The Empire's Ruin, page 34
“Now that we are back up to six,” Goatface proclaimed, “I believe that a boat ride may be appropriate.”
Ruc glanced at the others, but they looked as baffled as he was.
Monster slugged back another gulp of quey, studying the trainer as she swallowed. “A boat ride sounds suspiciously fucking pleasant.”
“Pleasant?” Goatface took some time to consider the word. “Yes. Well. I suppose it depends on your feelings regarding boats.”
“What kind of boat?” Ruc asked warily.
“Perhaps it will be easiest to show you.”
* * *
“These,” Goatface said, gesturing to the hulls knocking gently against the dock, “are the funeral skiffs.”
The boats were as beautiful as they were grim: slim-waisted, tapered to a high prow at stem and stern, lacquered black, upholstered in black crushed velvet beneath black canvas canopies. Bronze oarlocks and fittings gleamed in the morning sunlight.
“If you have the … profound honor,” the trainer went on, “to fall in the Arena during the contests of the high holy days, your body will be cleaned, carried to these docks, laid in one of these hulls, then rowed into the delta, where it will be burned on a sacred island.”
“Some fucking honor,” Monster muttered. “Tossed in the delta and torched.”
Stupid shrugged. “An improvement on rotting in a stagnant backwater.”
“Is it?” the woman demanded. “Dead is fucking dead.”
“Dead,” Mouse agreed, as though the word needed saying one final time.
Ruc ignored the exchange.
“We’re taking one of these now?” he asked, trying to keep his voice level, even bored as he studied the boats, then glanced over his shoulder.
Goatface had warned them as they left the yard about trying to escape.
“Some Worthy,” he’d said, producing the key from the thong inside his shirt, “when leaving the yard for the first time have made a … how should I put it … a series of reckless and unfortunate decisions.”
“Which one do you want to be?” Monster asked, turning to Ruc. “I’d take Reckless. Your girl’s got Unfortunate scribbled all over her, but it’s up to you two.”
Bien didn’t reply. She was staring at the heavy wooden door, the straps of iron banding it, the massive apparatus of the lock itself.
“We’ve been here one day,” Ruc said, raising his hands. “No one wants to get reckless.”
“Disappointing,” the woman muttered.
Goatface shook his head. “A very prudent choice, in fact.”
He gestured to the guards walking the wall overhead. They weren’t Greenshirts. The Arena had its own dedicated patrol, every man armed with a loaded flatbow and a sword, all of them focused like circling hawks on the warriors below.
“It is a great honor to serve in the Arena,” Goatface continued. “Vang Vo chooses only the most … scrupulously devout, the most meticulously trained.” He waved cheerfully up at the guardsmen. None returned the gesture. Goatface shrugged, turned his attention back to Ruc and the others. “Do you know what happens to the men on duty if one or more of the Worthy escape?”
“I’m willing to bet it’s not a hand job from the high priestess,” Monster replied.
“Indeed.” Goatface nodded. “Indeed it is not. When the last Worthy escaped the men on duty were given one day to find her. When they failed, they were stripped … of both their rank and their garments, taken a small way out into the delta, tied to posts which were sunk in the mud until only their noses were above the water, sliced at the armpits and thighs, and left for the schools of qirna.”
Bien stared at the man, aghast.
Goatface caught her expression and nodded once more. “It has made the others … what is the phrase? Exceedingly zealous in their work. They have been known to kill entirely innocent Worthy for the sin of looking with too much longing at the world beyond these walls. Isn’t that right, Cho Min?”
Ruc turned to find a complement of a dozen guardsmen approaching from across the yard. The man at the head of the column—Cho Min, presumably—nodded curtly, his face flat and expressionless as a brick wall.
“Cho Min and these others will accompany us,” Goatface said. “Not to worry. It is a purely … prophylactic measure taken whenever the Worthy venture outside the yard.”
“A lot of loaded flatbows for a prophylactic,” Talal observed.
“Yes. Well. Cho Min is nothing if not thorough.”
“What happened to her?” Ruc asked as Goatface fit his key into the lock, then shouldered the heavy door open.
“To whom?”
“The Worthy. The one who escaped.”
“Oh, her. She was caught hiding in an attic over on the Gold Coast,” Goatface replied genially, “hauled into the square, then torn apart by the … more devout of Dombâng’s citizenry.”
Which should have made for a compelling cautionary tale, but as Ruc stood there on the docks studying the funeral skiffs, he couldn’t help but consider the possibilities. Unlike that nameless Worthy, if he and Bien were able to make it out of the yard, make it into one of these boats, or any boat, for that matter, they wouldn’t be forced to hide in attics. A small head start and they would be gone into the delta, where none of the Dombângans dared follow.
At the moment, unfortunately, the guards didn’t look inclined to offer that head start.
Cho Min had his men deployed in a loose net around them, four out ahead, at the end of the dock itself, the rest blocking any passage onto the mud flats flanking those docks. They carried their flatbows at the shoulder, aiming down the stocks as though ready to loose at the first sign of flight. It made Ruc queasy just watching them. An overreaction, the barest twitch of a finger, and someone, maybe all of them, were dead. Any escape was going to have to wait.
“Yes,” Goatface said, turning to Ruc, “and no.” It took him a moment to realize the trainer was answering his earlier question. “We are taking one, but not in the … most traditional manner.” He gestured to the nearest of the boats. “If the six of you would be so obliging as to lift it from the water.”
“Lift,” Mouse repeated, as though he’d seen this coming from the moment they set foot on the docks.
Goatface nodded encouragingly. “Lift.”
The boat was three times as long as Ruc was tall, but narrow and cunningly built. Once the six of them managed to arrange themselves on the dock, they were able to haul it from the water without too much effort, Stupid giving instructions, Monster cursing the entire time. When they went to set it down on the dock, however, Goatface shook his head.
“No! Oh no, my fine warriors. You would damage the keel! And besides, we haven’t even begun.”
As Ruc and the others held the hull in place, uncertain what to do next, Goatface took hold of the rail, made a surprisingly nimble leap, and vaulted into the boat. Bien and Stupid staggered beneath the additional weight. Mouse grunted with the strain, and for a moment Ruc felt the boat slipping from his grasp. Before he could drop it, however, all the old reflexes snapped into place—as a child with the Vuo Ton he had spent endless days in and out of dugout canoes, hauling them, flipping them, righting them—and he shifted his weight, slid a thigh underneath the slick hull, adjusted his grip, and felt the boat steady. When he looked down the hull, he saw Talal, Mouse, and Monster similarly braced, bodies bent with the strain as Stupid and Bien regained their footing.
“Now,” Goatface continued, opening a red parasol, propping it against the rail, fidgeting with it a moment, adjusting it so that it more thoroughly blocked the sun, then settling himself onto one of the seats. “To the Arena!”
“This has to be a fucking joke,” Monster muttered.
The trainer shook his head. “While I appreciate a hearty jest as much as the next person, I assure you that I am in earnest.”
“It would be easier to carry,” Ruc pointed out, “if we flipped it over.”
Goatface laughed. “I have many goals as your trainer. Among them, however, I regret to say that I do not include your ease.”
Monster shook his head regretfully. “Ease.”
“The longer we stand here arguing,” Bien growled, “the longer we have to hold the boat. Let’s just get it to the Arena.”
Ruc nodded, shifted his grip so that he could hold one of the thwarts instead of the rail, waited for the others to get similarly situated, then began walking.
They carried the funeral skiff the length of the dock, across the wide landing fronting the Arena, in through the wide gates, down a long corridor, then back out through a smaller doorway into the sunlight, onto the damp sand of the pit itself. The stands loomed above them in a rough oval, blocking out all but a disk of smoky sky above. The wooden benches were mostly empty save for a few drunks, a few orphans, a few gamblers scouting the warriors, hoping to get an edge in the betting of the high holy days.
“So this is where it happens,” Bien breathed quietly.
They’d seen it from above. It was different standing on the dirt. It felt, Ruc thought, as though they were being swallowed by the place.
“An arena,” Goatface agreed, “sanctified by the blood of the brave.”
Ruc tried to imagine what it would feel like to fight in that captive space, to fight to the death with ten thousand people screaming, leaning out of the stands, hurling curses and encouragement, pounding thunder from the wooden boards beneath their heels. It was one thing to wrestle crocs and stalk jaguars in the solitude of the delta, another to do your struggling, killing, and dying with all those eyes fixed on you.
“Is it sanctified enough,” Monster demanded, cutting through his thoughts, “to put this fucking boat down?”
“Down?” Goatface sounded genuinely baffled. “Down? My dear Monster … we are going up!”
He looked like some debauched emperor, half-reclined against the thwart, lazing in the shade of his parasol, a finger extended toward the top of the stands.
“Up,” said Mouse.
“Fuck,” said Monster.
The short man smiled pleasantly down from the comfort of the boat. “Indeed.”
Goatface wasn’t the only trainer who had brought his warriors out of the yard. The pit—fifty paces across at the center—was more than large enough to accommodate the fifteen or twenty Worthy who were stretching and warming up in the shadow of the stands, along with their trainers, and at least as many Arena guards, flatbows at the ready. None of them, however, had thought to bring a funeral skiff, which left them free to watch with a mixture of curiosity, amusement, and contempt as Goatface’s team attempted to get the boat out of the pit and up into the stands.
The trouble was the eight-foot wooden wall ringing the pit. For obvious reasons, there were no steps leading up from the sand, which meant lifting the skiff.…
“Vang Vo will be very displeased,” Goatface observed, “if the keel of her boat is damaged.”
“Then maybe we should have left the ’Kent-kissing thing in the water,” Monster snapped.
“We need someone up top,” Bien said. “At least two people.”
Ruc nodded. “You and Stupid. You’re the shortest. You won’t be doing any good down here.”
“We’re also the weakest,” Bien pointed out.
“I resent that,” Stupid said mildly.
“Go,” Talal put in. “Once we tip it up, we’ll have most of the weight on our end. You’ll just have to steady it.”
The Kettral didn’t raise his voice, but there was a note there that Ruc hadn’t heard before—not urgency, exactly, but something that, coming from another person, might have been a command.
“The four of you are good to hold the boat?” Bien asked.
“Good,” Mouse confirmed.
“Speak for yourself, fat man,” Monster muttered.
Stupid laced his fingers together, Bien stepped into his cupped hands, and he boosted her up. From the top, she reached down to grab his wrist, and with a little scrabbling he was over.
By that point, the other Worthy had become fully absorbed in the spectacle. As Ruc and the others struggled to lift the boat above their heads, the abuse began.
“This is what it’s going to look like on the holy days,” someone joked. “These Annurian whores scrambling over each other to get out.”
Ruc ignored the gibe.
Monster did not. “What it’s going to look like,” she shouted over her shoulder, “is me shoving this skiff up your puckered fucking asshole.”
The crack earned her a wave of derisive laughter.
“It’s your own ass you ought to be looking out for,” someone shouted. “You keep waggling it around the yard, one of these days we’re gonna test it out, see if it’s as tight as it looks.”
The woman half turned, her lips twisted with fury.
“In the Arena,” Goatface observed calmly, invisible as an oracle in the boat above their heads, “your opponents will try to unsettle you, to provoke you.”
“It’s working,” Monster growled.
“And when we get finished with you,” the heckling continued, “we’re moving right on to the one with the mud sucker ink.”
“Bet mud isn’t the only thing he sucks.”
Do not measure scorn for scorn or hate for hate, Ruc told himself, straining beneath the weight of the boat. Who makes their heart a home for bile and rage is never clean, never free. The last fifteen years it had been those words, those and the other Teachings, that he had leaned on in the roughest quarters of Dombâng, reciting them in his mind whenever he was cursed, or mocked, or spat upon. He remembered his amazement at discovering, for the first time, that they were true, that they worked, that the world was a brighter, better place when he looked at it through the twin lenses of love and forgiveness.
Lenses that had cracked when Eira’s temple burned.
He could still recite the words, still remember every teaching, still believe intellectually in the message of the goddess. It was the feel of her truth that had vanished. He tried to put away his rage only to find it stuck to him, lodged in his soul like a burr in good silk. What he wanted to do was to drop the boat, round on the other Worthy, and bury his fist in their faces over and over until they stopped talking. The urgency of the desire frightened him.
“If,” Goatface continued mildly from above, “you want to provide your foes with a gift, you will allow yourself to be goaded.”
Ruc took a deep breath, felt the rage fill the air inside his lungs, then blew it out slowly.
“Just lift the boat,” he growled, straining beneath the weight.
“Lift,” Mouse agreed.
“All right, you ungoadable shitheads,” Monster snapped. “I’m fucking lifting.”
Talal, for his part, remained silent, the muscles of his back and shoulders flexing as he drove the bow of the boat upward toward the top of the wall.
“Forward,” Bien called down. “You have to come forward.” Then, after a couple of laborious steps: “I’ve got it!”
It didn’t feel like she had it. It felt, if anything, as though the hull were growing heavier. It was one thing to hold the boat at shoulder height, quite another to steady it high overhead. Ruc could hear Monster muttering a string of curses just behind him, and beyond her, down by the end of the boat, Mouse’s labored breathing.
“We need someone else up here,” Bien said, her voice tight with strain. “Quick.”
“Talal…” Ruc began.
“Go,” the Kettral said.
“Go,” Mouse agreed.
“Can the three of you…”
“Just get the fuck up there, lover man,” Monster spat.
The hull sagged when Ruc released his hold. Mouse groaned and Talal gave a quick, involuntary grunt. Monster, for a miraculous few heartbeats, quit her cursing.
Ruc lingered just long enough to make sure they weren’t going to drop it, then took two quick strides toward the wall, leapt, caught the top, and vaulted himself over. Bien and Stupid were leaning out over the sand, hands on the rail of the boat, trying to lift it and guide it forward all at the same time. Ruc slid between them, found purchase just under the front deck, and lifted. It felt as though his shoulder might pop from its socket, but then Bien and Stupid were able to adjust their hold and the weight became bearable once more. Gradually, step by laborious step, they moved the boat up until it was Monster’s turn to climb the wall, then Talal’s, and finally, when almost the whole hull had slid over the top of the wall, Mouse’s.
The huge man, as it turned out, was better at lifting than climbing. He’d held the stern of the boat all alone, sweat streaming down his forehead, eyes squeezed tight against the strain, as Talal scampered up to join the others. The wall, however, seemed likely to defeat him. He’d taken hold of the top easily enough—he could reach the full distance without even jumping—but couldn’t pull his weight up. After a couple of aborted pull-ups, he tried walking his feet up, then heaving a leg over as Monster had done—to no avail.
“Any week now, you fucking anchor,” Monster shouted.
“Anchor?” Mouse protested, straining yet again to drag himself up.
“He needs help,” Bien said.
“We all need fucking help,” Monster shot back. “Unless you grow some muscle, we’re not holding this boat just four of us.”
Bien hesitated, then nodded. “I’ll go. I’m the weakest.”
“There seems to be a gap,” Stupid managed, “in the logic there.”
Bien, however, had already slipped out from beneath the hull. The skiff dipped a little without her support, but it wasn’t like losing Mouse or Talal. Ruc gritted his teeth, pushed a little harder, and the boat steadied as Bien dropped into the pit. How she planned to hoist a man three times her weight over the obstacle Ruc had no idea. The answer, as it turned out, was that she didn’t. Instead of trying to lift Mouse up, she dropped to all fours next to the wall. Ruc could just glimpse her over the edge, knees and hands buried in the wet sand.
The Worthy of the other trainers whooped with delight.
