Callus looked at Carse and Boghaz, then smiled lazily and gestured with the bottle. “Get aft, carrion,” he grunted and let the lash run out.
Carse glared at him out of red eyes and snarled. Boghaz gripped the Earthman by the shoulder and shook him.
“Come on, fool!” he said. “We’ll get enough beatings without you asking for them.”
He pulled Carse with him, down into the rowers’ pit and forward along the catwalk between the benches.
The Earthman, numbed by shock and exhaustion, was only dimly aware of faces turned to watch them, of the mutter of chains and the smell of the bilges. He only half saw the round curious heads of the two furry creatures who slept on the catwalk and who moved to let them pass.
The last starboard bench facing the stern-castle had only one sleeping man chained to its oar, its other two places being empty. The press-gang stood by until Carse and Boghaz were safely chained.
Then they went off with Scyld. Callus cracked his whip with a sound like a gunshot, apparently as a reminder to all hands, and went forward.
Boghaz nudged Carse in the ribs. Then he leaned over and shook him. But Carse was beyond caring what Boghaz had to say. He was sound asleep, doubled, over the loom of the oar.
Carse dreamed. He dreamed that he was again taking that nightmare plunge through the shrieking infinities of the dark bubble in Rhiannon’s tomb. He was falling, falling—
And again he had that sensation of a strong, living presence close beside him in the awful plunge, of something grasping at his brain with a dark and dreadful eagerness.
“No!” Carse whispered in his dream. “No!”
He husked that refusal again—a refusal of something that the dark presence was asking him to do, something veiled and frightful.
But the pleading became more urgent, more insistent, and whatever it was that pleaded seemed now far stronger than in the Tomb of Rhiannon. Carse uttered a shuddering cry.
“No, Rhiannon!”
He found himself suddenly awake, looking dazedly along the moonlit oar-bank.
Callus and the overseer were striding along the catwalk, lashing the slaves to wakefulness. Boghaz was looking at Carse with a strange expression.
“You cried out to the Cursed One!” he said.
The other slave at their oar was staring at him too and so were the luminous eyes of the two furry shadows chained to the catwalk.
“A bad dream,” Carse muttered. “That was all.”
He was interrupted by a whistle and crack and a searing pain along his back.
“Stand to your oar, carrion!” roared Callus’ voice from above him.
Carse voiced a tigerish cry but Boghaz instantly stopped his mouth with one big paw. “Steady!” he warned. “Steady!”
Carse got hold of himself but not in time to avoid another stroke of the whip. Callus stood grinning down at him.
“You’ll want care,” he said. “Care, and watching.”
Then he lifted his head and yelled along the oarbank. “All right, you scum, you carrion! Sit up to it! We’re starting on the tide for Sark and I’ll flay alive the first man who loses stroke!”
Overhead seamen were busy in the rigging. The sails fell wide from the yards, dark in the moonlight.
There was a sudden pregnant silence along the ship, a drawing of breath and tightening of sinews. On a platform at the end of the catwalk a slave crouched ready over a great hide drum.
An order was given. The fist of the drummer clenched and fell.
All along the oar-bank the great sweeps shot out, found water, bit and settled to a steady rhythm. The drumbeat gave the time and the lash enforced it. Somehow Carse and Boghaz managed to do what they had to do.
The rowers’ pit was too deep for sight, except what one could glimpse through the oar ports. But Carse heard the full-throated cheer of the crowd on the quays as the war-galley of Ywain of Sark cleared the slip, standing out into the open harbor.
The night breeze was light and the sails drew little. The drum picked up the beat, drove it faster, sent the long sweeps swinging and set the scarred and sweating backs of the slaves to their full stretch and strain.
Carse felt the lift of the hull to the first swell of the open sea. Through the oar port, he glimpsed a heaving ocean of milky flame. He was bound for Sark across the White Sea of Mars.
VI. On the Martian Sea
The galley raised a fair breeze at last and the slaves were allowed to rest. Again Carse slept. When he awoke for the second time it was dawn.
Through the oar port he watched the sea change color with the sunrise. He had never seen anything so ironically beautiful. The water caught the pale tints of the first light and warmed them with its own phosphorescent fire—amethyst and pearl and rose and saffron. Then, as the sun rose higher, the sea changed to one sheet of burning gold.
Carse watched until the last color had faded, leaving the water white again. He was sorry when it was all gone. It was all unreal and he could pretend that he was still asleep, in Madam Kan’s on the Low Canal, dreaming the dreams that come with too much thil.
Boghaz snored untroubled by his side. The drummer slept beside his drum. The slaves dropped over the oars, resting.
Carse looked at them. They were a vicious, hard-bitten lot—mostly convicted criminals, he supposed. He thought he could recognize Jekkaran, Valkisian and Keshi types.
But a few of them, like the third man at his own oar, were of a different breed. Khonds, he supposed, and he could see why he had been mistaken for one of them. They were big raw-boned men with light eyes and fair or ruddy hair and a barbarian look that Carse liked.
His gaze dropped to the catwalk and he saw clearly now the two creatures who lay shackled there. The same breed as those who had cheered him in the square last night, from the wharfside ships.
They were not human. Not quite. They were kin to the seal and the dolphin, to the strong perfect loveliness of a cresting wave. Their bodies were covered with short dark fur, thinning to a fine down on the face. Their features were delicately cut, handsome. They rested but did not sleep and their eyes were open, large and dark and full of intelligence.
These, he guessed, were what Jekkarans had referred to as Swimmers. He wondered what their function was, aboard ship. One was a man, the other a woman. He could not, somehow, think of them as merely male and female like beasts.
He realized that they were studying him with fixed curiosity. A small shiver ran over him. There was something uncanny about their eyes, as though they could see beyond ordinary horizons.
The woman spoke in a soft voice. “Welcome to the brotherhood of the lash.”
Her tone was friendly. Yet he sensed in it a certain reserve, a note of puzzlement.
Carse smiled at her. “Thanks.”
Again, he was conscious that he spoke the old High Martian with an accent. It was going to be a problem to explain his race, for he knew that the Khonds themselves would not make the same mistake the Jekkarans had.
The next words of the Swimmer convinced him of that. “You are not of Khondor,” she said, “though you resemble its people. What is your country?”
A man’s rough voice joined in. “Yes, what is it, stranger?”
Carse turned to see that the big Khond slave, who was third man on his oar, was eyeing him with hostile suspicion.
The man went on. “Word went round that you were a captured Khond spy but that’s a lie. More likely you’re a Jekkaran masquerading as a Khond, set here among us by the Sarks.”
A low growl ran through the oar bank.
Carse had known he would have to account for himself somehow and had been thinking quickly. Now he spoke up.
“I’m no Jekkaran but a tribesman from far beyond Shun. From so far that all this is like a new world to me.”