Jon leapt backwards, his forest-trained muscles doing the thinking for him, and his opponent swept past, carried by the momentum of its attack.
It turned in an instant and once again the knife carved through the unresisting air; this time making slashing contact with Jon’s left forearm. A vivid red line instantly appeared as the flesh parted like paper and Jon felt a pain like molten metal pouring over his arm.
And this one’s the weakest! he thought in his agony.
He fell backwards in his desperate haste to escape that ardent blade; staggered, catching one leg over the other and fell heavily to the sand.
Had the Lord had the facial muscles to smile sardonically at this point it would have done so but it did not, so it merely leaned forward to deliver the final blow.
As it did so Jon drove his own blade straight upwards into the centre of its chest and it was the Lord’s flesh that parted like paper. There was a spray of perfectly white, milky liquid from the wound. The Lord dropped its knife and an instant later followed it to the wet, white-stained sand.
Jon stood up shakily, hardly able to believe that he had won.
The Lords, who had been watching from outside, raised their upper arms above their heads and gave out a booming ululation; whether in anger or appreciation, it was impossible to tell.
Jon was given some more of the tepid water and allowed to sit down for a short time. A very short time, for almost as soon as he had finished the water another opponent appeared on the other side of the arena and approached wielding a knife identical to the one Jon and his erstwhile opponent had carried.
Once again the combatants warily circled each other; once again suddenly making slashing or thrusting attacks with the instruments of death. To his surprise, Jon found that he was beginning to understand the tactics and techniques that the Lords were employing. Perhaps the creatures were not as clever as they obviously thought they were.
Just as he thought that, the other’s blade came towards him out of nowhere and drew a scarlet line over Jon’s bare chest. An instant later the blade came again and calmly flicked the knife out of Jon’s hand. The Lord made a slight nodding motion of its grim head as if to say, “The contest is over” and moved forward.
In a relaxed manner, it came up to him and drew back the killing blade. For an instant their gazes locked and in that instant Jon seized the knife-wielding arm and bent it backward. The creature convulsed for a second and then Jon was suddenly behind it, bending the arm back and back, with another arm around its throat. The creature’s vestigial arms scrabbled helplessly, trying to gain purchase on his sweat-soaked frame but failing to do so. It dropped the knife and, seizing the opportunity, Jon put both of his mighty arms on the creature’s head and gave a sudden powerful, twisting, irresistible jerk.
There was a loud “crack” and the Lord went limp in his grasp. Jon let its lifeless body slump to the sand. He turned to face the others. They had raised their upper arms and were making that weird howling which could be either approbation or fury.
And so the day wore on.
Opponent after opponent. Each stronger, more agile, wilier, more powerful than the previous. Jon’s entire body became crisscrossed with dripping, scarlet lines, intersecting each other in a crazed pattern of death. The world became a blurred, crimson haze of hell in which ebony figures moved, slashing, probing, cutting. His legs became heavier and heavier while his mind became a misted thing, unable to plan, predict, tell the body to move out of the way of the stabbing bringer of oblivion.
And then it was all over. The knife dropped from fingers that could no longer grip, out of control of a mind that could no longer control.
He wanted it over. He had done far better than he had expected, lasted longer than he had any right to expect.
Now he could die, knowing that he had taken many with him. They would not be able to forget him very easily.
Let us end it now.
He fell to his knees, his head bowed.
He was vaguely aware that many of the Lords had gathered around him. Then the crowd parted and he thought he recognised the blurred figure of the Leader himself.
Slowly, agonisingly, he raised his head higher and forced his bloodshot eyes to focus.
It was the Leader. And it carried something. It was a curved blade, carved out of a strange black material. He had seen many shades of blackness before but nothing like this!
It was a blackness that should not exist, as if a Demiurge God had forgotten to colour in all parts of his creation and left a hole through which another terrible universe could be glimpsed.
The Fatal Scimitar.
‘You have done us a great service, stranger,’ the distant voice whispered, ‘many have tested themselves against you and you have rewarded them with a true challenge. Our people will be stronger for what you, our brave enemy, have accomplished. But your task here is done. Now you must leave us.’
It lifted the Fatal Scimitar.
Jon looked at those glowing rubies with no fear, only burning, esurient hatred.
‘Do it!’ he roared with the last shreds of his strength, ‘By Korok, just do it!’
A great silence fell like an invisible cloak.
The Lords stood completely motionless.
Then the Leader spoke.
‘Forgive us. We did not know that you had the power to speak the Holy Name. You are a warrior of the Great Lord. We should have known by your fighting spirit. Forgive us!’
And with that each Lord lowered itself to the sand and chanted: ‘Forgive! Forgive!’
Four
Jon spent some time with the Lords of the Sands after his ordeal. They took him into the largest of the huts and applied many different types of salve to his crisscrossing wounds. The ointments stung and burned so badly that he let out many roars of pain. But they persisted and gradually the pain subsided. Then they bound the wounds with some type of plant fibre, much like linen, until there was hardly any flesh visible on his torso. His face, mercifully, had received few cuts.
They gave him several types of broth to eat and water that tasted almost fresh to wash down his meals. Then mostly they left him alone in the dim quiet of that hut to lie still and recover.
Jon was relieved to discover that they made no attempt to query him on his apparently exalted status. The fact that he had been able to utter the holy name without immediately being burned to a cinder was all the proof they needed, it seemed.
Jon himself avoided the topic in whatever short conversations he had with them for fear of revealing the fact that he had no idea who the Great Lord Korok was or which qualities that person possessed which made him so great.
Of the Lords of the Sands as a people, he learned nothing; mainly because they themselves knew nothing.
They had no history, no records of great deeds, of epic journeys or struggles going back into a deep and distant past. They might as well have snapped into existence yesterday. All that they knew, all that they lived for, was to fight and struggle and measure themselves against opponents. There were other tribes of Lords out there in the wilderness and on the few occasions when those tribes met there was always strife and violence.
Jon thought to himself that such an existence was utterly meaningless but refrained from commenting. It looked as if that this was the whole sum of their culture, the core of their being and any disapproving opinions from him might push their trust of him to the limit. So he nodded wisely with the hint of a smile when they told him exultant tales of how they had come across a whole family of the others and slaughtered them all in their sleep.