things have a tremendous significance for the men who worshiped the green-sun deity Grodno. It would, in truth, be a death. When the green sun passed before the red, and being smaller it did not thus create an eclipse but rather a transit, was the time for the Magdaggians to break out in another of their surges of violence and upheavals of conquest. During those times the men of Zair looked to their defenses, sharpened their swords, and sailed the inner sea in strength.
What the men of Magdag did during the green sun’s eclipse, during the time of the Great Death, I was to learn. .
The massive buildings were as I remembered them.
I felt my heart move with pity and anger as I saw the slaves in their thousands laboring beneath the suns. Progress had been made on the buildings that I recalled as being half finished. I saw gang overseers lashing on the slaves to faster and faster work. The Chuliks would not let me approach too close. They had their long swords half unsheathed. They were not happy. I could smell the tension on the hot air.
“They are behind their schedules,” I was told by a rast-faced guard commander, an overlord of the second class. He was the first I had met since my second arrival in Magdag. I had been moving in the company of overlords of the first class and of nobles — Zair forgive me.
“The time of the Great Death approaches,” he said. He seemed happy to spend the time talking to a noble. “We must have at least one new hall finished by then.”
“Assuredly,” I said.
He nodded with his own driving conviction. “We will,” he said. He held a whip and ran the thongs through his blunt fingers. “We will.”
Choked by the redolent memories of the slaves and workers, with sudden brilliant images of Genal, Holly, and Pugnarses in my mind, I looked over the fantastic scene. I could see it with a new eye, now, from a different perspective. The place swarmed with men and women. In their gray garments, or naked, they moved over the buildings on their scaffolds like a confused army of insects. Huge masses of stone were hoisted into the air as the shrieked commands of the whip-masters cut through the air as their whips cut through the sweating skins of the slaves. The piles of bricks grew under the sun, and were carried away by endless streams of slave children. The shouts, the bedlam, the smoke of dust and chips that hung over everything, the stinks of the thousands of people, rose like an evil miasma. This was what Babel might have been; although here everyone could understand his neighbor. This convulsion of perverted energy smoked to high heaven upon the plain of Magdag, there on my adopted world of Kregen. Making it my business to inspect every part of the work, I visited places I had never seen before. There were the smiths, working miracles of beauty in scrolled iron and brass. There were the masons cutting stone to delicate perfection. The artists painted their frescoes, their friezes, working with the sure speed that had painted this figure in this position in these colors a hundred times before. A strict and formal routine held the decoration into ritual patterns. Inside some of the lofty halls with their plethora of columns and innumerable images and paintings, I sometimes felt I had reentered the hall I had left only moments before.
The production lines stunned me with their expertise set up or the development of some of the artifacts used. Earth did not reach that state of expertise until the automobile assembly line indicated what mechanical effectiveness might be obtained from this breaking-down of function into separate work-quanta.
Men in long lines labored to produce, for example, barrel after barrel of the iron nails used in fixing wooden fasciae. They worked with a kind of numb professionalism, slaves chained to their benches, the only sounds the eternal clinking of the hammers, the bellow of the forges. I saw the way masses of slaves were yoked to the gigantic stones ferried down from the mountains of the interior. They could sort themselves out into their gangs and tail onto ropes and haul away under the lash with a skill I remembered.
Down by the sludgy banks of the sluggish stream that bore the ferried stone from the interior — a blackish- gray basaltic stone and quite unlike the yellow stone used in the construction of the city’s noble houses — I saw the wide extent of the kitchens. Holly had cooked for the workers on a small scale, by the gang. The slaves had mass cooking. The place stank and crawled with flies and vermin. Down by the river, which ran red here, I saw immense piles of bones, and tall stacks of vosk skulls, too thick and strong to be easily disposed of. The rubbish dumps stretched, it seemed, for miles. Pollution, something I had hardly expected to experience on Kregen, had come to Magdag with a vengeance. My Chulik guards made no effort to show me the warrens, and I had enough sense to know I could never enter there dressed as I was and with a mere six Chuliks. Glycas had invited me to what he termed a hunting party. When I had gathered that this meant that a group of his friends would be riding, mailed and with long swords in their hands, into the warrens to chase, and cut down and rape what fell in their path, I declined, pleading a fever.
My life had become, again as it had so often done in the past, intolerable to me. Something must be done, something could be done, and if I, Dray Prescot, thought anything at all of myself and what I was here for at the express command of the Star Lords, then I would have to do it. I would have to do it
I wanted to do it.
The Princess Susheeng was becoming tiresome. My door was kept locked at night, but she scratched on it two or three times. I knew it was her, for I could smell her perfume, thick and odoriferous and liberally applied. I fancied she would begin a more obvious attack soon and, remembering the Princess Natema, I put in hand a little scheme. Away inland, to the north, beyond the chain of factory farms similar to that one where I had been captured by the men of Magdag, lay broad pastures, lush plains covered with head-high grasses. Here big game hunts were a pastime I might welcome. I recalled with a pang the Savanti, and of how Maspero had apologized for the atavistic behavior of himself and his friends as they had led me out on a graint hunt that would lead, if any danger and harm there was, to them alone. Away beyond the plains of Turismond lay lands that were colder and colder until at last they vanished beneath the mist and ice. So the Magdaggians said. They never cared to venture there, seldom went other than a few dwaburs into the plains. They were essentially an inward-looking people: the Eye of the World aptly named for them.
Arrangements for my expedition were made and Vomanus, who I thought had a permanent girl waiting for him in some palace or other of the city, was dug out to accompany me. I managed to avoid asking either Glycas or his sister. We had a few Chulik guards, a safari of slaves for porterage, and mounted aboard our sectrixes we set off. Very quickly I lost the safari. I had told Vomanus to carry on as though expecting to meet me out on the plains. I dumped the sectrix and my gear, and donned the gray breechclout I had stolen from a slave of the palace. I crept by night into the workers’ areas by the buildings.
I was not home, but I felt a queasy sensation of homely familiarity grip me. At that point I almost called the whole stupid venture off. But I went on. This, I remember thinking, is a part and parcel of what the Star Lords wish me to accomplish.
As the familiar odor of the warrens rose about me and I saw again that crazy skyline of tumbling walls and leaning towers, the sacking-draped flat roofs where the workers would lie out in the heat of the night, the dark mouths of alleys where the streaming pink moonlight fell aslant the dust and the cobbles, I had to restrain myself from picking up my heels and running. Even then I could not be sure which way I would run.
The old familiar hovel looked the same.
A worker who had found a bottle of Dopa lay propped against the wall snoring lustily. I could hear the restless sounds of thousands of people all about me, people crammed into hovels compressed into narrow streets of tumbledown buildings. I pushed open the familiar door. Genal sat up on his sacking bed, blinking like an owl.
“Who-?” He squinted in the parallelogram of pink moonlight. “No — Stylor? Stylor!”
I moved in fast and gripped his hand.
“Lahal, Genal. You are well?”
He looked at me, swallowed, closed his mouth.
“Lahal, Stylor.” Suddenly he jumped up and ran across the packed earth floor with its bit of sacking carpet, knocking over an earthenware pot on the way. He bent over another pallet that I had not noticed. He shook the sleeper.
“Pugnarses — wake up, wake up! It is Stylor, returned from the green radiance of Genodras!”
I chilled.
Pugnarses awoke in a foul temper, cursing by Grakki-Grodno, the sky deity of beasts of haulage, and looked blearily at me. He tumbled up from the pallet. His shaggy hair and eyebrows, his malevolent look, all coalesced and I put out my hand to cover my feelings, and I said: “Lahal, Pugnarses.”
