Transit to Scorpio

by Alan Burt Akers

  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.

  There were more guards in evidence than usual.

  One of my men, young Loku, a Hikdar of a hundred, who was poor dead Loki’s brother, reported to me. His fierce warrior’s face with its sheen of dust-covered sweat looked gray and sunken; but the vicious look in his eyes reassured me.

  “The women told me, Dray Prescot,” he said. He had taken a risk, talking to the slave women in broad daylight. “There have been two escapes. One from the marble wherries, the other from, these very quarries, last night.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Nath, the thief, cleared his throat and spat dust.

  “Good for them, bad for us. Now the Rapas, for sure, will strike twice as hard.”

  Loku would have struck Nath for the disrespect he showed a Vovedeer; but I restrained him. I had need of Nath.

  “Find out whose turn it is to feed the vosks,” I told Loku, “and arrange for one of us to do that unsavory task.”

  The vosks were almost completely devoid of intelligence, great fat pig-like animals standing some six feet at the shoulders, with six legs, a smooth oily skin of a whitish-yellow color, and atrophied tusks; their uses were to turn waterwheels, to draw burdens, to operate the lifting cages, and also to furnish remarkably good juicy steaks and crisp rashers. We, as slaves, saw them only as work animals. We ate the same slop as the vosks.

  The mastodons which did the really heavy work fed cheaply on a special kind of grass imported from the island of Strye.

  As well as Rapa guards there were many Rapa slaves working with us, gray vulturine beings with scrawny necks and beaked faces, whose gray bodies reeked with their own unpleasant sweat. They were more restless than most in the quarries that night as the twin suns sank beneath the marble rim and the first of the seven moons glided across the sky.

  I made Nath tell me what he knew of this city of Zenicce.

  The city contained approximately one million inhabitants, about the same number as the London of my own time, but in Zenicce there were uncounted numbers of slaves, hideously suppressed and manipulated. By means of the delta arms of the River Nicce and artificially constructed canals as well as by extraordinarily broad avenues, the city was partitioned into independent enclaves. The pride of House rode very high in Zenicce. Either one belonged to a House or one was nothing. I learned with an expression I kept as hard as the marble all about us beneath the glowing spheres of the first three moons of Kregen that the House color of the Esztercari Family was the emerald of the green sun of Kregen. So the cramph Galna whom I had hurled at the Princess Natema was of her House. I wondered how he would die, shackled to the horns of a vove and released across the broad plains of Segesthes? He would not, I fancied, die well—in which as I discovered later I did him an injustice.

  Across the outer compound a Rapa slave was being beaten by a pair of Rapa guards. They used their whips with skill and cunning, and the gray vulture-like being shrieked and jerked in his chains. He had lost, so the whisper went around, his hammer and chisel, and if the overseer so willed it, that was a mortal offense. The vosks in their patient turning of the capstan bars would haul his broken body to the topmost step of the marble quarries, and then he would be flung out and down, to crash a bloody heap on the dust and chippings of the floor a thousand feet below.

  In the moon-shadowed dimness of the marble walls Loku crept to my side. His face was just as gray and lined; but a fiercer jut to his chin lifted my spirits.

  “We feed the vosks for this sennight,” he said, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight.

  “And?” I asked.

  He drew from his breechclout a hammer and chisel. I nodded. It was death to be found with these tools in the barracks, when not working on the marble faces, or down in the Jet Mines. Down there, shut in by the logs for seven days and seven nights, slaves did not wear their chains. Now, back on the surface, we were heavily chained and shackled. “You have done well, Loku,” I said. Then, I added: “We shall not forget Loki, we clansmen of Felschraung.”

  “May Diproo of the fleet feet aid me now!” moaned Nath. His wizened body shrank back. Loku cuffed him idly, sent him keening to a corner of the marble hut.

  I did not think that Nath, the thief, would betray us.

  We waited that seven days in the white quarries until it was our turn to take the huge marble slabs in their straw balings onto the wherries and transport them into the city. Somewhere in the city, or better yet out on the open plains, my men would be waiting for us. They had not been recaptured. What was done to recaptured slaves was ugly and obvious, given the circumstances.

  All that week extra guards were posted, many of them men in the crimson and emerald livery of the city wardens, men supplied by all Houses as a kind of police force. The Rapas made very free with their whips. The Rapa slaves seethed. My men and I were model slaves.

  The glint of marble chippings in the air, the eternal tink-tink-tink of the women trimming stones, the heavier thuds of the hammers on chisels all over the quarry faces, the deeper slicing roars as vosk-powered saws bit in clouds of flying chips and dust, all these sounds frayed at our nerves day after day; but we remained quiet and attentive and docile in our chains.

  We took turns to feed the vosks, swilling the remnants of our slops into their troughs, pent between priceless marble walls. The places stank almost as much as the Jet Mines. They would put their pig-like snouts down and grunt and gulp and waves of the nauseating liquid would pulsate out around our legs, filling our noses with the stench. Those whose duty it was, and whom we had relieved of that duty, thought we were mad. Many guards patrolled, on the alert; but few cared to venture too near the vosk pens, as none ventured into the Jet Mines. One shift had refused to send up the stinking black marble, and had simply been shut in there to die. When other slaves had brought the twisted, ghastly bodies out, the guards paraded them through the workings so that none should miss the lesson.

  Gradually, on my orders, we cut down the vosk swill.

  On the second to last day the vosks were hungry; but we fed them sufficient to quieten the immediate rumblings of their stomachs. On the penultimate day we did not feed them at all, and they were as recalcitrant as an unpunished slave so that, for a time as I labored at the marble, with the sunshine lancing back from the brilliant surface and dazzling my eyes, I feared I had miscalculated. But the vosks are stupid creatures. At the end of the day they grunted and squealed and fairly broke into ungainly waddles on their way back to their pens. We tempted them with morsels of food, sparingly, and so quietened their uproar.

  But they received no more food.

  On the last day they were surly, puzzled, drawing their loads and turning their wheels with a stupid pugnacity that made me feel heartily sorry for them and what we were being forced to do to them. The slaves, mostly lads and girls, whose task was to prod them along, gave them a wider berth than usual, and stood well out of their way at evening when the twin suns sank in floods of gold and crimson and emerald.

  We carried the great slopping vats of swil
l to the pens and I managed to spill a quantity of the vile stuff near the boots of a Rapa guard, who croaked his guttural obscenities at me, and I stood the flick of his whip in a good cause, for the guards moved away. We poured the slop down outside the marble walls of the pens. The vosks went hungry on the last night—and in the morning when we should have fed them for the last time before punting our loaded wherries from the clocks. They squealed and grunted and some, finding hunger a stimulus to a more primitive action, butted their atrophied tusks against the walls of their pens.

  That morning the twin suns of Antares rose with a more resplendent brilliance. We ate hugely of the slop the vosks had not seen. Nath was under the eye of Loku. All our chains had been cut through in stealth and with muffled hammers, and now were lapped about us, ready to be cast off. Nath shivered and called on his pagan god of thieves.

  We went aboard the wherry for which we would be responsible, clambering about among the gigantic blocks of marble the women had trimmed clean and square, following the slave masons’ chalked marks, and I took the greatest chance of all and went swiftly and quietly in that morning radiance to the vosk pens. I threw open all the gates. With a vosk goad I urged the stupid beasts out, and I joyed to see the idiot ugliness of their faces, the pig-like malice in their tiny eyes. They were hungry. They were loose.

  The vosks began to roam the quarries, looking for food.

  Guards ran yelling angrily, prodding with spears and swords. I saw one Och, his six limbs agitated, attempt to prod a stupid vosk back and rejoiced at his dumbfounded surprise when the usually docile beast turned on him and knocked him end over end with a resounding thump of those two tiny tusks. Had I been inclined, I would have laughed.

  I jumped from the jetty onto our wherry and joined the rest of my men, my chains wrapped about me, as the Rapa guards stalked aboard. There would have been ten of them, I knew, for the citizens of Zenicce were naturally touchy about insufficiently guarded slaves in their city. This morning, because for some unfathomable reason the vosks had gone mad and were overrunning the quarries, there were only six guards.

  We pushed off and with the long poles punted slowly along the canal between marble tanks.

  Soon the banks became brick, and then the first of the houses passed. Mere hovels, these, of people without a House, living on the outskirts of the city, free only in name.

  I admit now it was a strange sensation to me to be riding water again.

  We passed beneath an ornate granite arch over which passed the morning procession of market vendors and peddlers and housewives and riffraff and thieves, and all that smell and bustle and morning talk and laughter awoke a thrilling in my veins. The sky grew pinker with that pellucid liquid rose-glow of Kregen on a fine morning. The air as we approached nearer the city grew sweeter, and this alone indicates the putrid atmosphere of the mines in which we had sweated and slaved. The canal debouched into a larger channel whose brick walls rose to a height of some ten feet above the water. On each side the blank walls of houses, each joined to the other, frowned down, their roofs at different heights and forms of architecture so that the skyline formed an attractive frieze against the light.

  Sentinels in the colors of their Houses were to be seen at vantage points along those walls. Between enclave and enclave on the perimeter of the city lies always an armed truce.

  Close now to our destination we swung out of the broad canal which had steadily increased its freight of traffic. There were light swift double-ended craft which, given the niceties of canal navigation, would be almost certainly some form or model of gondola. There were deep-laden barges, like ours, punted by slaves. There were stately pulling barges gay with awnings and silks, the oarsmen sometimes men, as often as not some outlandish creatures decked out in weird finery, all gold or silver lace with cocked hats gay with plumes. I watched all these strange craft with as strange a hunger in my belly, for I had not seen a boat for years, let alone a ship billowing under full canvas to the royals, heeling to the Trades.

  Ahead a truly enormous arch towered over the canal. One side of the bridge laid atop the arch was festooned with ocher and purple trappings; the other side gleamed all in emerald green. We turned up a perimeter canal past the bridge, turning toward the green hand, and soon a more open aspect made itself felt in the architecture. We had entered an enclave. From the colors I knew it to be the enclave of the House of Esztercari and a fierce and unholy joy threatened for a moment to sway me from my purpose.

  “Ahead a truly enormous arch towered over the canal.”

  The building site lay to the rear of a stone jetty. We poled in slowly and more slowly toward the jetty, the water pooling and swirling from the wherry’s blunt bows. I nodded to two of my men. They slid their poles inboard and ducked down in the center of the spaces we had left between the carefully-stacked marble blocks. I heard short sharp sounds, as of iron on iron.

  A Rapa guard swung around from the bows, looking back, his vulturine face questioning. I, from my position in the stern, also looked back as though seeking, like the guard, for the noise astern. I saw another wherry following ours, loaded with marbles, its crew Rapas, its guards Ochs. It was coming in very fast, due to our loss of way, and would collide very soon. I did not mind. Now I could hear the fresh gurgle of water, bright and cheerful and inspiriting, welling from inside our wherry.

  “What’s that racket?” demanded the Rapa in his croaking voice.

  I lifted my shoulders to indicate I did not know, and then jumped down from the high stern and went forward, as though he had called me, trailing my pole. The wherry was appreciably lower in the water. A Rapa guard in the waist made as though to stop me. Him, I struck full force and knocked down and into the marble blocks where two of my men seized him and silenced him. Two more Rapa guards had vanished. Water sloshed and gurgled almost to the gunwale. Another Rapa guard vanished. I saw Loku, with Nath at his side, loop a coil of chain about the fifth guard’s bird-like ankles in the big boots and drag him down out of sight. His beginning shriek chopped off short, as though a bight of chain had snared his windpipe.

  The following wherry had avoided us and was poling past. No one aboard seemed to be taking any notice of us—and then I saw why. Instantly fury and outrageous indignant anger spurted up in me.

  The Rapa slaves on the second wherry were slaying their Och guards with their chains, were flinging the small six-limbed puffy-faced people overboard in bright splashes of water.

  We were now sinking. Within seconds the canal water slopped inboard. Now the plan was for us to dive and swim for the bank, covered by the confusion of the sinking wherry. But guards were rushing from every direction. The Rapa revolt had sparked an instant reaction, so clumsy, so violent had it been. Our own escape could not avoid detection now. The Rapas’ wherry touched the jetty and they boiled ashore, shrieking, inflamed, their grisly chains whirling in their fists.

  Chapter Ten

  “Dray Prescot, you may incline to me!”

  The Princess Natema Cydones of the Noble House of Esztercari had come early that morning to the stone masons’ jetty of her enclave to select new marble for the walls of a summer palace she was having built on the eastern side of her estate. That she would be taking marble destined for the building of the new water-rates building did not concern her in the slightest. As far as the princess knew there was nothing she might not have if she wanted it.

  As I watched in dumb fury those idiotic Rapa slaves destroy the fruits of my planning I did not know, then, that among the knot of brilliantly attired nobles on the jetty stood the Princess Natema impatiently stamping her jeweled foot on the stone, waiting to have the coverings ripped from the marble so that she might choose the exact stones she coveted.

  All I saw was the charging mob of Rapas and the sudden wink and flame of weapons in the sunshine and the ugly whirling of the iron chains.

  The Rapas were not so stupid, after all. They had successfully smuggled many more of their fellows aboard the wherry. They
had been aided in this, without a doubt, by my ruse with the vosks. They were a formidable scarecrow crew in their rags and chains who roared onto the landing. Almost at once brilliant emerald green uniforms were flying through the air and splashing into the waters of the canal.

  There was a chance for us, after all…

  “Loku!” I cried. “Now! Nath—it is up to you to show the way through the city. We depend on you—if you fail us you know what your fate will be.”

  “Auee!” he cried, and he grasped his left arm with his right fist, as though it were broken. “By the Great Diproo Himself, I won’t fail! I dare not!” And he dived over the side. Those of my men who could not swim, and the clansmen often practiced the art in the lonely tarns of the moorlands far to the north, were equipped with balks of timber. They now all took to the water and began swimming for the far bank. There everything would be up to Nath.

  I waited, as a Vovedeer, as a Zorcander, should. A leader of a clan is called that, a leader. When two or more clans are joined together under one leader he is then entitled to take the name of Vovedeer, Zorcander, the derivations of these names being obvious. The taking of obi becomes then that much more of a responsibility. So I waited until all my men were safely away.

  They had thrown off their chains; I still gripped a bight of mine between my fists, ready.

  The wherry had ceased its last drifting and was now nuzzled bows up against the larboard quarter of the Rapa wherry. The canal here was shallow, and the wherry with its marble freight had sunk until its bottom touched the silt and mud. Now about four feet of marble blocks stood above the water. I crouched on a block between two others, watching.

  From the shrieks and screams, the pandemonium and the fierce clash of sword and spear on iron chain I guessed more guardsmen had run up and were engaged in the task, no doubt not entirely unenjoyable to the soldiery, of butchering the last of the slaves. I could take no part in that. My duty lay with my men.