82 - A warrior pure

I could not sleep that night. As I paced, I heard through the door to the adjoining room, which was Skorsas’s, a muffled moan.

His day had not been entirely bad; he came right in after Minis left, to check me and the room for damage, I think, but happened to glance down at the floor and let out a huge gasp and a string of words I’d come to know as an invocation to his particular God (each caste and sex has its own, which is why there are ten: five castes, two sexes.) He bent down, and lifted, between his pristinely-gloved first finger and thumb, Minis’ ruby button. There was a tiny fortune on my floor, left by the boy’s nervous pickings.

“We should return them to him,” I tried to say in Arkan.

“No, no…!” he said, and many other things; between scores of different words and various gestures, he got me to understand that it was best to wait until Minis mentioned it, if he did. I think he wanted me to believe that was some form of Arkan civility, but I couldn’t miss the light in his blue eyes. The jewels and gold disappeared somewhere into his room.

Now he was upset, though. I’d asked him again, why black, and he seemed offended; but since he seemed offended sometimes even by the sight of me, I took no notice. After dinner, I’d stopped by Iska’s desk to quietly ask him.

Iska sighed. “It’s the way we Arkans show we are in mourning,” he said. “He was in love with his fighter before you.” The man’s name had been Tondias, and he’d been dead only three days. No wonder Skorsas was not at his best.

Now I heard half-smothered sobbing through the door. I thought of how young he was; my lost loves of that age had broken my heart just by leaving me, not being hacked up in front of my eyes as well as a slavering crowd’s, and I’d been comforted. Another hurt child with no one comforting him.

I tapped on his door, and when he did not answer, tiptoed in. Hot though it was, he had his pillow wrapped around his head as if he wanted no one to hear, though I could conceive of no reason he could be ashamed of grieving. Another Arkan thing, I thought. His tiny cot shook with it. I laid my hand gently on his shoulder.

His weeping cut off and he went still as a statue. Slowly his face peeked out, his eyes white all around the blue. To my shock, the black locks were shorn off. I remembered, how he’d promised to cut them off today.

“Aigh!” He clenched his eyes shut and flipped off the other side of the cot onto the floor, clutching the covers around himself, and started hurling Arkan curses at me, his eyes clenched shut; I kept hearing the words fikken and shennen. Finally he made a gesture, a violent thrust away. I finally saw: I was stark naked, in front of one whose people cover even their hands.

He’d promised me we’d shop for clothes tomorrow, and in the meantime hung several other robes in my wardrobe, which all smelled of rich scented oils. I threw one of them on, and found it was too big on my shoulders, like the shirt, and long enough it trailed on the floor. It had been Tondias’s.

No wonder Skorsas doesn’t like me, I thought. As my stepfather was at first for me, I am an intruder a thousand ways. Not knowing it, I have probably been callous a thousand ways.

I belted the robe and folded my hands inside the sleeves. He was sitting up with his back against the wall, wrapped thickly in bedclothes, and cringed away when I knelt beside him. How I would console him without words or the use of my hands I wasn’t sure, but I had to try.

His eyes were more afraid than angry now, obsequious again, and I caught the Arkan words for “I’m sorry.” I remembered what Iska had said, that my boy would be the only person devoted to me and me alone; he might be in trouble if I complained. Too Yeoli not to gesture, in the end, I brushed it off. He flinched, as if I meant hit him.

In the end, it was by a smile that I made him understand. All people on the Earthsphere share that. He looked like a child spared the comb, and then the grief came, naked. Skorsas’s beauty was astonishing; I think I sensed even then that before coming here, he had been a pleasure-boy. On those fine lips and white-blond brows, more true now with the paint washed off for the night, emotion showed clear and keen as through Arkan glass.

I’d learned how to say, “Why black?”; now I could say “Why no black?”

It was for my sake, he made me understand. By Mezem custom, for a boy to wear mourning dye is very bad luck for his fighter. His time of grieving was finished, and from now on, he promised, he would devote himself solely to me.

“No,” I said in Arkan. Perhaps he’d never lost anyone close before, and did not know what a brutal thing the Mezem law asked of him; perhaps he was denying it to himself. As best I could, I told him he’d grieve for a good year, and he need never forget Tondias for my sake. He stared at me for a long time; I swore on my crystal I would keep it secret, hoping he knew or could tell that was sacred. He stared for a long time more; then his eyes brimmed, and he pulled the blanket-edges in over his face.

“Skorsas.” I held out my arms when he looked, to let him come if he wanted, same as with Minis. After a little while he did. He wept out his heart, howling muffled into my neck, sometimes beating my chest with his fists, sometimes saying “Tondias!” and other words in Arkan, as I held him. In time he fell asleep, so I lifted him back into bed, tucked the covers in around him and left him with a caress on his brow.

It made me think of Fifth, whom I’d have kissed goodnight as well; thinking how many good-night kisses he’d missed from me brought my own tears, piercing.

A good night’s sleep is all-important, the night before a duel, but in the hot sticky Arkan darkness, my mind flew back and forth like a new-captured bird in a cage, fleeing from the horror of Minis’ life to the rawness of Skorsas’ grief to my own bondage to the axe that hung waiting to fall over my nation, and then around again, unending. I dozed on and off, but the dreams magnified the realities and so were best to flee from.

Greenhands do not fight in the Ring proper in the afternoon, but in the training ground in the morning, so that those who live get to watch for the first time in the afternoon. I slung on Chirel, my mind watching from afar, not believing my hands were doing it, as Skorsas hovered around me chattering; from the one word in ten or twenty I understood, he was encouraging me. First fights are always what the Mezem calls “clean blade”—sword alone and no armour—so I didn’t put on my wristlets, which was just as well. Bad enough that I polluted Chirel, doing this.

I seized on one possible mercy. “You said in the Ring sometimes a fighter doesn’t have to kill to win,” I said to Iska. “Can I do that here?”

He shook his head no. “If you don’t kill on the first wound, you have to finish him. Else someone else will, which makes it slower. Best it’s you.” He looked at me quizzically. “Your pride, his pain, Karas Raikas… which is more important?” I turned away from him fast, setting my teeth against nausea.

Out in the colonnade, the writers and oddsmakers staying clear of him and his Mahid, Minis waited. Of course he wanted to see me fight. Sorry, lad, but now I like you less. I did not look at him.

It was a mercy, perhaps, that I was called in for the second fight, only one man killed before my turn. I was drawn against a Brahvnikian whose name I only know as Friso Shalev. He was a big man, like most of them, probably in his mid-thirties, and so war-scarred I suspected he’d been a mercenary. Like everyone else but me he’d been bested by Koree, but he bore himself, and looked at me, as if he were certain of winning.

There was no more ceremony here than with sparring; Skorsas took me to one side of the ground, while Friso’s boy took him to the other, and Koree shouted “Fight!” I should draw Chirel now; Skorsas was certainly screeching something loud enough behind me. Friso, seeing me stand flat-footed, rushed me with his sword raised, so I drew Chirel just in time to parry.

He was one who fought mostly with strength, which those massive arms had a great deal of; he came at me hammer and tongs, almost as if he meant to overbear me, and he’d have knocked Chirel out of my hand, I think, if I ever parried straight on. But it was easy enough to hold him off, and get in my own strokes, for him to parry. He was as good as the best Yeoli regulars, not the elite. We circled a few times and his face grew increasingly angry.

I suddenly knew what I was doing; sparring. I saw it clear myself when I passed up a chance when I had him wide open. All along the colonnade the Arkans made yipping noises, and I realized, it was in contempt; however little these people knew of how to fight, they knew how to watch fighting, so they hadn’t missed it.

“Kellin! Raikas, kellin!” Skorsas was yelling; Arkan for ‘kill.’ I tried to steel my heart; I tried to tell myself this Brahvnikian was no different from any Lakan I’d killed, as hostile to my people; I tried reminding myself, he was trying to kill me. But when the next opening came, my hand held back again, and there was another chorus of yips.

He, naturally enough, was encouraged, and came on stronger. He cut low, so hard my parry only half-stopped it, and I felt the dull thud, almost between the ears more than anywhere else, that meant I was wounded. He’d caught me on the outside of the shield-side thigh, deep enough that it didn’t hurt yet, but the blood was flowing immediately. I took my weight off it.

In the frozen moment that followed, as he came in meaning to finish me, his sword wet with my blood, my body thought for me. It came down to whether I was willing to die here, and now. My body, in the end, was not. He lunged and I turned, and cut his throat, and so ended the part of my life in which I had been a warrior pure.

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[This scene from Minis’s point of view.]