"Book"
Sorry to jump from story to story...
Yeah, it annoys me too...
Anyway, this is my current project:
Book
Chapter One
Snake made his way through the streets and alleys. He was no stalker, but he’d mastered a certain amount of stealth over the years.
He was twelve years old and only barely weighed sixty pounds. No one had ever taught him to be brave, so he survived by evading and fleeing confrontation whenever possible.
Snake was always hungry.
He had talked to the strange trio of men twice before and he didn’t trust them.
The master was obviously rich. Both his giant bodyguards wore the finest of silks, soft leathers and had elaborately engraved and silver plated conchos reinforcing their leather armor.
One servant had an amethyst ring and the other had a big ruby ring.
The master though, was an odd man who dressed in black denim from head to foot and eschewed ornament. It was very odd to see a man spend more on his servants’ raiment than he did on his own.
Snake knew about men who wanted to use little boys like women. Perhaps he was lucky, but he’d never experienced that humiliation in his short life. That was no reason to start now.
Still, he didn’t think the men were trying to recruit him to play meat games. It wasn’t anywhere near that challenging to find a far more experienced and willing partner.
That didn’t mean that they weren’t trying to con Snake into something almost as bad.
Snake’s attention was behind him, watching for the strange trio, when he ran straight into Liss the capador head-on.
The man was bigger than either of the master’s bodyguards. He wore a brightly colored beggar’s coat sewn from multiple scraps of brightly colored fabric. Liss wore a big sword and he had a black eye-patch over the empty socket where his right eye had been.
“What’s this? Are little boys running to me to be geld now?” the capador said.
Snake twisted to the point that he was in danger of tearing the muscles of his arm, but it was to no avail.
“We were stalking that young man ourselves,” the drably dressed master said.
“That’s your problem,” Liss said.
Liss had six of his men with him and they laughed uproariously at his wit.
“They capture young boys and turn them into eunuchs,” the bigger guard, the one with the big ruby ring on his left forefinger explained to his plain master.
“I thought slavery and castration were both illegal in this kingdom,” the master said.
“These fellows don’t really care about the law,” the ruby wearer explained.
The drab master hunched his shoulders forward timidly while wringing one hand with the other in a servile manner.
“I’ll give you a gold coin for him,” the man said.
“Screw off!” Liss spat at the man.
Snake never saw the black clothed man draw. One moment he seemed to be kow-towing to Liss. The very next instant he had a slim cap and ball revolver in his right fist.
The pistolero went for headshots only.
Liss’ brains showered Snake. Then the man started working his way down the line.
The larger guard drew his huge leaf-bladed scimitar. He chopped one capador diagonally from the middle of his left collarbone almost to the upper edge of the pelvis bone on the man’s right. Then he viciously yanked his blade loose with a single jerk and then beheaded the man next to the first.
His companion drew his huge seven-shot, fifty-caliber cap and ball revolver—the type heavily favored by palace guards—and shot a huge capador with three hyper-rapid shots.
By then the drab master had already killed the other four—leaving his bodyguards looking a bit foolish.
“Grab the boy,” the master said.
“He still doesn’t want to come with us,” the second, smaller guard said.
“Dude,” the master addressed Snake, “You are in my debt. You’ll dine with us tonight. You can leave tomorrow if you still want to go then. I’ll even give you a gold coin, a dagger and a big breakfast—what say?”
************** ************** ********************
There were a dozen other children at the compound the master took him to. As the newest arrival though, Snake sat at the table with the master.
“My name is ‘Book’,” the drab master told Snake. “The big man is ‘Yamane’ and the smaller one is his cousin ‘Amat’.
“I can see that you’re not used to eating all you want. Eat slowly and give your stomach time to tell you that it is full.
“Puking is no fun and besides, it is wasteful,” Book said.
“You’re very lucky,” Yamane told Snake. “The capadores grabbed my older brother when I was three years old.”
“What happened?” Book asked.
Yamane shrugged.
“He killed his new master and escaped three years later, but his stones were still gone. He became a very large and powerful man, notwithstanding his disability.
“Today he is the head harem guard for a rich foreigner who chooses to live in our kingdom. He is fairly wealthy, but no whole man will break bread with him.
“I would like to kill every capador in the kingdom—and in kingdoms all around too,” Yamane spat.
“Would you break bread with your brother if he were here?” Book asked.
“He is my brother,” Yamane snapped defiantly.
“Ask him if he’d like to join my household,” Book said. “I doubt that I can equal what the merchant pays him.
“But should he choose to serve me, he will dine here at the head table with you and Amat as well as me and Snake—should Snake chose to join us.
“You’re not too proud to dine with a gelding are you?” Book asked Snake.
“If I stay, what will I be required to do?” Snake asked.
“Required? Nothing is required. Eat and loaf in your bunk or lollygag around the compound all day if you will.
“Expected? I can’t properly describe what we’re doing. Maybe you’ll have the gist of it in three or four years.
“Or at least, perhaps I will.
“It is the two-fold way of the sword and the pen.
“You are invited to become a warrior, a scholar and a priest. As warriors, we aren’t expected to soldier. As priests, we take no vows of celibacy.
“You are free to go anytime that you choose to and you are always free to return if you decide that you’ve left unwisely.
“In the meantime we eat well and try to have some fun.
“Can’t get any more fair than that—can you?”
“I’ll tell you after breakfast,” Snake said.
“You’re cautious. That’s good!” Book commended him.
*********** **************** ***************
The brothers stripped Snake naked.
“Is there anything precious to you in that pile of filth?” An adolescent brother asked him.
“I have a knife and three copper coins,” Snake protested.
The brother examined Snake’s knife dubiously. It had a slightly rusty three-inch blade and the wooden grips were partially splintered.
“Burn the rest,” the brother commanded.
“Sit,” a servant demanded.
“Why?” Snake demanded.
“I’m going to shave your head and any body hair that you may have,” the servant said.
“I don’t want my head shaved,” Snake objected.
“You can let it grow back, but we don’t want you bringing fleas, ticks or lice into our home.”
“These dudes are shaved headed,” Snake pointed out suspiciously.
“Many of the brothers find a shaved head comfortable and choose to keep up the practice,” the servant said.
“Why do they send a slave to shave me?”
“I’m a free man and I work in the kitchen—but I have a steady hand. If you’d rather be scalped by one of the brothers…”
After his shave, they insisted that Snake climb into a very large tub full of cloudy medicinal smelling water.
“Book said that I could leave in the morning,” it occurred to Snake to protest.
“Indeed, but we can’t have you contaminating our beds and blankets in the meantime—now can we now?”
“Drink this,” a brother demanded.
“What is it?” Snake demanded while smelling the foul-smelling cup.
“It kills worms,” the brother said.
“Nonsense!”
The brother brought over a jar filled with salted vinegar water and a thick rope of round worms.
“One of the brothers shat that out after the worming. The worms sneak into your gutty-works and steal food from you.
“Some of them are smaller and harder to see. If you’re to grow and become strong, it helps a great deal to be parasite free.”
No one bothered to tell Snake that some of the wormer’s foul taste was from a generous dose of opium. The wine that they gave him to wash the wormer down with was rather strong as well.
Snake forgot his understandable but unfounded paranoia as he drifted off to sleep.
The senior brother carried Snake to a guest bed and carefully tucked him in.
************** ***************** **************
The senior brother woke Snake the next morning, by poking him from beyond arm’s length with a pole.
Snake was shocked beyond words to find himself strip-stark naked.
“Those clothes are yours,” the brother told him. “If you choose to stay, we’ll issue you work clothing more suitable for hard training.
“Those are a bit fine for that.”
Snake had never owned such a fine set of clothes.
The brother had a small leather bag.
“We don’t steal from brothers. We take care of our own,” the brother said.
He showed Snake his three copper coins—they having been highly polished in the meantime—as well as five slightly larger silver coins. That way there could never be any question of them having cheated Snake somehow.
Snake’s knife had been ground to a sharper edge and the ragged wooden handles had been replaced with shiny bone.
There were two knives slightly smaller knives, though of much higher quality, along with a small Bowie with a six-inch blade. All the new knives had stag handles and were shiny and razor-sharp.
“You’re not large enough to wield a full-sized Bowie well. But that knife will serve you well, even when you’re full-grown.
“Size isn’t everything.
“Wear the big knife openly while here. Conceal the other two, wherever it pleases you.
“Wear your knife too, if you choose. The steel and workmanship is inferior—but even inferior weapons can serve a purpose and more weapons are always to the good.
“Is the knife a gift from a loved one?”
“I found it amongst some trash in a back alley” Snake shrugged.
“Well these knives are gifts from brothers who love you,” the brother said. “My name is ‘Clay’.”
“You don’t know me!” Snake’s paranoia flared.
“Jesus said that we’re all brothers and to love your neighbor as yourself.
“Even if you decide to go, remember Jesus. Research him diligently.
“Of course, if you stay, you’ll learn plenty about him, without half trying.”
***************** ********** **************
Yamane’s eunuch brother was sitting at the breakfast table.
Snake had thought Yamane was very large.
Liss had been a half head taller than Yamane—and thicker too.
Sturm was a head taller than Liss. His arms and shoulders, along with his bull neck were epic. He was more than a little thick through the middle—but that often went along with being castrated young.
Sturm didn’t carry anywhere near the fat of a typical sumo though.
Food was too precious to Snake to worry about who he ate with. Anyway, Snake thought of himself as the lowest of the low. He could fall no lower.
He had no strong feelings about eunuchs one-way or the other—outside of the fact that he very definitely didn’t want to become one.
“After breakfast, you’ll need to go through the shaving, bath and worming,” Book told Sturm.
“I assure you that I’m not dirty,” Sturm replied hotly.
“Seventy-two years I’ve walked the Earth Sturm.
“That is, I’ve walked this world and my own world for a combined total of seventy-two years.
“I have never backed down from a challenge.
“If you wish to challenge me, do so. Omit the challenge and reach for blade or gun—or scream and leap.
“You can disagree with me. You can slander and insult me. You can even spit on my shadow.
“Never, ever raise your voice to me. Do you understand?
“I will kill or be killed before I will endure being shouted at.
“I don’t give a rat’s derrière how clean you are. The cleansing is a ceremony that all my people go through.
“The boy beside you isn’t ashamed to eat with a eunuch. Are you ashamed to be shaved and be bathed as he was?”
Book turned to Snake.
“Here is your gold coin. Stay or go—It is yours to keep either way.
“Sturm, I’m not angry with you. I loose temper very quickly when folks boost the volume of their speech. It is a fault that I strive against.
“Please forgive me.
“Now I have duties to attend to.”
Snake was left alone with the giant eunuch.
“Would you be my friend?” the big man asked him piteously.
“When they cut me, they held my head under water until I passed out. When I woke, I was already cut and cauterized with fire.
“I shower but I fear more than a cup of standing water.
“I’m not sure that I can pass this test—and I’m ashamed to tell my brother, or my cousin or Book,” Sturm said.
“Wait here,” Snake said.
***************** ************ ************
“There was opium in the wormer,” Snake said. “I have tasted it before, though it didn’t come to me until later.”
“So?” Clay said.
Snake held up his gold coin—a large gold coin.
“You’ve seen the eunuch. Sell me enough of your opium to make him very happy and I’ll give you this.
“I could buy twenty times that much in town, but time is short,” Snake said.
“What is the deal?”
“It is a secret,” Snake said.
“We brothers don’t betray each other’s secrets,” Clay said. “Share and update.”
************** *************** *****************
There was no particular reason for Snake to witness the big eunuch’s shaving—but neither was there any real reason to exclude him.
Sturm’s mind seemed to be on grander things throughout the process. He even nodded off a few times.
When it was time for Sturm to bathe though, Clay and Snake ran everyone else out of the room—much to some of the brother’s total mystification.
Snake coaxed the tranquilized giant into the tub and held his hand and soothed him while Clay made sure that he was thoroughly bathed. That part of the ceremony was not optional.
“I don’t know about worming him now,” Clay said. “He’s already swimming in opium.”
While he was ruminating, Sturm took the pitcher from him and downed the entire contents and then burped loudly.
“What was that all about?” one of the brothers asked Snake as he left the infirmary.
“The big man is mighty shy about who sees his private parts—or lack thereof. We all have flat sides to out wheels,” Snake lied shamelessly.
After that, the three of them shared a special bond.
The bond between the eunuch and Snake was the strongest though.
Snake was Sturm’s brother and the son he’d never have, and an annoying and endearing pet—like a Rat Terrier.
Snake felt loyalty and solidarity for all the brotherhood eventually. Sturm was the only one that he loved like family. His mother had been his only family and love, but she’d died when he was seven.
Sturm was all the family that he’d never had, all rolled into the giant’s grim looking body.
************* ************ ***************
Snake weighed in at sixty-two pounds—stunted and starved, and from a relatively small-statured race to boot.
They put Snake on a relatively undemanding weight training régime.
Monday and Wednesday and Friday mornings he did squats, bench presses, bent-over rows, and presses behind the neck for five sets of five.
Then he did straight-legged deadlifts for three sets of eight, and dumbbell curls, triceps extensions and leg curls for two sets of eight.
He hardly worked up a sweat the first few weeks. But the weights he used were increased very gradually, but relentlessly.
They added a pound to his 5x5 exercises every week for six weeks. The seventh week they cut his weight in half.
His body needed time to rest occasionally, they told him. It rested better lifting half weights than it would stagnating completely.
When he started the next cycle, it was always with the fifth week’s poundage from the last cycle.
The eight repetition exercises had their weights increased less often. They were mainly for assistance and if the weight on the earlier exercises rose, then doing the same movements with the same weight afterward was still working harder.
No one put much emphasis on his weight training, because the brothers didn’t want Snake to be obsessed.
Strength—real exceptional strength—could only be built slowly over a period of years.
They fed Snake a steady diet of rich protein laden food. They encouraged him to top off each meal by drinking more milk than he really wanted.
No one would call Snake strong when he started.
He weighed sixty-two pounds and bench-pressed only thirty pounds for five sets of five.
A year later Snake was four inches taller. He weighed seventy-eight pounds and he bench-pressed seventy-five pounds for five sets of five. And arguably, he was no better able to prevail in a back-alley street fight, even against other youths, than he would have been a year earlier.
Every morning the brothers started their day with swordplay.
For Snake that meant swinging a stick endlessly. They swung to build strong wrists, the type that it takes years for a good swordsman to develop. They practiced parrying techniques—though without partners. And they practiced thrusting the practice swords through rings and batted at small bags suspended on strings to develop pinpoint accuracy.
And all the right handed, including Snake, were turned into left hand swordsmen.
There was wrestling and while the boys and girls never struck each other, there were boxing drills, rope jumping and heavy and light bag striking drills.
There were sand pits both inside and outside. There were also tatami type mats in other indoor practice rooms as well as exercise stairways that led nowhere and where some limited drills were done.
It was very hard to scuffle safely on stairs. The idea was to build skills, not cripple or maim the boys and girls for life.
All the brother’s wore a twelve-foot long rope on their left hip. The rope was made of braided leather and very flexible. There was a ball of steel perhaps an inch and a half wide with a hole drilled through it on one end of the rope.
At the other end was a ring just big enough to easily pass the ball through and make a lasso.
The rope had many functions. It could be used as a meteor hammer or a lasso. It could be used as a garrote, or to trip or hang someone. It could be used as a whip of sorts or to bind and gag an opponent.
It could even be used to climb short distances, though the brothers were taught to be very reluctant to abandon their rope.
Book told him that elite soldiers called “Rangers” from his homeland had once carried and used such ropes as weapons, though the practice had died while Book was a small boy.
He freely admitted that he knew only the rudiments of flexible weapons and no one on this world used them to any great extent.
He showed them some basic ways to use the Ranger rope for joint-locks and throws. He told them of skilled folk who would bind you hand and foot while you fought them.
He encouraged the children to find new applications for their ropes and when fighting in earnest, to always be ready for a chance to bring the rope into play suddenly and unexpectedly.
Ranger ropes would not replace revolvers, or swords or even knives—but they gave the brothers an edge.
Snake learned to read roman style printing his first year at the school and how to write it too. They taught him how to count and to add and subtract.
The teachers read stories to the students, both from the King James Bible and from children’s Bible stories.
The brothers were big on memorization and they taught mnemonics. The children began by memorizing the names of the books of the Bible. Then they memorized a brief summary of each book.
Eventually they’d be expected to know how many chapters were in each book and give a brief description of each chapter’s contents. But as with the weight training, that was a long-term project.
The brothers taught them to draw and paint. They taught anatomy in ever-greater detail through the years. As time went on, they acquired a nice set of skeletons, including a few human ones.
Taulin and Rye were also spoken in the kingdom and each had its own distinct alphabet. Rye was based on rather rigid and square-edged pictograms while Taulin writing consisted of long interlocking series of loops and scrolls.
Book could neither speak nor write either language and learning to read or write either script took much longer than mastering English writing.
He brought in scribes to teach the languages and the writing to his pupils during Snake’s second year.
The brothers also learned to read Braille and to speak sign language as well as to read and write a code that used its own alphabet and was peculiar to the brotherhood.
Herb doctors taught the students how to do simple healing and surgeries. An assassin came by for a month every year to teach them about poisons.
Book sent each of them to work part time in a small abattoir, because he didn’t want them to be strangers to blood, gore and death—not to mention the exquisite feel of a sharp blade parting flesh.
************** *************** ****************
After three years, Snake weighed one hundred and twenty three pounds. He could bench-press one hundred and thirty five pounds for five sets of five—more than his bodyweight for multiple repetitions.
At fifteen years of age, Snake was on the small side, but stronger than most boys his size.
He was starting to accumulate enough skills to make a difference in a fight.
They had expanded Snake’s martial art training. Part of the training had been becoming skilled with nunchaku and morning star type weapons. Book had little use for such weapons as weapons, but he was always seeking ways to strengthen wrists.
.....RVM45
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