Chapter 22 The Little Appian
Clay adjusted the angle of the lock pick and smiled to himself in the total darkness. One of the ankle manacles he had already laid aside. Since both locks were of the same kind, the other would also come off easily.
And finally. He had practiced on this sort of lock for three weeks while on the Heracles, practiced whenever the soldiers were away at the other end of the long deck. But each time he had opened a lock he had immediately snapped it shut again. It was no use trying to escape then, Kroz Crat had told him, not when he would only be chased down, recaptured, and imprisoned more securely. Wait until you are sold, he had told him, until some smug master leaves you alone.
His owner Mucius had obliged by chaining him to a post in this small outbuilding and leaving him alone for the night. And though, at Crat’s urging, Clay had thrown in the river almost all of his Old World clothing—so as not to draw attention to himself—he had kept his belt. Hidden in the belt were the picks.
He was thankful to his Uncle Everett for having shared with him the hobby of lock picking. Before it had been an interesting diversion. Now it was freedom. The second lock popped open. Clay threaded the pick back into the inner surface of the belt, refastened the belt under his long, rough tunic, and tied his rag of cloth waistband outside. Then he chuckled as he snapped both locks shut. Let them figure that out! He crossed the dirt floor of the shack, felt around until he found the door, and dragged it open.
Getting free was easy. The question was what to do now. His friends from the Heracles—Crat, Pollo, and Azco—had all been separated from him at Quintusia Harbor. They were to be taken to Antiochia, wherever that was. Left alone, all he knew was that he wanted to go east and try to find his older sister Simone. From all accounts, it was several hundred miles to the forest she had been aiming for when he had last seen her. He only hoped she had made it to some friendly humans there.
He himself had fallen off the huge, flightless bird they had been riding, but Simone had stayed on the korfy somehow. As she had ridden away and the soldiers had seized him, Clay had waved her on, had yelled at her not to turn back only to be captured herself. He suspected that she had had little choice but to ride on, anyway; the korfy had seemed unsteerable.
Now, in the night, Clay let his feet find a way across the soft earth of a cultivated field, moving down slope toward the sound of the Little Appian River. He considered that, whichever way he went, Kroz Mucius would follow. Perhaps Mucius would expect him to take to the river, would look there first? At any rate, he had most of the night for a head start. Maybe he could build a crude raft to begin his journey east. But the river flowed west, what about that?
He reached the river bank and looked out across the water while stroking his sparse and dirty beard—grown since he had left Indiana. A single boat was coming upstream, a lamp swinging slowly at its curved prow. Clay watched it for several minutes. Should he try to swim out to it?
Suddenly someone spoke at his elbow.
“I wouldn’t try it, smarty. It’s a long swim just to get captured.”
Clay jumped away from the sound of the voice, while at the same time registering that the speaker sounded quite young.
“Relax,” the boy said. “I’m one of Mucius’ slaves just like you. I’m on my way out of here, too. I’ll show you how to ride the river in style, if you don’t know how. How’d you get unchained?”
“Picked the locks,” Clay said in his heavily accented Gellene.
“Clever! You’ll have to show me how. My name’s Jules and I’m thirteen. I usually don’t stay any one place much, but I came down bad sick last winter and ended up getting caught and sold. I’ve been mending for months here, fattening up at Kroz Mucius’ table and doing as little work as possible, eh? But I’m ready to move on, you know? You can’t stay in one place too long.” He clapped Clay on the shoulder.
Clay looked down at the short, scrawny figure in the darkness. “Where’s your family?”
Jules laughed. “Good question. Say, there’ll be a line of grain barges along soon from the Agileez plantation up the river. And not much moon tonight, kind of cloudy. We swim out to the middle of the line of boats, hey, there’s nobody on ’em, right? They’re all tied together, so nobody’s in the middle ones. So we’re on our way to Quintusia, aren’t we? Are we partners, lockpicker? What’s your name?”
Clay told him.
“You talk funny, how come? From far away? I don’t care. Anybody who can pick locks is my kind of man. I’ll even share my stuff with you.” He raised a bag to show Clay. “I brought food from Kroz Mucius’ larder. What, go east? Man, there isn’t any east here. Don’t you know where we are? You go just a few more miles upriver and it’s not even deep enough for the galleys. And after that, why it’s just a thousand miles of nothing, not even villages out there.”
Jules listened as patiently as he could while Clay told him a little about Simone. “Well, if you’ve got to find her, come with me. We don’t have to go to Quintusia. We can go downriver like I’ve been saying and then cross north up to the Olympus. Now that’s a river! We go east on the Olympus, why man, we can go all the way to Farja if we want.”
As he talked, Jules pulled Clay along closer to the water. “To tell you the truth, I’m awful glad you got loose tonight ’cause I hate travelling alone. Now look, there’s a speck of lamp away up the river. Let’s see if it’s the grain barges.”
It was, and the two young men swam quietly out to them, Jules holding his food bag above the water. They slipped over the side of a barge, and the boy showed Clay how to scoop a shallow hole in the heaped grain and lie down invisible. Far ahead of them, and far behind, were the lamps that marked the beginning and end of the line of barges.
Clay lay in his hole in the warm night, looked at the clouded sky, felt the rocking of the barge, and endured yet another attack of homesickness. He missed his mother, missed Simone, his friends, hobbies, his own cluttered room at Cemetery House. Still, it was not so bad as before. On the Heracles his misery had been so deep, especially during the first week, that he had sometimes wept in front of the other men. They had been very kind to him.
Kroz Crat had for some reason believed Clay’s story that he was the descendant of Princess Lila and fetched by Sarrs to the Fold. Perhaps he and the others had simply wanted it to be true because every slave and poor person in the Fold dreamed and hoped of the reign of the Lila-me, when the shackles would come off and oppression end.
Crat had impressed upon him that he must not tell his identity to anyone. The rulers of Quintusia and the other Silent Cities had never recognized the claim of Lila’s family to the Empire. If they were to take Clay seriously, they would simply imprison him. Furthermore, the witch cult, worshippers of Midras, hated him even more. These witches were strong in the Silent Cities, their spies everywhere. Crat had reminded Clay of these things again and again. He must escape; he must travel incognito, trusting no one; and he must go east to some land called Eschor, a place where emperors are crowned.
No, he wanted to find Simone and go back to Indiana. By a terrible misfortune he was descended from this Lila, and he was suffering for it as if guilty of some crime. Thrown into a pre-technological society, enslaved, isolated, he must live as a tramp. At home, school would be starting soon, his senior year. But he had virtually no chance of getting back in time, and if no senior year, then how could he hold his place in the technological college to which he had already won a scholarship?
Well, he simply would not be making it. His life was being ruined while he skulked around the back lots of Ben Hur. These people did not even have electricity!
Clay’s nature, however, was not the worrying sort. He took refuge in sleep.
For the next three days he and his new friend traveled with the barges. When the boats stopped or passed near a village, they buried themselves in the grain, sometimes breathing through hollow reed
s. But these lands were rather empty, so most of the time it was enough to keep down in their scoop holes. At night they ventured out, for Jules knew the river’s every curve and ox-bow and therefore knew where they might cut across overland and rejoin the barges as they came around. These excursions were for exercise and for replenishment of their food supply: Jules was a practiced thief.
The boy, in fact, knew everything needed for this sort of life. Cheerful and illiterate, he had been on his own since the age of nine, and knew every cul-de-sac and thieves’ den in Quintusia and Kulismos, every unguarded pantry and orchard on the Olympus and Little Appian Rivers. Only sickness had slowed him down for a few months, but now he was happily resuming his career of slipping through the carefully wrought barriers and checkpoints of Sigapoleian society. He could run like a rabbit, swim like a fish, and hide like a chameleon. While the captain of the grain barges cursed and paid the tolls to the ubiquitous tax collectors, Clay and Jules paid nothing.
At dusk on August eighteenth, the boys left their barge and swam ashore to begin a hike across the narrowing neck of land that separated them from the Olympus River. Jules explained that there were just too many checkpoints at the fork of the two rivers, too many toll points, too many government officials. Much easier to take a long walk and then hop a boat on the Olympus. So he led Clay into the bed of a dry and abandoned canal, and away they went northward, feeling their way along in the night.
Kroz Mucius’ jowly face reddened. “That’s right, I said it already. A blond headed youngster with an accent. You have the record of the sale? Then why are you asking me about it?”
“Where is he?” Dom Chalice growled.
“I told you, he escaped. Got out of his shackles like magic. I’ve come the length of the Little Appian chasing after him and another slave boy of mine.”
Mucius stood on the high deck of Zavira’s ship the Cerberus and faced a crowd of black robed strangers. He had unsuspectingly hailed them when he had come near the fork of the Little Appian and the Olympus. A simple question about his missing slaves had earned him the boarding, not to say the capture, of his own small ship, and this forced interview aboard the Cerberus.
“How do you know he came this way?” the old man pressed.
“Because the other boy who disappeared the same night is a thief, and we heard reports of petty thefts all along the river. Besides, there’s nowhere else for them to go. Now if you’ll allow me to return to my ship, I’ll get on with finding them.”
“They haven’t come this far,” said Dom. “The officials at the toll point behind us have seen nothing of them, and yours is the first ship we’ve met since we left there. You’ve missed them.”
“But they must have passed the lesser tolls behind me, because the string of thefts continued,” argued Mucius. “Why couldn’t they have passed the one behind you?”
“We’ve missed them,” Amoz the Snake said softly. “They’re on their way to Quintusia.”
“No,” said Dom. “More likely holed up somewhere on the Appian.”
Mucius began to argue again but dwindled to a mumble as a veiled crone hobbled forward.
“Yes, Priestess?” said Amoz.
“The Cursed One goes east,” she croaked. “If he has passed us, it will be to turn east on the Olympas. If he has not passed us, then likewise overland to the Olympas. Turn the Cerberus around and pursue him.”
As her captain ran to command the rowers, Mucius began to splutter again about being returned to his ship.
“Throw the fool overboard,” said Dom.
At once, Mucius was manhandled over the side and had to dive for his life as the pinewood oars began to churn.
Captain Macar remembered the boy, one he had used before, scrawny but strong. “Just get under decks and don’t say anything,” he whispered sternly. “I’ll make it right with you later as to what you get paid.”
“And my friend, captain?”
Macar glanced at the taller blond boy, almost a man. “Yes, certainly. Just get out of sight below.”
Macar’s second in command Pytho was just arriving back at the galley, a coil of new rope on his shoulder.
“Who are they?” he asked, nodding toward the two boys as they disappeared below deck.
Macar laid a finger to his lips. “Pytho, you need to learn some things yet about the river trade. The company gives us only enough zugs to man the oars and not one more. That looks good on paper, but we usually lose a few, and this run has been worse than average.
“Fifteen short,” Pytho nodded. “One dead, four injured, nine sick, one put off with the Blue Plague—”
“Yes, rotten bad luck, and now we’re behind schedule as usual. The Cygnus won’t make it without more zugs, and the only way we’ll get them is off the record. Fortunately, hobo boys like these two can usually be found wanting to go our way.”
Pytho was a little shocked. “But they’re not slaves, Captain.”
Macar smiled as he preceded Pytho across the gangplank, leaving behind the village where the Cygnus had halted for rope.
“You can be sure they have been. But I take their thin stories at face value, accepting them as freemen, and so I get a reputation all up and down the river as trustworthy. The hobos tell each other I’m good for a trip east and decent food, with no questions asked; and then they get to walk free in Kulismos. So my supply of extra rowers never dries up. Now, don’t put chains on these two, and don’t stint their rations. All we need is a little luck with the wind, and the ship will make Kulismos on time for the fifth straight run. That’s a record for me.”
Pytho was still anxious. “No chains?”
“No chains. And keep an eye out for more of these boys when we stop again.”
“But if they’re treated like freemen, how does the company pay them?”
“You still don’t get it? The company doesn’t pay them. I pay them a few coins out of my own pocket. They don’t want much.”
“And off the record?”
“Everything off the record, Pytho.”
Below the deck, Jules and Clay found their way to vacant oar seats and took their positions. Each bench and oar were for one man only, and the zugs were stacked in tightly in three diagonally ascending rows. Clay had just room to swing his oar, his arms underneath the bench of the man just above and ahead of him.
“You sure you can row?” Jules asked from just below and behind.
“I can row fine,” Clay said. “I faked like I couldn’t, when I was on the Heracles, because my friends told me it would help to keep me from getting sold north. But actually I used to row a boat on a little pond near where I lived. Are you sure we’re not slaves again?”
The zug ahead of Clay turned and looked down at him, his dark eyes a mixture of patience and reproach; but he said nothing. His ankle chains clinked in front of Clay.
“Relax, lockpicker,” Jules answered. “In four days we’ll be in Kulismos.”