131 - Words spoken out of love

I did not know I had fallen asleep until I woke. My head was still on Niku’s shoulder, the scent of her skin faintly sweet in my nose. But she was in a nightmare, twitching, and moaning in her own tongue, “Gh’yir! Gh’yir!” Fighting, it seemed; when I asked her later she told me the word meant “Charge!” At least she hadn’t been in the Ring. I almost envied her; the memory of drawing Chirel for honourable reasons was like a distant ecstatic dream. Sometimes at night I would think about the mamokal or Sakrent, just to remind myself I had been a warrior once.

I tightened my arms around her and whispered soothing words nonetheless, and she calmed, pressing her cheek to my brow with a sigh. By a movement of air, perhaps, or a rustle, I felt another presence in the room, near my side. My breath froze in my lungs. Not knowing what to say, if anything, I lay tense, my head raised, the air seeming to pulse and ripple; then Niku sat bolt upright, and gasped.

“You brown bitch.” Skorsas; he’d come in to wake me again, and give me more painkiller. “You figure you won’t beat him any other way, so you do this. May you smother forever in Hayel.”

I felt her flinch, as if she’d been struck. I swung myself up, groped in the air for his shoulder to get a fix, and back-handed him across the face.

I didn’t think it was nearly hard enough to take him down, but he fell with a gasp, his hands smacking the stone floor through the rug, and then made a hissing sound through his teeth that I realized was sobs he was straining to hold in.

So I betrayed my boy, breaking my oath. It was the force of the blow on his heart, not his face, that had felled him. I could make excuses—that I was in pain and fear, that I’d been mistreated so many ways myself, that this barbaric place where I was called barbarian had made a barbarian out of me—but they were all excuses. I had chosen. “Skorsas,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“I care for nothing in the world but you,” he said in a quivering whisper, from the floor. “I care nothing for my father, nothing for my Empire, nothing for anything, but you, from the moment I first saw your face.”

You’d be fair in asking how I was so stupid for so long, to have missed the thousand signs. I stood feeling like a post, or a tree, no less blind, while the evidence flooded through my mind.

He was Arkan, and a youth; they fall in love not with women, or other youths, but men. He’d loved his last fighter, who’d been crueller than I. The devotion, the tenderness, the extreme dread that he’d doomed me with his words at the party, the words themselves; the looks he let linger on me, that I’d caught in the Legion Mirrors; even the first groundless loathing, that he’d never explained. I saw it now: he’d hated me for making his heart betray Tondias, when the corpse was barely cold. I had struck him for words he’d spoken out of love.

I knelt before him, reaching. “Skorsas… I’m sorry, I’m forsworn, I can’t tell you how sorry I am, I am forsworn, I’ll renew it stronger…” He scrabbled back in dread—all that careful training to get him over the fear, undone in one moment—and only let me touch him when I brought in my hand as slowly as in syrup. Even so, his shoulder flinched, and he had to struggle not to pull his face back.

“Those are tears, not blood, aren’t they?” I said. “Do you need Iska?” I heard a rustle on the sill; Niku was at the window, ready to go in a moment, saying nothing because anything she said would hurt him, I suspected.

“No. I’m fine.” He seized propriety back, with a firmly-indrawn breath. “You shouldn’t be taking care of me; you’re the one who’s hurt, you should be lying down.” His slender hands grasped my shoulders, and pulled. I let him steer me back into the bed.

“Skorsas,” I said, “it’s just that… there’s a lot you don’t know, can’t know, because no one’s told you, because that’s safest. But it’s love, for both of us. We’d both cut our own hearts out before we fought each other.” Was she gone? I wasn’t sure.

“If I had to cut my heart out not to hurt you, I would,” he said, in a way that brooked no doubting of its truth.

Then, the city came for me.

I had wondered why the street susurrus echoing dully in the garden had been noisier than usual, as if I didn’t know at heart. Arko was celebrating my victory. Now there were drunken tromping feet in the corridor outside my door, and blasts of horns, and joyful shouts of “Raikas! Raikas! Where are you?”

“Oh my little professional God,” cursed Skorsas, springing up. “They’ve broken in—don’t let them sack the place!”

“I love you, omores, I’ll come back if it’s safe,” Niku said. “Or—kakr!—not.” That’s Niah for “shit!” Through the window, I heard grown men in the garden, giggling like boys on a prank, “Ha, we can get to him this way!” She sprang back in and dived under the bed.

Now there were angry shouts from the rooms, too—“Fik off, you vultures, let us sleep!” Iliakaj yelled—and Iska’s voice, with weary calm, “He’s resting, leave him alone if you care for him.”

“We want him! We won’t leave without him! Raikas, come out and party! They can’t refuse, he won’t refuse; there’s too many of us!” Semana kra, I thought ruefully.

Voices rose. “Get the fik out of here or your blood will be on the walls!” –“Hah! We’re Raikas’s, we could take any of you other shen-kicker Ring-bucks!” –“Iska, get the shennen guards up here!” –“Raikas, call off your dogs!” From outside my window, I heard Mana say icily, “Wrong window, morons—he’s not there. You peek in any window and you’re going to get your balls handed to you swimming in a platter, anyway.” His Arkan had got better. Always, he’d have my back. But there was going to be a pitched battle right in the corridor, if I did nothing.

“Skorsas, peek out and tell them I’m coming as soon as I’m dressed.” I groped to the wardrobe and opened its doors, before realizing the futility.

“You’re not going to—!” he gasped. “Celestialis, you’re too good to the world, you have the soul of a king…” He yelled my promise out the door, and the cheering doubled, while the angry cries gave over. “You’ve never been so reluctant to do this,” I said laughing, as he helped me on with some peacockish thing whose peacockishness I was just as happy not to see, “and I never so keen.”

He linked his arm with mine in a death-grip as we went out, to a Mezem-roar in miniature. Wine-stinking breath and body smells choked the air. Several hands hefted my legs, and I was off the ground; then I was on someone’s shoulders, with a grip on one of my ankles I recognized as Skorsas’s, growing more desperate as the drunks carried me down the stairs.

By weapon-sense, I felt six guards converging around me; Iska had assigned us an escort. “His sword!” Skorsas shrilled, and the fans took up the cry. While I’d been sleeping, he’d had the lion-keepers retrieve Chirel, and cleaned it very thoroughly. The fans cheered as I slung it on my shoulder, as if I were not whole without it.

Like a general on horseback, I thrust my arm towards the outer gate with a grand flourish, and bellowed, “Onward!” in my battlefield voice, the blind leading the blasted.

Roaring and whooping and singing the songs they’d attached to my Ring-name, they paraded me through every street in Arko, I swear, rich or poor, and into a good many of the taverns, while Skorsas’s hand clung like a clamp to my ankle. I couldn’t help but get drunk just from the streams of wine that happened to hit me in the face while my mouth was open. I didn’t have much strength, but I didn’t have to walk a step, or do much of anything more than let what must have been thousands of hands clasp mine.

How real is a Mezem fan’s love for a fighter, which can shift with a thought on his death to his killer? Less than nothing and worth the same, I’d always thought. And yet, fighting Riji, I’d felt the sincerity in their exhortations, and now I felt it in their hands, and it was not just from the wine, because I remembered the same afterwards. Somehow in all this circus fakery, and across the chasm of language and nation, the spark that cleaves one human heart to another can still strike. More than one person said to me, “I’d be losing you, and it’s treason now because you’re king of a country we’re fighting—but I’d still spring you, if I had the choice,” in a way that I knew was honest, even without my eyes. Then it occurred to me that Mana had been right; I had done the semana kra thing.

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