Theatre of the Gods (50 page)

‘We’ll see.’

And so the captain stumbled, cursing, into the iron arena – a vast black cage of iron ribs lined with sharp spikes. The cage was surrounded by ranks of the Emperor’s Insect Legion. When the royal referees asked Lambestyo to state his fighting manifesto he said, ‘This is stupid.’ And so the referees hastily stitched him a flag with ‘This is Stupid’ on it. Then he was stripped to the waist, and the crowd in the Omnivision™ Arena gasped. The spectators in their homes and in the theatres gasped too as Dray’s cameras, bolted to a grid above the ring, zoomed in upon the snake-nest of scars which ran across his lean and muscled torso. The boy turned his burning gaze towards a tiny chamber high above: an aperture covered in gauze from which the Empress was rumoured to watch. He saluted the empty heights. Miss Fritzacopple personally ensured that he was greased down, limbered up, then she pushed him into the arena to face a man who called himself ‘Ulrich’. Ulrich had just arrived in port and was said to be one of the best freestyle wrestlers around. He was a hulking sailor with tattoos featuring hideous acts of violence. The captain performed just one act of violence before picking him up and throwing him out of the cage.

His next opponent was also a large man with a fearsome reputation, but Lambestyo had little trouble dispatching him. ‘They’re trying to throw these fights.’

‘I know,’ said Fritzacopple as she surreptitiously dabbed fake blood on her fighter’s eye. ‘No one wants to win. The defending champion must be a monster.’

‘Well, then why do I want to win?’

‘Because if you can get close to the Empress you might be able
to get her to help us leave. Here, let the next guy hit you and bite down on this blood capsule. Then at least the people will be happy.’

‘How did you get a blood capsule?’

‘I used to be a dancer. Try to make him look good.’

But this was harder than it appeared. The opponents seemed to be getting weaker with every round. When the Necronaut strode towards him his opponent crawled up the side of the cage, squealing.

‘Don’t run,’ hissed Lambestyo. ‘Just come down and I’ll let you hit me.’ But there was no coaxing his opponent, Hetfield, from the cage heights. Not until the fight was called off.

Then the referee announced that the captain had now earned the right to face last year’s champion. A hush fell over the stadium as his opponent entered.

‘A girl?’ said the captain as he caught his breath. Shona entered the arena and glared at her opponent. They met in the centre and the captain said, ‘Our mothers taught us not to hit girls.’

‘I spit on your mothers,’ said Shona, and she spat right on his boot.

‘OK then,’ said the captain.

The bell sounded and before Lambestyo could even raise his fists Shona cracked him across the jaw with a brass chain, sending the blood capsule pinging off the bars like a bullet.

‘She has a chain!’ called Fritzacopple unhelpfully. The captain wobbled for a second and before he knew it he was on his back, Shona’s face an angry inch from his, and her chain was wrapped around his throat.

‘I would just like to say I am sorry for my earlier comments about not hitting girls,’ rasped the captain. His face was turning purple. ‘I can see now you are a strong and capable young woman.’

‘Try not to let her strangle you!’ yelled his coach.

If the captain had talked to anyone before the event he would have learned the reason this competition was a little soft. It was soft because most of the men in this city did not want to be humiliated into a bloody pulp by Shona. She had won three years running, and
all the men she’d beaten were broken men.

‘Take this, Renaldo!’ she said as she rammed the captain’s head repeatedly against the iron floor of the ring. His head ran thick with sparks. ‘Renaldo?’ he gasped.

Again, if he had bothered to speak to any of the locals before the event he would have learned that Renaldo was the name of a man who had, some three years ago, broken up with Shona so that he could run off with her best friend. She had decided that if she couldn’t exact her revenge on Renaldo, she would instead exact it on all Renaldo-kind. Any Renaldo who stepped into her ring had received the same bloody treatment. Now, as he lay on his back under a barrage of astonishingly brutal blows, he realised that his stance on striking a woman had been logically flawed. ‘Perhaps,’ he thought, ‘if women are truly to take their place in society as equal partners with men, we need to stop treating them as precious objects. Certainly,’ the captain thought, as Shona put him in a choker hold, to the cheers of the assembled, and began to pound the back of his head with her chained fist, ‘I would never strike a woman in anger. But if, for example, a woman had me in a choker grip and was pounding the back of my skull with her chained fist while squeezing my eyeball with her spare thumb and screaming, ‘You like that, Renaldo! You like that!’ then I would be within my rights to fight back. Yes. I do not think this is unreasonable at all. OK then.’ And with that he flipped Shona over his shoulder with one single casual motion, and the crowd went
absolutely ballistic
.

*

Later, as Miss Fritzacopple dabbed his blackened eye with a cotton ball, he tried to explain his position. ‘She was crazy! She thought I was called Renaldo!’

‘She was smaller than you,’ said Miss Fritzacopple. ‘You should be ashamed.’

‘What was I supposed to do? Lie there and let her beat me to death?’

‘Oh, you’re being overdramatic. She would never have beaten you to
death
.’

‘But what about equality?!’ cried the captain. ‘Isn’t that what you want?’

‘The rules are simple,’ said Miss Fritzacopple. ‘We want equality, but you must not hit us, and if the ship is on fire we get the lifeboats.’

The captain tried to throw his arms up in disgust, but it hurt too much.

‘How do you think that poor girl feels right now?’

‘She feels fine,’ he replied. ‘We’re meeting later to drink a bottle of rum.’

*

Lambestyo was declared the Knight of the Night of the Ring of Iron. He was told a ball would be held the next evening in his honour. He was told he must attend on pain of death. After the contest he had been ordered to climb a ladder into the heights in order to pay his respects to the chamber where the Empress was rumoured to sit. He found himself on a narrow ledge before a diaphanous screen. He never saw her face; she was just a quivering silhouette, a voice, calm yet dreadful. Later, he wouldn’t say what the Empress had said, but in his journal he wrote, over and over: ‘A shark, a shark, the life of a shark …’

*

The curfew had been suspended for the Night of the Ring of Iron. Maxwheel Struff, theatre director, dilettante, gourmand, author, raconteur and chairman of the Grand Ball Committee, was stumbling home in the witches’ hour in his pink top hat and gold-leaf-encrusted
britches when he felt the inexplicable. He felt compelled to take the small, bone-handled butterfly knife from his left boot – ‘Because walking at night with all those creeps and jealous former lovers about – always bring protection, I say!’ – and to calmly open a vein in his wrist, and then to smear five words in foot-high letters. The words were on the temple walls the next day when people began to arrive for prayers:

‘SEE YOU AT THE BALL’.

AT THE BALL

In calling for the lady invited, the gentleman should be punctual in arriving at the hour agreed in writing or telegram prior to the event. If the gentleman is of enough substance to have ordered a carriage, he sends her in first to sit facing forward, then sits opposite the stinger end of the carriage – unless the lady requests him to sit somewhere else. In leaving the carriage the man goes first and helps the lady descend, being careful not to drop her or become caught in her skirts, and being careful to protect her hair or fascinator from snagging on the stinger. He then escorts her to the ladies’ dressing rooms where he leaves her in the charge of the matron, while he goes to the gentlemen’s apartment to divest himself of coat and boots.

Diemendääs by Night: A Guide to Common Etiquettes and Courtesies for Debutantes
, Maxwheel Struff

THE NIGHT, THE SHARK

The Ball of the Knight of the Night of the Ring of Iron was the event of the year. To cancel it because its chairman had killed himself and scrawled a dire message on a temple in his own blood? Unthinkable. The city elite turned out to the event. Lenore stopped traffic with her dress, her make-up and her hair woven with a knot of black thorns. Miss Fritzacopple had carried out her orders with a set of faint
tsks
: dark around the eyes, dark upon the lips, no colour on the cheeks.

‘Do you think our captain will be well to attend us this night, supposing?’

‘I have no idea. I believe he is recovering from his date with a fighting lady and a gallon of rum.’

‘I think he’ll come. I want him to view upon me in my finest.’

‘Do you and all?’

‘I do.’

‘You want him to see you looking like you’ve been woken from the grave?’

‘I
was
woken from a grave, remember? A coffin of ice. I wonder if he will notice.’

‘I don’t believe our captain notices much any more. And you’re too young to be noticing the likes of him.’

‘I’m too young to notice things?’

‘Too young to crush on things.’

‘And how old were you when you first crushed on a thing?’

Miss Fritzacopple staunched a lovely memory of the friend of an older brother. ‘That’s hardly the issue. And I don’t think any age is old enough for his like.’

‘That Empress is plenty old enough. I’ll show that old woman.’ Then brightening: ‘I need a protector, you know. The man of my dreams is to be attending, remember?’

‘Honestly, Lenore, there’s more guards than guests here tonight.’

The room stood still as they entered. The Emperor, dressed in his most lavish outfit yet – a dazzling scarlet saloon coat with silver thread stockings – looked alarmed when he saw Lenore. ‘This look is … new for you,’ he observed.

‘But not for you, I fancy. Am I not just a chicken off the old block?’

The Emperor turned quickly to the botanist. ‘And where is our man Fabrigas tonight? Fashionably late?’

‘Off with Dray, no doubt,’ said the botanist. ‘They are a pair.’

‘They are. And Our Lady’s champion?’

‘He is arriving now. I smell him,’ said Lenore, somewhat breathlessly, and sure enough the murmurs rose upon the stairs, and then came busting through the main door, and there he stood at the top in a fine coat and a pair of shining boots. The Emperor had sent his best tailors to his suite with orders that he was not to bar them entry – on pain of death. The Emperor had learned that if he wanted the captain to do anything he had to add ‘… on pain of death’. The captain’s hair was still wet and rough as waves, and his coat was rebelliously unbuttoned. He carried a bottle in his left hand, and the women all swooned upon the stairs as he came lazily down to meet his friends.

‘I’m here!’ he announced.

‘We are glad,’ said the botanist. ‘Aren’t we, Lenore?’

‘I suppose we are to that,’ the girl replied.

‘Lenore has put a lot of time into her look this evening.’

‘I can see. And … what is this all about?’ He circled his head
lazily with his finger.

‘If you remember,’ said the Emperor patiently, ‘it is a grand ball in your honour.’

‘Ahhhhhh, jess.’ He ruffled his own hair and took a swig from his bottle. ‘Keep up the good work.’

Then the captain was off to the bar, the seas parted. Later in the night they saw him near the dance floor, surrounded by some of Diemendääs’s most beautiful women. They saw him once more, alone upon the balcony, staring out into the night with his black eyes. And then he vanished.

‘What is to become of him? And us?’ said Fritzacopple.

The Emperor, who had been spending a scandalous amount of time with the botanist that evening, seemed about to answer when an aide appeared, breathing heavily. ‘Your Majesty, I’m afraid there’s been … an incident.’

A young man, a visiting explorer, had been caught canoodling with a general’s wife and had fled the ball, pursued by officers. He had vanished into the night.

‘Our Lady’s champion, Lambestyo, no doubt.’

‘Not him, Your Highness.’

*

‘He’s leaving us,’ said Lenore. ‘I can feel it. He didn’t even let me have a single dance.’

‘He was off talking to women his own age. You can’t expect him to hang around us.’

On the dance floor, couples floated madly by, ghastly grins upon their faces. Shrieks came from the balcony as an admiral tried to lift a lady’s skirts. There was a mania settling over the room.

‘One day I’ll make him dance with me,’ said the green-skinned girl. The grimness with which this was said alarmed the botanist. But then a shadow rolled across her. The music and all the voices in
the Grand Ballroom stopped abruptly.

‘Hello, little monster,’ said the botanist, in a voice that was both hers and not. ‘I wonder if
I
might have the next dance.’

‘Miss Fritzacopples?’

‘She’ll be back before you know it. I’m just borrowing her mind for a few minutes. I wanted to talk to you in person. At last. Are you well? You look well. Are you enjoying your voyage?’

‘It isn’t the kind of voyage which you enjoy. But well enough.’

‘And where are your friends? The old wizard?’

‘Elsewhere. Who is for the asking?’

‘And your dear captain?’

‘Also absent. Who will I say is calling?’

‘You know who I am. You know what has to happen.’

‘You’re going to kill me.’

‘It has to be.’

The botanist’s voice was calm and measured, but with a raw edge, the sound of a good pair of scissors cutting cloth.

‘The men you said would protect you.
Vanished
. No one here to stop me killing you.’

‘Please leave My Ladies’ body. You don’t belong in there.’

‘I won’t stay long. And your little boyfriend? Where has your friend gone to?’

‘I have not any idea. He is
not
my boyfriend. And I have given you more words than a lady should for a stranger.’