The ponies gained on us. I filled most of the reds, many blues. Ahead of us. I swung around and fired from the side. The rest of the reds. We passed. I took a yellow and two blues.
Bellan waved us down.
I left Barak with the horses and walked back to them. The target bristled like a porcupine. I had left five blues unscored. “I see you did not really bother to try for yellow,” Bellan said. “This is very good. I have splendid archers among my horsemen here. They do this for sport. They score perhaps three or four blues, fifteen reds. You have twenty blues and all twenty-five reds.” Raspar smiled.
“I will leave you in Bellan’s charge,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll dine at my house this evening?”
5
So our days formed a new pattern, a strange pattern, one strand wildness, one strand business, and one strand elegance, and the three plaited together.
The wildness was the practice track. That first day with its horse sweat, metal sweat, pepper of dust, and back-breaking, bone-bruising exercise, was merely the prologue to skill, dis-
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comfort, and danger. Bellan was a hard exacting tutor. He would swear as vilely as a bandit when Darak failed to achieve his demands, and Darak would listen, without apparent anger or resentment, and then try the thing again, and get it right. Each night, as he lay on the hostelry bed, I would rub salve into the tear along his spine, where the three blacks, straining at either of his strong arms, had tried to rip his body in half. Bellan, stripped, bore, among many scars, one long hard whiteness along his spine, tough as leather. As for me, my right arm was raw from the weals the shield bracelets had made, holding that bronze monster across my body. Here I saw the disadvantage in my inability to scar-I could not form protective tissue. Each dawn my arm was healed, but by evening the skin was gnawed open again. Unlike my feet, the soles of which had been like iron since I woke under the mountain, my self-renewing flesh made me vulnerable as a baby. Bellan did not think any more of it than that I was a soft girl, for all my archer’s skill. He told me to wind linen bandages around the weal marks, and had leather rings set inside the metal bracelets. This helped, but it was still bad enough.
By the third day, when we thought ourselves masters of bow and chariot, Bellan began to wean us to the meat of the thing. I had not yet seen the stadium at Ankurum, or a design of the Straight, when prepared for the Sagare, but, by Raspar’s grace, the practice track became a fair copy. We had Straight, turn, and Skora. Now we learned the pillars of Earth and Air. They were sheer treachery, and, more than the other two obstacles to come, we could only prove ourselves against them in the arena. Earth was an oak-wood wall on wheels, rolled in and fixed in the ground before the race. In the wall were four arches, each wide enough to take one chariot. There would always be six chariots at least competing to get through these four openings; we knew already that this year the Sagare had garnered seven contestants-besides ourselves. Air was represented by two pits, only five feet in diameter, it is true, but stretching down some ten yards. There was plenty of space between and to either side of them, so that a chariot ahead and on its own would manage well enough. But, given a bunch of them, some would be driven into the trap; a horse’s legs would go in and snap; if the back wheels caught, the driver and archer would probably be thrown out despite the bar, down the shaft or under the hooves of the teams behind. Two days we spent on the wall of Earth, dodging two other practice chariots of
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Raspar’s, held by Bellan’s men. There were spills, but nothing bad. A man broke his leg, and one team, not ours, ran mad right through the wood-luckily flimsy stuff that did not do much harm. The two days after that we played the pits of Air, dug not so deep, and covered, fortunately, by a light mesh frame. Several times the blacks would have floundered into them, but by sunset of that second day, we had learned the trick of speed or dropping back that would take us clear or leave us last, to catch the others when the stretch was open again.
Water was next, and Raspar did not have the underground springs that bubbled beneath the Sirkunix; instead we learned our lesson hard under the torrents of gigantic tipped buckets swung by chains from above by Raspar’s laughing, jibing servants. My bow and shafts hung wet and useless a hundred times before Darak had mastered it, and I had mastered the art of shield-covering them if he misjudged. And then came Fire.
It was the tenth day, and the Games had already begun at Ankurum. The Sirkunix was near enough the town walls, that in stillnesses during the day, the occasional roaring shout of loud anger or joy would soar up to the farm. It was the wrestling, beast fights, and acrobatics. The races would begin four days from now, and two days from that would be the crowning race, the empress, the Sagare. That tenth dawn, we knew we had six days left alone to prepare ourselves for victory or death.
And so, between those flaming poles, which were the symbols of the pillars in the arena, we rode well enough, because we must.
The farm villa was cool and white, a sparsely but tastefully furnished dwelling, which provided the elegance and business threads in the dangerous plait. Here, the transaction had long since been signed, witnessed, and almost forgotten, it was so light a thing now in this preparation for the race. Darak’s goods were gone. In return he had a handsome price, a price, he assured me, beyond anything he could have hoped for otherwise, while working through an intermediary agent.
“Once we are the victors of the Sagare, we can ride back like kings,” he said to me, but his eyes had the lost, bright, fevered look of Bellan’s now. He was charioteer, mind, flesh, and soul; even asleep, I felt his body quiver, alive with the rush of the chariot. Rarely did he turn to me for love in the
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dark. He was exhausted; besides, Bellan had warned us both, frank and expressionless.
“If you have sense, you’ll leave each other be in bed till this is over. A man drives from his head, his hands, his feet, and his loins. As for your woman, if you should chance to get her pregnant now, you’re lost. When do you bleed?” he added to me. “Not on the day of the race, I trust?” I told him I did not know. There seemed as yet to be no timing with me, as with other women. “I’ll get you a draft,” Bellan said. “It’ll dry you till the race is over. Women-” He made a gesture of disgust. “If you were not the genius you are with a bow, I’d never have let you near this thing.”
And so, on the tenth evening, the race six days away, we sat with Raspar, the dinner over. Candles flickered, licking light colors from the silver plates and onyx cups. Outside, crickets sounded in the warm dusk.
“You are what I guessed you to be,” Raspar said to Darak. “You held them through the fire. Mark you, they have been trained to look flame in the eye since they were foaled. I have seen men ride into the Sagare with horses unbroken to fire, and I shall see it again. A fool’s trick. It only ends one way.” He refilled his own and Darak’s cup. “I have entered your name already.”
Darak nodded.
“You ride as Darros of Sigko, not as my man. Best this way. Ankurum knows and marvels at your feat in bringing in your caravan. You’re a famous hero. There will be no mention of me, but I’ll have my men moving through the stadium, ready to explain who owns the three fine blacks. That should do it.” He smiled, his friendly, half-shuttered smile. “You said you would take scarlet as your color. That’s very good. No Ankurum man has dared this race, and scarlet is Ankurum’s device-from the vine. They’ll shout for you for that. I believe the bills are already hammered up. And you’ll win.”
Darak grinned, tense, amused, defiant. Raspar glanced at me.
“I cannot see your, lady’s face under her shireen. Does she have any doubts?”
“Bellan is a brilliant man for chariots,” I said, “but can we trust his judgment? Has he no longing to be in Darros’ place?”