Emerson · Firestone, Republic of Scale
1713
Emerson was six years old and his father had told him more than once that they did not come to Firestone for the tournament. A Mercer officer named Lenz had business in the city over a grain contract. He was allowed one aide and Emerson’s father volunteered because he knew the officer. His mother said the road would do Emerson more good than being at the forge, so he went too. The Republic’s tournament simply happened to fall in the same week. Emerson listened and then asked whether they could watch the fighting.
Now they sat near the top of the amphitheater on a bench of pale gray stone. Beyond its rim, Firestone spread out in red stone under the midsummer sun and the glare stung Emerson’s eyes whenever he looked that way. Heat came up through the soles of his shoes even this high above the arena. A vendor somewhere below kept yelling over the crowd and the breeze carried up the smell of meat roasting on a stick.
His father said the place held forty thousand people. Emerson could not picture forty thousand of anything. He thought that half of Felsberg could have fit inside. From up here the fighters looked small enough to pick up between two fingers.
“Can you see?” his father asked.
Emerson stretched out to make sure before he answered. “Yes!”
“There are places farther down.”
“I can see just fine!”
His father looked at the narrow strip of bench beneath Emerson’s heels. “Then perhaps you can see sitting down.”
Emerson sat. The man in front of him wore a broad hat but by leaning to one side he could see most of the sand. He did not ask to move. Moving might mean missing something. When the herald called the opening bout Emerson leaned forward around the hat to see the gate. His knee knocked into the man’s shoulder. The man turned around. He had a plain face under the brim and pale eyes that went straight past Emerson to his father.
“I believe this is yours.” He did not raise his voice. One hand stayed flat on something in his lap.
“Pardon my son, sir,” his father said.
He drew Emerson along the bench and sat him behind his own shoulder. From there Emerson could see half the sand. He had turned down the lower benches for this view and now he had half of it. His father had said sorry for him to a stranger.
The man had already turned back. The broad brim settled and did not move again. The first bouts went by in flashes of steel too far away to follow. Whenever the crowd stomped, the bench trembled beneath him. He did not know that stone could do that.
His father was harder to please. A fighter with shoulders twice as broad as his opponent’s lost his sword and yielded. Emerson thought it was unfair. The smaller man picked up the sword and gave it back to him.
“He was bigger!” he protested.
“Then he ought to have kept hold of his sword.”
Emerson meant to argue but the next fighters came through the gate before he thought what to say. A woman two tiers below had brought a birdcage and a thin girl sat on the step at her feet with both hands around the cage. He was trying to see what was inside the cage when the cheering faded. He turned back to the arena. A man lay on the sand.
His opponent stood over him. Something small swung from his hand on a chain and a thread of smoke rose from it. Attendants dressed in white walked across the fighting ground without hurrying and Emerson waited for the fallen man to get up. Instead, they covered him with a cloth and carried him toward the gate on a stretcher with one attendant at each end. Emerson watched the cloth. It did not move.
The noise slowly came back. A boy three rows down asked his mother when the next fight would start. Four men came out and raked the dark patch where the fighter fell until the sand lay as pale and smooth as the ground around it. Two tiers down, the thin girl was still staring at the gate. The woman with the birdcage kept a hand on her shoulder.
“Father, did he—”
“Watch the next one.”
His father’s eyes stayed on the gate. Emerson pressed his hands flat against his knees.
“They won’t put another Nine Isles boy against that man!” someone behind them said.
“Not after that! Someone ought to have read the contract.”
Both men laughed. Emerson turned around far enough to see that they were not looking at the arena. One wore a ring with a black stone. The other was turning his own ring so its face lay against his palm. He knew the word contract. His father had been saying it since they left home and Emerson did not understand what was funny about it. Then a man carrying a scythe walked out onto the sand and his father leaned forward.
“There. See the scythe? That’s the Desert Reaper.”
The name meant nothing to Emerson. What happened next did. The man with the scythe hardly moved. He lowered the blade until it nearly touched the ground and the sand began to move. It lifted in a low sheet and slid toward his opponent’s boots.
When the other fighter tried to step aside, it closed over his ankles. He tore one foot free. Before he could set it down, another ridge rose and caught him. He tried to hack at the ground with his sword. The grains scattered under the blade and ran back into place like water. All the while the man with the scythe waited.
Emerson had seen men stuck in the mud down by the harbor but mud did not follow a man when he tried to get out of it. He pulled his own feet up under the bench. It was over in less than two minutes. The trapped fighter yielded and the sand fell away from his legs. A red-haired man came running down the steps past their row. He smelled of smoke and he did not stop until he reached the rail below.
“Rogers?” his father said after him.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Rogers did not look back. Down on the sand the man with the scythe rested the Desert Reaper across his shoulder.
“Is he the strongest?” Emerson asked.
His father gave a short laugh. “Him? Twenty years ago, he couldn’t have beaten anyone down there.”
“He just did!”
“Look at what he’s carrying.”
Emerson looked. The scythe shone as its owner turned toward the gate. Copper glinted in the haft though at that distance he could make out nothing more.
“That’s what the weapon is for,” his father said.
Emerson watched the blade until it went into the passage. Two benches down, a tall fair-haired boy had turned around and was staring up at them. The brown-haired boy beside him tugged at his sleeve until he faced the arena again.
The last bout began late in the afternoon. By then the shadow of the upper wall had crept across their bench and Emerson was too busy leaning forward to notice. The older fighter came out first, holding a curved sickle in each hand. The metal was a dull gray but the inner edges were sharp. He walked across the sand confidently without looking up at the crowd.
“He was a general,” his father said. “Now he’s a Vicarion, second strongest in the Republic.”
“Is that better than a general?”
“A good deal better! Give him ten years and he’ll be the Primaris, unless somebody kills him first.”
Emerson looked at the sickles and wondered who would try. Across the arena, a man sat in the shade of an awning while the men around him stood. The younger fighter drew less than half the cheering when the herald called his name. A saber hung at his hip and he did not touch it. His dark coat pulled tight across broad shoulders and he was built like the men who hauled sacks off the wagons in Felsberg. He stopped in the middle of the sand and grinned up at the stands. Then he wet a finger and held it up to test the wind. The lower tiers laughed. Emerson’s father made a small sound through his nose.
“What?” Emerson asked.
“Nothing.” His father was studying the younger man’s coat. “He’s not from the Republic.”
“Will he fight with the sword?”
“Not for long, I’d wager.”
A horn sounded across the arena. Everything happened faster than Emerson could keep in order. The younger man went in first with the saber, fast and low. The Vicarion was already somewhere else. A sickle swept through the empty air. Emerson saw nothing leave it but the younger man sprang aside as though something had been thrown at his head. When he landed, a red line opened across his shoulder. A sharp crack reached the top tier a moment later like a log splitting under an axe.
Emerson was on his feet. His father caught the back of his shirt and held him. There was nothing to watch until it had already happened. A strip of the younger man’s sleeve jumped loose and fluttered away. A furrow burst open in the sand beside his boot. The Vicarion’s sickles turned in short tight circles. Every turn sent something invisible across the ground. Emerson dug his fingers into his father’s knee.
The younger man stopped grinning and he gave ground with his eyes on the blades. Then his eyes dropped to the sand. The next stroke came low; this time Emerson saw it. A thin line of sand leaped along the ground and raced toward the dark coat. The younger man swept his hand sideways and the line bent with it. Dust burst from the wall behind him. Then the crowd roared.
“He saw it,” his father said.
“Saw what?”
“Watch the sand.”
Emerson watched. The younger man turned one hand and the wind came to him. Sand lifted into it in a pale haze and all at once the Vicarion’s cuts had a shape. Now Emerson could see them curve through the dust and break against the arena wall. The younger man gathered the wind around himself until sand hissed against his coat like water thrown on hot iron. Then he flung it all back across the arena with his palm.
The Vicarion blocked with both sickles. The blow drove him to one knee. Emerson shouted. His father’s grip tightened in his shirt.
“He’s making him work for it!” his father said.
The Vicarion came up with sand clinging to his knee and attacked again with no pause between the strokes now. The younger man pushed forward through them. His coat snapped around his legs in his own wind and a tail of sand dragged along behind him. For the first time, the older man gave ground.
Then the Vicarion threw one of his sickles wide. It went spinning away toward the edge of the arena. The younger man did not look. He drove his fist forward, and a gust flung sand into the Vicarion’s face. The Vicarion turned his head and left his chest open. The younger man lunged.
Behind him the thrown sickle returned. It swung around in the air as though someone had tied a cord and was pulling it. Emerson opened his mouth to shout a warning. The blade was already behind the younger man.
It cut straight through the wind. The ring of sand around the fighters fell apart and poured to the ground. The younger man’s step faltered and he dropped to one knee. His saber skidded away across the sand as the sickle came back into the Vicarion’s hand. The Vicarion turned the other blade upside down. The younger man started to rise. Then the blade’s inner edge met his throat and he stopped with one knee still in the sand.
His father pulled Emerson back against the bench. Blood had spread across the younger man’s shoulder and sand was stuck to a cut on his cheek. He looked up at the Vicarion with his chin lifted just clear of the sickle. Then the man laughed. He knelt in the sand with a blade against his throat and laughed as though someone had just told him a joke meant only for him.
The Vicarion bent and said something Emerson could not hear. Then he lowered the sickle. He transferred both weapons into one hand and offered the other. The younger man took it.
The amphitheater erupted. Emerson sprang up against his father’s grip and screamed until his throat hurt. Around him people stomped on the stone and shouted for both fighters. He cheered with them for two men whose names he had already forgotten.
“Was that the best one?” he asked. “Father, was that the best one today?”
His father did not answer. He had stayed seated while everyone around them rose. So had the man in the broad hat. The man was writing in a small book and ink was ground into the side of one finger. Below, the Vicarion left through one gate. Attendants in Concord’s colors gathered around the younger fighter. One of them took his arm across his own shoulders and walked him into the passage. Emerson watched his father watching them. The hand in his shirt relaxed.
“They’re going to build more of those,” his father said.
“More sickles?”
At first his father did not seem to hear him. Then he let go of Emerson’s shirt and reached under the bench. “Get your coat. It’s a long walk down.”
Emerson wanted to ask whether a sickle would come back to anyone who threw it. His father had already taken his hand and they walked down the steps.
They left Firestone nine days later. Emerson talked about the tournament for most of the journey home. For weeks afterward he ran around the yard with a bent stick and tried to make it curve through the air. Kira told him he had made the whole thing up.
“It came back!” Emerson insisted.
“Then why doesn’t yours?”
He said that his was only a stick and went to fetch it. Kira was still laughing behind him.
“Throw it harder!” she yelled after him.
The memory shrank as Emerson grew. By twelve, he could no longer describe the Vicarion’s face. The man on one knee who laughed with a blade at his throat stayed with him longer than the rest. By fifteen he was not entirely certain the sickles had come back.