Noran stopped. He eyed me up and down.
“The schrepims cost me money. They are renowned kaidurs — hyr kaidurs. They must be coddled. If they are damaged before I see them fight... By Glem! Am I or am I not the vad!”
Everyone around him hastily assured Noran that, indeed, he was the vad.
Up to now on Kregen I had not much faith in receiving any help from the Star Lords or the Savanti. Oh, yes, there had been times during which I thought that, well, perhaps either the Everoinye or the Savanti might have arranged things to favor me. But these occasions were few and far between. As far as I knew, and as far as I was concerned, I was battling along alone.
Now, a large missal tree overhung the arcade a few paces along and its leaves brushed the tiled roof. The arcade curved around Vad Noran’s private arena. A movement among the branches of the tree drew my attention, and then the quick looks of the others.
Up there, quickly glimpsed and vanishing, the green-scaled visage of a schrepim glared down on us.
As I say, it was probably mere chance. But, perhaps, just perhaps, the Star Lords did have a hand in it...
“They have run into the arena!” shouted Callimark.
Noran swung to bellow at his guards.
“Go and round them up — and treat them gently until I get there.” He guffawed then, suddenly back in good humor.
“After that you may fight in my arena as though in the Jikhorkdun!”
There were a score of guards. They ran off obediently enough, but it was very clear they did not much fancy the task ahead of them. I felt a stab of pity. Schrepims are the very devil as antagonists. They are quick and sudden, skilled with weapons, able to take a great deal of punishment before they are killed. Their vigorous energy is cold and reptilian, and exceedingly vicious.
The memory of that time over in Higher Ripolavi where we’d been forced to fight a roaming band of schrepims came back to me. There are schrepims and schrepims, and that lot had been of the Soparan race. These four who would give the twenty guards a nasty time, as I judged, I gathered were of the Saradush race. Over in Ripolavi we’d lost Nath the Langon and Nalgre the Forge before we’d even got properly to handstrokes. We’d lost half a dozen more good men before we’d seen the scaled fighters off, and there had been only thirty of them in the band.
Noran was rubbing his hands together. Callimark was looking relieved.
“We will go up into my arena and witness the fight.” said Noran. “It is what I paid for, and I will not be balked of my pleasure.” He set off at a brisk trot around the arcade toward the flights of steps leading up to the stand seating. We followed.
Managing to fall in beside Unmok as we trailed along after the vad, I said, “Froshak got away.”
“Thank his Fristle gods for that! We’re like to have our heads off if—”
“No, Unmok! It will turn out all right. Remember the werstings.”
“I do. Money will not stitch my head back on my shoulders.”
Noran’s private arena had been built as a miniature copy of the arena in the Jikhorkdun. Strewn with silver sand, ringed by comfortable seatings, shaded by a velarium which could be pulled across on its yards if the suns burned too hotly, it waited in the true style of an arena — an area dedicated to combat, blood and death.
He even had the four quarters arranged with their various colors, each with a prianum to receive the trophies of victory and the four staffs with the colored symbols. At the moment the ruby drang lifted highest. Noran was of the reds. The sapphire graint, the diamond zhantil and the emerald neemu were all at the bottoms of their poles. I wondered if he altered this when he invited guests of different color persuasions.
His own box, although lavishly appointed, flanked by columns garlanded and wreathed and with sumptuous hangings of cloth of gold and ruby velvet, did not dare match the opulence of the royal box in the great arena of Huringa. Queen Fahia was conscious of her regal dignity and touchy on matters of etiquette. But the display of wealth was dazzling.
Noran took his seat. It was a throne in everything but name. We settled alongside on the lesser seats. Each one was softly upholstered, with padded arms and back, and with a small table alongside with wine racks beneath. As I sat down and looked out across the suns shimmer along those silver sands I caught my breath.
Here I was, looking out over the arena in Hyrklana instead of being down there, with a sword in my fist, facing death for the entertainment of gilded trash in the stands and the howling crowds!
Sitting in those plush surroundings with the waiting oval of silver sand spread out below me, I wondered what was going to happen next. My thoughts veered off to a vision of this kind of obscenity finding a place in Vallia. The bloody tradition of the arena flourished in many countries of Havilfar. Even the games of Jikaida City were in truth an offshoot of the Jikhorkdun. No, in Vallia we drew spiritual sustenance and refreshment from other sports. There were precious few Vallians I knew who would wish it otherwise.
Three of the escaped schrepims moved into view below. They stepped cautiously backwards, feeling back with each foot in turn, moving with the reptilian grace of their kind. Following them in a curved line, the guards advanced cautiously. There was a sense of hunting animals closing in for the kill in the way that semicircle of guards shuffled steadily forward. But it was clear to us all that they were in no hurry to get to grips with the scaled men.
Noran picked a candied fruit from a box on his table. He bubbled now with good humor.
“This is more like the way life was meant to be led.” He popped the fruit into his mouth. His cheek distended, glistening. “I paid my money, now I want my entertainment.”
“The guards are not happy,” commented Callimark. He, too, sat forward in his chair to watch, and a lick of spittle drooled from the corner of his mouth.
“Get on with it!” Noran abruptly shrieked down. He waved a fist at the guards. “A dozen gold pieces for the first to attack!”
My small knowledge of the fighting habits of the scaled men told me the guard who accepted the offer would not live to collect his dozen gold pieces.
I studied the schrepims.
Their greenish-grayish scales were dull. Different races have different shapes and colors of scale, of course, and the edges glister with different contrasting colors. These three had orange edges to their scales under their fighting harness. The straps were all of scales. Their armor was scale. But their swords were solid thraxters, efficient weapons in the hands of experts, although in nowise the finest swords of Kregen, as you know. The tails of the schrepims were thick at the root, and heavy, flat, flailing instruments. They were nothing like the supple whip-tails of Katakis, for instance, or the superb handed tails of Pachaks or Kildois.
“What are you waiting for?” bellowed Noran again.
The guards shuffled forward, swords pointed, shields up, the visors of their helmets pulled down.
“They’re all jikarnas,”
[4]
said Callimark. He beat a fist on the marble coping before him. He looked contemptuous.
No one sought to contradict him. Also, no one suggested he might like to hop down there and set to himself.
The aura of the scaled men exuded a menace that comes as much from their reputation as from their mere presence. Ordinary mortals steer clear of them, and they have their own ways on Kregen.
“Jikarna!” Noran shouted the word down. It made no difference. Slowly and steadily the guards advanced and as steadily the three schrepims retreated. It was quite clear the guards had decided that no single one would rush forward — the notor’s dozen golden deldys or not — but they would attack together, in a bunch, and overpower all three in a final massive onslaught.
That made the sweetest of sweet sense to me, by Krun.
The three scaled heads, so much like those of lizards, turned this way and that, in purposeful summing up of the situation. When the action began the speed of the schrepims would be blinding. And, I own it with some diffidence, I began to calculate just how many guards might be left at the end, or even if any would be left alive, and whether or not the scaled men might win free.
“Fifty deldys,” roared Noran.
One of the guards, a Khibil, reacted. Khibils with their overbearing ways and haughty fox-like faces always consider themselves to be a superior race of beings. Well, I own to a fondness for Khibils that, although of a different nature from my affection for Pachaks, shares much of that fellow feeling. This Khibil hoisted his shield, whirled his sword — and charged.
He shrieked as he went in, boring dead for the center scaled man. “Fifty golden deldys!” he screamed, and with all the cunning of the fighting man sought to overpower the center antagonist before the two flankers could strike at him. Taking his onslaught as the signal, with equal cunning the other guards rushed forward.
The Khibil had time for one stroke. It was a bold, slashing blow that would have taken the head off the schrepim had it landed. But the schrepim was not there as the blow whistled past. A superb sliding glance of the scaled man’s body, a glint of greenish gray, and the wicked sword smote once, and was still.
The Khibil staggered away, his shield falling uselessly, his sword dropping. His foxy face was a mere mask of blood.
The remaining guards howled and flung themselves on. It was all a flurry of blows, and the quick scrape and ring of steel on steel, the screech of steel on bronze. How they fought, those schrepims! Superb in their reptilian strength and speed they danced on their massively muscled legs, balancing on those thick tails, striking and avoiding, chunking into the guards and slashing and hacking, and withdrawing with bewildering rapidity.
Yes, oh, yes, I remembered their style of fighting!
Four guards were down, then three more, their throats slashed, their unshielded sides cut through. Blood smoked on the silver sand. The uproar deafened. Three more guards staggered away, their legs unable to support them, sinking to the sand. Three more — and yet three more. The four remaining waited no longer. They cast down their shields and ran.
With long reptilian strides the schrepims chased them.
Swords lifted and blurred down in savage blows.
The last man, the single survivor, screamed and ran blindly.
One of the schrepims tossed his sword into the air. He caught it by the forte. His arm went back and he hurled, a vicious, cunning, superlatively destructive cast. The running man staggered on for four paces, lurching, before he fell with the sword burst through heart and lungs.
“By Havil!” Noran was on his feet, one hand to his chest. His face was flushed. “By Glem! They were superb, superb!”
“Money well spent!” declared Callimark.
I looked at these two with interest. None so blind...
Unmok nudged me.
“Jak! They’ll—!”
“Yes,” I said.
Rich blood puddled the silver sand.
Vad Noran was suffused with pride. This villa was a palace and a fortress. Within its walls his will was law. My early impression had convinced me that it would take far too much time to break an entrance in my own old swashbuckling way. The trick with the werstings to gain us entry had been essential, and had worked. But, also, that very impregnability of his villa meant Noran, standing now flushed with the excitement of the combat, had no fear of the three schrepims. He looked down at them as they walked alertly back toward his box.
“Well done, Slacamen,” he shouted, giving them a nickname common among diffs and apims, a name, incidentally, I had heard the Schrepims often chafed under. “There will be much gold for you, aye, and rich foods and fine clothes.”
Still the three advanced, silently, across the sand. The blood glimmered most evilly upon their blades.
Unmok the Nets choked out some unintelligible comment. He started to scrabble over the back of his chair.
Noran did not turn.
“Sit quietly, Och! These Slacamen cannot climb up here.”
Unmok collapsed onto his seat. He was quivering.
“You are sure? Notor — you are sure they cannot get at us?”
“Of course. Why should they?” Noran’s contempt seemed to me to reveal a sudden and unwelcome thought — the kind of thought he would not allow himself to think.
The scaled men couldn’t climb up here, could they?
From my own experience I fancied they could — and would.
I said, “Van Noran! There are three down there. Were not there four in the cage?”
Callimark let out a squeal of pure terror.
“By Flem! He is right!”
“They will not harm me!” Noran bellowed it out. He put a beringed hand to the hilt of his sword. “I am Vad Noran! I bought them to fight for me! I pay them and feed them — they owe their lives to me.”
“I do not think they see things that way.” I looked along the seating, left and right. There was a fourth, and I did not think he would have run off and left his fellows.
The throaty sound of breathing, hoarse and rasping, came from Callimark trying to nerve himself. Unmok crouched in his seat. Noran yelled down, “I am Vad Noran! I pay you gold to fight for me, Slacamen!”
Left and right, along the seating, and up to the lip of the arena wall, along the trees, and down again, to the ornate entrance. My gaze flicked about. No sign... No sign,
yet
...!
Very quick and sudden, schrepims, very fast and deadly.
But although Vad Noran’s guards were not, in the judgment of a hard old fighting man, worthy of their hire, some, at least, of that score who had died in the arena had struck shrewd blows before they perished. Two of the schrepims bore wounds, from which a green ichor leached. Hard to kill, these reptilian humans, but die they could, given courage and strength and skill and the effort of willpower to pit against them.
Around the arena I looked, carefully, seeking a glimmer of greenish scales along the seatings or up among the overarching trees. Callimark continued to breathe noisily. Unmok sat up straight and hauled out his sword.
“I am not in the habit of doubting the word of a noble,” he said, and there was an edge to his voice. “But it seems to me the schrepims will climb up here and we will die. I will strike a blow first, by the golden jeweled cup of the Och Kings!”