Shadowed By Wings (43 page)

With a roar of outrage, he charged at me.

I sidestepped his charge. Misjudged. His poliar caught me on my hip, sent me spinning round with a blast of pain. The crowd roared. The pain turned my head airy and fuddled.

The ground reverberated beneath me. From one corner of my eye I realized, shocked, that Re was close, engaged in combat with the dragonmaster and Ringus, his snout darting forward, his venom-coated tongue snapping forth.

How big he was, how muscled and fast! He exuded heat and fury. His great scaled hindquarters were swinging toward me, talons shredding up clouds of dust. The dragonmaster danced about him, wielding his whip, while Ringus darted in and out between the bull’s hindlegs.

The two inductees who’d stood as if paralyzed shrieked as Re’s hindquarters loomed suddenly closer. They both dropped their weapons and fled, blindly.

The panicked movement caught Re’s eye. With breathtaking speed, he spun round, nearly trampling Ringus, knocking the dragonmaster into the dust with his furiously lashing thin tail. Re’s neck snaked forward, his tongue shot forth:
Smack!
He hit one of the fleeing inductees square upon the back. The stricken inductee sailed through the air and landed hard facedown, skidding upon belly and chin through dust. Re’s snout shot toward him, his jaws opened, and he picked the fallen little boy up in his mouth. A gurgled scream. A blur as Re shook him. A foreleg talon slashed up toward snout. The ground turned red with blood.

The crowd roared anew.

Dono smashed his poliar against my ribs and I crumpled.

Blinding pain white-hot through my torso. My head turned buoyant and cotton clouded.

Dono came at me, poliar raised like an axe above his head. Fear injected adrenaline through my veins and I scrambled for my cape and snapped it wildly at him as he brought his poliar smashing down to my face. I rolled. His poliar slammed into dirt. I felt the chain hook-clasp of my cape catch on something, and as I rolled, the clasp tugged reluctantly along the rolled rope of my cape.

Dono screamed.

The clasp had snagged upon his left eyelid.

He clawed at his face, ripped the thing out of his lid. I stared in horror as blood poured over his cheek from his self-shredded eyelid. Behind me, Re bellowed, close, too close. Still on my back in the dust, I turned, looked wildly over one shoulder. One of Re’s great clawed feet scored the ground a hand’s breadth away from me, and the ground shook.

I screamed shrilly.

Confusion, clouds of dust, a mountain of heaving belly scales above me.

Through the clouds of dust, a figure. Ringus.

“Get out, get out,” he screamed, and as I struggled to stand, Re shifted again, lightning fast, and I saw two slitted, amber red eyes appear suddenly above me, and then Ringus was snatched up in Re’s maw.

Re reared up on his hind legs. In typical dragon fashion, he used the sharp, hooked talons of his forelegs to eviscerate the prey in his mouth.

I staggered away, terrified, half blind with the pain that radiated outward in crippling waves from where Dono had smashed his poliar against my ribs.

I heard Egg’s voice in my head then:

“If you’ve been hurt bad in Arena an’ Re is chargin’ at you, your only hope of survivin’ is pundar. You drape your cape over yourself, drop to the ground, keep your mouth shut, an’ don’t move.”

But I had no cape.

I espied one of the inductees, standing terrified near the very gated entrance we’d come through, a clawful of feet away from me. I launched myself at him, tackled him about the midriff. We both went down hard.

Clapping one hand over his mouth, I wrenched the cape from his neck.

And covered us both.

“Stay still!” I hissed into his ear. “Pundar, pundar!”

Quivering mightily, the terrified young boy obeyed.

The ground reverberated beneath us as Re’s great feet slammed into earth, growing closer, closer. I held my breath, closed my eyes, fought the shrieking urge to run, run, run.

A mighty, bone-rattling roar from the bull.

Beneath me, the inductee screamed shrilly.

I waited, tears of dread rolling freely down my cheeks, for the snap of Re’s teeth upon my spine.

But it didn’t come. No.

Only a dusty gale of wind, whooshing over us in violent, rhythmic gusts. Our cape was blown away.

Exposed and helpless, I squinted through the billowing dust. Mighty Re stood in the center of the stadium, the dragonmaster bellowing at him.

The great bull had spread his massive wings and was beating the air. Along the coliseum’s lowest tiers, canopies shuddered and veils and bitoos flapped like flags.

I saw it then. Re’s erection. His great, forked phallus glistened a red-mottled pink in the sun’s light.

Relief and incredulity rushed over me: Ringus and the dragonmaster had succeeded. Re was ready for mating.

As the iron gates holding back the onahmes were rapidly winched open to the cheers of the crowd, I staggered upright and hauled the bawling inductee to his feet. I leaned heavily on him, as if he were a crutch, and we returned to the tunnel from which we’d emerged beneath Arena, a lifetime and yet only moments before.

TWENTY-TWO

I
begged the dragonmaster for venom that night as the pain from my smashed ribs rolled up and down my torso in agonizing waves, as Eidon bellowed again and again for my head, for having caused the death of his lover. I craved venom not just to end the pain, understand, but to erase the horrific image of a young boy being ripped apart, of Ringus’s guts dangling in glistening loops above me. I needed venom to obliterate the fear inspired by the certainty that such would be my fate on the morrow.

The Komikon denied it to me.

“Think you I can repeat today’s performance?” he bellowed. “None but Ringus could work the bull so swiftly alongside me! Tomorrow you go in with dragonbait at your side: a maimed veteran who would kill you, and four lackluster inductees.”

“Please, I need venom.”

“You splayfooted crookback!” the dragonmaster screamed, causing the onahmes stabled about us to snort and shift in agitation. “You yolk-brained screw! Summon the Dirwalan; summon your bird!”

“I can’t!” I roared back, and was at once limp and sweat-slicked by the pain that laced across my ribs. “She won’t come to me, understand? She’s abandoned me; I called for her, but she didn’t come …” My voice choked off into a series of rib-tearing sobs.

I was shattered. I was forsaken. My mother had not come.

“Give me some venom, please!” I wailed, and I think the dragonmaster would have fled then, either to find me an analgesic potion or because he realized that all was truly lost and his public execution was now a certainty.

But he couldn’t leave.

Not just one Auditor stood in my stall now, see. The onahme that had been stabled there had been relocated; four Auditors, all of them tall and enveloped from crown to toe in white, stood in her place—guarding both the dragonmaster and me, that on the morrow, we both could be publicly eviscerated by Re.

I knew Temple would not make the mistake the day following of allowing either of us to survive.

Dawn again, and I could barely move. Heedless of my pain, the Auditors led me, shackled once more, to the carts waiting to transport us to Arena.

The dragonmaster, too, was shackled about wrist and ankle, though he moved not in stiff, silent agony, but flung himself against his chains, twisting, snarling, utterly wild. It had taken seven brawny nashvenir stable-men to fetter him earlier, upon Waikar Re Kratt’s orders. All of the seven bore bruises, bite marks, and gashes from the brawl, if not broken bones.

Screaming invective and Djimbi curses both, the dragonmaster was tethered by three of the Auditors to the back of the last cart in the procession. He would be forced to walk the distance to Arena.

Clank.

The chains about my own wrists were likewise fettered to the back of the cart. I would be forced to walk the distance, too.

I would not make it. If I didn’t faint from pain, I would be stoned to death by the crowds en route. A dense numbness descended upon me, so complete that when my eyes fell upon Dono, whose left eye was grossly swollen and bruised, I felt nothing. Nothing.

The carts creaked forward, trundling down the long, tree-shaded avenue of Nashvenir Re. Halfway down the avenue, Waikar Re Kratt’s daronpuis and lords waited upon their wing-pinioned destriers, glutted with the certainty that Kratt’s folly over me would soon be ended, that his unfathomable mistake in allowing me to live this long would soon be corrected.

Waikar Re Kratt sat at the fore of the procession, indifferent and imposing upon his magnificent beast. He lifted his reins and started the slow, stately walk for Arena.

I fell. I was hauled upright. I fell again. An Auditor stood me upright a second time, but the ground would not stay beneath my feet. I crumpled from the pain in my ribs.

Kratt rode down the length of our parade and studied me from atop his bejeweled dragon, his golden hair a dazzling crown. “Throw her in the wagon,” he said. “We waste time.”

And so I was not forced to walk to Arena.

The thoroughfare was choked with humanity, even more so than on the day previous. There were hawkers selling finger sheaths and sugary biscuits, and kiyu komikons parading their strings of enslaved girls. Half-breed men in ragged pantaloons sold roasted coranuts to elegant children herded by nursemaids, while scrawny-limbed youths danced slapfoot on top of wooden crates, their begging bowls cupped in their palms. Ornate litters borne upon the shoulders of grim piebald servants wove like drunken boats above the heads of merchants dressed in frock coats and above bearded, blue-eyed Xxelteker sailors wearing their trademark animal-skin hats. Thieves and gambling-den proprietors rubbed shoulders with gaudy bayen men in shiny byssus, while lanrak paras, soldiers outside of army—or mercenaries, as some would call them—armed with half pikes and sabers, flanked the entrances to the inns and taverns they’d been hired to keep free of ruffians. Music, laughter, shrieks, and guffaws spilled out from the inns on clouds of blue pipe smoke.

As our retinue crawled along the thoroughfare and into the shadow of Arena, those who had lined the streets to hurl invective and rock at me were jostled by the self-absorbed mayhem choking every avenue, door frame, and verandah. Free from any such hindrance, bayen women with hair coiffed into bizarre topknots leaned from the windows of some of the finer inns to hiss and clatter their silver fingersheaths at me. One went so far as to hurl her chamber pot in my direction in her righteous rage. Urine and excrement rained upon the crowd; outraged bellows exploded from the street. A riot seemed imminent.

I felt caged and vulnerable and half-wild with fear in the back of the cart, and as we lurched through another pothole and pain lanced across my ribs, my bladder threatened to loose. Shackled to the back of the cart, flanked by the walking statues of white cloth that were the Auditors, the dragonmaster bucked against his chains, shrieking and foaming at the mouth. A bold bayen youth, clothes as black as a cat, darted forward and clubbed the dragonmaster across the back with a stool. The dragonmaster staggered, fell, was dragged several feet by his chains before one of the Auditors hauled him unceremoniously upright.

The crowd roared its approval and pelted us with rocks and rotten fruit.

The apprentices covered their heads and crouched small and low in our carts, and at the fore of our parade, I saw several of Kratt’s chancellors bellow indignantly at those who’d inadvertently struck them. The dragon pulling our cart tossed her head and rolled her eyes, and several of the destriers upon which were seated Clutch Re lords pranced nervously.

We turned a corner, came to a ragged halt before one of the dank tunnel entrances leading underground into Arena—the same tunnel we’d entered the day before. The guards within winched the gates open; something crowd-sent glanced off my right ear and sent my vision reeling.

As my eyes cleared, I found myself staring into the red face of a portly man standing atop a crate, an arm’s length from where I sat. He held a handbill in one hand and was shouting for all to hear, spittle flying from his lips:

“At midnight precisely, come see the extraordinary fight of furious animals! For the first fight, we offer you a Xxelteker steer, attacked and subdued by six of the strongest dogs of the country. Our second fight will pit a wild she-cat against a Northern Bear, and if the she-cat is not vanquished, several pieces of fireworks will be tied to her tail, which will produce a very entertaining amusement indeed. Purchase your admittance tickets, all!”

And then the cart I was in lurched forward, and we were rolling into the clammy gloom beneath Arena.

Two boys in loincloths stood to one side of the tunnel guards, dipping tarred torches into a metal barrel of glowing faggots and handing the lit torches to those Clutch Re lords who asked for them as they rode past. Eidon took a torch. Two of the four Auditors flanking the dragonmaster also took a torch each.