by Karen Miller
Hekat looked at him. “All of this is Abajai’s want?”
“Every word I speak reflects the master’s want,” said Retoth. “Of that you can be certain.”
“I am certain of Abajai,” she told Retoth.
More shocked noises from the watching slaves. She looked at them sideways, feeling contempt. Goat people. Bleating like goats, huddling like goats.
They would make me small, the slaves in this house. I am not small. I wear no slave-braid. I named myself. I call him Abajai, he is not my master. Abajai is my friend.
Retoth departed, she ate hot cornmush, she frightened the stupid slaves with her eyes. The slave Nada took her back to her chamber, four more women slaves joined them. They brought a tall stool, six burning lamps, combs, brushes, and a wooden box full of beads and amulets and tiny silver godbells. Hekat sat on the stool and the slave women stood round her, godbraiding her hair.
When they were finished it was after highsun. She slid off the tall stool and shook her head. The godbraids reached just past her shoulder blades, the beads and amulets rattled and clattered, the tiny silver godbells sang; she would make a pretty noise wherever she walked, people would hear her before they saw her, they would say to each other, Who is this girl-child with singing silver godbells in her godbraided hair?
She would tell them: I am Hekat, precious and beautiful .
After the highsun meal, Retoth said to her, “Come.”
He did not own her, she was not his dog. She stayed at the table. “Where do we go?”
“To the Merchants district. To the bazaar.”
“What do we buy there?”
“You will see. Come .”
It was Abajai’s want she play Retoth’s stupid game, so she followed him up the stairs and along the passageways towards the villa’s front doors. Within one closed room she heard sharp raised voices. She felt her heart leap.
“That is Abajai,” she said, and stopped. “I will see him.”
Retoth slowed, turning. “Not before he sends for you. The master meets important men this day. He has no time for bratty children. Come.”
She folded her arms. “I am not a bratty child. I am Hekat.”
He halted, and pointed his finger. “I am chief slave of this house! I can beat you if you do not obey.”
She speared him with a look. “No, Retoth. You cannot touch me.”
Retoth’s hands became fists. Ugly feelings struggled in his eyes. She knew he wanted to unfold his fingers and slap her beautiful face but he did not dare. He said he could beat her, she knew he could not. If Yagji could not beat her, or make Abajai beat her, no slave born in the world could raise a hand to her.
“Tcha!” said Retoth, and stalked away. “You waste my time. You will see Abajai when we return. He has said so.”
Hekat smiled, and followed him.
Retoth did not speak to her on the long walk from Abajai’s villa to the Merchants district. She didn’t care. Being in the fresh air was better than sitting below the villa’s stairs. She could see the city in sunshine now. She would have so much to tell Abajai when she saw him again.
There was a special place for people to walk, so the many slave-carried litters in the streets were not slowed down. Some of them traveled quite swiftly, their muscular slaves running in a flat-footed shuffle. The litters were beautiful, carved from exotic polished wood inlaid with bronze. Some were curtained in heavy silks, others were open so the world might admire the masters and mistresses they bore, wearing rich fabrics and jeweled amulets, bright as songbirds in rainbow colors.
At the end of some streets stood a godpost with a godbowl at its base. She saw a godspeaker dressed in brown linen and snakeskin empty the offerings from one of the godbowls into a leather satchel slung over his shoulder. He was very young, his brow bound with the tiniest scorpion. Retoth bowed his head as they passed him. So did she, after Retoth poked her with his elbow.
There were images of the hooded godsnake wherever she looked, not just on the godposts at the end of the streets. It was painted on the walls enclosing some of the houses, or sat as a bronze statue on top. It was picked out in green and blue and red stones where they walked, and in the middle of the road.
The godsnake of Et-Raklion was everywhere.
Twisting her neck, she looked up at Raklion’s Pinnacle, rising from the center of the city. In the bright sunshine she could see a wide road winding round and round, leading past the barracks and the palace to the godhouse at its peak. If she squinted she could see many moving figures on that road, traveling up, traveling down. The scorpion on top of the godhouse’s godpost blazed black and crimson in the light. The god’s great eye, watching them all.
The roads and walkways grew steadily busier the closer she and Retoth got to the Merchants district. Now there were open slave-drawn carriages, hung with bells and amulets, seating one or two people and rolling swiftly on polished wooden wheels. The slaves wore a harness over their shoulders, their godbraids bounced and rattled as they ran with the carriages jingling behind them.
Hekat stared. One day she would ride in a carriage like that. Proudly, with Abajai, so all Et-Raklion would know she was precious. She thought of the man in that savage north village, and was sorry he would never know that sending her away with the Traders was the only good thing he had ever done.
She and Retoth reached the bazaar at last, an enormous covered place crammed end to end and side to side with stalls and booths and foodsellers with trays on leather straps around their shoulders, hawking sweet jellies and spiced nuts and pastries dripping with honey. The air was almost too thick to breathe, so many smells, sweet and sour and sharp and soft. They filled her lungs and made her gasp. There were more people beneath this one high roof, shouting and laughing and singing and arguing, than lived in that village in the north.
Retoth took her by the arm and pulled her close. “Stay with me!” he bawled into her ear. A few steps away a woman and two men played drums and cymbals and a wailing wooden recorder. It was hard to hear Retoth above their noise. “My shadow, brat, or Abajai will be displeased!”
She pulled a face. Retoth used Abajai’s name the way the man had used his goat-stick, what a stupid slave. Abajai would never hurt her. But she’d be Retoth’s shadow, all the same. It would be easy to get lost in this shouting, stinking, crowded bazaar.
He took her to a booth filled with racks and racks of clothing. Two fat women pounced, like sandcats on rock mice. She was pulled behind a saggy curtain, poked and prodded, made to undress, then try on tunic after tunic, pantaloons, robes, so many clothes, till she wanted to scream. The only reason she did not scratch out their eyes was because they had a mirror that showed all of her body, from her godbraided head to her bare brown toes.
She had never seen her whole body before.
Entranced, she let the stupid fat women coo and chatter and smother her in fabrics. She only snarled when they tried to take off the snake-eye amulet Abajai had given her. Then they squealed and groveled and Retoth demanded from the other side of the curtain to know what was going on! The women rushed to tell him that all was in order, but Hekat said nothing. She looked at her body, and was amazed.
Her arms were long. Her legs were long. Her head with all its heavy godbraids sat neatly on her long neck. In the village there’d been dull dry skin lying thinly over skinny hips and ribs and jutting shoulders. Now . . . she was not fat, but there was flesh on her bones. She’d felt her body changing as she traveled the road with Abajai and Yagji but now she could see it: smooth and sleek, her shape so pleasing to the eye. Her skin, not dull but rich warm brown, glowing in the booth’s mellow lamplight.
Last of all she studied her face. Not as thin as when last she’d seen it, shown to her by the woman Bisla in Todorok. Her eyes weren’t frightened anymore, they were open and fearless. Proud. Defiant. Words she had learned from Abajai, that Yagji said described her, and should be beaten out of her. Abajai paid no attention to stupid Yagji. For herself, she lo
ved those words. She loved herself, shining in the mirror.
I am proud. I am defiant. I am Hekat, precious and beautiful. All of me is beautiful. The god sees me. I am seen by the god.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After the longest time the fat women finished drowning her in clothes. They left her alone to dress and took armfuls of the tunics and pantaloons she’d worn for them out to the front of their booth. When she joined them they ignored her, they were busy squabbling over coin with Retoth. He ignored her too, he cared more for Abajai’s money than for her.
Bored. Hekat wandered a small way from Retoth and the women, threading her way through the jostling crowd. Her interest was caught by a booth full of amulets. She wandered closer. The amulet-seller was busy with a customer. Hekat stood to one side and looked at the merchandise laid out on wooden tables and dangling from ropes stretched over her head.
Some of the amulets were as large as her fist, others smaller than her smallest fingernail. Some were carved out of bone, or fashioned from lizard skulls and snake-skulls and even fleshless human fingers. The bones and skulls were banded in bronze, in silver, in gold. There were tiny stone snake-fangs as blue as the sky. Larger snake-fangs in rock striped cream and crimson. Snake-eyes of pale green crystal, of richest yellow and hot fire-flame. Tiny clenched fists carved out of ivory, and ivory feet with a snake carved into the sole to guard against fangstrike. There were lots and lots and lots of scorpions, in every kind of stone and crystal. One in particular caught her eye, snared her attention like a fly drawn to honey. She picked it up to look more closely.
It was the size of a living scorpion. Shiny black, with deep flecks of scarlet and gold that caught the bazaar’s torchlight and shimmered, like breathing. It felt warm on her palm, almost alive. She almost expected to feel its feet move against her skin.
“What is this? What is this?” the amulet-seller demanded. Her other customer had gone away, they were alone in the amulet booth. “Whose child are you?”
Reluctantly, Hekat put down the carved black scorpion. “I belong to Trader Abajai.”
The amulet-seller was a wrinkled woman, so old her skin was fading to a light and ugly brown. All her greying godbraids were limp. Her eyes were filmed over with whitish scum, she was missing most of her teeth.
“Trader Abajai?” the old woman said. “Returned from the road? The god sees me. Abajai is Et-Raklion’s son, beloved of the god. What is your name, and where are you from?”
“I am Hekat from the savage north.”
“Aieee!” The old woman hitched up her shawl; it was sewn with so many amulets it kept trying to slide off her bony shoulders and rattle to the booth’s threadbare floor. “The savage north. That is why the child is fearless, and stands before me with its head held high.” She picked up the amulet, caressed it, smiling. “Does Hekat like my scorpion? I made it, you know. I made all these amulets. The god speaks to me in the night, in the wind, in the water. I make these amulets and the god sees me in its eye.”
Hekat looked again at the beautiful scorpion. “I like it.”
“Then you may have it,” said the old woman. “A gift for Hekat from the savage north.” She leaned forward. “But keep it secret, child,” she whispered. “This amulet is special. I have never made another like it. The god thundered in my heart as it guided my blade. It thunders now. It wants you to have this.”
Hekat nodded. If she told Retoth he would take this gift for himself. “I will keep it secret.” She reached for the black stone scorpion, and her hand touched the hand of the old amulet-seller.
The woman gasped, she dropped the scorpion onto the table, not caring if it chipped or smashed, and seized her in a grasp too strong for such brittle, claw-like fingers.
“Savage Hekat!” the old woman breathed. Her scummy eyes lost their focus, rolled upwards in her head like a godspeaker’s in the middle of sacred ritual. “The god sees you, it burns you in its eye! Great lady, mother of the god’s desire, mother of the son! Rivers of blood, rivers of greatness! Wastelands of despair!”
As Hekat wrenched free, Retoth appeared at her shoulder. “Hekat, I told you to stay with me! Abajai will beat you when I tell him of your wickedness. He will not abide disobedience beneath his roof!”
She was so shaken by the old woman’s rantings she said, without sneering, “I am sorry, Retoth.”
Retoth’s anger melted. “Oh. Very well. But you must come, it is wicked to dawdle.”
“My new clothes?”
“They are sent to the villa. Now come !”
The amulet-seller was muttering and moaning, rocking on her seat. “Burning! Blood! Aieee, the god thunders!”
Stupid old woman, she was demonstruck and ripe for stoning. Hekat snatched up the scorpion amulet and thrust it into her pocket, then ran after Retoth just as the bazaar’s milling crowds swallowed him entirely.
They left the noisy, smelly bazaar and walked even further to the School district, where Retoth paraded her before a variety of tutors until one agreed to teach her reading and writing and dance in the villa.
“I do not need a tutor,” she told Retoth, as they headed back to the Traders district. “Abajai is my teacher.”
“Tcha!” said Retoth, shaking his head. “The master is too busy to bother with you. Hold your tongue now, you give me a headache.”
On the long silent walk back to Abajai’s villa Retoth dropped silver coins into four of the godbowls they passed on the way. He even gave a copper coin to her, so she could please the god once. She thought, briefly, of giving the god the black carved scorpion. In the end, though, she just gave it the copper coin. The scorpion was so beautiful, and the god already had so many amulets in its godbowls throughout the city. Besides, it meant the amulet for her.
The first thing she heard when they returned to the villa was Abajai’s voice, coming from a room near the entrance hall. Forgetting Retoth, she dashed through its open door to find him.
“Abajai! Abajai! Here I am!”
He was stretched out on a long low couch, nibbling dried grapes from a glazed green bowl. Yagji sprawled on a couch beside him, feeding ripe plum pieces to an odd-looking animal perched on his fat belly. It was brown and white and hairy, it had a little face that looked almost human and tiny hands with four fingers and a thumb and a long curled tail. It saw her and let out a screech.
“Hooli! Hooli, don’t be frightened!” said Yagji, and clutched the hairy thing to his breast. “Stupid brat! Don’t you know it is rude to enter unannounced? Look what you’ve done, you’ve frightened Hooli!”
Hooli? Then this was a monkey . What a creature! Safe in Yagji’s suffocating arms it chattered and gibbered and hid its face behind its hands.
She pointed. “Yagji called Hekat a monkey on the road. Hekat is nothing like that Hooli!”
“No, she is not,” said Yagji, scowling. “My Hooli is worth a thousand times more in pure solid gold!”
“Only to you, Yagji, I promise,” said Abajai, chuckling.
Hovering in the doorway, Retoth said, “Forgive me, master, I could not stop her in—”
“It is no matter,” said Abajai. “Leave us, Retoth. I will have private words with Hekat.”
Retoth bowed and withdrew, closing the lavish room’s door. Abajai looked her up and down. “Your godbraids are pleasing,” he said. “They honor the god. You have visited the bazaar? You have new clothes?”
Hekat dropped onto the nearest couch and sat with her spine very straight. Her godbells chimed softly, singing his praises. “Yes, Abajai. Thank you.”
“What of a tutor?”
She pulled a face. “It would be better if Abajai taught me.”
Yagji snorted. Abajai said, “No. This is best. There are many things to learn from a tutor, he can teach you what I cannot.”
She felt pricky tears, she blinked them away. “I have a tutor. He comes from next highsun.”
Abajai leaned forward and flicked his finger on her knee. “I am pleased. Do you like Et-Rak
lion city?”
She sighed. “Et-Raklion city is beautiful. Will Abajai show me all of it, soon?”
“Not soon,” said Abajai. “Yagji and I have been on the road many godmoons. My time is for business now. The things you saw upon the road, Hekat—warbands and dead men, blood on the brown grass—have you sharpened your tongue on them to Retoth or any slaves below the stairs?”
He had no time to show her Et-Raklion? Disappointment was a snake-fang, piercing her heart. “No, Abajai. Hekat does not talk with slaves.”
“Good,” he said. “Those things we saw upon the road are our secret, they are things for the Traders and the warlord to know. No-one else.”
Our secret . Aieee, to know how much he trusted her. “Yes, Abajai.”
He nodded, serious. “I tell you this also. We are no longer on the road. This is the city, we must live city lives. Unless you are sent for, you will stay beneath the villa, you will learn your lessons and obey Retoth. That is your world now, below the stairs. Retoth will give me reports of you daily, I will know how you go on. You wish to please me?”
“Only to please you, Abajai,” she whispered. From the corner of her eye she could see Yagji, feeding the monkey Hooli more ripe red plum-pieces. He was smiling. He had never liked her. He was jealous.
Now Abajai smiled, his eyes were kind. “Do not despair, Hekat. From time to time you will see me and I will see you and all the time the god will see us both. If pleasing Abajai is your true want let that be enough for now.”
She was Hekat, beautiful and precious, come from Mijak’s savage north. She was strong and proud and fearless. She plucked the snake-fang from her disappointed heart and flung it away.
“Yes, Abajai,” she said, and left him to sit with Yagji and the stupid monkey. She went downstairs, to the slaves’ world below the villa, and shut herself privately into her chamber, where she sat on her soft bed and bit her lip until her pricky eyes stopped their stupid burning.