119 - Good weapons she has

Skorsas and I curled over the Pages, his pristinely-gloved first finger pointing at the words, and gathering a grey smudge of ink from the paper as it slid tensely along them.

“I… know… I… c…ca… can?” he read haltingly.

“Yes, can,” I said, my Arkan/Enchian dictionary in my hand.

“…t…ake?”

“Must be, hang on, let me look it up... yes, take.”

“…h…him. I know I can take him, R… Riji… said.”

“Well done.”

“C…a… Car..v… carving…”

“Good, you read it before I did.”

“…o… out… his… g… gu…t…guts, guts! Right. …w…will… be… a…. p… pl… pl… what’s that word?”

“I don’t know, let me look it up, p, p, p, pl, pl… pl…there it is… pleasure.”

“Carving out his guts will be a…” He looked at me with horror. “Pleasure.”

“Right, perfect! Next sentence, go on.”

Some number of eight-days before, I’d come to learn that Skorsas’s illiteracy not only inconvenienced, but haunted him. Being fessas, I came to understand, he ought to have been educated, then apprenticed to his father’s trade, which was goldsmithing. Instead, his father had got addicted to Arkanherb, and ceased working; now he did nothing but sit in their parlour in a drugged haze. Among the things forgone when he’d ceased bringing in money had been Skorsas’s education, which in Arko, like everything else, costs money.

“No matter,” I told him when I caught him long-faced about it, around that time. “I’ll teach you.”

“You? But… I want to learn how to read Arkan.”

“I know, and so do I, and have been a little, from the dictionary. I’ve been meaning to learn it properly; I’ll just take you along with me.” He stared at me and once I’d convinced him that I meant it, knelt before me as if making obeisance, and burst into tears.

Tutoring him meant not only learning Arkan script myself, but prowling through libraries to find suitably easy works for practice. Once I’d given proof I could read at least Enchian—the Arkan assumption is always that no one can but them, even though, if you count okas, slaves and women, most of them cannot—they let me borrow what I liked.

At the entrance to one wing of the University library, which was bordered in black, an officious man demanded to know my age before he’d allow me in. This was the Second Portal of Propriety, he told me, with a great air of self-importance. In truth I wasn’t sure of my age, sensing my birthday was close to now but not knowing the Yeoli date; Arkans keep better track of solstices than equinoxes. As was my habit I gave the older count, twenty-one, which happens to be the Arkan Third Threshold, or coming-of-age, so he let me in. It was a disappointment, in truth, to find out what Arkans considered too hoary for twenty-year-olds to read.

At any rate, I would go back to the Mezem with a stack of children’s books on one arm and a stack of Enchian translations of Arkan strategy and tactics on the other. But the Pages, I gathered, could be good practice too, written in clear prose as it generally is; and I was always taught that students learn to read fastest if they are given writing on topics that interest them.

Finished, Skorsas smacked shut the Pages, hard, his porcelain-like face stormy dark. “He could take you, in his dreams,” he hissed. “That snot-nosed, book-brained, too big for his cod-piece, Enchian cow-fikker.”

As the story recounted (along with my squaring, in prurient detail), Riji had returned to the Ring for no other reason than to fight me. I was expected to take this as an honor; in truth, I saw, it was. Much was made, of course, of his not being in his prime: he was thirty-five. Yet if prime is between twenty-five and thirty, as Mezem fanciers say, I wasn’t in mine either.

It wouldn’t be immediately; he said right out that he’d need to fight a few fights with others to get back into form. Probably he meant to unnerve me, too, as I’d have to watch.

I will say nothing of how they went, except that he was true to his old name. My heart went out to those men who died unspeakably for no reason but his training. The crowd fell in love with him anew. At least it meant I wasn’t being matched against anyone hard in that time, since I was being saved for him.

It was just as Iliakaj had said. Outside the Ring, Riji dressed and acted impeccably, never a hair or a word out of place; he loved to discourse on the finer points of civility and morality over dinner, even with me. In the Ring, he wore his long hair in an unkempt braid, and his fighting-clothes were shredded rags, true to the part he played, the madman.

Once, seeing no other way to find out, I asked him why he took a part so different.

He answered me honestly and straightforwardly. “I am playing nothing,” he said. “You are familiar with Haradas’s concepts of the intellectual and the beast within each of us?” I was, having read some Arkan philosophy as well as strategy. “Most men let the two fight it out, and so are always locked in a struggle. I let them take turns, so that when I am the intellectual I can be purely the intellectual, and when I am the beast, likewise. You see why I came here; there is no better place in the world for that.”

No argument there. It explained the device of his sword, which had a head with a serene face on one end of the guard, and a madness-contorted one on the other. Perhaps he isn’t mad, I thought, but in some way further ahead than the rest of us; but nothing justifies what he does in the Ring.

He was certainly brilliant. He spoke ten languages, not six, read and wrote six. He was expert on the Enchian lyre as well as the Arkan harp; sometimes he would play in the stands at dawn, strange dark melodies that he was improvising, leaving me to wonder, since I was likely the only one who’d be awake, whether they were meant somehow to unnerve me, too.

Once when I sat reading in the parlour, I looked up, feeling a gaze on me so intent it was warm, and caught him drawing me. “You don’t mind, do you?” he said, surprisingly humbly; did doing art make him human? Not seeing why I should, I said, “Not at all.” When he was done, a bead later, he showed it to me, with a grin like a child’s.

It was astonishing, as good as any artist’s; he’d caught me perfectly, my emotion, my coloration —how with black charcoal on white paper, I don’t know— even my resemblances to my father and mother. I secretly hoped he’d give it to me, but felt it would be intrusive to ask, and he folded it away in a portfolio.

Riji, of course, read at least as much as I did when he hung about the Mezem, which he did only for old time’s sake, I imagine, since he wasn’t required to. Having heard of his success and seeing mine, a few other fighters took up reading, imagining it might contain some secret of victory in the Ring, which of course it does not.

†

About that time, a greenhand came in of whom enough fuss for five Karas Raikases was made, for no other reason than that she was a woman.

Never before in Mezem history had there been a female gladiator, it was said, though I found that hard to believe; Mezem history, I had come to learn, was whatever the writers made of it that day. And yet, we were picked by Arkans, who, like Lakans, believe women cannot fight. No slight feat to convince them; I wondered how she’d done it. Her name, I heard, was Niku Wahunai, and she was from Niah-lur-ana, the island in the south Miyatara where they make chocolate, someone whispered. Someone else whispered that a Niah taken prisoner by Arkans always finds a way to commit suicide. Perhaps she had convinced them by not doing that.

I was in the fighter’s parlour when I heard one of the boys say breathlessly, “I just saw this. One of the oddsmen in the colonnade made a grab for her breast.” No one looked up from his book or game of laesha or dice. “You know what she did? A standing double-kick—still in leg-irons! Broke at least one rib, I know… I heard the crack.” Everyone looked up from his book or game of laesha or dice. One or two casually got up to go to the hall of testing, where her worth as a fighter would be judged.

Soon the story came back from there. Because it’s only wooden swords, many new captives won’t try to kill the testers; this one had no such qualms, leaving two of them senseless and a third dead with a crushed windpipe.

On the training-ground, I saw one would have to be blind not to see warrior written all over her. She moved like water, held weapons as if she always had, and even as a man would have been muscular. Not hulking, but corded, the bunches and veins showing up clear under honey-brown skin.

All through training, the men from lands ruled by men snuck glances to see if she kept up. She did, and did better in sparring than any of the other greenhands, all men. All around I heard Arkan men whisper that she was a man in disguise, or of an inhuman race, or altered by magic, or a demon… anything but a woman of strong body and spirit who’d got good training, as if that was somehow too terrifying to contemplate.

The writers added another tale: that she had ensorceled her opponent into weakening by “charming his barbaric loins.” Skorsas was almost more afraid of her, on my behalf, than of Riji, especially when she was given the room next to mine.

“You are a woman-lover,” he said, direly. (Most Arkans believe that a man should marry a woman only for children, since only other men are worthy of love, so this was something of an insult from him.) I didn’t disabuse him. “Are you sure she couldn’t charm your loins in the Ring?” I asked him whether he really thought I’d listen to my loins while the woman was looking to cut out my heart. “I’m from Yeola-e,” I said to him. “I’m used to women warriors.”

That wasn’t strictly true as it applied here, actually; I was used to fighting side-by-side with them, and sparring them, but I had never actually faced one in war, since Lakans hold the same as Arkans, that women are not capable. It occurred to me that being in the habit of thinking of them as comrades-in-arms might weaken me against her—but only until I felt her intent, and the first stroke aimed to kill coming at me. Then, I was sure, she’d be the same to me as any other opponent.

And yet, when I watched her run through the exercises, breathing easily, muscles rippling under warm brown skin, black eyes like two polished onyxes flashing with life, I felt as a man-for-women does, not as a fighter.

Let my balls drop off and my heart fall out of my chest before I fall in love with her, I thought. Or even just want her. It was bad enough, every eight-day when the matches were made, to have Mana here. We’d made a pact, same as mine with Iliakaj; but what if the crowd showed the red, either way? To stand hiding my trembling before Fate’s Helmet, as they call the bowl from which the lots are drawn, knowing that one lot held the name of a lover, would be unbearable.

Fighters play all manner of tricks on each other, subtle or unsubtle, outside the Ring as well as in, to win. (The first time or two someone had said “I’ll have your innards, Raikas,” or the like, I’d answered “I’m sorry!”, letting show my true anguish, until someone had said that must be my trick; now I said nothing.)

They’re good weapons she has, those eyes, I recall thinking. I bet she has most of us both charmed in the loins, and therefore scared. I did not want to see, but could not help but see, that she was beautiful.

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