Their leader jabbed a thumb toward the front of their ship. “Porky, get us going. I don’t want to have a lizard breathing down our necks while we on-load.”
“Aye-aye, Durrn.” One of the crew ducked back into their ship. Durrn followed, waving to his men to bring us aboard.
“Wait!” I said, startling my guards. “What about our friends?”
Durrn spun about, eyes narrowing.
“Keryl!” Timash shouted. “What are you doing?”
“Yes, what are you doing?” Durrn walked up to me, peering into my eyes.
“We left two friends in that building over there.” I motioned with my head, feeling it unwise to use my hands around the nervous guards. Meantime I was trying to tell Timash telepathically, Trust me! with little success. Perhaps it was as well. “We can’t leave them here.”
“They might not agree with you.”
“Whatever you’ve got in mind, it can’t be any worse than what we’ve seen here.”
Durrn chuckled. “You might be surprised.”
I laughed right back at him. “So might you.” That unnerved him, but when Marella appeared from the shadows and shouted “Stop!” at him, he completely went to pieces.
As I have stated before, in moments of crisis my body leaps ahead of my mind, taking the initiative when the more settled of spirit would have withheld action pending rational consideration of outcomes and consequences. Not so I. This time my body literally leaped without conscious impetus, and the consequences were severe.
As soon as I had seen we were outnumbered, I had slid my baton up my sleeve and held it there. Our captors had not gotten around to searching us, and now they paid the price.
I spun, sliding the baton in my hand as I did so and resting it with some force against the side of a guard’s head. When he staggered, I grabbed his sidearm.
My fingers wrapped themselves around the grip in a practiced habit a million years old—but when I reached for the trigger there was none. I pointed the gun at the remaining guard and wished I knew how to fire it.
The gun flashed and the guard went down. Deep in the back of my mind the words telepathic trigger echoed faintly, but I was too involved to appreciate the Library’s far-ranging education right then. I whirled, searching for targets.
There were none, and too many.
Timash’s guards had turned at the sound of Marella’s shout. One lay on the ground, one writhed in the ape’s grip, but the third had trained his weapon on the girl. Timash was between us. At the last second, Harros appeared, chasing Marella. The guard shifted aim, fired, and Harros went down.
“Nice shooting, lad.” Durrn had appeared in the hatchway, his gun leveled at me. “But you won’t have time for another.”
And then he shot me.
In the hands of an experienced marksman, a Nuum phase-pistol can render a target unconscious for a number of hours without any appreciable after-effects. I survived Durrn’s attack because he wanted me to; knowing how long I would need to recharge my pistol, he took the time to adjust his own, to my everlasting benefit.
A few moments’ careful listening with my eyes closed led me to believe that I was in no immediate danger, so I allowed myself to look about and examine my surroundings. That they were strange to me was no shock; prisons were becoming a familiar sight. The room was small, seemingly hewn out of thick logs. Light was provided by a heavily-barred electric lamp in one corner of the ceiling. That Timash was napping in a corner, wearing thick chains that matched my own, was likewise not unexpected, but the absence of Harros concerned me. Several empty sets of manacles lined our jail, but they bespoke nothing of any recent occupancy.
“Are you awake?”
“Unfortunately.” My friend opened one eye. “I was hoping you wouldn’t wake up. I was hoping maybe you were having a dream and I got caught in it.” He touched one hand lightly to his closed eye and winced. “I didn’t think it was true.”
“Are you all right?”
He grunted. “I’ll live.” Then he winced again. “Oh. Bad choice of words.”
I felt cold. “Harros?”
Timash and Harros had never gotten along; I knew that, but my friend’s voice showed genuine concern.
“He was shot in the head. Maybe it was an accident; I don’t think they meant to kill us. They brought him on board, but he wasn’t moving—and if they know anything, they’re sure not telling me.”
“On board?” I repeated. There were no windows in our cell, and there was no sense of movement. I’d no idea we were inside a vehicle.
“We’re on a sky barge.” He couldn’t keep his hand away from the area around his closed eye. It was as if the pain would eventually convince him that his plight was real, and then he could do something about it. “They’re a Nuum invention. They use them to ferry themselves around—the rich ones do, anyway.”
“A sky barge? Are we airborne?” I tried to feel my surroundings, placing a hand to the deck, but there were no vibrations, no sounds of engines.
“Yeah. Don’t ask me how they work. We’ve seen them on occasion flying over our mountain. They never make a sound, just sail over like a huge balloon. Uncle Balu says sometimes they fly so low you can see the rowers.”
I recalled now that Balu had told me about sky barges once, but our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of four motley jailors, two of whom exchanged our fixed manacles for others, while the remaining pair guarded us from a distance—with cutlasses. At first I believed all an elaborate dream after all, that I was trapped in a Morphean landscape out of Robert Louis Stevenson, but I was to learn that the gaudy play into which I had been involuntarily cast was all too real. Everything in this surreal world had its place and its purpose: I was to be thrust into my own niche very soon.
We were forcibly marched up several flights of what appeared to be wooden ladders before being pushed into daylight. I stopped; I could not help it. The vision before me was so incongruent as to overwhelm me as I had not been since my first days in this looking-glass world.
I stood upon the deck on a Spanish galleon the size of the Titanic. Masts like redwoods towered above me, and sails of a shimmering silver stretched for what seemed miles in the bright sun. To my immediate left, seated below the level of the deck, I saw the rowers Timash had mentioned, swaying to and fro to a beat I could barely hear, though they were but scant yards away. And beyond the rowers, beyond the limits of the ship itself…
…were the clouds. We sailed, without a doubt. We sailed the sky itself.
I stumbled forward as a heavy hand shoved me in the back.
“Enough gawking! Move along! We got a place for yah!” And I was herded to an open spot among the rowers and chained again into place…
My memories exhausted, I did not return to any conscious appreciation of my state. I rowed. My body rowed. Whither my mind had gone, I had not the wit to say.
Chapter 34
I Am Robbed
When my shift was over, I was reunited with Timash and introduced to my crewmates. We were in no condition to exchange polite greetings; our labors had pushed us well past the edge of exhaustion. I had fancied myself well-conditioned, and Timash—Timash was a gorilla!—but we fell limply to the deck the moment our jailors pushed us through the door to the “crew quarters”—a euphemism at best. Technically it was not even correct, since the real crew, those skilled “air sailors” who truly operated the ship, had their own separate and far superior quarters above decks.
We were slaves. We lived communally, always chained, rotated on and off the rowing details as our masters wished. We lived to work, and we only stopped when we died. These things I was to learn over time, but the first thing I learned was the raison d’être for this flying circle of hell: It was a prison, and all of the men around us were convicted criminals. This I had discovered very quickly indeed.
I awoke with the exceedingly unpleasant sensation that I had tried to eat a woolen blanket in my sleep. I rolled over, spitting our bits
of Timash’s fur, and banged into a wall. I didn’t have to roll far.
My first sensation had been a bad taste, and my second had been pain, but the third was the most disturbing, as it stole upon me gently but insistently. As Timash rolled away from me—thank god, or he might have crushed me—the last feeling became at once more pronounced: I was cold. All over.
My clothes had been stolen while I slept.
Levering myself painfully into a sitting position, I tried to clear the dreams from my head and ignore the eyes I could feel upon me. Behind closed lids the pressure of foreign minds beat against my shields. Those too feeble to take my physical possessions were attempting to make do with the crumbs and tidbits of my unconscious mind. But they were weak, and I had overcome the dreaded telepathic virus. I shook them off like fleas. Their panicked feet beat a tattoo on the deck. Someone laughed, but it was dry, like a splintered stick. Suddenly, opening my eyes felt like the last thing I wanted to do.
We sat in a cleared space, away from other sleepers and away from the door. Had we been dragged to an open space to sleep or simply pulled out of the doorway so others would be saved the trouble of stepping over us? It did not matter, since we had most likely been robbed by the same good Samaritans who gave us a place to rest. Timash had been stripped and left on the floor even as had I; I shuddered to think of strangers’ hands all over my senseless body. They had left me my shorts, but filched my coveralls and boots.
A low growl from behind me said that Timash had awoken. He had exhibited a more aggressive side since leaving Tahana City than I had seen before; I did not know if it was a sign of his continuing maturity (sometimes I had to remind myself that he was still much younger than I), or the loss of the civilizing influences he had known all his life. In either event, this seemed both the most obvious, and the least desirable, time for him to test his newfound capacity for anger.
Next to opening my eyes, confronting an outraged, half-naked bull gorilla ranked as one of the worst choices in a day that had already reached calamitous proportions—and I had only just awakened.
I rotated, crablike, without getting up, hoping to avoid any more notice than was inevitable. Timash was more jumpy, his shoulders twitching with the thought of what he would do to the unfortunate soul he found wearing his clothes. I swallowed hard; my weeks in the city of the apes had not inured me to their behavior as much as I had thought. Still in the back of my mind they were the savage beasts of my own time, beating their breasts only when safely contained within iron bars. This ape had yet to begin beating his breast, but he wasn’t separated from me by thick iron bars, either.
Many of the men who were awake at this moment had congregated toward the far end of the compartment, talking and arguing amongst themselves as men will in close quarters with no diversions. In the trenches of France, even with the closeness of sudden death—or perhaps because of it—men weakened by months of freezing weather and scarce food had suddenly erupted into riots over inconsequential playing cards or another man’s picture from home. Sometimes only the shrieking of the incoming shells had stopped the madness. And sometimes the only way was to substitute another form of madness: Not all suicide charges could be laid to blame at the door of an incompetent rear-line command.
So I knew the gunpowder that lurked in a mob chained into a small space, and I knew that the fastest way to ignite them, to unify them against the newcomers in their midst, was to charge in. However righteous our anger, however strong our arms, we would be torn limb from limb.
This news was not welcomed by Timash, but I made him listen. I used my experience leading men to ease his brow and calm the twitching of his shoulders, but deep down, his still eyes burned. I told him to keep that fire banked, because sooner rather than later, we would need it. He asked me why.
“Because whoever stole my clothes also has the Library.”
Now indeed my plight had surpassed the merely calamitous and traversed the realm of the catastrophic. Possession of the Library was a capital crime; even if it remained hidden from the Nuum, its possessor held the key to both the secret of my origin and to my ever returning home. Its retrieval was not only imperative, but must be accomplished in such a way that its true nature—its very existence, if possible—remained undiscovered.
“We should find some clothes,” Timash suggested gently. “All we’re going to do is draw attention to ourselves otherwise.”
Forcing my other problems into the back of my mind, I nodded. Naked, we were marked. Clothed, we could begin to fit in.
“The men who stole ours must have had some before,” I said. “Let’s find them.”
Timash smiled, showing fence rows of teeth. “Yes, let’s. We’ll want to give them back when the time comes.”
Although lying in an exhausted stupor we must have appeared helpless—as we had been, and I reminded myself that we had been lucky to awaken at all—once we had gained our feet our true sizes became apparent to all. Never a large man, I was nonetheless the tallest of the galley slaves by several inches, and Timash outweighed any three of them. Any thought of further hazing evaporated, and even the crowd at the end of the compartment shifted, however reluctantly, to let us by. We kept a close eye out, but no one was wearing familiar clothing. Either it had been stolen by the crew—which I doubted, as the Library would then have been found and I would not be here—or the thieves were taking their turn up on deck.
New clothes we found without undue trouble, so worn and torn that they actually fit me after a fashion. Timash was forced to tie together a sort of loincloth. We turned next to learning the lay of the land. Timash volunteered to find us a tutor, and I let him. His method was simple and effective. He picked one of the loners lying pathetically against a wall and dangled him from one hairy paw.
“How do we get fed around here?”
The poor devil’s eyes rolled and his jaw clacked like he was afraid Timash was about to feed upon him, and for a moment I had doubts myself. I looked around to see how the others were reacting, holding their distance with carefully averted eyes. But they were watching all right, and Timash was giving them a show they wouldn’t forget. On impulse, I turned my back on him and stared at the others. After a moment, they turned their attention elsewhere. I kept on staring.
Within a few minutes, my friend had all of the information he was going to get, and I had marked in my mind several of our fellows who had flinched under my gaze, as well as two or three who hadn’t. Timash and I retired to our “spot” to compare findings.
“The crew pretty much doesn’t care what goes on down here, as long as nobody gets killed too often—it’s too much trouble finding replacements.”
“That’s probably what happened to us. What about the captain? Is he the type who might listen to reason? Can we explain we don’t belong here?”
“My friend Wince over there didn’t think so, but then he strikes me as the type who keeps his head down. It’s a lot safer that way. All he knows is that the captain holds the crew in an iron hand, and the crew likes to take it out on the rowers. There’s a gang of about a dozen that runs this whole Hold—that’s what they call it, the Hold. Wince says they used to call it the Hole, but I guess the boss down here wanted to make it sound a little better.”
“Does this boss have a name?” I asked. “And more to the point, does he have our clothes?”
“Yes to both. He calls himself Skull.” I stared, frankly incredulous. “No kidding. Nobody knows his real name; he’s been here about a year, and he beat the old boss to death the first night. According to Wince, he’s a brute—bigger than me, even.” He stretched his massive chest self-consciously, as if I needed any reminder. “Anything that comes down here that Skull wants, he takes, and that’s what happened to our clothes. If we hadn’t been so wasted, he would’ve have beaten us up first, but we saved him the trouble.”
I could have read the thoughts dancing across Timash’s brain without any telepathic powers at all. I bit back a grin and focused on our
problem, lest he mistake my amusement for enthusiasm for an immediate pitched battle.
“We’ll have our chance, my friend. If Skull realizes what the Library is, he won’t rest until he knows how to use it—and if he thinks I’m going to tell him, he’s in for a sorry surprise.” I stopped for a moment, staring at the opposite wall. Even when you haven’t a clue what to do next, it’s best not to let your subordinates know. Leadership demands an air of mystery. “But we have to choose our battlefield. Right now he holds all the cards: numbers, experience—and he may get privileges for keeping the rowers in line.”
“But we don’t have a lot of time. He’s sure to have discovered the Library by now—and when he gets back down here, he’s gonna come right to you to find out what it is.”
Slowly, I shook my head. “No, he won’t. He’ll be tired, and we’ll be rested. His kind never strikes unless they have the advantage. He’ll want to rest a while, perhaps wait for us to turn a shift upstairs, then pounce on us while we’re weak…” I thought about those who had turned away rather than meet my eyes, and those who had not, and suddenly I had an inspiration. “Go back to Wince,” I suggested, “and ask him how many of Skull’s men are here right now.”
The door at the far end of the Hold opened precisely when Wince had predicted it would, and, again exactly as foreseen, Skull was the first man through. He was easy to spot: He was wearing my clothes.
“Do they look as ugly on me as they do on him?” I whispered to Timash.
“Worse,” he assured me. Oh, but he was in a rare mood.
We sat atop a pyramid of five of Skull’s gang. Three had been among those I spotted earlier; the remaining pair, part of the short-lived mob that saw crushing our insurrection as a chance to enter Skull’s good graces. “Short-lived,” I call it, because when the majority saw how quickly we dispatched their brave fellows, they melted away like an August snow. Our attack had been sudden, brutal, and totally unprovoked. And it had worked. Timash with his temper up was…remarkable.
The Stolen Future Box Set Page 24
