I was chained to the ankle ring of one of the tarns.
The Tatrix had apparently lost interest in me, for she turned to Dorna the Proud and Thorn, Captain of Tharna.
The warrior whose arm had been broken knelt on the marble flooring of the pillar, bent over, rocking back and forth, the injured arm held against his body. His fellow stood near me, among the tarns, perhaps to watch me, perhaps to steady and soothe the excitable giants.
Haughtily the Tatrix addressed Dorna and Thorn. "Why," she asked them, "are there so few of my soldiers here?"
"We are enough," said Thorn.
The Tatrix looked out over the plains, in the direction of the city. "By now," she said, "lines of rejoicing citizens will be setting out from the city."
Neither Dorna the Proud, nor Thorn, Captain of Tharna, answered her. The Tatrix walked across the pillar, regal in those tattered robes, and stood over me. She pointed across the plains, towards Tharna. "Warrior," said she, "if you were to remain long enough on this pillar you would see processions come to welcome me back to Tharna."
The voice of Dorna the Proud drifted across the pillar. "I think not, Beloved Tatrix," she said.
The Tatrix turned, puzzled. "Why not?" she asked.
"Because," said Dorna the Proud, and I could tell that behind that silver mask, she smiled, "you are not going back to Tharna."
The Tatrix stood as if stunned, not understanding.
The uninjured warrior had now climbed to the saddle of the tarn, to whose ankle ring I lay helplessly chained. He hauled on the one-strap and the monster took flight. Painfully I was wrenched into the air and, cruelly hanging by my shackled wrists, I saw the white column dropping away beneath me, and the figures upon it, two warriors, a woman in a sliver mask, and the golden Tatrix of Tharna.
Chapter Seventeen: THE MINES OF THARNA
The room was long, low, narrow, perhaps four feet by four feet, and a hundred feet long. A small, foul tharlarion lamp burned at each end. How many such rooms lay beneath the earth of Tharna, in her many mines, I did not know. The long line of slaves, shackled together, stooped and crawled the length of the room. When it was filled with its wretched occupants, an iron door, containing a sliding iron observation panel, closed. I heard four bolts being shoved into place.
It was a dank room. There were pools of water here and there on the floor; the walls were damp; water in certain places dripped from the ceiling. It was ventilated inadequately by a set of tiny circular apertures, about an inch in diameter, placed every twenty feet. One larger aperture, a circular hole perhaps two feet in diameter, was visible in the centre of the long room.
Andreas of Tor, who was shackled at my side, pointed to it. "That hole," he said, "floods the room."
I nodded, and leaned back against the damp, solid stone that formed the sides of the chamber. I wondered how many times, under the soil of Tharna, such a chamber had been flooded, how many chained wretches had been drowned in such dismal, sewerlike traps. I was no longer puzzled that the discipline in the mines of Tharna was as good as it was. I had learned that only a month before, in a mine not five hundred yards from this one, there had been a disturbance created by a single prisoner. "Drown them all," had been the decision of the Administrator of the Mines. I was not surprised then that the prisoners themselves looked with horror upon the very thought of resistance. They would strangle one of their fellows who though of rebellion, rather than risk the flooding of the chamber. Indeed, the entire mine itself could, in an emergency, be flooded. Once, I was told, it had happened, to quell an uprising. To pump out the water and clear the shafts of bodies had taken weeks.
Andreas said to me, "For those who are not fond of life, this place has many conveniences."
"To be sure," I agreed.
He thrust an onion and a crust of bread into my hands. "Take this," he said.
"Thanks," I said. I took them and began to chew on them.
"You will learn," he said, "to scramble with the rest of us."
Before we had been ushered into the cell, outside, in a broad, rectangular chamber, two of the mine attendants had poured a tub of bread and vegetables into the feed trough fixed in the wall, and the slaves had rushed upon it, like animals, screaming, cursing, pushing, jostling, trying to thrust their hands into the trough and carry as much as they could before it was gone. Revolted, I had not joined in this wretched contest, though by my chains I had been dragged to the very edge of the trough. Yet I knew, as Andreas had said, I would learn to go to the trough, for I had no wish to die, and I would not continue to live on his charity. I smiled, wondering why it was that I, and my fellow prisoners, seemed so determined to live. Why was it that we chose to live? Perhaps the question is foolish, but it did not seem so in the mines of Tharna.
"We must think of escape," I said to Andreas.
"Be quiet, you fool!" hissed a thin, terrified voice from perhaps a dozen feet away.
It was Ost of Tharna, who, like Andreas and myself, had been condemned to the mines.
He hated me, blaming me somehow for the fact that he found himself in this dire predicament. Today, more than once, he had scattered the ore which, on my hands and knees, I had chipped from the narrow shafts of the mine. And twice he had stolen the pile of ore I had accumulated, poking it into the canvas sack we slaves wore about our necks in the mines. I had been beaten by the Whip Slave for not contributing my share to the day" s quota of ore required of the chain of which I was a member.
If the quota was not met, the slaves were not fed that night. If the quota was not met three days in a row, the slaves would be whipped into the long cell, the door bolted, and the cell flooded. Many of the slaves looked upon me with disfavour. Perhaps it was because the quota had been increased the day that I was added to their chain. I myself guessed this was more than coincidence.
"I shall inform against you," hissed Ost, "for plotting an escape." In the half light, from the small tharlarion lamps set in each end of the room, I saw the heavy, squat figure beside Ost loop his wrist chain silently about the creature" s thin throat. The circle of chain tightened, and Ost scratched helplessly at it with his fingers, his eyes bulging. "You will inform against no one," said a voice, which I recognised as that of the bull-like Kron of Tharna, of the Caste of Metal Workers, he whose life I had spared in the arena during the Battles of Oxen. The chain tightened. Ost shuddered like a convulsing monkey.
"Do not kill him," I said to Kron.
"As you wish, Warrior," said Kron, and dropped the frightened Ost, roughly disengaging his chain from the creature" s throat. Ost lay on the damp floor, his hands on his throat, gasping for breath.
"It seems you have a friend," said Andreas of Tor.
With a rattle of chain and a roll of his great shoulders, Kron stretched himself out as well as he could in the cramped quarters. Within a minute his heavy breathing told me he was asleep.
"Where is Linna?" I asked Andreas.