120 - Its chains on my soul

Niku Wahunai didn’t like being in Arko much, as far as I could tell from the bangs and crashes from next door, more felt than heard as they shook the stone wall. I would hear later that she’d reduced every piece of furniture in her room to flinders that day. “Would it help to talk?” I imagined asking her. No! I told myself, or at least one part of me. Stay inside my kilt, you stupid man-worm!

Once she came out of her door fast as I was walking past, running into me, and knocking my katzerik out of my hand onto the floor. For a moment we looked into each other’s eyes, that close; hers flashed bright with life, the kind you get the urge to make laugh. Her cheekbones were strong and high, her lips full and curving, her eyebrows arching under a shock of wavy black hair. I answered her apology icily. But the touch of her body on mine where her shoulder had struck my chest and her shin my knee stayed on my skin, fiery warm with the feeling of the promise of comfort, like a hearth in winter. I am thinking about her too much, I thought. I wonder if she is thinking about me at a—No. I am thinking about her far too much.

She fought her first fight, in the training-ground, against the least of the other greenhands, beating him easily. Why was I nervous? I was not nervous... Demon, magic, inhuman, man in disguise, the writers intoned again. I wished they’d at least settle on one story. I guess those fighters who are brown-skinned themselves have a better chance of catching her eye... No. No!! The coldest water you can get out of the Mezem cisterns is not very cold, so I stayed in it until I was chilled to the bone.

Sometime after my twelfth fight, I was reading in the bath, late enough that most of the others were sleeping. It was still the old bath, as Minis’s renovations weren’t yet finished, a remnant from an earlier time, when Arkans found nothing immoral in communal bathing. Fifteen people could sit in it, though rarely more than five ever did; that’s too much closeness with each other, for most fighters. I was alone, with my katzerik and my book, something I always found calming.

“Karas Raikas.” I did not need to look up; only one person in the Mezem had a woman’s voice. “Does anyone listen, in here?” I stared at her; the last thing I’d expected was that she’d speak Yeoli, albeit with a thick accent from a hot clime. Before I had a chance to answer, she threw off the sky-blue silk cloth she’d had wrapped around her, and climbed naked into the water.

“No, if you speak quietly,” I said, peering coldly over the edge of my book, then turning my eyes back to it to make clear she was imposing, and wondering why I’d been honest instead of saying that which would make her go away. I pointedly turned a page. Her lithe brown form with its chiseled sheaths of muscle on thighs and calves blazed in the corner of my eye. I still remember the line I was reading, from Etzakas’s War Histories, “so the enlightened general will endeavor to set ranks in this fashion, “ for I read it seven times without it entering my mind.

“I want you, Raikas,” she said, from deep in her throat. “Will you make love with me?” The book almost went swimming, then. Ripples on the water obscured her body from me, and mine, fortunately, from her. Her eyes burned on me. I looked away and took a long pull on my katzerik.

“No,” I said, finally.

“Why not?” She leaned closer. Even in all-but-scalding water, I felt a quick heat like a new-lit fire coming off her. “You want me, no less than I want you. Why are you afraid?” I stared, got caught in her gaze again. My heart raced and my innards went cold at once.

Let her take the flush on my cheeks for anger, I thought, and slammed the book shut. My voice coming out icier even than I’d meant, I said, “Do you understand this place?”

“Yes, of course,” she said lightly. “We might get matched. Do you think I’m an idiot?”

Once enough time had passed to allow me to unlock my tongue, I said, “And you ask why not?”

“I am a dead woman fighting, Karas Raikas,” she said. “But my body still fights to live and wants to live hard. I’ve been fighting this thought, that I must be enemies with everyone.”

“Yes, well, so does mine. Long enough to get out of here. Fighting the thought that you have to be enemies with everyone when you do have to be enemies with everyone is stupid.”

Her long black eyebrows hardened, the arches straightening out into two daggers, the skin on her forehead darkening in the centre. “And is it stupid to not let Arko kill our souls while we’re here?” she gritted.

“I can resurrect my soul once I’m free,” I said, turning back to my book.

“Arko,” she said in a hissing whisper, leaning close, “has its chains on my body; that’s enough. I won’t let it put its chains on my soul. It’s a shame you have, one like you. Farewell.” While I sat back with eyebrows up, she sprang out, her brown body cutting up through the water with barely a splash in the way of people who swim a lot, and was gone.

Now that it was too late to voice it, my flush did turn to anger. Give it time, one-chainer, I wanted to say, who are you to call me to account, let’s see how long you last. You don’t understand; what I have suffered you won’t, even should you make twelve chains, as I have. I fingered the spot under my eyebrow; greenhand, there are a thousand things you don’t know.

But my anger soon crashed in and turned to ashes, being false, as I saw. These were justifications, the pale and bitter arguments of one whose hopes and strength were failing. Arko did indeed have its chains on my soul; when else in my life had I been angry at someone for wanting me? The ripples smoothed, leaving the only sound a dripping water-tap somewhere in the shower-stalls; I looked down at my wavering reflection, gold teeth winking, and saw my own impression of my strength and courage stripped away. I was full of fear, if not enough to freeze me, enough to stiffen my mind; for, good reason or not, it had ruled me just now. She was right.

The next day I avoided her eyes, and she avoided mine; but I was aware every moment of where she was, even when I couldn’t see her, as if she were a sword. I met Mana in the woods, always heartening, but did not share this with him, ashamed to.

Thus the shame grew. Every sight of those rippling brown arms reprimanded me for cowardice, every passing of that proud bearing, always facing elsewhere, while I sat in the fighters’ parlour with my head buried in smoke and a book—since keeping to my room would be a retreat—etched reproach on my heart. Did she know I was hurt by her looking down her nose? Did she care? And yet she was a fighter; they all play tricks.

In the training-ground we happened never to face each other. I began to wonder whether she had got the better of me, should we be matched. Perhaps she had charmed my loins—well, we already knew she had charmed my loins. Perhaps it would be fatal. Chalk up yet another time that Skorsas had been shrewder than I.

No, I told myself. It changes nothing, if I go against her in the Ring. Semana kra.

Yet somehow I happened never to imagine Chirel in my hand piercing one of those thick strong thighs or shining brown shoulders, or even hitting with the flat that proud-held head, though I imagined that and better with other fighters, particularly Riji Klifas. I told myself I did not need to.

That night as I lay half-asleep, I heard a scratching like a tree-twig brushing the stonework outside my window. I woke and tensed, ready to fight; the courtyard had no trees. “Raikas?” came the whisper, in her accent. “May we speak? There is much I didn’t explain.” She’d come along the ledge, easy from the next room.

I was awake enough to fight, not enough to think; I said yes. She swung her legs over the sill, their shine flashing under her open robe, and knelt beside my bed. Her eyes shone faintly, like black glass beads in the darkness. “I should say, I am sorry,” she said. “I judged you, though I do not understand what it is to be you. Do you forgive me?”

Nothing could come to my tongue, but “Yes”; how could it?

“You fear being matched against me,” she said. “You need not; if you are, you will never face me.”

“How can that be?” I whispered.

“I would not. I would do otherwise. Ama Kalandris witness and second Fire come if I lie.”

I have always been a good judge of honesty; by her eyes, that had never left mine, I would have believed her. But when I understood her meaning, it was beyond belief.

“There is no otherwise, that is not death,” I whispered. “So you are saying, you’d give your life to save mine?” Without hesitation, she dipped her head, yes.

“But I’m nothing to you, a stranger, really. You don’t know me; for all you know I could be a child-raper, or traitor, or have murdered my family in their sleep, back home. Or have no particular care for you.” Because I don’t, I told myself firmly. None.

“You are none of those things,” she said, with certainty like a child’s of his parents’ goodness. “Besides, my life… You know my people are never captured alive?”

“Except for you?”

“There is a reason we kill ourselves,” she pressed on, resolutely. “But I… perhaps you do not believe, in visions.”

“Oh, I do.”

“Lord Friend came to me while I was senseless, and said I must come here, alive. That if I tried… he would not take me.” Lord Friend, I thought: Shininao, in her tongue. “What would become of me, if I tried to throw myself under the wheels of the wagon, for instance… he showed me.” My inward eyes clenched shut, against the sight of her crushed, that perfect brown symmetry broken, to heal twisted and crippled.

“Why were you to stay alive?” I asked. “Did he say that?”

I was destined to meet a handsome stranger, part of me expected her to say, the same take she’d told to Suryar Yademkin last night and would tell Dridas Danas tomorrow night. But instead, she said the one thing of all that rang most true, to me who knew foreknowledge. “I don’t know. He didn’t show me that. But that was the day I should have died. Each day, since then, is a gift, and a dream: free, nothing. If good cause came I should give my life again. You are that. I love you.”

My heart flared into a roaring like a fire poked; but I said what I must. “You must think I’m an idiot. Last time you just wanted fikken.”

“I thought I wanted only that. Do we always understand ourselves? If I said all I knew of you, it would seem like flattery, what a liar might say… If you were not the man I think, you wouldn’t argue with me, wanting me as much as you do; you’d just use me, without a thought. I understand, you suspect me. I swear, Lord Friend…” She strained, as if to say a forbidden word. “… Death witness. That is the highest oath of my people.” In my silence she went on. “Which means nothing to you, of course. Second Fire come then.”

All down my spine, the little hairs rose. “Lord Friend Death,” I said, “is indeed witness to one who falsely swears that.” She flinched; under her robe, her chest rose and fell fast; her little strong hands clenched the edge of my bed. “Don’t say it if you don’t have to; it calls his attention. Raikas, please, don’t call it down. Not on you.”

The madness of this place has infected me, I thought; half of me believes her. The very preposterousness of her story recommended it; usually one trying to put one over on you does it more subtly.

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