But he started out strong, tough, unwounded, and not despairing of his future in Karan. Most of the other prisoners were in much worse shape, and their defeat and capture had knocked out of them most of the will to live. As their captors drove them along like cattle, the Scadori began to sag and stumble. Each time one went down, the Karani infantry guarding them would close in, cut the man out of the file, and lay his belly open with a sword. It was always a slash across the belly, so that the man lay on the ground shrieking in agony until his strength failed. Sometimes that took a long time, so that the prisoners marched miles farther on before the dying man’s cries faded away behind them.

  After this happened a dozen times, something new was feeding Blade’s determination to live. It was a desire to live long enough to kill a few more Karani. When and where didn’t matter. He would quite gladly pick them up by their collars and bash their heads together, or strangle them very slowly with his bare hands, if he couldn’t find a weapon. But he was quite certain that at least one Karani was going to pay for every Scadori prisoner left writhing and shrieking on the ground.

  After a few days there were no more executions. Everyone still on his feet was determined to stay there until he dropped dead. Some of them did just exactly that. Thirty miles a day on a few swallows of water and half a loaf of coarse bread was too much for even the hardened Scadori.

  It was not beyond Blade’s strength. There were times when he wasn’t sure about that, but somehow he was always able to go on putting one foot in front of another. Sometimes exhaustion, sun, dust, and the sweat pouring into his eyes blinded him so that he stumbled and staggered along. Before too many more days his back was burned raw by the sun and his feet left traces of blood as he walked. But he kept on going.

  One night a Karani soldier slipped in through the guards and offered him a full skin of water and large slabs of bread and meat. Blade recognized the man as one of Pardes’ personal bodyguard, poured the water on the ground, and threw the bread and meat in the man’s face. He would make this march on his own, with the strength that he had in him, without accepting favors from any damned Karani. He would do that or die.

  As the prisoners started off the next morning, Pardes himself rode in close to the line, staring hard at Blade. Behind rode his usual companion, a hard-faced officer whose right cheek was a mass of scars above his brown beard.

  Blade returned the stare, although it cost him more strength than he could really spare to keep his head up until the eunuch rode off. By now it was all he could do to keep his body upright and moving forward.

  That was more than a good many of the other prisoners could do. By the time they reached a large river, only about thirty were still on their feet. None died after that, however. They were allowed to drink all the water they wanted, bathe, cut each other’s hair and beards, pick out each other’s lice, and generally make themselves look and feel human again. Although the food did not improve, Blade felt his strength returning rapidly. He had lost nearly thirty pounds, but what was left was all muscle and bone and sinew. The soles of his feet were as tough as shoe leather, and he was alert and aware again. The Karani guards were careful to stay at a safe distance from him, and both Pardes and his henchman were unmistakably impressed.

  After a few days spent recovering, the surviving prisoners were loaded aboard a large flat-bottomed river galley and began a journey downriver. The days passed, the river widened slowly, and its banks became less covered with forests and more studded with farms, plantations, and towns. The towns grew larger and closer together, and the traffic of barges, galleys, and fishing boats on the river grew thicker. Twice they passed ferries crossing and recrossing the river, propelled by paddle wheels driven by horses on a treadmill. Blade noted all this with interest. Karan had a civilization, no doubt about it. But the smell of decadence and weakness rose from that civilization, even from the small sample Blade had seen so far.

  Then at last they came to salt marshes and a tidal estuary so wide that Blade could barely see from one shore to another. Two seagoing galleys came out to join the river ship, and the three rowed on together through the night.

  At dawn the next morning Blade at last saw the towers of Karanopolis rising out of the mists ahead. He saw the miles of walls with their hundred-foot towers crowned with banners, he saw the harbor crammed with galleys and sailing ships and fishing craft. He saw the three-and four-storied buildings that jostled each other for space on the five hills inside the walls. He saw the gilded and blued domes of the temples, the square towers of the palaces, and everything else that made Karanopolis the wonder of its world.

  The sight of the mighty city did not discourage him. But it gave him a far more vivid notion of how large the prizes might be in the game Pardes and Iscaros were playing. Power over this city and the empire it ruled would be an immense, glittering prize. Men who sought that prize would gladly risk their lives and fortunes. They would even more gladly expend any number of minor pieces-such as unknown Scadori prisoners.

  Chapter 9

  For his first weeks in Karanopolis, Blade lived well. In the House of the Servants of the Arena on the outskirts of the city, he and the other prisoners destined to become gladiators lived like princes-or, more accurately, like cattle being fattened for the slaughter. They had good and abundant food, a bottle of the finest wine each day, daily baths, exercises, massages with perfumed oils by trained slave girls, and once a week a night with one of those slave girls.

  Blade found it hard to enjoy himself with the girls. They were scrubbed clean, perfumed, and wore gilded bells and bracelets and the filmiest of silks. But the expression in their eyes was the same as that of the slave women in Scador.

  Otherwise the month Blade spent in the House was almost idyllic. He felt the flesh returning to his bones until he was up to his fighting weight again. His massive muscles regained all their strength, his reflexes regained their lightning speed, he became once more an almost frighteningly skilled fighting machine. He did frighten some of the guards. They took to giving him his orders from twenty feet away, with one hand clamped hard on the hilts of their swords. That made Blade laugh out loud, and that laughter in turn made him even more formidable in their eyes. But the men chosen for the service of the High Arena were expected to have their pride, so there was no punishment. A warrior, even a slave warrior, could not be broken into a cringing creature like one of the slave girls.

  But there would be no such protection for Tera. She was in the hands of a man who might take personal pleasure in literally beating her into submission. The thought of that happening to Tera was never entirely out of Blade’s mind. Even when he was impressing guards by snatching thrown spears out of the air or fending off two swordsmen at once with only a small round shield and a stick, he could not forget Tera.

  He knew very well where all this luxurious living and training would take him in the end. From the sunbathing deck on the roof of the House he could look across the fruit orchards and country villas to the looming mass of the High Arena. Inside that hill-sized pile of black and white checkered stone he would sooner or later fight and probably sooner or later die, for the amusement of as many as two hundred thousand people.

  What he didn’t know was how being a piece in Pardes’ game would affect his path from the House to the Arena. He was sure it would. The eunuch wouldn’t let even the smallest of his pieces go astray until it had done its job. But it would be a waste of time to try finding answers when he didn’t even know half the questions.

  Blade left the House of the Servants of the Arena after six weeks. As fighters were trained and fattened up, they were bought by wealthy individuals or syndicates. Some of these bought gladiators simply for the pleasure of seeing them go out and fight and die. Others bought them and sent them out because putting a good team of gladiators into the Arena amused the people of Karanopolis.

  That way could lie power-power over the swarming mob of the great city. In their hundreds of thousands the mob could swamp any army, sweep away any enemy, topple noblemen, princes, and even Emperors. It had happened before. To be able to make it happen again, at their command, was the dream of every ambitious man high enough in Karan to have any dreams at all. If they could not do that, they could at least try for the more modest goal of keeping their enemies from hurling the mob against them.

  Blade didn’t exactly get all this laid out for him on a gilded scroll. But he kept his eyes and ears open and his mouth shut, and built up the picture out of the odd piece dropped here and there by guards or loose-tongued visitors. After six weeks in the House, he had few doubts left about what kind of game Pardes was playing.

  Blade was not bought out of the House by Pardes himself. That would have been unsubtle and foolish. The huge eunuch would never be foolish-at least not more than once. He probably would never be unsubtle, either, even when he could afford it. Among the rulers of Karan, intrigue was not just a technique. It was an addiction.

  The man who came to buy Blade was named Figurades, a wealthy merchant nearly as big as the eunuch. But most of his bulk was fat, and the fat was swathed in embroidered silks and soft kidskin, not in wool and leather and metal. His sausage-thick fingers practically dripped rings, and his heavy-fowled face did drip sweat.

  Blade doubted if all that sweat was caused by the heat. It was the height of summer and the sun poured down into the Auction Yard behind the House. But beside the merchant stood Pardes’ henchman, the scar-faced soldier. He wore a long knife in his jeweled belt and his small eyes moved from Blade to the merchant and back again. He watched Figurades particularly closely as the man counted out one thousand two hundred stamped gold coins as Blade’s purchase price.

  Left to himself a merchant like Figurades would never have paid half that sum for even the most formidable gladiator-slave. But he wasn’t being left to himself. Blade suspected that half of those coins came from Pardes’ own purse. The eunuch had moved his new piece one square forward.

  No doubt the next move would be to the High Arena itself, for Blade’s first combat.

  Chapter 10

  Blade’s first fight in the Arena came two weeks after Figurades bought him. It was not much of a test. Against Blade none of the three opponents lasted more than ten minutes. Two of them had no more chance than a twelve-year-old boy. The third was either more skilled or more desperate, but even he lasted ten minutes only because Blade realized that he shouldn’t kill too quickly. The crowd in the seats of the Arena had the same fondness for seeing slow, painful deaths as the Karani soldiers did. Blade couldn’t bring himself to slice the man apart piece by piece, but he did manage to play with him long enough to have the crowd howling in bloodthirsty delight. Then the man launched a wild charge at Blade. A moment later he was flat on the sand at Blade’s feet, blood pouring from his mouth and from the spear wound in his chest.

  Blade learned a good deal from that first fight. He learned even more from watching the rest of the day’s fighting. By nightfall, it was obvious that only fights involving the less skilled gladiators were usually pushed to the end. The magnates of the Empire of Karan were more than happy to gratify the mob’s lust for blood. But as a rule, they were unwilling to dip too deeply into their pockets to do so. A first-class gladiator ran from four hundred gold pieces on up. But the poor wretches who died by the half-dozen cost their masters no more than fifty or a hundred apiece.

  Yet there was a catch in that pattern, a catch that Blade kept in mind on the way back to Figurades’ slave quarters that night. What happened when really good fighters faced each other, each owned by a master with a well-filled purse? Even against a half-trained fighter, bad luck or an accident could still kill an expert. Against an equal, the risk was even greater.

  Then suppose betting was heavy, so that one side might gain a tempting prize by a kill? Or suppose someone wanted to put on a particularly spectacular show of skill with weapons? Blade wondered how long it would be before he got caught in a situation like that.

  He saw experts pitted against each other the very next week, in fact. Iscaros sent seven of his most formidable gladiators into the Arena. Five of them walked out of it, leaving behind two dead comrades and no less than seventeen dead opponents and a wildly cheering crowd.

  That day Iscaros was accompanied by a woman who made Blade start the first time he saw her. For a moment he thought he was looking at Tera, flaunted on the arm of her master. Then he looked more closely and saw that this woman, though much like Tera, was a good head taller and stood and gestured like one born to command. The simple robe that flowed down from her slim shoulders glittered with a wealth of tiny jewels that not even the arrogant Iscaros would have lavished on a slave woman.

  «Who is that woman with Iscaros?» Blade asked the one-armed ex-gladiator in charge of Figurades’ team.

  The man grunted and spat openly over the railing into the sand below. «That-that-«He apparently couldn’t think of a word bad enough. «That woman with Count Iscaros, she’s Princess Amadora. ‘The Gift of Ama,’ the Love Goddess, her name is. Certainly fits her, too. Can’t live a day without a man’s tool in her, they say. Count Iscaros must have more than meets the eye, for her to keep him around this long.»

  Blade looked at the princess again. No, she did not look that much like Tera. This woman had no more life in her face than in the diadem perched on top of her high-piled hair. Then Blade remembered that in Karan the diadem was a sign of royal blood.

  «Iscaros aims high, even so. Can’t the Emperor stand between him and Amadora?»

  The other man granted and looked at Blade as though he had just asked why water ran downhill. «Not a chance. She’s the Emperor’s own first cousin, and ten good years older. She did a fair bit to raise him up after his father died. Now, though, I think likely she’s aiming to raise him higher still.»

  Blade knew by now the ceremonial method of slow execution in Karan. «On a wall hook, with a gilded cord around his throat?»

  The man looked at Blade warningly and cleared his throat. But he also nodded. Blade decided not to ask if Amadora was aiming for the Coral Throne herself. That question was neither wise nor at all necessary.

  Was Iscaros aiming just as high? Certainly he would have a chance to do so, as long as Princess Amadora kept him around. That made the game he was playing against Pardes even bigger than Blade had suspected.

  Blade did not much care who ruled in Karan. But he did care about being so trapped in games played by its mighty men and women that he could not lift a finger to help or even find Tera. It was maddening to realize that he might never even know if she was dragging out her life in some third-class brothel, or lay dead in a secret grave, tortured to death by Iscaros for an evening’s amusement.

  Blade decided that if he had a chance to kill one high-placed Karani and one only, it would be Iscaros.

  The summer wore on, the fights in the Arena now coming two and three times a week. The competition among Karan’s rulers to put on the best and bloodiest show for the screaming mob grew more and more intense. Before too long, all of the competitors except for Pardes, Iscaros, and two or three others with either great ambitions or great wealth or both dropped out, unable to stand the pace.

  The showpiece of Iscaros’ team was a trio of men only a little smaller than Blade. They always fought as a trio, one with broadsword and shield, one with a two-handed axe, and one with trident and net. Each of them was formidable alone. As a team they swept all before them until no one could be found to bet against them and only the cheapest and most expendable fighters were sent against them. Finally they disappeared from the Arena, after gladiators picked to fight them started killing themselves rather than appear in the Arena against the Three of Iscaros.

  Blade, meanwhile, built up a modest reputation of his own as a spectacular executioner of unskilled and semiskilled fighters. Only twice did he meet men who were anything like a fair match for him. Building a reputation by satisfying the crowd’s barbarous thirst for blood disgusted Blade. He was also quite sure that his lack of equal opponents was no accident. Somewhere in the background, Pardes’ massive hand was at work, playing his piece as he thought best.

  The summer was more than half over when one evening before the games the one-armed trainer called Blade to his office. As Blade entered, he saw a large wicker basket sitting on the table, a bronze tube tied to the handle with a gold cord. The trainer nodded to Blade, who broke open the tube and read the letter inside.

  It had no salutation, no signature, and no manners. It said only:

  In tomorrow’s fighting you shall be matched alone against the Three of Iscaros in a Game of Rescue. Your victory shall earn much. (For whom? Blade wondered.) His Sacred Majesty shall be present, wishing to appear before his people as he prepares his march into Scador. It is wished that you eat no food and drink no wine except from this basket.

  Blade had heard rumors of an invasion of Scador, but this was the first definite word. In any case, there was a more important question.

  «What is a Game of Rescue?» asked Blade.

  The trainer smiled. «One of the great shows of the High Arena, Blade. You will be remembered for being part of one, whether you win or lose. I can think-«

  «Think after answering my question, please,» said Blade.

  The trainer made a mock bow. «As Your Exaltedness wishes. In the Game of Rescue one or more beautiful women are tied naked to a stake in the center of the Arena. One side tries to rescue them, the other to keep them from being rescued. At the end of the fight, the victors rape the women.»

  Blade could not keep the disgust out of his voice. «There, in front of half of Karanopolis?»

  The trainer shrugged. «Why not?»

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18