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could not break. Fresh fliers brought fresh slaves. A Bleg came into our hut with the numbers 8279
branded on his breast and back over the atrophied carapace, and I shook my head and called him that,
although I did not forget the Gon.
The question of what was mined here teased me at the beginning; but gradually I grew indifferent. The
mountains existed. We must chop them down and break them up and shovel them into the wicker
baskets, they would be carried to the chaldrons, and the calsanys would draw them out to the crushers.
The refiners, powered by a sickly green stream flowing over a bluff and falling into a scummy pool, rich in
minerals, would do their work; then what was left over would be packed in wooden crates, lined with
leather, and loaded aboard fliers. When the quota dropped, the law permitted an increase in working
burs. A bur is forty Earth minutes long. It grew so that at the face a bur seemed to stretch to a Terrestrial
hour. And still I had no idea what the refined rock was needed for, what the Hamalese, Zair rot em, did
with it, why they forced this agony on fellow human beings.
The tailings stretched for dwaburs along the base of the foothills, ulm after ulm of them, spreading a
powdery and ashlike detritus. What the refiners did, what sort of rock this was, what was taken from it
all these things I did not know and gradually came not to care about.
Early on I had said to a man, an apim, laboring alongside me, What do they want the rock for, dom?
I do not know, he had said, bashing his pick so that chips flew. I only wish I could choke the rasts
with it.
Amen to that, I said, striking with my pick.
No one knew.
Every day we labored. There were no rest days.
The knowledge that if I did not escape soon I might forget that escape existed drove me on. While
loading the fliers one day for the Hamalese rotated tasks according to their rules a man was
discovered secreted in one of the leather-lined wooden boxes. Where guards of other peoples perhaps
would have had sport with him for example, taking him aloft so that he thought he was escaping, and
then pitching him overboard; or weighing the box and declaring it was short-weight and so pouring rock
upon him until he was crushed the guards at the Heavenly Mines acted strictly according to the law.
The Hamalians or Hamalese, either term is quite correct took him in chains to a summary court,
where he was found guilty for he was certainly that, having tried to escape and sentenced to the
prescribed punishment.
There are always sedentary jobs to be done in a mining complex like this, work that can be performed
quite well by a man who cannot walk, by a man, say, who has no legs.
They found him that employment. The law had no wish for extra severity and would not take his life.
Slaves of quality were hard to come by in great quantity, and would not be wasted, only refuse being sent
as victims to the arenas. And only tough fighters would do as coys, apprentice kaidurs.
This man, number 5763, sat all day at his task, his stumps beautifully bandaged. He had shouted that he
came from Hyrklana; but that did not help him.
If he tried to escape again, the law would be more severe on him; and, as was written down, at the third
attempt would then demand his life.
He would be hanged in the most strict ritual procedure.
I witnessed only two hangings, one for a third-time escape attempt, incredible though that may be, and
one for a slave who had struck an overseer.
This slave was a Chulik.
Had he killed the overseer the law admitted that the next of kin, or the dead man s superior officer failing
a next of kin, might stipulate what punishment the murderer would suffer before death.
They were colorful in their thinking in those areas, were the bereaved in Hamal.
And there was no revenge, no bloodthirsty shrilling anger in all this. It was all written down in the laws of
the land . . .
A new slave, number 2789 for they filled up the old roster numbers with new slaves at the Heavenly
Mines said to me, Eight-two-eight-one! I must escape! I ll go mad!
I said to him, Two-seven-eight-nine. To escape is so difficult it is scarcely worth the attempt. Better for
you to go mad.
Only later, as I sat eating my chunk of bread made from good corn, for the Hamalese wished to keep
up our strength and coarse pudding of vosk and onion, with a finger over the gregarian at the side of
my bowl, was the truth of what I had said borne in on me.
I, Dray Prescot, unwilling to contemplate escape?
Number 8281 knew the truth. Dray Prescot was an empty boaster, a bladder of wind.
Eight-two-eight-one knew the truth.
It took me a day to think of the subject again. We were opening up a new seam far down into the guts
of the mountain. The rock we wanted held a gray metallic sheen which differentiated it from the yellower
rock all around. Yet it held no mineral I could tell. We simply took all the gray rock, irrespective of minor
differences. This seam was narrow, and an overseer, a little Och holding with his four limbs a lamp, a
wax notepad, a stylus, and a prodding stick, waddled up on his two lower legs to supervise. We were all
crouched down, for the roof pressed close, and the oil lamp it was not samphron-oil smoked a
little. I smelled the lamp; but, also, I smelled another nostril-tickling odor. In that confined space in the
grotesque shadows of the lamp, the little Och prodding and writing, a Rapa guard with a spear bending
almost double ready to spit the first one of us who did anything against the law for the law would hold
a guard within his rights if he killed protecting a Hamalian I picked up the unmistakable scent of
squishes.
Memories of Inch flashed into my mind, of his insatiable hunger for squish pie, and of the taboos he held
in so great honor, and of that limb of Satan, Pando, taunting poor Inch with rich, ripe juicy squish pie.
The Och squeaked and backed away.
All out! He shouted so loudly some of the slaves jumped and a trickle of rock slid from the overhang.
All out at once! Guard, prod em along, you onker!
We scuttled out.
We did not go back to that seam again.
Although I can recall that scene in all its clarity now, at the time with the same depressing grayness of
days it passed from my mind; the little flicker of the idea of escape guttered like a candle in the opened
stern-lantern of a swifter of the Eye of the World.
Number 2789 harked back to the idea of escape himself, and so forced me to contemplate reality. Was
not 8281 also Dray Prescot? Was I not Pur Dray, Krozair of Zy? The Lord of Strombor? Prince
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