“Won’t get up, Notor,” reported the Deldar in command of the slave detail.
“If he’s damaged goods he is of no use to us.” The Jiktar’s words carried a nasal whine. He glared down on me.
This, I felt, must be the time. I had suffered a very great deal. I had been kicked and prodded and mauled, and I was bound with thongs and I was destined for slavery. Well, someone would be sorry for all that before I was finished.
I broke the bonds with a single convulsive jerk.
I stood up.
The Rhaclaws began to yell at once.
The Jiktar took a step back, and then I took his pudgy throat between my fists. I did not kill him. I threw him at the nearest bunch of Rhaclaws. They are a stocky lot, the Rhaclaws, with two arms and two legs, and heads that are so large and dome shaped that, lacking a neck, their chops seem to rest on their shoulders and, as Zair is my witness, are almost as wide as those shoulders. I say they do not have necks; this is not perfectly true. They do have a small disclike neck that enables their massive domed heads to swivel. Now their two legs apiece did not stop them from toppling over in a muddle as the Jiktar struck them. “Seize him!” someone was yelling, as there is always someone willing to shout those easy words rather than to dive in.
I picked up a Rhaclaw who was driving in with his stux low at me, and whirled him about my head. I yelled, then, like a fooclass="underline" “Hai, Hikai!”
The huge domed head of the Rhaclaw cut a swath through his fellows. I forged on. Things were becoming interesting. One or two of the slaves were beginning to jump up and down, and at least three of them had freed themselves from their bonds. We might make a tasty little party of this yet. The gate lay open. No one had thought to close it on a rabble of cowed slaves. The Rhaclaw-club in my fists cleared a path. I aimed for the gate. Torchlight spattered the scene with drops of ruby radiance. Shadows writhed at the gate and I saw a Hikdar — he was apim — hurling his stux. A quick roll of the wrists interposed my human club and the Rhaclaw made no sound, for he was already unconscious, as the stux penetrated his chest.
I bashed my way on, and dodged two more flung stuxes, and then a Rhaclaw came at me with a thraxter. He was smashed to the side. His great domed head struck the gate, burst, and blood and brains splashed out, vivid in the torch glare.
I felt sorry for him. But then, he should never have hired out as a mercenary had he not envisaged some such bloody ending.
“Run with me, comrades!” I roared at the slaves. Some responded. I saw a burly fellow with a shock of villainous black hair slashing about him with a thraxter. He handled the weapon as he would handle a cutting knife in the cane fields. Others ran to follow me.
Swinging back to the gate I started through, and this time I draped the senseless Rhaclaw over my back and so heard the individual sick chunk of three stuxes as they smashed into him, poor chap, instead of my naked back.
I was through the gateway.
The torchlight dimmed, but the Maiden with the Many Smiles floated serenely above, a little cloud drifting across her smiling pink face.
Fresh torches blazed before my face. A group of men. riding half-voves halted and the glitter from their accouterments near blinded me. I shook my hair back and glared up at them. Their leader stared down, remote, in complete command, with a haughtiness I recognized and loathed.
“Hai, Jikai!” I roared, and swung the dead Rhaclaw and let fly at this supercilious rast astride his half-vove. He ducked. The Rhaclaw flew past.
The half-vove rider spoke in an icy tone of voice.
‘Take him alive!”
The half-voves closed in.
Well, they were tougher opponents, but I could handle them.
From nowhere a net descended about me, enveloping me. I had no knife, no sword. I fought the strands, the smothering folds tangling and obstructing. Men dropped from the high saddles of the half-voves and closed in. Their thraxters gleamed most wickedly in the confused lights of the torches and of the Maiden with the Many Smiles.
I took two strands of the net into my fists and wrenched, and wrenched two more, and so tore a hole in the net.
I thrust up through the net, kicking it from me.
The first man was upon me.
I slid his sword, chopped him across the neck, took his sword away, and parried the immediately following onslaught from three of his fellows.
They sought to strike me with the flat and so knock me senseless.
I used the edge, for I cared nothing of them.
They wore armor and billowing cloaks, very romantic in the streaming moonlight. I was near naked, clad only in an old scarlet breechclout I had had no time to fasten properly. That I, Dray Prescot, Krozair of Zy, Lord of Strombor — and much else besides — should be laid low by a breechclout!
And — my own old scarlet breechclout, at that.
I sprang and leaped and fought and beat them back and so took stock of a fine half-vove and readied myself to leap upon his broad back and so urge him away with those special clansmen’s words that only we and the voves may understand.
I leaped all right — but I was heading downward instead of upward. The scarlet breechclout had finally untwisted and fallen about my legs. Tripped, I pitched headlong. In the next moment something extraordinarily hard and heavy sledged alongside my head and there was no time for a single chime from the bells of Beng-Kishi.
Chapter Eight
Nath the Arm glowered on the recruits as we stood on silver sand in the wooden-walled ring, blinking in the suns-light, shuffling our feet. We were coys, for anything that is young and green and untested on Kregen is often dubbed a coy, with a sly laugh, and we screwed up our eyes and stared up at Nath the Arm as he looked down on us from his pedestal.
“Unequal combat is the secret,” he roared at us. “That is what pulls the crowds. You’ll be unequal, and if you live, maybe you’ll be unequal the other way.” Nath the Arm chortled, his massive black beard oiled and threaded with gold, his wide-winged ruby-colored jerkin of supple voskskin brilliant with gems, his kilt a splash of vivid saffron. He wore silver greaves. His black hair, graying at the temples, was savagely cut back around his ears.
The villainous fellow with the black hair who had thrashed about with the sword, back where I had chastised the Rhaclaws, swallowed and grimaced at me. “Unequal?”
“Silence, rasts!” Nath the Arm thumped a meaty fist onto the wooden rail before him. His face, leathery, whiskered, and lined, crisscrossed with old scars, loomed above us, the huge blue-black beard glittering with gold. “You talk when I tell you. You do anything when I tell you.”
As though we had been faced with a victorious render crew we had been given the alternatives. We could become slaves and work on the farms or in industry or the mines. We might become fodder for the Jikhorkdun. We might, if we thought ourselves apt enough with a weapon, become kaidurs, beginning, of course, as coys. Or, we could be slaughtered, there and then, out of hand. Some, who with a shake of the head said they knew of these things, had chosen to go as slaves. Those of us here, in the small sanded practice ring hot and sticky beneath the Suns of Scorpio, had chosen to become coys and so perhaps, one day, if we lived, to become kaidurs. Escape, we had been told, was impossible, and then, with many a sly wink and nod, Nath the Arm pointed out to us the wonderful advantages enjoyed by a great kaidur: the gold he received as purses, the girls who sighed and lusted for him, the wine he might quaff, the soft living between bouts in the Jikhorkdun where the maddened crowd showered him with plaudits.