, he beckoned to a tall, bearded fellow who was lounging by the steps and called, “Sergeant Orson. Here’s the one you’ve been expecting.” Then, to me, “Sergeant Orson is a good man. Pay attention to him. Tell him your troubles, if you have any. If you don’t, tell him you don’t. Understand?”
“Yes, sir, Captain Orley.”
Then I was standing on the roadside, smelling food as the man approaching me grew larger with every step until he loomed like a tree. “Cadet Naumi,” he purred from a truly overwhelming loftiness. “Welcome to Point Zibit.”
The seventh morning after my arrival, the sixty male and female residents of Houses 4A and 4B ran up the side of a mountain. I was accustomed to running, though not on an uphill track. Still, I acquitted myself fairly well, coming over the last rise and down into the final clearing slightly ahead of the middle of the pack. Stamina, Mr. Weathereye had always told me, is half attitude and half practice. I had the attitude, and the practice would no doubt come.
Sergeant Orson stood at the entrance to the clearing, pointing across it to the large commissary wagon, already thronged by earlier arrivals. I joined them, noting the wide choice of foods, including several things I would eat only if I were starving. I took a modest plateful of the tastier stuff and wandered about the clearing as I ate it.
East of the wagon, a section of cliff had fallen to create a vast pile of scree. Behind the wagon, north, the road continued upward along the cliffs, separated only by a narrow strip of sloped woodland from the seaward precipice to the west. The south side of the clearing held the road we’d come in by, as well as a picket line where eight huge horses were tied. As I passed, I stroked all eight enormous soft noses and leaned my head against one or two huge, silver-maned shoulders. The horses’ feet were feathered with brushes of silver hair above hooves as big as dinner plates.
Grangel, the cadet who had renamed me Noomi and whose cronies had helped in making it a universal term of ridicule, dragged in close to last. He was loud in his outcries of displeasure at the food choices left for the laggards until Sergeant Orson silenced him and climbed into the wagon bed, calling for attention. Reading from a prepared list, he divided our group into teams of six and told us we could take a short rest, after which we were to collect stones from the scree along the base of the cliffs and use them to construct drystone walls “this long…” displaying lengths of cord, “…and this high…” displaying shorter ones, “…in the areas already staked out west of the road.
“I’m going back to Zibit with the wagon,” he cried. “We’ll return with your supper about sunset. Have the walls done by then.”
The hostler and the sergeant busied themselves stowing the mess wagon and hitching the team. I, who had decided it would do no harm to get a good look at everything, picked up two measuring cords from where they’d been dropped, strolled over to the staked area, and looked it over, then walked over to the edge of the scree and looked carefully at the stones there. What seemed at first glance to be a mountain of raw material would actually yield a much smaller volume of usefully flat and stackable rock. A much better selection of flattish stones lay above my head to the left, where a narrow shelf extended above and along the upward road. What stones had collapsed there had not fallen as far, and less stone had fallen on top of them, making them less splintered than most, though the shelf would take some climbing to get to. On my way back, I saw the hostler remove a number of shovels from the wagon and lay them under the thorny growth at the foot of the trees, where they were easily visible to anyone who was using his or her eyes.
I returned my plate to the wagon and sat for a few minutes, taking deep breaths. Sergeant Orson bellowed at us to start work, and the horse-drawn vehicle rolled slowly away down the hill. I stared after it, feeling the rumble of those wheels up through my feet and legs. We had flown over the high mesa to Zibit in a flier. The officer who met me had used a floater. The obviously heavy commissary wagon was drawn, however, by eight huge horses. All very interesting.
My team was number six. The other five members of it, two girls and three boys, immediately began rushing or staggering back and forth as they fetched stones to the assigned site. I went a bit farther up the road, thrust my fingers into a few narrow slots, found a few almost invisible footholds, and worked my way up to the shelf where
