Cordyceps Thirteen
Cordyceps Thirteen
My morning classes were Geography followed by the elective I was most excited about. That made it rather hard to get through Geography at all.
Geography was taught by Professor Ortherre. He was a young man, maybe in his mid-to-late twenties in an ill-fitting tweed jacket who was bouncing on the balls of his feet at the front of our class.
The room was on the second floor, with large windows overlooking the grounds at the back of the school where there was a track for running and a large field for various sports currently being tended to by a small team of landscapers with push mowers.
There were seats in neat rows across the room, with a wide corridor down the middle that led all the way to the front of the class where the professor was standing on a small foot-high stage. The walls were covered in maps; some seemed like they were fresh prints, but a number of them were in glass frames and looked quite aged.
Professor Ortherre had dragged a large globe so that it stood next to him, a big visual representation of what his class was all about.
The Dragons sat on the left, away from the window-side of the room that the Trolls had instantly claimed as their own. Half of them were already paying more attention to what was going on outside instead of the teacher, at least until he clapped his hands.
“Welcome, gentlemen, to your very first class at Eden-Powell. I’m honoured to be your first professor. Though that honour will not shield you if you fail to behave. My class is quite taxing on the mind and memory, and I expect all of you to work and study hard to keep up. I aim to teach you of the world beyond the walls of City Nineteen.”
He spun the globe with a few quick strokes across the equator and the planet spun and spun, drawing everyone’s attention to it until, with a hard smack, Professor Ortherre slapped a hand over the globe, then tapped his index over a stretch of land to the north of the equator.
“This, right here, is where we are. Next to a small continental shelf between the ocean to the west and a large sea to the east, with only a thin channel splitting us apart from the greater empire and turning City Nineteen into a unique part of the greater Free Cities. As you will learn, geography and history are often the same subject, though in this class we will be studying the lands as they are more than the history that made them that way. We will be learning about foreign cities and distant lands and strange places across the globe and the strange peoples that inhabit them.”
He smiled, and I could feel his enthusiasm. Almost literally. Was that a teaching skill at work or was he just young and charismatic?
“But! Today we will not learn of the Rockholm dwarves or the wild cervid of the grand plains, or even of our distant cousins the elves in their Home in Exile. No, we will be starting a little closer to home.”
And then the lecture turned immensely dull as he had us pull out some textbooks from a shelf to one side of the room. The professor walked up to the blackboard and listed a number of pages to read. Then he just read straight out of the book.
I had kind of hoped to learn more about the rest of the world. It couldn’t all be as terrible as this city, could it?
Apparently it could be. Or at least, it could in this ‘Empire’ I was inadvertently a citizen of. City Nineteen was one of the twenty-seven or so ‘free’ cities. Technically we were a monarchy. Just as technically, the nobility had sold off and lost a lot of their power a generation or so ago, and now there were corporate entities that had more discretionary power than the Empire once had at its prime.
The class was too sanitised to really display any of the many, many issues I could imagine existed with this kind of... was it even a system? It was more a loose coalition of agreements between the rich not to step onto each other's toes too much while they tried to backstab each other for greater power. The occasional newcomer upset the balance of power often enough that there wasn’t ever a full monopoly and... and that was about all I could get out of reading ahead here.
The nearest city to ours was City Sixteen, across the channel from us. The nearest by land, however, was City Eighteen, which was substantially larger than our humble little metropolis.
It made me feel impressively small, seeing just how many cities there were, how many people I’d have to kill to set it all to rights.
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Near the end of the class the professor took over once again. “City Nineteen, as you have read, was settled in this region for two reasons. First, two dungeons in close proximity to each other is a rare occurrence. There are more satellite dungeons beyond the edge of the city, but they aren’t as productive as the two we have.
“We also happen to be in an immensely defensible position. The better part of the city is defended on one side by the Gutter and the other by sharp, rocky cliffs and nearly impassable terrain.”
That explained the richer part of the city. The rest, however, was all situated in a lower, flatter area. Probably perfect for building in. Probably also susceptible to flooding, now that I looked at it. The place I’d grown up in was only a foot above sea level. What would happen when water levels inevitably rose?
Well, I could imagine. The poor would drown. A few factories would have to shut down temporarily. The parents of the people in this room would complain at length about lost revenue, and then they might deign to build a dike or something to prevent future flooding. Maybe.
I made a mental note to write to the Union about it. The land next to the coast was less desirable. It might be possible to prevent anything before it really started.
Class ended, and I felt... strange? Melancholic and a little conflicted, but also energised. Sure, the lesson was rote and rather dry, but it was still a lesson. I’d missed being in a proper school.
“Which elective do you have?” Milo asked Montgomery.
“Introduction to World Religions is next for me,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it. I heard that the teacher is an archbishop.”
“Yeah, but not of an important god,” Milo said.
Montgomery gasped. “Watch yourself, Milo, they can hear you.”
Milo shrugged, and from the looks he earned from some of the others close by, he’d just earned himself a bit of a reputation there. “I have Introduction to Herbology and Botany next,” he said. “It’s more practical.”
“Really?” I asked. “Me too.”
Milo jumped a bit and looked at me as if he hadn’t noticed I was a step away from him. He probably hadn’t. “Oh, yeah, my family does a lot of farming. We even have a garden at home.”
“You do your own gardening?” Fairweather asked.
“Father says it’s important to know how to work a garden at least. It scales up to knowing how a farm works, and then you’ll know if your farmhands are cheating you or not. A good noble knows enough about how everything works within his domain to know when a subject is being truthful and how to respond according to each issue in turn.”
That last part was definitely repeated verbatim from someone or something.
“I just like plants,” I muttered, which earned a guffaw from Montgomery and a shake of the head from Milo.
Inevitably we had to split up. The Herbology elective was held out of the main school building and in a greenhouse that was surprisingly close to the Dragon dorms on the east end of the campus.
They were quite pretty, three large glass-walled buildings, their structure a scaffold of wrought iron with a few flourishes. The interior was filled with greenery.
Milo and I were two of four Dragons with this elective. The other two were boys called Andrew and George. We introduced each other with a round of handshakes that felt a little surreal coming from what were essentially kids.
The rest of the class was made up of five Trolls, and they were all eyeing us up as we came to a stop by the front of the main greenhouse. Class wasn’t going to start for another couple of minutes, and no one seemed ready to just walk in.
Seeing as how we weren’t going to do anything, I decided to extend an olive branch. “Hi,” I said. “My name’s Gunther. Looks like we’ll be in the mud together, so maybe a round of introductions?”
One of the boys, taller and bigger than the others, snorted. “You wish, Gunther. I don’t want anything to do with you. Our blood’s not the same.”
***