95 - The wind in the stands

Before I got to the Mezem, I never dreamed I’d see anyone do what everyone there does: light the end of a small paper tube with something in it that burns, put the other end to their lips and draw the smoke into their lungs—willingly. Even Minis, all of eleven, did it. Most of my life I’d thought that smoke in the lungs was a means of death.

More recently, I’d heard of Arkanherb, and how you indulged in it by somehow breathing in smoke; the altered state, I had deduced, was from bringing oneself near to death. But the fighters and the boys and Iska and Koree all pulled on these things, with a kind of desperation, so frequently that the whole place stank. In my room, it was so thick it disturbed my sleep until I got used to it, having seeped into the very stone, it seemed, over centuries. Yet everyone behaved normally, at least for people in Arko.

During a language lesson, I pointed to the one Skorsas was sucking on, and he said katzerik. From a little box that seemed to be gold-leafed, though I hadn’t thought he could afford such a thing, he drew one that was not yet burning and, generous soul that he was, offered it to me. That was the most heart-felt Arkan “No!” I’d voiced to him yet. I swore inwardly I’d never so pollute myself, inevitable though it seemed in this place that seemed little less smoke-begrimed than a house on fire.

Later as I learned more words I was able to ask him why, and he told me that it calmed the nerves. No wonder so many fighters would have one right before going into their gates.

I can’t remember quite exactly when I started, third or fourth fight, perhaps. I couldn’t avoid being polluted by smoke from everyone else’s katzeriks anyway, I reasoned, so I might as well see if it calmed my nerves. It did, and I was soon a slave of the things as well as of Arko, like every other fighter.

The night before my fourth fight, I could not sleep. Skorsas offered me katzeriks, water, wine, Arkanherb (which I refused), sleeping drug (which with the wine should have worked) and a massage, all to no avail. I got up, and committed a child’s act.

I’d been matched against Lobryr Flame-hair, of Kurkania, who had four chains; with a trembling hand I knocked on his door.

“Who the fik is it and what do you fikken want?” he snapped. Not a good start; but I had reason, I felt, to get him out of bed.

“It’s Karas Raikas,” I said quietly, in Enchian. “If you kill me, I will forgive you, since you were forced, same as I. If I kill you, will you forgive me?”

At heart, I expected a tearful yes. As I said, it was a child’s act. Instead, from within came quick footsteps; then the door flew open, and he seized my shoulders and threw me back against the wall.

“Forgive you?” he said in rough Enchian. “Don’t ask forgive you! I going to kill you, hack off your head, lions eat your bones!” I tried to twist free, then nerve-grabbed his hands, and we were fighting, so the guards must pull us apart; this must be saved for an audience. As they drew us to our respective rooms, I heard one say laughing, “Some of them just can’t wait, can they?”

A few other fighters glared from their doors; it was unwritten law not to break each other’s sleep. “Start again, you puppies,” said a cold low voice, “and I’ll disembowel you both.” That was Suryar Yademkin, whose chains were a golden wreath, twenty-seven; one was for Tondias, Skorsas’s dead love. He could say such things.

As I stood in my gate, the Director’s hand on the lever, I set my mind on what Iska and Koree had said. You are killing anyway, even if you get wounded. You are such a good warrior that your country does indeed need you. It was for my people; semana kra. I could follow that mindlessly enough.

I took Lobryr down by running him through the thigh so as to cut a little into the artery, a wound he could survive if the bleeding was stanched and he was taken fast enough to a healer. I was going to put my hand on it myself, but he slapped his own palm against it and drew back his sword, and started screaming bitternesses at me, his twisted face soaked in tears. It would be wrong to repeat what he said, and I have done him enough wrong. What I had done the night before, I saw, had been cruelty.

In the crowd, the kerchiefs showed more red than white. Except when the loser is a favourite, it is hard to know why on one day the wind in the stands seems to blow white, and another day red. The weather, touching people’s moods as it does, seems to weigh on it, as do good or bad harvests; by Mezem legend, Arkans are more merciful in jubilation after a great victory in some foreign war, but plague can put them either way; sometimes they want to share their suffering, sometimes they want to see mercy because they are sick of death. To me, most often, it seemed unspeakably random.

I ached for his forgiveness, wanting to ask again, like a child, but saw how his honour would forbid it, like surrender. He hadn’t let go his sword, and did his best to parry when I came in to finish him, so he died in the satisfaction that he’d died fighting. I had won unscathed, preserving my health.

Men with note-boards chased me almost all the way into the baths, shooting off a volley of questions like arrows. Some even knew Enchian. “Raikas, how’d you do that? Where’d you learn that move? Where were you trained? Aren’t you glad now you changed your mind? Do you think you’ll make fifty? Are you happy you won? What’s your real name? What’s fikken wrong with you that you won’t give us a single fikken answer? We’re your name in town, boy, however little you understand, so smarten up.”

Skorsas treated me like a war-hero returned home. He could now make me understand I was the latest sensation. After I’d sparred Koree, it had been predicted I would be the next great champion; that had faded after my first three fights, but now started up again in earnest.

To leap ahead again, the next day the Watcher of the Ring came out, I set my teeth, and read the Enchian version. I wavered between laughter and nausea. When I found the title, “Luminary to be: Lightning Loner,” I read on, wanting to know who they were touting, until I came to “this mountain warrior, of ebon curls and smouldering eyes,” who was brilliant when he didn’t hold back and get wounded. So that’s what Karas Raikas meant. It was a name a child spoiled into believing he was clever would give; no wonder people bit their lips. Forever after, I always thought of it, when I did, in the Arkan; it retains a certain grace that way, left over from the time I’d not known its meaning.

I was a fascinating creature, I read: mysterious about my true name, objecting so much as to slay the previous objector in mercy, then changing my mind like the wind and putting Koree to shame in the next breath. They spun off all sorts of tales about Yeoli mysticism and how ancient mountain masters could blow down walls with a sharp breath, kill with the touch of a finger and parry swords with bare hands, which I had demonstrated, a little. Some scribbler argued in all seriousness that I’d faked my objection, and even the wounds, so as to conceal my true ability. All agreed that my skill had depths unplumbed, that would be the delight of Arko if I would reveal it in full. It was then I resolved to do the quickest and least necessary in every fight.

Having washed Lobryr’s blood off the surface of me, I got out of the bath and went straight to my room. This time it was beyond weeping: at midnight my hands had not ceased trembling, my insides felt empty as if each organ held only air, and all I perceived seemed unreal, as if I were drugged. As I write, the line of memory is broken; yet I remember my awareness being that way at the time as well, as if parts of me had fallen away randomly, like flesh from a dead man’s bones, or gone invisible, like patches on the skin of numbness that one can recall no cause for, nor even when their feeling went.

That was the first time in my life I feared for my sanity.

I no longer know myself, I thought. Springing out of bed, I went to the Legion Mirrors. Too close to see the line of images, it being hidden behind the one, I examined my own face. It was all there, familiar, Yeoli, the same one the Assembly Palace carver had graven for my official portrait; the eyes looked tired and anguished, but I’d seen that before.

I haven’t changed, I thought, cradling my crystal in my fingers; whatever fix I might get myself in, I am still myself.

That was four fights in: I had forty-six to go, if I couldn’t escape. Thinking that, I understood my fear. If I felt so shaken so soon, how would I bear more than ten times as much again? From then on I knew I would have to do more than trust myself unthinking; I would have to cling, hard, in full awareness, to what I knew.

In the death-hour, I crept out onto the training-ground, where moonlight had softened the harsh hot red-brown of the sand to a misted blue, and cooled it under my feet. Arko’s heat-haze is chilled away on some nights, such as this; the air stands so still it seems to hang like clear glass, and every sound, even quiet footsteps in sand, comes crisp and ringing.

I looked up. The same bright pitted moon shines over Arko and Yeola-e, the same constellations wink down; being familiar, they were a comfort to see. To any eyes that might be up there, I thought, Arkans and Yeolis, and indeed all humanity, must seem one; anywhere on the Earthsphere, even around the other side where All-Spirit knows what kind of people live, any slave torn from any nation can see something of home just by looking up. The thought was comfort in itself. I knelt, and clasped my crystal, and called the God-In-Myself, knowing it was no indulgence this time, I was truly in need. Just enough of the wind and the harmonic singer came to my ears to tell me, “I am here, Chevenga, and it’s all right.”

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