by Victor Poole
"Philas is lonely, he doesn't love me," Ajalia said.
"He was kissing you," Delmar protested.
"Go away," Ajalia said, before she thought to ask Delmar how he knew that Philas had kissed her. "Philas is another slave from my caravan," she told Leed. "He's in charge of things. You'll see him in a minute. Seriously," she said to Delmar, "go away. I'm busy."
"I want to come," Delmar said. "I won't tell anyone where you're going. No one pays any attention to me."
"That isn't true at all," Leed said. "Everyone watches you. And all the ladies tell your mother where you've been."
"Why do you know so much?" Ajalia asked the boy. Leed grinned at her. She smiled back. She felt as if she were looking at a younger version of herself. Delmar had turned moody.
"That wasn't a very kind thing to say," he told the boy. The three of them were nearing the little house. "Now she won't let me come with her."
"You have scars on your wrists," the boy told Ajalia. She reflexively closed her hands into fists.
"Observant," she said lightly. She opened the door to the little house, and went in. The boy followed her, and Delmar ducked in last of all. He pulled the door closed behind him. The downstairs room was deserted; the house was humming gently with the murmur of voices on the upper levels.
"Go and find the boy called Darien," Ajalia told Leed. "Make friends with him." Leed studied her face, and then nodded. He vanished up the stairs.
"Let me see," Delmar said, catching Ajalia by the wrist. He caught her off guard, and she raised a hand to slap him. Her open hand slowed, and hung in the air. She could not find within herself the reason why she did not want to attack Delmar. She wriggled her arm out of his grasp.
"No," she said.
"I want to see how bad it is," Delmar said. His voice was low, persistent. Ajalia again had the feeling that Delmar had become a new man; his face was more alert, and his eyes pressed into her.
"No," she said again. A flush was travelling up her skin.
"Please, let me see," Delmar said.
Ajalia was struck with an urgent need to laugh, or run away. Delmar's words were like poison to her; they roiled up the silent surface of her being, and brought hidden things into the light. He reminded her somehow of her father, and yet she did not feel him as a danger.
"They are mine," she told him.
"I can help you," he said, and reached for her arm. She drew it away; he caught her fingers in his hand.
Philas came down the stairs, and cleared his throat. Delmar tightened his grip on Ajalia's hand. She began to feel as though she couldn't breathe.
"I'm going tonight," Ajalia told Philas.
"To Talbos?" Philas asked. She nodded. "Is he bothering you?" he asked, nodding at Delmar.
"She has scars," Delmar blurted out. "On her wrists. I wanted to help. I have something that can help," he told Ajalia.
A lick of fury shot up through Ajalia's torso; she ripped her hand away from Delmar. Philas moved quickly down the stairs. He was used to reading Ajalia's moods, and he moved in front of the door. Ajalia tried to reach the handle, but Philas's large form was in the way.
"Move," Ajalia growled in her throat. Tears were gathering in her eyes.
"Let me see," Philas said. He raised his hand as though he were reaching for a wild horse, and Ajalia flinched away from him.
"They aren't what you think," Ajalia said, but she saw that Philas already knew what they were. He caught her arm up in his hand, and pulled away the sleeve. The breath hissed disapprovingly between Philas's teeth; his fingers gingerly touched the white scars that spread like ragged teeth over Ajalia's inner arm. She had been wearing fabric cuffs over her wrists in the East, but here there had been no need; the long sleeves of her desert robes had hidden her arms, and the sleeves of her pale inner clothes came down to the heel of her hand.
"I can make them go away," Delmar said. He took Ajalia's other hand, and examined the jagged flesh.
"I'm sorry," Philas told Ajalia. "I never knew."
"Don't tell him," she said quickly in the Eastern tongue. Delmar was looking down at her scars, his tongue between his teeth. Philas looked at Ajalia, and nodded.
"Are they marks from the wetlands?" Delmar asked, without looking up. Ajalia and Philas both started, and stared at him. He looked up, and saw their faces. "What?" he asked. "I thought everyone knew about the wetlands. The Saroyans sell their children to the wetlands," he told Ajalia, "but the Slavithe people don't. We aren't awful like that."
Ajalia pulled her sleeves back down over her skin, and sat down.
"I'm going tonight," she told Philas. Her voice was unsteady; she was determined to ignore what had just happened. "None of the other slaves know," Ajalia said to Delmar. "You can't let them know."
"There is a horror of the wetlands among us," Philas said. "The others would not mind her any longer."
"I won't say anything," Delmar said. "The boy, Leed, is the one who blabbed."
"He won't tell them," Ajalia said dismissively. "He wanted to throw me off around you."
"Why? Who is Leed?" Philas demanded "Why throw you off? What is this?"
"Leed is on my side," Delmar said with dignity, "not yours."
"Leed hasn't met Philas yet," Ajalia told Delmar. "Don't be so sure."
"Leed wants Ajalia to marry me," Delmar said firmly. Ajalia burst into wild laughter. Philas and Delmar stared at her. Philas turned back to Delmar.
"Who is Leed?" he asked again.
"The boy she collected today," Delmar said. The two men were sitting on either side of Ajalia now. She felt penned in by solicitous affection.
"Stop talking to each other," she complained. "It was easier when you didn't."
"Why?" Delmar asked innocently. "You already fight us both off. She fights you off, too, doesn't she?" he asked Philas. Philas nodded agreeably.
"Goodbye," Ajalia said shortly, and went up the stairs. She could hear the low rumble of Philas's voice behind her; she blocked out the words. A frantic itching was spreading up her arms, from the knotted flesh where she had cut out the marks. She had been captured twice, and put on route to the wetlands. Both times she had been captured by the same man. The first time, she had escaped. The second time, she had killed the trader before running away. A gap of two years had stretched between her initial and second recapture; she had thought she was safe the first time she got away, but the trader had hunted her, and she had learned to be merciless in order to escape.
Her masters in the East did not know she had killed; she made sure that no one knew. She threatened violence often enough, and she carried a knife, but she had found that no one believed her capable of real action. She had marked slaves under her authority in the past, but the practice was common enough, and she had never been brutal.
The wetlands mark was a long brand, in shape like a carving knife. It had been put into her right arm first, and she had marred it out soon after she had escaped the wetlands trader the first time. When he had tracked her, and stolen her from her new owner, he had marked her left arm. She had cut the fresh mark out with the same blade she had used to kill the trader; she still remembered the searing of her burned flesh, and the stink of the blood.
Ajalia got around the corner of the landing, and leaned against the wall. The white stone was cool against her skin; she wanted to be sick. An awful feeling of turmoil was stirring up her gut. The walls of the house swirled around her like sweeping white waves. A cloud passed over her vision. She rubbed the thick scars against her sides, and felt the thickened skin scratch against the fabric of her sleeves.
She had meant for her arms to heal cleanly, to obscure the mark of the wetlands on both of her wrists, but she had been young, and she had not known how to change and clean the dressings scrupulously. First the left, and then the right wounds had become infected, and she had suffered with fevers and deprivation in the long stretch of grassland that went between the wetlands and the trading hub in central Leopath. She knew now th
at she was probably lucky not to have died, but the infections had left long white scars up both of her wrists. She had shown herself useful enough for her Eastern masters to overlook the blemishes, and all that they implied, but most slaves shunned any chattel from the wetlands. Her master knew, but until now, the other slaves had not known.
Thinking that Philas knew made Ajalia feel sick to her stomach. He had been bad enough before, with his wheedling and his cajoling, but she thought that the change he would undergo, now that he knew she carried old wetland marks, would be almost unbearable. She did not care as much about Delmar, or she told herself she didn't. She felt as though the little house was closing in on her now; she felt that Philas would hold her secret over her head, and keep her from normalcy with the other slaves.
For the first time since she had belonged to her current Eastern master, Ajalia began to think about running away.
She came up the stairs to the door that led into the first workroom, and peered inside. Two women were bent over a length of golden silk, draped over a chair; one of them was piercing the silk with a long black needle that left even pinpricks of a dark substance behind. The Eastern slaves had taught the Slavithe girls to mark their seams before they sewed, and to bring their silks to one of the slaves, to check every step of the process. It took time for the slaves to use the Slavithe girls for sewing, but the untrained young women were restricted to straight seams and simple fastenings, and once they had been broken to the work, they became a great help.
In the third room, Ajalia found Darien and Leed, huddled in a corner over a collection of dead insects that Darien had been putting in his pockets. The room was full of Eastern slaves; they were sewing loose overskirts out of shimmering opaque silk, and one of them was singing an old Eastern ballad.
Ajalia went into the corner, and stood over the boys. Darien glanced at her, and winked. She folded her arms, and studied Leed. The Slavithe boy was a little smaller than Ajalia's particular Eastern helper, but they had similar builds, and they crouched over the dried bugs with the same intensity.
"Darien," Ajalia said in the Eastern tongue, "I have a job for you." Darien nodded sharply without looking up. He was prodding open the wings of a blue beetle he had found on the road through the trees just outside the city. The wings were blue with a sheen of angry red beneath. Leed was watching the wings expand with a fixed look; his tongue was twisted in the corner of his mouth.
Ajalia put her back against the wall, and slid down to the floor. She watched the glowing lengths of silks pulling and falling against the floor, raised up in the hands of the swiftly sewing slaves. Her eyes flickered to the slaves nearest the corner; she knew they were listening, and she lowered her voice.
"How much Slavithe have you learned?" she murmured in Slavithe. She saw the two young men closest to her relax; they had not learned any of the Slavithe language, and they began to talk to each other in the Eastern tongue.
"I can say a little," Darien said haltingly.
"Good," Ajalia said, and she lowered her voice further. Using the Eastern language, she told Darien about Leed, and about where he had come from. She explained about the northern pass, and her plan for removing the robbers from the opening in the wall. Darien listened carefully, his fingers busy among his insects. He handed one of the largest ones to Leed, who grinned and turned the body over.
"The boy is your in with the gang," Ajalia murmured. "Learn to speak to him, and then tell him your purpose."
Darien gave an infinitesimal nod. His lips had pursed into a fat square.
"He is sharp," Ajalia told Darien. Leed glanced up. She knew that he knew she was talking about him. She met the boy's eyes steadily, and he looked back down at his beetle. "If you lie to him," she told Darien in the Eastern tongue, "he will know."
"I understand," Darien said.
"He is like me," Ajalia said firmly. Darien met her gaze; his eyes dug into hers, and his face narrowed. When he was satisfied that she was telling the truth, he nodded.
"Leed," Ajalia said in Slavithe. Leed sniffed to show he was listening. "I have a cache of money hidden outside the city walls."
Leed's whole body stiffened; his fingers froze on the bug, and Ajalia could see his breath moving very slowly, in and out, like a predator hunting.
"When you can speak with Darien," Ajalia said, "and he can speak with you, I will let you have the cache."
"You'll tell me where it is?" Leed asked. His eyes remained fixed on the beetle.
"How soon can you learn?" Ajalia asked. Leed glanced up at her. His gaze was scornful. Give me a week, his eyes said. Ajalia's mouth curved in a dangerous smile. "Good," she said.
She stood up, and stretched out her arms.
"Is Philas drinking the black stuff?" she asked Darien in the Eastern tongue. With pleasure, she saw Leed immediately mouthing along with her words, his tongue curling around the sounds, testing them in his teeth. She spoke loudly enough for the others to hear; the two young men nearest her cocked their heads a little to one side.
"He has left off the poison tree juice," Darien said wickedly. "He has headaches now." The boy glanced shrewdly at Ajalia from under his eyelashes. "He's pining," Darien whispered. Ajalia grinned.
"Philas would like you to think so," she said, and then she caught the eye of one of the male slaves sewing nearby. "Philas wants everyone to be in love with him," she said. "That way, he never does any work."
The male slave stifled a guffaw, and repeated the joke to the others, who burst into peals of laughter. Their hilarity only increased when Philas appeared at the door of the room, his face strewn with a wearied expression.
"Work harder!" Philas snapped at the room, and the slaves tittered, and snorted over their stitches. Philas waved at Ajalia to come over, and she did, walking through slaves who quickly began to chant a parody of the marriage ceremony at Philas.
"Oh, stop!" Philas shouted pettishly, and fled. Ajalia followed him out of the room, and went with him down the stairs. Jenna was in the kitchen downstairs, struggling with a tureen of soup. Ajalia helped the female slave to put the basin on the table, and passed her a pair of coins.
Jenna shot her a grateful look.
"He is so stingy," Jenna mouthed, jerking her head towards Philas. Ajalia shrugged sympathetically, and snagged a pair of bowls from the long stack on the low shelf that ran along the kitchen wall. She filled them with soup, and went into the room where, as she suspected, Delmar was sitting.
"I thought you would have left," Ajalia told him. He made a face at her. She was impressed with this expression of emotion. She had rarely seen him show feelings without being twisted into it first. She put the bowl of soup into his lap; he tried to shift away from her, but she plopped herself next to him, and dug an elbow into the crook of his arm to make him stay put.
"I thought you didn't like me," Delmar whispered to her, glancing up at Philas, who had just come into the room from the kitchen.
Ajalia shook her head to get him to be quiet, and licked demurely at her soup. She watched Philas studiously ignore her proximity to the son of the Thief Lord, and she smiled with grim satisfaction.
Jenna followed Philas into the room. The young slave's eyes took in the closeness of Ajalia to the young Slavithe man, but when Ajalia winked at her, Jenna's face broke into a devilish smile.
"I think Ajalia will stay behind in Slavithe," Jenna told Philas seriously. "Her heart has found its one true domicile."
Philas made an aggressive noise, like a pair of rocks being rubbed together, and glared at Ajalia. She ignored him. Delmar was sipping tentatively at his soup, and seemed oblivious to the others.
"I am going away," Philas told Jenna. "Give her instructions," he barked at Ajalia, and disappeared into the kitchen.
THE JOURNEY TO TALBOS BEGINS
"Philas has business," Ajalia told Jenna. "You will manage the slaves. You will not leave the house. You will bar entry to any strangers. If Lim or Yelin approach the house, you will send them away wi
th a small gift for their mistress."
Delmar listened to the stream of Eastern words, his eyes fixed on his soup. Jenna's eyes flickered between Ajalia and the doorway where Philas had vanished. Her mouth opened a little to speak. Ajalia continued, and Jenna closed her lips.
"You will indicate to no one that Philas or your master is out of the house," Ajalia said. "If, for any reason, anyone asks where Philas is, or questions if your master is in the house, you will explain that our master is observing the cleansing holiday, and cannot be disturbed."
Jenna's eyes lost their haunted expression; the female slave was well-accustomed to the cleansing holidays, which were an elaborate fiction rigorously upheld by all the Eastern clans and their slaves. There were real rituals in the deep culture of the East, but outsiders knew nothing of their exact dates, and their meaning was jealously guarded. When the trading caravans travelled, if for any reason a face-bearing slave was incapacitated or unavailable, the slaves told the locals that their master was observing one of the essential cleansing holidays, and refused to speak further on the matter.
Jenna had never been in charge before; the suddenness of her promotion seemed to be making her head swim.
"Repeat what I have told you," Ajalia commanded. Jenna repeated most of what Ajalia had said. Ajalia drilled her again, until the female slave could repeat everything she had outlined.
"There is one more thing," Ajalia told the slave. "Chad is coming to help you."
The look of satisfaction that had begun to settle into Jenna's eyes vanished; her mouth hardened.
"I do not need the help of a Slavithe man, or of anyone," Jenna said. Ajalia saw her eyes flick momentarily at Delmar.
"Learn your place, slave," Ajalia told her, still in the Eastern tongue. "Chad will oversee my Slavithe girls. He will likely try to take power from you. If you falter in your duty, I will relay your failure to our master at home."
Jenna's lips spread into a long, determined line.
"I will not fail," Jenna said.
"Chad is a fool," Ajalia told her. "He is officious, and offensive, and he will make many suggestions, but he has very little brain."