The week was extremely educational.
Some of the wheel slaves were captives taken in war; others were native Zanadarians sold into slavery by impecunious parents or condemned to the wheels of the flying navy for some misdemeanor, or because of accumulated debts. The Sky Pirates require an enormous number of wheel slaves, a steady supply of fresh new bodies, as the grueling labor wears men out swiftly. Few wheel slaves last out their first year belowdecks. For this reason, I learned, the civil courts of Zanadar used slavery as a standard punishment for almost everything―murder, theft, embezzlement, adultery, bankruptcy, rape, attempted assassination, fraud, and just about any other crime you could name. And slavery automatically meant the wheel.
We labored in shifts around the clock, four hours at the wheel and four hours off―a murderous pace. After my first three or four shifts at the wheel I thought I would die. After a few more, I wished that I could die. Never had I realized the body could experience such bone-deep exhaustion. As the saying has it: I discovered muscles I did not know I possessed. But we were fed heartily on good vastodon steaks washed down with a ration of some fierce red wine. And unlike the slaves at the oarlocks of an old-time galley back on Earth, the huge compartment wherein we labored and in whose corners we slept were not black stinking holes. Wide-open louvers in the upper works permitted a bracing flood of cold fresh air to circulate. In time I began to harden; my shoulders toughened and my back, belly, and chest began to develop steely thews.
Between shifts I talked with my fellow slaves. They were a motley crew, about half of them black-haired Zanadarians with paper-white complexions, the rest from every tribe and nation across the breadth of Thanator. There were silver-gray, chitin-clad Yathoon such as Koja, although, as it happened, they came from various of his rival clans and there were none of his own people at the wheels of the frigate. But there were many of the honey-skinned, redheaded Ku Thad with their slanted emerald eyes. Beyond these representatives of the three Thanatorian races I had already encountered during the course of my travels and adventures across the surface of the jungle moon, there were others from peoples I had not yet met, including many from a squat, dour-faced race who had lank, colorless hair, swarthy, greasy skins, and yellow eyes. These, I was told, were members of a bandit army called the Chac Yuul, the Black Legion. I will have quite a bit more to say of them before my tale is told.
We were en route to Zanadar, the city of the Sky Pirates. Scuttlebutt had it that the glib-tongued, wily Pirate Prince had persuaded Darloona that he wished to help her people against their foes, but to do so must first return to the Cloud Kingdom to marshal his forces. Scuttlebutt also had it that Thuton was wooing her for all he was worth, with an eye towards uniting the two realms. I ground my teeth at this information, and entertained some bitter thoughts of what I would like to do to the Sky Pirate when next I had him at sword's point.
Talking to the wheel slaves helped fill in the blanks in my background information. There were enormous areas in which I was completely ignorant.
I learned that the planet, or moon, was largely land surface. Thanator has two inland seas. The larger of these, Corund Laj, the Greater Sea, is in the northern portion of the globe, while Sanmur Laj, the Lesser Sea, is far to the south. The Greater Sea and its coast is dominated by a race of red-skinned, bald-headed men, merchants and traders and shopkeepers, a mercantile civilization like ancient Carthage, but culturally closer to medieval Persia. Their civilization is called, for some reason, the Bright Empire of Perushtar: it is composed of the three cities of Farz, to the north, Narouk in the west, and Soraba to the south; its capital, Glorious Perusht, lies on a large island off the southern coast which has the rare distinction of being the only island on all of Thanator.
The superb metropolis of Shondakor lies on the river Ajand, one hundred korads* south of the Sea of Corund Laj.
West of the Corund Laj and at approximately the same latitude rise the White Mountains of Varan. Hkor, upon one of whose peaks Zanadar, the City in the Clouds, is built. To the south of these mountains, west of Shondakor, and at approximately the latitude of that city, lies a colossal tract of jungle called the Grand Kumala. South of the Grand Kumala the Plains of Haratha stretch for about five hundred korads, from the shores of Samnur Laj the Lesser Sea in the remote west to the foothills of the Black Mountains of Rhador, towards which the Yathoon Horde had been traveling. The distance between the encampment of the Horde and the city of the Sky Pirates, then, was enormous―three hundred and ten korads, or two thousand one hundred and seventy-five miles.
My readers (if any there be) must forgive me for this dissertation on Thanatorian geography, which may be a bit lengthy. But since the course of this story of my adventures on Callisto will take my reader, as it took me, to most places in this hemisphere of the jungle moon, I felt it advisable to describe the location of these lands and cities, and their relations to each other, in some considerable detail. As to the opposite hemisphere of Thanator, there is little that I can say, as I have never seen it. This modicum of geographical information, incidentally, which I gleaned from conversation with my fellow wheel slaves, proved priceless. For at last I had some notion of where lay that all-important disk of milky jade in its ring of guardian monoliths―the Gate Between The Worlds, to which I must somehow make my way again if ever I hope to return to my own world. I have marked its approximate location on this rough map.
I also learned something about the recent events on this world. Some months before my arrival on Thanator, the city of Shondakor had been conquered by a powerful bandit chieftain named Arkola, leader of the Chac Yuul, the Black Legion I mentioned a bit earlier. I know of no precise terrene equivalent by which I can explain the nature of this robber horde. They are, in a sense, nomadic warriors like the Don Cossacks of seventeenth-century Russia; they are also, in a way, something like the wandering condottiere of fifteenth-century Italy. Professional warriors, banded together under a commander selected by popular acclaim, they go where they will, living off the land, here attacking a merchant caravan, there seizing a fishing village or a hamlet of farmers, sometimes laying siege to the castle of some reputedly wealthy lord, and at other times selling their swords as a mercenary unit in some war between the cities of Thanator. What had led them to attack one of the most splendid and brilliant of all the great cities no man could say. But they had taken Shondakor by surprise, and seized control of the metropolis in a virtually bloodless coup. Perhaps their warlord, Arkola, had wearied of the nomadic life of camp and march, and sought to carve out a kingdom for himself and his Legionnaires―or, even better, to become the master of a kingdom that already existed, rather than creating one.
At any rate, when the Princess Darloona saw that the dreaded Black Legion was already within her gates and that further resistance was futile, she led the bulk of her people from the city into the jungles of the Grand Kumala. Discretion is, by repute, the better part of valor; doubtless Darloona thought it wiser to avoid the massacre of her people by escaping the Legion with her fighting strength all but unimpaired. Once hidden in the trackless depths of the Grand Kumala, she could regroup her forces, lay her plans, and live in hopes of retaking the city. The Kumala is twenty-five hundred miles from east to west, and one thousand five hundred miles from north to south at its greatest breadth. You can see how easily one could conceal an army or two in that enormous wilderness, beyond chances of discovery. With nearly four million square miles of the densest of jungles at your disposal, you could tuck several fair-sized empires into the corners of the Grand Kumala and they might never be found.