130 - The Living Greatest

I thought the screaming roar was in my head, at first. My temple hurt and felt like glass, both at once, as if I’d been hit; against the whole back of my body was sand, my sweat making it stick to my skin. I was lying flat.

I heard sneering words: “See what you’ve done, boy? He was brilliant; I’ve never fought anyone so good! And only twenty-one; the world will never see the full flower of his greatness, it’s tragic! He’d have made fifty, easily, if not for your loose mouth.” By the cruelty of those words, I knew where I was. Anger came sizzling through my pain.

Riji was standing over me, then bending towards me. My chain was still clipped on my hand; Chirel was too distant and low, as if beneath the ground: in the lion-trench. I opened my eyes. A mistake: they instantly filled with fire. The day had grown hot after all, and in the burning sun of afternoon, the Ring’s golden dust gets scalding hot, as you can sometimes feel when it kicks up against your toes or you lose a sandal. He’d flung a big handful into my eyes. Grabbing me by the forelock, he ground it in with the heel of his hand, sending agony right down to my guts. I could do nothing but scream and writhe. Then he stood up, and backed away.

I turned over and got up on my elbows, and for a moment could not tell up from down, the two seeming to spin end over end. I tried to shake it off, and nausea came up much harder than I could hold down, making me throw up into the sand. Some of the crowd yelled “Ugh!” as if I’d shown bad table manners.

“Raikas!!” my fans were screaming. “Up, my treasure, up, my darling, up, for the love of all Ten Gods!” Wishes have strength, even from them; I won’t deny, they aided me. But Riji stepped close, fast, and kicked me onto my back again. He slid his sword-tip under my belt and cut it through, flicked my kilt off; I didn’t have it in me even to try to wrap it with the chain. An earth-shaking sight, to an Arkan; some laughed, some whooped, some cried out in anguish, for opportunities lost, for the tragedy.

All-Spirit… how must this be to watch, for Mana, for Niku, for Minis? I got to my elbows again, and this time he stayed standing back, letting me rise all the way to my feet. I was blind, my eyes nothing but balls of fiery pain; I gingerly tried wiping one and almost threw up again with the pain that caused. Blinking was agony, too; what hurt least was keeping them clenched hard shut.

The fans started screaming instructions at me, trying to direct me, far too many mixed together to understand. Riji chuckled, a strange, high, light sound, and started speaking again, his voice clear, since he was close. “No one can fault you for lack of tenacity, Raikas,” he said. “You couldn’t beat me sighted and with your sword and un-stunned, but you’re up, as if you can now… amazing!”

It would be death, to listen. It would be death, to let myself be crushed by the truth of the odds. I barred the gates of my mind against his words again, and thought of Mana, and Niku, and Minis; of my mother, my other parents, my sibs, my people. I thought of my children, two now. I thought also of the one thing I had not shown him, and so, with any luck, he didn’t know I had.

I set my chain to spinning, and went towards where I’d last heard his voice, though I knew he’d faded off to my sword-side. Now the voices directing me increased tenfold, deafening; mine screamed, “Sword-side! Sword-side!” and then his took up the opposite, “Shield-side! Shield-side!” to confound me. I heard Skorsas try to make his thin youth’s voice heard over all the others, screaming, “Raikas, listen to me! Listen to ME!!”

Now and then Riji would come close and laugh or whistle, teasing me, at which I’d strike or charge vaguely, as if the sound alone were guiding me. When he was silent, I pretended to do it randomly, as if I were defending myself by never letting him know when or where I’d strike. I am going on sound only. I know nothing else. One move giving it away, letting him know I can tell where he is, and I’m done… “Behind you! No, to your shield-side, no back behind you, no…” Riji could move faster than Skorsas’s words. I stumbled over something, a horn, I think, that someone had flung into the ring.

The fourth round must end sometime; he’d want to do something, I guessed, to incapacitate me worse before that so as not to let me recover too much in the break, with Skorsas tending me. When he makes his move, I make mine, I decided. I’d barely thought it when he faded in close behind me and slashed for the tendons behind my shield-side knee.

Everything went creeping slow, as it does, as if all the world were in a sea of syrup, giving me time to measure exactly where his blade-edge was coming in, slowing the whirring spin of his chain to a ponderous turning, letting me decide at my leisure what to do. The chain was coming around, I could imagine the slow flashes of its links in the sun, reach grab it deflect the sword with the back of my wrist leap spinning the chain pulling me in drive my heel into his guts for Yeola-e for mama for Fifth for Mana for Niku so I am a straight line in the air and I heard air gasp out of him, and felt organs burst and part and my foot bounce off his spine, throwing me a bit back as I landed on the other.

He fell without a sound, incapable of making one, the sword tumbling out of his hand and the chain dragging my hand down until I let go.

The noise was beyond what I’d thought possible. The Mezem is built of stone and half-arm-thick beams, but even the sand beneath my feet was shaking. Things hit me, thrown from the stands: flowers, flags, hats, silken things that I learned later were underclothes. Were they showing kerchiefs? I had no way of knowing. He was dying of the kick anyway; killing him now would only spare him a few beads, or a day at the most, of unspeakable agony. I picked up his sword and raised it in Iliakaj’s request for the red.

It took so long my arm began to get tired, and I started to feel all over my body that I would soon fall over. I turned my face to Skorsas, to let him know he was my eyes. From the crowd’s battling chants, I gathered it was about even; and Kurkas, of course, would draw it out just for the excitement and the drama. Why did I ask; I should have just done it… “Red! You’ve got red, Raikas, do it!” Skorsas shrieked, his voice breaking high.

I bent down, found Riji’s sweat-soaked shoulder, groped through the rags for his chest, pressed to find the space between ribs under the muscle. He was drawing breaths in tiny retching gasps, his heart pounding unearthly fast and weak; without seeing his face, I couldn’t even tell if he felt my hand, or knew what I was about to do. I switched my grip on the mad-and-sane-faced sword, and drove the point through his heart. His body jolted all over, and froze, and on the last breath that heaved out of him, he formed a faint word that I didn’t understand. “S..ss…ssor…rra…” Then he was still, at peace.

I laid his sword beside him, and stood up, suddenly so tired it was all I could do. “Oh shen, shen, shen, they’re rushing the Ring, Raikas, I’m coming, Kemmas”—that was Riji’s boy—“grab the sword! Raikas, it’s all right, hang on, I’m coming!” I felt Skorsas’s hands seize my arm, and then we were in a press of shrieking, clawing, droplet-spitting excuses for people. “Let him be, he has to get his chain then he’s got to go to Iska, leave him be!” he yelled at them, one-down though they could be any caste. We couldn’t get anywhere until I set my chain to whirling above my head, which made them back off just enough for him to lead me to the stairs.

At least I could defend my hair, my fingers, my blood. Kemmas did snatch up Riji’s sword in time—Skorsas’s urgency about this seemed odd to me until I remembered that all of Riji’s possessions now became mine—but his corpse fell to the souvenir-takers. When a great fighter dies, enough genuine finger-bones of his appear for sale on the streets of Arko to have come from an army, but ten fingers’ worth of them are real.

As I came back down from getting my chain, a knot of people closed around me, clasping my hands, smacking my shoulders, steadying me, cheering me in their many accents. The fighters—in broad daylight and full view of the crowd. “Not one fan’s touching you, lad,” said Iliakaj, from behind and beside me. “It’s all us. And not one fan’s going to.” Tomorrow they’d go back to their usual reserve with each other, as would I; for today, they’d give me, and themselves, this.

†

By the time I was in the clinic, I was shaking, and babbling, and leaning on Skorsas to stay steady on my feet, even after he’d lit a katzerik for me. I kept thinking, somehow, that what was pouring from my eyes was blood. He began saying “You’ll be all right,” over and over, and feeding me very fast doses of whack-weed, as you do a wounded comrade.

“It’s all right,” Iska said, once they’d got me lying down on a table, and took my head between his hands. “It’s fear for your eyes that’s getting you, lad.” I felt the truth of this down to my bones, and just hearing it said, so I knew at least one person understood, seemed to ease it. He lifted my head on his arm and gave me a draught of very strong poppy-juice. “I’m not going to touch them; I called in the Haian. He might put you right out, but in the meantime this will relax you. It’s all right, they’ll heal.” He cleaned and stitched the little wounds I had, and then I was freezing, so Skorsas raised my feet on a pillow, wrapped a blanket around me, and fed me drop upon drop of whack-weed.

It was the same Haian who’d come while I’d had the nayasin chiravesa; I’d forgotten his name, and he reminded me it was Anhunem. He didn’t put me out entirely to bathe my eyes, just put a mask over my mouth and nose that made me breathe something that made me cease to care about the pain even as I still felt it. When he’d got every grain of sand out—it took him a bead and a half, and some he had to do with tweezers—I still could not see, but he told me not to worry, salved my eyes and bandaged them, and gave me more drops. My sight, he said, I’d likely get back in a few days.

Likely? Weapon-sense might get me through the Mezem; I wouldn’t do so well at fighting command. But it was, as he said, too soon to worry.

His other prescription for me was stillness and quiet, so Iska had the boys carry me up to my room on a litter, only after he’d had the guards cleared the corridors. After a fight like this, too many people end up in the quarters, wanting so much to be there that they don’t respect the usual rules, and pretend to be somehow official so that they’re supposed to be there, though no one knows who they are.

Skorsas was as nurturing as a mother, calling me “Jewel of the World,” now, Arko apparently not being big enough. And “Living Greatest,” since by defeating the former one I had become that. It seemed almost a waste, that a title so coveted should come to one to whom it meant nothing, though I wondered with vague irony what Esora-e, who’d wanted to make me the greatest warrior, would think.

I slept, but because the Mezem very much follows Haian ways and I’d taken a head-blow hard enough to put me out, Skorsas gently woke me up every bead and a half, asking me my name and where we were and so forth, to make sure my mind had not wandered out of my ear while I slept.

Then, when the coolness of the air let me know it was night, I was awakened by sinewy arms around my neck, and warm lips on mine. “Live, omores, live!” she hissed, silvery in the dark. Though it was so wild it hurt my eyes and my head and even made one or two of my cuts bleed again, we made love like two starved lions, and then wept, for the feeling that has no name but sheer feeling. “If he’d killed you I would have insulted him, so that he’d stay, and fight me,” she whispered, deep in her throat, so that it had a touch of an animal growl. “I couldn’t have lived without killing him.”

-

This scene from Minis’s point of view


--