“Where’s your home?” the rider demanded. His friends kept their horses who were longing for gallop.
“Rus’.”
The riders exchanged glances. “Never heard of it,” the back one said angrily. “Some made-up place, yeah?”
“Or a tiny kingdom!” a different rider cried.
“Tiny as my nail!”
“Very good,” the back rider resolved. “He’s no one’s man.” He dismounted, prodded Oleg’s chest with a whip handle. Oleg did not stir when the man felt the muscle on his arms and chest efficiently. Then he made Oleg open his mouth and counted his teeth.
The first rider cried impatiently, “You’re ready to grab all sorts of carrion, Ternak! Look! He’s a bag of bones.”
“He’s from Europe,” the second rider added. “Our blood.”
Ternak laughed. “God said He knew no Gentile or Jew. So everyone is equal to Baron’s stone quarry, ha ha! Take him to Murad.”
They surrounded the pilgrim: two with bare sabers, the third with an arrow on the bow string. Oleg looked in their faces of skillful slavers, experts in this gods-awful trade.
“Stretch your hands!” Ternak commanded. “Not ahead! Behind you!”
Oleg crossed his arms behind him submissively. Ternak put a rope on them deftly, tied his hands together. Another rider helped him to lift Oleg on the horseback. Ternak shook his hands off. “So heavy a bag of bones!” he said with surprise. “Abdullah! Take him to Murad and join us.”
Abdullah swore, mounted hastily and galloped to the castle, whooping and holding the bound pilgrim.
They had barely entered the courtyard when a huge creature covered with black hair came out to meet them. He seemed to Oleg half a man, half a beast, with his low forehead, close small eyes, huge massive jaw and absent neck: his boulder-like head was seated on muscular shoulders directly. His bare chest resembled a beer cask, his legs looked as though he spent his whole life seated on that cask, but his arms were as big and thick as tree trunks but covered with thick black hair instead of bark.
The enormous man wiped his hooked fingers, which looked fire-tempered, on a hem of his blood-stained leather apron. He looked the wonderer over with revulsion. “That one a croak on his first day! Kadji damn you, Ternak…”
Oleg was brought to a low stone barn. The door was ajar, the inside smelled of sewage and stiff air. They pushed Oleg forcefully into the dark. His foot found no floor, he went rolling down the stairs and came back to himself on the stone floor covered with wisps of rotten straw.
He heard the door shut and barred upwards. A strong hand touched his shoulder, a mocking voice said in his ear, “Hail to the builder of new world!”
Oleg’s eyes got accustomed to the semi-dark quickly. He discerned about twenty half-naked men along the walls. Each one had a tarnished metal collar round his neck, three were fettered. “Which world?” Oleg asked.
“The new one,” the other man jeered. “Fair one! Christian one! Baron Otset’s castle among barbarity. It’s an outpost of Christian host in the land of Saracen…” He was half-naked, his back in awful swollen wales. His face was crossed by a lacerated crimson wale, his left eye swollen.
Oleg sat up, rubbed his numb hands. “I heard… there’s a stone quarry?”
The man grinned, baring sharp stubs of front teeth. His gums were bleeding. “Ever worked stone?”
Oleg nodded, still looking around. If the man wants to see the novice frightened, he will be disappointed. Pilgrims see much in their travels.
“A pilgrim?” Oleg nodded again at that. The stranger went on, “Half pilgrims here. Baron gives us a chance to build the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. For him, definitely. The castle’s done, now the wall raised… My name’s Yarlat.”
“I’m Oleg. From Rus’.”
“Is it somewhere in Hyperborea?”[5]
In the next morning Oleg was brought to the forge. Two strong warriors put an iron ring around his neck. The forger was skillful and fast to join the metal ends and rivet them together. The skin on Oleg’s throat got burnt a bit.
The guard made a strong slap on his back. “I love pilgrims! Humble, accepting. Other pigheaded. Yesterday two of ‘em fed to dogs alive.”
The collar was burning hot, slow to cool. The guards led Oleg through the main gate outside. In half a mile from the castle, there was a pit large enough to contain two or three such castles. Fine sharp dust was rising from it. Oleg heard heavy blows of iron on stone.
The guard led Oleg up to the brink, pointed at a wooden ladder. “Get down! No pick for you, drag stone out. The foreman show you in.”
Down in the pit, half-naked men were pounding rocks with heavy picks, making holes in the stone, driving wooden stakes into the holes and watering. The wet swollen wood would break stone. The broken boulders were tied round with ropes and lifted up.
The foreman frowned at his new slave. “You drag broken stone. To that wall. On top only those won’t try to escape. We don’t know if you will.”
Silently, Oleg gripped a sparkling colored edge of the cut-off boulder. The black-bearded man who took it by another side told him through gritted teeth, “Don’t be idle, but don’t work fingers to bone. Or you won’t live till evening!”
All the forenoon they rolled or dragged stones to the wall. Rope ends were thrown down from above, Oleg and the black-bearded man called Shaggy tied the stones round, dawdling with knots to extend the moments of rest. Then boulders were lifted with poignant slowness, their sharp edges scratched the stone wall, the crumbs of granite fell down.
After a brief lunchtime, when each slave was given a dried fish and a slice of bread, Oleg was told to drive the wooden wedges. Others were watering. The slab of stone underfoot was crackling and groaning when Oleg felt a strange strain in it. Next to him, two moaning slaves were rolling a broken-off boulder with long poles.
“Step aside,” Oleg warned them. “Or you may be injured.”
The slaves looked bewildered. The foreman gave him a sharp look, then suddenly barked at them, “Get away!” The slaves flew up, like birds flushed. The huge slab gave a crack. A boulder shot up as if hurled by catapult and ploughed the dry rocky ground two steps long. Oleg stood on the very edge of the larger slab. The foreman kept his eyes on the novice, his mouth twisted. “You know stone? Good… Two fools owe to you.”
The slab was broken like an overripe watermelon: its inside gleaming red with black grains, lined from top to bottom with straight grooves, water-swollen wedges stuck in them.
Oleg picked up his excessively heavy hammer. Slaves moved around like half-dead men, their eyes lackluster. His heart wrung with guilt: he still had not found the Truth to rescue them.
By evening he was hardly able to drag his feet along. The hammer was dropping out of his hands, twice he escaped falling boulders only by miracle. Covered with stone crumbs, dripping with sweat, he could barely hear, through the buzz in his ears, the foreman shout for everyone to finish work and get out.
The exhausted workers rushed to the rope ladders dropped from above, where the guards’ swords rang and glittered with bare steel. Oleg lingered. His breath burst out in rattles, his legs quivered.
The foreman whipped him. “Move it!” he bellowed. “You have to be in before dark!”
Someone helped Oleg up to his feet. The guards above struggled to keep their mad dogs who pawed the ground, reaching for slaves, and clanked their scary sharp teeth.
The foreman shoved Oleg into the barn, both collapsed on the dirty floor. Once the gate was slammed
