The suns of Scorpio (7 page)

Then she went to stand once more flaunting her beauty insolently in the pink moonshine, as human bait. That night, my first at the task, we picked up six men who wished to sample Holly’s wares. We bound them and gagged them and took their finery, personal jewelry, money, and weapons. This facet of Holly amazed me; I saw she could act with all the sure purpose of a mature woman. The men would be sent into the warrens by certain paths Holly knew. From there, naked and bound, they would find their way into distant slave gangs over the other side of the building complex. It would be impossible to prove their identities when confronting the immediate response from the overlords and the guards, which was usually a blow to the head. Holly, however, seldom took even that risk. She usually insisted the men be sent to the galleys; who would not tremble at that simple phrase? Sent to the galleys. When I asked why the hated overlords and guards were not killed out of hand, Genal looked at me as though I were mad.

“What?” he exclaimed. “Send them straight up to Genodras, to sit in glory at the right hand of Grodno, before they have suffered here on earth? I want to know they suffer, first, before they die and are received into the Green Glory.”

I did not say anything.

What had impressed me as a vital element in the structure of the Eye of the World was that while the slaves believed in the red-sun deity, Zair, in general, the workers, whose allegiance should have wholeheartedly belonged to Grodno, were most lax and loose in their beliefs. This feeling that death would release them to go to their hopes of glory in the green sun was perhaps the strongest religious tenet they tolerated.

The surrounding countryside was terrorized by the mailed men. They took anything they wanted outside the immediate bounds of their city limits and the enormous machine-run, factory-type farms. By galley and by their mounted cavalry, they dominated the northern littoral. There were other cities on the northern shores, but none approached Magdag in size, power, or magnificence. So far I had seen no zorcas or voves, those magnificent riding animals of Segesthes. The overlords rode a six-legged beast rather like a skittish mule, blunt-headed, wicked-eyed, pricked of ear, with slatey-blue hide covered with a scanty coarse hair that overlords trimmed and oiled. I wondered at their suitability as mounts; the six-legged gait is often awkward and uncomfortable for a rider. The riders did not wield lances, relying on their long swords. I saw little evidence of bows, and those I did see were the standard short, straight bow; neither the reflex compound bow of my Clansmen nor the long English yew bow were in evidence in Magdag. The riding beasts, the sectrixes, seemed to me good sturdy animals, although I doubted their hardiness; they did not, in my estimation, stand enough hands high to give a Clansman all the room he would like in which to swing his ax or broadsword. More and more I was coming to see Magdag as a great builder’s yard. The slaves and the workers, and occasionally the free artificers, lived in their tiny shacks of straw or lathe or mud brick tucked against the sides of the mighty buildings they were constructing or ornamenting. There was great richness in the buildings, masses of gold leaf and encrustation, acres of precious stones, porphyry, chemzite, chalcedony, ivory, kalasbrune, slabs of marble veined and pure, flashing in the suns. Inside the labyrinthine areas where the slaves gathered in the shadows, filth, and the smells there was only mud brick and clay and harsh stone, and miserly quantities of sturm-wood. The imbalances were great and terrible, greater, even, than my own Earth’s at the close of the eighteenth century. Inside these warrens was a kind of no-man’s-land. The guards did not care to venture in unless in such force as to smash the slightest opposition. They did so enter, from time to time, to rout out skulkers, for there were many who sought to take sanctuary in the slaves’ warrens. It was Genal who apprised me of the latest plot.

In the maze of alleys and courts linking and separating the hovels and the slave compounds, we walked after a period of a two-day rest. We had disposed of a goodly number of guards, and the reaction was, as usual, brusque. A new guard commander for our gangs, those of Pugnarses and the other slave overseers, had been appointed. He was a man whose meanness was a byword. Already he had had Naghan’s woman flogged to death, the bright blood spouting as her back was ripped down to bone, the flesh and blood hanging in striped ringlets of agony. The plan was to kill this overseer, this overlord of the second class, one Wengard, and his whole platoon, and then to make an escape and seize a galley from a harbor — any galley, any harbor.

“I do not like it, Genal,” I said.

“Neither do I.” He hunched his shoulders as we walked toward the brick works, surrounded by slaves and workers. I was aware that I knew little of the inner conspiracies that must fester continually in a situation like this. There must be gangs, clans, sects, mobsters and criminals, perverts and blackmailers, by the thousand in these sinks. The person who wished to lead this latest revolt was a Fristle, one called Follon. I had no love for Fristles. They were not true men. They had two arms and two legs, true; but their faces were like those of cats, bewhiskered, furred, slit-eyed, and fang-mouthed. Fristles had carried my Delia off to her captivity in Zenicce when I had been transplanted to that beach in far Segesthes.

“There are Chulik guards, now, under Wengard, the overlord of the second class,” I said.

“Yes,” agreed Genal. “But Fristles are hereditary foes of Chuliks, except when hired as mercenaries by the same employer.”

“Who is not a foe of Chuliks?” I said carelessly, not wishing to continue the conversation. I felt sure the Star Lords did not wish me to become embroiled with a plan of rebellion that had almost no chance of succeeding.

“Follon, the Fristle, had told me, now he has asked me outright. Do we join — more particularly, as a stranger here, do you join?”

“No,” I said.

I thought that would be an end to it.

All about us the noise, the buzz, the stink, the never-ending toil went on. Work and work and more work, under the lash and the knout, under the balass stick. We worked, we workers and slaves. We worked.

Follon approached me during the single break of the day when the suns stood overhead. His cat-face looked mean, the whiskers stiff and spiked.

“You, Stylor. We have seen you fight. We need you.”

There were always fights and scrimmages in the warrens and as a stranger I had had to impress on my unwilling comrades that I was not a man to be trifled with. I had broken in a few heads in the proving of that, and Follon, the Fristle, had not missed that significance.

“No,” I said. “You must find help elsewhere.”

“We want you, Stylor.”

“No.”

He puffed himself up at me. He reached up to my chest. His cat-face showed an expression I could clearly read — anger, resentment, blind fury that I had denied what he asked, and, too, fear. Why fear?

He thrust at me. I moved back two steps, not a stagger, a deliberate disengagement. He jumped in, hands raking. I sidestepped, and chopped down on the back of his neck. He went on going forward, forward and down. He stayed down.

A whip cracked agonizingly across my back and I turned to stare at Wengard, the overlord of the second class. His mail-clad arm was raised and the whip about to lash down again.

“Cramph! I will not tolerate fighting! Pugnarses! This is your man . . . Have him disciplined.” As Pugnarses, sweating, ran up, Wengard said: “Stripe him with your balass, Pugnarses. No, you calsany, not now! After work, so that he may lie and suffer all night. I will inspect his back. I want to see blood, Pugnarses, blood and bone! And, tomorrow, I want to see him back at work.”

The overlord prodded his foot into Follon’s prone body.

“Take this stupid calsany away and when he awakes treat him in the same way. You hear, slave?”

“I hear, master,” said Pugnarses. I saw his right fist contract on his balass stick, white like tallow, his knuckles like skulls. He dared not tell this mighty overlord that he was not a slave. The whip was poised, ready, hungry.

I rose to my feet and straggled off, prepared to endure a thrashing, of which I have had more than my share in life, rather than do anything that would upset the plans of the Star Lords and so hinder my eventual return to Strombor.

The mighty overlords could not be expected to know what slavery was like. Wengard, now, was serving as a slave-master because he must have committed some misdemeanor. Usually the overlords themselves only came to the workers’ and slaves’ warrens for sport — blood sport. I felt it would be very good to have Wengard and his ilk for a full day’s work in the megaliths of Magdag. As the twin suns dropped to the horizon, I prepared for my unpleasant interview with Pugnarses. He would not spare me for the fragile friendship we shared with Genal and Holly, for he was ambitious. One day he might, given luck, ruthlessness, and continuing health, become an overseer of overseers himself and wield a whip, clad in a white garment like the overlords themselves, giving his orders to the overseers of the balass. Pugnarses resented the fact that he had not been born an overlord. Follon waited for me in the lath hut with its straw roof where I expected to find Pugnarses. I put down my clay tablet and laid the wooden implement carefully beside it. I moved gently, cautiously. A Fristle, suddenly appearing at the door, slammed it against the laths. In the sudden dimness I felt a thick net fall and envelop me. I heard a quickly-stifled uproar as Fristles jumped me.

“Pin his legs!”

“Smash his head in!”

“Kick him in the face!”

I lashed out, but the hampering net blunted my blows.

I saw the gleam of a dagger, a dagger like the one we had taken from the guard who had tried to sample Holly’s fresh beauty. I tensed myself and then relaxed, ready to concentrate all my energy on that dagger. The door opened.

“Hold!”

I did not recognize the voice. Someone out of my vision was now giving quick, hissing instructions. I heard fragments. “Would you have him go straight to Genodras, to sit on the right hand of Grodno, in glory? Think, fools! Let him suffer for betraying us. Let him repent and repent again as he labors at the oars. To the galleys with him!”

I did not feel too grateful. Death — what was death to a man such as me? I had gained a thousand years of life by my baptism in the pool in the River Zelph that flows into the lake from which Aphrasöe, the Swinging City, grows. I had quivered at the thought, until I had found Delia of the Blue Mountains, and recognized that twice a thousand years would not be long enough to consume all the love I had for her. It was my duty not to die while she lived. But, the galleys! I did not think much more. The sack in which they tied me was coarse and stinking and oppressive so that I struggled and gasped to breathe. Ignominiously, I was bundled down the secret slave ways from the warrens to the wharves and jetties of the harbor of Magdag.

After much bumping and stealthy movement I was flung down onto a wooden floor which moved with a swinging, familiar lilt. I was lying on a deck. Once more I was aboard a ship. I felt then the movement of the Star Lords — or the Savanti, those one-time friends of Aphrasöe — a movement I could neither understand nor explain.

Zorg and I share an onion

The two onions balanced on Zorg’s calloused palm were not the same size. One was, to speak in Earthly measurements, something over three inches in diameter, plump and round, its orange-brown outer skins shining, crisp, and flaky. We both knew its insides would be sweet and succulent, tangy and rich. The second onion looked like a slave beside a master: smaller, about two inches in diameter, with hard stringy outer skins already extending up into a growing neck of unpleasant yellow-green. It was scrawny. But it, too, would contain food to sustain us within its unlikely-looking skin. We studied the onions, Zorg and I, as the fortyswifter
Grace of Grodno
heaved forward on the swell with that blessed quartering breeze filling the sail above us. Sounds of shipboard life rose all about us, with the smells as well. The twin suns of Scorpio blazed mercilessly down on our shaved heads. Our crude, round conical hats fashioned of straw gave pitiful protection. Of course, up on the poop —
Grace
of Grodno
was of that class of galley not provided with a quarterdeck — the overlords of Magdag lolled at their ease in deck chairs beneath striped awnings of silk and mashcera, sipping long cool drinks and toying with fresh fruits and juicy meats. Our two naked companions on the bench had already shared their onions between them, onions of the same size.

“The choice is onerous, Stylor,” said Zorg of Felteraz.

“Indeed, a weighty problem.”

We would receive no more food until breakfast the next morning; we were only reasonably provided with water, and that was simply because
Grace of Grodno
, with her single square sail and arrogantly jutting beak, had caught a favoring breeze. We would make port in Gansk that evening, and sail again the next morning. The galleys of Magdag would venture on a cruise that would take them across the inner sea out of the sight of land for as much as four days at a stretch, but they did not like that. They preferred to hug the coast.

“If, my friend, we possessed a knife . . .”

Zorg had lost a lot of weight since I had first seen him, as a slave, in the colossal, empty hall of Magdag, dragging the idol of stone with me. The moment I had seen him again, after I had been transferred from the training liburna, I had made it my business to be near him when the oar-masters sorted us into benches. We had been oar companions now for a season — I had lost all count of days. On the inner sea, the Eye of the World, navigation even for galleys is possible for almost all of the season. Zorg lifted the larger of the onions to his mouth. I simply looked at him. We had come to understand each other in these days. He regarded me with an expression that, for a galley slave, was as near to a reassuring smile as can be. He started to bite.

He bit swiftly and cleanly around the onion, his strong, yellow, uneven teeth chomping like a beaver’s. He parted the onion into two not quite equal halves. Without hesitation he handed me the larger of the two.