opponent escaped in the night and had to be killed. You are entered in a double double.’
Javlin wrenched at his chains so hard that the keeper was swung off balance.
‘Ik So! You betray me! How much cajsh have I won for you? I will not fight a double double.’
There was no change of expression on the insect mask.
‘Then you will die, my pet vertebrate. The new arrangement is not my idea. You know by now that I get more cajsh for having you in a solo. Double double it has to be. These are my orders. Keeper, Cell one-o-seven with him!’
Fighting against his keeper’s pull, Javlin cried, ‘I’ve got some rights, Ik So. I demand to see the arena promoter.’
‘Pipe down, you stupid vertebrate! You have to do what you’re ordered. I told you it wasn’t my fault.’
‘Well, for God’s sake, who am I fighting with?’
‘You will be shackled to a fellow from the farms. He’s had one or two preliminary bouts; they say he’s good.’
‘From the farms …’ Javlin broke into the filthiest redulian oaths he knew. Ik So came back toward him and slipped one of the metal gloves onto his forepincers; it gave him a cruel tearing weapon with a multitude of barbs. He held it up to Javlin’s face.
‘Don’t use that language to me, my mammalian friend. Humans from the farms or from space, what’s the difference? This young fellow will fight well enough if you muck in with him. And you’d better muck in. You’re billed to battle against a couple of yillibeeth.’
Before Javlin could answer, the tall figure turned and strode down the corridor, moving twice as fast as a man could walk.
Javlin let himself be led to Cell 107. The warder, a worker-redul with a grey belly, unlocked his chains and pushed him in, barring the door behind him. The cell smelled of alien species and apprehensions.
Javlin went and sat down on the bench. He needed to think.
He knew himself for a simple man – and knew that that knowledge meant the simplicity was relative. But his five years of captivity here under the reduls had not been all wasted. Ik So had trained him well in the arts of survival; and when you came down to brass tacks, there was no more proper pleasure in the universe than surviving. It was uncomplicated. It carried no responsibilities to anyone but yourself.
That was what he hated about the double double events, which till now he had always been lucky enough to avoid. They carried responsibility to your fellow fighter.
From the beginning he had been well equipped to survive the gladiatorial routine. When his scoutship, the Plunderhorse, had been captured by redul forces five years ago, Javlin Bartramm was duelling master and judo expert, as well as Top Armament Sergeant. The army ships had a long tradition, going back some six centuries, of sport aboard; it provided the ideal mixture of time-passer and needed exercise. Of all the members of the Plunderhorse’s crew who had been taken captive, Javlin was – as far as he knew – the only survivor after five years of the insect race’s rough games.
Luck had played its part in his survival. He had liked Ik So Baar. Liking was a strange thing to feel for a nine-foot armoured grasshopper with forearms like a lobster and a walk like a tyrannosaurus’ run, but a sympathy existed between them – and would continue to exist until he was killed in the ring, Javlin thought. With his bottom on the cold bench, he knew that Ik So would not betray him into a double double. The redul had had to obey the promoter’s orders. Ik So needed his twelfth victory, so that he could free Javlin to help him train the other species down at the gladiatorial farm. Both of them knew that would be an effective partnership.
So. Now was the time for luck to be with Javlin again.
He sank onto his knees and looked down at the stone, brought his forehead down onto it, gazed down into the earth, into the cold ground, the warm rocks, the molten core, trying to visualise each, to draw from them attributes that would help him: cold for his brain, warm for his temper, molten for his energies.
Strengthened by prayer, he stood up. The redul workers had yet to bring him his armour and the partner he was to fight with. He had long since learned the ability to wait without resenting waiting. With professional care, he exercised himself slowly, checking the proper function of each muscle. As he did so, he heard the crowds cheer in the arena. He turned to peer out of the cell’s further door, an affair of tightly set bars that allowed a narrow view of the combat area and the stands beyond.
There was a centaur out there in the sunlight, fighting an Aldebaran bat-leopard. The centaur wore no armour but an iron cuirass; he had no weapons but his hooves and his hands. The bat-leopard, though its wings were clipped to prevent it flying out of the stadium, had dangerous claws and a great turn of speed. Only because its tongue had been cut out, ruining its echo-location system, was the contest anything like fair. The concept of fairness was lost upon the reduls, though; they preferred blood to justice.
Javlin saw the kill. The centaur, a gallant creature with a human-like head and an immense gold mane that began from his eyebrows, was plainly tiring. He eluded the bat-leopard as it swooped down on him, wheeling quickly around on his hind legs and trampling on its wing. But the bat-leopard turned and raked the other’s legs with a slash of claws. The centaur toppled hamstrung to the ground. As he fell, he lashed out savagely with his forelegs, but the bat-leopard nipped in and tore his throat from side to side above the cuirass. It then dragged itself away under its mottled wings, like a lame prima donna dressed in a leather cape.
The centaur struggled and lay still, as if the weight of whistling cheers that rose from the audience bore him down. Through the narrow bars, Javlin saw the throat bleed and the lungs heave as the defeated one sprawled in the dust.
‘What do you dream of, dying there in the sun?’ Javlin asked.
He turned away from the sight and the question. He sat quietly down on the bench and folded his arms.
When the din outside told him that the next bout had begun, the passage door opened and a young human was pushed in. Javlin did not need telling that this was to be his partner in the double double against the yillibeeth.
It was a girl.
‘You’re Javlin?’ she said. ‘I know of you. My name’s Awn.’
He kept himself under control, his brows drawn together as he stared at her.
‘You know what you’re here for?’
‘This will be my first public fight,’ she said.
Her hair was clipped short as a man’s. Her skin was tanned and harsh, her left arm bore a gruesome scar. She held herself lithely on her feet. Though her body looked lean and hard, even the thick one-piece gown she wore to thigh length did not conceal the feminine curves of her body. She was not pretty, but Javlin had to admire the set of her mouth and her cool grey gaze.
‘I’ve had some stinking news this morning, but Ik So Baar never broke it to me that I was to be saddled with a woman,’ he said.
‘Ik probably didn’t know – that I’m a woman, I mean. The reduls are either neuter or hermaphrodite, unless they happen to be a rare queen. Didn’t you know that? They can’t tell the difference between human male and female.’
He spat. ‘You can’t tell me anything about reduls.’
She spat. ‘If you knew, why blame me? You don’t think I like being here? You don’t think I asked to join the great Javlin?’
Without answering he bent and began to massage the muscles of his calf. Since he occupied the middle of the bench, the girl remained standing. She watched him steadily. When he looked up again, she asked, ‘What or who are we fighting?’
No surprise was left in him. ‘They didn’t tell you?’
‘I’ve only just been pushed into this double double, as I imagine you have. I asked you, what are we fighting?’
‘Just