116 - The living sigil of hope

A few days later, I heard in the fighters’ parlour a choked cry in Mana’s voice, as he would make if an arrow in him were being pulled out. I could not come running, as I yearned to; though it must be known that we were friends of some sort, we’d decided to continue pretending not to be, for the eyes of the easily-distracted Director (or idiot, as Iliakaj unfailingly called him). Absent curiosity was the most I could show, so I strolled out as if I’d intended to already.

Mana sat trembling with his face buried in his hands, the Enchian Pages open lying before him. Shivers crawled out all through me from my heart. I peered over his shoulder; such closeness for news reading is not suspicious.

Hidden within the fear of news is the assumption that it will be no worse than one fears. Sieges against the strongholds at the border, I expected, or a pitched battle in the foothills, since Arkan armies had mustered there; it was an odd time to attack, with winter, which would fight for us, coming on. But that had been only a diversion; the main strike had come not by land, but by sea.

In one great ship-battle at Erealanai, our full fleet had been destroyed, and the town taken; now they were pouring upriver into the central plains, and we were already twenty-thousand dead.

As one’s flesh is struck numb at first in a severe wound, my heart felt nothing, and my mind could think. I saw it like one of my teaching-games; Azaila seemed near, a presence like a fire below me while I perched on the beam, and Hurai, saying, “Think, boy. Now—you haven’t got all day.”

We bear the burden of our customs; all through our war-history are times we’d have defended better by attacking, or foreigners have taken advantage, raising armies near our borders without fear, and so forth. While all the other nations around us have their island sea-bases, we are bound not to, for we’d have to take them. The Arkans had struck from Tuzgolu, and so taken us by surprise.

Yet Yeoli half-action was written all over it as well. The Pages wrote little news from abroad that had no bearing on Arko, but it had announced my aunt’s reinstatement to the semanakraseyesin, awaiting my sister’s coming of age, on the stated presumption I was dead; they’d have amended that to acting semanakraseye when they’d got my letter. With all that turmoil, the semanakraseyeni office could hardly run with perfect smoothness.

Whoever was acting chakrachaseye had done what was natural, when another nation sent warriors to their border adjoining us; sent warriors to our border adjoining them. Now they were in the high valleys, while Arko stormed through the plains. Scenes began running before my inward eyes: a forest of red sails on a horizon, frantic cries, “To arms, to sea!”; a ram splintering planking, the roar of fire in rigging, a deck stained red; all the people of the city out on the shore to see their fate decided, and their anguished cries, as they saw. My heart ceased being numb. Next I knew, my eyes were half-full of sparkles and black streaks, and what I did see was the parlour ceiling with its crisscross gilding, beyond the Pages, which were still in my hands. I’d thrown myself straight backwards from my chair; I heard my rage-cry still echoing.

Faces stared, curious; a voice said, “Has Yeola-e burnt down or something, to set them off?” When Iska and Skorsas came, I got up and moved; I was afraid I’d kill any Arkan my arms could reach. Flames seemed to roar through every muscle, crying “Move!”; at the same time, a blade seemed to be working back and forth in my guts; it was not only they who should die. The training-ground was worse than where I was, the city too. I went at a full run to the woods. In the streets people sidled away from me, fear on their faces.

Mana was in our first meeting place, sword in hand, gazing at it. I knew what he was thinking: what is the point of this thing’s existence?

I flung myself at his feet, my face into the dirt—I’d forgotten that gritty dark taste, since Daisas had brought me here—and said nothing. What could I: “I’m sorry?” “Forgive me?” He knelt at my head; when he laid his hand on my shoulder, I shrank away. His comfort was mercy: injustice.

His hands caught my arms, pinned me to him. “Cheng, don’t blame yourself.” You say that in kindness, I thought, as a friend would. “Fourth Chevenga, listen to me. The people wills.” Or to keep me from giving myself justice, because you imagine I might yet be some use. As semanakraseye, as if I were ever worthy while I played at wearing the signet. Better I’d never been born; but that was the stroke of the past, only the next best thing remained. I’d forgotten the dagger, just had Chirel; but there was his sword, which he’d sheathed. He saw my eyes fix on it, and the intent in them, I guess. With a cry of rage he hit me across the face so hard I saw stars.

“Kyash on you!” he yelled, as I knelt reeling. “You are my semanakraseye, I am looking to you for strength in my terror, to be the living sigil of hope as a semanakraseye is supposed to do, and you want to stick yourself and die right in front of me!?” He drew his sword and flung it down on the ground before me, hilt by my sword-hand. “If that’s what you choose and who you are in the end, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, then go ahead, best you kevyalin do it, you are worth nothing to me or to Yeola-e or to anyone you supposedly love!”

There was nothing to say to that, of course, but, “I’m sorry. I’ll pull myself together.” I picked up his sword, cleaned the earth from it with my own sword-rag, and handed it back to him hilt-first. It occurred to me about then that the Pages might be as truthful about war news as they were about the Mezem.

Now, the discrepancies leapt out at me, and I spoke them to Mana as soon as they did. Our whole fleet could not have been destroyed, without their taking Asinanai as well, which they’d hardly forget to mention; Tinga-e would hardly be undefended; even if fifty ships with two hundred warriors each were sunk and not a single person swam away, that was only ten thousand dead.

Still, I doubted untruth would reach so far as taking a city. We should not pretend Selina had not fallen, and they were not sailing upriver. We would fight our utmost, and still Arko would outnumber us; I remembered why I’d made friends with the kings all around. I had; Tyeraha had not.

Kranaj knew my aunt as the sister of my father, who’d warred against his father; Astalaz knew her as the semanakraseye who’d warred against his, herself. My hand-clasps of friendship with them had had the distinct feeling of, ‘We shall put the past behind us.’ But in Tyeraha the past had returned. As well—and I should be old enough now not to be troubled by this, I told myself—such friendships are founded, in part, on the friends’ judgment of what the consequences of enmity might be. To put it more bluntly, Kranaj and Astalaz both were more afraid of me as semanakraseye than of Tyeraha or Artira.

It suddenly occurred to me also that I had another possible means of getting a letter home. (How having the spear-point of Arko in my face could sharpen my mind; I’d been remiss not to have thought of it right away.) Persahis, if I could persuade him to take the risk, and he was already taking the risk of healing me.

The letter would be from Mana to his mother; the paper would have a Yeoli-style border of elaborate running-patterns, which in truth were Athali letters, that I would do. I would tell Tyeraha all that had happened—the grium, the truth-drugging, the attempts at escape—and urge her to let the neighbouring kings know that I was alive in Arko, and held in very grave breach of Kurkas’s safe conduct.

So I had my plan, and he bound me to it, saying, “In Arko, I am your people, and the people wills.” It was not necessary, but it felt good. Then he hit my shoulder with his fist, and said, “We’ll get out of this, Cheng.” Now I’d shown my strength, he’d found his again, and answering his grin with one of my own made me feel stronger again. We both knelt to meditate for a time, then went back to the Mezem, apart.

But there was a thought I was guarding my mind from thinking, knowing I’d fall apart all over again, perhaps for good, if I let it have play. Sometimes, in the darkest nights at the death-hour, it is still there. The land diversion and sea attack was my idea. I will never know.

When I was back in my room, Skorsas handed me a parchment packet that flashed with gold. His face under its paint and powder was pale.

It was addressed to me by my real name and sealed with the Imperial Arkan eagle; inside, scribed ornately with golden ink, was a dinner invitation from Kurkas, for five days hence.

“An invitation from the Imperator is a summons,” said Skorsas. “The runner is waiting downstairs, so you’ve got to answer. While you were out, I got a fellow I know in town to do you up some decent stationery, monogrammed and everything. Here’s the pen. What do you want to wear?” (From him, that always meant, ‘I’ve decided what you should wear.’) “You understand you can’t say no, right?”

“I don’t want to say no,” I said, as I wrote to Kurkas in Enchian that if I survived my tenth fight, which would be four days hence, I’d be delighted to join him for dinner. “He and I had agreed to meet in the first place, remember?” He’d learned everything he needed to of me; now was my chance to learn something of him.

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115 - It's a story

Iliakaj’s room smelled of Lakan incense and Haian camphor lotion, the kind that gives relief to old wound-aches. I didn’t ask about his worst wounds; that is not something a fighter ever tells other fighters, and so it would be rude to ask. Above his vanity was a mosaic of tiny paintings, astonishingly sharp for their size, of what looked like fighters. “All my opponents, to date,” he said. “A fan does them and sends them to me.”

As I marveled, a cricket began chirping, somewhere inside here with us. Somehow, in this room, in this building, it didn’t seem that incongruous.

“So if you mean to marry Irela,” I said, “you must not mean to leave Arko.”

“No. My life is here now. My family at home… well, I have been blessed with one dispensation. I was permitted to write home, after the first four times. They’d given me up for dead. But, you know, they expected me to marry and move to my own place when I grew up anyway… they just didn’t think it would be quite so far away. I wouldn’t want to take Irela, and kids, away from their place. The kids know nothing but Arko.”

“Why not marry her now, then?”

“I know it’s easy to forget with all this, Sievenka, but I’m still a slave. Slaves have to get their owner’s permission to marry, and I’m afraid the idiot would say no. First thing I do when I make fifty is apply for citizenship, and then I’ll marry her.”

“And then what; teach sword-craft? You could do what Koree does, if he ever quit, and you wanted to. How could the greenhands not respect you?”

“Or put my feet up,” he said. “I have enough that I need not work ever again.”

“You’ve earned it ten times over, by my book,” I said.

He absently petted the snake. “Silly fans,” he said. “What was I going to do with a live snake? I wear it for the one who gave it to me.”

“As long as it doesn’t strangle you,” I said. “The Immortal, killed by a symbol of immortality...”

He laughed, as I’d known he would, by the harmony we’d found between us. If we are matched, it will be there then, too, I thought, and he could use it to beat me. “It eats crickets,” he said. “I know you’re wondering why you heard one, but were too polite to ask. You were so obviously raised in a palace. The snake’s meal is noisier than the snake. I never cease to wonder at the inventiveness of fans.”

“What’s the most inventive thing they’ve ever done?” I asked. “That bit of… skin… perhaps?”

“That’s among the most inventive, for sure,” he said. “They threw me an amazing surprise party for my hundredth chain; that was nice. I was utterly surprised; I would never have thought of it.”

“They mystify me,” I said. “I despair of ever understanding them… and wonder if it’s in truth because I don’t really want to. How one moment they are so heartless, screaming for your blood, and the next, they’re acting as if they love you, and it seems so real.”

“Well, you can’t see them as one; they are all different,” he said.

“Well, sure, you have one person thinking one way and the next the opposite; but sometimes it seems like the same people. Tzen kellin ripalin, yes?”

“Arkans are good at that,” he said. There were a hundred stories in that creased brow.

When I’d first arrived and learned what my fate here would be, I’d shut out of my mind all thought of them. But over time they’d gathered *** over my mind, like a weight, and forced me to face them. Perhaps because they were the reason I’d been sentenced to this fate; perhaps their sheer number; or perhaps because they were people, and so called to the part of me that sees people in numbers and whispers, semana kra.

I bared my heart to Iliakaj. “After that, I hated them for a while, wished them massacred, wished the city sacked and razed, imagined a sea of their blood. But that didn’t stick either; my mind strains for reasons. It’s mostly at night, for some reason. What is this to them? What does it mean to them? It obviously means a lot—why?”

He waited, knowing I was not finished asking, even before I was. “I can see the fascination in watching two good fighters fight; the skill, the moves, siding with one of them in your heart and wondering who will win. I always loved watching my teachers spar; but that was to learn, also. Why don’t they get bored of it after a while? And why don’t they get sick of the gore? Why don’t they ask, ‘Why are we doing this to these men?’ and walk out as one? It means so much that they must keep us, against our will; why so much?”

He shrugged, but then thought for a bit, the furrow between his sharp-lined eyes deepening again as he searched for the best words. “They feel small in their lives,” he said finally. “Following a fighter is the closest they can get to a person who raises them out of themselves—or lowers them.” He laughed drily. “Who takes them to an extreme, either way, where they feel more. They don’t want to be themselves; they imagine they want to be like us, on the sword-edge, in the excitement and the drama, not living the grimness they bear every day.”

I ran this through my mind several times, trying to understand it, in vain. He went on. “They don’t know how to live for now, except vicariously. It feeds a kind of desperation in them.”

“But…” Finally I put words on my bafflement. “Why don’t they want to be themselves? Who else would they want to be? All right—I can see, here in Arko, why an okas would want to be an Aitzas. But that’s just about wealth; and besides, lots of Aitzas come; why would they want to be fighters, who are slaves? If you aren’t who you are, who are you?”

“Sievenka… well, curse it. I want to say, did you never want to pretend you were a prince, performing heroics in war, when you were growing up? But you were that. I read your page in Lives of Notables as soon as I found out, to study you, and almost wish I hadn’t… you don’t know what it is, to live a life that is insignificant. No wonder you’re confused.”

I remembered how I’d looked up at a shepherd on the mountainside, after Jinai’s reading, and wished I were him, living a life that was insignificant, and so not responsible to a nation. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

“Maybe if I put it this way: they would love to be someone who doesn’t hurt the way they do, every day of their lives.”

“But we hurt the way we do, and that’s got to be more than a vanishing few of them. For one thing, they generally have more than a year or two, tops, of life ahead of them.” I thought of how angry I would be even to lose my last eight or nine years, were my prospects in the Ring hopeless. “Besides, they aren’t us—they’re them! There is a custom we Yeolis have, chiravesa, being the other—but it’s always to understand the other, not pretend to live their life for some sort of bizarre, perverse need…”

“They don’t pretend enough of it to understand our pain—”

“Or don’t care; I’ve seen that plenty enough.”

“The part they pretend… Sievenka, it’s like a drug. That’s why you see so much Arkanherb smoke up there. Being a fan is like being addicted to an illusion… a dream. They are slave to it.”

“Well, I can see why people become drunks... drunkenness is happiness. It soothes pain. And I gather it’s the same with Arkanherb. Katzeriks, you just go mad if you can’t have one. But, how does this feel good? Where’s the pleasure? I am sorry if I seem an utter innocent here... but I guess I am.”

“They get to forget their own pain, by feeling for and with someone else, who lives a larger life than theirs. You know... the excitement, the drama. Without having to feel our agonies truly, just distantly.”

“I can see why they’d want to feel our ecstasy, just of surviving another day... but someone has to lose.” It came to me suddenly why tzen kellin ripalin ruled in the Mezem; by switching their love immediately from vanquished to victor, it allowed them all to stay in love with victors all the time. A shudder seized me, from the heart outward.

“Why do people like plays about horrific tragedies?” he said.

“I can tell you why I like them,” I said. “Because they reveal something searingly real, and they let you cry out your own pain, whatever it is, from your heart. But I wouldn’t want every play to be a tragedy; I couldn’t bear that. You have to have some comedies. And every fight is a tragedy.”

“We are the tragedy played out every four days, so they can cry out their own pain too, as you see. And the glory thrown in to gild it.”

“I can see why they’d want to see courage, heroism, someone coming back from all but defeat with a brilliant move, so you can’t help but love him; but so rarely is it that.”

“It’s a story, Raikas—Sievenka, I’m sorry. A fairy tale they come to see, four-day on four-day. They cast some of us as heros, some as villains; they make up stories about us every time they sit down in those seats.”

I had wondered why fighters wore what looked like circus or theatrical costumes; I’d thought they were being pretentious, or trying to intimidate their opponents—or, once I’d come to know Skorsas, their boys had such plans. And yet so often a man seemed entirely different in, say, the fighter’s parlour, than in the Ring. I’d thought it brought out different parts of their natures; now I saw what would have been obvious, from their moves, had I been able to bear it: they were acting.

“But why would they…” We were slaves, I remembered. They’d got orders, perhaps through their boys. Or perhaps they’d found it brought in more golden gifts. “Right.”

“My character is The Immortal, the one who never dies, even when he is defeated,” he said. “So they always show the white. Suryar Yademkin, they’ve made a heroic warrior; Dridas Danas, the fallen prince; Shorai the Black is a villain, a pirate; Arno Mayhem is the madman, whose moves you can never predict. Some of them indulge themselves in their own pretenses, in truth.” The moment he said that, I thought of two or three. “Then there was Riji Kli-fas, who was in a league of his own; when it came to madness, I think he was the real thing.”

I’d learned a little more about Riji, since the Sereniteer who’d questioned me had mentioned the name, but only a little: that he’d settled in Arko, and was still accorded the title “Living Greatest,” since those worthies who were deemed experts of the Mezem were still of the opinion that no fighter had come along since he’d won his fifty who could beat him.

“He was before my time, but I heard plenty,” said Iliakaj. “He came voluntarily; showed up at the Mezem gate with a sword and a stack of books. He played to the worst of the bloodbats, always, wearing a get-up that was all raggedy, his hair wild out to here; outside the ring he dressed immaculately, not a hair out of place. He’s a professor at the University here, now.”

“A professor at the University?”

“Yes—teaches Diverse Foreign Philosophy to the students who’ve already been there five years. The man is brilliant: he paints as well as any Arkan artist, plays the harp as well as a paid musician, speaks six languages, has written books, and is in with the brainiest of Arkan academia.”

“You mean, he’s a genius.”

“And an utter bloodthirsty madman in the ring, yes. He would kill, and torturously, even if they showed the white—some frowned on it at first, but then the crowd started always to indulge him, as did the idiot, and the Imperator.”

“You’re making this up,” I said. “You’re pulling my leg!” We were close enough, I felt now, that he might.

“Second Fire come, I am not! Ask Koree, or Iska!”

“I will. If it’s true, you can laugh at my naivete.”

“I already am, lad.” But he said it affectionately, not slightingly at all, so I could not be offended. “I meant to say, about what they make us play, though: you, they weren’t sure what to do with. One look at you and anyone’s going to think ‘hero,’ but then you were reluctant and cold to the fans and vicious to the writers and telling the idiot ‘fik you.’ So it was decided you would be one who has both the hero and the villain in him—which, of course, makes you everyman, too—which is why you have both the hero’s colour of red and the villain’s of black. Skorsas knows his stuff.”

As if that weren’t enough to make my head spin, he said, “I can’t imagine the idiot hasn’t caught wind of who you really are, so I’m surprised he hasn’t done anything with it, yet… don’t be surprised if he makes you wear blue and green and whatever insignia a king—sorry, whatever the position really is—of Yeola-e wears into battle.”

“Over my fikken dead body!” He flinched back from me, the faintest trace, then stared surprised, as I sprang up out of the fancy chair to pace, quivering. I keep thinking my suffering cannot get any more huge, or any further beyond imagining, I thought.

“I might be wrong,” he said hastily, though I knew it was out of kindness, not fear of me. “He may not be doing it because he feels the Karas Raikas persona is too entrenched with the fans. Skorsas feels for you enough that if he understands you, he’ll be dropping that in the idiot’s ear.” I seized calm. In this place, I was coming to learn, it was better not to worry about anything happening until it did.

It was near noon; I should go. But there was one more thing I wanted dearly to say. “Iliakaj, some fighters are determined to beat you without wounding you out; but others are more determined to kill you than anyone else, so that they can say, ‘I killed the Immortal.’ Right?”

“You’re getting the feel of it, Sievenka. The latter are almost easier to beat, often.”

I took my crystal in my hand. “I give you my oath, second Fire come if I am forsworn: if we are matched, though I hope we are not, and if I manage to get the better of you, I’ll make sure I don’t wound you out.”

He smiled, the laugh-lines creasing a thick scar on his cheek. “Thank you. Second Fire come says I will do the same for you.”

“Then we have a pact… probably not allowed, I would think; my lips are sealed. Of course if you get me, the crowd might show the red; not a chance that would happen with you.”

“I have a way of asking for them to show white,” he said. “I’ll do that.”

“You do? How? Do other fighters do that?” I’d never seen it, as far as I knew. “I want to do that every time!”

“What a gentle-hearted thing you are, Sievenka, for a warrior, and a king—not king, sorry. I told a writer, he wrote it, and they picked it up. Raise the empty hand, means white; raise the sword, means red.” He hadn’t cared either way in the fights of his I’d seen, it seemed. “Let a writer overhear that I’ve inspired you.”

“Then I do it… and your fans will show their whites, perhaps—and you have lots of fans.”

“Perhaps. It’s worth trying.” The noon bell rang, and all Arko, but for the tiny girls whose agonies were the chimes of noon, fell silent. When we were free to speak again, he said, “Well, my friend, shall we go to lunch?”

“I am honoured that you trust me enough to call me that,” I said.

He gave me his hand on it, and I did likewise, though then he pulled back, saying, “If that’s not too familiar for a… people’s-will-doer.”

“The Mezem might decree that it’s not too familiar for you to stick your sword into me, one of these days,” I said. “And here, you are the master and I am the student. So, no, not at all.” I grabbed his hand again. “I wish you fifty in a row and long life, Immortal.”

“Thank you, Sievenka. I wish the same for you.”

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114 - Iliakaj the Immortal

I mostly avoided speaking with the other fighters. My inclination always is to befriend whomever I speak to, and that would make it all worse, both for me, and them. So I mostly avoided their eyes, and learned little about them other than what can be gathered about a person by watching him fight. So it was that, even as a ten-chainer, I wondered what Skorsas was talking about when he was avowing that something, I can’t recall what, was utterly impossible. “That’s about as likely,” he said, “as the sun rising over the west Rim, or someone killing Iliakaj the Immortal.”

From this, I would have thought Iliakaj was a hero out of an Arkan myth, except that his name was Enchian and his room was six or seven down from mine. He was thirty or so, I guessed, a quiet man with a more phlegmatic manner than you usually see in the Mezem, brown hair and a short goatee, and several severe scars that I imagined he’d got in war. He was very civil, playing none of the games that fighters play on each other to try to dishearten each other. In the Ring, he was very good, good enough that I felt drawn to study his fighting. What struck me most is that he seemed to have a huge number of rabid fans, far too huge, and rabid, for twenty-eight victories. One thing every fighter does know precisely about every other is the number of his chains.

“He’s not that high a chainer,” I said to Skorsas. “And no one is immortal.”

“He wears twenty-eight chains,” my boy said. “He has upwards of two hundred… maybe three, by now.” I stared at him, stunned. “You remember the rules; it’s the same as what happened to Wiloo three fight-days ago.” Wiloo had been taken down in the Ring by a thigh-wound, but the crowd had shown mostly white and the healing of the wound would leave him whole, so he’d have to start from no chains again.

“That’s happened to Iliakas”—speaking no Enchian, Skorsas could not help but make even Enchian names Arkan—“eleven times. Even when he gets beaten, somehow he escapes taking a wound that’ll kill or cripple him, every time, and every time, the crowd shows the white—they’d consider it blasphemous to show the red, now. He was here long before me… eight years, I think.”

I stayed speechless. Of course I’d been taught the rules, and yet somehow still at heart had felt it wasn’t possible to stay captive here longer than a year and a half or so, one way or the other. Eight years; that would be the rest of my life. “He didn’t want to marry an Arkan woman,” Skorsas went on, “thinking he’d make fifty and leave each time. He picked up a mistress, though, has kept her for years, and they made three little errors. He’s filthy rich, rich as an Aitzas,with all the boodle his fans have thrown him over the years. I guess you’ve never seen the inside of his room; you should.”

No wonder he had so many fans; no wonder he was beyond all the nonsense. He must be beyond fear, too, so I would not be hurting him by speaking with him; nor need I fear myself that I’d be made to kill him, if we were matched. He liked to sit up in the stands alone sometimes, so once when I spotted him I went up and asked if he minded my joining him, which he did not.

Closer up, he was astonishingly scarred, on his face, his arms, his legs; his purple silken shirt hid his chest. We made small-talk at first, about the Mezem mostly. No surprise, he knew the place from the top of the stands to the depths of the basement. He’d made a study of it. He felt for the lions, cooped up in their small cages and the trench, when they were born to run free.

“Do you mind me asking you,” I said, once I felt we’d broken the ice well enough, “how many chains you’ve won since you first came here? I have an opinion about it; but to speak it needs a calculation.”

“Oh?” he said. “An opinion, lad? Two-hundred and ninety-six.”

I couldn’t help a bit of a gasp; hearing the exact number hit so much harder than Skorsas’s estimates.

“They should have set you free, five, almost six times, over,” I said.

He shrugged. “Two-hundred and ninety-six—but never fifty in a row. Yet.”

“I hope this time it will be fifty,” I said. And that I will not be matched against you, I thought, but did not say.

“You want to see them, lad? I keep them in my room.” I hoped I was not ensuring we’d be matched by walking together with him into the quarters.

His room was just as Skorsas had said, sumptuous enough that it was like a bit of the Marble Palace inserted into the Mezem, but with every finger-width of the walls covered with engravings, gold-bordered love notes, medallions, feathers and snakes and eggs formed of jewels, ivory reliefs, clippings from the Pages and the Watcher, and a thousand other mementos. On a Piinanian-era corner table stood a box made of Arkan glass, containing a section of a dead branch, a water-dish and and a finger-width or so of sand on the bottom; looking closer I saw a speckled snake twined around the branch. Absently he reached in, took the snake, which didn’t seem to object, and wrapped it around his neck. Snakes, eggs and certain birds, in Arko, symbolize long life.

“This isn’t the oddest thing a fan has given me,” he said. “This is.” He showed me what looked like a piece of pale leather, with ‘Iliakaj the Immortal’ imprinted on it with what looked like some sort of dye, in fancy Arkan letters. “An old man; he set out in his will that I should get this when he was dead, and died about three years ago or so.” All-Spirit… is that a tattoo? “I imagine he might have liked to have them mark my full name, three words in one row along it… but had to go with one word on top of the other, because he just wasn’t that well-hung.” I doubled over, swallowing vomit, while he chuckled.

Along one edge of the ceiling was a line of hooks, each of which held a swath of victory chains. I could not doubt there were two-hundred and ninety-six, less the twenty-eight around his neck. “I’ll send my boy for something,” he said. “That Yeoli tea, perhaps?” We sat down on his cushioned and gold-trimmed chairs.

“I am a draw,” he said, seeing me gazing at his chains. “The idiot loves me.” I didn’t have to ask whether he spoke of the Director. “Now and then people gather signatures to ask him to free me, but there are never enough; my fans want to keep me here.”

“How do you bear it?”

He shrugged. “Get up every day and start over. Never think about the past, only look forward.”

“Don’t you worry that the future might be the same as the past, and that you’ll never get out of here?” He was the sort of person who would tell me, without anger, if I was offending him, I knew.

He made a brushing-away motion with his hand. “That way lies madness. I went through it, the second and third times—see—eight chains only, then seventeen. When I was younger, more full of bloodfire—it kills. I went to a Haian, man named Persahis—he’s very good.”

“Really! I go to him.” Somehow it seemed entirely safe to tell him this.

“That’s good,” he said. “I wonder how you bear what you do... amaesti, I should call you.” So, he read the Pages; or else the word had gone around.

“I can hardly be a stickler for formality here,” I said. My Arkan still was bad enough that it was a great relief to speak a language I knew better, such as Enchian, and so express subtler things. “Just call me Chevenga. You have part of the answer already: Persahis. I meditate; I study Arkan war-craft; I trust in the strength of my people.” I don’t know that it will succeed, I did not say.

“Good man. You’ll make it out that way. You have your people fighting for you, too; I’m sorry they got caught this time. Ha!” He laughed. “Who’d have thought I, the son of a soldier, would be drinking tea with the king of Yeola-e?”

“It’s good tea,” I said. “For Arko. I’m not a king, though.” Like those of most foreigners, his eyes soon glazed over on my explanation of that. “And I’m the son of a soldier too; four soldiers, in fact.”

That got us wondering whether his father had fought any of my parents, and from there we went to how we’d got captured. Of his generation, he’d been the one designated to give the required military service to the King, fighting many skirmishes with pirates along the Enchian coast. In one of them he’d been caught, and the pirates had sold him to the Mezem.

“What will you do if—no, when,” I hastily corrected myself, “you get out of here?”

“Marry Irela… that’s my lady. Make my children honest.”

“Children?”

“Yes—we have three. Next time I’m fighting and you’re not, look in the seats five rows back from the ring east of the gong; you’ll see them wave madly at me when I go into my gate. The four of them always bring white kerchiefs up their sleeves, just in case they have to save old dad again.” I remembered what Skorsas had said, “They made three errors.” No wonder it was so hard to learn Arkan.

“They must not worry about you getting killed,” I said, when I’d picked my jaw back up again. “Because it’s never happened, all their lives.”

“No, they don’t. Doesn’t enter their heads; why would it? They like it when I get wounded, since I convalesce at home—their home, I mean: Irela’s house.”

“How is that you’ve been… defeated…” It was hard to say the word to him. “And not even wounded out?”

He shrugged again. “Luck? The favour of the Gods? I don’t know. It seems, when I’m fighting, that I have some sort of gift; but maybe I am just telling myself that. It just happens to happen that way, every time. So far.”

“Perhaps you have a strong constitution,” I said. “So that wounds that would kill others don’t kill you, or you can fight through ones that would fell someone else.”

“There’s a trick to fighting wounded,” he said. “You shake it off, you breathe deep, you bear down with your mind on not letting senselessness take you, resist the temptation... and keep going. You draw on your will to live, which will be most strong right then. You don’t think about the wound, don’t even look down and see your own blood... you know, Sievenka, I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. You know. First three fights, it was as if, if the man wanted to be done in an instant, all he had to do was wound you.”

“I wasn’t really fighting until then.” I felt I could tell him anything.

“No, you weren’t. You were embarrassed to show how good you are. You’ll make fifty, easy, if you don’t either get ransomed, or ruined by the grium, first.” No wonder I felt I could say anything to him; he felt he could say anything to me. No wonder I liked him.

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113 - So easy to destroy, so hard to create or repair

Inodem deaths were caused by female attempt to kidnap ring-fighter

The Pages, Aras 4, 58^th-last YPA [Enchian version]

The mysterious deaths of ten guards at the Lefaetas Inodem, it turns out, were the result of an elaborate plot by female Yeoli darkworkers to seize and remove the ring-fighter Karas Raikas from Arko, which was foiled due to the demonic miscreants being arrested on suspicion of simple burglary.

About midnight on the night of Selinae 26, the same night of the Inodem deaths, two people who were not Mezem residents were spotted in the Mezem courtyard, now being refurbished into an enlarged bath, by alert Mezem guards. The guards’ complement has been doubled since a burglar, who still remains at large, stole six-hundred gold chains from the Mezem a month ago.

Though they turned out to be women, the intruders resisted arrest at first by claiming to be avid Mezem fans desperate to visit their heart-throb among the fighters, then by fighting their way free. A Mezem guard was killed and two more wounded, and one of the intruders died by cutting herself with a poisoned knife she was carrying. The other was captured alive after being struck on the head from behind.

Both women, who were blond, blue-eyed, fluent in Arkan and wearing their hair fessas-length, were each found to be equipped with a personal arsenal of swords, daggers and throwing-knives, and three sets of forged identity papers. On examination, both proved to be unpurified. Under truth-drugging, the one survivor revealed that they were actually Yeoli and working for the nation’s spy and assassination service, Ikal.

The questioning further revealed that the women were two of a party of twenty men and women, all of whom were able to pass as Arkans, who had been sent by Yeola-e to remove Karas Raikas, whose own truth-drugging has revealed that he is Fourth Siefenkas Siaeranoas, the missing head of state of Yeola-e, from the city. The Marble Palace has been aware since he arrived of his true identity.

Eighteen Yeoli darkworkers were assigned to kill the lefaetas guards on the Rim and lower the platform, while the two women were to fetch Raikas from his Mezem room, after entering the Mezem quietly during the day amidst the usual crowd of hangers-on, observing him training and concealing themselves under the stands until an appointed time at night.

The fiendish plan went awry due to the women being unaware that Raikas had been taken to the Marble Palace for further truth-drugging after the fighters’ afternoon training session. After searching his room, they were spotted scaling a wall inside the Mezem. The darkworkers who had seized the lefaetas, in the meantime, fled the scene.

Under truth-drug, the witch-like female revealed that she and her cohorts had been in Arko several eight-days, and the plan had been aborted several times already due to Raikas being elsewhere than he habitually was, including on the Presentation Platform, being corrected after a bungled escape attempt of his own. The conspirators never informed Raikas himself of the plan, for fear of him being truth-drugged.

The surviving barbarian predicted that her eighteen partners in crime, who remain at large under different Arkan identities, would likely make a second attempt.

“We advise citizens to be on the alert and report anyone who behaves, speaks or moves in a suspicious manner,” says Morrilas Tekam, solas, of the Ministry of Internal Serenity. “Anyone, that is, of either sex. It is the most savage and inhuman barbarism to permit and train women to engage in such perfidy, but nonetheless, peoples like the Yeolis do it, so that Arkans should not merely beware of suspicious men.

“We also point out how this incident confirms the futility of escape forays for Mezem fighters, and caution against any and all attempts. Concerning Karas Raikas in particular, he has now been injected with the grium sefalian at the orders of the Marble Palace, and only the Marble Palace holds the antidote, so anyone who removes him sentences him to a slow and agonizing death.”

The surviving female Ikal agent remains in Marble Palace custody undergoing further procedures before her execution.

†

I wondered if I knew her, from the School of No Name. None of us knew each other’s real names—except mine, which everyone knew —but we did know faces. I turned my mind away from imagining what she was suffering, since it would accomplish nothing but causing me more pain.

So they were trying to rescue me. Of course they’d try again. How, All-Spirit, how, could I somehow get word to them, “They’re done truth-drugging me; try again but this time get me in on it!”? Trust, I told myself. As Mana kept saying, my people were not weaklings or cowards.

I had to laugh, though, at the claim that Kurkas had known who I was from the start, when he had for only three eight-days.

For my part, I could keep looking for chances to escape, and meanwhile seek a Haian’s knowledge of the grium. (Minis had sent to me a bit of a scholarly piece on it, which said that it had originally been invented to cure killing growths; trust Arkans to make it into what it was meant to relieve. But the excerpt said only that the Marble Palace claimed to have an antidote.)

After what I’d seen done to Erilas, I dared not even ask Skorsas to cast about among the city Haians, but Mana was willing. There were two or three-hundred Haians practicing in the City Itself then—all men, of course, since Arkans wouldn’t trust a woman—but only twenty or so were held to have any knowledge of the grium sefalian. I went to the five who were held by all to know the most; three said if there was an antidote, they didn’t know it and knew of no incidences of successful antidoting; the other two said there definitely was not, and there were only two possible cures. The Haian who was most confident in his knowledge, Nemonden, laid them out for me, in gentle tones.

Drastic goes without saying, I thought, to brace myself as he began to explain. The first cure was a long regimen of rest and extremely strict dieting, including long fasts, “which,” he said, “makes strenuous physical exertion impossible.” So much for that. The other was quick, but dangerous, and could only be done on Haiu Menshir: surgery.

“Surgery?” I asked him. “In my head? I didn’t think it was possible to do that, and leave the patient alive.” He assured me it was done by several healers on the island, usually to remove growths in the brain, though, being the most extreme of treatments, it was used only when death would otherwise be certain. People were sometimes saved, though some came out of it brain-addled, which in my case would be as bad as death, or worse. I remembered how little time the Imperial Pharmacist had needed to afflict me with it. The shudders came, as they sometimes did when I thought about the grium, bad enough that Nemonden put his arm round my shoulders. So easy to destroy, I thought, so hard to create, or repair.

So that way was closed too; I could hardly beg permission of the Marble Palace to go to Haiu Menshir to get its own expedient eliminated, promising I’d be right back to fulfil my role as hostage, and finish my fifty fights while I was at it. My chances depended on my escaping. Needless to say, the further advanced the grium was, the less the patient’s likelihood of cure.

But in the meantime, Nemonden told me, I could slow the grium’s growth by keeping the diet he laid out, taking a Haian remedy he made up for me, daily, and frequently ingesting a certain drug that he did not make up for me. “You already take it,” he said. “Not here, since I disallow it, but elsewhere, constantly, by what you have told me. What is in truth a noxious habit, that I would normally urge you to stop, will stand you in good stead, it turns out.” The stuff was in katzeriks, so I was taking a dose every time I smoked one. Some part of me felt vindicated.

“You should go to a psyche-healer, too,” he said, quickly adding as polite people, as opposed to commanders in armies, always do when recommending psyche-healers, “I know you are not mad. But your circumstances impose the most extreme strain on you, and Persahis—that’s the one I’d recommend—can help when you need it, which you do.” I didn’t try to deny it.

I had one more mainstay than most ring-fighters have, in Mana; but he was in the maelstrom with me, while this Haian, outside it, could be a rock. I went to his office next.

His method was both touch and talk at once; he’d have me lie on his table, usually face-down, and pour out my heart. Feelings that are severe beyond expressing, as in extreme circumstances, stay festering in the body and will in time act as poison; so Haians say, and I already believed in a vague way, but never so vividly as when Persahis, by pressing his fingers into some exact part of my back or neck or head, seemed to slip them straight into my heart.

I would lose myself in anguish or terror or shame or rage or all of them at once, as purely and wholly as a baby does, and afterwards feel relaxed as a wrung-out cloth, and much better. He also reminded me, by his very Haian-ness, that the world was much bigger than Arko, which helped. I scheduled visits with him for every four days. But it would be no cure; the only cure, we both knew, was freedom from my situation, which he could not give me.

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112 - Huge beyond imagining

While I had been prisoner in the Marble Palace, I hadn’t thought I wanted to kill myself; in the Mezem baths afterwards, with the first katzerik in four days, the urge came hard.

It is hard to take two steps back and judge such a feeling in comparison with previous spells of it, or remember that they were solved; you know it was there before, and it passed, and the instances are points of memory in your mind. But you are still in its grip, every thought shot across with the feeling.

I was thinking to save my people an amount of money that might otherwise break them, for I could not doubt that Triadas, if not Kurkas, would be wise enough to charge no less for my ransom. I was also thinking that Triadas might realize he didn’t have all he wanted out of my mind, and all the rest was freely available to him so long as that mind existed. I was thinking as well that my mind was compromised anyway, in a way that would grow worse with time, by the grium, something which Triadas would never tell Artira while they haggled my price. No matter how I looked at it, it seemed, my life was now not an asset to my people, but a liability. A liability I could remove without much trouble.

The next day after breakfast, I went to my favourite place in the woods outside the city, taking not just Chirel but my pin-dagger out of the Weapons Trust. It would be wrong in so many ways to do it with Chirel—to sully the sword of the semanakraseyel with the blood of a semanakraseye, or any Yeoli, to make my father’s sword the killer of his child and my grandmother’s the killer of her grandchild, and so on—but of course I had to take it, so as not to draw suspicion.

By law, further building inside the Rim was prohibited, except on land already built on—one reason the centre of Arko has buildings as high as twelve floors—so that the woods remain wild, for the benefit of the citizens. That means some parts have wide and well-worn paths; but others, deeper in, are more remote. There was a glade, where a tiny stream flowed into a shallow clear pond, dotted with lilies; in the buzz of cicadas, the croaking of frogs, the trickling of the stream and the birdsong, you could forget that the biggest and most bustling city in the world was but a tenth’s run away.

It was in the seventies of etesora, a time when autumn would clearly be making itself felt in Vae Arahi, but was undetectable here. But the glade was shaded, green and cool; if you came before dawn there might be fingers of mist over the pond, until the relentless Arkan sun burned them off. Its surface was the only mirror I’d look at myself in, these days.

I didn’t now, though. I wrote a letter, for Mana to pass on to everyone else when he got home, explaining why, and sending them all my love. I folded it into my belt-pouch, as they’d likely go through it afterwards; I was going to tuck it into my shirt until it occurred to me it would end up blood-soaked, and perhaps unreadable, that way.

Then I knelt at water’s edge, drew the dagger and took it in both hands, point inward. I aimed it between the ribs toward the centre of my heart, an instant death, so long as I didn’t chicken out before it was all the way in.

I didn’t mean to hesitate, but in the moment of truth, suicide is not an easy thing, and I saw in a moment I’d have to convince myself, to will my hands to make the move. I might have to take some time; no matter, I’d take it.

I wrestled with my thoughts for a while, until I saw what I would have to do was go back into the state of the Kiss of the Lake, when I had entirely relinquished my claim on life, for the sake of my people. That, in fact, had been harder than this would be, since in the instant before you relinquish, you suffer the most abject terror, from the smothering; here there’d be just a knife, not even touching me, the instant before. But something kept whispering to me, This is not the Kiss of the Lake, no matter how much I tried to make myself deaf to it.

In all this I lost my sense of time, so I am not sure how long how I was there, before a calm Yeoli voice behind me said, “Cheng, may I ask that you not do that, until you hear me out?”

Mana would be the first to say that no one really gets hunches or inklings, that it’s just chance, and yet he told me afterwards that his itch to follow me out to the woods after we’d eaten had been so strong it had almost been like a hand pulling him.

Then when he’d been getting his sword, the Weapons Trust man had happened to say, “Your countryman was just here, not just for that elegantly-plain sword of his, but that dagger with a sliver of a blade, which he very rarely takes; wonder what he’s doing.” He knew me well enough to follow the trail of my reasoning, for why I shouldn’t do it with Chirel. He went out the Mezem gate at a dead run.

He knew me well enough also to guess I’d go to the place that seemed least like Arko in Arko, and, so I wouldn’t catch him creeping up on me by weapon-sense, left his sword hidden in the trunk of a hollow tree a little way in from the edge of the woods. I wouldn’t like to be a criminal in Arko, if Mana was the Sereniteer.

As his voice jolted me out of myself, my hands jerked the dagger back away from me. I gasped in several breaths, and realized I was dripping sweat. He came around and knelt in front of me, close enough to seize my hands, but didn’t. I wondered if it was in respect of my choice, or that he trusted his own speed, to match mine if I tried.

“So it’s over, in your mind?” he said. “We are conquered the moment they decide to try? Do you think so little of us, your people, that we are such cowards and weaklings?” I remembered, as no doubt he intended, our previous conversation. “If so—then do it, with my blessing. If you think so little of us, we don’t need you.”

“Of course I don’t,” I said. “It’s not that.”

“You still love us, then—and you would leave us? In our darkest time, you whom we need so much would walk away?”

“Mana… it’s not that either.” I found myself despairing of my ability to explain in a way he would understand.

“What is it, then? I think you owe me, and all of us, an explanation.”

Of course, I hadn’t meant to deny them one; it was in my belt-pouch. I thought of handing it to him, as that would do my thought the most justice; but I found myself shy to. Such letters are traditionally read after the death of their authors. I just told him, instead.

“Hmm,” he said, thoughtfully. “All very reasoned. And yet so often, logical excuses are what a coward speaks most loudly, so as to conceal his cowardice.”

I stared at him as if he’d slapped me across the face; it jolted me out of what was left of my reverie like a dunking in ice-cold water. I couldn’t think of a single time that anyone who knew me had called me that before.

“What, Fourth Chevenga? Did I offend you? Were those fighting words?” The trace of a grin quirked one corner of his lips, almost the same one he’d get poking a hornets’ nest with a short stick. “Maybe I should call you an idiot, too; think how it is! Here is all Yeola-e, staring down the blade of Arko, tip in our faces. And here are you, our semanakraseye, staring down a blade too. But it’s in your own kyashin hands!”

I’d almost forgotten it was there, slender and glint-edged, the point trembling. “You see relief there, don’t you?” he said. “One thrust, and you need not worry about anything; you won’t have to go through the hardship of hanging on through whatever you have to hang on through to get home, or fighting them, or tearing out your heart about what Triadas got out of you… well, who could blame you for wanting it?”

“He didn’t tell me that, in effect, I conceived the whole plan against Yeola-e for him,” I said. “But I’m sure I did, because if you were him, and had me, what else would you do?” I had never said it before, even to myself. The pain in my heart was as if the dagger was already there, but without bringing the relief of death, and it was as if there were three more daggers piercing my throat and both eyes as well.

“No one could blame you for wanting it,” he said, gently. “But the coward who breaks the unit by fleeing, and so kills everyone in it, does that because of what he wants, too, for which no one can blame him: his life. Don’t you see how we’d be left, if you did this? How broken, and doomed, we would be?”

I clenched my eyes shut, as if that could keep them from bleeding tears. I saw. The dagger shook in my hands. Huge beyond imagining, more than you can bear; now I understood Jinai’s words. It felt as if it would swallow me whole, overwhelm me beyond any hope of healing, ruin my mind in and of itself.

“Chevenga, you do need relief,” he said, so softly it was hardly more than a whisper. “You do need mercy. I know that.” He reached over the dagger in my hands, to take my face between his. “But, you’re thinking, extreme pain needs an extreme medicine, and you can only think of one. You’re forgetting all the others.” He leaned over the dagger, to kiss me as a lover kisses.

Our friendship had never been that way. We’d touched for warmth and laughs and comfort only, never sexual pleasure. I am sure he’d never touched another man for sexual pleasure either, his nature being inclined entirely towards women. But I know what he was thinking: what was needed, only another Yeoli could do, and there was no other Yeoli here.

He reached up under my hands holding the dagger with both of his, and stroked my nipples through my shirt with thumbs tender as two tongues. That undid me; my arms went loose, my hand dropping the dagger beside me, and the sobs came roaring up out of me, like a river with water over my head engulfing me. He wrapped his arms around me and held me hard, pulling my head into his neck. “I’ve got you,” he whispered. “Just let it take you.”

When I look back, it was like a fit of madness. I couldn’t think; I lost track of time again; my emotion was me and I was my emotion, as fighting had been me and I had been fighting against my Arkan escort in Roskat. But he held me through it, like a rock in an ocean driven wild by storm, and then brought me to ecstasy, as Vaneesh had. “I stand in for all your people,” he said, all through, as he slowly raised me towards it. “I am Yeola-e. We love you, and we need you, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e. Feel it.”

In the back-arched, screaming throes of ultimate pleasure, he brought me back to my senses. I lay naked and boneless in the gentle air of the glade afterwards, and he stroked my brow, and I was myself again.

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