by Trevor Zaple
He brought his hands together in a loud clap; at this prearranged signal, Karl’s personal horses came charging into the arena, with the proudest and boldest being ridden by Tyler. Tyler brought them into sharp formation and led them through a series of intricate manoeuvres that charged and thundered around Richards place in the center of the ring. The execution was slickly done and utterly professional; Richard felt ashamed that he had ever doubted the man. When the horses finally became still and Tyler held up his hands in triumph, the crowd roared with delighted and the stands thundered with applause. Richard noted with satisfaction that the House Speaker was amongst the loudest and most enthusiastic of the crowd.
After Tyler led the horses out of the ring and the crowd died down, Richard held up his hands once again. The hush returned over the crowd and he felt a small surge of triumph. They were his to command, an audience rising and falling by the gestures he made. There was a power in it that made his labours seem worthwhile. He spoke again with a calm, powerful inflection.
“For your consideration, I submit to our honourable guests a tournament of fighters, six in all. Tonight, they will fight – and die – for your amusement, and for a prize of six hundred standard weight coins”. A murmur ran through the crowd; for some of the farmers it was equivalent to a year’s wages, but it was nothing compared to the revenue they took in from wagers made against various fighters over the course of the year. In terms of sheer currency, Karl Tiegert was a very wealthy man. On the spur of the moment he made an offer that he had only tried a few times in the past, when he’d attracted odd numbers of gladiators for large prizes.
“There is a seventh fighter in attendance tonight to seek the prize. If there are any in the audience who wish to vie for the prize themselves, they need only make themselves known, and they will be accorded with the rights and responsibilities of the other gladiators”. He paused to give the crowd time to consider the offer and work themselves up to accepting it. When the House Speaker arose from his seat, Richard’s heart sank into his stomach; surely such an important man would not stoop to fighting in the dirt for six hundred coins? If anything happened to him, Richard’s head would be rotting in the far fields before the moon rose. As the House Speaker began to address him he realized that he had ceased to breathe.
“Master Adams,” the House Speaker said, and Richard reeled to hear that the man knew his name. “You have already granted us a true gift in your man’s demonstration of his abilities with horseflesh. I have not seen a better display outside of the Republics own horsemasters, and it brought tears to my eyes to see the skill – the art – brought to life. Allow me to repay you, and your kind master. Choose one of my men to fill in as the eighth fighter in the tournament, so that we may see a full circle of combat and prolong our entertainment greatly”.
Richard blinked at this, considered it quickly, and smiled. It was a smile of such vulpine nature that it nearly set his eyes on fire. He gestured outwards with open palms.
“Any of your men, your Honour?” he asked, trying to clarify. Karl looked at him sharply, and Richard though that he could see the hatchet-faced mans vicious mind devising a punishment for the pertinence that he was perceiving. Richard swallowed hard but kept with it. The House Speaker looked at him without expression for a moment before responding.
“Any of my men,” he repeated, “any whom take their orders directly from me. Choose as you will”.
Richard nodded and immediately held out his hand to point a strident finger at the Executive Box. He pointed it directly at the sleek, overfed man in the simple white robe.
“That man, Your Honour,” he decided. “Let that man join the others in the ring”.
FOUR
An intense wave of conversation crashed over the audience and Richard had to hold his hands up for five minutes to achieve even a rudimentary silence in them. He kept his eyes on the House Speaker the entire time. He felt as though he had likely stepped over a line, and during the five minute interval between noise and silence he had quite a bit of time to think of how Karl might punish him for this. He could already feel the augmented whip marks flaming down the tough muscles of his back.
The House Speaker’s expression was careful, an educated study in neutrality. He kept his eyes on Richard in turn and gave nothing away through them. When the crowd settled down he cleared his throat and addressed Richard with the sort of tone that he had once been accustomed to hearing from politicians, and his own sales staff.
“Master Adams,” he said, “I told you to pick any of my men and you have done so; consequently, I will keep to my end of the offer”. The crowd fired up into conversation again but a quick gesture from Richard brought them to a quick, interested hush. “Before I offer up my advisor here to the possible slaughter, I feel that I must ask – why this man? Surely one of my soldiers would fit the bill as well?”
Richard’s thoughts raced for a moment before he responded. Over the course of countless nights in the past quarter-century, he had had ample time to think his next words through.
“Your Honour, I chose that man because I know that man. He was once one of the ruling apostles of the cult that held Brantford before His Lordship McAllister brought the city into the Republic. He was a terrible man, Your Honour, a man who believed that the best way to keep his own lifestyle was to make sure that others would maintain it for him, at no cost to himself. He and the others enslaved the post-plague population and forced them to work ceaselessly so that they could gorge themselves on food and drink. They took advantage of people, worked them to death, murdered them for the slightest of insubordinations, and raped vulnerable members of the community whenever they got the chance”. He paused here to let this sink in. “They also put into place a program that destroyed most of the knowledge of the old world that was contained in the city. At their hands, countless books were burned, computers were smashed, and even signs were painted over in an attempt to erase the past entirely”.
The audience rose into an uproar once again, and this time it took the intervention of the House Speaker, rising and facing them with his arms upraised, to bring them back to silence. Once they did so, he turned to his ‘advisor’ and crossed his arms.
“These are heavy accusations,” he told the man in the white robe. “Many crimes hang over your head now. I have offered you into the tournament, so you should consider it a chance to clear your name. If you win, all such crimes will be stricken from your record and you will be able to carry on with untainted prestige. If you lose, it will be considered tatamount to an admission of guilt”.
The white-robe’s face was a mask of terror. He gaped at his master, and then turned his whitened face to stare at Richard.
“You!” he screamed. “How can you do this? Brother Isaiah, I implore you! Don’t do this! Don’t make me do this! Please! PLEASE!”
“ENOUGH!” the House Speaker roared, and the white-robe fell into a shocked silence. Karl’s eyes widened, and Richard felt a small smile tug at his lips. “I have heard rumours of these things for years, enough so that it has made me question my original decision to buy you”. The House Speaker turned his attention to Richard, who felt his nerves tighten. “Can you swear to your accusations? Your veracity will reflect itself on your master, you understand”.
Richard looked at Karl and saw that the man was staring at him, a look of pure poison in his eyes. Richard swallowed, his stomach fluttering. If this somehow turned out wrong, he did not think that Karl would hesitate to have him killed, length of competent service notwithstanding. Such thoughts were fleeting, however; everything that he had accused the man of was the absolute truth, even somewhat understated. He steeled himself and faced the House Speaker with clear eyes.
“I have seen everything that I have accused this man of with my own eyes. I was kidnapped and forced to labour for them until the coming of the Republic. I saw first-hand the predations of these men, on the health and well-being of my fellows. Two of my friends were executed on their order
s, and I was sent on any number of missions to destroy the past. We were forced to cover over any written symbol or we would be considered heretics”.
The House Speaker took this all in and nodded. He turned to the man in the white robe.
“You will be first to fight, tonight,” he proclaimed calmly. The man in the white robe broke into incomprehensible sobbing; the audience murmured with disgust. Wanting to hurry the proceedings along, (and suddenly afraid of what the white-robe might burst out with in regards to Richard’s own role in the past), Richard clapped his hands and gestured to the audience.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned. “Without any further delay, let us begin tonight’s entertainment”. The audience responded with deafening applause.
The outcome of the first fight was a foregone conclusion; the hapless former cult leader was matched up with Simon through a random draw, and was dead within the first three minutes. It only took that long, Richard suspected, because Simon drew the fight out to keep the crowd happy. The white-robe chose a cudgel but proved himself to be too weak to swing it effectively; Simon easily sidestepped the man’s ineffectual swipes and darted at him professionally with a long, thin blade. After dancing around him for an extended period of time, Simon grew bored and ran the man through. Marcus and John entered the ring to drag the white-robe’s still-twitching corpse out into the fields, and the tournament continued on smoothly.
Richard watched the remainder of the fights with half-interest; his eyes went more often to Karl and the House Speaker, who were deep in conversation and only paying the most basic of attention to the tournament at hand. He wondered what they were discussing – what the House Speaker’s purpose in coming to their arena was – but knew that he would only find out if Karl deemed it necessary for him to know. Still, they seemed very intent on whatever it was they were speaking about, and Karl’s face betrayed that the topic of discussion was an uncomfortable one for him.
The fights wound their way through to the end; seven people died in combat that night in various ways, and their bodies were dragged out of the ring by Marcus and John, whose expressions never changed. Simon stood proudly in the center of the ring while the audience applauded him. Karl stood and said something congratulatory; Richard’s attention usually lapsed during his speeches and this time was not different. He spent the time going over the post-battle checklist in his head; first and foremost would be the cleansing of the ring. A profuse amount of blood had been spilled and the floor was slick with it, a sour, metallic tang in the air above it. He would have to start the arena servants on cleaning it, and then ensure that the stands were swept and cleaned of any litter. He would have at minimum two more hours at the arena, and as usual he hoped to minimize the amount of time he had to spend there. Tonight especially; he had other things he wanted to be doing in the dead of night.
Simon was presented with the prize and he accepted gladly; Richard knew that despite this, the man would be back for the bare-knuckled brawls that would occur the next week. Richard knew which one of Simon’s archetypes the man actually was. He watched the man limp out of the arena with some concern; he had taken a hard strike to the calf that had nearly cost him his life, and Richard had been shocked that he’d been able to continue standing on the leg. He hoped that some townsman or gentleman farmer would take it upon themselves to give the night’s champion a ride home in their wagon.
After the audience left Richard kicked the cleaning crew into gear, barking orders and sending the mops to the parts of the rings that needed the most work. He pushed and harangued, and if several of the cleaning crew shot him murderous looks he pretended not to pay it any mind. Let them hate me, he thought sourly, after all, if it wasn’t for this, it would be for something else. The idea did not give him any comfort, but the effect of his task-mastering upon the assembled servants did; it was only two hours before Richard was able to inspect the place and declare it fit to lock up for the night. He did so after seeing the servants out; he had once lost a number of weapons to a servant whom had hidden himself in the storage closet and waited until everyone else had left. The man had been caught days later and summarily hung, but Richard had been whipped soundly nonetheless. He did not plan on being whipped like that a second time.
By the time he started on the path back to the farmhouse the dark held fast over the land. The moon would be setting in a few hours and he intended to be making his way towards the copse in the field as soon as it did. The farmhouse was lit up with a number of lamps, causing it to blaze in the midst of miles of dark countryside like a bonfire. Most of the House Speaker’s contingent of soldiers were drinking on the front porch, slopping beer and speaking in loud, drunken voices. He gave them a smile and nod and they clanked glasses together in his honour. Inside the house, Sandra’s three kitchen servants had moved from cleaning the kitchen to sweeping out the other areas of the house. They looked up when he came in but went back to their tasks in a hurry. This suited Richard just fine, as he wanted to make sure everything was going according to plan before he pretended to turn in for the night. He did not see Karl or the House Speaker anywhere; he assumed that they were occupying the richly-appointed sitting room on the second floor, continuing whatever intent conversation they’d been having during the tournament. After checking the ground floor over (and making sure that Sandra was too busy to molest him) he headed into the basement.
The entire basement had been converted from the root cellar it had been into a wide, fairly comfortable servant’s quarters, with bunks separated by cubicle walls that had been scavenged from an old office building. There was one lamp here but he put it out as he passed by; the others could find their way through the basement by the small moonlight coming through from the tiny windows set here and there in the top of the wall. He settled into his bunk, drew the thin cover over himself, and began to wait for the moon to set.
The other servants made their way into the basement and sleep; Richard lay staring into vague darkness, listening to them fumble and climb into their beds. Two hours passed and he dozed off at one point; when he awoke he shook himself and pinched his flesh in several areas. He concentrated on staying awake and when he saw the darkness creep across the basement he crept out of his bunk and began to pad noiselessly across the floor. The basement steps were the original earthen stairs and were virtually noiseless as he made his slow, steady way up them. The floor of the farmhouse was treacherous for creaks but he knew which boards would squeal on him and which would not; at any rate, he made his way back to the kitchen and left the house by the back entrance, hoping to avoid any of the House Speaker’s soldiers that might still be awake. There was no one outside of the kitchen door and he crept his way out into the field, cutting away from the house on a diagonal to avoid catching any attention from the upstairs windows. Those windows were dark, but Richard did not want to make any mistakes.
He reached the grove of trees and got on his hands and knees. After a moment or so of searching he found the hollow and retrieved the tablet. He found the power button by tracing his finger along the edge of the device and held it down until the flare of light splashed out at him. He looked around nervously as it booted up, worried about the amount of light it was throwing off, but he decided after a moment’s consideration that he was far away enough from anywhere that no one would be able to see his small light source at all.
His hands shook as he explored the contents of the tablet, tracing his way through folders of pictures. Samantha had been beautiful; he knew that some of it was the way he had framed her in his memories but the pictures provided him with tangible evidence of it. She was as luminous as he remembered, and it brought unheeded tears to his eyes. The pictures were all of places he hadn’t thought of in years: cheap apartments, parks he remembered from St. Catharines, sights in Toronto. The Cuba pictures were mind-blowing to him; the opulence on display was now nearly incomprehensible to him, and it made him feel vaguely nauseous. There were also several pictures of Samantha in a scan
dalously tiny bikini, resting in various poses around the beach and the resort; he remembered her young, firm form under his touch and was overcome with undeniable lust. He fumbled out his rock-hard member and began to satisfy himself vigorously. He was nearly at the point of no return when he heard the urgent sound of horse hooves thundering in the near distance. He froze, his hand wrapped around his throbbing manhood, and stared out into the darkness in the direction of the road.
He saw moving figures bearing flaming torches speeding down the beaten ground beside the old roadway at a furious clip. There were three of them, pounding away at the pathway and moving with alarming speed toward the farmhouse. Within a pair of seconds he shut down the tablet and replaced it in its hiding spot in the hollow beneath the tree. He crawled out of the grove and made his way across the field with agonizing slowness. A light appeared in the upstairs window of the farmhouse, and moments later was extinguished. As he was approaching the back door into the kitchen, he heard the front door slam open and a commotion come clamouring out of it. He huddled by the back door, listening intently for any clue as to what was happening. He heard many of the soldiers grumbling about the drink, and hangovers, but the complaints were faint and quickly covered up by the sounds of horses being mounted and ridden away. He was about to open the kitchen door when he heard a voice speak briefly on the other side of the house.
“We have to hurry,” he heard the House Speaker say. “If they’ve already marched on Kitchener then we don’t have much time at all. Hopefully the House will have the brains to convene an emergency meeting, but I can’t be too certain of anything”. There were more sounds of horses being ridden away, and then silence descended upon the farmhouse again. Richard took the opportunity to unlatch the kitchen door and sneak back into the house.
