“His white silk gloves are ruined.”
“You idiot!” Her nostrils whitened. “There are killers ahead of us, and you prate of white silk gloves!”
Natema still wore emerald earrings and a single chain of gems about her neck, depending to her waist. These I took in my fingers and removed, and she stared at me with her blue eyes wide and drugged with the emotions of the moment. I threw the stones away.
“Come,” I said. I looked at her. I bent, rubbed my hand in the dust of the floor and then smeared that filth all over her face and hair and body as she struggled and twisted, cursing. “Remember,” I said hrashly. “You are slave.”
She slew me with her eyes. Then we padded on, furtively, toward the sounds of conflict and killing, and I made very sure that the Princess Natema hung her head and dragged her heels as a docile slave should.
Chapter Thirteen
There were five of them in a narrow passageway that led between the slave’s domestic workrooms and the noble portion of the palace on the floor immediately below that containing the princess’ private boudoir. They had three slave girls for their sport and they wanted another. Natema and I had worked our way through the chaos of the palace, passing furious isolated fights, dodging aside as slaves ran and were killed by Ochs or Chuliks, and as guards ran and were slain by slaves. I had picked up a gray breechclout for Natema, and she had grimaced at the filth and bloodstains upon it; but I had spanked her where it stung and she donned the dismal garment. We insinuated ourselves through the slave-dominated areas, ever-watchful for guards; but it would have been madness to have declared Natema for who she was here; to my satisfaction, I must admit, the slaying of guards was far more in evidence than the killing of slaves and we must, perforce, wait. Although I itched to get into the fight and battle alongside my fellow slaves, I felt a curious inverted responsibility for Natema. She could not be all evil; she might truly love me, as she said, and that at once placed a responsibility in my hands. And, even if she did not, I did not relish the thought of her radiant loveliness despoiled by the frantic army of carousing, slaying, singing slaves everywhere on the rampage.
So we worked our way through to where she promised me there would be safety, and here we were, our way barred by five Chuliks with three human girls for their sport, not joining the fighting as, being paid mercenaries, they should.
They saw Natema and laughed, their tusks gleaming, and called out.
“Let her go, slave, and you can return.” And: “Give her to us and you will not be killed.” And: “By Likshu the Treacherous! She is a beauty!”
I put Natema behind me. We must go ahead, to the safety of the noble apartments. The Chuliks stopped laughing. They looked puzzled. Three of them drew their rapiers and daggers.
“What, slave, would you dispute an order from your masters?”
I said softly: “You may not have this girl. She is mine.”
I heard a low gasp from Natema.
The three huddled slave girls scarcely merited a glance; all my attention was on the mercenaries. Had they been Ochs the odds would have been more even. I advanced a foot and brandished the rapier and dagger as my old Spanish master had taught me so long ago.
“The French system is neat and precise,” he had said. “And the Italian, also.” He had taught me fine arts of fencing with the small sword, often erroneously called a rapier. With that nimble little sticker one can thrust and parry with the same blade. With the heavier, stiffer Elizabethan rapier, such a blade as I now grasped, one needed to dodge or duck a thrust, or to interpose the dagger, the rapier’s lieutenant, the Hikdar to the Jiktar. Even so, I could fence well with the rapier without a main gauche. I hold no great pride in this thing; it was all of a oneness with my ability to run out along the topgallant yard in a storm, or to swim incredible distances underwater without coming to the surface for a breath. One is what one is, what is in one’s nature.
Nowadays, that is in the twentieth century, foil fencing, foil-play, such as one learns at a university, is a far removed from the art of sword fighting to kill as is Earth from Kregen.
At the time of which I speak, however, most of my sword fighting had been done with cutlass aboard ship and with the broadsword or shortsword from the backs of zorca or vove. I had not fenced or used a rapier in years. All sword fighting tends from the complicated to the simple. These Chuliks because of the narrowness of the corridor, further narrowed in one place by an enormous Pandahem jar, could come at me only two at a time. Very well, then. They could die two at a time.
The blades clashed and rang between the walls. I took the first one on my dagger, twirled, twisted at the same time the second Chulik’s rapier on my own, rolled my wrist, thrust, drew out the stained blade and immediately took the renewed first’s attack once more on the dagger. It was all very slow. Slow, yes-but deadly. My rapier was caught on the third opponent’s blade-he stepped most gallantly over the twitching body of his companion to get at me-but before he could fairly engage I had spitted the first one through the throat, and then, springing aside, let the long lunge of the new antagonist go swishing past my side. I closed in rapidly, inside his guard, and thrust my dagger into his belly. Instantly I dragged my blades clear and sprang to meet the last two-and at the first onset my captured Chulik rapier snapped clean across with a devastating pinging.
I heard the women screaming.
Blood made the floor slippery. I hurled the broken hilt at a Chulik, who dodged nimbly. His yellow face slicked under the lamplight. The fray was close and deadly for a moment as my dagger held them at bay, and then I had drawn the rapier I had taken from the mailed warrior-he who had fought so nobly and died so well.
Indeed, and his blade was a marvel! The balance, the deftness of it, the suppleness as the gleaming steel whickered between the ribs of the penultimate antagonist!
The last one stared in appalled horror on the four dead bodies of his carousing-companions. He tried to escape. I would have let him go. I stepped aside for him in the corridor and raised my blood-stained blade in ironic salute. My eye caught a movement to the side and I glanced quickly to see the three slave girls rising. Two were still partly draped in strings of pearls. Trust these mercenary ruffians to select the prettiest and most pleasure- skilled of slave girls. Then I saw the third-naked, trembling, but with eyes filled with a fire I knew and remembered and loved-Delia, my Delia…
Natema shouted, shrilly, her voice filled with terror. I flicked my glance back. The Chulik whom I had been about to let go, with the honors of battle, had seen my involuntary look toward the girls, and he had stepped in and was in the act of thrusting his rapier between my ribs. My opinion of him as a fighting man went down. He should, in those close quarters, have used his dagger. Had he done so I would not now be telling you this. I flicked the long blade away with my own dagger and sank my rapier into his belly. He writhed for a moment on the brand; then I withdrew it and he slumped, vomiting, to the floor. Natema rushed to me and clasped me, shaking and sobbing.
“Oh, Dray! Dray! A true fighting man of Zenicce, worthy of the Noble House of Esztercari!”
I tried to shake her off.
I stared at Delia of the Blue Mountains, who drew herself up, naked and grimed, her hair dusty and bedraggled, her body taut and firm in the lamplight. She looked at me with those limpid brown eyes and-was it anguish, I saw? Or was it contempt, and anger, and a sudden cold indifference?
I was standing by that great jar of Pandahem porcelain. We were abruptly surrounded by green clad nobles who surged into the corridor, chief among them Galna, whose hard white face ridged and planed as he saw Natema. He cried out in horror and whisked a fellow-noble’s gaudy cape about her glowing nakedness. The slave girls were hustled back with the rest of us as the princess was placed within a solid palisade of noble living flesh. There was some confusion.
