Tempests and Slaughter

‘He was killed fightin’ rebels two year back,’ the other man said. ‘An’ the boy is Prince Ozorne.’

Now Arram remembered. Ozorne was a year or two ahead of him in the Lower Academy.

From the podium, the crier bellowed that the emperor would bless the games. Everyone thundered to their feet and then hushed. His voice amplified, most likely by a mage, the emperor prayed to the gods for an excellent round of games. When he finished, everyone sat.

For a very long moment the arena was still. Then the boy felt a slow, regular thudding rise through the stone and up his legs. His body shuddered against the railing. Nearby, in the wall that took up a third of the southern end of the arena, huge barred gates swung inward.

Here came drummers and trumpeters, clad only in gold-trimmed scarlet loincloths. Their oiled bodies gleamed as brightly as the polished metal of their instruments. The brawny men represented every race of the empire in the colours of their skin and hair and the tattoos on their faces and bodies. One thing they had in common: iron slave rings around their throats.

Arram rubbed his own throat uneasily. His original home, Tyra, was not a slave country. Three years in Carthak had not made him comfortable with the practice, not when there were no slaves at his school. He saw them only when he was outside, and the sight of them made him edgy.

The leader of the musicians raised his staff. The trumpeters let loose a blare that made Arram jump, almost tipping him over the rail. The men caught him again.

‘You’re best off at your seat,’ the friendly one advised. ‘Ain’t your mamma callin’ yeh?’

‘I’m eleven,’ Arram lied. ‘I don’t need a mother – I’m a student at the School for Mages!’

The men’s laughter was drowned out by a thunder of drumrolls. Arram gave the sands what he called his special, magical squint. Now he saw waves of spells all over the arena floor. They sent ripples through the air, carrying the arena’s noise even to the people in the seats high above.

‘Why do they allow spells on the arena sand?’ he shouted at the friendlier of the two men. As far as he knew, magic was forbidden here. Perhaps they allowed only their own magic, just as they allowed the emperor’s magic.

‘What spells?’ the man bellowed. He reached over Arram’s head and tapped his friend as the musicians marched past. ‘The lad thinks there’s magic on the sands!’

The other roughneck looked down his flattened nose at Arram. A couple of scars on his face told the boy he may have come by that nose in fighting. ‘What’re you, upstart?’ he growled. ‘Some kind of mage?’

‘Of course I am!’ Arram retorted. ‘Didn’t you hear me say I’m in the School for Mages?’

‘He’s simple,’ the friendlier man said. ‘Leave ’im be. Who’re you bettin’ on?’

The other man seized Arram by the collar and lifted him into the air. ‘If you’re a mage, spell me, then,’ he growled. ‘Turn me into somethin’, before I break yer skinny neck for botherin’ us.’

‘Don’t be stupid!’ Arram cried. His mind, as always, had fixed on the question of magic. ‘Only a great mage can turn a person into something else! Even—’

His foe choked off Arram’s next comment – that he might never be a great mage – by turning his fist to cut off the boy’s voice entirely. ‘Stupid, am I?’ he shouted, his eyes bulging. ‘You moneyed little piece of tripe—’

Arram might have corrected him concerning the state of his purse, but he couldn’t breathe and had finally remembered a teacher’s advice: ‘You don’t make friends when you tell someone you think he is stupid.’ He was seeing light bursts against a darkening world. He called up the first bit of magic he’d ever created, after a walk on a silk carpet brought flame to his fingers. He drew that magic from the sands and seized the fist on his collar.

The tough yelped and released Arram instantly. ‘You! What did you do to me?’

Arram couldn’t answer. He hit the rail and went over backwards, arms flailing.

He was trying to think of lifesaving magic when a pair of strong, dark brown arms caught him just before he struck the ground. He looked into a man’s face: eyes so brown they seemed black in the bright sun, a flattened nose, a grinning mouth, and holes in both earlobes. His head was shaved.

‘You don’t want to join us, lad, trust me, you don’t,’ he told Arram, already walking back against the line of marching gladiators. The ones closest to them were laughing and slapping or punching the big man on the shoulder. Like him, they wore leather armour. Like him, they were oiled all over. Some were missing ears or eyes. These were the beginners, the midlevel fighters, and the old-timers, not the heroes of the arena. Some didn’t look at Arram; they were murmuring to themselves or fondling tiny god-images that hung on cords around their necks.

‘Hurry, boy,’ an older gladiator muttered to Arram’s rescuer. ‘Guards comin’.’

‘You don’t want the guards catching you,’ the big man explained to Arram as he quickened his pace. ‘They’ll whip you before they cut you loose. Is your family here?’

‘Sitting in the copper section,’ Arram said miserably. He had no idea how he’d get back to Papa and Grandda.

‘Don’t fuss,’ the big man told him. ‘We’ll fix it.’

Arram smelled something odd, like a barnyard thick with hay and dung. The ground under his rescuer shook. The boy looked up and cringed. Massive grey shapes approached, swaying as the sands thundered beneath their broad, flat feet. They waved huge, snake-like trunks painted in brightly coloured stripes, circles, and dots.

He had never been so close to an elephant! One halted in front of them as the others followed the parade of gladiators. As the gladiator lowered Arram to the ground, the gigantic creature knelt before them.

This elephant was decorated all over in red and bronze designs, even down to its toenails. It eyed Arram with one tiny eye and then the other before it stuck out its immense trunk and snuffled the boy. Despite his lingering fear, Arram grinned – the trunk’s light touch on his face and neck tickled. Carefully he reached out and stroked it.

‘This is Ua,’ the big man told Arram. ‘Her name means “flower”.’ He pointed to the rider, seated behind the creature’s large, knobbed head. ‘My friend’s name is—’ The name he pronounced sounded to Arram like ‘Kipaeyoh.’ ‘It means “butterfly” in Old Thak. Kipepeo,’ he called up to the armoured woman, ‘this lad must return to the bleachers – Where?’ He looked at Arram, who pointed. By now his father and grandfather had shoved up to the rail, next to the kinder burly man. The one who had dumped Arram over the wall was nowhere to be seen.

‘He must be placed there,’ the big man told Kipepeo. ‘Can you do it? Quickly?’

‘For you, Musenda, my love, anything,’ the woman called. She blew the man a kiss, then sounded a series of whistles.

‘Ua will get us all out of trouble,’ the man called Musenda told Arram. ‘No yelping. Ua’s as gentle as a kitten. For now.’ The elephant twined her trunk around the boy’s waist and lifted him. Arram yelped as his feet left the ground.

‘Thank you – I think!’ Arram called as Musenda trotted off to his place in line. The passing gladiators and elephant riders waved to Arram as they spread out in their ranks. Arram realized they were blocking the imperial soldiers who were trying to catch him. He clapped his hands over his face.

‘Don’t panic,’ Ua’s rider ordered. ‘She won’t let you come to harm.’

Arram lowered his hands and realized the elephant was too short to reach the top of the wall. ‘Her trunk isn’t long enough!’ he cried.

Kipepeo laughed. Tapping the great animal with a long rod, she guided Ua to the wall just beneath Arram’s relatives. Frightened and excited at the same time, the boy grabbed some of the coarse hairs on Ua’s crown for balance, trying not to yank them. Then he prayed to the Graveyard Hag, Carthak’s patron goddess and, he hoped, someone who might look after elephants and boys.

Kipepeo gave three sharp whistles.

Slowly, groaning in elephant, Ua straightened and stood on her back feet. Arram gasped as she lifted him high with her trunk. Now he was within easy reach of his father and grandfather. He raised his hands. They bent down, gripped him, and hauled him up and over the arena’s rail.

On solid stone once more, Arram turned and shouted, ‘Thank you, Ua! Thank you, Kipepeo!’

His two adults scolded him loud and long as they dragged him up the steps to the copper seating, but they also bought him a lemon ice and grilled lamb on skewers once they got the tale of his short adventure out of him. They even helped him to stand on the seat between them as the lengthy line of warriors, animals, and chariots finished their parade around the arena.

The gladiators bowed to the emperor, thrust out their fists, and shouted, ‘Glory to the emperor! Glory to the empire!’ The moment they finished, the elephants reared on their hind legs and trumpeted, the sound blasting against the arena walls. The crowd cheered, Arram and his family cheering with them.

Now the parade returned to the gate at the rear of the coliseum, with the exception of two groups of fighters.

‘It’s a scrimmage,’ Yusaf explained.

‘It’s a fight between lesser fighters, like a small war,’ Metan added. He was Arram’s grandfather, owner of their cloth-selling business. ‘The ones that need more experience. One team wears green armbands, and the other wears orange.’

‘Have you a favourite?’ Yusaf bellowed. The noise of the crowd was rising as people bet on Greens or Oranges.

Arram shook his head shyly. This fight was taking place right in front of the emperor’s part of the stands: he could not see much detail.

‘Here,’ Yusaf said, pressing a spyglass into Arram’s hand. ‘You ought to have a really close look at your first fight!’

Arram smiled at his father and raised the glass to his eye. Yusaf showed him how to twist the parts until he could see the emperor as if he stood only a foot or two away. Arram gasped at the flash of jewels on the great man’s robes, then swung the spyglass until he found the teams of fighters. Musenda was not among these gladiators.