I did not know what he meant by Krozair. I had not heard the word before. Nath rowed at the oar with a blind convulsion, his lean naked body panting for breath in the hot air. But Zolta looked across with a quick and rhythm-breaking suddenness. His face showed shock. I fought the oar back into rhythm, cursing in a lurid mixture of English, Kregish, and Magdag warren-filth. We rowed.
I heard a hail.
Looking back toward the poop as I surfaced from each stroke I could see a turmoil up there. The awnings were coming down. That was good. Now their damnable surfaces would not catch wind and slow our progress. Men were running about up there. Grace of Grodno, I had been told, was more than a moderately fast galley for a four-fortyswifter, and in our cutting across a gulf in order to reach Gansk we had dropped the nearest land below the horizon.
It seemed to me as I rowed that I had been rowing all my life. Memories were faint around the edges, other worlds and other lives away. Only Delia of the Blue Mountains remained clear and beautiful to me in that time of inexpressible misery. I had been engaged as a galley slave in battles, when the galley of Magdag on which I served had captured a fat merchantman from one of the cities of Zair, and twice we had been involved in a real battle with a galley from Sanurkazz. But, so far, I had not been in action aboard Grace of Grodno. I did not know the ways of her captain or her oar-master, her whip-deldars or her drum-deldar in moments of emergency. Zorg and I had been through a lot together on the calm waters of the Eye of the World. Now, the signs were clear: Grace of Grodno was clearing for action. The drum-deldar increased his beat.
We pulled into it, keeping time, hauling the heavy looms through their prescribed arcs as delimited by the rowing frames guiding and controlling the movements of the extreme inboard ends of the looms. As the inboard man I had the most space to move through, and we were graded downward and outward as to size, where Zolta, the smallest, perched almost over the water on the projecting deck-platform behind the parados.
Soon it became clear, from the way in which the officers, soldiers, and sailors were continually looking aft, that we were being pursued. There would therefore be little chance of the ram being brought into action. As though confirming that, a party of sailors appeared on the low foredeck — it was too small to be called a forecastle — and began to rig the forward extension of the beak. I heard shouting from the aftercastle at the extreme aft end of the poop. Soon an officer ran forward and the sailors began to unship the extension, amid a great deal of acrid comment.
Nath, his eyes upturned, his lungs pumping, spat out:
“So the Grodno-gasta thinks he’ll fight! Ha!”
Grodno-gasta, I knew, was a blasphemous and extremely indelicate remark.
“Zair rot him!” snarled out Zolta, pulling.
We were now pulling at a back-breaking pace and still the drum-deldar stepped up the rate. Zorg was heaving now, not using his body as a good oarsman, but trying to do the work with his biceps. His face was a color that appalled me, slatey blue-green, something like the hide of a sectrix. He was gasping with a convulsive effort at each stroke.
“Sink me, Zorg!” I said viciously. “Roll with the stroke, you stupid man of Zair!”
He choked and did not have the spittle to hawk. His eyes rolled. He managed to croak out words: “I will never yield! Krozair! My vows — I am — Zorg! Zorg of — of Felteraz. Krozair!” He was rambling now, his body going up and down with the oar, hardly pulling a quarter of his weight. Then he used another name I had not heard before, and I knew that he was no longer with us aboard this foul galley of Magdag but far away: in delirium, yes, but not here with us. “Mayfwy,” he said and, again, in a long sobbing groan: “Mayfwy.”
He could not escape the observation of the whip-deldar much longer. Nath, Zolta, and I were pulling now with all the dead weight of Zorg hanging on the oar. Sweat reeked down our naked bodies. Then the green conical straw hat fell from Zorg’s head and tumbled down.
Bareheaded, Zorg was the object of instant attention.
The whip-deldar lashed him. He laid the whip unerringly across my friend Zorg’s back. Old snake talked to him.
Zorg’s tanned skin split and blood oozed, then spouted out as the whip fell again and again. I, alongside, was splattered with the blood of my friend as the whip-deldar of Magdag flogged him to death.
“Get back to your oar!” roared the whip-deldar. “Pull!”
But Zorg of Felteraz was past all the pulling he would ever do in this life on this world of Kregan beneath Antares.
The confusion attendant upon freeing a dead slave from his shackles and throwing him overboard and replacing him with one of the oarsmen at the moment luxuriating in a spare capacity and chained deep in the hold, a luxury we all tasted in turn, was as nothing compared with the confusion evident on the poop. As the body of my friend Zorg, all naked and limp, with the blood dripping from his butchered back, was dragged out from the bench and hefted up to be thrown overboard, soldiers ran up to the aftercastle carrying bows. Others manned the ballistae. The sailors were readying their cutlasses. The confusion was abhorrent to me, as a man trained aboard a king’s ship, but all my attention was required for the eternal rowing. Pull, pull, pull — and continue to pull. Once again the drum-deldar, under the shrilled commands from the poop, upped the rate.
I did not see Zorg consigned to the deep.
I did not see the splash his mutilated body made as it broke the surface of the water and vanished from mortal men’s sight. I knew he believed that, after his death, he would go up to Zim to sit at the right hand of Zair, in all his glory. Suicides did not achieve this resurrection, either to the green or to the red, otherwise many of my fellow galley slaves would have found that shortcut to paradise. I acted, I believe, out of pure animal instinct, out of hatred, out of sheer lust to kill and kill yet more of those wolves of Magdag. Yet I was a trained seaman, accustomed to handling ships, cunning in the use of wind and weather, and I knew that wolves of greater power than those of Magdag chased Grace of Grodno. If I say that instincts impelled me to foolhardy action that professional expertise would approve, that will perhaps best sum up what I then did.
As Zorg was taken from me, his shackles released, I put all my strength into breaking the last web of metal still joining the rubbed-through link. I surged up with such force that the loom of the oar cracked against the rowing frame. Nath and Zolta looked at me with numb faces, their bodies and arms going through the rowing motions that were ingrained into their muscles.
I felt stiff, tight about muscles abruptly trying to perform some different series of actions from those they had been forced into for hour after hour. The whip-deldar heard the crack of loom against rowing frame and came running, his whip high, his face vicious. I caught the lash in my left hand and jerked it and with my right hand I choked him around the throat. I threw him down among the slaves at the oars. Then I was on the gangway.
So quick, so sudden, I stood there. I had once before seen a slave break from his oar. He had tried to dive overboard and sailors had caught him and held him, so that, later, the whip-deldar could cut him up with old snake.
I moved to the side, above the gawking faces of the slaves.
Four soldiers, in mail, their long swords swinging free, ran down the gangway toward me. My movement to the side convinced them I was going to dive and they hesitated, ready to let me go, willing to be rid of a fool slave who might, just might, be picked up by the following ship. Or so I read their hesitation. If I was picked up, the pursuer would have to slow his pursuit. I think they came to the decision that the pursuer would not stop, would not be fobbed off by a screaming face in the water. They started toward me again — and I was on them. My balled fist smashed in the face of the first. He had no time to scream. I grasped his long sword. It hissed in the air. I clove the second through his ventail and he toppled backward, horror on his face, blood staining the mesh.