“Hi there. Slept well?”
With the jawbone of a carnivore, short hair, and a powerful chest under his close-fitting T-shirt, he looked more like a wrestling trainer than a nurse. Milos didn’t like his steely blue eyes or his small, thin-lipped mouth.
“Thirsty? Here, drink this.”
Milos raised his head and thirstily drank the half glass of water that the man was offering him. “Are you a doctor?”
“Me, a doctor? Not me! Mind you, I was once in the cobbling trade, and medicine, well, it’s a bit like do-it-yourself. You get better with practice. Sewed you up, didn’t I? See any difference between my work and a surgeon’s? Come on, be honest. See any difference? Skin’s only leather, right? You just have to disinfect the material and wash your hands. That’s the trick of it.”
“What about that? Did you do it?” asked Milos, pointing to his chained ankle.
The man roared with laughter. “Put that on you, did they? I never noticed! What a bunch of brutes! I’ll set you free.”
He took a small key out of his pocket and turned it in the padlock.
You’re no brighter than “they” are, thought Milos. If you have the key, you’re no stranger to this ring and chain. I bet you put them on me just to give yourself credit for taking them off again. He knew instinctively that he would never trust this man and made up his mind to keep his distance.
“Know where you are?”
Milos looked blank.
“In the infirmary of a training camp!”
Milos still looked blank.
“A camp that trains men for the fights. Are you surprised? You must know about the fights, right?”
The man had sat down on the edge of the bed. It seemed to Milos that there was a touch of admiration in his smile.
“Come on, don’t act so stupid. We know all about that business with Pastor. Hey, you fixed him good. But don’t go thinking it’s held against you. Nope, we really appreciate it around here. He was a fat oaf, Pastor was. Past his prime. And the winner’s always in the right, eh? This time you were the winner. Good work!”
“He’d have set his dogs on us. I had to do it.”
“That’s it. It was you or him, bound to be. You thought you’d rather it was him! Which means you know all about these things and they weren’t wrong to bring you here.”
He patted Milos’s arm with the satisfaction of a racehorse trainer who has just acquired a Thoroughbred. Milos made a face. The effect of the local anesthetic must be wearing off, and the pain of his injury was beginning to tug at him. The effort he was making to talk was a severe strain too.
“I’ll explain about the fights tomorrow,” the man said, getting to his feet. “You know enough for today. You better rest. Oh, and I’m called Fulgur. If you need anything just ask for me: Fulgur.”
Before leaving the room, he disconnected Milos’s drip and went to check the other injured man’s pulse.
“And this guy here, he’s a champion. Name of Caius. You could do worse than take him as your example. See you tomorrow, Milos Ferenzy!”
Milos dozed for a few hours, and then woke up in the middle of the night, fully alert and sweating. Fulgur meant lightning in Latin. And Caius was a Latin name too, wasn’t it? They’d chosen such strange names! And the names must be false. He had an idea that he could easily understand the mystery behind all this if he wanted to, but something in him refused to do it, or rather was trying to postpone the moment. He’d have liked to talk to the man in the other bed to reassure himself, but his companion merely groaned or muttered incomprehensible remarks in his dreams now and then.
In the early morning, pale light made its way through the window. Milos waited until it allowed him to see a little and then tried getting out of bed. Taking the strain on his arms, he managed to sit on the edge of the bed. He stayed there for some time until his dizziness wore off, then very carefully got to his feet. He made his way along the wall to the window. It opened easily, letting in a sweetish smell of damp moss. Through the bars, which were sealed in place, he could make out a tall fence some yards away and beyond it a forest of bare-branched trees. He took deep breaths. The cold air made his head go around, and he almost fainted. He was about to close the window again when the muted sound of regular footsteps approached. About fifteen young men, wearing shorts in spite of the cold weather, passed under the window at a run. They were carrying swords. Their noisy, rhythmical breathing moved away in a cloud of mist.
“Shut it!” snapped a curt voice. Turning, Milos saw Caius watching him from his bed. His fevered gaze pierced the dim light. Thick stubble was begin ning to cover his scarred cheeks. “Shut that window!”
Milos shut it and went slowly back along the wall. Once he was lying down, he expected his neighbor to speak to him again, but he had to wait a good ten minutes before the man spoke in his harsh voice once more.
“Already injured when you got here, were you? Where’ve you come from?”
Milos hardly knew what to reply. Where had he come from? It wasn’t so easy to explain. And he didn’t quite know whom he was talking to. The man called Fulgur had told him to take Caius as his example, but Fulgur’s idea of an example wasn’t necessarily to be recommended.
“I was captured,” he ventured carefully.
There was a long silence. Milos intended to stick to his decision: he would say as little as he could, commit himself to nothing, and observe as much as possible.
“‘I was captured.’” Caius laughed as he imitated him. “So do you at least know where you are?”
“In a training camp, I think.”
“You think right.”
Milos didn’t like the man’s sarcastic, condescending manner. He still asked no questions, guessing that this might be the best way of actually learning something. He was right about that.
“Fact is, you’re in the country’s top training camp. Landing here is your best chance of survival. Give me a drink.”
It was a struggle for Milos to sit up, reach the glass of water, and hand it to Caius, but he did so without complaining. He even waited for the other man to finish drinking so that he could take the glass from him again, put it back in its place, and then lie down.
“Want to know why it’s your best chance?”
“I’m not asking you anything.”
Caius paused for some time, probably slightly puzzled by Milos’s attitude.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen! I thought they didn’t take anyone that young in the camps. What the hell did you do to be put in here with us? Bumped off one of the Phalange’s big shots or something?”
For the first time Milos gave no answer.
“God, was that really it, then? You took one of them out?”
Milos did not reply.
“Not very talkative, are you? Quite right, keep it to yourself.”
Conversation lapsed again. The light in the room was growing brighter. Someone went down the corridor outside but did not come in. For the second time, Milos heard men running and breathing rhythmically outside the window. He thought for a moment that Caius had gone back to sleep, but then the other man spoke again, in a very low voice and without opening his eyes: “This is the best camp because it’s where you’ll learn best how to hate your opponents. How to concentrate your anger. It’s all in the head, you know, nowhere else, not in the legs, not in the arms. Never forget that. The man who gave me this chest injury last week had a torso and biceps twice as strong as mine, but he just wasn’t eager enough to . . .”
The rest of the sentence was inaudible. Caius’s voice was dropping yet lower.
“Not eager enough to do what?” This time Milos couldn’t help asking.
“Not eager enough to kill me. And he was too afraid of dying. Dead before he even walked into the arena . . . already dead when our eyes met. He saw the hatred in mine; I saw the terror in his. The fight was decided before it began. My second. My third will be this winter. My wound will be better then, and I’ll win for the third time. And then I’ll be free . . . free . . .”