“You mean some slip of the tongue, lack of advice, through bitterness?” Raspar smiled again. “I see you understand a little of the human mind.. Well, you’ve no need to
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fear. He will want Darros to take that race for a very fair reason. There is a man-Essandar of Coppain-who is entered for the Sagare. It was his chariot that tipped Bellan’s into the Skora at the stadium there. It was not a Sagare, that one, a simpler race altogether, but still dangerous. The chariot axle gave from the impact, the horse inside left fell. Bellan was flung among the team behind. He hates Essandar, as well he might. I do not know all of it, but I gather it was less luck than a personal thing between them, over some girl.”
It was late when we left the farm.
“From tomorrow on you’ll stay here at night,” Raspar said. “I know you like to keep one eye on your men, and, from what I’ve heard about them in the town, it’s just as well. But give your Ellak charge. No more of this riding back and forth. You’ll need cosseting after the day’s work. I have a masseur coming, one for each of you, male and female. Besides, now that you have the mastery of the track, you’ll be on show a little. Some of the Warden’s ladies are coming to watch the famed and handsome Darros handle the team tomorrow, and they may well stay to eat with me. The rich idlers will want to come and judge your form so they can lay their bets.”
As we rode back along the dark road to the Ring Gate, I said: “I told you. Raspar’s tame dogs to do tricks for his customers and patrons.”
Darak laughed.
It would not trouble him, gypsy, boaster, showman that he was. Let them all come and stare,
And they came.
If anything, it was worse than all the fire and pain, that anger which must be restrained. I, with the arrow poised, how dear to my soul it would have been not to loose at the three running targets, but at that crowd of fools by the fence.
The curl-haired women in their litters and carriages, shimmering in their snow-white frocks. I had chosen my dress well indeed, for the agent’s supper. White was the most fashionable color among the nobility and the rich. Because, of course, white is so easily dirtied, and only the wealthy would do little enough that it could not be spoiled. With their white, they wore clusters of jewels of every color and in every setting, gold, silver, copper, and a metal they call alcum, a kind of dark gray stuff, that shines with an incredible blue light under the sun. The men were much the same, white tight
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trousers clinging as a second skin, with built-out shoulders and sleeves slashed red, orange, yellow.
The women, and some of the men also, cooed and sighed at Darak; called him over between runs. He had no time for the men, and showed it, yet despite their sulks, they could see he was a likely winner. They had spent time at the practice track attached to the Sirkunix itself, and apparently no one there came near the standard to which Bellan had got us. With the women, Darak was amenable. They gestured lightly at me with pale ringed hands, and laughed. Darak laughed with them.
Some men came after me to a corner field,
“Clos and I are agreed. We really must watch for you in the arena. You know the custom-bare to the waist. I beg you don’t hold the shield too close, sweetheart.”
I turned to Bellan, who was standing a little behind me, supervising the rub a groom was giving the blacks. He, I knew, had little time for these bystanders.
“Bellan,” I said, “would it be an insult to my host Raspar to put my knife between the ribs of these two?”
I saw, from the tail of my eye, they backed off, laughing a little nervously.
“Yes,” Bellan said. He grinned. “Alas.”
“Then I must not do it,” I said. Deliberately, I unlaced my shirt and pulled it back, leaving my breasts bare. The two men exclaimed, one flushed, embarrassed. I stood still a moment, while, flustered, they tried to call up something lecherously witty to say, then, unhurriedly, I laced the shirt again. “Now, gentlemen,” I said, “I have fulfilled my duties to my host. Perhaps next time you come to watch, you would wear less jewelry. It tends to catch the sun and flash in the eyes of the horses. In my eyes, too, when I take aim. I might misfire.”
I could tell they took my meaning. They turned and went off, one muttering, “Damned whoring tribal bitch.”
Bellan chuckled. It was the first time he had come near to liking me.
“You’ve a word for yourself, I see,” he said, “but careful. Not good to make an enemy before a race.” The laugh went off his face. His left arm twitched.
Five days, four days. We were pummeled by the masseurs until our flesh rang. Dieted also-though for me, this had no use-lean foods, and little wine or beer. Even when the day
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was over, Darak would spend hours with the horses, talking to them, fondling them.
“You and they must be four parts of one whole,” Bellan said. “And you,” he said to me, “you are the black crow on the dead man’s shoulder, jealous for what carries you.” I was handling by then the things they called “spiced” arrows-no longer the “plain” ones I had had that first time. You took what you wanted into the arena, it seemed, arrows spiced with anything you fancied. The most used were corded-a tail of thin rope fixed on the flight; shot in between hub and rim, they would tangle the spokes and foul the wheels. The wheels were a popular target. Hollow arrows, filled with small iron balls, would be fired through, snap on the spokes, and spill their dangerous cargo under the hooves of anything coming after. Yet these had their disadvantages-one would meet one’s own artillery coming back. There were many other devices, all clever, but the trouble was to make these arrows fly. Now, in addition to allowing for the movement of one’s own chariot, and the movement of the other chariot, one must allow for altered weight, cords that might slew the shaft sideways, or tangle on the bosses of the vehicle one rode-a thousand precautions and difficulties, and more.
Three days, two days. Bellan looked slyly at me.
“With one plain arrow,” he said, “and your sharp eye, you might try for the classic shot. Three times only is there a record of it in the Sagare.”
I asked him what it was.
“To slice a man’s reins in two. The leather flies wide. The control of his team goes from his grasp. He’s finished. Try it.”
Ten times around the turns I tried on one of the practice chariots behind us. But I could not make it happen. The reins flick, move, are never still. I was glad the elegant crowds had gone to the races at last, and were not there to see it.
One day more before that Day.
It had been almost easy till then to shut out fear. The grueling toil, the drum of advice always pounding in the ears, the cruel masseurs like two giant-people, the tiredness, the thick black swoon of sleep with dreams so deeply buried they were not recalled. But that day before the Day, they were easier with us. We rested late, and not till noon did we go out to the track to try the chariot that would carry us in the Sagare. Black metal, gleaming like the horses, set with red enamel suns and golden vine trails, a queen among chariots,
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and with the blacks between her scarlet shafts, that perfect unison only an artist of the stadium could have made. Bellan grinned at our praises. The chariot had come from Raspar’s own workshops, after Bellan’s design. In it, riding, fast, fast, we were one thing in all truth; even I, the sitting crow, was part of it. Bellan let us fly on the track, and did not call us back, allowing us for once the clear pure joy of it. But after that wine, the day turned bitter.
The blacks were sent to rest, and Darak and I lazed in the villa court among the lemon trees in pots, and the clambering vines. We played a dice game with Maggur, but were interrupted by Ellak.
Twelve of Barak’s men had gone out into the town, started up a drunken brawl, half-killed a few brothel guards, and were now in. the Warden’s prisons. Darak’s face went white. He stood up, sending the dice crashing, and hit Ellak violently across the face.