“But you have a key.” The gladiator looked him over, sizing him up.
“I do not.” It was a lie; Arram knew the spells that would open the room. Now he really disliked this man. “Unless you are hurt or seriously ill, I must ask you to leave.” He moved until he stood directly in front of the stillroom door. He fumbled for a protection spell that would be just enough to send this man on his way. He was terrified that he would use the wrong thing.
“I have a headache.” The man took a few steps toward Arram, a smile on his mouth. Arram recognized the expression in his eyes: it was contempt, something he knew all too well from school. “Give me something for it,” the gladiator ordered.
“Your training chiefs have headache medications,” Arram replied. Ramasu had explained that on the first day.
“But I want healing from you, boy.” The man shook his arms out in front of him, as boxers and masters of unarmed combat did. He clenched his fists, making the joints crackle. His muscles bulged.
Arram called a ball of glittering black fire to his hand. “Go to your training master, please,” he said calmly, glaring. “Before I help you outside.”
“Kottrun, what are you doing here?” Musenda walked in. “The practice chief is looking for you.”
“I have a headache,” the other gladiator snapped as Arram slowly absorbed his Gift. Kottrun added, “And this piece of arena bait—”
Musenda cut him off. “You’ll have it worse when the practice chief gets his hands on you. Besides, you know the chiefs carry what’s needful for the usual things.”
Kottrun glared at Arram. “You’ll regret this,” he said, his voice so quiet only Arram would hear. He walked out, passing too close to Musenda for politeness. Arram watched him go.
“What was he really after, youngster?” Musenda asked. “You’re standing by the room with the serious medicines.”
“We had only reached the headache area of our conversation,” Arram explained. He silently cursed the bone-deep school tradition of never reporting bad behavior to instructors. Besides, the way days in the camp went, he might never have to deal with Kottrun again.
Musenda slapped the doorpost casually. “Well, if he bothers you, let Ramasu or me know. Why don’t you lock up and go get something to eat?”
“I’ll do that, as soon as I’ve finished my chores,” Arram assured the older man. “Thank you. Oh, and wait!” He ran into the stillroom and retrieved the sack with the toys he had gotten for Musenda’s family. “They aren’t much, but I thought the children would like them,” he explained as he gave the sack to the gladiator.
Musenda looked at the little doll, the lion, and the gorilla, all with moving wooden limbs. “You’re a good-hearted fellow,” he said gruffly. “If I can ever do anything for you…”
Arram started to shake his head, then thought again. He grinned. “As a matter of fact, a close friend of mine thinks you are the best gladiator who ever lived,” he said. “She would love a favor of yours.”
Once Musenda was gone, Arram shut the door and locked it. Relieved, he sat on a bench and wiped his sweaty forehead on his sleeve. This thing with Kottrun was more like what he’d expected when he first arrived and hadn’t seen until today.
That was wrong of me, he thought shakily. Treating him like trouble. What if he was truly ill? I will have failed him.
He didn’t act ill, his common sense told him. He acted like a bully, or a thief. Arram answered him as he would have answered a bully. If I don’t take it from the likes of Tristan or Diop, why would I take it from him?
Arram considered telling Ramasu but changed his mind. It wasn’t necessary; Musenda had handled Kottrun. And Arram didn’t want to confess that he’d been about to strike a non-mage with his Gift.
Still a little shaky, Arram left the infirmary, then checked and double-checked the locking spells on the windows and doors, in case Kottrun returned to break in. Only then did he go to supper. Soon enough he would be gone, never to return if he had his say. Let another bully clash with Kottrun, someone who was allowed to teach him a lesson.
—
“Don’t waste time easing mild injuries,” Ramasu told Arram the afternoon before the games. The fighters had the day to themselves, so they had no patients. Instead they readied the supplies they would use the next day. “You’ll need your strength for the big ones. Treat them enough to keep them alive for a day, until we can tend their injuries properly. We will have many fighters with wounds that will kill them if we don’t keep them alive. Pass the ones whose hurts you are unsure of to Daleric.”
The gladiators’ usual healer had returned to his cottage on the Arena Road that afternoon. He had brought three more healers with him, two men and a woman, who would help on the day of the games and the days after.
Arram stopped packing a box full of jars of ointments and cloths. “Unsure?”
“Unsure whether their injuries truly require healing or whether they are simply trying to get out of the next battle.” Ramasu put an armload of jars into another box and set them in order. “Some new people will pretend they are worse off than they are, particularly since you are new. Don’t let them do it. If they’re caught by the commander of the arena, they’ll be hanged off the side of the arena at tomorrow’s sunrise.”
“Death by hanging has to be more merciful than the games,” Arram commented as he hammered a lid onto his box.
“They aren’t hanged by the neck. They’re hanged by the wrists and left to rot. The arena is kinder.” Ramasu rested a hand on Arram’s shoulder. “I’ll have a nausea potion for you in the morning. And a sleeping potion tonight, for both of us. Understand, if you served on a battlefield, it would be far worse. There are so many more killed or wounded. This is the closest to a battlefield I can bring you at present.”
Arram began to place bandages in a fresh box. “Why? Why is it needful?”
“Why was the typhoid hospital needful, or any other plague or surgery I’ve brought you to? A mage with healing skills must be ready for such things. This is how we repay the gods for our Gifts.”
Arram nodded, though the thought of working on a battlefield, particularly after the busier days here, made him dizzy. He was dreading the new day so much he had refused his noon meal.
“I knew nothing of desperate sickrooms with more than one person to tend when I was your age,” Ramasu said as they worked. “I was to be a priest of Mithros and rise high in my duke’s service. My marriage to a daughter of His Grace’s house had been arranged since we were children. I was fifteen when my Gift blossomed. Within a year I had been disowned and driven from my city, my father’s parting purse in my hand and my mother’s curse in my ears. I had managed to destroy half of the god’s temple.”