57 - The Annual Games

It is not considered improper for an anaraseye to become semanakraseye without having yet married or graduated from the Circle School, especially if he’s been otherwise busy with war. But I have my own schedule, for my own reasons.

It wasn’t too late when I got home to write the exam again—though there weren’t nearly enough questions about Laka for my taste, I passed well—and start with the preliminaries again. That meant I’d be all over Yeola-e for the full summer, which lent itself far better to having flings than growing the kind of love that makes for marriage. But then I might fall in love at first sight with someone in a game-army, who’d be willing to move to Vae Arahi to be with me; you never knew.

Fighting my preliminaries as not only a warrior but a renowned one with a very sparkly collar for my age, as well as those little details of being almost the size of a man with a man’s voice, was very different from three years ago. No one said anything about multiplication tables; more often I heard they were honoured to be fighting for me. Best of all, I had only to look and they’d jump, so commanding was easy, and I had a clue what I was doing in hand-to-hand. I got into the Annual Games with twenty-one of twenty-four possible points.

It happens every fall in Terera and Vae Arahi, my birthday usually coming during the quarter or semi-finals. The twenty-four entrants have to fight three games each, on different ground, including, sometimes, a naval battle on the Lake. The numbers range depending on how many warriors come; this year it would be about twenty-five thousand, so in the final it would be twelve and a half thousand each.

With that many warriors descending on the town for a half-moon, we of course make a festival out of it, and the tavern-keepers and vintners make up any losses they’ve suffered in the rest of the year. Don’t even think of finding a room at an inn; the people in them this year reserve them for next. There are even some rooms that are passed down in families. Most of the warriors sleep in a peacetime war-camp near the School of the Sword.

I worried about those who would be matched against me, not because I was certain to defeat them, but because they must feel like obstacles to my destiny, who should in duty to Yeola-e step aside, and yet had no fair reason to give up their own ambitions. I didn’t expect Dean Nainara to speak to this when we were gathered beforehand, but she did.

“You need not reveal it because you should never admit it,” she said, “but it may be that you are thinking, should you be matched against the anaraseye, that it would be best for Yeola-e for you to be at less than your best.

“I forbid you in the strictest terms to do so, even more strictly than the rules of the Games state. And I will explain why, also, as orders are generally carried out best by those who understand the reason for them. It is the opposite of what you are thinking. You fail Yeola-e, if you do not do your best to defeat him, because it is not good for Yeola-e, it would weaken Yeola-e, to have an anaraseye, or a semanakraseye, in the Circle School who is not truly worthy to be there, but thinks he is.

“As you know, Chevenga is training in fighting command, and so will consider whether to appoint himself and no one else chakrachaseye and then go onto the field, if there is war, carrying all of Yeola-e’s hopes. If he has a false sense of his ability and so appoints himself when he should in truth choose someone else, the result could be very severe, and very bitter, indeed.

“So by my rights as dean of the Circle School, I order you not only to do your utmost, but rise beyond your utmost, spare no effort or strain or inspiration, try even harder than with anyone else, to beat him. Have you heard me?” They belted back their acknowledgement to her, at least half fixing their eyes on me, full of my destruction.

I wonder also whether the senior students of the School, who conceive the scenarios, were trying to make it hard for me too. For my quarter-final I drew the slope of Haranin, which is interesting in the sense that one is always fighting either uphill or downhill, unless you arrange for the whole battle to turn around, which of course your opponent is trying to prevent, but which is mostly open ground.

Perfect for Kadrini pikers, I saw. The game-general is free to equip his warriors beyond their own wicker game-swords and shields, and the game-spears and arrows the school keeps in store, in any way he can arrange in time. The night before the game I gathered about thirty of my friends and little sibs (many of whom would be fighting against me), and begged and cajoled the captain of Terera armoury into lending me a thousand pikes. Working into the dead of night, we refitted them with game-points, swearing to refit them with war-points again, changing wicker for steel, after the Games were over.

People skilled in wielding the pikes were less trouble to get than the pikes themselves; among my first three-thousand-strong game army were better than seven hundred who were fresh from using them against the Lakans. In the morning, my friends who were green (one side is always green and the other blue, the Yeoli colours, and this time I was blue), the moment they’d relinquished their wills to my opponent, who was Cherao Kalila, loyally told her what I had, but it was too late for her to get her own pikes.

I was surprised no one else thought of it, in truth; the only thing I could think was that the Games and war are very different things in people’s minds, both with their traditions, so that what has been adopted in war still has another fence to cross to become tradition in the Games.

The upshot was that using them to steel my centre with a weight that could not be stopped gave me a solid win for my first game, even though a little while after taking the first long draught from my water-skin, I suddenly felt awful, as if I’d been poisoned with a quarter-dose. To quit and get to a Haian, of course, you have to surrender, and then you’re waiting another year. “Grin and bear it,” said my shadow-mother, who was fighting for me, when I told her why I looked so pale. “I think it’s Games Malady.”

“You think it’s what?”

“Have you drunk out of your skin?” I signed chalk. “From when it was filled, has it been out of your sight?” I signed chalk again; it wasn’t mine in truth but one I’d had handed to me, filled, from the stack by the stream. “The senior students probably had someone from the School of No Name put something in it. Sometimes they do that. You know how it is: always they replicate true war as closely as they can, and the enemy doesn’t call a pause when you get sick.”

So I endured, fighting even as I felt like throwing up and lying down at once, made my win and for the rest of the games used my own water-skin, unslinging it from my shoulder only to fill. I found out afterward they had indeed poisoned me.

My second game, I drew Terera Plain, which is ground suitable for horse, and Mechora Shae-Lil, my adversary, and I were given leave to use two hundred destriers. (One of the many staggeringly-lavish gifts Astalaz had given me in Laka was Akaznakir, a classic Lakan black of the absolute best bloodlines, and I’d started training on him still in Laka.) Of course this was an even better place for Kadril, but Mechora had his own by then, though only five-hundred (he was from out of town and had fewer friends here than I did.)

The trick with cavalry, of course, is that they give you not only force against foot, but the freedom to send them distances on the field at that speed. (This is a tenet for Lakan generals, I knew both from the books and the battles I’d seen, and so most of them have mastered it.)

So on Terera Plain, since the numbers and the ground were similar, I decided to mimic a Lakan’s plan from four centuries ago, that he’d used against some tribe on their northwestern border. (Mechora had fought in the Lakan War, but it was a pretty safe bet that he hadn’t read this book.) The only difference was the Kadril, but I worked them into it.

What the Lakan had done was, as he formed up his ranks, set all his horse on his far shield-side wing, which was against a steep hill, but echeloned back from the edge of the foot line. The enemy tribe tended to put their strength on their sword-side anyway; now they bolstered it. Then as soon as the foot ranks closed, the horse went at a full gallop behind their own foot lines, around the end of the sword-side wing and into the flank of the enemy’s shield-side, where he was weak.

So I did the same, setting my thousand Kadril on my shield-side, which was against the edge of the woods. Seeing this, Mechora put both his five-hundred Kadril and his horse on his sword-side, facing mine. The only weakness I saw was that he might send his horse into the gap left open by mine when they faded sword-side, and flank my Kadril, so I set the furthest shield-side five-hundred pike-bearers, ranked ten deep, in an oblique, the shield-side back but only ten or so paces from the edge of the wood, with my horse half-behind; they could fold back to make the flank a front if they had to, else trap Mechora’s horse against the woods.

It was a joy, being on point, angling my game-spear as if to begin a signal of charge forward, then whipping it to my sword-side as I wheeled Akaznakir and kicked him into a gallop that way, his gait so smooth it was like flying.

It worked perfectly; Mechora was caught entirely off-guard, his game-army ending up between horse and Kadril. I chased him down personally and tapped him with my game-spear, and I was but one final away from the Circle School.