Sovereign's Gladiator

by Jez Morrow

  “What Beast?” Devon asked.

  “That,” said Xan, “is what the Kiriciki call your Raenthe Empire.”

  * * * * *

  When the sun went down, the thin air got quickly cold. The people of the steppe slept in packs like litters of puppies, so no one thought of giving Xan and Devon separate quarters or separate beds.

  Xan and Devon spent the night in the loft of a barn under a thatched roof.

  Devon came to Xan naked. He slipped under Xan’s cloak and lay against him. Devon’s skin was smooth and warm. Xan knew better than to talk this time. This would be the last time.

  Devon was a solemn lover.

  They moved together in silence. Xan could not deny he enjoyed the way Devon responded to his touch. Xan felt an impulse to reassure him, to tell him to relax. I’ve got you.

  But he didn’t.

  Xan had to forcibly remind himself, I am not your friend. I am not your lover. I do not, cannot, ever love you.

  Xan’s mouth came down on Devon’s lips. They had never kissed.

  Devon responded ardently, tongue stroking tongue. Xan’s arms surrounded him, pressing him to his broad chest. Devon felt as much as heard Xan’s heart thudding against his chest. Xan’s lips moved against Devon’s lips, his tongue filling Devon’s mouth.

  Devon’s body worshipped his enemy.

  Xan tore away from their kiss. His mouth roved lowered, kissing Devon’s throat, his chest, down his hard belly to his groin. Xan’s hair brushed across Devon’s skin like raw silk.

  Xan drifted kisses over Devon’s balls and up his rigid sex. His mouth surrounded Devon’s cock with heated wetness. His tongue was maddening. Devon’s breath clogged in his throat, his body awash in fire.

  Xan came up, leaving Devon gasping.

  Devon inhaled the scent of olives. Xan was crushing them in his hands.

  Xan made himself slick and entered Devon, facing him. Devon had a strong urge to cry. That urge burned away in a sexual blaze. His hips rocked up to meet the thrusts of Xan’s cock.

  Devon kept his voice out of his labored breaths when he really wanted to bleat and moan out loud. The motion of Xan’s stout cock and Xan’s hard body sent him higher and higher. Devon was losing himself, flying, burning.

  Xan’s wet heat released inside him. In answer, Devon’s own ejaculation painted thick white lines on Xan’s belly hair.

  Devon clung to Xan like a lover.

  He heard Xan murmur in his own tongue a word that sounded like beautiful.

  Late in the night, resting in Xan’s arms, Devon said quietly, “When we get back to Calista City, I will have you executed.”

  “You will not live to see Calista City again,” said Xan with what sounded like real regret.

  When Devon got back to Calista City—and he would get back—would he be able to order Xan’s execution?

  No. He couldn’t. He knew that.

  But I can hand him over to Marcus, who will chop off his head, and I will cry but it will be done.

  As Xan and Devon entered the village where the Shepherdess dwelled, Xan felt he was carrying a great weight. A slow poison worked in his gut. Devon was right. Loyalty demanded a heavy price. The price must be paid. But there was no way Xan could ever feel good about this. He must shut down his thoughts, his fear, his despair, and do it, like a charge into hopeless battle.

  Devon had got to him. The Sovereign didn’t have Xan by the cock—well, maybe he did—but Devon had got into his head and his heart.

  I don’t want him to die.

  The Sovereign must die.

  The Shepherdess would judge.

  The village was old. The houses had stood there for ages, grown up around haphazard streets with uneven twisty steps and blind alleys.

  One did not just walk up to a tribal leader’s house and demand to see her, and Xandaras was not of the Kiriciki people. Xan found a native angelos to submit his request for an audience with the Shepherdess. Getting an answer might take days. Not too much hurried here.

  Regret ached like a slow wound. Xan wanted this over and done now.

  He didn’t want it done ever.

  Devon was serene. Xan left him napping in the sunshine at the edge of a field of stunted cornstalks at the outskirts of the village.

  The angelos came back with a message sooner than Xan wanted. The Shepherdess would see Xan and his prisoner.

  This was it. Judgment.

  And Devon had come so willingly. He had insisted on coming here.

  Xan walked back to the cornfield with tortured heart, only to find a flattened patch of grass and no one in sight.

  Devon was gone.

  Xan felt sick, double-crossed. It was only the same thing he’d done to Devon. He did not like the feel of it coming back at him at all. He felt stupid, enraged, betrayed. Devon had played so high and mighty, all wounded honor, courage and perfect bullshit!

  That deceitful, two-faced son of a bitch dared call Xan a coward for lying.

  Xan strung his bow and nocked an arrow. He scanned the open land for a fleeing man. Devon wouldn’t be hard to hunt down. Devon was not a figure that could ever escape notice.

  A whispery voice sounded behind him. “Are you looking for the outland stranger?”

  Xan turned, looked down. An aged man, bent over a knotty walking stick, stood there.

  Xan answered him, “Yes.”

  The old man lifted a wavering finger and pointed toward the center of town.

  The main street was a pressed dirt path between close-built stone buildings. The cramped central meeting square was as wide a space as you could find in this village.

  Xan stared at what he found there.

  Anywhere you go throughout the wild lands, throughout the entire Raenthe Empire and probably beyond even that, you could find people playing a game of ball in some open space. Whether they threw it, hit it or kicked it, a game of ball was a universal language.

  Here the ballplayers were in formed up in two teams, kicking around a stitched-up chaff-stuffed goatskin.

  In the midst of the tribesfolk was the Sovereign, dressed in plain garb like the Kiriciki—a loose-fitting drab long-sleeved top, a hemp belt, and gray leggings. Heavy cloth rags bound with rope on his feet were what passed for boots here.

  Some of the players were barefoot. The leathery soles of their feet were as thick as camels’ pads.

  Devon moved among them, spry and agile as his black horse.

  A red flush tinted his cheeks. He breathed deep and easy in the high thin air. His black eyes were bright and merry.

  Nimble-footed, he made a quick turn, feinted and passed the chaff-stuffed goatskin to a big youth who booted it into a woven jute net for a score.

  Smiles appeared from all the open windows of the buildings on the square. Their teeth were gapped, their eyes set in wreaths of wrinkles crinkled up laughing.

  At the pause in the action, an old man beckoned Devon to him on the sideline. The man leaned a bony elbow on his cane and by motions, advised Devon to sweep his foot lower when stealing the ball.

  Devon made the local hand gesture of thanks. A big youth was shouting to Devon, then threw him the ball.

  Apparently Devon had made an instant connection with this big youth on his team, and the two were passing the ball to each other without needing to look at each other. They scored again and exchanged the local style of victory salutes, knocking their palm heels together.

  Jealously rose up white hot in Xan’s chest, so sharp it was painful. It stayed, lodged under his heart.

  Devon flashed a brilliant smile to his teammate with a dark-eyed wink. Xan suddenly could not catch in his breath. His chest tightened with a fierce need to possess that smile.

  Xan wanted Devon—all of him—and could not share, not even a glance.

  Xan forgot for instant that he’d come to take Devon to his death.

  Devon and the youth were doing something physical together and doing it well, and Xan couldn’t stand it.

 
And now Devon was teaching the youth the backhanded wrist knock which was the Raenthe style of salute between comrades. Xan’s mind went blank with rage.

  Xan may have dominated Devon in the dark, but who really had lost himself? Who owned whom after all?

  Devon’s baritone laughter rang like bright water striking between the close stone buildings. Xan did not own his laughter.

  Voice gone husky, Xan called Devon out of the ball court. “The Shepherdess waits.”

  Devon gave up the goatskin and walked off the square. He bent over, patting his tunic, making dust roll off in clouds. He told Xan he wanted to bathe. “I won’t go to her dirty.”

  “You’re not going to her bed,” Xan said, sour.

  “It’s respect in my land. And that’s the only way I know.”

  There was a bite in the breeze. The water in the streamlet was icy cold. Devon endured. He crouched in the freezing water under a pearl gray sky. Devon looked otherworldly up here in the high country, so city fine and sleek with his straight white teeth, his exotic obsidian eyes and his wavy black hair.

  A rustling sounded in the high grass of something small coming over the stream’s bank.

  It was a child, come to fetch water in his clay bucket. The boy saw Devon crouched naked in the stream. Devon bore a small tattoo in a particularly brilliant hue of blue low on his back. It was a stylized winged disk. It was the mark of the Raenthe Imperium.

  The child gasped in horror at the sight of it, dropped his clay bucket and ran screaming.

  Devon ignored him. He squeezed some olives and slathered the oil over his chin. He put a palm up to Xan waiting on the bank. “Give me your blade. The edged one. Not the dirk.”

  “You will not go armed to the Shepherdess,” Xan said.

  “I will shave with it,” said Devon, his palm out in attitude not to be refused.

  The hair on Devon’s face was very fine and slow to grow. There were only wisps of it on his chin and along his jaw. It made him look a little bit wicked.

  Xan gave him the sharp-edged blade. Devon carefully shaved off his fine whiskers. Without them, he looked like a young god.

  Clean-faced again, Devon tossed the blade aside on the creek’s bank and rinsed off. His skin roughened all over from the cold.

  Xan opened his cloak for Devon, rising out of the water, and enfolded him in it. Xan warmed him in his arms.

  Xan murmured against his wet hair, “I thought you ran.”

  “No,” Devon spoke into Xan’s chest.

  Xan took Devon’s wide shoulders and held him at arm’s length, a naked beauty. Xan looked into his dark eyes, and told him, “You should run.”

  “No,” Devon said with an almost smile. The dripping tips of his hair brushed his shoulders with the shaking of his head. “I came to see the Shepherdess.”

  Devon turned to pick up his native clothes. He’d already shaken out the dust from them.

  Xan walked at Devon’s side into the village.

  Whispers bounced off all the stone walls, with covert pointing fingers at Devon. He has the Beast’s mark, said the whispers.

  The voices did not sound of hatred. The sound was closer to pity. The villagers’ fear was for him, not of him.

  The village smithy came out of his forge and offered to burn the mark off for Devon. The old man held a brand with a glowing end.

  Devon thanked him for the thought and asked to be taken to the Shepherdess.

  Runes were carved into the stone walls of the small house where the Shepherdess resided. The inside was warm with the presence of many men.

  The Shepherdess sat ensconced in cushions on a low dais at the far wall. She wore shawls of a fine lamb’s wool and many necklaces and bracelets. Feathers and bright beads were braided into her iron-gray hair.

  Xan was trying to put together the proper Kiriciki words to tell her who Devon was, but Devon was already hailing her in a language Xan didn’t know.

  And to his utter shock, the Shepherdess answered him in the same unintelligible tongue. She motioned Devon, not Xan, to take a seat on the cushion before her.

  Devon sat cross-legged on the cushion before the Shepherdess.

  Xan and all the Kiriciki tribesmen in the chamber stared in blatant open-mouth gawks as the Sovereign and the Shepherdess conversed in a language almost none of them knew.

  “How do you know these words, stranger?” the Shepherdess asked Devon.

  “This is the language of our ancients,” Devon said.

  “Ours too,” the old woman said.

  “We have the same ancients,” Devon told the Shepherdess of the Kiriciki tribe. “We are kin. Your people and mine.”

  “The Raenthe do not speak the tongue,” the Shepherdess said.

  “Our holy men do,” Devon told her.

  “Are you a holy man?” the Shepherdess asked.

  “I am the owner of a red litter.”

  One of the Shepherdess’ attendants, who apparently did know the ancient tongue, gave a start. He hissed a translation to his fellow tribesmen who picked up their bows and arrows and made warding signs.

  The Shepherdess interpreted their flurry of hill speech for Devon. “They say you cannot die. They say they shot you in your red litter. You should be dead.”

  “I can die as well as the next man,” Devon told her. “Not what I came here to do.”

  “A child says you are painted.” The Shepherdess reached around her own back to indicate where Devon was tattooed. She was more limber than she looked. “Here.”

  “I have a tattoo,” Devon acknowledged. “What does the child say about it?”

  “He says you wear the mark of the Beast,” the Shepherdess said.

  “I am the Beast,” said Devon. “I am your Sovereign.”

  Sovereign was a Raenthe word but everyone here understood that one.

  A murderous shuffling stirred around him, a gripping of weapons, scowls of fear and anger, but no one was moving to make an actual strike against Devon—because he was here and the Shepherdess was talking with him. The Kiriciki were not going to kill him while she was listening to him.

  “We have seen your power,” the Shepherdess told Devon, disapproving.

  “Something has gone wrong out here. This is not my will. Terrible things have been done in my name,” Devon admitted. “There will be an answer for that, ma hahn. Know this—you have not seen my power.”

  He asked for all her complaints. They were many and horrible. She told him of the men they called snatchers who came from the Harpy’s Rook and stole away men from all the desert tribes and took them off into the Belly of the Beast from where they never returned.

  “Harpy’s Rook,” Devon echoed. “Would that be a fortress carved into the foot of a mountain in the east?”

  “You know it is,” the Shepherdess said.

  She told him she had seen the Raenthe overlords kill their own men. “The green ones kill their blue ones out in the desert and scatter our weapons upon the dead. Then more blue ones come out and burn our villages.”

  Devon bowed his head, swallowing down bile. He struggled not to get sick.

  “We assumed Raenthe knew this. You did this.”

  I did this.

  Devon lifted his pale face, his eyes flaring. “Raenthe knows now. Raenthe is angry.” Devon brought his breathing under control. “Tell me, ma hahn, who attacked me in the Witch’s Cleft?”

  “I did that,” said the Shepherdess, sitting straight up, her shoulders set proud. “That was done on my command. Was I not just?”

  “I understand it now,” Devon said. “But how did you know I was coming?”

  “A messenger came to us. He warned me that the Beast was coming. Said he, Kill the Beast inside the red litter and the Raenthe will withdraw from the wild lands.”

  Devon leaned forward over his crossed legs and touched the floor between them. “Where did this messenger come from?”

  The Shepherdess’ papery eyelids closed. “I do not know. But he knew things. He f
oretold your coming.” She opened her eyes. “His name was Marcus.”

  Chapter Seven

  An alarm went up from outside. Xan moved to the window.

  A man burst in to the Shepherdess’ house, made a quick reverence to the Shepherdess, and spoke hurriedly.

  Xan translated the words for Devon. “He says soldiers are coming. The Beast’s henchmen are here.” And Xan added words of his own, “An armed column approaches. Yours.”

  Devon looked to the Shepherdess, his face blank, stunned. His own soldiers were coming. He told the Shepherdess, horrified, “Ma hahn. They don’t know I’m here. They don’t know what they’re doing!”

  The Kiriciki in the room picked up their clubs and spears, bows and arrows all around. Devon didn’t know their tongue, but it was a good bet they were saying, “Kill the Beast!”

  Devon demanded, “Xan, are the soldiers wearing blue or green?”

  “Blue,” Xan answered from the window.

  Devon seized the Shepherdess’ hand. Her attendants gasped. They might have killed him right there, but apparently did not want to spray the Beast’s blood on the Shepherdess. Devon looked her in the eyes, his head lower than hers, beseeching, “Those are my men. I can stop them. They will listen to me. Let me go to them.”

  “Ma hahn!” All her men were pleading, most likely begging to be allowed to slay him.

  The Shepherdess’ withered lids closed and opened. Her free hand covered Devon’s hand. Her skin was cool and papery. She told her followers what must have been, “Believe him.” And then to Devon, she said in the high speech, “Go.”

  Devon ran outside. Armed men spilled out after him, not pursuing him. On the Shepherdess’ command, they were ready to serve him. Devon said, “Xan, tell them I need a horse.”

  Devon rode down the slope and galloped across the plain to meet the approaching column of Raenthe blue. Xan rode at Devon’s flank.

  As the distance closed, faces came into focus. Devon leapt down from his horse in a cavalryman’s dismount. He motioned Xan to stay behind and Devon strode forward alone, his arms spread wide to meet the armed troop.