by R. Lee Smith
“Now you,” he said, and put his hands on her.
She waited, staring fixedly at the wall while he satisfied himself that she had no weapons socketed away, and when he was done, before he could give an order, she moved in close and touched her cheek briefly to his chest.
His spines flared. “My Eshiqi,” he said, rubbing her back. “When Hruuzk called to you, you didn’t know he saw me coming, did you? You thought he meant to put you on the block with the other slaves.” And he smiled, like it was funny.
Amber didn’t smile. She didn’t swear at him either, or call him names or make any of the sarcastic comments she might have made if it wasn’t for the little matter of how much English he might or might not understand…and if he wasn’t right.
“Come to my table,” he ordered, moving ahead of her to take his seat—still the only seat—and giving his thigh an inviting pat. When she sat, he pinched off a large bite of tachuqi meat and offered it up. “Hruuzk tells me you’ve been a good worker. You may think Hruuzk praises all the women who have played Zhuqa’s House with me, but he doesn’t. You have been my loyal woman…and a good mother to my child.” He watched her eat. “Did you lose one?”
“No,” she said, but thought of Nicci. “Never had one.”
“I’ve lost five so far. I try not to see omens in piss anymore, but…this is my sixth.” He took a bite for himself and chewed, gazing up at the ceiling as if he could see through it to Xzem and the baby, far above them. When he swallowed, he looked at her again. “A child needs a mother.”
“A child needs not to grow up in a place like this even more.”
“As the Word says, a father is God upon the living world,” said Zhuqa, giving her another bite of meat. “The only God my son is likely to know. I can train a son. I can take him on hunts and raids. I can teach him blades and spears and grappling. I can be proud of him. I can even be fond of him, from a distance. But even a warlord’s son needs a mother to hold him.”
“I guess you’re not always a dirty girl, are you? Sometimes you’re a real sweetie. A prince among thieves. Or a princess.”
He grunted, rubbed her thigh, fed her another bite.
“What if it’s a girl?” asked Amber. “What happens to all your fatherly affection and pride then? Do you sell her?”
“Eh?”
She put her hands together in the teardrop-shape, but he continued to look blank. Amber made rocking motions with her arms, then realized she’d never seen Xzem rock a baby that way. For that matter, she’d never seen a human rock a baby that way, either. Awkwardly, she cupped her arms as if holding a baby upright at her breast and rocked back and forth instead. This put unpleasant pressure on her sex, but after she’d again made a teardrop-shape and repeated the baby-rocking, his light bulb finally came on.
“You think it will open up female?”
“You’ve got a fifty-fifty chance, don’t you?”
Zhuqa grunted and stroked his throat, studying her through narrow eyes. “Zhuqa the Warlord has only one use for daughters,” he said after a long silence. “But in Zhuqa’s House, all children are prized. If I gave her to you, would you be grateful?”
“That depends. So far, all of your promises have only been good for a year.”
He grunted, but in a thoughtful way that made her wonder again how much of what she said he was starting to understand. It didn’t help when he said, “This place will never be better than a raider’s nest to anyone who has ever known a true home, but you might be surprised how long a child can be happy here, if it’s cared for.”
“That’s a horrible thought,” said Amber, taking the piece of tachuqi he offered her.
“To a child who is not…well, you get Iziz.” Zhuqa gestured broadly and helped himself to a root. “Who, I think, would never imagine that he has been mistreated in his life, but who was surely bought and buggered six times for every finger and toe on his body before the last of his scales went black. Raider-sprats like Iziz or Xzem…they’re not unhappy just because they take a poke ten years too early. That’s only hell to people who know better. So I ask you again—” He held up another piece of meat and cocked his head. “If I gave her to you, if I let you be the God in her living world, if I let you decide how much hurt is normal and how much is never visited…will you be grateful?”
“How grateful do you need me to be?”
“I’m giving you a chance to have a family,” he said quietly. “But I won’t let you raise my child to hate me. If you want it, you will have to decide whether you want to be my loyal woman or my fierce little slave.”
She didn’t answer, not out of defiance, but simply because, for one terrible moment, she wasn’t entirely sure what her answer would be.
Zhuqa’s eyes stabbed into her, deeper and deeper. At last, he leaned back in his chair and gave her another bite of meat. “But I won’t ask you to choose tonight. For now, I am content as long as you play the game, Eshiqi. You don’t have to mean it, but you have to play the game.”
She closed her eyes, took a few breaths, then looked at him and forced a smile.
“I suppose you think it’s silly,” Zhuqa mused, tracing the shape of her lips with his fingertips. “And I suppose you would be right. But what else do I have here, eh? They taught us about evil when I was a boy, and about God’s love and the promise of His forgiveness. I believed it. I believed that I knew where I fit in the world. I believed that I would serve Him someday and if it was His will, I would return with honor to be steward of my father’s House. I believed I would have children in a place where it was not expected and acceptable for the first one to die. Now these things, the very idea of them, are nothing but pieces in a silly game.” His eyes sparked. “Why shouldn’t I want to play it?”
Amber did not answer. After a few seconds, he grunted and shifted her off his knee. “It’s dark in here,” he said.
Amber looked around, then went to the nearest lamp and pulled the wick up a little. The flame lengthened, but guttered. The pitcher of xuseth oil he kept in his room was nowhere obvious. While she looked for it, he went to the wall where he kept his awful drink in a new waterskin, poured himself half a cup, thought about it, then poured the other half. By the time she’d found the oil (on the shelf where it belonged, and God alone knew what it was doing there), he was back in his chair with his feet propped up on the table, drinking.
“Do you want to know what I did?” Zhuqa asked suddenly. His voice was mild; his scales, dark. His eyes, half in and out of shadow, had all the expression of cigarette burns. “Would you like to know what great unforgivable act cut me from my father’s name and put me here? Would you like to know why I am so unfit to keep his House, why my children, if any of them survive, will never have the name I was born under? Eh? Do you?”
She ducked her head and fussed with the lamp, hoping that if she stayed quiet, he’d change the subject.
He took his boots off the table and brought his chair crashing back onto all four feet. She jumped; he watched her, calmly picking through the bowl of roots for one to eat. “Two years before my ascension, the training master I was brunt to broke his leg. They replaced him with someone new, someone from outside. He took an interest in me. Used to keep me extra hours, teaching me advanced fighting forms, but didn’t work me too bad afterwards. We spent a lot of nights just sitting up together, chatting while I cleaned his boots or put an edge on his blades. I liked him,” Zhuqa said, twisting the words like a knife. He laughed once, shortly, and drank again.
“So. So one night, after hours, as we were chatting, he brought out a flask of wine and offered me a swallow. The Word forbids all things which cloud the mind and corrupt clay, but this man, my master, my friend, told me that only applied if you did it to excess. And he would know, wouldn’t he? He had been a Sheulteb once. He was a Sword and a true son of God. He gave me a swallow and he gave me a few more, and when I was warmed up nicely, he brought out a few leaves of phesok and gave me some of that. I don’t remember falling
asleep. I just remember waking up…when he was in me.”
Amber ran out of things to do to the lamp. She got up, feeling his stare on her like a physical weight, and went over to the cupboard. She straightened the pillows, shook out the furs, brushed grit off the mattress.
“To this day, that baffles me,” said Zhuqa. “Just outside the masters’ gate, not a hundred walking strides from where he stood when he fucked me, slept one or two hundred women desperate for the healing fires of a son of Sheul. He didn’t need to make a boy drunk to get a poke in unless he wanted to. Suppose I should feel flattered.” He drank, eyed the empty cup, then got up to pour the last of the wine. “I don’t. Come and take this, Eshiqi.”
She went, but she took the empty flask, not the cup he tried to give her. There was a moment when he thought about forcing it on her—she could see it glittering in his eye as he watched her hang the flask upside down to dry—but in the end, he let it go and sipped at it himself.
“In the morning, I told my blademaster. They called a tribunal. I had to tell the story to a room filled with men and boys I knew. The man, my master, denied everything. He went on to say that he had caught me rubbing my cock and this was the act of a boy who feared to have it made known. And since neither of us would recant, it went to trial. He stood for himself. My father sent a Sheulteb. He wouldn’t…He wouldn’t stand for me himself. And this man, this lying man, this man who gave me drink and gave me phesok and bent my sleeping body over the back of a bench, this man won that trial.”
In spite of everything, Amber turned around. “And they threw you out?”
“No,” said Zhuqa. He was looking right at her with his face now full in the light, but his eyes were still cigarette burns. “It’s not unforgivable to fuck your fist or to tell lies to a tribunal. They held me in a cell and whipped me at fourth- and tenth-bell for a full brace in the public courtyard and then they gave me back to him. I went to lessons every morning. He had me every night. Without drink or phesok.” He shrugged his spines stiffly. “Too hard to come by in the city. Anyway, I managed with the help of the one boy I still trusted to send a message to my father. He came in person the next day.”
Zhuqa was quiet for a time, just holding his cup and staring at some point in space between the two of them. At last, he shrugged again and drank off the last of it. “He dragged me out of lessons to the first empty room and beat me until I went black. Then he went home. My master took me out of the infirmary a few days later and fucked me three times. Making up for time lost, he said. He couldn’t manage the last go, so he used the hilt of a practice sword. It was bigger than he was. I bled. He told me to clean it. I killed him with it,” said Zhuqa, tossing the empty cup on the table. “He wasn’t sleeping. His back wasn’t turned. I took him on in the full sight of the God that let him fuck me and let him lie about it and let me be whipped for the lie and I killed him with a wooden toy of a sword. Then I gave myself over and they turned me out. Not for the murder, although they did call it that. No, they turned me out for blasphemous and malicious lies, because I said that he had fucked me when God had proven that he had not. There I stood, with my own blood and his stinking grease still inside me…”
He trailed off, then gave the empty cup on the table a morose flick with two fingers and stood up. “A man named Chuaan hunted me down later that year and fed me to his men for a catch-cock. Shouldn’t have bothered me—not much did by that time—but I saw fire as soon as the first hand was on me. I killed six of them, they tell me, and so the legend of the mighty Zhuqa who has never been poked was born. I let them think so. I am—” He smiled, thin and hard as razors. “—such a liar. Come here, Eshiqi.”
She went. He slung his arm around her shoulders and she held him steady all the way to the cupboard. She took his boots off, helped him out of his harness and picked his legs up for him when he dropped back onto the mattress. “Say something,” he said, staring at the top of the cupboard.
“This man you hate so much,” said Amber. “You turned into him.”
She said it in English, but he said, “I know,” and turned his dead gaze on her with a smile. “Would you call that proof of God, eh? Is it keeping balance in the world, in His great, unknowable design?”
“I call it proof that people can be horrible without God’s help.”
She could tell he didn’t get much of that, if anything, but he didn’t let it bother him. He plucked at her arm, pulled her in with him and shut the cupboard door.
“I’m too drunk to fuck,” he muttered, rubbing at his face. “Use your hand.”
She did. It took longer than usual. She wiped him off with the edge of a blanket when it was over and lay down beside him.
“Your Sheulek,” he said, so thickly now that he could scarcely be understood. “The one you think is coming…if he really believes all the piss he was taught, he’ll never take you back. And if he doesn’t…he won’t come for you at all.” His hand brushed at her hair, then slipped down to cup her hip and pull her back against him. “You’ve gone to Gann, Eshiqi, just like me. If God Himself would not forgive you, why would he?”
She didn’t answer. Eventually, he fell asleep.
She lay awake.
10
Amber was surprised to see the new slaves back in the workpit the next day, although after some thought, she supposed it was as good a place as any to put them. Some of them were dressed now. Some of them had been given names. All of them had the same distant stare, even when they looked right at her. But when Hruuzk gave them instructions, they listened and did what they were told. Not as smoothly or as well as the long-time slaves who shared the workpit, but that would surely come in time.
After getting everyone started, Hruuzk gathered up the kids and a few of the women and took them away, saying something about work ‘up top’ that needed doing. He was gone a long time and came back alone, carrying a huge sack over his shoulder and a small chest under one arm.
“Here to me!” he called. “Yllgami! Ena! Eshiqi! The rest of you, keep on with what you’re about. All right.” He thumped sack and chest both on a table and opened them. The sack was stuffed with a confusing jumble of rope; the chest, with hundreds of small fish hooks.
“Mud’s thawing and snow on the mountain’s melting, so we’ll have aamyr washing in from the lake any day. Yllgami, you sort out the nets. Ena, you mend them. Eshiqi—” Hruuzk produced a mending kit that had been tucked into his belt and held it out to her. “—sew on the hooks. Yllgami will show you where and how.”
Amber slowly took the kit from him and turned it around. It was Meoraq’s.
“I want the first of them ready for the water this evening and the last of them in the water by tomorrow night. Show me those clever hands, eh? Good girl.”
Hruuzk gave her head a pat. She looked at him, thinking of the night she’d first held this kit, and Meoraq beside her as she made new soles for the boots Zhuqa had taken away. Someone else in this camp was wearing them. Someone else had the white thuoch hides which would never be her coat. Someone had stolen the clothes she’d spent all winter making.
Someone had stolen her.
“Get to it,” Hruuzk ordered, already on his way out. If he’d seen anything different in her eyes, he hadn’t thought it worth mentioning. And why should he? An unhappy slave in the workpit? No, really?
Yllgami was brushing at Amber’s sleeve with the very tip of her knuckles and making mewing sounds scarcely loud enough to hear. Reluctant to put Meoraq’s mending kit aside, Amber tucked it underneath her arm, but gave Yllgami her full attention. Life went on. Mothers died, ships crashed, people left you, people stole you…but life went on.
It helped to think of the nets like Christmas lights. First, they had to be untangled, and while it was obvious that whoever had packed them away had made an effort to bundle each one separately, they’d all knotted together. As soon as the first one was free, Ena had it and a spare coil of rope and was using what looked like a giant wooden barrette to
patch holes in the loose weave. As Amber continued to help Yllgami, Dkorm and Xzem arrived.
He kicked some sacks into a heap and sat down, tucking Rosek under his arm with an expression of profound dislike. She was restless, wriggly, and already making those breathy barking noises that meant a crying fit wasn’t far off.
Amber hesitated, picking at her net, then pushed it back and headed over.
“Take the fucking thing,” Dkorm groaned, but instead, Amber rummaged in the crates and bags around him for the scraps of clothing left over from her mending of a few days’ ago. With rags in various colors and a little thread from Meoraq’s kit, Amber threw a crude doll together. She wasn’t good at domestic shit like this, but good enough for Rosek, who gawped at the gift like it was the first she’d ever seen…which it probably was. She took it, chewed it, shook it, and let out a shrill squeal and began to beat it vigorously against the side of a crate.
“How is that better?” Dkorm demanded, spines flat.
Amber went back to the nets. Ena had finished her repairs and Yllgami was waiting anxiously next to the box of hooks. Amber watched without interest while Yllgami deftly and wordlessly sewed about a dozen fish hooks into the weave, not too closely spaced and all pointed in the same direction, then took the needle when it was offered and got to work.
She immediately stabbed herself with a fish hook. The hooks were barbed; pulling it out tore the little wound even wider. It bled enough to draw a thin red line from the tip of her finger to the crease of her first knuckle, but that was all. ‘Just lick it,’ she thought in Meoraq’s terse, irritated voice, and did. It tasted bitter.
The fish hook was a swoop of metal lying in her palm, reflecting nothing but the lamp light. ‘Meoraq could kill a man with this stupid thing,’ she thought sourly. But what did that prove? Meoraq could kill a man with a beach ball.
Breath on her shoulder. She stiffened, but didn’t turn around. She didn’t try to hide the hook either, knowing it had already been seen. She simply picked up a needle and started tying it onto the net.