The rake is not a garden rake. People hear the word and see a thing for leaves. Mine is oak, five foot in the handle, eleven iron tines set close and flattened at the ends so they cut and lift instead of scratching, and it weighs about what a full water can weighs. You do not drag it. You set it, you pull with your back straight, and you walk backward down the length of the ring so you do not print what you have just made.
My name is Zsofi Marek. I keep the floor of the second ring in the Pits, and I have kept it nineteen years, since my father put me on the barrow at eleven. People assume I watch the fights. I have never watched one from the rail in my life. You see them from the mouth of the tunnel with a rake in your hands, waiting to be let in.
Here is the work, since nobody has ever asked me about it. Between bouts you go out and pull the middle flat, because a man who steps in a hollow turns an ankle, and a turned ankle is a short bout, and a short bout sends the house up the stairs with their money still in their pockets. You go over the low spots with the back of the rake. You lift the clots out with a trowel and drop them in the bucket. Then the wetting can, then a last pass, and out, and the whole of it wants to be done in the time it takes the Master's men to settle the book. Longer than that and somebody comes to the tunnel to look at you.
The sweepings are mine. That has always been the arrangement, down there. Whatever the tines bring up out of the floor belongs to the raker, and what the tines bring up is teeth, mostly. Teeth and fingernails and boot hooks and buttons, and now and then a coin out of the lining of somebody's boot. Koss's Curiosities in the Marrow pays two groats for a sound tooth and four for a good front one, and I have put more bread on my table with teeth than with wages. I keep them in a stone jar with a cork in it. If you find that ghoulish I will not argue, only note that the men they came out of are usually still standing there while I do it, and that a few of them ask for theirs back.
The rings themselves are cut into the stone. You know that, if you have been down. What you may not know is that the stone cannot be cleaned. It has been drinking a thousand years and it will not come clean for lye or sand or fire, and it is black in the low places, and it is slick when it is wet. So we lay fill over it. Two hands deep, packed, wetted every night. It saves the stone from showing and it saves the fighters' knees, and a man who can still stand at the fourth round is a man the house can sell drink against.
For nineteen years the fill was yellow grit off the river flats below the Kereskedo. Coarse stuff, full of shell. You wetted it and it packed, and the blood sat up on top of it in lumps you could lift with a trowel, and every spring the spent fill went up the ramp in barrows and fresh came down. I never thought about it any more than you think about the plaster on your own wall.
In the spring the fill changed.
It came down grey. Fine as milled flour and cool in the hand, and it packed without wetting, and it was full of small hard bits that were not shell. Rozito Vallikozo's barrows brought it. Nobody up top said where it came from and nobody down our end asked, because we all knew, and knowing a thing and saying it are two different trades in this city. It came from the fields. It came from the plateau edge where the reed grass stands head-high and the plinths sit out in the mist, from that soil that is not soil, and it came cheap because there is not a mason or a builder in Kormor Kirak who will lay a course on Hallaset ground.
The Pits are not particular. That is nearly the definition of the Pits.
The first night I worked it I stood in the middle of the ring at the end of the third bout with the trowel in my hand and nothing to do with it.
There were no clots. There was no wet. Two men had gone eleven rounds on that floor and one of them had opened above the eye in the way that bleeds worse than it hurts, and I had watched it run, and when I came back out with the bucket the floor was grey and dry and a little darker in the middle, the way a hearthstone is darker in the middle. I put the trowel down and I put my hand flat on it. It was not cold.
Grit off the river flats takes a spill and holds it and gives you something to lift. That was the trade. The new fill does not hold anything. It takes it down and it takes it fast, and by the time you have walked the length of the ring and turned around there is nothing there to lift, and you go back out with an empty bucket, and after the first month you stop carrying the bucket.
The wetting can went the same way. Four cans a night is what my father taught me, to keep the dust off the front rows. By midsummer I was carrying eight and the floor was dry behind me before I reached the far wall. I mentioned it once to Bendek, who has kept the water butts down there longer than I have been alive, and he said the pumps were slow and looked at the wall while he said it.
And the fights changed. That is the part I would want somebody to write down.
Dorosz makes the matches for the second and third rings. He is a small, tidy, unhappy man who has done that work for twenty years, and in twenty years he sold what everybody sells, which is a killer. You put a name up that finishes men in the second round and the house comes to see it finished. That spring he stopped booking them. He put out word he wanted lasters. He raised the purse for a bout that went past the sixth and he raised it again past the ninth, and he began paying the loser, which had never once been done in that place, a full third if the man walked out on his own legs.
The fighters thought Dorosz had gone soft or gone clever. The house thought it was getting more for its coin. I stood in the tunnel with the rake and worked out what all of it added to, and what it added to was more rounds on the floor. Not more dead men. Dead men are a nuisance down there, they cost the Master a payment and a body and a story. What the new arrangement bought was time, and men standing up in the middle of that ring for as long as they could be kept standing, and bleeding onto it the whole while.
The house was not paying for a winner. It had stopped paying for a winner. It was paying for the spill.
Milos Farkas was a laster.
He came out of the Terrassian Quarter and he had been three years apprenticed to a clockmaker until the winter he got his left hand into a fly press, and after that no bench in the Quarter would take him, so he sold the rest of himself in the only market that was buying. He was not a fighter. I want to be exact about that, because it is the whole of what he was. He was a large slow patient young man who had learned to be hit and keep his feet, which is a real skill and a filthy one, and Dorosz booked him Thursdays and paid him by the round.
He used to sit on the edge of my barrow after, in the tunnel, breathing through his mouth. I would hand him the jar and he would go through it with two fingers until he found his own and put it in a tin he carried. He had a tin of them by the autumn. He said his mother would want him buried whole and I said his mother would want a great many things.
He healed fast. That was the first wrong note and I did not hear it for what it was. Cuts that should have kept him off a fortnight were shut in three days, clean, no heat in them. Dorosz was delighted and booked him twice a week.
What Milos could not do was get warm. He wore his coat in July. He slept fourteen hours and woke tired, and he went the colour of a church candle, and his hands, the good one and the bad one both, went cold and stayed cold. I put my palm against his cheek once in the tunnel, the way you do with a child, and it was like touching the wall of a cellar. He laughed at me. He said the fill was drawing the heat out of him through his back, because he spent half of every Thursday lying on it.
He said that as a joke. I have thought about it since.
I began marking coppers in the summer.
There was nothing occult in it. I thought Dorosz was buying the same dirt twice. That is an ordinary sort of theft, and if you have worked nineteen years for the kind of men who run the Pits you take your leverage where you find it. I took four groats, filed two notches in the rim of each at a spacing of my own, and pushed them down into the fill of the second ring at the four staples.
In the autumn they carted the fill up. That happens twice a year now instead of once, and it goes at night, up the long ramp past the creature pens and out through the yard behind the Night Market, and the empty barrows come back down before dawn with fresh grey in them. I stood at the ramp head and watched a line of it go. The entire spilled contents of that floor, going back up the hill to the fields it came from.
Eleven days later, sifting the fresh fill for stones before the first bout, my rake turned up a groat with two notches filed in the rim at a spacing of my own.
I sat down on the edge of the ring with it in my hand. It had come down grey, out of a barrow, out of the plateau. It had gone up in the spent load. Whatever they do with it up there in the mist among the plinths, they do it, and then they load it back onto the carts and bring it down to us, and we lay it out two hands deep and put men on it to bleed. Round and round, and everything that goes into that floor goes up the hill, and the hill sends the floor back.
There was a second coin in the sifting that year. A groat, older than mine, worn nearly smooth, with three notches in the rim at a spacing that was not mine.
I asked Bendek who raked the second ring before my father. He took a while about it. He said Ilka Serem, who kept a jar the same as me and asked more questions than the work required, and who went up with the barrows one spring to see the fields for herself. He said the Master hired my father the week after. He said it the way men down there say things, with his hands busy and his eyes somewhere else, and then he asked me if the pumps were still slow.
Milos died on a Thursday in the eleventh round with a cut over the ribs you could have got from a kitchen knife.
He went down in the middle of the floor and did not get up, and Dorosz's men carried him out through the tunnel past me, and I want you to understand the part that has stayed with me. There was almost nothing on him. His wrap was hardly marked. And when they had taken him out and I went in with the rake and the bucket, there was nothing on the floor either, not a spot, not a dark place, only grey fill and the print of where he had lain, and I pulled it flat in four passes and the house came back in for the next bout.
He had no one to take the purse. Dorosz put it back in the book. I kept his tin.
They announced the Convergence in the squares a fortnight after that, and the barrows went to three nights a week, and then to five. The fresh fill comes down warm now. Not warm like a stove. Warm like bread that has been out of the oven an hour, and warmest through the middle of the ring where they fall, and if you kneel on it at the end of a night you can feel it come up through your knees.
In the spring sifting I found my second groat, and the little bones of somebody's hand, and a front tooth with a chip in it that came to a peak. Milos broke that tooth on the rail in his second season and would never let a drawer near it because he was vain, and there is not another like it in Kormor Kirak, and it came down that ramp in a barrow of fresh fill from the plateau edge.
I put it in his tin. Then I took up the rake and pulled the middle flat, because Dorosz opens the second ring at dark and a hollow turns an ankle.
There are iron staples set in the ring wall for chaining the beasts. Four of them, in a course, a foot apart. My father showed me the lowest one the year he put me on the barrow, to teach me how deep to lay the fill, and in that year the fill came to the middle of it.
It stands over the third staple now. It has come up a hand and a half in nineteen years and better than a hand of that since the spring, and in all that time not one barrow has ever gone up the ramp that did not come back down full. The floor is rising. It is rising faster in the months when the comet is bright, and no one has ordered it dug out, and no one will.
In a few more years the men will fight level with the rail. After that, level with the street. And it will not be a pit at all by then, and all of you will be standing on it.