Manhounds of Antares (6 page)

The Rapa tried to straighten up, hissing, his beaked face vicious, his crest swelling. But I hit him again, with my free hand, and turned to Tulema.

“Eat.”

“But — you—”

“I am not hungry.”

That was true. Only moments ago I had risen from the campfire, replete with the finest delicacies Valka could offer.

She fell on the food ravenously.

If you were not strong and determined and ruthless here you would not die of starvation, for you could eat dilse, but you would slowly decline. Maybe, I thought even then, there was purpose in this. I had some inkling of slave-masters’ ways.

We walked away and I waited for Tulema to finish eating.

Then I said: “Tulema. Listen closely. I want to know the names and conditions of all the people who were with us in the cell when—” I hesitated. I could hardly say to her, “When I arrived,” for that would demand explanations I would not give, and if given, would not be believed. I finished: “When the slave-master was knocked down.”

The food inside her warmed her. She did not giggle — slaves only laugh and sing when something special happens, like the master falling down and breaking his neck — but she let me know she thought my remark highly apposite.

“I think I can remember. But why?”

Instinctively I had to quell my instant rush of bad language, my browbeating intolerance of any who would question an order. I said: “Does anyone escape from here, Tulema?”

“We believe so — we hope so — but I am frightened to go—”

That did make some kind of sense, but it was a tortuous thread. Tulema told me something of herself, and thereby something also of where we were. She came from a seaside town called Fellow, and she sounded sad when she told me of her home in Herrelldrin. She had every right to be sad. We were on the island of Faol, and she shivered as she told me. The island lay off the coast of Havilfar.

Havilfar!

So far on Kregen I had trod the land of the continents of Segesthes and of Turismond. I had touched at Erthyrdrin, in the continent of Loh. But the continent of Havilfar was all new and unexplored by me, virgin territory. I fancied I was in for some wild adventures and some seething action in the future, and, as you shall hear, I was not wrong.

After the meal a sudden shrilling of a stentor’s horn made everyone jump and then rush madly for the exits. I stumbled along after Tulema, trying to keep her in sight in the frenzied rushing to and fro of slaves. Screams and cries rang out, people shouted for friends, and I saw the way the slaves kept darting frightened glances back, into the dimmer recesses of the caves.

We all pushed up against the lenk-wood bars.

I blinked against the glare of the twin suns and looked out. I knew we were in the southern hemisphere of Kregen now, and therefore the suns would cross the sky to the northward, but just where we were off Havilfar in relation to the equator I could not say. I guessed we were nearer that imaginary line than I had been in Vallia, nearer, even, than I had been in Pandahem. For the northern sweep of Havilfar rises out of the southern ocean east of southern Loh, below the rain forests of Chem. I fancied Inch’s Ng’groga would not be too far away, down to the southwest.

In the clearing cut from the jungle I saw guards strutting, banging their whips against gaitered legs, swaggering in their tunics of forest green. Among them a number of well-dressed men and women moved as though on a shopping expedition.

I say as though on a shopping expedition, but then I thought that was what they were doing — shopping for slaves. In that I was wrong.

A group advanced to the cage where we stood and Tulema shrank back. Other slaves with us pushed forward boldly. Tulema held my arm. Without any sense of rancor I guessed she saw in me a meal ticket and did not wish to lose me. My sentiments were not to lose her, for she could tell me of the people in the cell when I arrived.

In the mob of slaves pressing up against the bars one man stood out. He was dark-haired, and his hair was cropped. He looked lithe and bronzed and fit. He had about him an alertness, an air of competence, and I saw the way he stood, loosely and limberly. The people with him pressed against the lenk-wood bars.

“A very fine bunch at the moment, Notor,”
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a guard was saying to one of the customers. The guard I categorized in a moment: hard, arrogant, whip-wielding, a true slave-master, toadying now to the highborn of the land.

The man he had addressed as “Notor” also merited little attention, being fleshy, bulkily built, with a dark beard and moustaches. His eyes were like those of a leem. He wore a fine tunic of some fancy pale lavender silk, and boots, and at his side swung a sword. He carried a kerchief drenched in perfume. The party with him, other nobles and their ladies, were likewise attired in silks and satins against the heat. They were a chattering, laughing, carefree group of people — and my heart hardened against them, for all I had been as happy and carefree in what, although it was but a bur or so ago, now seemed another world.

“Yes, Nalgre,” said the lord. “I think so. What do you advise for this season? A dozen? Would that be enough for us?” He sniggered. “We are passable shots, Nalgre.”

“The finest shots, Notor Renka,” quoth Nalgre the slave-master. “I believe, with all due deference, you could easily accommodate a full score.”

Tulema tugged me back again.

“Do not press against the bars so, Dray!” I had told her my name, Dray Prescot, without so much as a Koter for title. I had had my fill of titles for the moment.

I shook her hand off, for I wanted to learn as much as might be of the situation in which I had been placed, a problem to solve and someone to save — someone, I had no idea who.

At that instant, when I was about to press forward and so join the mob, slightly separated from the others, clustered around the lithe dark-haired man, I saw beyond the bars a man I knew. He walked with the notables and laughed and glanced over the slaves, and waved a scented handkerchief airily.

The man was Berran, Vadvar of Rifuji, a noble of Vallia who had been a secret member of the third party, and who had led his men to the aid of Naghan Furtway to fight at The Dragon’s Bones. I had thought him dead. Now he was here. I wondered how many others of the leaders of the abortive coup had fled to Havilfar.

Feeling it was prudent not to be recognized I stepped back away from the bars. I must have stepped smartly, for Tulema let out a squeal, and I realized I had trodden on her toes. I do not apologize, so I said: “Who is that man with the dark hair and handsome face? A slave who looks unlike a slave?”

She recovered quickly. From the corner of my eye I could see the Notor Renka and his party, and with them Berran, moving away with the slave-master, so that danger had passed.

“He is a guide. They are brave men — I wish—” She swallowed. Her face wore a drawn look of misery. “I am frightened to go with them. I can offer nothing — but everyone says they can save us.”

Manhunters of Faol

A few quick questions established just what was going on here on the island of Faol.

Slaves were taken from the cell and, now that I understood, I was not surprised to see the willingness with which they went. They tried to hide that eagerness, they tried to dissimulate, but for all that they fairly skipped out of the cell. They were not happy merely because they were being let out of a cell. Their joy ran in deeper channels.

The man Tulema had called a guide went with them, and I could see him trying to hush his companions, and for a space they would slouch along like dejected slaves, only to go pushing on toward the slave barracks at the far end of the clearing. Guards surrounded them, harsh, vicious men in the leaf-green tunics, with whips and swords and spears.

The notables who had done their shopping had gone.

They were not here on Faol buying slaves.

They were on holiday.

They might even — and I hoped Zair might have mercy on them for so abusing a great word — they might say they were on a Jikai.

For these slaves would be hunted.

They were quarry.

On the morrow, given clothes and a knife apiece, they would be let loose in the jungles of Faol, and then the nobles and their ladies, dressed up in fancy hunting clothes, would take after them. Oh, it would be great sport. They’d hunt the slaves right across the island, making great sport of it all, shouting “Hai, Jikai!” like as not.

I felt sick.

That human men and women could so debase themselves frightened me. No wonder the men of Aphrasöe so passionately wished to cleanse the planet Kregen, to give it honor and dignity, to remove forever the stain of slavery.

One tiny spark of hope there was, one ray of hope in all this morass of horror and ugliness.

That hope made the slaves walk out so eagerly on what would be a dreadful chase through the jungles, hunted and slain for sport.

For the guards had no way of knowing that the young men the slaves called guides would lead the hunted creatures to safety.

Tulema told me.

“The guides are very brave men, Dray! They can find their way through the jungles, and they can lead the people out to safety! And then, they come back here, through the tunnels in the rock, at the back of the caves, they return to lead out more slaves to freedom!”

“They are brave, Tulema,” I said.

“Oh, yes! They take who they can, but they are promised rewards for their help, and I cannot reward anyone, for my parents are dead and I was a dancer in a dopa den, and I am afraid . . .”

A thought occurred to me.

“Why does not everyone escape out through the tunnels in the caves?”

She shook her head. “The ways are terrible and fraught with danger. The shafts are steep. The stone crumbles. Men can slide down, no one can climb up.”

Well, I could be sure that slaves had tried to get out that way, and had failed. Slaves do many things to escape. The fear of death will not stop them, only failure of a scheme will hold them back from escape.

An old crone wandered across the cell, sweeping with a rustly broom of twigs, cleaning up. Everyone moved out of her way. She was not a human being, and here I saw for the first time a member of the race of Miglish, the Miglas, who inhabit a large and important island off Havilfar.

“Get out of the way, you onker!” said one of the slaves, pushing the crone. She spat back at him and waved her broom, her long tangled hair about her face.

“May Migshaanu the All-Glorious turn your bones to jelly and your teeth black in your mouth and may she strike you with the pestilence and your eyes dribble down your cheeks, you cowardly nulsh!”

The Miglish crone waved her broom, whose stiff twigs were no more wildly tangled than her dark hair. The slave fell back, but still he mocked, and, indeed, the Migla looked a strange and unwholesome sight. She wore a gray slave breech-clout and a gray sacking garment. Her words tumbled out in a torrent. Tulema pulled me back, saying, “She is an evil old witch, Dray!”

The Migla swiped her broom at the dusty floor and tottered across to the lenk-wood bars where a guard in the leaf-green opened the narrow, barred door for her. She went out, still complaining, her thin bent back hard and angular beneath the sackcloth. She was evidently a tame slave and employed to clean up. Truth to tell, cleaning up was always necessary in these slave pens of Faol.

The slave who had pushed her spat on the floor.

He was a fine upstanding young man, with a Umber body on which the muscles showed long and supple, clear evidence that he could fight his way to the choicest parts of vosk, the fattest and juiciest onions, the best knuckle of bread. Tulema glanced at him, and away. He stared boldly at her, and walked over, moving with an arrogant lilt to him, a cock of the chin.

“I have not seen you before, shishi,” he said, and he smiled with the wide meaning smile of a young man who imagines he knows all there is to know of the world and its wicked ways.

Shishi is a word I do not much care for. It carries certain connotations when spoken in that way by a man to a girl, and is far from respectful. It had been used by various men to Delia when we were in captivity and most of the men who had so spoken to her were dead. I started to say something, in my usual intemperate way, but Tulema put a quick hand on my arm and spoke loudly over my words.

“There are many slaves here, dom. It is no wonder you have not seen me.” And then, with meaning, she added: “Why have you not gone with a guide to freedom? You are a strong man—”

“Yes, I am strong.”

And, there and then, to my amazement, he started in on a series of callisthenic exercises, bulging his muscles, striking poses, making his body an exhibition of muscular strength.

I did not laugh, for, as you know, I do not laugh often. Although, looking back, I see I seemed to do nothing else but laugh during that wonderful time in Vondium when Delia and I were first married.

“This man is a Khamorro of the land of Herrell,” Tulema whispered to me, her eyes wide and fearful. “They know a very terrible means of breaking men’s bones. Do not, Dray, I beg you, even think of fighting him.”

“Do not be frightened of him,” I said.

“You do not understand! I do not know what kham he may have reached, but if you touch him he will kill you.”

About to make some noncommittally brave and no doubt foolish reply, I stopped my wagging tongue. A girl had walked into our cell and approached the bars, and stood staring out in hopeless longing upon the mingled opaline rays of the twin suns. There can be no shame about nakedness among slaves, for between us we did not own so much as a pocket kerchief to cover ourselves, but this girl’s stance, the way her arm reached up to clasp a lenken bar, the long line of her body, moved me. Her hair waved in a bright and genuine golden color about her shoulders, and her face, pallid and clear, revealed a beauty that seemed to light up the dank dark cave-cell.

I fancied I remembered the glorious golden hair shining as she ran from the cell on my arrival, when I had thrown the whip-wielding slave-master.