The Godspeaker Trilogy

by Karen Miller

  “I wonder,” he said, “if you don’t mind my asking. This fine vessel of yours is a slave ship, isn’t it?”

  The sailor’s single green eye burned him up and down. A patch hid the ruination of his other eye, but the long scar that trailed down his sun-leathered cheek like a dribble of candle wax suggested horrors not to be imagined. The man hawked and spat and scraped at his stubbled jaw with the blade of a knife, produced suddenly from the baggy blue trousers.

  “And what if it is?” he said, his accent rough and guttural, with daggers in it. Definitely a Slyntian. An unsavoury breed. “You have a complaint?”

  “No, no,” Dexterity said hastily. “Just making sure, you know. Wouldn’t like to think I was bothering the wrong person. Ah … where do you hail from, if I might ask?”

  “Last port was Insica. You got a problem with that ?”

  Insica. Insica. Oh yes. In Slynt, which made sense. A good two months’ sailing distance east, if memory served. “Oh dear, not at all. I was just curious.”

  The sailor scowled. “Stow your curiosity. What do you want?”

  “Ah. Yes,” he said, his heart bouncing from rib to rib. “Well, I want to buy a slave. From you. If you have one to spare.”

  “Buy a slave?” the sailor echoed. His bright blade flashed as he tossed it from hand to hand with casual disregard. It looked sharp enough to shear fingers should he miss … but he didn’t, nor did he glance once at his lethal toy as he considered the suggestion. “There be no slavery hereabouts. You Ethreans, you disapprove. You got laws.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Indeed. Yes. There are laws. I don’t deny some of us do disapprove of slavery, that time-honoured institution.” He strayed his fingers to his waist purse. “But not all of us. And you being from foreign lands, and not likely to see me again, I don’t expect our laws would trouble you unduly … would they?”

  The sailor grinned, revealing teeth in good health, if alarmingly orange. “Only if the king’s men poke their noses where they be not wanted.”

  Dexterity smiled back, sweat slicking his spine. “Oh, I don’t see why a private matter of business between two gentlemen should remain anything other than private. Do you? Of course, if there’s someone else I should make my request to, someone with more authority …” He let his voice trail away suggestively.

  The sailor scowled and jutted his jaw, which set his triple-plaited beard bobbing. The wicked knife flashed one last time, then disappeared. “I be as good as captain for now. Boss and crew be at furlough, up in the town. You be speaking to anyone, you be speaking to me.”

  “Oh, well, that’s perfectly fine,” Dexterity said, and swung himself down from the cart. Patting Otto, looping the reins about a handy bollard, he whispered, “You stay here, all right? I won’t be gone long.”

  “You wanting to come aboard?” the sailor said.

  “Of course,” he replied. “Try before you buy, that’s my motto. Never settle for a pig in a poke. I’m sure you have excellent taste in slaves but I don’t like to part with money without seeing for myself what’s on offer.”

  The sailor grunted and held out his hand, fingers twitching suggestively. “Let’s peep the colour of your dosh, then.”

  For a few coins he’ll let you on board, Hettie had said. Dexterity hid a scowl in his unplaited beard, filched two copper piggets from his waist purse and handed them over. At this rate he’d have no money left for buying a three-legged wharf rat, let alone a man, with or without blue hair. “For your time and trouble, kind sir.”

  The look the sailor gave him was anything but kind. “My time be worth a sight more than that.”

  Two piggets became four. The sailor hawked and spat again, and the piggets vanished. “Up the gangplank then,” he said, nodding at a flimsy piece of timber tying the ship to the shore. It was narrow, and moving, and it had no railings. The sailor’s single green eye was maliciously amused.

  Dexterity swallowed. This could be unfortunate. Seemed there was a choice here of either drowning or being crushed between hull and pier. But he’d come too far to turn back now, so he took a deep breath, which made him want to vomit, fixed his gaze on the solid railing above his head and scuttled up the gangplank. Behind him, the sailor trod the narrow stretch of timber with the ease of a man sauntering along his own home street.

  The smell was even worse on board.

  “Where are they?” Dexterity asked, looking about at the trimly coiled ropes, the scrubbed deck, the battened hatches. “The slaves, I mean?”

  The sailor stamped his booted foot. “Where do you think? Down below. In the hold.”

  “Oh.” The hold. Naturally. Where else? His eyes were watering from the fumes that breathed upwards from what must surely be a sweltering cesspool of death, if the stench was anything to go by. “I don’t suppose you could bring them up on deck for a few moments, could you?” he said hopefully. “Let me have a look at them in daylight?”

  The sailor nearly choked to death, laughing. “Bring ’em up? Nay, sir, you’ll be going down to shake ’em by the hand, you will. Now or never, for I got no time to mawk about with a jiggirit like you.”

  Jiggirit . Now there was a word he was glad not to know. “Oh. Well. All right,” he said, and watched as the sailor fetched a lamp, lit it, unbolted one of the hatches and stood aside.

  “After you,” he invited, his careless hand indicating the descending wooden ladder, orange teeth and green eye brilliant in the strengthening sunshine. “Smartly, I’ll thank you.”

  “After me,” Dexterity said faintly. “Yes. Of course.”

  As his head passed deck level and his foot groped unsteadily for the next rung down, the hold’s heat and stink smote him like a hammer. He swayed, dizzy, and splintered his hands on the ladder with desperate clutching. It was dark, too, a fuggy lightless gloom leavened only by the sailor’s following lamp and the snatches of sunlight filtering through the open hatch above.

  “On you go now,” the sailor urged. “You want a king’s man to come asking of our business?”

  No, he most certainly didn’t. Hettie, Hettie, what have you got me into? His feet touched the hold’s floor, then the sailor slid the rest of the way like a monkey down a greased pole and held the flickering lamp high overhead.

  Tears of pity burned Dexterity’s eyes as he adjusted to the dimness, and could properly see the slave ship’s wretched cargo. See the sleeping-pallets stacked floor to ceiling, with barely a foot’s space in between them. See the glint of manacles in the lamp’s faint glow. See the slaves, rubbing flesh to putrid flesh, packed as tight as fish in a barrel. Some were light-skinned, some were dark. Others were coloured as he’d never seen in his life, puddled white and black … or perhaps it was just bruising. The rankness of their unwashed bodies, of bucketed excrement and vomit and urine, of rotting sores and maggoty horsemeat rose up in a wave and crashed upon him, stunning him, leaving him half-robbed of all his senses.

  A murmur rose from the noisome crowd as the slaves realised something out of the ordinary was happening. Dexterity caught a glimpse of countless desperate eyes, gleaming in the near-dark.

  ‘Choose, then,” said the sailor, sounding nervous. “Captain’ll be back from furlough sometime, and there’ll be hell to pay if he finds you here.”

  “Give me the lamp and I shall,” Dexterity said, and held out his hand. “I want to look first.”

  “Look at what?” the sailor demanded. “One slave’s as like another. Choose the nearest and be scarpering off my ship.”

  “Give me the lamp!” Dexterity snapped, and plucked it from the sailor’s surprised fingers. Holding it aloft, he ventured step by unsteady step between the rows of naked, chained men, women and children, heartbreaking as they turned emaciated faces to look at him, stretched bony, begging fingers towards him and whispered in tongues unknown, yet searingly knowable.

  Save me, help me, free me. I want to live. Don’t let me die.

  Speechless, almost blinded by tears, he turned away
from them, hurriedly searching for a man with blue hair. He didn’t dare call the man’s name, call Zandakar , for fear of starting a riot or making the sailor even more uneasy.

  Hettie, Hettie. Help me, please.

  “Come on! Hurry!” the sailor shouted, fear shredding his voice. “Now, else I’ll lock you in here with the rest of the vermin and good luck to you at journey’s end!”

  “One minute, just one minute!” he shouted back. “I’m nearly done.”

  Hettie, for God’s sake. You brought me here, you’d better do something!

  Choking on the foetid air, his forearm pressed against his face in a vain attempt to stifle the stench, he forced himself to the back of the hold. There. Up there, on the pallet closest to the ceiling. Was that a glimmer of blue? Was that the man?

  Jerkily he clambered one-handed up the side of the bunks, the lamp held high, tearing and kicking himself free of all the reaching, desperate fingers, stopping his ears to the wailing cries for help. He reached the topmost bunk and shone the lamp on its occupant. A man, past his first youth but not old. Desperately thin, a rack of bones draped in dull, coffee-coloured skin. Dirty, stinking, runnelled with sores, daubed with pus and shit and vomit.

  Beneath the filth, his tangled hair was blue.

  Dexterity felt his heart pound like a hammer. Hettie, I’ve found him. Oh, Hettie. What now? He touched the chained man lightly, afraid his touch might cause more pain.

  “Zandakar,” he whispered. “Is that you? Is your name Zandakar?”

  The man’s eyes dragged open. They were blue as well, the clear sharp blue of ice, burning with fever and the stirring of hope. He spoke, a string of foreign, unintelligible words. His voice was a harsh croak.

  “No, no, I don’t understand you,” Dexterity said, still whispering. He hung the lamp on the corner of the pallet and laid his finger like a feather on the man’s pustuled lips. “Zandakar? Zan–da–kar?”

  The man with blue hair nodded, slowly. Against that feather finger he said, “Zandakar”. Then one chained wrist lifted, as though its weight were a torment, and one clawed finger pointed at his xylophone chest. “Zandakar.”

  He patted the slave’s bony shoulder. “It’s nice to meet you. Don’t go away.” Turning carefully, he called out to the sailor. “Here! Here I say! I’ve found the one I want. Bring keys for his manacles and I’ll give you gold!” As the sailor stamped and cursed towards them, he turned back to the slave. “Don’t be frightened, I’ll have you out of here in—oh.”

  Tears were streaming down Zandakar’s sunken cheeks.

  “You! You want his chains off?” said the sailor, standing below and brandishing a set of keys. “You unchain him!”

  Leaving Zandakar weeping and the lamp hooked in place, Dexterity slithered to the floor. “For gold, my friend, you’ll unchain him and you’ll carry him up to the deck and get him safely into my cart!”

  The sailor stared. “Me? Carry a slave?” He spat. “You be witless.”

  He could’ve torn out the sailor’s triple-tailed beard. “Do you want your gold? Gold I’ll wager you don’t intend sharing with your captain or your shipmates? If the answer’s yes, you’ll do as I ask!”

  More cursing and swearing, but the sailor obeyed. Zandakar cried out as the manacles were torn free of his suppurating flesh, and again as he was dragged off the rough wooden pallet and thrown like a carcass over the sailor’s resentful shoulder. Then he fainted, and Dexterity breathed heartfelt thanks for small mercies.

  As he took the lamp from the burdened sailor and followed him to the foot of the ladder, the wretches he wasn’t able to save realised he was leaving and they were not. They wailed and screeched in more tongues than he could count, battering him with their terror and pain. Weeping himself now, he closed his eyes and scrambled towards freedom as fast as he could climb.

  “Batten the hatch, quick,” said the sailor as Dexterity flung himself into the sweet fresh air above the hold. “They’ll shutten up once it’s nice and dark again.”

  He did as he was told, then discarded the lamp and nodded at Zandakar, still senseless and dangling. In the bright sunshine he could see cooties scurrying through the man’s blue hair and on the dark skin. He felt his stomach turn over queasily.

  “Now you must put him in my cart.”

  With a silent snarl the sailor turned and headed for the gangplank. Dexterity followed, and once down on the pier he hurried to Otto and his cart. “Wait, wait a moment,” he snapped at the sailor, and shook out the blankets he’d brought just in case. He spread one on the bottom of the cart, then stood back. “Gently, gently!” he cried as the sailor dumped the unconscious slave like an unwanted sack of bones.

  “Now pay me and be gone,” the sailor said. One hand played with the hilt of his dagger, the other was outstretched, greedy for the kiss of gold. His sharp green gaze darted up and down the pier, alert for the return of his ignorant captain.

  Dexterity untied his waist purse from his belt, removed the eight remaining piggets from it, and tossed the purse to the sailor. “There’s twenty talents in there, enough to buy ten slaves, I expect. But you’ve been very helpful, so take it all. And if you’re as smart as you think you are you’ll never breathe a word of this to another soul.”

  The sailor laughed, and licked his lips as a stream of gold poured into his hand. Then his one good eye narrowed and he bit a heavy round coin, to be sure.

  “I’ll be on my way, then,” said Dexterity. He tucked the second blanket around the slave with blue hair, Zandakar, dithered a moment, and covered him again with the light canvas he kept stowed in the cart for unexpected rain. Better that casually prying eyes catch no glimpse of this particular passenger. Then he unhitched Otto’s reins from the bollard and put his foot on the wheel hub.

  The sailor grinned at him. “Come again sometime, and welcome,” he said, trickling his gold out of sight. “We’ll find you another one, eh, with fine ripe titties!”

  “I don’t think so,” said Dexterity, and hauled himself into the cart. “But I’m sure it’s a lovely thought. Good day.” With a sharp smack, he slapped the reins against Otto’s indignant rump and never once looked back at the sailor, or the black slave ship, or its roaring red dragon figurehead as they made their way back along the pier towards the merchant’s gate, heading for help in the only possible place it could be found.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ursa was in her front garden, pruning roses.

  “Jones!” she greeted him as Otto and the cart rattled to a halt by her front gate. “You’re out and about early.”

  “Yes, aren’t I?” Dexterity agreed, and cleared his throat. “Ursa, I need your help.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” she said, blotting her dirt-smudged face on her sleeve. “I’m always saying it. But why are you saying it, Jones? Should I be worried?”

  He looked up and down the quiet street, where one or two other early risers were going about their business, and leaned as close as he could without actually falling off the cart. “It’s like this,” he began in a confidential whisper.

  Behind him, beneath the blanket and canvas coverings, the man with blue hair stirred, groaning.

  “What was that?” said Ursa, looking around.

  He straightened. “What?”

  The man in the cart groaned again, a piteous sound. Ursa planted her hands on her hips. “That!”

  “Ah …” he said. Oh dear. Now that he was at the point of confession he found himself unaccountably nervous. Ursa had firm views on slavery. She had firm views on everything. And she wasn’t going to be at all impressed about this.

  But that’s not important. The poor man needs physicking and that’s what he’s going to get. And I’m going to get my ears chewed off, I just know it.

  “Dexterity Jones, what have you done?” Ursa demanded, dropping her pruning shears into the basket beside her. “Have you gone and run someone down with your donkey cart?”

  “No!” he said, offended. “
How could I possibly do that? I can walk faster than Otto trots, most days. No. But I do have someone here who’s in need of a physick.”

  Lips thinned, expression grim, Ursa pushed open the garden’s front gate. “Jones, what kind of trouble are you landed in now?” she muttered, stamping to the back of the cart.

  He swivelled on the driver’s seat and tried to look wounded. “Trouble?” he said, as she pulled back the covering canvas and blanket. “Ah—well—none at all.” Trouble is too light a word .

  “Really?” Ursa stared at the groaning naked man with the blue hair. “What do you call him, then?”

  “Zandakar,” he said, after a heart-pounding moment.

  Ursa’s eyebrows shot up. “Zandakar?”

  “Well, it’s his name.”

  “And how do you know?” said Ursa, running her physick’s gaze over the unconscious slave’s mistreated body and clearly not liking what she saw.

  “Ah …” He cleared his throat again. “Hettie told me.”

  “ Hettie told—” With a hard-breathing effort, Ursa bit back the rest. “Never mind. You can explain later. For now, help me get this poor wretch into the house.”

  “No, I don’t think so, Ursa. I think he has to stay with me. You can physick him at my place.”

  “Your place?” Ursa shook her head. “Out of the question. This isn’t a simple case of a dab of ointment here and a snippet of gauze there. This man’s in a bad way and—”

  “I’m sorry, Ursa, but he can’t stay here. Your clinic’s too busy, someone could notice something’s going on. Someone might see him by accident. They’d certainly see me hanging about. And no-one must know this man is in my possession.”

  She stared at him, incredulous. “Your possession ? Jones, are you telling me—”

  Oh dear. He took a deep breath. “Yes. He’s a slave. I bought him. From a Slyntian.” With the money he’d intended spending on new curtains, and more. The enormity of it smote him without warning.