Chapter Nine: An Education

If anyone's interested in finding out what the names in this story mean, go to 20000-names.com. That's where I get them from. With the exception of Theodore and Susie...
***
The next morning, every muscle in Theo’s body had turned to marshmallow, and it hurt. He managed to bait Sashi into physically pulling him out of bed, which brought on quite a lot of giggling and the threat of yet more beans on toast. Theo countered by offering to make breakfast; Sashi accepted with caution, evidently wondering what he was planning. She submitted awkwardly when he cheerfully positioned her at the head of the table and arranged a napkin and a wilting flower in a jamjar in front of her, and watched with apprehension verging on amusement as he bustled about.
The balance finally tilted in favour of amusement when he served up slightly burnt toast topped with raspberry jam and peanut butter with all the flair of a French chef. She hit him with the napkin and laughed.
“I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t this.”
“Just call me the connoisseur of the unexpected,” he smiled, sitting next to her. They ate in silence that was verging on companionable, but was awkward enough for Theo to seek conversation.
“So…how did you come to join the Society?”
Sashi raised one shoulder in a half-shrug, toying with a crust.
“Automatically. My parents were both members. My brother’s an automatic member as well, although he’s gone off to work for the French Society…”
“So it’s automatic membership for member’s kids?”
“Well, not really…if it’s possible to keep up the pretence about the Society that’s preferred, but my parents basically lived down here all the time and I was born down here. Got given a Jackalope when I was six, to make up for my brother being born…it just wasn’t convenient for me to leave.”
“Oh. Makes sense, I guess. So if you’re basically a second-gen member how come you’re stuck cleaning out the Hellhounds?”
She gave a flicker of a smile. “I don’t like killing things and Mr Adfair was kind enough to let me keep things alive instead. Aren’t you supposed to be learning something around now?”
“Oh hell, yes I am…hang on…”
Consulting the timetable, it was duly discovered that he should be going out to learn how to use spears, as would be taught to him by…
“Rowena?”
“Oh, yes. Rowena’s our resident spear expert. You’ll never see her without one if you go with her on a mission…she refuses to use anything else.”
“Even close up?”
“Oh yes. There are spears for use up close too. Some of them have spikes on.” Sashi shuddered. “Rowena has a large and rather nasty collection…”
Theo left for his lesson feeling as though he’d just been sent on a suicide mission.
Rowena was waiting impatiently in the archery fields, playing with her ponytail in boredom. Her arms were bare, and for the first time Theo noticed that they were heavily muscled; she was certainly much stronger than he was. Next to her were three of her favourite weapons; one javelin, one stone-tipped spear and one iron-tipped spear.
“There you are,” she said, immediately upon spotting him. “You’re thirty-four seconds late you know.”
“I am? Sorry,” Theo apologised, wondering why a delay of just over half a minute had engendered so much impatience in the girl. “But, uh, I’m here now.”
“Yes. Come on, we’ll start straight away.”
She turned and trotted off, leading him away from the people practising with bows and arrows, towards a deserted section of field. The instant they arrived she thrust the javelin at him.
“Have you ever thrown one of these before?”
“Uh, yes…we used to do it at school,” he answered, deciding to omit the fact that he’d never been very good and hadn’t so much as touched one in three years. This seemed to satisfy Rowena, at least for the time being.
“Show me,” she demanded. “Show me your throwing stance.”
Rummaging through his memory for the correct way to stand, Theo managed to arrange himself side on to the distant target, holding the javelin in his right hand, drawn back to throw. He felt amazingly awkward, especially while Rowena assessed his stance through narrowed eyes.
“Keep your arm straighter,” she told him, physically pulling his throwing arm back so it was to her liking. “Don’t grip it so hard! Along the palm…put the shaft between your index and middle fingers…that’s it. Okay, run and throw.”
Theo did his best. The javelin managed to land point-down in the grass a couple of metres away, paused, and then fell over.
Rowena shook her head.
“We got a long way to go,” she stated, retrieving the javelin. “Do it again.”
Theo did it again. And again and again, until his rather demanding instructor decided they’d done all they could with the javelin and she would allow him to actually lay hands on a proper spear.
She gave him the iron-tipped one first. It felt sleek and wicked in his hands, something designed to rain down death from a distance. It was exciting and it practically begged to be thrown, but it also felt more impersonal; you could hurt anyone with it. It wasn’t anything like a sword, which was up close and personal.
“There’s not all that much difference between the stone and iron tips but it’s up to you which you prefer,” Rowena said briskly. “I like the stone-tipped ones better as they don’t break as easily, but when they do it’s really nasty and can do even more damage to your target. All right…throwing a spear’s much like throwing a javelin, except it’s a little heavier. Look, I’ll demonstrate.”
She picked up the stone-tipped one with her left hand and held it with the ease of long practice. She took up position, aimed carefully, took a couple of skipping steps, and threw; muscles bunched and released in her arm, and the spear arced through the air and impaled the far-off target straight through the bull’s-eye. It was most impressive and the mark of a true master, unlike Theo’s first effort.
“Do it again.”
He did it again.
“You’re getting a bit better,” Rowena eventually conceded, after the twelfth or so effort. “You could do well, if you practice a lot.”
“Uh…thanks,” Theo said, rubbing his upper arms, which were protesting again. He suspected this was high praise. Rowena gave him a brief thumbs-up and grin, returning to cheerfulness now her teaching job was done
“Next time we’ll use an atlatl!” she exclaimed, gathered up the spears and the javelin and skipped away. Gathering that he was now dismissed, Theo wandered off himself, entirely in the dark about what an atlatl actually was.
There was another riding lesson afterwards. Susie greeted him with pricked ears, investigated him for food, found none, and put her ears back instead. Theo stuck his tongue out at her, and was startled by Hector’s booming laugh from behind him. The Horsemaster evidently found his relationship with the bay mare to be amusing.
After a couple of false starts he managed to tack her up and lead her out, and he only failed to mount properly once. This was encouraging, and Hector seemed pleased. And then he decreed that most of the lesson would be spent in trot, with Theo singing ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ over and over again in order to help with the rhythm of his rising. This was not encouraging. But at least he didn’t fall off this time.
And so it was that when Theo, smelling strongly of horse and with watery horse drool wiped down his front (after the lesson Susie had had a drink, and then decided to check his pockets for carrots again, leading to a rather damp t-shirt), headed towards the library for his third lesson of the day, he was still humming a nursery rhyme. It had been engraved permanently in his brain.
“…The grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men…” he mumbled, pushing open the door of the library building. The curator of the museum gave him a cheerful nod.
“Looking for the library?”
“Yup. Through the door and round the corner, right?”
“Got it in one, son. First door on your right. Easy as anything to find.”
And so it proved. It would have been hard to miss the huge double doors with the massive sign reading ‘Library’ above them even without the directions.
The minute he entered a short, skinny woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses hurried over.
“Mr Theodore Hunt?”
Theo replied in the positive, and was promptly handed a fairly thick booklet.
“These are the books recommended for those entering the Society. Mythological bestiaries, books on ancient weapons for the most part. You are not expected to read all of them. The best ones to start with are highlighted.”
“Uhm, thanks.”
She gave him a bright-eyed smile and scurried away back to her desk. Slightly overwhelmed, Theo opened the booklet and searched for the first highlighted title, which turned out to be ‘The Complete Encyclopaedia of Mythical Beasts and Their Habits’. He duly went looking for it, and only then realised just how big the library actually was.
The main room was bigger even than Mr Adfair’s study, with a high vaulted roof and shelves reaching up to a balcony that ran completely around the room about halfway up the walls. On that balcony were yet more shelves, all filled with books. Through a door in the back Theo could see another huge room, also full of shelves which were full of books, and yet another after that.
It left him with a very odd feeling that the library was somehow bigger than the building that contained it, especially since the building had to contain the museum as well.
“Don’t be stupid,” he muttered to himself. “It’s probably just some weird quirk of architecture…”
Rolling his shoulders in an effort to shake off the feeling, he went off in search of the encyclopaedia.
Eventually, with the help of the librarian Miss Terrwyn, it was located and heaved over to one of the reading tables, which groaned audibly as it was set down. It was a big book.
“That should keep you going,” Miss Terrwyn said cheerfully, and scurried off again. Theo looked at the book, which did not look back. It had a picture of a lion and a unicorn on the cover, probably out of some vague sense of patriotism, seeing as lions weren’t exactly a myth.
With a sigh, he sat down and opened it.
First thing first, he considered, was to look up some of those odd creatures he’d seen in Mr Adfair’s stuffed animal gallery, namely the Cat Sidhe and the Brag. The contents was beautifully illustrated and full of peculiar names; he ran his finger down the page and muttered to himself before locating the word ‘brag’.
Brags, it transpired, were more or less Kelpie Lite. They transformed into donkeys and lured people into riding on their backs, but they didn’t go in for the drowning and the eating, at least not directly; all they did was buck their rider off into bogs and run away laughing. Theo smiled at that; very childish behaviour for a mythical beast.
The next page detailed how to kill them. He skipped over that, vaguely disquieted by the talk of beheading and impaling, and looked up Cat Sidhe.
The first thing he discovered was that he’d been pronouncing it wrong; it was ‘Kett Shee’. They were fairy black cats with white spots on their breasts that haunted Scotland and apparently did little more than scare the pants off people; the book recommended killing them anyway, because there was also proof that they randomly attacked and savaged lonely walkers.
Theo skipped the killing talk there as well, and went to pick something else to look up. He chose kelpies, out of a vague feeling he ought to know a bit more about Susie’s ancestors, and turned to the relevant page. Turned out they came in several varieties; black, white, those that turned into women, those with dripping manes, those with bulrush manes; many also sported adhesive skin to trap their riders on their back. Included were several rather nasty stories, most of which involved children and some almost gleeful and decidedly lurid descriptions of them being eaten. Susie’s cheeky face floated into Theo’s mind, and he thanked his lucky stars that the mare was only half Kelpie.
He spent several more hours absorbed in the book, looking up the most outlandish creatures he could find and also some of the ones he already knew of, in case any of his ideas about them turned out to be very wrong. In the majority of cases, however, the old legends and stories were pretty accurate; only occasionally did the book point out, in a mildly patronising tone, a mistake that had been made or a misconception that had crept in over the years.
For the most part he overlooked the invariably detailed descriptions of how to kill them. A few instead were recommended for taming, which was more reassuring; but for the most part the information was informative and fascinating. He left the book only with reluctance, after being informed by the librarian that he should have gone to lunch an hour and a half ago. It was only luck, she said, that he had had another session in the library scheduled for after lunch; by the time he’d finished, though, it would be time for his next sword fighting lesson. Rather abashed, he nodded, thanked her and hurried out.
Sashi wasn’t in when he got back to the flat, but had left him a note in small, neat handwriting indicating the presence of sandwich-making materials and warning against attempting to cook anything. After bolting down a hastily-made cheese and salad sandwich with mustard, he rushed to meet Mr Aldobrandino, who greeted him with a raised eyebrow but kindly omitted to mention that his pupil was ten minutes late. He did, however, make Theo go through the positions he’d learnt the last lesson three times in a kind of unspoken punishment, both for the rapier and the sabre. Theo was developing a decided fondness for the sabre already, a fact which made Mr Aldobrandino grin for no readily apparent reason.
This time, after they had finished the next set of positions, he let Theo have a short sparring session with him near the end of the lesson. It ended with Theo flat on his back, after his teacher had demonstrated a cunning trick with his sabre and also his ready willingness to teach the hard way.
“This is not fencing, Mr Hunt!” he said cheerfully, offering a hand to help his winded student back to his feet. “I am teaching you to fight for your life! Now, again!”
This time, Theo ended up flat on his back even faster.
“We will have you fighting like a master in no time!” declared Mr Aldobrandino, grinning in a way Theo felt was decidedly unnecessary. “Again!”