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

by Victor Poole

  "Wait," the tall woman said. There was an edge of desire in her voice. Ajalia thought she might be able to milk money out of that desire, but she did not wish to encounter this woman's brand of evil head-on. She did not meet the woman's eyes, and she began to feel waves of heat, of pointed hatred, gushing out of the woman towards her. Ajalia began to feel much more like herself. Hatred, emotion, desire, heat, these were things that Ajalia would grapple with. These were tools she could turn to her own uses.

  "I will inform the silk merchant," Ajalia said blandly to the door, "that the covering no longer suits your needs."

  Ajalia turned, very slowly, very deliberately, away from the grand white stone house, and took one step away from it. She paused, and sighed, and took one more, deliberate step. The tall woman began to laugh.

  "You are a clown, among your people," she said merrily, and again, Ajalia felt a sort of clang, an incongruence that troubled her, and pulled at her skin. The voice of the tall woman was normal, was filled with life, with color, and the face, Ajalia knew from watching before, was also normal. But the picture, altogether, of the face, and the words, and the music, did not match what impression she could glean of the soul of this tall woman. Someone had made a picture, had filled it in with skin and elegance, and had left the insides undone.

  Ajalia had met crazy persons. This woman, she was sure, was not insane, at least not in the way she had seen ever before. The woman simply seemed—blank, invisible, somehow. Ajalia could not follow her motivations, or predict her next words. She could not connect the woman's words with any inner desire. She felt as though she were witnessing an elaborate puppet show, and that the woman expected her to play along. She did not want to play along.

  This time Ajalia did not walk away. She turned to the woman, still without meeting her eyes, and asked the door, "Is there anyone in the house with money?"

  The woman did not respond for a moment, and then she laughed again. "Leave the bundle here, slave," she said. "I will pay tomorrow."

  Ajalia stepped backwards, into the street. The bundle of fabric still lay over her shoulders. The sun was beating down on her. No one had ever called Ajalia "slave" before. She had never been just a slave. She had been many, many things, and she had not owned her own life for many, many years, but no one had ever, to her face, called her a slave.

  Ajalia reached out to the first man she came near, and took him by the shoulder. The Slavithe man was startled, and looked at Ajalia's foreign clothes and dark hair. He smiled. His eyes softened when she spoke to him in his own language.

  "Honored stranger," Ajalia said, just loudly enough for the tall woman to hear, "this good woman cannot buy what she has said she will buy. I fear embarrassing her in your fair city, but my master cannot lose this valuable bundle."

  The Slavithe man nodded sympathetically. Here, Ajalia told herself, was the kind of behavior she had come, already, to expect from the Slavithe people. Kindness, honesty, regard for others, and quickness to help.

  "I fear giving offense," Ajalia said to the man. "I am a stranger to your ways."

  "It is hard, to be a stranger," the Slavithe man said eagerly. He had not noticed the tall woman standing by the palatial house. Ajalia was standing near the center of the street, and she was still not turning to face the elegant woman with the green cloth tied into her brown hair. The man turned in a semicircle. "I will help her to understand," he assured Ajalia. "Our language is a delicate thing. You do not wish to offend."

  His back was to the woman and the open door. Out of the corner of her eye, Ajalia saw the elegant woman. Her refined face was frozen in a pleasant smile; she looked as though she was in some kind of shock, but her eyes had not widened at all.

  Ajalia began to open her mouth, to point out to the Slavithe man the place where the tall woman stood. The tall woman seemed to read Ajalia's intent, and she snapped into action. Uttering a cry like a happy bird, she came forward and stood near the man. Ajalia had a feeling that she was about to be pushed under a fantastic pile of lies, and she stepped away.

  "It is not free," Ajalia cried, holding up a frantic hand, as though she were fending off a violent attack. "How can she understand?" she shouted at the Slavithe man, who watched her in shock. The man turned to see what Ajalia recoiled from in such evident fear, and Ajalia watched his face melt from surprise to a blank docility.

  "Madam," he said to the tall woman, "this good stranger does not know our ways. You must pay her now."

  Ajalia wanted whatever was happening in front of her to slow down. Some complicated exchange was passing right before her. She had seen the man's face go through an incredible revolution as soon as he had seen the elegant woman's face. Ajalia's curiosity about this tall woman heightened, and she felt more than ever that something was wrong. She was unspeakably glad that she had refused to go into the tall woman's house.

  "How are you?" the tall woman asked the Slavithe man solicitously. The man did not reply to this question, and Ajalia sensed that no reply was expected. The question was not sincere. Instead, the man took Ajalia kindly by the hand, and turned her to face the tall woman. The tall woman preened a little, and Ajalia directed her gaze carelessly over the tall woman's head. Ajalia could almost feel the angry click of the woman's teeth as they snapped together into a furious smile. She knew that the woman had been sure that Ajalia would be forced to meet her gaze. Ajalia knew somehow that the woman meant to hypnotize her somehow, to keep her from noticing the discrepancy in her words and actions by the false light in her eyes. Ajalia would not look at the tall woman's face, and the tall woman knew now that this was deliberate. The tall woman changed tactics, and pulled a heavy purse of money from her plain clothes.

  "Because you are a stranger, and do not know the ways of our people," she said in a voice that was as smooth as the silks of the East, "I will pay you now."

  Ajalia did not accept the large bag of money.

  "My master," Ajalia told the man, and she met the man's eyes with relief, "will punish me if I cheat any of your honored citizens. I do not desire to steal."

  "The stranger is right to pursue an honest price," the man said solemnly. "She is a welcome addition to our fair city."

  "She is indeed," the tall woman said, and this time her voice did not sound nearly so smooth, or so controlled. The facade of elegance was beginning, ever so slightly, to crack. A small crowd of Slavithe people had begun to gather around Ajalia, and they were staring avidly at the Slavithe man, and at the tall woman.

  "I will help you to count our money," the man said to Ajalia. "You have only just arrived, and our ways will be strange. You are right to be careful." The crowd of people nodded in agreement with this statement. Ajalia could feel a wave of popular opinion shoring up her position. The tall woman looked acutely uncomfortable. Ajalia could see her shoulders climbing slightly, and her jaw was in a fixed smile. The door of the big white house was still standing open, and some of the servants from within the house had come and were standing in the doorway. The Slavithe man turned solicitously to the tall woman. "What price had you named?" he asked, and before the tall woman could reply, Ajalia spoke.

  She said a price that was more than double what she had bargained for in the marketplace, and as Ajalia said the great number, she looked finally into the tall woman's eyes. What Ajalia saw there surprised her, and she was satisfied with herself.

  She saw a narrow, cold woman, a calculating woman, a woman that was hardly human. She saw that the tall woman had been caught, and that the tall woman knew she had been caught in her attempt to steal. Ajalia saw fear, and rage, but mostly she saw bare, cold, calculating cunning. A shiver went down her spine, and she felt, of a sudden, that she had met another model of her own mother from long ago.

  Good gods, Ajalia thought in exasperation, my mother. She had not thought of her mother for so long that it seemed utterly ridiculous to start thinking of her again now, but as the tall woman handed the inflated number of coins to the man, and as he counted them, w
atched interestedly by the collected audience of Slavithe bystanders, she began to examine the tall woman anew.

  She was not afraid any longer to look deeply into the tall woman's eyes. She saw through the woman now. Ajalia wondered that she had not thought of her mother at once, but then, her mother had never been tall, or elegant, or wealthy, and so it was not perhaps so surprising after all.

  When the transfer of money had been completed, Ajalia thanked the Slavithe man graciously, and he assured her that he was overjoyed to have been of assistance. She invited him to visit the little house, and told him where it lay, and he promised to do so at some future date. The crowd dissipated slowly, and Ajalia, bold now that she had won, thrust the heavy package of cloth into the tall woman's arms.

  The tall woman took the cloth, and smiled. "Would you like to come inside?" she asked Ajalia, and Ajalia nearly laughed. It was absurd, beyond absurd to her, that she had traveled so long and so far, and finally cornered another version of her mother here, in the backwater and isolated land of Slavithe. Ajalia had been sold into slavery, had been lied to, manipulated, bargained for, and whipped, but she had never until now met a being to equal the cold-hearted contradictions of the woman who had made her body with her own.

  Ajalia regarded the tall woman now with something like affection, in the way that a man grows affectionate towards a wolf that destroys his sheep, or the way a merchant grows fond of a shark that eats his wife and children while he is at sea. Ajalia felt almost grateful to this woman, for reminding her of how light and joyous her life as a slave really was.

  "You are too kind," Ajalia said simply, and followed the tall woman into the palatial house. She regretted going in as soon as she had stepped over the threshold, and stopped at once.

  "What a beautiful home," she said in glowing tones, and she went back outside.

  "But you have only just seen this piece of it," the tall woman said, and again, Ajalia was tempted to laugh. She felt a sudden desire for Philas. She wanted to hear his voice. She felt as though she were going to go insane.

  "No," Ajalia said, and she walked quickly away.

  The tall woman did not follow her, and Ajalia walked through the streets towards the poor tenement where she had taken a room. The poor district was as far away from the wealthy woman's house as it was possible to get, and the walk was long. Ajalia embraced the length of the walk, and the anonymity of it. She did not speak to anyone, and after a time, the glow of the sun against her face began to wash the words of the rich woman away from her skin.

  The money she had taken from the wealthy woman hung heavily in her clothes. She had to dispose of it before she saw Lim; he had a nose for money that was second only to her own, and she could not afford to bring such munificence into his sight without arousing his deepest suspicions. Ajalia could sense desire, and she had a gift for bargaining, but Lim had an equal gift for sensing value, and he would almost certainly know that Ajalia had far too much money on her person.

  When she finally reached the tenement, the sun was climbing down into the late afternoon. Ajalia turned away from the building without going in, and walked towards the market. She came through the horse trading district on a whim, and purely by chance she spotted the sunburnt black horse that she had seen the day before. She wanted to buy the horse, and after a little bargaining, she did, and gave the man who had owned him a bundle of coins to feed and house him for her. She took the address of his stables, and walked with a lighter heart towards the market. Her purse was suitably emptier now. She had not spent all of the extra money she had taken from the wealthy woman, but she had decreased her holdings enough to balance whatever suspicions Lim would be apt to have.

  When she came to the market, the sun was beginning to glare against the goods in the stalls. The metal cookware was catching the full sun as it moved into the west, and Ajalia shielded her eyes against the flashing lights of the pots and pans. She came close to the stall Lim had bargained for, close enough to hear his irritated voice rising and falling over the slaves, and she wound away again. She had no interest in his potential interrogation about the woman's wealth and household. She had not prepared an answer yet. She did not know what she would say.

  Ajalia assumed that Philas had gone home long ago. She envisioned him going into a tavern on the way, and asking for the drink he had had before. She wondered if it would pickle his brains, or if the evil purple juice would have any sort of cleansing effect on his nature. She smiled as she thought of Philas buzzing about the home in an apron, cleaning the walls efficiently, and singing the powerful rhythms he had brought from his homeland.

  Philas was something of a rarity among the slaves; he had come originally from over the sea, from the land where the stone working people lay. Ajalia thought that Philas's homeland would be where the Slavithe must trade their quarried rock. She knew that the harbor in back of Slavithe was inaccessible from the rest of Leopath by sea, and the Slavithe people had never bothered to dig useful connections out into the rest of the continent by land.

  Philas had told her once that he had been sold as a boy into the deep west, and that he had travelled farther East from there. She suspected that he had run away and been caught several times, but he had never said this. Ajalia had never run away from her owners. She had nowhere, and no one, to run to.

  She did not know if Philas had left any sort of a family behind. She had never met anyone from across the sea, aside from him, and she did not know if he was typical in any way, or an outlier. She had not asked him much about himself, but when he was very drunk, or in an exceedingly good mood, he sang strange songs.

  Ajalia had not spoken her mother tongue for many years. Philas did not know where she was from. She did not think anyone knew where she was from, and she was content to let things remain that way.

  The pouch of money hung heavy against her waist. She had not paid Lasa yet, for the rental of the little house, and she began to wander the market with more purpose. She thought that if she could find a suitable gift for Lasa, she would feel better.

  She could not find anything. She could not concentrate on anything. The objects danced before her eyes, and before long she found herself near the end of the market, staring at the blue fibered bridle woven with big red beads. The bridle was handsomer than she remembered, and the bright blue metal bit twinkled at Ajalia.

  Ajalia wished she was still wearing the mask and the robes of her master's clan. She felt exposed and alone here in the market in her pale, plain shift and bare face. She wished she was with Philas. Philas irritated her, and kept her from feeling things too sharply. Philas was useful in that way. She did not want to be alone.

  Ajalia walked away from the blue bridle without talking to the merchant, and she found a second cloth merchant's stall. She bought three narrow lengths of coarse cloth in three different colors, and she made the merchant fold them up in a narrow package for her. She asked the merchant if he knew where she could find needles, and he told her he would sell her some.

  "I want skeins of thread as well," she told him, and he pointed down the street.

  "There are threads in the back of Madam Ecta's shop, good stranger," he said. "She will have needles as well." The cloth merchant was staring at Ajalia's face. She felt defensive. She did not say thank you to him.

  As she came away from the stall, he rushed out from behind the counter and come up to her again.

  "It is most shocking," he said, "but your face is pale, and the day is hot. You must sit down."

  Ajalia began to tell the man that she was fine, but he had begun already to flurry her busily into his shop, and into a narrow back room that lay behind his wares. There was a chair, and the merchant made her sit in it, and he opened a wide window in the back of the room.

  Ajalia could not remember a time when anyone had made her sit down like this before. She did not know how to stop the merchant. She could see that he did not want anything from her at all, and she did not understand why he was behaving like this. I
n her experience, humans did not treat other humans in this way.

  She started to ask him if he wanted anything, but her throat was dry.

  "I am not like this," she explained, and she felt dizzy again, and closed her eyes.

  The man did not say anything. He pressed a vessel of water into her hands, and vanished into the front of the shop again. Ajalia sat for a moment near the open window, and a vision of her father pressed itself obtrusively into her mind's eye. She felt robbed of herself, skinned of the only protection she had ever had against the emotions that she thought she had successfully killed off.

  She was naked here, bare of her weapons, exposed to the merciless fresh air and the beautiful sunlight. She did not belong here, in life. She thought that she would rather anything than to be alive right now. The cool, wet sides of the vessel of water pressed against her palms, and she stared at the water. She was not used to being able to drink water. She had heard some people say that Slavithe had fresh springs of water in their forests outside the city, but she had not believed it. She had had fresh water in her own homeland, but in the East, and in the cities she had travelled to, water was either filthy or considered a drink for animals. There was safe water in the East, but it tasted like sludge, and in the farthest west, even animals knew not to drink from the thick and slow-moving streams and sluggish ponds that lay within the dank marshes near the sea.

  She felt betrayed by the water in her hands. There had been a deep well in the pasture next to the crossroads where she had been born, and she had drawn water every morning there since she had been able to carry water, and she suspected she had been expected to carry water from an earlier age than that. Carrying water had been a sort of framing ritual of her life. The water in her hands now sparkled, and twinkled gently at her. She was sure that it was going to be sweet and fresh, and she wished it had at least had the decency to be full of dirt, or floating bugs. She did not want to be reminded of her childhood. She did not want to face her past.