To which he would reply, his fists knotted: “Aye, Stylor, I do! But revolt — that must be carefully planned — carefully planned-” He looked about him uneasily.
Many men and women talked of revolt. Slave and worker, all spoke of the time when they could become free men through rebellion. At this time I do not think one of them thought beyond a rebellion to a true revolution.
Maybe I do the Prophet a disservice in saying this.
Perhaps, even then, he had a glimmering of the true ideals of revolution over the bloody gut-reaction of rebellion, for afterward he proved himself nobly. He was called only the Prophet; he must have had a name, but it was forgotten. Slaves might be called what their master wished; in my case I had been called Stylor for the task I performed without my even being aware of that until the name was in habitual use. Among the close-packed warrens on the landward edge of the city, outside the gay and noble sections where the overlords lived in luxury with the sea breeze to cool them in the heat of the day, the Prophet moved with a sure tread, preaching. He spoke simply that no man should own another in slavery, that no man should cringe to the whip, whether slave, worker, or free, that men should have some say in what happened to them in life.
I met him from time to time wandering the warrens among the slaves and the workers, speaking in words of fire, to be met with lackluster eyes and disillusioned shrugs, the sloughing away of all hope. He was constantly on the run from the guards. He was an object of pity and some affection to the workers, like a blind dog they would not see killed, and so they hid him and fed him and passed him along from hideout to hideout. In those runnels of ancient brick and mud walls, of crazy roofs and toppling walls and towers, an army could have been lost. The guards ventured into the ulterior at their peril, only in force. For two days in every twelve the workers might return to their homes in the warrens, although often they contrived to spend more time there than that, until roused out by guards. Then the Prophet would speak to them, trying to inflame them, trying to arouse them.
Because he was an old man, even by Kregan standards, being, I suppose, about a hundred and eighty, his hair was white. His white mass of hair, his white beard, his white moustache, were merely the ordinary features of an old man, and their remarkable similarity to what one conceives of as a prophet’s appearance was merely coincidental. His old eyes fairly snapped at me like a barracuda as he spoke, his voice a hoarse resounding trumpet easily audible a quarter of a dwabur away. Such men are known on our own Earth.
The guards, whether human or beast, seldom ventured into the slave warrens. Holly, Genal, and I were standing in a doorway listening to the Prophet, and both young people’s faces were alight with their inner passions. They, at least, saw sense in what the Prophet said. Beneath scattered torchlight the mass of workers and slaves before us listened as at an entertainment; their spirits had been whip-broken. Then the shouts and shrieks broke out, the trample of iron-shod hooves, the clash of arms. A party of mail-clad men rode in heavily from a side street, deploying instantly, yodeling and shouting, to come smashing into the mass of people. They were using their swords’ edges. Blood spouted. The Prophet disappeared. Holly screamed. I grabbed her arm and Genal took her other hand and we dived back into the doorway. Even as the warped boards closed on us the mounted men hammered past.
“They’re not after the Prophet,” said Holly, her breast heaving, her eyes wide and wild. “This is sport for them, a great Jikai!”
I winced to hear that word in this contemptible context.
“Yes,” said Genal viciously. “It is time for them to come hunting for fun.” His eager voice broke. “For fun!”
“There is work for me tonight,” said Holly. I stared at her. I had no idea what she meant. I was to find out.
CHAPTER FIVE
Bait for overlords
The Maiden with the Many Smiles, the largest moon of Kregen, floated free of cloud. Brilliant pink moonlight flooded down over the deserted square on the outskirts of the warrens. In many doorways human bright-eyed maidens waited. Given the size of the moon, almost twice that of Earth’s satellite, the fullness and the brilliance of the night, the square was lit as brightly as many a daytime on Earth. In the shadows between the moonlight the girls waited. Presently, the soldiers, the mercenaries, the guards came. They carried money, presents, eager smiles, and manifold lusts. In one shadowed doorway, only the long limber length of one shapely leg showing in moonlight, waited Holly.
“Are you sure?” I whispered to Genal.
“Yes. We have done this before.”
“Quiet, you stupid calsanys!” Pugnarses spoke with venom and ill-concealed impatience. His balass stick was gone; now he clutched a cudgel made from homely sturm-wood. Genal also held a cudgel. We watched as the men in their ornate robes, their hair coiffed and perfumed, the rings glittering on their fingers, walked along the arcades and past the doorways of the square, gradually filling it as more and more appeared after the arduous day’s tasks. Holly’s leg looked almost indecently exposed and alluring, there in that streaming pink moonlight. Two other moons, also at the full, hurtled past low over the crazy rooflines of the warrens.
The men at arms were not wearing their mesh steel now. It would interfere in their delights of love. One approached Holly. He was tall and saturnine, with a black down-drooping moustache and a mouth like a rast. He wore a gorgeous green robe, much bedecked with silver embroidery. His coin purse chinked as he walked. He had a long dagger belted at his waist.
Holly said: “Do I please you, master?”
His eyes appraised her boldly.
“You please me, wench, by your looks. But can you perform?”
“Come with me, master, and you shall taste delights such as the voluptuous Gyphimedes the immortal mistress herself never vouchsafed the beloved of Grodno.”
The man’s eyes brightened and his tongue-tip moistened his narrow lips. “You interest me, wench. Two silver oars.”
I could guess Holly would be pouting, twisting her hips so as more excitingly to strain the thin material of the shush-chiff, the sarong-like garment worn by girls on festive occasions. “Three silver oars, master,”
she wheedled.
“Two.”
Genal was fidgeting next to me, and Pugnarses rumbled thickly: “May Makku-Grodno take the girl!
What does the money matter? Let her make haste!”
Genal said quickly: “She must act her part.”
The bargain was struck at two silver oars and two copper oars — those tarnished coins of Magdag with the crossed oars on their reverses, a variety of vapid faces of Magdag overlords on their obverses. The man bent his head to follow Holly into the doorway, with a lascivious chuckle on his lips, his hands already reaching to strip away the shush-chiff. Genal and Pugnarses, one on each side of the door, struck the man over the head and as he collapsed soundlessly forward into my arms I dragged him bodily inside. Not one of us said a word. I stared at Holly in her shush-chiff and, indeed, she was exceedingly beautiful, young and fresh and soft, sweet with the promise of youth.
Then she went to stand once more flaunting her beauty insolently in the pink moonshine, as human bait. That night, my first at the task, we picked up six men who wished to sample Holly’s wares. We bound them and gagged them and took their finery, personal jewelry, money, and weapons. This facet of Holly amazed me; I saw she could act with all the sure purpose of a mature woman. The men would be sent into the warrens by certain paths Holly knew. From there, naked and bound, they would find their way into distant slave gangs over the other side of the building complex. It would be impossible to prove their identities when confronting the immediate response from the overlords and the guards, which was usually a blow to the head. Holly, however, seldom took even that risk. She usually insisted the men be sent to the galleys; who would not tremble at that simple phrase? Sent to the galleys. When I asked why the hated overlords and guards were not killed out of hand, Genal looked at me as though I were mad.
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“What?” he exclaimed. “Send them straight up to Genodras, to sit in glory at the right hand of Grodno, before they have suffered here on earth? I want to know they suffer, first, before they die and are received into the Green Glory.”
I did not say anything.
What had impressed me as a vital element in the structure of the Eye of the World was that while the slaves believed in the red-sun deity, Zair, in general, the workers, whose allegiance should have wholeheartedly belonged to Grodno, were most lax and loose in their beliefs. This feeling that death would release them to go to their hopes of glory in the green sun was perhaps the strongest religious tenet they tolerated.
The surrounding countryside was terrorized by the mailed men. They took anything they wanted outside the immediate bounds of their city limits and the enormous machine-run, factory-type farms. By galley and by their mounted cavalry, they dominated the northern littoral. There were other cities on the northern shores, but none approached Magdag in size, power, or magnificence. So far I had seen no zorcas or voves, those magnificent riding animals of Segesthes. The overlords rode a six-legged beast rather like a skittish mule, blunt-headed, wicked-eyed, pricked of ear, with slatey-blue hide covered with a scanty coarse hair that overlords trimmed and oiled. I wondered at their suitability as mounts; the six-legged gait is often awkward and uncomfortable for a rider. The riders did not wield lances, relying on their long swords. I saw little evidence of bows, and those I did see were the standard short, straight bow; neither the reflex compound bow of my Clansmen nor the long English yew bow were in evidence in Magdag. The riding beasts, the sectrixes, seemed to me good sturdy animals, although I doubted their hardiness; they did not, in my estimation, stand enough hands high to give a Clansman all the room he would like in which to swing his ax or broadsword. More and more I was coming to see Magdag as a great builder’s yard. The slaves and the workers, and occasionally the free artificers, lived in their tiny shacks of straw or lathe or mud brick tucked against the sides of the mighty buildings they were constructing or ornamenting. There was great richness in the buildings, masses of gold leaf and encrustation, acres of precious stones, porphyry, chemzite, chalcedony, ivory, kalasbrune, slabs of marble veined and pure, flashing in the suns. Inside the labyrinthine areas where the slaves gathered in the shadows, filth, and the smells there was only mud brick and clay and harsh stone, and miserly quantities of sturm-wood. The imbalances were great and terrible, greater, even, than my own Earth’s at the close of the eighteenth century. Inside these warrens was a kind of no-man’s-land. The guards did not care to venture in unless in such force as to smash the slightest opposition. They did so enter, from time to time, to rout out skulkers, for there were many who sought to take sanctuary in the slaves’ warrens. It was Genal who apprised me of the latest plot.
In the maze of alleys and courts linking and separating the hovels and the slave compounds, we walked after a period of a two-day rest. We had disposed of a goodly number of guards, and the reaction was, as usual, brusque. A new guard commander for our gangs, those of Pugnarses and the other slave overseers, had been appointed. He was a man whose meanness was a byword. Already he had had Naghan’s woman flogged to death, the bright blood spouting as her back was ripped down to bone, the flesh and blood hanging in striped ringlets of agony. The plan was to kill this overseer, this overlord of the second class, one Wengard, and his whole platoon, and then to make an escape and seize a galley from a harbor — any galley, any harbor.
“I do not like it, Genal,” I said.
“Neither do I.” He hunched his shoulders as we walked toward the brick works, surrounded by slaves and workers. I was aware that I knew little of the inner conspiracies that must fester continually in a situation like this. There must be gangs, clans, sects, mobsters and criminals, perverts and blackmailers, by the thousand in these sinks. The person who wished to lead this latest revolt was a Fristle, one called Follon. I had no love for Fristles. They were not true men. They had two arms and two legs, true; but their faces were like those of cats, bewhiskered, furred, slit-eyed, and fang-mouthed. Fristles had carried my Delia off to her captivity in Zenicce when I had been transplanted to that beach in far Segesthes.
“There are Chulik guards, now, under Wengard, the overlord of the second class,” I said.
“Yes,” agreed Genal. “But Fristles are hereditary foes of Chuliks, except when hired as mercenaries by the same employer.”
“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 Aphrasoe, 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 Aphrasoe — a movement I could neither understand nor explain.
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