94 - The excitement! The drama!

“You’ve got to stop doing this, Karas Raikas,” Iska said, in a voice both gentle and full of import, in the sharing of his wisdom. “It’s bad for your health.” I felt a smile twitching my lips, as any number of retorts ran through my head. I said none of them, though.

“Well, think,” he said. “You think you can survive fifty wounds like these three?”

“No, probably not,” I said.

“I will tell you what people are saying.” Why do you think I give a shit what Arkans are saying? “You’ve got fighting-skill of astonishing excellence—you must have been in the elite of the elite in Yeola-e—so that you could not only make fifty, but probably easily. But you seem not to want it.”

“I don’t want it,” I said. “Have you forgotten, I am not here by choice? All I want is to be away from here.”

“But fighting is the only way to get away from here. I think you are refusing to admit that to yourself, lad.”

Cursed right I am, I thought. I had written that I would do everything in my ability to escape, but it also occurred to me that Artira might send people from Ikal into Arko to help me. Minis might find another way as well. But in the meantime, it was the Ring or death, and perhaps I could not survive twenty such wounds, or even ten. Each time I went into the Ring, I saw, I was forgetting to think of the future, and a semanakraseye always should.

“I can never say that a man is invincible, because… you know. But if you make peace with yourself about killing, you will be as close as a man can get. It’s your only flaw.”

Perhaps those few words of Iska’s show Arko in its truest light better than all this great mass of my words. Here, my humaneness was my only flaw. “I don’t want to make peace with myself about killing, at least this kind,” I said. What’s wrong with you people?

“Then you have to make peace with yourself about dying,” he said. So much easier, I thought, except for that one little detail: semana kra. He patted my unscathed shoulder. “Think on it. You are killing anyway, even if you get wounded.” I couldn’t argue with that, except in my heart, so it came out as tears.

On the way down the corridor, he passed Koree coming the other way. He came in without asking permission. I thought he’d call me a liar again, since I had given my word but wasn’t fulfilling it with all of me, but he said, without saying anything else before it, “There is a truth you have to master. Why don’t you want to kill?” I told him.

“Only for Yeola-e; then the truth you have to master is that you kill here for Yeola-e. It is about the preservation of your life. You are such a good warrior that your country does indeed need you. You know it, Raikas; don’t pretend you don’t.” I did not deny it. “Don’t pretend to yourself it is not true, either.” That was all; he didn’t even wait for me to answer before going.

Just as I was thinking, ‘Good, everyone’s leaving me alone now,’ and then, ‘I should have Skorsas bolt the door,’ another person came in without asking permission: Forlanas Limmen, as I knew now was the name of the Director, followed by an interpreter. Of course the Director was above sitting on the bed of a mere fighter; I’d had Skorsas get a desk and chair for me, so now he slid the chair under himself. The interpreter got to stand.

“You’re not my favourite fighter, for reasons I doubt I need explain,” he said in Arkan, if the interpreter’s work was true. Fik you, I thought. “But still, the Mezem would be impoverished to lose you, so I am taking the trouble to advise you.” Oh, fik you so much. I suddenly saw what he meant by “impoverished”: the more fights a man can win, the more the Mezem can charge for tickets to see him fight.

“Raikas… many people pretend this is not so, but they know it in their hearts: the Mezem… is the true glory of Arko. This place of ours is the true heart of the Empire. What we do here… the excitement, the drama… is the true life-blood of Arko, that breathes vitality into its existence. There are truths that are played out here, on the golden sand; the truths of the Gods, manifest on the Earthsphere. Call it our little secret, the mystery of our guild.” He scraped the chair a little closer, and leaned towards me for emphasis. The bed being next to the wall, I could not push it further away.

“I know you came from nothing, Raikas, that you were living only a barbarian’s life before; but now… you are part of all this! It is yours, this glory, this life-blood! This is the finest thing you could do, the highest you could ever rise! I don’t know what it is that keeps you from seeing it—fear, pain, stubbornness, whatever—but… I see it…” He stared off past and above me, the beady blue eyes in his pasty face filled with wonder. What he declaimed passionately, of course, the interpreter repeated in a drone, that apparently being the Arkan way, an incongruity I’d have laughed at, had I been in a better mood. “I… see it!”

What? What do you see? The voice of my thoughts mimicked his breathless tone. The terror and despair in men’s eyes, the blood on the sand, the rotting gnawed bones? The excitement of pointless death, the drama of agony?

“I see it!” he snapped. “And so you should see it too, so we do not lose you to a series of fool’s wounds. So? Tell me you understand.”

“Tell him I have only one thing to say,” I said to the interpreter. “For which your services are not necessary. Forlanas…” I drew it out long. “Fiiiiiik….. you.”

I’ve been asked many times whether the look on his face was worth what I went through afterwards. I am still divided in myself; if I remember that, the answer is a grim charcoal, but then when the look on his face comes into my mind’s eye, I am laughing all over again, and it’s a resounding chalk. His mouth made a little round circle, and his eyes were circles too, owlish, white all around, for an astoundingly long time.

Then they closed up, into that particular ugliness that is the face of an overweight Arkan full of anger, and he sprang ponderously up out of the chair, stamping, letting out a string of Arkan which the interpreter didn’t translate, but mostly didn’t need to, it being at least half fik, shen and kaina marugh. I also heard the word “flog.”

“Interpreter,” I said. “Tell him whoever’s going to flog me has to come in here and get me.” He said nothing as he followed the Director, but must have translated it outside, for shortly after, four full-geared guards came down the corridor. I got up, grabbed the curtain with its rod off its hooks, dumped the curtain off the rod onto the bed and threw open the door, with my shield-hand. Skorsas screeched behind me, “Why did you say that again!? And what are you doing?”

Mezem guards are not much as warriors, as a rule. I held them at the door, taking one of them down, before the back two thought to slip through Skorsas’s room and then the door that joined his to mine; retreating up onto my bed, while Skorsas retreated into the closet, I took down two more. The fourth ran like a rabbit. With Skorsas shrilling after me, I went into the corridor; a fighter with a swath of chains said drily in Enchian, “Karas Raikas! Don’t you know you’re only supposed to do that in the Ring? Fighting in private is like taking money from the Director’s pocket, you know!”

Of course, they did what I should have known they would: stun-darted me. Hit by such a small thing, no bigger than a thimble, I wondered why Skorsas ran in so fast and grabbed me around the waist, until a bare instant later when I felt a little light-headed, then found I didn’t know up from down, then saw all go black.

I woke up in chains in a cell again. The testers had told me stun-drug leaves a nasty headache; now I found they had not lied. Leaning close over me as if to hide what he was doing, Skorsas lifted my head on his arm and said, “Drink this fast.” It was poppy-juice. I quaffed the cup, and he called to someone else, having orders to do so, I gathered, when I awoke. Two guards dragged me to the training-ground, where a square frame of beams was set up.

No going without bonds by choice for honour in Arko; nor did they worry about re-opening the cut shoulder-muscle, but just tore off the sling to stretch me hand and foot in the frame by my shackles. Koree would do the honours, it seemed; I heard him say, behind me, “Ten lashes, for insolence.”

I laughed it off in my mind. I can take ten in a blink. What I didn’t know was that the Arkan whip is nothing like the Yeoli army whip, which leaves no scar, or the Lakan, that cuts with a fine leather strand. Its tail has ten steel beads in it; sometimes they are round, sometimes sharp with points to pierce and drag through the flesh at every stroke, depending on how much pain the flogger wants to inflict. The Mezem one has points, of course.

Nor did I know that Arkan custom always adds the one extra stroke for assurance of good behavior, so that while I kept my silence through ten, the eleventh caught me relaxed and so flayed a cry out of me. They didn’t unbind me even then; Koree poured a bucket of brine over my back, rubbing it into the cuts around my sides, too, making sure he didn’t miss a finger-width. “It’s to clean out festers before they start,” he said, “so think of me as your healer.” The scars would show as long as I lived.

Even then, it wasn’t over. Four guards took me down from the frame: the three I’d struck down with the curtain-rod, recovered now, and the fourth who I’d revealed a coward, all with dark grins on their faces. No question of me fighting them; despite the poppy-juice, the pain seemed to reach through my back to my lungs so I could barely breathe. I needed their hands to hold me up.

Skorsas followed them as they led me, calling them all manner of names for doing this, until one said something that shut him up fast as a gag; that they’d make me feel every word. They took me to a half-empty storage room, and did not take off their gauntlets. I remember little, only the walls and floor and ceiling advancing and receding, and a front tooth, that I muddily realized must be mine, being crushed on the stone floor before my eyes. “Shh, don’t even try to get up,” Skorsas said to me, when they left the scraps that were left of me to him. He had me carried to the infirmary on a litter.

I jump ahead, so be assured I’ll slip back: from when I was healed enough to walk, every time I walked by their posts afterwards, those four would grin smugly, in pride at having bested one man already incapacitated, I suppose. When the shoulder-wound had healed enough that I was in training again, I challenged them, Arkan-style: a slap across the face with an ungloved hand, no trouble for me since I never wore gloves. All four of them at once, clean blade, I proposed, which would be suicide against people with a shred of skill or courage, so I needn’t worry.

They protested; through a lot of gestures and repetitions and referring through my dictionary as they spoke, I came to understand. They were constrained by their positions not to kill me, while no such restrictions hindered me, which would make the fight unfair. True enough, so I made a gesture which I think is universal, going into stance with two fists clenched before me. They all glanced at each other, then said “Yes.”

Before the appointed time, one of them quit his job and left for Korsardiana on urgent family business. I left the other three each with a gap in his teeth, as they had me, and from then on they were deferential, in that particularly beaten-dog Arkan way.

But as I lay in the bath afterwards, scalding my scraped knuckles, I thought, I’ve been here barely a moon, and have three times as many scars as I did before already; yet I’ve given far worse than I’ve received. Thrust a person into barbarity, and he becomes a barbarian. Suddenly the sight of Assembly Hall and the great crystal in my hand, and my own voice saying, “By the will of the people let this become law” came into my mind. The baths are a good place to weep; you can splash water over your face if someone looks.

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