Fireball Read Online Free PDF Page B

face and keen eyes. He wore a tunic with a light red cloak over it, fastened at the front by a gold pin. Two other men followed him respectfully.
    His inspection of the seven naked figures was rapid. Four he immediately touched on the shoulder with a small black stick he carried; they included the man who had been brought in with Simon. He studied the remaining three more closely. Standing in front of Simon, he put the point of the stick under his chin, lifting his head. He stooped down and kneaded the muscles of Simon’s right arm with hard, probing fingers; the act was impersonal but degrading. He stood back again, making a more general survey. Then he touched just one of the three with his stick, rapped out a few words of command, and with his two followers strode away across the forum.
    A choice had been made, Simon realized, but what choice? It did not, anyway, have any immediate effect; the seven were mobilized as a group and marched away by the two guards, except that marching was scarcely the term to describe the ragged shuffling progress their roped ankles permitted.They left the forum at the nearest corner and went along a narrow street, crowded with people and horse-drawn vehicles. It was lined with shops—small boxlike rooms open at the front—selling a variety of goods: metalwork, pottery, cloths, cooked meats, wines. Smells were strong all the way, but particularly as they passed one with a display of leather goods. No one paid any attention to them, any more than they appeared to pay attention to the beggars, with a wide variety of deformities and mutilations, who squatted on the roadside, chanting for alms.
    They turned a corner into another, slightly wider street. The whole of the left side was taken up by one massive building, with no windows at ground level and only narrow slits higher up. A prison? The blank front was broken at last by a stone archway, wide enough to take a cart, with wooden doors folded back from stone pillars and an armed guard on either side. They went through without challenge; through the dark tunnel beyond and into a vast sunlit square.
    It was full of soldiers, practising weaponry and exercising. They were in a number of squads, under instructors. Simon saw a squad fighting in pairswith wooden swords, and another group heaving lances at dummy targets, roughly man-sized figures made of sackcloth. Not a prison but a barracks. Did that mean they had been press-ganged for military service? If it were so, things looked better again. Only marginally, but margins were becoming important.
    There was a brief outburst from one of their guards, and the two groups split. Simon, totally ignorant of what was said, followed the man on his left. A barked order, accompanied by a casual but stinging cuff to the side of the face, told him he had done the wrong thing. The guards seemed to find it amusing; they laughed, obviously at him, before they parted, directing their separate squads. The five who had been tapped by the officer’s black stick went through a doorway on the left. Simon and the remaining slave were marched on.
    His new companion was a small, swarthy man of about twenty. He had laughed with the guards, and he now rattled words off, grinning at Simon as he did so. A query of some sort. When Simon just looked at him, he shrugged and said something to the guard. The guard responded, in an almostamiable tone. It looked as though the pair of them had passed some selection procedure and qualified for a slightly improved status.
    Their destination was a door in the end block, immediately facing the tunnel through which they had entered the barracks. Inside there was a hall, lit by oil lamps, with an iron-railed stone staircase leading up and doors on either side. They were led through one of them into a room lined with shelves. The guard barked a command, and since his companion came to a halt, Simon did the same. He had a moment’s panic as the guard approached him with