As Baster-kin makes his way to the concrete pillar he has indicated and is recognized by ever more of the crowd, a strange hush falls over those participating in the various activities in the arena as well those among the audience. It is not a hush inspired by affection, of course, although it certainly contains a large measure of respect. When he nears the concrete pillar to which the brown bear is chained, Baster-kin takes aside one of the enormous, scarred Stadium attendants — the men who do the inglorious work of moving animals and racks of weapons from the arena to the scarcely lit iron cages and storage rooms below — and orders the man and his fellow workers to remove all the animals to their cages, and disarm all combatants. It is a command that would draw jeers, were it issued by any other officiaclass="underline" but now, no voice among the assembled athletes and spectators is brave enough to express the disapproval that all feel. Such is the effect of the hard glare that the Merchant Lord moves from face to face about and above him; such is the effect he has long cultivated.
Only when his eyes settle on Radelfer, who stands outside a curtained stall that is one of a group approximately a third of the way up the Stadium benches, does Baster-kin stop studying the crowd. Then, when he takes more specific note of the expression upon his seneschal’s face — one of genuine regret for the very public family spectacle that he believes is about to take place — his lordship jumps down from the pillar’s base and, issuing a final order to one of the animal handlers, moves at a quick pace to join Radelfer before the more (if not completely) sympathetic seneschal has a chance to warn Adelwülf of his father’s approach.
When Baster-kin closes in on the stall, he begins to hear the sounds of fornication emerging from it; and when his lordship arrives, he rips the curtain away, to find his son fully engaged with one young noblewoman, the pair of them having bothered to shift their scant clothing only enough to allow him to enter her, while a second young woman laughs and holds a wineskin, alternately pouring its contents into Adelwülf’s mouth and pressing her ample breasts into that same hungry maw. At the sound of the curtain being torn, the two young women shriek, for they are able to see the man responsible; Adelwülf, however, only begins to turn, disengaging from the widespread girl beneath him as he shouts:
“Ficksel! Which of you idiots dares interrupt my amusement—?” He grows silent when he sees the figure behind him, and quickly tries to straighten his tunic as he exclaims, “Father! What are you doing here—”
“I assure you, Adelwülf,” his lordship replies, putting his fists to his hips, “I am not here for my pleasure or amusement. Our kingdom is in chaos, our bravest young men are daring death of every variety in the provinces and beyond, and you lie here throwing curses more suited to a Bane’s filthy mouth at your father while consorting with such as—these …” Baster-kin quickly nods to the two young women. “Get out,” he says to them. “I do not want to know your names, nor those of your clans — for I should have to tell them how their virtuous daughters pass their evenings, and if they have an ounce of patriotism in them, they should exile you to Davon Wood, out of the shame if naught else.”
“Just a moment, Father—” Adelwülf says, trying to recover some ground.
But Baster-kin’s fury is not spent: “Do not use that term in addressing me, just now, you useless sack of meat — I am your ‘lord,’ until I give you permission to call me anything else!”
As he tightens a simple belt around his tunic, Adelwülf keeps his blue eyes fixed on his father, with an injured intensity that would burn some sense of uneasiness, perhaps even sympathy, into most onlookers. At the very least, most witnesses could not fail to appreciate the unfortunate nature of the moment; but the hurt and anger in the son’s young eyes do nothing to soften the severity of Baster-kin’s aspect, and Adelwülf soon murmurs, “Very well—my lord,” in resignation, as he gets to his feet. Standing on the bench above the man who has tormented him in like fashion for much of his life, Adelwülf rises higher than his father, and would seem to have the physical advantage; but the air of fear that shows through his rage nullifies any such superiority of position. “Now that you have spoilt yet another of my few enjoyments in life, what would you have me do?”
Baster-kin steps up onto Adelwülf’s bench, in order to look him more closely in the eye. “What would I—” the father echoes, with more genuine anger than the younger man can possibly manage. “You really have no idea, no sense of any duty, do you, whelp? Well, then—” With frightening suddenness, his lordship lays tight, painful hold of his son’s left ear, pulling him first out of the stall, and then, stumblingly, back down the rows of benches. “Let us have it your way, for a few moments! Let us engage in the enjoyments of this foul place—clear the arena!”
Adelwülf would like to argue, but the struggle to keep from crying out at the pain in his ear and the difficulty of staying on his feet in front of his friends below are together too great an effort, and he finds himself saying only, “Father! My lord—I beg you, can we not settle this matter at home?”
“Home?” Baster-kin shouts. “You are home, whelp! Let us, then, enjoy the true entertainments that your hospitality has to offer!”
Because Adelwülf is no longer in fact a child, whatever his father’s indictments, Baster-kin’s maintaining a secure grip on his ear requires keeping a clamp-like, even violent hold on the entirety of the appendage, soon causing its skin and gristle to tear away from the skull at one spot; and, like all similarly minor cuts to the head, the wound begins to bleed profusely enough that by the time they have reached the lowest benches that surround the arena, a stream of the precious fluid covers portions of Adelwülf’s face, neck, and upper chest. Catching sight of this seemingly grievous injury, the young man loses all concern with maintaining a courageous demeanor in front of his friends:
“My lord!” Adelwülf pleads desperately, as Lord Baster-kin, again surrounded by Radelfer’s men, roughly forces his son out onto the sand of the arena, in full view and hearing of the others in the Stadium. “Please! I am bleeding, let me depart the Stadium, at the least, and spare me this humiliation before my comrades—”
“‘Comrades’?” Baster-kin replies. There seems something in Adelwülf’s appearance and pathetic manner that gives him a deep satisfaction. “You call these play-warriors ‘comrades’?” As he continues to drag his son across the now-empty arena and toward the concrete pillar on which he stood moments earlier, Baster-kin raises his voice and addresses the crowd that stands outside and above the sand-strewn oval. Few of the young men and women present have departed the Stadium, so compelling is the scene being played out before them; and this fact makes Radelfer, who has joined the ranks of the spectators along with his men, profoundly uneasy. “Do you all think of each other as ‘comrades’?” Lord Baster-kin calls to the Stadium’s crowd. “As soldiers in some peculiar conflict that neither risks nor takes any of your lives, yet is somehow of enough importance that you merit the same ranks of friendship and honor as do the young men who fill the ranks of Broken’s legions?”
For a long, very strange moment, the Stadium knows something it has rarely if ever experienced, in recent years: silence. Not a member of the crowd watching what takes place between the two Baster-kins, father and son, has the courage to venture an answer to the older man’s question, however much they may disagree with what he says. Even Radelfer is uneasy that he is about to witness a scene of violence such as his mind — never so strangely or even terribly ingenious as his master’s — is incapable of conceiving. But, although impressed by Rendulic’s ability to hold the attention of the drunken crowd about him, it is when Radelfer looks to his own household guardsmen that his uneasiness becomes simpler dread: for he sees that they, too, are struck dumb by Lord Baster-kin’s ability to keep the false warriors of the Stadium not only silent but in a state of terror; and these are men who, unlike the youths in the stands, have seen much of true violence, and have developed the ability to know when horror is approaching.