by Jim Rudnick
He walked a few feet away and then turned back to them. “The dog, Khuno, has been re-assigned to our canine teams; your bags will be searched, and then some of the clothing will be put into your new slave barracks. You are slaves as of now. Get used to it,” he said, and he laughed loudly.
“Khuno was never yours—he was a Shorecroft Patrol K9 dog,” Jon said.
“And what makes you think that means anything—we provide dogs to many other towns and villages for their use. Khuno was sent to Shorecroft just a year ago, it seems, and it’s nice to see that he’s back. He’ll go out again too, and be our own secret within another new town and their security forces. We seed many dogs, Khuno was just one of them,” he said as he shook his head.
“You all must think that we believers are just a cult, full of idiots who pray all day long. Some of us are, but here at the top, not so much, eh?” he questioned.
Everyone in the room knew that question needed no answers. They had thought just that, and they’d just been outdone by this cult, and outdone badly.
As the Shieldsmen led them out of the building, instead of turning back to their left toward the city, they went to their right toward the pyramid. At the start of the construction site, they turned right once again.
Along that street, in the almost dark early evening, they were marched, and occasionally they went by Empire City citizens who all stood out of their way. Behind their hands, they talked to each other about them, Javor thought. With at least twenty shieldsmen holding them at spear point, it was no wonder.
At the next corner on this long block, they turned to their left and entered an area that had a tall wire fence all around it. A set of guards let them into the area, and ahead there were low single-story buildings—slave barracks. They were marched and prodded all the way down to the last one on the left and then herded inside.
A large room, bathrooms against the far end wall, with two dozen bunk beds was what they found. At a set of tables all pushed together, four other slaves were wolfing down their dinner. They turned to look at the cadre’s entrance but didn’t stop eating, gobbling up what looked like some kind of stew.
The Shieldsmen stopped, and one stepped forward. “You are slaves. We have chosen to bed you with other discontents and non-believers here in this barracks,” he said as he pointed at the four slaves still eating.
“You will obey, or you will be whipped. If you are whipped too often or if you injure yourself—you will go on the list for the next Equinox Games. You have few chances—I’d offer that you do not want to spend them unwisely.” He and the rest of the Shieldsmen turned to leave.
“What makes you think that we will do this?” Sue said, stepping up to challenge him.
The spear caught her in the shoulder, its tip and inches more of steel embedded just below her collar bone, blood seeping out.
“We do not think at all, we know,” the Shieldsman said as one of them moved forward to pull the spear out, and he wiped it off on her hip as the rest of them held the cadre at spear point.
“You will be visited by the slave keeper in a while, but ‘til then, I’d try to staunch that blood loss. You will need to pull tomorrow and pull mightily too. Does anyone else wish to question the Empire?” he said.
The quiet was pregnant with hate, but not a word came out of the members of the cadre.
He nodded. “This barracks will always have its own guards, but the whole slave camp is guarded. Shieldsmen and dogs and yes, slaves earn extra food if they turn in those planning to escape. Your time here is yours, but the other half a day is spent helping the Empire build the pyramid …” he said, and in a moment, they’d left the barracks building.
Wayne and Bruce were already at Sue’s side, helping her to lie down. Wayne ripped off his shirt, tearing an arm off and using it as a temporary bandage to soak up her blood. She was actually better than they all thought—no screaming or any type of reaction. Shock, Javor thought at first.
“Point had pretty sharp edges, but no barbs,” Wayne said as he plied the wound itself.
Sue looked up and him, grinned, and said, “What, Wayne, no one, two, three count?”
He shook his head and then looked up and over to the table where the other slaves were still eating but all had eyes on Sue.
“Can any of you help here?” Wayne said.
They stopped chewing, and one of them, a big man with a dusty T-shirt on, put down his spoon. “Slave keeper will be here sometime soon—spear wounds go to the top of the list,” he said.
Jon said, “I take it that the slave keeper will provide some kind of medical help?”
“Some kind, yes,” the big man said as he got up slowly as if he was hurting himself.
He limped over, and Javor could see he favored his left leg and was moving slowly. He got to Sue’s side and bent over to look at the wound itself.
“Typical, they aim below the clavicle to ensure that tomorrow you can still shoulder the rope and pull,” he said, and then he pointed at the edges of the wound.
“See that yellow tinge? Ointment that they put on their spear tips, helps the wound by killing any germs—sorta like they want to hurt you, but you gotta pull tomorrow,” he said with what might have been an attempt at irony.
Javor nodded. Made sense. He took a step toward the man and held out his hand.
“Javor Novak—thanks for your help,” he said as he introduced the whole cadre to the man.
The big guy nodded to them all and even smiled a little. “I’m Toby Nelson—been here over a year. Last member of the original oil exploration team who got jumped northwest of here near New Liskeard. I was one of the floater pilots for the company, and now the Empire has them all. All my peers are gone, but I’m still here. If you’re smart, then you’ll just pull, eat, and then sleep.
“Wound’s gonna hurt like hell for a week or so—but will heal okay, I think. Slave keeper will stitch it up and put in some more antiseptic. Pulling tomorrow, Sue, will be hell, I can show you how to fake it. One day, we’ll all give you, but the slack will get us all whipped some …”
He again shrugged and went back to the table to finish his stew. “Hungry?” he asked as he eyed the big bowl of remaining stew and the new slaves to the barracks.
Jon said, ”No, we’ve just eaten.”
Toby grinned and took another portion onto his plate. “More for us,” he said with another grin, and the whole table refilled their plates.
Sue moaned more in the next hour as they slowly acclimatized to their new living quarters.
“I like the other place better,” Bruce said, and that got more nods than anything else said that night.
They all helped get Sue over to a lower bunk and arranged her on it. She winced badly but didn’t cry out, and she waited for medical attention.
“Something I have to tell you all,” she said, first making sure the slaves were all at the table still eating and that she had a bit of privacy.
“The Regime gave me something to help us negotiate,” she said with a wink.
Javor thought she might have been somewhat wonky from the wound, so he patted her other shoulder and said, “Easy, Sue … easy.”
She shook him off and in a low whisper—so low they all had to bend down and get close to her as she exhaled her words softly—she said, “The Regime gave me a nuke—it should be in my pack, disguised as a simple battery for the radio. Half-mile spread, no rads either, so it’s really just to do a single task of blowing up this city. If I don’t make it, you should know it exists.” Her body spasmed then with pain.
Bruce held her one arm on the wound side and said, “Nothing doing, Sue … you’re going to be fine. You heard that guy, they don’t hurt slaves who can pull … just settle down, honey.”
Wayne and Javor nodded and patted her too.
Ten minutes later, a group of Shieldsmen entered carrying their packs and tossed them in a heap just inside the doorway. Bruce went over, checked, came back in a moment, and said, “Most of my
stuff is still there, but it has been rifled through.”
Sue asked about her pack, and he nodded and said, ”Yup, all your stuff is there—but the radio looks like it has seen better days, but all else is about the same. Your undies look like they’ve been handled too …”
That got a grunt from some of them and a smile to,o which was what Bruce had been aiming at, and they waited now for medical help.
Javor grabbed a lower bunk right beside Sue and realized there was only a thin mattress over the metal slats that were the bed frame itself. He found his clothing on the floor, gathered it up, and put it on his bed,to use as a pillow. His backpack had been slit open by the Shieldsmen, he thought, and rifled through. No kibble for Bixby—and that at least was only a small disappointment, as he knew the dog would be well treated. He did wonder how a dog could be used against the master that he’d adopted, and that bugged him for a while as he watched the rest of the cadre settle in.
Twenty minutes later, a black-robed figure along with three Shieldsmen walked into the barracks, and he went right over to Sue. Kneeling beside her, he pressed and prodded the wound, ignoring her squeals of pain. His face never showed a thing as he went into a satchel he had over his shoulder and got out a tube of something. He leaned over Sue, and pressing the area around the hole with one hand, he squeezed some of the ointment out of the tube and right into the hole. He went back into his bag and withdrew a small leather case from which he took a needle and some kind of catgut or the like, Javor thought.
He was all business as he used a spray to topically numb the area around the wound, and then he stitched up the wound with stitch after stitch. Javor counted eleven stitches to close Sue’s wound.. The black-robed man then went back into his bag and used some thick bandages and some wide white tape to seal the wound. He fished out a couple of pills, gave them to Wayne, who was hovering over them both, and nodded.
“One now, one tomorrow at first pull, and then the last one at dinner,” the man said.
Sue was full of questions, but he ignored her. Wayne just nodded and the slave keeper left them as he’d come, quietly and quickly.
Sue moaned and Wayne stuffed the first pill into her, and she had to work up the spit to swallow it.
“We have water—we always have lots of water,” Toby said as he got up and walked over with a cup in his hand, and Sue took it gratefully and drank the whole cupful.
Bruce took the bunk over Sue, and Wayne took the one over Javor. They all sat and chatted. The patrollers took the next couple of bunks, and they discussed their plight as well as what they might do about it.
“Thing is, is that the barracks are all wired so that the Empire can hear you all the time. Good thing too, because if we heard you all discussing a plan of escape, we’d need to report it—or be whipped. Glad to hear that you’re all sad you’re here, but that’s about as far as it should go, I’d think,” Toby voiced from his own bunk at the far end.
All good to know, Javor said to himself. Very good indeed … Now what I need is sleep, as tomorrow I get to help build a pyramid … sadly …
#####
Jon was right ahead of him, and Javor thought, in the past week or so that we’ve been slaves, his back muscles have already grown considerably.
While the guards were smart enough to make the team work on alternating sides of the ropes, that was due, he thought, to just trying to balance out the slaves’ muscle tone and abilities. It was the smart thing to do, and that worried him a bit. Anyone who showed that kind of planning for their slaves meant they had been at this for a while—and would continue too.
One week and a bit, he thought, is really not enough time to try to formulate an escape plan.
That’s what he told himself as his head hit his bunk every night, tired to the bone.
We have no weapons. We are watched every minute we’re awake—and when we sleep as well. We have no one here who we can use to try to gain an advantage to help escape either. We are what we are, slaves ...
He was a puller. Everyone who was a slave, he’d learned, had a job title, which was descriptive of what their job was.
There were pullers—like him. His team was his barracks mates—the cadre plus Toby and the others—and they always pulled on one huge rope on their side of the sledge for a full day. Another team just like them, but one bigger at twelve slaves, took the other side of the sledge on their own rope, and everyone pulled.
Moving the rollers from the back of the sledge around to the front of the sledge were the rollers. He almost grinned at that name being a bit more descriptive than the job entailed as the rollers waited behind the sledge for a large log to come free. It was picked up by four rollers, moved to one side, and then run up past the sledge for it to be positioned in front of the sledge as the next rolling log to provide almost frictionless upward movement on the ramp.
There were mudders too, whose job it was to daub the rollers with a coating of mud—not the whole log but just above the three rails on which the logs rolled. Friction was the enemy, and Javor had to admit, the Empire had covered just about all their bases.
He knew that behind him and below him and miles away, there was the granite quarry, with more slaves who cut the blocks from the granite walls. Those slaves moved the blocks the three miles from quarry to the pyramid itself. And then finally, the pullers, like him, who slowly moved stone by stone upward toward the summit.
He grunted as one foot on the ramp below slipped just a bit and the rope took some slack. He flinched ahead of time knowing this kind of slack meant a guard could well be drawing back on his whip right now … and in a moment more, he’d feel the tip sting into his back.
But not this time. No whip cracked and he pulled a bit harder on the rope—not hard enough to cause any slack to appear in front of him either. He’d learned that the rope told the guards who was pulling steadily and who was not. And their whips corrected all.
He pulled on the rope steadily with about eighty percent of what he figured was his maximum pulling ability. This stone, the fourth since they’d started this morning, was the same size as always. With twenty-three pullers on the mud-covered logs, the sledge made solid time up and up and up. At the corners, the ramp leveled so that the pryers could pry-bar it around the corner, and they got to stand and take a few minutes while the sledge was turned the ninety degrees.
He nodded to Wendy, one of the new barracks mates he’d inherited, and smiled over to Toby. They were a couple, he thought, having heard tiptoe footsteps in the night, but that was none of his business. He had to pull. That was all.
And that’s what bothered him the most.
Being a slave of the Empire is not something I’d ever thought I would do—I know what I could do. But the plan to escape is still beyond me.
“They said that there’d be more facing stones again soon,” Wayne said under his breath to him so that the guards didn’t overhear them. Slaves do not talk—they pull; he’d been whipped more than a dozen times learning that one.
He nodded. Facing stones were lighter as they came to the ramp with one side already beveled off. They’d become the exterior stones of the pyramid, and yes, they were easier to pull. He could turn to look way down to see if he could find any such stones in the assembly points to come up the ramp, but he didn’t bother. Today, they had to get ten stones up the ramp and in place for the final pryers to get into position and the fitters to make the proper installation too.
He sweated more and held up his hand to show the water girls that he needed more water, and one of them, a youngster of about ten or so years, came over with the big plastic bag now half-full of water. She motioned, he squatted down, and she aimed the spout on the side at his mouth. Lukewarm water surged out of the bag and into his mouth. A week ago, he’d forgotten to care that this was messy and made him look like a boor—water was what he needed, so he drank and then held up a hand to get her to stop.
He smiled at her as he stood back up and said, “Thank you,” and
a guard near him barked, “Shut up, slave,” and he did just that.
He saw that the pryers had the sledge now in great position, running on the rails below, and he got ready in line for the big pull that was always needed to start a new pull up a new side of the pyramid. They always had to start off with a huge pull to get the sledge up and on the first rolling log—pryers pryed and they pulled and the rollers stuffed in that first log—and they were off at a foot or a bit less every few seconds, climbing the pyramid with another stone.
No escape. The future for him was as a slave …
“Nonsense,” he said to himself again today, ”I will find a way out of this.” Every member of the cadre felt, he was sure, like he did right now. They pulled. But behind that pull was the raw emotion that they would try to escape.
Every day, Sue said she wondered what he Regime was doing about their disappearance, and the answer today was just like it had been then—they had no idea.
Wonder how Bixby is doing once again here in the city, or maybe he’s already been sent out again Wonder if one of those facing stones might be next, Javor thought and hoped the load could be lighter for a while…
#####
He held up his hand, and the water girl he liked to see, the ten-year old girl with the blonde hair, hauled the water bag over past a couple of guards who were sitting on a roller log and toward him.
The pryers were doing their thing—jamming their long pry bars under the edge of the sledge itself and gently lifting it up on the rails below. They did so carefully to not damage the underside of the sledge, which might affect its ability to roll smoothly on the rolling logs. They were careful to move the sledge inch by inch, so the alignment would be met and not exceeded.
The guard with the black hair, streaked now with rock dust, stopped the girl and asked where, and she pointed at first Sue, over on the far side of the pile of log rollers, and then to him. The guard nodded, eyed him, and pursed his lips together.