Damon Knight - Orbit 20

He was drunk, mean drunk. How grotesque he appeared in the muted light of the glowing colored lanterns! He was so broad and so short. The features of his face, already distorted by his twisted genes, were now beaten and bruised, swollen and lumpy. He had not won by the easy road I had taken, but he had won all the same.

When I sat down at their table his head was resting in his arms. He was either singing or crying in a low groaning tone.

“Well, since it’s me and you for the purse, I don’t see why we can’t be civil about it. I’d like to buy you and your lady a drink or two. I’d like to be friends.”

He raised his broad ugly face from his arms, and now I saw, with a suppressed shudder, a second pair of hands tensed gripping the table.

“You know how I beat them, pretty boy, how I’m going to beat you?” He spoke so quietly that I could barely hear him.

And now he held out his four arms in the air for my inspection.

“I beat them with these short thick arms, you think. But you’re wrong, I beat them because I was born mean. I was born to be hit and hit back. I beat them because I was born a mutant, and I hate every normal son of a bitch alive.

“And do you know, pretty boy, I hate you most of all. Because she smiles for you. Because they all smile for you, when they’re laughing at me, when they’re frightened of me.”

He was speaking softly, almost in a whisper; it was hard to follow him over the raucous dance music in the bar.

She held one of his arms, pleading with him in a soft, worried voice, until suddenly he slapped her viciously across the face.

Her eyes grew even larger in shock; her mouth was open and round, as if to say, “Oh,” with a thin trickle of blood from her ripe lower lip, to match the tears which slowly spilled and glistened on her cheeks.

His head slowly sank down, into the tangle of his arms, and he began to mumble once again to himself, in the darkness he had created.

She touched my arm as I rose to leave.

After the fight, when I recreated it in my mind, it seemed that I had done everything with genius. I easily stayed away from him in the early rounds, while he threw frustrating, exhausting punches into the empty air; my footwork was superb. He was even easier to hit than I had imagined. I had my best round in the sixth, when I began to land a series of hard high kicks; it must have seemed only a matter of time until he sank under a sea of blows and exhaustion. At the end of the round they gave me a standing ovation; I already knew I had lost the fight.

I remember the relentless expression in his eyes, the inexhaustible energy expressed by the slope of his shoulders, the opening and closing of his four hands, as he sat across from me in his comer between rounds.

Later, when I could see anything, I could see her. There were many people in the ring but I could see her form, first as a misty ghost in a cloud of pain, then clear; like an angel she was etched against the sky, while I lay on the ground, on my back, defeated.

“He’s all right,” she said. “Oh, thank the Goddess, he’s all right.”

And then she was gone, and there was the old man, methodically cleaning my face with a wet cloth, his expression as calm and distant as ever.

“You fought very well,” was all he said.

Later that night I was awakened by a pounding on the door. I dragged my aching body out of bed, and through my swollen eyes I made out the form of one of the boys who worked at the tavern across the street.

“The old man’s in the tavern and he’s pushing the mutant hard, looking for trouble,” he told me.

For a while I just stood there, and thought about going back to bed and pretending it was all a bad dream. I felt as if I had been trampled by a horse. Then I ran down the stairs and across the street.

“You’re not actually much of a fighter,” was the first thing I heard as I opened the door. “You’re too stupid,” the old man continued loudly. “Oh, it’s all right in a ring where they keep inside the rules and someone tells you what to do. But outside the ring you’re too stupid to adjust adequately to your environment.”

The girl had one of the mutant’s four arms, struggling with him, no doubt to save the life of a worthless old fool. The other people in the tavern were silent with shock. They didn’t know the old man.

“If you want to wager your purse,” he went on, “against this modest purse of mine, and learn, as well, as valuable a lesson as you have taught my young protégé, I will show you the difference between the martial arts and playing games in the ring. I must warn you, though, it will be rough.”

The mutant hurled the girl aside and lurched to his feet. He fumbled at his belt and threw his purse on the counter where the old man had set his.

“Where? Where do you want it, old man, here or outside?”

The old man sprang to the counter, scooped up an enormous pitcher of wine and threw it on the mutant’s feet, which were, I noticed, encased in new sandals made of slippery leather. Then he tossed a bowl of pepper in his face.

It was brutal and quick. The mutant was coughing and choking from the cloud of pepper, slipping and sliding on the wet floor in his wet shoes, while the old man hopped about like a cricket. He was in rare form, and he fought a brutal fight.

He snatched up a tall stool and prodded the mutant gingerly a couple of times with it to put him further off balance, and then quite suddenly, he struck him a terrible snapping blow on the knee. Almost before the mutant struck the ground, the old man dropped the stool, sprang to him and snatched one of his four wildly flailing arms out of the air. This he whipped viciously in a circle, then let go, and ran back to pick up his stool again.

“Have you had enough,” he asked cheerfully, “or must I strike you again with this stool?”

The mutant sat up with an expression of agony. I don’t think the leg was broken, but I know the arm was. His other three hands were clenched into fists, his short, massive arms pulsing with muscle. My God, I thought, he’s going to try to fight on.

I suppose I intended to come between them, somehow to stop them, and all she saw was me running to aid the old man. I don’t know. I only know the mutant’s woman lunged at me from the side, and I felt a sharp pain in my arm.

She held the dagger high to show me my own blood.

“I’ll kill anyone who touches him. I’ll kill you both. Take the purse and get out. Get out.” And it seemed to me, with all the pain I felt, the pain from the knife wound, the aching from my beating, the agony of being misunderstood, that on some deeper level of my being I felt a thrill of giddy awe. Somewhere inside my mind the puzzle fell in place, and I knew fully, for the first time in my life, woman in all her mysterious glory.

From then on my memories are like disjointed dreams. My mind was swimming from loss of blood, exhaustion, the beating in the ring, or just the confusion of too much color and too much noise.

Someone, I don’t know who, tied up my arm with a scarf; the wound was shallow but painful.

With a strange urgency, I followed a form through the streets. At times I vaguely knew who I followed, at others he was only a shadow. And yet I found him where I somehow knew I would find him, all alone in the middle of that street. The cages were open, empty. Some of the astonished merchants were still counting their coin.

“Is the money all gone, old man?”

Later on, when I thought about him, I liked most to remember him then. He seemed filled with an inexpressible mixture of wild joy and grief. His eyes, I realized with astonishment, were filled with tears. It was the only emotion I had ever seen him show.

“The birds are free,” was all he said.