Arena of Antares

Chapter Fourteen

My life in Huringa proceeded much as any other kaidur’s at this time, for I was waiting for the signal to which I might respond. If the queen was to be overthrown, poor soul, for all her evil, then the plan must be good and absolutely watertight. She controlled everything personally, with pallans to convey her orders and, sometimes, to venture on advice. I palled up with Mahmud and Gyss, and was sent into the arena from time to time, usually to rapturous applause, and otherwise lounged around fretting over this damned interdict of the Star Lords, and drinking and having what fun was offered. Here I brushed up on my knowledge of Havilfar, as you shall hear when overt knowledge is essential. A parcel of Chulik slaves were brought in.

We all went down to the bagnios to see them.

Now Chuliks are not often kept as slaves. Their chief value lies in their fanatical obedience to orders and their absolute loyalty while they are being paid. They are superb fighters. I had met a Chulik render captain; that had been unusual.

Chuliks are an extremely fierce manlike race of people with oily yellow skin, the head shaved so as to leave a long pigtail, two three-inch-long tusks thrusting upwards from the corners of the cruel mouth, and round black eyes. On the Chulik islands stringing off the coast of southeastern Segesthes the training of the males from birth is designed to produce high-quality mercenary soldiers, and they generally command higher fees than other races. There are large colonies of Chuliks in other islands and continents, of course, as I had found in the Eye of the World and in the Hostile Territories, and these people, like the other races about them, know nothing of the outside world. Chuliks may share some of the normal attributes of mankind, like two legs and two arms and two eyes; but they have little of the attribute of humanity.

So it was that the idea of Chulik coys intrigued us all.

“Well, Drak, and how do you fancy their chances?”

“By Kaidun, Balass,” I said. “They are a mean bunch.”

Balass laughed. Balass liked laughing. He was a black-skinned man from Xuntal, with fierce predatory hawklike features, and brilliant eyes, and he was a fine fighter, a kaidur. I had found in him a chord of friendship that I was loath to touch, for fear he would be dragged across the silver sand smearing his lifeblood, hauled out by the cruel iron hooks. He was named Balass the Hawk. Balass, as you know, is an ebony wood, often used for purposes of correction and chastisement.

“A cage voller flew in today with many volleems,” said Balass the Hawk. His bright eyes showed all the mischief and merriment the news meant.

“Oho!” I said. “Then it behooves us to see this, kaidur. Indeed, yes, Balass the Hawk, this must not be missed.”

“Beng Thrax’s silver kneecaps must support us all.” Balass chuckled. We both knew what these Chulik coys would face, pitted against volleem.

Volleem, the flying form of the leem, is a nasty brute at the best of times, and we wondered what the Jikhorkdun managers would think up to make the spectacle more interesting. You see — I have reported this conversation as I remember it — how bound up I was becoming with this whole evil business of the arena. And yet, it was not wholly evil. In straight combats between men of equal skills and armed in the same fashion, many virtues for a warlike nation must accrue, especially when that nation is faced with ferocious depredations by vermin like the Leem-Lovers from the southern oceans.

Each of the four colors received their quota of Chulik coys and the managers designed a different test in each case.

The greens were caged, a Chulik and a volleem together, and left to fight it out with spears. The blues were herded in altogether, with a variety of weapons, into a vast cage erected in the center of the arena and all their quota of volleems released upon them at once. The yellows, being in the ascendant, were kept in reserve.

The reds were given an assignment that brought howls from the red benches where the kaidurs lolled on their ponsho fleeces and shrieks from the red terraces soaring up in the amphitheater. Each red coy had a strong steel chain attached to his left ankle, and the chain passed to a ring riveted around the front rear leg of a volleem. The thraxters the Chuliks were issued would not cut the steel chain, light as it was.

The resultant spectacle raised a pandemonium of noise and screams and yells. Silver sand puffed. Bright blood flew. The battering of the volleems’ wings, the shrieks as men and beasts were torn and slashed, all blended into a bedlam of horror and revulsion — and yet men and women of many races sat in the terraces and enjoyed it as a spectacle!

And all the time the citizens of Huringa thus disported themselves their slaves labored to manufacture the produce and grow the food that kept the city and the state great.

I felt the Star Lords had set a purpose to my hands, and I itched to prosecute it with more zeal than the careful machinations of Rorton Gyss and Orlan Mahmud and their friends would allow. The volleems massacred the Chulik coys. All their weapons-skill could not overcome the tremendous odds. Only one Chulik survived, badly lacerated and injured. He was a red coy, and when he was carried in, dripping blood, we all rose to him, Chulik though he was. His name was Kumte Harg.

The volleems would be cared for, rested, fed, and then when they were back to full strength again, would be starved ready for the next bloody spectacle.

The only subject of conversation from then on was just who would be sent out to face them, and with what.

I fancied that Drak the Sword would find his fool self mixed up in that confrontation somehow. For a successful kaidur whose ambitions lifted no higher than the plaudits of the crowd, the rewards of victories, the acclamation of his comrades and peers, this life I was now leading could scarcely be matched. I had continually to fight against its seductive sway. The real tests came in two forms: in the first that I would forget who and what I was and revel in the better aspects of the Jikhorkdun, overlooking or excusing the wilder and more bloody aspects; in the second that I would be sent out against an opponent better than I.

Ascent up the scale of success was relatively rapid. An unknown coy one day would be the apprentice of the next few sennights, and then with each successive accolade would climb the ladder until he made kaidur. Some men managed this very rapidly, others at a more sedate pace. For them all, the descent would be swift.

So it was that I rigidly kept myself apart from the other kaidurs, even Balass, to my sorrow, for he was a fine man, and trod the lonely path of the true hyr-kaidur.

During this period I was well aware that I was, as it were, serving an apprenticeship of a different sort and to two different masters — rather, to a clique of masters and to a mistress. The would-be rebels contacted me from time to time, and always it was big talk of what they would do, and how, and never when. The queen sent for me, particularly after a great Kaidur, and we would talk. Always, these audiences I had with her were in the chamber, with her sitting regally on the curule chair. Her neemus and her shishis flanked her, fifis fluttered to and fro with wine and palines, and the giant Brokelsh waved the gorgeous feathered fan.

The cunning managers of the Jikhorkdun ensured my fights were carried out with weapons familiar to them. Each time I saw the queen my question was always the same.

“And when are you going to put that great sword back into my hands?”

She would give a little frown, and, out of custom, I would add: “Queen?”

She would laugh lightly, an evil little tinkle.

“When the time comes again for a great Kaidur, Drak.”

So I would not press the matter.

She said, once, I remember: “It says in the Hyr-Derengil-Notash that all things are as they seem to all men.” This famous book, the Hyr-Derengil-Notash (the title means, very roughly, the high palace of pleasure and wisdom), is often resorted to by philosophers. It had been compiled by a Wizard of Loh some two thousand five hundred seasons or so ago, and copies existed in various forms, each with its bibliography and separate notations, and you may be very sure the Kregan academics argued long and earnestly over their wine as to the analysis and interpretations to be placed on each separate word and phrase. She looked at me with those bright blue eyes of hers, so like her sister’s, speculative upon my ugly face. “It says, Drak the Sword, that where there is evil there must be good. And where there is good there must be evil.”

I nodded. “The interpretation is still debated, Queen.”

“My interpretation satisfies me. Evil must of necessity exist. The Hyr-Lif says so explicitly.”

One of her neemus yawned. His fangs were very bright and sharp. He closed his eyes, yawning.

“Yet does not the book say also something of the relative amounts of good and evil? Does it not say that an ounce of evil is enough for a ton of good?”

“It does, Drak my smooth-tongued kaidur. And, also, as you know well, the Hyr-Lif says that an ounce of good is enough for a ton of evil.”

“The Hyr-Derengil-Notash means all things to all men. It is read as the heart commands.”

She nodded, for the statement was so prosaic, so universal, no answer was needed. Kregans often refer to the heart as the seat of emotion and knowledge, although the doctors, so skilled with their acupuncture needles, are well aware that it is the brain that controls the body. She waved for wine and a neat little fifi with sleek black fur glided across, her silver vestments and diaphanous robes billowing, her ankle bells chiming softly. I still had not formed a final opinion on ankle bells. The wine was good; light, for it was daylight, yet pungent and redolent of the sunny north. I drank with pleasure. I should say that I still did not know the crude red wine the kaidurs quaffed before combat, Beng Thrax’s spit, was drugged with the sermine flower.

Truly, as I sat there with the Queen of Hyrklana sipping fine wine, munching palines and miscils, waited on by scantily clad jewel-entwined slave girls of surpassing beauty, I was a part of the Jikhorkdun that many and many a coy would give his ears for. The life, for all its horrors and bestiality, could claim a man utterly.

Of course, many women were available to the kaidurs, for if a great lady could flaunt a hyr-kaidur as her latest conquest she would score a notable coup over her fashionable rivals. Huge sums were paid by some of these ladies of Huringa for the favors of a kaidur. I gave none. Pressures were brought to bear, and I hurled them back, concealing my contempt, pleading other excuses. The queen, I know, was apprised of this and approved. For she, Queen Fahia, assumed I was deeply enamored of her. I appreciated the dangers of this course, and was somewhat apprehensive in a distant way for what might follow. But I felt it imperative that my freedom of maneuver should not be impaired. As an example I attended a secret meeting of the Horters and a few nobles in a house at the end of an unlighted back alley. It was all talk and speeches and wild declamations and, a thing that made me perk up a little, a counting of weapons and men available. They were small enough, to be sure. We left unmolested, and sang as we wended our way through the streets, Rapa and Fristle slaves lighting our way with flaring torches. The armed guards of the queen, prowling the streets on the lookout for any mischief they might knock on the head, let us go, for we were merely a gang of drunks. But for me, as a hyr-kaidur, these excursions were fraught with a peril quite foreign to the Horters. At subsequent meetings I tried to insist on a more practical approach and in this Rorton Gyss backed me up.

“We need to think more forcefully,” Gyss said. He spoke in his own downright way, direct and yet charming. “We must so organize the people who share our views that the government is attacked simultaneously on all sides. We must do this thing, for this evil queen is leaching the life-blood of the country away. I came over the road from Shander’s End today, and the surface is not fit for troops to march, and the money for its upkeep was spent in Chem buying boloths for the arena. Is this the way to run a country?”

I tell you, you who listen to these tapes spinning through the recorder, I, Drak the Sword, kaidur, took more interest in that part of his speech wherein he mentioned that boloths had been purchased for the Jikhorkdun. I confess it. I sat up. The boloth can be best described by imagining four elephants affixed in such a way that there are eight tusks facing forward, eight legs a side down the body, and a tendrilous mass of whipping tails at the other end. Its hide is hard and gray like a rhinoceros along the back, a brilliant leaf-green along the sides, and yellow beneath. It is slow. But it can still gather enough speed from its sixteen legs to build pace sufficient for a few hundred yards to outrun a totrix. After that it must pause for some time to allow its three hearts to pump fresh oxygenated blood around that ponderous body.

As an afterthought — it has an underslung jaw that can gobble a strigicaw, all spitting and snarling, at a gulp.

When I got back, Nath the Arm was frantic. “The queen has sent for you, Drak, by Kaidun! You must go to her at once! By Havil the Green,” he said, lapsing into unfamiliar theistic regions for him. “Hurry, lad, hurry! Or all our heads will roll!”

“I will wash and dress myself in fresh clothes,” I said. “Nath, if any heads are removed they will all be mine.”

As I prepared — for this summons from the queen came at an inconvenient time — I pondered what Orlan Mahmud had reported at the meeting. He claimed to have set ablaze two of the state manufactories for vollers. He said his men had burned not only fifty fliers, but the sheds and yards also. When I was ready I took up my thraxter and, with a last flick of her tail from Tilly, with Oby opening the door for me, I went up to see what Queen Fahia wanted of me.