Milos raised his arm in acknowledgement and walked to his corner to await the bell.
Markus didn’t hear the chime above the roar but the two men closed, Milos dwarfed by Denam. The gerant full-blood kept his hands down and let Milos take a punch. It was as if he had swung at a tree. Denam’s head moved slightly to the left with the blow. Milos clubbed him two-handed across the other side of his face and Denam’s head lurched to the right. Denam returned his gaze to his opponent and grinned, his teeth bloody. Milos didn’t appear to understand. He looked down at his fists as if there might be something wrong with them.
Denam slapped the man, brushing his arms away. Blood sprayed from Milos’s mouth and he staggered as if drunk. Denam caught him in two great hands, one wrapped around his neck, the other encompassing his thigh, and lifted him four yards above the boards before slamming him down, full-bodied, face first.
Milos did not rise. An apprentice scrambled in to scatter sand across the crimson smear left behind when they dragged him out beneath the lowest rope.
Markus wasn’t alone in thinking that Denam was finished for the night, but the flow of the crowd indicated another challenger coming to the fore. The newcomer appeared, climbing clear of the throng. From behind, Markus saw only a dark cloak and black hair. This challenger stood even shorter than Milos, little more than six foot and of considerably lighter build. The audience hushed in surprise.
‘Hunska?’ the whisper went round.
‘Fool!’ came the reply.
The challenger might not be a giant but even so hunskas were never this tall or broad-shouldered. Denam fixed the newcomer with a stare so murderous that Markus felt the need to run boiling up inside him. As an empath he was used to swimming in the currents of others’ emotions but the ring-fighter’s anger ran swifter and more deep than anything he’d felt before and at each moment threatened to overwhelm his senses.
The challenger ducked beneath the top rope.
‘Drunk,’ someone speculated.
Markus tried to imagine how drunk a person would have to be to think this a good idea. Too drunk to stand, probably. This one didn’t move as if inebriated though.
The hush fell to silence as the challenger’s cloak fluttered from the ring. The woman wore the same as the ring-fighters, just a white loin-cloth and a white band of cloth bound tight around her chest, her pale skin accentuating the redness of Denam’s complexion.
The fight-master didn’t approach to learn the challenger’s name. Instead he raised his voice, ‘Nona of the convent.’
Nona didn’t lift her arm to acknowledge the crowd’s roar but she did make a slow turn, and when the black orbs of her eyes swept across him Markus knew that he had been seen.
‘Fight!’
Denam came slowly to meet the novice, fists raised to protect his throat and eyes, his stance closed to defend his groin. Markus watched Nona intently, trying to see anything of the girl he’d known over those weeks in Giljohn’s cage. She was two years his junior so she would be around seventeen, but she looked every inch a woman. Long-limbed, lean, an athlete’s body, each muscle chiselled in hard relief, flat belly above the jut of her hipbones. Even frightened for her as he was, Markus couldn’t deny she drew his eye in ways unbecoming to a Holy Brother.
Nona stepped in with a swift confidence, striking Denam just below the ribs on his left side, five or six blows landing with the rapidity of a woodpecker hammering at a tree. She punched with her whole body, swivelling at the waist. Denam laughed the blows off and swept a hand at the novice. She evaded him with ease, landing three or four more punches in the same spot. Hard as she must be hitting the man, Markus couldn’t see what hope Nona had of victory. The muscle covering Denam’s bones lay inches thick and the bones beneath must be like those of a draught horse. She might as well try to punch a bear into submission.
Denam squared up against Nona, his hatred for her obvious even as he tried to laugh at her efforts. Nona stood her ground and the crowd drew in its breath. Denam swung with an arm that looked as thick around as Markus’s chest. The fist he drove at Nona was the size of her skull.
She took the punch in the face, her head snapping to the right. The follow-up came from the left, snapping her head back the other way. Markus imagined those fists would shatter a skull, leave cheekbones in fragments, break a neck …
Nona looked up at the fighter towering above her and smiled, her teeth unbloodied. Denam seemed astonished, the crowd roared in wonder. Magic? But Markus had sensed no enchantment, not the slightest crackle of it. He could only imagine that she had moved her head at the same speed as the fists seeking it, allowing only a gentle contact.
Again Nona peppered the same spot below Denam’s ribs with half a dozen blows in the space of a heartbeat or two. She leapt back, rolling under a sweeping hand, rising in the same motion, kicking at her target, evading a second questing hand and spinning to land another kick in the same spot.
Denam came towards her, his own roar louder than the mob. As he advanced he favoured his left side. A small thing that could easily pass unnoticed. Nona twisted clear, bounced off two sets of ropes and landed a flying kick, just below his ribs.
For long minutes the fight continued, Denam’s attacks almost brushing Nona’s pale skin but never quite finding it. Nona landing a score of punches and kicks on her target, perhaps two score. Denam’s rage grew, his face crimson, spitting and foaming, howling threats and promises. But he crouched over the injured side now, the bruised lower ribs, covering them with his elbow. He leaned against the corner post, hitching in a breath.
‘Come on, big boy.’ Nona’s first words in the fight.
They worked like a spark to flash-powder. Denam threw himself forward with a scream. Nona dived beneath his outstretched arms, rolled head over heels between his legs, through the opening left as fury overcame caution, and drove her heel into his groin with all the speed and strength she possessed.
Denam made it two more strides before he realized that Nona was no longer in front of him, and a further stride before the pain hit home. The gerant’s legs forgot whatever orders they had and dropped him to the planks where he curled around his agony, blind to the world.
Nona sprang to her feet, the fight still in her face, teeth bared. With the awful gale of Denam’s hatred subsumed into his wordless agony, Markus could now feel Nona’s emotions and found himself rocked back upon his heels by the raw animal aggression bleeding off her. He had experienced something similar when a wrong turn had taken him to the dog-pits beyond the walls of Old Town. A bloodied mastiff with its jaws locked around the throat of another hound had given off the same explosive violence that the novice did. Markus fully expected Nona to fall upon her prey, gouging Denam’s eyes from their sockets or stamping his face to pulp. But instead, in the space of five deep breaths, she drew it all back in, every piece, until there was nothing he could read above the mixed sea of emotion all around him. Of all that he’d seen that night it was this quenching of fury that was the most remarkable to him.
Ignoring the cheers, and the fight-master coming to question or reward her, Nona vaulted the ropes and dropped into the crowd. Within moments she was at Markus’s side, vibrant, sweat-soaked, alive, the alien blackness of her eyes level with his.
‘You came,’ she said.
Markus shrugged. ‘You asked me to.’
Markus had grown beyond Nona’s expectations. She remembered a fierce spiky-haired farm-boy who had welcomed her to Giljohn’s