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

by Victor Poole

  "You are the one," the rich woman said coolly, and Ajalia stepped forward just long enough to murmur Gevad's name. The rich woman glanced over at Ajalia, and gave a curt nod. Ajalia slipped backwards, into the shadow cast by the wall of the great house, and when she saw that the rich woman was absorbed for the moment in berating Gevad with what seemed to be a litany of wrongs, Ajalia went away.

  She wound her way through the streets until she came near to the little house. She saw that there were only a few lights showing in the windows, and that most of the slaves were still at market. The moon had, by now, risen to a full and beautiful blue, and the clouds had cleared out of its path. The city was bathed in a silvery blue.

  Ajalia felt the weight of the keys in her hand. She had gotten blood on the keys, and on the sleeve of her white robe, but she didn't mind. She was still carrying the knife by its blade, and when she looked down, she saw that she was gripping it too hard, and making a sharp crease against her palm. She was going to cut her hand to pieces if she didn't stop.

  Ajalia put the knife away, and she knew that her robes were ruined. She had not cleaned the tip of the blade, and it had gotten slips of her blood all over it, which now, she realized too late, had been carried into the housing on her back. It irritated her to waste her clothes, and she bent her steps towards the poor district, and the tenement that she had rented a room from.

  Slavithe was not a small city, but it was roughly divided into sections. Ajalia had come through the main road towards the market, and that road was mainly lined with residences on either side. A business and government district lay on the south end of the city, and Ajalia had not yet set foot there, and the market lay at the extreme end of the city walls. Above and to the east of the market, the upper half of the city was filled with houses. Ajalia had just come from the nicest houses in the city, though she didn't know that, and she was travelling now towards the poorest residences that could be had. A large horse district was tucked into the folds between the tenements and the market, and all against the eastern wall were buildings like the one that Ajalia had visited, where there were few windows, and the inner space did not seem to match the shape of the building.

  The city was sprawling and intimate at the same time; the buildings were all composed of layers, and were sandwiched close together, and none of them extended too much to either side. The city was not enormous in the ground it covered, but it was well-planned, and it was squeezed together and built up so that it held a more massive clustering of people than seemed possible.

  There was a second addition to the city, a sort of outer settlement, that hugged around the eastern wall and ran up against the mountains that lay against the sea. This was where the quarry and shipping people made their living.

  Ajalia had been in the city for two days, but the layout of the residential area felt intuitive to her; it blended seamlessly into a fluid patchwork of layered floors and gradually increasing or decreasing income levels. She had been in cities before where the distinction between classes had been distinct, and almost rigidly enforced in the separation of housing, but here, even the poor people lived in buildings that were as well-constructed as those of the wealthiest people.

  It was odd, Ajalia thought, as she reached the tenement and slipped the bundle of keys into the place where she was keeping her money. She went directly to the door of the old Slavithe woman who had rented her the room, and eased open the door.

  The old woman looked as sour as ever.

  "What do you want?" she demanded, and then turned to see who had opened the door. Her face changed a little when she saw it was Ajalia. "Sit down, young one," she said, and thrust her eyes towards a chair that lay half-covered with brown clothes near the center of the room.

  "Have you eaten?" the old woman asked, and then laughed.

  "What is it, grandmother?" Ajalia asked.

  "You have not, you cheat. What have you brought me?" The old woman moved from a narrow stove to a shelf heaped with mismatched and rickety bowls, and ladled some manner of mush into a dish. "Eat," she said, pushing the dish at Ajalia's face.

  "I had an adventure today," Ajalia said slowly. She did not have a spoon, but the mush smelled divine.

  "Eat," the old woman urged again. Her old robes lay in heaps and uneven piles like scabs over her back, and around her neck. Her skin was wrinkled, and it dripped down around her neck. The old woman reminded Ajalia of someone, but she could not bring the other face into her mind. She felt as though she were looking at the reflection of someone she had once known.

  "I have been to the market," Ajalia said. She had meant to milk the old woman for information, but now that she looked in the old wrinkled face, she saw that fishing for information was not a very good idea. Something about the way the old woman's mouth puckered at the edges made her uncomfortable. She tried to think, again, of where she had seen such a face before, and with a shudder, a vision of her father's smiling face rose up in her mind.

  "He was not like this," Ajalia murmured to herself. She felt sick.

  "What, dear?" the old woman snapped. Ajalia stood up. Her arms felt weak, and her fingers were trembling. She could not take a deep breath. The vessel of mush fell with a clatter to the ground, and the contents splashed over the floor.

  Ajalia left the room. She stumbled out of the open door, and her balance was not good. Her vision felt swirly. She thought that she was going to fall against the door jamb, but she put a hand against the cold metal, and pressed her feet into the stone floor. She felt stifled. She wanted to take her clothes off.

  "I'll be right here," the old woman called after her. Her voice was clear, free of embarrassment, and empty of curiosity. Ajalia thought that a normal person would have wanted to know why she was stumbling suddenly out of the room, but the old woman didn't seem to care at all.

  Ajalia crept up the stairs. She kept her arms and hands pressed against the white stone walls, and they were cool and bracing against her. She wanted to take her clothes off. She felt more and more as if she could not breathe, and her robes seemed to be dragging against her chest. She felt dizzy. She got to the next floor, and sat down on the small square landing. The stone here was discolored just a little; it gave just a hint of a brownish odor, as though dead leaves had been left there over the winter. Ajalia leaned her temple against the wall, and tried to breathe.

  She stood up abruptly, and walked straight to her room. She wanted to collapse on the floor and sleep for days. She wanted to throw up. She wouldn't mind dying. Her door was unlatched as she'd left it, and she remembered that the room could possibly have been emptied a little. She opened to door, and began to laugh.

  The little room was stuffed with junk. People had not come and taken things away; they had added their own discarded furniture. Ajalia stopped laughing, and began to clean. There were little broken tables, and shattered crockery made of a kind of narrow tan clay that had been fired and then glazed a fiery red. There were shards of white stone, and dismembered limbs of chairs. In one corner was an enormous pile of discarded Slavithe clothing.

  Ajalia found a broken lamp, and took it to the open window, where the moonlight poured in. The lamp was all right, except that one of the panes had cracked through, and the wick had dripped down within the bottom of the casing. Ajalia broke out the cracked pane, and threw it on the floor.

  She used her tiny knife to dig the wick up from where it had crumpled. She looked around the room. She did not have her tinder box with her. She went to the window, and looked outside. There were torches along the street, but she didn't want to go back down the stairs. She felt like an animal in its hole, and she did not want to venture out of it.

  There was one torch burning at the side of the building, one floor down. She contemplated for a moment the idea of climbing down the side of the building, but with a sigh, she went back into the room with her lamp and a few long sticks from a broken chair leg. As Ajalia climbed down the stairs, the shadows stretched from end to end of the narrow stairs
, and the piles of rags and discarded furniture made hideous shapes against the pale walls.

  Ajalia went out into the street, and lit a long stick from one of the torches. She had not seen the torches being lit, but she thought that there must be an army of torch-lighting servants in the city. She lit her lamp, and waved out the flame of her stick. As she wound back up the stairs, the light from the silver lamp made licking shapes of white and gold rectangles against the walls.

  A pang of homesickness stole over her heart. She thought of the long hanging curtains in the servants' quarters, and the polished wood floors that lay throughout the house. She wished she was at home in the East. She thought of it as her home; it was the only place she had ever felt safe. The bundle of white keys she had taken from Gevad lay heavily against her hip, and she began to think of what she would do next. She didn't know how she was going to get a list of the houses the keys went to. She thought it was likely that most of the houses had been stolen, or at any rate extorted from people who didn't know how to protect what they had. Ajalia felt that was the same thing. Her own mother had not been able to protect what she had, after her father had left. Ajalia smiled as she came to the door of the little room, because she was thinking of what her mother would have done if she had met Gevad. Gevad, Ajalia thought, would have ended by owning Ajalia, and her little brother, and her mother would have been left in more debt than she had been when she started.

  Ajalia began to sort through the garbage. Some of it was in surprisingly good condition, despite being broken. Some of the dishes were only cracked, and there were at least two pieces of furniture that could easily be repaired. Ajalia began to move things into piles of real trash and salvageable items. The silver lamp cast a cozy glow over the heaps of things that lay in the small room. Ajalia began to wonder what kind of a person lived in a small, poor tenement room, and then paid enough attention to the rest of the building that when a door was left unlocked, they put their old junk into the room.

  On a whim, Ajalia stood up, picked up the lamp, and went up the stairs to the next floor. She knocked on a door that had a sliver of light gleaming out from underneath, and waited.

  "What do you want?" a male voice shouted out.

  "I'm new here," Ajalia shouted through the door. She heard shuffling footsteps, and then the door opened a crack. A young man with dark black hair poked his face into the crack, and his eyes traveled up Ajalia's foreign robe.

  "You are new," he said.

  "Did you put trash in my room?" Ajalia asked.

  The young man grinned. "No," he said. "Is that your room down there?"

  "What did you put in?" Ajalia asked. The young man frowned.

  "I didn't put anything in your room," he said aggressively.

  "It's okay, I'm not going to make you take it back," Ajalia said.

  "Oh," the young man said. "Then I put in the two chairs."

  "Why didn't you fix them?" she asked.

  "Why would I fix them?" he asked.

  "You know the city, right?" Ajalia asked.

  The young man stared at her for a moment.

  "Yes?" he said.

  "I'm looking for someone who knows Gevad, the house agent."

  The young man's face changed. "No," he said, and he closed the door.

  AJALIA FINDS A USEFUL FACE

  Ajalia raised her hand to knock on the door again, and then put her hand down. She went back down the steps with her lamp, and went back to sorting things in her room. A wide empty space was beginning to grow in the center of the room. The floor was becoming visible. Ajalia put her hand against the floor, and felt the cut of the stone. It was seamless, and smooth, and utterly too beautiful for such a poor tenement. She felt as though the house was like a grand dancing hall, belonging in a palace, that had been partitioned into rooms. She scrubbed just a little of the dirt away from the floor, and saw that the bottom layer of dirt had become ground into the surface of the stone.

  Ajalia was half listening to the stairs. She was pretty sure that the young man had nothing else to do in his life, and that he would show up at her door eventually. She would wait until his curiosity delivered him to her. Ajalia scraped at the dirt, and remembered what the servant in the eatery had said about the poison tree juice being used to clean the stone. She thought that she would have to procure some of this juice. Ajalia loved to clean things up. Cleaning gave her a sense of control, of serenity in a world of pain and confusion. She would enact order on this room, and on the stone floors and walls, and in cleaning, she would rebuild her stoic approach to life.

  As she stood, and sorted more piles of clothing into garments that would produce usable scraps, and fabric that was too worn to be saved, she took an inner determination; never again, as long as she stood in the city of Slavithe, would she feel emotions like those she had felt today. She was going to get a handle on herself. She was going to put her feelings back into the locked chest where they had been for so many years, and this time she was going to make sure that her past stayed where it belonged.

  Ajalia heard a gentle creak outside her door, and looked up. The young man with dark hair from upstairs was standing there.

  "Gevad's a creep," he said. He was wearing the brown Slavithe standard garb, and his hands were thrust into his pockets.

  Ajalia kept cleaning up.

  "Sorry about the stuff," he said, shrugging towards the mess in the room. "Do you want help?" he asked. Ajalia shook her head. "Don't do anything with Gevad," the young man said again.

  "Where's your family?" Ajalia asked him.

  The young man blinked, and his head shook slightly. "Um, I don't have one," he said.

  Ajalia looked at him. "They're dead?" she asked.

  "No," he said quickly. "I just, don't—" His voice broke off, and he shuffled his feet against the door.

  "Are they slaves?" Ajalia asked.

  The young man looked angry. Ajalia did not look at his face. She glanced at his sandals, which were of a nicer quality than his clothes, and smiled as she tore into another pile of ragged clothing.

  "We don't have slaves," he said. "And those clothes are from Madawi, down one floor below you. She keeps junk, but she's too lazy to throw it out."

  "Did you move the clothes in here for her?" Ajalia asked. She was not angry, and after a moment, the young man laughed.

  "No," he said, but she knew he was lying.

  "You don't have slaves," she said.

  "No," he said proudly. "No one owns anyone else here. Everyone is free."

  Ajalia paused what she was doing, and looked up at him. "Not like me," she said.

  "Well, yes," he said. "Not like you." He watched her sort the fabrics. "What are you going to do with those?" he asked, and then he added, "we have servants, you know. They get paid for their work."

  Ajalia did not think that he wanted to hear about the money that she made as a high-status slave in the East.

  "What kinds of houses does Gevad keep?" Ajalia asked. The young man leaned against the door frame, and pursed his lips.

  "You don't want to do business with him," he said. "He will take advantage of you."

  "I know," Ajalia said.

  The young man made a face, and wrinkled his nose. "Sure," he said, "but he really will."

  "I know," Ajalia said.

  "No, you don't," the young man said triumphantly. "You think you can be all sharp and whatever, but he cheats."

  "I know."

  "No, you don't," he said. "You couldn't know something like that. Nobody knows stuff like that until after they've been ripped off by a guy like that."

  "I know," Ajalia repeated.

  "Oh," the young man said. A new thought seemed to come into his brain. "Have you been ripped off before?" he asked. She didn't reply, because she felt that the answer was painfully obvious.

  "You can use these for blankets, you know," the young man said. He came into the room and put his hands on the clothes that Ajalia was stacking up against the chairs. "They don't look
like much, but they're warm. You take these scraps," he said, lifting the top garment, which was so worn and threadbare that the light of the lamp passed right through it, "and you put them into a sack with some stitching around the edges, and some stitches through the middle, and then you use it as a rug for a few years."

  "And that makes a blanket?" Ajalia asked. Her voice was dry, but not biting in any way. The young man did not suspect her of an attack. Her hands moved smoothly over the pile of fabric. She was reaching the bottom of the pile; she meant to burn the useless scraps.

  "Well, you use it as a rug, for a few years," the young man said. He had grown interested in the sound of his own voice, and his words were jumping up towards the ceiling with verve. "And after a while, you cut open the old bag, and the fibers will have woven themselves into a kind of thick fabric. It's excessively warm." He paused, and Ajalia thought for a moment that he was going to cry. She looked up at his face, and tried to imagine why.

  "I have one of those blankets," he told her. "Made of scraps. You can see it if you like." He picked up one of the old jackets, and twisted it around in his fingers. "You sew the patches together," he explained. "I have the blanket on my bed."

  Ajalia stared at the young man. He was so extraordinarily innocent. He did not mean to seduce her, and yet in any place that she had been, his words would have been layered with innuendo. She could not determine the cause of his extreme lack of self-awareness. He was standing there like a child of five, offering to show her some part of his collection of material goods, much as a child would offer to display a bug he had found.

  Ajalia never said yes to these kinds of offers, but she could not quell a deep, welling curiosity that was wriggling around her feet. She wanted to know more about this young man. He seemed, to her, typical of the Slavithe people in some way. He was younger than most of the people she had met in this city, but he exemplified that strange innocence, the bland and unassuming kindness that seemed to ooze out of the faces of the people in this city.