Laila, Spock's Granny (Book 1: Vulcan Gladiatoress and Klingon Slave)

Celebrations 2

Soon after, Nerek and I headed back to the Grand Arena, as I was done here until tomorrow evening. We picked up Gahris and flew to our host who had invited us for lunch. Our host had the most exquisite foods served, but I was not so much into exquisite Klingon food. Too many worms, larvae, insects and other unidentifiable culinary delights. A hearty meal was much more for me. Maybe I was Vulcan after all. In the afternoon, Gahris and I sparred again. I tried to mimic the fighting style of his next opponent. The upcoming fight was not the death or freedom one, those ones had been pushed towards the end of the festivities. Those ones were supposed to be the highlight. Gahris upcoming fight should not be too much of a problem, unless his opponent was paid to injure him in order to make him more vulnerable for the death or freedom fight. Nerek and I might have been too paranoid, but better being safe than sorry. After the sparring we went back to our hotel to take a break and prepare for tonight's reception. The bath indeed was my favorite and I indulged into it again. After I had dried myself up, wrapped up in a towel, I sat down at the desk in my room and put pen to paper and wrote a letter to my mother. When I was almost finished, Gahris came into my room, fully dressed already. He did not bother about me only being wrapped in a towel and nosy as he was he looked over my shoulder and read the letter.

"You know, this is private", I lectured him a bit irritated.

"Since when do you hide anything from me?" Gahris was not into Vulcans and as a gladiator privacy was something very hard to maintain over time. I had given up on it, at least with Gahris. "Well, a letter to your mother is nothing, you need to be ashamed off. However, I recommend you burn that letter right now", he adamantly demanded!

My eyes grew wide and with raised voice I asked: "Why would I do that?"

"Because, you have to take into account, that Nerek and your mother's master will read the letter before it will get into your mother's hands. You cannot write about you trying to escape. You have to be very careful not to put anything compromising in there", he replied with a lecturing undertone.

I knew, he was right, but I still had to swallow my pride before I agreed with him: "Ups, I did not think about that."

"Please give me the letter, before anyone finds it." Impolitely, he did not even wait for me to hand it to him, but ripped it out from under my hand, grabbed a lighter from the desk and set it on fire.

"Eh what are you doing?"

"I'm protecting you, my friend!" The piece of paper was disintegrating now and burning pieces dropped to the carpet. Before seeing my room going off on fire, and no better idea in my mind, I ripped the wet towel off of me and extinguished the various little fires on the floor. It smelled really bad but luckily, the carpet did not have any holes in it.

I reprimanded him: "Do you see what you did? This is not the arena's sand floor, this is a nice and expensive carpet."

He snickered: "Yeah, I know what I did. I actually made you drop your towel and show off in front of me in all your naked beauty."

With a still irritated voice, I replied: "So after all those years, you finally found out, that I indeed am beautiful and you figured, you wanted to start a romantic relationship with me!"

"Actually I just wanted sex", he teased!

"Oh, that's Ok, I feared you would start to court me", I fired back.

"What's that supposed to mean? Are you rejecting a courting Gorn? That is a racial discrimination of sorts."

"Well, my impression was that everybody in the Klingon realms gives a shit about racial discrimination. I did get quite some of it myself. By the way, I'm not into Gorns. Just for your information."

Gahris raised his voice: "OK, I get it. Why don't you stop your scandalous behavior", he pointed his index finger at my bare breasts, "and write another letter to your mom", and laughing aloud ran off towards his room, before I could throw something at him?

He was right, I should write that letter again now. So for the next twenty minutes, I wrote a new letter, which just contained banalities and stuffed it into an envelope, which the hotel had provided for convenience.

5 min. before the arranged meeting time, I knocked at Neres door. "I will be right with you, just give me one more minute", was his greeting after he opened the door.

"I'm a bit early, because I wanted to ask you a favor", I brought my request to him.

"What favor?"

"Can you send this letter to my mom, please?"

He looked at it with suspicion, then said: "The address is not complete!"

"I know. Would you complete it for me please?" Slaves did not have direct access to any means of communication unless supervised. As such, I could not search for the address.

With a bit reluctance he replied: "OK, give it to me, I'll complete the address and post it tomorrow."

He took the letter and closed the door again. I was not sure, if my letter would end up in the bin or really go on its journey to Hitora.

The reception was very stiff and boring. A lot of Klingons, who felt utterly important. Even though, they wanted to be seen with us, I got the feeling we were nothing more but expendable slaves for them. Puppets for their distraction.

Next day in the afternoon, was Gahris' fight in the Grand Arena. Neres and I watched it from the team tribune, a tribune for the team members of the gladiators. The fight was atrocious, it lasted over the full 12 rounds. Eventually Gahris barely won by 1 point. He was finished, but had another fight scheduled in three days.

I could barely properly congratulate him, then I had to go to the outside arena for my own fight. This one I won again in the first round. I was glad for those quick victories, because the next fights would be more difficult. Tomorrow I would likely have two fights to do.

Lunch that day, was with a nice upper middle class Klingon family. They had two kids, which asked us one question after the other. One question led to another one. It was funny but also exhausting in a way. The food was really good, not the fancy stuff we had so far, but something more common. Excellently prepared however.