“I can get you what you need,” Emily said.
12: Cheap and Strong
The bar was dim from the moment Marcus stepped through the door, and it only got dimmer the farther inside he went.
This suited him fine.
Shards of anemic, dust-flecked light jabbed through its front windows—empty frames lined with the jagged remnants of panes long since shattered. They faced the far wall of a narrow alley, and the light that passed through them had already been battered by bends and forks and mounds of trash that marked the alley’s winding path, leaving little more than splinters of luminescence to pierce the bar’s dank interior. Their penetration was scarcely subcutaneous, and as Marcus descended, his eyes switched gears to the wispy orange glow of tallow candles smoldering in hammocks of broken crockery. Cobwebs of smoke dangled from the ceiling, their stinging strands catching on Marcus’s face and forcing his eyes into slits.
A dented piece of reflective metal hung behind the bar, collecting scraps of residual light and sprinkling them over the assembled bottles. A woman in a leather jerkin stood behind the counter, exchanging chitchat with a trio of drunks whose positions on their stools were at various degrees of precariousness. The barkeep spoke with easy banter, though her hand was never more than a foot away from a short steel rod she kept half-hidden in a lip at the countertop’s edge. It was nearly invisible in the bar’s crepuscular glow, but Marcus’s eyes were well-honed, and they spotted it effortlessly. He could scarcely fault her for her prudence, as the slab of meat she’d hired as a bouncer was slumped at the end of the counter, his wages pouring down his gullet as if out the bottom of a hole-ridden bucket.
He flagged down the barkeep and ordered a bottle.
“Of what?” the barkeep asked.
“Does it matter?”
The barkeep handed over a scratched-up glass vessel with a V-shaped chink in its lip. The bottle was unlabeled, its contents clear and anonymous. Marcus swigged it until it burned too much to continue—a state achieved with acceptable promptness. He pulled a handful of pesos from his serape and thrust them into her hand. She took the money and offered him an empty glass. He waved it away.
Marcus exchanged a few hollow pleasantries with revelers on his way to the backmost table. He was almost surprised to find himself addressed and responding in Mejise, a language he’d spoken most of his life but that felt more than ever like a foreign tongue.
Securely nestled between columns of wood and shadow, he began absolving the bottle of its sinful contents—a task he set about with diligence and determination. When it was done, he set the bottle aside and took stock of his drunkenness. It was, to his mind, inadequate. Likely the bottle had been watered down, its caustic effects drawn from cheaper, non-intoxicating additives that left him with a sour belly and an unfortunately robust sobriety. Without alcohol’s beguiling aegis, he had no choice but to think of his predicament
Of the Jefes who ran Juarez, why was it Thorin who’d had to grab power? Why not Delgado, who wielded his authority with something like justice? Or Evangelista—a canny kleptocrat, perhaps, but one too set in his ways to unweave the status quo. Thorin’s coup was the worst possible outcome—but also, Marcus saw in retrospect, the likeliest one, perhaps even the only one possible. Delgado and Evangelista had held the edge in strength and numbers, but it was always Thorin who’d been the most ruthless. Unencumbered by empathy, his mind could move with a viper’s stealth and speed, slithering through cracks in the unspoken agreements the other Jefes considered impenetrable.
Ironically, it was these qualities that drew Marcus to Thorin in the first place, to seek his services as a lender where the other, more conservative Jefes would balk. It was a decision that, when recalled, still left him aghast at its reckless stupidity. He’d known Thorin’s word was worth less than the rancid air in which it sounded, but he’d counted on the Trinidad to keep the man’s venal caprices in check. In so doing, he’d sold his foolish self into slavery without even knowing it. Usury was one thing, but how could one free oneself from debt bondage when the man who held that debt wouldn’t accept payment? So long as Thorin was in power, Marcus was as good as marcado. Unbranded, perhaps, but no less owned.
Marcus knew someone was coming several seconds before they arrived at his table. Inebriation could make him fumble-fingered, but it couldn’t sheath the ever-drawn blade of his awareness—and he was far from inebriated anyhow. His left hand slipped silently beneath his serape while his right lay by the bottle in a loose C-shape, a casual posture that could morph it into a cudgel in a single neat swipe.
The figure scraped a chair over the floorboards, drawing four parallel lines in the straw strewn about as a prophylactic against spills and vomit and—on more colorful nights—blood. Strings of greasy black hair dangled over his forehead. Sunken, yellow cheeks revealed the contours of his skull, and sores studded the outline of his smiling lips. He wore a dustcoat several sizes too big for him, its hem filthy from dragging over miles of hardpan.
“Welcome home, primo,” the man said. “If I can call you that. Two days, and I have to hear about it from some dickhead pandilleros.”
“It’s hardly been two days,” Marcus retorted. “Besides, I’ve been busy.” His eyes flicked to the bottle, back to the man’s.
The two men laughed. There was genuine warmth in the sound, though it lay atop a much greater coldness, the embers of a campfire lit on the tundra. Marcus’s smile soon wilted from the chill. “What’s happened to you, Emilio? You look terrible.”
“You should find yourself a mirror, calaca, before you tell me about looks.” Emilio’s smile invited Marcus to share the joke but received nothing in reply. He glanced to the floor, his tongue probing at the sores on his lips. “These are lean times. Especially for the trade.”
Marcus nodded. Emilio’s trade wasn’t an easy one, and its practitioners felt booms and busts as keenly as more orthodox tradesmen. Pickpockets may have little to fear from the constabulary—a neutered organization of overgrown watchmen even before Thorin’s tenure—but their “clients” could be rough indeed.
“Leaner times I can’t recall.” Marcus batted the bottle back and forth. It glided on a cushion of spillage, leaving comet tails of moisture. “If it’s money you’re after, I don’t—”
“Please.” Emilio held up his hand. “I know what happened.”
“How?”
Emilio shifted in his seat. “It doesn’t matter. This isn’t about money.”
“How do you know what happened, Emilio?”
“Thorin’s men are crowing about it, and he’s done nothing to dissuade them. They say you’re his dog, that you tried to buy your own freedom with a girl from the north.”
Marcus’s grip tightened around the bottle. He forced his fingers to loosen before they crushed the glass and cut themselves to ribbons. “My freedom was never sold. I was a debtor, not marcado.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
Marcus felt as if someone had used his guts as a tourniquet. There was no graver insult to a free fighter than to be called marcado, yet even this insult Marcus could bear. But to accuse him of offering Selena as barter, that was unforgivable. It was an abhorrent charge.
Is that why it chafes you so, whispered a voice. Or is it simply a bit too close to the truth? It is because of you she is in the pits, is it not?
The spindle in his belly gave another savage turn. Emilio laid his fingers on the back of Marcus’s hand, beckoning him back from the darkest caverns of his memory.
“I’m not here seeking money. I didn’t come to tell you about Thorin’s nasty little rumors either—had hoped not to, in fact, though you’d’ve heard of them soon enough anyway. I’m here to ask you to come see your mother.”
Marcus closed his eyes. “I’m not ready for that yet.”
“If it’s up to you, you’re never going to be ready. And you may not have as much time as you think.”
“Is sh
e …”
Emilio’s hand seesawed in the air. “Who can say?”
“Very well. Perhaps in a courtyard or café …”
“She can’t leave her bed, Marco. She’s much too weak. You’ll have to go to her, not her to you.”
Marcus raised his chin until the back of his head touched the seat behind him. He rubbed his face. The stubble he found there surprised him. How long had it been since he’d shaved? There’d been no opportunities for grooming on the back of Hector’s wagon, and his mind had turned to other matters since.
“I’ll go,” he said, fixing his eyes squarely on Emilio’s. He tossed the bottle to his cousin, who caught it easily, his quick hands moving on reflex. Marcus watched their deft tracings with a touch of pride. Emilio hadn’t taken to knifework, but those clever hands were still crafted under Marcus’s tutelage.
“What should I do with this?” Emilio asked.
Marcus flipped him a coin—his last. “Fill it with something cheap and strong. And bring back a second glass. I could use the company.”
13: A Tough Old World
The Iron Circle was aptly named.
It sat in a sinkhole that, through judicious tunneling and the building of earthworks, had been converted into an amphitheater of impressive size. Rows of clay-rich earth sprouted upward in dozens of concentric arcs, their corners hewn into wood-lined benches and bulwarked with stone. The seats descended toward a stretch of hardpan demarcated into rough quadrants by faded lines of chalk. The shape of this inner plateau was formless; its boundaries jigged and contorted by architectural necessity. Offshoots jutted into the crowd where the edge of one bench had collapsed, while buttresses shoring another against a similar fate intruded inward.
Lending order to this chaos was a band of circular metal, two hundred feet in diameter. It formed a ring in the arena’s rumpled heart, its steady curvature supported by steel posts every twenty feet. There was no door, no focal point, no break in its blue-black perfection. Combatants entered by clambering over or under it. Two did so now, pulling an appreciative roar from the crowd. Both bore marks of bondage on their faces: one a purple star with curved points as if bent from rapid spinning, the other three black bars stacked one atop another.
The star-faced man, the smaller and leaner of the two, held a strange weapon in one hand. Neither sword nor spear, it tapered steadily along its smooth metal length to a gradual point. Ten inches of tight-wrapped leather formed a crude handle at the butt end. Though three feet long, it seemed light, for the crouching man wielded it without difficulty.
The bigger man, his head shaved to pebble smoothness, bore a more conventional broadsword. Selena wondered where he might have found such a weapon. Clearly, it had been made in the days before the Last War—it was at once too well-forged and rust-eaten to be a modern facsimile.
The fighters circled one another. The smaller man moved in a frog-like crouch, his upper body nearly parallel to the ground, his knees bent at acute angles. The larger man matched him with a sidestepping march. He kept pace with the smaller man for a time and leaped without warning. His sword rose and fell with the swiftness of ricocheted lightning. The smaller man hopped to one side, his spear-sword jabbing out with equal speed. The larger man swiveled his hips with surprising grace, and the spear-point destined for his belly instead grazed the meaty flesh below his ribcage. The wound made a sucking sound as the steel tip pulled free, tearing the narrow bridge of flesh between its entrance and exit. It was an ugly gash, but shallow, and the big man seemed barely to notice it. He unearthed his blade and heaved a wide, open-handed strike. The smaller man dropped lower, and the sword whizzed over his shoulders. He stabbed out again, but this time the larger man was ready and sidestepped it all together. Their first clash concluded, the two fighters withdrew from range and studied each other, smiles of mutual admiration playing on their lips.
Selena leaned forward, engaged despite herself. She’d expected little more than brute force bludgeoning from the proceedings, but both men moved with the self-assured dexterity of real fighters. Their builds and styles put them at odds, an issue which usually makes some bouts ugly or lopsided, but both men had, piled atop their primary skill sets, the far rarer savvy to find sure footing on unfamiliar ground.
Their second clash proceeded like their first, a blitzkrieg tussle of grunts and feints and the whicker of steel narrowly evaded. The larger man scored a point this time, but not with his main weapon—a clean blow from the broadsword would have bisected the smaller man easily. He landed instead with a sharp kick to his opponent’s abdomen, hurling him back and derailing a fierce jab of his needle, which had been on track for the hollow of the bigger man’s ribcage. The smaller man landed with a wheeze three strides from the bigger man’s feet. The larger man brought his broadsword down in a triumphant arc. The smaller man wriggled from its path with inches to spare, moving with a liquid scuttle that seemed almost to defy his anatomy. He hop-scotched to safety and whirled to his opponent, sword-spear brandished like the baton of a lunatic conductor.
The fight ended, as most did, with anticlimax: a misplaced swing, a seized opportunity, and the spear-sword skewered the larger man between the third and fourth rib. It traveled upward on a diagonal for a foot or two but stopped before coming out the other side. The smaller man made no effort to withdraw it, but sprung back empty-handed, allowing the larger man his final spasms of confused anger. He lurched like a stuck bull, swung his sword ineffectually at nothing, and collapsed. Only after a few feeble twitches did the smaller man inch forward and retrieve his weapon.
As the roar of the crowd reached its climax, Selena was surprised and faintly horrified to find her own voice among its chorus. She found fights to the death repulsive in both their morals and the waste they engendered, but the artistry she’d witnessed viscerally thrilled her. The arena was and always would be her home, and she would forever find some manner of solace there, whatever strange form it took.
A heavyset man beset with rings stormed into the ring. His every motion whispered with luxurious fabric. He stood over the dying man and kicked him several times, admonishing him in rapid Mejise. The large man did nothing to retaliate, but merely closed his eyes, ashamed.
His ire spent, the heavyset man made a twirling motion with one hand. Two men in vests of stiff leather shuffled onto the field, tectonic discs of muscle shifting beneath the skin of their legs. Both bore a tattoo of three black bars in the same position as the dying man.
Once the field was clear, two new fighters entered the ring. Selena recognized them instantly. There was no mistaking Eleanor and Theodora among the other competitors, whose shirtless figures presented various conglomerations of stooped and corded muscle. The girls, by contrast, wore flowing dresses woven from strips of sheer fabric—colors contrasted to distinguish participants at a distance. Theodora wore red, Eleanor blue. They bore no weapons, nor were their fists gauntleted or wrapped in stiff cotton to prevent splintered bones or dislocated knuckles—a practice so common in bare-knuckle fighters Selena would have thought it universal.
The crowd cheered them as loudly as they had the men, though their enthusiasm struck a different timbre. It was rounder and more jovial, pierced through with whistles. The girls acknowledged the attention with prim waves. They strutted toward one another, instants of bare leg flashing through gaps in their dresses’ fabric. The crowd’s jubilation reached a higher pitch.
Coins showered the ring, cast in a volume Selena would have thought impossible from such a grubby-looking group. The girls smiled and preened for the crowd, conjuring a fresh volley of coins, before strutting into fighting position.
What followed was not a fight, but its coquettish parody. A gaudy piece of burlesque theatre where feints and jabs never landed but instead snatched free ribbon after ribbon of clothing, revealing provocative bands of bare skin. Their faces pantomimed aggression, indignation, and triumph, taunting one another with handfuls of purloined fabric or cross
ing their arms over themselves with rosy-cheeked shame. It was acting of the broadest sort, but the audience lapped it up, eager to buy whatever nymphic myth the girls chose to sell them.
Selena became aware that she was a lone woman in a row of men, all of them frothing with glee at the spectacle before them. They laughed and cheered and stomped their feet, whispered innuendo to one another before dissolving into a susurrus of giggles, howled encouragement or advice in coarse Mejise. The salacious content of their requests oozed through the language barrier and into Selena’s ears. She pressed her hands against her thighs to keep them from balling into fists.
The act reached its crescendo with both girls nude save for two parallel bands, the first hugging their breasts, the second shifting precariously over the curvature of their hips. They circled like wrestlers, arms raised, thigh muscles coiled and ready to spring. They leaped as one, clashed midair, and tussled to the ground.
Eleanor was quicker—either through honest athleticism or the scripting of the show. She pinned Theodora face-down, locked her arms behind her, and raised her to her knees in a posture of submission. The crowd foamed with anticipation. Sensing its mood, she cooed out a question in Mejise and cocked a hand to her ear, as if straining to make sense of the deafening cry that followed. The downcast eyes and clench-kneed shyness Selena had witnessed in the barracks was gone, replaced by a boisterous theatricality that drank in the crowd’s gaze the way a plant drinks in sunlight.
A fusillade of coins pelted the hardpan at Eleanor’s feet. She rolled her hand, inviting further offerings. When they’d arrived to her satisfaction, she reached down and with a flourish yanked the ribbon from Theodora’s chest. Her pale, full breasts swung freely for an instant before she hid them behind crossed arms. Eleanor strutted before the crowd, holding up the top like the pelt of a rare and wily creature she’d felled. Feigning vengeance, Theodora crept up behind Eleanor and ripped her top off in kind. The two of them chased each other about the ring for a while before exiting to whistles and applause.
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