The Prince of Shadow (18 page)

“You'll be fine, Bixei. The cooks say that we will compete against the house of Lord Yueh today.” Stipes ate for a moment. “Lord Yueh lost many of his best men to disease last season. He wishes to make a number of purchases from Lord Chin-shi, and has wagered each match to the first blood only, as he does not want the merchandise too badly damaged.” He noted Bixei's glum face and added, “Of course, as a novice, the rules of your own competition already demanded blood only. But it means I don't have to win my own bout to keep my head.”

Bixei nibbled on his bread, but finally threw it down in disgust. “Lord Yueh is not the only buyer in attendance, and he needs experienced fighters to rebuild his ranks, not a novice fresh from his first fight.” He sighed deeply. “I knew, even before Lord Chin-shi lost his fortune, that one or the other of us might be sold or that in some future bout one of us might have to watch the other die. But Master Jaks sets all of his lordship's bouts, and he never sets old partners against each other in the arena. Lord Yueh is known to do so to increase his sport.”

“I won't ever kill you in the arena, boy.” Stipes cupped a hand around the back of Bixei's neck and gave it a companionable shake. “And you'll never be good enough to take me, so we are safe as can be.”

Bixei didn't snap at the bait offered in that taunt, but abandoned his plate to stand by the open door and watch the audience filing in. Llesho watched him go, so intent on the tension screaming from every muscle that he forgot Stipes until he dropped a hand on Llesho's shoulder. “It will be all right,” he said, but Llesho could tell from the pensive frown that the gladiator didn't believe his own words. Overhead, the sound of eager feet and the settling of benches marked the presence of the growing crowd.

“Lord Yueh wants to buy Master Jaks,” Stipes said. “He must believe that Lord Chin-shi's trainers are better than his own. We must prove to him that they are.”

With that last word of encouragement, he dropped his half empty plate on the trestle table and went to join Bixei at the open door. They argued for a moment, and then wandered away together into the shadows. Llesho watched them go, then he put his own plate back and strolled outside to watch the crowd pour in. Soon, the riser in front of each bench was filled with stamping feet as the crowd clapped and shouted for the games to begin.

Suddenly, a hush fell, and a dozen trumpeters at the entrance to the arena heralded the coming of the governor. Master Markko called to Llesho to take his place in the grand march around the arena, the crowd's last chance to view the competitors before betting closed. He responded in a daze. Thebin did not have such games, and Llesho had not, in his entire life, seen so many people gathered together in one place for anything. Soon he would be a part of it. He took his place at the end of a line. At a tone that Master Markko had been waiting to hear, the gladiators of Lord Chin-shi's house strode out into the sunlight and the sawdust.

A shout went up from the crowd, and colorful banners waved at them. At Master Markko's command, the gladiators all raised their right hands over their heads and shook their fists in the air as they circled the arena. The competing houses of Farshore's lords did likewise, some marching in the same direction and some parading counter to them. The two lines met at the center of the arena, and spread out to face each other. A fanfare sounded again, and the gladiators dropped to the ground and kowtowed deeply, with their forelocks in the dust, forming a living promenade of backs offered to the master's lash. As he passed, the governor flicked the ceremonial willow switch above the fighters with words like “courageous,” and “valiant,” and “dauntless” to exhort them in their battles. In this manner the governor made his way to the official box, with his consort following.

By tradition, the youngest gladiator to be blooded on that day would receive the favor of the governor's consort. Accordingly, the lady lifted Bixei to his feet; with a smile, she set her ribbon upon his right-hand sword and a kiss upon his lips. “Win for me, today,” she said.

Llesho recognized that voice, and when he looked up from his ceremonial kowtow, a woman with a cool face and eyes much older than her years was offering a smile of the mouth only to Bixei, who blushed red under the attention. It was the woman who had tested Llesho with the spear and the knife in the weapons room on Pearl Island. She showed no recognition of Llesho, but returned to the side of her husband, who invited the audience to rise and meet their new hero, Bixei of the house of Lord Chin-shi. The governor bowed graciously to the young champion of his lady, who held out her hand to him. Bixei touched his forehead to her fingers in the ceremonial pledge, to fight valiantly in defense of her favor. The couple bowed to the mayor and his guests, and ascended the carpeted risers to the official box. Together the governor and his lady took their places beneath a silk umbrella with many tiers in recognition of their rank.

The trumpeters again blew their fanfare, and the directors of the bout met between the two mock armies to assign each man to his predetermined foe. Llesho had only a moment to see Bixei drawn away to face a boy much the same age and build, but carrying a pike. “Fight inside his reach,” Llesho thought to himself, but then he was called to attend to his own demonstration. He would go through the motions of a bout, while his opponent would do the same. Because of their youth and limited training, however, they would not engage each other with their weapons, but perform the exercises that would display their skill level at a distance of a few paces from each other.

His opponent carried her knife and sword far differently than Llesho did in his own training, but he quickly picked up the rhythm of it, and moved to counter and attack with his trident. She was good, and Llesho wondered again why Lord Chin-shi trained no women fighters. She came at him, a little close on the next pass, and he could see that she knew his attention had wandered, and that it annoyed her. “Like dance,” he thought, and picked up the tempo of his action, meeting her next slash with the move of his own devising he had practiced to smoothness—using the staff of his trident to support his vault, he leaped high over the sword and landed lightly behind her swing. Her right side was exposed to the blades of the trident he brought to bear with lightning swiftness.

A ripple of applause followed the move and Llesho looked around, to see who of the more experienced fighters had landed the admired blow, but his opponent was bowing respect to his strike, before taking her stance again. This time, she moved inside his reach, and rested her knife lightly against his gullet. “Not so pretty a move,” she conceded, “But you would be dead, and not merely blooded, if I chose to press my advantage.” She did put a little more pressure behind the knife, and Llesho froze, immobilized by the surprise, and his fear that she would truly slit his throat if he should move.

But her arm seemed to sag a little, and so he knocked her hand aside, feeling the burn as the point of the knife scratched its way across his throat, and when he felt the metal clear of his body, he brought the trident up, set to skewer her on its three sharp blades. When he stepped back to clear her reach, she followed him in; she twisted and ducked under his weapon and swept one foot in a low circle in front of her, taking Llesho off his feet. He bounced back again before she could immobilize him with her sword, grateful for Master Den's lessons in unarmed combat. The hand-to-hand forms worked just as well, he realized, in combination with his weapons training.

Their bout came to a halt when a monitor blew the whistle. Llesho analyzed his bout as he had been taught. His opponent sucked in air harshly, in broken gasps, while Llesho still breathed normally, if perhaps a little faster than he would at rest. Clearly, if the monitor hadn't stopped the bout, he would have won it, thanks to his Thebin capacity to control his breathing. But in a true bout, the results would have been less certain. He would have had first blood when he caught her by surprise with his trident leap, but she would have taken the prize in a fight to the death.

He thought that, as he had tricked her with a move she had never seen, she had also tricked him with her sex. He didn't expect a woman to be able to fight, and had not guessed that her fight would be different from a man's, going for the quick kill rather than a wearing down and wounding over the course of an extended bout. Her strategy made sense, but he knew he would have to work hard at making up for his lack if he wanted to survive in competition to the death. And his plans called for staying alive long enough to win his freedom.

He bowed respect for his opponent's skill, as she bowed to his. Then she shocked him to the core of his being when she turned to the monitor and said, “I'll take him. Lord Chin-shi may have his price; have him cleaned up and delivered before the victory banquet tonight.”

The monitor bowed low and she departed, not toward the staging area under the benches, but up the carpeted risers to the governor's box, where she took a seat behind the governor and his consort. Llesho could see that she was still breathing heavily, and she wiped her arm across her brow to clear the sweat streaking it, but the governor made no comment, just raised a sardonic eyebrow at her and leaned over the balustrade to examine her purchase. Llesho stared up at them, dumbly, until the monitor of his bout took him by the arm.

“Come on, boy, you are in the way here,” he said, and nudged Llesho in the direction of the door that would take him into the staging area below the eastern benches. “Wait with your own house; someone will be down to fetch you soon enough.”

The smell of blood under the benches almost covered the smell of sweat and the body's fighting humors discharging in vapors off the skin of the gladiators. Bixei lay on the trestle table. A bandage already wrapped his forehead, with an extra thickness over his right eye and a piece of leather clenched tightly in his teeth. He grimaced as Master Den cheerfully bound up a wound on his thigh. “That pretty face of yours will heal clean,” Master Den commented as he wrapped the thigh with bandages, “But your new master will enjoy playing ‘find the scar' with this one. And I hear that he tips very well.”

Stipes, with no sign of injury on him, was glaring at Master Den, but before the bandaging was done, a guard poked his head through the open doorway to announce the arrival of Lord Chin-shi with Lord Yueh. Lord Yueh entered with the boastful swagger of a man who judges his own courage and skill by the success of his gladiators, and who has thus proved himself victor. Lord Chin-shi followed with the desperate look of a man who has lost everything on the toss of a coin, and now asks himself how he could have been so foolish as to gamble against a crooked house.

Their two very different consorts followed behind: Lady Chin-shi boldly examined the gladiators in their various states of nakedness and coverings of bandages, while the much younger Lady Yueh trembled in the wake of the party, her sad eyes downcast and her cheeks red with embarrassment. She looked, Llesho thought, like a slave newly brought to market, shamed by her newfound station in life and unsure what that station would bring. Her husband was pointing among Lord Chin-shi's gladiators. Master Markko took his place at the side of his lord to record the sales.

“Madon, of course.” Lord Yueh pointed to the gladiator, who sat resting his weight on the table. The wound on his chest had not yet been tended; it leaked a red trail down his naked torso, but he did not seem to notice it. “He is mine by the rules of the contest,” Lord Yueh added with a smirk. He seemed to enjoy Lord Chin-shi's discomfiture.

Madon stared at his new owner with predatory aggression stamped upon his jaw, the reek of battle and blood stinking on his damaged muscles, and Llesho permitted himself a tiny shudder. The rules of gladiatorial combat were clear. If, in a fight to the blood only, a competitor should kill his opponent, his own person was forfeited to the offended lord, whose property had been taken from him in the unfair contest. In such cases, the primary owner had the right to punish his slave for the damage he did to the honor of his house, and for the cost to his house of the gladiator's flesh and skill. It was not unusual for the offending gladiator to die of his chastisement, with his dead body presented to the holder in payment of the blood debt.

It made no sense. Madon, rumor had it, had refused all deadly combat since a lord with too many gambling debts had shifted the order of his own gladiators to give Madon a battle to the death with his old lover. They were both good, and his lover had not died quickly of her wounds. After days had passed, when Madon had realized that she could not recover, he had sneaked into his opponent's encampment at the outskirts of the city and had slit her throat while she thrashed in the fever nightmares that boiled her brain. Madon had returned half mad, the barracks story was whispered, and had recovered slowly. He had made a vow that he would not kill again, and it was said that Lord Chin-shi had honored his vow. As little as he knew Madon, Llesho was sure that he had not broken his vow deliberately. Lord Yueh, it seemed, had found a way to break it. And now Madon belonged to Lord Yueh.

His lordship, however, had passed on from an examination of his prize. “That one,” he said, pointing at Stipes. He skipped over Pei and Bixei, seemed not to notice Llesho at first, and gestured at Radimus. He sorted out the rest of the stable in a manner that seemed unthought but left him with the most experienced of Lord Chin-shi's stable, and Radimus, whom he chose with a thoughtful gleam in his eye. Of his selections, only Madon had a wound.

Lord Chin-shi examined the list, and nodded his head in agreement. “Radimus will need further training before he is ready for a fight to the death,” he said. “He is full grown, but new to the arena. Madon should do well as a teacher, he has studied with Master Jaks and Master Den for many years, and knows their techniques well. And in terms of skill, he is the equal of Jaks, and inferior only to Master Den in hand-to-hand.”