Next they went into the cemetery and searched out Glynn's grave. Dav, the most artistic member in the sibko, had carved out a fighting sword on top of the grave marker, so it was easy to locate. In the shelter of a bushy tree, the sword seemed to thrust out of the ground, as if the corpse beneath was holding onto the hilt from inside the tomb. The shadows cast by the tree created the illusion of fresh bloodstains along the blade.
Standing silently by the grave, Aidan thought of Glynn's wasted death. One day a roving band of bandits had come too near the sibko, which was undergoing extended wilderness-survival training, camped in some geodesic domes abandoned by another sibko whose members had gone on to the next stage of their training. Gonn, an insecure military strategist at best, had panicked and set up a perimeter defense outside the encampment. It was clear to Aidan that the bandits might have passed them by if Gonn had not drawn their attention.
Aidan remembered lying on the ground, his hand tightly clutching the low-powered laser pistol that had become standard issue for the sibko after its tenth birth-noting. It could not kill, but it could cause extreme discomfort, as Aidan learned when Peri, the sneaky little runt of the siblitter, had shot him during a mock infantry exercise. The beam caught Aidan in the neck, sending a steady pain through it that was worse than any headache or muscle spasm he had ever endured. The pain made his eyes tear up and he fell to the ground. Peri, fearful that her toy had been set too high, ran over to him. When she saw that he was still alive, she laughed triumphantly. That was Peri's way; she exulted in her victories and let her victims know that she was happy to have defeated them.
In spite of his pain, Aidan had grabbed Peri about her legs, tipped her over, and disarmed her of the toy laser pistol, which he then held to her head. At that moment he had wanted to give her a headache the equal of the pain she had inflicted upon him. Fairness won out, however. Aidan accepted the skirmish victory as his due, sending the now-frowning Peri back to the assembling area with other defeated child-warriors, all waiting for their next turn in the battle game.
Aidan watched the bandits come toward the entrenched sibko. He could hardly make out the features of their faces, so begrimed were they with the dirt of the road that it looked as though they'd been wallowing in mud. Their clothes were mostly old and ripped, though here and there a bandit wore relatively clean, new-looking garments, probably booty from their most recent raid. The hair of the man at the head of the pack was tightly wrapped in a trio of short pigtails that bounced against his forehead with each step. Three pigtails identified him as the antikhan, a title that marked his rebellion against the warrior caste (he had no doubt been a disgraced warrior or failed warrior cadet). The word itself showed contempt for the rigid political structure of the Clans, each of whose leaders was called a khan, while the leader of all the Clans was given the exalted title of ilKhan.
Each member of the attacking horde seemed to grow in size as he or she came nearer. It was an optical illusion, Aidan knew, but the front ranks of the bandits were nevertheless populated by bulky, thick-muscles brutes who looked like warrior caste flush-outs.
Aidan, remembering Glynn's latest Mifoon adventure, took aim at the bandit leader's forehead and waited for him to get as close as possible before firing. Sibparent Gonn, who was in charge of weaponry training, had told Aidan that his main flaw as a marksman was that he was always the most eager to fire and most ready to fight in the entire sibko. Therefore, Gonn said, he should train himself to use proper caution. Aidan was now trying to be cautious, while his finger longed to pull the trigger and blast the bandit leader between the eyes. (According to Gonn, Aidan was one of the two or three best shots in the sibko, too).
He would have fired, and he would have stunned the leader and perhaps averted the attack if it were not for Glynn. No one ever had a clear notion of why she did it, though Gonn would later say the fanciful tales she told had chipped away too much battle armor from her mind, and that she probably thought she was some roving yojimbo out to save the local community from ravagers.
At any rate, Glynn marched past the line of sibko-defenders. With her height, she seemed like a giant stepping over ordinary people, especially with all the members of the sibko prone and looking up at her with awe. As though her long legs propelled her with a life of their own, she headed right for the advancing horde, which came to a halt at a signal from the tri-pigtailed leader.
The leader watched Glynn's approach, no doubt noting that the only weapon at her disposal was a sheathed sword that bounced rhythmically against her thigh just as his pigtails had danced against his forehead. He smiled, revealing surprisingly white teeth. With the rest of his face obscured by dirt and grime, the smile seemed to exist on its own, almost as if it floated in front of his face, an eerie smile without a link to anything else.
A few steps in front of the leader, Glynn stopped and said something to him. Her words did not carry back to the sibko, most of whose members now stood and, defying Gonn's cautioning, had begun to move toward the bandits. While not losing sight of Glynn and the bandit leader, Aidan chose one of the bandits, a surly-looking, stocky, bearded man on the right flank, as his quarry if a battle erupted.
The bandit leader's killing move was nearly undetectable. His right hand had rested in front of a scruffy vest, quite casually, then suddenly he had drawn a knife from somewhere in his clothing and raked it across Glynn's neck. Aidan got a sense of some blood spurting as Glynn fell, but by then his rage had taken over and he rushed toward the stocky bandit he had selected. As he came close, he realized he could get a shot at the bandit with his pistol, but he also knew he did not want that. It would be too easy. For his own sense of revenge, he had to make the man suffer.
The bandit came at him. He, too, had found a knife somewhere on his clothing and was brandishing it like a tiny sword. Knife or sword, no conventional weapon could frighten Aidan. In their hand-to-hand combat training lessons, he and the other sibko members had been well-drilled to respect a weapon but not to fear it.
Switching the pistol to his left hand, Aidan used it to deflect the downward arc of the bandit's knife. Before his adversary could recover, he grabbed the man's wrist with hands whose muscles had been strengthened by long calisthenic drills supervised by sibparent Gonn. Aidan had squeezed resilient materials, performed a dozen types of exercise ritual, hardened the skin in martial-arts demonstrations. As a result, he—like the others in the sibko— could do wonders with just bare hands. Aidan could feel the bandit's wrist break as he snapped it backward violently. The knife fell out of the man's hand. Kneeing the stocky man in the stomach and doubling him over, Aidan quickly snatched the knife off the ground and waited patiently for the man to straighten up. It would have been too easy to plunge the knife into the bandit's back. That would have been too much like a proper Clan death, the noble demise of a warrior who, even though a member of the bandit caste, could die in battle. But if the man were to die, there must be shame attached to it, especially after the bandit leader's almost casual slaying of Glynn.
As the bandit straightened up, he made a quick lunge at Aidan, who neatly sidestepped the man, sending him plunging forward and down, his face in the dirt. Ironically, it was Glynn who had drilled him in this very same battle-footwork.
Aidan stepped backward. He sensed, out the corner of his eye, a movement toward him. Another bandit, a short, thick-legged woman with fire in her eyes, raced toward him. Her fighting skills were no better than those of the man on the ground, and Aidan was able to strike the side of her head with the barrel of his pistol. He could have stabbed her, but he was saving the bandit's knife for its owner. She collapsed and he saw, as the fire in her eyes went out, that she would be at least momentarily unconscious.