96 - My heart's brother

One night, a little later, I lay awake with something Azaila had once said echoing in my mind. “To kill without anger is not natural to humanity. So it takes that which all unnatural acts take, to commit: will.”

By will, I had to master the truth, that I was fighting for Yeola-e here. I began to form the thought-strategies, to decide the things I could allow myself, and forbid myself, to think when I entered the Ring. Outside as well; it was going to take will also to remain myself, doing what I was doing.

I started a regimen as well: to meditate twice every day, morning and night, imagining myself in the shrine of Vae Arahi, Assembly Palace and the Hearthstone Dependent, all three, and to imagine myself speaking to those I loved. Even though I was learning to speak Arkan and Arkan was all around me, I would keep thinking in Yeoli except when I was thinking in Arkan. I would study Arko as an outsider studies it; as I’d suspected, by the sheer size of the city, it has the most astonishing libraries—canyons, seas, edifices of books—including more in Enchian than you’ll find in Yeoli in the libraries even of Tinga-e and Thara-e. What I chose to study first, until I ran out of works on it, was Arkan strategy and tactics, first in Enchian and then in Arkan, once I learned to read it well enough. I could see myself having use for that knowledge in the future.

Finally, I would not give up on escaping. After some hard thinking—a child’s implausible thinking can draw you in, if you are not that far from childhood yourself, and it concurs with your own desperate wish—I made myself face up to the fact that I could not pin my hopes on Minis. He was a child. He had such power that if he truly tried, he could get me out in a moment, but he had instead latched onto me and was desperate not to lose me, and would put himself before me as children do. If I leaned harder on him to spring me, he’d see me as just one more grown-up betrayer, and turn on me.

But there were other ways. By now I had learned that enough goods were forbidden to be removed from the City that smuggling was a profession; wave enough gold under one of these men’s noses, I knew, and he’d be willing to smuggle a person. I worked on finding the connections.

I did not carve a tally on the wall of my room, but I did carve my Arkan initials, K.R., the Yeoli date I’d arrived, and, in irony, I suppose, the sign of peace, that I had been wearing around my neck when I’d set off for Arko.

†

Four days after my fifth fight, I saw from the training ground, as one often did, two slavers coming along the colonnade with a new man in chains. My sparring-opponent could have whacked off my head without my noticing, and almost did; I’d never thought to see that jaunty style of walking again. It was Mana.

I ran away from my man, so the thicket of fighters was between the colonnade and me, then when he chased me, let him throw and pin me under him. He must have wondered how he did it so easily. If Mana saw me, the first thing he’d cry out would be my real name.

When I’d tapped out and gotten up, he was gone into the Hall of Testing; he’d be back out again, I could not know precisely when. The punishment heavier than push-ups but lighter than a flogging is being expelled from training; a fighter who does not keep his edge in practice is likelier to lose. I stayed lying in the dirt. Koree could smell laziness as a buzzard can meat, and because there’d been whispers that I was his favorite, he was hard on me, so as to prove otherwise. In an instant he swooped. “What’s this, think because great promise you can sleep in training? Fifty push-ups, cockerel.”

“Fik you, Koree,” I said. Thrusting his finger towards the door like a spear, he barked “Out!” It was such a useful expression.

“What in Hayel”—the place where Arkans who have lived badly go after death—“did you do that for?” said Skorsas, when we were in my room. I could think of nothing else, but to be honest.

The loyalty to me his position required had always been faultless; I’d comforted him in his grieving several times again as well, so, as far as I could tell, he’d ceased hating me. He’d been particularly kind after I’d been beaten; when I had screaming nightmares he’d come and hold me, taking my head on his shoulder. Now I decided to truly trust him.

Because the matches are not always made by pure chance—I’d heard by now how two high-chainers won’t get matched against each other for months, until, coincidentally, one’s fiftieth fight—fighters do not befriend each other. If two have a feud, they’ll invariably be matched, for the crowd loves a grudge; if two are known friends, it’s just as inevitable, for the crowd loves tragedy.

“That Yeoli…” I said to Skorsas.

“I perked my ears,” he said, or words to that effect. I could understood about half of his Arkan, now, which made it possible to understand all if he was patient enough to repeat much. “His name is Mannas Something-I-Forget. He looks really good, everyone’s saying he reminds them of you.” No surprise; we’d had all the same war-teachers. “But he’s something political, so they put him in the cells, and I bet he’s off to the Marble Palace for a prick of truth-drug sometime soon.”

My heart came to my throat; what if he had caught a glimpse of my hair or my hand, which he’d know? But that was before he’d gone into the Hall of Testing. He must have answered honestly about why he was in the Empire, I thought, as he did his name; he wouldn’t have, if he’d known I was here.

“He knows me,” I said. “If he sees me he might say my name out. My real name.”

“Shit of the Gods,” Skorsas breathed. “You’re not something political, are you, Jewel of the Mezem?” He’d started calling me that. “Fikket, you could be the missing king of Yeola-e, and then I’d land in the shit—I don’t want to know!”

I just said, “Will you watch him for me? See when they take him to drug him?”

It was that evening, at dinner hour. He was gone for three beads, by Iska’s bead-clock, on which the Mezem runs. I ate in my room, putting out the story that I was in a mood. Even afterwards, I saw, it might not be safe to see him; he might be questioned again.

Skorsas spied for me. Mahid had taken Mana, and they did not announce their intentions; but he said, “He got truth-drug-scraped, I’m sure. People who’ve had it done always look like someone did a grape-pressing dance through their insides… it means, they fill you with the drug, then ask you, ‘What would you least’—oh, you know about this?” I had never shared with him, how Koree had talked me into fighting, and didn’t now.

Scraped is a good word, I thought. The sight came to my inward eyes of the inside of a skull cleaned raw, and I turned it away. Yet if they did that, they’d likely not do it to him again. He didn’t know all of Yeola-e’s most delicate military secrets off by heart.

I waited till late, slipped by Iska’s desk when he was looking through his phial-drawers, and gave the cell-guard a length of silver chain Skorsas had given me. Beyond the window bars of the one locked cell it was pitch-dark; but I knew his breathing.

“Mana.” He moaned; sheets rustled. “Mana. Heart’s brother. Don’t say my name.” I had to raise my voice a little higher. “Mana, chen. Give me your candle and don’t say my name, that’s an order.”

“All right, all right, Che—milakraseye,” he murmured, heaved himself to sitting and fumbled on the cell’s night-table. “You and your cursed mysteriousness… here.” I lit it from a wall-torch, gave it back through the bars.

He had two moons worth of beard, and his hair was hacked off, of course; otherwise he was just the same. Tears stung in my eyes. Now it came to him where he was, for his face went pale enough to see even in candlelight as his eyes fixed on me. I wrapped my hand around his where it clutched a bar, as I had Sakilro’s. “Don’t say my name.”

“Saint Mother,” he whispered. “Sweet Saint Mother help us.”

“They don’t know who I am,” I said. “That’s why I keep telling you not to say my name.” We clasped wrists and pressed our brows together, the best we could do through bars; the guard, who was one of the kind ones, was looking the other way.

“Mana, heart’s brother, you’re alive, I thought you were dead! What happened?”

“I faked it,” he said. “A kindly Arkan couple took me in, saved me, nursed me, and sold me to a slaver. Their gentleness was an investment, it seems.” I told him my tale, in turn.

When I finished, his eyes were the fierce imp’s I knew. “Another fine scrape,” he said, laughing. “If we could get out of your grandmother’s reach when we hit the back of her neck with that snowball, we can get out of this.” Nothing in the world could have been more heartening then; it was as if we were on the Lakan border again, in a camp full of friends.

Under truth-drug, he’d told them the truth, of course, that he didn’t know what had become of me.

“Good,” I said. “You don’t know me. You’ve never seen me before, though we got taught the same style, classic Yeoli. For Mezem reasons as well as Yeoli; I know Iska told you they match by lot, but they don’t always.”

His brows twitched. I always wore my crystal and father’s wisdom-tooth outside my shirt, and my chains inside. His hand was on my shoulder; now he shifted it in, curling his wrist around the bar, and fished them up into the light.

What could I say? He was here; he’d been told the rules. To Arkans I could claim I was forced; he was a Yeoli, who knew I’d chosen.

But when his grey eyes flicked up to mine, I found not horror or dismay, but compassion. Of course he knew me better than anyone but my mother. “Don’t reproach yourself. You’re doing right. Yeola-e needs you. Listen to me, Cheng: the people wills. You get that?” I signed chalk.

“I don’t know you,” he said, grinning again. “Who are you?”

“The ebon-curled and smouldering-eyed Karas Raikas.”

“You’re Karas Raikas! All-Spirit! No wonder these people keep saying I remind them of him.” We laughed; then the guard cleared his throat loudly, and we agreed to meet again.

The writers pestered me the next day. “You know him, don’t you, Raikas? You’re both Yeolis.” I answered, “That’s like my saying to you, ‘You’re from Arko? So-and-so is from Arko, too, do you know him?’ There are two thousand thousand people in Yeola-e; do you expect me to know all the other nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine?” Skorsas and I had been working on large numbers.

His first fight was the same day as my sixth. No surprise, he didn’t hesitate as I had, and won unscathed. I had thought it would be harder to do what I must with him watching, for shame, but found it easier. The facet of semana kra I was now enacting was sharper, and more insistent on my compliance, in the presence of one of those who depended on it.

He got the room across and three down from mine, so I could easily slip him notes. In the forest around the city are private places; in a green clearing one could imagine, if one tried, was in southern Yeola-e, we made our proper greeting embrace, which turned into a wrestling match in the moss.

He showed me the scar Ethras’s man had given him, as spectacular as one will ever see on a body still living; he’d twisted fast enough to keep the below-the-ribs back-thrust out of his entrails, but it had cut a little into his kidney. His benefactors had even paid a Haian to heal him.

We spoke long of the Mezem, comforted each other for our slavers’ torments. “Don’t let this claw you down, Chevenga,” he said, and kept saying the like. “You start sinking into a pit, and I’ll pull you out by the hair with one hand and the balls with the other.”

“Why do you say that?” I said. “Why should you worry more for me than for yourself?”

He pulled me to him, pinned my head against his shoulder. We touched so much, I’m sure, because we were both starved for a friend’s warmth. “I know you,” he said. “Having to do anything you feel stained by, even if you have no choice about it, you feel like a knife in your heart.”

“It doesn’t show then?” I said. “I haven’t changed?”

He said, laughing, “Of course not, you idiot,” and tickled me silly.

“Except for the teeth, that is. Esora-e will turn somersaults over that… Did you lose them in the Ring?” I told the tale of the four guards, then asked him what he meant. “Oh come on, you know! The bristly-nosed old boar couldn’t stand a necklace with metal links on you; what do you think he’ll say to teeth of gold?”

“Gold?” I gasped. Skorsas had arranged everything with the healer who did dentistry in Arkan too fast to understand; then I’d just sat in his chair, keeping my eyes and mind on anything but what he was doing, as everyone does in a dentist’s chair. It had never occurred to me he might not remake my teeth with ceramic as a Haian would, and I hadn’t looked in a mirror since then, except once in the Legion Mirrors, with grit teeth and closed lips. “Kyash,” I said. “This is Arko!” I turned to the sun, grinned and held my hand where it should reflect; sure enough, there was a golden shine on my fingers.

In the image of their desires, I thought, they will remake me. But this time Mana of the earthly and simple was there, to see the overblown thought on my face and cut it short. “See?” he said. “You’re taking too much on your shoulders, right now, Fourth Chevenga. So you look rich in Arko, where money’s everything, and Esora-e will hop when you get home—so what? You can always get them done over.” I contritely signed chalk.

Yet one thing never came up, under that sweet warm sky, that day: that we might be matched against each other. Neither of us could bear to mention it, I suppose, because, other than pretending we were strangers, or escape, there was no plan to be made against it.

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