“Why didn’t you tell us he was busy and didn’t want to be disturbed? Let’s start that game.”
Edmun and Spud stared at each other uncomprehendingly, as they returned their swords to their belts. They decided not to ask about what had happened inside. Edmun resolutely picked up the deck and dealt four hands, his confidence in his ability to control the cards vastly restored. None of them misbehaved. Spud brightened up, and cut himself a chew of tobacco. For a minute he masticated it furiously and then spat hopefully into a corner. The result was wholly gratifying. He beamed at Edmun and the game went on.
Mark watched the door close and looked at Omega. “If they send soldiers for me tomorrow, it would look funny if those men were out of uniform. Better to let them have their swords.”
Omega nodded. “I guess you’re satisfied now.”
“Perfectly. Handing over their weapons was one thing there was no chance of their doing accidentally. Let’s get back to work.”
“Go to it,” Omega said. “I’m no help to you, so I’ll leave you to figure it out for yourself. There are some other things that need my attention. See you later.”
The old man’s body faded abruptly and was gone. Mark looked at the maze of apparatus spread before him and felt a sudden loneliness. Omega’s return had filled him with a new enthusiasm, but with his going it seemed to have gone also. He wished he had never fallen off that cursed boat. It had embroiled him in a set of circumstances which was keeping him from the one place in the world that he wanted to be... at Nona’s side.
Yet he knew that he couldn’t stop now. He had to finish the job. There would be an eternity of time to enjoy Nona’s company, when this work was done. And millions of people would be the happier for his labor. The thought seemed to give him a new vigor. With flying fingers he went back to the intricate wiring.
Heedless of time, he continued to work, while the sun faded in the west and the night began its long, quiet reign. Several times he ripped his wiring apart in exasperation. Once he produced a vibration which seemed to shake the whole building. Cracks appeared in the walls and the cell doors shook and rattled. With a quick glance at his meters he snapped off the current.
The vibration was a very short one, even shorter than the cosmic rays. But it was still far too long to approximate the waves of thought. These seemed to defy his efforts. With a sigh he tried a new hookup. There was an answer to the problem, and he was determined to find it.
Chapter 15: The Gala of Fools
MORNING came, though Mark failed to notice it until he heard the sound of the gongs announcing the end of curfew. Shortly after the sound had throbbed in the silence, Spud appeared, carrying a set of manacles and a leg chain attached to a heavy iron ball.
He stopped short at the sight of the apparatus-littered corridor. The lighted walls he didn’t notice, for the sun was streaming in the window.
Mark looked up, disturbed by the rattling of the chains. “Quiet!” he snapped.
Spud looked apologetic. “They’ll be coming for you pretty soon,” he said. “The people who take part in the games are kept under the stands during the day.”
“I really shouldn’t spare the time, but I suppose —”
Mark frowned as he held out his hands. Although he had been consistently failing to solve the problem, he had a notion that he might get the answer very soon, just before the ringing of curfew’s end, he had experienced a return of the nebulous idea which had popped into his head while Omega had been talking.
But before he could pin it down, curfew had rung and Spud’s interruption did the rest.
Somehow he knew that if he could follow the thought through, he would have his answer. It had something to do with the fact that the same machine would produce both the hypnosis wave and the telekinesis wave which would furnish the power for its transmission. The clue lay in the short difference in wave length between the two.
Spud snapped the manacles on his wrists and clamped on an ankle iron. Then he lifted the iron ball and offered it to Mark. Mark took it gravely, and they went into the guard room. Edmun was dozing in a chair; the others weren’t in sight. Spud pulled a chair from beneath the table and gave it to Mark. Then he made himself comfortable.
“Tell me about these games,” Mark requested, more to pass the time than anything. When the soldiers arrived to escort him to the arena, they would have no reason for going back into the prison for their man. And from Spud’s viewpoint, it would be much better for no one to know that Mark had pretty much the run of the prison. And it was equally desirable, for Mark, that no outsider learn of any unusual doings here.
Spud’s eyes lit up at the thought of the games. Suddenly voluble, he recounted the things he had seen during the celebrations of previous harvest festivals. As he talked, Mark felt a chill taking form inside him, gripping frostily at the pit of a long disused stomach. Spud wasn’t describing a series of games at all.
The Duke had said that he thought Mark would have an even chance of surviving a week of these events, and Mark had visualized some sort of primitive rough and tumble where men’s limbs were in danger. Some form of game in which sides would be formed and men would pit their strength and durability against one another. Hazardous and brutal, but not necessarily fatal.
But Spud was gleefully and with elaborate detail describing a simple routine for slaughter. He told of unarmed men pitted in mortal combat against equal numbers of armed and armored soldiers; of fights between prisoners armed with daggers; of animals from lands far to the south stalking men and women trapped within the arena.
Mark shuddered. And these barbarians were the people he was trying to help. For a long minute he contemplated giving up the whole idea of the rebellion. If this was the sort of thing that they liked, they weren’t worth lifting a hand for.
BUT then he remembered a certain news picture he had seen when an apparently high state of civilization had flourished on the earth. It had dealt with a public hanging which had taken place in his own country. The picture had shown a morbid throng standing on tiptoe, that no gruesome detail would be missed. A mother was holding aloft a small girl.
And only a short step further back in the history of his people there had existed barbarities of almost the same sort as the ones that Spud was so gleefully describing. Accused witches had been burned at the stake. Small boys had been put to death in this very land for the heinous offense of throwing stones at the constabulary. Torture was an established institution in the good Christian days of Richard, the Lion-Hearted — and even later. Scientists of a few hundred years prior to Mark’s birth had been stoned and burned for the crime of consorting with Satan.
Yet the close descendants of the very people who had fostered all this, were the humane and kindly, the enlightened peoples of the twentieth century. Had human character changed so abruptly in the course of a few hundred years? Hardly.
If conditions were changed so that the Brish could consider themselves free human beings, the more humane aspects of their natures would come out. He hoped.
Mark knew that he still felt surges of primitive savagery within him. Such instincts, of course, only came to the fore during the heat of battle, but they were there, nevertheless. And he was the product of a gentler era. It was natural that during the present age of misery and suppression, the tougher elements of human nature should predominate. But the very fact that the gentle Jon, Duke of Scarbor, was a man of some popularity, proved that the better instincts still survived.
Having settled this point in his mind, Mark became even more determined to go on with his plans.
“Get those two new guardsmen in here,” he commanded. Spud, interrupted in his glowing story of the games, stared, then jumped to obey. He returned in a minute with the others, who were red-eyed and angry at being disturbed.
“Waken Edmun,” Mark directed. “And all four of you sit side by side on that bench.”
Wonderingly, the guards obeyed. Mark faced them with a stare. In a few moments their
eyes glazed, the lids drooped wearily.
“On the floor at your feet,” he said, “you see pieces of sandstone. The blades of your daggers could use a little sharpening.”
All four drew their weapons and glanced stupidly at the gleaming blades. Then, as one man, they reached down as if for the piece of sandstone. There followed a brilliant performance of the motions used to sharpen knife-blades. Mark was satisfied that the men were fully under his control.
“That’s enough,” he said. “Replace your knives and drop the sandstone. Now, listen carefully. In the prison corridor are several machines which are extremely dangerous to touch. Don’t for any reason go near them. If any new prisoners are brought in, take them to the cell block on the top floor. Sudden death awaits the man who molests those machines!”
Nodding his satisfaction, Mark woke the guards. That ought to do the trick.
IT WAS perhaps a half-hour later when a peremptory hammering sounded on the outer door. Spud answered it, and in strode a soldier who had been with Jon when Mark had been snatched from Erlayok’s torture chamber, accompanied by another, who had helped Erlayok in the same chamber. A sudden suspicion flashed in Mark’s mind. He remembered the cat-ate-the-canary expression that he had last seen on Erlayok’s face. A possible explanation seemed to suggest itself in the presence of this man.
“Why are you here?” he demanded.
Erlayok’s man grinned maliciously. “To see that you get what’s coming to you,” he informed. “Erlayok runs the show, you know. And he’d be disappointed if his star performer didn’t show up. He doesn’t trust the likes of this lad here.”
Jon’s man paid no attention. Mark guessed that this wasn’t the first insult he had swallowed on the way over. But he had evidently been given strict orders from the Duke to stay out of any battles which might interfere with his job.
“And you’re here,” Mark guessed, “to see that I do my performing in the arena only, and not to an audience of Erlayok’s men?”
“Exactly,” the man said, smiling. “I’m Chumly. The Duke’s orders were to see that you are protected. But of course you’ll be on your own when you enter the arena. Shall we start?”
Erlayok’s man made an insolent gesture and mimicked, “Shall we start?” Then he roared with laughter. Mark reflected sadly that Erlayok’s men all seemed to own a lamentable sense of humor. He turned to Chumly. “A real wit, your friend.”
“On the way over I decided he resembled some obnoxious little dog, yapping at his betters,” Chumly replied. “But on the other hand, a dog has some admirable characteristics, even those little yappers. On second thought I should say he reminds me of some dirty, wallowing pig. I’ve noticed something of the odor, too. He needs a bath.”
With a roar of rage Erlayok’s man, whipped out his sword and started for Chumly. Mark stopped him with a look. The weapon clattered to the flagstones of the courtyard, and a glassiness replaced the anger in the man’s eyes.
“You’re a hybrid,” Mark stated. “The spawn of a dog and a sow.”
The man promptly dropped to all fours and waddled across the court behind them, yapping occasionally in a dejected sort of way.
Chumly looked back at him and chuckled. “That’s a trick worth knowing,” he said. “His Highness told me you were an unusual man, but I didn’t expect anything like this. You stand a good chance of coming out of that arena alive.” He said the last in a voice which implied that such things were practically unheard of.
Mark scarcely heard him. So Jon had said that he was an unusual man. Mark tried to think why. His action in stopping the runaways could have been done as well by a thousand other men. It might have been that business of bending the cell bars, but Mark didn’t think so. Then he remembered the Duke’s dramatic entrance in to the torture chamber. Had the Duke seen his flesh emerge unblemished from the branding iron? But he had made no mention of it. And certainly his surprise would have been equal to that of Erlayok and his men. He would surely have questioned Mark once they were out of the place. Unless he already knew...
“When you rescued me yesterday, did you break right in, or were you outside that room for a while before the Duke entered?”
“We were there for a few minutes,” Chumly answered. “The Duke stood outside the door and looked in. The rest of us couldn’t see anything, but I could bear the Earl talking. The Duke broke in when they were going to burn out one of your eyes.” Chumly’s admiration for his companion showed in his face. “You sure held out on them, didn’t you?”
That answered the question in Mark’s mind. The Duke did know. He became more convinced when he considered the fact that only two guards were being used to escort him to the arena. Erlayok had sent his man merely to check up on Jon, to be sure that he didn’t let Mark escape. But Erlayok probably thought that Jon would dispatch several soldiers for the errand. And the fact that only one of the Duke’s men was sent to guard him, meant that the Duke might want to give Mark an opportunity to escape. Or it might also mean that Jon knew that Mark had no intention of escaping. His attempt to puzzle out the possibilities of the situation was interrupted by a commotion to the rear.
The antics of Erlayok’s man were attracting due attention. He was doing his very best to carry out Mark’s command by behaving in the probable style of the hybrid he firmly believed he was. He barked and then grunted, alternately.
Upon their arrival, Mark broke the spell, but not until several of the soldiers present had seen him bury his face into a pile of garbage, barking happily as he did so. Chumly removed Mark’s chains, and joined the other soldiers.
THE arena was like a huge ball-park. The stands would easily hold the population of a fair-sized city. The prisoners were herded into spaces beneath them. Dozens of soldiers were guarding the doorway which led to the street, but only one was stationed at the barred portal entering the arena pit.
Mark’s nose was assailed by a multitude of odors, all offensive. The predominant one was of close-packed humanity, and that was the least pleasant of all. Mingled with it was a variety of others originating from other such enclosures as the one he was in. These were animal odors, and among them he detected the strong fragrance of the lion. This was probably one of Spud’s “animals from lands far to the south.”
From his position near the barred door to the arena he could see that the stands were rapidly filling up. Evidently the entertainment was to last for the better part of the day, for he noticed that many of the spectators were carrying packages of food. Directly opposite the prisoners’ pen was a series of ornate boxes, equipped with plush seats, and attended by uniformed lackeys. Obviously these were reserved for the nobles and their families. Some of them were already occupied by gaudily dressed men and jewel bedecked women.
There was a sudden murmur in the stands when one of the boxes, a prominently situated one, was almost filled by the gross bulk of Erlayok. Behind him came two young women, richly appareled, who seated themselves at his side. Handsome and assured, they were quite apparently members of mankind’s oldest and most enduring profession.
Erlayok looked about him. He frowned as he noted that the most elaborate of all the boxes was still empty. This one was no doubt the one reserved for Jon. And the Earl was probably piqued that he should have to wait for the appearance of one whom he considered a useless puppet.
Mark grinned, and hoped that Jon would keep him waiting for an hour. He was disappointed, though, for scarcely had Erlayok made himself comfortable when the Duke appeared, alone. The murmur which arose as the crowd saw him, deepened Erlayok’s frown. Jon was obviously the more popular man.
The first event was one which was calculated to start the day off with a bang. A stentorian-voiced announcer described it to the avid spectators. Four condemned men were to be forced into the pit, each armed with a dagger. A lion would then be loosed. The cheer which greeted the announcement told Mark that this was evidently the sort of spectacle the people wanted. He experienced a momentary return of the revul
sion he had felt before.
The feeling left when he noticed the expression of distaste on Jon’s face. The Duke sat alone, and this further cheered Mark. It indicated that although Jon was obliged to attend this affair, due to his position, his family didn’t care to.
He was suddenly jolted by a rough shove from behind. Wheeling, he saw the face of the man he had humbled in the street. He was leering in a most horrible manner.
“It’s your turn now,” he grated, handing Mark a short dagger and brandishing a borrowed sword to protect himself. “Let’s see you go out there and stick that in the lion.” He burst into gales of laughter at the thought of anybody managing to do any harm to a lion with such a puny weapon. Mark took a deep breath and went...
Chapter 16: The Happy Warrior
SOLDIERS stood behind the three other victims, ready to force them into the arena. But it wasn’t necessary. The iron door swung open and the four stepped out. Mark looked around to see where the lion was coming from, but it was impossible to tell. There were doors on all sides of the enclosure and the lion might be dispatched through any one of them.
The other three evidently reasoned the same way, for they immediately went toward the center of the pit. That point was the farthest away from all the doors.
Mark followed slowly, tossing his dagger aloft and catching it dexterously by the handle. He didn’t feel nearly as sure of himself as he looked, but at least he was making a nice impression.
He reached the place in the middle of the pit where the other three were standing, and went on toward Erlayok’s box.
He guessed that the lion wouldn’t be loosed immediately. The crowd would be first given a display of the breaking nerves of the victims, waiting, for a rending, slashing death to claim them. Mark was spoiling the show, if that was what they were expecting.
His nonchalant tossing and catching of the dagger not only attracted every eye in the stands, but served to somewhat calm the nerves of the other three. They watched him too, though they were also watching out for the entrance of the lion.
The Best of Argosy #6 - Minions of Mars Page 12