“What my friend here is trying to say is that this is all my own doing. I’m not being kind. It’s the truth.”
As might any of us in her situation, she wanted to be sure of her absolution and so she pushed her anxiety too far. “I still think it’s my fault.”
“Have it your own way.”
She looked so crestfallen at this that Vague Henri instantly took pity on her, put his hand in hers again and led her out of the room into the even darker corridor outside.
“I’m such an idiot,” she said, in tears and angry at herself.
“Don’t worry. He meant it about it not being your fault. He’s just got to give his attention to this now.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Cale’s going to win. He always wins. I have to go.” She squeezed his hand again and kissed him on the cheek. Henri stared after her, feeling many strange things, then went back into the waiting room.
With ten minutes left, Cale had begun, silent and automatic, to do his exercises before a fight. Kleist and Vague Henri joined in-arms milling, legs stretching, grunting softly with the exertion in the dim light. Then the loud knock on the door.
“Time, gentleman, pleeeease!”
The boys looked at each other. There was a short pause then a loud rap! as the bolt slid across a second door at the far end of the room. It groaned open slowly, and a ray of light bit through the gloom as if the sun itself waited just outside for Cale, the bright light arcing across the once dim room with all the weight of a blast of wind wanting to push them back into the safety of the dark.
As he started forward, Cale could hear her last words. “Run away. Leave. Please. What does any of this mean to you? Run away.”
In a few strides he was at the threshold and then out into the two o’clock sun.
Along with the second blast of light, the bear-pit roar of the crowd, like the end of the world, assaulted his eyes and ears. As he moved forward ten, then fifteen, then twenty feet and his eyes adjusted, he made out not the wall of the faces of the thirty thousand moving and booing, cheering and singing, but at first only the man waiting in the center of the arena holding two swords in their scabbards. He tried not to look across to Solomon Solomon, but he could not stop himself. Solomon Solomon, thirty yards to his left, walked straight, eyes fixed on the man in the center of the arena. He was huge, far taller and broader than Cale remembered, as if he had doubled in size since Cale had last seen him. Cale was astonished at himself as terror drained him of the strength that had made him invincible for nearly half his life. His tongue, dry as sand, stuck to the roof of his mouth; the muscles in his thighs hurt, barely able to support him; his arms, oak strong, felt as if to lift them would be an impossible feat; and there was a strange burning in his ears, louder even than the noise of the crowd, the booing and cheering and snatches of song. Along the amphitheater wall several hundred soldiers were standing at attention every four yards or so, alternately looking in at the crowd and out into the great ring itself.
The high-hatted hooligans sang joyfully:
NOBODY LIKES US, WE DON’T CARE
NOBODY LIKES US, WE DON’T CARE
BUT WE LOVE LOLLARDS AND HUGUENOTS
DO WE? DO WE? DO WE? DO?
OOOOOOOH NO, I DON’T THINK SO
BUT WE DO LOVE THE MEMPHIS AGGRO…
Then they raised their hands high over their heads and clapped in time to the beat of a new song, raising their knees up and down as they did so:
YOU’LL HAVE TO LIVE,
OR ELSE YOU’LL DIE
YOU’LL HAVE TO LIVE,
OR ELSE YOU’LL DIE
YOU’LL HAVE TO LIVE,
OR ELSE YOU’LL DIE
YOU’LL HAVE TO LIVE,
OR ELSE YOU’LL DIE
Trying to outperform them and taunt the participants at the same time, the baldy Lollards chanted happily:
HELLO, HELLO, WHO ARE YOU?
HELLO, HELLO, WHO ARE YOU?
ARE YOU A RUPERT? ARE YOU A FRED?
IN A MINUTE YOU’LL BE DEAD.
WHO ARE YOU?
OH WE DON’T LIKE TO SAY, WE DON’T LIKE TO BLAB
BUT SOON YOU’LL BE LYING ON A MARBLE SLAB
LYING ON A SLAB COVERED BY A WREATH
MISSING YOUR PRIVATES, MISSING YOUR TEETH
HELLO, HELLO, WHO ARE YOU?
Each step forward dragged Cale further down, as if weakness and fear, alive in him for the first time in years, ran riot in his guts and brain.
Then finally he was there and Solomon Solomon beside him, his rage and power burning alongside him like a second sun.
The master at arms gestured them to his left and right. Then he called out:
“WELCOME TO THE RED OPERA!”
With that, the crowd, almost as one, rose bellowing to its feet-except for the section reserved for the Materazzi, where the men cheered and the women applauded indifferently. This was not, in any case, the top drawer of Materazzi society, who would not readily associate themselves with something as vulgar as either this occasion or the not-quite-one-of-us Solomon Solomon, who, though respected for his power in the military hierarchy, was the great-grandson of a man who had made his fortune in dried fish. This is not to deny that a few of the choice of Materazzi society had come late, including a deeply reluctant Marshal, and were watching from carefully recessed private boxes while eating that morning’s catch of prawns. In the section reserved for the Mond, the blazing hatred they felt for Cale erupted in a sea of arms jabbing toward him and a chorus of derision.
“BOOM LACALACALACA BOOM LACALACALACA TAC TAC TAC.”
From high up on the West Bank some skillful thug or hooligan, having escaped the searches of the peelers, threw a dead cat in a massive arc, the body thudding into the sand only twenty feet from Cale, to a roar of delighted approval from the crowd.
Panic ran riot though Cale’s wilting soul, as if some reservoir of fear had been dammed up in him for all these years and now had burst its banks and swept away all nerve and guts, all gall and the will to power. His very spine shook with cowardice as the master at arms handed him his sword. He could barely now raise his hand to pull it free, so weak had he become. It was so heavy that he let it fall to hang loosely at his side. Everything now was just sensation-the bitter taste of death and terror on his tongue, the bright and burning sun, the noise of the crowd and the wall of faces. And then the master at arms raised his hands. The crowd hushed. Then he dropped his arms to his sides. The crowd bellowed as if one beast, and Cale watched as the man who was about to slaughter him raised his sword and cautiously, thoughtfully, moved toward the trembling, panic-stricken boy.
From deep inside, something in Cale called for protection, begging to be saved: IdrisPukke save me, Leopold Vipond save me, Henri and Kleist save me, Arbell Swan-Neck save me. But he was beyond all help except the help of the man he hated most in all the world. It was Redeemer Bosco who rescued him from the sickening blow and the red blood spilling on the sand; it was the years of violence at his hands, the daily dread and fear-those were what delivered him. Beginning in his chest, the waters of terror began to freeze. As Solomon Solomon quickly circled, the coldness spread downward through Cale’s heart and guts and into his thighs and then his arms. In only a few seconds, like a miraculous drug suppressing an agonizing pain, the old familiar, numbing, lifesaving indifference to fear and death was back. Cale was himself again.
Solomon Solomon, wary at first of Cale’s immobility, was moving in quickly for his attack, sword raised, eyes intent, controlled, the skillful emissary of violent death. He moved within striking distance, then held for a moment. Both stared into each other’s eyes. The crowd hushed. All sights seemed to come to Cale as in a tunnel-an older woman in the crowd was smiling at him like a kindly grandmother while pulling her finger across her throat, the dead cat so stiff on the ground it looked like a badly made toy, the young dancer at the arena’s edge, her mouth wide open in alarm and fear. And his opponent shuffling in the sand, the grating noise much louder than the crowd, who seemed to be so far away. And then Solomon Solomon gathered his strength-and struck.