But Krok said: “He has lost many men, for he had enemies aboard and his hands full when last I saw him. And he must have guessed that few of us can be left alive, since he has not seen our ship come out of the bay; so he is more likely to try to reach home safely with what he has, either in both his ships or, if he has too few men left to man both, in one of them. Should he reach Blekinge safely, even if only with one ship, the story of Krok’s expedition will be told in the Listerland and will be well remembered in the years to come. Now, however, these men will surely kill us, for their anger will be greater now that two of our ships have escaped their clutches.”
In this, though, Krok was proved a false prophet. They were given food and drink, and a man came to look at their wounds; and then they realized that they were to become slaves. Some of them regarded this as preferable to death, while others were doubtful whether it might not prove a worse fate. The foreign chieftain had his galley slaves brought ashore and let them speak with the Vikings. They seemed to hail from many different lands and addressed them in various strange mumblings, but none of them spoke any language that the prisoners could understand. The foreigners remained in this place for a few days, putting their damaged ship in order.
Many of the oarsmen in this ship had been killed when Berse had rammed it, and the captured Vikings were set to replace them. They were well used to rowing, and at first they did not find the work too arduous for them, especially as, in this ship, there were two men to each oar. But they had to row almost naked, of which they were much ashamed, and each man had one leg chained. Their skin was almost white compared with that of the other slaves, and their backs were sorely flayed by the sun, so that they came to regard each sunrise as another turn of the rack. After a time, however, they became tanned like their fellows, and ceased to count the days, and were conscious of nothing but rowing and sleeping, feeling hunger and thirst, drinking and eating and rowing again, until at last they reached the stage where, when harder rowing than usual had made them weary, they would fall asleep at their oars and continue rowing, without falling out of time or needing to be aroused by the overseer’s whip. This showed them to have become true galley slaves.
They rowed in heat and in fierce rain, and sometimes in a pleasant cool, though it was never cold. They were the Caliph’s slaves, but they had little knowledge of whither they were rowing or what purpose their labor might be serving. They rowed beside steep coasts and rich lowlands, and toiled painfully up broad and swiftly flowing rivers, on the banks of which they saw brown and black men and occasionally, but always at a distance, veiled women. They passed through the Njörva Sound and journeyed to the limits of the Caliph’s dominions, seeing many rich islands and fine cities, the names of which they did not know. They anchored in great harbors, where they were shut up in slave-houses until the time came for them to put out to sea again; and they rowed hard in pursuit of foreign ships till their hearts seemed to be about to burst, and lay panting on the deck while battles that they had no strength to watch raged on the grapplings above them.
They felt neither grief nor hope and cried to no gods, for they had work enough to do minding their oars and keeping a watchful eye open for the man with the whip who supervised their rowing. They hated him with a fierce intensity when he flicked them with his whip, and even more when they were rowing their hearts out and he strode among them with big lumps of bread soaked in wine, which he stuffed into their mouths, for then they knew that they would have to row without rest for as long as their strength sustained them. They could not understand what he said, but they soon learned to know from the tone of his voice how many lashes he was preparing to administer as a reward for negligence; and their only comfort was to hope that he would have a hard end, with his windpipe slit or his back flayed until his bones could be seen through the blood.
In his old age Orm used to say that this period in his life was lengthy to endure, but brief to tell of, for one day resembled another so that, in a sense, it was as though time was standing still for them. But there were signs to remind him that time was, in fact, passing; and one of these was his beard. When he first became a slave, he was the only one among them so young as to be beardless; but before long his beard began to grow, becoming redder even than his hair, and in time it grew so long that it swept the handle of his oar as he bowed himself over his stroke. Longer than that it could not grow, for the sweep of his oar curtailed its length; and of all the methods of trimming one’s beard, he would say, that was the last that he would choose.
The second sign was the increase in his strength. He was already strong when they first chained him to his place, and used to rowing in Krok’s ship, but a slave has to work harder than a free man, and the long bouts of rowing tried him sorely and sometimes, in the first few weeks, made him sick and dizzy. He saw men burst their hearts, spewing bloody froth over their beards, and topple backwards over the benches with their bodies shaking violently, and die and be thrown overboard; but he knew that he had only two choices to make: either to row while his fellows rowed, even if it meant rowing himself to death, or to receive the kiss of the overseer’s whip upon his back. He said that he always chose the former, though it was little to go for, because once, during the first few days of his slavery, he had felt the whip, and he knew that if he felt it again, a white madness would descend upon him, and then his death would be certain.
So he rowed to the limit of his strength, even when his eyes blurred and his arms and his back ached like fire. After some weeks, however, he found that he was ceasing to be aware of his tiredness. His strength waxed, and soon he had to be careful not to pull too hard for fear of snapping his oar, which now felt like a stick in his hands; for a broken oar meant a sharp lesson from the whip. Throughout his long term as one of the Caliph’s galley slaves, he rowed a larboard oar, which involved sitting with the oar on his right and taking the strain of the stroke on his left hand. Always afterwards, as long as he lived, he wielded his sword and suchlike weapons with his left hand, though he still used his right arm for casting spears. The strength he gained through this labor, which was greater than that of other men, remained with him, and he still had much of it left when he was old.
But there was a third sign, apart from the growth of his beard and of his strength, to remind him that time was passing as he labored at his oar; for he found himself gradually beginning to understand something of the foreign tongues that were being spoken around him, at first only a word here and there, but in time much more. Some of the slaves were from distant lands in the south and east and spoke tongues like the yapping of dogs, which none but themselves could understand; others were prisoners from the Christian lands in the north and spoke the languages of those regions. Many, however, were Andalusians, who had been put to the oar because they had been pirates or rebels, or because they had angered the Caliph with seditious teaching concerning their God and prophet; and these, like their masters, spoke Arabic. The overseer with the whip expressed himself in this tongue, and as it was always a wise thing for every slave to try to understand what this man wanted from them, he proved a good language-master to Orm, without causing himself any exertion in the process.
It was a cumbrous language to understand, and even more so to speak, for it consisted of guttural sounds that came from the depths of the throat and resembled nothing so much as the grunting of oxen or the croaking of frogs. Orm and his comrades never ceased to wonder that these foreigners should have chosen to give themselves the trouble of having to produce such complicated noises instead of talking in the simple and natural manner of the north. However, he showed himself to be quicker than any of the others in picking it up, partly, perhaps, because he was younger than they, but partly also because he had always shown an aptitude for pronouncing difficult and unfamiliar words that he had found in the old ballads, even when he had not been able to understand their meaning.