Chương 79: Twelve Minutes

The stations were the dullest thing in the building and Abe loved every second of them. Leeds had four. Prescot had two, and the school had one pad by the equipment cage that gives you three numbers and stops. The first was a bar on a track that you pushed until you could not push it, and a man wrote the number down and put the slip in a tray. The second was the pad, which he had stood on twice before in two other buildings.

This one read to one decimal place, and it had a screen on a stand beside it so that everybody in the hall could read it too. The third was new to him. It was a frame with a hanging weight in it and a wire going up to a spool. It did not measure how much weight you could hold. It measured how long you could keep the weight rising, which turns out to be a completely different question. The fourth was a woman with a stopwatch and a length of floor. And over all of it there was a man at a table with a microphone.

Every few minutes he gave out a name and a town and a station, in the easy voice of a man who had said names all his life. For most of the morning there was hardly anybody in the seats to hear him. What anybody was never went over the speaker, because that is private everywhere, even here. Abe went around all four with his coat off and his sleeves pushed up and forgot to be frightened somewhere in the middle of the second one.

Nobody in that hall was going to say one word to him about Salt Row or about Thursday or about what a boy his age ought to be able to do. There was a bar. You pushed it. Whatever happened, happened, and a man wrote it down and put the slip in a tray, and the tray did not care who you were at all. He put a number up on the pad that made the man with the tray look at the machine instead of at Abe. Then he got to the frame with the hanging weight, and stayed on it.

The spool went around, and went around, and kept going around. The man running it wrote a number down and looked at it. He did not put the slip in the tray straight away. Priya was on the rail with her arms folded. Abe stood there with his sleeves up and his heart going.

"Is it good?" he said.

"It is the best one anybody who has not gone over has ever done in front of me." Priya said it in exactly the voice she uses for the time of day.

"And every man here who has gone over will beat it before lunch and think nothing of it. Both of those are true. You have to carry both." Somewhere behind him a man said the number out loud, and a second man said it back to him as a question. A girl Abe had never met let out one short laugh and put her hand over her mouth. He did not use the still once all day. He could not have if he had wanted to, with nine hundred seats and forty prospects and a man up a stepladder.

By eleven o'clock he had stopped noticing, because there was not one thing in that hall he needed it for. Coming off the frame with his sleeves still up, Abe looked down the hall. Priya was standing in an office doorway with her coat done up, talking to a man in a cardigan. She had a piece of paper in her hand. Not the folder. A piece of paper, held up a bit, with her thumb partway down it. Abe was forty feet away and heard none of it.

The man in the cardigan listened to the whole thing with his head a little on one side. Even from forty feet away you could see he was being kind about it. Then he said something short, and put a hand on the door frame, and went back inside. Priya came back up the hall and picked her bag up off the rail and did not say anything about it at all. Abe did not ask, because asking would have meant saying out loud that he had stood at the other end of a hall and watched.

In October somebody from the school had come with her. He did not understand what he had watched until eleven o'clock the next morning. At half past one a man put a table across the door with a cash box on it, and the hall Abe had had almost to himself all morning started filling up behind him. There was a sheet of paper taped to the table with ADULTS 2 · UNDER 16 1 chalked on it, and the man had a bag of change and a roll of blue tickets.

By two o'clock the line went back out of the doors and along the front of the building in the rain. Abe went out to get his bag off the bench in the corridor and could not get back in.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm on the list."

"Everybody's on the list, son." The man had one hand on the table and about three hundred people behind Abe waiting to pay him.

"Name." If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. So Abe said his own name. The man ran a finger down the running order until he found it, read it out loud to check it against him, and let him past. Nobody in that line knew who he was. About four of them recognized him and said so to each other while he was standing there, which was somehow worse than the whole line knowing.

Behind him the man on the door started telling people the standing was full. The bouts started after two. Three minutes each, your own art, with whatever your art fights with. A man with a whistle stopped them the moment anything went wrong. Real steel, some of it. Down the running order there were two spears and a pair of hooked sticks. One boy's whole art seemed to be a shield with no weapon behind it at all. At school it was wooden swords, one blade afternoon a month, and everybody knew why.

Here a woman sat at the corner of the mats in a folding chair with a thermos and a paperback. She was, Abe guessed, being paid more than anybody else in the building. In the second bout of the day a Salford boy took a cut across the forearm. The woman put her paperback down, and he was back in the line before his next bout with nothing to show for it but the torn sleeve. The mats at the far end had a rope around them and four rows of chairs, and about a hundred and fifty people who had gotten there early.

Abe had four. The first one was a boy from Wakefield, and that was about all Abe ever found out about him, because it took four seconds flat to put him down. The hall went up, and the Weave paid him nothing at all, because not one second of it had been hard. The second one was a girl from Halifax who was faster than him and knew it. He won the first exchange. She came in and he was already inside it, exactly the way he had been with the Wakefield boy.

He got a clean one onto her shoulder that would have finished most people in that building. She took it, and stepped off it, and then the fight started. After that he did not touch her again. She put him on the boards inside a minute with something she did with her front foot. It was a little half step in that was not a step in at all. He went for the space where she had been and she was not in it, and the floor came up and hit him in the shoulder blades. He got up.

The man with the whistle looked at him and Abe nodded and they went again. She did it a second time, off the other foot, and he did not see it that time either. He lay on the boards for a second with the roof a long way up above him and forty people making noise. He had absolutely no idea what had just happened to him. Twice. Then he got up and put a hand out to stop the man with the whistle.

"How did you do that?" The girl from Halifax looked at him like he had asked her the time in a language she did not speak.

"What?"

"The foot. You did it twice and I didn't see it either time." He was still getting his breath back.

"Will you show me?" There were about a hundred and fifty people around that mat and every one of them heard him ask. The noise off the seats came down after it, row by row, until the whole hall was waiting with her. She went pink up the sides of her neck and looked at the man with the whistle. The man with the whistle had his hand up to end it already. Two falls was two falls, and the bout had been over before Abe opened his mouth.

He looked at the pair of them for a moment, and then he stepped back off the mat, because there is no rule anywhere about what to do when somebody does that.

"You're serious," said the girl from Halifax. It was not a question.

"Yes." Then she showed him. Right there, with the clock stopped and the hall watching. Twice, slowly. One hand on his shoulder to put him where he was supposed to be standing, and the other one turning his front foot out with her fingers like she was setting a table. It took her about four seconds to teach it. It took Abe the rest of the afternoon to start getting it wrong less often. The third one was a boy from Ketton, four inches taller than Abe, with a spear, who had clearly been told to keep it long.

It was the dullest three minutes of the day. Abe won it on points because the man with the whistle had to give it to somebody. He learned nothing. Nobody clapped much. It counted exactly as much as the other three. Waiting for his fourth, Abe watched Danforth fight, two mats down. Danforth did everything the way the diagrams do it. His feet were right, his guard was right, and he scored twice.

Then a broad boy with red hands hit him harder than anybody had ever coached him for, and Danforth went down, and the bout went with him. He was up before the man with the whistle got there. He shook hands properly. He said something that made the red-handed boy laugh. Behind them the seats were roaring at somebody else's bout. In January there would have been a crowd three deep around that mat. Abe counted the people watching and there were six, and one of them was him, and not one of them was holding a pen.

The last one was a boy from Bradford. He was heavier than Abe and he came out grinning, and when he put his hands up the air over them shook, the way it does over the top of a chimney. They were hot. Actually hot. Abe found this so interesting that he lost the first thirty seconds of the bout to standing there looking at it, which is not a thing SECOND MEETING can do anything about, because a skill that hands you the first exchange cannot make you take it.

The Bradford boy hit him in the ribs and it stung twice, once for the hit and once for the heat of it.

"Sorry," the boy said, cheerfully, still coming. Then Abe set his feet. There is a thing that happens when Set Stance holds and the other person has put everything they have into moving you. They find out that where you are standing is now a matter between you and the floor, and that they were not invited into it. The boy from Bradford came in hard and hot and Abe did not go anywhere. He came in again and Abe did not go anywhere.

The third time he got both hands on Abe's shoulder and drove off the back foot with his whole weight and his whole grin. Abe stood in it like a post in a road. The boy from Bradford stopped. He stepped back, and stood there breathing, and started laughing at him. He was still laughing when the whistle went. He was still laughing when he shook Abe's hand.

"You're a wall," he said, delighted, to Abe, to the hall, to nobody. The seats took the word up. Abe heard it twice more from the banks before he got off the mat. Abe came off the mat with his ears going and stood at the edge of it with his hands on his knees, and the screen came up. Set Stance · Apprentice Lv 8 (12, 140 / 12, 800) He read it twice. That Set Stance bar had been at about half on Monday morning. Four bouts of three minutes each was twelve minutes, and that was what the running order gave him.

He had used four seconds of it on the Wakefield boy. The other three bouts had taken everything he had. None of it had come off the four seconds. The four seconds had been free, the way the four seconds are always free. It had come off the parts he was bad at. The thirty seconds of standing in front of a boy with hot hands not knowing what to do. Getting up off the boards twice with no idea what had put him there.

A tall boy from Ketton keeping a spear head between them for three solid minutes while Abe found out that he had no answer for it at all. He stood in a hall full of strangers with six hundred and sixty points left on a bar. He worked out, standing up, that the whole afternoon had paid him for the parts where he was out of his depth, and for nothing else. He wanted to tell somebody so badly that his chest hurt.