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

by Victor Poole

  The eatery was both quiet and loud at the same time. It was full of noise, but it was a different sort of noise than Ajalia was used to. In the East, and in many of the lands that she had visited on caravan journeys, food places were full of shouting people, impatient faces, and angry words. The servants who served customers were always harried and annoyed, and the food, even if delicious, had to be battled for in aggressive lines, and through crowded tables and chairs.

  Here, there was a loud chattering in the air, but the sounds were civil, and kind. The words did not have any sharp bites on the edges, and the people in line did not jostle each other. The Slavithe people did not even look impatient. They looked as though they were enjoying themselves. Most of the patrons of the eatery were speaking to each other, and Ajalia realized that the groups she had taken for long-time friends were actually casual acquaintances. As she listened to the words dance gently between the Slavithe people, she found that some of the people in talk with each other had only just met.

  No one bothered her. There was an old man in front of her in line, and a young woman with a child behind her, and neither of them tried to talk to her at all, which she appreciated. Unconscious of the act, she began again to wind her hands over and around her scarred wrists and arms. The uneven skin made a gentle scruffing feeling against the soft texture of her sleeves. She felt as though she were going to cry. She was horrified with herself. She had never cried in front of people, not since she had run away from home.

  She could not understand what was happening to her here. She began to examine the eatery, to get an idea of the menu. She could not find any writing anywhere, or pictures. The room was constructed of wood, which was a visual relief from the unrelenting stone of the houses and market stalls outside. The eatery was a little rectangular affair that had been thrown up between two stone walls; Ajalia could see the white rock of the adjoining buildings peeking out from beneath the boards.

  The ceiling was low, and the room was filled with ruddy golden lights from closed metal lamps. The wood shone reddish, and the air was hot with freshly cooked foods. At length Ajalia came to the front of the line, and watched the old man ahead of her carry away a tureen of thick soup. Her mouth had begun to water. She had meant to eat the food she had saved beneath the counter in the kitchen of the little house, but she had worked through the morning instead. She was hungry.

  The servant behind the counter asked her what she wanted, and his voice was friendly.

  "I don't know," Ajalia said. It was the second time that day that she had gone blank. She did not know what was happening to her. She never behaved like this, without preparing for an encounter, or readying herself for an attack. She had talked to Lim in the same blank way earlier, and here she was, in a strange land, and talking to a servant with all the cupidity of a cupcake.

  "Do you like bread?" the servant asked. Ajalia nodded, and she did not know what the servant had said. She was still battling tears. She did not understand what was happening to her. Her fingers twisted over and around the little bubbling scars that rimmed her left wrist, and her forefinger traced up the line of scarring where, long ago, the cuts had become infected and spread up her arm.

  The man behind the counter gave Ajalia a tray filled with sandwiches and a hot drink, and she paid him without bargaining for a better price. It was this last action that made her know she was not herself. The tears and the blankness she could have excused with the heat and the newness of the city, perhaps, but paying quietly without finding a way to save some portion of her coins was so wildly out of character that a trickling finger of fear chased up her spine. She looked at the floor, and carried her tray meekly to the table where Philas had finished draining the vessel of sludge.

  He was smacking his lips, and he reached for one of Ajalia's sandwiches with an eager hand.

  "Thanks," he said.

  She slapped his hand away, and shoved the tray away from him.

  "Buy your own food," she snarled at him.

  He stared at her.

  "What happened?" he asked quietly.

  Ajalia did not reply. She began to eat her way through the food, but then stopped, and pulled three metal coins out of the pouch the cloth trader had given her after she had worked out the written agreement for use of the stall. It was not payment for Lim; the merchant had paid her a fee for facilitating the deal. Ajalia owed the money to no one. She handed the coins to Philas, and gestured with her face at the line that still wound through the shop. Philas got up without a word, and went to the back of the line.

  Ajalia sniffed at the vessel that had held Philas's poisonous drink, and shoved it away with disgust. It smelled like an acidic cleaning fluid.

  She tried her own piping hot drink, and found that it was a thick, creamy mash of sweet fruit mixed with spices and crushed nuts. The drink was practically a soup, but she found it delicious and refreshing. Philas had not reached the front of the line by the time Ajalia had eaten her food, and she left the tray on the table, as she had seen others do in the eatery, and left the shop.

  The sunlight hit her eyes when she went out. She did not know what time of day it was, and she did not want to look up to find out. She walked the short distance to the cloth merchant's stall, where Lim and Philas had directed the setup of their silks and other goods, and the sight of the stall was blinding. Next to all the other stalls in the market, the Eastern materials looked as though they had been conjured up by magic. The Slavithe stalls were filled with goods that had mostly natural hues, and that, if they shone, shone with some manner of metal. Everything in the Eastern stall shone and glittered with almost surreal detail. The colors exploded out of the stall, and the textures of the silks and of the gold and silver and glass and robes made a feast for the eyes.

  Ajalia saw that a large crowd had already clustered several people deep around the stall. The Slavithe were not unaware of the charms of the beautiful things in their midst, and Ajalia saw that Lim was holding court in the crowd of busy bodies. The Slavithe men, and the women who were dressed like the Slavithe men, were stroking the patterned silks, and running their fingers over the smooth, many layered colors. They were, mostly the women, picking up the little glass bottles of spices, and putting them to their noses. They were touching the curious gold chains, and conversing with each other over the exotic, sharply cut robes that draped around the fluffy white figures among the silks.

  THE WOMAN WHO STEALS

  Ajalia wondered what they thought of the robes. She could not imagine any of the plainly dressed Slavithe wearing such a flagrantly cut and colored robe into the public market. She did not know if the robes would be suitable for their cultural festival days.

  As she reached the edge of the stall, a tall woman with elegant brown hair came up to the cluster of people, and the Slavithe people parted to make way for her. Ajalia examined this woman. She was the first Slavithe woman Ajalia had seen, aside from Lasa, who wore her hair long. Her brown hair was looped casually into ropes, and tied up around her head with long green rags of the rough Slavithe fabric. The woman's eyes were green as well, and she looked intelligent and kind.

  Ajalia watched the woman look over the stall, and she smiled when the woman took Lim aside. Ajalia moved closer so that she could hear.

  "How much for the wrap?" the Slavithe woman asked Lim. She pointed at the stall.

  Lim waved his hands up and down, and explained that the stall was not yet open for business.

  Ajalia stepped forward. "She wants the wrap from the silk," she told Lim in the Eastern tongue. The tall woman looked at Ajalia curiously. Ajalia could feel the woman's eyes traveling carefully over her clothes, and over the way she had arranged her hair. Ajalia felt as though she were passing through a kind of test of character.

  Lim examined the tall woman. "Why does she want it?" he asked Ajalia suspiciously. The woman was wearing the same plain clothes as the other Slavithe people in the street, and Ajalia saw that Lim suspected the woman of being poor.

&
nbsp; "She is not poor," Ajalia said quietly to Lim in the Eastern language. "Look at how the others made way for her."

  Lim appraised the woman again, and nodded at Ajalia.

  "Sell it," he said, and moved back towards the stall.

  The tall woman repeated her question. She did not look angry or impatient. Ajalia saw that she meant to have the plain white wrap, and Ajalia was more than happy to oblige this desire. The wrap would be one less thing to be bundled up and taken back home on the caravan. There would certainly be no silk left to wrap up with it by the time they left Slavithe to return to the East.

  In a few moments, Ajalia had struck a bargain with the woman, and helped her to bundle the long folds of plain pale fabric into a neat bundle. Ajalia tied the bundle up with a length of string, and offered to carry it home for the woman. Ajalia was curious about this woman, and curious to see how others among the Slavithe lived. Lim would not begin actively bargaining possibly for another two days, to give the whole city a chance to look closely over his wares, and discuss the merits of foreign silk with their wives and neighbors. Cutting into the silk was an arduous and painful task, and one that could not be undone. Ajalia had often been in cities when one wealthy man had bought an entire length of silk for his own home. Poorer families would buy what remnants they could afford, to make fine handkerchiefs or scarves of the material, but it was never wise to cut the fabric until the oldest and richest families around had made up their minds about how much of the fine stuff they would buy.

  Lim had plenty of slaves hanging around the stall to do his bidding, and now that Philas had worked his magic, he would hang about the house with the slaves left behind to guard the stuffs left behind.

  Philas had no head for a bargain. He was a fantastic salesman, but he almost never roused himself to an effort, and the money he would have gotten from working at trades didn't seem to appeal to him much. Ajalia thought it was a shame that Philas didn't have more ambition. He would have been a fine replacement for Lim, in her opinion, though she ran things better than anyone did.

  The brown-haired woman agreed to let Ajalia carry the heavy bundle for her, and the pair departed in the sunshine of the market.

  "How did you learn Slavithe?" the woman asked Ajalia, and Ajalia told her.

  Ajalia's eyes were combing through the market as she walked, taking in anew the details she had marked on the previous day's entry to the city. The market seemed larger today, more complex. There were winding ways that trailed down between shops, and Ajalia could just glimpse dark corners filled with urns and jars, and other crannies stuffed with hoops and spare wheels.

  The lady asked Ajalia about her master, and about the customs of owning slaves in the East. Ajalia answered without thinking; she had a script prepared for this kind of situation, and her tongue pattered pleasantly over the picture that outsiders liked most to see of the East. She told the woman of the plantations of slaves, and the harvesting of the silk, and her ears took in the chattering of merchants hawking their wares, and the bargaining of Slavithe people over pots and pans. She described the horses of the East, and her nose took in the pleasant tang of dust kicked up by three sweat-gilded horses that were led prancing by, their flanks glittering in the sun.

  Ajalia told the woman of the weather in the East, and of the tall palm trees that hung like protective gods over the house of her master. The heat was growing stifling, and beads of sweat collected gradually under Ajalia's arms, and prickled at her scalp. The bundle of cloth was slung easily over her shoulders, and the packed fabric made a dark, wet feeling against the skin of her back.

  "And what of your family?" the woman asked, as they left the marketplace and came into the open street. "Are they slaves as well?"

  Ajalia kept her eyes focused on the soaring white walls of stone, and the chaotic green plants that fought for space on the balconies.

  "I never knew my family," she said easily, and she lied without pain. There was no flicker in her eyes, no flutter of her lips to give her away. She had not told this lie before, but now it came like fresh spring water to her mouth, and made her feel both alone and strong. "I have always been a slave," she said.

  "I suppose it is easier," the tall woman said, "when it is all that you have known."

  Ajalia was a little behind the tall woman now, and she glanced a little to the side, to see what she could see of the tall woman's face. The woman was not trying to be ironic; she had meant what she said. Ajalia struggled for a moment to put a name to what she felt, but then she realized that the tall woman was the first Slavithe person she had met who was not made of courtesy. She wondered why this was. Every Slavithe she had spoken to, she thought, had been kind, but this woman seemed somehow harsher, made of sharper outlines than the others.

  Ajalia shook her head fiercely, and settled the bundle across her back. These thoughts were not like her thoughts. She did not feel that they came from inside of her. She began to think that the city was filling her with some demon spirit that she did not know. She could not explain how she felt. But there was a rumbling and a shaking up of her insides, that was rattling around at the bottom of her stomach, and shivering all up and down her spine. She could not recognize herself as she felt now. She had always, as long as she could remember, had a fortress of planning and preparedness inside of her; she had never been taken by surprise by another person trying to hurt her or trick her. But right now she felt filled only with a blank whiteness; she did not know what had happened to her usual procedures for living.

  Ajalia drew her attention with some difficulty back to the tall, brown-haired woman with the green eyes.

  "This is where I live," the woman was saying. Her long, pale arm was pointing with elegant ease down the street. Ajalia followed the direction of the woman's arm, and saw an enormous white edifice that was bursting with green foliage and colored flags. The house was set slightly apart from the houses on either side, which, as far as Ajalia had seen of the city, was unusual, and the tall white house had a palatial look.

  "Your residence is great and beautiful, adored mistress," Ajalia said automatically.

  The woman smiled easily, and led the way across the street. Ajalia saw that the Slavithe people parted ways for the tall woman here as well. The tall woman did not seem to notice, or mind, that others in the street moved aside for her. Ajalia began to wonder what sort of position this woman held in the culture, that accorded her so much deference. She had seen no other Slavithe given outward respect like this in the city so far.

  The tall woman took her up to the entrance of the house, and then stood pointedly to one side. Ajalia was used to being directed with body language; she understood clearly that she was expected to open the door for the woman. The expectation hit Ajalia in the face like a slap of chilled water. She had not been treated this way, well, ever. Even as a child she had known she was valuable property. Even when she had first been a slave, and her wrists had been branded, she had known she was being marked so that she could be kept track of. At this moment in time she felt like nothing more than a moving door stop.

  Ajalia did not open the door, but waited, patiently, pretending to be blind to the motion of the tall woman's shoulders as they tilted ever so slightly towards the house. Ajalia shifted the bundle of cloth on her shoulders, and gazed down the center of the street, turning her face and shoulders away from the tall woman. Ajalia could hear the tall woman breathing delicately. The woman's elegant nostrils extended just slightly to the sides, and Ajalia thought that she was disappointed in Ajalia's unwillingness to open doors on cue.

  After several seconds of this standoff, the tall woman opened the door herself, and stood aside for Ajalia to go into the house. Ajalia no longer wanted to go into the tall woman's house, but she had the bundle of cloth on her back, and the door was open. Ajalia felt a series of spiny alarms go off inside her heart. This woman was dangerous, she realized, in a way that she did not understand. She should not go into the house. The interior was airy, white, and f
illed with luxury; she could see carpets and hanging wooden designs against the walls of the entry, and she knew the woman was rich.

  Ajalia began to berate herself for being an emotional wreck, for not being in her usual fighting form, but the warning in her heart had never yet led her astray. She trusted the feeling that she had, though she did not understand it yet. Ajalia set the bundle of fabric down just inside the door, without stepping foot in the house, and she backed respectfully away.

  "I will wait for payment here, wise patroness," Ajalia murmured clearly in Slavithe. She kept her eyes on the flooring of the great house that was peeping out from under the open door, and she could feel the woman's eyes on her face.

  "I will pay you in the market, tomorrow," the woman said. Ajalia knew she was lying. She knew that the woman did not intend to pay at all.

  Ajalia's heart hardened. Whatever about the woman was standing her hair on end may have been unfamiliar, but Ajalia was no stranger to thieves from every walk of life. With one motion, Ajalia scooped the large bundle of cloth into her arms, and stepped away from the open door. The tall woman did not see the action coming, and her face betrayed her as she stepped forward, one hand raised. Ajalia swung the bundle up onto her shoulders, as though she had accidentally come to the wrong house, as though she meant to go on walking down the street with the tall woman.

  The tall woman's eyes recovered their gentility. "I will bring the money to the market," she repeated, and her voice was like sweet syrup, but firm.

  Ajalia smiled at the door. She did not meet the woman's eyes, and she could almost hear the woman's teeth grinding with frustrated passion. Ajalia had met this sort of thievery before. It sought a battlefield, an encounter of emotions, and when bypassed, it was impotent. Ajalia turned away, slowly.