“Are you all right, Zorcander?” asked one of my men, and the nearest beast growled like a dog in its throat and beat him over the head. He did not cry out. He was a clansman.
“We must stick together, my clansmen,” I shouted, and before the beast could strike me I raised my voice and bellowed:
“We will come through yet, my friends.”
The spear-blade lashed alongside my head and for a space I stumbled along blinded and weak and dumb.
The camp to which we were brought was resplendent with richly-decorated marquees, and everywhere signs of opulence and luxury indicated clearly that this hunting party believed in making life on the great plains as comfortable as possible. Lines of zorcas tethered together on one side were matched by lines of another riding animal, an eight-legged beast not unlike a vove, except that they were smaller and lighter and without the ferocious aspect of a vove, without the horns and the fangs. Our own captured zorcas had been brought in, I noticed, and tethered with the others. But our captors had not brought in one single vove. Had I been given to empty gestures, I would have smiled.
A man stepped from a tent and stood wide-legged, his hands on his hips, regarding us with a curl to his lips. He was very white-faced, dark-haired, and he wore tight-fitting leathers over all his body. They were of the same brilliant emerald as the garments worn by the things that had caught us.
I decided it would be something to do to snap his neck; something that might lighten the drabness of days.
He turned his face back toward the tent opening. The tent was the most grandiose in all the camp. We stood bedraggled and naked in the dust.
“Ho, my princess!” the man called. “The Ochs have made a capture that may amuse you.”
So, I thought to myself, they have princesses hereabouts, do they?
The princess strolled to the entrance to her tent.
Yes, she was beautiful. After all these years, I must admit she was beautiful. One first noticed her hair, like ripe corn with the morning sun shining on it in a field of our own Earth. Her eyes were the cornflower blue of the flowers one might find in that field. These were old and tired cliches before ever they reached Kregen; but I recall her as I first saw her that day long ago as she stood looking down on where we had been flung captive in the dust.
She lifted a white rounded arm that glowed with the warm pink pulse of blood. Her lips were red, red, and soft like a luscious fruit. She wore an emerald green gown that revealed her throat and arms and the lower portion of her legs, and she wore around her neck a string of blazing emeralds that must have ransomed a city. She looked down on us, and her nostrils pinched together as at an offensive smell. Very beautiful and commanding, she looked, on that day so long ago.
I was lifting my face to look at her.
The man walked across and kicked me.
“Turn your eyes to the dirt, rast, when the Princess Natema passes!”
Within my lashings and the yoke I rolled over and still looked up at her although the man had kicked me cruelly hard.
“Does the princess then not desire admiration from a man’s eyes?”
The man went mad.
He kicked and kicked. I rolled about; but the bonds interfered. I heard the princess shouting with anger, and heard her say: “Why clean your boots on the rast, Galna? Prod him with a spear and have done. I weary of this hunt.”
Well, if I were to die, then this monkey would die with me. I tripped him and rolled on him and placed my bound wrists on his throat. His face turned purplish. His eyes protruded. I leered at him.
“You kick me, you blagskite, and you die!”
He gargled at me. There was an uproar. The Ochs ran about waving their spears. I surged upright gripping Galna, and my men on the lashings rose with me. I kicked the first Och in the belly and he tumbled away, screeching. A spear flicked past my body. Galna wore a fancy little sword smothered with jewels. I dropped him as though he were a rattler, and as he fell I managed to drag the little jeweled sticker out. The next Och took the small sword through the throat. It broke off as the beast shrieked and struggled and died.
I flung the hilt at the next Och and cut his head open. I picked up Galna again, my hands and wrists swelling against the lashings, and hurled him full at the princess.
She gave a cry and vanished within her tent.
Then, as it seemed so often when things were becoming interesting, the sky fell in on me.
Neither of us would ever forget my first meeting with the Princess Natema Cydones of the Noble House of Esztercari of the City of Zenicce.
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.