133 - Life is Everything

Excerpt from Life Is Everything (unexpurgated version), by Norii Maziel Aitzas, Workfast Literary in Arko, Ye. 1552 / 55^th-to-last Year of the Present Age

I never expected the editor of the Watcher of the Ring, Akam Hinnias, to come to me frantically. “There’s a ring-fighter who says he’ll only speak to a writer who will write the entire truth of what he says, on his hope of Celestialis. Everyone in the Pages Mezem section and Watcher of the Ring staffs has chickened out, and now the black-haired foreign scruff is laughing that he’s not surprised. But I still need the story. I thought immediately of you.”

I gave the appropriate answer. “A sword-swinging backwoods barbarian insults every writer in the Mezem, and you want me to talk to him? Why don’t you just give him what he deserves, an invitation to Hayel?”

“Because he’s Lightning Loner,” said Akam, “and he just beat Riji the Mangler. It’s the Mezem story of the decade. Someone has to get something out of him.”

*

I am not war-trained. I don’t follow the Ring. I know next to nothing about it. I went to two or three fights on special occasions as a child. I wouldn’t know a thresher defence from an axe-cut if it nicked me in the nose. I decide I will just ask him how he did it, faithfully take down every word I can understand and then contritely check the facts and spelling with real Ring-scribes afterwards.

There is an utterly justified sense of indignation mixed in with the naked envy on their faces, as I pass their positions in the Mezem colonnade the evening after the fight, to meet the newly-throned pug. All I can do is cast apologetic looks. I didn’t even see it.

The inside of the Mezem is a world outside the world. It is furnished in faded Piinanian glory, all smoked mirrors and gilded curlicues suggestive of a more delicate and refined age.

Its residents dye their hair green or purple or rainbow, file their teeth to points, wear rings through parts of their bodies that cannot be mentioned in a decent publication, walk openly with naked hands and hairy torsos, yell across the genteel atria in barbaric tongues.

A primitive with animal bones lashed to his arms reclines on a master-crafted Aatzorian chair, playing chess on a gold-plated set, against a coal-black creature wearing nothing but an odd agglomeration of leather straps. An obscenely-muscled brown woman wearing nothing but an eye-stabbing orange slip of cloth wrapped loosely around her body strides purposely towards the glass-doored exit. The Mezem staff dotes on the fighters like faithful valets the beloved sons of a noble household.

The place smells of sweat, incense and ancient woodwork. The corridor to the fighters’ rooms is defaced with scribbles and scrawls in indecipherable script painted or smeared over the restrained Piinanian woodwork. Iskanzas Muras, fessas, the healer and de facto chief, sends one of the ubiquitous Mezem boys to lead me down it.

There is some negotiation, between this boy and Skorsas Trinisas fessas, Lightning Loner’s boy, whose drunkenly-free tongue at a Mil Torii Itzan party famously induced Riji to return, fatally, to the Ring. “First thing, before he’ll say a word, your illustrious self must say the oath,” I am firmly told. “In front of him.”

I am shown into a small simply-furnished room, its walls festooned with tributes, cards, ribbons and medallions, which barely hide the tally-scrawls in the stone where centuries of fighters have kept track of how many fights they won and survived. I prepare to meet the new-crowned king of the sweaty blood-clan, the toughest of the human pit-bulls, the one who loves truth.

We tend to think of Ring-fighters somewhat like tools: either stonily indestructible, when they prevail, or useless and to be forgotten, when they fail. It hasn’t occurred to me that Lightning Loner, injured severely enough to fall in the Ring the day before, might still be recovering.

He lies in bed, half propped up on pillows, his eyes covered with bandages so that he is entirely blind. Skorsas hovers nearby, ready to serve as his eyes and hands, as well as offering me tea, nectar, wine or anything else I might desire during the interview, in the Mezem tradition of grandiose hospitality.

I am familiar, after an afternoon of hurried research, with engravers’ renditions of the famous features: the wild shock of black Yeoli curls, the square brow, the sharp chin. What I did not know was how engravers idealize his size—or perhaps it is my own imagination, scaling him up to match his Ring reputation. Lightning Loner is not a tiny man, from what I can tell, but of average height, which makes him smaller than most fighters.

Nor is he nearly as rude and rough-cut as I expected, as I find once I have made the oath to his silent, impassive-faced witness and we begin our conversation. Though I was thoroughly warned by my colleagues of his offensive habit of speaking to everyone from slaves to nobles as equals, no matter how much respect he ought to pay or be paid, I certainly did not expect this to be offset by a straightforward civility so genuine and unfailing it makes me feel awkward. Nor did I expect him to be capable of speaking Enchian as flawless as any scholar’s, or his answers to have a grace and dry wit, undercut with humility, that one would more expect to hear at a diplomatic function than in the lair of the blood-mongers.

Lightning Loner speaks Arkan very fluently, for the short time he’s been learning it, as well as a passable Lakan, and his native tongue. He is better informed on world affairs than most Arkan nobles. He has a shelf full of Enchian and Arkan books on general-craft, politics, Arkan history and various other subjects; his night-table is heaped with more. He thinks before he speaks, and when he doesn’t, his answers still sound as if he had; when he is painfully blunt, it’s due to his refusal to gloss over the hardship of his circumstances to soothe Arkan audiences. If he had no reason to be blunt, if his Arkan speech were not fessas-accented and shot through with the mannerisms of the Mezem, because he learned it from Skorsas—if he were not here—one could easily think he is a foreign prince on a state visit.

So I wrote before I knew what was already an open secret in the Mezem: Lightning Loner and Fourth Shefen-kas Shaeranoias, the head of state of Yeola-e, were one and the same. But with me, he brushed off the matter of his true identity and the implications it raises. That was not the truth he wanted to tell Arko.

I came to him bearing a certain amount of annoyance and cynicism. I soon find it melted away. We tend to think of ring-fighters as brutes and thugs, albeit elevated ones, with no purpose or ambitions, no desires or memories, outside the Ring. We only see them fight, ferociously; we do not see them brood, or dream, or lie awake on their pallets thinking of home. We take their violence as their nature, their ferocity as willing. We forget that it is, in all but a few cases which serve well to sustain the misconception, forced upon them. Like all slaves, they must do the work given them or face punishment, which, to compel them to do this particular work must necessarily be severe: death by torture.

What I learn, at his every word, is that the man we know as Lightning Loner holds the opinion that the life of all living beings as sacred, and, therefore, no death should be entertainment.

Yet he cuts, thrusts and kills to the cheers of the crowd, fight-day after fight-day, because he has no other way to return to his life beyond the Mezem. A man of delicate sensibility forced to do what he despises, he wages a constant, deeper, all-pervading battle against shame, anguish and, ultimately, the despair that will cause a crucial slip in the Ring, and reduce the sum total of all his struggles to nil. Nor is he alone, he says; forced to be less than human, every ring-fighter strives, day in, day out, to maintain his humanity.

That is the true story of the ring-fighter’s life, the story that Loner wants Arko to know, if Arko is to know anything of him. It has never been mentioned, however, in the Pages or the Watcher, considered trivial, perhaps, or unsuitable to the sporting spirit of the Mezem and the tastes of Mezem followers. No writer has ever done a long article about him, all frightened off by the depth and insistence of his discontent, and his unwillingness to conceal it. After all, what Arkan wants his afternoon’s pleasant diversion intruded upon and tarnished by anything so grindingly sad?

But Lightning Loner has far more to say than that. The citizens of any culture, immersed in its ways as we all are necessarily, become blind to its warts, oblivious to its self-contradictions, numb to its barbarities. Though Lightning Loner is a savage and therefore cannot understand Arko, some might say, or perhaps has a particularly jaundiced notion of us due to his impression being based on Mezem fans, his observation is unclouded by familiarity, and his eye for fallacies unerring. He and I had barely begun to discuss his fight against Riji when he began offering his insights on Arko and Arkans in general, with an astonishing and merciless clarity.

Who and what we are, especially to the rest of the world, we don’t fully understand, though we have a moral obligation to, Loner contends. The myriad ways in which we impose suffering not just on foreigners, inside the Mezem and elsewhere, but on each other, our fellow Arkans, constantly astonishes him. We would benefit, he feels, by seeing it clearly for ourselves.

That is why Lightning Loner seized upon the first sufficient leverage he had to tell his tale his way. That was the seed of this book.

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