Half a King

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‘Now?’ Jaud spat into his palms and worked his two strong hands about the polished handles of their oar. ‘We row.’

HEAVE (#ulink_641294a2-9534-512f-9eec-36e80373e632)

Soon enough, Yarvi wished he had stayed in the flesh-dealer’s cellar.

‘Heave.’

Trigg’s boots ground out a ruthless rhythm as he prowled the gangway, whip coiled in meaty fists, eyes sweeping the benches for slaves in need of its encouragement, blunt voice booming out with pitiless regularity.

‘Heave.’

It was no surprise that Yarvi’s withered hand was even worse at gripping the handle of a great oar than it had been the handle of a shield. But Trigg made Master Hunnan seem a doting nursemaid in Yarvi’s memory. The whip was his first answer to any problem, but when that did not cause more fingers to sprout he lashed Yarvi’s crooked left wrist to the oar with chafing thongs.

‘Heave.’

With each impossible haul upon the handles of that terrible oar Yarvi’s arms and shoulders and back burned worse. Though the hides on the bench were worn to a silky softness, and the handles to a dull polish by his predecessors, with each stroke his arse was worse skinned, his hands worse blistered. With each stroke the whip cuts and the boot bruises and the slow-healing burns about his rough-forged thrall-collar were more stung by salt sea and salt sweat.

‘Heave.’

The suffering went far past any point of endurance Yarvi had imagined, but it was astonishing the inhuman efforts a whip in skilful hands could flick from a man. Soon its crack elsewhere, or even the approaching scrape of Trigg’s boots on the gangway, would make Yarvi flinch and whimper and pull that fraction harder, spit flecking from his gritted teeth.

‘This boy won’t last,’ growled Rulf.

‘One stroke at a time,’ murmured Jaud gently, his own strokes endlessly strong, smooth, regular, as though he was a man of wood and iron. ‘Breathe slow. Breathe with the oar. One at a time.’

Yarvi could not have said why, but that was some help.

‘Heave.’

And the rowlocks clattered and chains rattled, the ropes squealed and the timbers creaked, the oar-slaves groaned or cursed or prayed or kept grim silence, and the South Wind inched on.

‘One stroke at a time.’ Jaud’s soft voice was a thread through the haze of misery. ‘One at a time.’

Yarvi could hardly tell which was the worse torture – the whip’s stinging or his skin’s chafing or his muscles’ burning or the hunger or the weather or the cold or the squalor. And yet, the endless scraping of the nameless scrubber’s stone, up the deck and down the deck and up the deck again, his lank hair swaying and his scar-crossed back showing through his rags and his twitching lips curled from his yellowed teeth, reminded Yarvi that it could be worse.

It could always be worse.

‘Heave.’

Sometimes the gods would take pity on his wretched state and send a breath of favourable wind. Then Shadikshirram would smile her golden smile and, with the air of a long-suffering mother who could not help spoiling her thankless offspring, would order the oars unshipped and the clumsy sails of leather-banded wool unfurled, and would airily disclaim on how mercy was her greatest weakness.

With weeping gratitude Yarvi would slump back against the stilled oar of those behind and watch the sailcloth snap and billow overhead and breathe the close stink of more than a hundred sweating, desperate, suffering men.

‘When do we wash?’ Yarvi muttered, during one of these blissful lulls.

‘When Mother Sea takes it upon herself,’ growled Rulf.

That was not rarely. The icy waves that slapped the ship’s side would spot, spray, and regularly soak them to the skin, Mother Sea washing the deck and surging beneath the footrests until everything was crusted stiff with salt.

‘Heave.’

Each gang of three was chained together with one lock to their bench, and Trigg and the captain had the only keys. The oar-slaves ate their meagre rations chained to their bench each evening. They squatted over a battered bucket chained to their bench each morning. They slept chained to their bench, covered by stinking blankets and bald furs, the air heavy with moans and snores and grumbles and the smoke of breath. Once a week they sat chained to their bench while their heads and beards were roughly shaved – a defence against lice which deterred the tiny passengers not at all.

The only time Trigg reluctantly produced his key and opened one of those locks was when the coughing Vansterman was found dead one chill morning, and was dragged from between his blank-faced oarmates and heaved over the side.

The only one who remarked on his passing was Ankran, who plucked at his thin beard and said, ‘We’ll need a replacement.’

For a moment Yarvi worried the survivors might have to work that fraction harder. Then he hoped there might be a little more food to go around. Then he was sick at himself for the way he had started to think.

But not so sick he wouldn’t have taken the Vansterman’s share had it been offered.

‘Heave.’

He could not have said how many nights he passed limp and utterly spent, how many mornings he woke whimpering at the stiffness of the last day’s efforts only to be whipped to more, how many days without a thought but the next stroke. But finally an evening came when he did not sink straight into a dreamless sleep. When his muscles had started to harden, the first raw blisters had burst and the whip had fallen on him less.

The South Wind