“My feet are hard,” I said. I stripped the boots. The day was warming and the metal layers of the floor were hot from the sun. I felt giddy with tension, the air around me fragile as cracked blue glass. They handed up to me the bow and long flighted arrows—I had not known what they meant when they called them “plain.” I would learn later.
The groom came up and fixed a metal bar against the open chariot back, about level with my waist, then locked it into place.
Two men on ponies rode onto the track behind the chariot, facing me. Between them they carried, swinging on a cord, a large oval wooden target, marked with patches of dark blue, yellow, and red.
“When the chariot is at full stretch,” Bellan said, “aim for the colors of the target. Blue is best, being hardest to see, red fair, and the bright yellow passable.”
Bellan moved out of the enclosure. The gate shut.
A jolt. I took it. A second jolt and I was flung against the metal bar, almost winded. Damn Darak. I heard him laugh.
“Courage, Imma.”
My feet balanced on the moving thudding floor, apart, over the backs of the wheels. I braced my body, taut against the metal, and waited. We were going fast now. The dusty ground whirled past, fizzing with speed. Behind, in front of me, the ponies galloped, the target swinging. I drew up the bow, steadied, aimed, fired. The arrow went wide. Hair blew forward around my face from speed. I would have to plait it or club it, like the warriors of a krarl. Again I aimed and fired. The arrow nicked the board and flopped in the dust. The chariot was still incredibly gaining. Another jolt that almost pitched me forward over the bar. I reeled back against the metal side, blinked my eyes clear of dust, took aim, and shot. The arrow lifted, came down, and caught red. I straightened, then relaxed my knees a little. I had more of the feel of the jouncing floor now. I leaned out over the bar and took three blues, one after the other. “Darak,” I said, “three blues, one red.” He did not hear me.
The ponies gained on us. I filled most of the reds, many blues. Ahead of us. I swung around and fired from the side. The rest of the reds. We passed. I took a yellow and two blues.
Bellan waved us down.
I left Barak with the horses and walked back to them. The target bristled like a porcupine. I had left five blues unscored. “I see you did not really bother to try for yellow,” Bellan said. “This is very good. I have splendid archers among my horsemen here. They do this for sport. They score perhaps three or four blues, fifteen reds. You have twenty blues and all twenty-five reds.” Raspar smiled.
“I will leave you in Bellan’s charge,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll dine at my house this evening?”
5
So our days formed a new pattern, a strange pattern, one strand wildness, one strand business, and one strand elegance, and the three plaited together.
The wildness was the practice track. That first day with its horse sweat, metal sweat, pepper of dust, and back-breaking, bone-bruising exercise, was merely the prologue to skill, discomfort, and danger.
Bellan was a hard exacting tutor. He would swear as vilely as a bandit when Darak failed to achieve his demands, and Darak would listen, without apparent anger or resentment, and then try the thing again, and get it right. Each night, as he lay on the hostelry bed, I would rub salve into the tear along his spine, where the three blacks, straining at either of his strong arms, had tried to rip his body in half. Bellan, stripped, bore, among many scars, one long hard whiteness along his spine, tough as leather. As for me, my right arm was raw from the weals the shield bracelets had made, holding that bronze monster across my body.
Here I saw the disadvantage in my inability to scar—I could not form protective tissue. Each dawn my arm was healed, but by evening the skin was gnawed open again. Unlike my feet, the soles of which had been like iron since I woke under the mountain, my self-renewing flesh made me vulnerable as a baby.
Bellan did not think any more of it than that I was a soft girl, for all my archer’s skill. He told me to wind linen bandages around the weal marks, and had leather rings set inside the metal bracelets. This helped, but it was still bad enough.
By the third day, when we thought ourselves masters of bow and chariot, Bellan began to wean us to the meat of the thing. I had not yet seen the stadium at Ankurum, or a design of the Straight, when prepared for the Sagare, but, by Raspar’s grace, the practice track became a fair copy. We had Straight, turn, and Skora. Now we learned the pillars of Earth and Air. They were sheer treachery, and, more than the other two obstacles to come, we could only prove ourselves against them in the arena. Earth was an oak-wood wall on wheels, rolled in and fixed in the ground before the race. In the wall were four arches, each wide enough to take one chariot. There would always be six chariots at least competing to get through these four openings; we knew already that this year the Sagare had garnered seven contestants—besides ourselves. Air was represented by two pits, only five feet in diameter, it is true, but stretching down some ten yards. There was plenty of space between and to either side of them, so that a chariot ahead and on its own would manage well enough. But, given a bunch of them, some would be driven into the trap; a horse’s legs would go in and snap; if the back wheels caught, the driver and archer would probably be thrown out despite the bar, down the shaft or under the hooves of the teams behind.
Two days we spent on the wall of Earth, dodging two other practice chariots of Raspar’s, held by Bellan’s men. There were spills, but nothing bad. A man broke his leg, and one team, not ours, ran mad right through the wood—luckily flimsy stuff that did not do much harm. The two days after that we played the pits of Air, dug not so deep, and covered, fortunately, by a light mesh frame. Several times the blacks would have floundered into them, but by sunset of that second day, we had learned the trick of speed or dropping back that would take us clear or leave us last, to catch the others when the stretch was open again.
Water was next, and Raspar did not have the underground springs that bubbled beneath the Sirkunix; instead we learned our lesson hard under the torrents of gigantic tipped buckets swung by chains from above by Raspar’s laughing, jibing servants. My bow and shafts hung wet and useless a hundred times before Darak had mastered it, and I had mastered the art of shield-covering them if he misjudged. And then came Fire.
It was the tenth day, and the Games had already begun at Ankurum. The Sirkunix was near enough the town walls, that in stillnesses during the day, the occasional roaring shout of loud anger or joy would soar up to the farm. It was the wrestling, beast fights, and acrobatics. The races would begin four days from now, and two days from that would be the crowning race, the empress, the Sagare. That tenth dawn, we knew we had six days left alone to prepare ourselves for victory or death.
And so, between those flaming poles, which were the symbols of the pillars in the arena, we rode well enough, because we must.
The farm villa was cool and white, a sparsely but tastefully furnished dwelling, which provided the elegance and business threads in the dangerous plait. Here, the transaction had long since been signed, witnessed, and almost forgotten, it was so light a thing now in this preparation for the race. Darak’s goods were gone. In return he had a handsome price, a price, he assured me, beyond anything he could have hoped for otherwise, while working through an intermediary agent.
“Once we are the victors of the Sagare, we can ride back like kings,” he said to me, but his eyes had the lost, bright, fevered look of Bellan’s now. He was charioteer, mind, flesh, and soul; even asleep, I felt his body quiver, alive with the rush of the chariot. Rarely did he turn to me for love in the dark. He was exhausted; besides, Bellan had warned us both, frank and expressionless.