…or, Hitting Below The Belt
I dressed warmly, when it was time to get ready for the match. T-shirt and sweater, with my heavy jacket ready. The weather had been fair so far. Warmer than fall in Westphale, anyway. But I hadn’t been out at night much, and I was remembering skirmish matches back home.
I’d never been all rah-rah-rah about it, but high school skirmish was a big deal because it was something to do. You went out to the field and ate hot dogs and hung out. There had been a group of guys—mostly guys, though by the end of high school some of them had regular girls—I’d hung out with a bit. They hated the skirmish coaches and the captains and they didn’t give a damn about how the team did. They’d gone to every match, though, sometimes even paying to get in. They’d hung out at the back of the stands, or under them, or out behind the old equipment shed, smoking and joking around.
Anybody asked them if they liked skirmish, they’d say it was lame and fake and nobody cared about it, but they were at every match, and when things were really getting gritty out on the field they’d watch along with everybody else.
That’s skirmish. It was part of the whole high school experience. It was there whether you liked it or not, and you couldn’t help getting drawn into it.
If not for Iason, I could have found something else to do with my Saturday night. There had to be other stuff going on. In that sense, college skirmish wasn’t as big a deal. In every other sense, it was a bigger one. The field was bigger. The teams were bigger. They had elves and dwarves and monsters.
A dwarven player or two had been a big deal when they showed up on the opposing team, back in high school. The MU team had two squads of them.
That wasn’t why I was excited, though. I was excited because it was skirmish. I was excited because I was thinking about cool fall nights on the field outside of Agora.
After two weeks of strangeness and crazy sex and new experiences and dealing with elves’ issues, I felt like I was going home. It was just what I needed to get back to some kind of normal space after the thing with Alli.
I left the man bracelet on my dresser so Iason would know I was in the stands. I was going for my own reasons, but I was also going for him. The two weren’t mutually exclusive. Like most things in our relationship, we could have different goals that ended in the same place.
Anyway, I didn’t want him getting distracted, looking for me in the stands. It wouldn’t be easy even for an elf to pick out a single face, especially when the field was daylit and the stands weren’t.
I’d never understood why skirmish was played at night when the periods alternated between “day” and “night”. If they were going to artificially cycle the conditions on field, it seemed like they could have played it at any time. For all that she didn’t care about skirmish, Marlot was the one who’d explained it to me. Magical darkness that could block out sunlight had to be strong. It was easier to illuminate natural darkness for the sun periods than it was to darken the field without making a blob of inky blackness.
Indoor fields were the exception, as they could be naturally dark at any time, but matches were still mostly held in the evening as a matter of tradition.
Barley came knocking on my door a few minutes before I went to find Marlot, to see if she could be coaxed into joining me. I’d go alone, but I was hoping for company. The more the merrier.
“Hey,” I said. “Change your mind about coming?”
“No,” she said. “I really don’t think that’s a good idea, and anyway, I think I should stay with Violet.”
“She’s not still all strung out, is she?”
“She’s asleep now,” Barley said.
“She passed out?” I asked, more alarmed.
“Well, no, she’s just asleep,” Barley said. “She came out of her whatever a while ago. I just think I should stick close to her, in case she, you know, relapses.”
“Relapses into what? She was high,” I said.
“Yeah, but, there could be lingering effects,” Barley said. She sounded like she hoped there was so she could take care of Violet. I had an image of her in a sexy healer costume.
In fairness, that was probably coming from me more than her.
“Ah,” I said. It wasn’t my place to kill her hopes. Violet thought that spending time together would cure Barley of her crush.
“Anyway, you know that Pala girl doesn’t know a lot of people here since she doesn’t live on campus,” Barley said. “But she’s very interested in skirmish.”
“I got the feeling you didn’t like her,” I said.
“Well, I certainly don’t care for her treatment of animals,” Barley said. “But I feel like I should try to be nice to her, and I know what it’s like to not have any friends—”
“You knew what it’s like,” I corrected.
Barley smiled shyly.
“Yes, thank you, James,” she said. She blushed and started to stammer. “I, um, I told her, uh—”
“You told her she could go with me?” I guessed.
“I said you might, um, yeah,” Barley said. “I think it’d be nice to include her in things.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“Okay. I told her about the nexus—the ceiling in there’s pretty high, and I didn’t want to leave her waiting around outside,” Barley said. She was looking at me with eyes full of expectation.
“That’s fine,” I said again. That wasn’t what she was looking for. I tried again. “That was a good idea.”
“Thanks!” she said, and she meant it. She was grateful to be told that she’d had a good idea. I watched her relax. She was relieved. She’d been bracing herself for disappointment.
I felt sorry for her.
“I need more friends, anyway,” I said. “Particularly ones I’m not likely to get it on with. No offense.”
“None taken,” she said. “Anyway, it’s been kind of a busy day, so I think I’m going to go join Violet while I can. I’ll talk to you later, James.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. She kissed me on the cheek and then head into Violet’s—and now, I guessed, her—room, and then I ran into Marlot, who didn’t need any coaxing; she was already heading over to find me.
Pala was waiting for us downstairs. Marlot made a big show of looking up and down the hallway. It wasn’t empty but it wasn’t exactly awash in a flood of people.
“Well, she could be anywhere in this crowd,” she said, shading her eyes against the overhead lights.
“Hello! I’m over here!” Pala cried, waving.
“Oh, hi,” I said.
“There you are,” Marlot said.
“Hello! I meant to ask, what is wrong with your leg?” Pala asked, looking at Marlot’s cane.
“Nothing,” Marlot said. “My hand is afraid of heights and likes to have something to hold onto.”
“Oh,” Pala said. She looked at the big stone spear in her hand, and put her other hand on the shaft, frowning at it. I watched her hold onto it and then let go a couple of times, like she was testing how it felt. She shook her head. “But you were limping,” she said. “Like it hurt you to walk.”
“That’s so I don’t look stupid holding a cane,” Marlot said.
“Oh,” Pala said.
“So, um, you ready for the match?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “I so love the skirmish. I love fighting. There is nothing better in the worlds than a good fight.”
“In a real fight, people die,” Marlot said.
“Not where I’m from,” Pala said. “We have fights all the time—my brothers and sister and cousins do—and nobody dies. Not like you do here. And I get to watch.”
“You like to watch, huh?” Marlot asked.
“Mar,” I said.
“Oh, yes, I love to watch,” Pala said. “Especially when my brothers do it together.”
“Marlot,” I said. “Don’t you think there’s such a thing as too easy a target?”
“That’s my sister,” Pala said. “She’s very easy.”
“Yeah, let’s get going,” I said and started for the door. I held it open for Pala while she turned sideways and ducked through it.
“Thank you,” she said. She was slightly embarrassed about it.
I could see why Pala lived off-campus, and why she didn’t have many friends. I agreed with Barley that we could invite her along for things, but it would be hard to have her over. The ceilings in the dorm buildings weren’t as high as the nexus’s, and she’d take up a lot of sprawl-space all on her own.
“So, did you, uh, like the fair thing?” I asked her. As small talk went, it was lame. Maybe even lamer than small talk usually was. But I knew three things about her: she was big, she liked watching fights, and she’d cooed over the dragons. She was self-conscious of her size and talking about fights just handed Marlot openings.
“Very much,” she said. “And the underwear dragon girl explained about you to me.”
“What about me?” I asked.
“About you and your—your boyfriend? She explained it and I think I understand it now.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“You’re a pervert!” she said. She looked at me like she expected me to give her a prize and a pat on the head—somehow—for having insulted me.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I mean a sex pervert,” she said. She frowned. “Am I saying it wrong?”
“I don’t think you’re saying it right, whatever it is,” I said. Marlot started cracking up. I gave her a dirty look.
“Then I guess I still don’t understand,” she said. “I thought I did.” She looked sideways down at me. “Are you a girl?” she asked hopefully.
“No,” I said. “We went over this. I’m a boy. A man. All man.”
“Sometimes he’s a deer,” Marlot said.
“Then I really don’t understand,” Pala said.
“Sometimes,” Marlot said, “when an elf and a deer really love each other, and they decide the time is right, they write a letter to a stork—”
“I know about storks!” Pala said. She looked at me again. “Are you—expecting?”
“I’m expecting a camera guy to burst out of the bushes and tell me I’m on TV,” I said.
“We’re on TV?”
“Never mind,” I said. No wonder she couldn’t understand homosexuality, if she didn’t have a handle on the regular type. I wasn’t going to try explaining the bees and the bees to somebody who didn’t get the birds and the bees.
“It’s okay, Pala,” Marlot said helpfully. “You were mostly right. He is kind of a sex pervert.”
“Oh, I thought so!” Pala said. Maybe she had a sense that Marlot was teasing her somehow, because she looked down at me again. “Unless you’re a girl.”
“No!” I said. “Do I look like a girl?”
“You look more like a boy than you look like a girl,” Pala said. “But—you cannot always tell.”
“So, where exactly are you from, Pala?” I asked.
That one stopped her in her tracks.
“Cool it with the trick questions, Jamie,” Marlot said.
“I am from—up?” Pala said.
“You mean the north?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said. “I guess so. I was sent here for my wellness.”
“Your health?”
“I don’t think that’s right,” she said. “Oh. And also because my uncle says I am very clever and that should be—nourished?”
“Nurtured, maybe,” Marlot said. “Nurtured or nourished. Possibly neutered.”
“He says that I am like a garden flower that should be protected in walls or I will be trampled upon,” Pala said. “So he sent me here.”
“Another delicate blossom,” Marlot said to me. “You should start a greenhouse.”
“I just hope that all my cousins weren’t too angry with him when they found out what he did,” Pala said.
“You were pretty popular back home, huh?” Marlot asked. She asked it lightly. I got a squicky feeling about what sort of “trampling” her uncle might have been protecting her from. It obviously couldn’t be literal.
“Yes,” Pala said. She held up her spear. “But he gave me my father’s spear, which was supposed to go to my brother, or my cousin, or my other brother, or my other cousin, or my sister, or—anybody but me, really. The fights over it were very nasty. Not good ones.”
“Did anybody try to get it from you?” Marlot asked.
“No, he made me promise not to give it to anybody, and nobody will be the one to fight me for it,” she said. “They wouldn’t dare.”
I wondered if that meant she was the only giant-sized one in her family after all.
She shrugged.
“My uncle, he means well, but he isn’t very clever.” She smiled and hugged the spear like a skinny, pointy teddy bear. “But it was my father’s and I appreciate it, even if I won’t get to keep it for long.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
“My uncle says so, and they were like brothers. Everybody says so. I have pictures of him with it,” she said. “He even named himself after it.”
It took me a moment to figure out she was telling me why she thought the spear was her father’s, and that she probably meant he’d named the spear after himself. I let that go.
“I meant, what makes you think you won’t get to keep it?”
“Oh. Well, Uncle Hallbjorn will realize his mistake and take it back,” she said. “He is foolish. When others would spend the whole day thinking something through, he makes a decision in two hours. I am like him, a little, but only because I do not have as many brains as others.”
As slow as Pala was, I kind of wanted to punch whoever had told her that.
On the off chance that she wasn’t the big one in the family, then preferably from very, very far away.
Maybe with a catapult.
“If it was your dad’s, don’t you have as much a right to it as anybody?” I asked. “More than your cousins, anyway.”
“No,” she said, as confused by this idea as she was by men dating. She laughed. “You’re funny.”
“That’s me,” I said. “A funny, funny pervert.”
“I’m glad you’re funny,” she said. “Uncle Hallbjorn told me that most perverts are creepy and I should punch as high as I can reach and run for my brothers if I ever meet one.”
“Go ahead and do that to Jamie if he starts looking shifty,” Marlot said.
“Okey dokey,” Pala said. “What is ‘shifty’?”
“About like that,” Marlot said, jerking her head towards me. Pala looked down at me in alarm. She raised her fist and then stopped, confused.
“Marlot!” I yelled, ducking and stumbling backwards. “Khersis fuck, I’m not a pervert!”
“If I reach as high as I can, I won’t hit you,” Pala complained.
“Well, think about it for a couple of days,” Marlot said.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked her.
“Nourishing,” Marlot said.
“Okay,” Pala said, all smiles. She dropped her fist. “We should be going. Your pretending-to-limp is almost as slow as really limping, and I don’t want to miss the opening.”
