Luna Page 37

  Carlinhos turns his head to one side, grins at his sister.

  ‘Ola.’

  ‘My silver tongue let me down this time, Carlo.’

  Carlinhos’s face twitches sad. He grimaces to another deep working by the masseur. You are magnificent, Ariel thinks, and I think of knives slicing that perfect skin and I am filled with cold horror.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Nothing to be sorry for,’ Carlinhos says.

  ‘I can try … No I can’t do anything. I’ve reached the end of words. They will have their duel.’

  ‘I know.’

  Ariel kisses the back of her brother’s neck.

  ‘Kill him, Carlo. Kill him slowly and painfully. Kill him in front of their eyes so they can see every last thing they hoped to do to our family bleed out in front of them. Kill him for me.’

  ‘Can I come? Can I?’

  ‘No!’ Rafa thunders. Robson trots at his father’s heel.

  ‘I want to support Carlinhos.’

  ‘No,’ Rafa says again.

  ‘Why not? You’re going. Everyone is going.’

  Rafa turns to Robson.

  ‘It’s not handball. It’s not a game. It’s not a thing you support. We’re going because Carlinhos does not fight alone. I don’t want to go. I don’t want him to go. But I will go. And you will not.’

  Robson shuffles, frowns.

  ‘Then I want to see him now.’

  Rafa sighs in exasperation.

  ‘Okay.’

  The gym is the least used of Boa Vista’s chambers. Bots have cleared years of dust, slowly warmed it from the chill of the eternal deep rock. Carlinhos has hung ceramic bells on ribbons from the ceiling. Seven bells. In a pair of fighting trunks he feints and dodges, cuts and pivots across the floor.

  ‘Irmão.’

  Carlinhos comes panting to the rail. He sets the knife on the ledge, rests his chin on his folded arms.

  ‘Hey, Robson.’

  ‘Tio.’

  ‘Did you ring any?’ Rafa nods at the hanging bells.

  ‘I never ring any bells,’ Carlinhos says. A movement, so fast and unexpected Carlinhos has no answer to it. Robson presses the tip of the knife to the soft skin under Carlinhos’s right ear.

  ‘Robson …’

  ‘Hadley Mackenzie taught me, if you take a man’s knife, you must use it against him. Never let go of the knife.’

  Carlinhos is liquid action; he ducks away from the knife point and in the same flow of movement twists Robson’s wrist firmly enough to teach pain. Carlinhos scoops up the dropped knife.

  ‘Thank you, Robson. I’ll watch for that.’

  All the bells chime, a gentle tintinnabulation. Another small quake.

  Carlinhos comes out of the bathroom, eyes wide.

  ‘There’s a whirlpool in there. I didn’t even have a whirlpool in Boa Vista.’

  ‘It’s the least I can do, Carlo.’

  Lucas’s preparation of Camp Carlinhos has been unusually difficult. The wedding fiasco still taints the social atmosphere. Should news of a duel between enemy Dragons leak, even the threat of litigation from Cortas and Mackenzies would not stay the gossip networks. Handsome boys fighting in not many clothes. Even better than handsome boys marrying. The exclusive apartment on Orion hub was hired through shell companies; the printer designs commissioned through another and the masseurs, physiotherapists, psychologists, cooks, dietitians, knife-smiths, discreet security hired anonymously through agency AIs. A training room has been built and Mariano Gabriel Demaria brought secretly from Queen of the South and set up in the adjoining apartment. Last of all, Carlinhos’s fighting knives, of lunar steel, have been carried from João de Deus and installed in the dojo.

  ‘This is the bedroom.’

  ‘I can walk right round this bed.’

  Carlinhos collapses back on to the bed and folds his arms behind his head. His glee is bright. Lucas’s mouth tightens.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry. This. I should never have asked …’

  ‘You didn’t ask. I offered.’

  ‘But, if I hadn’t held out on Lucasinho …’

  ‘Ariel came to see me in Boa Vista. Do you know what she said? That she was sorry she couldn’t stop it. And you’re sorry because you think you’re the cause of it. Luca, I always knew this would come. I printed out my first knife, and I looked at it and I saw this. Not Hadley MacKenzie, but a fight where the family would depend on me.’

  It’s a forgiving.

  ‘Hadley Mackenzie is fit and very fast.’

  ‘I’m fitter.’

  ‘Carlinhos …’

  Lucas looks at his brother, sprawled on the bed, happy on real cotton. In twenty-four hours you could be dead. How can you bear that? How can you bear to waste an instant to anything that is trivial? Perhaps that’s the fighter’s wisdom; the trivia, the immediate physicality of high thread-count imported cotton, the felt things are the vital ones.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re faster.’

  Wagner picks up the knives, instinctively finds the balance. He looks at the things in his hands. He’s just past full dark and his focus and concentration are at their most intense. He could spend hours obsessing of the line of the edge, the metallurgy.

  ‘You do that too comfortably,’ Carlinhos says.

  ‘Scary things.’ Wagner sets them back in the case. ‘I’ll be there. I don’t want to be, but I will.’

  ‘I don’t want to be either.’

  Brothers hug. Carlinhos had offered a room in the apartment but Wagner has called on the pack. The Packhouse is a cold and dim place when the Earth is dark. He came up from Theophilus the night before and slept fitfully in the pack bed, tiny and spread across as much space as he could, but still one man; troubled by recurring dreams of standing naked in the middle of the Ocean of Storms. Analiese doesn’t believe his story about going up to Meridian on family business but she can find no obvious lie to get purchase on.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ Wagner asks. Carlinhos’s laugh startles him.

  ‘All the others, they all say how sorry they are, how guilty they feel. Not one has asked if they can do anything for me.’

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I should like very much to eat some meat,’ Carlinhos says. ‘Yes, I’d like that.’

  ‘Meat.’

  ‘You can eat that?’

  ‘Not usually in this aspect, but for you, irmão …’

  Sombra locates a churrasceria, vainly expensive. It boasts rarebreed pork and gin-massaged, music-soothed beef from dwarf Kuroge Washu cattle. Glass-fronted meat safes display the hanging carcases, small as pets. The prices are vertiginous. Carlinhos and Wagner take a booth and they talk and dip their wafers of exquisite beef into the sauces but most of the time they keep companionable silence together, as close men do, and find they have communicated everything.

  Run with me, he said.

  Marina and Carlinhos drop on to the back of the Long Run. In five breaths they have matched the rhythm of the ritual. Marina is not afraid to sing this time. There is only one Long Run. It hasn’t stopped, day or night, since she last dropped out of it. Then her heart, her blood, her muscles tune to the unity.

  Yes, I will, yes, she said. Marina had come to Carlinhos’s call expecting sex, hoping for something else. Something to take them out of this apartment that stank of the close presence of death. Carlinhos wanted to go home and run. João de Deus was only an hour away on the fast train. She and Carlinhos travelled in their Long Run kit. They drew admiring smiles and glances. They are handsome together. You know who they are? Oh, really? Marina’s kit was smaller and tighter than she had ever dared before; her body paint more aggressive. I’m tighter and more aggressive, she thought. She had retrieved the green tassels of Ogun from vacuum storage and wore them with pride.

  Marina kicks forward to the head of the run. Carlinhos laughs and comes up on her shoulder. Restless
blade, Ogun’s knife cuts out-of-doors. Restless blade. Ogun’s knife goes for the kill. Then time, self, consciousness vanish.

  They fall on to the train home, sweet and sweaty, fall into the seats as the train accelerates on to Equatorial One, fall together. Marina curls up against Carlinhos. He is so good, he brings out her inner cat. She loves the otherness of men; they are as unknowable as animals. She loves them as things different from and marvellous to her self.

  ‘Will you come?’ Carlinhos mumbles.

  She has been expecting and dreading this question so her answered is prepared.

  ‘I will, yes. But …’

  ‘You won’t look.’

  ‘Carlinhos, I’m sorry. I can’t see you get hurt.’

  ‘I won’t die.’

  Ten minutes to Meridian.

  ‘Carlo.’ This is the first time Marina has ever called Carlinhos by his most intimate name; his family-and-amors name. ‘I’m going to leave the moon.’

  He says, ‘I understand,’ but Marina feels Carlinhos’s body tighten against hers.

  ‘I’ve got the money and my mum will be all right and your family has been wonderful to me, but I can’t stay. I’m scared every day. Every single day, all the time. I’m afraid all the time. That’s not a way to live. I have to leave, Carlinhos.’

  Passengers are already rising and collecting their children, luggage, friends in anticipation of arrival. On the pressurised side of the platform Marina and Carlinhos kiss. She stands on tiptoe. Train travellers smile.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ Marina says. They go to their separate apartments and in the morning Carlinhos walks out to fight.

  The bots finish dusting the courtroom moments before the combatants arrive. It hasn’t been used in a decade. The air has been scrubbed; no taint, real or imagined, of old blood. The courtroom feels cold though it has been brought up to skin-temperature. It is small and very beautiful, panelled and floored in wood. Its heart is the fighting ring, a five-metre sprung floor, good for dancing or fighting. Witness docks and judges’ benches are narrow galleries around the ring. Adversaries and judges sit close enough to be hit by arterial spray. This is the morality of the combat court: violence touches everyone.

  In the Mackenzie dock; Duncan Mackenzie, Bryce Mackenzie. He can barely fit in the narrow gallery. Again in lieu of Robert Mackenzie, Jade Sun-Mackenzie, mother of the zashitnik. In the Corta dock, Rafa, Lucas, Wagner and Ariel Mackenzie. With Ariel, her escolta, Marina Calzaghe. Ariel defeated a last-minute subpoena attempt by the Mackenzies’ legal team to compel Lucasinho, Robson and Luna to attend. Judges Remy, El-Ashmawi and Mishra preside, none of whom have ever worked with Ariel Corta.

  Judge Remy calls the court to order. Judge El-Ashmawi reads the offence. Judge Mishra asks if any reconciliation or apology will be made. None, says Lucas Corta.

  The formalities calm, the formalities order, the formalities distance you from what will happen in this wooden ring.

  Seconds in. For the Mackenzies, Denny Mackenzie and Constant Duffus, deputy head of security. For the Cortas, Heitor Pereira and Mariano Gabriel Demaria. Each side presents the fighting knives to the judges. They inspect them minutely, though none knows about blades, and approve one from each case. Mariano Gabriel Demaria kisses the hilt as he lays the lunar steel knife in its cradle.

  The combatants come up from their stables beneath the court. Both look up as they step into the court, then around as they size up the space and its limitations. Smaller than they thought. This will be close, fast and savage. Carlinhos wears cream trunks, Hadley grey. Both trunks contrast with their skins. They are digitally naked, without familiars. Jewellery is a weakness but Carlinhos wears a single green cord around his right ankle; the favour of São Jorge. Carlinhos’s seconds close around him.

  Marina covers her face with her hands. She can’t look at Carlinhos, she must look at Carlinhos. He’s a boy, a big smiling boy who has wandered from one room to another not realising that behind him each door is locked, each room smaller than the one before it until he ends here, on the killing floor. She feels sick; a nausea of every bone and sinew. Carlinhos kneels, Heitor and Mariano huddled over him, and murmurs. Across the ring Hadley Mackenzie skips, bounces, sniffs, stares, a gyre of energy and intention. He will cut Carlinhos apart, Marina thinks. She has never known fear like this, not when Mama was diagnosed, not when the OTV rolled into its launch run at White Sands.

  The Court summons the combatants to the bench. At two metres ten Carlinhos is taller than Hadley but heavier. The Mackenzie is wire and steel. Judge Remy addresses the fighters.

  ‘We would inform you that though this combat is entirely lawful, the Court of Clavius deplores this action. It is barbarous and unbecoming to your families and corporations. You may continue.’

  Mariano Gabriel Demaria presents Carlinhos with his knife. He feels its weight, finds his grip, locates it balance and speed. He tries it for heft and punch, dancing its tip through the nine directions. Grip, firm but floating. Effort/no effort. To feint, to lunge, to pivot is not to cut. All effort is to cut. Live at the ultimate extension of each sense, feeling for the invisible bells hanging in the dark maze.

  ‘Seconds out.’

  Heitor and Mariano retire to their ringside stall under the witness gallery. There are no rounds, there is no recovery or moments of advice in the corner in the court arena. You fight until there is a winner.

  Carlinhos dips his head to his family. Slow fat tears roll down Marina Calzaghe’s face.

  ‘Approach.’

  Carlinhos and Hadley meet in the centre of the ring, raise blades in salute.

  ‘Fight.’

  The fighters drop into stance, weight balanced, arm raised. And they clash. Carlinhos pivots, trying to draw Hadley, put him out of phase but the Mackenzie is sharp and fast, so fast that Carlinhos loses tempo for an instant. Carlinhos recovers. Marina has never seen a knife fight. It is ugly and violating and harsh. There is nothing glorious about it; no skill of cut and thrust, parry and riposte, blade as attack and defence like the way of the sword. In the way of the knife the first contact will be the last. Any hit will be final. Slash, disarm, stab, immobilise. The speed is dizzying. Faster than thought. Hadley wears a skull grin on his face; his concentration is total. And he is faster, lighter, quicker. Feint, pivot, recover. She glances over at the other Cortas. Rafa’s eyes are closed. Ariel’s hands are over her mouth. Wagner is a mask of utter concentration. Lucas’s face is like a skull. The expressions are the same on the Mackenzie side of the ring.

  She can’t look. She can’t look away.

  No one can keep up this killing pace. She can see that Carlinhos’s balance is off. His reactions are a fraction slow. Sweat gleams on his skin. His eyes are hard, his face is closed. It’s a dance, a killing two-step. Tight, fast, blazing slashes and stabs: the knife hand, the tendons of the leg. High, low. Carlinhos feints, Hadley blocks with his blade, cuts a gash down Carlinhos’s bicep that rotates into a slash across his abdominals. Carlinhos is already dancing away from the blade, it draws a line of blood on his belly. He doesn’t notice. He is burning adrenaline, beyond pain, beyond anything except the unity of the fight. But the gash to the biceps is heavy. He’s losing blood. He’s losing control. He’s losing the duel. Carlinhos swivels and skips back, putting distance between himself and Hadley. Hadley moves to close the gap but in that instant Carlinhos shifts knife from right to left hand. It’s a surprise for an instant, but enough to force Hadley into retreat. Hadley shakes his head like he’s shaking out a crick from his neck and shifts the blade from right hand to left.

  Bare feet slide in a slick of Carlinhos’s warm sweet blood.

  Carlinhos sees all the ways that Hadley Mackenzie can come at him in the next attack, all of them simultaneously and in every one of them the knife opens the tendons of his hand, disarms him, tears his leg tendons and sends him down and guts him.

  He dies here.

  And then he sees the other way, that is not the way of the knife.
The way of malandragem. Who brings Brazilian jiu jitsu to a knife fight? Carlinhos throws away his knife. It embeds in the wooden walls of the court, quivers. Hadley’s eyes follow it and in that instant Carlinhos steps inside his guard, blocks his swing with his hands and snaps his elbow joint.

  The crack resounds around the court arena. The knife falls.

  Carlinhos twists the broken arm behind Hadley’s back. The two men are as close as lovers. Carlinhos scoops up the dropped knife and in the same motion drives it into Hadley Mackenzie’s throat and out through the interior jugular.

  The court is on its feet.

  There is a look of mild surprise on Hadley’s face, then disappointment. Blood gushes from the hideous wound, his hands flap uselessly at death. Carlinhos lowers him to lie gurgling and flapping in the pooling blood.

  Carlinhos roars. Throws back his shoulders, balls his fists, roars. He kicks the wood of the gallery, again and again, smashes a fist into the walls. Roars. He faces his family, shakes sweat from his hair and bellows his victory.

  Marina hides her face in her hands. She can’t bear what she sees. This is Carlinhos. This always was Carlinhos.

  Hadley is still now and there is a second voice in the courtroom; a long, keening wail, so uncanny and inhuman its source is not obvious until Jade Sun lunges for the rail. Duncan Mackenzie grabs her, holds her. She cries on, incoherent with loss and desolation. The Mackenzie seconds cover the body.

  ‘The case is satisfied,’ Judge Mishra shouts over the roaring and the keening. ‘The Court is dismissed.’

  Heitor Pereira and Mariano Gabriel Demaria try to escort Carlinhos down to the under court. He shakes them off and crosses the fighting floor to bellow in front of the Mackenzies. His body drips with sweat-smeared blood. He jabs an accusing finger at Jade Sun, at Bryce Mackenzie.

  Marina is dying.

  ‘Seconds, control your zashitnik!’ Judge Al-Ashmawi shouts. Heitor and Mariano seize Carlinhos, one on each shoulder, and fight him to the gate. Jade Sun spits. Spit flies far on the moon. The gobbet of saliva strikes Carlinhos on the shoulder. He turns, kicks a spray of blood from the floor at her. Blood rains in her face, speckles the Mackenzies.