The galley swung about and eased to the side of the wreckage. A large man, broad-shouldered, yet lithe, with large hands, a broad face, grayish blue eyes and unruly, shaggy, windswept reddish hair, stood at the rail. There was something like an animal about him, indefinable, unpredictable, tenacious, intelligent, cruel. To look at him one knew, though it was the deck of a galley he bestrode, that he was of the warriors. I would have feared being owned by him. His eyes, appraising me, made me conscious of my slavery.
Clitus Vitellius lifted his hand, in a salute of warriors. The man returned the salute.
"I am Clitus Vitellius of Ar," he said. "Am I your prisoner?"
"We have little quarrel with those of Ar," said the man. "You have little shipping."
Clitus Vitellius laughed.
"Clitus Vitellius of Ar, and his men," said the man, "by accounts rendered to me by Samos of Port Kar, of the Council of Captains, participated creditably in the action of the day before yesterday on behalf of the Jewel of Thassa."
Port Kar is sometimes spoken of by her citizens as the Jewel of Thassa. Other men speak of her differently, rather as a den of thieves and cutthroats, a lair of pirates. The city is under the governance of a Council of Captains.
"We did the small things we could," said Clitus Vitellius. "Cos, as you know, wars with Ar." Then Clitus Vitellius. looked to the man on the ship. "My men?" he asked.
"Sound and hale," said the man, "on the ship of Samos, theThassa Ubara."
"Excellent," said Clitus Vitellius.
"Your vessel," said the man, grinning, "appears seaworthy but has clumsy lines."
"I request passage for two," said Clitus Vitellius, "myself and," indicating me, "this slave."
The man on the ship looked at me. "A sleek, beautiful little animal," he said.
"A traitress," said Clitus Vitellius.
"Doubtless you will discipline her well," said the man.
"It is my intention," said Clitus Vitellius.
I put down my head.
"I grant you passage," smiled the man on the ship.
I felt myself taken and lifted, bound, to a sailor, who lifted me over the rail. He put me by the mast, kneeling, bound.
In a moment, Clitus Vitellius, aided by the hand of the man who had spoken to us, leaped aboard.
"Bring her about," called the man to his helmsmen.
"Left oars!" called the oar master. "Stroke!"
Slowly the galley began to swing about.
The man who had welcomed us aboard, permitting us passage, looked down at me. I looked up at him, naked and bound.
"In courtesy," said Clitus Vitellius, "I grant you and your men slave rights upon this woman. But beyond this, I re-serve her to myself. If you wish her beyond my permissions, we must do contest."
"You wish to keep her for your discipline?" asked the man.
"Yes," said Clitus Vitellius.
The man crouched beside me. He thrust open my mouth, holding it with two hands. "Barbarian," he said.
"Yes," said Clitus Vitellius.
The master, a free male, permitted me to close my mouth. He took the tag on my collar in his fingers. He scraped salt from it.
"I was being sent to the Lady Elicia of Ar," I said, "my mistress."
"You should belong to a man," said the man.
"Yes, Master," I said.
"You seem interested in the slave," said Clitus Vitellius, puzzled.
"You are an enslaved Earth girl," said the man to me.
"Yes, Master," I said.
"You were sent once," he asked, "to a paga tavern on Cos, called the Chatka and Curla?"
"Yes, Master," I said.
I felt his hands, hard on my arms. "Excellent," he said. He looked at me, and I felt terror. "I shall now ask you a simple question," he said, "and you will answer it immediately and truthfully, if you would live for another five Ihn."
Two sailors seized Clitus Vitellius, who struggled. I looked at him, wildly.
"Have you heard of one called Belisarius?" asked the man.
"Yes, Master," I whispered. "I brought him a message."
"What message?" he asked.
"I do not know!" I cried.
He stood up. "We shall have the message," he said.
"I do not know what it is!" I cried.
"Release me!" demanded Clitus Vitellius.
"Thurnock," said the man. "Take the slave below. Put her in Sirik. Chain her in the hold."
A large man, blond-haired, powerful, threw me to his shoulder. "Master!" I cried to Clitus Vitellius.
I heard him struggling.
"Release me!" cried Clitus Vitellius.
"I would speak with you upon the high deck," said the man to Clitus Vitellius, "and I would speak with you alone."
"I do not understand," said Clitus Vitellius.
"Release him," said the man. The sailors released Clitus Vitellius.
"Come with me to the high deck," said the man. He turned, and led the way. Clitus Vitellius followed him, angrily.
The large man descended a short flight of stairs, leading downward from an opened hatch.
The ceiling of the hold was low, and, at the bottom, the man bent over, and carried me in his arms. In the hold there were many supplies, and weapons, and riches. The convoy had been broken and it had scattered. Many ships had been taken. Much loot lay in the hold. This ship alone, I gathered, carried the ransom of a dozen Ubars.
The man lay me on my side on the boards of the hold. Against the wall of the hold there were five girls, illuminated in the light of a tiny ship's lantern. They were stripped. Each was chained by the left ankle to a common ring.
The man brought a Sirik, and locked it on my throat, and about my wrists and ankles. Then, with another chain, looping it through the Sirik chain which fell from my Sirik collar to my braceleted wrists and confined ankles, he secured me to a heavy ring, passing one end of the looped chain through the ring and then, with a heavy padlock, closing the open end of the loop. Only then did he untie the bonds on my wrists and ankles. When I was freed of those bonds I was chained in Sirik, fastened at the ring. I was secured much more heavily than they.
"The men," said one of the women, "were taken from the boat and chained, and put in a round ship."
"What men?" I asked her, puzzled.
"The men who were with me in the longboat," she said. "Do you not remember me?"
"No," I said.
"We were together," she said, "on theLuciana of Telnus."
"You are the free woman!" I exclaimed.
She laughed ruefully and lifted with her small hand the chain which held her fair ankle. She indicated the other girls beside her. "We were all free," she said.
"Rejoice," said I, "that men found you pleasing."
The girls shuddered.
"They are going to take us to Port Kar and sell us," said one.
"What is it like, being a slave?" asked one of the girls.
I looked at her beauty, and laughed. "You will find out," I said, "-Slave."
She shrank back, frightened, against the wall of the hold.
"What ship is this?" I asked.
"It is theDorna," said one of the girls.
"And who is its captain?" I asked, referring to the man who had spoken with us, the lean, strong, reddish-haired man, so like an animal, clearly of the warriors.
He frightened me.
"That is Bosk, of Port Kar," said one of the girls.
Above us the hatch was closed. I heard it lock. I looked upward. I was in Sirik, fastened to a ring, chained in the bold of theDorna, the ship of the dreaded pirate and slaver, Bosk of Port Kar.
I lay down on the planking of the hold, naked in my chains.
"We shall have the message," he had said.
But I did not know what the message was.
"We shall have the message," he had said.
I did not know what the message was. When I failed to give it to him I did not know what would be done to me.
These were days of war. I had been an unwitting message girl for one side. I had now fallen into the hands of the other side.
I looked at the other girls. How I envied them. They would be branded and made simple slave girls.
They need only obey and be dreams of pleasure to men.
I felt the planking of the hold with my body. The chains were tight on me. I did not know what would be done with me.
25
The Message
I lifted the strung beads to the square-jawed man with short, closely cropped white hair. His face was wind-burned and, in each ear, there was a small golden ring. To one side, cross-legged, sat he who was Bosk of Port Kar. Near him, intent, watchful, was Clitus Vitellius. Beside the man before me, the man with white, short-cropped hair, who was Samos of Port Kar, chief among the captains of the Council of Captaim of Port Kar, was a slender, gray-eyed man, clad in the green of the caste of physicians. He was Iskander, said once to have been of Turia, the master of many medicines and one reputed to be knowledgeable in certain intricacies of the mind.
I knelt back on my heels. There were two other slave girls in the room, in slave silk, collared, kneeling to one side, waiting to serve the men, should they desire aught. I was naked, as I had been when I had strung beads for he called Belisarius in a house in Cos.
Samos put the beads before him on a tiny table. He looked at them, puzzled.
"Is this all?" he asked.
"Yes, Master," I said.
Iskander, of the physicians, had given me of a strange draft, which I, slave, must needs drink.
"This will relax you," he had said, "and induce an unusual state of consciousness. As I speak to you your memory will be unusually clear. You will recall tiny details with precision. Further, you will become responsive to my suggestions."
I do not know what the drug was but it seemed truly effective. Slowly, under its influence, and the soothing, but authoritative voice of Iskander, I, responsive to his suggestions, obedient to his commands, began to speak of the house of Belisarius and what had occurred there. I might, in my normal waking state, have recalled much of what had occurred there, even to the words spoken, but, in the unusual state of consciousness which Iskander, by means of his drug and his suggestions, had induced in me even the most trivial details, little things which a waking consciousness would naturally and peremptorily suppress as meaningless, unimportant, were recalled with a lucid, patient fidelity. Notes had been taken by a thin, blond slave girl in a brief, blue tunic, named Luma. Her tunic suggested that she might once have been of the scribes. Her legs were pretty. She knelt close to Bosk of Port Kar.
"What does it matter," Samos had asked Iskander, "whether a word is spoken before or after another?"
"It may matter much," said Iskander. "It is like the mechanism of the crossbow, the key to a lock. All must be in order; each element must be in place, else the quarrel will not loosen, else the lock will not open."
"This seems strange to me," said Samos.
"It is strange to you because it is unfamiliar to you," said Iskander, "but in itself it is no more strange than the mechanism of the crossbow, the mechanism of the lock. What we must do is reconstruct the mechanism, which, in this case is a verbal structure, a dialogue, which will release, or trigger, the salient behavior, the stringing of the beads."
"Could she not simply be commanded to recount the order of the beads?" inquired Bosk of Port Kar.
I could not do so.
"No," said Iskander, "she cannot do so, or can only do so imperfectly."
"Why?" asked Samos. "Is the drug not sufficient?"
"The girl has been carefully prepared," said Iskander. "She is under powerful counter-suggestion in that particular. We might, in time, break through it, but we have no assurance that we would not tap a false memory, set within her mind to deceive or mislead us. What I would suspect we would encounter would be overlays of memories, the true with the false. Our best mode of procedure appears to be to reconstruct the trigger behavior."
"You suspect then," asked Bosk, "that several arrangement orders of beads might be in her memory?"
"Yes," said Iskander, "each of which, I suspect, would be correlated with a different message.
"We would, thus," said Bosk, "not know which of the messages was the true message."
"Precisely," said Iskander. "But we do know the trigger sequence will release the crucial message."
"Otherwise," said Bosk, "the intended recipient of the message would also not know which message was the one intended for communication."
"Correct," said Iskander.
"Proceed then," said Samos, "in your attempts to reconstruct the trigger, or the key, in this matter."
Iskander had then continued his questioning of me.
I lifted the strung beads to the square-jawed man with short, closely cropped white hair, Samos, of Port Kar.
I knelt back on my heels.
Samos put the beads on the small table before him.
"Is this all?" he asked.
"Yes, Master," I said.
"It is meaningless," he said.
"It is the necklace," said Iskander. "I have done what I can. Should it bear an import, it is up to others to detect it."
"Give me the necklace," said Bosk of Port Kar.
Samos handed it to him.
The pirate regarded it. "Note," said he, "the frequency of yellow beads. Each third bead is yellow."
"Yes," said Samos.
"Why should that be?" smiled Bosk.
"I do not know," said Samos.
"From the fact that each third bead is yellow," said Bosk, "we may infer that the units of import consist of pairs of beads, separated by the yellow beads. Note that this pair consists of a red bead followed by a blue bead, and this other pair by an orange bead followed by a red bead. There are several such combinations. We might suppose that, say, a red bead followed by a blue bead correlates with one alphabetic character."
"What if the order were reversed?" asked Samos.
"Doubtless, if that combination were used, it would correlate with a different character," said Bosk.
"We do not have the key to the cipher," said Iskander.
"We can try all combinations!" cried Samos, pounding the table.
"We may suppose," said Bosk, "as a working hypothesis, that the message is in Gorean. As far as we know, Belisarius, whom we know only by name, and it may be a code name, is Gorean."
"Yes?" said Samos.
"See," said Bosk, who was examining the necklace, "the most frequent combination of colors is blue and red."
"So?" asked Samos.
"In Gorean," said Bosk, "the most frequently occurring letter is Eta. We might then begin by supposing that the combination of blue and red signifies an Eta."
"I see," said Samos.
"The next most frequently occurring letters in Gorean," said Bosk, "are Tau, AI-Ka, Omnion and Nu. Following these in frequency of occurrence are Ar, Ina, Shu and Homan, and so on."
"How is this known?" asked Samos.
"It is based upon letter counts," said Bosk, "over thousands of words in varieties of manuscripts."
"These matters have been determined by scribes?" asked Samos.
"Yes," said Bosk.
"Why should they be interested in such things?"
"Such studies were conducted originally, at least publicly, as opposed to the presumed secret studies of cryptographers, in connection with the Sardar Fairs," said Bosk, "at meetings of Scribes concerned to standardize and simplify the cursive alphabet. Also, it was thought to have consequences for improved pedagogy, in teaching children to first recognize the most commonly occurring letters."
"I was taught the alphabet beginning with Al-Ka," smiled Samos.
"As was I," said Bosk. "Perhaps we should first have been taught Eta."
"That is not the tradition!" said Samos.
"True," admitted Bosk. "And these innovative scribes have had little success with their proposed reforms. Yet,
from their labors, various interesting facts have emerged. For example, we have learned not only the order of frequency of occurrence of letters but, as would be expected, rough percentages of occurrence as well. Eta, for example, occurs two hundred times more frequently in the language than Altron. Over forty percent of the language consists of the first five letters I mentioned, Eta, Tau, Al-Ka, Omnion and Nu."
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