by Janine Cross
So this was where I’d learn vebalu, the exercises that developed a dragonmaster apprentice’s physical agility, coordination, mental faculties, reaction time, and skills with Arena goading tools.
I’d expected something more refined.
I spotted Ringus. The slender servitor was leading a group of his peers through a furious drill of calisthenics. He had his back to me, hadn’t seen me enter. I wondered what had ensued after he’d fled from me last night.
Abruptly, Ringus stopped exercising and gave a long whistle. The servitors began hurling themselves over, under, and along the assorted gymnasium equipment at his signal.
First, they leapt onto and raced across a waist-high narrow bar, then leapt off the bar with a somersault. Upon landing, they snatched up one or more of the many goading tools scattered about the ground, and, while dodging around and whacking a series of tall, straw-wrapped pylons, they antagonized and hindered one another with their tools.
The action during this obstacle race grew quite fierce, shields, lances, capes, and bludgeons all swirled and stabbed with malevolent vim. Grunts and the occasional cry of pain peppered the air.
Upon completing eight circuits of the sparring obstacle course, the servitors then sprinted back to the balance bar, dropped their weapons about its base, and hurled themselves at a domed structure.
Twelve feet high and constructed of steam-bent bamboo, the hide-covered dome clearly represented the back of a dragon. The aim was to vault directly onto the bamboo dragon’s back, using its nearest hind leg as a springboard to flip oneself up onto the dorsum, whereupon one tossed oneself off the other side with a half twist, to land facing the opposite flank of the beast.
At that point, Ringus dodged in and out under the dragon’s scrotal sac, an impertinent bulge I thought surely more prominent than that of a real bull, though I couldn’t be sure, as the only male dragons I’d seen had been the senile kuneus of Convent Tieron; the testes and penile forks of those beasts had been as withered as their infirm wings.
Each time Ringus darted toward the bull’s testes, he spread his arms wide, embraced as much of the scrotal sac as he could, and rubbed his torso and hips against the bulge as if trying to scribe circles upon the thing.
I flushed furiously.
This was the ignoble part of an apprentice’s duties, the part children giggled over and women sniggered about, and the moment in Arena when men lustily roared their approval and their lewd taunts. This was where we apprentices used our hands and bodies to bring the bull to full penile arousal. This was when we became Temple’s dragonwhores.
Understand, a bull only achieves erection during shinchiwouk, display and combat with another bull dragon. But due to the scarcity of bulls, no Clutch lord wanted to risk his prized bull in such a conflict. Thus Abbasin Shinchiwouk, oft called Arena, was created. This, then, is what I knew of Arena at the time:
Situated on the outskirts of Fwendar ki Bol, Village of the Eggs, Arena was both a place and an event. Each year, for eight days, the bull dragons of every Clutch in Malacar underwent shinchiwouk in an enormous Temple stadium. Many wagers were laid concerning how long it would take the dragonmaster apprentices of each Clutch to arouse their bull, how many apprentices would die in the process, and how many female dragons each bull would mount once aroused. The bloody, ribald spectacle was attended by the elite from both Malacar and the Archipelago. The lower stands of Arena, nearest the action, were always filled to capacity by rishi, Xxelteker sailors, and lower-class merchants. The status, wealth, and political standing of each Clutch was determined annually at Arena. Half a dragonmaster’s apprentices never left its bloody grounds.
During shinchiwouk in the wild, much butting of domed head against flank and scrotum takes place between bulls, with the intent, of course, of driving away one’s competitor. The few extant accounts of shinchiwouk sightings in the jungle all state that the weaker bull withdraws before real damage occurs. All that physical stimulation of the testes, combined with the excitement of battle and the odor exuded by the female dragons witnessing the conflict, causes a bull to achieve erection. Remove even one of those elements from shinchiwouk—butting of the scrotal sac, battle lust, or the scent of gathered female dragons—and a bull is unable to mate.
For shinchiwouk to be successfully re-created in Arena, then, a dragonmaster apprentice must incite battle lust in a bull while stimulating the bull’s testes. The young female dragons witnessing the mock battle behind a series of huge iron gates exude the necessary pheromones.
Flushing from the roots of my hair to my toes, I looked away from Ringus as he continued his vigorous, full-body manipulation of the bamboo dragon’s scrotum.
There were more stations on the vebalu course; I just couldn’t see them clearly, my view obstructed by target pillars, bamboo dragon, and whirling bodies. But this much was obvious: Vebalu training would be intense and exhaustive.
After leaping several times over the bamboo bull, Ringus came to stand before us inductees. His skin gleamed with perspiration and his lean chest heaved deeply and easily; he looked bright-eyed and exuberant. He was good at vebalu, very good. No doubt he’d be granted veteran status soon.
His eyes fell upon me.
He stopped still. Paled. Shot a look toward the wrestlers, where Eidon trained. Ringus’s larynx jogged up and down a few times, then he turned stiffly back to face us, avoiding my eyes, his exuberance gone. Clearly, he had told Eidon of what had occurred last night.
Anger flooded me, swift and thin, and then was gone. In its wake, I realized I’d expected as much. I’d now have to find a way to use Ringus’s fear of me to my advantage.
“On your feet,” Ringus cried at us inductees. “Do as I do and don’t fall behind, or Egg’ll beat you.”
Standing scowling to one side like a gandi, a herder, Egg thwacked a leather baton into one meaty palm. We all flinched. A sloppy grin broke through Egg’s frown and a chortle of delight escaped him before he could pull his somber mask back into place.
“Like this, keep up, follow me,” Ringus shouted, and he began leaping high into the air to briefly grab his heels before landing again.
Venom-charged, I felt as agile as a jungle cat, my muscles like coiled springs. I kept my eyes on Ringus and matched his every move. Then I began trying to speed up the pace, press him into a competition, and sure enough, aware of me from the periphery of his gaze, he accelerated his pace to keep even with mine.
I accelerated my pace further, leaping so fast my toes only grazed the ground with each landing. Ringus matched me leap for leap.
Soon the inductees on either side of me were falling, gasping, wheezing, our ranks in chaos. Egg charged from inductee to inductee, bellowing and thwacking his baton with abandon, a harried look on his swarthy face.
“Stand up! What’s wrong with you? Jump, jump, all together!” He threw his baton to one side with an aggrieved roar, grasped a young boy about the waist, and hoisted him over and over into the air.
“In time with Ringus!” he bellowed. “Jump. Jump. Jump!”
I kept pace effortlessly with Ringus, whose eyes were now locked upon mine. We were in an open contest, one that he was clearly determined to win. Soon all the inductees collapsed in a chest-heaving heap about us. Egg quit badgering them to watch us in amazement, his jaw slack.
My lungs began to burn, as if the air were turning into thick, hot blood in my throat. My vision began to swim. But I would not give up. Not yet.
Ringus, too, was struggling. Although he had the advantage of years of training, I had the advantage of the dragonmaster’s venom draft soaring through my limbs. Both of us were failing badly, though, jumping no longer swiftly or gracefully, but as if stones were tied to our ankles.
After a clawful more lung-burning leaps, I decided I’d pushed Ringus far enough. That he’d been willing at all to engage in a contest of wills after witnessing my unnatural rapport with a haunt the night previous garnered my respect for him. If I wanted to restore
his sense of worth before me and earn his respect—and possibly his alliance—I needed to gracefully lose this challenge I’d lured him into.
So, with a shuddering wheeze that wasn’t at all feigned, I collapsed upon the ground. After a few more leaps, just to prove his win fair, Ringus likewise stopped.
While he and I heaved for air like hooked fish, Egg pulled his wits together.
“That’s enough warmin’ up, hey-o,” he muttered, thoroughly disgruntled. “ ’S not normal.”
He gestured at the inductees and took his unease out on them. “Sit up, sit up, get yourselves ready for the next part! You’re going to learn your weapons now, an’ I want you all to pay close attention.”
While the veterans began target practice with bullwhips, the servitors gathered in one corner of the gymnasium to practice drills with capes, bludgeons, hooked nets, and staffs capped by great, bulbous knobs. Poliars, Egg called these, as he explained the different goading tools to us.
“But you’ll be usin’ only capes an’ bludgeons today,” he said, nudging one of the leather-covered clubs piled atop a filthy mound of terracotta-colored capes at his feet. “Remember, you’re trainin’ for Arena, hey-o. If you want to survive, you’ll move fast an’ hit hard. The idea is to get your opponent down, so’s he’ll be bait for Re while the dragonmaster and whatever servitor or veteran is in Arena with you can work the bull.”
Work the bull. A euphemism for whoring the beast, for arousing Re.
“When you hit someone, you wanna hit him real hard, so he goes down screamin’ and writhin’. That sort of thing gets Re’s attention fast. When Re goes into Arena, he ain’t been fed for a couple of days, hey; he’s hungry an’ mean, and he’s frustrated as anything ’cause he can smell the onahmes in the holding pen, but he can’t get at ’em.
“Don’t run when the bull comes at you,” Egg continued, swatting at a fly that buzzed about his oily locks. “Movement is what Re goes for, movement an’ noise. You have to learn to stand still when he charges, wait till he’s close, then move, when he’s built up so much speed he can’t maneuver fast. You get behind him, then, an’ work him good.”
From the mound of frayed hempen cloth at his feet, he picked up a cape. It was exactly the same rufous color as the ground, so much so that it looked woven from dirt.
“Every apprentice wears one of these in Arena. Never let a stronger apprentice grab your cape; if that happens, you’re locked in hand-to-hand combat, an’ as an inductee, you’ll go down. A cape can garrote you, smother you, an’ blind you. But,”—and here he squashed the persistent fly with an audible splat between his meaty paws—“it can also save your life.”
I was uncomfortably aware of how dry my mouth was turning during his lecture, how sweaty were my palms. On either side of me, my fellow inductees shifted about, restless with their increasing anxiety.
“All of you know what a pundar is, right?” Egg asked us, scowling.
Nods all around. Pundars were lizards with remarkable camouflage abilities. Their skin could turn from the green of a leaf to the red of the earth in seconds flat, and they could hold their breaths and remain as still and stiff as a clod of earth far longer than a child could.
“One of the skills an apprentice learns is the art of pundar,” Egg said, and even though such an announcement would have caused hilarity elsewhere, we all remained sober and listened intently. “If you’ve been hurt bad in Arena an’ Re is chargin’ at you, your only hope of survivin’ is pundar. You drape your cape over yourself, drop to the ground, keep your mouth shut, an’ don’t move.”
Shivers rippled over me at the thought of cowering beneath a worn cape while a bull dragon the size of a large hut came charging toward me.
“Remember, Re goes for sound an’ movement. I ain’t sayin’ his eyesight is poor, hey-o. But if you’ve just clobbered a fellow inductee, an’ he’s howlin’ and writhin’ on the ground, Re’s gonna go for him, not go snootin’ about the ground tryin’ to figure out where you’ve disappeared to. Every veteran in this stable has survived Arena an’ aroused the bull at least once by using pundar, after strikin’ down a fellow apprentice as bait for Re.”
I cleared my throat. All eyes turned on me.
“What happens to the person that’s fallen? What exactly do you mean by ‘bait’?”
Egg snorted derisively. “Whaddya think happens? Anyone who falls gets ripped apart by Re, and while he’s feedin’, the survivors work him good. What’s there not to understand about that?”
I couldn’t answer.
“If you do get your opponent down an’ survive Re’s charge an’ manage to work him, you’ll be promoted to servitor when you return here. Your chances of survivin’ next year’s Arena are better then, ’cause you’ll spend more time vebalu training instead of mucking stalls, an’ you’ll form alliances with veterans who’ll watch your back in Arena. And most important of all”—here he wagged a thick finger at us—“as a servitor, your name might not even end up on the Ashgon’s Bill, which means you won’t be required to enter Arena at all.”
The wide eyes of every inductee were riveted on Egg. Each boy’s jaw was set with the conviction that he would survive Arena and move on to become a servitor.
I couldn’t look at the boys, so filled were they with childish determination.
Understand, the majority of the inductees were eight to ten years old—most of them a good nine years younger than I—their knees overlarge on their twiggy legs, their bellies as round and smooth as cooked eggs. Their chests were slight, their ribs visible, their arms thin. They were children, to me, and I knew with both frustration and sadness that the dragonmaster had chosen the majority of them solely as temporary stall muckers, their ultimate purpose to incite bloodlust in our bull dragon with their lives a year hence in Arena. Fodder, he had called them, before going to round them up on Sa Gikiro a few days ago. “Now, get on your feet, all of you,” Egg ordered, “an’ pair up.”
In a mad scramble, all the inductees claimed one another as opponents. A dark-skinned, scrawny boy with an unruly cowlick sprouting like a parrot’s plume from his crown was left without a partner. Shoulders hunched, he had no choice but to stand opposite me.
He was ten years old if he was a day. He should have been learning his clan’s guild trade, and in his spare time, making peepholes in mating shacks in hopes of glimpsing naked women. His was an age for foolish play and wrestling with siblings in the dust, for eating much and sleeping heavily. Yet here he stood, learning the brutal art of fighting to the death.
“Grab a cape, snap it on, an’ start on the balance beam!” Egg bellowed at us. “C’mon, get movin’! An’ remember, you’re trainin’; don’t use full force and really break someone’s kneecaps, else you’ll be whipped for it.”
I grabbed one of the filthy camouflage capes and, after fumbling a bit with the heavy, rusted chain, clasped the cape about my neck. I could easily see how an opponent could garrote me, with that coarse chain about my throat.
With my reluctant opponent standing a generous arm’s length away from me, I queued up to start the sparring course.
All those years balancing atop mill wheel and convent roof while at Tieron, fixing cogs and replacing roof tiles, stood me in good stead on the beam, despite the trembling in my fatigued legs. My technique for swirling my cape in my young opponent’s face and obscuring his view was also more than competent, and my reflexes for darting out of reach of his bludgeon were superb, learned after years of darting away from tail lashes and head butts from the retired bulls I’d served as an onai.
But my bludgeon hung limp in my hand.
Egg lumbered over to me, scowling, as I and my young opponent danced about the straw-stuffed pylons on the obstacle course.
“Wassa matter with you?” Egg bellowed in my ear. “Use your bludgeon!”
I gritted my teeth and gave the straw pylon nearest me a mighty whack, which unfortunately left me open to attack from my opponent. He promptly thwacked his blud
geon across my lower back. I cried out from the blow but was not felled, only bruised.
“Turn round an’ hit him back!” Egg screamed.
Panting, sweat running down my dust-coated face in rivulets, I faced Egg. “No.”
“Eh?”
I took a shuddering breath. “No. I won’t do it.”
We were blocking the obstacle course; the inductees sparring behind us were forced to come to a stop.
Egg gawked at me. “Whaddya mean, you won’t do it?”
“I won’t fell someone as bait for Re,” I gasped, heart pounding not just from the exercise but from defying Egg’s order.
“What do you think your purpose in Arena is, hey?”
I swallowed. “To serve Re.”
“You think you can do that, with every inductee that’s out in Arena alongside you tryin’ to bring you down?”
“I … I intend on trying.” I sounded as confused and uncertain as I felt.
Dumbfounded, Egg’s great jaw moved up and down several times before he sputtered, “You’re completely cracked.”
“There’s no law that says an inductee has to sacrifice another to save himself in Arena, is there?” I asked.
“Common sense says so!”
I frowned, shook my head. “I didn’t join the apprenticeship to commit murder.”
Egg let out a string of curses, then spun on the inductees pooled behind us.
“Don’t stand about starin’!” he shouted. “Get trainin’, get movin’, go!”
Word of my refusal to attack another inductee spread quickly amongst the apprentices after that, and with every new circuit through the vebalu course, I was challenged by a different opponent. Each young boy attacked me with bold glee. As the sun poured wrathful heat over us, my quick reflexes began to slow, and some of the inductees’ hits landed hard against kneecap or ankle and felled me.
But I persevered.
Though more than once, my bludgeon twitched in my hand as anger exploded in me, prompted by pain, and I almost gave in to brutal retaliation.