155 - You Whose Whim Is Life and Death

Sometimes, I thought, I tire of the excitement, the drama. I hadn’t felt nothing before I’d fought Riji, but now there was this strange sharp flatness within me, as if I wore armour where before I’d had skin. I asked myself if I were nervous underneath, couldn’t feel it at all, and guessed that probably I was. When had I so lost my knowledge of myself?

Feet began to pound up into the stands. The crowd had been a touch sparse for my thirty-first—my second thirty-first—understandable after fifty-seven deaths by trampling, but they’d be jammed in today, some even sitting on the steps, so that if there were a fire, many more than fifty-seven would die.

I had thought the city would be in mourning, tell the truth. Fifty-seven is many to die all at once, away from war or plague or disaster of the Earthsphere. I thought the Director would be scrambling to institute new laws or renovations or something to prevent it from ever happening again, as we would in Yeola-e. But no one seemed particularly concerned. Of course they’d been mostly fessas and okas. And it’s a place of death anyway, I thought, so why be concerned? The madness of Arko knows no bounds.

I will do my utmost, and then he will forgive me or I will forgive him, for what he does, I told myself. All is well. A deeper thought whispered bitterly, Are you a fool?

We both waited by the Weapons Trust, as fighters about to go into the Ring do, and I had with thirty-one other men. My Mahid waited like posts of coal beside me. I wore the hobbles and cuffs both, since the Director had decided to make my constraints part of my mystique. Skorsas would sling Chirel on my shoulder and the Mahid would free me when the Director’s hand was on the lever.

I did not look at Iliakaj when he was looking at me. He showed nothing when I did look at him, other than the usual singing tension that fighters get just before fights, which in him was more still, like the surface of a calm pond, than most. His fear, it seemed, he’d mastered; good news for me. Or so it seemed.

We said nothing. What was there to say? I was afraid that anything I said he would interpret as the typical fighter’s gambit to sap his morale; or that it would hurt him somehow; or that it would sound foolish; or that it would be contemptibly pathetic in the face of the horror he and I shared; or—I wasn’t sure why I was afraid to speak to him. So bitter, this coldness. I wondered if he, like me, had acquired a flatness, had lost his own feelings and his knowledge of himself, in those years. How could he not?

And yet perhaps that harmony was there still, between him and me, and I was just forbidding myself to feel it because of what we were about to do. Neither he nor I had changed into someone different. I wanted to look at him, to look for it, as if that were possible. I knew better than to do so. Whether it was there or not, he would show a face like a Mahid’s. It seemed wrong to intrude.

After the ceremony between fights, the crowd noise swelled like the roar in your ears when you are about to pass out, but full of joyous eagerness, demanding Iliakaj and I come out. Our boys called us. We went up in step, one of my Mahid taking my elbow to help me up the stairs, and the noise tripled. Rain is infrequent in Arko, but they do not postpone a fight for it unless it’s so thick the fans cannot see, and that’s vanishingly rare. It was overcast today, with drops spitting out of the sky.

The stands were a sea of madly-waving white specks—though the fight had not yet begun, the kerchiefs were out. I understood; we’d both made it known to our fans that we preferred not to kill, so mine were showing the white to tell me to spare him when I won, and his to spare me when he did. No surprise, Kurkas was there, perched in the Imperial Box’s throne like a voluminously-robed frog.

We went to our gates, the other six Mahid took their positions, and we made our bids, clean blade both as he preferred it, same as me. As always, his wife and his three children were there, the little ones smiling with perfect confidence.

The sacred words were intoned. As the Director took the lever and my Mahid freed me, our eyes met across the Ring. If there was expression in his, I could not read it. I worked the kinks out of my shoulders, and drew Chirel. The gong crashed and the gates clanged open.

I had noticed before the familiar way he took the Ring, like a long-time bureaucrat in Assembly Palace walking into her office; everything is to hand because she knows without thinking where it all is. It was something else again facing it. He moved as if he’d been born there, and the lions were his siblings and colleagues.

I went in aggressive and he came in cautious, as usual, and now we were close I looked him in the eyes again, to see whether my death might be there. I could not tell, and then we were fighting, so it was not a thought to have.

He had a touch and precision like an old master’s, that can feel you out and discern every weakness in an eye-blink. He was strong, too, at least as strong as me, with the easy liquid power in his strokes that you can get only by year upon year of combat. I was faster than him, I knew, but only slightly; if I had greater endurance than him it was only slight, too. And if I wanted to make a move he’d never seen, I’d have to invent it, though I was sure he had many I’d never seen.

The harmony was there, in that we understood each other without effort. That he could not hide. But it meant nothing if he’d spoken true, and if he was still afraid. I couldn’t see that, nor feel it blade-to-blade; but even if it was not there now, it could come up any time, especially if he felt me prevailing. The gong crashed for end of round, without us having got even a nick on each other. I hadn’t thought I was holding back, but perhaps I was without knowing it, and perhaps he was too. How much I’ve lost, of knowing myself, I thought.

As he toweled sweat from my head and neck, Skorsas said, “I know you don’t want to kill the Immortal.” I’m holding back without knowing it. “But you might have to. You have to think of your people first.” My boy knew what would persuade me. He said he’d kill me if I held back; I have to be true to my word and go all out. But I set my mind to slow the stroke the moment I won the opening, something I had never done before. I need but intend, I told myself, and I will do it.

To the death-sounds of gong and gates we went out again, and this time I had at him hammer and tongs, trapping him against the lion-trench, until he got out by driving me back with several strokes so hard he’d wind himself in a moment if he did many more, and side-stepping fluidly. I went at him, and I began to know I had him. Iliakaj was a plain-minded person—part of what I liked him for—so there was a straightforwardness to his fighting that I knew I could solve.

By the harmony between us, perhaps, he knew too, and I saw it in his grey chip eyes, under the blue sweatband he always wore: fear.

Or perhaps it was the third round, or fourth. In truth, I can’t remember. He was a great fighter, and it was a beautiful fight, and I felt the beauty as I always do in beautiful fights, but it was so cut through with pain that my memory shrinks away, like a caterpillar from a firebrand.

To counter the fear in himself, he raised anger, but that doesn’t truly solve fear. In tightness, he lost speed and the watery mind, by which I mean, the state in which you can flow whichever way is right with as little thought or hesitation as water. I had him, even more certainly.

Now I saw the struggle in his face, and could know it as if it were my own. He has me, I’ll be stripped down to nothing, deep breath start again, again, at my age, the little wool-hair bastard, I’ll cut out his guts, I’ll find it in myself, God of the Ancients send me the ability, it’s not coming, he won’t kill me but it’s another fifty and I don’t know if I can…

I saw him fight in his heart, as bravely as the greatest of heroes, to be better than he was; I saw him smash his head inwardly against his limits, and even so, drive them back some, take pleasure in it, and then fight despair again when he knew it was not enough. I saw him battle with futility, vanquishing it with thoughts of hope until futility made itself clear to him again. I saw him refuse to allow himself to believe I was better than him, even as I was. The fans were seeing it too, the cries of mine drowning out the cries of his. I felt tears gathering, burning, behind my own eyes. I am his despair. I never wanted to be that to anyone.

I stepped back. “Iliakaj…” Of course in the din no one could hear me speak; but there are some who can read lips, and truth-drug would betray me if I were suspected. So I just fixed his eyes, and put the question in them, which only he would know, having heard it from my lips before. My offer is still open.

He checked only long enough to get my meaning. Then he sprang in with a two-handed beheading-blow so hard I had to duck and wrist-parry both to escape it.

That left him far over-committed, of course. I saw him know where Chirel would come in, and anguish fill his eyes. In the last moment, I twisted the blade so the flat struck his head, and he fell boneless, his sword tumbling from his fingers.

I had struck to knock him out only long enough to put Chirel’s tip to his throat, but, as a war-teacher will say, there are different thicknesses of skull, so you can’t always know. It was a few breaths before he was back, and in the meantime, the stands seemed almost to float up from their pillars, for leaping and screaming Arkans. I had never seen so unanimous a white, even without my holding up my empty hand, which I did anyway.

All eyes turned to Kurkas, who had the glass doors of the Imperial Box open today. He sat considering for a time, making the entreaties of the crowd strengthen; then he showed the red.

My heart turned to ice in my chest. I looked down; Iliakaj’s eyes were open, and he was seeing. He looked at me, then, and I saw the truth in his: the harmony between us had never broken. He had been afraid, that was true; he’d used it to give the threat that he had never truly meant, or intended to carry out, weight enough for me to be fooled by it.

What he must have seen in my eyes, the crowd shrieked in words, begging in three and four and five-up. “This abject one begs You Whose Whim is Life and Death, spare him!” –“Your Divine Self cannot kill the Immortal!” – “We unworthy wretched devastated ones beg on our loathsome knees You Whose Choice is Fate Itself for mercy!”

The red stayed in his hand as if to say, “No semana kra here.”

I looked down at Iliakaj again. I could not bring myself to look at his family, though from a distance, it seemed, I heard three piping voices crying, “Spare these miserable lowly ones’ Daddy!” His eyes, made greyer by the grey sky, looked as if they were steeling themselves to take the thrust of Chirel into his brain-artery. My sword-hand seemed to have no existence except, ‘I will not do it.’ What would happen, if I bucked the Imperator, if I refused? He was ransoming me; he could not kill me. But I thought of the pincers, and the black silked hands over my mouth, and felt sick and stunned at once, knowing I did not have the will.

Then the crowd’s begging surged; Kurkas had heaved himself up, and was pacing the Imperial Box ponderously, the red and white kerchiefs clutched together in his hands, clasped behind his back, as if reconsidering. I never thought you had the showman in you, I thought acidly.

Not the best showman; the turn was too abrupt to be convincing, the flip of the white kerchief outward too melodramatic. The crowd went mad, though. Enough semana kra to let yourself imagine they love you. But as I sheathed Chirel, some part of me loved him for it. Such is the power, of power.

Iliakaj lay still for a bit, his eyes closed. Then he took a deep breath, and pulled himself up painfully to his elbows. Take a deep breath. Get up. Start again. I helped him up with both my hands, and we flung our arms around each other, letting our tears flow free.

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