Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (19 page)

25

C
ampo Real was a bigger version of the women’s training ground: a huge, sandy, open-air arena under the curved artificial sky. The games area was surrounded by bleachers—on three sides plain and without back support, but with comfortable chairs and cushions on the fourth. This was the zone where the nobility sat. Bruna and Deuil were placed among the plebs. The aristocracy would never have condescended to mix with them, and even the Bureaucrat for Sport had made it quite clear that he considered them very inferior beings, almost at the slippery limits of despicable.

The place was packed with people, and the stands showed a disciplined distribution of colors based on caste. The bottom rows, which had the best view, displayed bureaucratic stripes, then came a green band, followed by blue and then the indeterminate brown of the serfs. So, like the plebs the Earthlings were way, way up, seeing the games area from a considerable distance. Above them was only a walkway with no seats, up to which the few slaves authorized to attend the event climbed. As for the soldiers, they were distributed throughout the arena, creating regular black lines. They were all on duty. They could watch the game, but their priority was to maintain order.

The royal box was in the center of the zone for the nobility. The event didn’t start until the monarch, Javierundo, had made his entrance. Despite her enhanced vision, Bruna found it hard to appreciate his appearance from so far away. He seemed tall and slim, even taller thanks to the height of his ponytail, which he seemed to have lifted from the nape of his neck with a long metallic tube. Maybe it was a hairpiece or a wig. He also seemed to be dressed in the purple tunic of the Priests, but it sparkled whenever he moved, so it must have been embroidered with gold or precious stones. When Javierundo had arrived, the entire stadium stood up and there was total silence. A piercing sound rang out, and taking that as their cue, the Priests in attendance intoned, “May the Sacred Principle be Our Law.”

To which all in attendance replied, “Obedience.” It was as if all the words were coming from a single throat, so synchronized and so clearly did they resonate. The priests again intoned, “May the Sacred Principle be Our Law.” The people chanted, “Belonging.”

They continued to recite the eight remaining primary elements captured in the decenary. The unity startled Bruna. It was both terrifying and beautiful. The dangerous, intoxicating attraction of the human mass, a fierce and yet protective ogre with a thousand heads.

When the ritual was over, everyone sat down. The curtain went up, and the young Rancor women appeared. Malena wasn’t among them. The leader glowed with whiteness, a shriek of light, a translucent flame. The Master in charge of the game made them slither around the arena, muddy their spotless clothes, position themselves on all fours and serve as seats for the first row of nobles. But compared with their training, it all seemed pretty tame to Bruna. During the break she slowly looked around the packed crowd, wondering if the Black Widow was somewhere out there. The idea that that dangerous woman could be on the Kingdom of Labari weighed a little on her mind, a slight but constant alarm bell, a dull unease.
In fact
it is like in my story,
thought the rep.
Death, the unseen hunter, always creeping around behind my back.

Finally, the Minor Game began. Two teams, thirty men a side, dressed in yellow and in red, came out into the arena and lined up on opposite sides of it. Each team had five banners of their color, and as Tin informed them, the game’s purpose was to plant their own five banners in the enemy’s house, which meant in the red or yellow strips at the very edge of the field, which the rep now noticed ran along the two opposing ends of the arena. It sounded easy, but the confrontation had to be controlled by rules, either too simple or too complex, since merely watching the game didn’t offer any clues. Rather, it came across as a barbaric, meaningless battle.

“It’s easy, easy,” Tin explained enthusiastically. “As long as you stay in your own house, the Bashers can’t club you. But as soon as you leave it, they’re obliged to attack, and as long as you’re on the move they can’t stop bashing you. So the teams make their Sacrificials head out one by one. While the Bashers entertain themselves by pounding them to pieces, the Quicks try to reach the enemy line and plant their banner. But if the Bashers finish off the Sacrificials, then they’re allowed to beat up the Quicks. The Quicks are very important because there are only five of them, and they’re the only ones allowed to carry the banners. Five Quicks, five Bashers, and twenty Sacrificials on each team. Look, that red Quick is trying to get back home because he hasn’t had time to plant his banner. Ayayay, almost there, almost there. Oooo! Not quite.”

Stunned, Bruna and Deuil watched five incredibly strong maniacs kick a skinny young man, curled up in a fetal position, destroying him. They had just demolished another red player, who, bloody and in a faint, was being removed from the field of play by some attendants. Bruna recalled the artisan at the stall with the belts and hoped neither of those two was his son.

It was the yellow team’s turn, and another player shot out like an arrow across the arena, pursued by five red gorillas. The Sacrificial dodged, did somersaults, performed incredibly athletic acrobatic leaps, one of them over the top of a pursuer. A blow felled him, but he got up and continued to evade them. The blow had stunned him, however, and he’d lost a good deal of his agility. When they caught him, they bashed him. He got up again, staggering. He lasted a few seconds on his feet. They beat him up. A thunderous roar erupted: the yellow Quick had planted his banner, and the Sacrificial had endured a lot.

“What a beautiful play,” Tin exclaimed, his eyes full of emotion. “The more they resist, the more they get hit. It’s admirable. That Sacrificial was originally a serf.”

They were already removing him from the arena, limp like a broken doll.

“If they keep lynching them this quickly, the game will be over in five minutes,” Deuil commented somberly.

“Yes, this afternoon’s game has started very strongly. But it’s not always like this. Sometimes the Sacrificials manage to get back home without being caught, and the same thing happens with the Quicks.”

“I assume quite a few players die,” said Bruna.

“Yes, there is the occasional death, or some boy who ends up a cripple or loses an eye. But that’s what the One Principle teaches us: the individual should sacrifice himself for the group. There’s no greater honor than to be a Sacrificial. They’re the Heroes of the Kingdom. They’re the most loved and the most renowned.”

“If this is the Minor Game, what’s the Major Game like?” asked the rep somewhat fearfully.

“It’s the same, the same. Everything’s the same, except that in the Major Game the captain of the losing team is decapitated, while the captain of the winning team immediately goes up to the next caste. It’s the only possible way to go up in class on Labari apart from those elevations magnanimously granted by our king. The Major Game is considered to be a Sacred Trial, a liturgical test, so the outcome is dictated by the One Principle. There are only four Major Games a year, and the teams come from all parts of the Kingdom to play in them. Each time the contestants are the best two teams.”

Bruna recalled a former serf from Labari she had met on Earth. The serf had been expelled from the Kingdom because she had become a mutant. She had been working in the Potosí mines and, thanks to the excessive number of teleportations she had been forced to undertake, a third blind, amorphous eye had emerged on one of her temples. It was known with absolute certainty that as of the eleventh transfer, TP disorder attacked all living beings, which was why the Agreements of Cassiopeia had forbidden more than six teleportations per person. But the Ones hadn’t signed the Agreements. In fact, as that serf with the milky eye had explained to Bruna, they assumed that the One Sacred Principle defended you from everything bad. If you were a pure enough person, you would never suffer a mutation. Apparently, they even used TP disorder for their Sacred Trials to resolve serious lawsuits among the nobility. The litigants would begin to teleport themselves until one of them became a mutant, and that was deemed a divine sentence that could not be appealed. Keeping in mind that even the aristocracy was this ignorant and fanatical on Labari, Bruna wasn’t surprised that the players submitted themselves so docilely to the ordeal of the game.

The game continued on its course with the same brutality, the same rage, and the same monotonous repetition of Bashers clubbing and Sacrificials and Quicks watering the sand with their blood—sand that was occasionally raked over by the attendants to hide the bloodstains. Sometimes, as Tin had suggested, the players dodged and escaped from the hands of their pursuers and made it home uninjured, but that usually led to them being loudly booed by the crowd. The game came to an end when the yellow team lost all their Quicks, so the heroic resistance of the Sacrificial who had so moved Tin helped not at all. The reds won even though they had only managed to plant four banners.

The rep stood up, sick of the violence and with a dullness similar to the one she used to feel when she was in the military—a sort of defensive empathy disconnection. Labari was definitely not one of her favorite corners of the Universe. She felt frustrated and disheartened. They only had two more days on the Kingdom, and so far they had not discovered anything about the case. Even worse, Bruna didn’t know where to start looking. As they headed toward the exit, Tin fell behind a little. It was the first time she and Deuil had had a private moment since he and the serf had picked her up from the Rancor training ground.

“I have Yárnoz’s address,” the tactile whispered into her ear. “I know where he’s living. It’s in Oscaria.”

Bruna gave a start and glanced at Deuil’s smiling, satisfied face with a mixture of admiration and aversion: damned tactile, capable of triumphing where she had failed. But immediately she felt the thrill, the joy, the lust of the pursuer faced with its prey. Her mind fired, making plans.

“It will be harder for us to sneak away during the day,” she said breathlessly. “So we’ll go tonight.”

26

T
hey ate the same atrocious food for dinner at the inn while Deuil explained to Bruna how he had got hold of Yárnoz’s address.

“We went past the Assembly of Nobles, which is where the Masters get together once a month to discuss topics to do with governance that are subsequently sent up for the King’s signature. The Priests do the same in the other palace facing it, the Sacred College. I told Tin that the building of the Masters was beautiful and that I’d love to be able to visit it. I already knew it was a public space and that they allow plebs of all castes to visit it when there is no assembly in order to make them feel insignificant in the presence of the building’s opulence. So in we went, and it really is an imposing palace—or rather, a medieval fantasy, a place designed to impress. Very high ceilings, gigantic sculptures, dark murals highlighted here and there with touches of gold. A somewhat lugubrious place but lovely. The dimensions alone must leave the plebs breathless, accustomed as they are to the narrowness of this hyperpopulated world. The main room of the Assembly is enormous and full of armchairs placed in a circle. In the middle of that circle there’s a round table, and in the center of that table—well, you already know it’s a very ritualized society and it gives symbolic importance to geometric shapes—there’s a gigantic book made of fake parchment, which is a register of all the Masters, their family trees, their titles, and their lands and where they live. I pretended I was leafing through it and searched for Carlos Yárnoz. He was Master of the Blue Hill. That’s where he lived.”

“By the great Morlay! How the devil are we going to find that? How do you know it’s in Oscaria?”

“Because this is a Floating World, not a remote Europe depopulated by the Great Plague of 1348. An artificial platform such as this is at the limits of sustainability, and the distribution of space has to be precise and rigid, not the product of chance, as it was on the old Earth. The entire Kingdom of Labari is divided into sectors. And these in turn into subsectors, slim segments of the ring that are organized numerically. Haven’t you noticed the numbers all over the place? Oscaria consists of sectors one, two, and three. In the book they translate the legendary old addresses into the current geographic network. Under Blue Hill was written ‘3, 127, N.’ In other words sector three, subsector one hundred twenty-seven, North. It’s either North, Central, or South.”

Bruna now recalled having seen numbers and letters inscribed on adobe walls, on the trunks of the few trees, on wooden posts, and on stone monoliths. They’d vaguely caught her attention, but there were so many striking things on Labari that she hadn’t gotten as far as focusing on this one.

“Where are we now?”

“Sector two, subsector twelve, Central. The sign is outside, written right on the facade of the inn. I’m afraid it’s quite far.”

“We’ll have to run. Are you a good runner, Fred?”

“I’m not bad.”

“Even with that wound on your foot?”

“Practically healed. By the way, you used a rather odd expression a moment ago. You said, ‘By the great Morlay,’ and if I’m not mistaken that’s an expression used by technohumans. Wasn’t Morlay the venerated leader of the techno revolt? Isn’t it shocking for a human like you, my dear Reyes, a nice basketball player, to use a phrase like that?”

His eyes were flashing with malice, those slanting eyes the color of the blue night sky, which now, by the light of the torches, seemed as black and brilliant as scarab beetles. Bruna’s obvious error mortified her, although she was sure she would never have made it if it might have compromised their safety. Or at least that’s what she hoped. The flickering light of the torches made the shadows dance across Deuil’s face, on his samurai topknot and his shaved temples. It was obvious that Labari, despite its old-fashioned facade, had mastery of advanced technology. In fact they altered their artificial world by faking dawns, sunny days, and moonlit nights. But then when they imposed their fictitious darkness they only used traditional modes of lighting: torches, candles, small lamps. It was all theater, a set. This world was the exaltation of the lie. Although she had to admit that the torches created a warm, intimate atmosphere.

Deuil’s sharp teeth were so white that they didn’t seem to be made of bone but rather of hard, opal-like glass. His hands were resting on the table, big and slender but strong. The very beautiful hands of a tactile. Would possessing such extraordinary hands have predisposed him to a career as a tactile? Or would the work have refined and strengthened his long fingers? She remembered that those hands had encircled her neck, and she felt her skin igniting. An urgent longing for those fingers to run over her entire body consumed Bruna.

“What are you thinking?” asked Deuil.

“Me?”

“You’re studying me and you’re thinking. What?”

“I’m trying to work out how good a runner you really will be. Let’s go up to our rooms. We have to leave.”

Once in her room Bruna put on a T-shirt and some black training pants, and after a moment’s hesitation she removed the plasma gun from its hiding place and put it in her small running bag. She went next door to get Deuil and found him half-dressed. He was an extraordinarily slim man, tapered and threadlike, but rather than bony, his body was soft and delicate, childlike. It was like the body of an adolescent right after a growth spurt, his arms and legs still out of proportion, too long, almost pliable. There was not a single hair on his bare chest, but he had two huge eyes tattooed on his nipples, disturbing eyes enhanced by eyelashes and with deep-blue pupils, like his real ones.

“What? Are you still trying to work out if I know how to run?” he said mockingly, aware of her gaze. But his eager and slightly hoarse voice betrayed the flippancy of his comment.

Bruna didn’t answer. She headed for the small lead-glass window and opened it. She’d already noticed the previous day that the window in Deuil’s room overlooked the back of the inn, while hers opened out on the front.

“We’ll go out through here,” she stated.

She turned around. The tactile had put on a dark-purple elastane T-shirt. He walked over to the window and looked down.

“It’s a bit high, but I think I’ll be able to get down.”

“The problem isn’t getting down now, it’s getting back up later. We have to come back in through here. Do you think you’ll be able to lift me?”

The tactile tilted his head to one side and examined her teasingly, saying, “What you mean is that you think I don’t count for much physically.”

“Will you be able to do it or not?”

“You don’t know the strength of the spirit,” he said, laughing.

“A Rancor player said exactly that just this morning. Then she gave me a terrifying demonstration. If you can achieve half that, you’ll do. I’ll go down first.”

With relaxed ease Bruna sat astride the windowsill, swung her inside leg over, and hung by her hands from the ledge. Then she let go, dropped, and rolled on the ground until she was upright again. As she was standing up, she watched Deuil drop down in a movement that was almost as agile as her own, which produced an odd feeling of satisfaction.

There was much less movement in Oscaria at night, understandable given that it was a dark world. After orientating themselves and mentally establishing their route, the two Earthlings set off at a slow, steady jog. Bruna’s feline eyes were adapted to seeing in the shadows, so Deuil kept close to her, and from time to time, if the shadows thickened or the terrain was difficult, he briefly turned on the flashlight on his mobile. They had agreed that if they had to provide an explanation to anyone, they would say they were out on a training run. They were athletes after all. But the few citizens they encountered in the dark city only glanced at them, almost fearfully, with the meekness and passivity of a people accustomed to tyranny. Now and again the Earthlings checked that they were heading in the right direction by consulting the positional numbers. The segments crept by at an exasperatingly slow pace, so Bruna quickened the pace. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Deuil was keeping up easily, showing no sign of being out of breath. Not that it was surprising; his thin build was ideal for running long distances.

It took them an hour and a half to reach 3, 127, N. This outlying zone of Oscaria was an ugly, wretched place. They’d gone through several subsectors with row after row of shacks for serfs. Here, on the other hand, apart from the poor adobe constructions there was a small, square stone house with a patio. There was no question it was Blue Hill, although there was no hill. All Labari was flat—or rather, curved—following the profile of the Floating World’s design.
On this world everything is circular,
thought Bruna.

They approached the house slowly and peeked cautiously through the narrow windows, which were actually nothing more than small bare slits that perforated the thick walls. To their surprise there was a light on inside, and not candlelight but an artificial glow. Bruna continued her outside tour of the house and finally found a slit that allowed her to see somebody. He was an old man with a messy white mop of hair framing his face. He was wearing threadbare Earthling clothes and sitting on a chair at a table writing on a piece of paper by the light of a mobile. He put the pencil down on the paper and got up, disappearing from view. He came back a moment later with something in his hand: an old magitonal, a small keyboard capable of imitating the sounds of a hundred instruments.

“I know him,” whispered Bruna. “I know him!”

The penny hadn’t dropped earlier because the man looked very old, and she had known him when he was young and handsome. But she remembered her childhood fascination—in her fake childhood, in her fake memories—when this musician started to play his magitonal, which was probably the same instrument he was now holding in his hands.

“He was Yárnoz’s lover, his partner.”

“How do you know that?” asked a startled Deuil.

“It’s in my memories. In my artificial memory. It’s a long story. What was his name, dammit?”

He had been quite a famous musician. She typed various search options into her mobile: musician, composer, Madrid, twenty-first century, Carlos Yárnoz, Pablo Nopal. Dozens of articles appeared, dozens of names. But when she saw it she remembered: Frank Nuyts.

On an impulse the rep took off, ran around the house, and slammed the heavy knocker on the front door.

Deuil chased after her, and when he caught up to her he hissed, “What are you doing?”

“Calm down. Let me speak to him.”

They heard footsteps, noises. The door opened a crack, and the upper part of a man’s head peered out, a wary eye looking at them. Lower down a lit candle. He seemed to have switched off the torch on his mobile.

“Frank? Frank Nuyts,” said Bruna.

The man thrust the candle through the opening and raised it a little so he could see their faces. He must not have liked what he saw, because he didn’t say a word.

“Frank, we’ve come from Earth. We’d like to talk to you about Carlos Yárnoz.”

The candle shook.

“Is he all right? Where is he?” said the voice, strangled by emotion. “How can you prove to me that you’ve come on his behalf?”

“Frank, Yárnoz is dead. They killed him in Madrid on July 24, nine days ago.”

The door slammed shut. Bruna ran to the nearest slit and stuck her face up against the hole.

“Frank, please listen to me. Let us in. I have important things to tell you, but I can’t shout them at you. I know you. I knew both of you in my childhood. More than twenty years ago you and Yárnoz used to visit a man called Nopal. You were friends. I remember that one night before dinner you gave Nopal the gift of a sonata. He was very moved. You played it on that magitonal you still use now. It was his birthday.”

Her father’s last birthday before he was murdered, Bruna remembered with anguish. How much her damned lie of a father hurt.
Three years, nine months, and thirty days.

The man’s voice emerged from inside the house: “How do you know all that?”

“I . . . I am Nopal’s daughter.”

The musician’s face appeared in the slit. “Nopal only had one child. A boy.”

“I can explain it to you. Let us in please.”

The face disappeared from the opening and silence fell. Seconds later the door opened. Bruna and Deuil walked over to it and let themselves in. Nuyts had sat down in his chair again and was looking at them through the flickering light of some candles. They came inside, closed the door, and approached him. His face was distorted with grief. He had the look of a madman, and his chin moved of its own accord.
He can’t be as old as he looks,
thought Bruna. She remembered him as a young man, handsome, blond, with a thick braid of golden hair reaching halfway down his back. He couldn’t be much more than fifty now. It was the face of someone who had suffered a great deal.

“Have you come to kill me, too?” asked Nuyts in a voice that shook but was calm. “I don’t mind. I have no attachment to this revolting life anymore.”