16
Dalip sat on the stone of the pit, back against the curved wall, facing the door. He’d been told by the guard to wait: he had no reason to give the man a nice name, so he hadn’t, and started thinking of him as Pigface.
He was more Cowface, broad and bovine, but Pigface seemed to sum up his raisin-like eyes and sticky pink complexion. He was casually, almost indifferently, brutal, as if that was the only way to behave and he’d known no other. Perhaps that was true: perhaps he came from a long line of Pigfaces, slave keepers who were little more than slaves themselves.
Then Stanislav appeared, entering the pit cautiously, looking up at the surrounding balconies and the rings of lit candles. Behind him, Pigface was watching.
‘Why are we here?’ asked Stanislav.
‘That’s the question I keep on asking. The answer, for me at least, is to fight.’
Satisfied, Pigface turned away to the guard room, leaving both doors open, and Stanislav toured the circumference of the pit.
‘And you have agreed to such madness?’
‘I didn’t really have much of a choice.’
‘No. You cannot fight. I will go and tell them this instant.’ He clenched his fists and started back up the corridor to find Pigface.
‘Stop. Stop. You don’t understand.’
‘I understand that you are just a boy, a child. If they want someone to fight, they can pick me.’ Stanislav seemed more than ready to start there and then.
‘They have a dragon.’
That stopped him. He put his hand on the door and leant against it. ‘They have a what?’
‘A dragon. They call it a wyvern◦– snake’s body, bat’s wings, two legs like a bird. We’re stuck halfway up a mountain and it’ll eat anything that goes beyond the wall. I managed to get out, tried to make a run for it. There’s literally nowhere to run to.’
‘We walked here. We can walk out again.’
‘Not with that thing flying around.’
Stanislav came back again. ‘You saw this wyvern, this draco?’
Dalip nodded sourly. ‘We’re in some sort of castle. Buildings surrounded by an outer wall, where there are two gates, at least. They don’t even bother to close or guard the gates, but I guess they don’t need to.’
‘You still do not have to fight. That is barbaric.’
‘I don’t think they care. They’re going to drag me here and give me a weapon, then set… things on me, whether I want them to or not. Either I fight back or I die.’ Dalip looked up at Stanislav. ‘I don’t want to die.’
‘Have they told you how many opponents you will face? What kind? Men? Beasts?’
‘They used a dog for the first time. A fighting dog of some sort. I have to assume it gets harder.’
Stanislav sat down next to him, and rested the back of his head against the same wall as Dalip.
‘This is how you win your freedom?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think it works like that.’
‘To the death?’
‘I’m here to fight. Apparently.’
‘This is, this is…’ Stanislav raised his hands, then let them drop uselessly in his lap. ‘Evil.’
‘I didn’t know what to do. I thought this might buy me some time.’ Dalip shrugged. ‘Something might come up. An opportunity, a rescue. I know I can’t keep going forever, but it’s better than being dead now.’
‘Is it? There are worse things than dying.’
‘I don’t know how to fight. Pigface said one of the guards would train me. I didn’t want that. So I asked for you.’
‘And you think I do?’ Stanislav pressed his chin into his chest. ‘You should not have picked me. Anyone else but me.’
‘I’m sorry. I wanted someone on my side, someone who’ll care enough to give me a chance.’
‘You will die in this ring of cold stone. You have no chance, none at all. By saying yes to them, you have given them control over you. Only by saying no do you keep your honour and your dignity intact.’ He ground his jaw. ‘You have made a mistake, Dalip. If you will not let me go and tell them you will not fight, go yourself, and let them do their worst.’
‘Their worst will be to let some other wild thing in here, and it’ll kill me.’
‘If you want understanding, understand this: you will not hurt them by fighting their animals. You will only hurt them by fighting them. The only way you have of hurting them is by not playing their cruel games.’
‘Stanislav: they’ll kill me. One way or another, they’ll kill me.’
‘This is true. But they will gain pleasure out of seeing you fight, not seeing you win. It is the fighting they want. Deny them that.’
‘I shouldn’t have brought you into this,’ said Dalip. ‘Okay, I do have a choice. Die now, die later. And everything you said is true. I just don’t want to die now. I want to live.’
He got up and dusted himself down and started to prowl.
‘What will you do,’ said Stanislav, ‘when they bring in another man? Or a woman? Or a child? Will you kill them to stay alive?’
‘No. No, I won’t.’
‘You are sure of that? Once you begin to kill, it will become almost impossible not to kill. What if they push this Pigface into the ring with you? He is a prisoner of the geomancer as much as we are.’
Dalip said nothing. He hadn’t thought that far ahead, and he was ashamed that he hadn’t. If it was Pigface facing him, knife in hand, sweat streaming down his forehead and stinging his eyes? The guard would stick a blade in him without a moment’s hesitation. Did that give him the right to do the same?
Killing him could be seen as protecting the others.
‘No,’ he said.
‘So you would be prepared to let Pigface kill you?’
He imagined the knife going in, into his belly, being dragged out sideways, his guts spilling out over the floor. ‘No.’
‘It must be one or the other. Those are the rules of their game. Two go in, one comes out.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘So you must decide whether you will be prepared to end another man’s life for the purposes of entertaining our masters, or whether you will not. What if,’ said Stanislav, ‘it was me?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? We are together through circumstance alone. Neither of us chose the other. If I am just another man you must kill in order to survive that day, then why not?’
‘You’ve not done anything to hurt me. Stanislav, please. I just want to live a little longer.’
‘And you call this living?’ He shook his head. ‘I do not blame you. I would have agreed with you once. You are young, you have experienced mostly kindness and generosity so far. You cannot quite believe what is happening to you, so you choose to put all that to one side and cling on to the idea that everything will be all right in the end.’
Dalip pressed his hands to his face and blinked back the tears.
‘It will be.’
‘I have seen it with my own eyes. I have seen men, and boys not much younger than you, believe until the very last second that everything will be all right in the end. They died with a look of astonishment on their faces, that the world had somehow tricked them into thinking that people were good and kind and fair, only to reveal that underneath, we are all brutes, savages and murderers.’ Stanislav pulled up his legs and hugged his knees. ‘We are prisoners, not of any state that has rules that mean we must be fed and clothed and well-treated, but of people who own us like property, to do with as they wish. Do we cooperate with such people? Only if we want to lose our souls as well as our lives.’
‘But useful slaves—’
‘Are still slaves! Pigface is still a slave. The wolfman is still a slave. Perhaps they want to be slaves, good slaves. I do not, and you should not either. It is not a condition that anyone should become comfortable with.’ He got up, and stood in front of Dalip. ‘What is it that you want? Do you want to fight? Is that it? To show you are a man? To kill and kill again because that is what men do?’