An Och guard hawked and spat.
Now women were bringing the midday food for their men.
The food was prepared at the little cabins and shacks erected in the shadows of the great walls and mighty upflung edifices. They clung like limpets to rocks. The women walked gracefully among the piles of building materials, the bricks, the ladders, the masonry, the long lengths of lumber.
“You are fortunate, Stylor, to be stylor to our gang,” said Genal as Holly approached. I nodded.
“I agree. None cook as well as Holly.”
She shot me a quick and suspicious look, this young girl whose task was to cook and clean for a brick-making gang, and then to take her turn with the wooden spatula of sturm-wood. The sight of my ugly face, I suppose, gave her pause. Because I had been discovered to possess the relatively rare art of reading and writing — all a gift of that pill of genetically-coded language instruction given to me so long ago by Maspero, my tutor in the fabulous city of Aphrasoe — I had automatically been enrolled as a stylor, one who kept accounts of bricks made, of work done, of quotas filled. Stylors stood everywhere among the buildings, as they stood at seed time and harvest in the Magdag-owned field farms, keeping accounts.
For that simple skill of reading and writing I had been spared much of the horror of the real slaves, those who labored in the mines cutting stone, or bringing out great double-handfuls of gems, or rowed chained to galley oar benches.
Magdag, despite its grandiose building program that dominated the lives of everyone within fifty dwaburs, was essentially a seaport, a city of the inner sea.
And here was I, a sailor, condemned to count bricks when the sea washed the jetties within hearing and the ships waited rocking on the waves. How I hungered for the sea, then! The sea breeze in my nostrils made me itch for the feel of a deck beneath my feet, the wind in my hair, the creak of ropes and block, the very lifeblood of the sea!
We all sat down to our meal and, as she had promised, Holly portioned out a double-helping to Genal, who motioned to her to do likewise for me. We were all wearing the plain gray breechclout, or loincloth, of the worker. Some of the women also wore a gray tunic; many did not bother, wanting their arms free for the never-ending work. As Holly bent before me I looked into her young face. Naive, she looked, dark-haired, serious-eyed, with a soft and seemingly scarcely-formed mouth.
“And since when has a stylor deserved extra rations, stolen at expense and danger?” she asked Genal. He started up hotly, but I put a hand on his shoulder and he went down with some force.
“It is no matter.”
“But I think it is a matter-”
I made no answer. A man was running toward us through the gangs of workers eating their midday meal. He thwacked a long balass stick down on shoulders as he ran, his face angry.
“Up, you lazy rasts! There is work. Up!”
With a snarled yelp of indignant anger Genal rose, his young face flushed, his eyes bright. Holly took a quick step to stand beside him. Her head came just to his shoulder. Both of them had to look up if they wished to stare into my face.
“Pugnarses,” said Genal disgustedly. He would have said more, but Holly laid her slender hand upon his arm.
The man was an overseer, a worker like ourselves but selected out from our miserable ranks to be given his tithe of petty authority, a balass stick — balass is similar to Earthly ebony — and a gray tunic with the green and black badges of his authority stitched to breast and back. He was a tall man, almost as tall as me, burly, with unkempt black hair and pinched nostrils, his eyebrows shaggy and frowning above his malice-bright eyes. He was the gang-boss of ten gangs, and he would never tolerate underproduction or skimped work. Always, the threat of the whip hung over Pugnarses as it dominated our lives. We all rose, grumbling and stretching and bolting the last mouthfuls of our food. Pugnarses thwacked his stick down with a ferocity I clearly saw came from his own simmering anger at what he did. He was a man born into the wrong area of life. He should have been a son to some high overlord, to strut about wearing his mail armor, his long sword at his side, giving orders in the midst of battle rather than orders as to quantities and qualities of mud bricks. We could now hear the high yells of other overseers and the long moaning chants of hundreds of workers and slaves. As we ran down among the scattered confusion of the brick works and out past where the masons were looking up from their midday meal, we could see the winged statue fully three hundred feet tall, being dragged by hundreds of men and women. The colossal statue towered above us, magnificent in its barbarity of inspiration and cultural attainment. Many days had been spent carving those immobile features, that cliff-like forehead, the feathered crown, the folded arms with their implements of semi-divine authority, those spreading wings of minutely carved feathers. Beneath its footed pedestal massive rollers of lenk creaked with the weight. As the slaves pulled and hauled and struggled in the heat, dragging that whole awful mass by long ropes, other workers lifted their rearmost roller in turn and carried it to the front. There the great overseer — with the blaze of color on his white tunic and a coiled whip in his right hand — could direct its accurate placing for the forward rolling weight. We were hurriedly positioned onto a rope and we toiled on as Pugnarses, sweating, shouted and lifted his balass stick. In time with the convulsive heavings of the other slaves we dragged the monstrous statue up the gentle incline that had been the cause of its momentary hesitation and the consequent calling out of fresh draft-animals — us — men and women, workers of Magdag.
Between us, with much breath wasted on cursing and swearing and the calling on Grakki-Grodno, the sky god of the draft-beasts, and with the balass sticks and the whips of the guards falling upon our sweating naked backs, we hauled that divine effigy up the slope. We dragged it clear of the incline and halfway toward the shadow- darkened gateway, four hundred feet high, into which it must pass to be set against the wall and serve as just one more reminder of the majesty and power of Magdag. In the long lines toiling on the ropes alongside I saw numbers of the half-humans of Kregen. There were Ochs; and Rapas, those vulturine-like people whose smell was so offensive in the nostrils of men; there was even a handful of Fristles. I saw no Chuliks among the slaves, although there were other beast-humans whose forms were new to me.
Other men and Ochs and Rapas with swords and whips guarded and goaded on men and Ochs and Rapas. Truly, creation on Kregen had leveled the species. Humanity, although apparently everywhere in the ascendant here in this section of Kregen, was not the only Lord of Creation. I saw a number of men greasing the ropes near their fastenings, and inspecting each roller in turn as it was dragged clear for cracks and weaknesses. Many of these men had red hair, and so might well have come from Loh, that continent of hidden walled gardens and veils, that lay southeast of Turismond in the Sunset Sea, nearer to Vallia than the eastern tip of Turismond, where only isolated cities flourished in a sea of barbarity. The thought of Vallia with its island empire I had never seen brought unbidden other memories from which I could never shake free, and I bent to the rope with a curse.
“By Zim-Zair,” panted a burly slave, entirely naked, next to me on the adjoining rope. “I’d have this accursed heathen statue topple and split into a thousand fragments!”
“Silence, slave!” A Chulik flicked a cunning whip in a welting blow down the man’s back. “Pull!”
The slave, his mass of curly black hair wet and glittering in the suns-shine, cursed but had no spittle to express his contempt. “Loathsome beasts,” he grunted, low, as he hauled with cracking muscles. His skin was tanned and healthy, his nose an arrogant beak, his lips thin. “By Zantristar the Merciful! If I had my blade at my side now-”
On and on we hauled and heaved that mighty colossus into its appointed resting place. It would make, I knew, another fine haunt for spiders.
As we crowded out through that towering opening, jumbled together, the workers talking and laughing now the work was done, the slaves moody and silent, I made it my business to get alongside the curly-haired man.
“You mentioned Zim,” I said.
He drew a brawny forearm across his bearded lips. He looked at me cautiously.
“And if I had, would that surprise a heretic?”
I shook my head. We moved into the light. “I am no heretic. I thought Zair-”
“Grodno is the sky deity these poor deluded fools worship when all men living in the light know it is to Zair we must look for our salvation.” His eyes had measured me. “You have not been a slave long? Are you a stranger?”
“From Segesthes.”
“We know nothing of the outer ocean here in the Eye of the World. If you are a stranger, then in peril of your
