Arena of Antares (22 page)

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 tête-à-tête, 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.