Dust drew into his mucus, graying the edge.
‘So. This is the lousy lot left from the morning?’ The man’s voice was naturally hoarse; bits of a grin scattered among general facial signs of contempt.
‘The girl is sound and cooks in the western style, though she’s strong enough for labor—or would be with some fattening. And she’s comely.’ The slaver spread one hand on his belly, as if to keep it from tearing away with its own dark doughy weight; he squinted. ‘You were here this morning, and I was speaking to you about a price …?’
‘I was here,’ the man said, ‘passing in the crowd. We didn’t speak.’
‘Ah, just looking then. Take the girl. She’s pale, passionate and pretty; knows how to keep herself clean. She’s of a good temper—’
‘You’re a liar,’ the tall man said.
The slaver went on as though he had not been interrupted: ‘But you are interested in buying …? In this high and loathsome hold, they seem to think slaves are too good for them. Believe me, it’s not as if they were concerned with the fates of the wretches for sale. I want you to know I take care of my wares. I feed them once a day and put them through a bathhouse, wherever we happen to be, once every new moon. That’s more than I can say for some. No—’ He wiped again at his trickling forehead with a fleshy thumb. ‘No, they think here that such luxuries as I have out are namby-pamby and not suited for the austere mountain life.’
A brown child with a near-bald head, breasts small as two handfuls of sand, and rags wrapped around her middle, ran up clutching something in leaves. ‘A dragon’s egg!’ she panted and, blinking, opened her hands. ‘A dragon’s egg, fertile and ready to hatch, from the corrals of the flying beasts not two miles above in the rocks. Only a bit of silver. Only a—’
‘Go on with you,’ said the slaver. ‘What do you think, I’ve never been in the high hold of fabled Ellamon before? Last time I was here, someone tried to sell me a whole trayful of these things; swore I could raise the beasts into a prime flock and make my fortunate.’ He humphed, making to push the child, who merely turned to the tall man.
‘A dragon’s egg …?’
‘A dragon’s egg would be a good bargain at only a bit of silver.’ The man prodded the leathery thing in the leaves with a rough forefinger. ‘But this—I spent a week here, once, picking these off the trees that grow down near the Faltha Falls. Dragonfruit they’re called. Lay them in the sun for a week, turning them every day, and you have something that looks a pretty passable version of one of the winged wonders’ seeds.’
‘Is that how they do it?’ The slaver flapped both hands on his stomach.
‘—only you forgot to pull the stem off this one,’ the tall man said. ‘Now go away.’
The girl, still blinking, ran off a few steps, looked back—not at the two men standing, but at the tow-headed woman, whose hair was as short as (if so much lighter than) her own, who was still sitting, who was still rocking, who was whispering something to herself now.
‘So, you know the lay of the rocks ’round Ellamon.’ The dark-armed slaver moved his hands up and down over his stomach, moving his stomach up and down. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Gorgik—unless I have need for another. When I do, I take another for a while. But I’ve stopped in many mountain holds over the years, fabled or unfabled, to spend a day, or a week, or a month. That makes Ellamon no different for me from any hundred other towns on the desert, among the peaks, or in the jungles.’ Gorgik inclined his scarred face toward the slaves, gesturing with his blunt, stubbled chin. ‘Where are they from?’
‘The old man? Who knows. He’s the one I couldn’t sell in the last lot—a bunch of house slaves, and him. All the time asleep anyway. The boy’s new-captured from some raid in the south. A barbarian from the jungles just below the Vygernangx …’ One hand left the slaver’s gut to prod at Gorgik’s chest—‘where your astrolabe comes from.’
Gorgik raised a bushy eyebrow.
‘The stars, set so on the rhet, must be from a southern latitide. And the design around the edge—it’s the same as one the boy had on a band around his ankle before we took it off him and sold it.’
‘What’s he doing?’ Gorgik frowned. ‘Trying to wear his chains through by rubbing them with a leaf?’
The slaver frowned too. I’ve kicked him a couple of times. But he won’t stop. And he certainly won’t rub it through in his lifetime!’
With his knee, Gorgik nudged the boy’s shoulder, ‘What are you doing?’
The boy did not even look up, but kept on rubbing the leaf against the link.
‘He’s simpleminded?’ Gorgik asked.
‘Now the woman,’ said the slaver, not answering, ‘is from a little farming province in the west. Apparently she was once captured by raiders from the desert. I guess she escaped, made it all the way to the port of Kolhari, where she was working as a prostitute on the waterfront; but without guild protection. Got taken by slavers again. Thus it goes. She’s a fine piece, the pick of the lot as far as I can see. But no one wants to buy her.’
The woman’s eyes suddenly widened. She turned her head just a little, and a faint shivering took her. She spoke suddenly, in a sharp and shrill voice that seemed addressed not to Gorgik but to someone who might have stood six inches behind him and seven inches to the side: ‘Buy me, master! You will take me, please, away from him! We go to the desert tribes and I’ll be sold there again. Do you know what they do to women slaves in the desert? I was there before. I don’t want to go back. Please, take me, master. Please—’
Gorgik asked: ‘How much for the boy?’
The woman stopped, her mouth still open around a word. Her eyes narrowed, she shivered again, and her eyes moved on to stare somewhere else. (The girl with the false egg, who had been standing fifteen feet off, turned now and ran.) Once more the woman began to rock.
‘For him? Twenty bits of silver and your astrolabe there—I like the quality of its work.’
‘Five bits of silver and I keep my astrolabe. You want to get rid of them before you have to waste more on their food—and bathhouses. The Empress’s slave-tax falls due within the next full moon on all who would take slaves across province lines. If you’re going with these to the desert—’
‘Three Imperial gold pieces and you can have the lot of them. The boy’s the best of the three, certainly. In Kolhari I could get three gold pieces stamped with the face of the Empress for him alone.’
‘This isn’t Kolhari. This is a mountainhold where they pay mountain prices. And I don’t need three slaves. I’ll give you ten iron pieces for the boy just to shut you up.’
‘Thirteen and your astrolabe there. You see I couldn’t take the thirteen by itself because certain gods that I respect consider that a highly dangerous number—’
‘I’ll keep my astrolabe and give you twelve, which is twice six—which certain other gods regard as highly propitious. Now stop this back-country squabbling and—’
But the slaver was already squatting by the heavy plank, twisting one of his identical thick keys in the peg lock while sweat beaded the creases on his neck. ‘Well, get it out. Get your money out. Let’s see it.’
Gorgik fingered apart his fur sack and shook out a palmful of coins, pushing off some with his thumb to clink back in. ‘There’s your money.’ He poured the palmful into the slaver’s cupped hands, then took the proffered key and bent to grab up the loosened chain. ‘The iron coin is Imperial money too, and supposed to be worth two and a half silver bits to the Empress’s tax collectors.’ Gorgik tugged the boy up by the shoulder, wound the chain high on the boy’s arm, pulled it tight across the narrow back, and wound it high on the other arm: pigeoning the shoulders made running at any speed impossible.
‘I know the Imperial money. In five years’ time you won’t see any other sort—more’s the pity.’ The slaver fingered through, translating the various coinage into imperials and adding them with silent tongue and moving lips. ‘And you know too, appare
ntly, the way they bind slaves in the mines down at the Faltha’s feet.’ (Gorgik finished tying the boy’s wrist; the boy was still looking down at where his leaf had fallen.) ‘Were you once an overseer there? Or a gang foreman?’
‘You have your money,’ Gorgik said. ‘Let me be on my way. You be on yours.’ Gorgik pushed the boy forward and pulled the end of the chain tight. ‘Go on, and keep out to the very end.’ The boy started walking. Gorgik followed. ‘If you run,’ Gorgik said, matter of factly, ‘in a single tug I can break both your arms. And if I have to do that, then I’ll break your legs too and leave you in a ditch somewhere. Because you’ll be no use to me at all.’
From behind the slaver called: ‘Are you sure I can’t buy your astrolabe? Two silver bits! It’s a nice piece, and I have a yearning for it!’
Gorgik walked on.
As they passed from under the scraggly market awning, the boy twisted back to look at Gorgik with a serious frown.
He wasn’t a good-looking boy. His shoulders were as tan as river mud. His hair, bleached in bronze streaks, was matted low on his forehead. His green eyes were bright, small, and set too close. His chin was wide and weak, his nose was sharp and arched—in short, he looked like any other dirty and unmannered barbarian (they had lived in their own, filthy neighborhoods along Alley of Gulls at the north side of the Spur whenever any of them had ended up in Kolhari). The boy said: ‘You should have taken the woman. You get her work in the day, her body at night.’
Gorgik tugged the chain. ‘You think I’ll get any less from you?’
3
GORGIK ATE HEARTILY FROM a heavily laden table. He joined in an army song and beat a mug of rum on the boards in unison with the mugs of the soldiers; half his spilled over the horny knot of his fist. With the fifteen-year-old barmaid on his knee, he told a story to three soldiers that made the girl shriek and the soldiers roar. A very drunk man challenged him to dice; Gorgik lost three rounds and suspected that the dice were loaded by an old and fallible system; his next bet, which he won, confirmed it. But the man’s drunkenness seemed real, for Gorgik had been watching him drink. In a long, long swallow, Gorgik finished his mug and staggered away from the table looking far drunker than he was. Two women who had come to the mountains from the plains and, having eaten behind a screen, had come out to watch the game, laughed shrilly. The soldiers laughed gruffly. And, at least, the barmaid was gone. One of the soldiers wanted the older of the women to gamble with the drunken dice man.
Gorgik found the inn owner’s wife in the kitchen. Outside, a few moments later, furs piled high as his chin, furs swinging against his ankles (as it was too warm for furs inside the house, she hadn’t even charged him), Gorgik edged between the ox-rail and the cistern wall and out of the light on the packed dirt behind the pantry window.
The inn, frequent in provincial middle-class cities, had once been a great house; the house had been closed up, ruined, parts of it pulled down, parts of it rebuilt. For more than a century only a third of it had stood at any one time; seldom for twenty years had it been the same third.
Gorgik carried the furs across what might have once been a great hall, or perhaps an open court. He stepped over stones that had, centuries or decades ago, been a wall. He walked by a wall still standing, and up a stand of rocks. Earlier, when he had asked the inn-keeper’s wife where to house his slave, she had told him to put the boy in one of the ‘outrooms.’
Out of the three, one had been filled with benches, branches, broken three-legged pots no one had gotten ’round to mending, and a cart with a shattered axle; the other two were fairly empty, but one had an unpleasant smell. The ‘outrooms’ had probably once been quite as ‘inside’ the house as the pantry in which the heavy, spotty-cheeked woman had paused, on her way from kitchen to common room with a basket of roots on her hip, to instruct Gorgik the way here to them. The rooms sat alone on a rag of granite that raveled away behind the inn itself, a single wall from one winding down (here and there fallen down), to join with the wall of the standing wing.
This was Gorgik’s third trip to the outrooms.
The first trip, just before sunset, had been to chain up his young barbarian to the post that supported what was still left of the room’s sagging ceiling (the straw was sticking out of the cracked daub): more than half the ceiling was down and most of two walls had fallen, so that the room was missing one corner.
The second trip, before his own dinner, had been to bring the barbarian his supper—a pan of the same roots the woman had been carrying, skinned and boiled with a little olive oil. In taste, texture, and color they were between sweet potatoes and turnips. Also, in the pan, were pieces of fried fat that, if still hot and served with salt and mustard, were fairly tasty. It was standard fare for a laboring slave, and substantially better than the boy would have gotten with his slaver. Gorgik had paid the extravagant price for salt, and, in the smokey kitchen, stolen a handful of ground mustard and another of chopped green pepper from two crocks on the table, scattered them about the pan, then, brushing his hands against his leg, ducked under the slant beam of the kitchen’s transom, with a yellow mustard flower on his thigh.
The third trip—this one—was to bring out the blankets—not that it was particularly chill tonight. As he reached the room, a black cloud dropped its silvered edge from the moon (one of the rugs, up under his chin, tickling the side of his nose in the pulsing breeze, was white); as the leaf-rush up about the thick trunks stilled, Gorgik heard the sound that had begun before the end of his first visit, had continued all through his second, and was whispering on into this, his third.
Gorgik stepped over the broken wall.
The boy, squatting away from him, so that only one knee was in direct moonlight, rubbed and rubbed his chain with a leaf.
The food in the pan was gone.
Gorgik dropped two of the furs on the rock floor and began to spread the third, black one.
The boy kept rubbing.
‘I bought you—’ Gorgik kicked a corner straight—‘because I thought you were simple. You’re not. You’re crazy. Stop that. And tell me why you’re doing it.’ He shook out the second, white fur, dropped it to lap the black, and flung out the brown on top of both.
The barbarian stopped, then squat-walked around and squinted at his owner, dropping both forearms over his knees; the chain hung down from his neck (a length sagged between his two fists) to coil on the ground before snaking away to its pole back in the dark. The boy said: ‘I am dead, yes? So I do my death task.’
‘You’re crazy is what you are. That scraping and rubbing, it gets on my nerves.’ Gorgik stepped on to the blanket edge and sat down. ‘Come over here.’
The boy, without rising, squat-walked on to the white fur. (Behind him, the chain lifted an inch from the ground, swung.) ‘I am not crazy. I am dead. Nargit was crazy, but not …’ The boy lowered his eyes, moving his thin upper lip around over his teeth—one of which, Gorgik had noticed by now, lapped the tooth beside, giving all his barbaric expressions still another imperfection. ‘Crazy Nargit is dead too … now. Because I kill him … I wonder if I would meet him here.’
Gorgik frowned, waited.
The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.
The boy said: ‘I have as many lifetimes as there are leaves on a catalpa tree three times the height of a man in which to go at my task. So I must get back to work.’ He brought leaf and link together; then he dropped his eyes again. ‘But already I am very tired of it.’
Gorgik pursed his lips. ‘You look very much alive to me.’ He grunted. ‘Had I thought you were dead, I never would have purchased you. A dead slave is not much use.’
‘Oh, I am already dead, all right!’ The boy looked up. ‘I figure it out, at the beginning. It is almost exactly like the tales of my uncle. I am chain in a place where there is no night and there is no day; and if I rub a single leaf against my chain for a length of time equal t
o as many lifetimes as there are leaves on a catalpa tree three times the height of a man, my chain will wear away, I shall be free, and I can go to the fork in the river where there will always be full fruit trees and easy game … But you know?’ The barbarian cocked his head. ‘When they took me from the forest, they chain me right away. And right away I begin my task. But after a week, a whole week into this death of mine, when they gave me to the man from which you took me, they took away my old chain—and gave me a new one! And it wasn’t fair. Because I had already work at my task for a week. Work hard. And do it faithfully every waking hour. A week, I know, is not so much out of a length of time equal to as many lifetimes as there are leaves on a catalpa tree three times the height of a man. Still I had work hard. I had do my task. And it make me very discouraged. So discouraged I almost cry.’
‘Let me tell you something about being a slave,’ Gorgik said, quietly. ‘Even if you work at your task a length of time equal to the number of lifetimes as there are leaves in an entire catalpa forest, as soon as your master sees that you are one leaf’s thickness nearer freedom, he will promptly put you in another chain.’ There was a length of silence. Then Gorgik said: ‘If I take that chain off, will you run?’
The boy frowned. ‘I do not even know which way I should go to find the fork in the river from here. And I am very tired.’
‘How long have you been captured now?’
The barbarian shrugged. ‘A moon, a moon-and-a-half … But it feel like a man’s lifetime.’
Gorgik fingered for the pouch dangling beside his buttock, took out the key, went forward on his knees, and reached for the boy’s neck. The boy raised his chin sharply. The key went into the lock; the chain fell—soft on fur, a-clink on rock.