Lod the Galley Slave (Lost Civilizations) (9 page)

“
We’ll die unless you row!” bellowed Eglon, his fear adding urgency to his voice.

Then a
large slave stirred. He was a leader, the end man, of a bench. When this man rose, he pushed his handle as far aft as he could. His stroke was the longest and heaviest, his work the hardest. This slave had no fat, no symmetry to his frame. Already a big man, his muscles coiled and writhed upon his arms and on his chest and thighs. They piled one atop the other in grotesque overdevelopment. He dwarfed his mates on the bench, and his hands no longer seemed flesh and bone, but talons, claws of calluses with iron strength.

Six months in a galley killed most slave-rowers, two or three years for the toughest and most strong-willed. Yet
this awful brute had rowed twenty long years; he had survived and lived where everyone else died. Pestilence and plague often wiped out entire holds. Similar storms slew thousands each rowing season. Sickness, starvation, whippings, beatings and dull resignation turned into despair and reaped a bitter harvest. But not for this slave: he was different, unique, a prodigy. A long white beard fell upon the massive chest. Long white hair, dirty and matted, framed a weather-beaten face holding two fiery blue eyes that blazed fury like some mad desert prophet.

His name was Lod. He had sworn twenty long years ago to slay Yorgash the High Slith Sorcerer for reasons none now remembered. His name among the rowing holds was legend. Yet for over five years none had heard him speak.

The giant creature of an oar slave raised his head. Lod rumbled, “Let us row.”

Chains rattled as three hundred slaves turned to peer at him.

“You will row because I order it!” shouted Eglon, “and for no other reason!”

“
Out oars,” Lod said.

Despite the raging waves, the wild sea and the chances that all their chests would be caved in, the slaves slid out the oars.

“Measure the beat,” Lod told the startled drummer.

Boom!

Three hundred slaves, naked as the day they had slid out of their mothers’ wombs, rose from their benches and pulled. The slewing
Serpent of Thep
came under control.

With an inarticulate shout of rage, Eglon spun around and clumped
from the hold.

-3-

An eternity later in slave-time the rain and lightning and ship-destroying waves ceased, but not the howling wind. It shrieked through the oar ports, whistling and mocking and stirring the wretched odors so coughing and gagging sounds mixed with clattering chains and groaning, protesting beefwood. Unable to witness such cruelty, the sun had long ago fled. Racing clouds hid the moon and stars; perhaps they too had begged off this awful sight. Only madly flickering lanterns illuminated the top deck, creating demented shadows that pranced upon the wicker lattice in the ceiling of the rowing hold. In the very gut of the galley were only two lanterns, one aft and one forward. The flames upon the oil-soaked wicks darted and danced, ducked and wove like whirling dervishes of Shurrupak. Illuminated on the benches were gaunt slave faces that grinned insanely for a moment. Heaving, sweat-slick backs writhed next. Then a whip-master lunged into view, his arm descending, the crack of leather on flesh lost amid myriad other torments.

For over twenty hours these wretches had rowed, over twenty hours of rise and fall and war against the raving sea. Some slaves no longer felt their hands, which had gone numb and frozen onto the handles. Others trembled uncontrollably. From a few oozed a greenish sort of sweat that stank worse than the bilge water. Wine-soaked pieces of bread no longer helped, although for a few merciless floggings did.

Whip-masters prowled the middle aisle, raised a little higher than the benches where the wretches sat. When a slave slumped over the loom, often screeching and more than once vomiting blood, the leather-vested ruffians rushed near and wildly beat the exposed back, crisscrossing the flesh with welts and bloody gouges. Sometimes the slave revived. Sometimes the officer with his dreaded keys unlocked the ankle manacle and soldiers dragged the unconscious slave to a watery oblivion.

At last Captain Eglon staggered again into the hold. His haunted eyes roved over the thinned ranks of animals.
“No! No!” he roared. “Look how few are left. Who will row after they’re gone?”

The one-eyed key officer with his stiff gray hair shrugged helplessly.

“You aren’t flogging them hard enough!” shouted Eglon.

“
Begging your pardon, Captain, but my whip-masters are near the end of their strength.”

With a practiced eye Eglon studied the slaves. His gift was to know each man
’s limit to a nicety. He jerked in surprise as he saw Lod watching him. He spun on the officer. “Roast them! The stink of burning flesh—their own!—that will drive them.”

Eglon departed, and soon whip-masters wearing thick leather gloves prowled the aisle as they clutched brands with red-glowing tips. A slave shortly slumped upon the oar. An awful hiss brought him round screaming.

“It’s working!” shouted a whip-master, a coarse-faced brute with a trident tattoo on his forehead.

“
Bless Captain Eglon,” said the grizzled officer.

Another whip-master snorted, and then shot a wary glance up at the hatch.

“I’d better reheat this,” said the first whip-master, holding the iron near his cheek. “Only the hottest touch seems to stir them.”

The grizzled, one-eyed officer nodded.

Lod, who had listened to the exchange, narrowed his intense blue eyes. Here was yet another crime to be weighed upon the balance of the scales of justice that someday he would address with cold steel. He didn’t doubt that he would survive; in that sense he was utterly mad. True, tonight’s drudgery had exhausted him to a state he only once remembered: a time when he had caught fever and raved they said for a month, never letting go of the rowing cleat. He believed he wouldn’t die because after that month he had received visions, blood-soaked nightmares of vengeance and dire slaughter. Since then, the visions had descended upon him with greater frequency, as if his years of torture had at least earned him the favor.

For time without end he had drawn an oar each rowing season. During the winter months they sent him south to the oven-dry pits of Tartarus—there to labor as a beast of burden. With thousands of other harnessed slave-wretches, he dragged vast cyclopean blocks onto barges. Whip-masters reigned there too. Sun-baked savages with flashing teeth, hairy men that delighted in the sounds of cracking scourges and the screams of the doomed. Worst of all, he had learned that the barges sailed to far-off Poseidonis, where the marble helped fashion monumental ziggurats to Yorgash.

Lod shook his head, trying to rid himself of thoughts. Thoughts made life unbearable and brought despair. Despair meant weakness. Weakness devoured strength and led to death. Therefore don’t think. Wait for the visions. Wait…

His eyelids fluttered. He was so weary. Yet to give in meant a red-hot iron upon his back. He snarled. The brands spoke to him, hissing knowledge as they burned. To heat them the captain had the charcoal-fire stove lit. That was only done when they were given bean soup, and they only fared on such while in harbor or when the sea was calm. Shipboard fires terrified even the toughest sailors. The seas, however, tonight, were anything but calm. Thus something dreadful was about to occur. That stretched Lod
’s cracked lips into a weird and deadly grin.

Surely his time was near.

Another slave slumped over a loom. The wicked smell of his burning flesh didn’t bring this slave around.

“
It’s not working!” shouted a whip-master.

“
Somebody tell the captain.”

Lod closed his eyes, rose for the millionth time, push
ed his oar aft as far as he could reach, and then groaned as he pulled with all his might. Row! Row forever! Row to heaven and back and then down to the eternal flames of Sheol. Row!

For the first time the visions descended upon him during waking hours. They consumed him, filling his blank blue eyes with sights of fire and spurting blood, with the screams of the guilty. The force of the vision bubbled up until he could remain silent no more.

“Arise, O Elohim! Deliver me, O Elohim! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked.”

“
Silence, you dog!” shouted a whip-master. He lashed Lod with the terrible scourge.

Lod howled, although he rowed; he drew the vast loom. Chanting, he said,
“Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”

“
Silence!” raved the whip-master, his arm rising and falling. “Still thy traitorous tongue, you dog!”

Heedless of the slashing pain, almost delighting in it, Lod chanted,
“Their feet are swift to shed blood. Ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of Elohim before their eyes.”

The key officer yanked the whip-master from Lod.
“Leave him.”

“
He spouts blasphemy.”

“
He rows,” said the key officer. “That’s all that matters for now.”

They turned to Lod. His eyes shone with a fanatic
’s gleam, wild, insane, of a desert prophet who would bring blood and thunder to the Earth. He bled. He rowed, and then he fell silent, enduring the agony of life for however long he had left.

-4-

Captain Eglon stood with the pilot at the prow, the dark choppy waters hiding the
Serpent of Thep’s
ram. Weary, spray-drenched sailors slept on deck, shivering under their woolen blankets, curled up like jackals. Armored soldiers with bronze cuirasses and iron short swords prowled uneasily, their glances tracking in the direction from whence came the breeze. In that same far distance, on the eastern horizon, the first crack of dawn gleamed.

Eglon had wrapped himself in his scarlet Caphtorite cloak. Seawater had stained it and soaked his turban. For safekeeping he had unclipped the ruby and put it in a silk pouch dangling from his silver belt.

“We’re not going to make it,” said the pilot.

“
You’re privy then to the Master’s timetable?” said Eglon.

“
How long do you think it took the pterodactyl to find us?” the pilot asked. “Abimelech might have told us, certainly, but he’s dead.”

Eglon peered at the smaller man; sometimes he thought the hunch-shouldered seaman mocked him. The emotionless pilot studied the horizon, an old salt, even now scratching at the lice that crawled through his black beard. Eglon shivered. He loathed dirt and anything to do with being unclean. At the Master
’s court it had been so different. He wondered for the hundredth time if he had been wise to accept the offer to be a captain. The Master needed captains so he could float a battlefleet superior to Eridu and its allies.

Years ago, they said, the coastal cities of Northern Vendhya had fallen like rotten fruit into the Master
’s hands. He’d had little need for war galleys then. Nor did he need many galleys now to keep those cities captive. In recent years the Isle of Iribos had been taken through treachery; otherwise large numbers of galleys would surely have been needed there. Now, however, in order to maintain the siege of Larak, Yorgash had to face down Eridu and its allies on the sea. A few galleys sailed out of Poseidonis; a few crawled up the coast from the Vendhyan cities, while many had been hastily constructed in the Bay of Great Sloths. Those, the pilot had said several weeks ago, had been built from green pine, and for some reason that was bad, although at the moment Eglon couldn’t remember why.

In any case, along the jungle inlets of far Southern Vendhya
rested the rotting remains of old hulks. A bold, Southern Vendhyan prince had once challenged Yorgash and had dared to sail north in might. Alas, the Vendhyan prince and his crews had contacted a dreaded, and to them, foreign disease. The Master had hinted many times that he had sponsored the pestilence. In terror the luckless fools had fled homeward, but along the way many had succumbed to the sickness, and the survivors had barely crawled into the endless jungle inlets and bays of that coast and jumped ship. Thus for uncounted years those marvelously built galleys had gone to waste.

Eglon still remembered his day of decision. It had occurred in the garden court. Chimes had tinkled as the courtesans preformed a complex dance for the Master. As he sat on his golden throne, the Master had drummed his ebon fingers on the skull of a city governor who had failed to send his quota. Twin emeralds, green and of flawless purity, had been set in the polished skull
’s eye sockets. An eerie, sinful taint, the barest of glows, had shone from the emeralds, as if the governor’s spirit yet peered out.

Worse, however, had been the dreadful, lost-soul moan that issued from the skull whenever the Master tapped a certain sequence with his fingernail upon the necroman
cy-bleached bone. On a more natural note, squawking, orange-feathered parrots had flown through the garden where the courtesans danced, while a fountain of perfumed wine had splashed behind them. The Master had turned suddenly, catching him lusting after the dancers.