“This is such a time,” Dietrich finished, and let it lie there in the space between them, with the coins.
The priest translated the words into the Mongol tongue, and Tegusgal’s only response was a soft grunt. The Mongol’s attention was on the sack of coins, his fingers dipping in and drawing out coins at random. Finally, the man’s dark eyes flickered toward him once more. Tegusgal’s lips curled into a cruel smile and he said a single phrase, short and direct.
The priest translated. “He finds your deal agreeable.”
Zug hustled beside Kim through the maze of tents that formed the fighters’ camp, an air of energy and urgency informing their pace. They rushed passed fires where meat roasted on spits, dodged around clumps of men bent over impromptu games of knucklebones, and diverted from their path to avoid a crowd forming around two men who were settling a disagreement over a camp girl by bare-knuckled brawling. They were running out of time.
They had not been able to speak with Madhukar. He had been impossible to find since word had come from the guards that he was to fight next in the arena. Worse still, they had been waiting for confirmation from the street rats that the Rose Knight, Andreas, would be the Western fighter. Zug had thought it too risky to warn Madhukar of the plan far in advance, and now they only had a few minutes before Tegusgal’s men arrived and escorted the wrestler to his bout. By the time they reached the tent, Zug and Kim were both winded.
Gasping for breath, Kim flipped back the flap on the wrestler’s tent and stared in shock. Madhukar was calmly seated on a mat, a girl massaging each of his massive arms while a third tried to dig her delicate hands into the hard muscles of his shoulders and neck. He was wearing a narrow loincloth that was only a token nod toward modesty. He was not even remotely ready to fight in the arena.
“What has happened?” Kim asked, and Zug could hear the strain in his voice. Zug felt at a loss as well, and he struggled to keep his panic in check.
Madhukar glanced up, his face twisting into a dour mask of displeasure as he did. He gave a gesture with his right arm, speaking bluntly in his halting grasp of the Mongol tongue. “Tegusgal changed his mind,” he grunted. “Said other man would fight instead.”
A cold fist wrapped itself around Zug’s gut and tightened into a viselike grip. Did the Khan’s man know something of what they were planning? No, he pushed that fear aside, if he knew, Madhukar would be locked in a cage now, not having his limbs massaged by lithe slave-girls. Tegusgal might toy with them, but he would not take any chances. If he knew, he would have come for Kim and himself already.
“Why?” Zug asked; at the same time Kim asked, “Who?”
Madhukar answered both of them with a shrug that only confirmed what they already feared. Why would Tegusgal have explained anything to the big wrestler? He barely treated the fighters in the Circus as anything above well-bred dogs, even at his most generous.
As there was nothing else to be learned from the taciturn wrestler, Kim and Zug turned away from Madhukar’s tent. They wandered, somewhat aimlessly, toward the middle of the camp, somewhat stunned and unsure what to do about the chance for freedom that might, even as they stood there, be slipping away like grains of sand through their open fingers. Zug felt a fury boiling inside him. It was a reaction to the futility of their circumstances, he knew, a response that was distracting to a warrior, but it was not unexpected. He wanted to scream, to grab any of the slaves and other oppressed fighters wandering blithely past and shake them. Grab them by their hair and force them to face the visceral truth of their circumstances. He inhaled slowly and deeply, drawing air in through his nose and letting it back out even more slowly through his pursed lips. Embracing such a fury would be a fatal mistake, and all chances of their plan ever succeeding would vanish.
“The boy,” Zug said, looking at Kim. “We could still get word back to the Rose Knights.”
Kim’s face was drained of color, the ashen pallor of death. “He’s already come and gone,” the Flower Knight said, as though hope were a delicate vase suddenly dropped and shattered on the ground, the reality only now sinking in.
“Then everything rests on him,” Zug said, looking toward the arena. “One man. Fighting alone.”
Kim jerked his head back, a smile fighting its way onto his lips. “We tried to make it otherwise, didn’t we? But that is the way it always is, in the end.”