With palpable reluctance, Tufah returned to the sweating, stinking gloom of the row-deck. As she returned to the bottom of the stairs, she was reintroduced to the hellish engine that drove the galley so sublimely and with such seeming calm from above decks. Now she was back with the grunts and groans, the gasps and moans, the flashing, slapping whips and the shouts and cajoles of the loose panted overseers, their own slick bodies, as sweat slimed and grimy as the luckless chattel they drove. Now the full heat of the day was upon them and it pressed on the hauling, sweating, grunting beasts like an invisible, omnipresent, force that strained at them every bit as much as the sea pressed and resisted their oars. Tufah was returned to her oar and one of the overseers, who for no apparent reason had always seemed to despise Tufah, took her whip to her back.

"Get hauling you loathsome animal!" and she underlined her curse with three swingeing stripes. "Hah, think you're above us talking with the captain up there," she growled. Suddenly, she grabbed Tufah's arm and stared at her brand. "Well, well, look at this. Our all too pretty girl is getting away from us. Think of it and all this time I've been convinced I would kill you before you got away from here! Where are you being offloaded? she asked. Tufah could have groaned at her accursed luck that this malevolent driver of all of them had caught sight of her brand.

"I offload at Mershap!" Tufah grunted reluctantly.

"My, we are losing you quick time and to think you were quite willing to leave us without us having a proper chance to say goodbye" and the overseer planted a barefoot against Tufah's sweating back and pushed her hard so that she slid from her bench and then snapped with obvious relish. "You're on punishment detail!" Tufah gave her a wicked stare.

"For what!" she snarled.

"Oh, so now she has conferred with the captain, I have to give this dirty, smelly wetback a reason for flogging her do I? For insolence then, that will do. Now get rowing you lazy scum!" and again she drove her whip across Tufah's back and with a grimace of pain and a grunt of effort, she aided her struggling oar-mate to maintain the rate.

Tufah looked about her and mused silently on the hundreds of slaves who had toiled and died, entombed in this dreadful galley and she spared a thought for the hundreds who were destined to follow her, as inevitably there would be. She would vacate a bench exclusively for one of them. How hellish it would be for them- as it had been for her the first time- when they see first-hand what miserable hell life at the oar meant. For a first-timer it was more than a shock to the system, it was a complete change of life and any mores or values a girl may have had as she first sat upon the row-bench would all be swept aside and replaced with either a concerted and damnable will to survive above everything else, or she would succumb, as thousands did and die prematurely and long before she sees freedom again, if she had ever been destined to do so, as so many girls were sent to the state galleys for life terms.

A couple or hours before oars up, as ever, the drum rate was suddenly increased to full speed and grimly Tufah gritted her teeth and both her oar-mate and her struggled to meet the impossible beat the drum set up. All about them, the oars clattered and swept, sending salt spray high as they plied the water and the whips spat their fire across tired, stooping backs laid low by the interminable day's heavy toil.

As the high rate went on, so Tufah could see more and more oars losing their stroke before catching it up again and struggling to maintain it. Even the lead oars struggled and though they rarely lost the beat, after two hours of such a blistering pace, they too seemed to feel the strain and even their relatively stripe free backs wore the weals of heavy rowing by the time the oars would be called in after the speed rowing. Tufah and her oar-mate lost the pace several times and were given stripes each time for their 'laziness'. It was at these times of full rate that the overseers were ever vigilant, but the blistering pace and the duration at which they were called on to maintain it made it impossible not to lose the stroke more and more as weariness ate into leaden limbs and lungs panted desperately at the fetid, sodden, oxygen depleted air. Until at long last, the order went out above the cacophony of flying whips and plying oars.

"Raise oars!" and with huge relief, instead of hauling the oar, at last, they were allowed to raise them clear of the water and feel the heavily laden galley glide like some ugly wooden swan over the water until her momentum ebbed as the slaves energy had.

The slaves were fed and allowed toilet and then the dreaded ritual of punishment detail was upon them. First women were selected from the benches and on this occasion, four women stepped forward. They approached the wooden steps to the upper deck and before ascending them, they each pulled off their sweat soaked, stinking pants and put them aside and went up on deck naked. These were the women who had been ordered up for a beating rather than the lash. Beatings were regarded as warnings, a caution that to err again would lead them to stand before the lash. It was totally at the behest of the overseer concerned, whether she sent a slave to punishment detail or a beating and Tufah almost envied the four that mounted the stairs naked for their turn on the birching bench on the upper deck.

Tufah knew the routine of that well enough, as did all the galley slaves. The low, curved bench with its padded leather top would already be in place and the two overseers who administered the beatings from either side would be waiting for their victims. Each girl would take her turn to lie on the bench. Her wrists and ankles would be fastened with straps and a final fixing would be brought around their backs, keeping their bodies firmly on the bench throughout. Then the beating would be administered, either with five foot canes, riding whips, or even broad, heavy prison straps. Medium or heavy birches were employed also, light birches were considered far too mild for the bruised and battered slaves of a rowing galley and there was no place for such an instrument onboard. The woman would be beaten upon her bare backside with total disregard for the tenderness of her sex. In fact, beatings were usually prolonged and protracted affairs of great brutality, as beatings of forty, fifty and sixty strokes were the norm, but even a hundred strokes were by no means rare. Tufah herself had suffered a hundred strokes twice and had gone to the upper deck more times than she could remember. Nevertheless, after the beatings, the girls were returned to their benches rather than having to sweat it out in the low lockup for the night, sitting in chains and gags with the other bleeding, sweating girls, as the women on punishment detail would have to. Even so, it made rowing the galley on sore and bruised buttocks even more of a struggle for the next couple of days.

Tufah saw that she would be sharing the lockup with three others that night and she was the last one called forward for her four and twenty stokes of the cat. As she sullenly stepped forward to stand in the bloody mire of the three that had bled before her, she waited out the final seconds before her flogging as her wrists were secured, she thought that this had not been the first time she had endured such a flogging, but it would be the last, there was some solace in that at least.

Just before the first stripes ripped across her shoulders, the spiteful little overseer who had ordered her forward for the lash made a point of standing in front of her so she could watch her as she suffered. She wore a cruel half smile on her pretty face and her dark and - for the Provincial girls - unusually short bobbed hair stuck wet and sweaty to her face and neck. Tufah tried to show little emotion as the first stripes tore across her shoulders, but by the fifth lash, she broke from a mere grimace, to a cry of pain. The whips were ripped across her hard and occasionally, the cruel overseers who knew how to deal the whip from their own bitter experiences, would cut her hard and long, sending the sharp and loaded, knotted cords whip lashing around her curves to bite into her ribs and the side of her breasts. Tufah had been no braver than she had the dozens of times she had stood there before and after twenty four lashes, her back was a mass of bruised and bloody stripes, her large breasts swayed and danced as she writhed to the lash and sweat ran down her succulent body. Her head was hanging miserably and the agony of her torture had broken her totally. Again, she had been whipped into compliance as the hundreds who had endured thousands of stripes before had and as before, the maddening agony had ripped into her, engulfing her body from her soft skin to the very marrow of her bones and by the end, she was hanging wan and spent.

That night, as ever she endured the customary evening in chains, gagged in the lockup with the other three slaves, sweating and bleeding in the sweltering blackness all enduring their agony together, mute and gasping in the breathless heat of the hut.

Tufah at that point wanted to off that galley more then she had wanted to be anywhere else in her life and for the first time, she felt her powers of endurance ebbing. Those powers of endurance that had always kept her from going mad whilst in the teeth of the unending brutality of the row-deck. Endurance that had kept under lock and key the impotent rage of being worked like an ox, flogged like something less than an animal. Now she could see there was an end to it, she felt the desire to keep these emotions in check were less important. Had she let the rage and the madness inside engulf her before, she would have died a slow and bloody death as a result, but now, she could feel the relentless grip of the galley, the oar, the bench and the row-deck gradually slipping, loosening, relinquishing its hold on her very life and survival and as it did, so the rage and anger boiled within her.

It was the cruelty and the constant torture that Tufah could not countenance. Surely if they wanted their galleys rowed and rowed by convicts, that was one thing, but to treat those women like chattel, like worse than beasts of burden, that was what Tufah struggled to come to terms with. Even so, a little voice inside of her nagged that so often in the past, the only thing that kept her stroking that oar when the Rahle wind blew, or the heat became so oppressive that just sitting in the gloom would make the sweat flow, the only thing that would make Tufah, indeed any of the slaves work then, was the lash. Nothing else, money, tempting with better conditions, nothing would have, could have made her stir her limbs with the continued desperation needed to keep the heavily laden hulk moving. Tufah knew in her heart of hearts that it was galley slaves that kept the galley moving and it was the lash that kept galley slaves rowing and that was not going to change, certainly in her lifetime or for many years to come as far as she could see.

Nevertheless, the relief, the unrivalled joy that leapt in her heart as she felt the chains about her ankles and wrists being thrown. It had happened a thousand times before and was prelude to a day or days of loading and humping heavy sacks and cargo, struggling with loads in the tight confines of the boat's hold to readjust the goods. Loading was an unenviable and miserable task, but now, it held no horrors for Tufah, for she would walk down the gangway a freewoman and she would be able to leave the loading and the subsequent rowing to the others. Tufah could hardly believe that at last, that desperately awaited hour had at last arrived.