Gritting his teeth, Topper turned and drew a wicked-looking knife. "This is as far as I'm running," he said through clenched teeth. "Aidan! Ches! Get Sophia and Molly the hell out of here, boys."
"Topper, no. Come with us." He looked up at the trees. They bent in an invisible wind, black against the stars.
"This is as good a place as any," Topper gasped. His white-tinged sideburns glistened in the night. "I just wanted to die free, boyo. Now, git."
Finally, Aidan nodded and pulled the others on. They were frantic now. Within a few minutes, Topper was lost in the mist behind them.
Aidan battled the agonizing sense that he was fleeing in a dream, that his legs were not his own, the feet pounding against the marshy soil those of a stranger.
Rising like a flock of ravens, a shriek of mortal agony shivered the woods behind them.
"Gawd!" Molly said, face gone the color of whey.
"Move!" Aidan screamed. They were stampeding now, running in blind panic through a maze of branches and mushy earth.
His arms and legs were burning. Once he almost fell, and Sophia helped him to his feet. Twice he helped her. With a cry of despair, Molly plunged into a muck-hole disguised by standing water. For a moment Aidan was torn. Wanting nothing but to continue his blind, seemingly hopeless quest for freedom.
Ches pulled at her arms, but the mud seemed to suck at her lower body. "Help us!" Ches said harshly, and Aidan came to him, gripped one of Molly's plump arms and set his heels, pulling with the power of his legs.
Molly came free, but there was no time to celebrate. No time for anything.
Aidan turned to face a forest filled with eyes.
Emerging from the shadows were eight creatures half the size of men, shagged with coarse black hair. Their faces were long and humanoid, shiny skin beneath tufts of beard.
Gruagach. Hairy demons.
Aidan had never seen them before. He doubted that any slave had, save Brian, who must have glimpsed them in the dark before his eye had been torn from his head.
Thotbs. Now he knew what had lurked in the darkness of the slave pens of his youth, what monsters had captured Brian, what secret lurked in the huts by Lake A'zam.
Babatunde had once spoken, obliquely, of apes specially bred at the command of the Pharaohs, selected for intelligence, ferocity, and hunting ability. Baboons he had called them. Hamadryad baboons, used as pets and palace guards.
Thoths.
"Mere" animals they might be, but Aidan felt the supernatural terror of his fathers, knew that these creatures were as deadly and unknowable as any swamp sprite.
Aidan felt his stomach crimp, squirting bile into his throat, but he swallowed and pushed Sophia behind him.
The escapees were encircled. The thoths watched them, still as statues now that their prey was trapped. One of them raised thin, fleshy lips back from its yellowed teeth and barked sharply. Suddenly all of them were barking and howling, although they still had not moved. Signaling?
Of course. The slave catchers would come now, and the thoths would not move to injure their prey, unless . . .
Ches drew his knife and screamed, slashing at the thoths. "Well, come on, then!"
"No!" Molly screamed.
Three of the lethal animals leaped. Ches impaled one before the others struck him and bore him to the ground, his screams lost in the snarls.
Molly started toward them, and Aidan grabbed her, threw her to her knees. "Help him!" she sobbed.
"They'll kill us all," he said coldly.
Molly writhed in his grip, cursing. "Ye cowardly bastard. Ye . . . Ches!" She said more, but it was unintelligible, and by the time she found words again, Ches was long past hearing.
Muzzles and claws stained red, the thoths scampered back away from Ches’s corpse, and once again ringed the captives.
Mahon was crying now. One of the thoths looked at the child curiously, its tapered muzzle seeming almost to smile. It was perhaps the most horrible thing Aidan had ever seen.
While Molly sobbed on her knees and Sophia tried desperately to quiet her son, the Danakil arrived. There were four of the slave catchers: low-class black men in heavily patched work clothes, men with wiry sparse beards and cruel eyes, men barely more cultured than the baboons they trained.
"Hope ye enjoyed yer little stroll." Their leader grinned.
Then, leveling their breech-loaders, they motioned the survivors onto dry land, and back into the arms of captivity.
Chapter Forty-seven
In all the world, nothing existed but pain and grief. The Danakil had dragged him the last half mile back to Ghost Town, and if the road had not been slick with mist and dew, the skin would have been flayed from his body. As it was, his shoulders felt dislocated, his wrists raw. At last Aidan was lost in a world of bruised flesh, unable even to scream Sophia's name.
He must have blacked out at one point. When consciousness returned, he was lying facedown in the dirt before Ghost Town's gates, and most of the villagers had gathered to witness his punishment.
Slowly, as if fearing that it might come off if he moved, Aidan craned his head to see Sophia. She and Molly sat in a buckboard wagon under Danakil guard, feet tightly roped. Molly looked almost drunken, her plump pretty face doughy with shock. Sophia clutched Mahon to her bosom fiercely. Her face was red and strained. "Stop it!" she screamed. "You're killing him!"
The slave catcher spit, grinning through a mouthful of broken yellow teeth. "He's strong. He'll cope."
Breathing dirt muddied by his own blood, Aidan watched as Malik rode up, took Sophia from the slave catcher's wagon, and threw her onto his own so roughly that he feared for Mahon's safety. Aidan struggled, to no effect. He managed to get out one protracted, tortured word. "No!"
Malik's smile was deadly. "Then stop me," he said. The sword master drew a knife from his belt. With a contemptuous gesture he threw it to the ground beside the bruised and exhausted Irishman.
Aidan's eyes burned in the silence. Watching to make certain that this wasn't a trick, with shaking hands Aidan found the blade, and sawed through the cords binding his wrists. All fear, even fatigue and pain, were burned away by the intensity of his hatred. He was an animal now, as much of a beast as the thoths that had destroyed their dreams of freedom.
Malik smiled at him coldly. Aidan seemed to quail before that gaze, losing his nerve and turning away—then leaped at Malik, slashing. Malik barely seemed to move, barely even flinched, but in one instant Aidan was armed and lethal, and in the next he was disarmed, hurtling though the air, somersaulting and smashing into the ground as if he were a thing without bones.
Malik looked down at his robe, and seemed mildly surprised to find it nicked. "He is fast."
He flicked his hand at the slave catchers, who responded by shackling Aidan to the shantytown's whipping post. Malik grabbed Sophia's face. "Watch," he said.
The first stroke split Aidan's shirt and striped his skin. The second spilled blood, and forced a grunt from between his clinched teeth. The third made him scream. A fourth. A fifth. He sagged, unconscious again.
And still the whipping continued.
"Stop it!" Sophia sobbed. "Please stop it! I'll do anything."
Malik seemed interested. "What do you offer me that I do not already own?" he asked.
She trembled, fighting to think of an answer that he might accept. "My word," she said. "I swear not to run away."
Malik's heavy lips curled in a dark smile, unimpressed. "Oh?" he asked.
"As long as you are alive."
There was a clear and murderous threat in her words, but for some reason, that intent seemed to please him more than her promised subservience. "Good," he said to her, nodding. "Good. Enough!" he called, and the overseer ceased the rain of blows.
As Aidan hung limply in the stocks, the wagon bearing Sophia and his only child rolled toward the gate. Aidan's world dwindled and swelled with his heartbeats, thoughts flashing like fish in a stream. He managed to clear his head long e
nough to see the wagon disappear through the gate with Malik. Her face was a tiny, pale oval staring back at him. He could not see her eyes, but knew they wept, as did his own.
That night, long after the crowd dispersed, Kai's father came to him in his room, where he had taken refuge in books and scrolls. Kai had read a hundred pages that evening, and barely remembered a single fact. If ever he had felt ashamed to be a Bilalian, this was the moment.
"Come," Abu Ali said. "It is time."
Aidan still hung in the stocks. He watched their approach balefully. His face was battered and scraped, but thankfully not deformed.
Oko Iskahan had set up a little fire near the stocks, over which he heated coffee in a little ceramic pot.
Abu Ali glanced at Aidan, who lowered his eyes. "Release him," Abu Ali said. "He has had enough."
Oko nodded agreement, and cut Aidan down. The tortured man sagged to the ground in physical surrender. Blood was caked beneath his nose and along a gashed cheek. His right eye was swollen shut, his shirt hung in bloody rags, his back was sliced in a dozen places. He managed to push himself up onto hands and knees. He looked at Kai, and their eyes locked for a long moment.
Kai looked away, ashamed. Oko called out to Ghost Town, and as if they had waited the call eagerly, three servants emerged and helped Aidan back into the compound.
This man was my friend, Kai thought. And now it has come to this. But I did not make this world. Al-Alim, the All-Knowing, did that. He cast Aidan's people in such a station.
He did it.
Not I.
Aidan lay in his cold bed in his emptied house, screaming and cursing as the Rune Woman salved his wounds. He writhed every time Moira touched the mass of shredded flesh that was his back. Pain exploded behind his eyes like logs bursting on a campfire.
"Ye scream," the old woman told him. "Let it out. Twill quicken the healing."
She busied herself about him for another hour, salving and powdering. Her hands were sure—this was work she had done many, many times before.
At last the pain began to recede, some mixture of exhaustion and poultice drawing Aidan toward sleep. Just before he reached its shore, Moira's hands withdrew. Groggily, Aidan turned to see a man standing in the doorway. It took him a moment to put a name to the shape: Brian.
Brian nodded to Moira, and she left the house. When the door closed behind her, Brian knelt beside the bed. "I'm sorry, Aidan," he said. "Sorry it took this to teach ye that ye have no friends in the big house. That the blacks have no more soul than the rocks in the field. Sorry that it took this to make ye ready . . ."
He leaned closer and began to whisper. Aidan's left eye blinked once, shedding blood onto his pillow, and his hand reached out and gripped Brian's as they continued to talk into the night . . .
Chapter Forty-eight
The sun was high overhead by the time Malik's horses and wagons reached his castle. On the wagon's front seat, Sophia clutched her child, watching each mile pass with increasing dread. Once, she had watched the fields and forested regions between Abu Ali and Malik's estate pass with joy, at Kai's side, knowing that she would spend a few pleasant hours watching her young master practice, and that if he had done well there would be good love that night. If he had done poorly, it would be up to her to ease his mind, soothe him, take him out of himself. She had imagined herself a vital part of his life . . . then.
But in allowing herself to fall in love with Aidan, she had left whatever small shadow of protection Kai had afforded her. Her illusions of freedom, of importance, were crashing down around her. Her legs felt weaker than they had since landing in Djibouti harbor.
She looked about herself wildly, trying to take in as much of the surroundings as possible. Somewhere, there was something that she would be able to use to her advantage. There had to be hope. There had to be. Otherwise, there would be nothing for her but death.
Malik, riding ahead of the wagon, dismounted a bit stiffly. Old wounds had leached away some of his almost miraculous fluidity, until he seemed no more than an ordinary, superbly fit man in his fifties. Ordinary, that is, until he picked up his sword. In combat he seemed to transcend the flesh, becoming in those moments something both greater and more primal than a common man.
Fatima waited beneath the castle's arched main doorway, her belly distended with child, her dark face outwardly impassive. Even at this distance, Sophia could tell that Fatima's emotions were boiling.
"So," Fatima said. "These are your winnings?"
Malik kissed her. "Fatima, my heart. You shouldn't be out of bed." His hand crept down to her belly, rested there. "It is nearly time. I merely bring you a wet nurse, and twenty gold Alexanders with which you may do as you wish." He extracted his purse and emptied it in her hand. Fatima tried to maintain an angry visage, then laughed and slipped her arm around his waist.
Malik gestured to his overseer, a big half-caste with sullen eyes and heavy, furred arms. "See this slave to her quarters."
Malik and Fatima returned to the house together, Malik's arm around her shoulder. As the overseer supervised the unloading of a few meager possessions, a straw-haired servant girl helped Sophia down. Sophia trembled, moved like an old woman, her dark hair falling across her face.
"My named is Tuti," said the girl with a nod. "You can come with me."
Always before, Sophia had entered through the front door, even if only as Kai's . . . slave. Slave. There, she had said it. She was a slave. This was her prison. She had been the worst kind of fool.
She saw everything through new eyes now, every digit. In comparison to Abu Ali's mansion, Malik's castle was spare indeed, inelegant and utilitarian if still fabulously rich. The wall hangings and tapestries spoke of war and conquest, with only infrequent hints of Fatima's personality.
Tuti led Sophia to a tiny room in the back of the house, on the west wing. A bed, a wardrobe, a window onto a green field. "This will be your room. We'll have a crib built, if you like."
"Yes, please," Sophia said. "Tuti?"
The smaller woman turned. "Yes?"
"Why does Malik want me here?"
Behind the veil, Tuti's eyes roamed over Sophia's lush body, and her lips twisted in a cold smile. Then she left.
Sophia hugged her baby and sobbed.
A minor sheik's gift of camels having finally overcrowded the animal quarters, Abu Ali declared the need for a new barn.
Kai and Ali supervised in its construction, and the work helped to distract Kai's mind from the feelings of guilt he experienced whenever he remembered that Sophia no longer lived with her husband.
As he had for the last week, Aidan worked far longer than anyone else on the crew. He carried more board, climbed the ladders to the most dangerous beams, hammered until his hands were covered with blisters, and then continued until they broke and were slicked with blood.
Kai's gaze met his for a moment. There was barely a flicker of recognition. His old friend turned away.
Kai's father rode up with Lamiya. "Come," said the Empress's niece. "Ride with us."
Ali slapped his brother on his back, and both brothers mounted up and followed. From the corner of his eye, Kai saw Aidan turn and glare.
The four of them rode up to the top of a rise, from which they could see the entire estate. Fields, rolling hills, Moorish house, slave quarters. Slaves working hard at their measured labors, timing their efforts to their work songs.
Distantly, he could see a steamboat chugging along Lake A’zam. Abu Ali seemed deeply satisfied. "This is my land," he said. "Mine, and my father's before me. When I die, it will be yours, Ali, yours and your brother's." He drew Lion's Blood and slashed the air with it. Then he passed it to Ali.
Kai's brother weighed it reverently.
"Does it fit your hand? Does it sing to you?"
"It sings, Father." Ali held it aloft, balancing it in his hand as if trying it on for size. And then handed it back to his father.
"This," said his father, "this is the world we have
made. There is luxury and comfort, but it can only be maintained by strength and wisdom. We have dangerous days ahead, and both will be called for. Can the two of you work together, now and always, for the continuance of what your grandfather and I built?"
"Of course, Father."
"Yes, Father," Kai said.
"Good. Good." Abu Ali let a touch of weariness seep into his voice, and for a moment they saw the weight of his years. Kai wondered if he himself would carry them as well, when such a burden became his own. "It is hard for a warrior to reach that point where his body grows a bit heavier every day, when he knows he is closer to the end than the beginning. But I am prepared to stand before Allah and give account of my life, and that is all a man might do."
"You have many more years before that day, Father," Kai said.
"Insh'Allah. But no man knows the day of his own reckoning. I wish to avoid the taxes, to divide my lands and give one part to you and Lamiya, Ali, as your wedding present.'
Lamiya lay one slender hand on Abu Ali's arm. "Father—that is too kind."
"No, it is only right. Your aunt needs Bilalistan's resources, and Ali will have my seat in the Senate only if he also holds my land. He must speak for me in the conflict to come."
Her face grew concerned. "And it will come, won't it, Father?"
Abu Ali seemed heavy and tired, older than Kai had ever seen him. "As the night follows the day. Bilalistan cannot forever remain an Egyptian colony. We must be free. Too many of us have blood ties to Abyssinia. If there is war between those two great powers, we will be torn."
"Egypt will not free us without blood and fire," said Ali.
Their father nodded. "All the crows in the sky could not pick the bones of the men who will fight that war. It comes," he said. "It comes."
A cloud seemed to have slid across the sun. Kai felt a chill that no cloak could relieve.
The Wakil seemed lost in himself for a time, and then roused himself to continue. "But I digress. Kai, on your marriage to Nandi, one-third of the estate will be yours. I will keep only a small piece of land sufficient for my house and servants."
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