Even so we had entered areas unknown to the men of Longuelm and this party was as much a scout as a hunt. Looking back now I can blame myself for bad scouting, or for bad generalship. But had our point not missed what he should have seen before he died, all that followed would not have occurred and you would not be listening to this tape.
The ground was breaking with the green growing burgeon of spring as we trotted down between two rounded hills whereon trees grew. We always welcomed trees as signs that water and a break from the plains was near. The air smelled as sweet and fresh as it always does in the better parts of Kregen. The twin suns shone, their emerald and crimson fires casting the twin shadows that were now so usual to me.
We bestrode high-spirited zorcas, and a string of fierce impatiently following voves trailed in the remuda. A few pack animals, calsanys and Kregen asses, mostly, carried our few belongings for camp. Yes, life was good and free and filled with the zest of high living for all those young men who followed me. The image of Delia of the Blue Mountains remained a constant dull ache within me. Yet I was beginning to accept, at last, that I must go on without her.
The shower of arrows and spears felled four of my men, slew my zorca, and pitched me into the dust. I was up in an instant, sword drawn, and a net closed around my head. I could see weirdly-shaped creatures flinging the nets and I hacked and slashed-and then a club smashed against my head and I went down into unconsciousness.
How could I be surprised when I regained consciousness to find that I was naked, apart from a breechclout, and that my hands were lashed together with cords and that I was yoked to what remained of my men?
We were prodded to our feet and commanded to march.
The beasts who had captured us smelled unpleasantly. They were not above four-foot tall, covered in thick hair of a dun color tending to black at the tips, and each had six limbs. The bottom pair were clad in rough sandals, the upper pair wielded the prodding spears and swords and shields, and the middle pair seemed to serve any other function as it became necessary. They wore slashed tunics of some stuff of brilliant emerald color-the color of the green sun of Antares-and their heads, which were lemon shaped with puffy jaws and lolling chops, were crowned with ridiculous flat caps of emerald velvet. They carried their spears as though they knew how to use them.
“Are you all right, Zorcander?” asked one of my men, and the nearest beast growled like a dog in its throat and beat him over the head. He did not cry out. He was a clansman.
“We must stick together, my clansmen,” I shouted, and before the beast could strike me I raised my voice and bellowed:
“We will come through yet, my friends.”
The spear-blade lashed alongside my head and for a space I stumbled along blinded and weak and dumb.
The camp to which we were brought was resplendent with richly-decorated marquees, and everywhere signs of opulence and luxury indicated clearly that this hunting party believed in making life on the great plains as comfortable as possible. Lines of zorcas tethered together on one side were matched by lines of another riding animal, an eight-legged beast not unlike a vove, except that they were smaller and lighter and without the ferocious aspect of a vove, without the horns and the fangs. Our own captured zorcas had been brought in, I noticed, and tethered with the others. But our captors had not brought in one single vove. Had I been given to empty gestures, I would have smiled.
A man stepped from a tent and stood wide-legged, his hands on his hips, regarding us with a curl to his lips. He was very white-faced, dark-haired, and he wore tight-fitting leathers over all his body. They were of the same brilliant emerald as the garments worn by the things that had caught us.
I decided it would be something to do to snap his neck; something that might lighten the drabness of days.
He turned his face back toward the tent opening. The tent was the most grandiose in all the camp. We stood bedraggled and naked in the dust.
“Ho, my princess!” the man called. “The Ochs have made a capture that may amuse you.”
So, I thought to myself, they have princesses hereabouts, do they?
The princess strolled to the entrance to her tent.
Yes, she was beautiful. After all these years, I must admit she was beautiful. One first noticed her hair, like ripe corn with the morning sun shining on it in a field of our own Earth. Her eyes were the cornflower blue of the flowers one might find in that field. These were old and tired cliches before ever they reached Kregen; but I recall her as I first saw her that day long ago as she stood looking down on where we had been flung captive in the dust.
She lifted a white rounded arm that glowed with the warm pink pulse of blood. Her lips were red, red, and soft like a luscious fruit. She wore an emerald green gown that revealed her throat and arms and the lower portion of her legs, and she wore around her neck a string of blazing emeralds that must have ransomed a city. She looked down on us, and her nostrils pinched together as at an offensive smell. Very beautiful and commanding, she looked, on that day so long ago.
I was lifting my face to look at her.
The man walked across and kicked me.
“Turn your eyes to the dirt, rast, when the Princess Natema passes!”
Within my lashings and the yoke I rolled over and still looked up at her although the man had kicked me cruelly hard.
“Does the princess then not desire admiration from a man’s eyes?”
The man went mad.
He kicked and kicked. I rolled about; but the bonds interfered. I heard the princess shouting with anger, and heard her say: “Why clean your boots on the rast, Galna? Prod him with a spear and have done. I weary of this hunt.”
Well, if I were to die, then this monkey would die with me. I tripped him and rolled on him and placed my bound wrists on his throat. His face turned purplish. His eyes protruded. I leered at him.
“You kick me, you blagskite, and you die!”
He gargled at me. There was an uproar. The Ochs ran about waving their spears. I surged upright gripping Galna, and my men on the lashings rose with me. I kicked the first Och in the belly and he tumbled away, screeching. A spear flicked past my body. Galna wore a fancy little sword smothered with jewels. I dropped him as though he were a rattler, and as he fell I managed to drag the little jeweled sticker out. The next Och took the small sword through the throat. It broke off as the beast shrieked and struggled and died.
I flung the hilt at the next Och and cut his head open. I picked up Galna again, my hands and wrists swelling against the lashings, and hurled him full at the princess.
She gave a cry and vanished within her tent.
Then, as it seemed so often when things were becoming interesting, the sky fell in on me.
Neither of us would ever forget my first meeting with the Princess Natema Cydones of the Noble House of Esztercari of the City of Zenicce.
Chapter Nine
Black marble of Zenicce
The most recalcitrant of slaves were sent to labor in the Jet Mines of Zenicce’s marble quarries. On the surface the quarries lay open to the twin suns whose topaz and opal fires blazed down on the white marble and lit it with a million hues and tones. Quarrying the white marble was hard unremitting labor; where we were, down in the Jet Mines, the work was a continual torture.
How many people realize, when they admire a fine piece of black marble statuary, a graceful vase or magnificent architrave, that agony and revulsion have gone into its production? Marble that is black is black because of the infusion of bituminous material. Whenever the marble splits, at every blow, it sends forth a fetid, filthy, stinking odor.
We were completely naked, for we wrapped our breechclouts around our mouths and noses to try in some ineffectual way to diminish that charnel house breath that gushed up at us each time our chisels struck into the stone.
Greasy wicks burned and sputtered in black marble bowls and pushed back a little of the darkness of the mines. In this mine there were twenty of us, and the
guards had shut down the hewn-log doors upon us. Only when we had cut and hauled up the requisite amount of marble would they feed us, and if we did not produce we would not be fed. For a full seven days we would labor in the Jet Mines, continually sick, desperately attempting to adjust to the smells and the fatigue, and then we would be let out to labor for seven days in the white marble mines of the surface, and then for a further seven days we would be employed on dragging and ferrying the stones along the canals of the city.
My clansmen and I often missed that third period of seven days, and would rotate seven days in the black below and seven days in the white above. I could remember little of my journey here. The city had been large, impressive, cut by canals and rivers and broad avenues, massed with fine buildings and arcades and dripping with green and purple plants growing riotously over every wall. Many strange-looking peoples thronged the streets, half-beast, half-human, and all, so I understood, in inferior positions, little better than slaves and functionaries.
The most recalcitrant of Zenicce’s slaves labored in the Jet Mines. My resentment at slavery was so great that, I confess now, I failed to use my reasoning powers, and I fought back, and lashed out, and snatched the whips from the guards and broke them over their heads before a measure of wisdom returned.
When young Loki, a fine clansman from whom I felt honored to receive obi, died in my arms in the foul deliquescence of the Jet Mines, and the vile miasma from the broken walls of marble breathed its poisonous fumes over us as he sprawled there with his sightless eyes unable to be blessed by the twin fires of Antares, I knew I was responsible for his death, that I had been selfish in my hatred. But the guards were clever. They had split my clansmen into three sections, each laboring on a different shift, so that when aloft in the white quarries and escape a mere matter of planning and execution, I could not take that escape route because the rest of my men were not with me, a third of them down in the Jet Mines where no man would leave a friend.
The guards were recruited from a number of races. There were Ochs, and Fristles, and other beast-humans, notably the Rapas, human monsters who might have been the blasphemous spawn of gray vultures and gray men. Very quick with their whips, were the Rapas, quick and finicky and cutting.
Of all the many foolhardy actions I have made in my life what I did, that day in the Jet Mines of Zenicce, must rank as one of the most stupid, for I know it cost me a great deal to make the decision. At the end of our seven days in that filth and stink when we were let out to go aloft to work the white quarries, I secreted myself behind a stinking rock and waited for the new shift. One of my clansmen in the shuffle of passing slaves caught a friend from the newcomers and hurried him out in my place, so that numbers would tally.
When the massive log doors clashed shut on us I stood up in the lamplight.
“Lahal, Rov Kovno,” I said.
Rov Kovno looked at me silently. He was a Jiktar of a thousand, a mighty warrior, barrel-bodied, fair-headed and with a squashed broken nose and an arrogant jut to his chin. He was of the clansmen of Longuelm. I thought I had made a mistake, that I had miscalculated. I thought as I stood there in the lamp-splashed darkness with the stink of that infernal black marble choking my nostrils and mouth that he blamed me for our capture. I waited, standing, silently.
Rov Kovno moved forward. He held the hammer and chisel of our trade. He dropped them into the chippings and dirt of the floor. He put both arms out to me.
“Vovedeer!” he said, and his voice choked. “Zorcander!”
One of the men of his gang, not a clansman but just one more of the unfortunates enslaved by the city of Zenicce, looked at me and spat. “He stayed in here after his shift was up!” he said. He could not believe it. “The man is a fool-or mad! Mad!”
“Speak with respect, cramph, or do not speak at all,” growled Rov Kovno. He put the palms of his hands to his ears and his eyes and his mouth, and then over his heart. He had no need to speak, and I was pleased, for it meant my plan could go ahead and free me from that worry.
I grasped his hand. “I cannot escape without taking all my clansmen,” I told him. “There is a plan. As soon as you make your escape with your men, Ark Atvar will then make his. My shift will go last.”
“Does Ark Atvar know of the plan, Dray Prescot?”
“Not yet.”
“Then I will remain here, in the Jet Mines, for the next shift to tell him.”
I laughed. There, in the Jet Mines of Zenicce, I, a man not given to empty gestures, laughed.
“Not so, Rov Kovno. That is a task laid on your Vovedeer.”
He inclined his head. He knew, as did I, the responsibilities of leadership, of the taking of obi.
We all knew that the first escape would be relatively easy, a clean break from the wherries carrying the blocks of marble from the quarries through the canals to whatever building site in the city had need of them. The second escape would be a little more difficult; but it should be done. The third escape would be the most difficult; and that would fall to my shift; I knew my men would not have it any other way.
I had to give Rov Kovno an agreement that I would order Ark Atvar to make the first escape.
The fanatical loyalty of the clansmen of the great plains of Segesthes is legendary.
On the seventh day of that unremitting shift cutting and moving the huge black stones, Rov Kovno begged me to allow him to remain in that hell to pass on the instructions to Ark Atvar. I may take a foolish pride in thinking he would not have thought any the less of me had I succumbed to his earnest pleas. And, truth to tell, the idea of climbing up out of that pit and seeing once more the daylight and smelling the sweet air of Kregen affected me powerfully.
I said to Rov Kovno, rather harshly: “I have taken obi from you, and I know what obligations the taker of obi owes to the giver. Ask me no more.”
And he did not ask me any more.
When Rov Kovno whisked an incoming clansman back out to join his shift and make the numbers up I gagged on the stench of the place and almost broke free. But I restrained myself, and was able to speak almost normally as I said: “Lahal, Ark Atvar.”
The ensuing scene was almost a repetition of that before. No time would be wasted. From the week in the white quarries on the surface the slaves would go for their week transporting the blocks. Then Rov Kovno would escape. That week passed as slowly as any week ever has for me-and it was my third consecutive week in the Jet Mines. No one before, I was told, had survived three weeks in that nauseous hell. All that kept me alive and moving was the thought that I had taken obi from these men, and that I owed them their lives and liberty. I confess that the image of Delia of the Blue Mountains faded then, shaming me, to a thin and distant dream, the stuff of fantasy.
When the logs rolled back and the beast-guards prodded the fresh batch of slaves down I looked at the newcomers with a trembling expectancy. From the looks on the faces of my men I knew-they had never expected me to survive, they had not expected ever to see me again.
Now began the fourth consecutive week in the Jet Mines. By the last day I was very weak. The abominable stench coiled around my head, reached down with vile tendrils into my stomach, caused me a continuous blinding headache, made it impossible for me to keep anything down. My men worked like demons cutting and loading so that my uselessness would not prevent them from receiving our miserable quota of food and drink let down on ropes. The other slaves with us, not clansmen, grumbled; but a rough kind of comradeship had of necessity grown up and we worked together, well enough.
On that last day as the great black blocks swung up in their cradles, gleaming against the lamplight, we waited for our relief. At last the logs rolled back and the fresh shift of slaves began to descend. I saw shaven-headed Gons, and redheaded men from Loh, and some of the half-human, half-beast men driven as slaves; but not a single clansmen was herded down into the pit. Rov Kovno and his men had escaped!
There could not be any doubt of it.
As we rose u
p into the marble quarries with the glinting rock cut in gigantic steps all about us, and we saw the tiny dots of slaves and guards working everywhere on the faces, the great mastodon-like beasts hauling cut blocks, the wherries lying in the docks slowly loading as the derricks swung, I began to think life could begin again.
Parties from the other cells of the Jet Mines were joining our band of twenty as we were marched off. There were thousands of slaves employed here. If twenty or so escaped, the overseers would be blamed; but the work would go on. But those twenty men meant more to me than all the other thousands put together.
“By Diproo the Nimble-fingered!” wheezed a weasel-faced runty little man, blinking and squinting. “How the blessed sunlight stings my eyes!”
His name was Nath, a wiry, furtive little townsman with sparse sandy hair and whiskers, with old scars upon his scrawny body, his ribs a cage upon his flat chest. I had marked him out as of use. By his language I guessed him to be a thief of the city, and consequently one of use to me and my clansmen.
In the air above the quarries hung a constant cloud of dust, rock and marble dust, stirred up by continual activity, and this irritated eyes and nostrils, so that we all cut a piece of our breechclouts to wear across our faces, making the garment briefer than ever. Across from the huddle of swaybacked huts enclosed by a marble palisade where we barracked during our period of seven days in the white quarries I saw a band of slave women chipping marble blocks. Their backs gleamed with sweat and the sweat caught and held a patina of marble chips and dust. They too wore simply the slave breechclout. Around their ankles and joining them in coffles stretched heavy iron chains. There was no romance of slavery here, within the marble quarries of Zenicce.
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