Chapter 3: Kuva

The next morning was the beginning of what would become my routine for the next several weeks. And as first days go, this one was a doozy.

After Heleen woke me and brought me to breakfast, Shimara approached the table and gave the order to begin training, just like she had before, only this time she pointedly focused her gaze on me, communicating that she was talking to me too. I frowned, and got up to follow the hunters. Thankfully, Heleen stayed by my side; after all, I would need an interpreter.

When we got to the training field, most of the hunters went to practice whatever their specialty was. I, meanwhile, simply stood in the middle of the field, totally unsure of what to do. I tried looking to Heleen, but she simply stood off to the sidelines. She wasn't here to do anything more than back me up. Shimara marched up to me, carrying two wooden staffs. I briefly took comfort in the fact that she didn't look any happier about this than I did, before I realized that wasn't good news for me.

She tossed one of the staffs to me, which I fumbled trying to catch, whacking myself in the jaw once. Once I had it in my hands, I looked up to see her rolling her eyes. I hadn't been at this ten seconds and she was already losing her patience with me. Not a good omen.

Shimara held out her staff, demonstrating the grip. I attempted to emulate what she was doing, configuring my hands and fingers on my staff. "Jon!" she barked, which sounded like I was doing something wrong. I looked more carefully at what she was doing, and tried adjusting my grip.

Shimara walked up to me and whacked me on the shoulder. "Jon!" she repeated.

"Hey, I'm trying here!"

Shimara tossed her staff to the ground and took hold of my hands, adjusting my grip. When she got my hands in the proper position she squeezed them for emphasis. After she bent to pick up her staff again, on her way back up she whacked me on my back to get me to straighten up.

She moved back to standing a few steps in front of me, and took a ready pose. "A, hakutas."

I looked back to Heleen. "She wants you to attack," she said.

Okay, I already knew this was going to be embarrassing. I recalled all the movies I'd seen where the untrained amateur tries to rush at his opponent, swinging his weapon like a caveman's club, quickly getting knocked on his ass by the more experienced fighter. Now I may be a slacker, but never let it be said that you can't learn anything from sitting on your butt watching TV all day. I wasn't about to charge her like an idiot; no, I was going to come at her carefully and patiently, like the masters in all those martial arts and samurai flicks said to.

I gripped the staff tightly and advanced, scanning her for openings or weaknesses, trying to convince myself I'd know one when I saw it. At an essentially random moment, I lunged and swung at her. She easily sidestepped my attack, and swatted my staff with her own, sending it too far along its arc and causing me to stumble forward. And as I stumbled past her, she spun and swept my legs out from under me.

Down I went. Boom.

I think I heard a few laughs. I think. And I think I heard Tekia's voice telling them to stuff it.

For a moment all I saw was the sky. Then I saw Shimara standing over me. "Pak."

"What?"

"Pak!" she repeated more sharply, whacking my head with her staff.

"Ow!"

"That means 'up, '" I heard Heleen say.

"Thank you," I moaned in my most sardonic voice.

I pushed myself to my feet, and Shimara resumed her ready pose. "Maka."

"Again," Heleen translated.

I again assumed a stance, and again tried scanning her for openings. I chose my moment more carefully this time; she didn't appear to be guarding her head, so I went for that. She immediately raised her staff to defend, and then swung under my arms, thrusting the end at my chest. "Shumen."

"She says you are dead," Heleen said.

I stepped back, and we tried again. I tried raising the staff and making a downward stab, but I didn't even finish the motion before she came up from under it with an upward stab. "Shumen."

I relaxed my pose, rolling my eyes and sighing.

"Maka."

"Yeah, yeah, in a minute."

She answered that by whacking me on the shoulder. "Maka!"

"Would you stop hitting me?"

She whacked me on the side of my face.

"Ow! What are you trying to do, knock out a tooth?"

She whacked me in the ribs.

It went on like that for hours. I kept trying to attack, and she continued deflecting, and swatting me whenever I did something wrong. Needless to say I had my share of bruises by the time she let me go for the day. Heleen wanted to take me to the yubaga to let him treat me, but Shimara apparently argued that pain would be a good teacher, and that we should let the bruises she gave me be. Personally, I was getting the impression she just wanted me to suffer a little more.

Thankfully, on that first day at least Heleen opted to ignore Shimara and took me to the yubaga anyway. The man's ointments helped, and by that evening the places where Shimara had hit me were barely purple anymore. But that was just the first day.

In the days that followed, initially Shimara would continue to have me spar with her, and continue to kick my ass. After a few days, once I started to improve a little bit with that, she started coming up with new things for me to do. She began giving me exercises to do. She'd make me run obstacle courses, or do squats on pedestals with weights draped over my neck and shoulders. Sometimes she'd just make me run laps around the training yard, usually in response to me doing something wrong. And whenever I was dumb enough to protest, she'd whack me until I did it.

Sometimes I sparred with Shimara some more, while other times she'd give me a practice spear and demonstrate moves with it that I had to mimic, getting more swats on whatever part of me was out of position when I didn't do it right. Gradually, with Heleen's help, she learned a few English words, at least enough to make simple commands. She learned to say "Attack" and "Defend" and "Throw." Oh, and she learned how to say "Bad," which she usually used before swatting some part of me. And let's not forget my personal favorite, "Run." Oh boy, did she learn to use that one.

Occasionally I'd try using a bow. I liked those moments, because it meant getting support from Tekia. After the usual beating and berating I would get from Shimara, Tekia's smiling face and gentle guidance was a welcome relief. Unfortunately, Shimara looked over my results and seemed to think the bow wasn't my weapon, and I would go back to practicing the spear with her. I kind of suspected she just wanted more excuses to hit me.

Shimara came up with more training exercises to put me through. I would have to throw a spear and hit a target that was moving on a track. I would have to stand surrounded by other hunters and defend as they all took swings at me. The worst was when I would have to deflect rocks that they would throw at me. I'm sure you can imagine I made a few trips to the yubaga after those.

It didn't take long to get to the point when I dreaded waking up in the morning, knowing I was in for another dose of Shimara's abuse. More than once I found myself considering whether all this was really worth it. There had to be less painful things I could be learning to do in this village. I could be learning some kind of woodworking, if I had a lick of artistic talent. I could be learning to tend the gardens if I didn't find that so boring I'd want to shoot myself. I could have been learning to build, if ... well, I didn't have much of a counterargument for that one. It's just not something I ever saw myself doing. But it had to have been easier than what Shimara was putting me through.

So why did I continue enduring her torture day after day? Because doing anything else would have been like admitting that I wasn't going home. I had to remember why I was doing this. I knew I was just grasping at straws, hoping that maybe going back into the forest and finding my crash site again might lead me to a way back, but it was all I had to go on. So I kept pushing on. And every morning, when Shimara came to the breakfast table and called the hunters to training, she would look at me, daring me to keep going, waiting to see me give up. My refusal to give her the satisfaction was my only way of getting back at her for all the hell she put me through every day.

Besides, after a few weeks, it was hard to argue with the results. Shimara had managed to work off a good amount of the flab I had built up on my parents' couch. Where before if I had hit my abs with my fist I would have been knocking on light rubber padding, I was soon knocking on wood. After weeks of running around carrying buckets of water or hauling piles of rocks up a hill, I was soon sporting some pretty rock hard biceps. Shimara may have been a harsh drill sergeant and maybe even a bit of a sadist, but I had to give credit where it was due.

At a certain point early on, I began to get the sense there was something Shimara wanted me to do that she wasn't communicating to me. After a while, with a little help from Heleen as a go-between, I figured out what it was: she wanted me to conform to everyone else's code of undress. Well, I wasn't quite ready to start going naked, but certain uncomfortable facts remained. The fact was, I only had one set of clothes with me, and the people here certainly didn't have any spares to offer me. While they had stuff they used to occasionally wash towels, I had nothing else to wear during any kind of attempt I might make at laundry. So after weeks of wearing the same clothes, especially in a hot place like this, they were starting to get pretty stinky. Keeping my boxers on when I washed every morning so that they got a little cleaner with the rest of me helped some, but it was far from an ideal solution.

So while I wasn't prepared to bare all, I did soon start slimming down on what I wore. The first thing I stopped wearing was my shoes. There wasn't really a whole lot of need for them on the soft dirt and grass, and besides, they were getting kind of uncomfortable without the stinky used socks that I really didn't want to put back on. A bit later Shimara allowed me my own knife, which I used to cut my jeans off at the knee. It wasn't long after that when I decided to cut the sleeves off my T-shirt. There were some days when I ended up just going without my shirt, which as the weeks passed and it accumulated more and more of my sweat, I started doing more often. The funny thing was, it seemed that the less I wore, the easier Shimara seemed to go on me.

I got a few nasty sunburns the first few weeks, especially on the days I decided to go shirtless. The good news was that the yubaga had some very soothing ointments to help with that. The bad news was that Shimara didn't give a damn if I was burned and still would hit me all the same. Fortunately I soon started getting a decent tan and didn't burn quite as easily. Some days it rained; it was warm rain, like Florida rain. A stark contrast to the cold and dismal rain I was used to back home. I usually left my shirt behind on those days.

In the afternoons, the hunting parties would have to go off and actually hunt, but Shimara always said I wasn't ready to join them. This ended up being the high point of my day; not only did it mean Shimara's abuse was done for the day, but it meant I would have the rest of the afternoon to spend with Heleen. We would spend our time together roaming the village or sitting by the gardens while she focused on trying to teach me the Azakosian language. She would frequently tell me my pronunciation sounded funny, and when I would try repeatedly to get a word right without success she would usually lightly hit me on the shoulder before falling into a giggling fit.

When we weren't practicing language skills, we would find other things to talk about. She would tell me about some of the customs around here, and she would ask me more about home. We'd occasionally meet with her sisters, who always seemed eager to learn more about me, especially Zeyla, who always had some new flower creation to show me. Quite often those creations were intended as gifts. When she gave me a crown of lilies to wear on my head, I swallowed my pride out of courtesy and did so, doing my best to ignore the snickers that Heleen and Rokina were trying hard to suppress.

The more time that passed, the more comfortable I found myself growing among these people, and the easier it got to forget that everyone I saw day after day never wore a stitch of clothing. When I was with Heleen, I would naturally look at her face instead of gawking at her body. After a surprisingly short amount of time, her figure stopped being a sexual object; it was just sort of there. It was just her.

For that matter, I stopped caring much about what anybody else's body looked like, either. That seemed to be the driving attitude of these people, in fact. As I began to notice, they didn't seem to do much to change their bodies. For one thing, circumcision didn't seem to be a practice they believed in. Nobody had any tattoos or piercings of any kind. They didn't seem to shave very much either, not that these people grew all that much body hair to begin with. Most of the men had at least some facial hair, but rarely was it ever thick. The women did in fact have hair on their legs; you just had to look pretty closely to notice it. They did appear to believe in cutting their hair and fingernails, and they certainly kept themselves clean and well groomed, but that was about it.

For my part, somebody in the village did ultimately come up with a concoction I could use as a form of shaving cream. Unfortunately the only thing I had to use as a razor was the knife that Shimara gave me. So I could shave, sort of, but not so well that I felt comfortable doing it very close.

After a while, I began hearing what people were saying to each other in whispers around me. When Heleen and I would roam the village together, often hand in hand as she seemed fond of doing, I would start listening to the words spoken in gossip as we passed. People were talking a lot about the Veseed and the makot, and some word Heleen hadn't taught me yet: koval. It was a word I began hearing all the time in reference to Heleen and me.

So one evening, after the gathering for dinner where I had heard the word tossed around among the people surrounding us, as Heleen was seeing me off to bed, I finally asked her about it. She gave me a "Good night, Clay," before I brought it up. "Wait, just a second, before you go, I've gotta ask: what does koval mean?"

A half smile formed on her face, and her eyes twinkled a little. "Love."

It would ultimately be almost a month and a half before I ever saw the inside of the forest again. In the few weeks before that, I'd started showing some improvement with the combat and strength training that Shimara had been giving me, and she began focusing on stealth and tracking. I would have to come up behind one of the other hunters and jump them without being detected, or find an animal that they'd trained to run through the village to a certain point. This I did a little better with, and it wasn't quite as painful.

Then came a day when I received my most unnerving challenge yet. When I arrived at the training yard, Shimara approached me with a blindfold in her hands. As it was explained to me, I would have to wear the blindfold, and Shimara would attack me from a random direction. I would have to sense her approach and defend myself. "Wonderful," I grumbled to myself as they handed me my staff.

Shimara handed the blindfold to Jazum and told him to put it on me. Before he could, though, Tekia came up to me and tugged on my arm to pull me aside. I stepped away from the others, and she looked into my eyes as she began fumbling for words. "You ... try. You ... do good."

I looked at her wide-eyed for a moment. But then something began to make sense that hadn't before. I remembered about a week or two before, when Tekia had approached Heleen at the evening banquet and called her away for a few minutes. I also remembered that Heleen had started excusing herself from me in the late afternoons until it was time for dinner, which kind of felt like I was being cut off from my lifeline, but I soon adjusted to roaming the village on my own. I'd never really connected the two until that moment; Tekia must have asked Heleen to start teaching her English, which was where Heleen had started going when she left me every day.

I turned a look back to Heleen, watching from the sidelines, who only gave a knowing smile. I gave a smile of my own back to Tekia. "Thank you."

As it would turn out, Tekia's few awkwardly mouthed words would end up making a world of difference. I stepped up to Shimara, and I looked her in the eye, seeing that she expected me to fail. As much as I knew I couldn't disappoint Tekia, I also knew I couldn't let Shimara win. I didn't care how much punishment she threw at me; I was going to show them all I could do this.

Jazum put the blindfold on me, and I gripped the staff in the ready position I'd been practicing for a month. I heard movement around me, from more than one person. I wasn't sure if anyone else was standing around me, maybe to disorient me. I didn't know how long Shimara would make me wait before she attacked. I didn't know how I'd sense her coming. The only thing I was completely sure of was that Tekia was watching me, willing me to succeed.

I shifted my weight on my feet, feeling the dirt under it, trying to sense any movement. I scanned around for any sound. I thought I heard someone running behind me to my right, and spun around, but my staff hit only empty air. I stabbed at another sound off to my right side, again connecting with nothing. I could swear I heard Shimara laughing at me.

I clenched my jaw and tightened my grip. I took a breath and allowed my nerves to relax.

I'm still not entirely sure what set me off, but all of a sudden I whirled to my left, and felt my staff strike Shimara's. I took another swing, but she dodged away, vanishing from my senses again. I went back on alert. When I heard more movement, I somehow knew she was coming at me from behind. I raised my staff behind my head to block her strike, and spun around to strike back. She blocked one attack, then another, before I lost her again.

I slowly turned, scanning around for her. I felt the ground shift with her footfalls and swung to my left. I felt her block me, and then swept the other end of my staff up in a rising arc. I felt it connect with her staff, but my swing didn't stop the way I expected it to. I felt something yield, and on impulse I swung again with a low sweep. This time I struck not the hard wood of her staff but soft flesh, which gave way under my attack, right before I both felt and heard a hard THUMP in front of me.

I didn't know if I was supposed to, but I dropped my guard and yanked my blindfold off, revealing what, I have to confess, was a wonderful sight before me. Shimara was down on her ass in the dirt, and her staff was about six feet away from her. I tried hard not to grin, but it was a losing battle.

"Um, well, uh," I stammered, scratching my head, "I wish I could say I'm sorry for that, but uh..."

Shimara's expression remained calmly neutral as she rose to her feet and brushed herself off. She looked right at me, and then said the word I'd been waiting to hear her say ever since Heleen taught it to me.

"Esed."

Ready.

I looked around me, for a moment not sure I was remembering the word right. All around me were proud grins, but nobody looked quite as pleased as Tekia. I smiled as wide as I was able, and turned to look back to Heleen. But then my smile weakened. Yes, she did seem to be congratulating me, but I couldn't help but think that her smile seemed a bit forced.

After a bit of discussion between Kezalo and Shimara, the plan was made: that afternoon, I would join Shimara's hunting party on the condition that I would follow their lead and not try to run off on my own. Once she was confident I could hold my own and knew the forest well enough to navigate, then I would be allowed to try to find my car again. I kind of wondered what it must have looked like by now, after all the time I'd been here. Did it have weeds growing on it by this point? Were there branches and vines all coiled through and around it? Hell, would I even recognize it if I saw it, or would it be so overgrown that it would just blend in?

Or was I just an idiot letting my imagination run crazy?

Somehow Heleen didn't seem as excited about this as I thought she should've been. It was only what I'd been waiting for practically since I got here; why did her happy face seem pasted on? And when I left to join the hunters, she rather coldly opted not to go with me. She claimed I would need to learn to communicate with the other hunters without her there backing me up, but I detected another reason she wasn't saying.