Empire (18 page)

After a few minutes, Reza saw that more of the children, as well as adults, had taken time out from their alien day to get a closer look at him. None made threatening gestures – at least from what he could tell; they all seemed threatening enough as it was – but the circle about him was rapidly growing in size and diminishing in distance.

His fear of being torn to pieces by an alien mob brought home the importance of his relationship with Esah-Zhurah. While he could hardly consider her an ally, much less a friend, she was the only link he had to life. Without her, he stood no chance at all of survival on this world, among these people, and he frantically wished she would come out of the building and lead him away from the overly inquisitive group forming around him.

At last, she emerged with a black tube about the length of her forearm clutched firmly in one hand. Taking the leash from the young girl, she started off again, Reza in tow. Flowing with the increasingly thick crowd of people, he occasionally bumped against warriors whose shoulders were above his head.

“What is that?” he asked Esah-Zhurah quietly, discretely pointing at the tube she carried.

“It is the priestess’s correspondence,” she answered. “It is a task certain of us undertake for her each day.” She looked askance at him. “Consider yourself honored, human.”

Reza raised his eyebrows in surprise. He had never been on a planet or known anyone who communicated by hard copy means, “the post” always having had an electronic connotation. But letters written by hand were akin to the books he had so treasured, and he began to believe that maybe the Kreelans were not complete savages after all.

“We will go to the bath,” she told him as she led him around a tight knot of warriors arguing heatedly over something that he could not quite make out. “What is your saying?” She thought a moment. “
Nature calls?
Yes?”

“Yes,” he replied earnestly. Although he had not had anything to drink for hours, he suddenly felt like his bladder was going to explode. Of course, he had been so preoccupied with gawking at the city that he hadn’t noticed until Esah-Zhurah mentioned it.

She led him to a doorway along a street that looked no more or less unusual than the others cutting through the metropolis. Through the doorway was a large softly lit anteroom. Kreelans in dark blue robes, barely contrasting with their skin, were in attendance, and Reza was shocked to see that everyone else – Esah-Zhurah included – was stripping off their clothing.

She turned to him, naked now except for her neckband and the ubiquitous baton, and snagged his skins with one of her claws. “Off,” she commanded tersely, wrinkling her nose in a sign of disgust. She gestured toward the robed attendant who already was holding Esah-Zhurah’s armor.

Reluctantly following Esah-Zhurah’s command, he stripped and gave his motley skins to the attendant, who took them as unwillingly as he parted with them before carrying everything away through another door.

Reza heard a growl behind him. Turning around, he found himself toe to toe with a warrior, her taut breasts – the left one carrying a terrible scar running from the left armpit to her stomach – a hair’s breadth from his nose, so tall was she. Even though they were aliens, they still had more basic things in common with human females than not, and he felt his face flush with embarrassment. He also noted that Esah-Zhurah was observing his predicament with keen interest.

The other Kreelans in the anteroom stopped what they were doing and stared, as well. Most probably had never seen a human other than himself (or had only seen one long enough to kill him or her, he thought), and by their reaction they certainly had never seen a naked human, least of all a very young male. Most of their eyes were focused below his waist.

Determined to show some courage, he raised his gaze from the warrior’s chest to her eyes and held her stare. From somewhere behind him, drops of water splashed, and he began to count them to mark what probably would be the last few moments of his life. He reached a count of eleven before he heard Esah-Zhurah’s voice behind him.

“Enough, animal,” she said, tugging him by his leash away from the still-staring warrior. “Combat is not permitted in the bath.”

Without another word, she led him through another archway and past the staring patrons in the anteroom. They went down a corridor lined with some kind of mosaic scenes of swirling rune-like shapes before entering the next room.

Reza stopped in his tracks, just inside the archway.
This is too much
, he thought. It was a public bath, all right, as in bathroom. As in bodily functions. He sighed heavily and followed along behind Esah-Zhurah, who had stopped when she noticed the resistance on the end of the leash. His stomach churned.

This is really disgusting
, he thought. He had never liked the open bathrooms of House 48. But at least there, even in an open bay bathroom, everyone had to endure the same level of public humiliation, and so it generally was not that big of a deal. And, if nothing else, everyone in the room had been human. And of the same sex.

After a moment’s pause he followed after Esah-Zhurah, who took her place on a strangely shaped throne of dark green. He took the seat next to her and tried to keep his mind on what he was supposed to be doing, rather than what was going on around him.

Esah-Zhurah finally stood up (he had already finished, such was his eagerness to get out of this place) and took him through the next archway, where a cleansing waterfall cascaded over them from the ceiling. The water itself smelled different, as if something – a detergent or antibiotic agent, perhaps – had been added, but he noticed nothing different about the taste as it poured over his head. The water ran down through sculpted drains in the sides of the chamber to disappear below.

After passing through a short tunnel past the waterfall, they found themselves in a large chamber that was, in fact, a soaking bath. Esah-Zhurah led him into the water, its scalding heat making him hiss with pleasure as it crept up his body. She propped her back against the side of the large pool, and he stayed close to her; even her despotic company was welcome over the hostile faces that peered from the water like sea monsters wreathed in a steamy mist. He kept inching closer to her, until their shoulders and arms touched under the water.

After he was sure she was not going to push him away, Reza closed his eyes, shutting out the alien faces around him. He forced himself to relax, letting the water’s heat penetrate his body. After a few minutes, and hoping he wasn’t going to breach any codes of etiquette, he took himself all the way under the water, rinsing out his rapidly lengthening hair and washing the accumulated sweat from his face. He felt his pores opening up from the water’s heat, and he sighed with the unexpected pleasure of actually having a real bath, a
hot
bath, for a change. Up to this point he had only the freezing water from the spigot in his room and a crude metal basin with which to wash. Blowing like a broaching whale as he returned to the surface, he met Esah-Zhurah’s eyes with a smile. He figured she would not understand its significance, but it felt good to have something, anything, to smile about.

Esah-Zhurah gave him a perplexed look, but nothing more severe.

When they were finished, she led him out the other side of the pool to a large area open to the sky. There they settled onto comfortable mats among the many other bath-goers who were drying off in the warm sun.

* * *

Reza did not realize he had drifted off to sleep until Esah-Zhurah poked him with a claw.

“We go now,” she said. They stood up, completely dry, and headed off down yet another corridor to the anteroom to retrieve their clothes. Reza noticed that his had been cleaned and smelled almost pleasant now.

As they headed through the main entryway, an incoming group of Kreelans made to enter, neither party seeing the other until it was too late. The ensuing confusion resulted in some unexpected jostling. But no one took offense, and Reza and Esah-Zhurah rejoined the throng of Kreelans moving through the boulevard.

Near the edge of the plaza, they happened to pass a group of older warriors in the undulating crowd. Reza, now used to the drill, lowered his head and averted his eyes, while Esah-Zhurah performed the ritual greeting.

But something went wrong. One of the warriors barked a question at Esah-Zhurah in a dialect Reza didn’t understand. Surprised, Esah-Zhurah started to respond, eyes still lowered. But she stopped in mid-phrase, looking at her left arm.

The baton, the Sign of Authority, was missing.

Esah-Zhurah’s hands flew across her armor in search of it, as if she might have accidentally misplaced it when dressing at the bath. Then she shot a questioning look at Reza, as if he might have had it. Her eyes were frantic.

“Reza,” she gasped. It was one of the only times she had ever called him by name. “Reza, where is the Sign of Authority? What has happened to it?” Reza could see she was petrified.

It must have been at the bath
, he thought.
It must have fallen out when we ran into that group of warriors when we were leaving
.

He was just opening his mouth to tell her this when the questioning warrior, quite formidable in appearance, spoke to Esah-Zhurah in a harsh tone using the same dialect she had before.

Esah-Zhurah was silent, her head hanging low in what Reza understood with a chill to be total, utter defeat. Without the baton, she had no authority and therefore had no right to claim him as her own. In this society, rank and authority were everything, and she had little of the first and none of the second in the eyes of the accusing warrior. The end result would be that the challenger could kill them both, or – even worse in Reza’s mind – take him as her own, for purposes he did not care to contemplate.

His fears grew deeper as the warrior momentarily turned her attention from Esah-Zhurah to himself. From her belt hung what could only be ears. Human ears. There were least twenty pairs strung on a cord. He felt a hot flame of rage flare in his heart, a worthy companion to the chill of fear that ran down his spine.

The warrior turned from Reza and spoke briefly to her comrades, and they murmured a response. He couldn’t understand the words, but he didn’t need to: he and Esah-Zhurah were in deep trouble.

The warrior took one step closer to Esah-Zhurah and – without any warning at all – flattened her to the ground with a brutal open-handed blow to the side of her head, the rapier claws gashing the girl’s scalp to the bone above her right ear.

Reza watched, wide eyed, as Esah-Zhurah yelped once and then crumpled into a dazed heap on the ground, dark blood pulsing from her wounded head. The warrior viciously kicked her over onto her stomach and then reached for a knife. Leaning down, the warrior grabbed Esah-Zhurah’s hair and used it to lift up her head, exposing her throat to the knife the warrior held in her other hand.

Reza moved without thinking. He rushed the warrior from behind, kicking out at her with both legs in a flying leap. She grunted in surprise and went tumbling over Esah-Zhurah’s prone form, nearly impaling herself with her own knife. But she recovered quickly, rolling deftly to her feet.

The other warriors and passersby gasped in astonishment, and a crowd instantly began to gather around the mismatched combatants. Their guttural comments merged into a buzz of curiosity as they formed a ring that marked the onset of what in their culture was an everyday occurrence: ritual combat. The only difference was that this would be to the death.

The warrior bared her fangs and roared a challenge at Reza. He backed up, trying to draw her away from Esah-Zhurah, who lay terrifyingly still. Reza thought frantically about his biggest problem: he had no weapon. Even if the advancing warrior had nothing but her talons, he stood no chance against her. Unless…

Acting quickly, Reza tore at the thin ragged animal skin that served as his shirt, coming away with a strip of thin leather that was almost twice the length of his arm. Then he quickly searched the ground for the other vital ingredient he needed: a simple rock. On the well-swept boulevards they had been on, he didn’t hold out much hope, but for once Fate favored him: a small piece of chipped cobblestone lay only a few paces away.

Praying that the warrior’s arrogance would give him a few more seconds, he dashed over and picked it up. Placing it carefully in the makeshift sling, he began his windup, wondering if the brittle leather would hold the sharp-edged projectile long enough before the sling came apart. The air filled with the whirring sound as he whipped it around his head, faster and faster.

The warrior stopped, regarding him with what he took to be bemused curiosity. Then she let out a harrowing bellow that was echoed by the other warriors surrounding them.

Ignoring the noise, Reza whirled the sling even faster, waiting for the right moment.

Now!
he thought, releasing the stone just as the warrior stepped into the sling’s line of fire. The cobblestone shard flew straight and true, its jagged edges mincing the Kreelan’s right eye. Her scream filled the void left by the suddenly silent onlookers. Dropping the knife, she fell to the ground, clutching her injured face and wailing in agony.

Reza wasted no time. His lips pulled back in a snarl of rage, he dropped the tattered leather strip and grabbed up the fallen knife. Leaping onto the warrior’s back, he entwined his left arm in her hair and levered her head back, exposing her throat to the blade clenched in his other hand, just as she had done to Esah-Zhurah.