-
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
for us. They had not been recaptured. What was done to recaptured
slaves was ugly and obvious, given the circumstances.
All that week extra guards were posted, many of them men in
the crimson and emerald livery of the city wardens, men supplied
by all Houses as a kind of police force. The Rapas made very free
with their whips. The Rapa slaves seethed. My men and I were
model slaves.
The glint of marble chippings in the air, the eternal
tink-tink-tink of the women trimming stones, the heavier thuds of
the hammers on chisels all over the quarry faces, the deeper slicing
roars as vosk-powered saws bit in clouds of flying chips and dust,
all these sounds frayed at our nerves day after day; but we remained
quiet and attentive and docile in our chains.
We took turns to feed the vosks, swilling the remnants of our
slops into their troughs, pent between priceless marble walls. The
places stank almost as much as the Jet Mines. They would put their
pig-like snouts down and grunt and gulp and waves of the
nauseating liquid would pulsate out around our legs, filling our
noses with the stench. Those whose duty it was, and whom we had
relieved of that duty, thought we were mad. Many guards patrolled,
on the alert; but few cared to venture too near the vosk pens, as
none ventured into the Jet Mines. One shift had refused to send up
the stinking black marble, and had simply been shut in there to die.
When other slaves had brought the twisted, ghastly bodies out, the
guards paraded them through the workings so that none should
miss the lesson.
Gradually, on my orders, we cut down the vosk swill.
On the second to last day the vosks were hungry; but we fed
them sufficient to quieten the immediate rumblings of their
stomachs. On the penultimate day we did not feed them at all, and
they were as recalcitrant as an unpunished slave so that, for a time
as I labored at the marble, with the sunshine lancing back from the
brilliant surface and dazzling my eyes, I feared I had miscalculated.
But the vosks are stupid creatures. At the end of the day they
grunted and squealed and fairly broke into ungainly waddles on
their way back to their pens. We tempted them with morsels of
food, sparingly, and so quietened their uproar.
But they received no more food.
On the last day they were surly, puzzled, drawing their loads
and turning their wheels with a stupid pugnacity that made me feel
heartily sorry for them and what we were being forced to do to
them. The slaves, mostly lads and girls, whose task was to prod
them along, gave them a wider berth than usual, and stood well out
of their way at evening when the twin suns sank in floods of gold
and crimson and emerald.
We carried the great slopping vats of swill to the pens and I
managed to spill a quantity of the vile stuff near the boots of a
Rapa guard, who croaked his guttural obscenities at me, and I
stood the flick of his whip in a good cause, for the guards moved
away. We poured the slop down outside the marble walls of the
pens. The vosks went hungry on the last night and in the morning
when we should have fed them for the last time before punting our
loaded wherries from the clocks. They squealed and grunted and
some, finding hunger a stimulus to a more primitive action, butted
their atrophied tusks against the walls of their pens.
That morning the twin suns of Antares rose with a more
resplendent brilliance. We ate hugely of the slop the vosks had not
seen. Nath was under the eye of Loku. All our chains had been cut
through in stealth and with muffled hammers, and now were
lapped about us, ready to be cast off. Nath shivered and called on
his pagan god of thieves.
We went aboard the wherry for which we would be
responsible, clambering about among the gigantic blocks of marble
the women had trimmed clean and square, following the slave
masons chalked marks, and I took the greatest chance of all and
went swiftly and quietly in that morning radiance to the vosk pens.
I threw open all the gates. With a vosk goad I urged the stupid
beasts out, and I joyed to see the idiot ugliness of their faces, the
pig-like malice in their tiny eyes. They were hungry. They were
loose.
The vosks began to roam the quarries, looking for food.
Guards ran yelling angrily, prodding with spears and swords. I
saw one Och, his six limbs agitated, attempt to prod a stupid vosk
back and rejoiced at his dumbfounded surprise when the usually
docile beast turned on him and knocked him end over end with a
resounding thump of those two tiny tusks. Had I been inclined, I
would have laughed.
I jumped from the jetty onto our wherry and joined the rest
of my men, my chains wrapped about me, as the Rapa guards
stalked aboard. There would have been ten of them, I knew, for the
citizens of Zenicce were naturally touchy about insufficiently
guarded slaves in their city. This morning, because for some
unfathomable reason the vosks had gone mad and were
overrunning the quarries, there were only six guards.
We pushed off and with the long poles punted slowly along
the canal between marble tanks.
Soon the banks became brick, and then the first of the houses
passed. Mere hovels, these, of people without a House, living on
the outskirts of the city, free only in name.
I admit now it was a strange sensation to me to be riding
water again.
We passed beneath an ornate granite arch over which passed [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- zambezia2013.opx.pl