The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman Read Free Book Online Page B

his way out into one of the blind alleys off a courtyard and sat down.
     
    “KEEP YOUR WAIST STRAIGHT! NO! NO! NO!” Cale snapped back from what had become almost a trance. The noises and sights of the training field had vanished as he’d gone missing in his memories of the past. It was something that was happening to him more often, but it was not a good idea to become so distracted in a place like the Sanctuary. You paid attention here or pretty quickly something unpleasant happened. All around him the sights and sounds of training were vivid now. A line of twenty acolytes, soon to leave, were practicing an attack in formation. Redeemer Gil, known as Gil the Gorilla because of his ugliness and terrible strength, was complaining routinely about the sloppiness of his trainees: “Have the gates of death been shown to you, Gavin?” he said wearily. “They will be if you keep exposing your left side like that.” The acolytes in the line smiled at Gavin’s discomfort. For all his physical power and brute ugliness, Redeemer Gil was as close to being a decent man as a Redeemer ever got. Except for Redeemer Navratil, and he was a peculiar case. “Night training for you,” Gil said to the hapless Gavin. The boy next to him laughed. “And you can join him, Gregor. And you, Holdaway.”
    Just beyond the line a small boy, no more than seven years old, was hanging by his arms from a wooden frame about seven feet off the ground. A belt of heavy weights in canvas was strapped around his shins and he was grimacing, tears of pain rolling down his contorted face. The Under Redeemer beneath him kept insisting that unless he raised his weighted feet to make a perfect L-shape every time, none of his efforts would count. “Crying won’t do any good; only doing it right will do any good.” As the child struggled to do as he was told, Cale noticed the extreme definition of the six muscles of his stomach as he strained, bulging and powerful as those of a grown man. “Four!” counted the Under Redeemer.
    Cale walked on past boys of five, some laughing like little boys anywhere, and eighteen-year-olds who looked like middle-aged men. There were groups of eighty or so practicing pushing each other back and forth, shouting in a rhythm as if they were one giant grunting against another; an additional rank of five hundred or so marched in formation without a sound, turning as one to the signaling of flags: left then right, then stopping dead, then retreating, then stopping again and moving forward. By now Cale was about fifty yards from the great wall around the Sanctuary, at the edge of the archery range where Kleist was giving lip to a squad of ten acolytes easily four years older than himself. He was abusing them for their uselessness, their ugliness, their lack of skill, the poor quality of their teeth and the fact that their eyes were too close together. He stopped only when he saw Cale.
    “You’re late,” he said. “Lucky for you that Primo is sick or he’d have your hide.”
    “You could always try, if you like.”
    “Me? I couldn’t care if you were here or not. Your loss.”
    Cale’s faint shrug in response indicated a reluctant acknowledgment that this was probably true. Kleist was stripped to the waist, revealing a remarkable, if odd, body shape. He seemed to be all back and shoulders, as if the upper body of an adult male had been inserted between the legs and head of a fourteen-year-old. His right arm and shoulder in particular were so much more knotted with muscle than his left side that he looked almost deformed.
    “Right,” said Kleist, “let’s have a look at what’s wrong.” He was clearly enjoying the chance to demonstrate his sense of superiority and very keen that Cale should know he was enjoying it too.
    Cale raised the longbow Kleist had handed him, pulled back the drawstring to his cheek, aimed, held for a second, and then loosed the arrow to its target eighty yards away. He groaned even as it left