Arena of Antares

Chapter Fifteen

This time Queen Fahia received me in a low-ceiled intimate chamber high in the Chemzite Tower of her fortress of Hakal.

She reclined on a low couch strewn with zhantil pelts and furs, silks and sensils, propped on one white elbow. She knew she looked incredibly seductive, for the tall and unflickering candlelight gleamed in mellow warmth from her skin and hair and that soft haze concealed the lines of arrogant power stamped on her face. She wore semi-transparent billowing trousers, and a translucent jacket artfully half open, and their silk blazed a brilliant scarlet into the scented bower.

I was ushered in, my thraxter taken from me, and fifis already giggling to themselves showed me to a low stool beside the couch. Nearby stood a hurm-wood table loaded with golden goblets and glass bottles, the dust removed only from the labels, with many glass and porcelain dishes loaded with fruits and a golden dish upon which miscils lay ready to crumble into instant deliciousness upon the tongue.

“Drak the Sword! I have been waiting for you and fortunate you are that I had affairs of state to occupy me.”

If this pantomime was to begin at all, I would start by laying down the ground rules myself. She was clearly bent upon complete conquest. I had evaded her, as I knew, before; this time the test had to be faced.

“Pour me wine, Drak.” She gestured vaguely at the table, and so, determined to please myself, I chose a bottle whose shape and color I recognized. The date on the label referred to the Vallian calendar, and it was, I saw, a damn long time ago this wine had been prepared. I poured carefully, and handed her the glass. She looked over the rim at me.

“Vela’s Tears, Drak?”

“Aye, Queen. It is a wine of Valka. You have heard of Valka?”

“Friends of the cramphs of Hamal.” An old sore had been itched here. She was the queen, concerned for her country, for this moment her role as a seductive voluptuary momentarily forgotten. “The Emperor of Hamal supplies Vallia with vollers and the rasts of Vallia do not venture so far south as here to Hyrklana. Our vollers are as fine as those of Hamal. But the empire blocks our commerce.”

As you may imagine, I drank this up with as much pleasure as I sipped that superb wine, Vela’s Tears from my own Valka.

The strong red wine suited my fancy. Usually I frowned on this drinking of unmixed wine, for that is a fool’s trade; but I fancied I needed the assistance the alcohol would give me in dealing with this wanton woman, for if she became a trifle fuddled I could then slip away and leave her to sleep it off. So I drank sparingly, and replenished her glass.

“Two of my manufactories were burned, Drak. Many fine vollers are ashes; but they may be rebuilt. But the yards and sheds are gone, and the tools — when I lay my hands on the yetches responsible I will deal with them!” She was panting, and the color flooded her cheeks. Candlelight flamed in her hair and glittered from her jewels. She held out a hand to me.

“I need a strong man, Drak. A man to make me forget my cares and worries.” She was smiling now, her moist red mouth open and inviting. “A hyr-kaidur, Drak! One who knows what a sword is for.”

Into that appealing hand I placed a fresh glass. This time the wine I had poured for her was a brilliant green concoction from eastern Loh, crushed from the fruit of the pimpim tree, thick and cloying on the tongue, overly sweet — and strong!

She continued to look at me as she drank. I merely touched the tip of my tongue to the pungent liquid.

“You speak of swords. When am I to receive that great sword-?”

She drank, and swallowed, and interrupted me. “You saw Hork the Dorvengur?”

“I did. He was brave, but a fool.”

Hork the Dorvengur had been a hyr-kaidur of the green. He felt a personal slight that I had performed a great Kaidur with this strange sword and with a leem and had sought to do likewise. The leem had ripped him to shreds.

“If I give you the sword, it may be to face a foe far worse than a leem.”

“There are many more dangerous foes than leems, although few as vicious, and, even, if your treasury can afford it, you might buy larger and stronger cats. There are risslacas. There are the boloths you have just bought, and the volleems which destroyed the Chulik coys. And there are many many more hideous horrors in this world of Kregen you might buy and send against me in the arena. But, I think-”

Again she interrupted. “You think that with that monstrous sword you would stand a chance?”

“Better than with a djangir, at all events.”

She laughed. “I love to see the bosks running with their heads down, their long horns outstretched; it is a great Kaidur against the shortsword.”

With some amusement I noticed that of all subjects we had got on to, the one consuming her passions was the one most calculated to make her forget why she had invited me up here. We talked Jikhorkdun for some time, and she drank steadily as I pressed her. Her knowledge of the arena was prodigious. She had the great feats of the past off by rote, dates and times and states of play, and all the records of the color champions for many seasons past. She knew so many names of hyr-kaidurs that she made me feel very small beer indeed — which was a most useful ploy, as I discovered. By careful and callous manipulation of Jikhorkdun talk and of wine I jollied her along as the night wore on. She was in reality a cruel and evil woman; but she was also aging and losing her beauty, and a trifle drunk and maudlin, and, I judged, more lonely than any person should be condemned to be. After a time she slobbered after me; but I laughed — I did! — and gave her more wine, and started on about how she had never allowed neemus into the arena, and so diverted her attention to areas in which she felt far more passion.

“Never, Drak-ak the Sword! Neemus are a part of me! They are so sleek and slender and all the female secret things a man will never understand.” A tear cut its way through the powder on her cheeks. Her flush was now wine-red, startling against the cosmetics.

I might never understand women’s wiles and secrets, but this case was too plain. She was the twin sister of Princess Lilah. Lilah although cold and aloof had been slender and beautiful and young. This Queen Fahia, the same age, was growing fat, her face was lined, her bones and sinews, as I guessed, feeling creaking and old. Yes, evil as she was, one could find a pity in one’s heart that was not put there through mere duty and form to any of the better creeds of Earth or of Kregen. She hiccupped again, and knocked a goblet over, and laughed shrilly, and Oxkalin the Blind Spirit guided me as I said: “I fight tomorrow, Fahia. You are exceedingly lovely, but the husband your king. . I must leave you.” I deliberately did not phrase that in the usual way in requesting permission to leave. I stood up. I had guessed that for at least the opening sessions of the night’s business she had had eyes spying on us. A golden bell stood on a lenken stand. If she struck that, once, probably, armed men would pour in. I wondered if she struck it twice the eyes would withdraw.

“You fight tomorrow, Drak the Sword? Then I will cancel the combat — cancel combat — fight tomorrow. .”

With her mouth open and her eyes slowly closing, she sank back on the couch, breathing in rapid shallow breaths that slowed and drew out to a deeper rhythm. I lifted her naked feet up into a comfortable position on the couch. I looked about at the table with the wreckage of the night’s drinking. I popped a handful of palines into my mouth and saw the second bottle of Vela’s Tears, untouched. About to pick it up, I paused.

Those eyes. .

I picked up the bottle. I held it in my left hand, even in that moment relishing the feel of something that had been born in my Valka, and I picked up in my right hand the small mahogany-handled gold-headed hammer and I struck the golden bell.

The chamber filled with armed men.

Their Hikdar stared about, at the sleeping queen, at the golden hammer in my hand, the golden bell still quivering. He commanded a detail of armed and armored men and halflings, and he stared at me like a loon.

I held up the bottle of wine.

“Have you a clean glass, Hikdar?” I said. “The queen and I have used up all that were here.”

Queen Fahia gave a little snore just then, and mumbled her lips about, and dribbled a trifle. The Hikdar’s chest swelled. His eyes threatened to pop like overripe squishes. He could barely turn his neck in the iron collar of his corselet for its swelling.

“Deldar Ropan! A glass for the kaidur! And jump!”

Dear Zair! How I plagued those guardsmen!

That was the first time we had a cozy tete-a-tete, Queen Fahia and I. She would give me no sensible answer about the Krozair longsword. Other kaidurs made the gallant attempt to use it in the arena and most were slain, although a fighter from the blues, surprisingly, bested his opponent, a strigicaw, and so scored a notable triumph for the sapphire graint. The queen insisted that the longsword be returned immediately after every bout. It hung among a splendid display of arms in her trophy chamber, magnificently decorated and appointed, in a great hall of the high fortress of Hakal. Balass the Hawk was only too pleased to give me the benefit of his assistance and contacts when I made a certain request of him. Shortly thereafter, in exchange for a boskskin bag containing quite enough golden deldys, I received a small dark purple glass vial of a curious shape, heavily stoppered.

“One drop, Drak,” said Balass, chuckling. “Guaranteed to knock over a dermiflon.”

That blue-skinned, ten-legged, idiot-headed monster grew so fat and ungainly that it could barely waddle and only its sinuous and massively barbed and spiked tail saved it from extinction at the claws and fangs of strigicaw or chavonth. To say anything would knock over a dermiflon was guarantee enough. So, armed with my secret purple vial with its drop-by-drop dermiflon guarantee, I could face those ultimate little drinking nights with Queen Fahia with greater equanimity. She did say, and more than once, that my company was very soothing to her in her great worries and problems, for she always slept well after I had visited her.

Poor soul!

But she could wield as much power as an absolute despot ever can over his or her subjects, and my head was still a-rattling between my shoulders.

I often wondered what the results for the island of Hyrklana would have been had the fifteen-minute interval that separated Fahia’s and Lilah’s entrances onto the stage of Kregen witnessed a reversal, so that Lilah had been the elder.

You will forgive me, I know, in my cynicism, if I suggested to myself that Queen Lilah would have been little different from what Queen Fahia in reality was. If the Star Lords truly had commanded me to a work here, I must also be aware that the realities of the situation, in political terms, could never obscure the greater human realities.

Only those people who have had to sign another person’s death warrant can truly know the realities, the miseries, the agonies, of power.[4]

“. . once and for all that evil queen! Drak — it must be you who slays her! You are the chosen one!”

“But, Orlan — to kill a woman, like that — I care nothing that she is a queen-”

“It is a deed done for all Hyrklana!”

“But I am not of Hyrklana.”

At this Rorton Gyss lowered his wine glass and stared at me. Always charming and courteous, the Trylon of Kritdrin now spoke in a smooth sensible way that admitted of no argument.

“You may not be of Hyrklana originally, Drak the Sword. But you are a hyr-kaidur, of the Jikhorkdun in Huringa, and that does make you indisputably of Hyrklana. Whether you will it or not, my friend, it is so.”

“Maybe. But there are armed guards she can summon instantly.”

“We know. But, Drak” — Orlan looked with a sickly smile at me, at which I pondered how much he really cared for the queen — “you are a kaidur. When you caress her, and bend over her, your arms about her, kissing her. Then you may place your hands upon her neck, so, and twist, so, and she will go quietly, and you may lay her, so, upon the couch.”

And Orlan Mahmud placed upon the table the two halves of the ripe fruit he had twisted apart. We all looked at the two halves of that rich fruit as its juices seeped onto the sturm-wood. It was a shonage fruit, I remember, larger than a grapefruit, as red as a tomato, crammed with rich flesh and sweet juices. No one spoke.

The little secret meeting room hidden in the rear of a hovel in a dingy portion of Huringa had never seemed more remote, clandestine, and filled with dark menace. I could do to Queen Fahia what Orlan Mahmud had done to the shonage; and I could do it silently and shielding the deed with my body from the alert gaze of the watchers outside the queen’s chamber. I could. I doubted if I would.

I said to Orlan Mahmud nal Yrmcelt: “You know the queen’s chamber in the Chemzite Tower. You have perhaps been there yourself?”

His young face flushed and that sickly smile returned to his features. “I have. Once.”

Before I could push any further the Trylon of Kritdrin interposed, smiling, charming, forceful. He had seen how it stood with me, I think, for he was a shrewd man. “Let us leave this portion of the plan for now, comrades. We will return to it when we are sure the quarters will rise.”

On that the treasonable business of the meeting could be concluded and we could get down to aspects more agreeable to me, the drinking and singing. If I give the impression that I drank a lot or was some kind of drunkard, this is not so. Water of most of Kregen is drinkable except where fouled by men, and the varieties of fruit juices are immense and wonderful. Also, I always prefer Kregan tea. The cover, that we were a drinking club, had to be maintained. So, singing, rolling along, our arms across one another’s shoulders, we staggered happily back into the street and so wended our merry way toward the south boulevard which led to the Jikhorkdun. Before we reached it, in an alley where a torch threw lurid gleams across the stones of the walls, and with Orlan hanging on to me and roaring out about ‘Tyr Korgan and the Mermaid,” Rorton Gyss leaned across and whispered fiercely in my ear.

“We are followed, Drak! A thin little rast in brown.”

Trust Gyss to have his eyes and ears open in this wicked world.

I looked back. It was the same man. I had forgotten him; now I remembered. He wore a djangir, and he looked mean, and he hovered at a corner where the stones had been grooved by the centuries of wear from the iron-rimmed wheels of passing quoffa carts. Hyrklana is rich in iron. He hung back there, waiting for us to pass beyond the torch before following. Orlan stopped singing, just where Tyr Korgan takes his third great breath of air and dives to inspect the Mermaid in wonder. He was not so far gone as to call on Opaz as he halted, all wine-flushed.

“What is it, in Havil’s name?”

“Hush, Orlan!”

Some genuinely staggering, some shamming, the conspirators turned to look back. The spy realized he had been discovered. He took to his heels at once. With a wild whooping the whole bunch pelted after him.

Only Gyss and I remained standing beneath the torch.

“Onkers!” said Gyss.

I knew what he meant. “I doubt he is a queen’s man, for she would have already struck.” I told him of seeing this man on the day I had become a hyr-kaidur. He frowned. “It is inconvenient. We must tread cautiously, leave for the country for a time. The day of wrath is postponed.” He added, without rhetoric or bombast, false to his nature as they would have been: “But it will come, Drak the Sword. The day of judgment will come.”

So we left the conspirators, like would-be leems, to go chasing after the spy as leems chase a running ponsho. We calmly walked back and I said to this quiet, contained man, “I think so too, Rorton Gyss. Remberee, Trylon of Kritdrin.”

“Remberee, Drak the Sword. Remberee.”

That night Queen Fahia summoned me to her perfumed bower in the Chemzite Tower of the high fortress of Hakal frowning down from its rocks over the Jikhorkdun. Armed with the purple vial of curious shape, dressed finely, I went. As usual the guards took my thraxter. Strangely, secure in the protection of the purple vial, I welcomed these philosophical discussions touching the arena. The queen would talk of the high excitement and the peril and the blood of the Jikhorkdun with a panting eagerness, her full moist lips shining, the lower lip locked by her teeth as she listened to tales of a great Kaidur. This absorption with the scintillating evil surface of the Jikhorkdun did not prevent her deep obsession with its inner philosophies, and we explored areas both of analysis and synthesis, of ideas and theories, that showed she understood far more than her voluptuous figure and jeweled body might give one to think, assuming she had no brain at all. She put great store by the Hyr-Derengil-Notash, that Hyr-Lif. Only the greatest books of Kregen are dignified by the description “Lif,” and only the greatest of these may expect to be honored by the “Hyr.” Her amorous advances would be reserved for a later time, when she had molded me, as she would think, into the kind of kaidur suitable to her high-flown fancies.

Once she was in a black temper. “I have had word out of the chief place of Hamal, that vile city of Ruathytu. They seek with their left hand to throttle realms to their south and with their right hand they prevent men from Zenicce and Vallia reaching us to buy our vollers. By Havil the Green — one day. .”

Then she laughed, a little shrilly, wildly even. “The yetches of Hamal are like Djangs with four arms, for they clutch to the west over their mountains, and to the north across the sea.”

I admit to a strange thump of the heart when she said that name — Djang. So, on this night, with her prowling black neemus taken on their silver leashes by their attendants and with many kisses and cooings from her, Fahia received me. Interestingly, instead of the usual red she wore in honor of the ruby drang, she wore a shimmering white gown, and from the costliness of the silks and sensils I guessed it had been the work of many slave-girls’ needles. Cunningly slit at thigh and belly, it clung to her, and slid and susurrated when she moved. Diamonds cascaded about her. Her hair of that brilliant corn-gold had been let down, and, without a single gem, swirled about her figure. In the rosy candlelight she did, indeed, I admit, look most alluring and desirable. Her moist red lips parted in a smile.

This was the woman the conspirators wished me to murder. However much she deserved the fate, could I take that white neck, with its hint of pudgy fatness, into my fists and so twist and stare down upon her without compassion as she died?

Hardly.

Her Fristle fifis fussed about her, and a couple of new apim girls, glorious in their fresh beauty, brought in her toilet necessaries. One carried the golden bowl and a towel, the other a pitcher of scented water and a fluffy, soft, pampering towel. The queen retired behind a small screen of interwoven papishin leaves. The two apims, slaves, wearing clean white loincloths, would not look at me. They trembled with fear as they ministered to the queen.

Almost, then, I did as I had been requested.

The single drop from the purple vial of curious shape did its work, and I was able to drink moderately and watch as Queen Fahia slipped into a sound sleep. I made her comfortable and then went out. The Hikdar of the guard knew me by now. We exchanged a few words; but he remained resentful of that first prank I had played on him. I went back to the Jikhorkdun.

The next day I heard the report that a man had been found dead in a back alley of the city. His brown clothes had been cut to ribbons, and his body slashed in a score of places. So my fine drunken conspirator friends had caught their ponsho.

All the same, most of them found reasons to leave the city and go to their estates in the country of Hyrklana. For a space, then, the queen was to keep her life and my life at the Jikhorkdun would continue. Were the Star Lords, I wondered, really at work here? To test that I went out the very next night, stole a voller, and was battered and beaten back by a gale whose savagery sprang from supernormal forces.

I raged.

By Zair! I was trapped in this round of Kaidur, and I had begun to detest it urgently. It has come to me as I tell you my story that you must conceive of me as a dour, brooding, humorless sort of apim, whose face hurts if he smiles, who does himself a serious mischief if he dares to laugh. I admit to a starkness of character, a feeling of doom that will not leave this side of the grave; but I do laugh, wildly and with great mirth, when a situation appeals to me in its incongruity, and I can smile most tenderly when my Delia is with me, and my twins, Drak and Lela, chuckle and laugh and grip my fingers with their tiny chubby hands. By Zair! But I talk now as I thought in those dark and scarlet days of the Jikhorkdun in Hyrklana. Babies grow up, as you shall hear, and their problems sometimes made my own seem mere pimples upon a boloth, trifles I scarce need mention beside the enormities of terror they were to face.

So I fought in the arena, and won — for defeat would end in death and the Kaidur would be over for me then — and I took a second purple vial from Balass the Hawk in exchange for a boskskin bag of golden deldys, and Naghan the Gnat was set to attend personally to my armor, at which I was much pleased, and Tilly plagued me with her long, supple golden tail, and Oby practiced swishing a thraxter about, and the long days passed. The twin Suns of Scorpio went on their eternal swinging paths about Kregen and the seven moons cast down their fuzzy pink light, and the air grew sweet with the scent of flowers, and the wealth in my marble chambers grew and swelled until in mere material terms I was a paladin of kaidurs. The queen, I knew, was kept happy by other kaidurs, and she had fallen into the habit of talking with me, seeing me when the circle of her life prevented other pursuits, and in these conversations I think we both realized our lives were restricted and circumscribed. Princess Lilah did not return to the kingdom. I never saw the king, Rogan. The hyr-kaidur Chorbaj the Stux was slain by Cleitar Adria. And on that night the queen summoned me. It was unusual for the pattern of living that had been established, and I was surprised. I dressed carefully and went to see her in the exotic chamber in the high fortress of Hakal.

“Chorbaj has got himself killed,” she said, flinging herself down on her couch. She wore a brilliant green sarong-like garment, almost a shush-chiff, which was encrusted with gems, and yet her white body glowed through cunning interstices in the sensil. I remained alert, my hand gripping that purple vial of curious shape.

“It was a great fight, Queen,” I said.

“Aye! A hyr-kaidur to the life. You reds crowed today, when the iron hooks dragged the bleeding corpse of Chorbaj the Stux from the arena.”

“The greens were not pleased, I’ll allow that.”

“I had thought to send for Cleitar Adria, but he took a cut in his victory.”

“I am here.”

“Yes, Drak the Sword. You are here. And tonight we do not simply talk and you do not lull me to sleep with your fine stories, like Sosie and the Kov of Verukiadrin!”

Sosie and the Kov of Verukiadrin is an incredibly similar story cycle to our Earthly Thousand and One Nights, and Sosie and Scheherazade are twin sisters separated by four hundred light-years.

“You were expecting Chorbaj the Stux,” I said. “He was a great kaidur. The Jikhorkdun is the poorer for his loss.”

“You, a red, can say that? A kaidur’s life is short and violent, and he must take what pleasure and profit he can.”

I did not reply.

She gestured for wine.

I went to the table, and as was my custom I poured her a mild wine to begin with, so that when I slipped into her glass the single drop that would knock over a dermiflon I could drown any trace by a wine stronger and more pungent. She rang her little silver bell for her attendants, and her fifis scuttled in, giggling, flicking their tails about, and a couple of apim girls came in, one with the great golden bowl covered with an embroidered damask, the other with the pitcher and the fluffy towel. Queen Fahia stood up and walked to the screen.

“Hurry, you useless yetches!” she snapped at the girls, and one of them gasped in terror, and ran with the pitcher of warmed and scented water. The other stood stock still, and Queen Fahia reached for her whip, with the silken bows and tassels and the exceedingly ugly and painful lashes.

“Must I slash you, cramph!”

I looked at this new girl, turning in curiosity, and so saw her, and dropped the wine glass and the purple vial and stared and stared. .

Delia, my Delia, in a slave breechclout, stood there, her eyes enormous and fixed on me with a look of utter disbelief.