Sunbird (55 page)

^{At the end of the fourth day the treasury of Opet had acquired five large pottery jars of fine diamonds. Trade in these stones was a jealously guarded monopoly of the ruling house of Barca. In addition there were eighty-six bushman children between the ages of five and fifteen years. They were wild slaves, and had to be bound until tamed.}

^{Huy devoted himself almost entirely to their welfare during the return across the mountains. With the help of Xhai and the other tame bushmen he was able to save most of them. Only a dozen of the tiny creatures died of terror and heartbreak before they could be handed over to the slave women of the main camp.}

^{Lannon broke the camp under the southern mountains and they turned north and east, recrossing the river and picking up the mountains of Bar-Zeng* on the horizon. They began passing through the populous kingdom of the east, where the Yuye peasants farmed the corn lands along the Lion River**.}

^{* The Chimanimani Mountains **The Sabi River}

^{At each settlement the freedmen turned out to welcome them, and make tribute to their new king. They were a cheerful throng, and the mud-walled villages were clean and prosperous-looking. Even the slaves in the fields were sleek and well cared for, only a fool would abuse a valuable possession. The slaves were mostly blacks, taken in the north, but amongst them were those of mixed blood, sired by their own masters, or by selected stud slaves. They were unbound, differing little in dress or ornament from their masters.}

^{Along their way the legionaries who had completed their military service left their regiments and returned to their villages. Their places in the ranks were filled by the young recruits.}

^{They camped each night at one of the walled and fortified garrisons that studded the road to the mountains of Zeng. They were passing now through the fringes of the wide gold belt that ran east and west across the middle kingdom. It was this belt on which the wealth of Opet was based, and the king's stone-finders had developed an almost supernatural ability to find the enriched reefs in which the gold was hidden. The results of their efforts were numerous mines where the ore was prised from the earth by platoons of black slaves working naked in the narrow stifling stopes. At the surface it was crushed and the powdered rock washed from the grains of native gold in specially designed copper basins.}

^{Lannon paused in his march to inspect many of these works, and Huy was impressed by the ingenuity of the engineers who overcame the problems that the extraction of the ore presented at each separate site.}

^{Where the gold-bearing reef was narrow, they kept the headroom in the stopes as low as possible by using only women and children in the workings.}

^{They employed elephants for hauling the ore baskets to the surface, and for carrying water to the mines situated in the drier areas.}

^{They had developed a method of undermining massive ore bodies and collapsing them under their own weight. It was a dangerous procedure, and at one of the mines practising this method Lannon and Huy were kept from sleep the entire night by the mourning wailing from the slave compound. During the day an ore body had collapsed prematurely and over a hundred slaves with a few slave-masters had been crushed beneath it. Huy wondered how much of that hideous sound was on account of the dead slave-masters.}

^{Driven by his insatiable curiosity, Huy had himself lowered in one of the ore baskets to the lower levels of one of the workings. It was a hellish place of foul air, and heat and sweat, lit by the flickering oil lamps. The naked slaves toiled in cramped and dangerous chambers hacked from the living rock. Huy watched an intrusive outcrop of harder rock demolished by the means Hannibal had used hundreds of years before to clear his passage across the alps. A slow fire was lit and kept burning upon the rock until it had heated to a dull glow. It was quenched then with buckets of liquid, a mixture of water and sour wine, that exploded in a swirling cloud of steam, and split the rock into chunks which were hacked out and dragged away by the slaves. Huy went to the face where he saw the native gold shine in the mother lode, rich and yellow, and he mused at the price that must be paid for its extraction.}

^{When Huy was again hoisted to the surface he was soaked with sweat, and filthy with dirt from the stopes.}

^{Lannon shook his head. 'What did you want to do that for? Have the birds got your brain, that you must grovel around in the earth?'}

^{At one of the mines the ore had been exhausted above the level of the subterranean water. It was impossible to go down below this level, for no method had yet been devised to clear the water from the workings. Bucket chains of slaves were seldom able to lower the level by more than a few inches. The mine must be returned to Astarte the mother of moon and earth. She had given of her bounty, and in return she must receive.}

^{Lannon, as was his right, selected the messengers, conferring with his slave-masters to decide which fifteen slaves would be the least loss to the labour force. The gods were not particular about the quality of the sacrifice. To them a life was a life, and therefore acceptable.}

^{Huy's heart went out to them as they were led down into the workings for the last time. They wore the symbolic chains of the sacrifice, and they shuffled along, stooped and maimed and coughing with the lung disease of the miners.}

^{Huy delegated one of his priests to supervise the sending, and when his emissary emerged from that evil pit Huy led the praise chant to Astarte, and the work of refilling the mine began. It would continue for many weeks because of the amount of rock that must be carefully repacked into the caverns.}

^{This refilling was necessary to placate the earth mother further and also to allow new gold to grow.}

^{Aziru explained the need for this. 'This is benevolent ground, suitable for the growth of gold. We replace rock in the earth and the action of the sun upon it will, in time, engender a fresh growth of the precious metal.'}

^{'All life is in Baal,' Huy intoned formally.}

^{'Our children's children will one day thank us for this seeding of the earth,' Aziru predicted smugly, and Huy was impressed with this forethought - and he recorded every detail of it all in his neatly flowing script.}

^{Three hundred days after leaving the city of Opet, the column climbed the foothills of the Zeng Mountains.* The air was cool and fresh after the heat of the lowlands, and at night the mist hung heavily along the slopes and woke the fever in men's bones so that they shivered and huddled in their cloaks about the campfires.}

^{* Inyanga Mountains}

^{Those hills were the gardens of Opet, where tens of thousands of acres of land had been terraced and cultivated, and where tens of thousands of slaves tended the olive groves and vineyards. The centre and citadel of these gardens was a fortified hilltop town named after the twelfth Gry-Lion of Opet, Zeng-Hanno. Here there were temples to both Baal and Astarte, the religious strongholds of the eastern kingdom, and Huy spent twenty days in synod with his priests and priestesses. Huy also exercised and inspected his own personal legion, the sixth Ben-Amon, which was the only one of the eight legions of Opet composed entirely of warriors of the blood. Their standard was a golden vulture set on a shaft of polished ebony.}

^{These religious activities were interrupted when Lannon summoned Huy to accompany him on a short journey to the east, from whence word had come that the Dravs awaited Lannon to renew the five-year treaty.}

^{Three sheikhs of the Drav met them when they descended the mountains of
Zeng
towards the eastern sea. They were tall, brown-skinned men with fierce eagle features and dark glittering eyes. They wore head-dresses of white over their long black hair, and they dressed in full-length robes belted with sashes of filigree and semi-precious stones. Each carried a magnificent broad curved dagger at his waist, and wore slippers with long pointed toes.}

^{Their warriors dressed differently, wearing baggy pantaloons, on their heads onion-shaped helmets, body armour of silver breastplates; and they were armed with round iron shields and long curved scimitars, spears and short oriental bows. Most of them were Negroes, but they had clearly adopted the Drav manner of speech and dress. Two hundred years of relentless warfare had preceded the treaty between the Drav and the kings of Opet.}

^{The two armies bivouacked on each side of a wide valley, with a stream of clear water overhung with shady green trees separating the camps.}

^{Under these trees the council tents were pitched, and here for five days the two delegations feasted and bargained and manoeuvred diplomatically.}

^{Huy spoke the language of the Dravs and he translated tor Lannon the negotiations towards a treaty of unrestricted trade and mutual military aid.}

^{'My lord, Prince Hassan is concerned to know how many warriors Opet could put into the field in the event of a threat to the security of the two nations.'}

^{They sat on piles of silken cushions and lovely woven woollen rugs of vivid design and colour, drinking sherbet, for the Drav would not touch even the finest wines, eating a dish of mutton and fish spiced with herbs, smiling at each other and not trusting each other farther than the range of the eye.}

^{'Prince Hassan,' replied Lannon, nodding and smiling at him, 'is concerned to know with what force we would oppose an attempt to seize the gardens of Zeng and the gold mines of the middle kingdom.'}

^{'Of course,' Huy agreed. 'What shall I tell him?'}

^{'Tell him I can field fourteen regular legions, as many auxiliaries, and 400 elephants.'}

^{'He will not believe those figures, my lord.'}

^{'Of course not, no more do I believe his. Tell him anyway.' And so the bargaining proceeded in an atmosphere of mutual trust.}

^{They agreed to secure each other's flanks, combine to hold the line of the great river in the north against invasion by the migrant black tribes, and to come to each other's assistance if that border was violated.}

^{'The prince would like to revolve the unit of trade, my lord. He suggests that 500 mikthals should equal one Opet finger of gold.'}

^{'Tell him politely to swing on his own testicles,' Lannon replied, smiling at the prince, and the prince nodded and smiled back at him, the gem stones sparkling and glittering on his fingers.}

^{They set the rate of exchange at 590 mikthals per finger, and went on to negotiate the slaving agreement, and the cotton and silk clauses. On the fifth day they ate salt together and exchanged extravagant gifts, while the armies gave displays of archery and swordsmanship and drill. These were intended to impress the other side.}

^{'Their archers are ineffectual,' Lannon appraised them.}

^{'The bow is too short, and they draw to the waist not the chin,' Huy agreed. 'They limit their range and accuracy.'}

^{Then later when the infantry drilled:}

^{'Their infantry are lighter armed and armoured, my lord. They have no axemen, and I doubt those breastplates would turn an arrow.'}

^{'And yet they move fast, and they have a fiery spirit - do not dismiss them lightly, my Sunbird.'}

^{'No, my lord. I will not do that.'}

^{The elephants charged across the open ground with the archers in their castles spraying a shower of arrows ahead of the line. The huge grey beasts tossed and trampled the lines of straw dummies and their squeals and trumpets rang against the crest of the hills.}

^{'See their faces,' Lannon murmured. 'The prince seems to be looking on the eternal seas!' And it was true that the Dravs were silent and subdued for they had no elephants of their own, they had not mastered the art of training them.}

^{They parted and when Lannon and Huy looked back into the valley they saw the Drav army winding away eastwards in column, with the sunlight sparkling on helmets and spearheads.}