The Swordsman's Oath toe-2

by Juliet E. McKenna

  “Of course, I’ll do my very best—” she began, a little affronted.

  “Bid whatever you need to,” I insisted. “Messire will repay you, trust me.”

  “Of course. Try not to worry. Once you’re out of here, we can sort out what happened, find some answers.” Mellitha sounded just like my mother, consoling me over a lost hound-puppy. I wasn’t reassured. That hadn’t turned out at all well either; the poor little scrap had gone scavenging around the crab-boats, fallen into the harbor and drowned.

  The guard snapped something at Mellitha and she responded with a curt rebuke. She still got to her feet however, pressing a bundle into my arms. “Just keep out of trouble in here and we’ll get you out at the sale.”

  “See if Shiv has any ideas,” I called over my shoulder as the guard hustled me out with his stave jabbing painfully into my kidneys.

  The rank-smelling turnkey led me through a couple of courtyards to a different wing of the lock-up. Mellitha’s coin had bought me a pallet lumpily stuffed with coarse husks in a wooden-floored, second-story room with a couple of handful others. I sat down carefully, my back to the wall, and unwrapped the bundle, the outermost layer proving to be a plain linen shirt and a pair of old breeches. Judging from the garb of my companions that was evidently the most clothing anyone here was allowed. A threadbare towel was rolled around a leather water bottle, some fresh bread and a creamy yellow cheese. The sharp scent made me realize I was actually starting to feel a little hungry again. I dampened the corner of the towel and cleaned the worst of the filth from my hands and face but gave up on the rest; the water would be more valuable in keeping me from the risk of prison fever lurking in whatever the turnkeys gave us to drink. Eating half of the bread put more heart into me and I certainly felt less vulnerable with some clothes on.

  A few of the others in the long room were staring with a greater or lesser degree of curiosity. I met their gazes without a challenge but with enough intensity to make them drop their eyes first. Once I was satisfied that I was unobserved, I discreetly removed the wax-paper package molded into the cheese and tucked it down the front of my breeches. That done, I made my own survey of my fellow would-be slaves, making sure I didn’t catch anyone’s eye or look at any one of them for too long. The last thing I wanted was to get myself into a fight. The other men were slumped on their pallets or staring idly out of the barred window; most were a little older than myself, well enough fed, and about half had the weathered faces of an outdoor life. No one was talking so I had no means of identifying their origins, but since I was only going to be here for a short while I didn’t see any benefit in striking up a conversation with anyone.

  A couple of younger men were coughing persistently, a soft but repetitive sound that was already becoming tiresome. It looked as if they had been forced to the far end of the cell, my pallet and another vacant place separating them from the other prisoners. I glanced at them and wondered how far over I could move myself before my neighbor on the other side would object.

  “Sit tight, be patient and Mellitha will get you out,” I told myself sternly. If I kept myself to myself and didn’t share a cup or anything, I shouldn’t be at too much risk of contagion.

  To my considerable surprise only the second chime of the day came ringing in through the unglazed window, from a timepiece quite close by, from the sound of it. I sighed; it was evidently going to be a long and tedious couple of days.

  Noon came and went, a shower of rain pattered softly down on the roof tiles and a different turnkey appeared with a tray of wooden bowls of barley-meal, all unpleasantly crusted with the remains of old meals and with flies hovering eagerly above them. I left mine untouched, soothing my growling stomach with a little more bread.

  “Hungry’s better than risking the squits,” I advised myself firmly. Besides, the less I ate, the less I would have to visit the reeking crocks standing against the far wall; one for excrement to sell for manure, one for urine to sell for bleach, I assumed wryly. Trust the Relshazri to find a way of turning coin from every situation.

  That was about the most humorous aspect of the day. The afternoon’s entertainment came when we were herded to the window by a couple of guards with whips in order to watch a man being garrotted in the courtyard below. It took ten men to drag the heavy-set criminal out and lash him to the execution frame; he screamed obscenities at them until a leather gag stopped his mouth. At that point tears began to stream down his brutish face, already red and suffused with blood even before the guards drew lots to see who would turn the ratchet to crush the sad bastard’s throat.

  I didn’t bother watching; there are no more lessons I can learn by seeing men die. Instead I looked at the other windows in the tall blocks ranged around the courtyard. The bottommost levels were evidently cells of the kind I’d woken up in; gaunt and filthy faces with matted hair were pressed to the bars, too many all too eager to see the spectacle. At the higher levels, men and women in decent garb looked down, some reluctantly, some with horrified fascination. I wondered how much they were paying for decent food and cleanliness; probably more than they would had they been lodging in the costliest inn the city boasted.

  As soon as the guards allowed us, I returned to my pallet.

  “What did he do?” one of the others asked, rubbing a hand over his ashen face.

  The guard scowled. “Raped and murdered little girls.”

  I was pleased to see everyone in the room grimace or spit with honest revulsion; perhaps it would be safe to risk going to sleep in here after all.

  By the time evening came I was bored out of my mind. I’d tried doing some basic stretches to loosen up my bruised limbs but that attracted everyone’s attention, so I soon stopped. I ate the rest of the bread and cheese, reasoning it would probably be stolen while I slept if I didn’t. The window faced west, so we caught the last of the sunlight as the rain clouds passed and I watched the black shadows of the bars slowly crawl across the chipped and stained plaster as I dozed. I can’t have gone to sleep so early since the summer evenings when my mother would herd Mistal, Kitria and myself to our beds as we all protested that it was still light and it wasn’t fair, why were Hansey and Ridner allowed to stay up?

  I woke in the dawn cool of the following morning with a nagging sense that something was not quite right. With a sudden shock I realized the coughing had stopped. Sitting sharply upright, I looked over to see one of the sick men lying rigid and silent, his glazed eyes staring blankly at the ceiling, lips blackened in an ashen face. His companion was prostrate opposite, skin pale and tainted with blue, his chest still moving slightly, a pulse hammering in his neck as the breath bubbled moistly in his lungs.

  My abrupt movement had woken a couple of the others; one went to hammer on the door and bellow for the turnkey. When two surly jailers arrived, they dragged the corpse and the sick man away, treating both with equal indifference and leaving the stained pallets behind. I shuddered and hoped that no one had died on mine recently, certainly not of anything contagious.

  If anything, that day was harder to endure than the first. I’ve never taken well to inactivity and although I continued to tell myself not to let it rile me—that Dastennin sends fish to the patient, anyway, that I’d been in worse places than this—it was all wearing a little thin by the end of the day. The only worse place I could think of was the Elietimm dungeon and at least I’d had people I could talk to in there, Aiten’s support, Shiv’s magic and Livak’s talents with locks as a basis for plans for escape. That started me thinking about the others, hoping they had some plan to secure my purchase at the auction, worrying in case the Elietimm had made some move while I was stuck in here. I finally concluded that what I hated most about my current situation was not the place I found myself in but the fact that I was having to rely on other people to get me out. That realization did nothing to improve my mood.

  I was trying to remember all the verses to one of those interminable Soluran ballads about some brainless noble rescuing
an idiot girl with more hair than wit when the door swung open to reveal a couple of guards and a well-dressed man with a ledger under one arm and in the other hand a pomander that he kept lifted to his nostrils. I envied him that more than his well-polished boots. The bookkeeper looked around the room and then started with the closest to the door, which happened to be me. Looking me up and down, he nodded to the nearest guard.

  “Strip him.”

  I ripped off my shirt and breeches myself, giving the guard a warning glare and trying to tuck Mellitha’s coin under the clothes unseen. The man with the pomander scrutinized me closely from head to toe and then nodded again; this time the guard seized my jaw and held it down so the man could see my teeth. The turnkey’s hand stank and I swallowed against an urge to gag, opening my mouth wide so the bastard wouldn’t have a reason to put a filthy finger in my mouth. If he had I’d probably have bitten it off, whatever it cost me.

  The clerk counted my teeth, nodded, made a note in his ledger and then looked me in the eye.

  “Do you have any skills?” he asked in passable Tormalin.

  I wondered quickly what to say for the best; I didn’t want to push my price up too high for Mellitha, but equally I didn’t fancy being sold as part of a yoke of ten field slaves to the first bidder.

  “Swordsman,” I said firmly.

  He shrugged, made another note and moved on to the next man. I won a warning glare from the turnkey as I reached for my clothes, so I simply sat down to wait and see what would happen next, listening as the bookkeeper went around the room. It seemed I was in the company of a couple of dockers, a mercer’s runner, a clerk, two rent collectors, a potter and a stockman. Dastennin only knows how they had ended up here. With this interrogation complete, we were herded, still naked, out of our cell and down to the end of a long line of other unfortunates waiting to enter a long, low building at the far end of the compound. A second line was forming, evidently drawn from the female cells, which made the wait a little less tedious. I felt sorry for some of the women, probably here through no fault of their own, vainly trying to cover their nakedness with hands and hair, often with children clinging to their thighs, eyes hollow with distress. Others had clearly been through this before, challenging the men with bold stares, pointing and giggling, hand gestures leaving little of their conversation to the imagination. One bold piece caught my eye and gave me a long, slow wink, but I caught sight of the brand on her palm marking her as a whore who stole from her customers so she didn’t get a response from me.

  The line moved on. We were shoved through a door by guards with ungentle clubs. I found myself facing a long, deep bath, for all the world like the one on Messire’s hill country estate that they use for washing the sheep. The guards were using their staves like shepherd’s staffs, so I jumped in rather than wait to be pushed. The water was scummy and foul with soiled straw but I didn’t care, scrubbing at myself to get the worst of the filth off, ignoring the sting of my cuts and grazes that were now joined by numerous bites from nameless vermin. Emerging at the far end, a man in a long tunic forced me on to a bench with impersonal hands and took a pair of clippers to my head. All in all, I now had a fair idea of what it felt like to be a ram being readied for market.

  The air was cold on my shorn scalp as we were herded through another door. It was one way of getting a haircut for free, but on balance I would rather have paid the coin to a barber and had a decent shave into the bargain. I rubbed a hand over the bristles on my chin, now at the aggravating stage where they were both sharp and itchy, and I doubted my own mother would recognize me at that moment.

  Stock brought down off the mountains for sale at home gets cleaned if it’s lucky, then it gets weighed while the water in the wool is still adding to the burden. The Relshazri evidently worked the same way; this line moved slowly toward the kind of balance I was used to see weighing sacks on at the harbor side. A couple of men were manhandling the hefty bullion weights on and off the scales while another checked the arithmetic, consulted a ledger and scrawled something on to labels, which were tied around the neck of each piece of merchandise. I tried to squint at mine but it was tied too short, tucked under my chin. For some reason I found that irritating me more than anything else that had happened so far.

  On the way back to our cell a guard handed me a bundle which proved to come from Mellitha. It had obviously been opened but she’d put in enough bread and cheese to leave me a decent meal after the guards had taken what they wanted. That was the highlight of the day; my money had vanished from my pallet and, as the sun faded from the window, I found myself struggling to keep my spirits up. Despite all my efforts to distance myself from events I had no hope of controlling, I could not help feeling humiliated. It wasn’t the nakedness, the impersonal handling like a piece of merchandise. It was the way my mind had been invaded again.

  Something had been done to me to make me lose my senses, to make me do something so out of character and worse it was something I couldn’t even remember. If I’d known who to blame, I could at least have been angry with them, but I couldn’t even be certain about that. Was it the Elietimm? If so, what were they trying to achieve? As I wondered, I began to worry about it happening again, despite all my determination to stay calm. Losing control like that, my wits lost in the shades, my body at the mercy of whoever might be passing, the danger of being robbed, even killed; I found myself shaking at the thought and with a real effort forced myself to drive it out of my mind.

  Fighting sleep as the night darkened outside the bars, I tasted faint salt on the breeze, reminding me of home. How was I going to explain this to Messire? However I told the tale, I was going to look incompetent. I’ve never favored explanations for failing in a duty that begin “I couldn’t help it but…” and frustration welled up in me as I tried in vain to come up with something better. My pride was going to take a worse beating than my body when I had to make my report. My hopes of making the step from sworn man to chosen man would fall right down the privy, I realized gloomily.

  I looked out at the stars. Livak was a girl who could count the beans in a handful; she wouldn’t blame me for what had happened but I still didn’t like the idea of looking such a masquerade fool in front of her. I cursed under my breath and sighed, looking in vain for the first glimmer of dawn lightening the sky. This would never have happened to me if those cursed wizards hadn’t dragged Messire into their half-witted schemes; I scowled into the darkness. Surely Shiv, Mellitha and Viltred could have come up with some way of getting me out of here? If you believed any of the ballads that kept minstrels fed, couldn’t wizards do things like walking themselves through walls, turning things invisible, sending guards to sleep? What were they doing while I was stuck in here, at risk of anything from a ramming up the arse to jail fever?

  “There’s no more point in them magicking you away than there is in you finding a way to break out of here,” I told myself sternly. “Think sense, fool. The Watch would have the ferries tied up and be turning the city inside out before we’d gone around the chimes.”

  I awoke with a sudden start to find guards busily rousting us all to our feet, herding us down the stairs to the courtyard where I saw manacles were to be clamped around our wrists, a chain threaded through to link us all together. The thought of being chained like a common criminal filled me with sudden rage. Without thinking, I pulled my hands away, cursing. A stinging slap from the guard split my lip. I reached for the bastard, only to be felled by a numbing blow to the meat of my thigh from the blunt end of a stave. The pain of that brought me to my senses. When I could stand, I gritted my teeth and submitted meekly to the fetters.

  “Get yourself reined in, imbecile,” I rebuked myself.

  “You’ll be out of here by the end of the morning and then you can go looking for the bastard who had you slung in here.”

  That idea warmed my blood and I began to take more notice of what was happening, realizing too that the worst of the stiffness from the beating had passed, un
noticed, over those idle couple of days. I found myself behind the clerk as we were marched along a series of foul alleys, the guards laughing and joking, wagers being made as to who would fetch the best price. The sun was barely climbing above the ruddy tiled roofs and we were all glad to move briskly in the morning cool.

  “No one knows what to make of you,” the clerk commented, looking back over his shoulder.

  I shrugged. “They seem to think you’ll go for a decent weight of coin.”

  The man smiled. “Yes, I should do, if the auctioneer gives me a chance to speak for myself. It did the trick last time.”

  “You’ve been sold before?” I had no idea what usually happened to slaves and this seemed the ideal time to start learning.

  “Twice,” he confirmed. “First owner died and we were all sold to clear his debts; second was only interested in getting a couple of season’s work for a deal with some Aldabreshi warlord.”

  “So what happens to you now?”

  “If I’m lucky, I’ll go to a decent merchant who’ll let me earn a coin or two at the back gate, so I’ll have something put by to keep me out of the gutter. It won’t be too much longer before I get too old to be worth my bed and bread and they set me free.” The skinny man’s face grew solemn.

  The jingling column reached a broad market square with a high platform on one side. We were herded unceremoniously into a pen behind it; to my frustration, I could see none of the crowd. All I could hear was the noise and it sounded as if there was a good turn-out, eager to buy the servants, field workers and laborers who made up most of the early lots.

  The sun was riding high in the sky by the time the sale reached the skilled men like myself and my companion. It was hot and airless in the slave pen and I shouldered my way forward eagerly when a lad with a bucket and ladle walked down the lines, dipping stale water into eagerly cupped hands.