91 - State of mind against state of mind

I was cleared as I’d expected, and my second fight was in the Ring proper.

A while after I woke, I noticed the sounds of shovels scraping in dirt, thrown clods thumping and workers calling each other in Arkan through my window. I thought nothing of it, though the noise grew quieter after another fighter, who’d indulged the night before, yelled at them for waking him up, and challenged any of them to a duel.

Out by Iska’s desk, Iska, the Director and some of the boys were talking, concerned; making a study of it so as to practice my Arkan, I gathered that it was that no one, not even the Director, had ordered the work in the courtyard, or knew who had. But on a fight-day they were all too busy to do anything right now.

Not wanting to go into the arena for the first time in the last moment so that it would all be strange to me, I asked Skorsas to show me to the place I’d heard we would sit, the Fighters’ Box. “You don’t sit there when you’re going to fight,” I understood him to say, “you stay inside.” Just like the circus, the performers keep hidden from the audience until it is time to make their entrance. I reminded him as best I could in my bad Arkan that I’d never set foot in the arena proper, having been laid up while the other one-chainers who’d come in with me had watched fights there on the afternoon of our first fights. He took me up.

The great bowl of the stands is deep as a valley and holds fifty thousand, the nobles in the closest seats, of course, the poor massed against the blue of the sky. The Ring is circular, some twenty paces across, and covered with sand the color of gold. It is bounded by a trench two and a half man-heights deep, in which, during fights, a pride of lions, that eat nothing but corpses, or still living men, that fall or are thrown from the edge of the Ring. The seats are fenced off from it but the ring-edge is not. Three bridges cross it: two at east and west for the two fighters’ gates, one at north for the winner to receive his chain.

To this day, I am certain my feet still know every rise and hollow; I could walk across with my eyes closed, and stop with the tips of my toes just far enough back from the edge that the claw of a leaping lion would touch them with their wind only. I could do it in my sleep; I know, for I still have dreams.

At the south is the Imperial Box, with its sliding plate-glass doors bordered with the sigil of the Aan family, the golden sunburst; this was where I would see him, I realized, and wondered if he’d come today. Behind it, about half-way up to the sky, is the great brass and gold gong, that is a full two man-heights high.

The bowl was empty, but then they opened the gates, beginning to let in the lines of people. I sat in the Fighter’s Box and watched the bright-haired crowd come in, something I remember more vividly than almost anything else.

The most eager come in the moment the gates are opened, a good bead before the first fight starts, dashing up the aisle steps to their places, whooping. The bowl gradually fills, echoing emptiness changing into a vast chatter. Tiny plumes of smoke rise everywhere as pipes are lit, and the air soon fills with the spice-sweet smell of Arkanherb.

The stands hawkers begin crying their wares, sweetmeats, sausage, nuts, wine, Arkanherb, banners and kerchiefs with the names, colors and likenesses of favorite fighters, mourning dye for afterwards. The bet-carriers thread through the seats, formal and obsequious among the Aitzas in their jewels and gleaming sheets of blond hair, rude and friendly among the ragged and shorn okas.

They sit silently through the various ceremonies, the boy choir’s singing and the priests’ litany, and cup their palms as one for the silent noon observance. Once that is done, it becomes a great party, with the whooping and whistling and blowing of horns. If a great favorite is listed, they will chant his name; if two rivals, their factions will try to out-shout each other.

The poor are loud and rough and comradely, though they sometimes break into their own fights, two bristle-haired men posturing, then flailing dark-gloved fists while everyone near eggs them on, since that kind likes to come here.

The nobles, with their cushions and hand-cloths and lap-dogs, behave with more outward decorum, but yell the most cutting words down to the fighters, knowing they will be heard. Men and women alike come, even whole families, with children, and no one considers that out of the ordinary.

Because I had not seen it before, I was granted a dispensation to sit in the Fighter’s Box on the same day I’d be fighting. I would fight in the second fight, again, so I got to watch the first one first.

Kurkas did not come, but Minis did—naturally, as he was my first fan—his entourage making a bustle in the Imperial Box. He did not seem to see me among the other fighters; of course he was expecting me to still be inside.

Once the herald has spoken the traditional words, “Step forth ye two, one to receive the chain of victory, one to receive the sword of death,” the great gong has been sounded and the Director pulls the lever that makes the fighters’ gates clang open, fifty thousand pairs of eyes follow every twitch of blade or shift of foot; fifty thousand voices gasp with every feint, roar with every flurry, exhort, sneer, warn, laugh, shriek.

There are the purists, who applaud the fine moves and yell advice as if they were Teachers, and the blood-bats, who in the way of that creature make themselves apparent on the first wounding, and love best the goriest death. One may see an Aitzas with a lace-decked pleasure-boy, soon to disappear under his master’s robe when a fight starts; quite openly the man will cry out in ecstasy at the killing or crippling blow. Yet when a favorite dies, they keen and pull and blacken their hair just as if they’d loved him (I had not yet heard of mourning dye that can be washed out).

The two men fighting the first fight were fairly equally matched, so it went for long enough for rounds, with rest-breaks between them, and they both left a fair amount of their blood spattered around the Ring before one of them got in the blow that ended the other’s strength. He didn’t wait for any kerchiefs, but finished him right away.

I watched it all as if through glass that was less than Arkan-perfect; it did not seem possible, and therefore real, that I would be there next, doing the same. But as the victor was climbing the stairs to receive his chain, I heard, “Raikas! Raikas!”, remembered it was my name, and saw Skorsas beckoning me frantically with a hand gloved in scarlet, that matched what I wore.

I was wearing what Minis had bought for me, though I wouldn’t have thought my dinner clothes would also be my fighting clothes; this, and not just to show my shape, was why they’d made sure everything was fitted or tied tight to my body, I saw now. Minis had bankrolled a whole wardrobe for me, and for Skorsas to match, so we’d be going shopping again soon, he’d let me know.

They leave a little time between fights for people to order things from the hawkers or visit the Mezem garderobes, but it is not long, and Skorsas wanted to talk to me, as best he could. “More slowly, more slowly,” I kept having to tell him, nervous as he was.

“You have to kill,” I caught, over and over. He was understandably afraid the same thing that had happened last time would again. “Kill, kill. Win. It is real, it is real, Raikas, you have to.”

With Chirel on my shoulder and no wristlets again, I stood in my gate, with him at my shoulder chattering. I was gone again; even knowing it, I could not bring myself back; it seemed I should be able to slap myself, and wake up in my bed in the Hearthstone Dependent. Or at least walk away; that I could be forced after all, that my body would presently do what was so against everything I believed in, seemed impossible.

It was worse here, in truth, with fifty thousand watching. Torn between impossibilities, to do or to flee, my limbs locked up, as if joined with stone; I hardly heard the gong sound or saw the gate open, and stood flat-footed, while Skorsas, who was not allowed to touch me once it was open, shrieked “Go! Go, Raikas, go!!”

My opponent, a Lakan by the name of Ixtak who also had one chain, seeing I wasn’t moving, charged me; if he could trap me still in my gate, he’d get me easily, he was thinking. The crowd yipped at me, and even flapped its lips, the more severe Arkan mode of disapproval, for cowardice.

I went out and drew Chirel in the last moment, circling away along the edge of the trench, from which the stench of rotting flesh was all but overwhelming. Yet still it didn’t seem real, this time more like an all-Yeola-e unsword tournament, with so great an audience; some other part of me thought absurdly, “I’m All-seeing Rao again!” Why not; I’d just signed a letter that way. My mind was not in the state a warrior’s should be.

Ixtak came after me very hard, with a flurry of blows that I parried easily enough; we circled, swapped places, moved in from the trench in an unspoken agreement. I was but sparring though, again, while he genuinely wanted my life, and fighting is always state of mind against state of mind.

The opening he found was on my sword-arm, from the inside of the elbow up and into the muscle of the upper arm, deep enough that the strength went out of my hand and Chirel began sliding out of my fingers. The moment slowed, so that the smile growing across Ixtak’s face as he had the thought ‘I have him’ and he lined me up for a lunge was slow as a glacier. I had all the time in the world, it seemed, to grab Chirel out of the air with my shield-hand, side-step and drive its pommel into his face. I watched his expression change, languidly as syrup flowing, from victory to shock and despair as he saw it coming.

Blinded, he staggered; leaving the Ring again but this time going to the battlefield in my mind—it helped that he was a Lakan—I’d taken off his head almost before I knew it, and certainly before I remembered I was in the Mezem and there had been a chance, however slight, he could have been spared.

The crowd was roaring; they’d made a din of joy at the first sight of my blood, I vaguely remembered, but now it was for the move. I didn’t understand yet that it was two different factions, and in some, also, two opposed sides of the same souls. Time speeded up to move at its usual speed, and I wanted to throw up at the sight of his headless corpse, as I had not since I’d dissected the bodies of the five Lakans I’d killed in Krisae.

I didn’t want to throw up in front of fifty-thousand blood-lusting Arkans, somehow, as if it mattered, as if they hadn’t seen me do something much more awful. I wanted to be anywhere but here, and Iska’s clinic would do. Something tightened around the wounded arm, hard: Skorsas was beside me, doing a fast first binding to stop the bleeding, with his brilliant red hands. “Your chain,” he said, reminding me that I had to go through the north gate and climb the stairs to the box of the Director to receive my victory-chain.

I had learned by now that the Mezem is truly run by Iska, Koree and the chief chip-seller (the seats are bought and sold by means of graven wood-chips, each representing a particular seat), and the Director was a witless Aitzas given this sinecure for some favor, like the men in the Hall of Testing, but with grander thoughts of himself. I dragged myself up, bowed my head to take the chain from his fat hands, then turned. “Young barbarian!” he said in Arkan, slowly and distinctly as to an idiot, which was good, as it let me understand. “What do you say to someone who has just given you something?”

It took a moment to penetrate my mind that he was teaching me manners, as I stood with my blood dripping, having just fended off death by a hair, almost in tears for having given it to someone in the same place as I, and trying to fight off the stink of blood-lust from everyone around me. “Fik you,” I answered, to gasps all around, but also stifled grins, and turned away to head down the stairs.

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This scene from Minis's point of view.