77 - An extraordinary person

“So, Raikas,” said Iska. “You told the testers you would not fight for a crowd. Are you still resolved not to?”

I sat thinking; foremost in my mind was that if I said no outright, they’d keep me in a cell, so I would not be able to look for the cracks in the wall I might find in the city. But my heart bristled even at saying I would draw Chirel on those who had neither done nor intended any wrong to me or mine, so I said yes. “You have the night, at least, to think about it,” he said. “Sleep on it. Pray… never mind, I forgot, you Yeolis are unbelievers.”

“May I speak to the one who refused before me… the Srian?” I wasn’t even sure why I asked, except that some sort of answer might be there. “If he speaks Enchian, that is.”

Iska looked at me a touch suspiciously. “He does. But whatever your reasons are for not wanting to fight, lad, don’t expect him to bolster them in you. His reasons are religious.” Then his face changed, and he said, “Still, no reason why not.” I knew what he was thinking: if he gets to know the man, he’ll do more to save him from torture. He called two guards to take me.

The Srian’s cell was at the end of the corridor. The guards stood back a few paces; Iska had apparently told them to allow us to speak in confidence. I peeked through the bars.

The cell smelled of mold and bedding that was not washed often enough, but also, faintly, of incense. There was no lamp or candle; I could only see that there was a man lying on the bed by the darkness of his ebon skin against the paleness of the sheets. His feet hung over the end, naturally, since he was Srian. Seeing the window of his cell-door darken, he looked up, the whites of his eyes bright against his dark face.

“I am the next one to refuse,” I said. “Right now I am going by the name Karas Raikas. May we speak?”

“I ask only one thing of you, Yeoli,” he said, his Enchian gracefully and thickly accented with the Srian lilt. “Give me the mercy of freedom from this place: don’t change your mind.”

“Will you tell me why you have chosen as you have?” I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to know; he had every right to say it was none of my business.

“I gave up the sword, and renounced all bloodshed before my Goddess, before the Arkans captured me,” he said in a quiet and resolved voice. “Better to suffer any torment of this world, than face Her in the next, having forsworn that.”

He wasn’t going to change his mind, then. It was comforting somehow; with a little thought I saw why. It is always uplifting, when you are a slave, to see someone claim his freedom absolutely. “I would give myself the one and only thing I wish: a quick death,” he added. “But my oath forbids that too.”

“By your own hand, you mean,” I said. “What about someone else’s?”

“No. But who will kill me quickly, except in the Ring? I tried that… I told them once I would fight, planning to let myself be killed in the first, but they truth-drugged me and so found out my true choice.”

I glanced at the guards. They looked as if they wished they had any post other than guarding the most inconsequential scum of the Mezem, those who refused; only one was watching me, looking bored to tears, while the other rolled a pair of dice in his gloved hand. “I will,” I said quietly.

The Srian lay silent for a moment; it was shock, I think, that suddenly his only wish might be so close. “You?” he said, disbelieving, but with his voice dropped to match mine. “They must not be letting you touch weapons, and watching you every moment, and there is a door between us.”

“It is possible,” I said, lifting my hand casually as if to lean on the bars on the window of his door, so as to measure them. I found myself wanting badly to address him properly. “May I ask your name?”

“Sakilro. Of Tebrias. I am pleased to meet you… Karas Raikas. But if you do this, they’ll punish you.”

“I am pleased to meet you too, Sakilro, though I wish it were in a better situation. You said it is the one and only thing you wish; don’t talk me out of it.”

He got up, sliding his long legs off the bed, and rising to his full height, a head taller than me. He stooped down so that we were almost eye-to-eye in a practiced way, as if he’d long been taught it was polite when dealing with diminutive foreigners. I guessed his age at early twenties, though he had no beard, Srians being mostly hairless on the face anyway. His hair was black and in pin-curls so tight they formed a solid thatch on his head. He had the flat nose typical of his race, and his black eyes were large, round and riven with fatigue and pain.

“You are absolutely certain?” I asked him. He’d made it clear, but not asking again would be less than due diligence. He looked me in the eyes as he answered, understanding. “Yes.”

I said, “Hold the outer two bars and put your face as close as you can to the inner two, between them. Close your eyes and tell me when you’re ready.”

He got a flash of surprise that I meant now, but it was gone in a moment, and he intoned something in his own language, with gestures. Then he wrapped his hands around the outer bars, and pressed his face close. I leaned casually against the sill of the window again, so as to look as if we were just talking right up until the instant I did it.

I considered telling him my name, thinking it was wrong for him to die without knowing by whose act, until it occurred to me that it was in truth by Arko’s. That name he knew. I was nothing to him but the agent of mercy; just as well that I grant him it anonymously.

“You are absolutely sure?” I said, one last time, though I knew I risked drawing an angry ‘yes’ out of him which could give us away.

If he hadn’t been absolutely sure in his heart, he might have prevented it that way. So easy it was, it seemed, for him and me to have unspoken understandings, as if we shared one mind. I was closer to him, I suspected, than I would ever be to anyone else here.

“Yes,” he said, quietly. “Thank you.” Making sure the guard didn’t see, I gripped his fingers for a moment. He closed his eyes. His face stayed impassive; it was good to see no fear in it. “I am ready,” he whispered.

My hand wouldn’t fit flat through the bars, so I couldn’t use the palm-heel; it had to be with the fourth knuckle of a vertical fist, which I had never done before. The nose-bone went true, though, up into his brain, as I knew when his hands went instantly lax and his huge body fell so bonelessly it thumped softly.

The guards both cried out startled, and turned to me, levelling their spears. I put up my hands. “Fik you, you miserable shen of a barbarian,” one of them yelled in rough half-Enchian. “What in fikken Hayel did you do?”

“I killed him,” I said. “I will come peacefully, though.”

“The fik you will! You live for nothing but to get Arkans in trouble, you shen-eating foreign bastard, you know that? Get honest Arkans in trouble, that’s all you’re good for, you dirt-haired fikker!” Of course they’d catch it, for letting me frustrate the Mezem’s plans for Sakilro on their watch. He railed on in the same vein, and the other yelled probably much the same in Arkan, while they came in with their spears leveled. I pressed myself face-first to the wall on my knees and with my arms spread, in the hope that would get it through their fear-thickened skulls that I was surrendering. They chained and collared me, flung me down and dragged me by the feet into my cell, kicking and spear-butting me all the way, leaving me on the floor as they slammed the door shut.

In a short time, Iska unbolted it and came in. “So you are a liar, saying you are averse to killing someone you have nothing against,” he said, as I lay at his feet.

“It was his wish,” I said. “Perhaps he did not share that with you.”

His silence let me know that Sakilro had. I looked up at him, and saw in his pursed lips the war in his heart, for having to punish me for doing a thing he admired. Without another word, not to mention unchaining me or helping me onto the bed or doing anything for my pain, he left, the door banging shut behind him.

It opened again shortly. This was someone I had not met, a middle-aged Ungilian made all of whipcord and war-scars on his leathern skin, wearing only a kilt and a shining swath of fine gold chains around his neck. His eyes looked as if he’d fought in every war in the world, and enjoyed them all. “I am Koree,” he said in a blunt hoarse voice and Ungilian-clipped Enchian. “The Mezem war-trainer.” So that was fifty prize-chains; they wouldn’t have someone in that post who hadn’t done it. “I promised Iska I’d change your mind in a twentieth-bead, Karas Raikas.” He sat down cross-legged beside me. “Let’s see how I do.

“You have golden hands; but you know that. I will tell you what I tell perhaps one in two or three thousand: you can make fifty, if you want. I am certain. It’s one thing to do the”—and here he said an Arkan word which I gathered meant the killing nose-blow—“in anger to someone you hate; it’s another to do it to someone you pity, in mercy. Then it’s another thing again, to have the guts to do that, when you don’t know how you’ll be punished. You are an extraordinary person.”

“It was the right thing to do,” I said. “That’s all.”

He leaned closer, and dropped his voice. “So extraordinary that you have showed it so fast here, means so extraordinary you show it wherever you go. Which means it is well-known at home. Maybe even well enough to be known to Arko, hmm? The signs of war are stronger; the tales of Yeoli barbarities are more often. And you’ve never said your real name.”

Sickness cut through the pain of the guards’ kicks, so hard I stopped feeling it. I could think of nothing to say that was safe, so I said nothing.

Koree dropped his voice almost to a whisper. “You know what a truth-drug scraping is? They put you under the drug, then they ask you, ‘What is the thing you’d least like us to know?’ and make you tell them. Then, ‘What is the next thing you’d least like us to know?’ And so on, until they’ve reamed you out of all your secrets. It’s usually Mahid that do it.

“I say one word into the right ear, that I have an inkling you’re someone important, and they will do that to you. But I will not, and none of these words of mine, or yours, will go beyond the walls of this room—if you will do just one thing. I think you know what it is.” He patted my shoulder, and chuckled, smiling a skull’s-rictus smile. “I’ve got you, haven’t I?”

I closed my eyes, and relaxed. “Yes,” I whispered. “I will fight.”