The Suns of Scorpio

by Alan Burt Akers

  “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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  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 u
s 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.

  I took it.

  Then I handed him the smaller onion.

  “If you value my friendship, Zorg of Felteraz,” I said, with a ferociousness I had not intended, “you will eat this onion. Without argument.”

  “But, Stylor—”

  “Eat!”

  I do not pretend I enjoyed giving up part of my rations, but this man was clearly not as fit as he had been, or as he should be. And this was strange. It is well-known that if a man can survive as a galley slave for the first week he stands a chance of eventual existence; once he had become, as it were, pickled to the galley slave’s life, he can endure unimaginable hardships and indescribable tortures. Once one has proved a galley slave, one can overcome obstacles of monstrous proportions. Zorg had come through the first terrible weeks when men were flogged to death daily at the benches and tossed overboard, when men’s hands ran red with blood with no scrap of skin left on their palms or fingers, when they tore crazily at their ankles implacably fastened by the rings and chains, so that the blood and flesh oozed and scraped away to the bone.

  The terrors of the galley slaves’ lives are well known in the abstract. I lived through them.

  Zorg made that peculiar grimace that in a galley slave passes for a smile and idly, automatically, nipped a nit that crept upon his weather-beaten and salt-crusted skin. The coarse sacks stuffed with straw were alive with vermin. We cursed the nits and all the other bloodsucking parasites, but we endured them because while they lived we had the sacking bundles of straw with their mangy coverings of ponsho skins upon which to fling ourselves. The idea of galley slaves rowing as we were, four to an oar with the whole bodily movement thrust and pulled and flung into the stroke, without some form of bench covering is ludicrous. Our buttocks would have been lacerated within the space of three burs; even the cruel oar-masters of Magdag recognized that. The ponsho skins, which covered the sacks and fell to the decks, were not there because we were loved; they were provided because without them the galley would not function.

  I admit, I had become used to the smells — almost.

  Life aboard a two-decker beating about in blockade gave one a flying start in enduring discomfort, dampness, stink, and short rations. I enjoyed advantages that Zorg, for all that he was a powerful man and had been galley captain, did not share.

  Now his face held a shrunken look that worried me.

  Nath, next along on the loom of the oar, burped and cocked an ear. Nath is a common name on Kregen; this Nath was big and had once been burly, for galley slaves tend to fine down. I had wondered how that other Nath, Nath the Thief in far Zenicce, would have fared in the galleys.

  “Wind’s changing,” Nath said, now.

  This was bad news to Zorg and to Zolta, the fourth on our oar. As an experienced sailor I had known the wind shift for perhaps ten murs, but I had wished to keep that unpleasant news from Zorg as he finished the onion.

  Almost immediately, the silver whistles were heard.

  The oar-master took his position in a kind of tabernacle midway in the break of the poop. The whip-deldars ran along the central gangway, ready to lay into the naked backs of the slaves if they were slow in readying themselves. We were not slow. More whistles sounded. A group of sailors handled the sheets, bracing the single sail around. They were an unhandy bunch, and I had time to relish the thought of how my petty officers would like to teach them the ways of the Navy aboard a frigate or a seventy-four. Clumsily, with a great deal of billowing and cracking of sheets, the sail came down. Long before it had been mastered and brailed we were all at the ready, one foot pressed on the stretcher, the other pressed against the back of the bench in front, our arms out, and our calloused hands grasping our oar looms. All the loop-ropes holding the oars clear of the water still outboard, a neat custom of the galley captains of the inner sea, had been removed by the outboard men, in our case Zolta, whose task that was.

  Now Grace of Grodno rocked before the gentle swell, her forty oars all parallel, in perfect alignment above the water. She must have looked like some great waterwalking beast, light and graceful with her slender lines burgeoning into a richly decorated stern with its upflung gallery, lowering down into the ram and beak low over the water.

  Grace of Grodno was a galley that, here in the Eye of the World, men called a four-fortyswifter: forty oars, four men to an oar. The clumsy system sometimes used on Earth of rating a galley by men to a bench was not used in the inner sea. The oars poised, ready. The drum-deldar beat once, a single, admonitory boom. I could see the oar-master as he looked up to where an officer leaned over the poop rail, all white and green and golden finery. No doubt they were savoring a little of our smell back there on the poop now. The officer had a handkerchief to his face. The oar-master lifted his silver whistle, and I collected myself, ready.

  The whistle sounded, the drum boomed, all in a practiced series of sounds and orders, and every oar went down as one.

  We pulled smoothly through the stroke. The drum-deldar beat out a steady rhythm, a double-beat of his two drums, one tenor and one bass, a smooth steady long-haul stroke. Our backs moved through the rhythm, forward so that our hands and the looms of our oars thrust above the bent backs of the slaves on the benches before us, then a steady — oh, so steady — pull.

  Grace of Grodno moved through the water. She moved with the same feeling which had been so strange to me at the time I had stepped aboard that galley in the lake from which the City of Aphrasöe grows. Now, in this smooth inner sea, the galley surged ahead as though on tracks. She scarcely rolled at all, and she drove forward over the calm sea like a monstrous beetle with forty legs.

  She was a relatively small galley. Only twenty oars on a side meant that her length was much below those of the fleet galleys I had seen in the arsenal harbor of Magdag, and, at a guess, I would say she was not above a hundred feet on the waterline. Again at a guess, for I never saw her broadside on from a distance, overall she would not have exceeded a hundred and forty. I admit now that I had been puzzled by these swifters’ possession of both ram and beak, thinking them mutually exclusive, but I had learned just how the galleys of the inner sea were fought.

  She was, of course, outrageously unseaworthy.

  We labored at the oars with a smooth, short, economical stroke that would give us some two knots speed.

  I, of course, had no idea what our mission was. I was merely a chained galley slave. As my body went through the unending mechanical motions of rowing, I pondered on that “chained slave” label. Between us, Zorg and I, we had been cautiously and carefully rubbing the link of the chain that bound us to the bench against a metal bracket-strut. Sweat-molded filth crammed into the growing breach concealed against discovery. As we bent forward and flung ourselves backward, over and over again, and the galley drove forward through the calm water, I could not help worrying over Zorg.

  “Ease up, Zorg,” I whispered to him when the whip-deldar had passed, vigilant in his patrolling of the gangway, his whip flicking, seemingly alive, hungry. The galley slaves called the whip “old snake.” I knew the expression had been used on Earth. One could easily understand why.

  “I — will — bear my part, Stylor—”

  “I will push and pull that much more, Zorg.” I was annoyed. He was a friend. I was worried about him. Yet he insisted stubbornly on pushing and pulling with the best, all out o
f his pride. Oh, yes, I knew the pride that burned in my friend Zorg of Felteraz.

  “I am Zorg.” He spoke in a low mumble. We could speak while rowing this easy stroke. “I am Zorg,” he said again as though seeking to hold onto that, and then: “I am Zorg, Krozair! Krozair! I will never yield!”

  I did not know what he meant by Krozair. I had not heard the word before. Nath rowed at the oar with a blind convulsion, his lean naked body panting for breath in the hot air. But Zolta looked across with a quick and rhythm-breaking suddenness. His face showed shock. I fought the oar back into rhythm, cursing in a lurid mixture of English, Kregish, and Magdag warren-filth.

  We rowed.

  I heard a hail.

  Looking back toward the poop as I surfaced from each stroke I could see a turmoil up there. The awnings were coming down. That was good. Now their damnable surfaces would not catch wind and slow our progress. Men were running about up there. Grace of Grodno, I had been told, was more than a moderately fast galley for a four-fortyswifter, and in our cutting across a gulf in order to reach Gansk we had dropped the nearest land below the horizon.

  It seemed to me as I rowed that I had been rowing all my life. Memories were faint around the edges, other worlds and other lives away. Only Delia of the Blue Mountains remained clear and beautiful to me in that time of inexpressible misery. I had been engaged as a galley slave in battles, when the galley of Magdag on which I served had captured a fat merchantman from one of the cities of Zair, and twice we had been involved in a real battle with a galley from Sanurkazz. But, so far, I had not been in action aboard Grace of Grodno. I did not know the ways of her captain or her oar-master, her whip-deldars or her drum-deldar in moments of emergency. Zorg and I had been through a lot together on the calm waters of the Eye of the World. Now, the signs were clear: Grace of Grodno was clearing for action.

  The drum-deldar increased his beat.