Jandar of Callisto

8. ZANADAR, THE CITY IN THE CLOUDS

As it happened, our arrival at the city of the Sky Pirates came about during one of my sleep shifts.

For days we had been soaring at two thousand feet above the dark crimson carpet of the Grand Kumala. But yesterday, towards evening, we at last reached the foothills of the Varan-Hkor mountains, and by dawn the towers of Zanadar were in sight.

My wheel gang slept in a cubicle on an upper level, just under the row of ventilation louvers. Thus I had a splendid view of the City in the Clouds, as Zanadar was sometimes called.

Directly ahead of our prow, a few degrees to port, a tall peak soared on the horizon, lifting its castled crest out of the purple gloom and into the brilliance of dawn. The mountains were largely of white marl, like snowy chalk veined with sparkling gray quartz; the peak was jagged, the city built at different levels, various towers or battlements connected by airy bridgeways which spanned the gap between many of the imposing structures, looking from our distance rather like cobwebs entangled in stiff spears of grass, twinkling jeweled in the morning light.

As the frigate drew nearer I could hear the stentorian voice of the First Mate bellowing orders through his megaphones to belay all lines and secure hatches.

"Ahoy the poop!" he bawled in his foghorn voice. "Signal crew stand by the aft lines. Prepare to display colors. Look alive at the sternpost steerage, you lads―"

A fainter voice sounded from the pilothouse and the First Mate relayed it aft. "Starboard your rudder, two points!" he bellowed. Then: "Look alive at those winches! Trim your rear surfaces―hard about on that rudder, men!"

I felt a shudder run through the taut structure and the great winches above me creaked, guy-stays thrumming with tension as the winch gang feathered the aileronlike segments of the vans to turn the ship about to port. The endlessly complex process of flying the Skygull I found ceaselessly fascinating. I would have given anything to be above-decks just then, watching how they did it. I understood that the winch gangs controlled the pitch and pace of the vans, while the rudder gang did the actual steering by shifting that enormous fan-ribbed rudder fin to either port or starboard; the whole operation was coordinated from the pilothouse, the captain's commands relayed from the belvedere observation deck to the first mate, who stood atop a sort of conning tower between the twin masts; he in turn relayed orders to winch or rudder gangs.

Now we were coming about into the wind. The wingbeats were slower now, the great vans almost still, gliding on the air currents, the forward motion gradually slowing as the downwards-tilted aileron surfaces dragged against the thrust. Struts creaked as the frigate tilted to port, lurching a little, and the mate raised his voice in a roar, telling the starboard winch gang to trim their pitch. I shall not translate the sulphurous oaths wherewith his command was peppered.

Zanadar lay dead ahead now, and much nearer. Built atop a mountain, the city of the Sky Pirates had no need of walls or battlements or even a barbican. The structures I could see were built in a characteristic style of architecture that ran to four-sided buildings, with flat roofs and tiered levels shielded by bright striped awnings. The buildings were very massive and solid, with enormously thick walls, and they tapered sharply from base to summit; I suppose this style was dictated by the cold air of this altitude and the constant gale-force winds that whistled about us. The crest of this mountain broke into a number of subsidiary peaks, a dozen of which had been artificially leveled off and converted to landing plazas for the ornithopter fleet. I could just see railed runways on the surface of the nearer plaza towards which we seemed to be heading. At each side of the plaza was a sort of roofless hangar, like a dry dock. Three dry docks were occupied by frigates comparable to ours. The docks rose above the level of the amidships deck and the frigates were hauled into place by dock gangs pulling on deck lines. There must be wheels, perhaps retractable ones, on the underside of the ship, for the vessels obviously were landed in the center of the plaza and were slid down the rails into moorage, then secured by heavy deck cables fastened to mooring posts.

Now the wingtips flapped in a swift, light beat. With each agitation of the ribbed vans, the hollow compartments echoed like a beaten drum. Fantastic vistas of tower and airy span and yawning chasm swept past the open louver. I glimpsed rooftop gardens, bright with colored blossoms, ripening fruits, glossy scarlet leaves, shielded from the bitter cold of the mountain air behind glassed cupolas, as we swung about.

From each spire glowing pennants unrolled on the wind their heraldic glories. Tiered levels fell away beneath, disclosing glass-domed boulevards where bright-robed throngs strolled between flowering trees, or rode in rickshaws of gilt paper and wood. This higher level, I learned later from Lukor, was called the Upper City; here dwelt the nobles and aristocrats and courtiers, with their attendant satellites―minstrels, clowns, jugglers, mountebanks, perfumers, topiarists, paper sculptors, the composers of masques, the blenders of cosmetics, the leaders of revels. This was the leisurely, affluent class, supported by the second level and its labors.

Now, as we circled lower, riding the updraft, we flew over what Lukor later termed the Middle City. The streets here were unshielded, open to the winds; the houses more squat, the streets lined with inns, wineshops, alehouses, mercantile establishments, drinking booths, houses of gaming or pleasure. Gaudy paper lanterns swung in the wind from long nodding poles: blue, copper, witch-green, lemon-like goblin eyes in the early morning gloom. Here dwelt the great Pirate Captains of the Brotherhood of the Clouds: the lordly privateers who led their own ships, or, in some cases, entire squadrons, in raiding expeditions against the trader caravans that attempted perilous crossings through the mountain passes, or against nearby cities and towns. Swaggering in belled cloaks and swash boots, bedizened wenches leaning on their velvet-clad arms, steel rapiers dangling against bulging purses, they strode the windy streets of the Middle City in drunken and arrogant splendor.

Of the Lower City I saw but little: grubby hovels crouched around the bases of the soaring tiers, grimfaced guards and scurrying, bent figures, shuffling laborers, and grimy urchins. Here dwelt the slaves, the servitors, the thieves and the outcasts, fallen from the glittering heights above to this wallow of squalid poverty.

We hovered on motionless vans. The first mate bellowed. Screws turned, releasing pressure cocks. The squeal of escaping gases. The frigate trembled, sagged, hovered, sagged again, and then her keel ground and grated against the floor of the plaza. I heard the thud of work gangs racing to attach the cables. Then the squeak of oiled bearings and the rumble of the rails as we were towed into moorage and made fast.

Darloona disembarked from an upper-deck gangplank; I caught only a glimpse of her, laughing, pink-cheeked with excitement, resplendent in drifting silks, leaning on Thuton's arm as he urbanely saluted the port colors.

I trudged out at ground level, one of a bent-backed, shuffling line of lowly slaves.

The slave pens were in the Lower City, behind walls as thick and massive as Sequoia palisades. Here Koja and I received numbered tags, suspended around our necks on stiff wire. We would share a three-man cubicle in the giant structure, and would be on call for the next corsair of the skies who required new blood to man the wheels. In the meanwhile, we had nothing to do but vegetate.

For me, the transition from the barbarism of the Horde camp to an advanced urban civilization was unsettling. How like modern Stockholm or London, I thought wryly. Grubby slums cowering at the foot of soaring mansions and palaces; the distant clamor of laughter and music from bright pleasure gardens far above drifting down to squalid alleys and fetid hovels at their foot.

For Koja, who had known nothing but the life of camp, hunt, and war, it must have been a revelation. But the somber fellow spoke little, keeping to his own thoughts.

Ours was a lethargic existence. Twice a day guards marshaled us into double lines and we shuffled forth to feed at long porcelain troughs filled with a lukewarm greasy stew of odds and ends of meat, pieced out with chunks of some tuberlike vegetable. We had each a wooden cup wherewith to dip our slops out of this common feeding trough. The cracked, dirty plaster of the walls―the greasy, food-splattered floor―the scrape and clatter of cups dipped in the congealing slumgullion―the blurred, weary, dull-eyed faces ―how different from the spacious rooms with waxed glistening floors, where well-groomed officers and aristocrats in immaculate uniforms glittering with gold braid―and the Princess of Shondakor―probably spent these same days!

News filtered down from the lordly heights above. Prince Thuton had vowed to restore Darloona to the throne of Shondakor. The emissaries of Zanadar were meeting with chieftains of the Black Legion to discuss the alternatives of peace and war. The entire armada of ornithopters was being readied for an assault against Darloona's capital, unless the usurper, Arkola, relinquished his hold on the throne.

Rumors whispered a royal wedding was imminent.

I began to reconsider my early opinion of Thuton as perhaps a hasty one. Koja's depiction of Thuton's motives as base, sordid, and political had sounded plausible at the time, and perhaps were still plausible ―but was I not swayed in my opinion more by personal grudge than by the evidence? For the tenor of the news was such that it looked as if Thuton was making a genuine effort to drive out the Black Legion and restore Darloona to her capital.

I hated the suave, foppish fellow. But the personal humiliation, the resounding defeat I had received at his hands, and my bitterness at the way he had swept Darloona from my side―these explained my dislike.

Doubtless, I should never see Darloona again. She was not likely to venture into the squalor of the slave pens, and her contempt and loathing towards me, however founded on misunderstanding, would certainly prevent any future commerce between us.

They said the charming Thuton had swept her off her feet, and would make her his Queen ere Year's End Day.

Perhaps it was time I stopped thinking about her.

She belonged to the glittering world of luxury and privilege, far above me. I could not have helped her, and Thuton could. She felt only loathing for me. Perhaps, I thought, I should turn my mind from her and her high affairs and start thinking about myself.

It was Koja who discovered the broken grating.

There had been a ferocious storm. Howling gale winds shook the thick-walled structures of the mountaintop city. Icy rains deluged the peak and went sluicing through the streets. Much damage had been done, so much that the usual work force of street laborers required considerable reinforcements. Every third slave in the pens was pressed into temporary repair and clean-up work. Koja was chosen from my cubicle.

He returned that evening with curious news.

A section of roof tiles had been torn away from the top of the building where we were immured. While laying new tiles by the roof-edge gutters, Koja had discovered a broken louver grating, loose at one end.

The stench of four thousand men penned up in one colossal warren of dirty cubicles was overpowering. Inadequate sanitary conditions contributed to the pervasive and unhealthy miasma. Men long penned in such close quarters were known to eventually develop diseased lungs and succumb to the spitting sickness.

For this reason, high up under the roof, wide louver-shuttered windows had been cut in the walls. Thick gratings of iron rods, clamped to the stone in brackets, kept the windows from serving as a mode of escape.

One of these gratings had broken. The damp had eaten into the outer plaster facing, corroding the iron bolts which had not been replaced for decades.

Koja solemnly reported that with a bit of luck, perfect timing, and the inattention of the guards, a man could climb out through the grating. But it would take two men to effect the escape―one to hold the heavy grating open, while the other slithered through.

"But once through, then what?" I objected. "How do you climb down the sheer wall?"

"That is not the way," he said, his harsh tones low so that none could overhear. "From the window, a man could climb up to the roof ledge, which is only a few feet above the top of the louver. And the roof of the slave pens connects with other buildings and higher tiers by means of those aerial bridgeways we glimpsed as the frigate descended to moor. It should not be difficult for one as strong as Jandar."

We discussed the notion further; in the end we decided to try it. Even should the attempt result in our demise, such an outcome was preferable to a short, dreary life at the wheel.

We resolved, in fact, to attempt our escape that very night. Delay might well foil our chances, for at any time an ornithopter might require wheel slaves for a voyage.

We slept in flimsy cubicles which extended, one after another, around the succession of balconies which lined the walls of the huge room. Wheel slaves are not chained, and their activities are kept under the most cursory observation. I do not know whether this is because the enervating and monotonous drudgery of wheel labor is believed to break morale and crush spirit to the point at which a wheel slave is incapable of seeking to escape, or whether the deadly va lu rokka philosophy is shared by other races of Thanator besides the Yathoon arthropods. However, it is fortunate for Koja and me that such is the case. Guards stroll about the balconies at irregular intervals, but in the hours between midnight and dawn they tend to congregate in the guardhouse, swapping erotic boasts and swigging a potent liquor called quarra with their comrades-in-arms, to the neglect of their regular rounds. Hence we selected two o'clock in the morning as the best time for our escape.

When daylight died, the guards lit flickering oil lamps, sealed against tampering and pinned to the wall with iron brackets. Koja and I retired to our pallets, yawning as if overpoweringly sleepy, and stretched out. All about us slaves scratched, grumbled, spat, prepared to retire.

For hours we lay motionless, pretending to sleep. From time to time a guard ambled by, starting on the lowest tier of balconies, circling the huge dim room, ascending by creaking ladders to the next tier, thus passing all cubicles. After the third such complete tour, the rounds became perfunctory, and the upper balconies were unvisited.

At the agreed time, Koja and I slunk silently from our cubicle, and ascended as unobtrusively as possible to the highest level. Here all was dark, and few eyes could have seen us had anyone been awake at this hour. We clambered as quietly as possible to the top of an unoccupied cubicle directly below the louvered window. Koja, whose long arms gave him greater reach, was elected to hold open the heavy grating while I, the more agile of the two, climbed upon his upper thorax and wriggled through the opening. Luckily the Zanadarian mode of architecture uses very thick masonry; and thus the jamb of the window was two feet wide, affording me plenty of room to stand.

I climbed out. Koja lowered the grill back into place, so that I could use the bars of the grating as the rungs of a ladder. It was not difficult to climb up to the roof from the top of the grating, using the slats of the louver for extra footing.

The night was clear and cold. Europa, which the Thanatorians call Ramavad, was aloft, a luminous globe of frosty azure-silver. Neither of the two other large moons had yet ascended the night skies, but Jupiter's smallest and inmost moon, tiny Amalthea, hung like a throbbing flake of gold against the dark. To the natives of Thanator, it is Juruvad, the "Little Moon."

The roof thrust out sharply in an overhanging ledge. Anchoring one arm over this abutment, I bent to assist Koja. I had bound a strip torn from my loincloth to the barred grating, and now I pulled on this, opening the grille so that my companion could climb out. ,

But even as I did so, and as Koja thrust his head and one segmented arm through the opening, the sound of angry cries and thudding feet came to me from within.

And so our escape was discovered. Hanging there above the street, one arm hooked over the edge of the roof, the other holding the barred grating free, my toes braced against the topmost slat of the louver, there was little I could do to aid my comrade. I urged him to hurry, to climb up on the jamb. But guards had seized his lower limbs and in a moment they had dragged him back into the pens.

He turned one last solemn gaze on me before vanishing from my sight. And he spoke one last farewell.

"The Lords of Gordrimator be with you, Jandar! Do not attempt to help me. Now you must seek your own freedom―"

"Koja!" I cried.

His last words were: "Save yourself! And thus I discharge my uhorz―"

And then they dragged him from the window.

I hung between earth and heaven, wishing there was something I could do to help him. But then the snarling visage of a guard thrust through the grating, the silver luminance of Ramavad gilding his copper helm while he jabbed a long spear at my legs.

It would do Koja no good if I were slain or captured. I kicked free of the louver and clambered up over the edge of the roof. The grating I let slam back: it caught the guard full in the face and I heard him fall with thump and clatter.

Safe on the roof, I climbed to my feet and looked around me. A feeling of grim despair possessed my heart. Never in all my months on Thanator had I been so completely alone as at this moment.

My only friend in the hands of the guards of Zanadar, I was alone and without a weapon in a strange, unfamiliar city, surrounded by enemies.