C HAPTER T WO

 

“WAKE up. You need to get off the boat.” Lling shook him by the shoulder, rousing Llesho from the questions going around in his head.

“I’m coming.” He bestirred himself, but found he could not control his arms or legs. The boat rocking gently beneath him seemed distant, his body not quite real except for the tight buzzing in his head.

Hmishi offered a hand, and pulled him to his feet, but Llesho’s legs seemed to have turned to water. He stumbled, grateful for the shoulder propping him up while he made his wobbling way to the shore. Familiar hands reached for him and hauled him into the slat-sided wagon for the ride back to the slave compound. Llesho found an empty corner on the flat bottom of the wagon and curled in on himself. Lling followed, and then Hmishi, each taking up their post to either side of him. Secure in their protection, he let his eyelids fall, lulled into a shallow sleep where the afternoon puzzled itself out in his drifting mind.

Sometimes, he knew, divers who had suffered enchantment of the deep and survived to tell of it described vivid waking dreams that came- to them as consciousness fled. Llesho had not felt like he was losing consciousness while he talked to the spirit under the bay, but his mind must have been starved to convince him Lleck had appeared to him and that he had spoken with the spirit of his old mentor. His heart told him otherwise.

Desperately he wanted to confide in someone, to ask if any of it could be true, but he knew better than to take such a risk, even with Lling or Hmishi. The Harn hadn’t always needed to steal Thebin children for the slave trade. The Thebin pearl divers on his quarter-shift all came from small-claim farms scratching out a marginal living on the fringes of the Thebin landhold. Harn raiding parties had robbed their homes and burned their crops, leaving them with nothing but their children and an agonizing decision. They needed the money that selling their children would bring just to feed the younger ones until they, too, were old enough to send to market. He once asked Lleck why the king did nothing to help his people. “In some ages, the gods favor their people, and in others they turn their backs.” The minister had wept softly after that. Llesho hadn’t understood, but he’d started a list right there of questions he would ask when he met the gods.

For the children trained to dive for pearls, however, slavery was little worse than the devastation they left behind them in the mountains. They knew nothing of kings or princes or palaces laid waste in that last great and terrible invasion. How could they understand his need to rescue his brothers when they could not imagine any rescue for themselves, or any reason to expect one? If they did not believe Llesho mad, they would believe him a danger. It surprised him to realize that he could not bear to lose the only companions he had left in the world.

“Kwan-ti will know how to help you.” Lling touched his“ arm, for comfort and for strength. The jokes and challenges that usually marked the trip home from the bay were silenced today, the pearl fishers watching him somberly. Llesho remembered the first time he had seen a drowning, when Zetch, a diver well past the age at which most had fed the pigs, had stayed below for almost an hour. When they brought him up, his sack was full of pearls, but so were his mouth, his nostrils, his ears, and he had jabbed mother-of-pearl shells into his eyes. Gone mad, the foreman had announced, but the Thebins knew better. The pearls in Zetch’s body would pay his rent in the kingdom of the dead, and buy him a new body—a free body—for his next turn on the wheel.

“I had a dream,” Llesho said, but gave no description of his conversation with the spirit. Lord Chin-shi, it was said, feared witches, and dreamers could sometimes fall within the web of his superstition. For his part, Llesho wondered if he must be a witch, to have the dead visit him in waking dreams, but he dared not ask. The question alone would be enough to send him to the flames. So he only said, “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I must have let my mind wander.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Lling answered. “Kwan-ti will know what to do.”

Llesho knew her to mean that he should say nothing more in the crowded wagon. Good advice, and easy to follow. He leaned his head against her shoulder and closed his eyes.

“Be careful with him. We could lose him yet.”

Kwan-ti, that was, and with a tone of command she only assumed when real trouble threatened. For a moment, Llesho wondered what had happened. As his companions jostled him awake, however, he realized that he must be the emergency.

“I’m all right,” he protested, struggling to disentangle the hands that reached to gather“ him up.

“No, you are not,” Lling contradicted in tones almost as commanding as those of Kwan-ti. “His mind drifted down below, during quarter-shift,” Lling explained to the healer, her voice shrill with her anger. “Then, because he’d dropped his rake when he was fading, Shen-shu lowered him back into the bay to find it. If I had not breathed into his mouth, he would have died with his head stuck in the mire.”

“Lleck would have saved me,” Llesho objected.

Lling took this as a sign of his condition. “See,” she said, “He thought he saw his father below.” Like many of the women in the camp, Lling believed that Lleck was the true father of the slave Llesho. And what would be more natural than that the son, dying, should see a vision of his father come to save him?

But Kwan-ti had gone very still; Llesho could feel her tension, like the fizz of lightning about to strike. “When did this happen?” she asked.

“On second quarter-shift,” Hmishi gave the answer. “The second hour of the quarter.

“I see.” Something of the tension faded, but Llesho felt, though he could not explain why, that Kwan-ti still listened for something the rest of them could not hear. “Bring him inside,” she finally said, and Llesho found himself tumbled out of the wagon into the arms of his Thebin shift-mates.

“I can walk,” he said, and squirmed out of their grasp. He nearly sank to his knees when his legs would not quite bear his weight.

Kwan-ti raised him by the elbow. “I see you can,” she said tartly, and then turned to his companions. “I’ll take care of him. You may come by to see him after you have dressed and had dinner.”

Hmishi took her at her word, and turned toward his own bed and the clothes basket at its foot, but Lling was not so easy to convince.

“Are you sure?” She touched his arm again, the question in her eyes for Llesho and not for the healer.

“About the clothes? I’m sure.” Llesho tried to lighten the worry in her eyes. “It’s hard to forget you are a girl when we are on dry land.”

“Hard seems to be the operative word,” Lling admitted with a teasing glance at places on his body girls were not supposed to look. “I suppose you will live after all.”

“Reassure his shift-mates in that regard. Unless he decides not to follow orders, of course.” Kwan-ti smiled to take the sting out of the mock threat.

Lling turned to do as she was bid, but swayed her naked hips like an invitation when she walked. After a few choice paces she looked back at Llesho with a little laugh before running to find her clothes.

When Kwan-ti was sure that the girl had turned her attention elsewhere, she sighed heavily. “Come on, boy. We have to talk.”

Llesho allowed her to lead him to the corner of the longhouse where she isolated the sick, but he would wait no longer for news. “Lleck is dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes.” Kwan-ti pushed him down onto a fresh bed just a short distance from the one where Lleck had died. “He wanted to see you very badly before he died, but I don’t have the authority to interrupt a work shift, unless a diver is at risk. Now I wish I had tried anyway. I might at least have spared you from drowning.”

The healer covered him in his bed with a light cloth. “You’re shivering,” she said, and added a blanket.

Llesho realized that it was true, but he seemed less to feel it than to observe it from a distance.

“Rest,” she ordered. “You can explain it all to me after you’ve had some sleep; you’re too tired to make sense now.”

Llesho stopped her before she could leave him alone. “He left a message for me, didn’t he?”

“Yes.” She said nothing else, and hesitated even before saying that much.

Kwan-ti had always made Llesho nervous, though not as an enemy might. She had a way of going completely still and looking at him with eyes as sharp as a hawk’s that made him think she was reading his soul. In some ways Kwan-ti reminded him of the way his mother had looked at him when he was six and he had sworn he hadn’t broken the vase in the great hall. It had comforted him, as a child, to feel in her gaze that his mother could see everything, and love him in spite of his crime. Kwan-ti did not love him, however. He closed his eyes to hide his soul, afraid that it was too late, but with no strength to do more.

“Your secrets are safe with me, Llesho,” she whispered. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

Fear had kept his mouth shut and his identity hidden all the years of his slavery. Lleck had made it clear that only his secrecy kept him alive. But he wanted to believe the healer, and he wondered, as he drifted into sleep, if it could hurt him, just this once, to trust someone.

That night Lling and Hmishi did come to visit, with others from their shift, but Llesho was sleeping, so they went away again with a promise to return. In the morning Llesho still slept, and Kwan-ti sent word to Foreman Shen-shu that her charge had suffered enchantment of the deep, that state in which a diver forgot the difference between air and water, and became a danger to himself and his shift-mates. Foreman Shen-shu sent a message back that Lord Chin-shi had no use for a pearl fisher who could no longer walk the oyster beds, but Kwan-ti ignored the threat, for now at least. With his dying words, Lleck had convinced her that the young Llesho had more pressing business to attend than plucking pearls from their homes in the mouths of shellfish.

When Llesho finally awoke, it was to sunlight breaking through the clouds high overhead. He could count on one hand the days when full sunshine parted the clouds over Pearl Island. What this portended, he did not want to consider, but he knew it was time to talk with Kwan-ti.

“May I have my clothes, please?”

“Of course.” Kwan-ti handed him a set of bleached and faded trousers and shirt, and politely turned away while he pulled them on. Llesho piled into his clothes as fast as he could.

“You can turn around now,” Llesho called, and Kwan-ti rejoined him, taking a seat on the bed next to his.

“You said he left a message. . . .” When Llesho thought of Lleck, so many conflicting emotions filled him—anger and sadness and wonder—that his throat tightened on the name. But of course, Kwan-ti knew what he meant.

“Your father loved you very much,” she began, but Llesho stopped her with a gesture. “My father is dead.”

“Yes—”

“No,” he contradicted her. “My father was dead before Chin-shi’s men ever brought me here.” She had to know that his father would not have permitted a single day to pass with his sons in slavery if he’d lived. “Lleck was a family servant. I loved him, but he was not my father.” He’d said too much and now he tried to keep the panic off his face. She would know that Thebin hardscrabble farmers didn’t have servants. “And he loved you,” Kwan-ti said slowly, seeming to ignore the second part of his statement. She looked into his eyes with that hawklike gaze. Then, as if the sun had touched her, she seemed to open up in front of him, her eyes wide with sudden insight, a tiny sigh escaping her lips before she clamped them closed again, lest she say something out loud that should not be spoken at all.

“I have to find my brothers,” Llesho said tentatively. Kwan-ti nodded. “So he said to me on his deathbed.”

“So he said to me in a dream beneath the bay.” he agreed.

“You cannot go back to the oyster beds now.”

“What am I to do?” he asked; this conversation with the healer felt more like a dream than the one he had with the spirit under the bay. Something about Kwan-ti’s eyes, the gentle touch of her fingers on the back of his hand, slowed time to a walk.

“For the present, you must consider what you can do that will not kill your soul in the doing,” she answered, and the spell was broken. She rose and spoke to someone behind Llesho in the longhouse. “Are you feeling ill, Tsu-tan?”

“Not at all.” The hopeful witch-finder bowed his head over the pearl basket he carried. “I just came to see how the young diver was faring. Shen-shu will want him back on the boat tomorrow.”

“Then Shen-shu can speak to me tomorrow. Now, we must permit young Llesho to rest.”

“Of course, of course,” Tsu-tan bowed and scraped his way out of the longhouse. He returned to his place beneath the coconut palm and took up again the pearl sorting basket never long out of his hands. He could see all the comings and goings of the longhouse from there, Kwan-ti knew, as she also knew he was watching her for evidence of witchcraft. She feared that Tsu-tan would now turn his attention on the young Llesho as well.

For himself, Llesho felt no inclination to rest. He had not regained his full strength, but he felt well enough to take a walk on the shore and watch for the red harvest boats to come in from the bay. So he left the longhouse while Kwan-ti was occupied in bandaging the cut foot of the cook’s assistant, and wandered out past the cookhouse, onto the road.

Few slaves traveled the road at midday, but those he passed had heard about Llesho’s double tragedy, the loss of Lleck and his own near drowning, and did not interrupt his brooding with idle conversation. Llesho had not quite told the truth about Lleck who, as minister of arts and education, was more a servant of the Thebin people than to the family of the king. Lleck had found him in captivity and joined him there, had taught the young prince not only reading and writing, but the arts of strategy that had come too late to save a king. As he walked, Llesho made good use of those lessons, setting evidence against probability, and examining methods to reach his goal.

If the apparition had been a dream concocted by his own starved mind, how had he known the minister had died? And if it was a dream, how could he explain the same message delivered to Kwan-ti? It must be true then: his brothers still lived, in servitude as he did himself. Llesho had to rescue them and together the brothers must free Thebin from the killing grasp of the Harn. If their mother still lived, languishing in the dungeons of her own palace—The thought stuttered out. Llesho could not imagine his beautiful mother reduced to squalor and filth, but the image of his battered sister bleeding into the refuse heap struck him to the heart. He hadn’t wanted her dead, not really, he’d just wanted his mother back. By the time Ping had turned two, however, the little princess had adored him. He couldn’t help but love her back. Couldn’t—wouldn’t—imagine her dead.

Since he had arrived on Pearl Island, he had been no farther from the slave compound than the oyster beds. There were no days off for good behavior, no visits to market or the city for a play or pageant. Once he had hated the duties that lined him up, smallest of seven brothers, to wave, nod, and bow at the side of his mother and father. He had longed for the day he was old enough to follow his brothers into the city for stolen pleasure in the night. That had all ended before Llesho even knew what pleasures his brothers found in the city. So why had Lleck come looking for the youngest and weakest, who was stuck on an island nobody ever got off of? Why hadn’t he found one of Llesho’s older brothers, who could actually do something about his deathbed revelation?

Trying to figure out Lleck’s reasons wasn’t helping him decide what to do. Llesho had walked all the way to the docks without even seeing the road he trod upon, but had only confirmed the impossibility of ever completing the spirit’s quest. Who left the island, ever? Lord Chin-shi, of course, and his wife and daughters. Lord Chin-shi’s son had not been seen on the island since before Llesho had arrived. The foremen, Kon of first quarter and Shen-shu of second quarter, sometimes accompanied their master to the slave markets to acquire new pearl fishers. But Shen-shu was the older of the two, and he was scarcely thirty. Neither was likely to give up their privileged position any time soon.

Pearl fishers never left the island, not living or dead. If they died of disease, they were cremated immediately to curtail the spread of infection. Rumor had it they did not always wait for death before feeding the fire with the struggling remains. When they drowned, or grew too old to work at all, they were fed to the pigs.

Kwan-ti had been right, though, he could not go back to the oyster beds. His lungs were fine, he could survive underwater as long as he ever could. But if he were visited by a vision again, he would surely drown while he argued with the demon who accosted him. He needed a second skill, one that would keep him out of the pig trough and get him off the island.

While he sat on the dock, thinking, the sun had dropped low, and he heard the taunting challenges of the pearl fishers returning home from the quarter-shift. He looked up, vaguely embarrassed to be wearing clothes when Lling and Hmishi and all of his fellow pearl divers were naked from work. He forgot all about the incoming divers, however, when he recognized the device on the prow of the harvest boat: tridents crossed over a round shield. Of course! Lord Chin-shi made his fortune on the pearl fisheries, but he spent his fortune in the arena. Renowned even in the longhouse for their prowess, Chin-shi’s gladiators competed in arenas almost as far away as Thebin itself. And gladiators were given a cut of the purses they won. If a gladiator was good, and survived his battles, he might pay his way free before age and injury cut him down.

Llesho elbowed and apologized his way past his companions who were swarming off the boat, mocking him for his clothing and asking after his health. When he reached Foreman Shen-shu at the prow of the boat, Llesho fell to his knees and knocked his forehead on the dock in the formal style of a petition. “Honorable Foreman, sir, I respectfully request that you take my petition to your master, Lord Chin-shi of Pearl Island.” He carefully referred to the master as that of Shen-shu alone, accepting by implication that Shen-shu held that position over himself. He’d learned long ago not to show the anger that flared every time he had to kowtow to the foreman: strategy, Lleck had taught him, sometimes meant sacrificing today’s pride for tomorrow’s victory.

“The witch forbids you to go back to the beds, doesn’t she, pig food?” Shen-shu answered.

Llesho lifted his head from the dock and sat back on his heels, his palms resting on his knees. “I know of no witch, Master Shen-shu,” he said, ignoring the more pertinent part of the foreman’s statement for that which he could truthfully refute. “I come to you with a petition to Lord Chin-shi that I may train as a gladiator for the ring.”

For a moment the entire dock went quiet, as Foreman Shen-shu stared at him in amazement. Then the foreman began to laugh. “A gladiator, pig food? A short contest with the pigs, perhaps.” In the silence, Shen-shu’s words rang sharply. “You pearl fishers are so skinny, Lord Chin-shi’s gladiators will use you to pick their teeth.”

Llesho reddened to the roots of his black, wavy hair. Beneath his clothes, he knew himself to be as skinny as his companions, whose bones he could plainly see pressing against the thinly stretched flesh that covered them. He imagined the gladiators to be huge men, taller than mountains with muscles like carved rocks, and knew he could not compete against such specimens of manhood. But, he reasoned, even gladiators must once have been boys. They could not have been born with all that muscle and sinew, and they didn’t have a Thebin’s natural endurance. If they could become great fighters, so could he.

“If I am so skinny,” Llesho argued, “the pigs won’t miss me, and the gladiators will have some fun breaking me into pieces.”

“That they will, boy, and feed you to the house dogs when they are done.” Shen-shu, who almost never displayed any sign of good humor, slapped his knee and laughed in agreement with Llesho’s assessment of his chances.

“Forget about the old witch and her threats and warnings,” he chided with more of that good humor so alien to his nature. “Your shift-mates miss you, and it makes them inefficient.”

“They must learn to do without me,” Llesho countered, “because I am determined to be a gladiator.”

“You are a fool, do you know that, boy?” Shen-shu was no longer laughing.

Although at a disadvantage, being still on his knees, Llesho looked up at the foreman and held his gaze steadily. A good strategist knew when to hold his ground. “Then I am a fool,” he accepted. “But I am a fool who will die as a gladiator, not as a pearl fisher. Nor as food for the pigs.”

“We’ll see.” Foreman Shen-shu would say no more. With his authority over the pearl divers came the responsibility to mediate their rare petitions. Those he could not negotiate to a standstill must be referred to the Lord Chin-shi. And the boy Llesho was clearly not going to negotiate.

“Your humble slave gives thanks for your beneficence, in taking this petition to your master,” Llesho answered, completing the formal petition ceremony.

His shift-mates, who listened silently while he argued his case with the foreman, stood apart from him with confusion and even fear on their faces. Llesho looked from one to the other, but found no understanding or support, not even from Lling, who turned away from him when he tried to catch her gaze. For the first time in his life as a slave, Llesho found himself embarrassed to see his Thebin shift-mates naked.

/ am your prince, he thought, you owe me more than this. But they didn’t know, and he couldn’t tell them, nor did he expect that they would thank him if he did. He turned his eyes to the ground and walked away, ignoring the wagon that silently filled with the divers going home.

C HAPTER T HREE

WEEKS passed for Llesho in an agony of suspense. Kwan-ti did not approve of his decision, but she could not declare him fit to work in the pearl beds either. They both knew that left little but the pig troughs for a growing boy with no useful skills. Kwan-ti said nothing, but went about her work with her lips pressed together and her eyebrows drawn down in a frown.

Llesho’s strength returned quickly, and with it the need for movement. He missed work, realized that the danger of the pearl beds had kept his mind sharp and his attention focused. And he discovered, to his surprise, that he missed his shift-mates. He had never thought of them as friends when they spent each quarter-shift together in the bay. In the days since he had seen the spirit of Lleck and nearly drowned, however, the pearl divers had begun to distance themselves from Llesho. The experience had set him apart as his secretive reserve had not. The usual quarter-rest banter that bound the group with petty griefs and shared workaday mishaps could not absorb so great a challenge, could not take in this new shape of him and make it ordinary. Llesho recognized the sudden emptiness where Lling’s smile used to be, and the ab-sence at his back that Hmishi used to fill. It seemed that he had been wrong on all counts. Not friendless and, according to Lleck’s spirit, not without a family either. And not aware of any of it until he found himself well and truly alone. Well, damn.

To fill the hours, he ran. Not fast at first, but as he recovered, his runs grew longer: around the island once, twice, before he stopped, gasping. Even Thebins needed to catch their breath eventually. Some days he had heard the measured tramp of feet falling in unison to a deep voice rumbling out the time—now faster, now slower, while the feet of running men kept the beat. Llesho had kept ahead of them easily, and soon enough they changed direction, moved off on a path Llesho never took, up the hill to the training compound at its height.

Mostly, the running kept him focused on the moment: on the smooth, pale sand shifting underfoot and the fronds of dense foliage grown too close to the path that brushed against him as he passed, marking his skin with the scent of rain and mold and the broken promise of sunlight. The chitter of birds deep in the forest paced his own heart, but couldn’t take the place of absent friends. Alone in his weary orbit of the island, he wondered how long he would be left adrift between lives.

In the third week after Llesho presented Foreman Shen-shu with his formal petition, a messenger came to summon the healer Kwan-ti to the main house. Lord Chin-shi had never summoned the peasant healer before. He had his own doctors, and the house servants took care of their own. Sometimes, when the wounds of Lord Chin-shi’s gladiators healed over on the outside but festered inside, Kwan-ti would receive a caO to treat them. But she had always stayed in the longhouse before, listening to the description of the wounded gladiator’s condition, and sending the messenger back with instructions and a notion or packet of herbs. This time, Kwan-ti herself had gone with the messenger, leaving her bag of herbs and healer’s pouch behind. Her quick glance, resting lightly on Llesho in passing, told him that he was the object of the summons. Lord Chin-shi, or his trainer, would want to judge her answer for himself when he asked what chance a half-drowned Thebin boy had to survive the rigors of gladiatorial training. She would need no tools of her trade for that.

Wondering what she would say just made him sick in the pit of his belly, so Llesho ran, as fast as he could manage this time. When he reached the landward side of the island, he plunged into the sea. He swam until his legs felt too heavy to propel him forward and he could not lift his arms to pull himself through the water. Alone and at the limit of his strength, he rolled over on his back and let the sea carry him, cradled in its warmth. So far from land, the sounds of Pearl Island did not reach him and Llesho allowed his mind to float with the current, wrapped in the quiet and at peace. He could stay here forever, he thought, with the salty breeze for company and the blood-warm water for comfort. The cry of a bird overhead seemed to come from a different world, calling to him though a bamboo screen set with bright silk streamers. It was another memory from his childhood before the Harn came, shaking itself loose when he let his thoughts wander. In summertime that screen had shaded the window in his mother’s sitting room, its ribbons in the colors of the goddess fluttering in the breeze. Llesho wanted to hold onto that memory, to pass into that world of his past that called to him with the cry of birds like the sound of laughter. But somewhere in the back of his mind he felt the presence of his old mentor looking on with disapproval. He had things to do: brothers to rescue, a nation to free from the clutches of invaders and tyrants. No time for rest, eter-

The water seemed to take Lleck’s side of the debate. The current pulled him away from the mainland that had grown no more distinct for all his efforts to reach it. After a while, Llesho executed a neat roll and began kicking strongly again, cutting through the water toward Pearl Island.

Too late, he realized that he’d swum out too far. . The island was too far away and his legs were leaden, his arms numb. Llesho should have been afraid, but dying didn’t frighten him anymore. He’d long ago come to terms with the gray depths as an enemy to his freedom; now he embraced the gentle side of the sea’s strength, another friend he was leaving behind. Something nudged his side, and the bumpy, grinning face of a water dragon broke the surface in front of him. Spume ran off her sides as her green-and-gold-scaled back rolled past him, never more than a tiny fraction of her length visible above the sea. She wrapped a loose coil around his waist. Her delicate forked tongue flicked out, touched his face, his hand; Llesho wondered if she planned to eat him for lunch. He thought he read laughter in her slitted eyes, however; she butted him gently with her tiny curled horns and disappeared, the soft, scaleless skin of her belly sliding effortlessly across his body. Even the water dragon had been company, once he figured out she didn’t plan to eat him. But then, just ahead of him, the dragon’s head rose out of the sea, coils glistening like gold and emeralds in the sun and the water. She dove, vanishing again into the sea, and he felt himself lifted on her strong back, and carried toward Pearl Island.

“I’m going,” he told her, “I get the point.” The dragon seemed to understand. She gave her back a wriggle, and laughed at him between sharp curved teeth. The human sound of that laughter, feminine and musical, should have surprised him more, except that Llesho had grown to expect the impossible from the sea. So he laughed in turn, ran a hand down the gleaming flank of his companion, and nudged her gently with his knees, the way he had directed his pony forward when he was a child in Thebin. When they grew too near the shore for her great size, the dragon dipped her head beneath the waves, and Llesho released his hold. He was close enough now to make the shore under his own power, and he struck out with strong strokes, leaving almost no wake from his smooth kicks. He soon reached the shore, and sat panting and looking out over the water he had just crossed, but the water dragon was gone.

When he returned to the longhouse, spent but at peace, Kwan-ti was already there, tucking stray tendrils of wet hair into her glistening bun. She said nothing to him of her day’s errand, nor did she question him about the lateness of the hour. For his part, Llesho made no mention of his attempted escape or the way the sea itself had comforted him and turned him back to face his future on Pearl Island. In the days that followed he still ran, but the urgency had gone out of his pounding feet. Tomorrow or the next day, the future would come for him. Fate was like that.

On the third day after Lord Chin-shi had summoned Kwan-ti, a boy not much older than Llesho himself, but a head taller and with pale gold skin, presented himself at the longhouse with the message that Llesho should gather up his possessions and follow. Since Llesho owned only the clothes on his back and the basket he had kept them in while at work in the pearl beds, he used his few moments to say good-bye to the healer, and to leave a parting message for Lling and one for Hmishi. He would miss them, and for a moment the thought of entering the gladiators’ compound, where he would see no Thebin faces, daunted him more than any fear of the danger his new trade might hold. But Lleck had taught him that all of life was a circle. You couldn’t go forward for long without meeting your past. Llesho had always hated that saying because he could think of little in his past that he wished to revisit. It surprised him to discover he took comfort in it now.

The messenger was eyeing him doubtfully when Llesho joined him. “I wouldn’t want to be you for all the pearls in old Chin-shi’s bay,” was all he said, though, and the two boys climbed the rise at the center of the island with only the crying of the birds for commentary.

Llesho had seen the gladiators’ training compound from a distance, but he had never been within the stout wooden palisade. Up close, Llesho could see the wall as individual tree trunks set upright, side by side, and snaggled at their tops like a hag’s teeth. Such precautions seemed unnecessary—if a Thebin trained to the bay could not escape Pearl Island, no soft servant or overmuscled gladiator would do better—but he figured that gladiators must, by trade, be violent men. And they might even be able to handle a boat. For whatever reason, it was as difficult to get inside the compound as it seemed to get out. At the postern gate, the boy who accompanied him spoke to a guard with an empty tunic sleeve tied up in a knot, who opened the gate with his one arm and herded them into a passageway so narrow that the shoulders of a larger man would brush each side as he passed through. Llesho clung to the rough palisade that made up the outer wall of the passageway. The inner wall was also constructed of tree trunks set upright in the ground, but peeled of their bark and smoothed of knots and other irregularities so that they fit snugly one against another. A broad polished band showed that most of the men who passed through these gates brushed against the smooth inner wall. But the sounds of grunts and curses and the clashing of weapons beyond that burnished palisade unnerved him, and Llesho pressed against the scratch and grab of the undressed outer logs for even the few inches of additional safety it afforded him from the sounds of battle within. Combat was part of his life now, but he shied away from the overwhelming reality of his decision as he followed his guide down the passage.

Llesho figured they had traveled halfway around the compound before they came upon a second guard, apparently whole, at an inner bar to their entrance. This man seemed to know Llesho’s escort and wordlessly opened his gate. He raised an eyebrow over a twisted smile when he thought Llesho didn’t see, but quickly turned back to his work with awl and leather and whipcord when Llesho answered with a puzzled frown. The man didn’t look like a fighter, but then, neither did the golden boy at his side.

Before Llesho could give this more than a passing thought, however, his companion had pushed him through the gate and he stumbled on the unfamiliar surface of sawdust under his feet. The smells of blood and sweat, and the sawdust itself, confused him, as did the flash of weapons and the deadly anger that seemed to crackle in the air around the fighting men. Llesho thrust one foot ahead of him, trying to regain his balance, and tripped over a piece of broken metal with bits of flesh clinging to it. With a squeal of surprise he fell face first into the training yard.

“Pick up your feet, fool!”

The words came from somewhere above a pair of darkly tanned sandaled feet that had planted themselves inches from Llesho’s nose. He needed to pick up more than his feet, and he didn’t want to guess what had made the wet splat soaking into his shirt. Llesho closed his eyes, wishing he could disappear, but his escort wouldn’t let him.

“It’s the new chicken,” the golden boy commented over T.leshn’s fallen bodv.

“Master’s pet?” the unknown voice asked doubtfully while Llesho dragged himself to his knees and finally to his feet, a better angle to follow the conversation. The boy who had brought him shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said, and “didn’t ask,” in a tone that clearly indicated Llesho was not his problem and he would just as soon keep it that way.

“Go back to work, then, unless Master Markko wants you to bring him in yourself.”

“Didn’t say so.” The boy was already heading away from his charge, and Llesho realized he still didn’t know the other boy’s name. Not a good time to ask, he figured, and tried to look regal for the man standing in front of him, while muck dripped off his tunic. The stuff stank with a pungent tang at the back of his throat, and Llesho crinkled up his nose, trying to identify the mess without sneezing.

“Paint and straw this time,” the stranger offered, and Llesho finally noticed the straw man lashed to a post, with bolts jutting from the place his chest used to be and bits of him scattered in a circle of sawdust.

The last time Llesho had seen a crossbow bolt, he’d been seven, and the bolt had been sticking out of his father’s throat. He closed his eyes, but that made it worse, not better. Regal just wasn’t working for him today. Hadn’t, actually, for the past nine summers, but he still drew on old lessons in distress.

“Better vegetable than animal, but don’t count on that for next time.” The stranger was watching him with sharp features set in a stern, forbidding frown below eyes that were judging Llesho to the soles of his feet. “What are you, boy, and what the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m a Thebin,” he answered, though the quirk of a smile, quickly suppressed, suggested that the stranger hadn’t meant for him to answer the question. “My name is Llesho. I was sent for. To be a gladiator.” He hoped. It was that or pig food, and if he’d been summoned for the trough, he wasn’t going to remind anyone.

“Llesho.” The stranger paused and seemed to be trying to remember something that escaped him before he could catch hold of it. “I’m Jaks, but you will learn all you need to know about me soon enough.” The stranger was taller than Llesho, but not as tall as the boy who had brought him here. His skin was brown and smooth, and he had broad shoulders and powerful arms with the line of each muscle carved sharply in the flesh. The left arm had six tattooed bands, the simplest ones faded with age and more recent ones in increasingly complex designs. Jaks wore a leather tunic with the history of old battles written in the bloodstains that marked it, and a belt with a sheath for a knife at the waist. Metal guards covered his wrists and forearms. He was obviously dangerous, but for some reason which Llesho couldn’t quite grasp, Jaks did not terrify him as he thought the man should, given the situation and a grain of common sense.

But common sense couldn’t explain why the tension drained out of Llesho at the sight of the gladiator, or why his head came up at a more confident angle. A memory returned to him then, forgotten like so many things about home. His father had hired men like this at court to protect his family. Those men had died, pressed step by step into the heart of the palace, loyal to the last. The man who had guarded Llesho from his birth had looked very much like this Jaks, until he lay dead at the feet of the terrified child. The memory sent a shudder through him, which the gladiator must have taken for fear of his new life.

“I don’t know what he was thinking,” Jaks muttered under his breath, and Llesho figured he was talking about his petition to train as a gladiator, and didn’t like the way the man dismissed him out of hand. But one problem at a time. The gladiator rubbed his neck with a mindless gesture that spoke of old injuries, or—

Llesho’s father had done that when faced with a particularly thorny problem. “Right now,” the gladiator said, “you need to change your shirt and check in with the overseer, Master Markko.”

“Change my shirt?” At first, Llesho thought Jaks meant with magic, and he almost asked what he should change his shirt into. Not that he could do anything of the sort, of course, but he could try, if magic was required of gladiators—he didn’t want to begin by showing any more ignorance than he already had. Then he realized, not change the shirt, change himself, by putting a clean shirt on. In Thebin he’d had a clean shirt for every day of the week, and special shirts made of yellow silk embroidered with bright colors for holidays and feast days, for banquets and for public days. Since he’d been a slave, though, he’d had one shirt and one pair of pants, nothing to go under them, and one day a week to wash them in, after which, for modesty, he would wear them wet until they dried. But he didn’t think Jaks wanted to know about the domestic arrangements of pearl divers.

“I don’t have another,” he said, and waited while the gladiator blew out another gust of annoyance like a belch. “Stupid to even think it,” Jaks muttered. Llesho held his tongue with an effort rewarded when Jaks finished, “Of course, Markko doesn’t know what he is doing. Not a single freaking clue.” Llesho waited out the storm as it broke harmlessly in another direction.

“You can’t see the overseer like that,” Jaks pointed out as if it should be obvious. “We’ll have to find something for you to wear.” The gladiator led him across the practice yard to a low building made of coral blocks. A covered porch ran along its length to keep out the sun and provide a cool place to rest after a day of practice in the yard.

It was more solid than the longhouse of the pearl divers, but obviously meant for the same purpose, which Jaks soon confirmed.

“This is the barracks,” Jaks told him, “Master Markko will decide where you will sleep, but you’ll need to be able to find the laundry wherever he puts you.”

The laundry was actually several rooms clustered at the end of the barracks, each devoted to a particular task in the process of keeping the competitors dressed and supplied with protective coverings. They passed through the leatherwork shop but did not stop, though the strange scents drew Llesho like an old dream. Not fighters, but horses. He remembered horses, and the image in his mind when he thought of that word made him want to weep. But Jaks was leading him through an open courtyard cluttered with vats of soapy water and ladders of vines with clothes and long stretches of plain white cloth pinned to them. The steam pulled the heat up into his face and he felt the slick of sweat on his temples, dripping down his nose and over his lip.

A man with more rolls of fat than Llesho had ever seen sat on the edge of a bubbling vat. Naked to the waist, he reached in to his elbow and drew out bits of clothes, some that Llesho recognized and some that he didn’t. The water smelled clean, and the bubbles released their own sharp scent when they burst, tickling Llesho’s nose. Curious, Llesho trailed a hand into a vat for himself and pulled it out again, shaking the burned fingers.

“Where did the midge come from?” the fat man asked, and Jaks answered, “Thebin, originally. The pearl beds more recently, and without a stitch to wear.”

Jaks was laughing at him with this strange man, who gave a clipped bark of his own laughter. “Madness,” the stranger gave his opinion with a little shake of the head, then gave Llesho one of those long, measuring looks that made him squirm. This man seemed to have no status, but Jaks treated him like a confidant, and the man himself looked at Llesho as if he were something discovered on the bottom of his sandal.

“Thebin, eh? Well, he won’t be easily winded. That’s one thing in his favor.” The washerman scratched thoughtfully at his backside. “As far as I can tell, that’s the only thing.”

Regal was easier in front of an obvious servant, and Llesho’s jaw came out, his head tilted just so, his shoulders straight and at ease.

Both men stopped laughing. “It can’t be,” the washerman whispered.

“Madness,” Jaks agreed softly, and added, for Llesho, “Pull it in, boy, if you want to stay alive.”

Danger. Llesho remembered the precise timbre of a warning rippling through time at him, and in reflex his eyes darted, looking for a place to hide.

“Dear Gods,” the fat man muttered, expression broken in shards of fear and denial. “Have you been on Pearl Island all along?” he asked.

Llesho did not answer. He figured the men must know that, and he wanted to understand what they were up to before he said anything in their presence. He had a feeling they’d know his whole life story if he opened his mouth at all.

“Does Markko know, do you think?” the fat man asked Jaks, as if Llesho were not in the room. “What do you suppose he wants with the boy?”

“Get him a shirt, Den,” was all Jaks said, but his voice had gone completely blank. “Not a new one. Old, patched.” So the washerman had a name.

“Pathetic,” Den muttered, but Llesho did not quite understand who or what was pathetic, so he decided to keep his mouth shut.

Den stood up, wearing nothing but a cloth wrapped between legs as thick as the logs in the outer palisade and covered with their own forest of coarse hair. “Off with it, then,” he said, and wiggled his fingers until Llesho had stripped off his shirt and handed it to him.

“We don’t have anything in his size.” The mountainous launderer wandered ponderously between the ranks of hanging cloth. “But this should do until I can get the stitchers on it.”

Llesho had lost track of the washerman somewhere behind him when the scuffling footsteps faded out of his hearing, and so he jumped when a thick arm reached over his shoulder and handed him a shirt. Not ponderous unless he wanted to be, then. Llesho stored that away for future reference while he pulled the clean shirt over his head and smoothed it into place. It came almost to his knees, and his hands were lost in the long sleeves. He made a face, but Jaks ignored it.

“That will do,” he agreed. A look passed between the two men that Llesho had the good sense to worry about, but Jaks took him by the shoulder and backtracked them through the laundry. When they were outside again, the central practice yard had emptied of men, leaving only the broken tools of combat behind. Jaks crossed the space without a glance or a word, and opened a door into a small stone house that sat a little apart from the sleeping barracks and equipment rooms.

“The pearl diver has arrived,” he told the man who sat at a desk in the elaborately decorated room. “What do you want me to do with him?”

“Leave him here. You may go.”

Jaks did so at once, and again Llesho found himself facing a stranger who looked at him with cool, incurious eyes. This must be the overseer, Master Markko, he figured, since that was the name the boy had given, and the same that Jaks had mentioned to Den in the laundry. From the way people had spoken of him, Llesho had expected someone huge and powerful, or erim and forbidding at least. In fact. Llesho could find nothing of distinction about the man at all. He had the golden skin and the dark hair of the boy who had come to fetch him, but Llesho could see no family resemblance beyond the most common ties to a place and a people. Master Markko seemed to be about as tall as the boy with no name, but with his full height, while the messenger had overlarge hands and feet, like a puppy who would be a much larger dog. The man, Markko, wore several layers of plain robes that marked him as a minor official in the lord’s household.

He seemed to be ascetically slim beneath the robes, but his face showed no feature of remark, nor could Llesho find any sign about his person that he was or had been a gladiator, or had ever fought in any way.

Markko looked up briefly from the work that lay scattered on his desk. “We’ve already had an offer for you, from Lord Yueh’s trainer;” he said. “Do you suppose you are worth such a lordly sum?”

“I don’t imagine so, sir,” he answered. He didn’t know how much Lord Yueh had offered, or what it meant in the scheme of the buying and selling of gladiators. However, Llesho didn’t want to go anywhere they knew enough to offer for him when he had no obvious skills or value.

“I suspect you are right,” the overseer said. “His lordship has declined the offer, which means you will be under my direction.”

“Yes, sir.” Llesho couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he hung his head as submissively as possible, and hoped that the overseer would soon tire of him.

After another penetrating look through eyes like chips of flint, Markko returned his attention to the paper on his desk.

“The mop is in the corner,” he said. “You can fill the bucket at the laundry, and begin with this room. Then the barracks floors need washing. When you are done, you may report to the cookhouse for dinner before you return here.”

“There must be some mistake,” Llesho suggested, hoping it was true. “I don’t know anything about washing floors.”

“How difficult can it be?” Markko asked him reasonably, “Mop, bucket, water, floor. In that order.” He turned back to his desk, but looked up when Llesho did not move.

“But I thought I was here to become a gladiator.”

Markko looked him over with a critical eye, as if he were buying fish in the market. “Do you like to bed men, boy? Large, hungry men with the bloodlust still running in their veins?”

“That would not be my choice, sir.”

“It is, however, the only choice I have to offer you,” Markko explained to him reasonably. He had hot changed his tone of voice, but Llesho realized suddenly that the mildness was a mask, that Master Markko already knew too much about him, and that this was one person he did not want to challenge. He ducked his head and looked as pitiful as possible in his patched and oversized shirt until Markko dismissed him with a wave of his free hand. Then Llesho picked up the bucket and the mop and crept out of the room, unwilling to turn his back on the man who had stared at him with no feeling in his eyes. That, Llesho decided, was what made this man dangerous. He had no feelings at all.

C HAPTER F OUR

LESHO spent his first day as a gladiator in training learning how to scrub barracks. He hadn’t been exactly surprised when he found himself on mop duty. A long time ago, it seemed, he’d been the new pearl diver in his quarter-shift. For weeks he’d cleared out dead oysters with empty shells while his shift-mates gathered the pearls that should have filled his sack. Shen-shu had beaten him after each shift from which he returned empty-handed, but that too seemed a kind of initiation with no real anger behind the blows. After a period of testing, the divers had accepted him as one of their own. Llesho had expected no less from the gladiators, and had braced himself for much worse than a mop when he followed the messenger up the hill.

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 ud 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 around 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 con-structed 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,” Markko 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.

C HAPTER F IVE

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.

As Llesho began to understand the forms, his respect for his teacher grew as well. Built like a mountain, with the warmth of the summer sun in his eyes, the humble washerman was the very image of the Laughing God, who had not walked the earth, it was said, for many human generations. Nor would he return while the Harn held the gates of heaven.

Den’s attention seemed everywhere, while his body and soul centered into the action: sinking his weight into the ground for the earth forms, and flowing through the water forms. In the air forms, he seemed almost to take flight, which should have looked absurd on his large body, but didn’t. When he demonstrated the water forms, Llesho caught glimpses, like double vision, of Kwan-ti at her workbench. She mixed elixirs and shaped little pills in his mind’s eye as Den moved from position to position. Llesho knew to trust the almost-visions that left impressions, like intuition, in their wake. Experience had taught him to keep the flashes to himself, but he determined to watch the teacher carefully, and found comfort in the memory overlaid upon the washerman’s movements.

He had realized on that first embarrassing day that the prayer forms demanded freedom of him. His body could not soar with heart and soul tied to the slave block and his chains. To succeed, he must free that part of him the gods owned. So each morning as the students lined up with the least experienced in the front, he found his place quickly. Closing his eyes, he took a moment to imagine himself at home among the mountains that rose above Kungol, the capital city where he was born. His brother, Adar, had kept a clinic in those mountains. Llesho remembered the cold, thin air that forced a human being to move cautiously so close to heaven, and the measured, gentle movements of the healer. He imagined Adar at his back, guiding him through the motions of the prayers; soon he was passing effortlessly through the exercises, wrapped in the warmth of Adar’s smile.

At the end of his first month at the compound, and just as Llesho was beginning to think that he would remain a slave to the mop forever, Den pulled him aside after prayer forms.

“You are doing well,” he said, and Llesho gave him a little bow, receiving the compliment with humility. “Are you settling into the barracks well?”

“Yes, sir, Master Den.” Llesho had learned the proper form of address for his teacher, and he used it now, waiting for the master to reveal his purpose. He knew that he showed too much of his relief to be out from Under the overseer’s evfi anH nprhane ton murh of his impatience as well, because Master Den chuckled at him.

“And I suppose you are wondering how prayer forms and mops will make you a gladiator.”

“Yes, Master Den.” He met his teacher’s eyes with a dare in his own.

“Shut that down right now, boy, unless you want to spend the rest of your days in Markko’s clutches.” Master Den managed to frown at him without ever changing expression, which Llesho didn’t understand, except that he dropped his own eyes, and scuffed his feet in the sawdust with all of the confusion he really felt.

The washerman studied him for a moment before releasing a sigh. “Very well,” he said, answering the silent demand. “After your work detail, you may join the novices at hand-to-hand combat training. Ask Bixei the way.”

Master Den knew that Bixei hated the newcomer, and he challenged Llesho with a crinkle of humor in his eye. “Be nice to your enemy, this time,” that look seemed to say, “or stay a slave to the mop forever.”

Llesho asked. Bixei wasn’t happy, and Llesho wondered if it was another trick when the golden boy led him away from the large central practice yard where the experienced gladiators went about their training. He was more certain of it than ever when they entered the laundry, but Bixei kept going, out the back and through the drying yards to a corner where the other novices waited for them.

Radimus, a member of Llesho’s bachelor group, nodded a greeting. “Pei,” he said by way of introducing the fourth novice, “Used to be a drover, till his master saw him fight in a barracks match.”

Up close, Pei was terrifying, almost as big as Master Den, but with a harder, scarred body. Llesho had never seen a barracks match—the pearl divers settled their arguments in other ways, and Master Markko would skin a man who took a gladiator out of competition for a personal argument. He’d heard the gossip, though, and knew that some lords wagered on the death matches of their own slaves. The former drover returned his curious wonder with a baleful glance that gave neither threat nor quarter—Llesho figured that was all the “hello” he was going to get.

Though new to gladiatorial combat, Radimus and Pei were both fully grown and Master Den paired them for practice, which left Bixei to spar with Llesho. As he picked himself up from the dirt for what seemed like the thousandth time that afternoon, Llesho gave a prayer of gratitude that no one but his small band of beginners could see his clumsiness or his repeated defeats at the hands of his rival.

Den never scolded him for his ungainly efforts, but repeated his instructions patiently. He taught efficiency over drama, elegance in simplicity, took Llesho’s hand and positioned it just so, nudged his knee into the proper stance, and nodded approval when he had it right. Then he demonstrated how the clean, deadly moves could be decorated to impress the arena crowds while inflicting little damage to his opponent. Llesho quickly realized that, while Bixei seemed to grasp the underlying deadly purpose of the training, the point of not doing damage to his opponent never seemed to penetrate his skull. As long as his opponent’s skill remained superior to his own, Llesho figured he’d be spending his afternoons with his face in the dirt and his arms twisted in knots at his back.

Things didn’t much improve until prayer forms one morning at the end of Llesho’s first week of hand-to-hand combat training. His body passed through the forms under Den’s watchful eye until, halfway through the Flowing Water form, he stumbled. His body was trying to perform two completely different moves at that point in the exercise and the realization stopped him dead in the middle of the form.

Den saw; the muscles in his face relaxed into a smile that never showed itself upon his lips, and Llesho knew he was right. Prayer forms and hand-to-hand were one, each growing out of the same body, the same nature, but leading to different conclusions: peace, or war. The move that he had stumbled on made sense then: he had reached the place in the form where a man must choose one path or the other, and when he had come to that place, Llesho had not known which path to take. But he did now. He completed the morning prayers with no further mishaps, and in the afternoon, in the shade of the drying yard, landed Bixei on his back for the first time. As a warning, he brought the blade of his hand perilously close to the throat of his enemy, then shifted into the more decorated style that would do no harm. The next morning, as he was putting away his mop and pail, Bixei came to him with a summons from Jaks to the weapons room. He was going to be a real gladiator at last!

Me knew the way, but Bixei insisted that he’d been told to bring him, which he did. “Good luck,” he muttered at the door, and then he was gone, walking away as fast as he could without seeming to run, and in the direction of the barracks. To spread the tale, Llesho figured, and he opened the door and entered alone.

The weapons room was long and narrow, with a beaten dirt floor and a single table running the length of it. Brackets set into all four walls held long-shafted weapons: pikes and staves and tridents, slim spears with gleaming heads as long as his hand and thicker ones hooked at the end of the blade. On the table, all manner of swords and knives and hammers and axes lay waiting next to nets and chain whips. Master Jaks stood rigidly straight, to the right of a door which led into the smith and repair shops ringing with the clangor of hammer on bronze and iron. Llesho hadn’t seen him since his first day in the compound, but he looked more terrifying and bleak than Llesho remembered, though only the occasional flex of the tattooed bands on his upper arms showed any of his tension. When Llesho had made his bow, Jaks turned to the door and rapped two sharp taps upon it.

Den came through the door first and settled himself to the left of the jamb. A woman followed him. She wore the plain clothes of a servant covered by a coat with wide sleeves that fell away at her elbows. Llesho figured that for a disguise. She carried herself with haughty assurance, demanding a degree of deference his teachers would not owe a woman of her apparent youth in the lower ranks. Den’s mobile features, set in a frozen mask, told Llesho that the woman’s presence deeply disturbed him. It disturbed Llesho as well.

“Are you a goddess?” he asked, and wondered if he could be any stupider, to draw her attention with a question that marked him as an uneducated fool, or as a Thebin raised at the center of a religious culture. A slave boy should have no knowledge of the gates of heaven, or the gods and goddesses who passed through them when they visited the living earth.

“He is impertinent,” she said to Master Den, but turned the dark, thoughtful pools of her eyes on Llesho and, he saw in them not age but history, and deep, deep, timeless knowledge.

The woman turned to Jaks and touched a finger to the most elaborate band of tattooing on his arm, as if she was reminding him of a secret. “Test him,” she said, and withdrew her hand into her voluminous sleeve. Jaks uttered no word that might identify the woman, but bowed deeply and stepped forward. He smiled to allay Llesho’s nervousness.

“Don’t worry, boy. Nobody is going to hurt you. In weapons combat it helps to start with a natural inclination, if you have one. We are here to find out what that might be for you.”

“Yes, sir,” Llesho said, as firmly as he could to show that he did understand and that he wasn’t afraid, though neither was true. The concept made sense, of course, but the woman’s presence suggested that more was going on than a simple aptitude test.

Jaks gave a single curt nod to accept the answer, though the ghnt in his eyes told Llesho he saw more of those doubts than he let on. “We will start with long weapons,” Jaks said, and gestured at the walls around them. “Take your time. Pick up whatever attracts you. Give it a chance, but if it doesn’t feel comfortable in your hand, put it back.”

Den interrupted then, with as much explanation as he was going to get. “Don’t watch us to find your answer, boy. The right answer for Jaks or me is bound to be the wrong answer for you.”

Llesho nodded and began to mark the perimeter of the room. At first he kept his hands clasped behind his back, but he quickly forgot his reticence as he handled the weapons. The pikes annoyed him. He tried several lengths of shaft, but the heads felt overbalanced and clumsy. Staves he handled well enough, but he quickly lost interest in them. The trident went to his hand with the easy fit of long practice. After a few awkward passes he centered himself, thought of water, and made a few smooth thrusts and feints, twirled the weapon in a wide circle around one hand and flung it to bury its teeth deep in the dirt at Jaks’ feet.

Jaks wrenched the trident out of the dirt with a wry smile. “No surprise there, I guess. Anything else?”

Llesho shrugged, and continued his circuit of the room. He approached the spears with curiosity, but one with a shorter shaft than the others drew him with a fascination so strong he glanced about him to be certain no one in the room had cast a spell on him. That was foolish. No one in Lord Chin-shi’s realm would dare to practice magic in the open like this. But the intent expressions on his three testers made him wonder how open this occasion really was. He reached out to it, and the room itself seemed to hold its breath. The weapon felt old, and Llesho could almost hear the high, thin wind of Thebin whistling in his ears when he touched it.

It felt . . . right. Not familiar, like the trident, which reminded him of the rake he used to play at battles with in the bay. When his fingers closed around the shaft of the spear, he felt the “click” of a soul finding its completion, hand meeting matching hand. Mine. He knew he had never held such a weapon before, just as he knew he would not willingly give it up now that he had found it. Not even if he died. Memories far older than the body he wore stirred in the back of his mind, roiling in the muck of time and terror. That part of him that was here and now, a slave with fifteen summers, could not shake the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach; the spear was poisoned, old memory whispered. He threw it away from him, shuddering in disgust even as a longing he did not understand urged him to snatch it up again.

Compelled by that terrifying desire, Llesho crouched to retrieve the spear. Poised, but certain now that the test was, indeed, a trap, and it had just closed on his neck, he tightened his hand into a fist, grasping only air. Master Den watched him out of deep sorrowful eyes, but Jaks picked up the spear where Llesho had let it fall and pointed to the table with it. “Trident, but we’ll hold off on the short spear,” he said in his most efficient voice, passing the spear to the woman, who slipped it into her sleeve. “Now try the close-in weapons.”

The woman watched Llesho with the hypnotic fascination of a cobra, and with about as much emotion. Llesho gave Den a pleading glance, but his teacher’s blank mask did not change.

“No one is going to hurt you,” Jaks urged him. “We just want to know how to train you that most ensures your success.”

That was only half the truth. Llesho didn’t know where the other half lay, but he knew he couldn’t see his way to it through the secrets clouding the air between them. He followed the direction Jaks indicated with the tilt of his head, and considered the weapons spread out on the table. A knife rested there, older than the others, with a haft that seemed alien among the scattered blades. He reached for it, felt the weight settle in his hand, flipped it to an overhand grasp, and held it above his head, shifting through an exercise that reminded him of the prayer forms Den led in the morning. Knife and hand were one, flowing into his arm, and he stepped though the form with slow grace, then snapped through it with lightning speed that surprised even himself. When he had come to rest again, Jaks took the knife out of his hand and set it down. “No knifework,” he said with finality, “What else suits you?”

But Llesho would not let it go this time. That knife was a part of him, and he wanted, needed to know how. “What is it?” he asked Jaks, seizing the knife from its place on the table and holding it up in confusion. “I know this knife! But I don’t remember—”

The woman reached across the table and touched his wrist with the same stroking fingertips that had brushed the tattoo on Jaks’ arm. “You will,” she said, with something like hunger in her voice. She wrapped her fingers around the blade of the knife and tugged it from his hand. Llesho released it quickly, shrinking from the cold, white fingers that did not bleed though the knife should have cut them deeply. When the blade had disappeared after the spear into her sleeve, Jaks took him by the shoulder and turned him back to the table.

“Try something else.”

Llesho glared at him. He wanted answers he could understand, but the hand on his shoulder triggered one of those flashes of almost-vision, confused images like memories of things he’d never seen. This one showed him Jaks’ arm, but clean of the marks that banded it. Somehow, the vision related to the woman and the knife.

“Your arm,” he nodded at the tattoos on the arm that held his shoulder. “What do the tattoos mean?” He couldn’t believe he’d asked, but the visions drove him with their own need, and he gritted his teeth and waited for the next flash, or for his teacher to knock him into the dirt for his impertinence.

Jaks refused to answer, but his expression turned to stone.

“They are his kills.” The mysterious woman answered his question and he shivered, wishing she had ignored him as well. “Each stands for a death.”

“In the arena?” Llesho turned to face Jaks, wanting explanations from his teacher, not the cold threat in the voice of the stranger. And he wanted the answer to be yes, clean kills, in equal combat.

    The woman shook her head, once, slowly, her cobra eyes devouring him with their cold stare. “Assassinations,” she said. “The simple bands for lower ranked targets, the more complex bands for targets of a higher rank.” She smiled. “Jaks excels at his profession.”

Llesho trembled. He was out of his depth, way out of his depth, and had been since Lleck’s spirit had appeared to him in the waters of the bay.

“What do you want of me?” he asked, though he dreaded the answer. He’d been on the wrong end of an assassination attempt when he was seven, and he couldn’t imagine doing that to someone else’s child. He would die first, even if it did sink Minister Lleck’s plans for him.

The woman smiled, and something eased in her eyes, which did not come alive, but ceased, at least, to suck him into the black darkness of her soul. “Survival,” she said, though he couldn’t tell whose, or why. “Shall we continue?”

Jaks turned to the table of weapons and held up two short swords. “Try this.”

None of the other weapons triggered a response like the knife or the short spear, but Llesho found himself generally at ease with the blade weapons, and awkward with the hammers and axes, more inclined to trip over his own net than trap an opponent, and for no reason he could set to words, just a feeling that set his external organs clawing their way up inside him that he would not, could not, touch the chain whip. He passed over it three times, and thankfully, Jaks did not pressure him to pick it up. When they were done, the woman took him by the chin and smiled. “We have before us a pearl of great value, Masters. Let us take care that he does not wind up food for the swine.”

Llesho’s entire body froze beneath her hand. Did she know about the treasure Lleck had given him, that sometimes pulsed in his mouth like a sore tooth? Or had the comment landed like a stray bolt from a crossbow shot into the air? He doubted that the lady ever spoke without thought. She released him without another word, however, and gave a bow to the masters before slipping out the way she had come.

Jaks visibly relaxed when she had departed. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Tomorrow, after breakfast, report for arms practice with the novice class.” he said to Llesho, and added, “Ask Bixei—he will show you.”

Den frowned from his place by the door, but said nothing, which was just as well. Llesho didn’t need a warning to keep the woman’s presence secret. He wanted an explanation if his teachers expected his silence for very long, but at the moment, he felt unready for any answers they might give him. Better to pretend the afternoon hadn’t happened. Something of this must have shown on Llesho’s face, because Den’s frown smoothed into his more usual bland nonexpres-sion. He didn’t look happy, though, which Llesho found more reassuring than not. And then he was gone, through the door into the smithy and back to his laundry, and Jaks was staring down at the table covered with small arms as if it held the secrets of the universe.

Llesho gave a perfunctory bow, although Jaks wasn’t looking, and went out into the practice yard. The heat danced in waves off the sawdust, but the stir at the corner of his eye was more than an illusion of hot air. The figure disappearing around the corner of the barracks looked like the guard who had greeted Bixei at the inner entrance to the compound on Llesho’s first day, but what the man would be doing skulking around the weapons room at rest time he could not figure, except that he didn’t trust the man, and hadn’t from his first sight of him.

The tense session in the weapons room had set his nerves on edge; Llesho knew the man could be completely innocent of everything but an unpleasant disposition, but it couldn’t hurt to keep a watchful eye on him. Some plot was moving in the camp. The woman was one clue. The guard could be her creature or set to spy on her by an enemy. Where one faction stirred, however, he knew that another was surely nearby.

Whatever that meant to the plotters, Llesho figured none of it was good for him. The awareness that he was unskilled and vulnerable, surrounded by professional killers, prickled his skin. The sooner he became one of them, the better for his survival. The word, crossing his mind, reminded him again of the woman’s answer to his question, “What do you want of me?” As a means to an end, he believed she meant him to survive. Safer, he knew, to go unnoticed, but if factions were forming in the camp, he was glad to know that he had allies—formidable ones, if his teachers’ reactions were anything to go by—whatever his side turned out to be. And whatever interests of their own motivated them to care.

Powerful or not, however, he would have traded the mysterious woman for Lling at his side any day. At least he understood Lling’s motives, could anticipate her. Didn’t worry that she’d decide he was not as valuable as she’d thought and send an assassin to dispose of him in his sleep.

He didn’t realize how much time had passed in the weapons room until the smell of dinner wafting on the late afternoon breeze reminded him that he was hungry. Resting on the long porch that fronted the barracks, Stipes waved a cheerful arm for him to join them, which Bixei accepted with just a fleeting glint of resentment in his eyes. Llesho dropped onto a bench and tried to let neither his uneasiness at the strange afternoon nor his excitement at finally becoming a gladiator show. “Jaks is starting me on weapons tomorrow.”

A hungry gleam settled in Bixei’s expression then. “That will be fun.” He smiled a shark’s grin full of teeth and promise. Llesho hoped that Jaks would not let the other boy kill him—at least not on the first day.

C HAPTER S IX

WEAPONSinstruction for the four novices—Llesho and Bixei, and the older Radimus and Pei—took place at the center of the practice yard. Around them, the more experienced gladiators clashed in pairs, sword against spear, pike against trident and net, stave against sword. In front of them, a table laden with small arms settled into the sawdust. Long weapons leaning against the table’s side bounced sunlight into Llesho’s eyes, blurring his mind as well as his body with the heat.

The novices themselves stood weaponless and at formal attention while the sun beat down on their bare heads. Sweat beaded under Llesho’s hair and ran down his face to fall unceremoniously from the tip of his nose. Like his companions, however, he did not move until Master Jaks had joined them with a ceremonial bow. They returned the bow, and Master Jaks began his instruction. “Long sword.” He lifted the sword, turned it so the sun ran down the curve of blade like liquid gold, and demonstrated a slash-and-thrust move before putting it down in favor of two shorter, fatter blades with a dull gleam on their rough surfaces. “Paired swords,” he said, and the blades twirled in his hands, faster than Llesho could see, while Master Jaks moved forward, then leaned back so far that his head brushed the sawdust on the practice yard. Leaping up off the ground, he executed a turn in the air and landed again without breaking the rhythm of the crossing blades. Llesho made a mental note to learn that trick.

“Pike.” Master Jaks set the swords down on the table and took up the long-shafted weapon set with a curved hook at its head. He made several lunges and turns with it, spun it overhead, and brought it down again. “Trident.” He replaced one weapon and took up the other, and Llesho saw how foolish he must have seemed with his companions, playing at tridents with their muckrakes in the bay. The pearl divers had bashed gracelessly at each other: Master Jaks did a precise dance of death. In fact, Llesho concluded, work with the long weapons compared closely with dance, while short weapons, like hand-to-hand, evoked the prayer forms.

After his demonstration, Master Jaks took the measure of his students, leveling a piercing stare on each in turn. He let that burning gaze rest on Bixei as he explained, “Part of weapons work is knowing how to kill; the greater part is knowing how to control one’s own impulses, by the use of superior technique to control both weapon and opponent without doing harm.”

Bixei would have spoken out in his own defense, but Master Jaks put up a hand to forestall him. He left them briefly to pass through the ranks of fighting men, tapping a shoulder here, whispering a word in an ear there. He returned with four hardened gladiators, Stipes among them, and took his place again in front of his class.

“Show me what you can do. Bixei?” Master Jaks stood aside while Bixei chose his weapons, paired swords, with one of his shark’s grins, which disap-peared when Master Jaks added, “Your practice partner today will be Stipes.”

The grin disappeared. Stipes quirked an ironic eyebrow at his companion, inviting him to accept what everyone in the camp would know. Bixei would have no opportunity to practice deadly arts on Llesho until he had learned the skill and the control on which Master Jaks insisted. Stipes carried a stave, and took his stance while Bixei changed weapons for a stave himself. But Master Jaks stopped him, with a shake of the head. “First choice always,” he said. Llesho saw the panic bloom in Bixei’s eyes, but neither his partner nor his teacher acknowledged that the first hit had gone to Master Jaks. Bixei returned the stave and took up the lethal blades. Pei grabbed a long sword, and Radimus took up a pike. Both were quickly paired with experienced fighters.

Llesho stared at the last unpaired training partner with dismay. He was a stranger, fully head and shoulders taller than Llesho, and heavily muscled. “I am going to die,” Llesho thought, and reached instinctively for the knife, but Master Jaks forestalled him.

“Never use a short weapon against an opponent with a longer reach,” he said, and handed Llesho the trident. Instead of pairing him with the stranger, however, Master Jaks explained, “As youngest novice, you are stuck with your master. Madon will oversee the practice.” With a nod to the gladiator, Master Jaks took his stance with a long sword and jabbed at Llesho, who knocked aside the blow with his trident.

Master Jaks was circling him, forcing Llesho to follow his movements by turning in a tight spin. Llesho thought quickly: if they were competing short weapon against short weapon, he could have devised a defense based on the prayer forms. If both used long weapons, he could protect himself by making his moves like dance. But the defense that might come out of the weapon dance would not suit the forms of the sword which, coming at him again, broke his concentration and brought him back to the moment. He was getting dizzy. If he didn’t come up with something soon, he would win by disgusting his opponent when he vomited.

His clothes were damp on his back, scratchy, and the sweat blurred his eyes. Even the sawdust underfoot burned through the soles of his sandals, and the light flashing off Master Jaks’ blade was making him squint and flinch with every step—deliberately. Master Jaks was using the sword to intimidate, the glare to blind his opponent. Llesho had to do something, right now. So he decided: he would act as his weapon dictated, and pretend the man in front of him also carried a long weapon that just happened to be ... short. He would make the rules of the battle, force Master Jaks to take the defensive.

Action followed thought on the instant; Llesho committed to the form of his weapon, felt his body shift into the position of a dancer. He leaped and tumbled with the trident held close to his body for protection and control. With the sun at his back, he planted the shaft of his trident in the sawdust and, clutching it like a pivot with both hands, he swung his body high over the weapon of his opponent. When he landed, he flipped the trident around, cracking the shaft down hard on Master Jaks’ sword arm and turned the weapon again, like lightning, to force the gladiator back with the knifelike tines of the trident pressing against his throat.

The wrist guards Master Jaks wore protected him from the blow, but he could not match the reach of the trident with his sword, nor could he angle out of danger without risking death. He dropped his sword with a smile. “Good,” he said. When Llesho continued to hold him at bay with the trident, he added a little reminder, “You won. You can rest your weapon now.”

“I won?” Llesho looked around in confusion as the practice yard came back into focus, and he realized that he was breathing heavily, the residual effect of adrenaline and fear. For a moment, in the heat of the competition, he had lost himself in a terrifying past, when men with swords had come for him and carried him away to slavery. He had been seven, frightened and alone among his dead. His hands tensed around the shaft of the trident: even now he wanted to kill the man in front of him, to prove to himself that he was helpless no longer.

“Llesho.” Master Jaks stood perfectly still, except that he moved his left hand slowly over his right, slipped out of the wrist guards and dropped them to the ground next to the sword.

The seconds beat in the pulse at Llesho’s temple; the sound of the blood rushing through his body drowned out the trumpeting glare of the sunlight. No other sound existed. The gladiators practicing in the yard had fallen still, as if a spell had paralyzed them all. Then a voice reached out to him, pitched to catch the attention of a small boy. Llesho wondered how he had let the enemy draw so close.

“Let it go, child.” Not an enemy. Master Den, the washerman. Suddenly the trident burned in his hands, and he dropped it, horrified at what he had almost done. But Master Den was there, with a hand on his shoulder and he turned into the warm comfort waiting for him, and cried against the broad fleshy shoulder as he had not cried in all the years of his captivity.

When the tears had exhausted themselves, he let out an exhausted sigh. Couldn’t keep his face buried in Master Den’s shoulder forever. He had to face the camp. He would never—not ever—live this down. But when he pulled away, the practice yard was empty.

“Master Jaks is in the weapons room,” Master Den said softly, with a reassuring pat. “Find him and apologize. Then go to dinner.”

Llesho bowed his head in submission to his teacher’s wishes. As he turned to go, Den added, “I think you’ve had enough of mops. Tomorrow, you will start in the laundry. I’ll clear it with Markko.”

Numb, Llesho nodded with none of the enthusiasm he would have shown before weapons practice. Then, he would have jumped at any chance to get out of mop duty. He was still grateful, but now he yearned only for the peace that seemed a part of the washerman. In the laundry he could hide from the derision of his companions, and from their fear of the “mad” student.

“Go on. Master Jaks will be expecting you.” Den sent him on his way still heavy of heart, but with hope and no little terror. He had to face Master Jaks and explain, somehow, why a lowly student and former pearl diver had nearly killed him in weapons practice, after the competition had been ceded. And without revealing his past, or what there was of it that his owners might not already know.

Taking a deep breath, Llesho entered the weapons room so quietly that Master Jaks, sitting with his head bent over a sword he worked with a polishing cloth, did not hear him come in. “Master,” he whispered, and Master Jaks looked up at him, his face empty of all expression.

“I am sorry, Master.” What was he supposed to say next, he wondered, that would make it better? “I am sorry I tried to murder you” seemed somehow inadequate, and “I don’t know why I tried to skewer you during practice” would confirm that he was mad.

Master Jaks put down his sword and folded the polishing cloth carefully before addressing his student. “Sometimes the enthusiasm of the battle overtakes us, even in friendly practice,” Master Jaks said. “That is why the master always takes the newest student for his partner. If anyone deserves to die of a student’s enthusiasm, it is the teacher who inspired him.” A smile twitched at his lips, and Llesho wondered if perhaps he was not the first student to best his teacher by surprise. Llesho doubted those other students had held their instructor at trident point long after the bout had ended, however.

While he could not trust his story to anyone, Llesho owed this man he’d almost killed much more than he had given. He bowed deeply, abjectly, and felt the tears form again. Not now. He couldn’t cry in front of the weapons master. Not again. Too mad for the pearl beds, and now too mad for the arena: they would feed him to the pigs for sure.

“I did not mean to hurt you, Master,” he blurted. “For a moment I was elsewhere, but it won’t happen again, I promise.”

Master Jaks had come around the table to stand face-to-face with his student. He was shaking his head, and Llesho stopped breathing. His apology was not accepted. He was lost. But then Master Jaks took his chin in his hand and tilted his head up. With the thumb of his free hand he wiped the tears from the hollows beneath Llesho’s eyes. “I know where you were,” he said. “And I am the one who is sorry. You reacted exactly as Den told me you would, and even warned, I was not ready.” He released Llesho with a sigh. “Den was right. We can’t afford many mistakes with you.”

For Llesho, the world stopped turning with his teacher’s words. What did Master Jaks know? What did he intend to do about it? His gaze fell on the knives on the table, lingered there.

“Are you going to sell me to the Harn?”

“I don’t buy or sell anybody, boy. I train fighters for the arena.” Master Jaks’ voice took on a hard edge. “And the Harn are unlikely to care overmuch about a peasant turned pearl diver, poorly trained into the semblance of a gladiator, now are they?”

“No, Master,” Llesho agreed. Perhaps he had misunderstood everything that had happened to him in the past two days, or perhaps Master Jaks was telling him that he had allies in the camp. He figured he was safe at the moment, anyway—from the Harn and the pigs—and obeyed with alacrity when Master Jaks sent him off to his supper.

His apologies had taken him into the dinner hour, and the gladiators and novices had all made their way to the cookhouse when Llesho left the weapons room. He felt peaceful, in the way the sea was calm after a storm. He knew he had to face the ridicule of Bixei and the others, but lingered in the practice yard to hold onto that precious sense of peace as long as he could. So he was alone when he saw a man creep into the stone house of the overseer. He would have thought nothing of it—messengers for the overseer came and went at all hours of the day—except that he was sure he recognized the man. But what business could Tsu-tan, the pearl sorter, have with the overseer of the gladiators? The question was on his lips when he joined his bench mates at dinner.

“That is not the frown of a man being sent to market,” Stipes noted. “What’s up, Llesho?”

“I just saw someone I thought I knew, from the pearl beds.”

Deep inside, Llesho felt that the puzzle of Tsu-tan was more important than his own embarrassment on the practice field, though he could not have said how he knew. Bixei seemed on the verge of drawing the conversation to Llesho’s lapse in weapons’ practice, but Stipes jabbed him in the ribs, and he shrugged with a sullen glare, then turned to the question at hand. “Maybe another pearl fisher has figured out that a fighting life would at least keep him dry.”

“Tsu-tan isn’t a pearl diver, he’s too old, and not Thebin to begin with. He’s a pearl sorter.“ He didn’t say what he’d long thought: that Tsu-tan was a worm of a man with an evil eye who almost never left his pearl basket, but sat under the palm tree that faced the longhouse like a scruffy spider at the center of a dusty web.

“Tsu-tan.” Stipes frowned. “A creature with the look of a weasel and an eye that would shrivel a man in his britches?”

“That’s him.” Llesho almost laughed at the description, so much like his own impression.

“He’s the overseer’s witch-finder,” Stipes said, “and sly as they come; I’ve heard it said that he is no man at all, but a demon who lives on the screams of Markko’s victims. If he’s here tonight, you can be sure there will be a burning before the week is out.”

Kwan-ti. In his mind’s eye, Llesho could see the evil man sitting with his back against his tree, his eyes following the healer with avid fascination. He had to warn her. But in his months of training, he had not once received permission to leave the compound. There had to be a way. He considered his companions at the table, but could not ask them for help. He already owed too many explanations, and he couldn’t expect men who depended on Markko for their well-being to risk the overseer’s wrath by helping Llesho warn his prey. There had to be a way, but dinner ended and he still hadn’t figured out what to do.

He followed his bench mates to the long covered porch that fronted the barracks, where the gladiators rested in the cool breeze of the evening. Radimus was there, tossing bones in a gambling game for favor-chips; Bixei joined him, but Llesho moved on to investigate a noisy group that had formed a knot at the far end of the porch. Pei sat on a solid chair at the center of the laughing and hand-clapping circle, thumping his broad foot in a steady rhythm on the floorboards. Joining the circle, Llesho picked up the rhythm with his clapping hands, encouraging the champions to begin a song contest. Madon finally stepped forward with a bow.

Placing his hand over his heart, Madon recited his challenge in time to the beat of the clapping hands and tapping feet:

“The Seven watch over the fighter, who swings his sword in their praise who sleeps with his sword like a lover And carries his sword to his grave.”

The circle of fighters cheered wildly. Madon signaled his victory with a wave of his fist in the air and bowed an invitation for his opponent to begin. A stranger stood away from the railing on which he had rested arid set a hand to his breast like Madon had done before him. As Pei picked up the beat again, the challenger intoned his response:

“The Seven watch over the fighter who vanquishes foe in their name who conquers with net and with trident And lives beyond death in their fame.”

The stranger’s side of the circle exploded in cheers to support their combatant, but the contest went to Madon, whose lines were closer to the classic rhyme pattern of the ancients than his opponent’s effort. Grumbling, the challenger vowed retaliation in a limerick that made outrageous claims about the parentage of the victor, and promised retribution in fair competition, which any could see had not happened here. No one took offense at the classic challenge, but many returned the insults in less poetic form.

Llesho laughed along, but he soon abandoned the group, slipping away to find his own bunk. Grateful as he was that no one had reminded him of his blun-der on the practice field, he could not shake the sense of disaster that had hung over his head since he had seen Tsu-tan enter the overseer’s cottage. He had plans to lay if he hoped to warn Kwan-ti in time. But the day had been long, and too fraught with emotion for Llesho to think about strategy. He soon fell asleep, where evil dreams pursued him, of Kwan-ti burning and Tsu-tan leering at the fire. Sometimes, Llesho was at the center of the dream fire, and Markko stood in the doorway of the stone cottage with a beaker of poison in one hand and a leash in the other, a hellhound with Tsu-tan’s face lying at his feet. Llesho rested little, and woke with a start at dawn.

After prayer forms and breakfast, Llesho made his way to the laundry where Den greeted him with a sour pucker of his lips.

“I don’t suppose anyone ever taught you how to wash shirts?” he asked.

Llesho shrugged. “I’ve washed my own shirt every rest-day since I was seven,” he said, “But the water came from what I could save out of my drinking ration over the week. I don’t suppose that was what you had in mind.”