158 - Life is Everything, redux

I don’t remember the rest of my time in Arko well. It didn’t seem I was mad at the time, at least at first, but then a hand underwater doesn’t look wet. The string of thoughts follows one after the other, like days; but when you look back, imagining half a year as a whole, and you see it as the blackness it truly was, just as the thrusts of history only become apparent much later.

Kyera Shae-Lemana was my thirty-sixth fight. The falling-apart feeling came back, and this time Sasaber couldn’t get rid of it. From then, I remember some utterly trivial things, like a clasp on a belt or the fall of someone’s hair, vividly as yesterday, while major ones, such as being tortured, I remember only the skeleton of.

Some signs of madness were there, though, enough for me to notice at the time: waking up in the morning and finding my hands shaking, for instance, whether flexed or relaxed, no matter how hard I willed them steady. I went to Iska, who pressed them in his own, his palms warm and gentle, like a father’s.

“So far you’ve borne everything,” he said. “What have you clung to? Don’t tell me; ask yourself. Whatever it is, it’s worked; keep clinging to it.” I said, “I don’t know that I have the strength.” He said, “Nonsense. Certainly you do. You know you’re at”—I can’t remember the number—“fights? Better than half”—or was it two thirds?—“Take it one day, one fight at a time, for that’s how it will come at you.” In truth, I think he wasn’t sure I had the strength; but saying this might give it to me.

When spring came in Yeola-e, of course, the war began to move again. Tinga-e fell, the warriors too starved to fight, and was sacked. When I read in the Pages that the streets had run ankle-deep in blood and a hundred thousand Yeolis had died, I had no way of knowing how much it exaggerated. But I could not doubt the city had been taken; and Arkan warriors encamped for a whole Yeoli winter will be vengeful.

I had killed three Yeolis when Norii came to speak with me the last time for the book. We’d become friends; I had told him my whole life story and everything on my mind, except for one thing; of all that, about an eighth was safe for him to write. I could tell when I went beyond the pale; he’d put his noteboard down.

“We’re done, then,” he said, as he was readying to go. He was the only Arkan I’d ever met from whom the Aitzas accent actually sounded refined and intelligent, showing how it was clearly meant to. I would miss him. “Unless you have any last thing to say?”

“I do,” I said. “Once I am free, I will return with an army and sack Arko.”

His pen froze in his hand, and he put down the noteboard, looked up and quirked his eyebrows, which were copious and yet narrow at once. “How do you expect to manage that?” he asked in that delicate accent, that had the weight of centuries of empire in it.

I smiled mysteriously and said, “You expect me to give away my plans?” So Life is Everything reads; in truth, I don’t remember the exchange. I do not doubt, though, that I thrust the noteboard into his hand and said, “Go ahead! Quote me, let all Arko know and be damned!” He did.

The title came from something I’d said when he’d asked me why I thought the Mezem was evil, and this killing we did, wrong: “Life is everything to the man I kill, just as life is everything to me,” or words to that effect. It came out after my forty-first fight, and he brought me a copy, and signed it with pen as if he’d scribed it, a custom for authors whose words are passed through the machine. I hadn’t thought he’d write like the others, but even so I was not prepared for what I read. His words, and my words in his hands, spoke my life here almost more clearly, it seemed, than I had lived it.

That same day, when my Mahid changed shifts, the two new ones cuffed me and led me by the elbows, not to the Marble Palace, but under the stands, where two more waited. They stripped me and did me as only Mahid unleashed, as they call it, can. Their leader was Second Amitzas, the head Mahid torturer; young Ilesias was one of the others. They had me for a good two beads.

I will say only that if one imagines a session of torture as a story, the main thread was that Amitzas had a serrated knife covered with the Lakan ointment of pain, azan akanaja, and orders to mark me with it once, to show the Imperator’s displeasure at my vow to sack Arko. The other Mahid had their sub-plots. One of them tore a bite-sized piece of flesh out of my back with his teeth, which even other Mahid find perverse; he got in trouble for it. I still have the scar, to show anyone who doesn’t believe this. It finished with Amitzas saying, “You will remember, every time you look in a mirror,” and slashing my right cheek from nose to jawline. The stuff started eating into my flesh instantly. They left me lying in the dust for Skorsas to find.

Iska took two beads on the wound, determined that I should be disfigured as little as he could help. I remember weeping when they lowered me into the bath, more in pleasure than pain. No surprise, the bite festered; that in itself kept me in bed and in half-waking nightmares, despite the sedatives, for three days.

By the number of times Skorsas said, “You will always be beautiful,” I knew my looks were ruined. I had never seen how I took them for granted; though I’d never thought myself as well-favored by the die as my father had been, I certainly had on occasion, as people do, looked into a mirror, posed and thought, “A fine figure this one cuts, yes, not bad at all.” Never again. I’d turn my head to see myself in profile from the uncut side, and wish I could enter rooms that way; or think, “On someone else, I’d think I’d say those eyes have seen too much.”

On the first day after, a note came with a very short poem, directing me to find things of mine in a certain place in the woods, signed, “Raven.” Skorsas went. It was my crystal and my father’s wisdom tooth, both of which the Mahid had torn off and thrown into the dust under the stands, and a lock of my hair, such as they’d all cut from my head as they left, for trophies.

I wasn’t in a state to notice, still raving, when Skorsas fastened the crystal and the tooth around my neck, but when I could, I thought: Ilesias. He did what was commanded, as he must; but wanted to give me some mercy. I had no use for a curl of my hair; he’d sent it just to show he’d taken it only for appearances. A Mahid by birth but not by nature, I thought, and then wondered how long he would last.

As for how the rest of the city took Life is Everything, my discontent came as a shock, of course. The tavern-master of the House of the Mountains accosted me in the colonnade after training a day or two later, and threw himself to his knees: apparently the mood of his place had turned so glum that his livelihood was threatened. He begged me to come and say something, anything, to cheer the miserable curly-black-wigged throng, apparently not noticing the ankle-shackles.

Hard on his heels came the king of the clan, a thin man with arms of straw whom one could tell was Arkan only by his blue eyes and his speaking; his hair and eyebrows he’d somehow made indistinguishable from mine, and he wore a vein-blood-red Yeoli-style shirt. His Karas Raikas pendant, the insignia of the fellowship, was golden; probably his life savings had gone to buy it.

The only name I had ever known him by was Freniraikas, which means “Child of Raikas.” I thought his heart would fail him, just from seeing me close; he was tongue-tied for so long I started feeling awkward myself. Finally he said what he had come to say: that if he could, he would free me, this on behalf of my true followers as well as himself.

From people who’d give their hair to see me fight, I thought, that means something. On a slip of paper I wrote my name in Yeoli. “Get this tattooed on your shoulder,” I said. “Then get those you know who truly would free me if they could to do the same. In the sack, my warriors will know by that, who loved me and believed in me.” His eyes bugged; then his face took on a glow, like those of people in Arkan paintings who’d been brushed by divine grace (odd-looking under black curls), as if he’d played a part in a legend that would be told for a thousand years.

Others thought I was a poor sport, throwing this pall on Arko’s love for me; in the Watcher, they called me cynical and small-minded, in the Pages ungrateful and a coward.

The rest of the city just took it as a stunning new turn of the script, and relished the heightening of the tragedy. I had wondered about Yeoli things becoming the rage in the city that was Yeola-e’s deadliest enemy; now it came to me why. Like Kurkas’s Tinga-eni wine, we were something to devour; it was whetting its appetite for us, savoring our delights, finding this new flavorful little morsel tasty. No wonder, I thought, Kurkas always licks his lips more at me than at his dinner, even when it comes from a breast.

Then Ilesias snuck to my window at night; I woke with the half-dreaming notion that it was Niku, and learned how desperately I missed her when I saw it was not. He told me that the one who’d bit me, whose name was Barbutas, had seen him pick up my crystal and tooth, which by Mahid measure would have been treason, and was blackmailing him. He needed a Yeoli crystal and a wisdom tooth, to prove he hadn’t returned them to me.

I was not willing to give up any of the wisdom teeth I had, so suggested he retrieve one from the lion-trench, which he did, though I learned later he could have gone one much more easily from a back alley in the poor quarter. The crystal he got from a jeweler—they were getting popular enough—and likewise a gold leaf like those in my hair, when Barbutas required that of him. I hoped that would be enough.

A few days later, I was in my room when the two Mahid changed shifts. The moment the relieved pair were gone, one of the fresh pair slid the bolts and said, as they always did, “Karas Raikas, you are required.” His voice seemed unusually young.

I opened the door. One of them was Ilesias; his face was Mahid stone, but his cheeks were pale, and even a stony pair of blue eyes can emanate terror. The other one was Barbutas, and what radiated from beneath the stone of his face was a eager smugness.

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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.

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156 - In the fire of full-bore expression

Before I began writing, so that my life became a book, I would sometimes ask myself what its theme would be if it were one. That divided it in my mind to several parts, including the one about my time in the Mezem, of which the theme was suffering. Its nature, its touch, its smell, its taste, its edges, its rhythms—I came to know it all as a shepherd knows his stick or a bureaucrat her pen.

Torture I have heard defined as being subjected at length to the unbearable; and so I came to know the nuances, the ebbs and flows, the processes, of the unbearable, searing and crystalline.

Subjected at length to the unbearable, do we learn to bear it? No, else it is not unbearable. We have borne it, as we still live; and yet we have not.

The Mahid made as fine a show as Mahid ever can, shackling and cuffing my wrists again after I’d received my chain, just to free my wrists, at least, the moment we were out of the crowd’s eye. Pretending the writers hounding me weren’t there, I headed to the baths, with Skorsas and the Mahid shadowing me, while Iliakaj headed to the infirmary; he looked all right, moving the same as ever, but Iska never let you go away unexamined after a head-blow.

I was just thinking that next time I saw Iliakaj I wasn’t sure I’d be able to look him in the face after what I’d done to him, and yet at the same time yearning desperately to speak to him, when my thoughts seemed to dissolve outwards and something huge, flat and immovable thumped into my shoulder from the side. As Skorsas grabbed me, I realized distantly it was the wall. I’d gone faint; I felt as if I was half-floating under water, and as if something within was tearing me apart, both at the same time. I’d join Iliakaj in the infirmary after all.

It is all vague. I remember the feel of the bed-frame in both my hands, as I clutched it; I was thrashing. I remember Skorsas saying, “Cruel Gods; defeat is a curse to any man. Why must victory also be a curse to this one?” I remember the dully sweet tang of poppy juice as Iska mixed it; then a flatness that was not the mind sheltering itself, but being dulled. I went still, and Skorsas stripped me and washed the sweat off me with a cloth and toweled me dry, tenderly as if I would break if he were even slightly rough. Then he climbed onto the bed with me, pulled me against him with my head on his shoulder and held me hard. “Stay like that,” Iska ordered him.

Everything I’d endured in the Mezem seemed to rise in me, poising to break over me like a sea-wave. Thinking of going into the Ring next, I couldn’t imagine being able to fight, let alone win. It seemed even my bones shook. “This is beyond my skill,” Iska said to Skorsas. “He needs a Haian.”

“Can’t be the one he used to have.”

“I’ll find another.” He was gone. Skorsas didn’t even loosen his grip on me until Iska came back, with the Haian in tow. That was as the effect of the drug was wearing off; he’d told Iska that he could not know my true state until it did. While Skorsas kept his arms wrapped around my neck, the Haian, Sasaber, felt my wrists.

My strength is gone, all of it, just like that... I don’t know how, and yet part of me knows it could be no other way. He knew nothing of my life. I explained it all. I feel like I am dying though I know I am not. I am breaking; I guess this is what it feels like. And yet I was dry-eyed, that obsidian flatness still in me.

“He needs greater privacy for what I will do,” Sasaber said. Iliakaj had been cleared to go up to his room while I’d still been on the poppy juice, and I couldn’t see far beyond the bed for the curtains they’d pulled around, but I could hear the voices of boys and guards. They took me up to my room, Skorsas and Sasaber with their shoulders under my arms, while the Mahid noiselessly slid up after us like two black ghosts.

Once Skorsas had obsequiously closed the door in the Mahid’s faces, and I was lying down again, Sasaber told him he needed to be alone with me, and Skorsas went through his door, bolting it on his side as he was now required to. Sasaber asked me the last thing in the world I expected. “When was the last time you had sex?”

Niku… I hadn’t even had the urge to whack. I counted days in my mind. It was like a time so long-gone it was in truth another world. I flew… I thought I did… was that a dream? “More than a moon,” I said.

“You need the opening of it,” he said. “Relax.” He made me breathe to his count, which made it very slow and deep, then talked me through relaxing, instructing me to loosen each muscle in turn from my toes up to my head, since I could not keep track of them well enough now to do it all at once, or even this way, by myself. I lay lax if not peaceful then, and he took hold of my manhood.

A man my age deprived so long should turn to fire in a moment and hit the ceiling with his seed in the next, even if the touch has only the impersonal tenderness of a healer healing. I felt instead as if the skin of my penis were the skin of my elbow or my knee, and there was stone inside. There truly is something wrong with me, I thought.

“You have walled yourself up all around,” he said. “Locked yourself away from feeling.” You must be kidding, I thought. When feeling is shredding me? But I thought of the flatness. “Open yourself.” He spoke as if it were a choice. There seemed to be no more choices for me in this than there is movement for a rock.

But no one is more patient and persistent than a Haian set on healing, and he had tricks. He somehow found the faintest thread of a vein of it in me, that seemed to want anything but to be grown into what it should be. It fought him all the way, like an animal thrashing so as not to be dragged out of its cage. Fighting is all… I fight in waking, I fight in my dreams, the edges that are my insides clang against each other and spatter what I am scarlet onto the golden sand. I came fighting, a violent ripping come, like the thrust of a sword and the spurt of heart-blood, and after I had screamed and thrashed like death-throes from it I didn’t stop screaming and thrashing like death-throes.

“Go on,” he said. “Release it. Let it out.” He had felt in my wrists, somehow, that sexual pleasure would shatter the flatness.

I went for a good bead. I cannot describe it in words since there was no thought, no more than for a screaming infant. I felt as the infant must feel, a deliciousness in the total release that is deep as the bones and down to the toes. In the fire of full-bore expression, one’s suffering is somehow knitted together from shattered bits into something coherent and therefore understandable, forged into something that may somehow, in spite of all, lend strength. In the rage of full-bore expression, one’s suffering is made into story, observable and so bearable.

Sometime while I was in it, Skorsas came back in and took me firmly in his arms again. All through, Sasaber stroked the air around me as if he were caressing some aspect of me that extended beyond my skin. I went until I was exhausted, already spent from the fight, and fell asleep like the dead, sleeping through dinner. When I woke up, I felt renewed, at least somewhat. I was myself again, at least as I was now.

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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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154 - His mind could change in the flash of a blade

I stood leaning back against the wall, stunned, barely able to believe what had happened except that my cheek stung from his hand.

Now what? What do I do with that? I tried to see clearly whether he’d meant it, and couldn’t; his words hung in my ears, You won’t know for sure, when we’re in the Ring, will you?

He hadn’t been faking the fear. I’d have staked my life on that. You can feign a shaking voice or hands, but not the smell of fear-sweat. He was not terrified that I would kill him—I couldn’t imagine he’d suddenly ceased to trust me not to—but of being taken down to no chains again, at his age. Perhaps he even felt something no one else could know, about the failing of his strength, or had had a touch of foreknowledge.

Or perhaps he was even afraid, as I had been the night before I’d fought Riji, of defeat.

The question isn’t whether he’ll do his utmost to beat me, I reminded myself. He will; it’s just whether he spoke true when he said that if his hand found a kill it would take it. In truth, I will find out on the first exchange. And yet he might not even know himself. If not, I wouldn’t find out anything, because his mind could change in the flash of a blade.

But he and I had been such friends; I had not imagined that unspoken seamless harmony. He was a steadfast person, as his mistress must know after three children, and the Mezem after seeing him getting up, taking a deep breath and starting over eleven times. One of those with steel bars in his soul, who is trustworthy to the end; I could not suddenly mean nothing to him. Would that not stay his hand?

And so weaken him, I thought. He’s afraid of that, too. He is fighting with himself, knowing his liking for me might be his defeat.

Iliakaj, I said in my mind, why don’t you just take me up on it? I knew that if he discerned that I was giving any less than my utmost, he’d be angry. Honour; he wouldn’t be the first to die for it. Why was he wasting it on this place? He’s been here so long it’s home, I thought. Part of him loved the Mezem.

It took a foolish amount of time, and effort in spinning out the snarl of thoughts, to see the only answer. I would just do what I had already given him my word I would do: my utmost. What I felt, I’d sort out, or suffer with, later.

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153 - The pact is off

I was not punished further, but my constraints were tightened. Now I had to wear hobbles all the time except when I was in my room, training or fighting—even in the bath—and when I was training I had to wear a collar with a long slender chain attached to the belt of one of my Mahid. (That meant he came with me when Koree had us run up and down the stairs of the stands, and of course I’d strive to outrun and outstay him, berating him for a sluggard and a weakling who was making my training too easy. They learned to send good runners.)

They did this once when I was in the Ring, fighting against Spiranedas the Pirate for my thirty-first again, the Mahid holding the chain in his hands and following me doing his best not to hinder my motion. But he had to come into the Ring with me, step dangerously close to the lion-trench and so forth—it occurred to me that if he fell in without letting go he could drag me in with him—and Koree told the Director it was slowing me down too much. Many of my fans complained as well, saying they were not getting their full chains’ worth, so they settled for deploying eight Mahid in total while I fought, my usual two in my gate and two more in each of the other three egresses. As well they’d post guards on all the doors leading under the stands.

Skorsas was best at helping me bear it. “I’ve never seen a fighter complimented so much, and so sincerely, in my life,” he’d say.

I beat Spira, and, as if to punish me for almost escaping again, the crowd made me kill him. Iliakaj won his forty-ninth (in this latest string), which had also been postponed due to the fire, and by the astonishing coincidences that happen all the time in the vicinity of Fate’s Helmet, he and I were matched for his fiftieth.

We made no pretense, after our names were read, but embraced. “Let us go somewhere private,” he whispered in my ear, though I had no idea what he’d want to tell me. There was my room and nowhere else, so we went there.

“Sievenka, if you throw it, I’ll kill you,” he said.

I’d got in the habit of wrapping linen strips around my ankles to keep the shackles from chafing them, and I was just unwrapping them now. I didn’t look up at first, trying to decide what to say. “You think you’re hiding it,” he said. “I’ve been reading fighters, by their faces and the way they move, for a long time.”

I drew myself up and let out a sharp breath. It would just seem silly if I denied it. “What is this? Pride? You don’t think you’ve earned your freedom even if one single fighter decides to make it a touch easier for you? After three hundred-odd fights?”

“I won’t take another man’s chances away from him, even for that,” he said.

“Ilia, you’re joking, right? Don’t you keep your eye on events?” (That was an insult, really; he did, unfailingly.) “You really think my chances of getting out of here have anything to do with fifty fights?”

“You might call it pride. Where I come from, the word for it is ‘honour’.”

“So to not take away my chances, you’d kill me; thanks so much. What if you beat me and I haven’t thrown it? Will you kill me then? Is our pact off? How will you tell?”

“Don’t pretend I’m a fool, Sievenka. I’ve watched every twitch of your finger in all of thirty-one fights that I was in the box to see, as well as sparring you. I’ll be able to tell on the first exchange.” He fixed my eyes with his, and then grinned darkly. “If you are worried about that, you’ll just have to beat me, won’t you?”

Feeling the choice taken away from me made me see just how firmly I’d chosen it and how wedded my heart was to it. I felt sick. I turned away, leaning on my hands to either side of the barred window. Get up… take a breath… start again… How much of that did he owe the cursed world?

“Iliakaj, don’t you see?” I said, whirling around to face him again. “Assuming we honour our pact—it doesn’t matter that I win. I am ransom-bait for my people, no matter what. But it does matter that you do. Think of her whom you love, and want to marry properly; think of your kids. Think of your age; one of these times, stiffness is going to catch you at exactly the wrong instant, and maybe the crowd or the Imperator or the Director will decide to be an asshole for once; it would be like them. That could be in the next fifty, and then I do have your blood on my hands. And for what, when none of my chains matter?”

“Ah, lad.” His voice turned gentle, much to my surprise; I’d thought he might get angry. “That’s how you are, how you think… in truth, that’s how I knew, more than any sign.” He patted the side of my arm. “One reason why I would never so lower you, as let you throw a fight. It’s this, too: I have been here so long and fought so many fights, it would be wrong to end it in such a way. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand. You’re out of your fikken dust-speck of a sliver of an excuse for a mind, but I understand.” I took a deep breath, and said, “I will not throw it. I will give it my all.”

“I’ll whip your wool-haired butt and fling you back to nothing, anyway, so-called Living Greatest. Then I will be that.”

“Oh, we’ll see about that, granddad. We’ll see who stays Living Greatest and who gets flung back to nothing.”

“Yes, we will see, you stripling Godless wool-hair.”

“Indeed we will, straight-hair, sheep-licking Enk.”

We went for a while, trading the slights of our fathers’ wars, until I was clearly besting him and he spat, “God of my ancients laugh at me, for getting into an insult-match with a politician.” Laughing, we flung our arms around each other, and messed each other’s hair like warriors on the same side after a victory.

†

There was as much fuss for this fight, of course, as there had been for Riji Kli-fas. “My precisely-accounting God, we’re rich,” said Skorsas. “If only we could buy you a lefaetas.”

The going odds the day before were five to four for me. Even that seemed wrong, an insult, like foul words thrown at a statesman. There was harmony between us, and our pact, which I hoped would make the fight easy to get through and the result easy to bear, whatever it was; but wrongness grew blacker in me as the time drew nearer.

It’s the wrongness of the whole Mezem, I thought. Imprisoned so long, he stands in my mind for the imprisonment of all of us, and I feel that if I have a hand in keeping him imprisoned, I’ve taken the side of the Mezem. That didn’t seem to explain all of it though, so I looked deeper into my heart. Yes, it’s worse: he’s a friend. Friend enough to have helped me keep my head in this place. I had never been in a duel with a friend, or even former friend. We would not kill but we would shed blood, and his life might ride on it.

I could not sleep the night before, for the pain of it, and had to don hobbles and Mahid to go to Iska’s desk. “No extract of nothingness this time,” I gritted, wondering whether the Mahid would whisper to the oddsmakers in the morning.

Iska seemed to know what was troubling me, and that it was beyond him to talk me out of it, or come up with some measure I might take myself, for he didn’t ask, but just poured the stuff for me. It put me into a flat dreamless sleep like a night without moon or stars.

In the morning, Iliakaj came into my room, having been waiting until my door was unbolted from both sides for Skorsas to fetch water. He closed the door in the Mahids’ faces, grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me up against the wall. I was too startled to counter.

“The pact is off,” he said, his nose a bare fingerwidth from mine, and his blue-grey eyes gone icy. “You hear me? I changed my mind. The pact is off. I might wound you out, I might kill you. In honour, I must tell you.”

“You’re doing this to make it easier for me,” I said. The harmony was still between us; did he think it could break so easily?

I expected him to deny it outright, angrily or sneeringly, but either way, loudly, the immediate urge of one whose true intent is the opposite. He didn’t. “You can tell yourself that all you like, lad,” he said coolly. “But you won’t know for sure, when we’re in the Ring, will you?”

“I think you’re full of shit,” I said. For one thing, he was neither telling nor showing me a reason for such a change of heart, even an unlikely one.

“Because this isn’t like me… fik you, I know that.” He took a deep breath, and I heard a quiver in it. “We’ve never hid much from each other, so it’s not as if you can’t probably smell it anyway. Fik you and your ancestors back to the slime… you’re one of three fighters who have ever scared me.” I did smell it, I realized, and felt it in the tension that made his fingers like claws. “You got under my skin, you little shit, talking of my age and stiffness if I had to fight another fifty; you should have kept your mouth shut. If I get a chance that’s a kill, I know my hand will take it.”

I stared at him stunned. “Well,” I said finally. “My offer’s still open.”

His hand was faster than Riji’s foot, backhanding me across the face; I barely had time to flinch my eyes shut. “Inferiors!” a cold voice snapped. The Mahid had orders to make sure Mezem laws weren’t broken, as well as the Imperator’s, it seemed. Iliakaj spun on his heel and strode out, slamming the door behind him.

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