164 - No shame lies with me

Mannas died for his liege—Raikas

By Norii Maziel : The Pages, Aras 28, 57^th-to-last Year of the Present Age (excerpts)

One evening last eight-day, Mannas the Wolf and Karas Raikas met in the bath of the Mezem, speaking quietly and in their native tongue, to make entirely sure their conversation would not be overheard.

The next morning Mannas was found dead in his room in the fighters’ quarters, of a deep slash in the throat that had severed lengthwise the right brain-artery, causing fatal blood loss all but instantly. The weapon was a sword-sharp shard from his broken water-glass, found on the floor beside his bed.

Yeola-e’s second-ranked Mezem fighter was slain by his own hand, two victories shy of the fifty that would have given him his freedom.

The clamour of grief from his fans, and from Mezem aficionados in general, was tinged heavily with shock and bewilderment, as a suicide usually is by those who care for the victim. The desperate question was heard all over Arko. Why? He was so close—why would he do this?

What almost never happens with a suicide is a full and public explanation. But Arko got one.

Red-eyed, pale and clad entirely in black, including a satin ribbon around his already-black head, and an arm-ring made of ebony that Mannas fans instantly recognized as Mannas’s, the Mezem’s first-ranked fighter came out to speak with the assembled writers that same morning.

In the way of a man who finds revealing truth a balm to his pain, who throws out a lifeline of authenticity in the hope that someone near will be humane enough to seize the end, Fourth Shefenkas Sharanoias—for that is who Karas Raikas really is—laid open everything he has hidden.

The Yeoli word for his position is neither possible to spell in or translate directly into Arkan; he gives it as ‘people-wills-one’ or ‘he who enacts the people’s will.’ He is head of state, and the position is hereditary, but ‘king’ is apparently so inaccurate a rendering that he unfailingly corrects it, almost as if it were an insult.

And yet once he had made his announcement, there was a change in his manner. The bitter wisecracks lessened, the formality increased, and the instinctive authority that he exudes in private—startling in a man who has only been a man for less than a year, by Arkan standards—he allowed to come very much to the fore. Laying claim to his true name, he was for once his true self.

The Marble Palace has known Shefenkas’s identity for more than a year, and it is an open secret in the Mezem. It has been mentioned in the Pages, but didn’t come into common knowledge, perhaps because it was not widely believed. He told me before I wrote Life is Everything, but I refrained from mentioning it in the book in respect of his wishes. “It doesn’t matter,” he maintained unwaveringly. “You are writing about the Mezem, and here I am no different from anyone else, and don’t want to be seen as such.”

“Mannas and I grew up together in Vae Arahi,” he told the assembled writers, in a quiet voice. “I don’t remember meeting him, I don’t remember not being friends with him. We were what is called in Yeoli, kerel kuriyel: brothers of the heart. He and I both knew that we were being set up to fight against each other in our fiftieth fights. He would not let that happen.”

Mannas was one Yeoli, Mezem experts agree, who had a chance against the Living Greatest. Shefenkas himself admitted this. “He wanted neither his blood on my hands, nor mine on his. We both would have been drugged out of our heads, and who knows who would have won,” he said.

“We last spoke yesterday, and we said farewell. Yes, I knew he would, and I told no one, and I don’t care, because that was his choice. In the end he would claim that much freedom.” By the law of the Mezem, Shefenkas should have informed the Director of Mannas’s intention so it could be forestalled; gladiators have been executed in the past for the like. But Shefenkas is ruled more strongly by laws in the style of his people, particularly concerning personal choice, and the universal law that requires honouring a friend’s wishes.

Shefenkas—who also revealed that he has been infected with the germ of the head as a precaution against his escaping—lives with eyes entirely open to the brutal possibility that every sacrifice and torment he and others have borne so as to guard his life, including Mannas’s suicide, might prove futile. “If I win two more fights, by the law I should be freed. But I don’t think that is what will happen, whatever the people of Arko think is fair. The best I can hope for is to be ransomed home.”

But, he admits, he doesn’t know whether Yeola-e can even afford what he is worth. “I might win myself nothing more, with my fifty fights, than a secret execution. But I have to stay alive just on the chance, and Mannas knew that, as did the other Yeolis who did the same. They gave their lives for that. Not one of them, once he’d decided what he must do, flinched from it or hesitated.”

Asked how Mannas managed to kill himself in one blow with a piece of glass, Shefenkas answered, “He was a great warrior, and he gave himself entirely to what he had chosen. Yes, he gave his life for mine. It was not what I wanted, but I am subject to the will of my people. You can clap chains on us, but we will guard our freedom in our hearts. And then we’ll arrange it. Mannas is a slave no longer.”

Asked what he will do, if he is set free after Yeola-e is entirely subjugated, he answered without hesitation—even though these words alone could spell his doom—“Fight until we are free again.”

And yet, when asked what message he would like passed to all Arko, he was implausibly generous, for a national enemy. “In my darkest times here, I have sometimes taken strength from the love of those Arkans who seem to genuinely love me. I guess it’s only human to take it where you find it—take it, and draw strength from it. For that, I thank all those Arkans who do have real feelings for me.” And when one writer made obeisance to him as a foreign potentate, he said, flinching, “Don’t do that, you’ll get in a world of trouble… I didn’t see or hear that and if any of the rest of you have hearts, you didn’t either.” By some internal miracle of his own heart, despite all he and his people have suffered at Arkan hands, he cares about some of us at least.

The rest of the day, Shefenkas mourned in the Mezem morgue beside the corpse of his heart’s brother, voicing his grief in the free Yeoli way, and sleeping on the morgue floor that night. He was not permitted, of course, to witness the cremation outside the City the next day, though he wrote Mannas’s epitaph.

I spoke with him privately that morning.

*

The people-wills-one of Yeola-e is still in the same black, having neither changed nor bathed since he donned it. The fall of ringlets that normally hangs low over his brow is gone, shorn almost to the scalp; he cut it off with his sword to send to the flames gripped in Mannas’s hands, he explains. Grief and fatigue crease his eyes.

Speaking of that final conversation, he tells me: “Mannas is—was—in many ways braver, and wiser, than me. He saw what to do clearly, when I was not allowing myself to.”

The conversation was not lengthy. “I told him I’d hired someone to kill me, darting me with instant-kill-juice in the Ring, or however—I told them not to tell me how they were going to do it. He’d have none of it. He kept repeating the law that rules my life, ‘The people wills.’ He told me, he was giving his life for Yeola-e as much as if he fell in battle. I couldn’t argue…” Shefenkas is seized with sudden tears, which he makes no effort to conceal. “I gave him what he most needed, what I owed him; I promised him I would not give up to despair, and I would get home and win the war. Sometimes you have to commit yourself to doing something you have no idea how you’re going to do. Then we made our goodbyes.” He weeps silently, his hand caressing the arm-ring, without a trace of shame.

But now he’s revealed to the Arkan public his name, does that not change the game? What are the implications? He reiterates what he said to the gathered writers: “I kept it secret out of shame, shame that I was a head of state fighting in the Ring like a dog or a rooster. But I’m done with that. It’s not as if I chose it. No shame lies with me.

“I don’t think Kurkas much cares whether Arkans know or not. I think the only thing that will change is that they won’t have to fake the manumission ceremony because now there’s justifiable cause not to free me. I’ll fight my fiftieth, the city will celebrate and the next day my faithful Mahid will tell me my presence is required at the Marble Palace, and you probably won’t hear from me again. I’m planning to set my affairs in order before the fight.”

Though he’d rather talk at length about his reminiscences of Mannas—the childish adventures they shared as boys, the battles fought together against the Lakans, Mannas’s unfailing smile and fiercely-held hope—I press Shefenkas on his own future. What does he really think will happen after his faithful Mahid take him to the Marble Palace?

“If I’m lucky, the Marble Palace and my sister Artira, who is acting in my place, will come to a ransom agreement, and I’ll go home. If I’m not so lucky, they’ll leave me in the Marble Palace dungeon and forget me. If I’m most unlucky, they’ll just kill me.

“But, tell the truth, I’m not really thinking about that. I still have two fights to go, and if I distract myself from them with what comes after, then what comes after might become entirely moot. I’m still a fighter, thinking four days ahead at the most.”

The guess is that he will be matched for his fiftieth either against S’fetkabras the Zak or, in a return match, Iliakaj the Immortal. Shefenkas refuses to speculate.

The least surprised by his illustrious identity were his most devoted fans. People like Freniraikas—who has now changed his public name to Frenishefenkas—keep saying things like, “We knew he was a king. It’s written all over him. Look at the way he carries himself.” I recall the impression when I first met him, which I wrote into Life is Everything: “If he were not here, one could easily think he is a foreign prince on a state visit.”

Shefenkas bears even the bitter likelihood of a futile future with an effortless dignity, despite having suffered one agony after another, from floggings to Mahid torture to the relentless news of his people’s deepening defeat to, now, the loss of his brother of the heart. Honesty has heartened and thus raised him.

In fact, the whole revelation was a very generous act towards the people of a nation that has so hurt him and all he loves, and quite likely will destroy him. Neither he nor Mannas was here by choice, so, from their standpoint, Arko was owed no explanations. Shefenkas could have let Mannas’s followers roast indefinitely in the pain of their bewilderment.

“The best of his fans loved him too,” he says in explanation. “At one time, I didn’t think it was ever real, the feeling fans have for us. I have learned that at least with some people, it is. So they deserve to know. I promised him also that I would explain to those who would need it.”

All through our talk, and even as he walks away, Fourth Shefenkas Sharanoias holds his arms folded, his sword-hand staying clasped on the ebony arm-ring, symbolic of his own vow to not let his heart’s brother have died in vain.

†

There was something I said to Norii that he did not quote, deciding that he should override my lack of caution. He wrote me a note later saying that he’d been worried about what Kurkas might have the Mahid do to me, if it went in.

“I went away alone to put on the arm-ring. When I did, I swore an oath, on my crystal, and the Great Crystal of Yeola-e in spirit, second Fire come if I am forsworn, that I won’t take it off again until I’ve come back to Arko with an army, and sacked it.”

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The morgue scene from Minis's point of view.

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