by Victor Poole
THE SLAVE FROM THE EAST
Victor Poole
Copyright © 2017 by Victor Poole
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
1 The White City of Slavithe
2 The Caravan
3 Gevad and the Little House
4 Philas's Fondness
5 Ajalia Procures a Cheap Room
6 The Unpacking Begins
7 Philas Begins the Cure
8 The Woman Who Steals
9 Ajalia Makes a Deal
10 Gevad Against a Wall
11 Ajalia Finds a Useful Face
12 Ajalia Sells Things
13 Lim Loses His Hair
14 Delmar
15 The Hole in the Wall
16 Gevad Gives In
17 Philas Takes Charge
18 The Feast of Beautiful Things
19 Ajalia's Foreboding
20 Ajalia Meets the Thief Lord
21 Delmar Closes In
22 The Poison Tree Bark
23 Magic
THE WHITE CITY OF SLAVITHE
The caravan stretched down the road like a brilliantly colored snake. The horses and asses were burdened heavily with bags and bundles of goods, and the slaves that walked beside them were covered with dust from the road. The road was a thick width of white dirt here; it stretched behind the caravan like a narrow ribbon, as far as the eye could see. It curved and looped over hills and into the far distance.
The caravan was coming from the East, and as Ajalia looked behind her at the wisp of road, she saw that the slaves were coming along well. They had been soft when the caravan had set out, but they were hardened now, and did not complain. The horse Ajalia rode was gray and white with dust; he snorted frequently to clear his nose. Ajalia was about two-thirds of the way down the caravan, and the dust cloud kicked up by the feet of the many animals and slaves filled the air. She did not envy Philas, who was bringing up the end of the line.
Lim was at the front of the line, riding the only great yurl in the caravan. Ajalia could see the giant haunches of the blue yurl roll up and down as it strode over the road, and she could see Lim's back, clenched and tense as he clung to the enormous beast. The yurl filled the whole width of the road, and kicked up the biggest clouds of dust of all the creatures that walked the desert path.
Ajalia's horse was fresh and eager to run. He jiggled the wooden bit, and snorted again. A sheen of horse phlegm spattered over Ajalia's face and clothes. She nudged the dirty horse, and gave him his head. He exploded away from the caravan, and she carved him away from the others, into the harsh desert that lay alongside the graveled road.
The white road made a sharp contrast to the color of the coarse sand; the desert was a bronzed orange, filled with dips and moderate dunes. Ajalia had heard that the founder of Slavithe, long ago, had commanded the marble rock that lay far beneath the sands to rise up, and then he had crushed the marble in one hand, and drizzled it over the winding sands in a narrow line that led directly to the oasis hub in the center of Leopath. She supposed that he had flown over the desert to accomplish this feat. She had also heard that Slavithe was full of living stone, and that fairies dusted the heads of Slavithe children with magic, so that they would grow up to be charming and wealthy.
She rode her horse through the thick sand; his body heaved and thrust through the difficult footing. She guided him to a length of pale rock that lay submerged in the sands, and he lurched onto the rock and shook himself.
Ajalia turned the horse, and her eyes flicked carefully down the line of the caravan. She looked over the familiar lumps and burdens that were strapped to the harnesses of the beasts, and made an adept enumeration of each item. She was looking for gaps and strange shapes in the burdens, or for signs of a new texture beneath the folds. She had already caught two slaves pulling watered silks from a pack last night. She knew they hoped to conceal the silk until they reached Slavithe, so that they could sell it and keep the money for themselves.
The slaves had not been with Ajalia before this caravan; they had not learned that she always noticed. She didn't mind the challenge. Philas and Lim she had known before this trip, but at home in the East, Lim had not been her superior.
Ajalia turned the horse back to the front of the caravan, and saw for the first time the light from the white walls of Slavithe. The white marble was blinding; it reflected the sun in an explosion of horrible burning against her eyes. The city looked small from here; it extended only a little over the horizon, and the sliver of shimmering light lay in a riotous bed of green.
Ajalia found it incredible that there could be such a vibrant shade of green in such a harsh climate, but the foliage was there. The white light was glimmering, like the slit of an almost-closed eye in a field of impossible green. The green was dark and deep against the orange desert. Ajalia urged her horse forward; she knew, or guessed, that the slaves would notice she was not watching, and would take the opportunity to help themselves, but she wanted to examine the city for herself.
She rode through the deep sand, her horse rollicking wildly up and down as he fought the thick dunes, until she came level with Lim. She glanced back; she had been right. She could see a tiny flutter of activity at the very center of the caravan. Philas could see some way up the train, but he did not care about Ajalia's work, and Lim was useless when it came to policing slaves.
"I'm going to take a look," she called up to Lim over the thick breathing of her horse. She spoke in the language of the East, and the words filled her mouth like oiled serpents. Lim glanced down at her, and she saw his eyes flicker briefly to the caravan. He nodded, and she urged her horse onto the white road.
His hooves caught onto the white surface with a sound like crunching glass, and he surged past the blue yurl in a whirlwind of dust and hair. The great yurl raised its head slightly, and roared. Ajalia heard Lim exclaiming, and she could see in her mind's eye the way he would clutch forward at the yurl's heavy shoulders.
The yurl was the heaviest-laden beast in the caravan; she carried more than half of the caravan's goods in the packs and bundles that clustered over her harness like bursting grapes. Lim was settled tightly in among the packs just over the yurl's shoulders. The yurl looked nothing like a horse; she was twenty feet tall to her head, and had two ivory horns that spread and branched into many curls over her eyes. She had the silky fur of her breed, and her tail had been braided and bound up into a wrapped bundle to protect the fine hairs from the dust of travel.
Ajalia had not received any particular instructions regarding the yurl; she guessed it had been brought along more to impress than to bargain with. Lim would have been told what was to be done with the enormous beast. Ajalia did not know if the Slavithe would have a way of caring for the great beast. She knew that yurls were not found this far south.
The road ahead was clear and creamy-white. Ajalia let her horse gallop forward. He was worn from the sludge through the sand, and his pace was more reasonable now. She looked forward to the slit of gleaming ivory in a bed of harsh green. She couldn't look full on at the city. It was bright, and it was demonic in the sun. She wondered if the people there got headaches from the glare.
Ajalia and her horse came over a rise, and a wide, fertile valley came into view. As she descended into the valley, the road widened, and the city lost much of its glare. She could see more of the walls of the city now. The hill had been cutting off from view most of the bottom of the walls and city, and Ajalia saw now that the walls were enormously high, and incredibly smooth. She did not know how any wall could have been made so tall and so seamlessly. If she
had not known that the magic of Slavithe was a myth, she would have guessed that the legends were true, and that the old ancients of Slavithe had shaped the marble with a force that surpassed human ability.
The valley was broad, and deep, and rich. The desert ended very suddenly, and fields of grain and strange shading trees encompassed Ajalia on either side. She slowed her horse to a trot, and he huffed loudly. She had chosen her horse at the beginning of the caravan's journey, after Lim and Philas had taken their mounts. Her gelding was small, and he was ugly, but she had seen that his quarters were coupled smoothly into a thick torso, and that his legs were clean and straight. Philas had not said anything to Ajalia, but she had seen his mouth grow gradually thinner and tighter as his own elegant mount had fussed and shied away from the work of the journey.
Lim had chosen the yurl, and he had not walked easily since the journey had begun. To his credit, he did not complain, but Ajalia suspected that he would never ride a yurl again. She looked from side to side, taking in the strange plants that surrounded her. Next to the road were long yellow hedges that were shaped like flopping clouds. Long trails of yellow leaves lay all along the edges of the road. Ajalia could see tracks and wheel marks indented in the bright yellow leaves. A faint odor of crushed flowers filled the air above the leaves.
The caravan had not met any parties travelling out from Slavithe on the road. Ajalia's master had postulated that trade would explode soon here, and he wanted to be in the first wave of foreign merchants to arrive and strike deals with the exotic Slavithe.
Clouds of trees blocked out the sky. The changes in the plant life were sudden and extreme. She could no longer see the white city walls in the distance. She looked back, and saw the yellow hedges. Her horse had trotted down into another depression, and the trees nearly met above her head. They were the strangest trees she had ever seen. Their bark was smooth, and it glistened like the rind of a fruit. The leaves were clusters of spikes that tore up and down the edges of the branches, which spun in spirals rather than branching out in straight lines like the trees she had known in the East. The trees were a vivid purple, and hints of a lush fuchsia burned at the tips of the leaves. The sky appeared almost colorless against the vivid branches of the purple trees. Ajalia peered into the shadows cast by the trees, and saw a strange white creature that looked like some kind of deer. The dainty animal leapt away at the noise her horse made on the road, and she saw a flash of brilliant red and orange under the creature's tail.
Ajalia urged her horse forward, and the road slithered up a long series of gradual hills. A rainbow of plants passed her in a blur, but she was impatient to see the city. She watched the smooth ivory walls climb back into view, and as she came near the city she saw that the walls were impossibly high. She felt tiny as her horse galloped nearer. When she was within fifty yards of the walls, she halted her horse and looked up. The walls kissed the sky. From farther away, high on the hilltop that crested above Slavithe, she had seen the vague shapes of buildings within the city, but now she could see nothing but tall, white, impassible wall. The upper third of the wall was what had cast such an unbearable glare; she saw now that the bottom two-thirds were in shadow, and they cast a deep shadow out into the landscape.
Ajalia spun her horse and looked about her. Just against the wall, for a hundred feet or more, was a rim of pale desert that resembled but little the orange wasteland that had stretched for so far a distance beyond this wide valley. The sand here was soft, and fine, and yellow, and it swept up against the white wall in nebulous eddies.
Ajalia looked back the way that she had come. A riot of colorful plant life met her eyes. The change from desert to fruitful paradise was sudden and complete. She did not know how it was possible. It was as though a tropical retreat had been dropped out of the sky onto the barren desert.
The city walls were long and wide; the creamy expanse vanished on each side into a wall of enclosing green and blue and lavender. Ajalia had never seen plants like these. In the East, the plants were more yellow than green, and red was the farthest any verdant life got to vibrant expression. Here, there seemed to be no limit to the color and variety of ferns and grasses, bushes and trees. The lushness of the world around her made her eyes ache, and she spurred her horse back into the road.
She met the caravan just at the top of the first hill, and she looked without thinking at Lim's face as he took his first look at this land they had come to conquer. His eyes betrayed his thoughts; she saw him lick his lips, and she smiled. She rode back along the line, and scanned the slaves as she rode. Two of them she knew had stolen before, and three more were looking very fixedly forward. There were twenty-two slaves in the caravan, besides Lim and Philas. Philas was too well-paid to steal, and Lim was not in Ajalia's charge. She thought it unlikely that he would steal from the caravan he was in lead of, although she wouldn't put it past him to take a cut of the proceeds of sales and trades before they returned to the East. She knew that Lim had ambition, and that made him careless of his reputation among the slaves. She slipped off her horse and threw the reins to a boy.
"Walk, don't ride," she said in the Eastern tongue. The boy clutched at the leather reins, his eyes fixed on the greenery that was now in view. His mouth was wide open.
Ajalia walked down the caravan until she caught sight of Philas. He couldn't see anything of Slavithe yet; the clouds of dust and the line of sweating bodies blocked his view. His eyes were fixed blankly forward, and he had pulled his collar up around his mouth and nose. Ajalia counted seven bodies forward from Philas. He looked asleep, but he had a knack for watching bundles and thinking of nothing at the same time, and sometime in the first two months of the journey his bevy of slaves had stopped trying to steal.
The real danger of theft was in the next hour, as the caravan neared the gates of the white city. Ajalia had responsibility for the fourteen slaves at the middle and front of the line. There were fifteen slaves, but she had won over the boy, and he had not learned to steal silk yet.
She started at the back of the line, where Philas's seven ended and her fourteen began. It was not difficult to find the slaves who were hiding something. She found seven. She emptied their clothes of goods, put the things back into the bundles, and sent the slaves, one by one, to the back of the line, to walk behind Philas. The spare beasts would stay on the road for now, following the lumbering yurl and the other horses, and the slaves had nowhere to run. The lands to the East were six months behind them, and the span of desert was a harsh place to cross alone and on foot.
Ajalia remounted her horse, and resumed her prowl. She loved this moment, loved being on the verge of entering trade in a new city. She loved the tension in the caravan, and the flickering eyes of the slaves. She loved the bickering, and the wide gazes at new things. She loved everything about it. Most of all she loved watching the merchants in the new city eye the gorgeous robes and ornaments of the Eastern slaves. She loved putting over the appearance of wealth. She loved to bargain.
The caravan reached the white walls of the city without further incident. Lim called the slaves to a halt outside the wide gates, and held a brief council with Philas. The slaves were arranged, and the horses swiped with damp cloths. The leather was burnished, and the bundles draped beautifully over the back of the yurl. The yurl's tail was let down, and it grazed the ground with brilliant blue.
On the caravan's journey, the slaves had been arranged in an order where they were easiest to control, but now they were put into a line designed purely for visual effect. Ajalia turned her robes inside out, and shook the dust out of her hair. She would lead the procession into the city, followed by the male slaves and asses, then by the horses, led by the women and children, and followed last of all by Lim on the yurl. Philas would follow in the very back to watch after the yurl's tail. Yurl tails had been cut off by onlookers before, when a caravan came into a strange city. The hair was fine and of a brilliant color, and made a very fine cloth when woven.
Word had reac
hed Slavithe some hours ago that a caravan from the East was approaching the city, and ragged boys and old men had wandered out of the gates to gawk at the strangers. Ajalia ignored the onlookers as she applied the ceremonial paint of the Eastern trading chiefs. She knew perfectly well how she looked, and she did not need the stares of the children and the elderly to sooth her ego.
Ajalia finished before the others. She usually did finish first. She wiped the sweat and grime from her ugly little horse, and as she was detailing the saddle, Lim lumbered up behind her.
"You've got the other horse," he said.
"I like this one," she replied without turning.
"My caravan, my rules," he grunted.
"He moves well," she said.
"The other's nicer looking," he said.
"Fine," she said. "You tell Philas."
Lim grunted, and walked away. Ajalia finished what she was doing, and mounted her little horse. She knew Lim would not tell Philas to trade horses. Philas was paid more than Lim, and Lim knew it, and resented it.
When the caravan was ready, Ajalia turned her mount and rode him to the gates. The Eastern slaves had clustered to one side of the gates as they prepared, and had been in the shadow of the great wall, but now, as she rode into the place where the gates stood open to receive them, golden sunlight spilled down the white road, and splashed against the brilliant red and gold paint on Ajalia's face.
The Eastern traders were theatrical men; they presented an opulent show that impressed all other cities, and garnered them a reputation for almost unlimited wealth. Silks and satins were abundant in the East and rare everywhere else. Ajalia knew that men like her master held a tight corner on the fabric market; they had enormous stores of fabric in their houses in the East, and they clothed their traveling slaves like kings, but when they traded outside their own territories, they did so sparingly.
If the chiefs had shared what they had, the price for opulent fabrics would have tumbled, and any moderately successful man or his wife might have worn silk. As it was, the price stayed artificially high; all the land of Leopath believed in the myth of scarcity, and when the slaves appeared in black and orange silk robes, and wearing the shimmering gold paint of the Eastern trading firms, outsiders felt as though they were witnessing a sort of miracle of endless wealth.