The Prince of Shadow

by Curt Benjamin

  Still, he was exhausted when he returned from cleaning the floor of the latrine, just in time to see the golden boy leaving the stone cottage. The overseer sat at his desk as if he hadn’t moved all day, but set his pen down when Llesho bent his head and stood in a proper submissive silence at the center of the room.

  “Lord Chin-shi has requested my presence,” Markko told him, and rose from the desk with majestic grace. “I will be at Lord Chin-shi’s house for much of the evening. You will doubtless wish to sleep before I return, but as you can see, I am ill-equipped for housing boys here. You will have to make do with a corner of the workroom in the back—” Markko gestured at a closed door shrouded in shadows under the stairs. “Don’t touch anything, and don’t go upstairs.”

  “Yes, sir.” Llesho did not look up until he heard the door open and close again behind the overseer. With a careful, darted glance to make sure Master Markko had actually departed, he raised his head and reached for the timbered ceiling in a great stretch to unkink his back. He looked at his hands ruefully. He had worked hard in the pearl beds, but his new duties with mop and pail left him with peeling blisters butting up against old calluses. His feet hurt, his back hurt, and his arms hurt, but none of that was going to keep him awake past his exhaustion. Not even his excitement that he seemed to be one step closer to escaping Pearl Island could do that.

  After another careful stretch, he looked around him, wondering why he was supposed to stay clear of upstairs. Curiosity was one of Llesho’s greatest weaknesses, but the looming shadows painted on the still and dusty air dampened any interest in exploring the upper region of the cottage. He did not want to know what cast those shadows, and so he ducked under the stairs and opened the door.

  The workroom was the same size as the office. An L-shaped worktable ran the length of two walls. Above the long side of the worktable, a window with its shutter propped open let in the damp evening air. Shelves ranged above the short side of the table and from floor to ceiling on both sides of the doorway were packed with tools and pots and jars and strange mechanical devices and scrolls and codices. Everything seemed to be neatly in its assigned place, but the workroom felt cluttered. Over everything hung the faint scent of purgatives and something more ominous.

  That sensation of clinging corruption deepened as the night darkened around him. The weights and balances, mortar and pestle, compounding beakers, all seemed to blossom like mushrooms in the shadows, growing heads with horns on them, and leering grins. Sleep. Llesho remembered sleep, something one did with the rustle of palm thatching overhead and the muttered dreaming of fellow divers in the longhouse. If gladiators were supposed to be able to sleep in a place like Markko’s workroom, Llesho figured he’d already failed his first test.

  But the muscles in his legs trembled and burned their determined message: they’d had enough for the day. So he found himself an empty corner and curled up like a badger with his back pressed into the wall. Moonlight streamed through the window, casting shadows that loomed over him in his corner and crept across the floor. Llesho curled himself a little more tightly and slitted his eyes to keep guard against the night.

  When the moon had set, Llesho still lay awake, tensed to repel whatever oppressive thing waited for him in the dark. Toward dawn he fell asleep at last, only to be wakened by faint scratches at the door. Ghosts, he thought, and shivered, refusing to close his eyes again in case the thing came for him in his sleep. So he was partly awake when a sandaled foot came into view at nose-level. This, at least, was growing tiresome.

  “Time to rise, rodent.” So was that voice. The golden boy, the messenger. “Master Markko has already gone out. He charged me to get you to morning prayer forms and breakfast. Said you could start in with the mop again. He will summon you if he needs you.” The boy seemed to study him for a minute, his face twisted in a sneer of contempt. “I wouldn’t hold my breath. Oh, I forgot. That’s all you can do.”

  Llesho wondered what he’d done to win the boy’s anger. A pearl diver would take his asking as a direct challenge, and the glare that greeted his blurry nod promised a foot in his ribs as the only answer he was likely to get in this new place. Llesho bit his tongue to keep his questions backed up behind his teeth. He understood breakfast, though, and he decided he’d find out what prayer forms were soon enough, and with a lot less pain, if he waited until they presented themselves and figured it out then. Golden Boy wasn’t staying for questions anyway. He was already on the threshhold when Llesho stopped him with the one question he really needed an answer to right away.

  “Privy?” He was hoping the answer didn’t send him across the practice yard and behind the barracks where he’d found—and scrubbed—the latrines yesterday.

  The boy pointed out the back. Better than a long trek through the entire compound, but he’d have to go past Golden Boy to reach it. And he was getting sick of thinking about the messenger by his job and his face.

  “Do you have a name?” he asked, trying to sound cool and in control as he squeezed passed in the doorway.

  “It’s Bixei.” The boy stuck out a foot to stop him, nose to nose. “Are you the Grand Inquisitor now?”

  “I can call you asswipe if you’d prefer,” Llesho answered evenly. He would rather not have a full bladder in a confrontation with the bigger and better trained boy, but he knew he had a choice. He could stand up to the bully from the first, or he could learn to like eating mud, because he’d be spending most of his days facedown in it with Bixei’s foot in his back. So he held his ground and waited for Bixei to take up the challenge.

  “Bixei, rodent, and don’t you forget it.”

  Which was pretty weak as a comeback, but beat a punch in the nose. Llesho shrugged as he passed the boy. Bixei stopped him with a reminder, “Prayer forms start in thirty seconds. And Master Den hates laggards. Enjoy your piss.”

  The messenger swaggered out, and Llesho followed as far as the front door, turning to complete his own errand around the back. Whatever prayer forms were, he decided, they wouldn’t be hard to find. It looked like the entire compound was shaping itself into ragged rows in the practice court.

  He arrived a minute late, enough to draw a sharp frown from the washerman who stood in his breechcloth at the front of the rows of gladiators.

  “The Gods are waiting,” Den gave him a meaningful frown. Llesho had the distinct impression that he meant the words exactly and literally, as if he had one of the Seven at his back, tapping a naked foot impatiently in the sawdust. Llesho quickly took a place at the end of one line, only to discover, too late, that Bixei stood at his right hand. Great.

  Once Llesho had drawn himself to attention, matching his stance to the men in front of him, Den made his formal bow and began to mark off the forms, each with a name to describe the action. The name and the action together formed a focus of contemplation, and the form itself became a prayer. At least it did when practiced correctly.

  “Flowing river,” Den said, and though he seemed to show no particular grace, still his large body made the form look simple, like pulling shirts from the washing vats. Llesho tried to copy the motion, summoning the image of a stream, and overbalanced. He flailed his arms to catch himself, and fell backward into the sawdust. With trained instincts, the men ranked behind him took one step to the side, neither catching him nor jostled out of the form by his crashing fall.

  Den halted the company to frown down at him, but said only, “Watch the shirt, boy, it’s almost new.” Mention of the patched and ill-fitting shirt flamed Llesho’s cheeks with embarrassment. The laughter of his fellows seemed good-natured enough, however, and the man in the line in front of him helped him up with a slap on the back.

  “You’ll learn, chicken,” he said with a grin, and turned back to complete the form “Willow bends in the wind,” which Llesho had missed completely. Bixei gave a scornful sniff, and ignored him for the remainder of the exercise.

  Llesho struggled with the next form and the next, caught one foot aroun
d the other and wrenched his ankle in “Twining branches,” then tried to lift both feet at once for “Butterfly,” and fell flat on his face. But gradually he began to feel a rhythm in the passage from one pose to another, movement gliding from foot to ankle, ankle to knee to hip, up through his spine to be contained between his outstretched hands. When he imagined performing the complex patterns underwater, in the bay, his movements became slower, more precise, more fluid. He visualized the sea at his back, and did not fall. By the time the exercise had ended, he was earning nervous glances from his fellows. Only Den, and Llesho himself, were breathing easily.

  Den bowed to the assembled company, freeing them to their morning meal. As the company broke up, he sought out Llesho for a slight nod of acknowledgment. “You are agile enough, and you learn quickly,” he said, too quietly for the departing men to hear. “Just be careful not to learn too quickly. All useful skills are acquired with effort.”

  “Yes, sir,” Llesho agreed. He had to be more careful here among strangers, who may have heard stories of Thebin but who had never actually met someone from the high mountain country. Lowlanders often mistook for magic the simple facts of a body constructed to survive the airless peaks. He knew that, but he needed time to discover what weaknesses he must pretend so that no one suspected him of supernatural gifts. And he’d have to figure out what strengths he could develop to compensate for his small stature.

  “The gods never call us without giving us the means to succeed,” Den said, and Llesho wondered what he’d shown on his face: not the Seven, perhaps, but a cranky old minister who wouldn’t stop giving him orders even after he was dead.

  “Give it time,” Den said, and patted him on the back before moving off toward the laundry.

  Time indeed. His plans had taken him this far; now Llesho had to figure out how to survive the training and earn a place at the competitions on the mainland. His stomach growled, and he sighed. Among Lleck’s Thebin proverbs, “Listen to your belly” was the simplest, and came down to the lesson, “Don’t try to think when you are hungry; all your answers will be food.” So he followed the retreating backs toward the cookhouse and the smell of boiled grain and fish. The man who had picked him up after his first humiliating fall that morning caught sight of him and gestured for Llesho to take a place in front of him. The line snaked toward a long table laden with vats of food still in their cooking pots. Llesho hesitated, but the waiting men sorted themselves out to leave a space for him. So he went, grateful when someone pushed a plate and a spoon into his hands.

  “I’m Stipes,” the gladiator said. “Short sword and net, trident if that is the only contest on offer.”

  “Llesho.” He followed the lead of the other men, filling his plate with boiled grain mush and a double dip of fish heads steamed with palm leaves in the pot for flavor. And in the spirit of the other man’s introduction, “I am pretty good with a muck rake, and I can hold my breath underwater.”

  Stipes laughed at that and led him to a bench where two empty places waited for them. All but one were strangers to Llesho, but Bixei stopped him with a look that would have killed if he had the knack of it.

  “Thanks.” Llesho gestured with his plate to show his meaning, and turned to find another bench, but Stipes pulled him down, nearly dumping the plate of food on Bixei’s lap.

  “Not so fast. I thought, if you wanted to come to the barracks tonight, you might share my bunk.”

  It wasn’t the first such offer Llesho had received in his life. In the longhouse new boys or girls his age were called “fresh fish” until they made their own preferences clear. Among the gladiators, the young trainees were apparently called “chickens,” but a polite offer deserved a polite answer in both places. Bixei’s poisonous glare wasn’t the first of its kind he’d seen either, but it put things in perspective. He didn’t know what they called it here, but he had no intention of treading Bixei’s waters even if he were inclined to accept the offer. Which he wasn’t. Made virtue easier that way.

  “Thank you,” he sat, and Bixei’s knuckles whitened around the handle of his spoon. “But I have promised myself to a woman, a pearl diver. She’s Thebin, like me. We’ve known each other since we were seven.” He smiled. The memory of Lling, slick as a seal under the bay, lightened his heart. He could imagine her expression if she heard his declaration, the way she would raise one eyebrow and pucker her lips like she’d eaten something sour. She’d punch him, no doubt, for the outrageous lie, and neither of them would ever admit how close to the truth he swam. Laughter sparkled in his gut, and he set it free. “We’ve been workmates half our lives.”

  Stipes shrugged good-naturedly. “Then you’re best off staying where you are,” he advised. “His Honor won’t ask, and some in the barracks would make their offer with a fist in your belly. Best to have some friends about you and a bit of a name in the ranks before you take on those offers.”

  Llesho knew good advice when he saw it, so he gave a little nod of agreement and dug his spoon into the mess on his plate. The fish was passable, the mushed grain tasteless, but he watched Stipes mix the two and found that, when taken together, the food wasn’t bad at all.

  Llesho noticed that Bixei’s knuckles had returned to a more natural color since he’d rejected Stipes’ offer, but the other boy hadn’t said anything for most of the meal. When Llesho had almost finished, though, Bixei asked a question, tinged with contempt. “You work with women?”

  Llesho almost answered with his own challenge, but he saw the gladiators lean closer over the bench and realized that Bixei asked for them all, and that the disdain covered a real curiosity. He relaxed, then, like he’d fitted a puzzle piece into place, and smiled. “Every quarter-shift. Lling saved my life. I had run out of breath and would have drowned.” The memory of hanging upside down from Shen-shu’s chain, his strength gone with the last of his breath, shivered through him with the terror he’d been past feeling when it happened. “Lling breathed into me, and brought me to the surface. Without her I’d be dead.”

  Fighting men, it seemed, could understand living or dying by how loyal a man could count his friends, but they still looked doubtful that a woman could share something as complex as honor. Stipes asked the next, and most obvious question. “But isn’t it . . . distracting?”

  Llesho shook his head ruefully. “Not after the first black eye,” he said, and the laugh that earned him seemed directed not at his own defeat in the field of romance, but at Stipes himself, and Bixei, both of whom received nudges in the ribs and a few waggled eyebrows along with the hoots of derision. Bixei flamed red in the face, but raised his chin to defy them all. “And don’t forget it, either, Stipes,” he said, confirming Llesho’s suspicions and giving Stipes a new warning as well.

  “Not likely to, am I, boy?” As an apology the words might seem lacking, but they were said with enough fervor to earn Stipes a nod of acceptance.

  Llesho had finished his breakfast and waited only for a pause in the brief conversation to make his excuses. Bixei was the next to stand as the rest of the bench also began to clear. He seemed less hostile, but said nothing more to Llesho and left quickly.

  “You’ll do, boy.” Stipes gave Llesho a slap on the back, and followed as Bixei cut through the throng for the exit.

  “Sure, I will,” Llesho muttered under his breath, though he doubted every word of it. He wished Lling were here now, and Hmishi. Together they might take on the world, but alone he didn’t know how he would make it as a gladiator. He wasn’t even a good mop boy. But he’d learn. He always did. And there was a mop with his name on it waiting for him at Markko’s—His Honor to the fighters, apparently—cottage.

  When Llesho returned to the cottage, the overseer was sitting behind the desk folding a sheet of paper. Bixei had arrived ahead of him, and was standing at Markko’s right hand with a message pouch hanging from a strap that crossed from his left shoulder to his right hip.

  “I won’t be needing you for the rest of the morning,” Mark
ko said without looking up. He gestured at a tray with a teapot and plate of broken biscuits on the corner of his desk. “Take these things with you, I’ve finished with them. And, after you have mopped the barracks to Master Jaks’ satisfaction, come back here. I may have something for you to do then.”

  Bixei looked down on him with haughty disdain while Llesho collected the overseer’s breakfast things, but something in the look and the posture made Llesho wonder what he was so afraid of losing. If Bixei wanted to be Markko’s servant, he was welcome to the job. The least of Thebins made poor ones of it—they were a proud people, but mostly proud of their independence, which they had nurtured and protected for generations on their mountaintops. Until the Harn had come. Unfortunately, Thebins also made poor soldiers. Llesho was going to change that, but not as a servant to a second-rate official in the employ of Chin-shi, Lord of Pearls.

  Something of what he was thinking must have communicated itself to the golden boy, because the haughty pride slipped a bit. But Markko had a rolled-up paper to go into the pouch, and Llesho ducked away without attracting further notice.

  Chapter Five

  TWO weeks after he made the trek from the pearl beds to the gladiator’s compound, Llesho took his place in the barracks with a bachelor group who showed no interest in him for conversation or anything else. He had grown skilled in the use of the mop and bucket and the prayer forms were coming more easily to him.