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Now Torg made a great show of stretching his muscles. He lifted a booted foot to tap Wintrow's spine again. “Got to go, boys. Work to do. Mild, you're the nanny. See pretty boy here keeps busy. ” With a final painful nudge, Torg lumbered away down the deck. Neither boy looked up to watch him go. But when he was out of earshot, Mild observed calmly, “Someone will kill him someday and tip him over the side and no one will be the wiser. ” The young sailor's hands never paused in their work as he imparted this information to Wintrow. “Maybe it will be me,” he added pleasantly.
The youth's calm advocation of murder chilled Wintrow. Much as he disliked Torg, as difficult as it was for him not to hate the man, he had never considered killing him. That Mild had was disconcerting. “Don't let someone like Torg distort your life and focus,” he suggested quietly. “Even to think of killing for the sake of vengeance bends the spirit. We cannot know why Sa permits such men as Torg to have power over others, but we can deny him the power to distort our spirits. Yield him obedience where we must, but do not . . . ”
“I didn't ask for a sermon,” Mild protested irritably. He flung down the piece of line he'd been working on in disgust. “Who do you think you are? Why should you be telling me how to think or live? Don't you ever just talk? Try it sometime. Just say out loud, I'd really love to kill that dog-pronging bastard. ' You'd be surprised what a relief it is. ” He turned his face away from Wintrow and spoke aloud in an apparent aside to a mast. “Dung. You try to talk to him like he's a person and he acts like you're on your knees begging his advice. ”
Wintrow felt a moment of outrage, followed by a rush of embarrassment. “I didn't mean it like that. . . . ” He started to say he didn't think he was any better than Mild, but the lie died on his lips. He forced himself to speak truth. “No. I never talk without thinking first. I've been schooled to avoid careless words. And in the monastery, if we see or hear someone putting himself on a destructive path, then we speak out to each other. But to help each other, not to . . . ”
“Well, you're not in a monastery anymore. You're here. When are you going to get that through your thick head and start acting like a sailor? You know, it's painful to watch how you let them all push you around. Get some gumption and stand up to them instead of preaching Sa all the time. Take a swing at Torg. Sure, you'll get a beating for it. But Torg is a bigger coward than you are. If he thinks there's even a chance you're going to lay for him with a marline spike, he'll back off of you. Don't you see that?”
Wintrow tried for dignity. “If he makes me behave like he does, then he's truly won. Don't you see that?”
“No. All I see is that you're so afraid of a beating you won't even admit you're afraid of it. It's just like your shirt the other day, when Torg put it up the mast to taunt you. You should have known you'd have to go get it yourself, so you should have just done it, instead of waiting until you were forced to do it. That made you lose to him twice, don't you see?”
“I don't see how I lost at all. It was a cruel joke, not worthy of men,” Wintrow replied quietly.
Mild lost his temper for an instant. “There. That's what you do that I hate. You know what I mean, but you try to talk about it a whole different way. It isn't about what is 'worthy of men. ' Here and now, it's about you and Torg. The only way you could have won that round was pretending that you didn't give a damn, that climbing the mast to get your shirt back wasn't anything. Instead, you got sunburned sitting around acting too holy to go get your shirt. . . . ” Mild sputtered off into silence, obviously frustrated by Wintrow's lack of response. He took a breath, tried again. “Don't you get it at all? The worst was him forcing you to climb the mast ahead of him. That was when you really lost. The whole crew thinks you've got no spine now. That you're a coward. ” Mild shook his head in disgust. “It's bad enough you look like a little kid. Do you have to act like one all the time?”
The sailor rose in disgust and stalked away. Wintrow sat staring down at the heap of rope. The other boy's words had rattled him more than he liked to admit. He had pointed out, too clearly, that Wintrow now lived and moved in a different world. He and Mild were probably of an age, but Mild had taken up this trade of his own inclination, three years ago. He was a sailor to the bone now, and no longer the ship's boy since Wintrow had come aboard. No longer a boy at all in appearance. He was hard-muscled and agile. He was a full head taller than Wintrow as well, and the hair on his cheeks was starting to darken into proper whiskers. Wintrow knew that his slight build and boyish appearance were not faults, were not something he could change even if he saw them as faults. But somehow it had been easier in the monastery, where one and all agreed that each would grow in his own time and way.