might be remarked that it may be used as a sling for the carrying of burdens.
“You understand, of course,” said the minor officer, addressing the woman in the pantsuit, “that she would not be in even the
“Ah!” said the woman in the pantsuit, delightedly.
“Doubtless you are concerned for her,” said the minor officer, smiling.
“No,” said the woman in the pantsuit. “She is only a slave.”
The officer of the court, trembling, looked down to the sand.
Janina, who seemed frightened, and perhaps had never been at the stake before, clung to the metal of the pipe, pressing herself fearfully against it, the palms of her small hands, too, up, against the metal.
“Any ladies who care to do so may now leave,” suggested Pulendius, considerately.
But not a woman stirred in the tiers.
Pulendius smiled.
The officer of the court felt weak.
Pulendius turned to the barbarian, and, with his hand, indicated the girl at the pipe. “What do you
think of her?”
“She is merely another slave,” said the barbarian.
Janina moved a little, her chains making a tiny sound against the pipe.
“I do not understand,” said Pulendius.
“Like these others,” said Ortog, prince of the Drisriaks, king of the Ortungen, waving his hand toward the tiers.
Women shrank back. Many cried out in rage, in protest. Even men cried out, in anger.
“You let your slaves out of their collars,” said the barbarian.
“Those are free women!” cried Pulendius, as though offended.
“At best, slaves,” said Ortog, his arms folded across his chest.
“Absurd!” cried Pulendius.
Ortog then turned toward the young naval officer, he with the three purple cords at his left shoulder.
“Let them kneel before true men, and learn to be women,” said Ortog.
The young naval officer met his gaze dispassionately.
The officer of the court put her hand to her breast. How conscious was she then of the intimate garments she had concealed beneath her “same garb,” beneath the “frame-and-curtain.”
“Hinak!” called Pulendius, angrily.
Hinak came forth, half bent, his hands ready, toward the center of the sand.
The barbarian assumed a similar position.
They began to circle one another.
“Wait! Separate!” said Pulendius.
The contestants backed away from one another.
The door had opened, you see, that main door leading into the hold, and a minor officer had entered. He hurried about the ring, before the tiers, and spoke quickly, seemingly urgently, certainly confidentially, to the captain. The young naval officer watched, curiously.
The barbarian, too, interestingly, observed this intrusion.
In a moment the captain rose, and turned to the crowd. “Forgive me,” he said, smiling. “It is nothing. There is a small matter to attend to.” He then left, followed by the first officer and the minor officer, he who had just entered that section of the hold.
“Please continue,” said the second officer, he now of highest rank in the room.
“Begin!” said Pulendius to the contestants in the ring.
In a moment all attention was returned to the contest.
Madly was beating the heart of the officer of the court. She had never understood anything could be so real, so meaningful. Here, on the sand, knelt a girl, scarcely clad, a helpless prize, chained to a pipe, the stake. There, on the sand, men prowled about, eyeing one another, in a combat that might well issue in death for one of them.
A strange, wild, primitive dimension of possible existences opened up then before the startled, expanded imagination of the officer of the court, vistas of terrifying battles and rude kingdoms, with savage ways, vistas of huts and shelters, of halls and tents, of pavilions and palaces, of fortresses and castles, within which men were men and women, women, totally so, and other vistas, too, vistas of green leaves, and rocks, and the feel of wet earth beneath bare feet, vistas of dark forests, of the weaving of coarse cloths, of the cooking by open fires, of waiting anxiously, hopefully, for the hunters to return, vistas of truth and reality she had suspected, but had scarcely admitted could exist. How far away then seemed the dusty tomes of the law, the tedium of litigation, the procedures of the courts, the endless, meaningless trivialities of protocol, civility and discourse, which things seemed then but the remote semblance of a reality, a reality always somewhere else. There was reality here, the reality of the growth of crops, rising out of the moist earth, of rainfall, and storms, of the truths of animals, and of men and women. She had never realized the nature of reality before, that it was not documents and legalities, and banal conversation, and pretense, and hypocrisy, but that it was different, that it was as hard, and perfect, and as natural, and as simple, and as uncompromising, as wood, and stone, and iron and steel. The true world, the unsheltered world, was as real, she suspected, as a coiled rope or a diaphanous, clinging sheet of silk, as real as a weighty golden coin or the leather of a whip.
“Stop!” cried Pulendius, in alarm.
One of the guards rushed to the barbarian, holding his fire pistol to his temple.
The barbarian held Hinak from behind, his arms under Hinak’s, his hands clasped behind the back of Hinak’s neck, pressing slowly forward, and down.
With a grunt the barbarian released his hold, and Hinak went forward, on his knees, in the sand.
In another moment surely his neck would have been snapped.
Hinak rose up, and hurried away. Grateful he was to leave the sand alive.
“The barbarian has defeated a professional fighter,” said the woman in the pantsuit, wonderingly.
“By some trick of wrestling, not with weapons,” said the minor officer to her right.
At that moment there was a soft cry of surprise from many in the tiers. The officer of the court, as well, felt her body move backward, swaying back, just a little, on the tier.
“The ship is accelerating,” said the minor officer.
“Am I not victorious?” asked Ortog.
Janina looked up at Ortog. Her small hands were pressed against the pipe to which she was chained.
“Oh, the contest is not yet done,” Pulendius assured him.
The officer of the court noted how closely the steel encircled Janina’s small wrists. They were small cuffs. The officer of the court realized, suddenly, they had been made for women. They would fit her as well as Janina. The collar was about Janina’s throat. Had she been in such a collar she could have slipped it no more than the slave.
Ortog threw back his head and laughed knowingly.
“Why did you not kill him?” asked the young naval officer.
“I choose whom I kill,” said Ortog.
The question of the young officer had made it clear to those who might be perceptive in the tiers that the barbarian was not intended to survive the evening. Perhaps he might then have availed himself of the satisfaction of destroying one enemy, perhaps in the same moment that the trigger on the fire pistol could have been pulled.
“Ambos!” called Pulendius, irritably. This fighter was from the world, Ambos, and was known professionally by that name. This was not uncommon in the arena, naming the fighters for worlds, or cities, or animals, or appearance. He was the fellow who had been successful in the last mock match, that with what were intended to represent the two-headed spears of Kiros. We do not know his real name. One account gives it as ‘Elbar.’ More importantly, for our purposes, he had once wrestled professionally on Ambos, before applying to the arena masters.
Ambos came forth.
“Kill him,” said Pulendius, indicating the barbarian. He then stepped back. There was to be no mock adjudication of holds, of breaks, and such, in this match.
Ambos, of course, had watched the previous match, and had noted the fate of Hinak. The barbarian was
