Shadowed By Wings (10 page)

“But you’ll be usin’ only capes an’ bludgeons today,” he said, nudging one of the leather-covered clubs piled atop a filthy mound of terracotta-colored capes at his feet. “Remember, you’re trainin’ for Arena, hey-o. If you want to survive, you’ll move fast an’ hit hard. The idea is to get your opponent down, so’s he’ll be bait for Re while the dragonmaster and whatever servitor or veteran is in Arena with you can work the bull.”

Work the bull. A euphemism for whoring the beast, for arousing Re.

“When you hit someone, you wanna hit him
real
hard, so he goes down screamin’ and writhin’. That sort of thing gets Re’s attention fast. When Re goes into Arena, he ain’t been fed for a couple of days, hey; he’s hungry an’ mean, and he’s frustrated as anything ’cause he can smell the onahmes in the holding pen, but he can’t get at ’em.

“Don’t run when the bull comes at you,” Egg continued, swatting at a fly that buzzed about his oily locks. “Movement is what Re goes for, movement an’ noise. You have to learn to stand still when he charges, wait till he’s close,
then
move, when he’s built up so much speed he can’t maneuver fast. You get behind him, then, an’ work him good.”

From the mound of frayed hempen cloth at his feet, he picked up a cape. It was exactly the same rufous color as the ground, so much so that it looked woven from dirt.

“Every apprentice wears one of these in Arena. Never let a stronger apprentice grab your cape; if that happens, you’re locked in hand-to-hand combat, an’ as an inductee, you’ll go down. A cape can garrote you, smother you, an’ blind you. But,”—and here he squashed the persistent fly with an audible splat between his meaty paws—“it can also save your life.”

I was uncomfortably aware of how dry my mouth was turning during his lecture, how sweaty were my palms. On either side of me, my fellow inductees shifted about, restless with
their
increasing anxiety.

“All of you know what a pundar is, right?” Egg asked us, scowling.

Nods all around. Pundars were lizards with remarkable camouflage abilities. Their skin could turn from the green of a leaf to the red of the earth in seconds flat, and they could hold their breaths and remain as still and stiff as a clod of earth far longer than a child could.

“One of the skills an apprentice learns is the art of pundar,” Egg said, and even though such an announcement would have caused hilarity elsewhere, we all remained sober and listened intently. “If you’ve been hurt bad in Arena an’ Re is chargin’ at you, your only hope of survivin’ is pundar. You drape your cape over yourself, drop to the ground, keep your mouth shut, an’ don’t move.”

Shivers rippled over me at the thought of cowering beneath a worn cape while a bull dragon the size of a large hut came charging toward me.

“Remember, Re goes for sound an’ movement. I ain’t sayin’ his eyesight is poor, hey-o. But if you’ve just clobbered a fellow inductee, an’ he’s howlin’ and writhin’ on the ground, Re’s gonna go for him, not go snootin’ about the ground tryin’ to figure out where you’ve disappeared to. Every veteran in this stable has survived Arena an’ aroused the bull at least once by using pundar, after strikin’ down a fellow apprentice as bait for Re.”

I cleared my throat. All eyes turned on me.

“What happens to the person that’s fallen? What exactly do you mean by ‘bait’?”

Egg snorted derisively. “Whaddya think happens? Anyone who falls gets ripped apart by Re, and while he’s feedin’, the survivors work him good. What’s there not to understand about that?”

I couldn’t answer.

“If you
do
get your opponent down an’ survive Re’s charge an’ manage to work him, you’ll be promoted to servitor when you return here. Your chances of survivin’ next year’s Arena are better then, ’cause you’ll spend more time vebalu training instead of mucking stalls, an’ you’ll form alliances with veterans who’ll watch your back in Arena. And most important of all”—here he wagged a thick finger at us—“as a servitor, your name might not even end up on the Ashgon’s Bill, which means you won’t be required to enter Arena at all.”

The wide eyes of every inductee were riveted on Egg. Each boy’s jaw was set with the conviction that he would survive Arena and move on to become a servitor.

I couldn’t look at the boys, so filled were they with childish determination.

Understand, the majority of the inductees were eight to ten years old—most of them a good nine years younger than I—their knees overlarge on their twiggy legs, their bellies as round and smooth as cooked eggs. Their chests were slight, their ribs visible, their arms thin. They were children, to me, and I knew with both frustration and sadness that the dragonmaster had chosen the majority of them solely as temporary stall muckers, their ultimate purpose to incite bloodlust in our bull dragon with their lives a year hence in Arena. Fodder, he had called them, before going to round them up on Sa Gikiro a few days ago. “Now, get on your feet, all of you,” Egg ordered, “an’ pair up.”

In a mad scramble, all the inductees claimed one another as opponents. A dark-skinned, scrawny boy with an unruly cowlick sprouting like a parrot’s plume from his crown was left without a partner. Shoulders hunched, he had no choice but to stand opposite me.

He was ten years old if he was a day. He should have been learning his clan’s guild trade, and in his spare time, making peepholes in mating shacks in hopes of glimpsing naked women. His was an age for foolish play and wrestling with siblings in the dust, for eating much and sleeping heavily. Yet here he stood, learning the brutal art of fighting to the death.

“Grab a cape, snap it on, an’ start on the balance beam!” Egg bellowed at us. “C’mon, get movin’! An’ remember, you’re
trainin’;
don’t use full force and really break someone’s kneecaps, else you’ll be whipped for it.”

I grabbed one of the filthy camouflage capes and, after fumbling a bit with the heavy, rusted chain, clasped the cape about my neck. I could easily see how an opponent could garrote me, with that coarse chain about my throat.

With my reluctant opponent standing a generous arm’s length away from me, I queued up to start the sparring course.

All those years balancing atop mill wheel and convent roof while at Tieron, fixing cogs and replacing roof tiles, stood me in good stead on the beam, despite the trembling in my fatigued legs. My technique for swirling my cape in my young opponent’s face and obscuring his view was also more than competent, and my reflexes for darting out of reach of his bludgeon were superb, learned after years of darting away from tail lashes and head butts from the retired bulls I’d served as an onai.

But my bludgeon hung limp in my hand.

Egg lumbered over to me, scowling, as I and my young opponent danced about the straw-stuffed pylons on the obstacle course.

“Wassa matter with you?” Egg bellowed in my ear. “Use your bludgeon!”

I gritted my teeth and gave the straw pylon nearest me a mighty whack, which unfortunately left me open to attack from my opponent. He promptly thwacked his bludgeon across my lower back. I cried out from the blow but was not felled, only bruised.

“Turn round an’ hit him back!” Egg screamed.

Panting, sweat running down my dust-coated face in rivulets, I faced Egg. “No.”

“Eh?”

I took a shuddering breath. “No. I won’t do it.”

We were blocking the obstacle course; the inductees sparring behind us were forced to come to a stop.

Egg gawked at me. “Whaddya mean, you won’t do it?”

“I won’t fell someone as bait for Re,” I gasped, heart pounding not just from the exercise but from defying Egg’s order.

“What do you think your purpose in Arena is, hey?”

I swallowed. “To serve Re.”

“You think you can do that, with every inductee that’s out in Arena alongside you tryin’ to bring you down?”

“I … I intend on trying.” I sounded as confused and uncertain as I felt.

Dumbfounded, Egg’s great jaw moved up and down several times before he sputtered, “You’re completely cracked.”

“There’s no law that says an inductee
has
to sacrifice another to save himself in Arena, is there?” I asked.

“Common sense says so!”

I frowned, shook my head. “I didn’t join the apprenticeship to commit murder.”

Egg let out a string of curses, then spun on the inductees pooled behind us.

“Don’t stand about starin’!” he shouted. “Get trainin’, get movin’, go!”

Word of my refusal to attack another inductee spread quickly amongst the apprentices after that, and with every new circuit through the vebalu course, I was challenged by a different opponent. Each young boy attacked me with bold glee. As the sun poured wrathful heat over us, my quick reflexes began to slow, and some of the inductees’ hits landed hard against kneecap or ankle and felled me.

But I persevered.

Though more than once, my bludgeon twitched in my hand as anger exploded in me, prompted by pain, and I almost gave in to brutal retaliation.

Gradually, a crowd began to form about the obstacle course. The servitors and veterans had heard of my refusal to attack. Pausing from their training during the worst of the day’s heat, they gathered to watch me parry and dodge.

The venom was all but gone from me by then, understand, and only my high threshold for hard labor after years at the convent was keeping me upright and moving. Jeers and hoots began peppering the air.

“Set a servitor against her!” someone called out. “See how long she keeps her vow then!”

“No, set a veteran against her!”

Laughter.

Then someone did step between me and my current opponent, and I came to a swaying stop and blinked through sweat-salted eyes at who it was.

Dono.

Relief flooded through me. He was ending this ridiculous show, was coming to my rescue.

“I’ll spar with her,” he said quietly, his eyes never leaving mine. “Hand me your bludgeon, boy.”

My young opponent swiftly obeyed and joined the sidelines.

Dono slowly began circling me, and I, instinctively, mirrored his every move. Then I stopped.

“Wait,” I said, my voice rasping from my parched throat. “I don’t want to spar you.”

“You’ll spar me or be beaten.”

“Fine,” I said softly. “But first I need a drink.”

Taunts and slurs from the crowd.

Dono considered, then magnanimously held up a hand for silence. “All right. You need a drink, go.”

I staggered off in a side-walking manner toward the dust-filmed cistern located in the far corner of the outdoor gym. I’d learned my lesson from the dragonmaster: Turn your back on someone, and you’re likely to get struck. Dono had agreed to allow me to seek water with the confident expectation that I
would
turn my back on him, and that he could then humiliate me by felling me with his first blow. He stood tensed as I moved away, his bludgeon twitching in readiness for felling me.

Of course, I gave him no such satisfaction.

While the gathered apprentices began laying wagers on how long I’d last against Dono, I plunged my head into the cistern’s algae-slick waters to invigorate myself. The water was miserably lukewarm.

I didn’t want to spar with Dono.

Not at all.

I craved his friendship, his support, even his indifference, anything but this hostility. Did he not remember how as children we’d raced crickets at dusk? How we’d napped side by side in the heat of midday during the Fire Season? We’d once shared a concoction of dead hornets, in the childish belief that drinking the mashed insects would furnish us with stingers. I’d had my first sip of maska wine at age seven, when Dono had had the audacity to steal some from his blood-uncle’s domicile and share it with Waivia and me.

He remembered none of that, apparently. He cared not that I was clan, was his milk-sister. All that mattered to him was that he should remain a cinai komikonpu, a dragonmaster’s apprentice proper, a veteran, and that my deviant presence in the stable domain be removed before it caused Temple to denounce the dragonmaster, end his reign, and oust all his apprentices.

I cupped water in my palms and did what I’d come to the cistern to do: I drank.

Have you ever experienced the queer rebound sensation that occurs, the morning after imbibing too much fermented drink, when, upon drinking water on a stomach empty of all food, the alcohol in your blood is temporarily reignited? If so, you can perhaps see the cunning behind my request for water: I had had nothing to eat all day save the dragonmaster’s venom draft, and, as had occurred more than once during my venom-dependent days in Convent Tieron, the moment I drank the water from the cistern, the venom in my blood was slightly reignited.

But only slightly.

I returned to face Dono. To a chorus of catcalls and gibes against me, Dono and I began circling one another.

When he attacked, I didn’t see it coming. He moved and was instantly upon me, and I was stumbling backward under a flurry of blows.
Thwack, thwack, thwack!
About my head, about my arms, about my waist. I couldn’t see, and I lifted my arms automatically to protect my head. He delivered a short, blunt blow across my stomach, winding me, then grabbed my cape and pulled it tight about my neck. I gagged and clawed at my neck.

He released me and nimbly leapt back, out of range.

Stunned, I tried to gather my wits, catch my breath. He came at me again.

Backward I stumbled, almost tripping in my desperation to avoid his blows. The purpose of his onslaught was clearly to humiliate and overwhelm, not injure me, for no blow was damaging, merely dizzying. My ears rang; I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t catch my breath or gather my wits enough to effectively dodge his rainfall of strikes.

I tried weaving. I tried ducking. I tried parrying his blows. But I avoided or stopped about only one in eight.

He grabbed my cape again, briefly strangled me, then let go and leapt back.

I gaped at him, wheezing, sweat running off me in grimy rivulets. The apprentices jeered and laughed.

“You can’t do it, Zarq,” Dono said, and I was somewhat pleased to realize that he was breathing hard. “Go home.”