Cracked Skulls

The heat was a living thing. It rose off the sand and settled over him like a second skin, and he let it. He had learned young that a warrior who fought the sun spent himself before the fight even began.

Across the ring, the boy waited. Staff loose in his brown hands, weight balanced so lightly he seemed to hover a finger's breadth above the grains. There was something unnerving in his stillness — the patience of someone who had already decided how this would end.

"This is not a dance, Efren."

His uncle's voice, dry as the wind, from the sideline. Efren let the corner of his mouth twitch. Duilo's irritation was one of the few pleasures the training ground offered. But he did not turn his head. If he lost focus now, the boy would open his skull.

He dropped his shoulders and let himself fall into the trance his father had taught him before he could walk — the long breath, the loosening, the mind sliding free of the aching body. The boy might be a mid-level Saraku, a mirror who could steal any move he saw and give it back better. It did not change what Efren was.

The old teachers said the three gifts had once been a single light — the sight, the mirror, the cold-and-flame — three pearls of one broken thing, scattered when the world was young. Efren had never felt much like a shard of anything holy. But he was Zsoru, and that was enough to keep him alive a little longer.

The command to begin was given.

The boy moved — and Efren had already seen it. A flash behind his eyes, half a heartbeat old: the staff swinging for his temple. He leaned out of a blow that had not yet arrived and answered with a kick to the ribs. Saw the boy step sideways before he did it. Changed the angle mid-strike. His foot found belly, and he pivoted for a second blow —

— and the boy was simply gone from where he should have been, faster than the sight could serve.

They broke apart and circled, chests heaving under the white afternoon glare. The boy's next moves flickered at the edge of Efren's mind, faint and shifting, changing even as the boy himself decided them. For a Zsoru, speed is everything, his father had told him, more than once, in the flat voice he used for facts and disappointments both. It was one thing to see a strike coming. It was another to stop it.

The boy dropped into the first sand stance. Efren's eyes narrowed. No boy their age could hold that stance with the grace it demanded — the whole body flowing with the enemy's movement instead of against it. It was a weakness. He would use it.

He came in light-footed, floating over the grains, and drove his fist at the boy's nose, adjusting his line at the last instant to beat the sight-reading he knew the boy would try.

But the boy took the sand stance and flowed, folding around the strike like water around a stone. Against a true master it would have been useless. Efren was nowhere near a master, and the boy knew it.

The fight collapsed onto him. He blocked, ducked, gave ground, evading with the quickness of a startled jackdaw — and it was not enough. The sands shifted; the staff grazed his side; his breath caught for half a beat.

Half a beat was all the boy needed.

The staff arced back and cracked against his skull with a sound he had already heard once, moments before, in the flash. The world went white and loud. He dropped to his knees, clutching his head, and felt something strange bloom in his palms — a warmth, spreading out from nowhere, gentle as a hand laid over a wound.

For one ringing moment, under the white, he thought he heard a woman's voice — close as breath, older than the sand.

Not yet.

Then there was only the pain, and Duilo's shadow falling across him.

"Shahti. Tell me where it hurts, boy." His uncle's tone was mild, as if discussing the weather, or his wife's demands at the evening fire.

"I am well." The words came out wrong, and his skull felt light enough to float off his neck. Blood had already dried in crusted lines around his eyes. Someone called for the healers.

He sat a while, cooking in the sun, then batted the helping hands away and stood on his own.

The boy who had beaten him stood apart, a cup of scrub wine in one hand — that vile brew that scoured the throat and soured the mind. Efren was surprised he could stomach it. At seventeen the boy was already the second tallest man Efren had ever seen; only his own father, who stood tall as two men stacked shoulder to shoulder, was taller.

"You won today, Doze."

Doze answered with one of his sly, crooked-toothed smiles and said nothing. He never said anything. Efren found the silence more insulting than any boast.

Doze walked on. Efren's head swam, and he swayed. The healers had drawn out what would have killed him; the rest was only weakness, and weakness was his own.

"You nearly had him," Duilo said at his shoulder.

"It does not change anything. Father will not hear nearly. He will hear that I lost." He spat into the sand.

His uncle smiled, unbothered. "As he should. He goes easy on you boys. In my day we were whipped and tied out in the night cold and made to run until we bled." He said it fondly, as men do about the cruelties they survived.

Efren walked toward the equipment hut without answering.

He was afraid, and he was angry, and he let neither show, because a man who showed either did not live long enough to grow old. The Sun Race was coming — that lethal running that culled every year's boys down to those the desert judged worthy. He could not afford fear now.

And there was other news riding the merchant roads, worse than the Race. The Eagle Empire had swallowed the Gryu tribes across the sea. Whole peoples, gone under the Eagle's talons in a season.

Dark times. A man needed to be strong.

He did not feel strong. He felt like a boy with a cracked skull, walking toward a father he could not please.