“Like a fish,” Khai answered at once.
“Good! That’s very important. You’ll see why when you know the plan. But right now I’ll show you how to climb up onto the rafters and hide under the roof….”
Still memorizing Gomba’s instructions, Khai eventually fell into a fitful sleep on a platform of rough boards placed across rafters above the sagging and cobwebby ceiling. Twice during the night he was disturbed when soldiers came to shake the Nubian awake and search the house; but on both of these occasions the black man grumbled so much about lack of sleep, unnecessary harassment and Pharaoh’s displeasure if ever he should discover what was going on, that the soldiers quickly grew uncomfortable and left. Half-way toward morning, when it was much cooler, the youth did manage to fall into a deep sleep, which claimed him utterly until some hours later when he sensed furtive movements in the ruined apartments below.
“Are you awake, Khai?” came Gomba’s urgent voice from the darkness beneath him. “Yes? Then come on down. Quickly, now. Our visitor has arrived.” Easing the cramps in his muscles, Khai stiffly obeyed and lowered himself down between dusty rafters. As his feet swung in empty air, the big black caught him and lifted him down.
Gomba’s visitor, a Kushite of about Khai’s own age and size, was in the process of disrobing and wrapping himself about with a blanket. In the kitchen, a small oil lamp showed that the slab had been prized up again from the floor, exposing the old sewer beneath. As Khai dusted himself off and shook cobwebs from his hair, Gomba helped the other youth down into the claustrophobic hole under the floor. Before he could replace the slab Khai went over and kneeled at the edge of the hole. “Thank you,” he said to the huddled figure in the sewer. Then the slab was moved back into place and dirt was scuffed over it, hiding the cracks in the floor.
Finally, as Gomba lit a second lamp, Khai began hurriedly to don the Kushite’s rags. “Over the top of your own clothes, lad,” the big black told him. “Quickly! You needn’t have bothered to tidy yourself up, for now I’ve got to darken your face down a bit and sprinkle a little dirt over you. And here—” he produced a sliver of charcoal and expertly drew an ankh on Khai’s forehead. “We mustn’t forget your slave mark. There—and you can wrap this rag around your yellow hair. So—” He paused to cast a critical eye over his handiwork. “There we are, a slave if ever I saw one—if a little too well-fed! Right, let’s be on our way.”
“Did the soldiers stop the Kushite on his way here?” Khai asked as Gomba steered him out into the dark, dirty streets.
“They did, as I suspected they would. A couple of them have been watching the house all night, I think—probably the same ones who kept waking me up! They might even be watching us right now, but they’re hardly likely to check us again. After all, they know now that you’re just a Kushite youth come to waken me up so that I can get the rest of the lads moving!”
The “lads” Gomba talked about were one hundred male slaves detailed to work for a week in the quarries downriver. They would be transported by barge to a point above the second cataract, marched around the falls to a second barge below the white water, and so on down the river for another seventy miles or so to the quarries of the east bank. There would be ninety-nine of them in all, with Khai making the figure up to one hundred; but long before the slave-barge reached its mooring above the cataract Khai would have made his escape. That is, if all went according to plan.
It would not be the first time a slave had escaped, many had tried it at one time or another. Usually they only made their run when they were well away from the slave-city, when they could quickly head for open country or lose themselves in the forests and swamps. Sometimes they made it, but more often than not they were caught. When that happened the soldiers made examples of them, putting their heads on poles in the slave quarters to be picked into skulls by vultures. And of course there were other deterrents: the swamps were full of hungry crocodiles and there were many poisonous snakes in the grasslands. …
Now Khai and Adonda Gomba hurried through the deserted, garbage-littered streets, and as the first hint of daylight tinged the sky to the east, so the slave-king urgently banged on doors and shutters and called out the names of those slaves detailed for work in the quarries. In no time at all his ragged party was a hundred strong, and soon they crossed the perimeter of the slave quarters into the city proper where a small squad of six Khemish soldiers was waiting for them. Then, with the soldiers flanking them three to a side, they formed four ranks and tramped quietly through the still sleeping streets, marching through areas of Asorbes which grew ever more opulent, until at last they approached the looming city wall and the massive arch which contained and guarded the east gate.
This was one part of the plan which Khai had dreaded, when the guard commander himself would count heads against Gomba’s list before ordering the gate opened. But to his surprise and relief the whole procedure went off without a hitch. Indeed, the sleepy-looking sergeant-of-the-guard hardly gave the slaves a second glance as he checked them off in bunches of ten. With the job quickly done, he ordered the gate opened and the slaves passed under the towering arch of the wall and out of the city.
“He can be forgiven his inefficiency,” Gomba quietly explained to Khai out of the corner of his mouth. “He’s been up all night, kept awake by reports of revellers, brawlers and other troublemakers in the streets between here and the slave quarters.” He chuckled grimly. “Now I wonder who arranged that little lot for him, eh? Anyway, all he’s interested in now is standing himself down from duty and getting home to his hot, fat little wife—who he probably suspects of having it off with his superior officer. Maybe she is and maybe she isn’t, but that hardly matters to us. What does matter is that we’re out of the city, right?”
IV
Slave Ship
Outside and below the beetling walls of Asorbes, the party of slaves waited until their escorts were relieved by two dozen guardsmen from the gate, then began their march along the stone road toward the river. The soldiers, all weary from their night’s duty, marched with a little less than their usual military precision, and their polyglot charges were not hard put to keep pace with them.
The slaves were not chained nor even roped, for there was little likelihood that anyone would be foolish enough to make a run for it so close to Asorbes. The land was all Khemish for hundreds of miles around, and of course each and every slave bore the telltale brand of the ankh on his forehead. Moreover, four of the guards were of Pharaoh’s Corps of Archers and bore their weapons with them. A runaway slave would provide excellent target practice.
Now the air was a little brighter and the shadowy faces of the slaves were starting to take on a certain individuality, so that Khai was glad when at last they reached the palm-grown banks of the river. They moved out along a stone quay to where the wide-beamed slave barge lay low in milky mist that lapped almost to its gunwales. Without preamble, the slaves were herded aboard and made to sit on plank benches fixed in rows across the width of the reed decks. Then the vessel’s captain came aboard.
Menon Phadal was a fat Khemite with a scowling face and small, piggish eyes. Quickly, those eyes now scanned his human cargo and he scowled all the more. Waddling to the door of his tiny cabin between the barge’s twin masts, he turned and sat down heavily on his captain’s bench. To Adonda Gomba he called out, “No girls, Gomba? No fun for Menon Phadal during his trip downriver ?”