Whip-masters prowled the middle aisle, raised a little higher than the benches where the wretches sat. When a slave slumped over the loom, often screeching and more than once vomiting blood, the leather-vested ruffians rushed near and wildly beat the exposed back, crisscrossing the flesh with welts and bloody gouges. Sometimes the slave revived. Sometimes the officer with his dreaded keys unlocked the ankle manacle and soldiers dragged the unconscious slave to a watery oblivion.
At last Captain Eglon staggered again into the hold. His haunted eyes roved over the thinned ranks of animals. “No! No!” he roared. “Look how few are left. Who will row after they’re gone?”
The one-eyed key officer with his stiff gray hair shrugged helplessly.
“You aren’t flogging them hard enough!” shouted Eglon.
“Begging your pardon, Captain, but my whip-masters are near the end of their strength.”
With a practiced eye Eglon studied the slaves. His gift was to know each man’s limit to a nicety. He jerked in surprise as he saw Lod watching him. He spun on the officer. “Roast them! The stink of burning flesh—their own!—that will drive them.”
Eglon departed, and soon whip-masters wearing thick leather gloves prowled the aisle as they clutched brands with red-glowing tips. A slave shortly slumped upon the oar. An awful hiss brought him round screaming.
“It’s working!” shouted a whip-master, a coarse-faced brute with a trident tattoo on his forehead.
“Bless Captain Eglon,” said the grizzled officer.
Another whip-master snorted, and then shot a wary glance up at the hatch.
“I’d better reheat this,” said the first whip-master, holding the iron near his cheek. “Only the hottest touch seems to stir them.”
The grizzled, one-eyed officer nodded.
Lod, who had listened to the exchange, narrowed his intense blue eyes. Here was yet another crime to be weighed upon the balance of the scales of justice that someday he would address with cold steel. He didn’t doubt that he would survive; in that sense he was utterly mad. True, tonight’s drudgery had exhausted him to a state he only once remembered: a time when he had caught fever and raved they said for a month, never letting go of the rowing cleat. He believed he wouldn’t die because after that month he had received visions, blood-soaked nightmares of vengeance and dire slaughter. Since then, the visions had descended upon him with greater frequency, as if his years of torture had at least earned him the favor.
For time without end he had drawn an oar each rowing season. During the winter months they sent him south to the oven-dry pits of Tartarus—there to labor as a beast of burden. With thousands of other harnessed slave-wretches, he dragged vast cyclopean blocks onto barges. Whip-masters reigned there too. Sun-baked savages with flashing teeth, hairy men that delighted in the sounds of cracking scourges and the screams of the doomed. Worst of all, he had learned that the barges sailed to far-off Poseidonis, where the marble helped fashion monumental ziggurats to Yorgash.
Lod shook his head, trying to rid himself of thoughts. Thoughts made life unbearable and brought despair. Despair meant weakness. Weakness devoured strength and led to death. Therefore don’t think. Wait for the visions. Wait…
His eyelids fluttered. He was so weary. Yet to give in meant a red-hot iron upon his back. He snarled. The brands spoke to him, hissing knowledge as they burned. To heat them the captain had the charcoal-fire stove lit. That was only done when they were given bean soup, and they only fared on such while in harbor or when the sea was calm. Shipboard fires terrified even the toughest sailors. The seas, however, tonight, were anything but calm. Thus something dreadful was about to occur. That stretched Lod’s cracked lips into a weird and deadly grin.
Surely his time was near.
Another slave slumped over a loom. The wicked smell of his burning flesh didn’t bring this slave around.
“It’s not working!” shouted a whip-master.
“Somebody tell the captain.”
Lod closed his eyes, rose for the millionth time, pushed his oar aft as far as he could reach, and then groaned as he pulled with all his might. Row! Row forever! Row to heaven and back and then down to the eternal flames of Sheol. Row!
For the first time the visions descended upon him during waking hours. They consumed him, filling his blank blue eyes with sights of fire and spurting blood, with the screams of the guilty. The force of the vision bubbled up until he could remain silent no more.
“Arise, O Elohim! Deliver me, O Elohim! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked.”
“Silence, you dog!” shouted a whip-master. He lashed Lod with the terrible scourge.
Lod howled, although he rowed; he drew the vast loom. Chanting, he said, “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Silence!” raved the whip-master, his arm rising and falling. “Still thy traitorous tongue, you dog!”
Heedless of the slashing pain, almost delighting in it, Lod chanted, “Their feet are swift to shed blood. Ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of Elohim before their eyes.”
The key officer yanked the whip-master from Lod. “Leave him.”
“He spouts blasphemy.”
“He rows,” said the key officer. “That’s all that matters for now.”
They turned to Lod. His eyes shone with a fanatic’s gleam, wild, insane, of a desert prophet who would bring blood and thunder to the Earth. He bled. He rowed, and then he fell silent, enduring the agony of life for however long he had left.
-4-
Captain Eglon stood with the pilot at the prow, the dark choppy waters hiding the Serpent of Thep’s ram. Weary, spray-drenched sailors slept on deck, shivering under their woolen blankets, curled up like jackals. Armored soldiers with bronze cuirasses and iron short swords prowled uneasily, their glances tracking in the direction from whence came the breeze. In that same far distance, on the eastern horizon, the first crack of dawn gleamed.
Eglon had wrapped himself in his scarlet Caphtorite cloak. Seawater had stained it and soaked his turban. For safekeeping he had unclipped the ruby and put it in a silk pouch dangling from his silver belt.
“We’re not going to make it,” said the pilot.
“You’re privy then to the Master’s timetable?” said Eglon.
“How long do you think it took the pterodactyl to find us?” the pilot asked. “Abimelech might have told us, certainly, but he’s dead.”
Eglon peered at the smaller man; sometimes he thought the hunch-shouldered seaman mocked him. The emotionless pilot studied the horizon, an old salt, even now scratching at the lice that crawled through his black beard. Eglon shivered. He loathed dirt and anything to do with being unclean. At the Master’s court it had been so different. He wondered for the hundredth time if he had been wise to accept the offer to be a captain. The Master needed captains so he could float a battlefleet superior to Eridu and its allies.
Years ago, they said, the coastal cities of Northern Vendhya had fallen like rotten fruit into the Master’s hands. He’d had little need for war galleys then. Nor did he need many galleys now to keep those cities captive. In recent years the Isle of Iribos had been taken through treachery; otherwise large numbers of galleys would surely have been needed there. Now, however, in order to maintain the siege of Larak, Yorgash had to face down Eridu and its allies on the sea. A few galleys sailed out of Poseidonis; a few crawled up the coast from the Vendhyan cities, while many had been hastily constructed in the Bay of Great Sloths. Those, the pilot had said several weeks ago, had been built from green pine, and for some reason that was bad, although at the moment Eglon couldn’t remember why.
In any case, along the jungle inlets of far Southern Vendhya rested the rotting remains of old hulks. A bold, Southern Vendhyan prince had once challenged Yorgash and had dared to sail north in might. Alas, t
he Vendhyan prince and his crews had contacted a dreaded, and to them, foreign disease. The Master had hinted many times that he had sponsored the pestilence. In terror the luckless fools had fled homeward, but along the way many had succumbed to the sickness, and the survivors had barely crawled into the endless jungle inlets and bays of that coast and jumped ship. Thus for uncounted years those marvelously built galleys had gone to waste.
Eglon still remembered his day of decision. It had occurred in the garden court. Chimes had tinkled as the courtesans preformed a complex dance for the Master. As he sat on his golden throne, the Master had drummed his ebon fingers on the skull of a city governor who had failed to send his quota. Twin emeralds, green and of flawless purity, had been set in the polished skull’s eye sockets. An eerie, sinful taint, the barest of glows, had shone from the emeralds, as if the governor’s spirit yet peered out.
Worse, however, had been the dreadful, lost-soul moan that issued from the skull whenever the Master tapped a certain sequence with his fingernail upon the necromancy-bleached bone. On a more natural note, squawking, orange-feathered parrots had flown through the garden where the courtesans danced, while a fountain of perfumed wine had splashed behind them. The Master had turned suddenly, catching him lusting after the dancers.
“Wrestler.”
When he had seen the Master studying him, Eglon fell groveling.
“You’ve feasted well these many years on my largesse. Will you now dare the outer world as a galley captain?”
Of course he had said yes. With the Master’s pupil-less gaze upon him it would have been folly to say anything else. So he had been one of the few to actually leave Poseidonis, to sail across the open ocean in a merchantman and back into the world of mortals. There on the stone quays of Mangalore he had been introduced to his soldiers and crew. From there they had journeyed overland three weeks to the jungle ruins of Krung Thep. The long-ago Southern Vendhyan sailors who had fled their plagued ship had given the disease to the city’s former inhabitants and wiped out the people. A day of hacking through jungle vines with machetes had brought him to a rich lagoon full of crocodiles, where a barge full of rowing slaves had been waiting along with orders to arrive at Iribos in three months’ time.
Standing now on the prow deck with the pilot, watching the first streaks of dawn, Eglon heard his belly rumble. So it had those dreadful days in the lagoon. It was one thing to clutch weaklings, lift them high and crack then over your knee, to watch them flop and contort for the Master and his clapping courtesans, but another to command sullen slaves to obedience and make them wade into smelly water filled with man-eating monsters. Failure had been inconceivable. So he had practiced his favorite trick on the first slave who hadn’t jumped fast enough, breaking the spine and tossing the fool into the water. Two reptilian beasts had broken the scummy surface and tugged and yanked the screaming slave apart. It had been a fascinating performance; one he knew the Master would have loved—and it had wonderfully motivated the others. In fact, he had found then that he had a talent for making men move. Perhaps the Master had known that. In any case, although twenty slaves had become crocodile fodder, along with three soldiers, everyone together had dragged the rotting hulk out of the ooze and into deeper water. Hot tar and ropes had done wonders for the old galley until several days later he had sailed the vessel into the sea.
Not only did he have a talent for command, but for piracy as well. The huge red ruby that usually adorned his turban and the scarlet cloak warming his shoulders were but a small part of his newfound treasures. Howling with glee and with a sword in hand he had rampaged across several merchantman decks. Looting was an incredibly delicious experience, immensely heady and pleasurable. Yet all this and his virgin captaincy were about to be lost because they couldn’t get to Iribos in time.
“Seems foolish to sail in late,” said the pilot.
An icicle of fear stabbed Eglon’s chest, making his heart thud faster. “You’re not suggesting we run out on the Master, are you?”
“I’m not daft,” said the pilot, who glanced at him sidelong.
Eglon dared consider the idea; then hastily shook his head. Yet how otherwise could he keep his captaincy, his very life? He grinned suddenly, his corpulent features wreathing into a smile, exposing strong white teeth. “We need rowers, yes?”
“More than half have been pitched overboard,” muttered the pilot. “Just as I predicted would happen.”
Eglon turned around and lumbered at the nearest sailor curled in sleep. With his fine rhinoceros-hide boot he gave the Vendhyan laggard a kick. “Wake up, you lout!”
The sailor jerked awake, trembling to see the captain over him.
“Run to the rowing hold!” shouted Eglon.
“C-Captain?”
“Don’t gawk at me, you dog! You’re going to row!” Eglon lifted his head. “Commander!”
“What are you plotting, Captain?” whispered the pilot, who had crept near on soundless feet.
“Everyone is going to row.”
“Even the soldiers?”
“Are you deaf? I said everyone.”
“The soldiers won’t appreciate that.”
Eglon turned on the pilot, grinning evilly and smacking one of his huge fists into his palm. “When I start worrying about what people like is the day on my own free will I sink my arse onto the impaling spike.”
-5-
Savage yelling caused Lod to stir. Every muscle ached and his hands had become lumps of clay. Groaning, he dragged his head off his arms, which lay folded on the giant loom before him. His back muscles twitched and his head felt as it had the time that an extraordinarily cruel captain had locked a lead hood upon him. He blinked bloodshot eyes, trying to focus on the slaves shuffling down the middle aisle, their ankle manacles clanking. Each of their arms had been cruelly bound behind their backs, their garments in tatters and their faces bruised to purple welts and bleeding at the mouth.
It was then Lod noticed the Serpent of Thep neither creaked nor rocked, nor did its worm-infested timbers shift. Instead, the galley lay utterly still. Seagulls cried outside, and he heard the sound of sawing and hammering. Last night sailors and soldiers had rowed beside him, Captain Eglon himself prowling the middle aisle with a whip. This morning fewer than one hundred exhausted slaves survived on the benches, gaping at this new sight like men awakened from death. Beyond the benches at the stern and prow archers leered with oiled black beards and wearing the peaked hats so beloved by Yorgash’s soldiery. With their shiny eyes they seemed eager to bend their bows and loose arrows at them.
Meanwhile, soldiers with curved knives, perfect for a crowded spot, cursed shuffling slaves, spitting at them, daring them to rebel and shoving them against the back of their heads. They brought new wretches down into the hold to refill the emptied benches.
Twenty years of mind-numbing drudgery hadn’t yet been able to slay Lod’s curiosity. In his lucid moments he often debated with himself over a myriad of issues. He had also become an expert on certain insect species: particularly blood-sucking lice, fleas and delicately long-legged spiders that built such beautiful webs. Occasionally, wasps flew through the wicker lattice above and snatched the spiders, drugging them into lethargy, laying a single dark egg into them and then carrying the paralyzed creature to a wattle-built nest. There, once the egg hatched, the larvae feasted upon its still aware host. Lod knew this to be true because he had broken open more than one wasp nest to find out. Rats had provided him with thousands of hours of contemplation as they scurried and burrowed in the wet sand of the ballast below.
Unfortunately, making pets of them was useless. He had tried several times. Other slaves had always killed them while he slept and devoured their meaty flesh. His most delightful pet had been a lark he had once captured by luring it with breadcrumbs. With bits of rope he had made a tiny cage, hanging it from a splinter in the wooden rib above him. The bird had soon learned to copy the different toots given by the oar master with his silver whistle
. Quite often the lark would imitate the calls, causing the rowers to undertake maneuvers that had not been ordered. Finally the captain had demanded that he free the bird—which had made the other slaves happy, for none of them had gotten any rest with the caged lark.
Lod sighed, certain that all those slaves of many years ago were dead. He alone lived on. He alone survived in this dank and dreary world.
“Keep your hands on the oar, White-Hair.” A soldier waved a curved dagger in his face, the edge keen and a bare inch from his eyes.
Lod obeyed, and he ignored a different soldier bending down and unlocking his chain. Then he shivered, which made the first soldier snarl and grab his hair and jerk back his head, pressing the wickedly sharp dagger against skin.
“Twitch a muscle, White-Hair, and I’ll slit your throat.”
Rage washed over Lod. That’s why he had shivered. A yearning to roar and bash their heads together had filled him the instant his ankle was free of the hated chain. Almost he had leapt up to do battle—almost, but not quite. Enough sanity remained for him to bide his time, to wait for the perfect moment.
“Slide to the end, White-Hair, to the oar port.”
Lod obeyed, even though he knew that his original sentence had mandated he always be the lead man, rowing the most difficult position. He slid over the soiled wool, over the empty places of slaves who had lost their lives last night. As he did, the new wretches were shoved off the middle aisle and to his plank. Their chained ankles made it impossible for them to step down. So they fell, one man gashing his cheek against the bench.
Lod, who had witnessed a thousand such brutalities, stared up at the whicker lattice. The sun shone high in the sky. He bent his head and peered out the oar port. No leather washer remained, so his view was excellent. To his delight he sniffed the salt sea instead of the hold’s vile stench. His eyes widened.
Masses of galleys cruised upon the sea in squadrons. Oars moved rhythmically, as if each vessel were a huge wooden centipede crawling across the water. Many had mast poles in place, with sails tied by ropes to the yardarms. Seen from this distance the galleys were beautiful; at least the largest were, with gilded forecastles and purple stern awnings. Bronze armored soldiers packed the decks of many and thousands of archers waxed their bowstrings. Sunlight sparkled off polished shields, making him blink, causing his eyes to water. Flute music drifted near. It timed the rowing in countless holds. Gulls wheeled overhead and sometimes triangular fins cut through the green sea, marking sharks that lived off the garbage thrown from the war vessels. Small punts hurried between ships, while barges struggled to move faster.
Lod the Galley Slave (Lost Civilizations) Page 7