Mena could not be sure how skilled her tutor actually was, but on a morning toward the end of the last month of spring the two fenced their way to a standstill. She stunned him by striking at several different points on his body with a single cut. Though Melio parried her, the shock on his face registered. He realized as well as she that with a single downward blow she had nearly cut him at the neck, on the side, and at the back of the knee, without losing any of her initial momentum.
After this, Melio stood some time, panting, watching her from behind the dark locks of his hair that stuck to the sweat of his forehead. “Who would have thought that Princess Mena Akaran would be the first to challenge me with the true use of the sword?”
“Don’t look so surprised about it,” Mena said. “All I’ve proved is that we are equals.”
“Easily enough said, but perhaps you don’t know what it means.”
“Of course I do. It means I’ll have to find someone else to fight. You know of the stick fighters?”
Melio voiced his opposition to the idea over and over again. He explained things she already knew but which he could not help but voice, as they seemed too important for her to ignore. She had not been trained to stick fight. The art and technique of it was vastly different from the swordplay they had been practicing. The sticks didn’t cut, but this didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous, even deadly. Stick fighters came from the hill villages of the islands. They were the poorest of men. They claimed warriors’ blood but could do nothing with it but test themselves against one another, trying to earn quick bounty from betting. They danced as if they were entertainers, strutting and preening and catering to the betting crowd, but when they attacked they did so with all the force they could muster. They dislocated shoulders with downward blows, broke forearms with twirls, thrust into abdomens so hard that the bodies bled on the inside. He had seen a man’s skull cracked open, watched another man blinded in one eye, another with his collarbone smashed to pieces so that it would never heal properly. And yet another fighter, a master of the craft, had managed such force in his whirling strike to a man’s back that the victim was unable to walk thereafter. He crumpled to the ground, devastated by what had just happened to him, and never again rose to stand on his legs.
“These are men you want to test yourself against?”
If she entered the circle with one of them, she risked a hundred injuries and would gain nothing for it. Why do that? It simply did not make sense. She was vain beyond all reason if she believed a month of sword training had prepared her for such a test. And, anyway, if found out, the wrath of the priests would fall upon her, endangering everything.
Thus was Melio’s rant. It did not do the least bit of good. Mena chose the day she appeared in the rough ring of the stick fighters. She dyed her skin with blackberry juice, leaving it a strange tint but not entirely unnatural. She wrapped her torso in a binding cloth that flattened her small breasts, dressed as a laborer, and bound her hair as Vumu men did. She held her open eyes above a smoky fire long enough to redden them, like those of a mist smoker. No doubt she looked unusual, but none who saw her imagined her to be the priestess of Maeben.
With Melio as a guide, she found the stick fighting gathering at the far side of Ruinat. Discovering it was the easy part. Getting into the ring, she thought, might be more difficult. She shouldered her way into the throng of men. They were young and old, laborers and dockworkers, hill farmers and urchins of the town, the smell of them rank and thick, the air clouded with sweat and mist smoke. She knew these people. She recognized faces from ceremonies. But she was not Maeben now. There was no distance separating them now. She was not arrayed in the guise of a goddess.
The ring man approached her, taking her in from head to toe, grinning. She thought he might ask her to explain herself, to justify being there. But he had no interest in her credentials. He was all business. He informed her that all new fighters had to earn the right to compete. Their first match was always with the one who held the ring’s title. The new fighter had to put up the entry fee. The sum, of course, was essentially forfeit. She would lose, but afterward she would be able to compete with lesser fighters.
“If I win,” Mena said, keeping her voice clipped and low, “am I then the title holder?”
The man laughed. “If you win, you’ve earned a place at the bottom, that’s all. Do you still wish to fight?”
“Of course.”
“Then you fight Teto,” the ring man said.
Teto, the said champion of the ring, was happy to oblige. He pushed through the sweaty bodies and stepped into the circle of cleared sand, where Mena awaited him. His stick, which he held toward the point and carried pressed up against the back of his arm, slid through his loosened fingers until his fist tightened around the hide-wrapped hilt. He moved with a demeanor quite different from Melio’s. His bare feet were careful in their placement but playful. He was light upon the toes, his legs rubbery bands of muscles that supported a floating, tranquil torso. His head seemed the weightiest portion of his body, eyes deep set in the skull and hard on her.
Mena did not have time to think much. Teto opened the duel; she responded. Within a few seconds she decided to fight him with the deadening defense. It was not something she had practiced before or named in advance. But from the first moments she knew that his strength was his greatest attribute and his pride in this was likely his greatest flaw. Instead of exerting extra energy in the impact of their sticks, she let her own force give when she parried. She stopped his strike but without the normal impact he was used to. He struck again harder and harder, his anger showing on his face and in the quickening pace of his strikes. But each time he touched her stick, it gave against his with a limpness he clearly found disturbing, as if he had struck a heavy rope that somehow diffused his force.
The end of the match came so quickly that the onlookers stood stunned afterward. Teto rushed her, his stick straight before him, intent on impaling her with his blade or flattening her with the rush of his body. Mena simply touched his stick with hers, slipped to the side, kept his weapon in place with the pressure of hers sliding over it. She lifted to clear his hilt and then snapped her stick across the base of his exposed neck with all the force her body could muster. And that was it.
Teto dropped to the sand, his hands clasped to his throat, writhing in agony, his cries of angry pain the only sound within the hushed arena of bodies. For some moments the spectators stared about confused, looking from one another to the two fighters and then around again, trying from the scene before them to understand the blinding motion that had preceded it, each of them blinking as if in so doing the world would snap into the rightful order, the outcome of the match reversed. Mena let them study this for a few moments, and then she turned on her heel in the sand and pushed through the crowd.