Curt Benjamin - [Seven Brothers 03] - The Gates of Heaven

by Curt Benjamin

  Rude snickers followed them, but Stipes merely glared and flailed his arm in a pantomime of rage. “Laugh all you want, jackasses, all of you. Then ask yourself who is sneaking into your wife’s chamber while you’re here making a joke of an honest man!”

  Stipes pushed through and presented himself at the Gate of Despair, a simple construction of wicker and rice paper covered everywhere with the images of wailing bodies in torment. The gate stood open, a plump guard with dead flat eyes sitting cross-legged on a dusty carpet with his back against the fence post.

  “Wishing to sell.” Dragging Llesho forward by the noose around his neck, Stipes showed him to the gatekeeper.

  The man didn’t let him in at once but set down the stick that he’d been using to scratch under his wrapped head covering. He rose ponderously to his feet and shook out his thin linen coat over voluminous pants. Taking Llesho’s jaw in his hand he looked deep into his eyes, as if he could read his mind, or his soul, through them.

  “He’s very frightened,” was his conclusion. Not a hard reach, Llesho thought, though the man added the observation, “Caught in the wild, I take it—” a captive taken from his village or clan, that meant, “—and not born under the yoke.”

  Stipes shrugged. “Don’t know where he came from. Needed help with the farm and his price was cheap. He tried to run once or twice, but I beat him and he seemed to settle in. Turns out he wasn’t so cheap, now that he’s cost me a wife, but what can you do?” Llesho had accumulated plenty of scars in his short life. He wondered how many of them would pass for the discipline of a harsh master, but Stipes had thought of that.

  “He’d been cut up a bit when I got him. Healed and all—hasn’t seemed to affect his heavy lifting or bending to the plow, but he doesn’t exactly put himself out for his master.” And Llesho hoped the calluses on his hands would support that lie with the gatekeeper, who might not be a guard after all, but something else entirely.

  The man turned his attention from Llesho’s face to his hands, turning them over and inspecting both the fronts and the backs. “Too small for my use, I’m afraid.” He dismissed Llesho with a flutter of manicured fingers. “Will you be putting him to the block?”

  “Not any chance of that.” Stipes shook his head, emphatically. “I don’t want him washing up at my door ever again. Private sale I’m looking for, someone just passing through on their way back where they came from. As far from here as a boat can take a man.”

  The merchant, as it now seemed, released Llesho’s hands with no comment about the pattern of his calluses, but heaved a sigh. “Not much market in that,” he said. “Most who come in before a voyage are bent on ridding themselves of their excess baggage, not buying for the trip. Still, if you don’t care what price you get, you might find what you’re looking for inside. The red trousers came in a little while ago and they are always looking for muscle. He doesn’t have much of that in the way they measure a fighter in the ring.”

  A hand wrapped around Llesho’s upper arm demonstrated his point. While his fingers did not meet his thumb, they came closer than they ought for an arm with any power in it. As a slave, Llesho had no status to speak, and Stipes kept quiet about his training as a gladiator. He had an eye for a different buyer, which the slaver seemed to understand.

  “He seems wiry and strong for all that if you’re looking to put him to the oar. They won’t pay much, but you’ll get something for him, and of course the satisfaction of knowing he won’t be sniffing under skirts any time soon.”

  Their story had made it clear that they had come from the countryside, and the merchant or guard gestured them forward as a host might. “This is the market just for working stock,” he called after them with a wave of his hand to take in the whole building. He talked equally of the human and four-legged kind. “Quality trade you’ll find with the luxury items across the square.”

  Stipes gave a knowing nod to signal his understanding but declined the invitation. “We have women at home,” he told the man, “but I would take a boy in trade to do the chores of this one. Do you know if the red trousers have brought in any such?”

  “Maybe, but I wouldn’t want you to speak ill of this market in your town, sir. I would be cautious of that trade and take my money to a local vendor who hasn’t put as much use on any boy you wish for labor.”

  The red trousers, who Llesho thought must be the pirates, weren’t likely to sell the strong young men they seized to row their ships. A slave near his own age offered for sale must already have broken under the oar. He’d be no use for heavy labor of any kind. With a companionable nod that he would heed the warning, Stipes tugged Llesho after him into the slave market.

  The auction would take place in the same corral where Kaydu and their companions were selling the horses, but the slave market sheltered an array of booths and corrals like the ones they had seen filled with lesser creatures on the outside of the Gate of Despair. Each merchant displayed his wares, shouting out his trade to drum up interest for auction or to complete early private sales. A trader in an elaborate headdress of many-colored scarves braided and wound into a tall turban with ribbons hanging down his back displayed his human merchandise in mating pairs crouching in cages too low for them to stand and too narrow for them to sit.

  Another in stark white from his tall round cap to his slippered feet showed half a dozen children with glazed expressions in their eyes tied by ropes to the support post of a shadowed booth. Llesho wondered if he read the sign above their heads correctly. The script was very like Thebin, but its advertisement, “for religious purposes,” made no sense.

  Or he hoped it made no sense. Bolghai the shaman had sacrificed sheep and horses to fuel the khan’s pyre, and his burrow had been littered with the skulls of small animals. Without consciously willing it, he moved toward the booth with some half-formed idea of rescuing the innocent victims of this fearful place, but a warning tug at the noose around his neck pulled him up short. “He’s buying, not selling,” Stipes explained under cover of a warning glower. “It’s a rescue mission of sorts. The priests pay a small sum for them and raise them in the mission school. They’ll do more praying than a free man would put up with, but they stopped feeding children to the burning god long ago.”

  Llesho wondered how he knew, but a slave didn’t ask questions, so he kept his mouth shut and his face blank. As they passed still more vendors with their human misery huddled in the backs of stalls or shivering cattle pens, Llesho heard a familiar accent in the crowd. Harnish, from the South. When he looked around him, he saw that they had passed into a corner of the market dominated by the raiders. In a smooth glide honed with long practice Llesho’s hand went to his sword, remembering too late that he came unarmed to the market as a farmhand and not a soldier. Quickly, he shifted his hand to rub at his hip with an aggrieved glare at Stipes, who marched ahead of him. With luck, any who had seen the move would mistake it for nursing the ache of a beating.

  “Cut out the auctioneer’s fee; you won’t do as well if you wait,” Llesho heard a customer say, pointing out the flaws in a trembling man of middle years with no flesh on his bones to speak of.

  “You’re right.” The raider sized up the huddled slaves crowded in the pen he guarded. “Maybe you’d like to take his place.”

  The customer drew back in horror and departed at speed for the more “civilized” corners of the market while the raider laughed at his back. “I’ve sold his kind before—” The slaver had caught sight of Llesho and followed the noose back to where the belt ended in Stipes’ hand. He swaggered over with a gait calculated to set the long hair of his murdered victims swaying on the scalps sewn to his shirtfront and planted his gruesomely decorated chest in Llesho’s face. “This isn’t the best market for his kind, but I can get a good price for him if you’re interested.”

  Llesho’s hand squeezed into a futile fist at his side. With no sword, not even his Thebin knife, he had no chance against this walking horror from his nightmares. He would
die before he ever reached his target and that would put an end to their plan to rescue the Qubal prince from a slower death at the oar. It was just the memories that kept his mind leaping like a jerboa to act on his most fatal desires.

  Stipes was shaking his head in a friendly but determined way, as if it didn’t matter that this man wore the skin and hair of his victims on his shirt. “This one’s going on a sea cruise.” He laughed as if he’d made a witty joke and pulled the noose tight when Llesho didn’t do the same. “Aren’t you, boy? A sea cruise, courtesy of old Red Trousers, hahaha!”

  Llesho thought he was starting to enjoy the part a little too much, but even the raider wasn’t ready to contest with pirates for a scrawny Thebin slave boy.

  “If you change your mind, we will be here until the end of business tonight, but you’ll get a better deal in trade before the auction starts.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Stipes promised, and resumed his search for the pirates.

  “We must be close,” he muttered. “We’re running out of places to look.”

  Llesho heard the words, but they didn’t come together to make sense in his mind. In the background, the cries of children rose above the murmuring roar of commerce to die abruptly again. Lost in his past, he remembered his own raw voice worn to silence on the Long March, so that he made no sound in the pens at all. The captain of the slavers had put his keepers on notice: “Shut him up, or I’ll cut his throat.”

  The woman who carried him had handed him over to a man who had once been a soldier. That one had covered his mouth and his nose until, unconscious, he made no noise. After that, when he cried, the man always found them, and with his face wiped clean of feeling, would cradle Llesho in his arms and cover his face until, so near death that he had passed beyond the care of his mortal existence, he did not weep. Llesho had been a wise child, however. It hadn’t taken long to learn not to cry at all.

  So entangled had he become in the horrors of his past that he didn’t realize they’d come to a halt in front of a corral with a small kiosk in its center. A small group of boys and men stood or sat at the limit of their bonds around a tall post set like a guardsman in front of the kiosk. “Is he touched in the head?” A woman reached out with a horny hand and grabbed him by the shoulder. With a hard shake, as if to rouse him to his senses, she added a caution, “If he is given to fits, we can’t have him among the oars.”

  “No fits,” Stipes answered the question for him as his owner had the right to do. “But he’s slow-witted.”

  Well, he had to be pretty stupid to come up with this plan, Llesho agreed. The slave dealer had skin like leather from the sun and the harsh winds on the water, and her lips were stained bright red from the nuts she chewed while she talked. A scarf aswirl in bright and clashing colors did a poor job at holding back her hair, a mix of brown and gray that seemed to be making a brave effort to escape the knot tied at the nape of her neck. She might have been any seafaring short-hauler from the clothes that any pas serby could see. Llesho knew she was a pirate, however, because he was looking down as suited a humble slave. Beneath her homely skirts peeked satin cuffs where wide trousers with red-and-yellow stripes were gathered in tight above her greasy slippers.

  He had a feeling this one knew how to wield the short curved knife she wore at her hip and maybe practiced with it on slave boys who were a bit dull-witted. Did Kaydu knew that women roamed the Marmer Sea as pirates? His mind skittered away, down its own odd trails as it often did in times of peril. He tried to imagine his captain in red-striped trousers, swarming the side of a fat freight hauler. It scared him that the image came so quickly and fit so well.

  “He doesn’t look very strong.” With the back of her wrist she wiped a trail of ruby-colored drool from her lip and then, like the merchant at the gate, she took his hands in hers. Turning them to look at his knuckles and back again, she ran rough fingertips over the calluses on his palms.

  “He’s stronger than he looks,” Stipes bargained. “It’s the southern blood, off the mountains, that makes him look so scrawny, but his kind have a name for endurance.”

  “Looks like he’s done a day’s work of some kind,” she agreed, and released his hands. Llesho wondered if she recognized his skill with weapons in the pattern of his palm and the ridges on the side of his hand, the horn on his fingertips and knuckles so very like her own, but she said nothing of it.

  “Take off his shirt.”

  That drew Llesho’s head up, the spark of resistance in the tilt of his chin which he had enough sense of self-preservation to point at her out of a very unkingly slouch. She had a sharp eye, and he had a feeling that she’d read the scars on his body like a map of his battles even if she hadn’t credited the calluses for what they were.

  The pirate took his defensive bristling for a different meaning, however, and snorted rudely out of an overlarge nose. “You’re a bit old for that trade, boy.” Without further explanation, she grabbed the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head to slip down the leather belt that Stipes still kept a grip on.

  Reflexively Llesho’s hand came up to cover the scars on his chest. He didn’t want anyone to see, didn’t want the evidence of what had happened to him out there for the world to make its own conclusions about him. The pirate wasn’t giving him a choice, though. In front of anyone who traversed that part of the slave market she tugged his arm down. Tapping her foot thoughtfully, she examined him like a butcher assessing his value on the hoof.

  “Somebody did a clean job on that arrowhead.” She poked at the scar on his shoulder. “Odd, in the front though.” She turned him around, inspected his back. “You’d think a running slave would have his scars here—” She swept a hand across his back, where he carried just a few light marks from his days in slavery. The worst of it had come in Markko’s workroom and didn’t show on the outside.

  “Neighbors helped round him up. The local constable caught him in an ambush.”

  The pirate nodded, accepting that for an answer. “I’m surprised you didn’t just leave it.”

  “He would have been useless for the work. My wife had some skill with herbs and we thought to save the price of a replacement.” Stipes gave a hunched shrug, indicating much that wasn’t true. Llesho kept his mouth shut while the pirate peered over his shoulder with a knowing wink.

  “Now this—” She turned Llesho around again, trailed a callused finger down the scar over his heart, his belly.

  The marks told a story, of the claws of a giant bird that was no bird at all but the magician, Master Markko, tearing him open on the steps of the Temple of the Seven Mortal Gods. But he had no intention of recounting the tale for pirates.

  “Does it pull much?”

  “Hardly ever,” he lied, the first words he’d spoken in the bargaining. He couldn’t tell whether she believed him, but she signed away the evil eye with casual superstition.

  “He reeks of dragons.”

  “Not dragons, goodwife, but the hunting eagle of a great lord, who mistook the boy working in the fields for a coney stealing grain. The lord feared for the safety of his bird and would not call it off until it had satisfied its rage on the boy. But he healed well, and is as strong as he ever was.”

  “And afforded your goodwife another opportunity to act the tender nurse,” she mused, as if his words had confirmed something she had already guessed. “Been covering himself in his master’s feathers, has he, and cockle-doodle-do-ing in the henhouse? He doubtless appealed to her sympathy. I suppose that explains why you’d like to rid yourself of him.

  “Very well,” she decided. From a purse that hung from the scabbard of her sword she drew half a dozen coppers. It seemed too low a price.

  He had no experience with the buying and selling side of slavery, having only been on the bought and sold side when a small and shattered child, but Llesho knew the price was low enough to make her suspicious if Stipes didn’t haggle. Fortunately, Stipes had his story ready.

  “Not so fast,
now. I don’t know much about city ways, and so I don’t know to haggle over the price for boys in the marketplace. But this one has already cost me more than he’s worth in trade. So I’ll take your coppers, if you make as part of the bargain that he is gone from this port by morning, and he never sets foot on dry land again.”

  Llesho thought that was a bit strong, but the pirate shook her head as if the agreement Stipes demanded made a sorry kind of sense for the cuckolded farmer he pretended to be. “All right. He’s young for the work and not likely to survive past the first storm anyway, but he’s cheap enough. You’ve got your bargain. I claim him bought and paid for the Bayerenin.”

  Llesho figured that must be the local name for the pirates. He was already thinking ahead to the next step in his plan. He scarcely noticed when the pirate stuck out her fat tongue and licked a bright red streak across her thumb. When she pressed the sticky thumb to his breast, right above the arrow scar, he twitched away in surprise.

  “None of that, boy.” She tightened the noose threateningly around his neck. “You’ve got my mark on you now. I will not be best pleased if I lose my six coins for nothing, but the market guards have little care for that. They will kill you if you try to run and present me with the carcass when they are done.”

  Stipes took a step with mayhem in his eyes, which would put them back to where they were when they had begun the search for Prince Tayy, but this time without a plan. So Llesho bent his leg and groveled in the dust at her feet.

  “Sorry,” he croaked out of his constricted throat, and she let up on the noose with a righteous sniff.

  “As you should be.”

  When it seemed that he might survive long enough to reach the sea, Stipes took up both his and Llesho’s packs, and turned to leave.

  Chapter Thirteen

  DON’T GO! As if he heard the unspoken words, Stipes turned around one last time. The pirate woman read it as easily as Llesho did.

  “Too late now, young farmer.” She spat a fat red gob of slime onto the sawdust covered floor to emphasize her point. “Coin has changed hands, the deal is done. I can maybe trade you an old fellow for him, or a girl, but that’s only because I’m a good-hearted soul and hate to see a customer go away dissatisfied.”