Читать книгу Red Sister онлайн | страница 33

That first night the hall opened its doors and the world flowed in to see men bleed. Denam and Regol got to watch from the highest rungs of the ladder in the furthest corner of the great hall, behind counters where the apprentices sold ale and wine to the crowd. The eldest of the remaining children crowded around the trapdoor. Everyone else had to find some chink among the rafters through which the events below might be glimpsed.

Nona’s spot afforded her a narrow view of the second ring. She wondered that they called it a ring when in fact the ropes strung between the four posts enclosed a square perhaps eight yards on a side, the whole thing a raised platform so that the fighter’s feet were level with the average man’s brow. She could see the tops of many heads, hundreds packed tight. The hubbub of their voices filled the attic. As the crowd built so did the noise, each of them having to shout just to be heard by their neighbour.

Saida lay close by, her eye to a crack. At her side an older boy, Marten, peered through a knot hole to which he laid ownership.

‘It’s all-comers tonight,’ Marten said, without looking up. ‘Ranking bouts on the seven-day, all comers on the second, exhibitions on the fourth. Blade matches are the last day of the month.’

‘My da said men fight in pits in the city …’ Saida said timidly, waiting to be told she was wrong.

‘In the Marn ports some do,’ Marten said. ‘Partnis says it’s a foolishness. If you’ve got willing fighters and a paying crowd you put them up on a platform, not down in a hole, where only the first row can see them.’

Nona lay, watching the throng below her while fights progressed unseen at the hall’s far end. Her view offered only the tops of heads, but she judged reactions by the pulse and flow of the crowd. Their roaring sounded at times like the howl of a single great beast, so loud it resonated in her chest, throbbing in her own voice when she yelled her challenge back at them.

At last a figure climbed into the ring beneath them. All around her Nona could feel other children scrambling for a view. Someone tried to lift her from her spot but she caught the hands that grabbed her and dug her nails in. The unknown someone dropped her with a howl and she put her eye back to the crack.