157 - Hearts of Home

I was let off training the next day, as was Iliakaj. I came out of my room only for a hot bath, which knitted me together further, despite the shackles. He, I heard, did not come out of his room at all.

Was I who I should be any more? I wanted to know, and yet that seemed to necessitate looking in a mirror. I hadn’t done that for more than two moons shy of a year, other than what I could not help but see out of the corners of both eyes when I passed between the Legion Mirrors. I had so mastered the habit of looking straight ahead only when I did that that it was graven on my identity. It wasn’t as if I were even responsible for how I looked any more; perish even the thought of that when you have Skorsas.

The second day after, I trained, as did he, though I saw he had orders to go light and not spar. I was calm, but I felt very fragile; going onto the training-ground, he looked as I felt, a touch of gingerness in his every step. I stayed away from him. Coming off he looked a little stronger, as if he had his head down and was climbing a staircase.

He was never looking at me when I glanced at him, and vice-versa, if he did glance at me. I hoped he didn’t. Without the flowing swath of gold around his neck—he must have forty-nine chains hung from a twelfth hook on his ceiling—he looked naked, and not like himself.

I wanted to speak to him; more exactly, I wanted to throw myself down before him in shame, saying sorry a thousand times. But what good would it do him? It would only make him feel the pain of the act’s own futility.

The second night he went out. To his family, I thought. They will help heal him. On the third day, as the Mahid were unshackling me for training, he said to me, as he passed, “Good afternoon,” as if nothing had happened. Tongue half sticking, I wished him the same back, not knowing what else to say.

As we were coming out of training, his boy passed with a box on his shoulder marked “Kerilas Abrian, Vintner.” Another healing method, I thought. After dinner he was waiting for me by the stairs. He looked at me direct. “So, lad, care to have a drink?”

“Uh… I guess… thanks…” I didn’t know what else to say.

“I’m three days off.” An Enchianism in his Arkan I didn’t understand at first. “Iska would have my nuts if I poured it down on top of the first or second day after a concussion,” he added. “You are cleared for booze, aren’t you?”

“I… have no idea,” I said. Iska had said nothing about it; it slowly dawned on me that this meant I was under no forbiddance.

“I heard when they brought you in. Hey! Iska! Is this one cleared—”

“No, no, don’t ask him!” I said fast. “He might say I’m not! Shh! Curse it…”

“Yes, but go easy,” Iska said to me, from his desk. “Three cups, no more.”

“You’re joking, right?” I said. “Three cups, what’s the point?”

“Three, Shefen-kas,” he said, with the stern healer face.

“Fine,” I gritted.

Iliakaj invited me to his room but I suggested mine so that I could be unchained. Mine was not equipped with jewel-crusted goblets as his was, so his boy went for them, then both his boy and mine disappeared like wisps of smoke, bolting the doors to my room behind them. Like a civil host he poured both almost to the rim and let me pick. I sipped. It was old; I hadn’t tasted anything so subtly complex since the century-old stuff in the Pikeras Fokas.

He took a much deeper draught of his own, and said, “Well, we knew it was going to happen, hmm?”

“Iliakaj, I’m sorry. A thousand times, I’m sorry.” Tears burned behind my eyes. I looked down into the round red-black refuge of the wine, though not as such an angle as to see my own face, then gulped down more.

He took a deep, long breath. “I know, Sievenka. I know. Look, it’s unlikely I’ll find anyone of your caliber again. Next time I’ll be out.”

“I wish you hadn’t found anyone of my caliber this time.”

“The Gods are laughing their guts out. And I get more training as a warrior.”

For all the wars you mean to fight in? I had a sudden wish, to have him in my elite when I got home, if I ever did. But perhaps he wouldn’t fight Arkans, since his love was one, and his children were half. “It would be like the Arkan Gods to get a laugh out of this.”

“I won’t make five hundred,” he said, “though some part of me thinks that’s what I’m going for.”

“You think you can’t last that long?” Now we were talking like friends again; how wrong was it? I took another generous mouthful of wine.

“Depends on how long they draw out the next fifty.”

“Hilarious Gods of Arko grant that you don’t have to,” I said. “They won’t draw it out that much; the chains, you know.” He nodded yes, Arkan-style, and upended his goblet into his mouth. “I can’t tell you how sick it makes me feel.” I did the same.

“You can’t let it get to you.” He poured again for both of us.

Maybe the wine put a flush on my courage, as I could tell it had on my cheeks. “Iliakaj... you don’t think they’d match us against each other again, do you?”

“They might.” I saw him read my face. “Sievenka… it’s hard. I know.”

“I shouldn’t think about it.” I had to be cautious. I was delicate.

“Sievenka, look.” He got up to take my shoulders in his hands. I listened as if he were a war-teacher. “They might do it again for the money they’d make. They might do it again to break you down more. They might do it again just because they can. In fact, I expect it. That way if they do not, I will have had a kind surprise.”

“You are stronger than I,” I said. My eyes filled with tears which, to my horror, seemed to be made of fear.

He yanked me in and trapped me in his hard-limbed hug, that was full of strength. As I lost it on his shoulder, he went on speaking, his voice sounding through his muscle against my ear. “Oh, I have my weaknesses, and my dark nights, too. But if I didn’t know to anticipate the evil the idiot or He Whose Fat is the Lard of the World can do to me and those I like, I’d be long mad, or dead. And if I have to do it again, I will. And so will you, because you have your people behind you. You are not alone, however much alone you feel.”

“My people are being destroyed,” I whispered.

“In this, I am one of your people.”

“You have too many troubles of your own to look after me!”

“You’ve held my life in your hand; in that sense I’m yours. So—”

“I shouldn’t even let you do this.” I tried to pull away, but he had more strength to hold me than I had to go.

“Shut up and listen, boy!” I looked at him as at a war-teacher again. “I’ve been here where you are... crazy with Mezem. You can do it; I see it in you. I can see you can beat this place.”

“Beat this place doesn’t just mean fifty, to me,” I whispered.

“Oh, I know what it means, Sievenka. But you can do that, too. You can hold onto yourself; that’s what I mean, more than anything.”

“I… I’m trying…”

“And this is your second cup, right?”

“Yes.” I knocked it back in one, and held it out to him empty. “I mean, this is.” He filled it again.

“I have something for you… Samas!”

His boy had gone for something; we heard the silky-smooth voice of Skorsas through the door. “May this one help your mighty self, Immortal?”

“Yes, thank you, Skorsas: fetch the envelope on my desk with KR written on it—Samas will know where it is—and another flask from my box.”

“This one hears and obeys.”

Something for me? I could not keep my mind on its own thoughts, though, as we were talking about the Mahid, and he said, “You know, I had to kill one of their failed kids?” He’d been sent into the Ring at seventeen, for somehow falling short as a Mahid, Iliakaj told me, downing more wine. “But he was free. In the Ring, he was freer than he’d ever been in his life. He smiled… really smiled when I killed him. He Whose Blah-Blah showed the red, of course. Probably the most merciful death he could have got.” I threw back the rest of my cup, and Iliakaj filled it again, as determinedly as an Arkan waiter.

The bolt was shot, and Skorsas came gracefully into the room, not apparently carrying anything under his scarlet silk shirt. He smoothly kicked the door shut, and with the odd clarity you sometimes get with drunkenness, I heard the outside bolt slide closed with a profound iron click. He drew the flask and the envelope out from under his shirt with a flourish, placing the former on the table and the latter into Iliakaj’s hand, and, once the bolt was opened again, was gone.

My cup was empty again, somehow. “That was a lovely first one,” I said. “I need the second, now.” He poured, chuckling. “Good thing I’m limited to only three.”

“Yes, good thing.”

“You never know what excesses I might descend to without the wise limits set by Iska.”

He snorted. Then he handed me the envelope. “This is from my woman, for you.”

I felt my eyebrows rise hard in a distant, dreamy sort of way. “Your woman?”

He mistook my concern. “Don’t worry, I’m not jealous. Her, and the kids.” I opened it. It held a long lock of blond hair in a ribbon, and three shorter brown and blond ones, the colours of each of his children’s hair. They were held all together by another ribbon. I took it up in my fingers, and stared at him, not understanding.

“She wanted to say thank you. She could see you didn’t want to do that to me.”

“Of course I—” Tears cut me off mid-sentence. I am not my own any more, I thought; my feelings do what they will.

“We all five understand, Sievenka.” He wrapped his arms around me again. How do I deserve this goodness from him, from them, after what I have done? How do I deserve this mercy, this love? I almost hated myself for accepting it; but it would be much worse to refuse it. He spoke to me gently, until the crying eased enough for me to say, “Tell her, tell them, I could never… I don’t want to… I never want to kill anyone, here. I don’t want to make their wives and their kids see them on their pyres. I’d even have spared Riji, if I were a better fighter…”

“Drink up, lad.”

“Good idea.” I gulped. “All-Spirit... why hasn’t all that got me more drunk yet?”

“You’re crying a lot of it out. Blood-fire, the Haian says.”

“What a waste of good wine.” I gulped again. “You were full of shit. Not about the fear, but that if the only death your found hand was a chance one…” We both started giggling. After several tries I said it correctly. “The only chance your hand found was a death one. Why? Did you fikken want to lose?”

“No shit next time.”

“You stupid asshole,” I said. “I would have given it to you. I don’t care. No matter if I lost. If you won, you were free.”

“And my honour?”

Wine enabled me to say what I had been too shy to say before. “What about your wife’s love? And your kids’? Is that worth less than your honour?”

“You want her to be tied to a man who’d take a false victory? And them to have a dishonourable Daddy?”

“Ever asked her? Or them? Of course not, you’re a fikken Enchian. You think they’re going to be ashamed of what you’ve done in the fikken Ring?” We were speaking a slurring mix of Enchian and Arkan, the swear-words all in Arkan. He was pouring again. “Fikken thanks, you dumb fik.”

“Fikken up yours, you young fik, you’re welcome. Sometimes, Shevenka, you just can’t ask a man to give up his heart for his heart’s desire.”

His pronunciation of my name was improved by slurring. “Better, better, but’s it’s Ssssshevenga. No wonder she sent me their hair, I give more of a shit about them than you do.” He pressed his lips together and took a deep hard breath through his nostrils; but his anger didn’t last long.

“Another cup.”

“Ohhhh, but I’m only supposed to have three… and this is the second already, shen!”

I can’t remember much more. I have a vague sense of showing him that I understood, telling him I knew he loved the Mezem, because he was surrounded with it, in its presence more than in his family’s, that it was his life even if it was the ugliest place on the Earthsphere, but then I couldn’t say Earthsphere in five or six tries, and we both fell over laughing, and then we were singing “Hearts of Home,” he in Enchian, I in Yeoli, so badly that I suspect it drew a cringe even out of the black marble souls of the Mahid. Not long after that, I understand, I passed out.

--