The Gladiator

by Jon Kiln

“Of many things. That you have been chosen by E’ghat. That you are one of his scattered ones. That you are sincerely converted. You like Mirah, don’t you?” She motioned to the bear-mask Draken had spoken with the first day he’d come.

  “I did not even know her name before this moment.”

  “So what? You liked how she talked to you. You like her, don’t you?”

  “I guess I do,” Draken admitted.

  “You’ll fight her to the death now, on the walkway by the water.”

  “What?” Draken exclaimed. One look at Pul told Draken he was not the only one surprised by this.

  “All the bear-masks at hand will watch you do it. Mirah is a powerful fighter. She used to fight in the pits of Edan with great skill. You will battle her. If you are one of E’ghat’s scattered ones, and I have no doubt that you are, you can beat her. When the moment comes that you can kill her, it will be your choice. If you don’t kill her, you can go.”

  “Go?” Draken asked, suddenly confused.

  “I told you, you can leave whenever you want to, after you’d heard what I had to say. Even if your faith falters, I believe you are a child of E’ghat. I would never have you killed. Half of our plan to get you both here was a bluff. Pul could have yelled for the soldier-police; we would not have harmed you.” She smiled, proud of her own craftiness. “None of these bear-masks would want you dead, either. If you choose not to kill her, you can go back home. You’ll never hear from us again. There will be no point in telling anyone we’re down here, because we’ll be gone. But maybe someday you will want to come to Edan and seek us yourself, when you’ve had more time to think about it. I hope that isn’t necessary. I hope you’ll make the right choice.”

  “You mean… kill her?”

  “When you fight, you will feel E’ghat within you. What you always thought was the fire of Rada. It will tell you to kill her. When you obey, everyone will believe that you are sincere. You will have cast your lot with us. You will be a new person. If you lose the fight, we’ll know we were wrong about you.”

  Draken looked at the woman he now knew was Mirah. Even though he knew he could guess the answer, he asked, “What about you? How do you feel about this?”

  She spoke with such sincerity that Draken almost looked away, feeling unworthy of her gaze. “Kill me tonight or I will have wasted my life.”

  He didn’t know what she meant by this, but wasn’t about to ask. There was something steely in her features that brokered no argument.

  “I guess we’ll just see if the fire lights inside me,” Draken said to himself more than anyone. “Then I will know for myself.”

  Chapter 24

  The air was humid in the tunnel as it always was. Here, the scent of dirt was not as strong as in the earthen rooms. The almost mossy smell of the water was as pervasive as its sound, rushing constantly past the stone walkway, scarcely as wide as Draken was tall.

  Even though it had been only a week or so since Draken’s last battle in the pits, when he wrapped his hand around his sword’s handle, he felt a pang of guilt. It had been too long since he’d last held it, he knew. Likewise, the weight of the dual bands holding the shield to his arm was like holding a memory of the past. He vowed, to E’ghat, perhaps, to never again go as long without wielding these twin extensions of himself. This is what he’d been made for.

  The female bear-mask, Mirah, Draken reminded himself, had the stance of a fighter who knew her way around an arena. She looked neither tense nor relaxed, but instead straddled the two conditions, forming a state known only by professionals of their caliber. Draken had lost fights to opponents who seemed less prepared than this, so he steeled himself. It was hard though, because for the first time in his life he did not know beyond any doubt that this was a battle he wanted to win.

  There were perhaps two dozen bear-masks in attendance. Sula and Pul were standing at the forefront. Draken hadn’t realized so many had been hiding down here. No one had said as much, but Draken had gathered that if he didn’t succeed today Pul would not be welcome to remain with his new family either. Pul seemed totally committed to E’ghat now. It had happened overnight, literally. Draken knew Pul wanted to stay. Instead of galvanizing him, this further confused the issue in Draken’s mind.

  So, he decided not to think. After all, this was a matter of the heart and spirit, not the mind. He imagined the gods themselves, chiefly Dramm-Teskata, Rada, and E’ghat, were actually the ones at war here, using his body as their battleground.

  Let the best god win, he thought, and suddenly the transition was made between waiting and fighting. When opponents were well-matched, it was sometimes not clear which one initiated the actual fighting. That was the case here. Their instincts so well-honed that they often acted without approval from the more conscious layers of the brain. Either Draken or Mirah had taken the initiative, and the other had reacted so close to instantaneously no mortal eye could tell the difference, not even their own.

  Mirah had a severely different style than any of the long-sword fighters he’d faced before. She swung wildly, with strokes a casual observer might have misinterpreted as sloppy or thoughtless. The benefit of such a style lay in the difficulty of predicting it. A wide, sideways swing that would have been easy to avoid had it not been so fast came hurtling toward Draken’s shield from the side furthest from the rushing water. There was barely time to react.

  He realized, almost too late, that she’d intended to push him with the blow into the water. She was playing dirty, something Draken had not had the luxury of doing since the earliest days of his fights as a kid in the shadow of Dramm-Teskata’s temple.

  Her dirty fighting was a lesson, he divined, probably an express order from Sula to Mirah. Both because fighting clean was his habit and because the fight had been arranged under the framework of so much talk of arenas. Draken had not thought even for a moment that dirty fighting would be allowed. Sula would have known that. In addition to adding to the challenge of the fight, Sula was telling Draken something about E’ghat. He didn’t live, play, or die in the same structure that Draken had always thought was the ultimate authority. Fighting dirty was the only smart way to fight. The only law was E’ghat’s law.

  Draken ducked too slow to avoid the blow entirely, but fast enough to roll with it without going over the edge. Droplets from the rushing water sprinkled his face, an invitation to join its swift course toward the center of the city. He rolled again, perpendicular to the flow, springing to his feet inches from Mirah’s side.

  She hadn’t been expecting him to come so close in such a vulnerable position, so she hadn’t been ready to block his attack. His sword hand was furthest from her, so he settled for an upward thrust of the shield. There had been times when this move had brought grown men off both feet, but he hadn’t been eating as well or exercising as much as he was used to, so it only staggered her.

  Pul and Sula were now shouting encouragement, to both Draken and Mirah, it sounded like, but Draken couldn’t make out individual sentiments over the rush of the water or intermittent cheers from the other bear-masks.

  Draken should have been able to take the window left by Mirah’s staggering to make a meaningful slash into her leg, a favorite mark of his in the pit. But she was too quick. Draken remembered the speed shown even by the towering Vgar and the speed Sula had betrayed even in her day-to-day movements in his rooms. Before he knew what was happening, another strike had landed. Draken was too close for her to make a full swing, so she’d used the pommel of her handle to smash her blow into Draken’s forehead.

  “Argh!” he cried, as blood filled both his eyes from a wound that seemed too deep to be on the head. Had she gone straight through his skull? Probing flames of pain lit up everything, illuminating nothing. She would be upon him any moment with a swing that might end his life.

  The cries of all the spectators were louder now and all the less intelligible for that, echoing off the stone, mixing with the rushing water. He didn’t care what they were
saying anyway. There was only one voice he wanted to hear now, and it wasn’t Rada’s.

  A fire was blazing inside him, too large to have just been started. No, it had been burning for a long time. Mirah had only uncovered it, the way all the fighters unlucky enough to do so before her had.

  He didn’t just want Mirah to die, he needed it.

  She was mid-swing when his sword skewered the soft pocket between her shoulder and breast, slicing all the way to the hilt. In any normal arena fight, this would have been the end. But Draken felt he was only now being born, only now was he beginning. She screamed, echoing the agony of his own yelp when she’d hit him.

  It was easy now. He couldn’t lose, and nothing would stop him from his aim.

  “E’ghat!” he screamed, slamming his shield into her face. “E’ghat!” he screamed again, as her nose and cheek bones broke. He threw the shield aside and wasted no time trying to extract his sword from her torn flesh. She tried to make a sound, but nothing could be heard over the rushing water and Draken’s own noises of gory victory.

  With his bare hands, he pummeled her until there was no life left. Her skull was broken and misshapen, and the skin of the neck held her head to her body more effectively than the ruined vertebrae.

  For a long time Draken only breathed, studying the blood on his knuckles, and even though the stream kept rushing along, it was as if there was no sound. He didn’t remember there were watchers until at least two minutes had passed, and then he looked up.

  Even Sula’s face showed shock. She had believed in him, but not to this extent. Pul’s mouth was a thin line, but Draken could see the truth behind it: his brother was trying not to get sick. Draken didn’t bother looking at the bear-masks, who covered their faces anyway.

  “E’ghat,” he said to them all, and smiled. It was his word now more than it was any of theirs.

  Chapter 25

  “Well,” Jace said, as Draken finished the account of his fight with Mirah, what Draken had long since considered his murder of the bear-mask. “That’s a story.”

  They’d been traveling now for a nearly a week, sleeping outside and foraging for food, a skill Jace surprisingly had mastered when he’d been a monk. It was one of many weird hobbies that others had often mocked him for behind his back and sometimes to his face. Draken had been telling his story off-and-on, stopping when other travelers were near or when immediate conversation needed to be made. There were many extra details Draken would add as he remembered them, so the story had proven a long and convoluted thing. Getting it out was the spiritual cleansing Draken needed, Brother Keller had been right about that. But it also hurt, like clearing a wound with stinging alcohol. Speaking of which…

  Draken was glad Jace hadn’t led them to another tavern since their first night together. It would be far too easy to turn back to the drink to help drown the guilt that continued to mount as Draken recounted the worst of his past.

  The morning was uncommonly clear, with almost no clouds to speak of to obscure the few remaining stars twinkling and fading as the sun rose.

  Clearly, the older monk was at a loss for words, making Draken queasy. Every second that passed in silence felt like a new pronouncement of his guilt. As he’d learned more about Jace, he’d found himself unable to resist respecting, even liking, the oddball monk. He had an opinion on just about everything, usually one totally foreign to Draken’s experience, and Draken was sure Jace had strong feelings of some kind about what Draken had just told him.

  Perhaps sensing this, Jace said, “Don’t think I’m judging your actions. Well, I mean, obviously they were sinful, and I do judge them to be such, but don’t think I’m trying to pass judgment on you, on the whole, as a person. I like to wait before I make those kinds of calls. And anyway, I’m not sure it’s my place to do so.”

  Draken didn’t say anything, and they walked in comparative silence for a few beats.

  “It must be painful to carry these things inside you.”

  “It is,” Draken said, and for a while left it at that. Then he thought of something else worth talking about. “Before we go to Figa, which I still think is a bad idea, by the way, you want us to stop somewhere, right? So, where is it?”

  “I guess we’re close enough for me to tell you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Whenever I have a horrible plan, I find it’s much better to wait until the last minute to bring it up with anyone. That way they’re much more likely to go along with it.”

  “You’re calling your own plan ‘horrible’?”

  “By some measures, yes.”

  “Okay, well… what is it?”

  “We’re going back to my old monastery.”

  Draken wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but certainly something worse. He didn’t know why the other monk wanted to go, but there was scarcely a less likely place for Draken to be recognized as a fighter, and for that he was grateful.

  “Well, I can see how that might be awkward for you,” Draken said, “since they kicked you out, but why is it a horrible idea?”

  “Remember Jace’s 15th maxim!”

  “Huh?”

  “Hint, it’s the one I just told you. I think I’ll wait until tomorrow at this time to tell you exactly why we’re going there. That way you’re…” He held his hands out as if he expected Draken to finish the thought for him.

  “Much more likely to go along with it?” Draken supplied.

  Jace winked and continued on the road.

  Chapter 26

  “You can’t be serious,” Draken said that evening when Jace’s target was in sight and he’d told Draken what his full plan was.

  “I’m always serious,” Jace said. “Even when I’m joking. And right now I’m not even joking. So I’m double-serious.”

  “This is… wrong.”

  “Maybe,” Jace conceded. “But I think it’s the will of the four-five gods all the same. And anyway, it’s not like any of the monks are going to use it. It’s just going to waste down there. We’ll wait until one hour after sundown, then I know exactly how to get in without being detected.”

  “What about your vows? You can’t use a crossbow.”

  “Oh?” Jace found a seat of soft dirt behind the bushes where he apparently intended them both to wait. “Interesting to hear you say that so soon after hacking four men down at the gates of our old monastery.”

  “You’re a monk.”

  Jace laughed. “Now you’re just giving me my lines. You’re no less a monk than I am.”

  “It’s different, and you know it. You’ve been a monk most of your life.” Draken took a seat, hoping it didn’t mean he’d already decided deep down that he would go along with Jace’s insane plan to steal a crossbow from his old monastery. It was a relic much like the sword Draken had taken from the Merreline monastery, a symbolic object reminding the monks of the gods’ war, the name given to the ongoing struggle against humanity’s entropic weakness. Symbolic or not, the crossbow was quite real, and, according to Jace, kept in good working order as part of the ritual of keeping it.

  “Do you know why monks swear never to take up arms? Do you know who started that custom?”

  Draken tried to think of which god might have commanded such a thing, but none of them seemed right. All the gods approved of war in the right circumstances, even Dramm-Teskata. So instead he tried to think like Jace. He tried to think of what human group would benefit from such a rule. “The kings and dukes? So their own armies would have more prestige?”

  “Good guess,” Jace said. “But no. Monks. Monks are the ones who pushed for this vow, a long time ago. It’s an excuse, Draken. An excuse to be protected by others. The responsibility to take action was removed. And many of the vows are like this. Since we, ahem, can’t grow our own food, the people have to bring us food from their own farms. We can’t have families, that’s just one more responsibility taken away from us.”

  “But it leaves us able to focus on worship. Do yo
u think that’s so useless?”

  Jace shrugged. “I don’t know everything.”

  “It sounds to me like you don’t think we should have monks at all.”

  Jace shook his head. “How often do we talk about the Canon?”

  “The scriptures?”

  “No,” Jace said, “a real cannon. Boom boom! Of course I mean the scriptures.”

  Draken didn’t see what this had to do with anything. “If by ‘we’ you mean—”

  “I mean everybody. Anybody. Monks, astro-priests, news-callers, farmers, kings, dukes, whores. Anybody you can think of. How often do we read the Canon or talk about it?”

  “Not often.”

  “Right. Not often. But do you know what it says about monks?”

  It was Draken’s turn to shrug. “A lot.”

  Jace nodded. “Obviously, Dramm-Teskata intended for there to be monks and monasteries. The Old Arbiters spoke of them many times. So I’m a monk in a monastery. Well, not anymore, I guess. About one out of every four rituals monks perform are in the Canon. Those are the ones I do. As for the rules: no fighting, no drinking, no farming, no family… I don’t know about those. Maybe that’s the way Dramm-Teskata wants it, but I don’t have any proof. There’s nothing about that stuff in the Canon.”

  Draken didn’t have a thing to say. He didn’t know if he agreed with Jace’s assessment of monks and monasteries or not. If it was true, maybe the church wasn’t as in-tune with Dramm-Teskata as he’d thought. All he knew was that, somehow, Jace had convinced him to help steal the crossbow.

  There was silence for a stretch, and then Draken checked the sky and saw that it was almost time.

  Chapter 27

  If Draken had thought Jace would have a foolproof plan of how to infiltrate the monastery undetected, he was to be disappointed. Jace did know of a secret entrance and roughly when various monks would be where, but the crossbow was in the kitchens just as the sword had been in the Merreline monastery, and there was nothing to stop a hungry monk from coming down to get a snack.