The Prince of Shadow

by Curt Benjamin

  The messenger was eyeing him doubtfully when Llesho joined him. “I wouldn’t want to be you for all the pearls in old Chin-shi’s bay,” was all he said, though, and the two boys climbed the rise at the center of the island with only the crying of the birds for commentary.

  Llesho had seen the gladiators’ training compound from a distance, but he had never been within the stout wooden palisade. Up close, Llesho could see the wall as individual tree trunks set upright, side by side, and snaggled at their tops like a hag’s teeth. Such precautions seemed unnecessary—if a Thebin trained to the bay could not escape Pearl Island, no soft servant or overmuscled gladiator would do better—but he figured that gladiators must, by trade, be violent men. And they might even be able to handle a boat. For whatever reason, it was as difficult to get inside the compound as it seemed to get out. At the postern gate, the boy who accompanied him spoke to a guard with an empty tunic sleeve tied up in a knot, who opened the gate with his one arm and herded them into a passageway so narrow that the shoulders of a larger man would brush each side as he passed through. Llesho clung to the rough palisade that made up the outer wall of the passageway. The inner wall was also constructed of tree trunks set upright in the ground, but peeled of their bark and smoothed of knots and other irregularities so that they fit snugly one against another. A broad polished band showed that most of the men who passed through these gates brushed against the smooth inner wall. But the sounds of grunts and curses and the clashing of weapons beyond that burnished palisade unnerved him, and Llesho pressed against the scratch and grab of the undressed outer logs for even the few inches of additional safety it afforded him from the sounds of battle within. Combat was part of his life now, but he shied away from the overwhelming reality of his decision as he followed his guide down the passage.

  Llesho figured they had traveled halfway around the compound before they came upon a second guard, apparently whole, at an inner bar to their entrance. This man seemed to know Llesho’s escort and wordlessly opened his gate. He raised an eyebrow over a twisted smile when he thought Llesho didn’t see, but quickly turned back to his work with awl and leather and whipcord when Llesho answered with a puzzled frown. The man didn’t look like a fighter, but then, neither did the golden boy at his side.

  Before Llesho could give this more than a passing thought, however, his companion had pushed him through the gate and he stumbled on the unfamiliar surface of sawdust under his feet. The smells of blood and sweat, and the sawdust itself, confused him, as did the flash of weapons and the deadly anger that seemed to crackle in the air around the fighting men. Llesho thrust one foot ahead of him, trying to regain his balance, and tripped over a piece of broken metal with bits of flesh clinging to it. With a squeal of surprise he fell face first into the training yard.

  “Pick up your feet, fool!”

  The words came from somewhere above a pair of darkly tanned sandaled feet that had planted themselves inches from Llesho’s nose. He needed to pick up more than his feet, and he didn’t want to guess what had made the wet splat soaking into his shirt. Llesho closed his eyes, wishing he could disappear, but his escort wouldn’t let him.

  “It’s the new chicken,” the golden boy commented over Llesho’s fallen body.

  “Master’s pet?” the unknown voice asked doubtfully while Llesho dragged himself to his knees and finally to his feet, a better angle to follow the conversation. The boy who had brought him shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said, and “didn’t ask,” in a tone that clearly indicated Llesho was not his problem and he would just as soon keep it that way.

  “Go back to work, then, unless Master Markko wants you to bring him in yourself.”

  “Didn’t say so.” The boy was already heading away from his charge, and Llesho realized he still didn’t know the other boy’s name. Not a good time to ask, he figured, and tried to look regal for the man standing in front of him, while muck dripped off his tunic. The stuff stank with a pungent tang at the back of his throat, and Llesho crinkled up his nose, trying to identify the mess without sneezing.

  “Paint and straw this time,” the stranger offered, and Llesho finally noticed the straw man lashed to a post, with bolts jutting from the place his chest used to be and bits of him scattered in a circle of sawdust.

  The last time Llesho had seen a crossbow bolt, he’d been seven, and the bolt had been sticking out of his father’s throat. He closed his eyes, but that made it worse, not better. Regal just wasn’t working for him today. Hadn’t, actually, for the past nine summers, but he still drew on old lessons in distress.

  “Better vegetable than animal, but don’t count on that for next time.” The stranger was watching him with sharp features set in a stern, forbidding frown below eyes that were judging Llesho to the soles of his feet. “What are you, boy, and what the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’m a Thebin,” he answered, though the quirk of a smile, quickly suppressed, suggested that the stranger hadn’t meant for him to answer the question. “My name is Llesho. I was sent for. To be a gladiator.” He hoped. It was that or pig food, and if he’d been summoned for the trough, he wasn’t going to remind anyone.

  “Llesho.” The stranger paused and seemed to be trying to remember something that escaped him before he could catch hold of it. “I’m Jaks, but you will learn all you need to know about me soon enough.” The stranger was taller than Llesho, but not as tall as the boy who had brought him here. His skin was brown and smooth, and he had broad shoulders and powerful arms with the line of each muscle carved sharply in the flesh. The left arm had six tattooed bands, the simplest ones faded with age and more recent ones in increasingly complex designs. Jaks wore a leather tunic with the history of old battles written in the bloodstains that marked it, and a belt with a sheath for a knife at the waist. Metal guards covered his wrists and forearms. He was obviously dangerous, but for some reason which Llesho couldn’t quite grasp, Jaks did not terrify him as he thought the man should, given the situation and a grain of common sense.

  But common sense couldn’t explain why the tension drained out of Llesho at the sight of the gladiator, or why his head came up at a more confident angle. A memory returned to him then, forgotten like so many things about home. His father had hired men like this at court to protect his family. Those men had died, pressed step by step into the heart of the palace, loyal to the last. The man who had guarded Llesho from his birth had looked very much like this Jaks, until he lay dead at the feet of the terrified child. The memory sent a shudder through him, which the gladiator must have taken for fear of his new life.

  “I don’t know what he was thinking,” Jaks muttered under his breath, and Llesho figured he was talking about his petition to train as a gladiator, and didn’t like the way the man dismissed him out of hand. But one problem at a time. The gladiator rubbed his neck with a mindless gesture that spoke of old injuries, or— Llesho’s father had done that when faced with a particularly thorny problem. “Right now,” the gladiator said, “you need to change your shirt and check in with the overseer, Master Markko.”

  “Change my shirt?” At first, Llesho thought Jaks meant with magic, and he almost asked what he should change his shirt into. Not that he could do anything of the sort, of course, but he could try, if magic was required of gladiators—he didn’t want to begin by showing any more ignorance than he already had. Then he realized, not change the shirt, change himself, by putting a clean shirt on. In Thebin he’d had a clean shirt for every day of the week, and special shirts made of yellow silk embroidered with bright colors for holidays and feast days, for banquets and for public days. Since he’d been a slave, though, he’d had one shirt and one pair of pants, nothing to go under them, and one day a week to wash them in, after which, for modesty, he would wear them wet until they dried. But he didn’t think Jaks wanted to know about the domestic arrangements of pearl divers.

  “I don’t have another,” he said, and waited while the gladiator blew out another gust of annoy
ance like a belch.

  “Stupid to even think it,” Jaks muttered. Llesho held his tongue with an effort rewarded when Jaks finished, “Of course, Markko doesn’t know what he is doing. Not a single freaking clue.”

  Llesho waited out the storm as it broke harmlessly in another direction.

  “You can’t see the overseer like that,” Jaks pointed out as if it should be obvious. “We’ll have to find something for you to wear.”

  The gladiator led him across the practice yard to a low building made of coral blocks. A covered porch ran along its length to keep out the sun and provide a cool place to rest after a day of practice in the yard. It was more solid than the longhouse of the pearl divers, but obviously meant for the same purpose, which Jaks soon confirmed.

  “This is the barracks,” Jaks told him, “Master Markko will decide where you will sleep, but you’ll need to be able to find the laundry wherever he puts you.”

  The laundry was actually several rooms clustered at the end of the barracks, each devoted to a particular task in the process of keeping the competitors dressed and supplied with protective coverings. They passed through the leatherwork shop but did not stop, though the strange scents drew Llesho like an old dream. Not fighters, but horses. He remembered horses, and the image in his mind when he thought of that word made him want to weep. But Jaks was leading him through an open courtyard cluttered with vats of soapy water and ladders of vines with clothes and long stretches of plain white cloth pinned to them. The steam pulled the heat up into his face and he felt the slick of sweat on his temples, dripping down his nose and over his lip.

  A man with more rolls of fat than Llesho had ever seen sat on the edge of a bubbling vat. Naked to the waist, he reached in to his elbow and drew out bits of clothes, some that Llesho recognized and some that he didn’t. The water smelled clean, and the bubbles released their own sharp scent when they burst, tickling Llesho’s nose. Curious, Llesho trailed a hand into a vat for himself and pulled it out again, shaking the burned fingers.

  “Where did the midge come from?” the fat man asked, and Jaks answered, “Thebin, originally. The pearl beds more recently, and without a stitch to wear.”

  Jaks was laughing at him with this strange man, who gave a clipped bark of his own laughter. “Madness,” the stranger gave his opinion with a little shake of the head, then gave Llesho one of those long, measuring looks that made him squirm. This man seemed to have no status, but Jaks treated him like a confidant, and the man himself looked at Llesho as if he were something discovered on the bottom of his sandal.

  “Thebin, eh? Well, he won’t be easily winded. That’s one thing in his favor.” The washerman scratched thoughtfully at his backside. “As far as I can tell, that’s the only thing.”

  Regal was easier in front of an obvious servant, and Llesho’s jaw came out, his head tilted just so, his shoulders straight and at ease.

  Both men stopped laughing. “It can’t be,” the washerman whispered.

  “Madness,” Jaks agreed softly, and added, for Llesho, “Pull it in, boy, if you want to stay alive.”

  Danger. Llesho remembered the precise timbre of a warning rippling through time at him, and in reflex his eyes darted, looking for a place to hide.

  “Dear Gods,” the fat man muttered, expression broken in shards of fear and denial. “Have you been on Pearl Island all along?” he asked.

  Llesho did not answer. He figured the men must know that, and he wanted to understand what they were up to before he said anything in their presence. He had a feeling they’d know his whole life story if he opened his mouth at all.

  “Does Markko know, do you think?” the fat man asked Jaks, as if Llesho were not in the room. “What do you suppose he wants with the boy?”

  “Get him a shirt, Den,” was all Jaks said, but his voice had gone completely blank. “Not a new one. Old, patched.” So the washerman had a name.

  “Pathetic,” Den muttered, but Llesho did not quite understand who or what was pathetic, so he decided to keep his mouth shut.

  Den stood up, wearing nothing but a cloth wrapped between legs as thick as the logs in the outer palisade and covered with their own forest of coarse hair. “Off with it, then,” he said, and wiggled his fingers until Llesho had stripped off his shirt and handed it to him.

  “We don’t have anything in his size.” The mountainous launderer wandered ponderously between the ranks of hanging cloth. “But this should do until I can get the stitchers on it.”

  Llesho had lost track of the washerman somewhere behind him when the scuffling footsteps faded out of his hearing, and so he jumped when a thick arm reached over his shoulder and handed him a shirt. Not ponderous unless he wanted to be, then. Llesho stored that away for future reference while he pulled the clean shirt over his head and smoothed it into place. It came almost to his knees, and his hands were lost in the long sleeves. He made a face, but Jaks ignored it.

  “That will do,” he agreed. A look passed between the two men that Llesho had the good sense to worry about, but Jaks took him by the shoulder and back-tracked them through the laundry. When they were outside again, the central practice yard had emptied of men, leaving only the broken tools of combat behind. Jaks crossed the space without a glance or a word, and opened a door into a small stone house that sat a little apart from the sleeping barracks and equipment rooms.

  “The pearl diver has arrived,” he told the man who sat at a desk in the elaborately decorated room. “What do you want me to do with him?”

  “Leave him here. You may go.”

  Jaks did so at once, and again Llesho found himself facing a stranger who looked at him with cool, incurious eyes. This must be the overseer, Master Markko, he figured, since that was the name the boy had given, and the same that Jaks had mentioned to Den in the laundry. From the way people had spoken of him, Llesho had expected someone huge and powerful, or grim and forbidding at least. In fact, Llesho could find nothing of distinction about the man at all. He had the golden skin and the dark hair of the boy who had come to fetch him, but Llesho could see no family resemblance beyond the most common ties to a place and a people. Master Markko seemed to be about as tall as the boy with no name, but with his full height, while the messenger had overlarge hands and feet, like a puppy who would be a much larger dog. The man, Markko, wore several layers of plain robes that marked him as a minor official in the lord’s household.

  He seemed to be ascetically slim beneath the robes, but his face showed no feature of remark, nor could Llesho find any sign about his person that he was or had been a gladiator, or had ever fought in any way.

  Markko looked up briefly from the work that lay scattered on his desk. “We’ve already had an offer for you, from Lord Yueh’s trainer,” he said. “Do you suppose you are worth such a lordly sum?”

  “I don’t imagine so, sir,” he answered. He didn’t know how much Lord Yueh had offered, or what it meant in the scheme of the buying and selling of gladiators. However, Llesho didn’t want to go anywhere they knew enough to offer for him when he had no obvious skills or value.

  “I suspect you are right,” the overseer said. “His lordship has declined the offer, which means you will be under my direction.”

  “Yes, sir.” Llesho couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he hung his head as submissively as possible, and hoped that the overseer would soon tire of him.

  After another penetrating look through eyes like chips of flint, Markko returned his attention to the paper on his desk.

  “The mop is in the corner,” he said. “You can fill the bucket at the laundry, and begin with this room. Then the barracks floors need washing. When you are done, you may report to the cookhouse for dinner before you return here.”

  “There must be some mistake,” Llesho suggested, hoping it was true. “I don’t know anything about washing floors.”

  “How difficult can it be?” Markko asked him reasonably, “Mop, bucket, water, floor. In that order.” He turned back to
his desk, but looked up when Llesho did not move.

  “But I thought I was here to become a gladiator.”

  Markko looked him over with a critical eye, as if he were buying fish in the market. “Do you like to bed men, boy? Large, hungry men with the bloodlust still running in their veins?”

  “That would not be my choice, sir.”

  “It is, however, the only choice I have to offer you,” Markko explained to him reasonably. He had not changed his tone of voice, but Llesho realized suddenly that the mildness was a mask, that Master Markko already knew too much about him, and that this was one person he did not want to challenge. He ducked his head and looked as pitiful as possible in his patched and oversized shirt until Markko dismissed him with a wave of his free hand. Then Llesho picked up the bucket and the mop and crept out of the room, unwilling to turn his back on the man who had stared at him with no feeling in his eyes. That, Llesho decided, was what made this man dangerous. He had no feelings at all.

  Chapter Four

  LLESHO spent his first day as a gladiator in training learning how to scrub barracks. He hadn’t been exactly surprised when he found himself on mop duty. A long time ago, it seemed, he’d been the new pearl diver in his quarter-shift. For weeks he’d cleared out dead oysters with empty shells while his shift-mates gathered the pearls that should have filled his sack. Shen-shu had beaten him after each shift from which he returned empty-handed, but that too seemed a kind of initiation with no real anger behind the blows. After a period of testing, the divers had accepted him as one of their own. Llesho had expected no less from the gladiators, and had braced himself for much worse than a mop when he followed the messenger up the hill.