by Simon Morden
‘Not with that thing flying around.’
Stanislav came back again. ‘You saw this wyvern, this draco?’
Dalip nodded sourly. ‘We’re in some sort of castle. Buildings surrounded by an outer wall, where there are two gates, at least. They don’t even bother to close or guard the gates, but I guess they don’t need to.’
‘You still do not have to fight. That is barbaric.’
‘I don’t think they care. They’re going to drag me here and give me a weapon, then set … things on me, whether I want them to or not. Either I fight back or I die.’ Dalip looked up at Stanislav. ‘I don’t want to die.’
‘Have they told you how many opponents you will face? What kind? Men? Beasts?’
‘They used a dog for the first time. A fighting dog of some sort. I have to assume it gets harder.’
Stanislav sat down next to him, and rested the back of his head against the same wall as Dalip.
‘This is how you win your freedom?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think it works like that.’
‘To the death?’
‘I’m here to fight. Apparently.’
‘This is, this is …’ Stanislav raised his hands, then let them drop uselessly in his lap. ‘Evil.’
‘I didn’t know what to do. I thought this might buy me some time.’ Dalip shrugged. ‘Something might come up. An opportunity, a rescue. I know I can’t keep going forever, but it’s better than being dead now.’
‘Is it? There are worse things than dying.’
‘I don’t know how to fight. Pigface said one of the guards would train me. I didn’t want that. So I asked for you.’
‘And you think I do?’ Stanislav pressed his chin into his chest. ‘You should not have picked me. Anyone else but me.’
‘I’m sorry. I wanted someone on my side, someone who’ll care enough to give me a chance.’
‘You will die in this ring of cold stone. You have no chance, none at all. By saying yes to them, you have given them control over you. Only by saying no do you keep your honour and your dignity intact.’ He ground his jaw. ‘You have made a mistake, Dalip. If you will not let me go and tell them you will not fight, go yourself, and let them do their worst.’
‘Their worst will be to let some other wild thing in here, and it’ll kill me.’
‘If you want understanding, understand this: you will not hurt them by fighting their animals. You will only hurt them by fighting them. The only way you have of hurting them is by not playing their cruel games.’
‘Stanislav: they’ll kill me. One way or another, they’ll kill me.’
‘This is true. But they will gain pleasure out of seeing you fight, not seeing you win. It is the fighting they want. Deny them that.’
‘I shouldn’t have brought you into this,’ said Dalip. ‘Okay, I do have a choice. Die now, die later. And everything you said is true. I just don’t want to die now. I want to live.’
He got up and dusted himself down and started to prowl.
‘What will you do,’ said Stanislav, ‘when they bring in another man? Or a woman? Or a child? Will you kill them to stay alive?’
‘No. No, I won’t.’
‘You are sure of that? Once you begin to kill, it will become almost impossible not to kill. What if they push this Pigface into the ring with you? He is a prisoner of the geomancer as much as we are.’
Dalip said nothing. He hadn’t thought that far ahead, and he was ashamed that he hadn’t. If it was Pigface facing him, knife in hand, sweat streaming down his forehead and stinging his eyes? The guard would stick a blade in him without a moment’s hesitation. Did that give him the right to do the same?
Killing him could be seen as protecting the others.
‘No,’ he said.
‘So you would be prepared to let Pigface kill you?’
He imagined the knife going in, into his belly, being dragged out sideways, his guts spilling out over the floor. ‘No.’
‘It must be one or the other. Those are the rules of their game. Two go in, one comes out.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘So you must decide whether you will be prepared to end another man’s life for the purposes of entertaining our masters, or whether you will not. What if,’ said Stanislav, ‘it was me?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? We are together through circumstance alone. Neither of us chose the other. If I am just another man you must kill in order to survive that day, then why not?’
‘You’ve not done anything to hurt me. Stanislav, please. I just want to live a little longer.’
‘And you call this living?’ He shook his head. ‘I do not blame you. I would have agreed with you once. You are young, you have experienced mostly kindness and generosity so far. You cannot quite believe what is happening to you, so you choose to put all that to one side and cling on to the idea that everything will be all right in the end.’
Dalip pressed his hands to his face and blinked back the tears.
‘It will be.’
‘I have seen it with my own eyes. I have seen men, and boys not much younger than you, believe until the very last second that everything will be all right in the end. They died with a look of astonishment on their faces, that the world had somehow tricked them into thinking that people were good and kind and fair, only to reveal that underneath, we are all brutes, savages and murderers.’ Stanislav pulled up his legs and hugged his knees. ‘We are prisoners, not of any state that has rules that mean we must be fed and clothed and well-treated, but of people who own us like property, to do with as they wish. Do we cooperate with such people? Only if we want to lose our souls as well as our lives.’
‘But useful slaves—’
‘Are still slaves! Pigface is still a slave. The wolfman is still a slave. Perhaps they want to be slaves, good slaves. I do not, and you should not either. It is not a condition that anyone should become comfortable with.’ He got up, and stood in front of Dalip. ‘What is it that you want? Do you want to fight? Is that it? To show you are a man? To kill and kill again because that is what men do?’
‘No, I don’t want to fight. But they’re going to make me fight anyway, so I may as well not die at the first attempt.’
‘You know of the Christian martyrs, yes? The ones that the emperors put into the arena with the wild animals? They did not fight, but prayed as they died.’
‘I’m not a Christian.’
Stanislav took a step closer, and pressed his extended forefinger into Dalip’s chest. ‘What is it that you want? What do you really want?’
‘I want them to let me go. I want to make them let me go. I want to make them give me back my turban, my kangha, my kara, my kirpan. I want to make them glad to see the back of me. I can’t do any of that if I’m dead.’
‘That is true,’ he conceded. ‘Will you fight to make them let you go?’
‘Yes.’ Dalip looked away, then back. ‘I think so.’
‘You have to more than think. You have to know. And you have to fight them, every second of every day until you are either free or dead. Can you do that?’
‘Yes. Yes I can.’
‘If this is ultimately futile, and the geomancer and her men are too powerful for us, then we might only make them pay in some small way for what they have done. Would you be content with that?’
Dalip stared at his hands and wondered if he could do it. He was a student, a son, a brother. Not a fighter. Why was he here? He was here because he was being held against his will by people who wanted to feed him to dogs. That was why. That was the answer: not ‘fight’. So they were wrong, and he’d show them they were wrong, one way or another. If that meant pretending to become what they wanted, then he’d do that, only for as long as it took to work out a way of escaping.
‘Yes.’
It
was Stanislav’s turn to come to a decision. His gaze wandered up to the first balcony, where the geomancer had sat. He pursed his lips and looked pensive.
‘Yes, then. I will attempt to train you. I know the basics. If nothing else, you will leave a better-looking corpse.’ He checked that Pigface wasn’t in sight. ‘Strip,’ he said.
‘Sorry, what?’
‘Strip. Let me see what I have to work with.’
Dalip kept his kachera on. Otherwise, he was naked, and felt utterly uncomfortable as Stanislav circled him, sizing him up as if he was a joint of meat. The air chilled his skin, and what hair he had rose up.
‘I have seen worse. You do a lot of sport?’
‘Cricket, mainly.’ Dalip looked straight ahead.
‘Cricket. How very … English. Can you run, throw, catch?’
‘I’m not bad, I suppose.’
‘The ball is small and hard. Are you scared of it?’
‘I know it’s going to hurt sometimes, and more if I get it wrong. But no, not really.’
‘This mark here.’ Stanislav pointed to Dalip’s arm. ‘This is where the dog bit you?’
‘That’s where I let the dog bite me. Then I stabbed it in the back and neck.’
‘We want to avoid that. A bigger creature will break your arm, even if they do not break your skin. A dog has blunt claws, made for running. A cat – a big cat – is sharp at every corner and will slice you like one of your Sunday roasts.’ Stanislav sized up the floor space. ‘This is small. Speed will only count for so much. Once you have made contact, ending it quickly will be your only option. Do you know any judo, or karate, or wrestling or boxing?’
‘No. I never really got into fights at all.’
‘Not even with racists or neo-Nazis?’
‘I got thumped a couple of times, but I was always able to run away.’ He shifted awkwardly. ‘Can I put the boilersuit back on? I’m cold and …’
‘Embarrassed? You will not die of embarrassment.’ Stanislav kicked Dalip’s boilersuit further away. ‘No. You cannot run away in here. Against animals, predators who will be used to killing for food and for dominance, there can be no running. You must dodge, close and strike, use your mind as a weapon as much as a knife. The longer a fight goes on, the more likely you are to lose. When you are tired, you will make mistakes. Out there, you have the chance to do it again. In here, it will kill you.’
Despite the cold, Dalip found his hands damp with sweat. Of course he was nervous. He’d be a fool not to be.
‘So how do we start?’
Stanislav weighed up the options. ‘You know what this is?’
He dropped to the ground and balanced his straight body on his fingers and toes. His elbows bent, his body dipped, then he straightened them again.
‘A press up,’ said Dalip.
‘You need more strength in your back and shoulders. Your arms are like sticks. One hundred. Start now, and I will find some weapons to practise with.’
Dalip assumed the position. He was quite light, and the first twenty weren’t too difficult. He could hear voices off, away down the corridor. He raised his head enough to see Stanislav and Pigface engage in, at first, an animated conversation with a lot of gesturing, and then it escalated to a full-throated shouting match. Pigface turned to walk away: a brief struggle ensued, ending up with the guard’s head squashed against the stone wall by Stanislav’s meaty hand, while the other relieved him of his knife. It had happened so quickly, almost effortlessly, that Dalip had no idea of the order of events.
Pigface slid down the wall when released, and Stanislav re-entered the pit. He stooped to put the knife on the floor and acted as if nothing had happened.
‘How many have you done?’
‘Twenty-six.’
Pigface was picking himself up off the ground, pressing his palm to the side of his head, staring narrow-eyed at Stanislav.
‘More, then,’ said Stanislav. ‘And faster. This is not meant to be easy. While you are doing that, tell me what you saw outside: tell me about the buildings, how far away they are, how many soldiers you saw.’
He gave the details as best he could, and then talked about what he presumed was the geomancer’s stronghold.
‘There’s a tower attached to this one, by a bridge that links the first floors. If that’s where she lives, then she can just walk from there to here without going down to the ground. But the only way out of here for us is through the guard room.’
‘How high is that balcony? Three and a half metres? Four? If one of us could climb that, then there is another way out.’
Dalip’s arms were beginning to burn. ‘It’s smooth stone. I don’t think anyone could climb that.’
‘No? I will show you how it can be done. Not today, though. Let them get used to us being here, then they will take less notice of us. How many now?’
‘Forty-seven. Forty-eight.’
The strain was showing in his voice.
‘Keep going. Do not stop. You are not weak. You are strong.’ Stanislav glanced up again. ‘If the geomancer was there, we could catch her by surprise. She does not look like a fighter herself. Incapacitate her guards, and you have her.’
The pain was building, and all Dalip could do was grunt.
‘Once you have taken her hostage, we can free the others, and whoever else wishes to leave. Her dragon cannot attack us without attacking her. When we are safe, we can decide what to do with her. Remember what she is and what she has done. There may be no justice other than what we give, and if we let her go, she and her men may hunt us down, or simply go back to slaving.’
Dalip’s arms were trembling with effort. He locked his elbows to rest, but Stanislav wasn’t letting him slack off.
‘In this ring you fight until you finish. You cannot stop before then.’
The fire. He couldn’t feel his arms any more, but he kept on going for another one, another two, then he collapsed face-first on to the cold, hard ground.
‘Your legs are not tired. Get up. Run from the door to the door, then reverse. We may have just one chance at this, and you must be ready. Up. Up!’
Dalip dragged his bones upright, his arms dangling uselessly at his sides. He started to run.
17
She had to step over a wall that hadn’t been there before. It was just about knee-high, wide enough to have to stand on on the way across it, made of rough stones that were more-or-less fitted together.
Having crossed it and jumped down the other side, she looked back at it. Crows was already heading up the hill, carrying the fish he’d caught – she still wasn’t quite sure how – while she was paddling up and down in the shallows.
The wall extended left and right. Soil and shrubs were piled up against the inside of the wall, and when she checked, the outside too.
Like it had pushed its way out of the ground.
She looked up the hill. Crows had disappeared into the ruined tower, so she took the opportunity to follow the line. It ran all the way around the tower, following the same contour, and she arrived back where she’d started a few minutes later, breathless and not a little confused.
She climbed after Crows, to find that the wall wasn’t the only addition. There was a new pavement in front of the doorway, and somehow the tower seemed taller and more substantial. If that had been all, she’d have just put it down to her faulty memory, but the circular wall was something else. She hadn’t forgotten it, and neither could she dismiss it.
And inside, the roof, or at least, the floor above, had been repaired. But not in a new wood way. The boards now over her head looked old and tired, the beams supporting them rough and soot-stained.
‘Crows? What the fuck is happening to your castle?’
‘You’ve noticed,’ he called from the back room where he kept his stores.
‘I’m not blind. Or
stupid.’ The ceiling was too far away for her to jump up and touch, but it obviously wasn’t at the top of the tower. There were going to be stairs somewhere, and she started searching for them.
She found a dark alcove that, when she looked up into it, she could see faintly. Uneven stone steps led upwards, and with a quick glance behind her, she started up them, hands feeling the way against the walls of the narrow staircase. It grew brighter as she climbed: the stairs ahead of her grew more ragged, until there were whole sections of tread missing, but there was a doorway to her right just before it became unusable. She stepped through, and found she was standing on the boards she’d been looking up at before.
They seemed solid enough when she pressed them with the toe of her boot, and she walked out on to them, listening to them creak softly.
Above her, the crows had moved up a level. There was another threadbare set of rafters hanging from the sockets in the walls, and the birds returning to roost seemed perfectly at home. She paced the square sides of the tower, and ended back at the door.
She wasn’t imagining it, and Crows wasn’t denying it.
‘Dinner is cooking,’ he said, appearing behind her.
‘How is this even possible?’ she asked him, throwing her hands up in disbelief.
He shrugged. ‘I cannot tell you why, but I can tell you how. There are lines of energy that flow under the surface of the land. Where those lines cross, the energy pools as in a well. Miracles happen there.’
‘So, what? The castles just appear?’
‘Yes.’ Crows shrugged again. ‘What can I say? Down was like that before I got here. I did not make the rules.’
‘What about the villages?’
‘Yes, those too. If you stay long enough in one place, a house forms for you. Those are along the lines. Where two or more meet, you get castles.’
‘Fucking hell. That’s crazy. Why isn’t everybody running around trying to find their own castle, then?’
‘As you can imagine, it is not as simple as that.’
‘And this one’s repairing itself because?’
‘Because you are here, Mary. The land responds according to our natures. Some people are weak in magic. Others are strong, like you. You can drink deeply from the well beneath us. The castle was never very big, and I lost heart, so it fell into ruin. Now, it is responding to your presence, and grows once again.’