In the midst of the fight, Gideon’s world had shrunk down to four essential elements: himself, his claymore, the Easterner, and his jian. With the conclusion of the fight, and his pounding heart gradually beginning to resume its normal rhythm, the rest of the world slowly crept back in. The first thing of normal reality he noticed was a terrific noise coming from all directions. When he looked up from the Easterner’s corpse, he saw thousands of eyes looking down at him, along with thousands of roaring mouths.
The crowd had come to bear witness to a sacrifice, but instead of a ritual it had received a champion. The outcome against the berserk Easterner had caused the crowd to go berserk itself. The men in the stands were now on their feet and howling like mad, screaming in an orgasmic burst of vicarious enjoyment for a glorious victory they deemed themselves to have been part of. It no longer mattered that Gideon was a stranger and a foreigner, he had stood and fought when the others ran, and for the moment at least that was enough to crown him as their new hero.
Gideon’s head pulsated with pain from the blow he’d taken from the Easterner, but the pain could not diminish the passionate loathing he felt for the crowd as they cheered for him. He had never wanted anything more in his life than to leave the arena and escape their sight. But he couldn't, not before he received the reward he had just risked his life for.
The master of ceremonies emerged from the hypogeum and strode across the sand to where Gideon stood. Once in range, he grabbed Gideon’s free hand and held it aloft, to the noisy delight of the crowd.
Gideon was furious as he ripped his arm out of the master of ceremony’s grasp, shouting to make himself understood over the crowd’s din.
“Get off me! I want my money! Now!!!”
In response, the master of ceremonies gestured up at the king with both hands, opening his palms as if to say only he could grant such a demand. When he looked up, Gideon found himself making eye contact with the king, and instantly understood that he, too, did not share the crowd’s joyous mood. The same coldness he'd seen in the king’s gaze before the fight remained, but now there seemed to be enmity mixed in with it. Gideon returned the king’s hostile gaze, and for a little while they glared at one another as the crowd continued its celebration.
Gideon didn’t understand why the king looked as though he was about to come down and fight Gideon himself, but he also didn’t care. His blood was still up after killing the Easterner, and despite the extreme pain in his head he still felt willing to fight anyone else who stood in his way.
The king broke off from the staredown first, looking around at the crowd as he raised his arms for silence. They ignored him completely, chanting the same question over and over.
“WHO? WHO? WHO?”
Frustration flashed across the king’s face. The master of ceremonies raised his arms for silence as well, and between their combined effort the crowd gradually obeyed. Once they had quieted down to an acceptable level, the king began to speak.
“We see that a champion has appeared before us. Tell us your name, champion, so that we may honor you.”
At the prospect of hearing Gideon’s name, the crowd finally fell totally silent. Gideon felt nothing but irritation at being the focus of their attention, a feeling that was enhanced to a great degree by his splitting headache.
“It’s Gideon.”
The crowd cheered once again and began to chant his name. He looked around at them, frowning deeply, and as he did the master of ceremonies grabbed his arm once again.
“It’s Gideon—sire! And sheathe your sword! You’re speaking to the king!” he hissed into Gideon’s ear.
Gideon's eyes rolled as he moved to sheathe his sword, and only after it was done did the master of ceremonies release him.
The king hid his impatience poorly as he waited for the crowd’s chanting to die down.
“Well, Gideon,” he said at length, “you have conducted yourself admirably. I believe your opponent was intoxicated with a strength enhancing narcotic. Would you agree with that assessment?”
“Yeah, maybe. Who knows.”
The master of ceremonies grabbed Gideon once again, rasping. “You must give the king the proper amount of respect!”
Gideon batted his hand away, snarling. “Touch me again and it’ll be the last thing your hand ever fucking touches!”
The master of ceremonies backed a few feet away, glowering. Some in the crowd laughed at him.
“Gideon,” the king called out impatiently, “You are clearly a skilled fighter. Tell us how you gained your skills. We wish to know who our valiant champion is!”
Should I lie?
As he weighed his options, instinct told him it would be unwise to be upfront with who he was before the king and the crowd. But then again, they would most likely discover the truth regardless. In fact there could be little doubt of that, he realized, because he’d already made the mistake of signing his name on an official form. If he lied, it might lead to complications down the road.
He let out a frustrated sigh as he stared up at the king. I was being stupid when I decided to do this. A thousand denars is not worth being under the Kenanite looking glass, or worth fighting a juiced up lunatic.
“I used to be a Singing Blade,” he began. “We were under contract to you in Forelia until the Lake Men destroyed us on a patrol just a day or so after the sack. I was one of the only survivors, and I came to Kenan to fight for the reward.”
The crowd began to murmur again. The king looked somewhat surprised at first, then narrowed his eyes with suspicion.
“A Singing Blade. How interesting. You must have known Captain Dance, then.”
Gideon found it very difficult to restrain the laughter that threatened to erupt from him, but he somehow managed.
“...Yeah. I knew him.”
A small smile appeared on the king’s face. He brought his left hand behind his back and turned to address the crowd, raising his right hand with the palm up.
“This man is a superb warrior, is he not?”
The crowd whistled and cheered.
“And the Singing Blades were a band of tenacious fighters under our employ, were they not?”
Some whistled, others shouted affirmations.
“And we are men who honor our words and our debts, are we not?”
“YES!” the crowd shouted in unison.
“Just so.”
The king turned back to Gideon with a grand sweep of his arm. “I grant this man the entire payment owed to the Singing Blades for their service to us. One thousand denars!”
Gideon raised an eyebrow as the king continued. His body language made it seem as though he was addressing Gideon, but in truth he was addressing the crowd.
“You may recall that the prize for winning this tournament was also one thousand denars. As the last man standing in the arena, you are the winner, de facto. This of course means that your total reward shall be two thousand denars!”
The crowd gasped and clapped with eager excitement. Two thousand denars was a small fortune.
“This is how well the loyal servants of Kaan value martial might!”
Gideon looked around at the cheering crowd, scowling. It didn’t take a genius to see that the king was using Gideon as a tool to manipulate them, and he deeply resented it.
“Kaan still has many enemies,” the king continued. “We need strong men like Gideon, do we not?”
“YES!”
“Then answer us, Gideon. Will you serve as one of my bannermen? Wealth, women, slaves…the comforts of power, the delights of victory, and the love of God. Everything a man could want, and it could all be yours! If you but say the word.”
All eyes were on Gideon, waiting for his reply.
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How do I get out of this?
He scanned the dais around the king, trying to find the right words to refuse him, and as he did his gaze was drawn to the Forelian woman. Her previous disinterest was gone, and from the way she stared at him it was obvious she also wanted to hear his reply. The collar around her neck gave him an idea, one which would involve a lie that would undoubtedly sound convincing to a Kenanite ear.
Gideon raised his voice so that no one in the arena could miss his answer.
“Sorry, but I planned on retiring after this fight. I’m going to start a slave business with the money.”
Fury appeared on the king’s face after Gideon’s first word, and by the time he’d completed his statement the king looked absolutely livid. The crowd, though, clapped with respect for Gideon’s decision. He felt amused as he watched an internal battle play out across the king’s face, one between rage at being rejected and a desire to please the crowd.
The king made his decision. The fury disappeared from his face, replaced by aggravated disdain.
“How droll. Very well, Gideon the Singing Blade, you have my leave to go. The master of ceremonies will show you to the bursar’s office, where you may collect your payment. Kaan’s blessings upon you!”
He turned his back on Gideon, returning to his throne. As he watched the king turn away, a new idea sprang to Gideon's mind, one that was very attractive but also very dangerous. He hated how the king had just used him, and wanted to punish him somehow for it. The desire for revenge soon won out over common sense.
“Wait!” Gideon shouted at him.
The crowd gasped. Gideon had just given an order to the king.
The king turned about slowly, casting a positively murderous glare at Gideon.
“You’ve just signed your own death warrant, you absolute fool,” the master of ceremonies snickered.
Gideon ignored him. He had a cocky smile on his face as he addressed the king again.
“I still haven’t received my boon.”
The king stared at Gideon for a full five seconds, trying to regain his cool before responding. He returned Gideon’s cocky smile with a false one of his own.
“Yes, how could I have forgotten? Name your boon, mercenary, before Kaan strikes your tongue from your mouth for your irreverence.”
Still smiling, Gideon raised his left arm and pointed up at the Forelian woman. He nodded in her direction.
“Her. I want her as my boon.”
He did not quite get the reaction he expected. The crowd was surprised, and fell silent as they turned to watch for the king's reaction. Then it was Gideon’s turn to be surprised as the king began to laugh, with more high spiritedness than would be expected of someone of his temperament or stature.
A grin remained on his face after his laughter came to an end. “You took my payment, refused my offer of employment, had the audacity to command me, and now you are asking for my most valuable slave?”
“Yeah,” Gideon responded, smirking.
The king gestured down to the Forelian woman. “Do you know who this is, mercenary?”
“Should I?”
“Oh, yes. This is the crown princess of Forelia. The heir apparent to that feeble city of weaklings, before I starved them into surrender and took them into bondage.”
He reached down and grasped her collar. She craned her head away from him warily as he continued.
“The collar around her neck symbolizes our exquisite victory over her people, and represents what they have become. She is a living trophy—the ultimate proof of the justness of our cause.”
He released her collar and leaned back up. “And you dare ask me to give her to you?”
Gideon gave him a casual shrug. “Hey, it’s your rules, not mine.”
He fully expected the king to become angry, but instead the king seemed pensive as he studied the princess. The realization that the king was seriously considering giving her to Gideon seemed to dawn on her, and she looked up at the king with a great deal of distress. Her voice was shrill as she shouted at him.
“Look at him! Can’t you tell that man is a heathen? For the love of Kalikaan, you must not do this!”
The crowd heard the despair in her voice, and they snickered and laughed as the king scowled at her.
“Be silent, slave.”
The nobles had been dead silent during the entire exchange between Gideon and the king. At some unseen signal they suddenly began to stir. A handful of them stood up from their thrones and approached the king, who turned to face them, resting both hands behind his back as he leaned in to confer with them. They spoke in low tones, too quietly for Gideon to hear. He was just beginning to lose patience with the entire situation when one of the nobles, a thin greybeard with a ruby ring on each finger, became visibly angry and animated while whispering to the king.
The king appeared to be listening to him, but after a while he leaned back up and ended the conversation with a dismissive wave, turning back to face Gideon. The nobles returned to their thrones with looks of displeasure, the ruby-fingered greybeard seeming the most displeased of all.
“I will grant your boon, Gideon, because it would please Kaan to give such a superb prize to a strong man of low birth. I must admit, it pleases myself as well to grant her to you. The weak peoples of the world should belong to the valorous.”
The crowd loved his last line, and as they stood up to cheer a cruel smile spread across the king’s face. He had managed to use Gideon to manipulate the crowd one last time.
Gideon scoffed and shook his head. His idea had completely backfired. He’d intended to put the king on the spot with his request—a request he felt almost sure the king wouldn’t agree to—in order to embarrass him in front of the crowd. He hadn't had a single clue who the princess was before pointing up at her, he'd simply expected her to be some minorly important person. That the woman had once been a princess was almost too strange for him to believe.
He felt confounded. How could a Kenanite, the king no less, be so willing to let go of such a prestigious slave?
My big mouth. Fuck it, I’ll just free her and send her on her way.
“Oh, and Gideon?” the king called out.
Gideon looked up, and his eyes went wide as he saw the king was mid-throw. He leapt backwards, barely dodging the knife the king had thrown at him. It bounced off the arena’s sand with a loud thump, and it came to a halt by his foot.
He bared his teeth with rage as he looked back up at the king. For his part, the king was smirking, clearly happy to have received the reaction out of Gideon he’d been hoping for.
“Take Kaan’s iron with you as well. It will be ward enough to protect you from her feminine God.”
The crowd laughed and clapped with appreciation. Gideon picked up the dagger, waving it around at the king flippantly with feigned gratitude before hanging it off his belt.
The king gestured to the rear of the dais and two soldiers appeared. He gave them some brief instructions, and soon they were unhooking the princess from the throne and lifting her to her feet. Once she was standing, the distress on her face disappeared like it had never existed, replaced by the same apathy Gideon had seen on the faces of so many other slaves. One of the soldiers pulled her by her chain, and she followed.
The crowd mocked and jeered her as the guards led her through the stands down to the arena, bombarding her with terrible cruelty. She kept her head down and her eyes locked to the steps below her feet as they berated her.
Gideon felt an intense sense of guilt as he watched it happen. He hadn’t been the one to put the collar around her neck, but the verbal bombardment had clearly been his fault.
The master of ceremonies intercepted the two guards as they stepped down into the arena. The guards handed the princess off to the master of ceremonies and retraced their path back through the stands up to the dais. Gideon watched as the master of ceremonies approached him with a business-like air, the princess in tow.
He came to a halt in front of Gideon, presenting the princess’s chain and the key to her collar to him.
“Your boon, sirrah. I am sure you will enjoy her just as much as the king already has.”
Gideon blinked, and took the chain and key from him with obvious reluctance. At this range he could see that the simple shorts and blouse the princess was wearing were little more than a few old cloth rags haphazardly sewn together. Her clothing was so tattered that it only counted as clothing in the sense that it was made of fabric and it covered her body. He had once seen a nurse in a field hospital use some torn up old cloth to wipe down a bloody surgery table, and those rags were essentially the same thing the princess had on, minus the blood. On her feet she wore thin sandals that offered only a token amount of protection from the ground.
Her hair was the only thing that betrayed anything about who she’d once been. The Kenanites always shaved a slave’s hair off, no matter the gender, in order to mark them as slaves, and the fact she still had hers marked her as special. Now that Gideon was taking a closer look at her, he felt a certain amount of alarm at how beautiful her hair seemed in comparison to her abysmal clothing. Without context it might have seemed as though she had gone to a serious effort to make her hair look nice, but then arbitrarily decided to wear the worst possible clothing she could find. Gideon strongly suspected that the Kenanites had done her hair up on purpose, for reasons that sickened him.
Her eyes had locked onto the ground by her feet as Gideon studied her. If she was aware of his gaze, then she'd decided not to acknowledge it. Because of the way her chin nearly touched her chest, and the terrible condition of her clothing, it was hard not to feel pity for her.
“If you’re quite satisfied then please follow me,” the master of ceremonies said. “I will take you to the bursar.”
Gideon glanced at the master of ceremonies and then back to the princess. He let go of her chain, releasing it with care so it wouldn’t swing into her. It hung freely off of her collar over her front, nearly touching the ground.
“Do you want to get out of here?” he asked.
She had no immediate reaction, which made Gideon think she might not have heard him. He was about to repeat his question when she lifted her chin to look at him. The princess had a guarded look about her, but Gideon saw something in her eyes that implied she was far from broken. They held eye contact with each other for only a few moments before her eyes darted back to the floor, and Gideon wondered what, if anything, she had seen in his eyes.
After the princess had been handed over, the crowd lost interest in them nearly as quickly as they’d decided Gideon was their hero. He looked away from the princess and scanned the crowd, feeling anxious to get away from them. They chattered to one another, waiting for the next sport to appear that would satisfy their yet unsated desire for blood.
Watching them, Gideon suddenly realized that for the Kenanites, bloodsport was a way to resolve, at least temporarily, the basic fear they felt over fate. The way they had subjugated and brutalized the Forelians had been just another expression of that same insecurity caused by death.
He gently rubbed the side of his head where he’d been punched. His headache hadn’t abated, and he felt impatient to acquire his money and use it to nurse his pain with a hot bath and a warm bed. He’d seen far more than enough of Kenanite culture, more than he could stomach in one lifetime.
When his gaze returned to the princess, he shrugged. She still hadn’t said a word.
“Alright, stay here then. Suit yourself.”
Gideon gestured at the master of ceremonies to lead on. He raised an eyebrow at Gideon but said nothing, and the two of them headed for the entrance to the hypogeum. After a few seconds, Gideon heard the princess’s chain rattling behind him, and when he looked back she was following.
As the master of ceremonies led him down the steps into the hypogeum, Gideon heard the king’s voice boom out behind him.
“The next event shall be—slave duels! The peers of the realm have prepared their best slave-warriors, including a pair of freshly captured Forelian soldiers!”
Gideon shook his head as the crowd erupted into cheers behind him. He descended down the stairs into the hypogeum’s cool darkness, and as he did it finally dawned on him that by opting to fight in the tourney he had enabled all of the wrongness he'd just witnessed. Once again, he’d chosen to fight the wrong battle, and guilt crashed into him just like a blow from an Easterner with nothing left to lose.