The Suns of Scorpio Page 5

  “By Zim-Zair,” panted a burly slave, entirely naked, next to me on the adjoining rope. “I’d have this accursed heathen statue topple and split into a thousand fragments!”

  “Silence, slave!” A Chulik flicked a cunning whip in a welting blow down the man’s back. “Pull!”

  The slave, his mass of curly black hair wet and glittering in the suns-shine, cursed but had no spittle to express his contempt. “Loathsome beasts,” he grunted, low, as he hauled with cracking muscles. His skin was tanned and healthy, his nose an arrogant beak, his lips thin. “By Zantristar the Merciful! If I had my blade at my side now—”

  On and on we hauled and heaved that mighty colossus into its appointed resting place. It would make, I knew, another fine haunt for spiders.

  As we crowded out through that towering opening, jumbled together, the workers talking and laughing now the work was done, the slaves moody and silent, I made it my business to get alongside the curly-haired man.

  “You mentioned Zim,” I said.

  He drew a brawny forearm across his bearded lips. He looked at me cautiously.

  “And if I had, would that surprise a heretic?”

  I shook my head. We moved into the light. “I am no heretic. I thought Zair—”

  “Grodno is the sky deity these poor deluded fools worship when all men living in the light know it is to Zair we must look for our salvation.” His eyes had measured me. “You have not been a slave long? Are you a stranger?”

  “From Segesthes.”

  “We know nothing of the outer ocean here in the Eye of the World. If you are a stranger, then in peril of your immortal soul I counsel you to have no truck with Grodno. Only to Zair can men look for salvation. They took me from my galley, the overlords of Magdag; they branded me and made me a slave. But I shall escape, and return across the inner sea to Holy Sanurkazz.”

  We were thrust apart in the throng, but I caught his arm. Here was information for which I hungered. The name of Sanurkazz caught at my imagination. I have mentioned how, when I first heard the name Strombor, my blood thumped and I felt a golden splendor unfolding. Here, now, was an echo of that feeling as the name Sanurkazz fell for the first time on my ears.

  “Can you tell me, friend—” I began.

  He interrupted me. He looked down at my hand on his arm.

  “I am a slave, stranger. I suffer the whip and the irons and the balass. But no slave or worker lays a hand on me.”

  I took my hand away. I did not remove it swiftly. I did not express an apology, for I have made it a rule never to apologize, but I nodded, and my face must have given him pause.

  “What is your name, stranger?”

  “Men call me Stylor, but—”

  “Stylor. I am Zorg — Zorg of Felteraz.”

  We would have gone on speaking, but the overseers whipped the slaves away and shouted at the workers, and so we parted. I had been impressed by this man. He might be a slave; he was not broken.

  By the time we had returned to the brick works, a temporary site among the colossal buildings all around, the time for our midday meal break had long passed and we were put immediately onto brick making again. As I checked the production and made the neat marks in the Kregish cursive, for there was always a strict accounting, I pondered on this man, Zorg of Felteraz. He, most clearly, did not share in the worship of the green-sun deity, Grodno. He was a follower of Zair. So, that was why he was a slave and not a worker. The differences between the two conditions were small; they existed and were either resented or proudly proclaimed; but for a free man the pride involved was a pitiful thing.

  My days among the megalithic buildings of Magdag passed.

  The sheer scope of the complexes amazed me. Men would be perched atop crazy scaffoldings of wood executing marvelous friezes along the architraves, five hundred feet in the air. The statuary varied from life size to enormous creations of many artificially interlocked masses of stone. So much art, so much skill, so much painstaking labor, and all to decorate and beautify vast and empty halls. Some of these buildings were truly gigantic. I heard odd comments about the time of dying, the time of the Great Death and the Great Birth, but little added up beyond what might be a simple agricultural death and re-creation cycle.

  I was sure of one thing. These were not giant mausoleum sacrifices of the living to the dead: they were not tombs; they were not Kregan Pyramids.

  Most of life aboard ship is occupied in waiting, and so I slipped easily into that life among the megaliths of Magdag, having been well-schooled in waiting. I knew that if I tried to break away without the permission of the Star Lords — I had by now convinced myself they must be the instruments of my present position — I would be punished by transferral back to Earth.

  As a stylor I could move among the buildings with some freedom, and I spent some time searching for the man of Zair, Zorg of Felteraz, but I did not find him. However, I will speak only of those things immediately touching on what followed, leaving out most of the unpleasant punishments; the starvings that followed low production or the lack of height in a wall by a certain date; the sporadic revolts ruthlessly put down by the half-beast, half-human guards; the infrequent days of feasting; the fights and quarrels and thievery of the warrens. They made a life savage, bizarre, demanding: a life that no man or woman should have to endure.

  I said to Genal: “Why do you and your people slave and suffer for the overlords simply so as to build them more empty monuments? Don’t you wish to live your own life?”

  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.

  “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 miser
ly 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.”