Outlaw of Gor (18 page)

The chain of slaves laughed, all except myself, and Andreas of Tor, who regarded me questioningly. I smiled at him, and shrugged. I did not have the answer to his question.

Little by little, I tried to restore the self-respect of my fellow slaves. It began simply enough at the feeding trough. Then I began to encourage them to speak to one another, and to call one another by their names, and their cities, and though there were men of different cities there, they shared the same chain and trough, and they accepted one another.

When one man was ill, others saw that his ore sack was filled. When one man was beaten, others would pass water from hand to hand that his wounds might be bathed, that he might drink though the chain did not allow him to the water. And in time, each of us knew the others who shared his chain. We were no longer dark, anonymous shapes to one another, huddling in the dampness of the mines of Tharna. In time only Ost remained frightened by this change, for he continually feared the flooding of the chamber.

My chain of men worked well, and the quota was filled day after day, and when it was raised, it was filled again. Sometimes even, the men would hum as they worked, the strong sound resonant in the tunnels of the mine. The Whip Slaves wondered, and began to fear us.

News of the distribution of food at the feeding trough had spread, by means of the slaves who carried the tubs of food, from mine to mine. And, too, they told of the stranger, new things that happened in the mine at the bottom of the central shaft, how men helped one another, and could find the time and will to remember a tune.

And as time passed I learned from the food slaves that this revolution, as unannounced and silent as the foot of a larl, had begun to spread from mine to mine. Soon I noticed that the food slaves spoke no more, and gathered that they had been warned to silence. Yet from their faces I knew that the contagion of self-respect, of nobility, flamed in the mines beneath Tharna. Here, underground, in the mines, home of that which was lowest and most degraded in Tharna, men came to look upon one another, and themselves, with satisfaction.

I decided it was time.

That night, when we were herded into the long cell, and the bolts were shoved in place, I spoke to the men.

“Who among you,” I asked, “would be free?”

“I,” said Andreas of Tor.

“And I,” growled Kron of Tharna.

“And I!” cried other voices.

Only Ost demurred. “It is sedition to speak thus,” he whimpered.

“I have a plan,” I said, “but it will require great courage, and you may all die.”

“There is no escape from the mines,” whimpered Ost.

“Lead us, Warrior,” said Andreas.

“First,” I said, “we must have the chamber flooded.”

Ost shrieked with terror, and Kron's great fist shut on his windpipe, silencing him. Ost squirmed, scuffling in the dark, helpless. “Be quiet, Serpent,” said the bull-like Kron. He dropped Ost, and the conspirator crawled to the length of his chain and huddled against the wall, trembling with fear.

Ost's shriek had told me what I wanted to know. I now knew how we could arrange to have the chamber flooded.

“Tomorrow night,” I said simply, looking in Ost's direction, “we will make our break for freedom.”

The next day, as I had expected, an accident befell Ost. He seemed to injure his foot with the pick, and he pleaded so earnestly with the Whip Slave that the fellow removed him from the chain and, putting a collar on his throat, led him limping away. This would have been an unusual solicitation on the part of the Whip Slave but it was obvious to him as to the rest of us that Ost wished to speak with him alone, to communicate information of extreme importance.

“You should have killed him,” said Kron of Tharna.

“No,” I said.

The bull-like man of Tharna looked at me questioningly and shrugged.

That night the slaves who brought the tub of food were accompanied by a dozen warriors.

That night Ost was not returned to the chain. “His foot requires care,” said the Whip Slave, gesturing us toward the long cell.

When the iron door was shut and the bolts shot into place, I heard the Whip Slave laugh.

The men were despondent.

“Tonight,” said Andreas of Tor, “you know the chamber will be flooded.”

“Yes,” I said, and he looked at me in disbelief.

I called to the man at the far end of the chamber. “Pass the lamp,” I said.

I took the lamp and went, some of my fellow prisoners perforce accompanying me, and held it to the circular shaft, about two feet in diameter, down which the water would hurtle. There was an iron grating set in the stone, about eight feet high in the shaft. From somewhere above we heard the movement of a valve.

“Lift me!” I cried, and on the shoulders of Andreas and the slave shackled beside me, I was lifted into the shaft. Its sides were smooth and slimy. My hands slipped on them.

Chained as I was I could not get to the grating.

I cursed.

Then it seemed that Andreas and the slave grew beneath my feet. Other slaves knelt beneath them, giving their backs that the two might rise higher. Standing side by side they lifted me higher into the shaft.

My shackled wrists seized the grating.

“I have it,” I cried. “Drag me down!”

Then Andreas and the slave fell in the shaft and I felt the chains that fastened my wrists and ankles to theirs tearing at my limbs. “Pull!” I cried, and the hundred slaves in the long room began to draw on the chains. My hands bled on the grating, the blood falling back in my upturned face, but I would not release the bars. “Pull!” I cried.

A trickle of water from above moved down the sides of the stones.

The valve was opening.

“Pull!” I cried again.

Suddenly the grating sprang free and I and it fell clattering with a rattle of chains and metal to the floor.

Now there was a stream of water flowing down the shaft.

“First on the chain!” I called.

With a rattle of chains a small man with a wisp of straw-coloured hair across his forehead snaked past the others and stood before me.

“You must climb,” I said.

“How?” he asked, bewildered.

“Brace your feet against the wall of the shaft,” I said. “Use your feet!”

“I can't,” he said.

“You will,” I said.

I and his fellow took him and thrust him bodily through the opening.

We heard him in the shaft, grunting, gasping, the sounds of chains scraping on stones as he began the tortuous inch by inch ascent.

“I'm slipping!” he cried, and rattled down the shaft and fell to the cell floor weeping.

“Again!” I said.

“I can't,” he cried hysterically.

I seized him by the shoulders and shook him. “You are of Tharna,” I said. “Show us what a man of Tharna can do!”

It was a challenge which had been put to few men of Tharna.

We lifted him again into the shaft.

I set the second on the chain beneath him, and the third on the chain beneath the second.

The water was sloshing through the aperture now, in a stream about as wide as my fist. In the tunnel it rose to our ankles.

Then the first man on the chain supported his own weight, and the second, chains rattling, began to ascend the vertical tunnel, supported by he who was third, who now stood on the back of the fourth man, and so it continued.

Once the second man slipped, dragging the first down with him, and causing the third to lose his grip, but by now there was a solid chain of men in the tunnel, and the fourth and fifth men held. The first began his tortuous ascent once more, followed by the second and third.

The water was perhaps two feet high in the cell, pressing upward to the low ceiling, when I followed Andreas into the tunnel. Kron was the fourth man behind me.

Andreas, Kron and I were in the tunnel, but what of the poor wretches on the chain behind us?

I looked up the long shaft, at the line of slaves moving upward, inch by inch.

“Hurry!” I cried.

The stream of water now seemed to press us down, to impede our progress. It was like a small waterfall.

“Hurry! Hurry!” cried the voice of a man still below, a hoarse, terrified cry. The first man on the chain had now ascended the tunnel to the very source of the water, another tunnel. We heard a sudden, loud swift rushing of water. He cried out in fear, “It's coming, all of it!”

“Brace yourselves!” I shouted to those above and below me. “Drag the last men into the tunnel!” I yelled. “Get them out of the cell!”

But my last words were drowned in a hurtling plunging cataract of water that shattered on my body like a great fist, knocking my breath out. It roared down the shaft, pounding on the men. Some lost their footing, and bodies were wedged into the shaft. It was impossible to breathe, to move, to see.

Then as suddenly as it had begun, the cataract ceased. Above, whoever worked the valve must have grown impatient and thrown it open completely, or perhaps the sudden torrent of water had been intended as a gesture of mercy to drown any survivors quickly.

As soon as I had caught my breath, I shook the sopping hair from my eyes. I peered up into the sodden blackness, crowded with chained bodies.

“Keep climbing,” I said.

In perhaps another two or three minutes I had reached the horizontal tunnel down which the tumult of the water had been fed into the vertical tunnel. I found those ahead of me on the chain. Like myself they were soaked to the skin and shivering, but alive. I clutched the first man by the shoulders.

“Well done!” I said to him.

“I am of Tharna,” he said proudly.

At last each man of the chain was within the horizontal tunnel, though the last four men had of necessity been dragged to its level, for they hung limp in their chains. How long they had been under water was hard to say.

We worked on them, bending over them in the darkness, I and three men from Port Kar, who understood what must be done. The other slaves on the chain waited patiently, not one complaining, not one urging us to greater speed. At last, one by one, the inert bodies stirred, their lungs opening to draw in the damp, cold air of the mine.

The man whom I had saved reached up and touched me.

“We are of the same chain,” I said.

It was a saying we had developed in the mines.

“Come!” I said to the men.

Leading them in two lines, shackled behind me, we crawled down the horizontal tunnel.

“No, no!” Ost had screamed.

We found him at the valve which emptied the reservoir of water into the slave dungeon more than two hundred feet below. He now wore the habiliments of the Whip Slave, a reward for his treachery. He threw down the whip and tried to run, scurrying like an urt, but everywhere he turned, the chain of haggard, violent men confined him, and as the chain closed, Ost fell quivering to his knees.

“Do not harm him,” I said.

But the bull-like Kron of Tharna's hand was on the neck of the conspirator.

“This is a matter for the men of Tharna,” said he. Those blue eyes like steel looked about the unyielding faces of the chained slaves.

And the eyes of Ost, too, like those of a terrified urt, looked from face to face, pleading, but Ost found no pity in those eyes that looked upon him as though they might have been composed of stone.

“Is Ost of the chain?” asked Kron.

“No,” cried a dozen voices. “He is not of the chain.”

“Yes,” cried Ost. “I am of the chain.” He peered like a rodent into the faces of his captors. “Take me with you. Free me!”

“It is sedition to speak thus,” said one of the men.

Ost trembled.

“Tie him and leave him here,” I said.

“Yes,” begged Ost hysterically, groveling at the feet of Kron. “Do that, Masters!”

Andreas of Tor spoke up. “Do as Tarl of Ko-ro-ba asks,” he said. “Do not stain your chains with the blood of this serpent.”

“Thank you, Masters,” said Ost, snivelling with relief, his face once more resuming that pinched, sly look I knew so well.

But Kron looked down into the face of Ost, and Ost turned white.

“You will have a better chance than you gave us,” said the bull-like man from Tharna.

Ost shrieked with terror.

I tried to press forward, but the men of the chain held firm. I could not come to the conspirator's assistance.

He tried to crawl toward me, his hands extended. I put out my hands, but Kron had seized him and pulled him back.

Bodily the small conspirator was thrown from slave to slave down the length of the chain until the last man hurled him, headfirst, screaming for mercy, down that dark narrow channel which we had ascended. We heard his body hit the sides a dozen times, and his frightened scream fading, only to be silenced by the distant, hollow splash in the water far below.

It was a night like no other in the mines of Tharna.

Leading the chain of slaves in two lines behind me, we swept through the shafts like an eruption from the molten core of the earth. Armed only with ore and the picks that chip the ore from the walls we stormed into the quarters of Whip Slaves and guardsmen, who had scarcely time to seize their weapons. Those not killed in the savage fighting, much of it in the darkness of the shafts, were locked into leg shackles and herded into storage chambers, and the men of the chain did not treat their former oppressors gently.

We has soon come on hammers that would strike our chains from us and, one by one, we filed past the great anvil where Kron of Tharna, of the Caste of Metal Workers, with expert blows, struck them from our wrists and ankles.

“To the Central Shaft!” I cried, holding a sword that had been taken from a guardsman now chained in the shafts behind.

A slave who had carried tubs of food to the troughs below was only too pleased to guide us.

At last we stood by the Central Shaft.

Our mine opened on it perhaps a thousand feet below the surface. We could see the great chains dangling down the shaft, outlined by the small lamps in the openings of other mines above us, and, very high above, by the white reflection of moonlight. The men crowded out onto the floor of the shaft, which lay only a foot below the opening of our mine, for our mine was the lowest of all.