Fliers of Antares (6 page)

The journey from the island of Sorah to the Heavenly Mines of Hamal is about three hundred and fifty dwaburs. I calculated roughly that the speed of the voller could not be above ten db — that is, ten dwaburs per bur. So we could expect to reach our destination in something like twenty-four or so Terrestrial hours. I settled down to a patient negation of everything outside me, willing to start more trouble when we reached these notorious mines.

The only incident of any interest occurred after we had crossed the coast up toward Methydria and could see in the far distance on our larboard side the hazy snowglint of a giant range of mountains. Two rofers appeared above us, beating through the air with massive strokes of their enormous wings, their necks outstretched. The flying animals, sailing past, looked calm and majestic, and we could see that each carried seating for a family of Fristles, six or so, with the little ones perched high at junction of neck and body craning over to look at us.

Although the root syllable
flut
does not appear in its name, the rofer is a kind of bird. Not so the tyryvols which, with their riders brandishing welcoming tridents, surrounded us as we settled into a gigantic basin in the foothills. These tyryvols are large flying animals, with whip tails, wicked, intelligent eyes, and bodies clad in flexible scales that evolution has not yet changed into feathers; although their wings — given another few million years or so — will sprout true feathers, I shouldn’t wonder. They come in different colorations, although the most favored color chosen by the aerial riders of Hamal is a lustrous mottle of black and ocher, with scarlet claws and bands of multicolored scales around their necks. They impressed me, these tyryvols, who had seen impiters and corths of the Hostile Territories, not to mention fluttrells and mirvols of Havilfar.

Their riders were short squat diffs with thin bandy legs. Their faces reminded me of the Ullars of Ullardrin of Northern Turismond, although there was none of that indigo dyed hair. There was, however, the same savagery about the square clamp of their mouths. At this time they habitually wore black and ocher scaled clothing made from the skins of the tyryvols, and they carried those damnably sharp tridents, and the thin flexible sword of the aerial fighter. These are the Gerawin of Gilarna the Barren in the Empire of Hamal. They proved to be immensely efficient guards and watchdogs over the Heavenly Mines for the Hamalese.

Around us stretched the barrens. The foothills trended up steadily toward the west and northwest. The task of escape from the mines on foot would be a daunting enterprise and one not to be considered without many days’ food and water and, inevitably, a weapon of defense against the frightful dangers infesting all such spots.

The Hamalese are an efficient people. The dominant species happens to be apim; but the many species of diffs take a full part in government, industry, commerce, and all the other branches of activity that make up a thriving empire. Hamal was an ambitious and outwardly thrusting empire. They made airboats and sold them to Vallia and Zenicce and other favored customers, although they would not sell to Pandahem or Loh. That efficiency took us in, cleansed and fed us, and let us rest for a space. Then we were issued picks and shovels. An example was made of a Gon who wanted to shave his hair and so made trouble; the cold, calculating discipline administered to him chilled all the slaves’ blood, and then that harsh impersonal discipline, that massive adherence to law and order, imposed its full weight on us. We marched down to the mines and went through the artificially illuminated passageways cut in the rock, and so came out to a vast and echoing space in the mountain. Here we set to work to hack the rock away and fill baskets with the broken stuff. The baskets were drawn on a track by calsanys, to the opening where crushers and refiners went to work, powered by the arms and backs of slaves.

That efficiency saw that every slave worked to the uttermost of his strength. Everything was regulated down to the last drop of water. Rock was cut, drawn out, crushed, refined, and parceled up into fliers to be sent somewhere in Hamal of which we had no knowledge then.

The whole process was inhuman.

The last ounce of effort was taken from every slave.

It was possible to survive, for I saw old men still laboring away, although the turnover was rapid, for the labor simply wore a man down until he saw no good reason to go on living. Absolute inhumanity reigned here. Work — slaving work — filled every day. Rest periods were calculated out with a nicety that allowed a man to recuperate just enough energy to return with his shift to work the next time around.

By comparison, the Black Marble Quarries of Zenicce, in which I’d spent some time, seemed to have been run by amateurs.

Order, law, discipline, rule. The lash, starvation, deprivation of water so that thirst tore a man’s spirit and made of him a tool in the hands of the Hamalese, all these things conspired together to make of the Heavenly Mines a place that proved Agilis knew what he was doing when he strangled his brother and would have allowed his brother to strangle him in return . . .

So I entered another period of my varied life on Kregen that, even now, fills me with a most profound horror, a revulsion of spirit that brought me face to face with the man I thought I was, the man Dray Prescot, shorn of all titles and petty ranks and symbols. It was just me, Dray Prescot, pitted against inhuman will and discipline.

I knew only one thing.

I would not give in.

The Heavenly Mines

Everything had a number.

Every pickax carried its number burned into the haft and punched into the ax. Every shovel carried its number burned and cut. Every drinking bowl. Every spoon. Every eating bowl. A number was branded on the hide of every calsany. Each tunnel, each chamber, each working face, every one possessed its own number.

We slept in rock shelters set against an old and abandoned cut’s side. Each rock hut had a number painted above the open door, which was provided with no blanket or hide. We slept on packed earth and each little space had a number scribed in the earth. We each possessed a single thin blanket, and this miserable covering had its number also.

And, as was inevitable, every slave had his own number.

Dray Prescot scarcely existed any longer.

The slave, number 8281, stood in his stead.

The number was branded on my chest and on my back for all to see.

The Hamalese used the common Kregish numbering and in normal times that linear script form is most beautiful. Here they had adopted the square and blocky numerology, so that my chest and back shouted aloud to the indifferent world that I was 8281.

The weird distortion of reality that must take place in surroundings of this nature and under psychological pressures so matter-of-fact and ingrained caught me up, so that I became completely habituated to think of myself as 8281. Whereas I might have taken violently against the number, instead I embraced it. For the number was me. I was the number. Eight-two-eight-one was Dray Prescot. Eight-two-eight-one existed.

By thus rushing forward and embracing my numerical alter ego I was able to dissociate myself from the almost psychotic anger of some of my fellows, who would not answer to their numbers until beaten, who refused to think of themselves as a number because of the lessening of simple human dignity.

I knew a little about human dignity; but I wished to survive.

I had witnessed the punishment of the Gon who wanted his head to be shaved, as is the fashion of Gons, through what I consider to be a foolish matter of shame over their white hair. He was not thrashed unmercifully, for the Hamalese guards and overseers had nothing written down in their laws and rules about mercy. He was simply punished as the law ordained for refusing to do his quota of work. The summary court which sat on the matter dismissed his reasons as untenable.

He was beaten with the regulation number of strokes each day he refused to work. Everything was carried out with the punctilio and observance of the law that I had seen so many times aboard a King’s Ship, when a hand was triced up to the gratings and given a red-checked shirt at the gangway. His crime placed him into most serious jeopardy, so that it was lawful to jikaider him, that is, flog crisscross.

After he had been flogged jikaider for the regulation fifty lashes he would be cut down and then the medical men would see to him, as was required by law. His back would be doctored and the medic would pronounce him unfit to work for the period his back would take to heal. Then, when he refused to work again, he would be jikaidered again.

This went on until he died.

And when he died that long and flowing white hair of the typical Gon glittered silver and brave in the dying light of the suns.

He had been number 8279, and that was how I remembered him.

I lost count of the days, and that alarmed me. But the apathy of work and of numbers held me in a grip I could not break. Fresh fliers brought fresh slaves. A Bleg came into our hut with the numbers 8279 branded on his breast and back over the atrophied carapace, and I shook my head and called him that, although I did not forget the Gon.

The question of what was mined here teased me at the beginning; but gradually I grew indifferent. The mountains existed. We must chop them down and break them up and shovel them into the wicker baskets, they would be carried to the chaldrons, and the calsanys would draw them out to the crushers. The refiners, powered by a sickly green stream flowing over a bluff and falling into a scummy pool, rich in minerals, would do their work; then what was left over would be packed in wooden crates, lined with leather, and loaded aboard fliers. When the quota dropped, the law permitted an increase in working burs. A bur is forty Earth minutes long. It grew so that at the face a bur seemed to stretch to a Terrestrial hour. And still I had no idea what the refined rock was needed for, what the Hamalese, Zair rot ’em, did with it, why they forced this agony on fellow human beings.

The tailings stretched for dwaburs along the base of the foothills, ulm after ulm of them, spreading a powdery and ashlike detritus. What the refiners did, what sort of rock this was, what was taken from it — all these things I did not know and gradually came not to care about.

Early on I had said to a man, an apim, laboring alongside me, “What do they want the rock for, dom?”

“I do not know,” he had said, bashing his pick so that chips flew. “I only wish I could choke the rasts with it.”

“Amen to that,” I said, striking with my pick.

No one knew.

Every day we labored. There were no rest days.

The knowledge that if I did not escape soon I might forget that escape existed drove me on. While loading the fliers one day — for the Hamalese rotated tasks according to their rules — a man was discovered secreted in one of the leather-lined wooden boxes. Where guards of other peoples perhaps would have had sport with him — for example, taking him aloft so that he thought he was escaping, and then pitching him overboard; or weighing the box and declaring it was short-weight and so pouring rock upon him until he was crushed — the guards at the Heavenly Mines acted strictly according to the law.

The Hamalians — or Hamalese, either term is quite correct — took him in chains to a summary court, where he was found guilty — for he was certainly that, having tried to escape — and sentenced to the prescribed punishment.

There are always sedentary jobs to be done in a mining complex like this, work that can be performed quite well by a man who cannot walk, by a man, say, who has no legs.

They found him that employment. The law had no wish for extra severity and would not take his life. Slaves of quality were hard to come by in great quantity, and would not be wasted, only refuse being sent as victims to the arenas. And only tough fighters would do as coys, apprentice kaidurs.

This man, number 5763, sat all day at his task, his stumps beautifully bandaged. He had shouted that he came from Hyrklana; but that did not help him.

If he tried to escape again, the law would be more severe on him; and, as was written down, at the third attempt would then demand his life.

He would be hanged in the most strict ritual procedure.

I witnessed only two hangings, one for a third-time escape attempt, incredible though that may be, and one for a slave who had struck an overseer.

This slave was a Chulik.

Had he killed the overseer the law admitted that the next of kin, or the dead man’s superior officer failing a next of kin, might stipulate what punishment the murderer would suffer before death.

They were colorful in their thinking in those areas, were the bereaved in Hamal.

And there was no revenge, no bloodthirsty shrilling anger in all this. It was all written down in the laws of the land . . .

A new slave, number 2789 — for they filled up the old roster numbers with new slaves at the Heavenly Mines — said to me, “Eight-two-eight-one! I must escape! I’ll go mad!”

I said to him, “Two-seven-eight-nine. To escape is so difficult it is scarcely worth the attempt. Better for you to go mad.”

Only later, as I sat eating my chunk of bread — made from good corn, for the Hamalese wished to keep up our strength — and coarse pudding of vosk and onion, with a finger over the gregarian at the side of my bowl, was the truth of what I had said borne in on me.

I, Dray Prescot, unwilling to contemplate escape?

Number 8281 knew the truth. Dray Prescot was an empty boaster, a bladder of wind. Eight-two-eight-one knew the truth.

It took me a day to think of the subject again. We were opening up a new seam far down into the guts of the mountain. The rock we wanted held a gray metallic sheen which differentiated it from the yellower rock all around. Yet it held no mineral I could tell. We simply took all the gray rock, irrespective of minor differences. This seam was narrow, and an overseer, a little Och holding with his four limbs a lamp, a wax notepad, a stylus, and a prodding stick, waddled up on his two lower legs to supervise. We were all crouched down, for the roof pressed close, and the oil lamp — it was not samphron-oil — smoked a little. I smelled the lamp; but, also, I smelled another nostril-tickling odor. In that confined space in the grotesque shadows of the lamp, the little Och prodding and writing, a Rapa guard with a spear bending almost double ready to spit the first one of us who did anything against the law — for the law would hold a guard within his rights if he killed protecting a Hamalian — I picked up the unmistakable scent of squishes.