The Slave from the East (The Eastern Slave Series Book 1)

by Victor Poole

  "It is a wise way to trade, honored one," Denai said. She could see his eyes slipping over her face, trying to dig under the paint and see what she was getting at. She could see the other traders craning their necks to hear what she was saying. She was trading on her five minutes of exotic status. She would be old news tomorrow, but today she was the Eastern chief, and she could trade on the emotions stirred by the parade that had just dazzled the city.

  "Can you tell me," Ajalia said slowly and clearly, her eyes still on the slaves, "which of your trading brothers has the finest horses in the city?"

  "My horses are very fine," another trader shouted. Denai blushed. She could see his jaw working.

  "I would tell you that mine are the best," he murmured quietly, "but it would not be the truth. My horses are not bad. But Alden's horses are the best."

  There was a general outcry when Denai said this. Many of the traders raised their voices, shouting their own names at Ajalia, and a rush of words crested over her face.

  "I thank you for this recommendation," Ajalia said. "I will not forget his name."

  She turned away from the traders, and began once again to direct the slaves.

  The traders stirred where she had left them, like wolves denied a hunt. The men were restless; they had whetted their tongues on a deal, and now they wanted closure. They wanted to know who would get the business, and they wanted to examine the horses in the caravan. Ajalia kept her animals crowded into a tight knot; the slaves were used to protecting their goods from a crush of people. The traders could see the haunches of many of the animals, but they could not touch them, and they could not see their faces or their legs.

  Lim appeared at the fringes of the crowd and called for Ajalia. She did not come to him, and he struggled through the crowd of men.

  "You do not come when I call," he said angrily.

  "I have arranged for the yurl," she replied.

  "She is still here," Lim pointed out. He was peevish.

  "Have you found a house?" Ajalia asked.

  "It is not easy to find a house," Lim snapped.

  The cloth trader rushed back into sight. He was followed by Ajalia's boy and another man, a burly-chested man with grizzled hair.

  "Honored stranger," the cloth merchant gasped, "This is my friend Erange. He has agreed to house your great beast for the length of your stay."

  "For how much?" Lim demanded. He spoke in the Eastern tongue; Ajalia glanced at Lim, and repeated his question to the cloth merchant in the Slavithe language.

  "Two thousand pieces," Erange said.

  Ajalia's eyes were on the horse traders. Their faces were impassive. She was being cheated. She glanced at her boy. His eyes were hard, and his mouth was grim. She nodded at the boy.

  "I will give you eight hundred pieces," she said.

  Erange's expression did not change. "I will take fifteen hundred, and half of the tail."

  "Denai," Ajalia called. The horse trader wormed his way through the crush of bodies. "Slave, I see you," she shouted in the Eastern tongue. The slave that had been edging his way out of the caravan made a dash for it, but two other slaves tackled him. Ajalia turned away from the slaves. Once the slaves had started to stop each other from escaping, she did not have to watch them so closely. She would speak to the slave later. Lim had his back to the slaves. His eyebrows were drawn together, and he opened his mouth to speak to Erange.

  "Wait," Ajalia said, holding out one hand. Lim stopped in surprise, and Ajalia spoke over him.

  "Denai, I will give you six hundred pieces to house my great beast, and you shall take two of my asses as well."

  "I accept, great stranger," Denai said at once.

  Ajalia called for the old woman slave to come with the yurl, and the caravan broke apart to allow the great blue beast to lumber forward. Ajalia found one of the young men who had been agitating for appointment and sent him with the yurl. He would be responsible for the beast's well-being, and would protect the tail. She sent the old woman as well, to watch the young man.

  The horse traders rushed into the gap made by the yurl and began to examine the caravan's horses.

  "You should not have cut me off," Lim snapped.

  Ajalia did not reply. Her hooded eyes watched the traders comb through the group of horses. The slaves were still working around the beasts, unloading them and arranging the goods.

  GEVAD AND THE LITTLE HOUSE

  "Have you sold the horses as well?" Lim asked. His voice was still petulant, but his eyes had turned to the traders with a speculative glint.

  "House," Ajalia said.

  "You are not master," Lim said.

  "They don't know that," Ajalia replied.

  Lim pressed his lips together, but he did not disagree with her. The fact that he could not play the chief in the caravan irked him; it was one of the few points upon which he would not argue.

  The traders were passing their hands up and down the horses' legs, and feeling in their mouths. Ajalia had seen that metal bits were used here. The horses would have to adjust to that if they were sold. Their mouths were sensitive in the East, and she did not know how roughly horses were handled this far south. She had been in cities where horses were seen as so much cattle, and were heaved around mercilessly.

  The eastern horses were fine and light colored. They were tawny, white, and copper colored, and had delicate faces and scooped nostrils. Ajalia was choosy about her horses, and had she been able to dictate the horses brought on the journey, she would have brought only squat creatures like her own ugly little horse. She did not believe in trading away beautiful horses to strangers.

  Lim saw the horses as potential money. He ran his tongue over his lower lip as he watched the Slavithe traders move among the horses.

  "You should stop them," he said, but he did not stand up or move.

  "You watch them," Ajalia said, and she walked into the market.

  She knew that Lim had meant to find housing, but Lim had a great opinion of his abilities, an opinion that was rarely cogent with reality, and Ajalia did not want to live in a drafty warehouse or an expensive palace. She followed the winding market, and looked at the stalls. The view was different from the ground. She had expected the crush of bodies, and the smell, but she had not expected such beautiful carvings that were everywhere, like overgrown flowers. The city was bursting with beautiful white stone. Ajalia had never seen such prolific stonework. Most markets that she had seen were temporary affairs, scaffolded over a square and able to be taken up and down. She had passed through a few giant cities where the markets were filled with soaring edifices, but never had she seen such deliberate permanence as there was in every corner here. The Slavithe city was massive and beautiful, and built to last forever, it seemed.

  The market stalls were not crude wooden affairs, or cloth draped over solid wooden struts. Each one had delicate stone arches and curving white columns that were exquisitely rendered. The shops had balconies over the market entrances, and it looked as though most of the merchants lived above their stalls.

  Ajalia passed cloth stalls and stalls filled with shining cookware. There were shops with elaborately colored beadwork, and more that glistened with leather. She wound through the streets, taking winding ways that had not been open to the massive caravan on their way into the market. Soon she reached the end of the market, and turned into the narrow streets that wound through the city to the right and left of the market entrance. Ajalia walked for a few paces down the left way, and looked up and down the street as far as she could see. The houses here were elegant and spacious. The white stone was the same, and the carvings were all there, but the proportions were greater, airier in the windows and the arching doors. The balconies were wider as well, and the stone was scrupulously clean. This was the kind of house that Lim would choose to move into, and it would break the success of the caravan. Lim had no sense of proportion when it came to expenditure.

  Ajalia turned back, and went down the narrow road that wound to
the right of the market. These houses were more promising; she could see that many of them had been divided into tenements. Cloth and tools hung in clusters over the balcony railings, and many houses had been whitewashed, but were not particularly clean. There was dirt in the many crevices and nooks made by the carvings, which spread just as prolifically over these edifices. The houses themselves were quite as large as the richer ones, but they were somehow narrower in the windows and doors, and had a feeling of having been squeezed together. It was perhaps the dirt in the streets that gave this impression, for in the other road, the streets had been quite as clean as the buildings, and here the white stone road was utterly neglected. Black earth ran up against the edges of the buildings, where the stone of the street met the foundation of the houses, and the cracks in the stones were overgrown with brilliant green moss.

  Ajalia watched the tops of the houses, and saw brilliantly colored banners and flags hanging down from the rooftops. She did not understand the clothing that she saw. It was evident from the flags, as well as from the colorful banners and drapes over the tops of houses, that Slavithe had an abundance of fine and colored cloth. She had seen market stalls that were overflowing with fine fabrics. And yet she had not encountered anything but brown, unworked cloth in the people's clothing.

  Even now, as she walked down the street in the crowded section of the city, the people who surrounded her, poor as they may be, wore the same rough brown fabric, and the same plain cuts of clothing, that she had seen in the wealthier part of the city. Even the cloth merchants had worn the same unadorned cloth, and from what she had been able to see of the women within the house windows, not even they wore colored or more beautifully worked cloth. She did not understand it.

  People clustered around her, and some of them spoke to her, but she did not reply. She walked slowly down the street, and as she measured the houses with her eyes, she came upon a stabled area. She had chanced upon the horse trading center of the city. Horses were everywhere, and their jostling, glistening bodies drew her eyes.

  The horses here were sturdier, and longer in the face than her own horses of the East. They had slightly bigger eyes, and their hooves were larger and coarser. She could see that they had slight feathering over their feet, and their muzzles were less finely drawn. Their necks were shorter, and their colors far more brash. She could see that they were strong, but their strength seemed to be more brute than finesse. She preferred her own horses, but the colors of these drew her to them. She began to walk among the steeds, and the smells and sounds of the various stables washed over her face. She relaxed in spite of herself.

  She had grown up near horses, when she had been a child in the far west, and though she had not been a horse trader herself, she was fond of the people who worked with horses. Horses reminded her of the time she had been free, before she had left her family, before she had been sold as a slave to the Eastern lands.

  A horrible black horse caught her eye. His coat had been ruined by the sun, and he was a burnished coppery brown. His eyes were dirty, and he held his neck at an awkward angle. She examined his legs, and found they were clean and straight. His back was crooked, but she suspected that it was more from misuse than an actual fault. His withers he carried strung up against his neck, and she thought that with proper handling, his spine would carry far straighter than it did now. He was hitched to a heavy wagon full of some billowing plant fiber, and his ribs stuck out under his skin. His hide was coarse and rough, and his mane would have been better off shaved. It had grown into a hairy mass of thick tangles, and she did not think it was able to be saved. She had a sudden desire to attack his mane with some good sharp shears.

  Ajalia shook herself, and turned out of the main street. She followed a winding alley until it opened out into a wider avenue. There were tall houses here, with wide doors. They looked less like houses than great white warehouses. Ajalia did not want to stay in an empty warehouse. She knew that Lim would prefer either a place that was absurdly cheap or showily expensive, but she was aiming for a bargain that would house the caravan comfortably without breaking their cash reserves, or their reputation.

  The third street she passed into struck her fancy, and she began to knock on doors.

  "Most kind native, I seek a house agent," Ajalia said politely to the servant that answered the door.

  "My mistress is such a one," the servant replied at once. Ajalia had doubts on this score, but she waited patiently for the lady of the house to appear.

  The woman who came out of the house had brilliant gold hair and flashing blue eyes.

  "Oooh!" she said, as soon as she saw Ajalia's robes and ceremonial face makeup. "Are you the Eastern chief?"

  "I am not, dear stranger, but I speak on his behalf."

  "You're a woman," the lady said. Her eyes sparkled. Her hair flipped a little.

  "I am, most kind one," Ajalia agreed.

  "Well," the woman said briskly, "Come along then, and I'll introduce you to Gevad. He is an excellent agent."

  "Your most efficient servant directed me towards yourself as one capable of such service," Ajalia said.

  "Oh, she's a fool," the woman said carelessly. "Gevad will suit you just so."

  "You are most kind," Ajalia said.

  "Say," the woman said in a low voice as she led Ajalia down the street, "are you really so stuffy, or is that part of the show?"

  Ajalia did not reply, but she smiled, and the blonde woman cackled with satisfaction. "I thought so," she said cheerfully. "Say, is this your first time here?"

  Ajalia said that it was, and the blonde woman launched into a breathless explanation of Slavithe fashion, customs, and history. Some of it Ajalia had heard before, from other traders who had heard stories of Slavithe, but much of it was new to her. She learned that the colored fabric was used on ceremonial days, and that the whole city wore plain cloth at all other times to show respect for their culture's ways. She learned that the city had been constructed with magic, and that the carvings in the buildings were made of real animals and plants that had been laid into the stone and then covered with marble softened by magic. She learned that the Slavithe's main trade was in marble, which they shipped out by a secret harbor behind the city's quarries, and that the harbor was inaccessible to the outside world. She learned that the city was self-sustaining, and that the intense cluster of foliage around the city stretched for miles in a strip behind the city walls, all the way to the rim of steep mountains that curved around the back of the city like a shield. She learned that the marble quarries produced several types of valuable metal, which had never been traded outside of Slavithe. She learned that her guide's name was Lasa, and that she had not been able to see the caravan because she had not been to market for a week and had not heard that a new caravan was coming into the city. Lasa apologized profusely for her lapse, and Ajalia assured her that the yurl was welcome to be stared at, at any time Lasa wished.

  When she had run out of breath to enumerate the glories of Slavithe, Lasa began to pepper Ajalia with questions. Before she had properly finished assailing Ajalia with the list of things she wanted to know first about the Eastern lands, they had arrived at a large green door set in white marble. Lasa rapped sharply on the green door, and it gave out a booming metallic clang. Ajalia was surprised at the sound created by the door. She would have thought it would have sounded thin and reedy, but the door, by its sound, seemed to be constructed of a kind of light metal alloy that was resonant and powerful.

  A scurrying young man appeared at the door, and then skittered away to fetch his master, who came quickly out into the street.

  The house agent greeted Lasa shortly, and began to pry solicitously into Ajalia's need for a house. Ajalia did not think the house agent was what she wanted, but she was willing to see where the encounter went. Gevad went back into the house for a bundle of curious white keys, and then led Ajalia and Lasa down the street. Lasa seemed determined to stay for all the action, and Ajalia welcomed her native input o
n the situation. As she followed Gevad down the street, her eyes traveled closely over the fronts of the houses and buildings that they passed.

  Some of the houses were fully three stories tall, and each story had its own set of balconies and windows that were equally elaborate. Ajalia did not know if she had yet seen a house that did not have a full balcony; it seemed to be something that was quite taken for granted in the architecture of the place. A few of the buildings that sandwiched between the houses seemed to have been constructed for some other purpose. They did not seem to be shops, but they had the look of being frequented often. She did not know if the Slavithe had any kind of religion in their culture. The Eastern people were pragmatic and stern; they worshipped no god, but kept themselves to a standard of wisdom and integrity that was, to Ajalia's mind, more honest than the fundamentalist superstitions of her mother's people.

  "What are these?" Ajalia asked, raising a hand to one of these narrow edifices as they passed.

  Gevad glanced at Lasa, and winked. Ajalia prepared to be lied to.

  "They are houses of magic," Gevad said good-humoredly. "Those who wish to seek our fathers' blessings go into these buildings, and lay their troubles on the floor. Then they lift up the air, which is charged with light and beauty, and take it into themselves to be refreshed. It is the way of our people."

  Gevad passed solemnly down the street, and Lasa touched Ajalia's hand.

  "Public bathing places," Lasa murmured, almost inaudibly. Ajalia watched the back of the house agent, as he trundled busily down the street. He was wearing the same brown color as Lasa, but Lasa's clothing was cut simply, and cinched around her figure with a wide dark belt. The house agent was wearing brown, but his clothes were draped in complicated coils that folded in and out over his shoulders, and produced the impression of a dark brown reptile. Gevad's hair was short in the back, and his head was rubbing bald on the very top. He did not have a bald spot yet, but Ajalia was sure he would have one this time next year. She watched the soles of his shoes as they pressed up from the ground. The Slavithe people wore a variety of sandals. The temperature was warm and pleasant, and the paving stones of the white streets did not present obstructions to the feet of those passing over them. The soles of Gevad's sandals were oddly clean, as though he had put on these shoes for the first time before coming out of his house. Ajalia did not trust such clean feet. She felt a worming sense of danger, but she was curious, and she had a knife in the back of her robes, tucked into the folds of her ceremonial ribbing. She was prepared to defend herself if the man was crooked.