If I Pay Thee Not in Gold

by Piers Anthony

  “Here,” she said as he took it, “and remind me to get you a better knife tomorrow. That one doesn’t keep an edge worth a conjured coin, and it doesn’t really have a point. I wish I could afford to buy you a sword, but a good, big knife will be much cheaper.” They really couldn’t afford the knife, either, but she had a certain squeamishness about using the same tool to cut up food that Faro might use to kill someone with. And really, Faro needed a bigger knife than this one. “A sword wouldn’t really be useful in close confines, would it?” she finished, hopefully.

  “No, little mistress,” he said, taking the knife with a smile of gratitude. “Perhaps later, but a sword would not be useful to me now. But a good knife-yes, I could use that here and now. And when we go out, conjure me another one of those staffs, only make it look like wood, if you can. I can use that as well; with a staff in my hand, I can take on as many as four men.”

  She well imagined that he could, although she wondered where he had gotten the training to use swords and knives and staffs. That sort of training wasn’t in a scribe’s usual repertoire, even one built as powerfully as Faro.

  Then the answer came to her fatigue-fogged mind.The arena, of course , she chided herself, as she slid into bed and extinguished the lamp beside it. Faro had already taken his place on his pallet, and she felt comforted by his silent presence. She hated to think about it, though. They must have done awful things to him, trying to break his spirit. And when they couldn’t, they must have been training him for the exhibition-fights, where they set the slaves to hack at each other until one of them died. Someone like him would have given them a lot of entertainment before he died. Faro could never do anything poorly; he would have set himself to learn to fight with the same single-mindedness that he had when he learned his skills as a scribe. She was certain of that. Faro could never be less than his best- even when it came to killing.

  She wondered if it troubled him that he had helped her to kill five men tonight whose only offense was that they had obeyed the orders of a woman. She was under no illusions; he had hated all women, and now he hated all but one. She had seen that carefully veiled hate in his eyes, heard it in his caustic wit, just one short step from insolence. Was he lying on his back, on that pallet, wondering if he should have spared their lives? Or did he simply feel that as tools of the woman who had owned them, they were as corrupt as she must be?

  She knew how she felt about it: no one had forced that Mazonite to attack her, and there were laws governing the behavior of slaves. Any slave attacking a woman-regardless of whether that was something he had been ordered to do, or something he had decided to do on his own-would be put to death, instantly. Only in the arena, at either a woman-trial, or the rarer fighters-challenge, could a slave do his best to kill a woman with no reprisals. They would have killed her; she had no compunction about killing them. After all, she had been trained by Marcus to know that one day, she would have to fight at least one man, and the odds were even that it would have been to the death. Every Mazonite knew that; those that entered the army spent their lives killing.

  Those men had not really been men to her; they had been things. They were not like Marcus or Faro. If they had run, as their mistress had run, she would have let them live. They had not; she had not.

  Why didn’t she feel anything? she asked herself, as she stared at the darkness of the ceiling. Was it that she was simply too tired? There was nothing inside her, no energy, no feeling, not even anger.

  Perhaps that was it. Perhaps it was simply that she had nothing left to feel with tonight.

  Or perhaps it was just that she was in a kind of shock. She certainly felt stunned. It was one thing to believe that someone wanted to frighten her; it was another to know that someone wanted to kill her.

  She hated to think about it, and hated to remember that Faro was a trained killer. It was not how she cared to think about him, but it was a good thing for her that he had learned those things. If he hadn’t-

  She fell asleep before she could finish the thought. They replaced the plants; they fortified the house when they were gone. The cost of the plants and the arms she obtained for Faro ate into their money, but she could not grudge the expense. They saved every copper-bit they could, and they continued to be very wary.

  It was just as well, for within six days they were attacked again.

  This time it was by a band of eight, a larger group than the one that had attacked them before.

  Once again they were on their way home, but this time from a more modest encounter. And this time it was in broad daylight.

  The circumstances were odd, too. A woman who often booked public entertainments had thought that other Mazonites might be willing to pay to see Xylina’s woman-trial restaged. Xylina was dubious, and Faro ominously silent, but she decided that the woman was too important to offend by an outright “no.” They went to hear her out, but in the end, Xylina felt she could not put Faro through that kind of humiliation a second time. Bad enough that she had once ridden him like a broken horse. It would be worse for him to recreate his moment of defeat twice a day for however long audiences continued to come. And they might not come at all; that, too, was a possibility. Or they might come in such small numbers that their share would not be worth the loss of other, more “respectable” income. And what about being naked? Xylina had not liked that at all, though she understood the need in the arena. The men could be clothed, because they were under the control of the trainers and never had any weapons to conceal, but the women had to prove they brought nothing in with them. Not only did Xylina not want to parade naked again, she didn’t want to press her thighs and breasts against Faro’s body again. Not now that she realized how he had reacted. Not in public and not in private.

  She declined, however, on the grounds that such a show might anger the Queen, being a blatant display of her own ability to conjure. That reason had taken some quick thinking on her part, for the woman could not possibly take offense at such an excuse. She pointed out that such re-creations could be viewed as a challenge.

  It was a pity; the woman lived in a lovely home and had at least fifty or sixty slaves, and it was obvious from her prosperity that the spectacles she staged were generally very popular. The room they had been received in was all of the finest marble, with comfortable, suede-covered couches for Xylina and her hostess, and a leather-covered stool for Faro. The entrepreneur herself wore fine silk breeches and a tunic dyed in expensive scarlet, and Xylina was served a generous selection of expensive cheeses, savory breads, thin-sliced meat and succulent fruit, with the leavings going straight to Faro. The rest of the house was like this part of it: cool and luxurious, though not as sumptuous as the villa. This woman evidently had a high degree of success in judging what others might well pay to see. But Faro’s set expression and the smoldering embers of his eyes told Xylina that this would be too much. She could not offend him this way, by ordering him to do this. Not after all he had done for her.

  “Truly,” she said to her hostess, trying to appear modest and thoughtful, “I wish that I could. But I have no intention of even making itappear that I was challenging the Queen’s power. Now I’m sure you understand that I have no ambitions for the throne; I would not know how to govern, and I would make a very bad ruler, I fear. Yet our Queen is suspicious, and has reason to be-and even if I proclaimed my lack of ambition from the rooftops, she would still suspect a challenge.”

  Their hostess frowned, but nodded. “You have a point, and a good one,” she replied grudgingly. “What you say is very likely. Our good Queen has challenged others on the basis of things much less suspicious.”

  “And only think how it would look to the Queen thatyou had been the sponsor of such a display!” Xylina added, as if in afterthought. She clapped her hand to her mouth as if dismayed. “Demon-spawn! She would think thatyou had ambitions to be the power behind the new monarch! She might well decide that you had posed a challenge through me!”

  “Holy mothers, yo
u’re right!” the Mazonite exclaimed, her brown eyes going wide with alarm, jerking her head up so that her sandy curls bobbed with agitation. “Perhaps I had not thought this out completely.”

  Now was the time to soothe her, before she decided to turn around and report this to the Queen’s agents. “I promise you, if you can think of a way for Faro to perform that will be successful without appearing to challenge the Queen, I shall be most pleased to enter into such a venture,” Xylina told her calmly, rationally. “I think that would be a most successful spectacle. Perhaps something involving his strength-not a fight with another gladiator, for that would be too much like the combats that the Queen sponsors-but perhaps he could undertake to fight a wild boar, or lift heavy objects, or break a wild horse-”

  “I shall think on it,” their hostess said, her anxious expression betraying her mixed emotions-greed for the money she could earn from the original idea, warring with real fear of the Queen. And not without reason; the Queen had right-of-challenge too, just as any of her subjects did if they wished to try for the throne. If she felt an unspoken challenge had been issued against her, she could issue a challenge of her own, and the challengesshemade were invariably to the death. Only self-exile could save the Mazonite so challenged from the inevitable end.

  After a moment of struggle, the fear won, and the woman escorted them to the street, promising to keep in touch.

  It was hard to walk through the cool marble hall, past the front garden with its lovely waterfall and artistically shaped trees, knowing that the wherewithal from just a few successful “re-enactments” could have madeher house look like this one. But she had not had a friend for so long-no, she could not betray him in that way. Not for something as stupid as gold.

  Their hostess left them at the front door, leaving a slave to see them to the gate to the street. The gate shut behind them with aclick that sounded very final to Xylina. “Well, at least we got a meal out of this,” Xylina said philosophically, looking back over her shoulder to talk to Faro as they made their way down the street. Walls in this part of town were all the same, with the only variations being in the gates set into them. The paved street was hemmed in on either side by stucco walls of a pale beige. It was almost sunset, but there was plenty of deep gold-tinged light. The streets were bare of traffic. The entrepreneur had specifically invited Xylina to share supper, probably hoping to get her into a more conciliatory mood with food and drink, and Xylina had made certain to eat heartily; the other inhabitants of the city were within their own doors and gates, enjoying their own evening meal right now.

  Faro’s expression lightened considerably, once they were out of those walls. “You should do something about my costume, if we get many more invitations like this one,” he replied from behind her. “I could have filched enough fruit, bread, and cheese for all of tomorrow’s meals, if I’d had somewhere to hide it. As it was, I only purloined two of those wax-covered cheeses.”

  Xylina turned to look at him, wondering if he was joking.

  She saw no sign of anything hidden in his tunic. And certainly their hostess had given her no sign that she had seen Faro taking and concealing anything. “You didn’t-” she said, her eyes wide.

  “I did,” he grinned, and displayed the two red balls of cheese like a conjurer, making them appear and vanish again into the breast of his tunic. And once there, although she had seen them disappear, she could not see where he had hidden them.

  She smothered a fit of giggles. Faro, a sneak-thief? Who would ever have believed it? “How did you do that? Where did you learn such a thing?” she demanded.

  “From one of the boys at the scribe school, when I was about nine, and was still small,” he replied, “I was hungry all the time, and the boy claimed my growling stomach kept him awake at night. They never gave us enough time to eat our fill, and they never let us carry food away from the table. One of the other boys was the son of an entertainer, a dancer and conjurer; he taught us all how to filch and conceal food, and what foods were best for the purpose.” His tone was light, and she caught a real smile lurking around the corners of his eyes and mouth. He obviously found her surprise quite amusing.

  “Is there anything youdon’t know?” she asked, wondering yet again at the twist of fate that had brought them together, and led her to keep him after she had won him. For all of the horrible things that had happened to her, this-not only the ownership, but thefriend ship-made up for them. Next to Marcus, he was possibly the most wonderful person she had ever known. She would die if she had to do without him, she thought, suddenly. Die-or if they were right, and she had a terrible enemy, she would be killed.

  “There are many, many things I can’t do. I can’t cook,” he pointed out wryly. “As you well know, given the number of meals I have near-ruined. I can’t sew. I can’t clean unless someone shows me what to do. I am not particularly good at supervising others, although I believe I could learn. And as you are well aware, I know very little about gardening other than that seedlings come from farms and that they must be tended- you have had to teach me all of that. When you come to own a horse, you will have to find someone else to buy to deal with it, for you have seen for yourself how horses hate me.”

  “Not all horses,” she said, stifling another giggle, for he was referring to a most unfortunate encounter with the dun mare that pulled the vegetable cart that serviced their neighborhood. Faro and the mare had confronted one another one morning a few days ago. For no reason that Xylina could fathom, the mare had decided that Faro looked like an enemy. She had gone for him, and had tried to bite him every time she saw him. The first time she had attacked him, Faro had not been aware of how fast she could strike nor what her range was. She had connected with his right buttock. And a horse’s teeth, as Xylina had learned after treating the wound, made very large and painful bruises. The worst part was that the same mare adored Xylina and would beg for caresses whenever Xylina walked by, turning in the next instant to attack Faro.

  “The only horse I have ever seen hates me,” he replied. “And she loves you. I can only conclude either that all horses hate me, or that she is a Mazonite to the core, and believes men should be beneath her hooves, making the pavement soft for her to walk upon.”

  Xylina could no longer contain her laughter. She stifled it behind her hand, as Faro grinned ruefully, and they turned the corner with her wiping tears out of her eyes.

  It was at that moment that Faro grabbed her arm and flung her into the wall; she hit the surface with both hands, softening her impact.

  As she landed, she caught sight of a large stone sailing through the air where her head had been. It was an attack; it could be nothing else.

  She quickly turned, using the impact with the wall to give herself extra speed, and looked for the danger. The first thing she saw was Faro, standing between her and harm, his back toward her. He was already using his staff against a pack of men, fending them off, gradually driving them away from her and the wall until they all stood in the middle of the wide street. It looked for all the world like a mastiff being worried by a pack of terriers, for he stood a head higher than any of the others.

  But terriers could be effective. One of them, a man with a raw, broken branch with bark still upon it for a cudgel, succeeded in getting past the staff to smash his club against the side of Faro’s head. Xylina winced at the sickeningcrack , but was too busy calling up her power to do anything to fend the attack off.

  The blow missed the temple, but the club laid open the scalp, and Faro staggered a little, stumbling forward two steps before regaining his balance.

  There was no time to waste; she had to act quickly before they took advantage of Faro’s injury. She did not exactly think; she assessed the situation and acted, exactly as she had in the arena.

  The worst thing that could happen to these men would be that they should get into each other’s way. That would mean that Faro could use his own blows effectively, and they would not be able to get at him.

&n
bsp; Yet anything she conjured to hamper them might also hamper him: oil on the street, or a rain of slippery stones, or flinging things at their legs or heads.

  If he only had a corner to stand in-

  That thought was all that she needed. She conjured him one. Power surged through her like an upwelling spring, and it did not even manifest from her hands this time, nor create a ghost-object before the full conjuration appeared. Instead, it simply flashed instantly into what she desired, creating two slabs of stone behind him that met in a “V” at his back.

  The immediate effect of the conjuration was to shove the men who had been standing there out of the way, as the stones sprang into being before their eyes and partially within the space they had occupied. Those men were knocked to the ground, taking them temporarily out of action. And now the rest of the ruffians could come at him only from the front.

  That evened the odds considerably. Now she was free to deal with the men between her and that newly-conjured stone. With the stone standing high between herself and Faro, she need not worry about hurting him with what she did.

  There were three of them, one kneeling, one still on his behind, and one staggering to his feet, all reacting to the sudden appearance of walls of stone in front of them. They stared at the stone, and not at her. That was a mistake. Before they could recover, she acted.

  The easiest thing for her to conjure was fabric-so she conjured that, yards and yards of it, dropping it over them and muffling them in its hampering folds. It dropped down right out of the air above them, again without a mist-shape presaging the actual conjuration, and without the conjuration actually touching her hands. Cries of surprise and rage came from beneath the fabric, and the folds churned and bounced as they pushed at it. Then she conjured a torrent of water that fell out of the empty air, like a sudden downpour of rain, soaking the fabric and turning it heavy and clinging, handicapping them further. She had made certain that it was icy water too, not hot-shocking them with the cold and giving her a chance to conjure up her next weapon.