Free The suns of Scorpio by Alan Burt Akers Page A

Stylor—”
    “Eat!”
    I do not pretend I enjoyed giving up part of my rations, but this man was clearly not as fit as he had been, or as he should be. And this was strange. It is well-known that if a man can survive as a galley slave for the first week he stands a chance of eventual existence; once he had become, as it were, pickled to the galley slave’s life, he can endure unimaginable hardships and indescribable tortures. Once one has proved a galley slave, one can overcome obstacles of monstrous proportions. Zorg had come through the first terrible weeks when men were flogged to death daily at the benches and tossed overboard, when men’s hands ran red with blood with no scrap of skin left on their palms or fingers, when they tore crazily at their ankles implacably fastened by the rings and chains, so that the blood and flesh oozed and scraped away to the bone.
    The terrors of the galley slaves’ lives are well known in the abstract. I lived through them. Zorg made that peculiar grimace that in a galley slave passes for a smile and idly, automatically, nipped a nit that crept upon his weather-beaten and salt-crusted skin. The coarse sacks stuffed with straw were alive with vermin. We cursed the nits and all the other bloodsucking parasites, but we endured them because while they lived we had the sacking bundles of straw with their mangy coverings of ponsho skins upon which to fling ourselves. The idea of galley slaves rowing as we were, four to an oar with the whole bodily movement thrust and pulled and flung into the stroke, without some form of bench covering is ludicrous. Our buttocks would have been lacerated within the space of three burs; even the cruel oar-masters of Magdag recognized that. The ponsho skins, which covered the sacks and fell to the decks, were not there because we were loved; they were provided because without them the galley would not function.
    I admit, I had become used to the smells — almost.
    Life aboard a two-decker beating about in blockade gave one a flying start in enduring discomfort, dampness, stink, and short rations. I enjoyed advantages that Zorg, for all that he was a powerful man and had been galley captain, did not share.
    Now his face held a shrunken look that worried me.
    Nath, next along on the loom of the oar, burped and cocked an ear. Nath is a common name on Kregen; this Nath was big and had once been burly, for galley slaves tend to fine down. I had wondered how that other Nath, Nath the Thief in far Zenicce, would have fared in the galleys.
    “Wind’s changing,” Nath said, now.
    This was bad news to Zorg and to Zolta, the fourth on our oar. As an experienced sailor I had known the wind shift for perhaps ten murs, but I had wished to keep that unpleasant news from Zorg as he finished the onion.
    Almost immediately, the silver whistles were heard.
    The oar-master took his position in a kind of tabernacle midway in the break of the poop. The whip-deldars ran along the central gangway, ready to lay into the naked backs of the slaves if they were slow in readying themselves. We were not slow. More whistles sounded. A group of sailors handled the sheets, bracing the single sail around. They were an unhandy bunch, and I had time to relish the thought of how my petty officers would like to teach them the ways of the Navy aboard a frigate or a seventy-four. Clumsily, with a great deal of billowing and cracking of sheets, the sail came down. Long before it had been mastered and brailed we were all at the ready, one foot pressed on the stretcher, the other pressed against the back of the bench in front, our arms out, and our calloused hands grasping our oar looms. All the loop-ropes holding the oars clear of the water still outboard, a neat custom of the galley captains of the inner sea, had been removed by the outboard men, in our case Zolta, whose task that was.
    Now Grace of Grodno rocked before the gentle swell, her forty oars all parallel, in perfect alignment above