Chương 65: The Mat Order

The year had decided things about him overnight. Yesterday forty people had stood in the doorway of that gym and gone completely quiet at a screen, and then talked about him to each other until Mr. Tench got them out of it. This morning somebody had saved him a seat in homeroom, which had never happened before, and a girl from the year below stopped him by the stairs.

"Does it hurt?"

"Does what hurt?"

"Any of it," she said, and went off down the corridor before he could answer. Amrit caught him outside the gym.

"My dad says you're going to be a soldier."

"I'm not going to be a soldier."

"I told him you weren't." Amrit looked slightly disappointed about it.

"He's told everybody at the works, though, so." There was a second board on the gym wall. The first one had been up by the equipment cage since December. Two hundred names in one column, the whole year on it, and nobody had looked at the bottom of it since the first week. The new one was a whitewashed sheet of ply, screwed up next to the fire door, and it had ten slots cut in it and ten cardboard tags hanging out of them, and every tag was blank. It smelled of glue.

Somebody had put it up that morning and made a mess of the second screw. Nita Sowerby was already standing in front of it with her hands behind her back, working out whether she was going to be allowed to do the lettering.

"He's not going to let you," Lena Ward said.

"He will."

"It's not your board."

"It's going to be my board," Nita said, in the voice of somebody who has already won an argument the other person has not started yet. Mr. Tench came in at ten after with the ply board's leftover screws in his coat pocket and put them on the cart, and then he stood in front of the year and told them what the rest of it was going to be.

"Two things and then we work," he said.

"The first one is that board." Forty people looked at the board.

"There's a ten now. Two hundred names on the old one and not one of you can tell me who is a hundred and fortieth." He nodded at the ply.

"Ten you will all know by Friday." Nobody said anything at all.

"You get on it the way you have been getting up the other one since December. You call one of the ten out, out loud, in front of the room. Then the two of you settle it on the mat, and whoever wins takes the higher tag." He put his hands in his pockets.

"Same days. Every Tuesday, and every Thursday if I can get the hall." Naylor said, "Can you call out anybody?"

"Anybody who's on it." He took a folded piece of paper out of his top pocket and put it on the cart.

"That's the ten. It goes up before the end of the lesson."

"Can you call out Croft?"

"You can call out Croft," Tench said.

"You want to think about whether you enjoy that." Croft had been leaning on the wall bars pretending not to listen.

"Naylor can have first go," he said, to the ceiling.

"I'll be gentle with him and everything."

"You've never been gentle with anything," Naylor said, and forty people made a noise, and Tench let it run and then stopped it.

"The second thing is that we are down to one blade afternoon a month." Ottley groaned from the back like a man who had been shot. He had had blades twice a week since December, and he had been first to the rack every Tuesday of it.

"You can groan," Tench said.

"The rule isn't mine and it isn't the school's. No healer, no edges."

"We've got a healer," said Ottley.

"We have got Mrs. Amery for exactly as many hours as somebody pays her for. After Christmas that is one afternoon a month." He looked at the ply board and not at the year.

"She puts an arm back together in front of you in about ten seconds. That is the only reason anybody in this building has ever been allowed to pick up anything with an edge on it."

"One a month."

"One. So once a month you find out what a blade actually does, and the other three Tuesdays you do this."

"Which afternoon?" said Ada Bewley.

"I'll tell you when I know." Then he taught them how you get out of Kindled. He drew it on the whiteboard as a line going up and across, badly, with a marker that was going. Kindled at the bottom left and Tempered at the top right and a curve between them, climbing.

"Everybody in this room breaks out of Kindled one day or stops being anything," he said.

"This is the part of the year where you find out what that costs. So." He tapped the bottom of the curve.

"Your chance of coming out the other side goes up with your depth. That is the entire rule."

"That's it?" said Ottley.

"That's it. There's no trick and there's nothing you can buy."

"There's catalysts," Danforth said.

"There are catalysts. They're worth a few points on a bad number." Tench put his finger on the curve at ten and slid it a little way along.

"I've watched two men take one. I wouldn't."

"Sir."

"Here. Ten, eleven, twelve. About half, anywhere in there." He left the finger where it was.

"That's where this country breaks. Half is what people can get to." Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. He moved his finger up the line, past twelve, past fourteen, and the curve went up with it.

"It keeps going," he said.

"A long way past anything written on a wall in this building." Then he put his finger on the top of it.

"At fifteen it's certain." He kept his finger on it.

"Not likely. Certain. Every time, and you pick the hour yourself." The gym went quiet in the wrong way. Abe watched about thirty heads start to turn toward him and stop, because turning right around would have been obvious. Then they turned back. Nell Mott did not bother and looked at him properly. Ottley said "Jeez" from the back and was ignored. Tench went on talking. He did not look at Abe once, and he did not change a word, but that was worse than if he had.

"So the ones of you near the top," he said.

"You're going to get told a lot this year that you're ready." Nobody moved at all.

"Some of them will mean it kindly. Some of them will be getting paid to say it." He capped the marker.

"Ten is half. Write that down somewhere your father can't see it." Danforth wrote it down. Then they did the mats, and nobody would call Abe out. Nobody said anything about it, which was how he knew that the whole year had decided it together at some point that morning without one of them saying it out loud. Naylor called out Amrit, lost inside a minute, and was so pleased about it that Tench had to tell him twice to get off the mat.

Then Ottley called out Croft, which he had been building up to since October, because Ottley could not be bruised and wanted the whole year to know how far that went. Croft dropped him four times. Ottley got up four times grinning like a lunatic, and Tench stopped it before there was a fifth. Six bouts. Twelve names. Abe stood at the side with his sleeves rolled up and watched. He had wanted this since the duel.

A room where the fight was the whole point, in front of people, where nobody could buy their way past it. Now it was here, and it was a wall of politely turned backs. Croft came and stood next to him with his arms folded and his shirt back on.

"You're waiting for me to do it," Croft said.

"I'm not waiting for anything."

"You are. You've been looking over here for ten minutes like a dog at a door." He was enjoying himself enormously.

"I'm not doing it in here."

"Why not?"

"Because it's a Tuesday, and there's no blades, and Tench would stop it after four goes." Croft leaned over and said the rest of it quietly, which for Croft meant that about eleven people heard it.

"I've got you for a whole morning on Saturday, in my own yard, with nobody counting. I'm not giving that away in a school gym for nothing."

"Saturday's the seventeenth."

"I know what Saturday is."

"There's a competition in Prescot on the seventeenth," Abe said.

"Gault got me on it yesterday." Croft stopped enjoying himself.

"What time."

"Afternoon."

"Then we start at eight," he said, and went off to tell Ottley how gentle he had been with him. Then Ada Bewley said, "Dolan." The room went off like she had thrown something. There were fourteen layers between them. She said his name anyway. She came in low and got hold of his sleeve and put her whole weight on his arm. Ada had no Talent worth anything in a fight and had never once pretended otherwise. What she had was four years on her own bedroom floor.

She took what you gave her and stayed up, and stayed up, until your arm was heavy and stupid, and then she had your wrist. Abe's arm did not get heavy. He felt her take hold, and he felt how hard she was pulling, but it was like being leaned on by a coat. He got his feet where he wanted them without thinking about it, and he turned, and she went down on the mat with a bang that he heard in his teeth. The room did not know what to do with it and made a small confused noise.

Abe put a hand down and she took it and got up. She blew a breath out and shook her arm loose at the elbow, and she was not embarrassed at all.

"I'm sorry," Abe said.

"Don't." She got her hair off her face.

"Don't do that."

"I didn't mean it like that."

"I know what you meant." She looked over at the ply board and the ten blank tags on it.

"I'm going to call you out every week."

"Ada, it's not going to go differently."

"I know that as well." She shrugged.

"You're the only one in here who can put me down properly, and I don't have to pay anybody for it." She picked her water bottle up off the bench.

"And it happens on a Tuesday. So I'm having it." Then she called out Sefton, and it was the third time, and everybody knew it was the third time. Sefton had a weekend water permit and the arms that come with one, and he had put her down twice already, both of them in the first two weeks of December, when the order was new and everybody in the year was calling everybody out. Both times he had been decent about it, and both times she had been back on her bedroom floor with the bed against the wall the same night.

It went two minutes, which on those mats is a long time. He got her off her feet twice and she did not stay off them. He got an arm under her and she went with it instead of fighting it and came up inside. He put his shoulder into her and she took it, and she took the next one, and by then his breathing had changed and everybody in that gym could hear it. She stayed up. She kept taking it, and she let the fight get long on purpose, because long was where she won.

Then Sefton's arm came up slower than it had come up the time before. She had his wrist before he had finished the movement. He went down on one knee and hit the mat with his free hand and it was over, and the gym came apart. Nobody had made a sound for Abe's number the day before. They made plenty for this one, because this was a thing they had all watched happen, from the start, with their own eyes, on a Tuesday, in a school gym, against somebody good. Nell Mott got to her first.

Naylor was doing his own commentary of it to people who had been standing right there. Sefton, who had lost, was hitting her on the shoulder and telling her she had cheated, which she had not, and both of them knew it, and he was laughing. Nita got the board in the end, because Tench looked at her once and said, "Go on then," and she had the marker out of her bag before he had finished saying it.

Tench had given her the starting ten on a piece of paper at the beginning of the lesson, in his own order, which he did not explain to anybody. She copied it out at the fire door in her best letters, and then she moved the two that had changed on the day. BEWLEY went above SEFTON, because Ada had won. AMRIT went above NAYLOR, because Amrit had. Then she put 13 JAN on the frame at the bottom, in the small letters she used for dates.

DOLAN · CROFT · DANFORTH · BEWLEY · SEFTON · MOTT · AMRIT · NAYLOR · OTTLEY · WARD Sefton read his own name sitting under Ada's and put his hand over his face.

"I want it written down that she cheated," he said.

"Write it on your own tag," said Ada. Abe clapped until his hands hurt. He shouted something at Sefton that he could not hear himself say, and he was outside of it the whole time. Ottley found him afterward at the coat hooks, which is where Ottley does his best work.

"Here," he said.

"Dolan. Serious question."

"Go on."

"Where'd you go? Because you left at Christmas looking like the rest of us and you've come back looking like somebody's uncle." Ottley squinted at him with his head on one side.

"You've got a jaw. You didn't have a jaw in December." Naylor said, "He's got a jaw, actually."

"You've gone all thick in the neck. Have they had you on something?"

"He's been doing water," said Sefton, from the bench, with his boots in his hand.

"You do that all winter, you come back looking like that. My uncle looks like a bull and he's five foot four."

"That'll be it," Ottley said, satisfied, and moved on to whether Abe would fight a horse. Not one of them got anywhere near the truth. Abe stood at the coat hooks and let his year decide he had put on muscle. Thirty feet away through the wall, on the end of his own row, in Nita's green marker, the board said training. He had hit nineteen nine days ago, standing in a marsh forty miles from his own bed with the water stopped dead all around him, cutting up something with a back on it the length of a bus.

He had known exactly what the number was that night. Nobody had ever told him that fifteen was where the gamble stopped, because in Calder there had never been a reason to tell anybody. So he could do it tomorrow. He could walk out of this building at four o'clock and take the door in his own yard, on his own, and come out the other side certain. Nobody in that gym had felt it land on them when Tench said it, because for everybody else in that room fifteen was a number out of a story.

Tench caught him at the fire door with the register under his arm.

"You worked it out," he said.

"Worked what out."

"Don't." He was looking at the ply board and the ten new tags on it, and not at Abe.

"You were past it when you stepped on that pad yesterday. And this afternoon I stood in front of forty children and said the number out loud and did not say your name." Abe did not have anything to put in the gap.

"So here's the part I didn't say to the room." Tench got the door open with his elbow.

"They're going to work it out. Then they're going to ask you when."

"All of them?"

"All of them. And they'll be pleased for you while they do it."

"What do I say?"

"Nothing at all, for as long as you can hold out." He went through the door.

"The first one will be that woman on the phone. She'll ask you very nicely."

"When."

"Thursday."