Cla replied from his corner, without getting up or looking up. “Why would I talk to those who will soon be dead? I understand there’s to be a contest. Very well. I’ll win it. If there’s a prize, I’ll take it and be on my way.”
We greeted this in thunderstruck silence.
Finally Fremmy said, “He don’t understand.”
“Got bad information,” Stooks said. “Or maybe there was still water in his ears and he didn’t hear so good.”
Iota dipped from their bucket, drank, then jumped up on the bars of the cell that had been a single until today, stretching his muscles and shaking the bars as was his wont, then let go and turned to face the oversized galoot hunkered in the corner.
“Let me explain something to you, Cla,” he said. “Clarify, as it’s said. The Fair One is a tournament. Such tourneys were often held on the Field of the Monarchs during the days of the Galliens, and people came in their thousands to watch. From everywhere they came, even giant-fellows from Cratchy, tis said. The contestants were usually members of the King’s Guard, although ordinary folk could participate if they wanted to test the hardness of their skulls. There was blood, and combatants were often carried unconscious from the field, but this is to be the old version, from long before the Galliens, when Lilimar was only a village not much bigger than Deesk.”
I knew some of this, but even after long days and weeks, not all. I listened intently. So did the rest, because we in durance vile rarely discussed the Fair One. It was a taboo subject, as I imagine the electric chair was in the old days and lethal injection is now.
“Sixteen of us will fight the other sixteen. To the death. No quarter, no crying off. Anyone who refuses to fight will find himself—or herself—on the rack, or in the Maiden, or pulled like taffy candy on the strappado. Do you understand?”
Cla sat in his corner, seeming to consider. At last he said, “I can fight.”
Eye nodded. “Yes, you look like you can, when you’re not facing the Lord High or spitting up lakewater. The sixteen fight again, leaving eight. The eight fight again, leaving four. Four becomes two.”
Cla nodded. “I’ll be one of those. And when the other man lies dead at my feet, I’ll claim my prize.”
“Yes you will,” Hamey said. He had come to stand beside me. “In the old days the prize was a bag of gold and, tis said, a life’s freedom from the king’s levy. But that was the old days. Your prize will be to fight Red Molly. She’s a giant, and too big for the special box where Flight Killer’s lickspittles sit, but I’ve seen her many times standing below it. You’re big, almost seven feet I judge, but the red bitch is bigger.”
“She not catch me,” Dash said. “She slow. I fast. They en’t call me Dash for no reason.”
No one said the obvious: fast or not, scrawny Dash would be long gone before anyone had to face Red Molly.
Cla sat, thinking this over. At last he got up, big knees cracking like knots in a fire, and approached the drinking bucket. He said, “I’ll beat her, too. Hit her until her brains come out of her mouth.”
“Let’s say you do,” I said.
He turned to me.
“You still won’t be done. Kill the daughter—you probably won’t but say you do—and you won’t stand a chance against the mother. I’ve seen her. She’s fucking Godzilla.”
That wasn’t, of course, the word that came out of my mouth, but whatever I said, there were murmurs of agreement from the other cells.
“You’ve all been beaten down until you’re scared of your own shadows,” Cla said, perhaps forgetting that when Kellin had told Cla to address him as Lord High, he had done so at once. Of course Kellin and the rest of the night soldiers were different. They had those auras. I thought of how my muscles had locked up when Kellin touched me.
Cla picked up the bucket of drinking water. Iota seized his slab of an arm. “Nah, nah! Use the cup, dummy! Pursey won’t bring the water-cart again until—”
I never saw a man as big as Cla move so fast, not even in ESPN Classic highlights of Shaquille O’Neal when he played college hoops for LSU—and even at seven feet and three hundred and twenty pounds, Shaq had had sublime moves.
The bucket was at Cla’s mouth and tilting. A second later, or so it seemed, it was clattering across the stone floor, the water spilling. Cla turned to look at it. Eye was on the cell floor, propped on one hand. The other was at his throat. His eyes bulged. He was gagging. Cla bent for the bucket and picked it up.