Winter's End

Ajay was perching on the windowsill. It had slipped past the bars and was looking into the bedroom with round eyes. Enraptured, Milos Ferenzy looked at the big bird’s bright colors, its bluish wings, the comical black mustache on both sides of its beak. He wanted to call to it by making little chirping sounds, as you do when you’re trying to entice an animal, but he couldn’t manage it. His mouth was too dry. Not that it bothered him. He felt completely well, as if he were in an immaterial body free of all pain, living in a state of suspended animation.

A pale ray of sunlight traced a slanting line on the whitewashed wall opposite. The room seemed to contain no furniture. A lightbulb with a metal shade hung from the ceiling. Milos noticed that he was wearing a coarse nightshirt with short sleeves. He turned his head to the left and saw the dressing on his arm. A flexible tube emerged from it, linked to a drip gradually dispensing its contents.

There was another bed parallel to his. Its occupant, a lean, muscular man of about thirty, was moaning faintly with his mouth half open. Thick bandaging surrounded his chest, but the most shocking thing about him was his devastated face, covered in terrible scars like furrows rimmed with pink flesh. His long, dirty feet stuck out from under the covers. Did they never wash people in this hospital? The pleasant sensation of wellbeing faded slightly

Hospital? What was he doing in a hospital? Oh yes, the mountain refuge. His leg. The knife in it. He gently pushed back the sheet, hitched up the nightshirt, and saw that his right thigh was painted with iodine. In the middle of the stain, his injury, stitched with black thread, looked quite small. I’m no doctor, he thought, but I seem to have been quite well looked after. At the same moment, the sheet slipped off entirely and fell to the floor. Then he saw that there was an iron ring around his left ankle, and the ring was chained to the bar at the foot of the bed. He let out a groan. The jay, no doubt hearing him, flew away with its wings rushing.

During the next hour, Milos lay completely still, worrying that he might set off some terrible pain if he made the slightest movement. Where was he? And why had he been given medical attention if he was to be kept prisoner? To take revenge on him for the dog-handler’s death? The ray of sunlight had disappeared now, and twilight was slowly filling the room. The man in the next bed had stopped moaning, but he was sleeping restlessly, his breathing irregular.

Milos wondered how Helen had felt when she came back to find the refuge empty. Had she thought that he’d set off into the mountains on his own? That he didn’t trust her? This worried him. He would have stayed; he’d promised to stay! But they had arrived first and taken him away on their sleigh, half unconscious. He remembered being in a sort of waking dream at the time, feeling the jolts, the cold, the sensation of being roughly manipulated, like a dead beast thrown into the slaughterman’s barrow. Then he had fainted right away, and now he was lying in this room, a quiet yet disturbing place, beside another injured man.

Firm footsteps could be heard out in the corridor. The door suddenly opened, and a thickset man pressed the switch beside it, flooding the room with glaring light.

“Hi there. Slept well?”

With the jawbone of a carnivore, short hair, and a powerful chest under his close-fitting T-shirt, he looked more like a wrestling trainer than a nurse. Milos didn’t like his steely blue eyes or his small, thin-lipped mouth.

“Thirsty? Here, drink this.”

Milos raised his head and thirstily drank the half glass of water that the man was offering him. “Are you a doctor?”

“Me, a doctor? Not me! Mind you, I was once in the cobbling trade, and medicine, well, it’s a bit like do-it-yourself. You get better with practice. Sewed you up, didn’t I? See any difference between my work and a surgeon’s? Come on, be honest. See any difference? Skin’s only leather, right? You just have to disinfect the material and wash your hands. That’s the trick of it.”

“What about that? Did you do it?” asked Milos, pointing to his chained ankle.

The man roared with laughter. “Put that on you, did they? I never noticed! What a bunch of brutes! I’ll set you free.”

He took a small key out of his pocket and turned it in the padlock.

You’re no brighter than “they” are, thought Milos. If you have the key, you’re no stranger to this ring and chain. I bet you put them on me just to give yourself credit for taking them off again. He knew instinctively that he would never trust this man and made up his mind to keep his distance.

“Know where you are?”

Milos looked blank.

“In the infirmary of a training camp!”

Milos still looked blank.

“A camp that trains men for the fights. Are you surprised? You must know about the fights, right?”

The man had sat down on the edge of the bed. It seemed to Milos that there was a touch of admiration in his smile.

“Come on, don’t act so stupid. We know all about that business with Pastor. Hey, you fixed him good. But don’t go thinking it’s held against you. Nope, we really appreciate it around here. He was a fat oaf, Pastor was. Past his prime. And the winner’s always in the right, eh? This time you were the winner. Good work!”

“He’d have set his dogs on us. I had to do it.”

“That’s it. It was you or him, bound to be. You thought you’d rather it was him! Which means you know all about these things and they weren’t wrong to bring you here.”

He patted Milos’s arm with the satisfaction of a racehorse trainer who has just acquired a Thoroughbred. Milos made a face. The effect of the local anesthetic must be wearing off, and the pain of his injury was beginning to tug at him. The effort he was making to talk was a severe strain too.

“I’ll explain about the fights tomorrow,” the man said, getting to his feet. “You know enough for today. You better rest. Oh, and I’m called Fulgur. If you need anything just ask for me: Fulgur.”

Before leaving the room, he disconnected Milos’s drip and went to check the other injured man’s pulse.

“And this guy here, he’s a champion. Name of Caius. You could do worse than take him as your example. See you tomorrow, Milos Ferenzy!”

Milos dozed for a few hours, and then woke up in the middle of the night, fully alert and sweating. Fulgur meant lightning in Latin. And Caius was a Latin name too, wasn’t it? They’d chosen such strange names! And the names must be false. He had an idea that he could easily understand the mystery behind all this if he wanted to, but something in him refused to do it, or rather was trying to postpone the moment. He’d have liked to talk to the man in the other bed to reassure himself, but his companion merely groaned or muttered incomprehensible remarks in his dreams now and then.

In the early morning, pale light made its way through the window. Milos waited until it allowed him to see a little and then tried getting out of bed. Taking the strain on his arms, he managed to sit on the edge of the bed. He stayed there for some time until his dizziness wore off, then very carefully got to his feet. He made his way along the wall to the window. It opened easily, letting in a sweetish smell of damp moss. Through the bars, which were sealed in place, he could make out a tall fence some yards away and beyond it a forest of bare-branched trees. He took deep breaths. The cold air made his head go around, and he almost fainted. He was about to close the window again when the muted sound of regular footsteps approached. About fifteen young men, wearing shorts in spite of the cold weather, passed under the window at a run. They were carrying swords. Their noisy, rhythmical breathing moved away in a cloud of mist.

“Shut it!” snapped a curt voice. Turning, Milos saw Caius watching him from his bed. His fevered gaze pierced the dim light. Thick stubble was begin ning to cover his scarred cheeks. “Shut that window!”

Milos shut it and went slowly back along the wall. Once he was lying down, he expected his neighbor to speak to him again, but he had to wait a good ten minutes before the man spoke in his harsh voice once more.

“Already injured when you got here, were you? Where’ve you come from?”

Milos hardly knew what to reply. Where had he come from? It wasn’t so easy to explain. And he didn’t quite know whom he was talking to. The man called Fulgur had told him to take Caius as his example, but Fulgur’s idea of an example wasn’t necessarily to be recommended.

“I was captured,” he ventured carefully.

There was a long silence. Milos intended to stick to his decision: he would say as little as he could, commit himself to nothing, and observe as much as possible.

“‘I was captured.’” Caius laughed as he imitated him. “So do you at least know where you are?”

“In a training camp, I think.”

“You think right.”

Milos didn’t like the man’s sarcastic, condescending manner. He still asked no questions, guessing that this might be the best way of actually learning something. He was right about that.

“Fact is, you’re in the country’s top training camp. Landing here is your best chance of survival. Give me a drink.”

It was a struggle for Milos to sit up, reach the glass of water, and hand it to Caius, but he did so without complaining. He even waited for the other man to finish drinking so that he could take the glass from him again, put it back in its place, and then lie down.

“Want to know why it’s your best chance?”

“I’m not asking you anything.”

Caius paused for some time, probably slightly puzzled by Milos’s attitude.

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen! I thought they didn’t take anyone that young in the camps. What the hell did you do to be put in here with us? Bumped off one of the Phalange’s big shots or something?”

For the first time Milos gave no answer.

“God, was that really it, then? You took one of them out?”

Milos did not reply.

“Not very talkative, are you? Quite right, keep it to yourself.”

Conversation lapsed again. The light in the room was growing brighter. Someone went down the corridor outside but did not come in. For the second time, Milos heard men running and breathing rhythmically outside the window. He thought for a moment that Caius had gone back to sleep, but then the other man spoke again, in a very low voice and without opening his eyes: “This is the best camp because it’s where you’ll learn best how to hate your opponents. How to concentrate your anger. It’s all in the head, you know, nowhere else, not in the legs, not in the arms. Never forget that. The man who gave me this chest injury last week had a torso and biceps twice as strong as mine, but he just wasn’t eager enough to . . .”

The rest of the sentence was inaudible. Caius’s voice was dropping yet lower.

“Not eager enough to do what?” This time Milos couldn’t help asking.

“Not eager enough to kill me. And he was too afraid of dying. Dead before he even walked into the arena . . . already dead when our eyes met. He saw the hatred in mine; I saw the terror in his. The fight was decided before it began. My second. My third will be this winter. My wound will be better then, and I’ll win for the third time. And then I’ll be free . . . free . . .”

Caius stopped talking. His head fell to one side, and a few seconds later, he was fast asleep.

Attempting to make some kind of sense out of what he had just heard, Milos tried not to give in to panic, but whatever he did, the words came together inexorably into a single meaning. His pulse and breathing were racing. The Latin names, the arena, the fights: it was all crystal clear.

So he hadn’t been spared either out of compassion or so he could be handed over to justice. The Phalange didn’t care about any of that. They’d left him alive for an entirely different reason: to make him risk his life in front of them in the arena. To make him die or kill before their eyes, for their pleasure. A gladiator. They wanted to make a gladiator of him! Hadn’t such barbarity been abandoned centuries ago? This was a nightmare.

The day brought him little fresh information. Fulgur came back as he had said he would, but only to bring in meals and check up on their injuries . The food was not very appetizing, but Milos’s instinct for survival made him eat everything put in front of him. As for Caius, he was sleeping like a log, and in his few waking moments he seemed to have forgotten everything he had said in the morning.

As evening drew on, the jay came to perch on the windowsill again and stayed there for several minutes, stepping from one foot to the other.

“Hello, you!” said Milos, touched by the bird’s fidelity. “Do you feel sorry for me? Did you come to tell me not to despair? Don’t worry. I’m pretty tough.”

When he woke up next day, he saw that Caius had gone. So had his bed. Fulgur walked into the room as abruptly as usual.

“Wondering what happened to your mate there, eh?”

“No,” said Milos, more determined than ever to ask no questions.

“I’ll tell you all the same: he asked to be taken back to the dormitory last night. Said he didn’t fancy your company.”

Dumbfounded, Milos tried not to show the slightest surprise but waited impassively to hear more. Fulgur leaned against the wall by the window, hands in his pockets. The bones of his forehead, cheeks, and jaw occupied most of the room on his face; by comparison his eyes and mouth looked tiny.

“Did you know it can be a very bad thing for a guy like Caius not to fancy your company?”

Milos said nothing.

“Now with me it’s the other way around. I like you. You don’t natter away like a girl, you never complain; you seem to know your own mind. I ask myself, What is it Caius doesn’t like about you? Any idea?”

No reply.

“Right. Well, it’s my job to explain the rules of the place to you and how it works. Are you listening?”

Silence.

“OK. This is one of the six training camps in the country. One for each province. Six provinces, six camps. Are you with me so far? Ours is in the middle of the forest. If you run away, you’re fair game: you’ll be pursued by a hundred men, caught, and killed immediately. So forget that idea. It’s for your own good. You were chained up the other day because you didn’t know about it yet. Now you do know, so there’s no need for the chain. Got it?”

Silence.

“Right. You’ll train here with about thirty other fighters — all of them criminals who’d have ended up on the gallows but were pardoned and sent here. Scum, the entire lot of ’em. Expect a bunch of little angels and you’re in for a big disappointment. There’s an arena in each camp. All of them identical: same size, same shape, same sand. And there’s a seventh in the capital, just like the other six except there’s tiers of seats around it for the spectators. No seats here because there’s no spectators. Still with me?”

Milos nodded in assent. In fact he had never listened so intently to anyone. Every word Fulgur said was etched on his memory as soon as he heard it.

“This is where you’ll train. You’ll fight for real in the arena in the capital. The fights are held over three days. They’ll be single combat against men from the other camps, guys you don’t know. You’re training with your mates here, and if you injure one badly, you’ll be punished. Everything clear?”

Milos did not reply.

“Your first fight will be in three months’ time, in midwinter. You have plenty of time to get better, grow some scar tissue, learn the techniques. If you win and if you survive, your second fight is in spring. Like I said, if you survive. Because the winner of a fight often dies of his wounds. Look at Caius! He came pretty close to it. Right. Then, if you win your second fight, the third’s in early summer. If you’re still alive after that one, then you’re free. Got that?”

Milos nodded.

“In fact you’re better than free. You’ve earned respect. You’re a celebrity. The Phalange will get you a cushy, well-paid job for life, give you total protection. You’re young; you’ve been shut up in a boarding school. You may not realize what that means, but I can tell you it means a lot. You’ll only have to say your name to get the best table in all the best restaurants and free meals. You’ll be able to travel in any taxi for free too. And even if you were ugly as sin, the most gorgeous women will be fighting over you. Whereas you’re a good-looking lad to start with, say no more! It gives the girls a thrill to think a man’s risked his life three times — even more of a thrill to know he’s killed another man three times. That’s women for you — can’t be helped.”

Milos felt himself blushing and thought of Helen. Would the idea that he was a murderer four times over make her love him more? He doubted it.

“In this camp,” Fulgur went on, “you’ll meet men training for their first fight, like you. They’re called novices; others who have already won their fights are called premiers; and then there’s the champions who’ve won two, like Caius. You’ll soon tell them apart. A word in your ear: make sure they all respect you. This isn’t a summer camp. The trainer’s name is Myricus. Listen to him. He knows what he’s talking about. He’s a former winner — he won three times. Any questions?”

“No,” said Milos, on the brink of nausea.

There was silence. Fulgur didn’t move. “You don’t ask whether I’m a former winner too?”

“No.”

Fulgur, obviously dying to talk about himself, was annoyed by this response. “Just as you like. One last thing: you have to take the name of a fighting man. I picked Fulgur because I’m as fast as lightning. You want to find a name that suits you. I’ll get them to show you the list and you can choose one.”

“I don’t want to. I’ll keep my own.”

“Just as you like,” Fulgur repeated with pretended indifference. “Show me your leg.”

Milos put back the sheet and uncovered his thigh. The wound had closed up well and looked clean and almost dry already.

“Excellent,” Fulgur said approvingly. “I’ll take the stitches out in a few days’ time.” And then, before Milos had time to protect himself in any way, he raised his right arm and hit the thigh as hard as he could directly on the injury. Milos screamed and almost fainted.

“So now,” said the man in unctuous tones, “kindly ask me if I’m a former winner. You’d really like to know, wouldn’t you?”

“Are you a former winner?” Milos groaned.

Fulgur’s small blue eyes, staring into his own, were cold as a reptile’s.

“Yes, that’s right. I’m a former winner. I killed my three opponents. So I could be living it up in the capital, but I’d rather stay here. Ask me why I’d rather stay here, why don’t you?”

“Why would you rather stay here?”

“Well, seeing as you ask, I’ll tell you. I’d rather stay here because I like it. Training hard every day, seeing the fear men feel getting into the vans to go to their first fight, watching the winners, hearing about what they did, watching the losers die and hearing about their deaths, the yellow sand in the arena, the red blood flowing into it, all that — I can’t do without it. It’s like a drug. You wouldn’t understand. I was like the rest of them at first, just wanted to save my skin. Kill my three men and get the hell out of this awful camp. But after my second victory, I started thinking what a great place it was — and liking what went on here too. It’s a matter of life or death. You don’t find that anywhere else except in war, but seeing as there’s no war on right now. . . . Well, any more questions?”

“No,” said Milos faintly, praying that Fulgur wouldn’t hit him again. The pain was spreading all the way to his stomach in waves of agony.

“Right. I’ll leave you, then. Thanks for this nice little chat.” He turned at the door. “Yup, I really like you, Milos Ferenzy. I just love talking to you.”