124 – The art of equilibrium in adversity

If I could bear to, I could write a hundred books on the thousand brutalities the Mezem laid on the lives all of all who lived there. Any large institution touches people in a limitless variety of ways, that flow from and thus reflect its central nature. Visiting the University Hospital in Haiuroru, for instance, you are struck by the minute kindnesses of wind-chimes, caring-cats, the always-gentle tone with which the healers speak and so forth, as well as the great kindness of whatever healing you need; go to the University of Arko and the multifariousness of erudition is astonishing, not only in the endless shelves of books, but the inscriptions on the walls, the talk in the corridors and even the elegantly-worded notes on wall wax-boards.

Where the greater nature is brutality, the brutalities are limitless in their variety too. Even after the Mezem had been explained to me, I didn’t know to expect to see a man with almost three hundred chains who’d never been freed, a fifty-chainer come back just to fight one man out of wounded pride, a woman set against children just because she was a woman, or my heart’s brother matched against a man whose joy he’d insisted we all share.

So when I lay awake in the death-hour, when I should be sleeping, I tried to discipline myself to be ready for anything, to accept that the plausible brutalities were likely and the likely ones certain, and to know that there was nothing too terrible that it couldn’t happen here.

How not to sink into despair? I’d been here five moons now, long enough to have seen men give up by letting themselves lose fights they should have won, in cowardly ways so the crowd would show the red. I’d seen men become slaves of wine or Arkanherb or the pleasures of the brothel, until the inevitable fight they went into, too brain-addled or tired, and lost.

I’d seen men go mad. They did it in different ways. I remember one who had a mouse in a cage, who became obsessed with it, calling it his lover and the only soul in the world who understood him, bringing it out bedecked with ribbons that matched his colours—until one day, in a screaming fit, he shredded the poor creature with his eating-knife. He didn’t last much longer himself.

I remember one whose trust I somehow gained enough that he pulled me aside once to show me a secret collection in a strong-box: a good thirty locks of blond hair, each wrapped in a ribbon. “I don’t get good ones unless I go as high as the fessas quarter,” he said. “More of a challenge, because the Sereniteers pay attention; the okas quarter, you can almost do it right in the street, in broad daylight. You read all the time, Raikas; notice the Pages talking about a string of unsolved murders?”

Having been given death by Arkans, he was giving death back; I couldn’t entirely blame him. I didn’t turn him in, though I might have if he’d been matched against Mana, Niku, Iliakaj or myself, and I’d thought he was the better fighter. Practicality reigns in these matters, in the Mezem.

There was more than one other fighter whose refuge was rape; no point turning them in, usually, because they’d choose people whose rape was not considered truly a crime in Arko, such as street-brats or whores. I’d heard of one fighter who’d gone berserk right on the Avenue of Statuary, killing every Arkan around him, even babies, until he was stun-darted and executed.

Why did the minds of some go to worms, while others kept their equilibrium? My best teacher was obvious: Iliakaj. Get up, take a breath, start over… it could be a trance chant. I asked him only once, though, because his answer was, “Sievenka, what you have to bear is so much worse than anything I’ve had to, I can’t begin to tell you how.”

He meant the war, of course. I had lost the refuge of thinking of home, of imagining the faces and the hugs of everyone there, because Arko had polluted that too.

It was not easy to accurately follow the war through the Pages, but I began to learn the tricks. Yeoli death-counts I’d known almost from the start I could trust no more than an Imperator’s safe-conduct; so far the Arkans had managed to kill off every warrior in Yeola-e about three times over, and yet somehow we still fought. But, over time, the true course of the war was traceable by which places were repeatedly mentioned, or were where writers were sending from, and so forth.

They had split into two armies, the first assigned to take the cities along the Ereala one at a time—and had reached in two moons, as best I could tell, Hyerona—the second assigned to the cities along the coast, working south from Selina, and now besieging Pirelanai. With any luck the inland army would stop for winter, giving us time to lick our wounds, but I could not know that. At any rate, the high passes were now closed until spring, so they wouldn’t even be able to foray into the mountains.

As best I could tell, they were defeating us in part by sheer numbers and in part by making good use of heavy cavalry in the plains, which fit well with what Jinai had seen.

So all my thoughts of home were worried. Were Esora-e and Denaina fighting, one-thumbed? Who among my warrior friends had died under hooves and spears in just the way Jinai had foreseen me doing in the first two forks? How were my mother and step-father and little sibs holding out? Did they have enough to eat? How were they explaining it to the little ones? How must it be for Tyeraha, as acting semanakraseye in the face of this, and Artira, soon to take over? The Servants of Assembly whose ridings had been overrun while they were in Vae Arahi, what were they doing? I imagined a thousand conversations, all with a common curse: I was not part of them. How much was Fifth crying for me, and were they telling him, “Don’t worry, Daddy will be back”?

How I had changed the expectations of my life, to be thinking things like, ‘They can’t even try to take Vae Arahi until spring,’ or ‘I haven’t felt any effects of the grium yet… I think.’ How different the world was, and I, from even half a year ago.

I realized that I had begun to learn the art of equilibrium in adversity as a stud-slave in Laka, and much of it was a simple discipline of not thinking of certain things except when necessary.

In the Ring, I had my fighting skill and Chirel; outside it, I had Mana, Persahis, Niku, Minis in his way, the hope of escape with Niku, the hope of Ikal succeeding in their next try, the hope of a surgeon on Haiu Menshir excising the grium, the hope of my friends who led countries remembering me, the knowledge of the courage and strength of all Yeola-e. I had my books, by which I would return to Yeola-e knowing how Arko fought down to the marching-songs.

I had, so long as I remembered I had, All-Spirit.

These were the things to think of, the points to make to myself, when my mind’s eye saw Yeoli footpeople mown under the hooves of the Sunborn Elite, or women staggering away raped, or my son’s tearful face, or Artira’s tears of helplessness, or those who lay dying on the fields or the beaches saying with their last breath, “Curse you, Fourth Chevenga, for going there, and not being here.”

I had to turn my mind away from these things ruthlessly, shut them into the darkness of my not-seeing, however inhuman that made me, or they’d drive me mad. I had to refuse to be swallowed by the darkness of my helplessness, by keeping my mind on the power I still had. I must make all the pain I imagined into my resolve, to live and return home. Would it change me, to become so hardened and so single-minded? No matter. If I must go mad in that way to save my people, then I must go mad. Semana kra.

The morning of my seventeenth fight, all these thoughts spun around in my mind, against my will, if anything, with despair winning out over hope. Who am I fooling? I’ll be matched against Niku before she’s finished and have to kill her; Ikal will fail again and this time all get killed; the Arkans will start sending friends of mine they’ve captured to the Mezem and I’ll have to fight and kill them, since Kurkas will show the red every time just for the joy of watching me do it; Mana and I will be matched for our fiftieths… if I even lived through today, that was; I did not feel right.

It started with not wanting to get out of bed or eat breakfast, though I thirsted for juice, and a feeling that seemed low in my intestines that was not quite pain, but a sort of tension that was uncomfortable, that came and went. All Skorsas found when he checked me, as much as he knew how, was that my heart was beating a little fast.

The new baths had one with currents, like in the Lesser Baths of the Marble Palace—just because I had liked it, Minis had told me—and so I soaked there, letting the water pound my aches, for a good part of the morning, while Skorsas brought me broth. That didn’t help; by the time I got out, the pangs had increased enough that I could no longer say they were not pain.

I wasn’t moving as I should either, it seemed; both Iska and Skorsas noticed. When Iska came to examine me, though, I was between them, and we had to wait for the next one to come up. It was bad enough that I sweated.

He felt here and poked there, asked if I’d eaten anything different from anyone else, which I hadn’t, asked when I’d last made shen, which I did right then, to no avail; the pain seemed to be in a different part. “To get you off your fight I need to tell the Director what you’ve got,” Iska said. An illness as small as a cold won’t get a fighter off, even though, as everyone knows, it can impair your balance. I’d learned this from having to fight through one for my fourteenth. “But I can find nothing wrong with you.”

Now I wanted to pace back and forth, so I did. Just to see it again, he waited for the next one, which put me in another sweat. “I will go speak to the Director,” he said, and was gone. Skorsas massaged me, which felt good wherever he thumped, but didn’t touch the pain. “You’re tensing up all over your abdomen when it comes up,” he said to me. “Bottom of your back, too.”

“They’re also,” I said, between breaths, “coming closer togeth—oh my All-Spirit Saint Mother help me bless me Shaina strength oh All-Spirit my CHIIIILD!”

†

“Your father had it every time,” my mother had once told me. “The day you came, he had to beg out of Assembly.” I remembered it from the births of the youngest two of my sibs: my mother, huge and dark-nippled and with the line of motherhood running down through her navel, her belly ridging whenever a pain came up, my father with a sheen and then drops of sweat under his bright curls, their hands gripping, fingers white, their voices, high and low, sometimes moaning, sometimes letting out almost war-cries, sometimes laughing.

Shaina’s due atakina 70 or so; it’s atakina 60! In the depths of brutality and despair, you can forget that life goes on, begetting itself, and good things can still happen. “What, Jewel of the Mezem, what?” Skorsas said frantically.

I let out a long burst of laughter. “I’m in labour!”

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