"Pull!" I cried again.
Suddenly the grating sprang free and I and it fell clattering with a rattle of chains and metal to the floor.
Now there was a stream of water flowing down the shaft.
"First on the chain!" I called.
With a rattle of chains a small man with a wisp of straw- coloured hair across his forehead snaked past the others and stood before me. "You must climb," I said.
"How?" he asked, bewildered.
"Brace your feet against the wall of the shaft," I said. "Use your feet!" "I can" t," he said.
"You will," I said.
I and his fellow took him and thrust him bodily through the opening. We heard him in the shaft, grunting, gasping, the sounds of chains scraping on stones as he began the tortuous inch by inch ascent.
"I" m slipping!" he cried, and rattled down the shaft and fell to the cell floor weeping.
"Again!" I said.
"I can" t," he cried hysterically.
I seized him by the shoulders and shook him. "You are of tharna," I said. "Show us what a man of Tharna can do!"
It was a challenge which had been put to few men of Tharna.
We lifted him again into the shaft.
I set the second on the chain beneath him, and the third on the chain beneath the second.
The water was sloshing through the aperture now, in a stream about as wide as my fist. In the tunnel it rose to our ankles.
Then the first man on the chain supported his own weight, and the second, chains rattling, began to ascend the vertical tunnel, supported by he who was third, who now stood on the back of the fourth man, and so it continued.
Once the second man slipped, dragging the first down with him, and causing the third to lose his grip, but by now there was a solid chain of men in the tunnel, and the fourth and fifth men held. The first began his tortuous ascent once more, followed by the second and third.
The water was perhaps two feet high in the cell, pressing upward to the low ceiling, when I followed Andreas into the tunnel. Kron was the fourth man behind me.
Andreas, Kron and I were in the tunnel, but what of the poor wretches on the chain behind us?
I looked up the long shaft, at the line of slaves moving upward, inch by inch.
"Hurry!" I cried.
The stream of water now seemed to press us down, to impede our progress. It was like a small waterfall.
"Hurry! Hurry!" cried the voice of a man still below, a hoarse, terrified cry. The first man on the chain had now ascended the tunnel to the very source of the water, another tunnel. We heard a sudden, loud swift rushing of water. He cried out in fear, "It" s coming, all of it!"
"Brace yourselves!" I shouted to those above and below me. "Drag the last men into the tunnel!" I yelled. "Get them out of the cell!"
But my last words were drowned in a hurtling plunging cataract of water that shattered on my body like a great fist, knocking my breath out. It roared down the shaft, pounding on the men. Some lost their footing, and bodies were wedged into the shaft. It was impossible to breathe, to move, to see.
Then as suddenly as it had begun, the cataract ceased. Above, whoever worked the valve must have grown impatient and thrown it open completely, or perhaps the sudden torrent of water had been intended as a gesture of mercy to drown any survivors quickly.
As soon as I had caught my breath, I shook the sopping hair from my eyes. I peered up into the sodden blackness, crowded with chained bodies. "Keep climbing," I said.
In perhaps another two or three minutes I had reached the horizontal tunnel down which the tumult of the water had been fed into the vertical tunnel. I found those ahead of me on the chain. Like myself they were soaked to the skin and shivering, but alive. I clutched the first man by the shoulders. "Well done!" I said to him.
"I am of Tharna," he said proudly.
At last each man of the chain was within the horizontal tunnel, though the last four men had of necessity been dragged to its level, for they hung limp in their chains. How long they had been under water was hard to say. We worked on them, bending over them in the darkness, I and three men from Port Kar, who understood what must be done. The other slaves on the chain waited patiently, not one complaining, not one urging us to greater speed. At last, one by one, the inert bodies stirred, their lungs opening to draw in the damp, cold air of the mine.
The man whom I had saved reached up and touched me.
"We are of the same chain," I said.
It was a saying we had developed in the mines.
"Come!" I said to the men.
Leading them in two lines, shackled behind me, we crawled down the horizontal tunnel.
Chapter Nineteen: REVOLT IN THE MINES
"No, no!" Ost had screamed.
We found him at the valve which emptied the reservoir of water into the slave dungeon more than two hundred feet below. He now wore the habiliments of the Whip Slave, a reward for his treachery. He threw down the whip and tried to run, scurrying like an urt, but everywhere he turned, the chain of haggard, violent men confined him, and as the chain closed, Ost fell quivering to his knees.
"Do not harm him," I said.
But the bull-like Kron of Tharna" s hand was on the neck of the conspirator. "This is a matter for the men of Tharna," said he. Those blue eyes like steel looked about the unyielding faces of the chained slaves. And the eyes of Ost, too, like those of a terrified urt, looked from face to face, pleading, but Ost found no pity in those eyes that looked upon him as though they might have been composed of stone.
"Is Ost of the chain?" asked Kron.
"No," cried a dozen voices. "He is not of the chain."
"Yes," cried Ost. "I am of the chain." He peered like a rodent into the faces of his captors. "Take me with you. Free me!"
"It is sedition to speak thus," said one of the men.
Ost trembled.
"Tie him and leave him here," I said.
"Yes," begged Ost hysterically, groveling at the feet of Kron. "Do that, Masters!"
Andreas of Tor spoke up. "Do as Tarl of Ko-ro-ba asks," he said. "Do not stain your chains with the blood of this serpent."
"Thank you, Masters," said Ost, snivelling with relief, his face once more resuming that pinched, sly look I knew so well.
But Kron looked down into the face of Ost, and Ost turned white. "You will have a better chance than you gave us," said the bull-like man from Tharna.
Ost shrieked with terror.
I tried to press forward, but the men of the chain held firm. I could not come to the conspirator" s assistance.
He tried to crawl toward me, his hands extended. I put out my hands, but Kron had seized him and pulled him back.
Bodily the small conspirator was thrown from slave to slave down the length of the chain until the last man hurled him, headfirst, screaming for mercy, down that dark narrow channel which we had ascended. We heard his body hit the sides a dozen times, and his frightened scream fading, only to be silenced by the distant, hollow splash in the water far below. _
It was a night like no other in the mines of Tharna.
Leading the chain of slaves in two lines behind me, we swept through the shafts like an eruption from the molten core of the earth. Armed only with ore and the picks that chip the ore from the walls we stormed into the quarters of Whip Slaves and guardsmen, who had scarcely time to seize their weapons. Those not killed in the savage fighting, much of it in the darkness of the shafts, were locked into leg shackles and herded into storage chambers, and the men of the chain did not treat their former oppressors gently.