78 - Five levels of humanity

Koree went. I roused myself to squirm up onto the bed—someone else’s concern if I bloodied it—and lay reflecting on how slavery tears us down to nothing, whatever we were before we were enslaved. I reminded myself how in nothing lies total freedom. Whatever constraints were laid on me here, those of a semanakraseye were not. In a short time Iska came back, with someone else. I had turned so I was facing the wall, wanting to be free of the glare of one of the two guards through my barred window.

“Stay facing that way, Raikas, so I can unchain you,” Iska said, and did, then rubbed my shoulders with his big strong hands, easing the spikes of pain, while I moved them to ease the stiffness. It was strange, and a little dizzying, to go from anybody’s meat to cherished guest to the contemptible lump on the floor, good only for kicking, and now back to cherished guest, in such a short time. “Now turn over, strip and let me salve you.” He didn’t go so far as to ask who had given me the scrapes and bruises, though, nor look surprised I had them.

The other person with him was a youth of fifteen years or so, with the fine acquiline features and perfect smooth skin that is the ideal of beauty in Arko; I’d seen it on statues and mosaics all the way through the City and had thought it wasn’t possible in real life, until now when I saw it. His lips were darkened with paint, his eyelids shaded faint purple-blue; the edges of the two sweeping wings of his white-blond forelocks were black as my own, dyed. He was dressed far more finely than Iska, in a black satin tunic and leggings with gold earrings and bracelets, and black gloves with backs of very fine lace. When his bright blue eyes met mine, they froze, and he gasped, then snapped shut his mouth and turned his face impassive by will.

“Raikas, this is your boy, Skorsas Trinisas,” Iska told me. “Every fighter has one. He will be your bodyservant, companion, guide in the city, healer’s assistant and the only person in the Mezem who is devoted to you and you alone. Oh, and teacher of Arkan; he knows no Enchian or other language. Skorsas…” Iska switched to Arkan then and I gathered he was introducing me when I caught “Karas Raikas” among the other words. His eyes stayed fixed on me, as I took off the shirt; I saw the ends of his hair tremble. For some reason he hates the very sight of me, I thought. Had he felt something for Sakilro, or was he a relative of Daisas? Did I remind him of someone who had done him wrong? Iska didn’t seem to notice, though I couldn’t see how he could miss it; perhaps he was pretending not to.

Iska apologized again for their pulling off one glove each, as if I cared, and the two anointed me everywhere I was hurt with whack-weed and marigold cream, though I’d heard Arkans didn’t believe in Haian remedies, and stitched me here and there. Skorsas’s touch was almost unearthly gentle, but his fingers trembled, as if they wanted to shrink from the feel of me. I wanted to ask him in private what the problem was, but of course unless I could figure out a way to do it with gestures, it was futile.

“Now try getting up,” Iska said, and watched me carefully all the way, ready to steady me if he had to, not knowing how hard a blow I might have taken on the head. He was so conscientious that I felt obliged to tell him, as if he were a Haian and I his patient, “I’m all right.”

Once I was dressed again, they took me from the cell into a room without bars. “The greenhands’ quarters,” Iska said. “When you’ve won one fight you’ll be assigned a proper room upstairs. Oh, by the way; that nice sword of yours is with all the other fighters’ in the Weapons Trust. You may have it whenever you wish, except inside the Mezem quarters, and if you go out into the city, again, you must wear it.”

We passed through what I would come to know as the fighters’ parlour, and I saw them close for the first time, as they were done training. They were of every race on earth, it seemed, except Haian; I even saw, to my amazement, a man who by every sign was Arkan. They wore all manner of circus style: hair dyed green or blue or purple and cut or trained into the strangest shapes, painted eyes, sleeveless satin robes in every brilliant color and pattern and coat of arms, metal piercing parts of them I’d never dreamed a living, rational person would put up with, tattoos of birds and dragons and spiders across faces, purposefully-raised scars on arms and shoulders and brows. All showed the muscles of their limbs and their golden victory-chains; those with the thickest swatches of them, I noticed, also had more other jewelry and wore finer fabric, just as Iska had said. They were mostly taller than me and built more massive; clearly the Mezem usually picked for that. I felt myself stripped naked again, as the lower-chainers measured me, but understood why they did. The high-chainers didn’t even glance, above looking at a greenhand.

Suddenly Jinai Oru’s voice came to me, from a blank-walled chamber in Tenningao, five years ago. “There’s a strong one: a death-duel against a man with black skin and blue hair, with a yelling crowd all around you, whose edge goes up to the sky.” In the light of foreknowledge, I thought, all considerations, plans, worries, choices, are dust-specks in a sunbeam. This had already been my destiny, then.

The room was plain, but had no bars and a bolt only on the inside. Iska left me there with Skorsas, saying, “No training today, you need rest more. Be good and learn the language now.”
He told Skorsas to teach me, I gathered.

The—my—boy’s face went from hidden rage to grudging acquiescence, the expression I had seen more than any other on the faces of Arkans, even free ones. Of course it’s a harder matter to teach someone a language when you don’t already both have one in common, since translation and explanation is not possible. Shy about their hands, Arkans don’t like to gesture, so every single sign he made, all of them absolutely necessary, he made gingerly and resentfully. I already had a few words from overhearing Ethras and my escort, and a few more from Daisas (mostly obscenities); now I did my best to acquire more as fast as I could. If Arko-ness was entwined with the rest of my life, I realized, there were more reasons to know it than Iska’s order.

What confused me the most was that Skorsas absolutely insisted that the word for “you” was different when I spoke to him than when he spoke to me, as was the word for “I” or “me.” I kept trying to ask why by putting on a baffled expression or shrugging exaggeratedly; he kept shrilling at me that it must be, and explaining why, I presume, at length in Arkan, making gestures that looked like stairs and levels but also the numbers one, two and three. Finally in exasperation he beckoned me to follow him, and led me to Iska.

When the healer was done with whoever had got there before us, Skorsas let out a long string of Arkan in which I caught at least one fikken and shennen each. “Ah,” said Iska, turning to me. “Look, Raikas, he’s one-upping you because fighters are, in effect, solas.” At my look of blank incomprehension, he said, “I guess you don’t know that Arkan is spoken differently depending on which rank of person is speaking to which?” At my look of deepening blank incomprehension, he said, “I see, you definitely don’t.”

In Laka, it had always struck me just how much of the speech and mannerism and dress and all other aspects of how people treated each other were about who was better than who, as if they were obsessed with the question. In that, Arko makes Laka look like Yeola-e. I already knew there were five levels of humanity in Arko: Aitzas, nobles; solas, warriors; fessas, skilled people such as administrators, artisans, healers and so forth; okas, free labourers, and daifikas, slaves. The length the men were allowed to wear their hair was governed by strictly-enforced laws; only Aitzas could wear it as long as it would grow, and slaves had to keep themselves all but bald. I’d also heard that only the top three castes were permitted literacy, and no women at all.

I didn’t know that whom you are speaking to determines what pronouns, verbs and even adjectives you use, and it changes not only if you are of different rank but how many steps different, so that learning Arkan is, in fact, like learning five or six languages in one. I had hoped that I’d only learn one, like a normal language. The different castes even had different accents.

“You are solas, in effect, which means you one-down Skorsas and the other boys, and two-down the servants, but to me you speak equal-to-equal, by special exception, since I am in command here,” Iska explained. “But, even though the Director is Aitzas and thus one up from solas, you must two-up him since you are still daifikas…” He trailed off, looking at me with the thought clear on his face, maybe you aren’t as intelligent as I thought. “Never mind… for now I’ll tell him to teach you equal-to-equal only, since it’s simple, and you’ll pick up the rest later.” He told the same to Skorsas, I gathered, and the language lessons became easier and much less frustrating for both of us from then on.

We broke for dinner. Mezem fighters, I learned, eat very well and as much as they like, which I did perhaps to excess for the first meal or two, it being so much better than the scraps of potato and gristle, cut off his own and his apprentice's portions of meat, that Daisas had fed me. Arkan food is not spicy like Lakan, and their favourite meat is beef, but it has a bewildering variety of dishes, drawn from all over the Empire, and a meal isn’t considered a proper meal unless there are a good ten different items on the plate.

I think Skorsas meant to teach me Arkan late into the night, but I gathered that somehow he was as tired as I was for some reason. In the street on the way here, I recalled seeing an elderly man with his white hair dyed black the same way; it had some significance. It occurred to me I could ask him; he’d taught me the colours, and (again, with Iska’s help) the questioning words, including “why.”

I knew better to touch his hair; the few times I’d come even close to him with my hand, until I’d learned not to, he’d shrunk back as if it were a firebrand. Arkans are extremely shy about touch as a rule; you’ll never see two people hug in the street, for instance, and even lovers won’t kiss except in the bedroom. So I touched what was left of my own forelock, then pointed at his, and said, “Why black?”

I expected an explanation that would naturally become a further language lesson; instead he looked at me mortified, and let out a frantic string of Arkan words in which about one in three, as far as I could tell, was the one that meant “sorry,” over and over. How it rankled, not to be able to say, “It’s all right, I’m just curious!” I managed “I” (equal-to-equal) and “not angry,” at least, since he’d taught me the emotion-words, though not “curious.”

It hardly made a difference. “Tomorrow,” he was saying. “Raikas, I swear”—here he made the Arkan sacred sign of two cupped palms next to the temples, then gripped the dyed lock on one side. “Gone.” He mimed cutting it with scissors. “Tomorrow, I swear.” In the inner corner of one perfect-lined eye, I caught the faintest glistening of a tear. He turned away from me fast—Arkan males also never show tears if they can help it—and was out the door, snapping over his shoulder, “Sleep!”

It was near the summer solstice—at home they’d be getting a start on preparing the festival foods, I realized, bringing tears to my own eyes—and the sun wasn’t far down behind Arko’s Rim, which always makes its sunsets earlier and sunrises later. So I doubted I could obey him for a while yet. And yet this bed was soft and this pillow was lavendered too, and it had been a hard day. I’d been roughed up, and killed two men, the first since the Lakan war, and agreed, at least in principle, to kill fifty more who were not in any way my enemies. I thought I might just nap for a bit, but when I woke up the daylight coming through my window was brighter, as it was morning.