Arena of Antares

Chapter Ten

Soft and gentle and very skilled were the fingers of Tilly, the girl Fristle, as she clipped and combed my hair and beard and moustache. I like a short, pointed, damn-you-to-hell beard, and moustaches that, whether I will it or no, thrust upward arrogantly. Tilly sang a little song as she snipped. It was “The Lay of Faerly the Ponsho Farmer’s Daughter.” Young girl Fristles with their soft fur and their sweet cat-faces and their exciting figures are notorious for their knowledge of the arts of love. Perhaps I am unfair in using the word notorious. It would be kinder to say famous. Of course, this meant nothing to me, for only Delia could ever stir me; but it was undeniably pleasurable to have Tilly thus minister to my wants. She would wash and rub me with oil and ease the stiffness out of my limbs and clip my hair and comb it and sniff at me and say, cheekily, “You are a veritable apim graint, Drak the Sword.”

To which I was honor-bound to reply, “Tomorrow I shall buy a silver chain.”

To which she, in her turn, would toss her pretty head and flick her tail around to tickle my ribs, while she went on snipping and combing and singing about the lay of Faerly, the Fristle ponsho farmer’s daughter. All this was meaningless. By tomorrow, far from buying a silver chain, or even threatening to, as I did almost every day, I would be aboard a stolen voller and winging my way northward to Valka — or southwestward to Migla, for I still felt great unease about that diabolical rain shower. I have said I prefer a short pointed beard. I had deliberately allowed my face fungus to grow inordinately. Oh, it had not sprouted into the great blaze of jet threaded with gold that Nath the Arm sported. But now, when Tilly finished her clipping, she sat back, curling her tail up, and said: “By the furry tail of the Frivolous Freemiff! You look so different, Drak my master.”

She knew I didn’t like her calling me her master.

We were slaves together. I frowned. She opened those wide slanting eyes of hers, so catlike, so sensual, and flicked her golden tail.

“I am no different, you impudent fifi. I am still Drak the Sword, a great hairy graint of an apim.”

“Aye! That you are!”

So, that being settled, I packed her off to her bed in an adjoining room, where she was perfectly safe not only from me but from any amorous kaidur who might wander the corridors of this high barracks. Somewhere below in a courtyard a poor devil was being flogged. I could hear the meaty thwack of each blow and the shrieks that gradually quieted to a moaning and then to a more horrible silence, punctuated only by that devilish sound of a man’s bare back being lashed raw.

The contrast between my condition up here, with all its luxury, and that poor devil below sobered my high spirits for the night’s enterprise. Young Oby came in, cheerfully whistling a scandalous song. He wanted my authorization for him to collect our allowance of samphron oil for the lamps. I gave it to him, sealing it with the crude signet stamp allowed me in the form of a thraxter crossed with a djangir. I had not chosen that signature.

“Who is that below, Oby?”

“Why, master, the onker Ortyg the Sly. He was caught stealing wine — purple Hamish wine, too.”

Well, stealing rum was a crime for which I had seen floggings enough in the navy of my youth. I dismissed Oby.

Then I set about dressing myself for the night’s adventures.

A nobleman or a Horter — that is, a gentleman — of Havilfar might well walk the streets of his city wearing a sword. He would not ordinarily carry a shield. They favored the curved dagger here, and with its ornate sheath and grip the one I slung to my belt was a flashy toy. But the thraxter was a warrior’s weapon, bloodied this day in the arena. I put on my favored scarlet breechclout — a new one specially procured and washed and ironed by Tilly. Over this the white linen shirt and then a yellow jerkin, its shoulders and back a blaze of embroidery. The weather was too hot for trousers. I chose calf-high boots of a supple leather that would breathe, for I did not wish to wear sandals in the game I was playing. A pouch contained a considerable sum in deldys and sinvers, and this I buckled to my waist. With due precaution I also wrapped a few extremely valuable gems into the scarlet breechclout. Around me in my marble chamber with its silks and feathers and furs lay a fortune I had won. All this must be left. It meant nothing. I wore a hat, one of the Havilfarese closely fitting leather caps, and could wish for one of the wide-brimmed Vallian hats with their jaunty feathers.

I knew nothing of the city of Huringa — save that its people liked to pay money to enter the Jikhorkdun and to wager if a man would live or die — and Oxkalin the Blind Spirit must guide me when I set foot outside the amphitheater. You may be sure I observed the fantamyrrh when I left that chamber, as I thought for the last time.

A stuxcal stood by the door, fully filled with its eight javelins. I had to leave it. A gentleman does not walk the streets of his city carrying stuxes, now does he? In a civilized city like Huringa? I thought not, judging by what I knew of Vondium and Sanurkazz and Zenicce.

Tilly and Oby were left. They had prepared me a good meal, and I had eaten well — roast vosk, taylynes, a pie of squishes and gregarians, rather too sweet, rich yellow butter and fluffy Kregan loaves, and — a triumph! — cup after cup of that fragrant superb Kregan tea. In my wallet I had stuffed a package of palines, and I carried two strips of dried beef, veritable biltong, which would sustain me for a long period.

Once past the corridors and passageways immediately adjacent to my chamber I was able to pass without notice. From my cap a great cascading mass of red feathers drooped and a red favor glowed on my left shoulder. These I planned to discard the moment I was out on the street and unobserved. The success of my plan hinged on the evening entertainments of the Horters of Huringa. They would take their carriages, their sleeths, or their zorcas and ride up to the Jikhorkdun, unable, it seemed, to keep away from the blood-reeking place, to inspect the latest hyr-kaidur, or a newly imported wild beast, or to watch practices. Some of these Horters, I knew, fancied their luck and would don a kaidur’s gear and venture into a practice ring. They would use rebated weapons — that went without saying. There must be many other entertainments for a pleasant evening in the city, I reasoned: taverns and dancing halls, dopa dens, even theaters. But the pull of the arena was stronger.

Down in a practice pit I saw a group of gentlemen watching a kaidur fence one of their number. The kaidur gave them their money’s worth, letting himself be bested. The Horters laughed and joked, garish in fine clothes, flicking their thraxters about, sniffing from pomanders, chewing palines. Oh, yes, they were a brilliant parasitical lot. I joined them. I, Drak the Sword, kaidur, had the temerity to insinuate my way into a group of nobles and Horters from the city.

Had Nath the Arm appeared he might well have recognized me. I doubted that even Cleitar Adria would do so. I was confident that Naghan the Gnat would recognize me at once; he was a sharp little one. So I had chosen a practice ring well away from the usual ones patronized by the coys and apprentices and kaidurs of Nath the Arm’s barracks. I was jostled by a young Horter, who did not apologize but merely twitched his elegant shoulders away. I let him remain on his feet and with his senses intact. As in almost any group, a natural leader led this one, a young man in the bright flush of youth whom the others called Strom Noran. He joked and laughed with them and yet quite clearly remained aware of his position.

“By Clem, Dorval!” he shouted to one of his friends, older and leaner and, I judged, looking for any opportunity to make money. “I’ll wager a thousand Deldys you could do no better!”

“I would refuse to take your money, Strom Noran,” replied this Dorval. “Callimark might be a kaidur himself!”

Callimark, the youngster who fancied he had beaten the kaidur in the practice ring, lifted a flushed face. Sweat stood on his forehead. “By Clem, Dorval! Don’t get out of it like that! Come down here and fight me!”

“Yes, Dorval,” said Strom Noran. “And a thousand on it.”

“Now, by Flem, you do push me, Strom Noran.”

“And by Flem I want to see it, Dorval!”

I stepped back. Their silly pride, their stupid wager, meant nothing. A great and horrid suspicion overwhelmed me. These brilliant, carefree, rich young men swore casually by Clem and by Flem — gods or spirits or saints of whom I had never heard, although with so many cluttering the pantheon of Kregen that was not surprising. But I had not missed the hesitation as they swore. If the first consonant of any of the gods’ names was omitted, one was left with Lem!

Then I knew the evil cult of Lem the silver leem had penetrated in secret into this city of Huringa in Hyrklana.

As I was to find, the people of Hyrklana are a fiery-tempered lot, hasty with the sword, bloodthirsty as their love of the arena testified to me even then. Yet there were very good and pressing reasons for much of this fierceness, this predatory urge to supremacy and violence. All along the southeastern coastlines of Havilfar the populations lived in a constant apprehension of the raids from those strange beings from the southern oceans. I had already met and fought one of their ships. But I had had little direct contact and knew nothing about them, except that as reavers they were viler than anything I had known on Kregen

— the overlords of Magdag could not bear comparison — and as reavers ought to be put down. So Hyrklana, from her exposed and precarious position jutting out into the southern ocean from the eastern flank of Havilfar, received her fair share and more of these devastating raids. A viciousness of reprisal, a hardness of character, a streak of reckless daring ran through all of Hyrklana — aye! and many another country of Kregen, too. They clung to the belief that one day, someday, a final reckoning would have to be made with these reavers. They had so many differing and usually obscene names I have not bothered to give a single one; but one name they had given to them that chilled me by its implications was -

Leem-Lovers.

From Quennohch in the south to Hennardrin in the north, the whole eastern flank of Havilfar knew and detested these reavers from the southern oceans. They came, this way around the planet, from the easterly southern ocean. Usually they limited their farthest advances to the sea areas around South Pandahem and the one we had fought must have been a loner. Not so very long ago they had captured and set up a base in the Astar group of islands approximately midway between Pandahem and Xuntal. Then a great Jikai had been called and they had been hurled out, reeking with their own blood, as men from this grouping of islands and continents dealt with them.

“By Gaji’s bowels, Strom Noran! Very well, then, and the thousand deldys will buy me a new zorca chariot!”

The lean dark Dorval had been goaded enough. As he threw off his ornate cloak and jerkin to stand in his tunic and kilt, Strom Noran laughed delightedly. The young man Callimark looked up, still panting from his previous bout, and he laughed also.

“Welcome to our circle, Dorval! It will be a pleasure to cross blades with you.”

Time was ticking along and the suns were now almost gone and the idlers and rufflers were drifting back from the Jikhorkdun at last to their other evening pleasures. I stood shoulder to shoulder with the Horter they had called Aldy and watched the mock combat. The youngbloods of Huringa catcalled and whooped and whistled as Callimark and Dorval set to. The kaidur who had allowed this youngster Callimark to beat him had done so with skill, so that it appeared Callimark was something of a sworder. Now the saturnine Dorval cut him to pieces — or would have done so had the blades been sharp and not rebated.

At last Callimark threw his thraxter down, his face angry and near tears, puffed with chagrin.

“You have the devil’s own tricks, Dorval, by Glem!”

Dorval turned his thin dark face up to the Strom.

“A thousand deldys, I think the sum was, Strom Noran.”

With a curse concerned with the obscene Gaji, Strom Noran lifted his hand. “I will settle with Havil in the morning.” By this he meant he would settle when the green sun rose above the horizon. The raffish Horter next to me, Aldy, chuckled and half to himself said: “By Gaji’s slimy intestines! The Strom must pay, the devil take him!”

Then he shot me a swift suspicious look, and I could guess he was cursing himself for so openly allowing his feelings to be known by a stranger. During the planning stages of my escape I had made it my business to inquire for a remote and almost unknown and certainly unfrequented part of Hyrklana. An oldster whose job it was to muck out after the totrixes told me he had come from a land far to the south called Hakkinostoling. This was a mouthful so that few people bothered to recall it, and the land being ravaged, its people were almost unknown. I had asked old Wenerl about his home, plying him with wine, and with rheumy eyes he had obliged with a description of a place anyone would wish to leave. So it was that when this youngblood Aldy glowered at me, suspiciously, I was able to speak with a fine free assumption of bumpkin ignorance.

“I am Varko ti Hakkinostoling,” I said, “and am but lately arrived in Huringa. Everything is strange to me, as you may well imagine, and I feel very lost.”

“Get a bellyful of wine and you will find friends,” Aldy counseled, and then yelled and dodged as Callimark came flying up out of the ring. Callimark landed neatly enough on the wooden edging; but then his foot caught and he pitched forward. I caught him under the armpits and stood him up. He was not at all pleased. He started to bluster, and Dorval, with his saturnine look, vaulted up after him, saying: “A fair fight, Callimark. You witness I did not wish it.”

“Well, Dorval, by Gaji’s bowels, you could have lost it then!”

Dorval chuckled and drew on his jerkin and cloak. “What! And lose a thousand deldys to a man who scarce notices them?”

So, arguing and expostulating, the crowd swaggered from the practice pit of the Jikhorkdun. Aldy mentioned my name to Callimark and Dorval, saying: “This is Varko ti Hakki-somewhere-or-other. He’s drinking with us tonight.”

They were a trifle rough and ready in a high-spirited way in their manners, not thinking much of the formal Horter, or of the Tyr or Kyr some of them ranked. Larking and shouting they made their way out of the Jikhorkdun past the watchful Rhaclaw sentries, out onto the broad patio fronting the amphitheater, and I, Varko, went with them.

Snug in the center of the group and talking to Aldy, I passed through the iron sentinel ring set around the Jikhorkdun. My red favors mingled with the flaunted red colors of the others. Maybe I would not have to dispose of them swiftly, after all. We swaggered down the long shallow flight of steps fully a hundred and fifty yards wide, thronged with people leaving the amphitheater. My escape had been comically simple. I think that somewhere, unknown to me at the time, above the clouds, perhaps, Homeric laughter was being roared out at my expense.

I could stare about me, enthralled, for was I not a bumpkin oaf from the backwoods? The outside of the amphitheater could never match the interior for grandeur, for a great deal of the seating was sunk in the ground; but the place reared up, alright, tall and imposing, with facade after facade of architecture rising on arches and colonnades. I looked where we were going. A wide boulevard led off southward. Three other boulevards led off to the other three cardinal points, but I discovered that no area of the city was given over wholly to one color; people lived cheek by jowl as to their color loyalties in the arena, and a baker of the red might shout jolly obscenities to a fishmonger of the green, while a haberdasher of the yellow tried to sell his goods to a housewife of the blues. All would wear their favors as a matter of course, and gnash their teeth when their quarter was down, and crow their triumph when in the ascendant. The reds, as second in the table, were able to swagger with a fine panache over the blues and greens, and yell shrill mocking promises of quick retribution to the yellows. The main thing that took my attention about the four main boulevards of Huringa was the lighting. Down each side of the roadway a long string of lights flared. I found out about these lights — and marveled anew. They were illuminated by gas, by a natural gas source in nearby hills, which had been tapped and piped into the city and used in flaring gas jets. The sight was wonderful and impressive to me. This merely served to confirm my feelings that Havilfar was further advanced than the other continents of this grouping of four.

We soon passed down the steps and so came to the waiting carriages, and the zorcas and totrixes and sleeths. These amazing gas jets flared brightly and lit up the scene in garish colors, the red of the favors around us, the brilliant harnesses, the gems and gold and silver, the waving feathers, the eye-catching brightness of fresh colors everywhere. The waiting zorcas stamped their hooves, the sleeths scraped their claws, slaves in their gaudy liveries opening carriage doors and soothing impatient animals and folding up steps and whipping up their totrixes or zorcas, everything melded into a bright scene of splendour — but I could not see the stars or the moons of Kregen above me in the night sky. This was my chance to slip away. Strom Noran shouted some witty sally and cursed his slave hostler to hold the Havil-forsaken sleeth still. He mounted, drawing up a very tight rein. The reptile reared on its two powerful hind legs, its claws biting into the ground, its silly forepaws flailing the air. Its small wicked head flicked a forked tongue and hissed demonically. Strom Noran stuck in his spurs and yelled and the sleeth went bounding off in that ungainly two-legged waddle they have, which can cover the ground at a fair turn of speed, for all that. The sleeth is an uncomfortable mount, and one I do not much care for, nothing being preferable to the zorca or vove. But these racing reptiles were all the rage in Havilfar, and the youngbloods risked their foolish necks in buying and riding the fiercest of them. To me, riding a dinosaur-like sleeth carried too many overtones of the Phokaym.

Now I was fairly out of the amphitheater and among the fashionable sporting crowd of Huringa and I noticed at once that almost no one was without a color favor. I chanced my arm and slipped between a gesticulating bunch of greens, hotly debating the very fight I had myself had this day, when the Rapa kaidur of the greens had fallen to my sword. They concealed me from Callimark and Aldy and the others. The last I saw was Dorval, very contemptuously mounting up on his zorca, and yelling at Callimark that he’d take him on his sleeth to the end of the boulevard, by Gaji’s slit ears, for two hundred. To which Callimark, foolish fellow, yelled: “You’re on, Dorval! And I’ll lick you-”

Sleeth and zorca sped off. I knew which one my money would be on. I let them go and cut away from the greens, who had come to no agreement why their great kaidur had failed against that kaidur of the reds, Drak the Sword, and so managed to slink off into an unlighted alleyway. I confess I knew little if anything of Huringa, and I learned precious little more that night. Once out of the glare of the gas jets I could look up and ease my eyes and see once again the glory of the stars and She of the Veils riding clouds high above. Colored lights festooned the sky up there, moving in long smooth arcs from horizon to horizon, dropping down and rising up. These were the riding lights of vollers. I watched where a group came to ground and set off walking. I went with care. My thraxter was loose in its sheath; and although I saw plenty of people coining and going about their business, and passed from torch-lit areas to other places of pitch-blackness, I was not molested. The flierdrome lay before me, blazing with lights, and the expenditure of oil must have been prodigious. Most of the lamps used a cheap mineral oil called rock oil, and not the more expensive, infinitely purer, and more beautiful samphron oil. I selected the voller I wanted. A four-place craft with a low rail, without a cabin and with fast lines, it would, I fancied, take me swiftly to Migla — or Valka. I vaulted the low drome rail, raced for the flier, leaped in and thrust the ascent lever hard over. The flier zoomed up in a graceful arc, and from the ground and dwindling in the rush of my passage, I heard the shouts and angry calls of the slave attendants. Their woes were not mine and although I felt sorry for them, for they might well be punished, this was just another of the burdens of Kregen I must bear — for a time.

The night sky enfolded me. I set the course at west-southwest and cracked up to full speed. Huringa sped past below.

I was free!

And then — and then the black clouds boiled solidly before me and a mighty wind rushed upon my craft, spinning it end for end and the noise blasted into my ears, and I was falling. . falling. . falling into blackness. .