Chapter 12: Recognition

"Cy, I contacted Hand Leader Evans this morning when you managed to communicate with me using your mind. I will leave you to speak with him." Finger Leader Roberts told me once the others had left us alone. "If you will excuse me Hand Leader?"

"Certainly." Hand Leader Evan replied. "Nice to meet you Cy." He shook my hand. "Walk with me." He turned and walked away. I scurried to catch up and matched my pace to his.

"Do you have any idea why I wanted to speak to you?" Hand Evans asked me.

"At a guess I would think it is because I was a little early for me to get the mental communication thing right?"

"Yes, well, that’s why your Finger Leader contacted me at first, but that was just for information. Early use of mind powers is a marker of higher than normal potential, and we like to watch such people as they are potential leaders. That would have been fairly normal. The real reason I am here is because in your second attempt to communicate, it seems that two other members of your finger heard you."

"I did notice that it seemed to be a little different at the time." I was puzzled about what made this so important.

"[Cy]" I heard in my head.

"Yes Hand Leader" I replied.

"[Mental communication please?]"

"[Yes Hand Leader]" I tried again.

"[Do you find that difficult to do?]"

"[No. The first time took some real concentration. Now it seems entirely natural . I have been listening to Finger Roberts all morning, and I think that his use of Mental Comms has made it feel almost normal for me now.]"

"[All right. Try to send a message Finger Roberts and I at the same time.]"

"[Do you hear me?]" I called in my head, trying to feel the mental taste of both Finger Roberts and Hand Evan at the same time.

"[Yes Cy, I hear you.]" It felt like a double echo. Both replied almost simultaneously but I had no trouble keeping their replies separate in my mind.

"Ok Cy. Thank you. I have seen enough for now. I will leave you to return to your training. I just want you to know that the ability you have demonstrated is very unusual so early in training and if everything else works out, then it indicates that you have the potential to rise very far in terms of leadership. I look forward to watching how things turn out for you. Thank you for your time." With that, Hand Evans turned and walked away.

I headed back to rejoin the others.

As I got back to the others, I realised that I hadn’t had an opportunity yet to ask about shaving, so I approached Finger Roberts and asked him what I should do.

"I think everyone should hear this." Finger Roberts said. "Gather round please. Ok, this is a little early in the program, but I want to explain something to you. Cy has just asked me how he can shave. That leads us to another aspect of the processing. As you have experienced, there are changes that have happened to your bodies since you woke up which have been stimulated by exercise. This has been pretty much involuntary. It is also possible to direct the changes deliberately. The first test of this ability and control is with body hair. All of you will be growing your hair until you learn to control the change simply by willing it. While the men have beards, everyone who sees them knows that they haven’t gained this ability. You will notice that a lot of the veterans have large and fancy moustaches. There are two reasons for this: one is that it demonstrates control and the other is based on history. Napoleons veterans were recognised by their moustaches. For the women it is a little more difficult, although hair on the legs is often the indicator."

"Does that ability extend to other things?" I asked.

"Yes. The start is facial hair. Once you have that under control, then I will teach you how to extend that to other things. You can change almost any physical aspect of yourself if you have sufficient skill." he replied. "Now, enough of that, today we are going to concentrate on a few more grappling holds: the neck and waist holds and the head lock."

Finger Roberts went through the process of demonstrating each hold in turn, and we spent a number of hours practicing these holds and the techniques for breaking them.

Lunch-time arrived eventually, and we discovered to our delight that we had been provided with fresh bread-rolls and sliced meat, so it involved very little preparation.

After I had eaten my lunch, I decided that I wanted to tackle the water-heating issue. I approached Finger Roberts and explained my concept based on what we called a "Donkey" which was a field water-heater made out of a 40-gallon drum. Essentially the principle was very simple, the drum was placed over a fire and it had a source of water that filled it. The hot water would rise to the top and pour out of a hole in the drum, while cold water took the place of the hot.

Finger Roberts complimented me on the idea, but explained that water heating was also one of the mental "magic" tricks that we would learn, and bathing in cold water was a major incentive to develop the skills.

Once everyone had finished eating, Finger Roberts instructed us to fetch our training swords. We returned to muster in front of him very quickly and he started explaining how we would be learning to use our swords.

"The first thing that you need to know," he began, "is that you work together as a team. We carry no shields. The warrior next to you is your shield. The principle of battle for you is extremely simple. You concentrate on striking the warrior in front of you to disable or wound him, and if you do so aggressively enough, you will put him on the back-foot and beat him before you need to worry about defence. We will teach you both attack and defence however as they compliment each other, but the focus is on teamwork.

"Our basic Finger formations are based on the concept of three up and down. The standard formation is to have three warriors in the line fighting, and three directly behind them in reserve. The Finger Leader fights with the Finger in this formation. There are a number of variations of this, where we can put more up front and less in reserve, or vice versa, depending on a number of factors. For example, if we have to fight in an enclosed space, then we might want only two to fight up front. This also allows for better husbanding of our strength as the reserve warriors can be swapped out. If we are required to cover a wider front, we can put four warriors up front, and have only two in reserve. We also have formations where we are all paired up and we swap and protect our buddy in the line.

"What we are going to do for the next while is learn the standard formations and drill in them; how to get into formation; how to change formation from one to another; how to replace each other in the line and what to do in various situations when one of you gets struck down and we have to react to reinforce the line. We will also practice the relief in the line; advancing to contact and breaking contact. There is no more square-bashing for the sake of pretty parades. Here drilling returns to its roots where it is a means to exercise control over formations in the midst of battle."

And that is what we did. We drilled for the rest of that day in the various formations. Finger Roberts drove us mercilessly through endless variations of the formations. He interspersed periods of formation drill with the various grappling holds and blocks. By the end of the day I was bone tired and collapsed into bed at the earliest opportunity.

Chapter 10: Getting to know you

We all got up and moved over to the sleeping side of the barracks. I decided to introduce myself around and find out more about the people who were now in my "Finger".

Other than Desrae and myself, there were two other men and one woman. The first guy I spoke to was tall and thin and told me he was from Michigan. What was interesting was that he was black and described himself as "African" and I was white and described myself the same way. His name was Geraint. His buddy was Elaine, a fat woman from Montreal, Canada. The other guy was Lian from Hong Kong.

"I am ravenous." I declared to everyone, "I am going to see what I can do about getting something to eat."

"Another braai I suppose?" Desrae asked.

"Well, I suspect that is a skill that is going to turn out pretty handy if we have to do a lot of our own cooking. Let’s see what’s available," I replied. I left the barracks and looked around. I had spotted what looked like a primitive Lapa to the side of the barracks-house and I strolled over to it to investigate. Sure enough, there was a box of some sort on the floor, which I opened. It seemed that this was a cooler-box of some sort. I couldn’t see any mechanism to cool it down, but I had already had enough experience of this place to just ascribe that to some sort of "magic" and ignore it. I unpacked the contents and found that we had been provided with some utensils, and under them there was a stack of steaks. In a sealed bowl I found the makings of a pretty decent salad.

"Excellent," I thought to myself, "just perfect for a braai."

The next step was to create some sort of braai-place. I decided to look in the storage area that I had seen earlier and found what looked like a metal grid which I thought would do very well for a braai-grid and hauled that over to the Lapa. I hunted around the area and hauled a bunch of stones back and proceeded to build a braai with a circle of stones that would hold the grid. Then back to the storage area where I found an axe-like tool and I set off into the surrounding forest to search for wood. I found plenty of dropped branches from the trees and within twenty minutes I had enough firewood stacked in the Lapa to keep a fire going for some time. Now for some way to start the fire.

I walked back into the barracks and asked if anyone had any lighters or matches, but had no luck, so I went back into the class-room area where I found Finger Roberts sitting at a desk doing some paper-work.

"Finger-Leader, I am trying to get a fire started to cook our meal for tonight. You don’t happen to have some matches do you?" I asked him.

"Take a look in the storage-locker under your bed Peters. You’ll find what you need there." He answered me.

I thanked him and went to take a look.

When I knelt down to look under my bed, the others all stopped their conversations to watch what I was doing.

"Lost something?" Geraint asked.

"No. The Finger-Leader told me to look under my bed." I answered. With that I pulled out the storage locker that I found there. All the others watched with great interest when I opened it.

Inside I saw that there were a number of interesting things. I scratched through the contents until I came across a flint and striker gadget that I recognised as vaguely similar to ones that I had used before. I also hauled out a Dixie and a knife and fork. I decided to leave exploring the rest of the contents of the locker for some later time. I returned the locker to it’s place under my bed and returned to the Lapa. As I left the room, I saw most of the rest all getting down to check out their own lockers.

After about half an hour, Desrae came out to join me.

"That smells incredibly good!" she told me.

I smiled as I turned the steaks on the braai. "Yes. I know. Funny how I knew that would draw you out here."

"The rest are on their way." she laughed.

"Great. The meat should be ready in another ten or fifteen minutes. You could help get the salad ready."

I didn’t have to call anyone. The five of us were joined by Finger Leader Roberts and I dished up for everyone.

After we had finished supper, Finger Roberts told us to gather out front again.

"You have all been issued with training swords and have gathered from what you have been told that is the primary weapon used here on War World. We are going to start training you to fight, and eventually, we will get to using the sword. I want you to put any of the romantic, swashbuckling ideas of sword-fighting completely out of your heads. You need to understand that the sword is a great big cleaver designed to inflict maximum damage on your enemy, it is not designed to clash against your opponent’s sword with a loud noise. The point of fighting is to disable or kill your opponent.

"We use a short sword within the Finger that is designed to suit fighting in close quarters. The sword is just one of your weapons. Your others are your hands, head, feet and elbows. Before we start with the sword, we will start with teaching you how to Grapple. This is the oldest known human fighting style. We have found that there is no better way to teach the concepts of timing and distance as related to fighting.

"Grappling will allow you to develop some of the the basic skills needed for fighting with the sword in formation, as well as in the general mêlée. It will help you to develop both strength and speed as well as teach you about how to break arms and legs, how to bind or lock an opponent’s arms, what places to strike including the eyes, nose, under the chin and the groin.

"We will work on Grappling first, interspersed with cardiovascular training and general endurance, and then we will move on to other forms of fighting.

"We will start with a shoulder hold."

I was surprised by this. I had expected to start immediately with training in the use of the sword. What he had to say though about not hitting someone else’s sword, made sense to me and I wondered why I had never thought of that when watching Errol Flynn or the Pirates of the Caribbean.

Finger Roberts gestured Lian to come forward and demonstrated a basic shoulder hold and the rest of us paired off and copied what he showed us. He then demonstrated the counter; how to break the shoulder hold and we practised applying the hold and then breaking it for the next hour.

Finger Roberts moved around constantly, acting as the partner for each of us in turn and ensuring that we rotated partners every few minutes. I got the feeling that he was evaluating us constantly.

At the end of the hour he called a halt. "That’s enough. You’ve had a long day. Knock off and we will continue tomorrow."

It suddenly struck me that it was still the same day for me that I had started at dawn at Greefswald, although I had no idea how long I had been out during the ‘processing’. I supposed that could have been any length of time. I decided it wasn’t important to think about. The priority now was the feeling of fatigue, and the fact that I was sore and dirty.

"Finger Roberts, is there anywhere for us to wash?" I asked.

"The stream is just behind those bushes." he pointed out.

When he said that, I realised that I had been subliminally aware of the the sound of running water. I returned to the barracks to retrieve the bar of soap and a towel I had noticed in the storage-locker under my bed, then I walked around the large bush and found a short pathway that led to a small stream. I stripped off my clothes and waded into the stream.

Desrae called out to me "Cold?"

"About this big" I answered her and held my index finger and thumb up about two millimetres apart.

She laughed and stripped off her clothes and joined me. As she walked into the stream, I took a good look at her and decided that she no longer looked like the ‘granny’ I had dubbed her. She looked like a twenty year old woman. Even her grey hair had regained it’s hazel colour. The rest of the members of the finger followed Desrae and I after an initial hesitation. I thought I could see that Elaine looked substantially less fat than she had a few hours before. Once I thought of it, I looked down at myself and saw that I had already lost my boep. In fact, there was a definite hint of muscles showing on my stomach. My arms and legs had also firmed up substantially. I hadn’t developed any large bulges of muscle, but I was definitely a lot trimmer than when I had last looked.

When I was finished I dried off and returned to the barracks room without waiting for the others to follow. I lay down on my bed and I must have fallen asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, because I certainly remember nothing of the evening after that.