His childhood was much the same as theirs: stories and games, hard work and long hours. He did notice that these young ones were better fed than he had been, but it had been a good year for Ard, The slaves ate well when there was plenty. Piju imagined that the slaves would be the first to go hungry when the food supply went bad. Not that the children of Leest had gained any food with their freedom. They went hungry almost every winter.
The biggest problem in Ard wasn’t the food but the lack of adult men. Every man in the barracks was taking care of children that weren’t his own. Young men who were not as old as Piju were acting as fathers for children who were nearly men themselves. Not a man in the barracks was over seventeen. During the riots four years ago, they had culled every adult male.
The Ruad owners had long ago decided that they had a right to have sex with their property, whether the woman was an appropriate match, married to some other slave, or a child of twelve. Problems between owners and slaves had always gone on, especially between women and men, but the Bolg were allowed to protest, and the Ruad nobles had allowed claims to go through.
Nobles did not own slaves, because they were well provided with Ruad servants. Piju thought that it was likely that the Ruad servants had problems with the wealth and privilege of their nobles, but that information had never trickled down to the slave quarters. Mistress Wing said that the king’s justice was fairly reasonable―at least it had been once. The Bolg didn’t care for the sex trade at all, but a stack of coins and a public shaming for the owners had been sufficient to keep them from taking up arms about it.
Something had happened, politics of some sort, and the nobles had been required to approve the practice. The women in the courtyard had said that most of the nobles still hadn’t really approved, but laws were changed. The practice was now considered legal with one’s own property. Once the nobles had declined to hear the Bolg cases, the riots had begun. The trouble must have fixed the politics, because these days the practice was again outlawed, but the Bolg men―anyone over twelve years of age at the time―had been killed, being considered too dangerous to live.
The Ruad considered an unarmed and untrained Bolg a danger? Piju was disgusted at their cowardice.
Well, not all of the Ruad were cowards; but their philosophers were a bunch of liars and thieves, and those were the ones gifted with slaves by their king.
The door stood wide open, but the boy knocked on the wood to get Piju’s attention.
“Piju! Glad you’re all right,” he said, gasping for air.
Piju recognized him as one of the boys who served at the Judge’s Library. He was called Samu Halfdan, and Piju thought that he belonged to one of Mistress Brea’s priests. He hadn’t met his mother, so he had no idea if she was Daen or Bolg. Besides his close-cut curly black hair, the boy looked exactly like a smaller version of the warrior priest who was called Sam, whose hair was long, straight, and brown.
“Samu,” asked Piju, “are you all right?”
The boy had run as far as he could and was completely exhausted. Piju watched as he wiped his forehead with the green edge of his eight-part cloak. His clothes under it were a pretty simple brown tunic and breeches, well patched and hemmed; the clothes were clearly hand-me-downs from someone much larger.
“I can’t find Waylaid, and I think he was run out of town.”
“Run out of town?” Piju was worried; had he stirred up something today? “Was there a fight?”
“No, I don’t think so, but I don’t know, maybe.”
Samu had tried to put his confusion into words, but in his gasps the sentence came out as three words. The “no” was understandable, and the sense of the words was there. But he couldn’t keep his mouth moving as fast as his thoughts, especially with breathing getting in the way.
“The Bolg way to say that is this,” Piju said. He raised his left shoulder and cocked his head to the side. “Use that instead, Mistress Brea has seen it enough. She calls it ‘The Bolg Shrug.’“
The boy took a couple of deep breaths, holding on to the doorframe.
“Berin―you know, Halfhand, the head soldier. He said that Waylaid had left town in a chariot with…uh,” he panted heavily. “He said somebody was with him, but I don’t remember who.” His voice was rough from running, and he couldn’t catch his breath. “He had a whole crowd chasing him. I think he got away.”
Samu sat down heavily, the children spread around him. They were amazed to see a stranger. None of these children had left the slave barracks since their births.
“I thought the crowd would go after you next, and I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
Thinking about Waylaid, Piju copied one of his master’s gestures, the raised hand, palm inward, of question. The boy looked confused.
“It’s a symbol for a question.” Piju said. He looked at the boy pointedly.
“How’d I find you? Oh, the guard at the gate said you went in here. It isn’t that big in here, and you guys are making a lot of noise.”
Piju laughed again, taking the time to let Samu breathe.
“No, young Daen, my question is, ‘Why are you here?’”
“Because I was looking for you…” The boy looked confused for a moment, “Oh, and I had to give you a message, or actually Waylaid. Um… I don’t remember it now, are you going to tell the Mistress?”
Piju flopped back down on the floor, covering his eyes with his arms. People didn’t ask him to be smart. People asked him to hunt, which he did very well. He wasn’t particularly smart or stupid, but basically he wasn’t thoughtful. Now was one of those rare times when he would have to think. Normally, when something like this happened, Waylaid would cuff him upside the head and say, “Think, boy.” He missed it, right now.
“You had a message for Waylaid about something?”
“Uh-huh” the boy agreed. One of the children dipped Sammy a cup of water from the barrel and brought it over; he slurped it down greedily. “Thank you.”
Piju snorted; this was fun to watch.
“Is there any food?” Samu asked.
Piju thought that the boy was hungry with good reason, but they had gone through all the biscuits in the house.
The courtyard exploded in shrieks and yelling as one of the older boys ran in from the street with a handful of hen’s eggs. They were tiny things, no bigger than your thumb, but they were necessary for some of the things the women in the courtyard wanted to cook. The courtyard wasn’t directly outside of Roe’s front door, which was still wide open. But the older boys were running in circles, chasing the girls for some reason, and their play took them all the way around the single women’s quarters and past Roe’s door. The play of the children in the barracks was pretty much just the same as anywhere else.
The courtyard also fronted the big communal oven. The big stone building had caused all the fear and near riots last spring, but now the ghost was an accepted, and thankfully unseen, part of life. Prepping for the feast day, one of the older ladies was mixing dough with the young girls. The older boys had been tasked with finding milk and eggs. Piju would have helped them, but slave children gathering and stealing eggs was normal. A wild Bolg in a Ruad garden might have raised some problems.
They were working on breeding up the hen population in the slave quarters, so they had to hunt eggs elsewhere. The Burning Ghost had killed all their birds, and it was a big step to start from scratch all over again. The women had asked Piju to help. He had decided to entertain the youngest ones until lunch, to give the older ones time to do the work.
Piju refocused on the problem at hand and decided that he’d have to track the message down himself. He didn’t want to be angry with the boy. He just needed training and some discipline. He thought that he himself had been better when he was that age, but it was hard to measure yourself.
“You have no idea why they wanted Waylaid?”
“No, sir.” The boy was worried that he was in deep trouble; chances were that he was.
He m
ight as well start at the top.
“Who gave you the message? Oren?” Piju asked.
“No, it was the lady, uh, Mistress Brea.”
“Good.” Mistress Brea would be at the Library, where he could get some lunch as well. That would likely beat biscuits, at least until Roe was cooking them. Today was a feast day for this moon; he could try to drop by her owner’s house. She would be cooking up a storm and might take mercy on a starving man showing up at her doorstep.
Piju decided that he might as well test the boy.
“Now, where would I find Mistress Brea?” He knew the answer was the Library, but he was pleasantly surprised.
“Oh, OOH,” the boy bounced excitedly, “on the east side of the Palace Courtyard, she went to meet with the King!”
Piju grinned, thinking that that question had been lucky. The solution hadn’t actually required much thinking, just getting the boy to do his job.
“She wanted Waylaid to meet her there?” he prodded.
“Yeah.” The boy nodded then remembered that he was in trouble and corrected himself. “I mean. Yes, sir!” He paused a moment. “Oh, and you can bring a guard and chariot if you want to.”
Piju looked confused.
“Well, she said a bunch of stuff I can’t remember but told me to tell Waylaid he could take the chariot and a guard.”
Piju was a bit disgusted, but there was no way he was walking past the Palace to get to the Library to get the chariot, to drive it back.
“Did she need me at all,” he asked, “or just a chariot?”
“I think she said ‘Waylaid should bring his apprentice.’ Which is you, right?”
“Yes,” Piju agreed, “that is me.”
He thought about this for awhile; he would rather not go to the palace. There were guards there that would rather kill him than talk to him. Supposedly, the Bolg and the Ruad were at peace, but many of the king’s warriors didn’t seem to know it.
“I’ll get up there and see what she needs. If she wants me to run for the chariot, I’ll do it after I talk to her.” This would be a weird waste of time, except for the part about Waylaid getting run out of town.
“What happened with Waylaid?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Nobody told me what happened, just that he left. There was a bunch of angry people looking for him, but they didn’t want to talk to me.”
Piju understood that; nobody spoke to a Daen if they didn’t have to, except another Daen.
“How old are you anyway?” Piju asked.
“Oh, I dunno,” the boy replied, suddenly cagey. “I think I’m like ten or something.”
“Are you one of Sam’s children?”
The boy made some non-committal noises.
“I’d better be going. Oren might have more work for me.”
“Wait, I have work for you,” Piju said.
The boy paused by the door; he had been set to scamper at the first chance.
“These boys need to learn the basics, maps and messages.” Piju rolled to his feet. “I’ve got work to do, but I expect you to give them the first half of your afternoon, ok?”
The boy looked at the children with a bit of a confused look on his face.
“I don’t know what to do.”
Piju gave him an encouraging grin as he wove his way between the boys toward the door.
“Yes, you do. Just teach them what you know. Make a game of it.”
He looked out into the courtyard at the women preparing pans.
“Oh, and it looks like I’ll be missing some kind of fry bread. I expect you won’t be missing it if you are helping with the small ones.” Piju could practically hear the boy’s mouth water from across the room.
Piju caught up his cloak and started to tie it around his waist.
“Want to trade for the day?”
Piju grasped the situation easily. The boy was just another Daen in that cloak. A Daen wasn’t stopped on the street by hostile crowds, because it wasn’t safe to anger a Daen. If Piju wore that cloak, it would be a lot safer for him to get through the guards at the palace gates. But if Piju wore the cloak, Samu wouldn’t be an anonymous Daen; he might resemble a Bolg slave.
“Can you get back ok?” he asked.
The boy nodded vigorously. “I saw your trick of roof-running last moon. I go anywhere these days. Nobody can catch me.”
“Well good for you, teach that to those Bolg.” Piju grinned and took up the eight-part cloak. It was actually good colors for a woodsman, maybe better than plain stone gray. “Thanks, Samu. I appreciate it.”
Piju walked out into the courtyard to greet the ladies who were working. There were no ex-slaves, but these ladies had limited tasks set by their masters or the king, who allowed that they kept up the slave barracks and children―their livestock―in their “free” time. Most were women in their late twenties and early thirties, with a few genuinely older women, who had been enslaved early in their adulthood more than thirty years ago.
All these ladies had been given this small liberty after the riots, when their husbands had been killed. When the laws had been re-applied, the nobles had given some specific rebukes to their owners. Those owners still wouldn’t give up their slaves, but they couldn’t have them in their homes anymore. The laws against having sex with slaves had been considerably broadened, and owners were actually going to be held accountable in the Ruad courts.
Whatever pain and suffering had been caused, it was four years in the past. As different as their world was from the one Piju grew up in, the people here had the essential Bolg happiness. There was a kind of acceptance of reality one found among his people. You didn’t ask for explanations; you didn’t demand changes; you worked with the day you found.
Piju was dour and quiet for a Bolg, not like his Fomor master, but it was obvious when he compared it to Roe’s bountiful happiness. It was evidence of a soul sickness that he should have fixed. He wished there were a Bolg spirit healer near Ard. In this matter, he would be better off talking to a journeyman spirit talker like Lynneth back in Leest. Master Waylaid just wouldn’t understand.
The basic Bolg acceptance of the world made the riots nearly inexplicable, to Piju’s way of thinking, but since the riots had happened, you lived with the world they had made. He had not been here. Since he was a Bolg, and they were his people, he was sure he would have done exactly the same thing.
He crouched with the women before the copper pans and bowls. He was able to speak properly, the Bolg way of speaking, here and with Waylaid. These were the only folk in Ard to speak the true tongue.
“Is it well, Mistress Raven’s Wing?” He touched his face and presented the back of his hand as a gesture of respect.
Rather than touching it with her fingertips, which were covered in egg and flour, she smacked it away with the back of her hand. She growled at him, but there was no anger in it. Perhaps she was secretly pleased that there was a true Bolg, a wild Bolg, in the camp and that person a handsome and extremely polite young man.
“You left the young Daen with the children?”
“Yes, Mistress, I hope he teaches them to take messages and run the town.”
Her brow creased, and she returned to folding the dough.
“Whatever for?” she asked.
Piju leaned forward, keeping their conversation somewhat private, even though they were likely the only ones even within the slave barracks who spoke the true tongue.
“To learn to run, to learn to remember, to learn the town, then they will learn the woods.” His voice stayed pleasant though his words were angry. “I will not let another generation die here in these walls, mistress.”
“My boy died here,” she said. Her reply was flat, her face deadpan, and the words without inflection, but Piju felt that he saw the pain under them.
“I know, Mistress.” Her boy had been nearly thirty years of age, and a leader among the slaves.
They were both quiet for several moments. It made the quiet among the women a
ll the more prominent. The other women were obviously doing their best to overhear and perhaps they understood a few words.
Piju shook himself, preparing for a hard thing.
“I need to tend the oven,” he said.
The woman looked at him askance.
“This is sorcery, isn’t it?” she asked.
“No,” he thought about it, giving her question the respect of a full answer “No, Mistress. Waylaid says that if we keep with sacrificing hens and pigs, it is not sorcery. It is only sorcery when we command the spirits using the blood and death of a person.”
Piju thought to himself in his innermost thoughts that Waylaid would certainly know what made sorcery. Waylaid only had one braid these days, where once he had worn a dozen. His one promise, given to the Good Father he worshiped, was to give up sorcery.
Waylaid didn’t talk about his past, but Piju had been with him as he went to dozens of ancient Fomor sites. Waylaid knew far too much not to have performed the same rituals himself.
Piju really hadn’t learned much about blood magic and sorcery after four years as an apprentice, and he really didn’t know what he was supposed to know. What was he to become as a journeyman? Certainly not a spirit warrior. Waylaid was letting him work on hunting. Had he been at Leest he would have…not been allowed on boar hunts at his age. Waylaid had pushed him to pass tests the village would not have let him take. But Waylaid was no master hunter; Piju was an apprentice for something else.
Should I become a sorcerer and strike fear into the Ruad as Waylaid has done? Piju tried considering it, but there were obstacles he couldn’t surmount. Most important, he was a Bolg, not a Fomor. Fomor were sorcerers and Bolg were not.
Piju cleared his mind of the random thoughts and focused on Mistress Wing.
“We are keeping the Burning Ghost happy and well fed, and he will keep our oven,” he looked pointedly at the shiny copper bowl, “hot where we need it, and cool and smoky where we need it. It is simply satisfying an ancestor, as we did at Leest when our spirit talker had died.”
Piju had learned from Waylaid that Leest’s old spirit talker, Imregor, had been skilled at magic. He had used his own death to bind his spirit to the turtle shell that Waylaid still carried. That a spirit speaker had performed sorcery was frightening, even though it was with his last breath.
The Broken Man Page 13