Kings of Ash

by Richard Nell

  “For a little while, princess.”

  She returned the smile, but looked away. “I don’t believe you’re guilty, Arun. I know you’re clever—I think you’d have fled had you known about the attack, or taken part in it.”

  “Then let me go.”

  Her long, loose hair tumbled as she shook her head. “My brother doesn’t care. He wants an example.”

  “I can be much more useful than an example. String up one of the assassins.”

  The torturer perked up, as if he’d smelled something rotten. “Please speak with the king or don’t interfere…my lady.” He bowed as genuinely as he’d read Arun his script.

  She ignored him.

  “He won’t believe anything you say. And he won’t trust you to do what you promise.”

  The bamboo was doing more than prickling flesh now. Every moment it seemed an increasingly firm ‘support’. Arun closed his eyes, not seeing an escape.

  “I’ll do whatever the king requires to prove my loyalty. I have no reason to lie, no cause, I am a mercenary, my life is…”

  “There’s nothing!” she interrupted, angrily, as if she’d been considering this all night.

  Sweet girl, Arun thought, seeing at last through her mask—seeing just a terrified young woman doing what she must. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live here trapped with the Kinslayer King.

  No doubt the toughness she’d shown before was a brave-face for guests while her brother dangled her out like bait. Arun looked on her fragile beauty and reminded himself she was no more than twenty-three, her husband dead, her whole family gone except the brother that killed them a few short years go.

  Of course she had to pretend to be loyal, but she probably hated him.

  “You’re a failed monk—you betrayed the Enlightened.” Kikay sighed. “He’ll never trust you.”

  Arun’s mind raced, and he surged against his chains as it clicked.

  “Yes, I’m a failed monk. Tell him to send me back to Bato a prisoner. I’ll re-take the tests, I’ll do whatever they ask to prove my honesty. Let the monks decide if I live.”

  The Alaku princess searched his eyes, then looked away again, turning back with at least some hope.

  “Maybe. Yes, maybe. He respects the monks.”

  “Enough.” The Master Torturer rose and looked straight at Kikay. “Until the king tells me otherwise, you’re forbidden from speaking to this prisoner. I am master here, my lady, in the king’s name. Leave us.”

  Arun blinked in shock at the tone. Kikay withered.

  “My apologies, I’ll speak with the king.” She bowed slightly and turned.

  “Do hurry,” Arun called, as casually as possible, noting the bamboo’s persistence growing stiffer by the moment. Save me, he thought, and perhaps later I’ll kill your brother for you.

  She spared a look at the bamboo, then his eyes, and ran for the steps.

  Arun almost sagged in relief. He realized he might be useless to a woman by the time she returned, but he couldn’t help himself, he watched her curves as she ran, and held her smile in his mind like a prayer as he breathed out.

  When he was ready he re-focused on his flesh, preparing to harden himself as he’d done a thousand times to snap boards and bend iron in training. The masters of the Ching could shatter stone with their palms and feet, and bend iron with their necks.

  But never with their balls.

  He held back the laugh at the insanity of life, and the pure, beautiful chaos of it all. Well, he supposed, controlling his breathing, there was a first time for everything.

  His torturer stood with arms crossed, pupils floating, and glared.

  * * *

  Arun felt the growth rising against his flesh, pushing, exploring, stiffening against him. Then he was back beside Lake Lancona while Old Lo poured salt-water in his eyes.

  “Keep your eyes open, boy.”

  “It hurts,” he’d whimpered.

  “And what is pain? Does a stone fear water? Fear salt?”

  “N-, no, teacher.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “Because a stone feels no pain, Teacher.”

  “Maybe it does, and you just can’t hear its cries. Be a stone, boy. Do not move.”

  Arun had done his best. The rusty sprinkler in Lo’s hand had been used both for watering plants and little boys, its wooden handle smooth and faded from use. He remembered wondering if the man or the tool was older, but he never talked back. He was always polite and respectful, and he’d never breathed a word about running away before he did it, not even to his brother.

  Bastard boys were always running away. No one would have thought much of it if Arun hadn’t been selected for the Ching, and so close to becoming a monk in truth. Anyway, the running came later, far later, after a hundred cruel tests and meaningless exercises. He’d suffered for years under that man.

  “Don’t move!”

  The voice was the butcher now. Lo had his arrogance and his tests and natural meanness, but measured against whatever lived in this torturer’s heart, the old monk seemed harmless enough.

  “Clear your thoughts,” whispered Lo again in the recesses of Arun’s mind. “Be still. Let the water flow over you, shape you, but do not resist. You are a flat stone in a river.”

  Fuck you, old fake.

  Arun’s mind had never once ‘cleared’. Most days he’d thought of taking the sprinkler and beating his teacher to death; sometimes he’d thought of stealing a boat and sailing away, far away, to a place with all the food he could eat and soft beds and maybe a mother and father who tucked him into it at night. He’d held his eyes open through sheer will.

  “Very good. Now don’t blink.”

  He hadn’t fucking blinked. But not because he ‘stilled his mind’ or ‘became like the rock’ but because he’d been so angry, so wretchedly tired of being weak, he had said to himself ‘I am the master of my eye, not this old man, not this pain. My eyes will not close’.

  “Yes, boy, empty your thoughts, still your mind.”

  Not once in all those years had Arun understood what that meant. And later he’d swum that damned lake with open eyes and a busy mind, just like he’d walked over hot coals and snapped wooden beams and danced the Ching with a busy mind. Just like he’d sat through morning prayer and afternoon prayer and evening prayer while he thought about naked girls and drowning Old Lo with water from his sprinkler.

  Now here he was. And what the hell was bamboo, anyway? Nothing. A piece of wood, a stupid plant, a lesser little form of life with no spirits or Gods, helpless to stop one single swing of one single machete. That’s what intended to kill him? Intended to invade the only thing Arun could call home? Well, he thought, let’s just see who cares more.

  He flexed every muscle from his chest down to his toes, twitching each separately as he’d learned painfully over a decade to do. The bamboo was sharp, he knew, that was the danger. His skin must be hard, so hard that the tip would hold and force the stalk to bend. He breathed out and lifted his torso a fraction of an inch. He cried out from the sheer bloody trapped rage and effort of it.

  “Move again, prisoner, and I take your hands.”

  Arun opened his eyes long enough to stare. Oh how he would enjoy killing this man when the time came. And by all the spirits and gods, he promised, it would come, because fate never spared anyone, especially not someone like this—not someone who deserved it, not in the end.

  The ex-monk found the muscles in his gut and around his manhood and flexed them, then settled very slowly, and very carefully, against the plant. He watched the other man’s eyes, which focused on the sharp, firm, round top of the plant pressing against his prisoner’s skin.

  ‘Bend but do not break,’ Arun imagined the old man saying, ‘be as the bamboo’!

  Fuck you, and the bamboo, and this fat, shifty-eyed monster.

  Arun breathed. Life became the passing of single moments, or perhaps it always had been and Arun just never noticed. Even now his mind wand
ered, thinking of all those he’d killed because fortune was fickle or because they were weak creatures in a world that tested strength.

  He felt each moment as if failure loomed—as if justice and fate pushed at him through the stiff stalk of a plant, and that his skin was torn and his body impaled already, blood running down his leg and pooling on the sunlit floor. But thought was useless. He had but a single task, a single purpose, and it was obvious. Life could never be more clear and beautiful.

  “Stop it.”

  The torturer’s hands flexed and his brow looked sweaty.

  “Stop what, my friend?”

  Arun exhaled as he spoke. He smiled at the glorious look in the monster’s eyes—a hungry carnivore trapped in a cage, terrible ambitions thwarted.

  The bamboo was slowly starting to bend. The torturer stared and stared, his face seeming to bend with it, pupils floating around his eyes as if he’d been smoking opium. His hands clenched white as he stood watching, his breathing getting heavier.

  Without another word he turned and walked to his tray. He lifted a claw-like contraption of knives, dipped it in sour-smelling liquid, and returned to the cage. He paused long enough to stare again at his bamboo, then raked it across Arun’s chest deftly between the bars.

  Arun screamed and shook more in rage than in pain. He breathed and kept his body tense, yelling again and again at the waves of pain rolling down his flesh. The cuts seemed shallow enough, but he yelled because he was trapped, because he was in the grip of a madman, and a living thing was trying to grow through his groin.

  He felt his muscles shaking imperceptibly, then the urge to swat at the pain like a mosquito, a shiver on his skin as the wind rose hairs on a man’s neck. He screamed again at the fury of it, the betrayal of his body. Finally he flinched. Not enough to lose control of his muscles, but enough.

  “You moved.” The big man was covered in as much sweat as Arun, like an addict too long from his pipe, expression locked now in the foggy haze of his passion. He put the claw down and returned to his tray, and very slowly, very deliberately, he lifted a butcher’s knife.

  “I will take your hands now,” he almost groaned. “But you must leave the stumps out of the shackles for me to bind them, or else you will bleed to death. Do you understand?”

  Arun’s heart pounded. His stomach rose in terror because he knew it was too soon. Kikay couldn’t have found the king and convinced him yet, let alone returned, and she was the only thing in the way.

  He’s going to do it. He’s going to cut off my bloody hands. Enlightened help me.

  With eager yet halting steps, the torturer jerked towards the cage. Arun knew the monster was savoring his fear, that he lived for it, that he needed it somehow. But it didn’t matter. Arun couldn’t stop the watery trembling of his bowels, the tightness arcing through his muscles. He was giving this awful man what he wanted and by all good spirits he didn’t want to lose his hands, please no. He screamed again in rage, trying to let out the trapped, helpless terror with the only thing he possessed that could escape the iron bars.

  The butcher smiled at last. He brushed sweaty fingers over Arun’s manacle locked hands and raised the cleaver. Arun cried out again, but this time, not in terror—but out of sheer, insane hope. Over the butcher’s shoulder he saw a shadow.

  A huge silhouette stepped into the gloom from the stairs, a shuffling scrape of callused foot against the stone of the basement. The butcher blinked, then turned.

  “Loa, pirate,” said a voice, deep and sonorous. Arun nearly wept, and laughed like a madman.

  “Loa, Ruka.”

  The savage was half-wrapped in white and red bandage, his bright eyes half-closed as if he’d been drugged.

  Oh God, Arun’s mind filled with terrible, hopeless thought, perhaps he’s only come to watch. Perhaps he hates me, perhaps he thinks I’ve betrayed the king and his rescue was just a ruse. And then: Or maybe he likes torture, who knows what he thinks, he’s a god damned savage!

  Ruka leaned against the wall as if exhausted, or in pain. He was unarmed. A gash across his side appeared re-opened just from coming down the stairs.

  The torturer gripped his knife and his massive chest heaved. He gestured up the stairs.

  “Go. Go back to your room! Go now! Understand? Go!”

  He gestured again and waved the blade, speaking as one would to a feral dog.

  The giant’s bright eyes opened slightly and shone in the light. He inspected Arun, the cage, the bamboo and the little tray covered in clean, metal knives. All at once he sneered and rose to his full height, as if whatever pain he had felt simply disappeared.

  “No.”

  With that he stepped forward, eyes locked on the butcher’s. The two big men leaned like hunting cats. Their faces were hardened in concentration, violence lurking in their limbs.

  Arun tried to push past the trembling in every muscle—past the waves of pain from what smelled like lemon juice dripping down his chest-cuts, and the urge to scream from still being so thoroughly and utterly trapped. He felt the strange joy of hope and salvation, and the fear of its failing.

  Ruka approached on shaky legs, his hands up and open, his eyes wary. He stood at least a foot or more taller than his enemy. His muscles were taut, corded and terrifying, and Arun knew the awful strength in the man’s body. But he was badly wounded, and unarmed.

  The butcher was thicker, and though fat, moved like a wrestler. He stepped and circled like a man no stranger to violence. He raised the cleaver to swing once, twice, but held it back. He faked a lunge, faked a dash to the side, and moved away. Finally he surged ahead.

  He almost leapt and shouted, one hand sweeping out as if just to distract. He swung his cleaver, and Ruka stumbled to the side but seemed too weak to move away. The blade sprayed blood.

  A piece of flesh squished to the ground. Ruka roared and charged, his bloody hands closing around the thick neck and forearm of the butcher. The two big men spun and flailed and fell to the floor. They grunted and growled like animals, striking out at each other with elbows and knees, one arm each devoted to the cleaver, holding it up as if some delicate jewel.

  Arun’s heart felt like it would burst. He strained at his bindings knowing nothing he did mattered, that his fate lay in other men’s hands. He cursed himself for a fool, playing the game of kings, hating his greed and the knowledge that if he survived this moment that the flood of victory would please him just as his terror fed the butcher.

  And there he waited, a plant sticking under his groin, some barbarian he’d meant to sell fighting tooth and nail for his life. What a strange, insane world, he thought, what a beautiful, terrible world.

  The butcher screamed.

  Ruka’s jaw opened and closed on the butcher’s face as he chewed, tearing flesh like an animal. The cleaver came free and Ruka flung it across the room. He brought his huge, bloody fists down again and again until his enemy went limp beneath his blows. Then he seized the thick neck, and squeezed.

  It was the slowest death of Arun’s life. He trembled, waiting for the gurgling last sputters of the dying man. Finally Ruka rose without a word. He shook like a new-born calf before plodding to the cage, his body coated in blood, his left hand missing its smallest finger. He knelt and took the bamboo pushing against Arun’s body, bending it down and away. Then he lifted it entirely from its pot, stumbled back across the room, and rammed it through the torturer’s gut.

  Without looking back, he stumbled up the stairs with the audible sounds of swallowing whatever bits of his enemy’s face he had still in his mouth. He left Arun alone, but safe, weeping and utterly speechless in the dark.

  Chapter 16

  Ruka woke on a wide bed with his feet propped on a table. Someone had wrapped his wounds—or rather, wrapped them again—including the even more freshly wounded hand.

  Nine fingers to match the nine toes, he thought. At least now in one way I’m symmetrical.

  A young, half-naked boy waited at the door. He looke
d at Ruka’s open eyes and bolted out, and soon returned with an older man who spouted gibberish. They replaced Ruka’s bandages and doused his wounds with water, offering Ruka a sweet-smelling alcohol, which he ignored. The terrified boy made a show of holding Ruka down while the old man sewed.

  “Still alive, brother,” Bukayag said at last as he woke to feel the pain.

  Ruka smiled. Still alive. At least for now.

  The old man noticed his good humor and began to sweat. His eyes twitched as Ruka’s brother grinned at every stitch of their flesh as if willing the needle forward.

  “If they come for us,” he hissed when it was done, “give me a sword. I will fight to the death.”

  Ruka only nodded, knowing the attempt would be pointless. His brother feared the new king would punish him for the attack, or for the torturer, or just because he thought him a threat. It had been a very long night.

  First they had hacked and bashed their way through the shadow men, taking a dozen wounds from darts and little knives on ropes and throwing blades. Then, later, after they dragged him to his room, after the healers and questions he couldn’t understand, he’d heard Ahrune’s groans and screams.

  He’d left his bed, slinking past the half-sleeping, incompetent guards who thought him near death. He followed the direction of the sounds to find another room for torture. He grit his teeth, disappointed.

  Beneath all the civilization and stone, beneath the dark caverns of paradise, still things were the same. The fat, unarmed islanders sat on their white sandy beaches ringed by killers with sharpened knives.

  As he looked at the devices conceived for pain, he’d thought again of Egil and a night of screams. Even without this shame, the little shadow-fox had saved him, and nevermind his reasons. Ruka owed him a debt.

  But I should have summoned a weapon, he thought, angry at himself and whatever drugs he’d been given that dulled his mind and senses.

  He had underestimated the squat little killer. In future he knew he must take care not to judge all foreigners from their lesser brethren, and be more cautious. He only had so many toes and fingers.