In addition to her own people she saw men taken from distant places known only from legend—pale-eyed men from beyond the northern sea, Arab nomads, Sarmatian tribesmen whose faces were fierce and closed, and elegantly tall men with dark, polished skin from the southernmost extreme of the world. Of the women, all were of sturdy frame save one, a native of the isle of Albion who stood in the rank ahead of her. This woman was a finely made creature with hair that was gauzy and golden and small white hands that had never known work rougher than spinning. Auriane found her presence disturbing. Most of the others, if not yet adept with weapons, at least looked as if they could be. This woman should have been sold into some noble house as a lady’s maid. Again and again it happened that just when she thought she had begun to make sense of this situation, she would be confronted with some odd and sad puzzle like this.
Corax halted and faced them, shifting smoothly to a practiced, confidential tone. “Life’s plain and simple here…some animals can be trained, some cannot. But if you heed well my words, a good many of you have a chance of life…a few, perhaps, even a chance at glory.”
His voice rose to strident pitch. “So listen well, you crop of villains! Second of your virtues will be courage. The faster you acquire it, the fewer scars you’ll bear from the brand. You will learn not to flinch when a naked blade is thrust in your face. Life, death—to you, it will be the same. You will learn to strike first and take bold risks—the crowd loathes a man too covetous of his own life. And at the moment of defeat, you’ll not shame us more by shrinking from death—you will offer your neck willingly to your opponent’s blade.
“But first of your virtues will be—obedience. There is but one will here—ours.”
Auriane felt a twist of contempt. At the heart of what seemed most incomprehensible about this race of men was the relish with which all classes extolled obedience: Why would a proud people raise their own to be slaves?
Corax resumed pacing, bobbing as he walked; that round, solid head was set so close on his shoulders it seemed some giant had tried to hammer him into the earth but had given up, finding him too tough and gnarled.
“You do not speak to your superiors of the First and Second Halls, nor will you covet their women or their gifts. Never will you raise a hand against a trainer. Tomorrow you will be taken to watch while a novice like yourselves, a wretch who tried to murder an undertrainer of the Second Hall, is fed to an Indian tiger.”
Then he shifted once more to a comradely manner, his voice rich with encouragement. “But for those of you who show merit, all manner of things are possible. You’ll have money gifts one day, for when you are victorious you’ll be allowed to keep part of your prize, amounting to a quarter of your value as a slave. And you’ll be given some freedoms. A select few might join the immortals. Your name will be uttered with admiration by the great. How many criminals and wastrels can boast of that? One or two of you might even be freed and made into citizens! So you see, you are not without hope.
“Every ninth day, and on important festival days—those dedicated to our own patron deities—Bellona, Nemesis and Mars—you will be granted a day of rest. And even better, now that the Palace has seen fit to give us the money for it, if you get your throats cut, you’ll not be thrown into the carnaria with the animals. You’ll be given as decent a burial as any man—”
“Thank all the gods for that at least!” came Sunia’s cynical whisper. Auriane turned faintly toward her and frowned, warning her to be silent.
“—and as you may know, we pool part of what we earn to be put aside for funerals, so you’ll even have a small procession, with incense and mourners. Some of you will live long enough to learn a simple truth—that the finest swordsmen in this school are better men in every way than the soft parasites who lap up the sight of your blood and fritter away their useless lives betting on you. Your courage will be real, while theirs, mere bluster. Let them think they show manliness in watching you. Why, they would scurry off in terror from what you will learn to endure! And you’ll have what you do not have now—the respect of your peers, the most courageous men in this city and in the world. This is our secret—that we strive not to equal the soft, effeminate patrician in the crowd whose worthy ancestors left him wealth, but to surpass him.”
An aggressive fly orbited Sunia’s head. Absentmindedly she raised a hand and waved it off.
“You there!” Corax’s gaze flashed to Sunia. He smiled with cruel satisfaction. “I believe I ordered you not to move. Come forward!”
Without thought, Auriane moved swiftly to Sunia and seized her shoulders, forcing her to stay where she was.
Corax’s eyes met Auriane’s. And he felt a sink of dismay. Now there’s a mule’s spawn midwifed by a Fury, he thought, silently cursing his luck. They send all the untrainable ones to me.
“Ah, the loyalty of friends,” he called out with mock sweetness. “I think the show of sentiment will set me to bawling. Where will that mother love be when we command you to kill her?”
Corax nodded to four slave-assistants with brutish arms and aprons of bloodstained leather. They withdrew glowing iron rods from a brazier and slowly approached Auriane.
Coniaric looked back from his place, struggling to catch Auriane’s eye, silently willing her to obey Corax. His right hand clenched as if readying a spear. Thorgild did not look at her, but shut his eyes, trembling with outrage.
Sunia whispered, “Auriane, let me go, it’s not worth what they’ll do to you.”
But Auriane held tightly to her, as if by doing so she retained some measure of control over her fate. For too long she had been stripped of every weapon but her wits and her patience. Lately her utter dependency on her captors was edging her close to madness. Her whole spirit needed to strike out against the confinement, the waiting. She found herself humiliated even by her dependence upon Marcus Arrius Julianus, for she knew well escape was impossible without his aid. She feared even to catch sight of her reflection in pooled water, lest she see dependency’s disfigurement there. By day she concealed her despair from her tribesmen, but in the dark of night on her straw pallet often her courage broke, and she found herself alternately raging at the Fates and praying feverishly to Marcus Julianus as though he were a god.
The trainers’ assistants ringed about her, their brands so close she could feel the fierce heat. She heard a whip crack and a torn-off cry of pain and realized Coniaric was attempting to fight his way to her aid.
One assistant grasped her wrist, then thrust a brand at her bare arm. She was struck blind with an agony brutal beyond anything she had ever imagined; it was soul-splitting, devouring. She cried out, not recognizing her shriek as her own voice; then she lost her hold on Sunia and sank to her knees, seizing her arm tightly in an attempt to staunch the raging pain. Two assistants dragged Sunia before Corax while two remained to restrain Auriane.
While the burly assistants held Sunia securely, Corax ordered a third to bring a short sword from the armory. As it was carried through the ranks, the menacing glint of the blade held every eye.
“You’ll not handle one of these until your training is near complete,” Corax said importantly, holding it aloft. “But it is not too soon for your first lesson in courage. Look how fine the edge—is it not beautiful?”
Sunia writhed like an animal in a trap, eyes glazed, a slack animal-cry issuing from her throat. Corax grasped the sword by its bone grip and paused before her, eyes narrowed in concentration as he sought his striking distance. “Hold her tight, now,” he commanded softly.
He was interrupted by a curse and a shout. Auriane had bitten one of the men restraining her.
“Control that frothing bitch-dog or I’ll see both of you dispatched to work in the morgue.”
He repositioned himself, squinting at Sunia as he expertly flexed his knees, his whole mind on the point of his sword as he prepared to demonstrate a thrust. Sunia shut her eyes tight, twisting away from him.
“Open those eyes, cowardly sow.�
�
Sunia forced them open to slits.
“Flies bother you, do they?”
Corax lunged, executing a thrust that was a flash of fluid motion and bright steel. When he was still, there was not a finger’s breadth between the sword’s stabbing point and Sunia’s right eye. Had he not had a precise sense of his striking distance, she would have died.
Sunia sank into a faint. The assistants let her slide through their hands until she lay in a sad heap on the sand. One kicked her in disgust.
“Rouse her and give her ten lashes,” Corax said, grimly shaking his head. “Her cowardice reflects badly upon you all.”
“You are the coward, not she!” Auriane’s voice was like the ring of steel on steel.
“Paps of Medusa, I’ve had my fill of that one. Bring her up here.”
To his surprise Auriane came forward willingly. As she halted before him, a solemn stillness seemed to settle about her like some invisible cloak. On closer look he found the banked fury in her eyes unnerving. He saw this was not mere bad temper, but an avenging wrath of troublesome proportions, the sort that might sweep others along with it. This one is exceedingly dangerous, he thought.
Corax grinned broadly to cover his unease—a demonic babe now, with jagged, blackened teeth. “If you blink, you’ll earn ten lashes not only for yourself but for everyone in the yard.”
Two assistants stepped forward to secure her, but she motioned them off.
“Think you’ve no need to be held, do you? Aren’t we full of mulish confidence?”
Auriane watched him with a sort of active calm, looking down from her slightly greater height; Corax saw, perversely, there was sadness in those clear eyes that pierced deeper into his soul than he liked. He scowled, an unconscious act meant to ward her off. He fought a sense that the world, suddenly, was turned inside out; he was not testing her—those bold gray eyes were testing him.
“A pity, I feel I’m not at my best today,” he said, smiling carelessly. “Today’s the day I might slip. Every trainer does now and again, you know.”
Auriane did not seem to hear; she was too intent upon weighing, sensing him; she knew at once he prepared to execute a cut this time rather than a thrust. Several times Corax saw her shift her distance from him with small, subtle movements like a musician feeling for the right note. Then she stood very still.
And Corax discovered with quiet shock he did not have to move to find his striking distance. She had accurately determined it simply by observing him. A fortunate guess, he assured himself. No one is that skilled.
As he drew back his arm for the stroke, he saw those eyes grow faintly excited—but not with fear. It was more the look of the huntsman who sights the boar.
By all the gods, Corax thought, the woman is possessed.
He executed his stroke. The blade slashed diagonally past her face, missing it by less than a finger’s breadth. The yard was silent but for the sinister hiss of rushing air. Auriane did not blink or move. Corax thought she might have stood alone before the altar of her savage gods; he had an uncomfortable sense he did not exist.
This is impossible, he thought. This is a thing that requires months to master. Most never master it. She is a witch. Or is that rabid insolence just greater than her fear?
He executed another stroke, then another, each more frantic than the last as rage rose like water boiling up savagely in a cookpot. On the fourth, Auriane sensed his anger overrode accuracy, and she took one nimble step backward that saved her life.
Corax gave it up then and announced with elaborate indifference: “So, you’ve a steady nature. It’s nothing, I see it all the time.”
She should be killed, he thought. She is too fearless to be controlled.
But she is a phenomenon.
“Ten lashes for everyone in the yard, anyway,” he went on smoothly—for he was certain they silently laughed at him. “That’s just for her insolence. Oh, yes, and a hundred for her.”
Auriane made a violent lunge at him. But five assistants held her fast; she was like a fly struggling in a web.
At that moment Corax’s slave Asterion hurriedly approached. He had come earlier with a message for his master, but paused a short distance off while this drama played itself out. Speaking softly into Corax’s ear in a dignified voice that disguised his contempt for the undertrainer, Asterion insisted, “A hundred lashes will kill her.”
“You’re a bright lad, Asterion.”
“That courage is prodigal. My poor advice, if you will hear it, is to keep her. Who can say how she might change your fortunes—or fatten your purse? Remember Meton.” Asterion was ever alert to the fact that his own fortunes could not rise faster than his dull-witted master’s.
Corax’s mind was heavy and plodding as an ox, but it worked thoroughly, following Asterion’s thought to the end.
Meton had been of little account, just another trainer of novices like himself—and then he trained Aristos. Overnight he was elevated to the First Hall. Now he was paid five times what Corax was given, and the school awarded him a rich money gift every time Aristos won. The scoundrel even dined at Torquatus’ table. Of course, this novice was only a woman, but a recklessly bold woman might be worth something. Corax’s mind lumbered ahead, unable to stop: He could leave his stifling single room just beneath his tenement-block’s roof and move down into the cool, spacious merchant’s apartments on the fashionable first floor, nearer to the courtyard fountains. He could free his slave Lycisca and marry her. He would ascend, if not to the First Hall, at least to the Second—and his peers in the Third could choke on their bile.
Corax gave Asterion a dismissive pat on the shoulder, then turned to the assistants and said in a covered voice, a spark of avariciousness animating his vacant eyes, “Ten lashes, no more—just enough to reprimand her. Then lock her up in the pit. Five days. No food, only water. We’ll starve the meanness out of her.”
Auriane found herself buried alive in the moist, earthen bowels of the school. She was chained to the floor, her face pressed against wet stone. The cuts from the lash had been doused with salt water so they would not suppurate, and her back felt like a glowing fire-pit. Regularly the guards opened and slammed closed the iron door of the passage leading to the cell, rousing the rats to fits of frenzied scurrying.
Fria, let me die. There is no way to survive in this mother-cursed place. All here is turned on its head. Courage brings the whip, betrayal brings praise, cruelty brings freedom and fame. I want nothing more from the world. Let me sink into black earth, into peace.
Nightmare-ridden sleep took her. After a stretch of time that might have been one day or three, her hunger-sharpened sense of smell detected the rich, sweet odor of boiled fruit. She opened her eyes and saw in the murky light that a wooden bowl, still steaming, had been placed within the bars.
She struggled against a powerful impulse to seize it and gulp it down like a beast. Something was wrong. Why would Corax amend his order and have food brought?
Several paces off a rat reared up, long body erect, its eyes glowing beads as it watched her warily. Auriane pushed the bowl closer to the bold creature and feigned sleep. It scuttled forward, then stopped, pausing to clean its face with a swift rotating motion of fleshy paws. Silently she cursed. After what seemed half a day it started forward again and seized a boiled fig.
With chilling swiftness its agony began. The little body writhed and jerked while Auriane watched in numb fright, imagining how its vitals burned.
This is the work of some unknown enemy. The Emperor would not deign to murder me in secret. And Corax, for some reason, wants me alive. The trainers, after that day in the yard, must have talked of what passed, and my name has reached the ears of someone who wishes me dead.
But who?
CHAPTER XXXVI
WHEN AURIANE WAS RELEASED, THE DAYS had a numbing sameness. The sandy yard, the cramped passages and the cavernous room off the kitchens were her country. This is how the plow-ox must feel, she surmi
sed, walking the same path day upon day, looking on the same scraps of the world. At first light the two hundred novices were jarred from sleep by the guards striking iron rods against the bars. The hours of practice, the miserable meals and the doubtful escape of sleep were the spokes of a wheel, marking the turning of the days. She found a strange good came out of it—the very monotony brought her a startling clarity of mind, the sense that her spirit-flame somehow gathered strength, as though she performed ceaselessly the Ritual of Fire. Was it this—or was it the return of the aurr—that made the ways of her country begin to look like a thing apart from her, not inseparable from her soul? She remembered Ramis often isolated apprentices and assigned them repetitive tasks. Was her purpose to create this odd sense of belonging not merely to one’s clan, but to the preserving sun, the ocean of night sky, and all sentient beings?
Have I in some way in this foreign place become an apprentice of Ramis after all? Athelinda, in spite of your efforts, the sorceress claims me at the last. But she will never have me completely—not while I seek to avenge.
The mornings in the yard were passed in maneuvers designed to build the novices’ endurance, alertness and speed, as well as the strength of leg so vital in swordfighting. Corax liked to have them run the circuit of the sandy yard with lead weights attached to their ankles while he stationed the assistants in the yard’s center, armed with wooden staves. The assistants would hurl the staves without warning, forcing the novices to dodge them. They did not kill when they struck, but they grievously wounded. In the afternoon the novices were given the same staves as weapons and taught to thrust at stout posts, then at straw men. Soon they were sparring with partners.
B007IIXYQY EBOK Page 79
