Free The suns of Scorpio by Alan Burt Akers Page B

the water. She must have looked like some great waterwalking beast, light and graceful with her slender lines burgeoning into a richly decorated stern with its upflung gallery, lowering down into the ram and beak low over the water.
    Grace of Grodno was a galley that, here in the Eye of the World, men called a four-fortyswifter: forty oars, four men to an oar. The clumsy system sometimes used on Earth of rating a galley by men to a bench was not used in the inner sea. The oars poised, ready. The drum-deldar beat once, a single, admonitory boom. I could see the oar-master as he looked up to where an officer leaned over the poop rail, all white and green and golden finery. No doubt they were savoring a little of our smell back there on the poop now. The officer had a handkerchief to his face. The oar-master lifted his silver whistle, and I collected myself, ready.
    The whistle sounded, the drum boomed, all in a practiced series of sounds and orders, and every oar went down as one.
    We pulled smoothly through the stroke. The drum-deldar beat out a steady rhythm, a double-beat of his two drums, one tenor and one bass, a smooth steady long-haul stroke. Our backs moved through the rhythm, forward so that our hands and the looms of our oars thrust above the bent backs of the slaves on the benches before us, then a steady — oh, so steady — pull.
    Grace of Grodno moved through the water. She moved with the same feeling which had been so strange to me at the time I had stepped aboard that galley in the lake from which the City of Aphrasöe grows. Now, in this smooth inner sea, the galley surged ahead as though on tracks. She scarcely rolled at all, and she drove forward over the calm sea like a monstrous beetle with forty legs. She was a relatively small galley. Only twenty oars on a side meant that her length was much below those of the fleet galleys I had seen in the arsenal harbor of Magdag, and, at a guess, I would say she was not above a hundred feet on the waterline. Again at a guess, for I never saw her broadside on from a distance, overall she would not have exceeded a hundred and forty. I admit now that I had been puzzled by these swifters’ possession of both ram and beak, thinking them mutually exclusive, but I had learned just how the galleys of the inner sea were fought.
    She was, of course, outrageously unseaworthy.
    We labored at the oars with a smooth, short, economical stroke that would give us some two knots speed.
    I, of course, had no idea what our mission was. I was merely a chained galley slave. As my body went through the unending mechanical motions of rowing, I pondered on that “chained slave” label. Between us, Zorg and I, we had been cautiously and carefully rubbing the link of the chain that bound us to the bench against a metal bracket-strut. Sweat-molded filth crammed into the growing breach concealed against discovery. As we bent forward and flung ourselves backward, over and over again, and the galley drove forward through the calm water, I could not help worrying over Zorg.
    “Ease up, Zorg,” I whispered to him when the whip-deldar had passed, vigilant in his patrolling of the gangway, his whip flicking, seemingly alive, hungry. The galley slaves called the whip “old snake.” I knew the expression had been used on Earth. One could easily understand why.
    “I — will — bear my part, Stylor—”
    “I will push and pull that much more, Zorg.” I was annoyed. He was a friend. I was worried about him. Yet he insisted stubbornly on pushing and pulling with the best, all out of his pride. Oh, yes, I knew the pride that burned in my friend Zorg of Felteraz.
    “I am Zorg.” He spoke in a low mumble. We could speak while rowing this easy stroke. “I am Zorg,” he said again as though seeking to hold onto that, and then: “I am Zorg, Krozair! Krozair! I will never yield!”
    I did not know what he meant by Krozair. I had not heard the word before. Nath rowed at the oar with a blind