As Llesho began to understand the forms, his respect for his teacher grew as well. Built like a mountain, with the warmth of the summer sun in his eyes, the humble washerman was the very image of the Laughing God, who had not walked the earth, it was said, for many human generations. Nor would he return while the Harn held the gates of heaven.
Den’s attention seemed everywhere, while his body and soul centered into the action: sinking his weight into the ground for the earth forms, and flowing through the water forms. In the air forms, he seemed almost to take flight, which should have looked absurd on his large body, but didn’t. When he demonstrated the water forms, Llesho caught glimpses, like double vision, of Kwan-ti at her workbench. She mixed elixirs and shaped little pills in his mind’s eye as Den moved from position to position. Llesho knew to trust the almost-visions that left impressions, like intuition, in their wake. Experience had taught him to keep the flashes to himself, but he determined to watch the teacher carefully, and found comfort in the memory overlaid upon the washerman’s movements.
He had realized on that first embarrassing day that the prayer forms demanded freedom of him. His body could not soar with heart and soul tied to the slave block and his chains. To succeed, he must free that part of him the gods owned. So each morning as the students lined up with the least experienced in the front, he found his place quickly. Closing his eyes, he took a moment to imagine himself at home among the mountains that rose above Kungol, the capital city where he was born. His brother, Adar, had kept a clinic in those mountains. Llesho remembered the cold, thin air that forced a human being to move cautiously so close to heaven, and the measured, gentle movements of the healer. He imagined Adar at his back, guiding him through the motions of the prayers; soon he was passing effortlessly through the exercises, wrapped in the warmth of Adar’s smile.
At the end of his first month at the compound, and just as Llesho was beginning to think that he would remain a slave to the mop forever, Den pulled him aside after prayer forms.
“You are doing well,” he said, and Llesho gave him a little bow, receiving the compliment with humility.
“Are you settling into the barracks well?”
“Yes, sir, Master Den.” Llesho had learned the proper form of address for his teacher, and he used it now, waiting for the master to reveal his purpose. He knew that he showed too much of his relief to be out from under the overseer’s eye, and perhaps too much of his impatience as well, because Master Den chuckled at him.
“And I suppose you are wondering how prayer forms and mops will make you a gladiator.”
“Yes, Master Den.” He met his teacher’s eyes with a dare in his own.
“Shut that down right now, boy, unless you want to spend the rest of your days in Markko’s clutches.” Master Den managed to frown at him without ever changing expression, which Llesho didn’t understand, except that he dropped his own eyes, and scuffed his feet in the sawdust with all of the confusion he really felt.
The washerman studied him for a moment before releasing a sigh. “Very well,” he said, answering the silent demand. “After your work detail, you may join the novices at hand-to-hand combat training. Ask Bixei the way.”
Master Den knew that Bixei hated the newcomer, and he challenged Llesho with a crinkle of humor in his eye. “Be nice to your enemy, this time,” that look seemed to say, “or stay a slave to the mop forever.”
Llesho asked. Bixei wasn’t happy, and Llesho wondered if it was another trick when the golden boy led him away from the large central practice yard where the experienced gladiators went about their training. He was more certain of it than ever when they entered the laundry, but Bixei kept going, out the back and through the drying yards to a corner where the other novices waited for them.
Radimus, a member of Llesho’s bachelor group, nodded a greeting. “Pei,” he said by way of introducing the fourth novice, “Used to be a drover, till his master saw him fight in a barracks match.”
Up close, Pei was terrifying, almost as big as Master Den, but with a harder, scarred body. Llesho had never seen a barracks match—the pearl divers settled their arguments in other ways, and Master Markko would skin a man who took a gladiator out of competition for a personal argument. He’d heard the gossip, though, and knew that some lords wagered on the death matches of their own slaves. The former drover returned his curious wonder with a baleful glance that gave neither threat nor quarter—Llesho figured that was all the “hello” he was going to get.
Though new to gladiatorial combat, Radimus and Pei were both fully grown and Master Den paired them for practice, which left Bixei to spar with Llesho. As he picked himself up from the dirt for what seemed like the thousandth time that afternoon, Llesho gave a prayer of gratitude that no one but his small band of beginners could see his clumsiness or his repeated defeats at the hands of his rival.
Den never scolded him for his ungainly efforts, but repeated his instructions patiently. He taught efficiency over drama, elegance in simplicity, took Llesho’s hand and positioned it just so, nudged his knee into the proper stance, and nodded approval when he had it right. Then he demonstrated how the clean, deadly moves could be decorated to impress the arena crowds while inflicting little damage to his opponent. Llesho quickly realized that, while Bixei seemed to grasp the underlying deadly purpose of the training, the point of not doing damage to his opponent never seemed to penetrate his skull. As long as his opponent’s skill remained superior to his own, Llesho figured he’d be spending his afternoons with his face in the dirt and his arms twisted in knots at his back.
Things didn’t much improve until prayer forms one morning at the end of Llesho’s first week of hand-to-hand combat training. His body passed through the forms under Den’s watchful eye until, halfway through the Flowing Water form, he stumbled. His body was trying to perform two completely different moves at that point in the exercise and the realization stopped him dead in the middle of the form.
Den saw; the muscles in his face relaxed into a smile that never showed itself upon his lips, and Llesho knew he was right. Prayer forms and hand-to-hand were one, each growing out of the same body, the same nature, but leading to different conclusions: peace, or war. The move that he had stumbled on made sense then: he had reached the place in the form where a man must choose one path or the other, and when he had come to that place, Llesho had not known which path to take. But he did now. He completed the morning prayers with no further mishaps, and in the afternoon, in the shade of the drying yard, landed Bixei on his back for the first time. As a warning, he brought the blade of his hand perilously close to the throat of his enemy, then shifted into the more decorated style that would do no harm. The next morning, as he was putting away his mop and pail, Bixei came to him with a summons from Jaks to the weapons room. He was going to be a real gladiator at last!
He knew the way, but Bixei insisted that he’d been told to bring him, which he did. “Good luck,” he muttered at the door, and then he was gone, walking away as fast as he could without seeming to run, and in the direction of the barracks. To spread the tale, Llesho figured, and he opened the door and entered alone.
The weapons room was long and narrow, with a beaten dirt floor and a single table running the length of it. Brackets set into all four walls held long-shafted weapons: pikes and staves and tridents, slim spears with gleaming heads as long as his hand and thicker ones hooked at the end of the blade. On the table, all manner of swords and knives and hammers and axes lay waiting next to nets and chain whips. Master Jaks stood rigidly straight, to the right of a door which led into the smith and repair shops ringing with the clangor of hammer on bronze and iron. Llesho hadn’t seen him since his first day in the compound, but he looked more terrifying and bleak than Llesho remembered, though only the occasional flex of the tattooed bands on his upper arms showed any of his tension. When Llesho had made his bow, Jaks turned to the door and rapped two sharp taps upon it.
Den came through the door first
and settled himself to the left of the jamb. A woman followed him. She wore the plain clothes of a servant covered by a coat with wide sleeves that fell away at her elbows. Llesho figured that for a disguise. She carried herself with haughty assurance, demanding a degree of deference his teachers would not owe a woman of her apparent youth in the lower ranks. Den’s mobile features, set in a frozen mask, told Llesho that the woman’s presence deeply disturbed him. It disturbed Llesho as well.
“Are you a goddess?” he asked, and wondered if he could be any stupider, to draw her attention with a question that marked him as an uneducated fool, or as a Thebin raised at the center of a religious culture. A slave boy should have no knowledge of the gates of heaven, or the gods and goddesses who passed through them when they visited the living earth.
“He is impertinent,” she said to Master Den, but turned the dark, thoughtful pools of her eyes on Llesho and, he saw in them not age but history, and deep, deep, timeless knowledge.
The woman turned to Jaks and touched a finger to the most elaborate band of tattooing on his arm, as if she was reminding him of a secret. “Test him,” she said, and withdrew her hand into her voluminous sleeve. Jaks uttered no word that might identify the woman, but bowed deeply and stepped forward. He smiled to allay Llesho’s nervousness.
“Don’t worry, boy. Nobody is going to hurt you. In weapons combat it helps to start with a natural inclination, if you have one. We are here to find out what that might be for you.”
“Yes, sir,” Llesho said, as firmly as he could to show that he did understand and that he wasn’t afraid, though neither was true. The concept made sense, of course, but the woman’s presence suggested that more was going on than a simple aptitude test.
Jaks gave a single curt nod to accept the answer, though the glint in his eyes told Llesho he saw more of those doubts than he let on. “We will start with long weapons,” Jaks said, and gestured at the walls around them. “Take your time. Pick up whatever attracts you. Give it a chance, but if it doesn’t feel comfortable in your hand, put it back.”
Den interrupted then, with as much explanation as he was going to get. “Don’t watch us to find your answer, boy. The right answer for Jaks or me is bound to be the wrong answer for you.”
Llesho nodded and began to mark the perimeter of the room. At first he kept his hands clasped behind his back, but he quickly forgot his reticence as he handled the weapons. The pikes annoyed him. He tried several lengths of shaft, but the heads felt overbalanced and clumsy. Staves he handled well enough, but he quickly lost interest in them. The trident went to his hand with the easy fit of long practice. After a few awkward passes he centered himself, thought of water, and made a few smooth thrusts and feints, twirled the weapon in a wide circle around one hand and flung it to bury its teeth deep in the dirt at Jaks’ feet.
Jaks wrenched the trident out of the dirt with a wry smile. “No surprise there, I guess. Anything else?”
Llesho shrugged, and continued his circuit of the room. He approached the spears with curiosity, but one with a shorter shaft than the others drew him with a fascination so strong he glanced about him to be certain no one in the room had cast a spell on him. That was foolish. No one in Lord Chin-shi’s realm would dare to practice magic in the open like this. But the intent expressions on his three testers made him wonder how open this occasion really was. He reached out to it, and the room itself seemed to hold its breath. The weapon felt old, and Llesho could almost hear the high, thin wind of Thebin whistling in his ears when he touched it.
It felt . . . right. Not familiar, like the trident, which reminded him of the rake he used to play at battles with in the bay. When his fingers closed around the shaft of the spear, he felt the “click” of a soul finding its completion, hand meeting matching hand. Mine. He knew he had never held such a weapon before, just as he knew he would not willingly give it up now that he had found it. Not even if he died. Memories far older than the body he wore stirred in the back of his mind, roiling in the muck of time and terror. That part of him that was here and now, a slave with fifteen summers, could not shake the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach; the spear was poisoned, old memory whispered. He threw it away from him, shuddering in disgust even as a longing he did not understand urged him to snatch it up again.
Compelled by that terrifying desire, Llesho crouched to retrieve the spear. Poised, but certain now that the test was, indeed, a trap, and it had just closed on his neck, he tightened his hand into a fist, grasping only air. Master Den watched him out of deep sorrowful eyes, but Jaks picked up the spear where Llesho had let it fall and pointed to the table with it. “Tri dent, but we’ll hold off on the short spear,” he said in his most efficient voice, passing the spear to the woman, who slipped it into her sleeve. “Now try the close-in weapons.”
The woman watched Llesho with the hypnotic fascination of a cobra, and with about as much emotion. Llesho gave Den a pleading glance, but his teacher’s blank mask did not change.
“No one is going to hurt you,” Jaks urged him. “We just want to know how to train you that most ensures your success.”
That was only half the truth. Llesho didn’t know where the other half lay, but he knew he couldn’t see his way to it through the secrets clouding the air between them. He followed the direction Jaks indicated with the tilt of his head, and considered the weapons spread out on the table. A knife rested there, older than the others, with a haft that seemed alien among the scattered blades. He reached for it, felt the weight settle in his hand, flipped it to an overhand grasp, and held it above his head, shifting through an exercise that reminded him of the prayer forms Den led in the morning. Knife and hand were one, flowing into his arm, and he stepped though the form with slow grace, then snapped through it with lightning speed that surprised even himself. When he had come to rest again, Jaks took the knife out of his hand and set it down. “No knifework,” he said with finality, “What else suits you?”
But Llesho would not let it go this time. That knife was a part of him, and he wanted, needed to know how. “What is it?” he asked Jaks, seizing the knife from its place on the table and holding it up in confusion. “I know this knife! But I don’t remember—”
The woman reached across the table and touched his wrist with the same stroking fingertips that had brushed the tattoo on Jaks’ arm. “You will,” she said, with something like hunger in her voice. She wrapped her fingers around the blade of the knife and tugged it from his hand. Llesho released it quickly, shrinking from the cold, white fingers that did not bleed though the knife should have cut them deeply. When the blade had disappeared after the spear into her sleeve, Jaks took him by the shoulder and turned him back to the table.
“Try something else.”
Llesho glared at him. He wanted answers he could understand, but the hand on his shoulder triggered one of those flashes of almost-vision, confused images like memories of things he’d never seen. This one showed him Jaks’ arm, but clean of the marks that banded it. Somehow, the vision related to the woman and the knife.
“Your arm,” he nodded at the tattoos on the arm that held his shoulder. “What do the tattoos mean?” He couldn’t believe he’d asked, but the visions drove him with their own need, and he gritted his teeth and waited for the next flash, or for his teacher to knock him into the dirt for his impertinence.
Jaks refused to answer, but his expression turned to stone.
“They are his kills.” The mysterious woman answered his question and he shivered, wishing she had ignored him as well. “Each stands for a death.”
“In the arena?” Llesho turned to face Jaks, wanting explanations from his teacher, not the cold threat in the voice of the stranger. And he wanted the answer to be yes, clean kills, in equal combat.
The woman shook her head, once, slowly, her cobra eyes devouring him with their cold stare. “Assassina tions,” she said. “The simple bands for lower ranked targets, the more complex bands for targets of a higher rank.”
She smiled. “Jaks excels at his profession.”
Llesho trembled. He was out of his depth, way out of his depth, and had been since Lleck’s spirit had appeared to him in the waters of the bay.
“What do you want of me?” he asked, though he dreaded the answer. He’d been on the wrong end of an assassination attempt when he was seven, and he couldn’t imagine doing that to someone else’s child. He would die first, even if it did sink Minister Lleck’s plans for him.
The woman smiled, and something eased in her eyes, which did not come alive, but ceased, at least, to suck him into the black darkness of her soul. “Sur vival,” she said, though he couldn’t tell whose, or why. “Shall we continue?”
Jaks turned to the table of weapons and held up two short swords. “Try this.”
None of the other weapons triggered a response like the knife or the short spear, but Llesho found himself generally at ease with the blade weapons, and awkward with the hammers and axes, more inclined to trip over his own net than trap an opponent, and for no reason he could set to words, just a feeling that set his external organs clawing their way up inside him that he would not, could not, touch the chain whip. He passed over it three times, and thankfully, Jaks did not pressure him to pick it up. When they were done, the woman took him by the chin and smiled. “We have before us a pearl of great value, Masters. Let us take care that he does not wind up food for the swine.”
Llesho’s entire body froze beneath her hand. Did she know about the treasure Lleck had given him, that sometimes pulsed in his mouth like a sore tooth? Or had the comment landed like a stray bolt from a crossbow shot into the air? He doubted that the lady ever spoke without thought. She released him without another word, however, and gave a bow to the masters before slipping out the way she had come.
Jaks visibly relaxed when she had departed. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Tomorrow, after breakfast, report for arms practice with the novice class.” he said to Llesho, and added, “Ask Bixei—he will show you.”
The Prince of Shadow Page 6
