I stepped into the circle now and there was an animal roar from the crowd. Tara's man did a vicious little dance step and kicked. As I leaped aside his left hand slashed at my face. I dodged the blow and blocked the right that followed it. There was a tinkle of steel on steel as our fingers met.
We circled then, each of us seeking a weakness in the other. I had a glimpse of Joro, tense in concentration at the edge of his high seat. It was odd to see him at a distance and at the same time to know he was inside me, fighting my fight.
I felt the power of his mind and doubled over to avoid a slash that had been aimed at my eye. Then, with my opponent off balance, Joro directed a blow at his shoulder. I felt my claws dig into the man's flesh and he went down on one knee. Quickly I kicked and saw my steel hoof slice his ear so that it dangled by a thread of flesh. Before I could follow through for the kill Tara's man was up with a thrust that sought to disembowel me. I stepped back in time.
But I was shaken. His sharp claws had brushed my belly. An inch more and I would have been bleeding my life out, red on the green of the gamesward. I felt nauseated. The noise of the crowd was like the surf, rolling in over me, but dirty, filled with garbage.
Barbarians! I thought.
Suddenly I didn't want to win. I didn't want to die, either, but the price for that was to kill this other man with whom I had no quarrel.
He was facing me again, his ear hanging down grotesquely, and throwing a series of orthodox feints with his left to set me up for a right cross. He had a strange expression on his contorted face.
"... television," I heard him grunt.
It was clearly that word—that Earth-word. I had to give him a word he'd recognize in turn as non-Uru.