Authors: Deborah Chester
Orlo
circled around in front of him and gripped his hair to pull up his head. “Are
you mute, you big bastard?” he growled.
Tears
and sweat streamed down Caelan’s face. Somehow he found enough pride to answer.
“No,” he said through his teeth.
“Get
up!”
Clamping
his jaw, Caelan managed to stagger to his feet. He was a full head and
shoulders taller than Orlo, but it was the shorter man who had the advantage.
“The
arena is no place for cowards,” Orlo said.
“I’m
no coward—”
“Shut
up!” Orlo raised the club again, and Caelan flinched back. Grinning, Orlo
slowly lowered his hand.
Shame
flooded Caelan. He knew in that instant he’d failed some kind of test.
“All
Traulanders are cowards,” Orlo said. “Big brutes who can’t move and won’t fight.
I know your kind.”
Caelan
burned inside.
No, you don’t,
he thought.
Not me.
“If
you were any good, the prince would have let his fancy private trainer work
with you. He wouldn’t have sent you to me.”
There
was something ugly in the way Orlo said that, something resentful that flamed
in his eyes. Seeing it, Caelan’s heart sank.
“I
am going to make you good,” Orlo said. “I am going to make you fight. Or I’ll
kill you in the effort. You understand?”
“Yes,”
Caelan breathed. It was what he had prayed for while he waited for the auction.
Now he wondered why he had ever thought he could do this.
“What
is it you call your religion?” Orlo asked.
“Severing?”
Caelan
did not trust his voice. Cautiously he nodded.
Orlo
raised the club with clear menace. “You try that nonsense around here,
especially on any of my men, and you’ll taste this. You understand?”
It
was clear Orlo didn’t understand what
severance
was, but his fear was dangerous. “I will obey,” Caelan
said. Any other response was unthinkable.
Orlo
did not seem to believe him. With a sneer, he gripped the amulet pouch hanging
around Caelan’s neck and yanked it over his head. “You won’t need this.”
Miraculously
over the years, Caelan’s owners had respected the pouch and left it alone,
although slaves weren’t allowed possessions. Now Caelan felt dismay wash
through him. “It is my amulet,” he said hollowly, trying not to betray his
concern. “I—”
“Liar!”
Orlo said sharply. “Trau is a civilized province, not a pagan one. Your kind
don’t carry amulets.”
That
was true, but until now no one else had seemed to know it. Caelan stared at the
little pouch with its precious contents and swallowed the lump in his throat.
Lea, forgive me,
he thought in despair.
“Please,”
he whispered, but with a scowl Orlo shoved him forward.
Thus
it began, a rigorous nightmare that never seemed to end. From dawn until dusk
they were pounded, forced to run laps along a track of deep, foot-clogging sand
while guards on horseback whipped them to keep going. Practice weapons were
heavy, blunt scraps of metal with worn hilt wrappings that often left a man’s
hand blistered raw or cut open. Injuries passed untreated. Many a man moaned
through the night with sprains, bruises, and lacerations. They were fed
plentifully and cheaply, mostly barley grain and beans, twice a day. The one
blessing was they could have all the water they wanted, and it was always fresh
in the barrel.
The
first night Caelan tore strips of cloth off his straw pallet and used it to
bind his ribs. Even with that tight support, the next few days were an agony he
thought he might not survive. Only
severance
enabled him to bear the pain. At night when he was
allowed to collapse on his pallet, he sweated in the darkness and tried
desperately to remember everything he had learned at Rieschelhold and from his
father’s teachings in an effort to heal himself. For the first time, he had to
acknowledge that he’d been a fool of a boy, but there was no going back. That
path was cut forever, and he remained, the only survivor of his family, the
unworthy one, the rebel and troublemaker who had disobeyed and disrupted and
who had lived. Where was the justice in that? Where was the mercy? Where was
the rightness?
Truly
the gods toyed with the lives of men.
In
the first days he was inept and slow. He kept dropping the fake weapons. His
footwork stumbled. The trainers swore at him and whipped him. Every time Orlo
walked by, Caelan made a stupid mistake.
And
Orlo would look both disgusted and satisfied at the same time. “Extra drills
for the Traulander,” he would say and walk on.
Increasingly
frustrated, Caelan could not understand why he did not improve. Even as a boy
in his father’s hold he had never been clumsy. Any physical activity was easy
for him. He wouldn’t have longed to be a soldier in the first place if he hadn’t
felt himself capable of it. But now it seemed as though all his natural
abilities had deserted him.
His
rib healed quickly, whether through the mercy of the gods or through his
limited efforts to speed its recovery. And although no one made any effort to
treat him, Caelan
noticed he wasn’t assigned to any practice bouts until he
was sound.
Already
fit, with a deep chest and powerful shoulders, he found the tough conditioning
work honed his body even more. He grew another inch, and his muscles hardened
to the kind of definition the trainers called deeply cut. The drills gave him
flexibility and a new awareness of his body’s strength. Long hours under the
merciless sun bronzed his skin to a dark honey color and bleached his hair
nearly white. His muscles rippled powerfully beneath his skin when he moved. He
was perhaps the tallest man in training, and the other fighters called him
Giant. The trainers all agreed that in looks alone, he would make an
intimidating presence in the ring, but they had already laid bets that he would
die in the first round.
Caelan
knew about the bet, of course, and it did nothing for his morale.
Although
he hadn’t prayed in years, now in the privacy of nighttime he lifted his heart
to Gault, asking why this was denied him. He had sworn he would do everything
in his power to excel, yet here he was at the bottom of the group. The
humiliation of his failure gnawed at him constantly.
Training
separately in their own advanced drills, the veterans paused to laugh and jeer every
time Caelan walked by. Sooner or later all the trainers came by to watch him
performing drills. Shaking their heads, they discussed him as though he couldn’t
understand what they were saying.
“Orlo
said he bested one of Lord Vymaltin’s champions at the auction.”
“Never!
Look at the clumsy oaf.”
“I
swear it’s what everyone says. It’s why Prince Tirhin bought him in the first
place.”
“The
prince must have been too drunk to see.”
Laughing,
the trainers walked on.
Seething,
Caelan focused everything he had on the lunge-and-feint drill he was
practicing. He
could
focus his mind. He had once been able to direct a warding key, after
all. He could do this.
Fresh
sweat broke out on his face with the effort he expended, but all he
accomplished was a sudden cramp in his leg that pitched him down, gasping hard
while the other trainees stopped their drills and laughed.
“Silence!”
Orlo shouted, swinging his club indiscriminately among them. “Get back to work.”
Pushing
his way through the chastened trainees, he came and stood over Caelan, who lay
sprawled in the sand, gritting his teeth while he worked the spasm from his leg
muscles.
“Get
up,” Orlo said.
“Yes,”
Caelan gasped out, trying. Hut the cramp wouldn’t release.
A
whistle of the knotted ropes through the air warned him. Caelan tried to dodge,
but the cattails cracked across his shoulders. The fresh pain drove away all
awareness of the cramp.
“Get
up!” Orlo repeated.
Caelan
scrambled to his feet and stood there, drenched with sweat and shame until he
was almost shaking.
Pursing
his lips, Orlo stared up at Caelan a long while without saying anything.
Finally he beckoned and led Caelan over to a corner of the practice pit.
“What’s
the problem, Traulander?” he demanded. “Your religion getting in the way?”
“No,
master,” Caelan said quietly. He kept his gaze on the ground to hide his shame
and frustration.
“Why
won’t Traulanders fight?” Orlo asked.
Caelan
clenched his fists. “I want to fight,” he said.
“You
don’t act like it. I could whip you bloody and it wouldn’t help.”
“No,
master,” Caelan agreed miserably. His plan was dying in his heart.
“Perhaps
you’re trying too hard. Relax, you fool, and let it come naturally. The weapon
is caressed, not throttled. Settle the hilt in your palm the way you would your
woman’s breast. Eh? Make sense to you?”
Caelan’s
face flamed, and he shifted his feet. Orlo knew how few women entered the life
of a slave, if any. Hut whether advice or a taunt, what he said did make sense.
Orlo
sighed and slid the club into his belt. “Assume stance.”
Astonishment
filling him, Caelan obeyed quickly. He couldn’t believe his luck at this
special attention, but he knew better than to spoil it with hesitation.
“Flex
your knees more,” Orlo instructed. “Keep your back straight but loose. Pay
attention! Feel how tense you are. You must be a reed, swaying always, never
still, never locked up. Lunge!”
Caelan
sprang forward, and Orlo skipped out of the way just in time.
“Not
too bad,” he said, “for a lumbering ox. Imagine you are standing on a pane of
glass. Do you know what glass is, Traulander?”
“Yes,
master.”
“Well,
well, perhaps you’re more civilized than I thought. Don’t pound your feet. You’re
dancing on glass, livery footstep must be light. You are a reed, swaying,
always moving. Lunge!”
And
on it went, for the rest of the afternoon. By the time he finished, Caelan was
dragging with exhaustion but heartened. The next morning, however, when he was
assigned a veteran partner for practice bouts, the moment he drew a work sword
from the rack he dropped it.
“Hail
the loser!” jeered his opponent.
Face
aflame, Caelan bent and picked up the narrow strip of blunt metal. The balance
was clumsy. Try as he might, he couldn’t even imagine it as a real sword. They
were forbidden actual weapons until they entered the arena. Sometimes he felt
that if he could practice with the real thing, he might do better. But he might
as well wish to walk the surface of the moon.
Many
years before, in the previous century, it was said gladiators practiced with
real weapons and as many died from sparring as in the ring. But there had been
an uprising, with the trainers and guards all massacred. Gladiators had escaped
the compound and run amok in the city, raping and pillaging until the army was
called out to stop them. Even then, some of them had escaped into the
countryside, never to be found. The others were rounded up and executed. Their
heads had rotted on the walls of the city for weeks.
Thereafter
had come the arena reforms. Haggai—whatever they were—had been brought to live
in the catacombs beneath the arena. Weapons were taken away altogether and not
put into the hand of a fighter until he was actually secured in the ring.
Guards were retrained to a new standard of vigilance. Any sign of rebellion or
unrest was punished swiftly with death. The veterans were kept separated from
the new trainees, except during supervised practice bouts. And even the
veterans were rotated among the barracks on a frequent basis, to keep
friendships from forming.
Not
that many men grew close, especially knowing everyone was a potential opponent
during season. With all fights to the death, it was smarter to keep comradeship
to a minimum. Trainees who didn’t heed that piece of advice died quickly in the
ring, eyes wide and astonishment frozen on their faces as the sword thrust
through their guts.