Chained in the hold, I saw nothing of the capital of the Sky Pirates when we descended ere long to a landing in the docks. We were led out across the long quays of hewn stone, scoured by a merciless wind that whipped rock dust in our eyes. I had one brief glimpse of soaring pylons and impregnable fortress walls before my captors plunged me again into gloom, this time the gloom of the slave pens. We were led to troughs of water and told to remove as much of the road dust from our persons as we could, then we were led to the block in a huge echoing room where several important-looking officials awaited our coming to apportion us to our tasks.
Slaves are not bought and sold in Zanadar, they are assigned.
The younger of the men examining us was a hard-faced, cold-eyed young man with a pallid, greasy, unhealthy complexion, nattily dressed in vivid silk pajamas and gauntlets sewn with brilliant gems. He was not impressed with our appearance.
“A sorry-looking lot, Thon,” he observed. “Just look at them. Half of them are toothless grandfathers ready for the grave, the others either drooling cretins or hollow-chested invalids dying from the coughing fever. Narouk must learn to do better than this, or the Council of Captains may level a punitive expedition against the city.”
The man he had addressed as Thon was a barrel-chested, hearty-looking man in his middle forties, graying at the temples, with a firm jaw and an air of command about him. He wore a simple leather tunic, greaves and girdle, and a large hooded cloak of bottle-green. The gaily dressed aristocrat who surveyed us with such high-bred scorn pressed a pomander ball to his nostrils as if to alleviate some fancied stench.
“Well, one or two of them look likely enough material,” Theon said gruffly, singling out both Ergon and myself with his eyes. “Yonder dog with the tan skin has a good physique, and the red-skin at his side would make a good maceman. I’ll take those two and you can have your pick of the rest, my lord.”
“How like you, Thon, to pick out the likeliest of the lot for your precious corps,” sniffed the one in silk pajamas. “I like the looks of the tan-skinned oaf myself―he stands tall and has an air of breeding about him. A touch of the gelding wire to cow his spirits, and he would make a rather handsome servant.”
My blood ran cold at his words. The most horrible thing about it all was not so much what he said, although God knows that was grim enough, but the negligent, casual manner in which he said it. It was as if be was discussing some dumb animal, not a human being like himself.
The older man shrugged.
“Mayhap, my lord. But my need takes priority over your requirements. For the prince will have his entertainments, as you know, and I am short two good men.”
The languid young man waved his pomander ball with a disdainful small moue of pique.
“Oh, very well, take them. I will have to make do with the best of what is left, I suppose … .”
The burly, graying man exchanged a few curt words with the clerks, scribbled something on a roll of parchment, affixed a seal ring to dripping wax, and led both Ergon and me apart from the others. My Perushtarian friend glanced at me with a grunt of satisfaction.
“Well, Darjan, at least we will still be together!”
“Yes,” I nodded. “And perhaps we can still arrange an escape
“No talking, you two,” one of the guards growled, cuffing me lightly alongside the head. “Step lively, now. The gamesmaster is a busy man and does not like to be kept waiting.”
Our new owner was Gamesmaster of Zanadar, which meant he was in charge of the management of the great arena and supervisor of the spectacles and entertainments performed there regularly. For the Zanadarians, much like the Romans before them, delight in sport, and there is no sport more exciting than men fighting for their lives. This was to be our fate, it seemed.
Our quarters lay beneath the great arena itself, which lay at one end of the city, beneath an enormous dome of crystal panes in a natural cuplike depression in the rock, perhaps the crater of a long-extinct volcano. A virtual labyrinth of tunnels and passages, rooms and suites and cubicles, had been hollowed out of the soft, lavalike rock below the sandy floor of the arena. There the trained fighting men and the ferocious beasts against which they were pitted were kept.
Our training began almost immediately. Gamesmaster Thon interviewed us briefly to form an estimate of our skills. I told him I was an excellent swordsman, but, oddly enough, he frowned at this and did not seem at all pleased with the news. I later learned that sword fights are not given in the arena for two reasons. For one thing, they are not very spectacular. The spectators in the top tiers demand something a little more active and exciting than watching two men standing face to face flickering thin steel blades at each other.
The other reason is that a slave armed with a sword is a dangerous man and might well slay his guards and attempt an escape.
So, instead of a sword I was given a spear and sent to train with the other keraxians, or spearmen. There was not much chance of a slave armed with a spear running amok or making a break for freedom. The spears we used were Harathian weapons, such as those employed by the Yathoon huntsmen of the southern plains. They are fifteen feet long, shod in heavy bronze, and cumbersome as well as awkward.
Because of his burly shoulders and deep chest, my friend Ergon was assigned to the tharians, or ax-men, who fight with the enormous bronze double-bladed mace, which is the weapon of choice among a people known as the Kumalians. One needed to have iron thews to employ such a weapon, for the Kumalian mace weighs thirty pounds and, including the shaft, measures nearly five feet in length.
We saw very little of each other, Ergon and I, in the next few days, because our trainers kept us busy from dawn to dark, and our labors were exhausting. The reason for this accelerated program was that we were to fight in the very next games, which were only a few days away. The Zanadarians are a cruel, lusty people who love fighting and vastly enjoy seeing men pitted in a desperate struggle against savage beasts or sometimes even more savage men and any excuse for the games is valid in their eyes. These particular games, for example, were being held for no more reason than an expected eclipse in which two of the Jovian satellites were to meet in a rare conjunction. On the night of the “great games,” as the festival of death was called, Ramavad would be eclipsed behind Imavad.
Ramavad, or Europa, is a luminous globe of frosty azure-silver, while Imavad, or Ganymede, is a deep crimson. The symbolism is obvious: in the peculiar mysticism of the Thanatorians, Ramavad represents the purity and holiness of life, while Imavad stands for blood and death and destruction. And the games to be held on this night of blood would be, I was told, appropriately sanguinary.
The training given us keraxians was simple, but, I trusted, effective. The great black jaruka-wood spears were all we would have wherewith to fight our adversaries, and the trouble was we could not be certain in advance as to which of the dreadful predators of the Callistan jungles we would be set against.
The consensus of opinion among the other keraxians of my team was that we would be sent out to fight a pride of savage deltagars. The deltagar may be described as a twenty-foot-long supertiger with scarlet fur and a lashing, whiplike tail edged with jagged serrations or horny blades. The beast is noted for his ferocity even among the terrible monstrosities of this jungle Moon, and much to my surprise my fellow gladiators did not seem to regard the deltagar as a particularly vicious opponent. This, I found out, was due to the fact that while a furious fighter, the deltagar can indeed be slain by such spears as we would be armed with, as only a coat of fur protected its vital organs from our bronze blades.