“You’re not our slave,” Tamar hissed. “You don’t have to do what we ask. You’re free. I freed you.”
“He freed himself,” I said softly, and Tamar lifted her chin in silent acknowledgment.
Janiya agreed with me, grumblingly, when we repeated Zosimos’s story to her. She called Zosimos into the yurt as well, and when he stopped cringing, which took awhile, she presented him with a single blue bead and a leather thong to string it on. Then she shooed him out and sighed. “It’s supposed to be an elder or eldress that hears out the story and accepts the runaway provisionally into the Alashi.”
“There’s an elder with Erdene’s clan, isn’t there?” I asked.
“Oh yes. But I’m afraid he’d be too frightened to tell his story there.” She rubbed her forehead. “He seems like such a child. I hope they keep him in the clan camp for the summer. There will be plenty of time for the brotherhood next year.”
We returned to the clan camp on the day we’d expected, and were greeted enthusiastically. Erdene was still miserable, but her lover had been allowed to join her, even though he wasn’t the father. I caught a glimpse of him, briefly; he seemed entirely willing to claim her baby as his own. He also seemed quite worried, given how sick she was.
Janiya made Tamar and me come along to introduce Zosimos to the elder. I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve that; I wondered if Janiya had guessed that I gave Tamar the idea of simply abducting a slave. It’s not like she wouldn’t have thought of it on her own. The elder looked silently from Janiya to Zosimos to Tamar to me. I shuffled my feet and nudged Tamar. If we waited until Zosimos spoke up for himself, we’d be standing there all night.
“Zosimos was a slave at the mine where we attacked,” Tamar said. “One of the Greek guards wanted him to dishonor Arachne, and he refused. And hit the guard. For that, they were going to kill him.”
“He knew that,” I said. “He chose death over slavery.” That was important. Here.
“As they were taking him out to murder him, we attacked,” Tamar said. “And I saw him and . . . grabbed him.” Her voice fell slightly flat at the end. She turned to Zosimos. “Did you take the opportunity to come out to us when we attacked?” she asked, a little pleadingly.
Zosimos shook his head.
“You just stayed where the guard left you?”
He nodded.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. He did take his freedom. It was luck that I grabbed him instead of the Greeks killing him.”
The elder looked . . . thoroughly amused, I decided. But he was trying to look surly and disapproving. “Luck indeed,” he said. “Lucky that you happened to find yourself a slave who deserved the gift you thrust on him.” He flicked the blue bead that rested against Zosimos’s chest; the boy flinched away like a startled sparrow. “And what if you had chosen someone who preferred bondage?”
“There aren’t any slaves who like being slaves,” Tamar said.
“Aislan,” I muttered.
“Not even her. If we showed up and offered to take her away, she’d be on the horse so fast, it would make your head spin. Anyway, a slave that preferred bondage would have run away from us. Or taken up arms against us!”
“You’re thinking like an Alashi,” the elder said. “A good slave obeys orders. A good slave stands where he’s left. Like Zosimos did.”
“A good slave would have been back in the mine,” Tamar said. “He was only where he was because he was about to be punished. Killed.”
“What do you have to say for yourself?” the elder asked, turning abruptly to Zosimos.
“Don’t send me back there,” he whispered.
“And why not? Do you think we need a fearful, cringing, voiceless boy among the Alashi?”
He cringed, of course, and the color drained from his face. His lips worked silently. Tamar opened her mouth, and I pinched her; he was going to have to speak for himself, sooner or later.
“No,” he muttered finally. “I don’t think you need me.”
“Shall we send you back, then? Or sell you to traders who will take you east?”
He shook his head mutely. Finally he opened his mouth and croaked, “You’d have to kill me first.”
“Well. Perhaps there’s hope for you after all.” The elder raised an eyebrow, glanced pointedly at Tamar and me, and shook his head. “You seem very young. How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“We’ll keep you here through the summer, then. You can ride with the big boys next year. Just as well; our brotherhood already has one blossom to train this summer.” The elder caught Janiya’s eye and jerked his head, dismissing the three of us; we withdrew from the tent and returned to the sisterhood camp.
“Is the brotherhood pretty much like the sisterhood?” I asked Janiya as we walked.
“I guess it depends on what you mean,” she said. “The young, unmarried men spend their summers in camps like ours, yes. I imagine a camp of twenty men would be a little different from a camp of twenty women, though.” She smiled a little ruefully. “If you’re wondering whether the brotherhoods tend to be led by men who prefer their summer friends’ company year-round—well, of course. The leader of this brotherhood is a man named Rishad. I like him; we spend a fair amount of time together during the winter. He escaped from the Greeks himself, quite a few years ago now. Like Tamar, he has some reservations about the whole idea that the only people who deserve freedom are the ones who take it for themselves.”
“Has he ever freed someone?” I asked.
“No. But he definitely would have approved of Tamar’s sense of initiative.”
The elder must have arranged accommodations for Zosimos, because he didn’t return to our camp to sleep. As we were packing the next morning, though, he came to find Tamar. He had new clothes, worn but clean—hand-me-downs from one of the boys who’d gone off to the sword brotherhood, no doubt. He seemed shy today, but less fearful. “Before you left, I wanted to thank you,” he muttered. “Thank you for freeing me.”
Tamar beamed and clasped his hand. “You’re going to do fine.”
As the boy turned away, I brushed his sleeve and whispered, “You freed yourself. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
As we rode out, back to our own grazing grounds, my thoughts turned from the Greeks I’d betrayed to the slaves that I had personally found for Kyros. One was a young woman, barely older than Tamar; I had expected a flood of tears when I caught up with her, but she had held herself as rigid as a soldier and barely made a sound the whole way back to Elpisia. The crier had been one of the men—one of the house servants who had run one day for no reason I could see. He’d been the easiest to find, as he’d walked straight out into the desert. Worse than Alibek with his single waterskin, that man had taken no water with him, and had in fact just about collapsed from thirst by the time I caught up with him, but that didn’t stop him from unleashing the most unearthly wail I’d ever heard when I walked up to him. If he’d wanted to die, there are less painful ways to kill yourself, I thought.
The only one who actually fought me was also one of the men. He’d made himself a makeshift knife with the broken edge of a jar. It was sharp enough to cut my arm when he lunged at me, but not deeply enough to leave a scar. I disarmed him without too much trouble and smashed his “knife” under my heel. He’d crumpled then, and had come back as meek and silent as a frightened rabbit. In an act of spontaneous generosity, I had refrained from telling Kyros about the knife. The cut healed on its own within a few days.
They took their freedom, too. Or tried to. And I took it away from them again.
If I had warned Kyros about the raid, it was unlikely that Tamar would have had the opportunity to free Zosimos. Had I traded Thales’s life for Zosimos’s freedom? It seemed almost worth it, thinking about Zosimos’s story. But then, as bad as I felt about Thales, he wasn’t a friend. I might feel differently if it had been Nikon’s life that had been traded.
I’ve betrayed everyone,
I thought. Before I ever came here, I betrayed everything the Alashi stand for when I hunted down Kyros’s slaves. And then I betrayed Kyros and the Sisterhood of Weavers when I failed to tell them about the raid. But the strangest thing of all was that I wasn’t sure which I regretted more. Thales had been trying to help me; he hadn’t run when I’d told him to run because he’d thought, in his confusion of recognition, that I needed help. But if I could go back and change one thing, I thought I’d go back and tell Kyros that I didn’t want to hunt down his slaves.
My thoughts were disturbing, and I tried to push them out of my mind—Thales, Alibek, the crying man, all of them. But I heard the man’s wail in my dreams that night. I woke up to Ruan’s snarl, and knew that once again the wail had come from me.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Who’s there?”
I stood up from my spot in the long grass, expecting to see Zhanna, but no one was there. I sat back down, dispirited, and gave the drum Zhanna had given me another halfhearted thump. She’d sent both me and Tamar out, separately, with drums and instructions to try to find our way to “openness” to the djinn. I had spent an absurdly long time tapping out rhythms, my eyes closed, but I felt no more “open” than I had the day she had us try to meditate. I did, however, feel hot; there was no shade where Zhanna had left me. I took a swig from my half-empty waterskin and glared at the drum.
Well, if it hadn’t been Zhanna in the grass, there was no one to care if I was actually beating on my drum or not. I flopped back in the grass, looking up at the blue sky and the dazzling sunshine. I could hear the steady hum of insects, and a bird warbling. It wasn’t so bad to simply be idle for a little while; at least I wasn’t trying to shoot a bow while Ruan yelled at me.
“Any djinni here?” I said aloud. “Hello? Anyone want to talk to me?”
I heard what I’d heard before—some sort of rustle—and suddenly I realized that I hadn’t heard it with my ears. Of course not. I was playing the drum. I sat up, my skin prickling despite the heat. “Is someone here?”
And it was there: shimmering in front of me like a water mirage. “Hello, Shaman’s Apprentice,” it said.
This is not Kyros’s djinn. Or Janiya’s. Looking at it, I was certain that it was not a bound djinn; I realized, looking at it, that it was larger than the djinni I’d talked with before. Larger, and the shimmer was brighter. A rogue aeriko, part of my mind insisted on calling it. I could be possessed by this djinn. The idea made me shiver even more.
I’d been approached by a free djinn once before, the one who’d warned me that I was being followed—but it had been gone so fast, I’d barely had time to think about what I was speaking with. I wondered if this was the same djinn, but I had a hard time believing that even a few months ago I could have mistaken this for Kyros’s djinn.
Shamans spoke with unbound djinni all the time. But now that I was facing one, I had no idea what I was supposed to say to it. Or ask it. Zhanna hadn’t really covered that. “Hello,” I said.
The golden shimmer swirled around me; I could almost feel something brush a tendril of my hair. “A little summoner,” it murmured. “You long to bind me, to make me your servant.”
“No,” I said. “Of course I don’t want to bind you.” The Alashi don’t do that.
“You think of bindings—but you never see the bindings on yourself.”
“What bindings?”
“Look,” it said, and it swirled again. And suddenly I saw double: one world of green steppe and blue sky, and one world of strange silver lines and black shadows. I looked at the djinn again, and I saw a face, a woman’s face, strange and wild. “Look,” it said again, and I looked and saw silver ropes curling around my wrists and ankles. I squinted for a better view, which didn’t help at all. I tried to pull the ropes off, but of course I could touch nothing; I shook them, but that didn’t work, either.
The djinn laughed; the sound went through my head like a knife, and I closed my eyes and clapped my hands to my ears. When the sound was gone, I found myself lying in the grass again; the world looked like it usually did.
What a strange vision. I didn’t think I dared tell Zhanna about it. I picked up the drum and resolutely began to beat it again, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the curling silver ropes, and as I pounded on the drum, the words I’d said to the Greek officer during the mine raid echoed in my head. You’re half a slave yourself—a conscript. I wasn’t a conscript, though; Kyros had invited me to come work for him, I hadn’t been conscripted for anything. My loyalty to Kyros is all that binds me, I thought. But I chose that. I chose that. Kyros knows he can count on me.
It was a few days later that I learned how to banish a rogue djinn that had possessed an unwilling victim. This definitely wasn’t as much of a problem among the Alashi as it was among the Greeks, but that day a djinn seized hold of, of all people, Maydan. She was grinding up some dried herb with her mortar and pestle, to mix into a salve, when the pestle suddenly tumbled from her fingers and she toppled forward in a faint.
Someone ran to get Zhanna, and she sent someone else to find Tamar while she eased Maydan onto her back. “You’re smiling,” I said, startled. “Are you glad she was possessed?”
“Not exactly glad,” Zhanna said. “But I’d been half hoping we’d see someone get possessed before the summer was over, just so I could start working with you and Tamar on what to do.” She sat up, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “Maydan would understand. If she were training an apprentice—two apprentices—she’d be sorry if I fell off my horse and broke my leg, but at the same time, she’d be a little pleased at the opportunity to teach her apprentices how to set a broken bone.”
Tamar arrived, breathless, and the three of us lifted Maydan into the shade of the yurt. “All right,” Zhanna said. “To properly do this, you need to have that state of openness that we’ve talked about—you can drum or dance or whatever you’re finding works for you.”
Tamar nodded, her face serious. I averted my eyes. I’d tried meditating, drumming, and even dancing; nothing made me feel open. But Zhanna was looking at me when I looked up, so I nodded, too.
“Don’t feel like you’ve failed if this doesn’t work. I’ll give each of you a chance to banish the djinn; it’s possible that you won’t be able to get it to respond to you at all, and if you do, you may draw it out of Maydan only to be possessed yourself. Don’t worry about that, though; I have dealt with djinn possession many times and I’ll take care of you.”
Tamar looked only moderately reassured.
“Go get your vests and put them on.”
We’d both had them off to embroider new designs. I was working on a horse; I’d borrowed Saken’s old vest to copy the horse she’d embroidered on hers, since it looked so real. Tamar was embroidering a bird clutching a flower in its claw. We both knotted the thread, trimmed off the needle we were using, stuck it in another cloth for safekeeping, and put our vests on.
Meanwhile, Zhanna fetched a carved box from the other side of the yurt and opened it. Inside were ritual items much like the things Jaran had used to banish Aislan’s djinn back in the harem: an incense burner, a bundle of feathers knotted together with thread, and a small clay jar. In Sophos’s harem, the small jar had held river water, drawn from the Syr Darya when water flowed there during the spring rains; here, to my surprise, it held a mixture of dirt and ash.
On Zhanna’s instructions, we each plucked a hair from our heads and placed it in the palm of Maydan’s hand. Then Zhanna took the feathers, dipped the tips into the clay pot, and brushed the gray ash onto Maydan’s forehead, hands, and heart. “Maydan, daughter of Aiday, daughter of Alina, you are a child of the river, the steppe, and the djinni.” Jaran had asked each of us in turn if we claimed her, but that didn’t seem to be part of the ritual here. Zhanna set down the feathers and turned to us. “To banish the djinn, you draw it into yourself and then tell it to go away. Put your hand on her forehead and think of yourself drawing the djinn out like you would pull
a bucket from a well, or like you’d draw a thorn from your foot. To banish a djinn, we say, ‘Return to the Silent Lands, lost one of your kind, and trouble us no more.’ ”
Jaran had said that, I remembered. Tamar was nodding.
“It’s difficult to describe it. Why don’t you each give it a try. Who wants to go first?”
“I do,” Tamar said, and Zhanna nodded to her.
Tamar stood up and began to dance. She hadn’t asked either of us to play a drum for her so it seemed like it would be intrusive to start; she whirled herself in circles until I was dizzy looking at her, then dropped to her knees beside Maydan and placed her small hand on Maydan’s forehead. She closed her eyes and clenched her jaw. I watched her curiously, wondering if she felt open and what, exactly, this meant to her. Time passed; her nostrils were white from tension. Finally she sat back, looking exhausted.
“I think I can—kind of feel it there,” she said. “But I couldn’t pull it out.”
“That’s fine,” Zhanna said. “And not surprising. You’re doing well to be able to touch it at all. Lauria, you try.”
I refused to dance in front of Tamar and Zhanna, especially as I knew it wouldn’t help, so I took my drum and beat it for a little while. I was faking, and I knew I was faking, but I didn’t know what else to do. After a while, my feet started to go to sleep, and my mind also almost felt a little dazed and numb, like my prickling feet; maybe that’s what she’s talking about. It seemed like it was worth a try. I touched Maydan’s forehead and reached in.
And suddenly, I realized that I could see the djinn, even though it was inside Maydan: a whirl of golden dust, like sparks flying to the sky from a roaring fire. I gasped and blurted out the phrase Zhanna had given us: “Return to the Silent Lands, lost one of your kind, and trouble us no more.”
“Gate,” it hissed, and I wanted to clap my hands to my ears as I had when the other rogue djinn had laughed. I felt it swirl into my chest, and for a moment I thought it was going to take me over, as it had Maydan. But it kept moving—through me like an arrow, I thought—and a moment later I realized it was gone.
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