everyone will eventually die. But I began then to feel the clinging strands of a doom outside of time and space drawing about me, and with every step I took, every decision I made, I would merely encompass my own destruction the more securely. I cursed the Star Lords, then, hating them and all their works.
Follon’s body had to be disposed of and so I carried him down to the river that flowed so sluggishly through its retaining banks of granite through Magdag to the sea. Here the banks were of mud, and in the shadow of a toppling tower of vosk skulls, I hoisted the dead Fristle, ready to cast him into the flood. The old Fristle woman, with a cry, darted forward. She made her intentions plain. I stopped most of the mutilation, but she divested the body of all its clothes and money and she took the curved sword.
“These I will keep,” she said, looking up at me. She was crouched, bent with age. “My Sheemiff is yours for the asking, for you are a great Jikai.”
I shuddered, and the two women Fristles eyed me speculatively. Jikai! How often, lately, had that great word been debased!
With some formal rote of acknowledgment, I bade them farewell and took myself off. Truth to tell, the sleek furred body of the girl Fristle, with its human outlines, stirred me. I half ran through the pink-tinged shadows into the warren.
As I had asked during my last visit, the Prophet had been found. Now he was waiting for me. It seems fairly clear that Delia’s loving actions in setting her whole empire in action to seek me out had upset the plans of the Star Lords. I had no way of knowing just what problems Delia had overcome in instigating this search: Tharu would not broach the subject and Vomanus shied away from it. He was a good and likely lad and, with a little discipline of the sort that gives a man an eye to survival, would turn out well. But the Star Lords — for, as I have said, I had by this time convinced myself that my presence this time in Magdag was of their fashioning — had drawn me here from Earth, four hundred light-years away, and here must lie the labors to which I must put my hands.
What those labors were blazed painfully obviously to me.
The Prophet looked just the same, with his white hair and beard fierce in his righteous rebellious ardor.
“The workers will rise, Stylor,” he said in his rolling sonorous voice. “Too long have we suffered. The time is ripe and we know the secrets of the overlords’ hearts.” He stared at the assembled workers with an exalted look, an expression of dazed fanaticism on his face, drawing the gaunt lines into sharper and more hungry wedges of skin and muscle.
“We know!” said Genal, with a reflection of that dedicated fanaticism uplifting him.
“Yes, we know the time,” said Pugnarses, and the hunger on his face glared bleakly out upon the gathering of those men and half-men who would lead the revolt.
We made plans. I listened. They had accepted me as one who had proved himself, and when I had promised to secure them weapons as proof of my intentions, I was a brother rebel. But the talk consisted of high-flown sentiments, of passion, hatred, and anger, of long detailed descriptions of what the rebels would do to the overlords once they had them in their power. I fretted. At last I stood up. They fell silent.
“You chatter,” I told them. They reacted angrily to this but I quieted them. “You talk of chaining the overlords in the gangs and making them haul stone, and of the whips you will wield. Have you forgotten?
The overlords wear mail, and they carry long swords! They are trained fighting men. What are you?”
Genal leaped to his feet, his dark face flushed and furious.
“We are workers, slaves, but we can fight-”
“I can bring you swords, spears, some coats of mail, but not enough. How, my gallant Genal, will you fight the overlords?”
Such were the dark torments, the passions of frustration twisting in that hovel as I faced them with the truth, that they had no time or energy to spare to wonder — then — where I would find weapons for them. I had brought food, so as not to be a burden on them, and already half a dozen long swords lay hidden in a pit beneath straw, closely wrapped in oiled sacks, below the beaten earth of Genal’s and Pugnarses’ hovel.
The talk buzzed, coiling, endlessly repeating itself. I let them talk this out. They had to face the truth of themselves.
At last, a silence fell. Pugnarses was knotting his fists together, and every now and again he would smash his fist into the earth of the floor. Genal, I saw, was close to tears, but he did not break down. He was looking at me. I saw that look. I knew the time for hard facts was near. Bolan, a giant man with a head that gleamed all naked and shining in the light, grunted. He had been shaved as a slave once, and his hair had never grown back. He could lift stone blocks that took three other men to shift.
“What do you say, Stylor?” he asked me directly, without artifice, like a charging chunkrah. “You have only dismay and doom for us — can you prophesy to any more effect?”
“Yes, Stylor,” cried Genal and one or two of the others. “Tell us a plan.” I noticed that Pugnarses did not join in.
Well, he would confirm and conform, for this was the only way he could achieve his heart’s desire as to an overlordship. I told them.
There was nothing clever about the plan. It’s only dreamers who believe they can develop something so entirely new that the suns of Kregen have not shone down on it before — always excepting, of course, the men of science and art.
“The merits of the plan are obvious,” I said eventually. “And its drawbacks, too. It will take longer than we would wish.”
Pugnarses started up. “Long! Yes, too long! Give us the weapons and we will kill the overlords and all their beast guards!”
“But, Pugnarses,” Bolan said, rubbing his naked skull. “Stylor has just told us, and I believe what he says is true. You cannot beat the overlords and the mercenaries by a mob of workers and slaves with a few swords and balass sticks!”
“You must train,” I said, and I put force into my words. “We will forge an army from the workers and slaves of Magdag so that slavery can be abolished from Magdag.”
They nodded, still only half convinced. I enlarged on what I wanted to do, and I admit that it is all elementary and obvious, but to a man who slaves in the sun the thought of a single extra day under the lash between him and freedom is intolerable.
“Give me your help and backing; bestow on me your authority so that I may so order and organize that the workers will rise as a strong and keen weapon.” I stared challengingly at them. I was beginning to feel alive again, and the shame of that reawakening as to its means may not be mitigated as to its ends; but it is in my nature to rise to a challenge and to strike down first he who would seek to kill me.
“I will fashion you a cadre of men who will use the weapons I shall bring, and the weapons we will make. I want production of certain weapons that I shall designate, and no others. I value freedom and liberty more than most men, for I have been deprived of freedom — in ways you cannot comprehend -
but if I tell you that a galley slave knows about slavery, you will not argue with me, I know.” I was jumbled, garbled in what I said, but I convinced them. I obtained total authority over the fashioning of this military weapon from the slaves. I had to. I could see this struggle only in military terms, now; for that was the only way to keep a sense of sanity and proportion. I wanted a small well-trained little army that could blitzkrieg the overlords so that the great mass of slaves and workers might follow and devour the struck-down carcass.
Sentiment had gone. I had seen the misery of the slaves; I had experienced it. I knew of the aspirations of the laborers and artificers — and I was well aware of possible conflicts of interest between slave and worker. I was born, you will recall, in 1775 and this year, I venture to believe, has a certain significance on Earth. On Kregen there were more complex antagonisms even than those surrounding, say, the combatants and theorists caught up in the French Revolution. I determined now to look at the revolt of the slaves of Magdag in purely military terms. Then, I would see that they turned their successful rebellion into a true revolution. That, as I conceived it, was what the Star Lords desired. Also — my Krozairs of Zy and all of Sanurkazz would benefit.
In the days and nights that followed I took greater and greater risks in sneaking out of the Emerald Eye Palace. I would climb out of my high window and use the ropy vines of the ivy-like plants that clothed the walls to clamber down and so over the wall and astride the waiting sectrix. Vomanus, of course, had to be a party to my mysterious disappearances, and he sweated out many a sleepless night waiting for my return. He thought I had a girl somewhere in the city. While cursing me for my stupidity in not sipping from the flower under my lips, he had a grudging admiration for my foolhardiness in taking wing to sip elsewhere.
