~
"Why don't you kill them all?" Mackervan jerked his braided head at the guards watching from up on the lip of the ditch. "Or just wave your hand and finish this thing right now?"
"Lazy, I guess," Dormun said, ramming his shovel into the clay where next week they would lay the stones. He was no less sore on his fifth day in the camp than he'd been the morning after his beating. Another few weeks, he guessed, then he wouldn't notice at all. That was the secret: everyone got used to everything, adjusting to a change in equilibrium the way mud, when stirred, always returned to the bed of the lake. Good news for a new slave, bad news for a fresh king.
"You could make us look like guards," Mackervan blared, careless of who heard. "Or create a disturbance and then we run off."
"Then they'd send the dogs after us."
"You think you'd lose a fight to a dog?"
Dormun leaned on his shovel, eyeing the braided man. "I'm going to ask you a question that will sound stupid. Why do you want to get out of here so bad?"
Mackervan gave him a look like he'd just vomited into his own bowl. "Because we're slaves!"
"Only for another year and a half. They'll let us go once the 'duct is done."
"Do you know how many times I could get drunk in a year and a half?"
"You think troubles are a stormy sea that will drag you down to the crabs and the squid. If only you could climb back on board the ship! You'd sail right through them."
"But instead they're bluebirds and women in a lake?"
"Don't be dumb." Dormun hefted a spadeful of clay, back twinging, then slung it over his hip. "'What the gods can't break, they bless.' You would be miserable a month after you got back to the paradise you falsely remember. Tragedy finds you wherever you are. It's not a sea, it's all part of the same plain. Keep walking. You'll be out soon."
"Maybe," Mackervan muttered with unusual dispirit. "Meanwhile you've got two black eyes and Aker's suffering the bad air."
"We'll be fine."
That night, in the sunset hour when they were allowed to rest and play games before being chained down till the morning, Dormun looked up from his breathing to see the faces of Harolt and his two bald friends among the circle of men gathered to watch him perform. The others had asked him to show them the story of when Josun Joh had tricked Olin the Smith into donning chains so strong even he couldn't break them, and though Dormun didn't believe in these odd northern gods and their convoluted backbiting, he'd obliged the other slaves, running the misty, foot-tall gods through their paces with equal parts pride in his work and resentment that he had no real choice in presenting it. For now, the bald men watched, and he breathed, making the shin-high Olin wriggle and drum his heels on the ground as Josun Joh approached his forge (the space around the figures in front of Dormun was mostly blank—he didn't coalesce the brick and flame of the forge until the god neared it, a trick he'd learned to enhance the dreamlike lock the spiros' act held on its audience), then hammered the blood-red sword he'd use to avenge himself on the goddess who'd killed his brother.
"Tomorrow," Dormun said, pausing Josun Joh the moment he lifted the finished sword, an asterisk of light gleaming near its narrow point. He exhaled and the two gods faded into fog, then nothing.
The men around him stirred, nodding, clearing their throats. Harolt stepped forward from the circle and he saw Aker and Mackervan tense in the dim light of the campfires and moon.
"Show us how Nil's Red Scourge fought the army of Lumland to a standstill," Harolt said.
Mackervan put himself between Dormun and the intruders. "Show me how you plan to walk out of here when I snap both your legs off."
Aker stepped beside him, coughing, and was joined by a stout man named Boren who through some saintly miracle had maintained a potbelly after two years in chains. In moments, Dormun knew, the two sides would beat each other into the ground, and once they fought themselves out the guards would rush in to tie their bleeding bodies down and, without a trace of irony, beat them again. Would the slaves take a lesson from that? Or would it be one more impossible knot in the string of absurdities that comprised their lives? But they were his friends and he could avert this, and he rose to his feet and faced Harolt.
"Give me back my pet."
Harolt nodded ponderously. "Show us the Red Scourge. If we like it, you'll get your toy."
"A spiros can't meet the wishes of a man who's wronged him," Dormun lied. "The gods work mysteriously. They love the man who steals a kingdom, but hate he who lifts a mango from another man's tree. I don't approve of this myself. Any fool can see the hypocrisy. Yet here we are, and I need my cat back."
Harolt tipped back his head, as if examining the dark sky for heavenly confirmation, then lifted a leather pouch from his neck, loosened its puckered mouth, and extracted the carved panther.
"So goes their will." He handed it back.
"Good kitty." Dormun stroked it with one finger, imagining, for a moment, Lapper's sun-cooked face teaching him to breathe and to believe something as soft and weak as breath could change things, then pocketed the carving and fixed the small crowd with a look of studied imperiousness. "Sit down. All of you. Let me show you how a single troop of warriors thwarted the greatest army Lumland has ever fielded."
The men settled into a loose ring and in their center Dormun breathed and arrayed a spearhead of red-bannered horsemen, each one a single inch tall but so distinct that, if he squinted, Dormun could make out the wrinkles and dust-streaks striping their faces. The grass seemed to grow branches, becoming the oaks and maples of the far north, and between them a clumped rabble of infantry sprung up like mushrooms toting axes and spears. Dormun spoke softly, forcing the audience to lean in as the Red Scourge harassed the army like ghosts in the woods. As he paused before the battle that had forced the truce, he saw a pair of guards watching from behind the ring of slaves, chains forgotten in their hands. They waited until he finished, then locked each man up for the night.