126 – Keep hope

Iska made one last try at getting me on the sick list, taking the Haian to the Director’s office. “He’s a man, isn’t he?” Forlanas spat, when they explained. “Not some sort of barbaric hermaphroditic creature, going to drop a slime-covered spawn in the Ring?” They explained again, more slowly. Of course, the Haian had to say the same as he’d told me, that in an emergency, it would go away. Forlanas considered calling me into his office, but then had a thought that was astonishingly wise and kind, for him. “Every time I call him in here, I end up flogging him.”

Meanwhile, I heard later, a delighted Biorio was saying under his breath, “Scream, you little wool-hair.” (He was Srian, and a good head taller than me.) “Some man; he sounds like my sister when she was having my niece.”

“It’s just pain,” I told Skorsas, and myself, as he dressed me, the crowd becoming a muffled thunder above. By their noise I could tell when the four fights before mine started and ended, and tried to know by that and the comings and goings of the pains whether I’d be fighting in the middle of one. Labour-pains are even, though, while Mezem fights are not. I probably don’t need to say that one was coming on when the timing-boy yelled down to us, “Biorio, Raikas, you’re on!”

How wrong it felt to sling on Chirel now, and how alone I was with that, I couldn’t begin to describe. In my gate, I set my teeth so as not to cry out while the choir of boys sang the song that comes before each fight, out of respect for their art, but otherwise didn’t try not to show it. “My bright-greaved God, Karas Raikas is getting nerves!” I heard the fans start to say around me, pretending to be discrete. “Look, he’s trembling, he’s dripping sweat, shen, I can’t change my fikken bet now…” Biorio bid spear and shield; I gasped out, “Clean… blade.” I was looking down and letting out a cry and so missed the judge’s nod, but I heard the herald bellow, “Judge’s clemency!” and the roar of the crowd.

Skorsas’s usual chatter of encouragement—I’d gotten used to it as I went into a fight, like bird-song in a forest—broke off mid-word as if he’d been brained; then he picked it up again, weak-voiced. I signed for my wristlets again, to a standing-up roar from the Raikas fans; truth be told, I didn’t feel like bearing the weight of a shield. The Director’s hand went to the gate-lever. “I’ll… find out… in a moment… whether… that Haian… was right,” I whispered to Skorsas, probably not the kindest thing to say to him right then. Strength, Shaina; I will be back. My gate clanged open, I staggered out drawing Chirel, and as soon as I closed with Biorio, the pain was gone as if I’d never felt it.

I wanted to be out of the Ring even faster than usual. It was so wrong to be dealing harm, and perhaps death, when my body and soul were full of the making of new life; I felt the horror much more strongly than usual, by the contrast. I did it on the first exchange, wrist-parrying his spear and doing the high feint to his shield-side that changes into a back-hand hook-slash at the sword-side of the neck. He went down, palsied all over and bleeding fairly hard, and the labour-pain came back instantly, almost knocking me to my knees.

By then, I had begun to do Iliakaj’s trick, raising the empty hand to tell the crowd I wished them to show the white, and the sword-hand to show I wanted the red, though it was always the former. Some of Iliakaj’s fans had begun to indulge me, and then a solid majority of mine, who were growing fast in numbers, began doing it. I held my shield-hand high now, and spoke, though I knew they could not hear. “Vote white… you fikkers… don’t… make me… take life… on the day… new life… comes of me… ” By a slim majority—always I wondered the same thing, what had the other man done to offend the rest—they showed white, and the Director concurred.

“Did you… see that?” I gritted to Biorio. “Let go… the spear… and I’ll stanch… the wound…” I’d had one whom I’d shown such a mercy try to plug me before. He tossed it weakly off to the side, and I knelt, and pressed closed the wound with my hand, taking his head onto my other. He was afraid he was dead anyway, he told me, but in the end he recovered entirely, and started again.

Whenever the Director showed the white, now, I gave him a sincere “Thank you,” as I took my chain. “So!” he laughed, even though I’d yelled in pain three times coming up the stairs, making all the fans around wonder aloud what was wrong with me, “it was all in your head, eh, lad?”

“I think you owe me a ‘Congratulations,’” I said, as he laid the chain over my head.

“Hmmph, yes, I suppose. Congratulations.”

“Thank you. I will pass that on to my wife.” I spun on my heel and started back down before he could say anything else.

The writers chased after me, asking what was afflicting me. “My wife is in labour back in Yeola-e, and I’m feeling it with her, second Fire come if I lie. Put that through the Press, you vultures, ha ha ha ha ha!” And I went into the bath for a bit, and then to my room and the all-consuming world that is birth. I usually cleaned, sharpened and oiled Chirel the same night, but now I let Skorsas just clean and oil the blade; I’d sharpen it tomorrow.

How I craved the smell of evergreens and birth-incense, the calming tones of midwife and family, the running-patterns of caterpillars and butterflies on the flags. How many times I wept, imagining them saying, “Oh, Chevenga, if only you were here!” and knowing I’d miss holding the baby, in her first moments in the world, imagining her tiny warmth in my arms, as if that could somehow make it real, for both me and her. How many times I laughed, just for the joy of her coming.

She came about a bead past midnight. It burned like fire in parts I didn’t really have, but, as far as I could tell from what I was feeling, nothing went wrong. If she was stillborn, surely I would feel Shaina’s anguish, but I felt nothing but joy.

Then I fell into bed and all went black as fast as if I’d been clubbed. Understanding how it must be for me, Niku didn’t come until the next night, and made love to me, saying, “Time to make you back into a man.”

Shortly after that, when I went to Persahis, he gave me a letter for Mana, which had a message for me in the patterned border. “Don’t worry, we will free you, one way or another,” my aunt wrote. My mother wrote, “Shaina bore your second child healthy and strong on atakina 61, and she and Etana, in your absence, chose to name her Kima Imaye. Congratulations, my child, now twice a father.” Kima imaye, in Yeoli, means “Keep hope.”

†

Riji and Raikas matched

By Sonakas Korilas fessas

The Watcher of the Ring, Mikas 26, 58^th-last year of the Present Age

With eight fresh kills to his name, the Living Greatest of the Mezem has decided that he is back in sufficient condition to fight the fight for which he returned. After declaring so to the Director of the Mezem today, the legendary Riji Kli-fas was matched against the Mezem’s most pre-eminent up-and-comer, Karas Raikas.

Riji’s fifty-ninth and Raikas’s nineteenth fight will be fifth on the slate on Mikas 28.

“Yes, he is very good,” the Enchian great told writers after the announcement was made. “I wouldn’t so trouble myself for some fighter of no account just because his boy bragged, unless there were some prospect of it being believed.”

Asked if he thinks Raikas has a chance against him, Riji said, “Of course he does. Every man I’ve ever fought had a chance against me. All fighters have a chance against all other fighters. That is the beauty of the Ring; we all go in equals, with nothing but our hands, our spirits, and our weapons. All pre-conceptions, we leave behind us, and only the future is ahead, a future of living purely in the moment, in the perfect joy of cut and thrust. I quote Eniankran, who is an Enchian philosopher of what in Arkan years would be the second-to-last-century of the Previous Age: ‘On the edge of the sword is the ultimate vitality.’ However, while he has a chance as they all did, I defeated them all.”

Has Riji a more detailed measure of his opponent’s ability? “He is trained classic Yeoli, with those feather-soft deflecting parries and that great precision, aided by an innate talent for precision. He is astonishingly fast; it’s a marvel to see, if your eyes have the skill to follow it. He’s fearless and accordingly he’s wonderfully flexible-minded and devious. I concur with those who have written that he does moves that seem impossible. And being only twenty-one, he is not even in the prime of his fighting-life. It is sad, really, that Mezem aficionados will never see it come to its full flower; ascribe that to one boastful boy.”

The Living Greatest continues. “It is the ultimate fate of all beings; however magnificent our minds and spirits, however subtle our skill, however beautiful and lofty our art, we all end up nothing but a heap of ruined flesh, insensate meat that lies in a lump and has no true future, whatever the trappings of mourning, but rot, or lion-food, the sublime brought down to the banal. The world shows the red for all of us, whatever we might have been or however we might have changed the world, had we lived longer. It’s this understanding I express, this reality that I manifest, as art, in the Ring. So it will go for Karas Raikas; first agony will dash him down to equal to the rest of the world, as we all cry out the same way when we feel it. Then death will dash him down to equal with the dust, where all living things end.”

Will the Living Greatest remain in the Ring or return to his scholarly retirement, assuming he does win? “The latter,” he answers, “until my Living Greatness is brought into question again, if it ever is.”

As always, Karas Raikas declined to comment, but by all reports and from all appearances—he did not seem at all tight in training today—he is not cowed.

The reigning odds, at the moment, are even.

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