84 - All things backwards

From the bed that was now mine, the crowd watching the fights in the Ring proper was like a storm, except that it reverberated through the building, not the sky. It started with a light pattering of feet and muffled susurrus of talk as the first spectators came in, then grew as they filled the seats, the building seeming to groan and strain with the weight of their thousands, and hiss with their talk. I’d heard that the Mezem held fifty thousand people, much more than any army I’d been in.

Then there was a silence—some ceremony?—and then their voices became united in following what they watched, like the audience of a play or a race or the Sinere Circus, except that they were so many their cries were like the roar of the sea. A force of nature, a primeval thing, unreal, dreamlike, ruled only by its own rules, it sent its massive vibrations through the stone pillars and the enormous beams that were the Mezem’s bones.

I wished it away as I lay, tried to stop my ears to it, tried not to imagine what each roar or laugh or rolling wave of whistling meant, what they were seeing. Now and then Skorsas came and went, fussing over this and that, showing no sign of hearing it himself. He’d become deaf to it, like people who live near thundering waterfalls.

Then with a final huge, long-lasting roar, the loudest so far, it ended, and the pounding of their departing feet was another kind of thunder, fading gradually and yet with suddenness that was somehow surprising, leaving the huge bowl of an edifice empty, and us in silence, again. Shortly thereafter I heard in the corridor the winners coming back to their rooms after bathing.

I signed to Skorsas that I wanted to write, and let him teach me the words for write and pen and paper. The idea of a waxboard seemed to completely confound him. He pointed at me, asking something, in amazement; I gathered it was, “Write? You?” I gritted back in Arkan, “Yes.” Was it unusual for a fighter to be literate?

He didn’t have pen and paper in his room, for some reason, so he fetched some from Iska. No ink-bottle, though; I mimed dipping it, which also put him at an absolute loss. I realized; it was an Arkan pen. One thing I knew, one slightly familiar thing, in all this strangeness; no wonder I had not recognized it. I put the tip to the paper, and there was the ink, making the perfectly even line that Arkan pens do.

I wrote to Iska, asking if the Mezem, or perhaps some nearby library, might have an Enchian/Arkan dictionary, with the pronunciations spelled out in Enchian, that I might beg to borrow (I couldn’t rent it, having no money), since it would speed my learning the language. Skorsas conveyed it for me, and came back saying, slowly, “Yes. We’re getting it.” He turned and was gone again, and came back in so short a time it astonished me, book in hand.

Setting myself to memorizing words, drilling on them with Skorsas’s help, so that I thought of nothing more sustained than the fleeting meanings of each word, with the image or memory attached to it, I could keep myself from thinking about where I was and what I had done. We went late into the night, even though I became dog-tired and the pain of the wound got worse, and I slept only fitfully, waking at the first creepings of daylight.

I need to stop my mind from flailing uselessly in emotion, I thought, and set out a plan. I couldn’t start looking for ways out until the wound healed enough, but I would—I’d already formed that plan—and in the meantime pretend to be what they wanted me to be, as I had once already, realistically enough that a man had died of it.

What if what Iska says is true, and there is no means of escape? The voice in me refused to be ignored. Another forty-nine times… I have to plan how to bear it. Just the thought felt like an avalanche coming down on me.

What is it, exactly, I asked myself, that troubles me? It wasn’t as if I hadn’t killed fifty before, many more than fifty, in war. They had no true ill intent toward me, but they’d kill me and cost Yeola-e what that would cost, no different than if they had, same as the Lakans. Was I being too soft-hearted, did I need to steel myself?

It came to me then that steeling myself, itself, was what I was afraid of. What if I have to steel myself so much I become heartless? If I cease to be myself, how much better is it than death, in the end? I could think of it as a disease, perhaps, that could be healed once I was away from Arko. But what if it cannot be cured? What if I learn things that I cannot unlearn, same as warriors, but on another level, that make me someone other than who I am, and I can never retrieve who I truly am, and should be? What if I come away corrupted, to return to the position of semanakraseye with its inherent powers, and I am a danger to Yeola-e without knowing it, as is always the case with people who are dangers to their own?

All these things I turned over and over in my mind, the thoughts running around in circles, the twitchings of my body hurting my leg now that last night’s painkiller was worn off, as daylight grew into full brightness. I dozed again, fitfully, then woke up after noon; distantly I heard the noise of the city, seeming louder than other mornings; I put that down to not having noticed it before.

Skorsas came in, wearing, instead of his usual understated tunic, leggings and unwrinkled gloves, a bit of leopard-skin around his hips; his hair was bright purple and standing, somehow, in thick spikes, and his hands were stark naked. “Good morning, Raikas!” he said cheerily, as if nothing were different.

“Um…” The words for colours, and body parts, were among the first he had taught me. “Purple hair… why?”

“Oh…” He let loose a string of fast Arkan, which included, several times, the word jitzmitthra.

“What means jitzmitthra?” I asked him. From the swarm of words that followed I picked out a few: “day”—no, “days,” “five,” “six,” and “mad” (he smacked his head and jumped up and down giggling when he said that one.) I couldn’t make head or tail of it. Iska would soon come in to check the wound, I remembered, so I could ask him.

Perhaps when the buxom and full-hipped woman, with false eye-lashes half a finger long, as much face-paint as a clown and huge puffy hair was done with me, whoever she was. My jaw dropped when I saw Iska’s face under it all. He batted the huge eyelashes at me.

“That’s very becoming,” I said. “Can you expl—”

“Why, thank you!” he gushed in a falsetto voice. “I sewed it myself.”

“Are you getting compliments from all the men?”

“That’s the whole idea. Darling.” He winked at me. “Now let’s see that nasty wound.”

“I imagine… you being dressed like that, and he being dressed like that, are not unrelated,” I said, as he undid the bandage. “Days… mad days… a festival? He kept saying ‘jitzmitthra’.”

“Yes, exactly. Jitz-mit-thra. Are my tits on straight?”

“Jitz-mit-thra. Give them a bit of a shove to the shield-side.” He did, to good effect. “Six days of crazy?”

“Most years five, but this is a leap year, so it’s six, and we have a”—here he said something in Arkan, which I repeated instinctively as I had got in the habit of doing, and which I have since seen best translated as, Diem of Carnal Licentiousness. “These are the days at the end of the year that don’t really exist, that don’t count, so we throw off all cares and all bounds and are entirely free.”

“And so can wear things that would normally be consider outrageous… I understand.” Like our own foolishness that happens on the summer solstice festival in Yeola-e, or Dagde Vroi in Brahvniki. Right then Skorsas rattled off something in Arkan, with a big grin. “He wants to dress you as a priest,” Iska translated, chuckling. “Seems more right for tomorrow,”—and here he said, and I mimicked, something in Arkan which I would later learn was said backwards, and so translate as Diem Wards Back. “People will wear their clothing backward, the kitchen will serve dinner in the morning and breakfast at night, and so on.”

“Can I be sold out of the Mezem as I was sold into it?” He pretended not to hear, rubbing marigold ointment onto the wound. “I guess that is no more possible than me bringing Friso back from the dead.”

“Security, unfortunately for you,” he said, “is the same as ever. It’s healing well; you may not have to keep weight off it for as long as I thought.” He didn’t bandage it again, wanting to let air at it.

“It hurts, but not like yesterday,” I said. “So I arrive in Arko just to find the whole city is mad… but then there’s a festival in which you all act more sane, phew.” He let out a girlish giggle.

“I suggest you watch the mayhem from the roof,” he said. “I have crutches in the infirmary; Skorsas will bring a few and you can try until you find the one that fits best.”

“Thanks, Iska. You ravishing thing. Perhaps I should make a pass at you.”

He feigned mortification. “Ooh, you barbarian beast,” he pouted, flapping a limp-wristed hand at me. “I’ll send your breakfast up.”

With my purple-maned boy, I ate breakfast in my room, pondering how much I wanted to share in the great yearly festival of a people who’d enslaved me and meant to make my life and death their pleasure. I never got tutoring in such considerations, I thought. Just as I was finishing, there was a claw-like scratching at the door, and a whiny bark that I would have thought was a dog’s if I had not known it was a young human’s imitating a dog. I realized I knew the voice: it was Kurkas’s son. I’d learned how to say in Arkan, “Let him in.”

Minis’ dog costume, no surprise, spared no expense. He wore a mask with big floppy ears that looked to be made of real fur and were on metal springs so they bounced with every motion of his head, carefully daubed brown spots on material that wrapped his whole body tightly, and a tail that looked to have a metal spring in it as well, so it wagged as he moved. A long deep pink satin tongue was attached to his chin, so it hung under the elongated nose of the mask like a dog’s. Around his neck was dog-collar dripping with sparkling gold charms, from which trailed a blue silken leash with sapphires and pearls sewn into it here and there.

On his hands and knees he bounced and wiggled his hips, making the tail wag, and panted with his tongue hanging out. Behind and to either side, as always, were his Mahid, but they were sparkling ghosts today, rather than shadows, their strict-cut suits brilliant white rather than black, and their belt-buckles black rather than silver. Strangest, they slouched rather than standing spear-straight, and let their faces have expressions. I understood. It was Jitzmitthra.

The Marble Palace must have dogs, I saw, because Minis could imitate one perfectly. On all fours, he bounded in and started making to lick my hand. “I guess I call you pup today,” I said. “What do I do with you, scratch you behind the ears?” He answered by flopping onto his back with all four limbs in the air, barking, as dogs do to demand a belly-rub. What could I do, whatever it was to share in their festival, but do it? He squealed in joy.

Almost to my surprise, he found his power of speech. “I love Jitzmitthra,” he said. “Even my birthday.”

“You were born during this?” I asked. “That’s got to be taken as the sign of something.”

“Yep, yep, yip, yip!” he said. “Tomorrow—Diem Wards Back. I was even born backwards, my father says, feet first. That’s why he called me Minis instead of Sinimas. I have to be more careful tomorrow than most people; my nurse says I’m more vulnerable to the little devils, the ones that turn the world upside down.”

“Ah. Those ones.” They’d had far too much influence on my life, lately. “I never thought Arko could be like this, tell the truth.”

“You’ll see sugar ones; everybody eats them.” In the sudden way of children, when they have a thought, he turned serious, leaning his elbows on my bed. “Raikas… would it be rude… I was confused yesterday. I was scared because I thought you’d get killed. And then happy because you didn’t. Why were you unhappy? You’re still alive.”

I can’t believe I’m going to explain this to Kurkas’s son, I thought. Dressed like a dog. “My war-training I was given for one thing only: to defend Yeola-e. That’s the only reason I should ever fight. That’s sacred to us. For me, killing belongs only on the battlefield.”

“You hurt because he died?” He played with his tail, and pulled the end of one ear into his mouth.

“I hurt because I killed him.”

“So was the author I read mis-quoting the mother of your country? I hoped... I wanted to help you.”

“No, no. It was a little garbled, but I understood it.”

“If we... are keeping you as a slave... and you’re a warrior... isn’t that a battle? For the sake of your people?” The thought I’d tried to have myself; it was the oddest thing, hearing it from Kurkas’s son, from under a dog-mask.

“I guess you could say that, since I’m fighting for my freedom. But it’s all staged. All set up, for the crowd. To kill someone just for someone else’s entertainment... that’s sacrilege.”

Behind his mask, his brilliant blue eyes deepened in puzzlement. “The Gods don’t like it?”

“It’s wrong. You don’t see it? It’s wrong to kill anyone for trivial reasons.

“You mean everyone’s important?”

My tongue froze in my mouth. What do you say to that? I searched for the reasons myself. “Everyone’s life is important,yes,” I said. “There were people who loved him.”

“A father?”

“And a mother. Maybe a wife, who has now lost him. For what? For my freedom?”

“And maybe sons?”

“And daughters, yes. That makes me sick.”

I thought tears might seize me again; but they seized him, his eyes going wet suddenly behind the mask. “I shouldn’t cry,” he sniffed.

“I don’t mind. You Arkans hold everything in too much. Well... maybe not right now, but usually.”

With tears standing in his eyes, he half-smiled. “Everyone here? Everyone here loved? Even daifikas? Okas? Fessas? I never thought of slaves as important…”

“Of course we all have families, did you think we grew out of the ground?”

“I never thought about it.”

“His family lost him, by my hand.” Now the tears burned in my eyes, wanting to come harder.

“They were just there to be used... oh... if he’s not just a fighter, a fighter slave to be used up, but a man... I never thought about it.”

Minis sat very still in his puppy costume, then looked at me, and said, “Raikas. I’m sorry.”

--

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