Mating Dance
Chapter 1
Jak:
Mort insisted on helping me loosen up, even though I had already loosened up and had been training for years to be able to kick, leap, spin, and even split from a dead-cold start. I let him stay, though; he was my best friend in the unit and I could use somebody close by, right now. They had brought up my opponent, wearing a long black cloak as well as the hood. Then they pulled the hood off, and I saw the man that I had to kill. She was a woman.
“What?” said Mort.
“Yeah,” I said. Automatically I had started some deep breathing. A mind like a still pond. “It makes sense, though. Their best male fighters aren’t bad, but they’re not as good as we are. Even the Mar know that.”
“What about with a bow? They’re very good with a bow.”
“Good thing this isn’t an archery contest,” I said. “Bow-and-arrow boys. Long-range heroes. Sooner or later, you have to get in close and use the weapons the gods gave us. And ours are better. So they sent in a woman to mess with my mind.”
“Well, don’t let her,” he said. “She may look designed for the bedroom, but their female assassins have killed our men in the past. Maybe their Council of Elders or Witches or Bitches or whatever picked her to get inside your head, get your own sword fighting against you, if you know what I mean.”
“It’s what you always mean,” I said. “But I don’t think with my sword. And you know me well enough to know I always scout out the territory. I looked into all the records and talked to every veteran I could find. We’re stronger, but their female champions are supposed to be wickedly fast. Nasty, too. I’m not underestimating her.”
“Yeah,” Mort said. “And forget that stuff from the ballads about her falling in love during the fight. This is to the finish, and you’d better be ready to finish her, because she’ll be looking to finish you.—That said, I will pause briefly to observe . . . Yeow! Those blue-green eyes with the dark hair are—.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That really helps me focus. And amazingly, none of those things had occurred to me, especially the part about maybe getting killed,”
He held up his hands. “Okay, okay. Glad to see your sarcasm gland is healthy.” He clapped me on the back. “You’re ready, brother. Kick her ass.”
I still couldn’t help thinking that “Kick his ass” would have been a little more rousing.
Jess:
I watched him and his second going through their rituals before the fight. He was tall, thin for one of their soldiers but wide in the shoulders, with long, sharp-cut muscles. The rippled box of his abdomen spoke of core strength. Our spies hadn’t been able to find out anything about him, except that he was one of a hundred of their best young fighters who had suddenly disappeared on the same day that the duel was agreed upon. With that build, I guessed him for a striker; he would take advantage of his long reach for kicks and punches. Still, it would be stupid to assume that he would be weak at grappling.
Until the marshals pulled the hood off, I had never seen his face. I caught him staring at me and met his eyes with my own. Sitting on top of that admittedly fine body was almost a clown mask: big, close-cropped head with a nose and ears a little too big, making his grey eyes look smaller than they were. Good teeth and chin, though. I saw him grin at his friend about something. And a strong jaw. The thought that in the next few minutes I might end all that he was, turn this good-natured-looking looking young man into inert flesh, was not one I wanted to entertain. I tried to drive it away by remembering that he would be trying to kill me, too. I flashed him a defiant smile, which he missed because he had turned his eyes aside on meeting mine. Good; he was uneasy. His people had handicapped themselves in the past with stupid notions about what women could and couldn’t do, and we had made them pay for their foolishness many times over the years. Now they knew what we could do—some of it, at least—but their fighters—who were all male—still thought of all women as noncombatants. They had gotten that nonsensical idea all tangled up with one of their few sensible ones about war—that attacking noncombatants was dishonorable. Mira massaged the cords of my neck. “I know they said to take him alive if possible,” she muttered. “They want to keep their diplomatic options open. I say, rot their diplomatic options; don’t take stupid chances. Win the fight and stay alive.”
“You mean abandon my plan to lose and die?” I asked earnestly.
The two referees, one from each side, announced loudly, “The combatants will now cooperate with the body-cavity search.”
“All right, smart mouth,” muttered Mira, “try not to enjoy this part too much.” She sent me toward the inspection circle with a slap on the butt and shouted loudly, “He’s yours, Jess!”
The inspection took a long time. After we had stripped, every body opening, every crevice was probed for weapons. At last both inspectors grudgingly declared themselves satisfied, and the rules were explained to us as we stood facing each other, naked.
“Standing for the people of Ter is Jak. Standing for the people of Mar is Jessica. Hear the rules, you and all who witness. If any part of your body touches the ground outside the fighting circle, you lose. Any interference in the fight by the spectators will be punished by death, and the offender’s side will forfeit the duel. Between the combatants, no empty-handed technique is prohibited. There will be no rest periods, no interruption of the combat except by the surrender, death, or obvious incapacity of one of the combatants, as determined by the judges. If you wish to surrender, so indicate by shouting, “I am beaten.” If you cannot speak, beat the ground three times with the palm of your hand, or t the sole of one foot. If you cannot speak or move in these ways, lie down flat on your back, with arms and legs spread wide, completely vulnerable to your opponent, who may choose to spare you, or not.”
They faced us off ten feet apart. We exchanged no salutes. We would now try to kill each other on behalf of our people; there was no point in pretending that our intent was “not personal.” The gong sounded. I stepped into the circle, toward the young man with the big ears and bright smile, whom I was about to kill.
Jak:
I wasn’t going to charge her and didn’t expect her to charge me; that was a high-risk, low-yield attack this early in the fight. We moved around, flirting with the edge of the critical distance for long strikes or kicks, now and then throwing feints that drew no reactions.
Jess:
I didn’t recognize his first attack consciously; it was too fast for that. Mother of All, it was fast: a low roundhouse kick off his forward leg. Skipping in to close the distance, he threw the kick so fast and hard at my thigh that I only had time to retreat by a step, so that the roots of his toes instead of his shin bone connected, a little like the difference between being hit with a paddle and being hit with a crowbar. It hurt, but it wouldn’t slow me down. And now I knew what his mind felt like in the tiny sliver of a moment before he attacked. I was in.
Jak:
Flicking a roundhouse kick into her thigh was just about the last thing I did right. I should have pressed her immediately; instead, I stood off to assess the effect. She took the initiative that I had given up. Her first real attack looked like a classic high-low combination. I parried the spear-hand she drove at my throat, looking for the groin or knee kick to follow. Even watching for it, I just barely slipped it, twisting to take the kick on my thigh. I thought of a midline counter attack. Instantly, she attacked on my preparation: a dull impact in my right eye with a burning pain in its center triggered an automatic counter jab to the chin by me, from which she fell back shaking her head, giving me time to cover up.
She had put a one-knuckle punch into my eye, only a quarter inch off target from bursting the eyeball, as her snap kick had been only a couple of inches off target from bursting my testicles. The eye hurt like hell and began to weep heavily, blurring everything it saw. My nose, whose root had taken some of the force of the punch, was running blood. I had been taught that pain was only a distraction if I let it be so, but the swelling of the eye that the knuckle strike promised could be deadly. I would need both eyes to fight this one. I noted with disgust that my jab had only split her lower lip. Reluctance to injure a woman was not going to be a problem any more; staying cool enough to think would be the challenge.
Although her hand strikes were not thunderous, they were quick and accurate enough to do damage. The swelling happened faster than expected; I was already losing peripheral vision on my right side, as I found out when I tried a long front kick. She seemed to be already in motion as I threw it; she skipped past it and an unseen roundhouse kick from her leading foot cracked like a whip against my right ear. I staggered away and the crowd whirled around me. She might have finished me off with her feet then, but she moved to hand attacks, conservatively keeping both feet on the ground, and I was able to smother her hand strikes enough to close with her, clinch, and clear my head. “They’re quicker, but we’re stronger,” Mort had said. I needed to be at close quarters like this to make my strength tell. As we grappled, I could tell that she was no novice at it; I felt her moving her weight this way and that, trying to lure me into overcommitting my own in some direction she could predict. She had her back near the edge of the circle, inviting me to push her out for an easy win. I let her believe she had fooled me. She pushed; I pushed back, as she predicted, but as she pulled and tried to pivot for a hip throw, I threw my weight even further forward at a different angle, hooked her near leg with my own and swept it back, spoiling her pivot and driving her hard to the ground. I planned to slam her head in the dirt as she fell, and end the fight. She took the fall on her shoulder with a grunt of pain, the price she had paid to keep her fall within the ring. I cocked my right fist to finish with a strike to her temple or throat; it could not have been more than a second that I hesitated, before instead pivoting 90 degrees to put a joint lock on her elbow. A pain exploded beside my one good eye. She had elbowed me in the temple, from below: incredible flexibility, since I had her other shoulder all but locked up. In that second while I was stunned, she slipped out from under my weight and regained her feet. I got up a half-second later, using one arm to protect my head, at the cost of a hard kick in the stomach. It hurt, but not enough to paralyze my diaphragm. I had bunched my other arm to protect my ribcage.
We both knew that time favored her, not me, with both my eyes now swelling shut. Peripheral vision would go first; I had already lost it in the right eye, so she would be working the right side, throwing hooks at my head, roundhouse kicks at the side of my right knee, looking for the knockout or the cripple through blows coming from the dark zone at the edges of my vision. The dark was spreading. I had to get inside again, to grappling range, where I still had a chance; there have been some very good blind wrestlers.
I knew she would give up the frontal attack on my stomach. Stomach muscles trained like mine and hers would not fall except to a very long siege, and she didn’t have the time. But she adapted well; a second after I had that thought, she threw a vicious left hook at my head, which I blocked with my right arm, creating an opening for a kick that cracked a couple of my ribs. Instead of falling back, though, I threw myself forward, reaching to pin her arms and take her down. She picked my reaching right hand out of the air, turned the wrist over as she pivoted away with her body, and twisted it, so that my wrist and elbow formed a squared-off S-bend. Keeping my captured wrist trapped against her shoulder, she bowed the shoulder at me forcefully. This pain was both sudden and unfamiliar; my body instinctively wanted to drop to my knees to reduce it. If I followed this instinct my face would meet one of her knees, or I would end up pinned on my stomach with my whole arm locked up, so I threw a punch at her jaw with my free hand and drove my right arm up explosively, hoping that the shock of the punch would help me break her grip. The punch never reached her, and what broke was my forearm, with a sickening, muffled ‘kruk’. I cried out, couldn’t help it. Something in my reaction seemed to unbalance her; she actually let go of the captured hand. I could ignore the pain for the short term, but not the structural damage; now I would have to fight with one hand and my feet. So I retreated, hoping to catch her coming in too eagerly. She hesitated, taking a deep breath as if she were the one shaking off a blow; then she pursued, throwing another low roundhouse kick at my lead leg. This time I saw it coming well enough to turn the hardened, thickened bone of my shin into her kick, hoping it would hurt her more than it did me. I took some satisfaction as the muscles around her eyes clenched. Yeah, that hurt.
It also seemed to free her from that momentary uneasiness. Her mouth twisted into a hard-lipped grin with a nod of acknowledgment, as if to say, “You’re not making it easy, but we both know I’m winning.” She had the discipline to take no needless chances. Instead, she began to dance around the circle, avoiding contact with me, flicking low-risk kicks at my knees and thighs, slaps at my ears, hooks at the right side of my head, where I would instinctively block with my bad right arm—all the while taking her time as my eyes swelled shut. I could not let her do that. I had to lure her in. So when she clipped me on the cheek bone with a hook punch aimed at my “good” eye, I staggered, let my head loll a little, projected confusion, invited her to close and finish me. She bought it—or I thought she had, seeing her right arm cocked to hook at the side of my head or neck. Instead, she stepped in quickly to bring a left elbow strike right up the middle, under my chin, and I went down. Her side of the crowd sent up a chorus of cheers. I got a leg under me and stood up slowly, tottering, blood from my bitten tongue running down my chin, only half-blocking another roundhouse kick to my temple, so that it mashed that same battered ear. The circle of the crowd spun and tipped and faded away. She had let me get to my feet; maybe she didn’t want to get into ground fighting, where my bad vision would be less of a handicap. I don’t know; I only remember finding myself standing, just barely, seeing her face with a miniature clarity at the other end of a long, narrow tunnel. I saw no elation of victory there; her eyes were only solemn and cautious. Their supernatural blue-green stood out against the black hair; I felt as if she had locked them on mine. Her backers in the crowd were shouting, “Finish him!” but she ignored them, wisely; she had already seen me fake a more serious injury in order to lure her in. Then she decided that I wasn’t faking this time. With a very small motion—a sign meant only for me, I thought—she shook her head, as if I had some choice in what would happen next.
Jess
What was he doing? The elbow strike should have finished it; I could feel that he barely knew where he was, glaring at me through the slits of his swollen eyes, fighting the dizziness from my elbow rattling his brains. There were no coherent tactics for me to read in his mind—only pain and shame and—trying to crowd these into the background—a blind refusal to submit to what was hurting him. So he was going to make me hurt him more. As long as he was on his feet, I had to presume him capable and knock him unconscious, cripple him, or kill him; both of us knew that. I knew I should not waste time groping for a low-risk way to win without killing him. We had both chosen to be here, knowing that the death of one of us was more than likely. Then I read his last, forlorn hope.
Jak
I breathed deeply, filling my lungs from the bottom up despite the spiking pain of the broken ribs, and I charged, demanding of my legs one more effort to drive me forward, the broken arm up to protect my head, watching for the groin kick but willing to take any other blow if I could only close with her and bull her out of the circle. I would lose the left arm’s protection once I closed with her; I would need my head and neck on her left side and my left arm binding her leg for the takedown.
No strike or kick came; she slithered under that reaching left arm and was behind me, her right leg grape-vining mine to trip me forward, and as my knees hit the sand she mounted my back and sank her leg hooks. I reached up to grab the choking arm that I knew was coming, and she wrung my broken fingers, distracting me with pain as she slipped in the stranglehold from the other side. I slammed the big knuckles of my left hand against the inside of her knee, the only target I could reach, but I couldn’t inflict quick damage from that position, only moderate pain, which she ignored. What followed was predictable, but I couldn’t do a thing about it except try to lock my chin down against my chest. The chin tuck bought me only a couple of seconds while her left hand wormed its way under it, around my neck, and then grabbed her own right bicep in the augmented bare-arm choke. Her biceps and forearm muscles inflated around my throat like a python’s coil. I could still breathe, a little. This choke is not painful; it’s merely fatal. In a few seconds, the air filled with black snowflakes that congealed into darkness. My face was in the dirt, her legs locked around mine to keep me from turning into her to break the choke. I kept struggling only for pride’s sake, and as the strength drained out of my body and it flailed in the panic of coming death, she whispered in my ear. In a soft, breathy voice at odds with what we were doing, she said, “You did all you could. But it’s over now. No more. Let it go, and sleep. Sleep.”
The last thought I remember was a fuzzy-minded refusal of that seductive oblivion, but my refusal did not matter. My mind floated out of my body and dissolved in the dusty air of the fighting circle.