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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