It was as though I had come into the court of Death, skeletons in bright armor and wormwood in golden cups to drink.
Behind me, the man with the stringed instrument began to sing. He had a fine voice, chiming on the stillness. I did not really catch the words, but it was a love song, not like any music the warriors knew.
Between the picket line of horses and the tents, right under the stair, two cannon stood on carts, motionless nozzled tubings of black iron. They smelled incendiary, as though they were dragons. It was their smell rather than their size that warned me of the danger in them, for they were not large. Perhaps, guessing me a stranger, they would spit fire at me of their own volition. But this was a child’s fancy, something out of my tribal recollection, not my own. Some men slept, sitting by the cannon. They were unlike the rest, dark skinned and also dark haired as I was, while the others in the camp were very fair. Neither did these drip ornaments. Their faces were like knobs of wood, brutal, ugly, and expressionless, even asleep. They were slaves, no mistaking it.
The other slaves, the red men, lay close by. The north end of the ground roofed over a pit, an old cellar or dungeon, with an oval opening looking into it from above, covered by a grating of green crusted metal. The fires shone dimly now and then into this hole, and I could make out a mass of bodies and shadows, and hear them crooning and groaning their discontent. They were past the bawling stage, and past the fighting stage too, maybe. They had had a night and day of forced marching, a caress or two from gemmed whips like that which I had noted hung from the belt of the sentry, little food, if any, and no hope.
No one had challenged me this far. Now a man stepped out of his pavilion. His mask was an eagle’s head like mine, but silver, with a green stone between the eyes. He nodded at the grating.
“The trash are unhappy with their lot,” he said. The clearness of his speech shocked me at last, for it could have been a tongue I had had since birth. “Yes,” I said, “I’m sick of their noise.” I was looking for a means to get in the pit, other than the
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grating. The last section of the northern wall sloped down into a kind of gully, which seemed a likely entry point. I was formulating some story in the alien language about visiting our prisoners and offering them the whip for their racket, when the silver face strode up to me and grasped my arm.
“You are not Slarn,” he said.
The masks of the city men had no apertures at the mouth and the voices that came from them were filtered and changed. I could tell this much, however: he was neither a young man nor a nervous one.
“True, sir, I am not Slarn.”
“Who then?”
I had been careless, trusting too much my peculiar luck, the occult demon-guide delivered from me.
“Come,” he said. “Unmask. I will know you.”
“As you wish,” I said.
I hazarded I should have the advantage of him; whatever trick me intended to detect, he would not look for me.
I loosened the cloak first, getting my knife ready to hand as I did so. As he took in my black hair, I heard him catch his breath in his throat. Then I had pulled off the mask.
I had been ready for all manner of things, but not for what he did. He fell back, and his arm went up, weaponless, instinctive, in a gesture of deference and denial. He blurted out two syllables I guessed to be an oath. Yet aware of his speech and still unable to fathom the word, I realized in a moment it was not an oath but a name.
“Vazkor.”
Unreasonably, receiving this unknown title terrified me.
A chasm gulped for my feet: I had lost my identity.
I had intended a smooth killing, like the other on the track, but I went at him in a blank panic, and drove in the blade vilely, missing the vital organ so he yelped with agony and fear before he fell. So much done amiss, I did not even have the sense left to lean and be certain he was dispatched. I Waited only long enough to hear if an answering hubbub would respond to his cry. When the night stayed peaceful, I ran and jumped down into the northern gully, without another caution.
As I had trusted, there was a low door in the side of the dungeon where the slope abutted on the gully. It was solid iron, but secured only by bolts fastened on the outside. These
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bolts I ripped from their sockets with my dagger, and stepped into the pit.
It was freezing, already fetid, the dark relieved inadequately through the oval grating by cheerless pale brown flakes of light.
A man lay moaning against my feet. His legs were bound with chains to the legs of two neighbors. I had reckoned on their being bound, but not on chains. However, the metal was brittle and green as the grating, and they were tangled in it rather than fettered. I tried to roll him free, chopping meanwhile at the chain with my knife. He muttered and struggled.
“Are you a man?” I asked him in the tribal tongue. I had observed that his captors had not even bothered to take his knife away from him. He flinched and groveled on the soiled floor of the dungeon, and all about the warrior-heap was flailing and tossing like a fever-house. I felt contempt, Hack and deep as the hole in which they lay. Prie in myself had brought me here; now my pride urged me away. I was not one with this mortal wreckage, crawling like insects in their own filth.
But I had come a distance and would not retreat. If they had no brain or strength of their own, I must goad them with mine.
The rusty chain cracked under my blade. The three men, loosed from it, curled together like disturbed puppies. Their vacant eyes were enlarged and stupid, and it occurred to me they had been fed some medicine on their journev here. The last of the three was a Dagkta from Ettook’s krarl. I saw he knew me and was trying to collect himself. I ewe him the bronze-mask’s knife, and put him to work on chains.
The slave-pit grew stealthily alive with staggering, bemused freedom. Some, less affected, were reviving in violent starts, snarling, searching out weapons, which in most cases had been left with them. Their eyes and knives glittered in the faint light. The tincture that had kept them docile was turning them vicious now that they had an avenue to escape and vengeance. Many were striped on the face or shoulders with the raw decoration of a whipping. Each had a score to settle.
None of this took very long, once we were stared on it. Soon there were about twenty standing in the pit, and eight lying down permanently from the treatment they had got, poisoned with the drug or beaten out of the world.
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In the ruin aloft, it seemed too steadily quiet; the fabric of peace was woven differently.
There was no need to speak to the red warriors. Most of them had recognized me, at last, and recognized themselves, and their blood was up. We stole out softly, two by two, into the gully, and scaled the slope.
The city men were on the dungeon roof, not five yards away, politely waiting for us. Near seventy of them.
The body of the silver-mask who had renamed me was missing-he must have lived long enough to crawl into their camp and warn them. Informed of everything, they had negligently formed their cordon and let us leap into it, like moths into the candle.
The warriors behind me faltered. They had never fought any but their tribal kin. What confronted them had an appearance of sorcery.
I was first onto level ground. The fires were burning behind the city men, making of them black dream figures, with bronze and silver beast-heads, white slanting swords, and green and purple rays spitting from their jewels as if their bodies had been pierced with eyes.
Suddenly one of them shouted. I tried to grasp the meaning, but, like a dream itself, my knowledge of their tongue was leaving me-then I caught once more the name the other had spoken: Vazkor.
And speech came in my mouth. I did not know what I said.
“So Vazkor enorr. Beheth Vazkor. Vazkor karnatis.”
It was like a portent, some god’s jest.
They retreated wordlessly, some slowly drawing off their masks, making men of themselves again. The faces they revealed were disbelieving, transfixed, white. Three knelt on the roof as if to worship, and ten more knelt after them, and another ten. These were all older men, forty or fifty years old. Among the rest there was an altercation, cries of anger and doubt. In the midst of this, understanding nothing but hungry for any chance, we sprang on them and cut them down.