The reek from the benches was thick as mud in the nostrils.
The Comforter bent near, fixing the irons to my legs, and securing these in turn to the bench. Both limbs were constrained. Later, an iron girdle about my belly would link me with the oar itself.
Before he went away up the ramp, one of the Comforters struck me across the back that I might wake to the full taste of my new life. I was returning fast to myself now, and reaching upward from my thought, healed the stripe immediately, which he did not witness in the gloom.
The shackles were of tempered blue iron, alcum as they call it in the northlands. I felt them over gently, wondering, as ever, if I could or could not. Then the rivets opened like warm putty. I laughed at my mage-craft softly as I lay under the bench, and the sound of the laugh, unfamiliar to the man beside me, my oar-mate, roused him.
To judge from his cries, his brain had been full of a dream of death, drowning in cold seas, weighted to the inescapable intestine of the sinking ship. He was a Seemase, sallow-pale and with curdled black hair of the Old Blood, like wool. He had a year of life left in him, and barely that. He looked at me, coming to himself, with a malicious pity, sorry another should share his rotten fate, and glad of it, too.
“Luck wasn’t with you,” he said to me, speaking the argot
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of the seaways, part Masrian, part Hessek, part ten or so ancient tongues.
“Perhaps it’s with you, then. How do I call you?”
“Call me,” he repeated. He coughed and spit to clear his lungs. “I was called Lyo once. Where did they catch you?” he added listlessly. He was not curious, this being merely a ritual, the new victim who must be questioned on a reflex.
I said, “They didn’t catch me, Lyo. See.” I showed him the broken chains about my ankles. The alcum-iron looked melted.
He peered, then had to cough and gargle up more phlegm before he said, “Did you bribe them not to fetter you? They Will still do it.”
I lifted a piece of the chain in my fingers; it fell apart in front of his eyes. He blinked, trying to puzzle around the thing.
“Should you like to be free, Lyo?”
“Free,” he said. He looked at me, then at the piece of chain. He coughed.
“You’re sick,” I said. “Two months, and you will bleed in the lungs.” Something went over his face, the thought of the oar in a high sea, his ribs broken, a tearing in his chest like cloth. His dull gaze flickered up into fright, then faded out.
“Death’s no stranger. Let him come. Are you Death?”
I reached over and put my hand on his belly. The sickness swirled up like a serpent trapped under a stick. He choked and caught his breath, and jerked away from me in terror. He gasped and put his palms over his face.
“Say what you feel,” I said to him.
Presently he said quietly, “You are God.”
“And what god is that?”
“Whichever you say.”
“You will call me Vazkor,” I said.
“What have you done to me?”
“I have cured your lungs.”
“Free me,” he said, “free me, and you can have my life.”
“My thanks. You offer what is already mine to take.”
He kept his palms over his face. It was a ritual gesture of humility before the Infinite.
“Pretend nothing has happened between us,” I said. “Later, you shall go free.”
He lay back, weakened by the shock of healed strength flowing through him. It was strange to work a magic this vi-
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tal, without even a sense of pity or sympathy having moved me.
I was cautious now, and did nothing further. Shortly a Comforter found me still in my place, unchained. He called one of his fellows. Next, the Overseer came, and shouted like a bad and unconvincing actor that they should know better than to shackle a man with corroded bonds. I vacantly gazed at them as they brought fresh fetters and did the work anew. Lyo laughed and a flail slashed him across the neck.
Not long after, the order came to resume oars.
The Hyacinth Vineyard was turning home.
South, no longer east. As I had seen in that flash of precognition on the island, the ship was the fate that would carry me toward my goal. I would find her in the south, then, maybe even in this city they named Bar-Ibithni, where they worshiped the god of fire. What did she do there? Or should I have to go farther to find Uastis Reincarnate, my mother?
Absorbed in this reflection, I made no effort to escape the oar. It was sufficient to know I could get loose when I wished. Besides, I was young and proud, and full again of my vow of hate, and somehow that mood was fitted to those huge, grinding pulls and thrusts upon a blade of iron and wood.
You row from the calf to the groin, from the groin to the pit of the skull. Only the feet rest easy, and then not always. A boy put to the labor when he is still growing will emerge, if emerge he ever does, with the body of a toad, a vast chest and arms and a goblin’s squat, tapering lower limbs. Here and there about Bar-Ibithni you might see such a man, survivor by incredible luck of a shipwreck or sea battle between pirates, who had subsequently bought himself off by bribery of a priest in some Temple of Sanctuary.
Yet the toil was nothing to me. I could have carried the enormous oar alone and made a jest of it, and later did.
Presently a Comforter came by to check my fetters, currently intact. He gave a grunt, stepped back, and, for mere sport, raised his flail. I turned and looked in his pupils.
“You should know better, dog, than to pick up snakes.”
A lightning of fear flickered in muddy irises. He felt the flail writhe in his hand, and let it fall with a cry.
“Poor dog,” I said, “you are sick. Go vomit, dog, till you are dry.”
He lurched about, clutching his belly, and staggered off in the growing gloom and began to puke. Lyo giggled excitedly.
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Judging a disturbance, another of the Comforters materialized at my elbow,
“Give me water,” I called to him, “water, for your god’s sake.”
He grinned and stared me in the eye, and made to beat me, and lashed himself across the face instead. He screamed with pain and stumbled to his knees.
“Now you will give me water,” I said. I put my palm on his shoulder, keeping the oar going easily single-armed. He took his hand from his injured face. “Water in a cup,” I said.
He crawled away, and returned with an iron bowl, his own, filled with mixed water and grain-liquor. I drank, and gave him the cup back with a bow. Bloody, he shambled to his station, apparently unaware of his hurt.
The Drummer sat drumming the time of the strokes, a moron, not seeing. The Overseer was above.
Tension had tightened over the rowing lines. The oar does not deal kindly with the mental process; only a few had taken in what had occurred. Even so, a febrile alertness had spread like a new smell through the deck, and a rampant, gnawing memory of the first aspirations of the slave-mutiny, rebellion: freedom. The inexorable pendulum had faltered. Not one of them but did not sense that much, and fasten on it with a cloudy prayer for change to whatever gods they still forgave and reverenced.
And none of us missed a stroke.
3
It would be a journey of seventeen days, so they reckoned, to regain the ship-roads and reach the city, for they had been in the outermost regions of their travels when the hurricane caught them. Seventeen days, too, was an estimation that took into account continuous use of full sail and oar-power together. For this, each rower worked a third of a day alone at the big pole and one third in harness with his mate. An hour following the sunset, when the quarter-lighted black of the underdeck thickened to an unbelievable second depth of darkness, a portion of sleep was allowed, and the slaves tumbled down into that abysmal, muttering unconsciousness
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by which any man, having once heard it, could tell such a spot blindfold ever after. At the midnight bell, the flails would rouse the lines again to toil in shifts till sunup.
For one day I perversely continued my slavery, after which I had had enough of it.
At sundown, before the last shift was done, I broke and kicked off my chains, and stood up leaving the oar to Lyo. The two Comforters I had had dealings with before retreated from me, shouting. Immediately the shouting spread, the rowers snarled around from their poles like hungry, angry beasts, yet still with not a stroke missed. Plainly the Comforters in my path did not wish to touch me. I met their eyes, and they crouched gradually down on the ramp, like men bowed by an enormous weight upon their backs. The Drummer, more observant on this occasion, had left off his beating and was trying to get his hammer ready for a blow. I called to him.