The grin disappeared. Stipes quirked an ironic eyebrow at his companion, inviting him to accept what everyone in the camp would know. Bixei would have no opportunity to practice deadly arts on Llesho until he had learned the skill and the control on which Master Jaks insisted. Stipes carried a stave, and took his stance while Bixei changed weapons for a stave himself. But Master Jaks stopped him, with a shake of the head. “First choice always,” he said. Llesho saw the panic bloom in Bixei's eyes, but neither his partner nor his teacher acknowledged that the first hit had gone to Master Jaks. Bixei returned the stave and took up the lethal blades. Pei grabbed a long sword, and Radimus took up a pike. Both were quickly paired with experienced fighters.
Llesho stared at the last unpaired training partner with dismay. He was a stranger, fully head and shoulders taller than Llesho, and heavily muscled. “I am going to die,” Llesho thought, and reached instinctively for the knife, but Master Jaks forestalled him.
“Never use a short weapon against an opponent with a longer reach,” he said, and handed Llesho the trident. Instead of pairing him with the stranger, however, Master Jaks explained, “As youngest novice, you are stuck with your master. Madon will oversee the practice.” With a nod to the gladiator, Master Jaks took his stance with a long sword and jabbed at Llesho, who knocked aside the blow with his trident.
Master Jaks was circling him, forcing Llesho to follow his movements by turning in a tight spin. Llesho thought quickly: if they were competing short weapon against short weapon, he could have devised a defense based on the prayer forms. If both used long weapons, he could protect himself by making his moves like dance. But the defense that might come out of the weapon dance would not suit the forms of the sword which, coming at him again, broke his concentration and brought him back to the moment. He was getting dizzy. If he didn't come up with something soon, he would win by disgusting his opponent when he vomited.
His clothes were damp on his back, scratchy, and the sweat blurred his eyes. Even the sawdust underfoot burned through the soles of his sandals, and the light flashing off Master Jaks' blade was making him squint and flinch with every stepâdeliberately. Master Jaks was using the sword to intimidate, the glare to blind his opponent. Llesho had to do something, right now. So he decided: he would act as his weapon dictated, and pretend the man in front of him also carried a long weapon that just happened to be . . . short. He would make the rules of the battle, force Master Jaks to take the defensive.
Action followed thought on the instant; Llesho committed to the form of his weapon, felt his body shift into the position of a dancer. He leaped and tumbled with the trident held close to his body for protection and control. With the sun at his back, he planted the shaft of his trident in the sawdust and, clutching it like a pivot with both hands, he swung his body high over the weapon of his opponent. When he landed, he flipped the trident around, cracking the shaft down hard on Master Jaks' sword arm and turned the weapon again, like lightning, to force the gladiator back with the knifelike tines of the trident pressing against his throat.
The wrist guards Master Jaks wore protected him from the blow, but he could not match the reach of the trident with his sword, nor could he angle out of danger without risking death. He dropped his sword with a smile. “Good,” he said. When Llesho continued to hold him at bay with the trident, he added a little reminder, “You won. You can rest your weapon now.”
“I won?” Llesho looked around in confusion as the practice yard came back into focus, and he realized that he was breathing heavily, the residual effect of adrenaline and fear. For a moment, in the heat of the competition, he had lost himself in a terrifying past, when men with swords had come for him and carried him away to slavery. He had been seven, frightened and alone among his dead. His hands tensed around the shaft of the trident: even now he wanted to kill the man in front of him, to prove to himself that he was helpless no longer.
“Llesho.” Master Jaks stood perfectly still, except that he moved his left hand slowly over his right, slipped out of the wrist guards and dropped them to the ground next to the sword.
The seconds beat in the pulse at Llesho's temple; the sound of the blood rushing through his body drowned out the trumpeting glare of the sunlight. No other sound existed. The gladiators practicing in the yard had fallen still, as if a spell had paralyzed them all. Then a voice reached out to him, pitched to catch the attention of a small boy. Llesho wondered how he had let the enemy draw so close.
“Let it go, child.” Not an enemy. Master Den, the washerman. Suddenly the trident burned in his hands, and he dropped it, horrified at what he had almost done. But Master Den was there, with a hand on his shoulder and he turned into the warm comfort waiting for him, and cried against the broad fleshy shoulder as he had not cried in all the years of his captivity.
When the tears had exhausted themselves, he let out an exhausted sigh. Couldn't keep his face buried in Master Den's shoulder forever. He had to face the camp. He would neverânot everâlive this down. But when he pulled away, the practice yard was empty.
“Master Jaks is in the weapons room,” Master Den said softly, with a reassuring pat. “Find him and apologize. Then go to dinner.”
Llesho bowed his head in submission to his teacher's wishes. As he turned to go, Den added, “I think you've had enough of mops. Tomorrow, you will start in the laundry. I'll clear it with Markko.”
Numb, Llesho nodded with none of the enthusiasm he would have shown before weapons practice. Then, he would have jumped at any chance to get out of mop duty. He was still grateful, but now he yearned only for the peace that seemed a part of the washerman. In the laundry he could hide from the derision of his companions, and from their fear of the “mad” student.
“Go on. Master Jaks will be expecting you.” Den sent him on his way still heavy of heart, but with hope and no little terror. He had to face Master Jaks and explain, somehow, why a lowly student and former pearl diver had nearly killed him in weapons practice, after the competition had been ceded. And without revealing his past, or what there was of it that his owners might not already know.
Taking a deep breath, Llesho entered the weapons room so quietly that Master Jaks, sitting with his head bent over a sword he worked with a polishing cloth, did not hear him come in. “Master,” he whispered, and Master Jaks looked up at him, his face empty of all expression.
“I am sorry, Master.” What was he supposed to say next, he wondered, that would make it better? “I am sorry I tried to murder you” seemed somehow inadequate, and “I don't know why I tried to skewer you during practice” would confirm that he was mad.
Master Jaks put down his sword and folded the polishing cloth carefully before addressing his student. “Sometimes the enthusiasm of the battle overtakes us, even in friendly practice,” Master Jaks said. “That is why the master always takes the newest student for his partner. If anyone deserves to die of a student's enthusiasm, it is the teacher who inspired him.” A smile twitched at his lips, and Llesho wondered if perhaps he was not the first student to best his teacher by surprise. Llesho doubted those other students had held their instructor at trident point long after the bout had ended, however.
While he could not trust his story to anyone, Llesho owed this man he'd almost killed much more than he had given. He bowed deeply, abjectly, and felt the tears form again. Not now. He couldn't cry in front of the weapons master. Not again. Too mad for the pearl beds, and now too mad for the arena: they would feed him to the pigs for sure.
“I did not mean to hurt you, Master,” he blurted. “For a moment I was elsewhere, but it won't happen again, I promise.”
Master Jaks had come around the table to stand face-to-face with his student. He was shaking his head, and Llesho stopped breathing. His apology was not accepted. He was lost. But then Master Jaks took his chin in his hand and tilted his head up. With the thumb of his free hand he wiped the tears from the hollows beneath Llesho's eyes. “I know where you were,” he said. “And I am the one who is sorry. You reacted exactly as Den told me you would, and even warned, I was not ready.” He released Llesho with a sigh. “Den was right. We can't afford many mistakes with you.”
For Llesho, the world stopped turning with his teacher's words. What did Master Jaks know? What did he intend to do about it? His gaze fell on the knives on the table, lingered there.
“Are you going to sell me to the Harn?”
“I don't buy or sell anybody, boy. I train fighters for the arena.” Master Jaks' voice took on a hard edge. “And the Harn are unlikely to care overmuch about a peasant turned pearl diver, poorly trained into the semblance of a gladiator, now are they?”
“No, Master,” Llesho agreed. Perhaps he had misunderstood everything that had happened to him in the past two days, or perhaps Master Jaks was telling him that he had allies in the camp. He figured he was safe at the moment, anywayâfrom the Harn
and
the pigsâand obeyed with alacrity when Master Jaks sent him off to his supper.
His apologies had taken him into the dinner hour, and the gladiators and novices had all made their way to the cookhouse when Llesho left the weapons room. He felt peaceful, in the way the sea was calm after a storm. He knew he had to face the ridicule of Bixei and the others, but lingered in the practice yard to hold onto that precious sense of peace as long as he could. So he was alone when he saw a man creep into the stone house of the overseer. He would have thought nothing of itâmessengers for the overseer came and went at all hours of the dayâexcept that he was sure he recognized the man. But what business could Tsu-tan, the pearl sorter, have with the overseer of the gladiators? The question was on his lips when he joined his bench mates at dinner.
“That is not the frown of a man being sent to market,” Stipes noted. “What's up, Llesho?”
“I just saw someone I thought I knew, from the pearl beds.”
Deep inside, Llesho felt that the puzzle of Tsu-tan was more important than his own embarrassment on the practice field, though he could not have said how he knew. Bixei seemed on the verge of drawing the conversation to Llesho's lapse in weapons' practice, but Stipes jabbed him in the ribs, and he shrugged with a sullen glare, then turned to the question at hand. “Maybe another pearl fisher has figured out that a fighting life would at least keep him dry.”
“Tsu-tan isn't a pearl diver, he's too old, and not Thebin to begin with. He's a pearl sorter.” He didn't say what he'd long thought: that Tsu-tan was a worm of a man with an evil eye who almost never left his pearl basket, but sat under the palm tree that faced the longhouse like a scruffy spider at the center of a dusty web.
“Tsu-tan.” Stipes frowned. “A creature with the look of a weasel and an eye that would shrivel a man in his britches?”
“That's him.” Llesho almost laughed at the description, so much like his own impression.
“He's the overseer's witch-finder,” Stipes said, “and sly as they come; I've heard it said that he is no man at all, but a demon who lives on the screams of Markko's victims. If he's here tonight, you can be sure there will be a burning before the week is out.”
Kwan-ti.
In his mind's eye, Llesho could see the evil man sitting with his back against his tree, his eyes following the healer with avid fascination. He had to warn her. But in his months of training, he had not once received permission to leave the compound. There had to be a way. He considered his companions at the table, but could not ask them for help. He already owed too many explanations, and he couldn't expect men who depended on Markko for their well-being to risk the overseer's wrath by helping Llesho warn his prey. There had to be a way, but dinner ended and he still hadn't figured out what to do.
He followed his bench mates to the long covered porch that fronted the barracks, where the gladiators rested in the cool breeze of the evening. Radimus was there, tossing bones in a gambling game for favor-chips; Bixei joined him, but Llesho moved on to investigate a noisy group that had formed a knot at the far end of the porch. Pei sat on a solid chair at the center of the laughing and hand-clapping circle, thumping his broad foot in a steady rhythm on the floorboards. Joining the circle, Llesho picked up the rhythm with his clapping hands, encouraging the champions to begin a song contest. Madon finally stepped forward with a bow.
Placing his hand over his heart, Madon recited his challenge in time to the beat of the clapping hands and tapping feet:
“The Seven watch over the fighter,
who swings his sword in their praise
who sleeps with his sword like a lover
And carries his sword to his grave.”
The circle of fighters cheered wildly. Madon signaled his victory with a wave of his fist in the air and bowed an invitation for his opponent to begin. A stranger stood away from the railing on which he had rested and set a hand to his breast like Madon had done before him. As Pei picked up the beat again, the challenger intoned his response:
“The Seven watch over the fighter
who vanquishes foe in their name
who conquers with net and with trident
And lives beyond death in their fame.”
The stranger's side of the circle exploded in cheers to support their combatant, but the contest went to Madon, whose lines were closer to the classic rhyme pattern of the ancients than his opponent's effort. Grumbling, the challenger vowed retaliation in a limerick that made outrageous claims about the parentage of the victor, and promised retribution in fair competition, which any could see had not happened here. No one took offense at the classic challenge, but many returned the insults in less poetic form.