Slaves of Elysium (27 page)

In one respect the stadium differed from its Roman counterpart. Halfway up its exterior wall was a ring of cantilevered open balconies. Jeni saw a few were already occupied with disks like theirs, and realised they served as landing platforms for those who did not want to be caught up in the crush below round the ground floor entrances and public carriage parks. It seemed their new owners literally belonged to a higher class than the rest.

Their disk settled onto its assigned pad, and they all climbed out. They passed through an archway into a curving ambulatory. Several other well-dressed persons were already there, chatting with each other before they moved through to their reserved boxes. Most were accompanied by slaves in different harnesses, some richly decorated with jewels, or else dressed in fanciful costumes. Jeni and Rebecca, however, received exactly the attention Vandra had planned.

Their long hair had been platted into the chain leashes clipped to the back of their collars, with the ends tied round ring handles. It looked like ropes of gold tethered them. Cross-linked chains between their wrists and ankle cuffs ensured they walked on all fours in front of their owners like dogs. To be certain they also kept their bottoms high to show off their golden bushes as well, they wore specially modified chastity belts. A single chain running between their legs from front to back ensured their orifices were guarded, whilst at the same time covering as little of their pubic hair as possible.

The belts themselves were thicker than normal and must have contained tiny levitator units, because as they walked along on their hands and feet their hips were held at a constant height from the floor. It made it easier to move around in their awkward posture and display themselves as their owners desired, but it was the strangest sensation. Jeni wondered how much the belts had cost.

After the Adamasees had exchanged a few pleasantries with their friends, and accepted admiring comments on behalf of their new acquisitions, they moved along a sloping covered passageway to their box.

It was set about a third the way up the sweep of raked seats that curved around the great bowl of the stadium, which Jeni guessed could easily hold fifty thousand people when full. Huge awnings were strung from masts that ringed the outer walls, shielding the audience from the sun. Giant screens also hung from the awning rigging, ready to display events down in the pit of the arena in close up detail. In addition, each box had its own private screen with a choice of camera angles.

With their lift belts turned off, Jeni and Rebecca were sat on cushions at the Adamasees' feet. Their leash rings were clipped high up the sides of their owners' chairs, so that nobody could miss seeing their hair. Vandra and Lorthon waved and called out to acquaintances seated in nearby boxes, and generally ensured everybody knew they were there.

Arena slaves brought in trays of finger food, and finally, with their social objectives achieved, the Adamasees settled back in their chairs and began reading their programmes and making comments about the events featured which meant nothing to their new slaves. Jeni and Rebecca exchanged curious glances, unsure what they were going to see.

With a fanfare a parade began. A couple of hundred people, wearing both armour and other colourful costumes, emerged from gates set around the floor of the arena and waved to the crowd as they made a circuit. Meanwhile an unseen announcer kept up a running commentary, sometimes introducing individuals who were evidently star performers to bursts of rapturous applause. The performers marched off and the first event got underway.

It was a sort of aerial joust, with contestants carrying lances and riding what looked like levitated saddles without any horses. The first few encounters were settled when one or the other rider was knocked off his saddle. They picked themselves up after a few moments to the cheers or catcalls of the crowd, and only seemed shaken. Presumably the armour they were wearing was well padded. It reminded Jeni of some historical re-enactment, if taken a bit more seriously.

Then a lance struck a man squarely. It must have found some chink in his armour because it went right through his body and snapped clean off. He reeled backwards out of his saddle and crashed to the sand of the arena to the accompaniment of a huge roar from the crowd. The cameras zoomed in for close-ups. Jeni saw blood about the broken shaft of the lance where it skewered his body, then looked away. A medical team in white coveralls carrying a floating stretcher ran out from the side of the arena, and began administering first aid.

But incredibly the contest was not suspended. The crowd kept on cheering the fallen man's opponent, who was waving back in evident delight. Jeni felt sick, and even Rebecca looked unnaturally pale. But the Adamasees were cheering and stamping their feet and the crowd around them were going wild. She could feel the arena shaking. Did nobody care about the fallen man?

Apparently not, for the next contest was even more brutal.

Aided by levitation motors, a kind of mock battlefield was erected on the sand in minutes, complete with bulwarks and other defences and obstacles. Two teams of about twenty men in red and blue tunics and helmets marched out and took up positions on either side of the arena, ranged about coloured circles that marked their bases. Each team was armed with swords, shields, spears and axes. They also carried three pennants in their own colours. These flew from short flagpoles chained to the backs of naked slave girls entirely covered in red or blue body paint.

So tightly chained to the poles were the girls that they could not walk and had to be carried shoulder high. They were only stood upright when the flagpoles were driven into the sand.

The game was very simple. Each side attacked the other and tried to capture their girl standards. Whoever got all three back to their base at the same time was the winner.

It was face-to-face combat with no quarter given. Men fell in bloody heaps and lay still, or else fought on with terrible wounds. The girl standards changed hands a dozen times, being dragged or carried back to one side and then recovered again. In lulls in the battle as the sides regrouped, taunts were shouted back and forth between them, and any captured girl standards were held up and the girls tormented or symbolically raped. And all this the arena cameras captured in loving detail.

Finally the red team, or at least what was left of them, managed to gather all the blue girl standards into their circle and were declared the winners. The captives were carried off, the dead or wounded taken away, the props removed and the sand raked clean.

That slave girls should be used as tokens in such a game and handled so casually troubled Jeni little. That was the sort of treatment they must expect. What appalled her was the bloodshed involved in the contest, which the crowd seemed to lap up without any consideration for the fallen. What sort of people were the Elysians?

For hours the bloody games continued.

Mostly it was men who fought, though a few of the contests pitted female gladiators together. When they did come to blows they proved just as brutal as the men and received as much applause.

Jeni wondered how could nominally civilised people enjoy such a nauseating spectacle. Yet she could not prevent herself snatching glances at the slaughter, lured by a terrible fascination she could not name.

One of the last contests was at least a little less bloody, though violent enough in its own way. It was also unique in that it was fought entirely between slaves.

Sixteen slave girls were brought into the arena mounted on the most unusual contraptions Jeni had ever seen. They sat on what could best be described as large pogo sticks, which lifted their heads half again their own height above the ground. Struts supported tubular metal rings around the base of the central sprung shaft, so they could be balanced upright without constant bouncing. The girls' feet were strapped to footrests secured to the sides of the shafts and their hands cuffed behind their backs. Their only means of steering their mounts was to lean in the direction they wanted to go and start bouncing; ducking and twisting if they wanted to change direction or turn about. This sort of motion set their naked breasts wobbling prettily in sympathy.

Their appearance was made even more bizarre by the peculiar saddles they sat upon, which were mounted on a second section of sprung shaft above the footrests. The saddles were formed of narrow sprung metal strips curving upwards and outwards in front and behind the rider, rather like the arms of a bow. Elasticised cords ran from the tips of these saddle arms to rings in the front and back of the girls' collars, presumably to help hold them in place and give them another point of resistance to work against when steering. The saddle tips were in addition capped with what looked like large rubber balls.

The first heat was a general melee. The girls were arranged in a circle, and at a given signal started attacking each other. They moved with surprising speed, each bounce carrying them as far as a running stride. Now the purpose of the rubber balls on the saddle tips became clear. The girls used them as clubs to try to knock over their opponents, lunging and twisting with remarkable agility as they crashed into each other. Reeling back and spinning about they attempted to strike a blow at the exposed sides of their adversaries to topple them, for once they fell they would be quite helpless and unable to stand again without help. The screens showed spraying sand, a mass of oiled limbs, straining thighs and heaving breasts.

A well-placed blow sent a girl and her strange mount crashing to the ground. The other girls continued to fight around her while she wriggled helplessly on the sand. A camera zoomed in on her angry face, and then panned down her body still bound to her mount, as though checking for any injuries. In doing so it revealed a detail Jeni had not appreciated before. To ensure she did not slide out of place on her narrow saddle and remained directly at the point of balance over the main shaft, twin dildos rose from the inner curve of the saddle and lodged in her vagina and rectum. Even though the girls were held against their saddles by their collar cords, every bounce must work the dildos inside them. They were fighting and masturbating at the same time.

When eight girls lay helpless on the sand the battle was halted. The fallen were removed and the remaining girls were divided into two groups and pitted against each other in paired combat. The winners of those heats fought again until there were only two girls left.

The crowd called out encouragement to the pair as they squared up to each other. One of them, looking very lean and muscular and with a determined set to her jaw, seemed to be the favourite and they chanted her name. ‘Selva, Selva!' Jeni noticed even the Adamasees joined in, and it was then she realised of what the girls on their bizarre sprung mounts reminded her: knights on a chessboard. They were living chess pieces!

The girls hopped forward, weaving and dodging, trying to open up the other's side. They clashed in a jumble of polished metal and flesh, grinding and swaying as they tried to topple the other with brute force, their mounts locked together. Then Selva reeled backwards, seeming on the point of losing her balance, teetering on the very rim of her supporting frame. Her opponent seized her chance and made a bounding charge at Selva's unguarded flank, but at the last moment Selva twisted round, clearly in perfect control. Her forward club pounded into the other's side and she crashed to the ground.

The crowd went wild. Selva rocked to and fro on her mount, panting and sweat-streaked, bowing in acknowledgement of their applause.

She was a slave sporting star, Jeni realised. How weirdly perverse. Yet had not something similar happened in Roman times? What reward did Selva get if she won enough contests? Was she given her freedom? But would she want to turn her back on such a sport at which she evidently excelled? Jeni's head swam; after what she had witnessed she did not know what to think.

 

Back in the flying disk on their way home that evening, Lorthon noticed their subdued attitudes.

‘What's the matter with these two?' he asked his wife. ‘They look ill.'

Vandra prodded Rebecca with her toe. ‘What's the matter, girl? Explain yourself. You may speak freely.'

Rebecca, still looking pale, said, ‘It was all that blood, mistress. And the... killing. I've never seen anything like it.'

Vandra frowned. ‘What killing? Nobody died today, you silly girl, unless a medic was seriously incompetent.'

Rebecca blinked in surprise. ‘You mean, they can cure even those injuries?'

‘Of course. They'll be ready to fight again in the next games.'

Lorthon was looking puzzled. ‘Anyway, I thought you barbarians would enjoy this sort of thing. Don't you have similar sports?'

‘Not usually as bloody as that, master,' Jeni answered. ‘Well, there is boxing, but the fighters are not allowed to hurt each other too badly.'

‘But surely you see plenty of blood. Aren't you warring with each other all the time, anyway?'

‘There are wars, master, but we try to limit the harm they do. There are rules. We try to be humane.'

‘So you fight wars humanely, yet you avoid bloodshed in your sports.' He glanced at his wife in evident bafflement. ‘What a strange land that must be.'

 

The Adamasees held a party. It was a small but exclusive affair, with a mere hundred and fifty or so carefully chosen guests.