School for Scoundrels

[Mordelain]

School for Scoundrels

[Mordelain]

“The Tama were like you once. Poor. Broken. Directionless. They squandered the resources of their world, bled it dry, and gave all chance to the winds. When their society began to collapse, its zenith spent, they panicked. They turned to the other worlds they had watched from afar, too cautious, afraid, and ignorant to wander. Instead of turning to those people for help in their time of need, they turned to war.”

“War?” interrupted the young, inquisitive mind at the front of the class.

Mordelain smiled warmly. A breeze rolled into the classroom through the gallery windows that lined the eastern wall. Soft silk screens fluttered. Hot sand, a peculiar smell that never left a desert dweller’s heart and mind fulminated through the chamber. Half asleep, the children towards the rear of the room stirred.

“Yes, Saddar. The Tama, potent magicians and arrogant fools thought they could conquer the other worlds.” Standing, Mordelain circled her desk. She leant back against it, palms pressed against the worn surface. Her eyes picked out the trouble makers in the room, and remained locked with them in a silent war of her own. “They forged the Kalithrism on battles bloody and cruel.”

At the mention of bloody, and certainly at the utterance of cruel, all eyes fell on the il’Jhain. She smirked. Since she had begun teaching at the academy, the Bedouin children had proven to be difficult students, and testing beyond measure. Slowly but surely, she had won them around. A little adventure to the history syllabus always did the trick. She wondered what Suresh, her mentor, would say at the discovery of her overly violent viewpoint on Fallien’s history.

“Go on, miss!” someone erred at the back. His voice half-quivered, joint excitement and shyness.

“Yes!” cried the gaggle of good students at the front. They found common ground with the others and pounced on the opportunity to share a moment.

Mordelain chuckled. She pressed air, as though pushing back an angry mob, and stepped away the desk. Bells and ribbons danced at her hips. The breeze faded, replacing the momentary life in the room with the Outlander Quarter’s usual laisse fair humidity. Soon, the sun would strike the city of Irrakam dead with its midday ferocity. For a few hours, the il’Jhain would rest, and the children would dream through cyclical trivialities and pondering on the afternoon’s lectures. She hoped.

“They appeared as gods, pious and indignant. They masqueraded threats with promises of ‘salvation’, technology to bring the people dredged in darkness out into their light.” A point to ill-conceived map of Althanas as was known by Fallien’s scholars focussed their attentions. “They promised the people of the nine worlds a glimpse of the spaces beyond their borders.”

One of the children, a young girl from the Nirakkal fields, scuttled from her chair to the map. A grubby hand slapped against it.

“Here?” the girl asked. She cocked her head over her shoulder seeking the teacher’s approval.

Mordelain chuckled.

“Yes, Kelda. There.”

[Mordelain]

All the students turned to examine the spot on the map in question. Golden light ran along the marble tiles and brought the moment to life. Mordelain wanted to explain what was beyond the sketches limitations there and then, but to give in to them now would detract from the afternoon’s excursion.

“All the people had to do was revere the Tama as priests, saints, if you will.” She spoke with a placid, unthreatening tone. The children, despite her efforts, all turned to glare at her. It was a wave of aggression born of religious intolerance in Fallien’s supposedly diverse culture. She rolled her eyes. “Children. We have talked about this. I am teaching you history. That does not mean I expect you to follow the ideals of others.”

Despite Jya’s grip on the island, tyrannical and impure, so young, her students knew no other alternative. The priesthood of the Keep were their idols, and the strength on which their families forged empires across the dunes. She had done her part to upend the stagnation, but the rest of the change was with the people.

“Why did they not just sail there and keep their freedom?”

Mordelain recognised the voice, and drew her eyes to Saddar. The black hair, curled and eternally greasy cast a shadow on a drawn face. Eyes pierced. Hearts raced. A challenge from student to teacher firmly issued.

“A good question.” Mordelain walked through the chair, winding carefully, footfalls soft, and stood before the map. “What do you think, children? Why,” she waved across the part marked Dheathain in a theatrical whirl, “would anyone sell their freedom for a bigger map?”

There was lots of hushed whispering and groupings of like-minded ideas. Children craned their necks across desks to huddle together and come to some sort of conclusion. Mordelain could only imagine all the witty attempts they were devising to undermine her. After a term in the academy, she swore she had heard them all.

“They didn’t have boats,” came the inevitable.

Mordelain shook her head. Her auburn hair danced flaxen in the now burning sun. The chamber sweltered, building up to the equally inevitable call for the midday sabbatical. She was running out of time to guide the children to a revelatory teaching moment.

“No. What else?” She looked over the sea of faces hopefully.

Silence.

Kelda returned to her seat. The sound of the chair scraping on tiles broke the awkward lull. It soon returned, silent thoughts turning into whispers turning into a tumult of background noise.

“Ignorance,” someone at the back said.

“Good!” Mordelain half-barked. She clapped enthusiastically, stood on her tiptoes to try to spy the speaker, but they remained hidden behind a sea of headscarves and ponytails. “More?”

“Fear?” Kelda added.

“Excellent!” the il’Jhain whelped.

She was half-surprised they had come out of their shells so quick. Little turtle like necks craned to get a better view of the map, piecing together the morning’s many puzzle pieces into the ‘bigger picture’.

[Mordelain]

“Foolishness,” shouted another. Perfect answer after perfect answer put a broad smile on Mordelain’s face.

Though hot, tired, and worn, she was finally beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The thought of why they were so difficult in the morning vanished, replaced with thoughts of how excellent and bright they became when challenged. A teacher’s folly.

“The Tama conquered the nine worlds through a combination of fear, ignorance, and subterfuge.” The explanation feels short of inspiring, because every child in the room latched on to that magical word that also meant spies.

“Spies?” several of the boys at the back repeated.

Mordelain paused. She pressed a spidery hand against her desk and sighed. She pulled herself back quickly, and turned to face her class. The sun, even high above the academy, brought the room to life and the children’s faces to incandescent smiles.

“Agents. Envoys of the Tama way the people came to know as Troubadours.”

The pieces of the puzzle finally came together and the picture on the surface was a maligned representation of the woman stood at the head of the classroom. They learned of the Troubadours in passing in another session. They were bright, cheerful people. They wore garb alike a Bedouin dervish, with more ribbons and bells, symbols of the moon chimes of their Homeworld. They also carried staves or spears, implements to slay and sway.

“Miss…,” came the inevitable wave of half-formed questions and innocent doubts.

Mordelain smiled meekly. “Yes Hadassah?”

Her raised eyebrow added weight to question. It also told the boy that to speak out of turn now would have dire consequences for his already ropey behaviour record. He practically shook beneath her warning glare.

“Aren’t you…aren’t you a Troubadour?”

The delivery of a well-formed question at the end of a difficult session gave Mordelain an overwhelming sense of satisfaction. It had taken three days to coax it out of them, but there it was, in all its scintillating and venerable glory. They had dared to ask. They had enquired. They had put information into a gourd and poured out intellectual milk (or so the matron of the school described). If she left it to simmer in this heat, it would turn to cream.

“I was.”

There was an audible sigh of relief, as though they genuinely believed she was going to enslave them all under some hidden agenda.

“You see,” she folded her arms, “the Tama made the foolish mistake of dominating all the words save Althanas first.”

This was, in her mind, where the story connected to the other lessons the children attended. The morning’s efforts had been to build up to Fallien’s greatest history, and failure. All children on the island learned this particular piece of history. They learned taught it repeatedly. Its importance and the need for it to never, ever slip their minds was paramount.

“We’re one of the nine?” Jaws dropped. A chorus of surprise echoed.

Mordelain curled her lips. “We were. Once.”

[Mordelain]

“It was fortunate for the Tama, weak as they were to magic, that the other worlds knew little about its powers.”

Magic was the other word which incited jitterbugs to form in the children’s robes. They twitched excitedly and fidgeted unceasingly at the prospect. The proximity of sabbatical and lunch became forgotten, a hindrance to their learning.

“When they came to Althanas, some eight centuries ago, they found a different challenge.”

She left it there, hoping someone in the group would remember what they had learnt weeks ago about the War of the Tap.

“The Tap,” Saddar replied on cue.

“Precisely. The Tap. They took a different approach to getting Althanian consent to a Gate placement.” Again, Mordelain approached the map. She pointed at three locations, saying their names aloud when her finger reached its destination. “Dheathain, the city of Luthmor. Radasanth, the capital of Corone. Finally, right here, in the former metropolis of Irrakam. The island desert we call Fallien.”

On the bookshelves, which lined the southerly wall, there were countless dusty tomes about this particular period. Scribes since the event had chronicled, revised, and re-chronicled the last eight centuries with each new revision, edict, and cover up. It surprised Mordelain, upon reading some of the material, how obscured the period was by the Keep. She expected Jya, of all people, to want her people to know the truth behind the xenophobic approach. Explaining why Jya controlled the borders and kept them tightly closed until recent events would have gathered support, not sewn dissent.

“Are you okay Miss?” some of the children asked.

Mordelain blinked. She realised she was daydreaming, and turned back to face the class as though the pause were part of some grand and scholarly teaching design.

“They tried to gather support in the other places, but the magic there was too wild, too passionate and untameable to tether the Void to this world. Instead, they tried in Fallien, and they would have succeeded in their goals here had someone on the Council not betrayed them.”

She wanted very much to tell them the story now. Her own personal history might seem sycophantic to teach as part of History, but she was, however she spun it, part of the downfall, and rise, of Old Fallien and New Fallien. She could not escape it anymore. She had a duty of care to help the island find its feet in the wake of the Edicts that broke down the walls at the borders, opened the ports, and gave hope to the dune bound poor and impoverished.

“Reva!” cried a gaggle of girls to the east.

Mordelain forgave herself and beamed a smile that triumphed for the day. She genuinely seemed surprised. Suresh had spent five years trying to catch her off guard, and here four nine years olds were, usurping his power.

“Reva Featherblood.” Mordelain’s utterance of the harpy queen’s name was dry and scornful. Even long in death, she inspired great contempt.

[Mordelain]

“I don’t know about you, children…,” she trailed off. Bums shuffled to the edge of sheets. The cries of bazaar sellers carried high in the wind finally seeped in in the momentary silence. Irrakam met the Academy, but the Academy had concerns that are more pressing.

“What?” they fumbled, ears pricked.

“It is starting to sound suspiciously like you’ve learnt something over the last few weeks.”

The chorus of groans swift turned into a dirge for enthusiasm. Pens rattled off tables, slates were wiped clean, and if by magic, the bell rang calling the children down into the cooler parts of the school’s cavernous expanse. Mordelain rested her hands on her hips and gave the children disapproving glares as they ran out the class so quickly they sent chairs, tables, and head girls flying in every direction.

“Do not run in the corridor!” she half-screamed.

Too late. They were gone. Their fervour would have drowned out even a sand worm’s roar. Mordelain was suddenly bereft of a teacher’s deliverance. Her heart still raced, adrenaline pumping through her veins in the wake of finally reaching a teachable spark – a title flourish of excitement in a difficult class. A connection between idea and bright young minds.

“…or you’ll trip,” she bitterly quipped. She dropped her hands to her sides. “Well.”

With gait, she clambered back to her desk, traversed its wide surface, and flopped into her chair without grace. She made to stretch, tired arms and legs finally free of professional conduct, but paused mid release when she saw a shadowy figure standing in the doorway.

“H-“

“It’s only me.”

Suresh’s dry tone cut through any hope of a peaceful snooze before afternoon lessons. Mordelain’s skin crawled.

“Oh. Great.”

“Did you forget?” he asked, eyebrow raised and demanding more.

Mordelain puckered her lips. She had.

“Maybe…”

“We eat lunch together every Monday to discuss your plans for the week. The priestess wishes to know how the Academy is progressing and more importantly, how you think the people are responding to the…,” he chose his words extremely carefully, “recent changes.”

Mordelain examined her domain. The gallery room on the eastern front of the building was, by comparison, the largest learning space available. The half-open wall, bay windows without glass leading out onto a marbled balcony, gave it a grandiose air often missed by children fixated on the blackboard behind her.

“Sometimes I forget.” She pulled on the draw to her right absent-minded, and fetched out two small glasses and a cylinder with straw surrounds and a flaking wax stopper.

“Forget?” Suresh moved into the space proper, red silk garb imposing on the dulling gold of the sun as it went through midday into early afternoon.

As Mordelain poured two modest drams of date spirit, she ruminated on her feelings. It felt like hope, but here and there abandonment, loss, and numbness prevailed.

[Mordelain]

“Forget about what I did,” she continued as she set Suresh’s glass on the edge of the desk. She gestured to it, and he approached. “Each recollection is like a cudgel to the back of the head.”

“You’re lucky it’s not an axe,” he chuckled. Before he could pick up the glass, she snatched it out of his way and bounded across the room towards the nearest bay window. “Hey!” he protested joyful.

She stared at him, a rake of a woman slowly losing her colour and shine. Though her garb, a mix of il’Jhain and Tama traditional work wear spoke rainbows, her cheeks were sunken, her hair drab. Split ends and become all too familiar friends since she had taken upon her role in the academy.

“What did you mean by that, exactly?” she asked, teacher tone forced for comic effect.

Suresh pandered to her whims and bowed politely. He was pleased she was laughing at someone other than herself for a change.

“Forgive me, I meant only to say the people of Fallien still seek a scapegoat.”

Mordelain nodded appreciative of his tact and honesty. Since her infiltration of the keep, things in Irrakam had changed. Amongst the changes, the xenophobia had become vigilante blame seeking. They wanted to know who was to blame for the Jya’s change of heart. She turned, hopped through the window, and padded barefoot out onto the almost too hot tiles of the long balcony. Suresh rolled his eyes, and began the short journey to the men’s exit. He swooned as he stepped out into the sunlight, and made for the solitary parasol over four large cushions and a small mahogany table.

“Join me, Mordelain. Let us have this lunch we cruelly allude to and never quite get to eat.” He grunted as he cascaded onto the larger of the pillows, silk cloth and ample girth rippling in the twilight.

The il’Jhain approached the battlement like wall of the balcony and peered down the walls. Like the keep, they were whitewashed, unbearable but beautiful to look at it in the daytime. She looked out across Irrakam, a city in transit, and began to pick out the ant like people in the winding bazaars below.

“There’s food under the table, if you wouldn’t mind?” she enquired. She did not look over to her mentor, transfixed by the tapestry of life determined to live on through chaos.

The events of that day would haunt her, yet without those memories, the academy would not exist. The borders of Fallien would not be opening. The il’Jhain would have remained a paradigm for political corruption. The desert would have died, and Fallien along with it. Now, there were scaffolds around crumbling towers. New buildings rose at the city’s edge, and soon, sparkling fountains and indoor gardens would give new life and community to the capital.

“I will join you when they call the horns,” she shouted expectant. That marked midday proper, and with it, another morning’s lessons done.

[Mordelain]

The horns reached the planes walker’s ears minutes after they sounded. Carried high on idyllic winds, with their sounding, all tension left her body. All over the city, builders were downing tools. Messengers were resting in doorways and under fledgling palms. Mothers were hurrying children indoors, herding them into cool inner chambers with makeshift crooks and flailing brooms. Only those who had to be out in the height of the sun’s heat dared to brave its perils.

“Okay then,” she said to console herself. She had been avoiding lunch with Suresh for so long, or at the very least, kept him talking about anything but that day. She did not think she could avoid it anymore, not since he brought it up so blatantly. “Ask your question,” she said as she approached the table.

“Question?” Suresh asked with his eyebrow raised and mouth half-full with poppy bread and red pepper hummus.

“The one you’ve made clear you need to ask,” she explained. She dropped elegantly opposite the merchant, crossed her legs, and began to place black olives, anchovies, and dried herb leaves onto her plate. She avoided eye contact with him, lest his stubbornly disarming eyes do their work.

“What did you do in the Keep?”

It came out so calmly and devoid of intonation, yet it disarmed Mordelain all the same. She slumped. Though the managed to continue to smooth half-melted salt butter onto a wholemeal pitta bread, by task’s end, she gave in and pushed the plate away.

“I did what I always set out to do.” She stared intently at the olives. Each one became Suresh’s head, and she reached out to squeeze the salt from them as though she had murderous intent. The only thing that stopped her acting on her impulse was the fact the merchant deserved explanation.

“Yet Jya lives and breathes as you or I!” he proclaimed.

“I never said I would kill Jya with my own hands,” she said through grit teeth.

She had climbed the Keep like a thief in the night. Every cliché of anticipation upended her resolve. When she stole into Jya’s chamber, at the Keep’s peak, she had confronted the fair-haired youth that had come to represent everything the Tama had thought she hated about Fallien’s confused ideals.

“So?” Suresh did not attempt to hide the fact he was still in the dark.

“I showed her.”

“…showed her what, damnit!” he barked.

“Junkyo.”

The word sparked recognition in the merchant. He frowned at first, and then grinned seditious. He continued eating, clearly not one for manners.

“Bulganin.”

“Oh my…”

“Zhuhai. Braen…I showed her all the nine worlds and all the dark secrets that were representative of the other continents, cultures, and kingdoms of Althanas.”

They had talked long into the night and well into the heat of the midday after. In truth, they had spent weeks conversing about the priesthood, the history of Fallien, and most importantly, the Vhadya.

[Mordelain]

Mordelain Saythrou had swallowed a lot of her pride that day. Admitting to the ruler of the country that you destroyed your guilt took much out of her. She felt a weight lift from her shoulders when the pious woman had exonerated her.

“I forgive you,” she said. Mordelain half-sounded disgusted, half-thankful. “She said I forgive you, and then we started to talk about what we could do to avoid something like that happening again.”

Suresh ruminated over another overly large mouthful. His eyes were dark, sullen like Mordelain’s, and yet somehow full of life and mystery. His skin had become increasingly mottled over the summer months, as age finally caught up with him, and things he could not simply buy a cure for or shoot down began to eat away at him.

“And here we are…,” he said finally. “Doing what, exactly?”

“Educating the people of Fallien slowly.” Mordelain had wanted Jya to abolish all the laws there and then, and throw the people into the crowd of the world kicking and screaming. Just as she had talked Jya into thinking in another way, so too had Jya changed Mordelain’s mind. Slow, calculated, paced change would better serve Fallien in the long term.

Suresh let out a long belly laugh that would surely haunt dogs in the city well into the evening.

“Cute,” Mordelain said cutting, tongue protruding coyly. “I sacrifice everything to make this island and its people safer, and you mock me.” She continued eating her food, avoiding eye contact, hoping he would fall for her sudden change in mood.

“Pffft,” Suresh spat, “you're not the only one who sacrificed much to be a paragon of the sands.” He set down his plate, adjusted his legs, and produced a pipe from his robes. He hesitated before lighting it, but the breeze was strong enough and blowing in an easterly direction to carry away the smoke from the classroom and out into the aether trade winds that whipped over Irrakam.

Mordelain kept in her chuckle for all of half a minute, and dodged several dogged bits of chewed bread as Suresh caught on and took out his frustration on their makeshift meal.

“You’re no worse than your students!” he guffawed, defeated but jubilant that some semblance of normality had returned to his adopted daughter’s usually rumbustious persona. “Honestly.”

“Ugh, you would never be able to teach me.”

On Junkyo, centuries ago, Mordelain had been the worst student imaginable. Half the height of her peers, bandy legged, and straw-haired, only her mother’s persistence and father’s influence kept her in the academy. Aged eighty, however, she finally came of age, in her final years found her stride, and dance steps. Her stave combat had taken her mentors aback, coming literally from nowhere to rise her to the highest echelons of the Tama’s crude, sycophantic hierarchy. That providence had brought her to Althanas under Coradan’s tutelage.

“Let’s hope your students don’t suffer for it,” Suresh joked.

Mordelain hoped so too.

[Mordelain]

The afternoon sabbatical passed all too quickly. Mordelain talked in detail about what Jya had said, and what she had asked, but felt as though Suresh was no longer interested. The deed done. His adopted daughter was safe. Prospects in the city would increase for his own personal, mercantile empire. Soon, the sound of chatter and chairs scraping caused Mordelain and Suresh to stand and linger in the doorway back into the classroom.

“I understand why you did what you did, and I am sorry I doubted you.”

Leftfield, Suresh’s apology sucker punched the il’Jhain. He had seemed half-asleep for the last hour. She puckered her lips half into a smile, half into a frown. She scratched her head. She danced from foot to foot.

“I…,” she erred. She could talk vast empires to their knees but on this occasion, Suresh upended her speechraft.

Suresh embraced her, a swaddling hug of poppy seed, musk, and tobacco smoke scented with strawberry. She writhed, but let him have his way. When he stepped away, she adjusted her ribbons and flicked crumbs off her bosoms. She tied back her hair, wiped her brow, and did the same checks for her mentor. He swatted her hands away.

“I’m going to bath when I get home, worry not about what I look like and more about what you’re going to do this afternoon to keep a gaggle of harpies occupied after a sleep and too much sugar.”

Driving the point home shut Mordelain firmly up, and left her modesty in his duty of care as he marched indoors. She followed him and drew the attentions of the early arrivals to the afternoon’s whittlings on arithmetic, astrology, and casual explorations of the properties of herbs. Mordelain’s favourite topics, given her own trial and error introduction to Fallien culture two years prior.

“Afternoon, Miss,” the girls said in a coy gaggle. Relations implied were never close to the truth, but she let them think what they wanted to think and ushered Suresh to the door.

“Girls,” she said politely to acknowledge their presence.

“I will see you this evening in the Abdos?” Suresh asked, politely adding another worry to the long threads of complications that stitched the pair together. Before she could ask what for, the confused look on her face prompted Suresh to clarify. “You are meeting Îdhdaer about the unification process because he will wipe the smirk off the other leaders’ faces with a maul if you are not there.”

Mordelain frowned. “Yes. Yes, I’m sorry, I forgot, but I’ll be there.”

As she swirled back to face her students, she at last began to picture a world where she was not pulled in ten directions. A world where she could stay in these four walls, and keep schooling scoundrels.