Lod the Galley Slave (Lost Civilizations)

Fantasy
Books by Vaughn Heppner:

LOST CIVILIZATION SERIES

Giants

Leviathan

The Tree of Life

Gog

Behemoth

Lod the Warrior

Lod the Galley Slave

THE ARK CHRONICLES

People of the Ark

People of the Flood

People of Babel

People of the Tower

DARK GODS
SERIES

Death Knight

The Dragon Horn

Assassin of the Damned

OTHER
FANTASY BOOKS

The Assassin of Carthage

Elves and Dragons

Strontium-90

Visit www.Vaughnheppner.com for more information.

Lod
the Galley Slave

(Lost Civilizations)

by Vaughn Heppner

Copyright © 2014 by the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

The Oracle of Gog

The legends of Lod were many, a grim hero of the Pre-Cataclysmic Age. That was long before the pyramids of Egypt rose and centuries before the ships of Crete ruled the seas. In that misty era of sabertooths, mammoths and behemoths, the demonic Nephilim walked the Earth. They were the sons of the
bene elohim
, who had come down from the celestial sphere and taken wives from among the daughters of men.

Lod
may have been born somewhere along the shores of the Suttung Sea. The ancient sagas first mention him as rat bait in the wicked city of Shamgar. That is where he learned his first harsh lessons of life.

I laid at his feet ten gold bars, twenty silver sacks and slaves both comely and strong. To the one hidden in shadows I bowed, and with my dagger cut my wrist, dripping blood, binding my soul with dreadful oaths. Then did Gog speak. He beheld my future. Now my sire is dead, my uncles slain, and I am king of the land.

- From the Testament of Zoar

-1-

“
We’ll try the Street of Harlots today,” the rat hunter whispered. A bearded, evil-faced ruffian, he plied a gondola’s long oar.

Lod—the rat hunter
’s bait—made no reply. He had found that stillness and corresponding silence warded off the misty chill better than rubbing his shoulders or wishing for a garment or blanket.

Lod was a mixture of gangly youth and rawboned size. His
broad, whip-scarred back matched his big hands and feet. Muscles like ropes twisted across him. He had no fat because his young body devoured every scrap of goat meat and soggy turnip he could find.

“
Keep watch,” the rat hunter whispered.

Hunched at the prow like a Nebo primitive, with tangled hair and a twist of linen around his loins, Lod squinted through the mist at the canal
’s oily water.

The thump of rowing stopped as the rat hunter scowled at Lod. Boat-wood creaked as the man stepped toward the prow where Lod crouched.

Lifting a
knout
, a leather whip, the rat hunter shouted, “Answer me when I speak to you!” His knout slashed through the air.

When the leather hit Lod
’s back, it burned like fire. But Lod kept hunched at the prow, his callused hands clutching the braided eel-rope attached to his collar. He bit his lips, mastering the pain, and his strange blue eyes blazed like some desert prophet gone mad.

“
Did you hear me?” the hunter hissed.

Lod
’s knuckles whitened as he clenched the leash binding him to the gondola. The leather thongs hissed through the air again. Lod groaned as they bit into his flesh.

“
Answer me, slave.”

Lod shuddered as his pale face drained of color, matching his abnormal white hair.

“By Gog!” the hunter hissed, striking a third time. He used brutal strength, drawing blood. “You will answer me.”

“
I hear,” Lod said.

“
Master!” snarled the hunter. “I hear,
master
.”

Lod nodded as sweat oozed and mingled with the blood on his back.

The
knout
dropped onto wood as steel slid free. Gnarled fingers twined into Lod’s hair and a gutting knife touched his cheek. The words whispered into his ear reached his nostrils. They reeked of sour ale and chewed kanda-leaf.

“
Who rules here, slave?”

“
You do,” Lod said.

“
I will only ask once more.”

“
You do…master,” rumbled Lod, in a voice that belied his youth.

The hunter let go and stepped back, sheathing his dagger.
“Face me, slave.”

Lod unfolded from his Nebo crouch, and on his hands and knees, he faced the hunter. A folded net lay in the middle of the boat. Beside it were three long tridents. The fourth was in the hunter
’s rope-roughened hands, with the razor-sharp prongs aimed at Lod’s face.

“
You’ve survived where none has,” the hunter said. His teeth were stained black by years of kanda-leaf chewing. “You’ve lived where everyone else has died. What’s your secret, eh? Where do you gain this mulishness?”

“
I do not know, master,” Lod lied.

A sneer curled the bearded lip.
“Then maybe I’ll sell you to a beastmaster.”

Something akin to fear sprouted
in Lod’s heart. He hated it, but the fear gnawed into his iron-hard belly.

“
I am good bait,” he said.

“
You know how to lure the vermin,” the hunter agreed. “But if you defy me again, I will sell you to a beastmaster. I’ll knock out your teeth first and break every finger. Then the beastmaster will use you as feed for the leopards he trains to attack men.”

F
ear tasted like bile in Lod’s mouth. He dropped his head, bowing before the hunter, hiding his hatred.

The rat hunter laughed
, an ugly noise. “That’s better. Now attend to your post, bait, and keep a sharp lookout.”

“
Yes, master,” Lod whispered.

The hunter took the long oar, the single o
ne he swept back and forth at the end of the boat, rowing through the misty canals of Shamgar.

The rising sun brought a bloody glint to the fog. Shadowy domes, towers and square fortresses
appeared like ghosts. Morning sounds heralded the dawn: a bucket of filth heaved into a canal, a gong waking its household, the shrill cries of swamp-beasts who had grown bold during the night. Somewhere in the murk, a priest of Gog called a paean of praise from his minaret, while the crack of a whip, shouted curses and heavy clinks of chain meant a slaver drove his wares early to market.

The mists thinned here. Lod squinted. Fifty feet out, crates bobbed in the water. Atop the biggest crate, licking an obscene claw, hunched a black canal rat the size of a rutting he-goat.

Before Lod could signal him, the rat hunter locked the oar, crept near and whispered, “Today we’ll try something new. Turn around, stretch out your hands and put your wrists together.”

Lod reluctantly obeyed.

The rat hunter bound Lod’s wrists with a braided eel-rope, looping it three times and tying it with a sailor’s knot. The hunter’s rough hands, his craggy features and the skill with which he tied the knot betrayed his former station as a reaver of the Inland Sea. Whatever had brought him down to scouring Shamgar’s canals was a secret he had never shared with his bait.

The hunter grinned, exposing his black-stained teeth.
“Do you know there’s a bet on you?”

Lod hunched dumbly like an ox, contemplating his bound wrists, afraid that if he spoke his anger might reveal itself. He had often thought of slaying his owner, but in Shamgar, they impaled such slaves. Lod shuddered. He had witnessed impalement before. Brutish men held down the screaming slave while others hammered a sharp stake up the man
’s—Lod squeezed his eyes shut, willing the memory gone. They had planted the dying slave upright so he writhed in agony and thereby provided edification for any others with similar thoughts of freedom.

“
Some say no rat will ever gut you,” the hunter was whispering. “Others predict that with me as your new master your days are sorely numbered. What has it been? Three weeks now?”

Lod lifted his head and stared into pitiless cruelty. He understood then that a bettor had slipped silver into the hunter
’s palm to weight the outcome.

The hunter sneered, and with his powerful rope-roughened right hand he slapped Lod across the face.
“Don’t stare at me, slave. Keep your eyes lowered before your master.”

Lod dropped his gaze as he tasted coppery blood.

Calloused fingers squeezed his shoulder. “Look at the size of you, and with muscles like brass. Who ever heard of bait like you? Gershon was right to fear his bait-boy.” The hunter struck his own chest. “But I know how to handle bait big or small, submissive or defiant. See that fat black bastard preening his claws. It’s surely a double-weight catch, well over one hundred pounds of vicious canal rat.”

Lod choked down his hatred.
“Master,” he said, “I need free hands in order to play dead. My movements now will be too jerky and I will not be convincing.”

“
You’ll play dead or I’ll make you dead, boy.”

Lod nodded. For years, he had survived the canals, longer than any bait, first as a boy weeping himself to sleep—but with a stubborn core just the same. Then he had become a soulless youth, with every soft emotion beaten out of him. Finally, he had become a legendry animal, a
thing
of rat hunter lore spoken of in the lowest taverns.

Until a week ago. A week ago
the visions began: dreams with fire, blood and the breaking of teeth. The visions seared him, filling his warped soul until he yearned to howl and gnash his teeth like a slavering beast. On the fourth night, lost words had returned to him, words he had learned at his father’s knee.

His father had been a seer, although others had named his father a shepherd. Those remembered words taught Lod that…that
Elohim
sent visions. On the fifth night, with a fevered shine in his blue eyes, Lod had prophesied in the dark, in the locked shed where they penned him: “Woe to the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims!”

As they drifted in the canal, the hunter bent low, whispering,
“I’ve watched you, bait, swimming like an otter, escaping the rats time and again. You trust yourself. Today you’ll have to trust me, and the skill of my cast. Now into the brine with you, boy,” and with his bare foot, the hunter shoved Lod hard.

Lod tumbled into the sewage-
filled waters, the forty-foot leash attached to his collar and the brass ring in the gondola playing out like a fishing line. Water shot up his nostrils as he somersaulted into the depths and kicked, but not too hard. Exploding onto the surface fooled no rat.

He soon bobbed up with his bloody back and slowly lifted his head, sipping air, watching through narrowed eyes.

The great black rat, as big as a he-goat, had stopped preening its webbed claws. Its nose quivered and its whiskers twitched.

From the side of the foggy canal came a splash. Lod knew the sound
intimately. A sheep-sized rat had plunged in. Then came two more splashes. The giant black monster on the crates squealed a challenging cry, and then it, too, dove into the water.

Lod had long ago divined the nature of canal rats: greedy, territorial and savage. They were not like sharks. Rats breathed air and not underwater. Just the same, a rat often submerged and occasionally made an attack from the depths. Most often, a rat surfaced
, and if the body was a corpse, it devoured the meat as fast as possible. Against a living foe, though, even the giant canal rats might balk.

The beasts were used to the weak, the perishing or the securely bound. Lod had learned early that bared teeth and raking fingers—fighting back
, in other words—gave him the seconds he needed either to escape, or for the hunter’s trident to make its strike. That was only true against a lone rat. When the beasts swarmed, they became frenzied, not because their courage increased, but because in their greed they feared that others might gain the choicest morsel before they could.