“Very attractive,” whispered her companion.
“I am not in the least interested,” said the officer of the court.
“Why are you blushing?” asked her companion.
“I am not,” insisted the officer of the court, her skin aflame.
“He wants you,” whispered her companion.
“He is an illiterate brute,” said the officer of the court.
“He looks at you as though you were a common slave,” said her companion.
“Perhaps he will buy me,” said the officer of the court, acidly.
“And what man would not, if he could afford you?” said the woman.
The officer of the court did not deign to respond to this remark. The very thought of it, she, for sale!
“But perhaps he would merely bind and gag you, and carry you off,” she said.
“Perhaps,” said the officer of the court.
“He wants you,” she said.
“Let him want me then, in vain,” said the officer of the court.
“You might not speak so proudly,” she said, “if you were on your knees before him, naked, your
hands tied behind your back.”
“Please,” protested the officer of the court.
“And you would be made his slave,” she said.
The officer of the court trembled.
“And you would serve him well,” she said.
“Please,” said the officer of the court.
“He would see to it,” she said.
At this point the young naval officer was looking about the stands, and, to her pleasure, their eyes met. This gave her the much-desired opportunity to escape the humiliating embarrassments of her conversation with her companion on the tiers. The young officer would surely remember her from the captain’s table, the preceding evening. He would recall, too, the bit of purple accenting her sheath, which, so subtly, but nonetheless clearly, proclaimed her own nobility. She, too, was of the blood! This, too, would give her a way of putting her companion in her place, who was of the honestori, but not of noble blood. This would make it clear to her that she must not speak in such a way to her, so frankly, so intimately, as though they might be of the same station, as though they might be equals, even as though they might both be no more than women huddled naked at the foot of a slave block, each waiting, in her turn, to be dragged to its surface, to be exhibited and sold. He was only a few feet from her, in his place on the first tier, in the place of honor, between the captain and the first officer, at the edge of the circle.
“Hail to the emperor!” she said. “Hail to the empire!”
He looked away, returning his attention to the activities of the gladiators, they preparing for their exhibition.
The companion of the officer of the court, the woman in the pantsuit, tactfully took no official notice of this episode.
The officer of the court stiffened in humiliation. Tears ran down her cheeks, which she swiftly wiped away.
She, too, said nothing of the episode.
Could the naval officer, he of the blood, have somehow suspected, or guessed, that she wore soft garments beneath her “same garb”? Was that why he had not deigned to recognize her, to return her greeting, even to indicate that he had noticed it?
She looked to the gladiator, by the opening of the tiers. He regarded her. On his lips there was, playing there, ever so subtly, a smile. It was a smile of amusement, of contempt. Quickly the officer of the court jerked her head away, angrily, looking to the sand, as though something of great interest might be occurring there.
She had never been so embarrassed, so humiliated, in her life.
There were, in the empire, you see, matters of distance, of rank and hierarchy.
Such were not to be lightly violated.
She had done so.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” called Pulendius, “welcome, all, to the festivities of the evening.”
All attention was upon him.
“And let us welcome, too, our special guest, one honoring us with his presence this evening,” he called, pointing to the fellow kneeling to one side, in skins, laden with chains, “Ortog, a prince of the Drisriaks, king of the secessionist house of Ortog.”
There was laughter, and polite applause.
The fists of the barbarian, in close proximity to one another, his wrists well confined in weighty manacles, clenched in futile rage.
This, too, caused amusement in the crowd.
Even had he no acquaintance with some patois interactive with Telnarian there could be little doubt, given Pulendius’s exaggerated, pompous references, clearly directed at him, and the amusement of the crowd, that he was the object of ridicule.
It will be helpful to the reader to follow certain later events if I make clear certain relationships, certain lineages, involved here. Ortog was a prince of the Drisriaks, which was one of the eleven traditional tribes of the Alemanni nation. His house, however, was secessionist, and thusly he was a prince of one house, of the Drisriaks, and the king, or pretender to kingship, in another, his own, that of the Ortungen.
“He dared to raise arms against the empire!” said Pulendius. “Now he kneels before us, humbled, in chains, as helpless as a slave!”
There were cries of delight from the audience.
“We shall now see him bow to the empire!” said Pulendius.
But the back of the kneeling, scowling figure remained straight, quite straight.
Pulendius regarded the prisoner.
But the prisoner remained motionless.
Pulendius, for a moment, seemed nonplussed, but, at a nod from the captain, he gestured to the two guards.
They seized the prisoner and, with great difficulty, forced his head down, into the sand.
But when they released him, he straightened his body, sand clinging about his beard and face.
In his eyes there was a terrible fire, that of a cunning, and a covetousness, and a hatred almost inconceivable to the educated, sophisticated, civilized passengers of the Alaria, a hatred which burned, like watch fires, outside the walls of the empire.
“Had we your weapons!” he cried.
“Such men have their possibilities,” said the naval officer to the captain.
“They make fearless, but dangerous, auxiliaries,” said the captain.
“Fortunately they are apt to spend more time dealing out death and destruction to one another than to the empire,” said the first officer.
“The emperor is under pressure from many quarters to ponder an edict of universal citizenship,” said the young naval officer.
“That would be a military mistake of capital importance,” said the captain.
“Assuredly,” said the young officer.
As these allusions might not be clear I shall mention that citizenship within the empire was a prized possession. And more was involved, considerably more, than matters of prestige or social standing. Without it, for example, one could be denied the right to hold land, denied the right to bring legal actions, denied the right to legal representation in court, denied the right to make wills, to bequeath property, and such. Careers, too, and advancement within them, often depended on citizenship. Employment in the vast bureaucracy of the civil service, for example, required citizenship. Without citizenship one was, in certain respects, even if free, little more than an animal. It was not merely that certain offices, certain forms of political power, were closed to one, but that one was, in a sense, not being a citizen, not really a member of the community. One was, in effect, without standing before the law. It was only gradually, and over a period of centuries, even thousands of years, that citizenship had become more widely available. In the beginning it extended only to a given class on the first Telnarian world; it spread later to other classes on that world, and then to the population of that world, and then, in turn, similarly, gradually, to the other Telnarian worlds; then, of course, later, it began to spread to certain classes on the provincial worlds, and so on. The apprehension of the young officer and the captain had to do with the military as a route to citizenship. The enlistment for both the regular military and for the auxiliaries was for twenty years, followed by a pension. Sons commonly followed the craft of their fathers. On worlds where the bindings had taken place this was required, the sons of soldiers being required to be soldiers, and so on. A fellow who enlisted in the regular military, the regular forces, received citizenship after his first year of service; a fellow who enlisted in the auxiliaries received it at the end of nine years. The value of citizenship was such that noncitizens with energy and ambition often seized upon the military as a route to the prize of citizenship, which, of course, descended to their children. This policy provided the regular military, and, to a lesser extent, the auxiliaries, with a large pool of capable, eager recruits on which they could draw. Two further observations are in order. Men normally understand the value of, and respect, what has cost them much time and labor. One who has literally been forced to earn his citizenship has learned its value, and never thereafter takes it lightly. Similarly, such men tend to remain loyal to the empire. They make good citizens. The fear of the young officer and the captain is now clear: If citizenship were universally extended throughout the empire, this would remove one of the major enticements for men of quality to enter military service. Too, of course, obviously the universal extension of citizenship throughout the empire would cheapen it, and, in effect trivialize it. Those who do not care to earn their citizenship, of course, are muchly in favor of receiving it as free gift, like bread and entertainment in the cities. The agitation, and the riotous nature, of such elements constituted a force which could be exploited, of course, in a variety of ways by those politically adept at such matters. “Power to the people,” so to speak, is always a popular slogan with those who have plans for putting the people to their own purposes. We can begin to understand, then, something of the factionalisms involved in such matters, and certain of the pressures to which the emperor and senate were sure to be subject.