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.