They rowed in heat and in fierce rain, and sometimes in a pleasant cool, though it was never cold. They were the Caliph’s slaves, but they had little knowledge of whither they were rowing or what purpose their labour might be serving. They rowed beside steep coasts and rich lowlands, and toiled painfully up broad and swiftly-flowing rivers, on the banks of which they saw brown and black men and occasionally, but always at a distance, veiled women. They passed through the Njörva Sound, and journeyed to the limits of the Caliph’s dominions, seeing many rich islands and fine cities, the names of which they did not know. They anchored in great harbours, where they were shut up in slave-houses until the time came for them to put out to sea again; and they rowed hard in pursuit of foreign ships till their hearts seemed to be about to burst, and lay panting on the deck while battles that they had no strength to watch raged on the grapplings above them.
They felt neither grief nor hope, and cried to no gods, for they had work enough to do minding their oars and keeping a watchful eye open for the man with the whip who supervised their rowing. They hated him with a fierce intensity when he flicked them with his whip, and even more when they were rowing their hearts out and he strode among them with big lumps of bread soaked in wine, which he stuffed into their mouths, for then they knew that they would have to row without rest for as long as their strength sustained them. They could not understand what he said, but they soon learned to know from the tone of his voice how many lashes he was preparing to administer as a reward for negligence; and their only comfort was to hope that he would have a hard end, with his windpipe slit or his back flayed until his bones could be seen through the blood.
In his old age, Orm used to say that this period in his life was lengthy to endure, but brief to tell of, for one day resembled another, so that, in a sense, it was as though time was standing still for them. But there were signs to remind him that time was, in fact, passing; and one of these was his beard. When he first became a slave, he was the only one among them so young as to be beardless; but before long, his beard began to grow, becoming redder even than his hair, and in time it grew so long that it swept the handle of his oar as he bowed himself over his stroke. Longer than that it could not grow, for the sweep of his oar curtailed its length; and, of all the methods of trimming one’s beard, he would say, that was the last that he would choose.
The second sign was the increase in his strength. He was already strong when they first chained him to his place, and used to rowing in Krok’s ship, but a slave has to work harder than a free man, and the long bouts of rowing tried him sorely and sometimes, in the first few weeks, made him sick and dizzy. He saw men burst their hearts, spewing bloody froth over their beards, and topple backwards over the benches with their bodies shaking violently, and die and be thrown overboard; but he knew that he had only two choices to make, either to row while his fellows rowed, even if it meant rowing himself to death, or to receive the kiss of the overseer’s whip upon his back. He said that he always chose the former, though it was little to go for, because once, during the first few days of his slavery, he had felt the whip, and he knew that, if he felt it again, a white madness would descend upon him, and then his death would be certain.
So he rowed to the limit of his strength, even when his eyes blurred and his arms and his back ached like fire. After some weeks, however, he found that he was ceasing to be aware of his tiredness. His strength waxed, and soon he had to be careful not to pull too hard for fear of snapping his oar, which now felt like a stick in his hands; for a broken oar meant a sharp lesson from the whip. Throughout his long term as one of the Caliph’s galley-slaves, he rowed a larboard oar, which involved sitting with the oar on his right and taking the strain of the stroke on his left hand. Always afterwards, as long as he lived, he wielded his sword and such-like weapons with his left hand, though he still used his right arm for casting spears. The strength which he gained through this labour, which was greater than that of other men, remained with him, and he still had much of it left when he was old.
But there was a third sign, apart from the growth of his beard and of his strength, to remind him that time was passing as he laboured at his oar; for he found himself gradually beginning to understand something of the foreign tongues that were being spoken around him, at first only a word here and there, but, in time, much more. Some of the slaves were from distant lands in the south and east, and spoke tongues like the yapping of dogs which none but themselves could understand; others were prisoners from the Christian lands in the north, and spoke the languages of those regions. Many, however, were Andalusians, who had been put to the oar because they had been pirates or rebels, or because they had angered the Caliph with seditious teaching concerning their god and prophet; and these, like their masters, spoke Arabic. The overseer with the whip expressed himself in this tongue and, since it was always a wise thing for every slave to try to understand what this man wanted from them, he proved a good language-master to Orm, without causing himself any exertion in the process.
It was a cumbrous language to understand, and even more so to speak, for it consisted of guttural sounds that came from the depths of the throat, and resembled nothing so much as the grunting of oxen, or the croaking of frogs. Orm and his comrades never ceased to wonder that these foreigners should have chosen to give themselves the trouble of having to produce such complicated noises, instead of talking in the simple and natural manner of the north. However, he showed himself to be quicker than any of the others in picking it up, partly, perhaps, because he was younger than they, but partly also because he had always shown an aptitude for pronouncing difficult and unfamiliar words that he had found in the old ballads, even when he had not been able to understand their meaning.
So it came to pass that Orm was the first of them who was able to understand what was being said to them, and the only one who could speak a word or two in reply. The consequence was that he became his companions’ spokesman and interpreter, and that all orders were addressed to him. He was, besides, able to discover many things for the others by asking questions, as well as he could, of such of the other slaves as spoke Arabic and were able to tell him what he wanted to know. Thus, although he was the youngest of the Northmen, and a slave as they were, he came to regard himself as their chieftain, for neither Krok nor Toke were able to learn a word of the strange language; and Orm always afterwards used to say that, after good luck, strength and skill at arms, nothing was so useful to a man who found himself among foreigners as the ability to learn a language.
The ship was manned by fifty soldiers, and the galley-slaves numbered seventy-two; for there were eighteen pairs of oars. From bench to bench they would often murmur of the possibility of working themselves free from their chains, over-powering the soldiers, and so winning their freedom; but the chains were strong, and were carefully watched, and guards were always posted when the ship was lying at anchor. Even when they engaged an enemy ship, some of the soldiers were always detailed to keep an eye on the slaves, with orders to kill any that showed signs of restlessness. When they were led ashore in any of the Caliph’s great military harbours, they were shut up in a slave-house until the ship was ready to depart again, being kept all the time under strict surveillance, and were never allowed to be together in large numbers; so that there seemed to be no future for them but to row for as long as life remained in their bodies, or until some enemy ship might chance to conquer their own and set them at liberty. But the Caliph’s ships were many, and always outnumbered their enemies, so that this eventuality was scarcely to be reckoned with. Such of them as showed themselves refractory, or relieved their hatred with curses, were flogged to death or thrown overboard alive; though, occasionally, when the culprit was a strong oarsman, he was merely castrated and set again to his oar, which, although the slaves were never permitted a woman, they