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Cramp couldn't help but notice that the centaurs were careful to gather up the Hithans' swords with the rest off the booty, sliding them clumsily into the scabbards (and not always the right ones) and then adding them to the pile of confiscated goods on their own backs. He told himself that that was better than if they had strapped them to their hips- or shoulders or necks or whatever that part of their anatomy might be called where their equine and human halves came together. The idea of weapons as effective as swords in the hands of such ruthless fighters was truly appalling. Though they had just proven that they hardly needed them. They were deadly enough already.

But once they had gathered up everything that could be gathered, including the injured, both their fallen comrades and the more numerous wounded Hithans, they set off, forming two lines so that they could drive their captives between them like so many dumb cattle.

They began to make their way along a series of low clay hills extending for several miles along the base of towering stone cliffs. Even here, the land was rugged, all rock and ash-colored mounds of clay with occasional streaks of off-pink or pure white, without even a blade of grass to provide the faintest sign of life. Occasional snowbanks, stained and dirty in the mid-summer thaw, melted slowly and reluctantly in the harsh sunlight, creating thin trickles of bitterly cold water that made the ground wet and slippery. The mud stuck like paste to feet and hooves, slave sandals and soldiers' boots.

They stumbled across the uneven ground, scrambling up bluffs and then down slopes nearly too steep for even the centaurs, who were obviously used to them, to keep their balance. The Hithans marched stoically, many of the slaves grumbled and groaned, but their centaur captors were ruthless, driving them across the broken landscape as if they were determined to reach their unknown destination as quickly as possible.

Cramp plodded along to one side of the churning, sullen mob of humans, walking closer to the centaurs than most of the other captives, who seemed terrified of them. Not that Cramp himself trusted the creatures or considered them to be friendly or safe. He just wasn't that frightened by them.

Of course he had spoken to one of them personally, which made some difference. It didn't make him trust them, however, despite their apparent sympathy. He had heard others condemn slavery- not many, but some- but he had never found any who were willing to live up to their ideals and actually do anything about it. Not that it would have done them any good even if they had had. But even so, it made him a bit suspicious of the centaurs and their supposed high ideals.

Not only the Hithans themselves but also most of their subject nations considered slavery such an inevitable and necessary part of civilized life that arguing against it was simply incomprehensible, like complaining about having to serve in the military or simply work for a living. A militant abolitionist preaching against slavery might not have been putting his life on the line, but he would have been setting himself up as a laughingstock. Not even the greatest of philosophers would have sided with him.

But most of those who grumbled against slavery were either slaves who simply hated the work they had been ordered to do or the poor who didn't have any and resented those who did, like a peasant on foot grumbling against the horses of the nobility as they crowded him aside on the road.

If he had been asked (and if he had been certain that he wouldn't get in trouble for giving an honest answer) Cramp would have admitted that he hated being a slave, hated being someone else's property to do with as he chose.

But even in his short life he had seen that life was unfair, not just to slaves but to nearly everyone. He had seen so-called freemen who lived on the edges of starvation, dressed in rags that made the clothes of slaves look luxurious by comparison, scratching and begging in the city streets as they struggled to survive on handouts from those who treated them like stray dogs fit only to be beat out of the way. And those freemen who held jobs usually were as imprisoned within their work as any slave, in theory free to quit but in practice trapped in their work as their only possible means to survive.

For the most part even the nobility were enslaved by the demands of custom and tradition, if not by imperial decree. The sons and daughters of even the most powerful families in the land were forced into years of service in the military, to strict submission to their elder superior officers as they fought long, bloody wars from one end of the empire to the other.

Life was hard for everyone, and if slaves had it harder than others in some ways they at least had the advantage of not having to worry about life. A slave could simply turn off his mind and not even think about what he was doing. It didn't matter, after all; not to him, anyway. It wasn't any of his business and he got nothing out of the work he was doing if he did it well and lost nothing if he did it poorly. As long as he was barely diligent enough not to get beaten for sloth he could be as indolent and lackadaisical as he wanted. Assuming, of course, that his master wasn't a complete thug who enjoyed abusing his property merely for the enjoyment of it.

Not that Picktallio had been bad, as masters went. The youngest son of his father, he ran somewhat toward indolence and never took anything any more seriously than absolutely necessary. By the time he reached his late twenties he had grown into an enormous gorilla of a man, nearly seven feet tall with hard muscles that had always been something of a mystery to everyone who knew him, since he seldom bothered to exercise unless forced into it. His just seemed to be one of those bodies that converted everything he ate- and he ate ravenously- into muscle rather than fat.

Like many good-natured, large men of abnormal strength, he sometimes harmed others unintentionally. He was becoming proverbial for his deadly slaps-on-the-back. Openly ugly and considered to be not as intelligent as he might have been (with some justification), Picktallio was at least easy to get along with, even for a slave, and Cramp was relieved to see that he was plodding along on the far side of the captives, stripped of weapons and armor, his coarse face set in a scowl that would have boded ill for any and all centaurs in the vicinity if his hands hadn't been bound securely behind his back.

The land didn't really become more rugged as they passed beyond the distorted clay bluffs into the into the mountains. That would have been impossible. But it did become more impassable- bare stone, sheer cliffs and occasional perilous glaciers nestled in steep-walled valleys.

But the centaurs seemed to possess an uncanny knack for finding ways through one seemingly impossible barrier after another. Surefooted as a pack of mountain goats, they led their captives up slopes of naked blue-gray stone at angles as steep as forty-five degrees that seemed to end at a straight cliff, only to turn and follow the base of the cliff along a hidden natural path as wide as a road back home. That trail, in turn, led to another, higher cliff that appeared at first glance to be totally impassable until the centaurs led them around its base to a broken series of layered ledges that led up the sheer face like stairs into the even higher mountains beyond.

Slowly but surely, along paths devious and hidden, they worked their way upward, to heights the Hithans had been unable to reach on their own even after weeks of effort.

Hands tied behind their backs, the Hithan soldiers struggled to keep their balance on the steep slopes and broken rocks. The unbound slaves had an easier time of it, but the exertion in the thin atmosphere soon had them all gasping for breath like beached fish.

Cramp wondered just how far it was possible to go into the mountains before they ran out of air or came to some final, impassable barrier. They had obviously risen considerably above the level of the ambush, and the centaurs showed no signs whatsoever of stopping.

That thought made him wonder, in turn, just how high they had already climbed. As they came out at the top of a steep canyon eroded through the face of a sheer cliff made up of countless layers of pastel strata like an enormous, hard layer-cake, Cramp turned and looked back the way they had gone, hoping to catch a glimpse of the place where they had been captured.

The view that stretched out below him was staggering. In the glare of bright sunlight and painfully blue skies, he could see vast reaches of slate-gray and white cliffs stretching out below him, some of coarse blue volcanic stone and others of layer after layer of ancient sediments, separated by broad, relatively level ledges coated with pastel clays in broken, eroded canyons like the backbone of some gigantic creature made of colored chalk, as if even the mountains had to stop and take a breath every now and then before climbing to the greater heights beyond.

Streaks of snow cut through the various earth-shades of rock and clay like slashes of pure white, glaring in the bright sun as if light were shining through from below, from the very heart of the mountains themselves.

And around it all, enclosing the sheer cliffs and deep canyons like a gigantic, broken wall that could only have been built by the gods themselves, were the mountains- jagged and irregular fangs of blue and white reaching impossibly high into the painfully bright, dark blue sky.

Cramp stared open-mouthed at the vast emptiness stretching away before him until a huge, black bird of prey appeared suddenly from nowhere and wheeled over his head, screaming shrilly. At that moment he felt a sudden lifting of his heart that had nothing to do with his mortal situation, prisoner of half-animals in an unknown land of death inches from where his sandals were braced on the sloping stone. He laughed with something that may have been joy and spread his arms, struggling to embrace something he didn't understand.

A hand grasped his shoulder. He turned to find Apanna standing at his side, glaring harshly into his face.

"Only a bird can fly," she told him roughly. "And only a fool jumps to see if he can join them."

"I wasn't going to jump," he told her absently, but he remained too exhilarated to bother to defend himself. He continued to stare down at the incredible view below him as his fellow captives pushed past him, sullen and surly with their eyes fixed stubbornly at the rocks beneath their unsteady feet. "Do you always live up here?" Cramp asked in a near-whisper.

"Where else would we live?" Apanna asked impatiently, not understanding. "The mountains are our home."

Cramp sighed. "You're lucky. I'd give anything to be able to spend the rest of my life up here."

Apanna smiled wryly. "That is no longer in your hands, human," she reminded him.

Startled out of his near-mystical exaltation, Cramp blinked and looked into her face, but her expression gave no sign of what was passing through her mind. Suppressing another sigh, he turned away from the spectacular view behind him and set off in the wake of his plodding, wretched fellow captives.

Part Four 

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