83 - Arko effaced him

I wanted just to get away from staring blue eyes. Arko loves that story, the fighter who seems about to lose turning around and winning after all, so the same people who’d yipped me derisively were now cheering and whistling. I don’t belong here, I should not be here, none of this has anything to do with me, intoned in my mind.

Now the pain came up. I could walk, but Skorsas insisted on taking my arm over his shoulder, and steered me limping to Koree, who put the the first gold chain around my neck. I had thought of refusing to wear them, but that now seemed like pretending I had not done what I had done. Skorsas took me to Iska’s healing room and I lay down on the bed while he pressed the wound, waiting for Iska. At least in here it was cool and the eyes were few.

This door was not locked, so Minis came right in as if he lived here, in his way. “Raikas? What’s wrong, other than the wound? You won, it’ll heal, you’re all right, what’s wrong?” My face was showing my heart, it seemed. The tears hadn’t come yet—it was starting to work its way into me that Arkans hold men who cry in contempt—but they were close.

“I just took a man’s life for no good reason, just for Arkans to drool over, and you’re asking me what’s wrong?” I felt a flinch from Skorsas; he couldn’t understand the words but the tone wasn’t sufficiently obsequious to be safe, to his mind.

Minis peered at me in that puzzling-it-out way, then said, “I was reading about Yeoli things last night… a quote from someone named Yeola. Should I tell you? Yeola was your country’s… not father, but mother, but in the same way, right?”

Kurkas’s son, I thought, is going to quote Saint Mother to me? I signed chalk, forgetting, then at his confused look, said, “Yes. She was mother to us. And yes, you may.”

“She said, ‘Responsibility is in the mind driving the actions of the kraiya—that’s Yeoli for a sword like yours, right?—not the hand on the blade.’ Like our solas, doing what the Imperator orders. It’s my father’s mind driving this, not your hand, so it’s his responsibility, not yours, right?”

The tears came hard, and curses tore out of me, both at once. By his look of blankness I realized I’d spoken in Yeoli. “Raikas, it’s all right!” he said, desperately. “What can I do to help?”

“Unless you can give me wings, nothing.” His face caught a touch of anger; I felt Skorsas cringing again. About then, Iska came in. He was a person who could calm with his very presence; the ungloved hand on the shoulder and the command to relax, while he gave me the Haian remedies, helped too. He washed the wound with marigold water, Haian-style—it was about two fingerwidths deep, cutting the muscle—and began stitching it.

“It isn’t your responsibility,” Minis said insistently. “You’re a Yeoli solas, with your duty to your country and your people, right? Your family needs you to live through this.” I clenched my eyes shut. Curse you, child, I thought, you think I need persuading? What do you think I did out there?

“I’m sorry, Raikas.” Had I shown the anger, and he’d read it correctly? “But you’re doing this for your oaths and your people who need you, right?”

“I would do it for nothing less.” Fik you, child, get lost, let me be.

“So you need to breathe and take your boy’s comfort, for your people and for your family,” he said, as if he were a healer. So little caring in this place, I reminded myself, don’t turn any of it away. I reminded myself also of what he had suffered. Weeping came on too strong to swallow, so I just let it take me.

Iska tied off the last stitch, and then Skorsas washed the wound again and bandaged it. “No weight on it for three days, no training for eight, no fighting for sixteen,” the healer told me. “I’ll convey this to the Director. And you don’t have to watch the fights this afternoon, because you should be in bed. You get a room upstairs in the quarters proper now; the boys will carry you.”

He and Minis and Skorsas went back and forth a bit in Arkan, too fast to understand, though I thought I caught the word for ‘water.’ Kurkas’s son translated for me: “They’re saying you can only soak in the tub if they come up with some way to keep your leg raised.” A soak I’d have loved, but had resigned myself to going without already. “Feh,” he said, as if at a bad smell, at something they’d told him. I should have known that would not be the last of it.

They carried me on a litter up a wide and tastelessly ornate set of stairs into a wide corridor. Each curlicue-carven door had a name-plate; some had sigils as well, or were painted in certain colours. The one they took me into had an Arkan letter in a rich jewel blue and black.

It was Tondias’ mark, I gathered, and so would soon be effaced. The room had a plain bed, a night-cabinet, a wardrobe which had a few things in it that were all that same intense blue and black, and little else. The rafters, by the hooks and holes here and there on them, had had things taken down from them recently; the walls, which were of stone, were carven all over with scratched letters.

I looked closer at the ones near the bed, and saw they were names, in every imaginable script, each with a tally of linear marks. Numbers of fights? Yet the chains provided a tally of that, and many of the names had well over fifty scratch marks; up high, framed, was a name with what seemed like two or three hundred marks.

It came clear to me when I saw they were all multiples of four, and none less than eight. It was how many days the fighters had lasted, not how many fights, an assertion, however secret, that their lives had been made up of days, not fights.

So I lay in the bed, which had been, and in Skorsas’s mind no doubt still should be, Tondias’s, and before him another fighter’s and another before that, back to the building of the Mezem. And I swore to remember the name of the man I’d killed here, Friso Shalev of Brahvniki, and every other I would, as long as I lived. No one else would.

Arko does well for a fighter’s body, I thought: feeds it, clothes it, trains it, all well. But at death, he is cast off like a worn kilt, his name forgotten as if no one ever knew it, his presence vanished as if swallowed in bottomless quicksand. By the Arkan ethic of tzen kellin ripalin, ‘who kills, becomes,’ his possessions all go to his killer, so only a few of Tondias’s things had been left by the fighter who’d killed him. Even those who loved a fighter are required to remove the marks of their mourning and forget him, after a scant few days.

No wonder they’d scratch marks on the walls, even the illiterate, I thought. For where else is Tondias? He lived here for what had to be several months; this room must have been full of things of his, but his touch is cleaned away; what’s left is mine now, even the leftover clothes that don’t fit me, until I die. He gave his life for Arko’s pleasure, and Arko effaced him; and so they will do with me, unless I make forty-nine more give theirs, and be themselves effaced.

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




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