Alan Akers - Krozair of Kregen

A week. Give a galley slave a week, more or less, and he will be either dead or toughened enough to last another week, and then another, and then perhaps, if his stamina lasts, to live. If the existence of a galley slave can be called living.

The Xaffer, Xelnon, lasted five days.

He would have died sooner, but Green Magodont caught a wind Swinging out of Magdag and so we slaves were spared much of the continuous hauling that is the killer. But he died. He did not tell us what he had done to be condemned to the galleys. Usually Xaffers are given the lighter tasks of slaves, household chores, secretarial work, record-keeping. Most often they, along with Relts, are employed as stylors. But he was here, with us, slaving, and then he was a mere cold corpse, blood-marked by the lash, a bundle to be thrown overboard to the chanks. A Rapa took his place, brought up from the slave-hold. His gray vulturine face with that brooding, aggressive hooked beak and the bright feathers rising around his crest fitted in with the stark horror of our situation.

We spoke rarely. We learned the Rapa’s name was Lorgad, that he had got himself stinking drunk on dopa and had run amok in the mercenaries’ billets. Exactly what he had then done he did not say, presumably because he could no longer remember. He pulled on the loom with us and we labored and sweated in the stink and dank darkness of our floating prison.

On the day after Xelnon died we beached up on a small island, one of the many small islands that smother the larger maps of the Eye of the World with measle spots. The swifter was hauled up stern first onto a beach of silver sand. I have said that the old devil the teredo worm is nowhere as fierce on Kregen as upon Earth and often the swifters are not sheathed in copper or lead. Often, especially in the cases of the larger types, they are. Green Magodont was not sheathed, and so despite her size her captain had her hauled up out of the water as often as he could. The task was formidable; but we slaves, still chained, were flogged up and over the side and so set to work hauling the drag ropes. The island glimmered under the distant golden fire of two of the moons of Kregen; the Twins, eternally revolving one about the other, smiled down upon our agony.

We were herded back into the swifter and chained up, for in the ship lay the best prison for us. In the normal course of events the gangs on a loom remained together in duties of this kind; but the captain of Green Magodont, although undeniably a cruel and vicious overlord of Magdag, was of the school that liked to rotate his oar-slaves between tiers. Once the agonies of learning how to pull correctly to the rhythm of the whistles and drums and to conduct the necessary evolutions smartly and promptly had been hammered into our skulls and muscles, we thalamites of the lower tier were rotated to the center tier, where the zygites pulled.

Green Magodont carried on the short-keel system eight men to her upper bank, six to her middle, and four to her lower. We did not aspire to the center tier until some time; but, at last, we were deemed sufficiently proficient to be rotated.

We had left that island where we had gone ashore to work, and since then, although the swifter had touched land each night, we had not gone ashore again. As to our journey and its direction, apart from my guess that we were headed southwest, I knew nothing. Oar-slaves are not consulted on the conning of the ship.

“Will they really let us onto the middle deck, Dak?”

“Once we can be trusted to pull correctly, Fazhan. Aye.”

Rukker the Kataki grunted and turned to find a more comfortable position, his tail curled up and looped over his shoulder. We rested this night, as we rested any time, chained to our bench. “Do we ever get up onto the upper deck?”

“Only when we are considered fully proficient.” I did not want to talk. More and more I had been thinking about my daughter Velia, of the tragically short time I had known her and known she was my daughter, of the manner of her death. “I can tell you that if I captained this damned swifter this loom would remain in the thalamites forever.”

“You!” scoffed Rukker. “Captain a swifter!”

“I said if.”

“And yet you know about Magdaggian swifters, Dak.” Fazhan had lost much of the scarlet in his face; he had thinned and fined down on the food we ate, on the daily exercise. “I was a swifter ship-Hikdar before we were taken. But I know little about Grodnim swifters.”

“I have been oar-slave before,” I said, and left it at that.

Fazhan grunted and turned his head on his arms, spread on the loom. But Rukker showed instant interest. “So you escaped?”

“Aye.”

“Then you will certainly assist me when we escape.”

“I escaped,” I said, “when we were taken by a swifter from Sanurkazz. A swifter captained by a Krozair of Zy.” I said this deliberately. I wanted to probe Fazhan — and Rukker, too. For the martial and mystic Order of Krozairs of Zy is remote from ordinary men on the Eye of the World, strange, and dedicated to Disciplines almost too demanding for frail human flesh. Fazhan turned his head back quickly.

“The Krozairs!” he said. He breathed the word as a man might in talking about demigods. The Rapa, Lorgad, snuffled and hissed. “Krozairs! We fought them — aye, and we thrashed them.”

“Thrashed?” I said.

The Rapa passed a hand over his feathers, smoothing them. “Well — it was a hard fight. But King Genod’s new army won — as it always wins.”

“But one day it will be smashed utterly!” said Fazhan. His voice blazed in the night, and surly voices answered from the other rowing benches in the gloom, bidding the onker be quiet so tired men might sleep.

I had learned what little Rukker would tell me of his story, and I knew Fazhan’s, that he had been a ship-Hikdar in a swifter from Zamu. Yet he was not a Krozair Brother, not even of the Krozairs of Zamu. As for Rukker, as he said himself, he was essentially a land soldier, and knew nothing of ships and the sea. As a mercenary he had hired out his — And then he had paused, and corrected himself, and said he had been hired out as a paktun to Magdag. I knew, if I was right and he was a gernu, a noble, that he had taken a force of his own country to fight for Magdag for pay. Now this was, to me, passing strange, for my previous experience with Katakis had been of them as slave-masters, slavers who bartered human flesh. There were a number of races of diffs living up in the northeastern seaboard of the Eye of the World, notably around the Sea of Onyx. Rukker had said he came from an inland country there, a place he had once referred to as Urntakkar, that is, North Takkar. He did not refer to it again. I said, “Have you heard of Morcray?”

“No.”

So I let that lie, also.

But if the Katakis were moving out from their traditional business and becoming mercenaries, then the future looked either darker and more horrible, or scarlet and more interesting, depending on the hardness of your muscles and the keenness of your sword.

We sailed in company with other swifters; just how many we thalamites in our stinks and gloom could not know. We anchored for the night and then took a wind and so rested the next day, and on the following day, the wind fell and we pulled. That was a hard day. Another ten slaves were hurled overboard, either dead or flogged near to death. Those who remained hardened, and the replacements from the slave-hold were those who failed.

That night we once again hauled Green Magodont out of the water. I saw six other swifters being hauled up, and also there were signs of a wooden stockade being constructed on the shore into which the slaves might be herded. I knew that Magdag, no less than every other Green city of the northern shore, was utilizing every possible sinew of war. Slaves were now becoming valuable, even though many a poor devil had been captured by the new army of King Genod, the genius at war. In the stockade only a few fights broke out. Most of us wanted to stretch out — and what a luxury that was! — and sleep. I did not stay awake long. The four of us — for the Rapa, Lorgad, was accepted by us as an oar-comrade — slept together. The morning came all too soon, and with many groans and stretching of stiff joints, we rose and were doused down with a vile concoction of seawater and pungent ibroi, and then we gobbled the food thrown to us. This was a mash of cereal, a torn hunk of stale bread, and a handful of palines. For the palines everyone gave thanks to whatever gods they revered. The whip-Deldars stalked among us, the lashes licking hungrily, sorting us out amid a great clanking of chains.