by Victor Poole
"I will handle Chad," Jenna said tartly. Ajalia glanced at the entrance to the kitchen, where Philas was laying out dinnerware.
"It is not unthinkable," Ajalia told the slave softly, "that Chad will suddenly seem to love you."
A spark of comprehension lit in Jenna's face. Ajalia saw the implications of what she had said trickle slowly, in a straight line, through Jenna's mind. The idea that Philas could be trying to leverage position with Ajalia, and that Delmar could be doing the same thing, seemed to snap into place for Jenna. Ajalia saw the way Jenna's lips pursed up, and the stout determination that drew in around her mouth. Jenna seemed to harden up, in a span of a few seconds, from a vague, well-meaning slave, into a forceful personality.
"Are you prepared to protect the caravan?" Ajalia asked.
Jenna gave a curt nod. Her eyes were clear and strong.
"I am," she said.
"Good," Ajalia replied. She stood, and took her bowl into the kitchen, where Philas scooping soup into a line of bowls. He turned around when Ajalia dipped her bowl into the bucket of water near the window.
"Does she understand?" Philas asked.
The brands on Ajalia's arms burned beneath the scars; she felt a sudden urge to hurt Philas deeply. She did not care if he had found out, and was being nice about it. She wanted to go back, and not let him find out at all. She thought she could see a subtle flush under his skin. She was sure that he was thinking of her as a piece of damaged chattel.
"Are you horrified?" Ajalia asked him. She saw his neck stiffen; his hands paused over the bowls.
"No," he said carefully.
"Liar," she said.
"Nothing is different," Philas said. He moved away from her. She crossed the kitchen in two strides, and blocked his way with an outstretched arm. She saw his eyes turn irresistibly towards her wrist. She laughed, and put down her arm.
"Is my story better than your pirates?" she asked. Philas frowned.
"I don't know what you mean," he said.
"You can stay," she offered. "I'm going tonight. I'm sure you can't bear to leave the house so long."
"Stop," Philas said harshly. "Nothing is different."
"Nothing is different," Ajalia told him, "except that you don't believe your own lies anymore."
Philas frowned. He tried to pass her, and she stepped aside. When he had gone out of the room, he turned and came back.
"What did you mean by that?" he asked. Ajalia shrugged. "What did you mean?" Philas asked again. A blush was climbing up his neck. "I don't use the black drink anymore," Philas said. "I'm not like I was."
Ajalia began to laugh. She knew that Jenna would be able to hear her from the other room now; they were standing just near the door.
"I'm coming with you," Philas said hotly. He stalked up the stairs. Ajalia stopped laughing, and went out towards Jenna. The female slave was sitting on the edge of a rough table. Her hands were clasped together in her lap, and her eyes were wide. She was staring at a blank spot on the wall. When Ajalia came into the room, Jenna looked up at her. Ajalia met her eyes.
"They will follow you, and hunt you now," Ajalia told the slave. "Beware of promises of love."
Jenna turned her eyes back towards the wall without blinking. A kind of sterile hollowness was in her cheeks.
"I am not as selfish as Philas is," Delmar said to Ajalia. All that had gone before had been spoken in the Eastern tongue, and the sudden plashing lilt of Slavithe made Ajalia blink.
"No," she told him. "You are worse."
"Philas and I have decided to be friends," Delmar told her. He was spinning his empty bowl in his hands, watching the wet surface catch the light of the evening that streamed through the window. Ajalia snatched the bowl out of his hands, and took it into the kitchen. A stream of slaves followed her, having come down the stairs from their work.
The chattering of many voices filled up the little house. Ajalia stayed away from Delmar, and waited for the sun to set. She saw Chad arrive, carrying another bag of knotted bread, and she watched the little boys trading phrases in a secret fort they had constructed out of a table and a chair. She watched Jenna watching the slaves, wondering which of them knew she was in charge, and which of them would try to jostle for position.
When the sun had set, and Philas had wandered down the stairs and made eye contact with Ajalia, she gathered her things, and went to the front door. Philas waved his hand in the air, and called for the slaves' attention. Many of the Slavithe girls had carried their sewing downstairs, and were huddled in a corner, piecing carefully through their seams.
"I am instituting a cleansing holiday," Philas told the slaves. A few of the Eastern slaves had gone back upstairs, but most of the slaves in the house had stayed downstairs to socialize. A trickle of tension travelled through the collected slaves. Many of their faces turned inquiringly towards Ajalia. She kept her eyes fixed on Philas.
"We will take no orders for silk, or clothing while I am gone," Philas said. "Finish the work you have. You, boy," Philas shot at Darien, "will carry deliveries, and collect payment. Jenna will hold any coins that come into the house."
The slaves muttered and shuffled; they knew that this meant Jenna was being left in charge. A few of the young men shifted restlessly. Ajalia was sure they were upset it had not been them. She opened the door; the boy Leed darted through the bodies towards her, and slipped out into the early dark. Ajalia followed him, and closed the door behind her.
An overwhelming feeling of tiredness stole over her; she felt as though she had lost her way. When she had come into the city, her purpose had been clear enough. She had determined that she would locate a house, she would parade in the likeness of her master in and out of the finest and most powerful houses in the city, and she would establish favorable trade relations with the people of Slavithe. But almost from the moment she had come into the city, a succession of complications had piled up, until Ajalia no longer knew what her next step was.
She had meant to establish a residence worthy of her master's name; she had determined many months ago that she would array her servants, and arrange for the meals and the decoration of the house. Ajalia had been on many trade caravans in her time in the Eastern masters' employ, and though she had never been on an expedition like this, she knew the drill. The caravan came, impressed the city with a spectacle of silk and fine wares, and established a roaring trade in fabric.
It was one thing to come to an isolated city like Slavithe, which had never received such a thing as an Eastern caravan, and knew not how to woo or entertain the powerful face-bearing slave, but it was another to sell silks to a city that seemed everlastingly clothed in brown, coarse tunics.
Ajalia had seen Philas negotiating sales as she had come and gone in the house these last few weeks; she had watched his face grow alternately flustered, and appalled. Ajalia had known they would sell all their silks from the first day that the fabrics had been displayed in the rented market stall, but she had expected the silks to sell in great swaths, or in long pieces to individual houses. All the cities she had visited on trade caravans in Leopath bought the silks thus. The other cities were well used to the seasonal visits of the Eastern slaves, with their enormous lengths of exotic and flashing silks. People bought the silks for use as drapes, or to dress their furniture. They bought silks to drape their most expensive harnesses and carriages. Fine women and men bought loads of the silk, when they could afford it, to create elaborate, and one-of-a-kind garments. Each city fashioned the silks into the characteristic fashions of their own city, and culture; never, in Ajalia's experience, had customers bought silk and then asked if it could be sewn into a garment by the Eastern slaves. The slaves could sew, and they could fit styles to the bodies of the Slavithe people that were simple and flattering, but the mere fact that the Slavithe people did not seem to know what do with the silk they clearly wanted to buy, flabbergasted Ajalia. She had never encountered such ignorance of fashion, such lack of simple vanity. When the Slavithe bou
ght the silk, and then paid for it to be made into dresses or robes, as far as Ajalia could see, they never intended to wear the new garments. Ajalia did not understand it.
She had seen Yelin twice in the market, accompanying her new mistress, and the Eastern slave had been attired in the shimmering silks she had packed with her from her own belongings. The golden-haired wife of Lim shone behind her Slavithe lady, like a jewel tied to the back of a plain brown beetle. Ajalia had never seen anything like it.
The door to the little house opened again, and Delmar and Philas came out. Ajalia wanted to ask Delmar, again, why he was coming with her. She wanted to snap at Philas, and to drive them both into the bottom of some bottomless sea. She could not understand the fixation that Philas seemed to have developed for her since they had entered the white city of Slavithe.
Ajalia had known Philas since the first day she had belonged to their Eastern master; Philas had been one of the few slaves to greet Ajalia, when she had entered the common housing of the slaves, and stood watching the other Eastern slaves at their labor. Philas had been like a kindly older brother, or a vague and likable uncle. He had always been drunk, but Philas's drinking had never interfered too badly with his work as a slave. Their master had given him some authority, and Philas had contained his worst binges to moments that would not wreak havoc on the wider picture of his life. He had often teased Ajalia that he would marry her, or told her that they were meant to be in each other's arms forever. He had never touched her before this trip, never shown that his words were anything but a joke. She had never watched him closely, the way she had watched other male slaves for signs of danger. Before this trip, Ajalia would have vouched for Philas as a decent person.
Now, she was not so sure.
His deprivation of liquor had been a fact, a part of the city that made life different, but once he had started to behave like a drunk who has nothing to drink, her heart had hardened. He had become, gradually, a mess. The black drink had kept Philas's mind functional, but she saw him now as a different person entirely. He was beginning to have a harsher side than she had ever known; the buffer of his addiction was stripped away, and the man beneath was not what he had seemed. With the black drink out of his life as well, she began to suspect that his behavior would become harsher; she hoped he would not become a threat, as Lim had.
Ajalia had distanced herself from the doings in the little house, as soon as she had begun to negotiate for the servants down in the quarries. She had not meant to take on such a massive project, but when Gevad had presented himself, he was too good an opportunity to let slip. Once she had taken the properties, the debts, and the servants on as her own, a nebulous plan had begun to spin in her mind.
She saw that the government of Slavithe was unstable, and that few of the wealthy citizens were sophisticated in the ways of the wider world. They traded like children, and though she had seen the fringes of corruption, the dealings of Gevad were about as shady a method as she had found.
The people of Slavithe claimed to live as a free people, a claim that was not borne out by their way of life. Ajalia had reflected many times since beginning to collect her new servants from their various entanglements, that she far preferred her own station as a slave to the complicated and muddled life-paths of those whose time she now owned. Her own situation, and the situation of her fellow slaves, was direct and clear. She belonged to her master, and though he allowed her to own her own things, he could rescind her privileges at any time. She had chosen to be sold to her current master; she had done the work to find him, and to figure out that he was a just and trustworthy master. She had engineered her sale, and made herself both valuable to her new master, and profitable to the master who had sold her. If she wanted to change her life to one as a free woman, she would have to leave the continent, or live in constant fear of recapture.
The Slavithe debtors lived lives of darkness, confusion, and despair. They were owned by no one; no one was obligated to feed or house them, and their children were seen as so much noise and obligation. Those servants who were able to discharge their debts through labor were the lucky ones; too many of the poor people Ajalia encountered, particularly in the quarries, simply owed too much money to live. They subsisted on scraps, worked on the edges of the quarries, and made what payments they could. Most of the servants who were young children had inherited debt from their fathers, or the debt had been sold with them to Gevad. Thus, a father who was deeply indebted may have exchanged the lives of some of his children for freedom; the debt passed to the children, who were taken to the quarries, or placed by Gevad, or another collector of debts, into service in a house in the city.
For many of these children, there was no hope of escape. They began life under the weight of a debt that they could never hope to repay; their services and labor filled the terms of their sale, but many of them owned nothing and made no money of their own. The worst cases were the youngest children, who had been thrust into houses in the city, or into businesses, where they were raised up to be extensions of their masters, ready at the beck and call of those who had contracted for their service, but without homes or families of their own. Ajalia found many of these who had lived for years under the shadow of their parents' debt, paying for the freedom of those who had created their bodies, without a sense of self, or purpose in life. These children, some of them grown into adolescence, had curiously empty eyes.
Most of the servants in this situation were not full-grown adults; Ajalia encountered only a few families where the cycle had repeated itself for generations. Ajalia had begun to suspect that the Thief Lord's rule had not been in place for many years. None of the Slavithe people alluded to any change in the governance of their city, but there seemed too little in the way of entrenched ways of doing business; too many of the servants in the debt-trap were young, and too many of the older couples were free of the kind of entanglement that seemed rampant in the newly married and the very young families.
Ajalia had not asked Chad about her suspicions; she doubted he would have any information to give her. His family had been one of those where the parents had bailed themselves out of debt by selling children. Chad's two sisters, whom Ajalia had yet to meet, had been contracted with a merchant's household; Gevad had sold the debt to the merchant himself, and Ajalia did not own Chad's sisters' labor, though she now owned the house the family had once possessed.
Chad seemed somehow oblivious of the privilege his sex and age had bought him; he had continued to live free, subsisting on the charity of his parents, who both found work in menial labor in the city and the quarry. Ajalia had learned during her negotiations with the quarry men that Chad's father paid a tiny stipend to the old woman who owned the tenement where Chad had lived; with this, Chad had lived, and eked out a meagre, if useless existence. Ajalia had found Chad to be ashamed of his parents, and of the debt that had been pawned onto his sisters, but his mind was curiously blank when it came to his own escape. Ajalia had occasionally wanted to smack the young Slavithe man upside the head, and to lecture him on the absurdity that he was living on the back of his family's labor, but she saw that his mind was but half-formed; Chad did not have a functional brain. Ajalia made as much use of him as she could, and monitored his behavior. She was prepared to cut him loose the moment he turned, but up to this point he had toed the line, if clumsily, of adequate loyalty and obedience.
Delmar baffled her. As Ajalia led the way through the darkened streets towards the stable district, Delmar was chattering in a low voice to Philas, explaining to the slave about the particular way the guards at the main city gate were arranged in shifts. Philas was listening with more grace than Ajalia could have mustered; she felt a shiver of anger at Philas. She wished that he would stand up to Delmar, or tell the young son of the Thief Lord to go soak his head. It irritated her that the two of them were chumming up together. She had been more comfortable when they had eyed each other with anger and suspicion. She had a sneaking feeling that they had both lost
whatever hopes they had held of winning their respective ways into her heart. This, she reminded herself, should have made her happy, since she had been rebuffing them both, but she felt embarrassingly petulant about the situation. She had started to get used to the attention, and she berated herself for being so soft.
Ajalia slipped her hand into her robe and wrapped her fingers around the thin piece of white stone. Leed, the little Slavithe boy, was trotting efficiently along beside Ajalia. She wanted to pick his brain, to squeeze out of him what he knew of the old letters and their pronunciation.
The black stone Ajalia had taken from the hut in the quarries rattled against her fingers; she drew it out, and rolled it into her palm. The stone was cool and hard against her skin. She pressed it hard against her flesh, and took comfort in the roughness and solidity of the round rock.
AJALIA BRIBES THE GUARD
The night was conveniently dark; a bank of clouds had rolled out under the moon earlier, and now the streets were illuminated only by the torches that were placed at intervals along the tall white houses. Ajalia glanced behind her. The light of the torches danced over Delmar's cheeks. The Thief Lord's oldest son looked somehow rough in the ruddy light of the fire. His eyes were vague and distant in the daylight, but his jaw had gained a harsh shadow in the night, and his pale hair fell in thick pieces over his face.
Ajalia pressed her teeth together. Philas was smiling at Delmar. Their heads were tilted towards each other, and their voices were lowered.
"Come on," Ajalia told the boy, and walked faster.
"Darien gave me a beetle," Leed told her. "It's a kind I haven't seen before."
"I have this rock," Ajalia said. She showed the boy the stone. Leed wrinkled his nose.
"Bugs are better than rocks," he said haughtily. Ajalia did not reply. She went in silence towards the stable district; when she came to the long row of wooden buildings, she passed around the back of the alley, and told Delmar and Philas to stay in the darkness.