Their empathy was such that they felt every blow, exulted in animal passion when their fighter retaliated and drew blood. In the course of an afternoon all their base instincts were satisfied. They knew violence, pain, triumph, death.
It was an orgy of absolution that ended with a maximum of fifteen deaths a year, instead of the thousands or hundreds of thousands that would occur on the battlefields if they themselves fought.
It was a solution to war, this Annual Sport. Only then did I realize it fully. Besides purging the emotions, it was a way of settling disputes that were matters of honor transcending the courts. Once a year the disputes were settled on the gamesward, the miniature battleground, a concentration of blood and death that permitted them to avoid the greater vulgarity of war.
And I was part of their mass catharsis, one of the hired instruments of their annual exorcism. For an instant I saw the tiers of humanity as a great analyst's couch, and the gamesward as the unlocked unconscious where ugly passion was set free.
This fancy passed and I found myself staring at a woman in a box at the edge of the field near me. Her face was contorted and almost unrecognizable as that of a charming hostess whose guest I twice had been—and whose guest I would be tonight at a fashionable, dignified reception if I lived. Fiendish delight now twisted her usually serene features and I had a quick flash of her thoughts projected into mine, urging me to kill the enemy, kill, kill, and in doing so to rend his body most abominably.
But then the great cymbals clashed and her face receded to a blur in the crowd. It was time for me to kill or be killed.
I strode forward confidently, giving no sign that one of my legs was false. I held my head high and tilted slightly to the right so that my good left eye could do part of the work of its missing fellow.
At the edge of the Circle of Death I stopped and bowed stiffly to my opponent from Tara. I studied him as he returned my bow. I had never seen him fight and didn't know if any of his limbs were false, like mine.
But then I knew. The left forearm of the man of Tara was prosthetic and it would be useless to try to draw blood from it. I knew because Joro was in my mind now, directing my thoughts, just as the noble from Tara was in the mind of my opponent, directing his. Now Joro would live every blow, feel the pain of wounds, smell the blood and sweat and experience the exhilaration of battle, even as I. But if I lost I would die, not Joro. He would withdraw and live to fight another time, in another hired body.
Yet while he guided and directed me he would have the same urgency to live, the same fear of death.