Transit to Scorpio

Chapter Nine

The most recalcitrant of slaves were sent to labor in the Jet Mines of Zenicce’s marble quarries. On the surface the quarries lay open to the twin suns whose topaz and opal fires blazed down on the white marble and lit it with a million hues and tones. Quarrying the white marble was hard unremitting labor; where we were, down in the Jet Mines, the work was a continual torture.

How many people realize, when they admire a fine piece of black marble statuary, a graceful vase or magnificent architrave, that agony and revulsion have gone into its production? Marble that is black is black because of the infusion of bituminous material. Whenever the marble splits, at every blow, it sends forth a fetid, filthy, stinking odor.

We were completely naked, for we wrapped our breechclouts around our mouths and noses to try in some ineffectual way to diminish that charnel house breath that gushed up at us each time our chisels struck into the stone.

Greasy wicks burned and sputtered in black marble bowls and pushed back a little of the darkness of the mines. In this mine there were twenty of us, and the guards had shut down the hewn-log doors upon us. Only when we had cut and hauled up the requisite amount of marble would they feed us, and if we did not produce we would not be fed. For a full seven days we would labor in the Jet Mines, continually sick, desperately attempting to adjust to the smells and the fatigue, and then we would be let out to labor for seven days in the white marble mines of the surface, and then for a further seven days we would be employed on dragging and ferrying the stones along the canals of the city.

My clansmen and I often missed that third period of seven days, and would rotate seven days in the black below and seven days in the white above. I could remember little of my journey here. The city had been large, impressive, cut by canals and rivers and broad avenues, massed with fine buildings and arcades and dripping with green and purple plants growing riotously over every wall. Many strange-looking peoples thronged the streets, half-beast, half-human, and all, so I understood, in inferior positions, little better than slaves and functionaries.

The most recalcitrant of Zenicce’s slaves labored in the Jet Mines. My resentment at slavery was so great that, I confess now, I failed to use my reasoning powers, and I fought back, and lashed out, and snatched the whips from the guards and broke them over their heads before a measure of wisdom returned.

When young Loki, a fine clansman from whom I felt honored to receive obi, died in my arms in the foul deliquescence of the Jet Mines, and the vile miasma from the broken walls of marble breathed its poisonous fumes over us as he sprawled there with his sightless eyes unable to be blessed by the twin fires of Antares, I knew I was responsible for his death, that I had been selfish in my hatred. But the guards were clever. They had split my clansmen into three sections, each laboring on a different shift, so that when aloft in the white quarries and escape a mere matter of planning and execution, I could not take that escape route because the rest of my men were not with me, a third of them down in the Jet Mines where no man would leave a friend.

The guards were recruited from a number of races. There were Ochs, and Fristles, and other beast-humans, notably the Rapas, human monsters who might have been the blasphemous spawn of gray vultures and gray men. Very quick with their whips, were the Rapas, quick and finicky and cutting.

Of all the many foolhardy actions I have made in my life what I did, that day in the Jet Mines of Zenicce, must rank as one of the most stupid, for I know it cost me a great deal to make the decision. At the end of our seven days in that filth and stink when we were let out to go aloft to work the white quarries, I secreted myself behind a stinking rock and waited for the new shift. One of my clansmen in the shuffle of passing slaves caught a friend from the newcomers and hurried him out in my place, so that numbers would tally.

When the massive log doors clashed shut on us I stood up in the lamplight.

“Lahal, Rov Kovno,” I said.

Rov Kovno looked at me silently. He was a Jiktar of a thousand, a mighty warrior, barrel-bodied, fair-headed and with a squashed broken nose and an arrogant jut to his chin. He was of the clansmen of Longuelm. I thought I had made a mistake, that I had miscalculated. I thought as I stood there in the lamp-splashed darkness with the stink of that infernal black marble choking my nostrils and mouth that he blamed me for our capture. I waited, standing, silently.

Rov Kovno moved forward. He held the hammer and chisel of our trade. He dropped them into the chippings and dirt of the floor. He put both arms out to me.

“Vovedeer!” he said, and his voice choked. “Zorcander!”

One of the men of his gang, not a clansman but just one more of the unfortunates enslaved by the city of Zenicce, looked at me and spat. “He stayed in here after his shift was up!” he said. He could not believe it. “The man is a fool-or mad! Mad!”

“Speak with respect, cramph, or do not speak at all,” growled Rov Kovno. He put the palms of his hands to his ears and his eyes and his mouth, and then over his heart. He had no need to speak, and I was pleased, for it meant my plan could go ahead and free me from that worry.

I grasped his hand. “I cannot escape without taking all my clansmen,” I told him. “There is a plan. As soon as you make your escape with your men, Ark Atvar will then make his. My shift will go last.”

“Does Ark Atvar know of the plan, Dray Prescot?”

“Not yet.”

“Then I will remain here, in the Jet Mines, for the next shift to tell him.”

I laughed. There, in the Jet Mines of Zenicce, I, a man not given to empty gestures, laughed.

“Not so, Rov Kovno. That is a task laid on your Vovedeer.”

He inclined his head. He knew, as did I, the responsibilities of leadership, of the taking of obi.

We all knew that the first escape would be relatively easy, a clean break from the wherries carrying the blocks of marble from the quarries through the canals to whatever building site in the city had need of them. The second escape would be a little more difficult; but it should be done. The third escape would be the most difficult; and that would fall to my shift; I knew my men would not have it any other way.

I had to give Rov Kovno an agreement that I would order Ark Atvar to make the first escape.

The fanatical loyalty of the clansmen of the great plains of Segesthes is legendary.

On the seventh day of that unremitting shift cutting and moving the huge black stones, Rov Kovno begged me to allow him to remain in that hell to pass on the instructions to Ark Atvar. I may take a foolish pride in thinking he would not have thought any the less of me had I succumbed to his earnest pleas. And, truth to tell, the idea of climbing up out of that pit and seeing once more the daylight and smelling the sweet air of Kregen affected me powerfully.

I said to Rov Kovno, rather harshly: “I have taken obi from you, and I know what obligations the taker of obi owes to the giver. Ask me no more.”

And he did not ask me any more.

When Rov Kovno whisked an incoming clansman back out to join his shift and make the numbers up I gagged on the stench of the place and almost broke free. But I restrained myself, and was able to speak almost normally as I said: “Lahal, Ark Atvar.”

The ensuing scene was almost a repetition of that before. No time would be wasted. From the week in the white quarries on the surface the slaves would go for their week transporting the blocks. Then Rov Kovno would escape. That week passed as slowly as any week ever has for me-and it was my third consecutive week in the Jet Mines. No one before, I was told, had survived three weeks in that nauseous hell. All that kept me alive and moving was the thought that I had taken obi from these men, and that I owed them their lives and liberty. I confess that the image of Delia of the Blue Mountains faded then, shaming me, to a thin and distant dream, the stuff of fantasy.

When the logs rolled back and the beast-guards prodded the fresh batch of slaves down I looked at the newcomers with a trembling expectancy. From the looks on the faces of my men I knew-they had never expected me to survive, they had not expected ever to see me again.

Now began the fourth consecutive week in the Jet Mines. By the last day I was very weak. The abominable stench coiled around my head, reached down with vile tendrils into my stomach, caused me a continuous blinding headache, made it impossible for me to keep anything down. My men worked like demons cutting and loading so that my uselessness would not prevent them from receiving our miserable quota of food and drink let down on ropes. The other slaves with us, not clansmen, grumbled; but a rough kind of comradeship had of necessity grown up and we worked together, well enough.

On that last day as the great black blocks swung up in their cradles, gleaming against the lamplight, we waited for our relief. At last the logs rolled back and the fresh shift of slaves began to descend. I saw shaven-headed Gons, and redheaded men from Loh, and some of the half-human, half-beast men driven as slaves; but not a single clansmen was herded down into the pit. Rov Kovno and his men had escaped!

There could not be any doubt of it.

As we rose up into the marble quarries with the glinting rock cut in gigantic steps all about us, and we saw the tiny dots of slaves and guards working everywhere on the faces, the great mastodon-like beasts hauling cut blocks, the wherries lying in the docks slowly loading as the derricks swung, I began to think life could begin again.

Parties from the other cells of the Jet Mines were joining our band of twenty as we were marched off. There were thousands of slaves employed here. If twenty or so escaped, the overseers would be blamed; but the work would go on. But those twenty men meant more to me than all the other thousands put together.

“By Diproo the Nimble-fingered!” wheezed a weasel-faced runty little man, blinking and squinting. “How the blessed sunlight stings my eyes!”

His name was Nath, a wiry, furtive little townsman with sparse sandy hair and whiskers, with old scars upon his scrawny body, his ribs a cage upon his flat chest. I had marked him out as of use. By his language I guessed him to be a thief of the city, and consequently one of use to me and my clansmen.

In the air above the quarries hung a constant cloud of dust, rock and marble dust, stirred up by continual activity, and this irritated eyes and nostrils, so that we all cut a piece of our breechclouts to wear across our faces, making the garment briefer than ever. Across from the huddle of swaybacked huts enclosed by a marble palisade where we barracked during our period of seven days in the white quarries I saw a band of slave women chipping marble blocks. Their backs gleamed with sweat and the sweat caught and held a patina of marble chips and dust. They too wore simply the slave breechclout. Around their ankles and joining them in coffles stretched heavy iron chains. There was no romance of slavery here, within the marble quarries of Zenicce.

There were more guards in evidence than usual.

One of my men, young Loku, a Hikdar of a hundred, who was poor dead Loki’s brother, reported to me. His fierce warrior’s face with its sheen of dust-covered sweat looked gray and sunken; but the vicious look in his eyes reassured me.

“The women told me, Dray Prescot,” he said. He had taken a risk, talking to the slave women in broad daylight. “There have been two escapes. One from the marble wherries, the other from, these very quarries, last night.”

“Good,” I said.

Nath, the thief, cleared his throat and spat dust.

“Good for them, bad for us. Now the Rapas, for sure, will strike twice as hard.”

Loku would have struck Nath for the disrespect he showed a Vovedeer; but I restrained him. I had need of Nath.

“Find out whose turn it is to feed the vosks,” I told Loku,

“and arrange for one of us to do that unsavory task.”

The vosks were almost completely devoid of intelligence, great fat pig-like animals standing some six feet at the shoulders, with six legs, a smooth oily skin of a whitish-yellow color, and atrophied tusks; their uses were to turn waterwheels, to draw burdens, to operate the lifting cages, and also to furnish remarkably good juicy steaks and crisp rashers. We, as slaves, saw them only as work animals. We ate the same slop as the vosks.

The mastodons which did the really heavy work fed cheaply on a special kind of grass imported from the island of Strye. As well as Rapa guards there were many Rapa slaves working with us, gray vulturine beings with scrawny necks and beaked faces, whose gray bodies reeked with their own unpleasant sweat. They were more restless than most in the quarries that night as the twin suns sank beneath the marble rim and the first of the seven moons glided across the sky.

I made Nath tell me what he knew of this city of Zenicce. The city contained approximately one million inhabitants, about the same number as the London of my own time, but in Zenicce there were uncounted numbers of slaves, hideously suppressed and manipulated. By means of the delta arms of the River Nicce and artificially constructed canals as well as by extraordinarily broad avenues, the city was partitioned into independent enclaves. The pride of House rode very high in Zenicce. Either one belonged to a House or one was nothing. I learned with an expression I kept as hard as the marble all about us beneath the glowing spheres of the first three moons of Kregen that the House color of the Esztercari Family was the emerald of the green sun of Kregen. So the cramph Galna whom I had hurled at the Princess Natema was of her House. I wondered how he would die, shackled to the horns of a vove and released across the broad plains of Segesthes? He would not, I fancied, die well-in which as I discovered later I did him an injustice.

Across the outer compound a Rapa slave was being beaten by a pair of Rapa guards. They used their whips with skill and cunning, and the gray vulture-like being shrieked and jerked in his chains. He had lost, so the whisper went around, his hammer and chisel, and if the overseer so willed it, that was a mortal offense. The vosks in their patient turning of the capstan bars would haul his broken body to the topmost step of the marble quarries, and then he would be flung out and down, to crash a bloody heap on the dust and chippings of the floor a thousand feet below. In the moon-shadowed dimness of the marble walls Loku crept to my side. His face was just as gray and lined; but a fiercer jut to his chin lifted my spirits.

“We feed the vosks for this sennight,” he said, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight.

“And?” I asked.

He drew from his breechclout a hammer and chisel. I nodded. It was death to be found with these tools in the barracks, when not working on the marble faces, or down in the Jet Mines. Down there, shut in by the logs for seven days and seven nights, slaves did not wear their chains. Now, back on the surface, we were heavily chained and shackled. “You have done well, Loku,” I said. Then, I added: “We shall not forget Loki, we clansmen of Felschraung.”

“May Diproo of the fleet feet aid me now!” moaned Nath. His wizened body shrank back. Loku cuffed him idly, sent him keening to a corner of the marble hut.

I did not think that Nath, the thief, would betray us. We waited that seven days in the white quarries until it was our turn to take the huge marble slabs in their straw balings onto the wherries and transport them into the city. Somewhere in the city, or better yet out on the open plains, my men would be waiting for us. They had not been recaptured. What was done to recaptured slaves was ugly and obvious, given the circumstances. All that week extra guards were posted, many of them men in the crimson and emerald livery of the city wardens, men supplied by all Houses as a kind of police force. The Rapas made very free with their whips. The Rapa slaves seethed. My men and I were model slaves.

The glint of marble chippings in the air, the eternal tink-tink-tink of the women trimming stones, the heavier thuds of the hammers on chisels all over the quarry faces, the deeper slicing roars as vosk-powered saws bit in clouds of flying chips and dust, all these sounds frayed at our nerves day after day; but we remained quiet and attentive and docile in our chains.

We took turns to feed the vosks, swilling the remnants of our slops into their troughs, pent between priceless marble walls. The places stank almost as much as the Jet Mines. They would put their pig-like snouts down and grunt and gulp and waves of the nauseating liquid would pulsate out around our legs, filling our noses with the stench. Those whose duty it was, and whom we had relieved of that duty, thought we were mad. Many guards patrolled, on the alert; but few cared to venture too near the vosk pens, as none ventured into the Jet Mines. One shift had refused to send up the stinking black marble, and had simply been shut in there to die. When other slaves had brought the twisted, ghastly bodies out, the guards paraded them through the workings so that none should miss the lesson.

Gradually, on my orders, we cut down the vosk swill.

On the second to last day the vosks were hungry; but we fed them sufficient to quieten the immediate rumblings of their stomachs. On the penultimate day we did not feed them at all, and they were as recalcitrant as an unpunished slave so that, for a time as I labored at the marble, with the sunshine lancing back from the brilliant surface and dazzling my eyes, I feared I had miscalculated. But the vosks are stupid creatures. At the end of the day they grunted and squealed and fairly broke into ungainly waddles on their way back to their pens. We tempted them with morsels of food, sparingly, and so quietened their uproar.

But they received no more food.

On the last day they were surly, puzzled, drawing their loads and turning their wheels with a stupid pugnacity that made me feel heartily sorry for them and what we were being forced to do to them. The slaves, mostly lads and girls, whose task was to prod them along, gave them a wider berth than usual, and stood well out of their way at evening when the twin suns sank in floods of gold and crimson and emerald.

We carried the great slopping vats of swill to the pens and I managed to spill a quantity of the vile stuff near the boots of a Rapa guard, who croaked his guttural obscenities at me, and I stood the flick of his whip in a good cause, for the guards moved away. We poured the slop down outside the marble walls of the pens. The vosks went hungry on the last night-and in the morning when we should have fed them for the last time before punting our loaded wherries from the clocks. They squealed and grunted and some, finding hunger a stimulus to a more primitive action, butted their atrophied tusks against the walls of their pens. That morning the twin suns of Antares rose with a more resplendent brilliance. We ate hugely of the slop the vosks had not seen. Nath was under the eye of Loku. All our chains had been cut through in stealth and with muffled hammers, and now were lapped about us, ready to be cast off. Nath shivered and called on his pagan god of thieves.

We went aboard the wherry for which we would be responsible, clambering about among the gigantic blocks of marble the women had trimmed clean and square, following the slave masons’ chalked marks, and I took the greatest chance of all and went swiftly and quietly in that morning radiance to the vosk pens. I threw open all the gates. With a vosk goad I urged the stupid beasts out, and I joyed to see the idiot ugliness of their faces, the pig-like malice in their tiny eyes. They were hungry. They were loose.

The vosks began to roam the quarries, looking for food. Guards ran yelling angrily, prodding with spears and swords. I saw one Och, his six limbs agitated, attempt to prod a stupid vosk back and rejoiced at his dumbfounded surprise when the usually docile beast turned on him and knocked him end over end with a resounding thump of those two tiny tusks. Had I been inclined, I would have laughed.

I jumped from the jetty onto our wherry and joined the rest of my men, my chains wrapped about me, as the Rapa guards stalked aboard. There would have been ten of them, I knew, for the citizens of Zenicce were naturally touchy about insufficiently guarded slaves in their city. This morning, because for some unfathomable reason the vosks had gone mad and were overrunning the quarries, there were only six guards. We pushed off and with the long poles punted slowly along the canal between marble tanks.

Soon the banks became brick, and then the first of the houses passed. Mere hovels, these, of people without a House, living on the outskirts of the city, free only in name.

I admit now it was a strange sensation to me to be riding water again.

We passed beneath an ornate granite arch over which passed the morning procession of market vendors and peddlers and housewives and riffraff and thieves, and all that smell and bustle and morning talk and laughter awoke a thrilling in my veins. The sky grew pinker with that pellucid liquid rose-glow of Kregen on a fine morning. The air as we approached nearer the city grew sweeter, and this alone indicates the putrid atmosphere of the mines in which we had sweated and slaved. The canal debouched into a larger channel whose brick walls rose to a height of some ten feet above the water. On each side the blank walls of houses, each joined to the other, frowned down, their roofs at different heights and forms of architecture so that the skyline formed an attractive frieze against the light.

Sentinels in the colors of their Houses were to be seen at vantage points along those walls. Between enclave and enclave on the perimeter of the city lies always an armed truce. Close now to our destination we swung out of the broad canal which had steadily increased its freight of traffic. There were light swift double-ended craft which, given the niceties of canal navigation, would be almost certainly some form or model of gondola. There were deep-laden barges, like ours, punted by slaves. There were stately pulling barges gay with awnings and silks, the oarsmen sometimes men, as often as not some outlandish creatures decked out in weird finery, all gold or silver lace with cocked hats gay with plumes. I watched all these strange craft with as strange a hunger in my belly, for I had not seen a boat for years, let alone a ship billowing under full canvas to the royals, heeling to the Trades.

Ahead a truly enormous arch towered over the canal. One side of the bridge laid atop the arch was festooned with ocher and purple trappings; the other side gleamed all in emerald green. We turned up a perimeter canal past the bridge, turning toward the green hand, and soon a more open aspect made itself felt in the architecture. We had entered an enclave. From the colors I knew it to be the enclave of the House of Esztercari and a fierce and unholy joy threatened for a moment to sway me from my purpose.

“Ahead a truly enormous arch towered over the canal.”

The building site lay to the rear of a stone jetty. We poled in slowly and more slowly toward the jetty, the water pooling and swirling from the wherry’s blunt bows. I nodded to two of my men. They slid their poles inboard and ducked down in the center of the spaces we had left between the carefully-stacked marble blocks. I heard short sharp sounds, as of iron on iron.

A Rapa guard swung around from the bows, looking back, his vulturine face questioning. I, from my position in the stern, also looked back as though seeking, like the guard, for the noise astern. I saw another wherry following ours, loaded with marbles, its crew Rapas, its guards Ochs. It was coming in very fast, due to our loss of way, and would collide very soon. I did not mind. Now I could hear the fresh gurgle of water, bright and cheerful and inspiriting, welling from inside our wherry.

“What’s that racket?” demanded the Rapa in his croaking voice.

I lifted my shoulders to indicate I did not know, and then jumped down from the high stern and went forward, as though he had called me, trailing my pole. The wherry was appreciably lower in the water. A Rapa guard in the waist made as though to stop me. Him, I struck full force and knocked down and into the marble blocks where two of my men seized him and silenced him. Two more Rapa guards had vanished. Water sloshed and gurgled almost to the gunwale. Another Rapa guard vanished. I saw Loku, with Nath at his side, loop a coil of chain about the fifth guard’s bird-like ankles in the big boots and drag him down out of sight. His beginning shriek chopped off short, as though a bight of chain had snared his windpipe.

The following wherry had avoided us and was poling past. No one aboard seemed to be taking any notice of us-and then I saw why. Instantly fury and outrageous indignant anger spurted up in me.

The Rapa slaves on the second wherry were slaying their Och guards with their chains, were flinging the small six-limbed puffy-faced people overboard in bright splashes of water. We were now sinking. Within seconds the canal water slopped inboard. Now the plan was for us to dive and swim for the bank, covered by the confusion of the sinking wherry. But guards were rushing from every direction. The Rapa revolt had sparked an instant reaction, so clumsy, so violent had it been. Our own escape could not avoid detection now. The Rapas’ wherry touched the jetty and they boiled ashore, shrieking, inflamed, their grisly chains whirling in their fists.