T H E • P H I L O S O P H E R • I N • A R M S: 123

I had not seen Minis, except in the Imperial Box, for two and a half moons or so, when he sent me a note asking me to meet him at the Gryphon Statue on the lakeshore of the Aitzas quarter, on Dimae 26 at midnight. “You are going?” Niku asked me, the night before. “Of course,” I said. “You never know, he might spring me. He’s tried. If that’s what it is, I’ll speak for you.” I would speak for Mana, too, of course, and Iliakaj… how many people might Minis be willing to spring, if he could any?

“Spring you?” she said. Whenever her brows rose, her skin under them lightened, alluringly; of course everything her body did was alluring. “But that would be treason.”

How much should I tell her, in this land of truth-drug? Least was best. “Probably he won’t,” I said. “But I will meet him just in case.”

The Director had seen sense—Iska and Koree going together to speak to him had helped—and begun matching her against actual fighters. She had four chains now, and I had fifteen. It was no longer every night we made love, since we’d slaked our first desperate hunger, and deprived ourselves of sleep enough that Koree trounced me in sparring.

He made a lesson of me, driving me right to falling, and then saying to them, with his foot on my neck, “Self-indulgence is just another way of finding death in the Ring. Is it not, Karas Raikas?”

I choked out, “Yes, master,” and Niku and I stayed apart for an eight-day, though we thought it would break our hearts. Now we’d sneak together one night in three or four, and bring each other to ecstasy only twice at the most for me and five or six at the most for her. Her project, meanwhile, was going well.

The way from the Mezem to the Gryphon Statue was smooth enough to skate all the way. Minis had found out the size of my feet from Skorsas, and had a pair of faib skates made for me, sending them around the same time as Niku’s first fight. That first day I’d fallen a few times and crashed into another fighter or two trying some of his or his Mahids’ moves; the slide down the banister, for instance, didn’t go so well. “Hide everything glass!” Iska bellowed, to much mirth. But skating in the chair-lanes fast enough to feel the wind in my hair brought at least the feeling of freedom, which was like a swallow of water in a desert, and so I’d started using them to get around the city.

I didn’t see him at first; he was hiding on the statue’s back, nestled between its wings. I needed only to see his face to know to hold out my arms. He slid down into them, jewels jingling as always, and clung around my neck, trembling. He’d grown a touch, slightly heavier.

“You got the skates,” he said.

“Yes, thank you. What happened?” I set my teeth. He couldn’t tell me until he’d bawled like a baby and I’d cosseted him like one, for a while.

It was very hard for him to get it out. He was eleven; one of the nobles’ sons who attended him had snuck into his bedchamber and latched onto his penis with his mouth. All-Spirit, I thought. Not even the son of the Imperator is safe, here? He was afraid that I’d heard rumours—I told him I paid no attention to ones about him anyway—that he’d ordered the boy to do it. He had also been first introduced to his betrothed—no such thing as a Spark of the Sun’s Ray marrying for something as trivial as love—and was terrified of what she and her family would think. This even though he’d thrust the other boy away yelling, tearing the bed-curtains. Not even the son of the Imperator is safe from either child-rape, or suspicion of child-rape—for the same incident?

Of course the first advice that sprang to mind—“Tell your father!”—would do him no good. Kurkas and the other boy’s father were dear friends; more exactly, as Minis put it, “Father says he is a good suck.” Kurkas would be just as likely to say, “Well, why didn’t you take full advantage?”

“He said he thought I wanted it but was afraid, and that he could persuade me,” Minis sobbed.

“If he thought he could persuade you, he should have tried while you were awake,” I said.

“I’ve ruined him, by banishing him,” he whispered. “But I want to kill him! He laid hands on me! I was having a dream about my fiancée and then I woke up and it was him…”

While I gentled him, I tried to cast my mind back to what Mirasae had said after I’d been put to stud in Laka, the words that had brought me greater peace. I told him the whole story, and about how it had hurt and felt good at once for me, too, and made me hate myself, too, and we were brothers in rape. I, and Kurkas’s son; how strange was that?

“What is most important is that you be very clear that he forced this on you. Asleep, you are no less helpless than I was, being threatened with having my balls chopped off; maybe more so, because I was given a choice. It was not by your will and so entirely not your fault.” He gained peace from that, as I had.

I got him to promise to speak to his Haian, as well. I could not be Mirasae to him, fleeting and clandestine as our meetings must be. We talked Mezem a bit; the baths were finished, and were being greatly enjoyed by the fighters, I told him. In fact, since a roof garden had been built in what had been the courtyard, Niku and I no longer had to sidle along a ledge to get to each other’s windows, and in fact often made love under the bushes in the garden.

He’d been terrified when I’d gone against Seliko, and was worried about Riji, until I cadged him out of it by asking what sort of fan he was to have so little faith in me, and made him laugh. We did not speak of the grium; perhaps he’d put it out of mind, as I did, much of the time.

We did speak of my children. Fifth must be four now, and Shaina’s first was very soon to be born; for all I knew, it might have happened already, though it was a little early. “Is he a good child?” Minis asked, his eyes intense. “Worth loving?”

Only in Arko, I thought, would I be asked that. “Of course he’s worth loving; he’s a child! All children deserve love.” Take that into your heart, Minis Aan; above all else, take that. I put it into my arms and hand as I held him, and he seemed mostly happy again as we skated our separate ways.

†

Suryar Yademkin made forty-nine chains. He was a big dark bear of a man, whose rallying cry to himself was senraha, his word for home. Now it was senraha all the time, the joy in his wide, white-toothed grins spreading through the quarters like a warm flood, at least to my mind. How blessed he was, to be but one fight away.

At dinner the night before the matches were to be made, he suddenly stood up and said “Everyone!”

Everyone stared. Fighters very rarely speak more to each other at dinner than, “Pass the fish sauce, please.” Suryar lifted his wine-cup.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said in his rough Arkan, “but I want to do this before one of you is chosen, that this toast would be a curse to. Here’s to, whether it be near or far, rich or poor, flat or mountainous: senraha.”

A silence thick as night fell. Even the boys with their serving-trays froze. All around I could see the fighters thinking, easy for you to say. It looks good, for you. No one moved, not even to chew. Eyes narrowed on him.

He stood alone, frozen, with the cup in his hand. I saw his face begin to redden under the brown, and the thought grow in his eyes: I meant to do a good thing, and I have done a terrible one.

Then a chair banged over backwards, and another man was standing with cup raised: Mana. Spear-straight, proud-shouldered, chin high, but his face was annoyed.

“To senraha!” he barked, like a setaseye. “Well? Come on! It’s what we all want, and it’s what we all share! So we will see one of us get it, most likely, and it’ll bring no hardship to any of us but one, so what’s the reluctance? For once, we can be big-hearted!”

He brandished his wine-cup like a weapon. “Riji Kli-fas! Your home is Arko, so you can drink to it!” To my surprise, the Enchian stood, chuckling. “Iliakaj the Immortal! Your home is even closer, right here in the Mezem, as far as anyone can tell!”

“Yes, fik you, Mannas,” the three-hundred-odd chainer said laughing, and stood, cup in hand.

Mana fixed his eyes on me, with a plain look of ‘You should be doing this.’ “Karas Raikas! Your prospects are good, and your home, which happens also to be mine, particularly needs its semanakraseye to drink to it—semana kra, up with you!” I sprang up, and yanked upwards on the arms of both those next to me. Niku, who was across, sprang up no slower than me. In a moment, we had everyone standing.

Such a soul had Mana-lai Chereda. Need I say why I loved him? Miracles happen in this world, even in such a part of it. We all realized at once that while two fighters making friends put themselves in danger, all fighters being friends with all other fighters changed nothing. “Say it again, Suryar!” Mana barked.

The forty-nine-chainer lifted his cup once more. His eyes filled with tears; he almost couldn’t choke it out. “Here’s to, whether it be near or far, rich or poor, flat or mountainous. The place we dream of when we lie in our Mezem beds. The place we smell the air of, in our minds, when we think about it. The place where those we love wait for us, still loving us. Senraha.”

“To senraha!” we bellowed as one, and drank, but didn’t sit down; dinner turned into a night-long party.

I was very much behind it, spending more jewelry I never wore for the casks of wine and the twenty women of the evening. While the boys and servants ran back and forth serving us, gaping and exclaiming they’d never heard of such a thing in all the history, we danced and hugged and poured wine into each others’ mouths like a victorious army. Riji brought out his lyre, and serenaded us with songs vastly more filthy than a scholar of his dignity should know. “To death, which we all will be to each other!” we toasted. “To the lions, who will chew our bones!” “To the buzzard crowd, who’ll dip their red kerchiefs in our lifeblood, and weep into their white!” “To life, may it last forever!” All night, we laughed and cried, wrestled and pissed on the Piinanian stonework, copulated with whores right on the table of the Fighter’s Parlour. By cocklight, a good nine of our forty-odd needed carrying to bed, and Koree just said, “Eh. Training’s off.”

Next day harsh truth came with white sunlight, sharp into our hung-over minds; the silence between us returned, and at noon we gathered before Fate’s Helmet. I learned then how bitter it was indeed, that I had not thought of it first, when I would never be matched against Suryar, being saved for Riji.

I said it to him in words and a secret embrace once, and in my mind many more times. I am sorry, my heart’s brother. No one should never have had to pay so, for his good nature, and I could have prevented it. I am a thousand times sorry. The Mezem evil always proves mightier in the end, the slaves who have bucked against their chains, slapped down with the whip, until the proof they are broken comes: they regret their act. “I should have left well enough alone,” Mana wept into my shoulder, out in the woods.

On the day of the fight, as we watched them take their gates, we all regretted what we had done, for we had ensured this fight to be a tragedy, either way. What else would the Director do, for excitement and drama, knowing the tale of the fighters’ party, and how it had started, would get out onto the streets and the Pages?

I shall say no more of the fight, which I watched stone-faced as I always must and always did, but that Mana won. Suryar fought as hard as anyone ever could, making it the sort of fight the crowd walks away from deeply satisfied. It came to a contest of stamina in the end, and Mana, like me, had spent his boyhood running up mountains. The kerchiefs were about even, red and white, though I thought it was leaning a touch to the white; of course yearning might have been clouding my view. Kurkas raised the red. It always depended on his mood, I had learned; thus a report of a victory from some distant border, or a misunderstanding with an underling that somehow displeased him, or just the ennui or contentment that we feel for no apparent reason, became a fighter’s life or death.

Mana and I met in the woods afterwards. There he, who had never before let the Mezem touch him even a trace, flung himself to the ground and piled dirt on his hair and wept in my arms when I seized him, crying, “I should have let him kill me!” Usually you can say to yourself, if I hadn’t taken him, someone else would have. Not when it’s the other’s fiftieth; his blood is on your hands alone.

“He never called me a double-dealer,” Mana said to me, between his sobs, he who always laughed. “He could have. But he was too good. Near the end, Cheng, when he felt himself flagging, you can guess what he said to himself to try to keep himself going… All-Spirit, Saint Mother, senraha, over and over again, senraha, senraha, senraha, then when I got him and he knew he was done, senraha…”