Fliers of Antares [Dray Prescot #8] Page 5

  Their riders were short squat diffs with thin bandy legs. Their faces reminded me of the Ullars of Ullardrin of Northern Turismond, although there was none of that indigo dyed hair. There was, however, the same savagery about the square clamp of their mouths. At this time they habitually wore black and ocher scaled clothing made from the skins of the tyryvols, and they carried those damnably sharp tridents, and the thin flexible sword of the aerial fighter. These are the Gerawin of Gilarna the Barren in the Empire of Hamal. They proved to be immensely efficient guards and watchdogs over the Heavenly Mines for the Hamalese.

  Around us stretched the barrens. The foothills trended up steadily toward the west and northwest. The task of escape from the mines on foot would be a daunting enterprise and one not to be considered without many days’ food and water and, inevitably, a weapon of defense against the frightful dangers infesting all such spots.

  The Hamalese are an efficient people. The dominant species happens to be apim; but the many species of diffs take a full part in government, industry, commerce, and all the other branches of activity that make up a thriving empire. Hamal was an ambitious and outwardly thrusting empire. They made airboats and sold them to Vallia and Zenicce and other favored customers, although they would not sell to Pandahem or Loh. That efficiency took us in, cleansed and fed us, and let us rest for a space. Then we were issued picks and shovels. An example was made of a Gon who wanted to shave his hair and so made trouble; the cold, calculating discipline administered to him chilled all the slaves’ blood, and then that harsh impersonal discipline, that massive adherence to law and order, imposed its full weight on us. We marched down to the mines and went through the artificially illuminated passageways cut in the rock, and so came out to a vast and echoing space in the mountain. Here we set to work to hack the rock away and fill baskets with the broken stuff. The baskets were drawn on a track by calsanys, to the opening where crushers and refiners went to work, powered by the arms and backs of slaves.

  That efficiency saw that every slave worked to the uttermost of his strength. Everything was regulated down to the last drop of water. Rock was cut, drawn out, crushed, refined, and parceled up into fliers to be sent somewhere in Hamal of which we had no knowledge then.

  The whole process was inhuman.

  The last ounce of effort was taken from every slave.

  It was possible to survive, for I saw old men still laboring away, although the turnover was rapid, for the labor simply wore a man down until he saw no good reason to go on living. Absolute inhumanity reigned here. Work—slaving work—filled every day. Rest periods were calculated out with a nicety that allowed a man to recuperate just enough energy to return with his shift to work the next time around.

  By comparison, the Black Marble Quarries of Zenicce, in which I'd spent some time, seemed to have been run by amateurs.

  Order, law, discipline, rule. The lash, starvation, deprivation of water so that thirst tore a man's spirit and made of him a tool in the hands of the Hamalese, all these things conspired together to make of the Heavenly Mines a place that proved Agilis knew what he was doing when he strangled his brother and would have allowed his brother to strangle him in return...

  So I entered another period of my varied life on Kregen that, even now, fills me with a most profound horror, a revulsion of spirit that brought me face to face with the man I thought I was, the man Dray Prescot, shorn of all titles and petty ranks and symbols. It was just me, Dray Prescot, pitted against inhuman will and discipline.

  I knew only one thing.

  I would not give in.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Heavenly Mines

  Everything had a number.

  Every pickax carried its number burned into the haft and punched into the ax. Every shovel carried its number burned and cut. Every drinking bowl. Every spoon. Every eating bowl. A number was branded on the hide of every calsany. Each tunnel, each chamber, each working face, every one possessed its own number.

  We slept in rock shelters set against an old and abandoned cut's side. Each rock hut had a number painted above the open door, which was provided with no blanket or hide. We slept on packed earth and each little space had a number scribed in the earth. We each possessed a single thin blanket, and this miserable covering had its number also.

  And, as was inevitable, every slave had his own number.

  Dray Prescot scarcely existed any longer.

  The slave, number 8281, stood in his stead.

  The number was branded on my chest and on my back for all to see.

  The Hamalese used the common Kregish numbering and in normal times that linear script form is most beautiful. Here they had adopted the square and blocky numerology, so that my chest and back shouted aloud to the indifferent world that I was 8281.

  The weird distortion of reality that must take place in surroundings of this nature and under psychological pressures so matter-of-fact and ingrained caught me up, so that I became completely habituated to think of myself as 8281. Whereas I might have taken violently against the number, instead I embraced it. For the number was me. I was the number. Eight-two-eight-one was Dray Prescot. Eight-two-eight-one existed.

  By thus rushing forward and embracing my numerical alter ego I was able to dissociate myself from the almost psychotic anger of some of my fellows, who would not answer to their numbers until beaten, who refused to think of themselves as a number because of the lessening of simple human dignity.

  I knew a little about human dignity; but I wished to survive.

  I had witnessed the punishment of the Gon who wanted his head to be shaved, as is the fashion of Gons, through what I consider to be a foolish matter of shame over their white hair. He was not thrashed unmercifully, for the Hamalese guards and overseers had nothing written down in their laws and rules about mercy. He was simply punished as the law ordained for refusing to do his quota of work. The summary court which sat on the matter dismissed his reasons as untenable.

  He was beaten with the regulation number of strokes each day he refused to work. Everything was carried out with the punctilio and observance of the law that I had seen so many times aboard a King's Ship, when a hand was triced up to the gratings and given a red-checked shirt at the gangway. His crime placed him into most serious jeopardy, so that it was lawful to jikaider him, that is, flog crisscross.

  After he had been flogged jikaider for the regulation fifty lashes he would be cut down and then the medical men would see to him, as was required by law. His back would be doctored and the medic would pronounce him unfit to work for the period his back would take to heal. Then, when he refused to work again, he would be jikaidered again.

  This went on until he died.

  And when he died that long and flowing white hair of the typical Gon glittered silver and brave in the dying light of the suns.

  He had been number 8279, and that was how I remembered him.

  I lost count of the days, and that alarmed me. But the apathy of work and of numbers held me in a grip I could not break. Fresh fliers brought fresh slaves. A Bleg came into our hut with the numbers 8279 branded on his breast and back over the atrophied carapace, and I shook my head and called him that, although I did not forget the Gon.

  The question of what was mined here teased me at the beginning; but gradually I grew indifferent. The mountains existed. We must chop them down and break them up and shovel them into the wicker baskets, they would be carried to the chaldrons, and the calsanys would draw them out to the crushers. The refiners, powered by a sickly green stream flowing over a bluff and falling into a scummy pool, rich in minerals, would do their work; then what was left over would be packed in wooden crates, lined with leather, and loaded aboard fliers. When the quota dropped, the law permitted an increase in working burs. A bur is forty Earth minutes long. It grew so that at the face a bur seemed to stretch to a Terrestrial hour. And still I had no idea what the refined rock was needed for, what the Hamalese, Zair rot ‘em,
did with it, why they forced this agony on fellow human beings.

  The tailings stretched for dwaburs along the base of the foothills, ulm after ulm of them, spreading a powdery and ashlike detritus. What the refiners did, what sort of rock this was, what was taken from it—all these things I did not know and gradually came not to care about.

  Early on I had said to a man, an apim, laboring alongside me, “What do they want the rock for, dom?"

  “I do not know,” he had said, bashing his pick so that chips flew. “I only wish I could choke the rasts with it."

  “Amen to that,” I said, striking with my pick.

  No one knew.

  Every day we labored. There were no rest days.

  The knowledge that if I did not escape soon I might forget that escape existed drove me on. While loading the fliers one day—for the Hamalese rotated tasks according to their rules—a man was discovered secreted in one of the leather-lined wooden boxes. Where guards of other peoples perhaps would have had sport with him—for example, taking him aloft so that he thought he was escaping, and then pitching him overboard; or weighing the box and declaring it was short-weight and so pouring rock upon him until he was crushed—the guards at the Heavenly Mines acted strictly according to the law.

  The Hamalians—or Hamalese, either term is quite correct—took him in chains to a summary court, where he was found guilty—for he was certainly that, having tried to escape—and sentenced to the prescribed punishment.

  There are always sedentary jobs to be done in a mining complex like this, work that can be performed quite well by a man who cannot walk, by a man, say, who has no legs.

  They found him that employment. The law had no wish for extra severity and would not take his life. Slaves of quality were hard to come by in great quantity, and would not be wasted, only refuse being sent as victims to the arenas. And only tough fighters would do as coys, apprentice kaidurs.

  This man, number 5763, sat all day at his task, his stumps beautifully bandaged. He had shouted that he came from Hyrklana; but that did not help him.

  If he tried to escape again, the law would be more severe on him; and, as was written down, at the third attempt would then demand his life.

  He would be hanged in the most strict ritual procedure.

  I witnessed only two hangings, one for a third-time escape attempt, incredible though that may be, and one for a slave who had struck an overseer.

  This slave was a Chulik.

  Had he killed the overseer the law admitted that the next of kin, or the dead man's superior officer failing a next of kin, might stipulate what punishment the murderer would suffer before death.

  They were colorful in their thinking in those areas, were the bereaved in Hamal.

  And there was no revenge, no bloodthirsty shrilling anger in all this. It was all written down in the laws of the land...

  A new slave, number 2789—for they filled up the old roster numbers with new slaves at the Heavenly Mines—said to me, “Eight-two-eight-one! I must escape! I'll go mad!"

  I said to him, “Two-seven-eight-nine. To escape is so difficult it is scarcely worth the attempt. Better for you to go mad."

  Only later, as I sat eating my chunk of bread—made from good corn, for the Hamalese wished to keep up our strength—and coarse pudding of vosk and onion, with a finger over the gregarian at the side of my bowl, was the truth of what I had said borne in on me.

  I, Dray Prescot, unwilling to contemplate escape?

  Number 8281 knew the truth. Dray Prescot was an empty boaster, a bladder of wind. Eight-two-eight-one knew the truth.

  It took me a day to think of the subject again. We were opening up a new seam far down into the guts of the mountain. The rock we wanted held a gray metallic sheen which differentiated it from the yellower rock all around. Yet it held no mineral I could tell. We simply took all the gray rock, irrespective of minor differences. This seam was narrow, and an overseer, a little Och holding with his four limbs a lamp, a wax notepad, a stylus, and a prodding stick, waddled up on his two lower legs to supervise. We were all crouched down, for the roof pressed close, and the oil lamp—it was not samphron-oil—smoked a little. I smelled the lamp; but, also, I smelled another nostril-tickling odor. In that confined space in the grotesque shadows of the lamp, the little Och prodding and writing, a Rapa guard with a spear bending almost double ready to spit the first one of us who did anything against the law—for the law would hold a guard within his rights if he killed protecting a Hamalian—I picked up the unmistakable scent of squishes.

  Memories of Inch flashed into my mind, of his insatiable hunger for squish pie, and of the taboos he held in so great honor, and of that limb of Satan, Pando, taunting poor Inch with rich, ripe juicy squish pie.

  The Och squeaked and backed away.

  “All out!” He shouted so loudly some of the slaves jumped and a trickle of rock slid from the overhang. “All out at once! Guard, prod ‘em along, you onker!"

  We scuttled out.

  We did not go back to that seam again.

  Although I can recall that scene in all its clarity now, at the time with the same depressing grayness of days it passed from my mind; the little flicker of the idea of escape guttered like a candle in the opened stern-lantern of a swifter of the Eye of the World.

  Number 2789 harked back to the idea of escape himself, and so forced me to contemplate reality. Was not 8281 also Dray Prescot? Was I not Pur Dray, Krozair of Zy? The Lord of Strombor? Prince Majister of Vallia? Kov of this and that, and Strom of Valka? Zorcander? Was I not? No title would help me now, but a Krozair brother is never beaten until he is ceremoniously slipped into the sea over the side of his swifter—if he can be buried decently by his brothers of the Order of Krozairs of Zy instead of dying in some stinking prison or under the longswords of those Grodnim cramphs of Magdag.

  Despite all the horrendous difficulties, there had to be a way of escape.

  The sheer efficiency of the Hamalese would make any attempt enormously difficult.

  Probably escape was impossible. I wondered about it then, and I freely admit it, if it was possible for one man, even a Krozair of Zy, to escape from the Heavenly Mines of Hamal.

  But, from somewhere, I found the determination to make that attempt. I did not care how foolhardy it might be. I knew, and I believe I understood at last, that merely staying alive was not enough. My Delia, my Delia of Delphond—who so far had not been called Delia of Strombor, as she had once wished—could not pine for me longer if I was dead than if I remained in these Opaz-forsaken mines.

  So the decision was taken.

  I would try to escape.

  Number and order and law had worn me down. If you have listened to these tapes of my life upon Kregen you will know with what a hearty zest I detest and despise petty authority exercised in heartless and evil ways, without thought for those who are weak and unable to defend themselves.

  Discipline is necessary in life—sometimes it is a necessary evil—but excessive discipline is a perversion.

  Law dominated the men of Hamal.

  I would turn their law against them.

  Number 2789 would help. There were others, almost always newly arrived slaves who retained some shred of their old spirit. The Heavenly Mines in their soul-destroying regularity broke spirits as boys break twigs in sport.

  I must have a plan ready to broach to the others, and then make it work. I worked out a scheme. Simplicity. Speed and simplicity. The seizure of a flier, for we would never walk out, offered our only chance, and the fliers were always well guarded. Strength. Well, we were strong from our unceasing and strenuous labors and the coarse but filling food.

  The plans tumbled into my head and always the glorious face and figure of my Delia smiled at me, and her gorgeous brown hair with those outrageous tints of gold and auburn glinting filled me with uplifting determination. I collected a few loose scraps of jagged rock, for the law proscribed a slave possessing anything that might be used as a w
eapon when he came off shift, and all the picks and shovels with their numbers were checked into the stores.

  In the hut I lay on the earth and drew my blanket about me. I turned over to think and I saw a reddish-brown scorpion scuttle out from a crack in the rock and stare at me, his tail high.

  If you have listened to these tapes I believe you may have some faint inkling of my feelings then.

  In that reedy scratchy voice I had heard before on the Battlefield of the Crimson Missals, the scorpion spoke to me.

  “You get onker, Prescot!"

  I knew no one else could hear that voice, or mine, in reply.

  “I know."

  “There is no escape from the Heavenly Mines of Hamal."

  “You may be a messenger from the Star Lords, you and the Gdoinye; but I will escape."

  The scorpion waved his tail mockingly. “The Star Lords know you, Dray Prescot; they know you are a fool, a get onker, an onker of onkers. They know many things. They know you are such a stupid onker you might succeed where noone else has succeeded before."

  “Believe it, scorpion."

  “The Star Lords have a use for you, Prescot. A use far from here in space and time."

  Sheer terror hit me then, for if the Star Lords banished me back to Earth, as they could (as they could!), I might never be returned to Kregen beneath Antares. I started up, sweating, prepared to defy the Star Lords and all their superhuman power once again.

  But the scorpion was growing, was glowing now with that damnable blue radiance, was bloating into a gigantic blue shape that filled the hut and burst the rock walls and so engulfed the night sky and all the stars and tumbled me headlong into that radiant blue confusion.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Star Lords blunder

  Often and often had I cursed that I was merely a puppet, a mere hank of hair and blood and bone, dangling on the strings so callously pulled by the Savanti and the Star Lords. Well, that might be true, in its own way. But as you know I had been developing ways and means of circumventing the Star Lords. Oh, yes, they could still hurl me back four hundred light-years to the planet of my birth, perhaps never again to summon me to Kregen. They could forever sunder me from Delia, the only woman in two worlds that means anything to me—and I say that in due deference and love for all the other women who have been and are my friends. But this construction of artifices had more than once before kept me on Kregen. The Star Lords could be manipulated.