by Joseph Lallo
Marret's eyes locked on the two heavy sacks of gold. Combined, they were enough to take the debtors from his throat and return him to the life he'd grown accustomed to. He swallowed hard. “That is acceptable.”
“Master, you—”
“If you utter one more syllable, I swear to you, blind man, I will find a way to make your pathetic life even more miserable,” Marret snapped.
“Pleasing to see that you know when to put a man in his place. Keep the gold—though if you fail to deliver, I'll be taking it back. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got another errand to run farther south. Another meeting with the blasted gatekeeper.” Teht muttered. “My talents are wasting away working on trivial things like this.”
She pushed her way past Marret and continued out the door, her attendants in tow. When the plantation owner attempted to follow, intent on oozing a bit more charm in hopes of making an impression as a social elite, the heavy door to the stable was slammed in his face. He let the false smile fall away.
“What,” Marret fumed, turning to his slave with a scowl, “do you think you were doing contradicting me? There are two bags of gold, each as big as that empty head of yours, that could have been lost had you continued your prattle.”
“You cannot hope to fill the order, master. Even if we do not lose a single bushel, and even if we deliver every last rakka seed regardless of quality, we couldn't hope to fill half of what she's asking,” Ben raved.
“Then we shall plant rakka on all of our fields,” Marret said.
“You cannot! Rakka ruins the soil if left to grow in it year in and year out. Within three seasons, you won't be able to grow a weed!”
“Within three seasons we will be able to buy half of Tressor if she keeps paying us so foolishly. This soil is the best in all of the kingdom. It has always done what we've required of it. It will not fail us now.”
“It has done what you've required of it because it has been cared for properly. It was the last semblance of your father's way that you hadn't abandoned.”
“That is all, blind man. Go. Back to your shack. And tomorrow, don't bother coming forward at meal times. You'll find your bowl empty. Tonight you should thank all that is holy that you are so frail. If I wasn't afraid they would snap you in half with their first blow, I would have my handlers teach you a lesson you would never ever forget,” Marret barked. “Have I made myself clear?”
“Crystal.”
“Then go!” Marret growled.
Outside, a crack of thunder pealed across the plantation, near enough and powerful enough to rattle the stable and spook the horses nearly into a frenzy. Without so much as a flinch from the sound, Ben lowered the lantern, pushed open the door, and departed.
Marret took up the lantern and marched after him expecting to see the beginnings of a rain storm, and thus another chance to ingratiate himself to his new benefactor in the form of a loaned carriage. Outside, he found not a cloud in the starry sky, not a drop of rain . . . and no sign of the strange woman or her body guards. Pausing only briefly to consider it, the greedy land owner rushed back inside the stable to see to his gold.
Ben simply marched steadily and slowly.
“The man doesn't understand the harm he does . . . doesn't understand the mistakes he makes. All it takes is the glitter of gold and the fool is as blind as me . . .”
#
Against tradition, advisement, and good judgment, Marret had chosen to completely fill his plantation with rakka. With the temperamental plants occupying the fields meant for lentils, there was some question of where the food for the slaves would come from next season, but this was, predictably, of little concern to Marret. Of greater concern was the fact that there simply weren't enough slaves to properly plant and tend to the additional bushes. Reluctantly, a portion of the gold was spent to purchase enough slaves to shoulder the additional load, and enough handlers to keep them in line and on task. Normally, training them would have taken at least a season, but with the lax requirements set forth by their benefactor, weeks of training were collapsed into two instructions: keep the soil moist, and pick any berry that isn't green anymore.
Once the baskets were filled, a cursory attempt at soaking and roasting the seeds was made, but it soon became clear that there would be no hope of keeping up with the harvest. The already-slashed preparation was reduced to a quick dip in a vat of water and a hasty sear. At the end of a season, all of the compromises and cut corners had produced just enough rakka to fill Teht's order.
At midnight on the last day of the harvest, she arrived as quietly and mysteriously as she had before, instructed a veritable army of cloaked servants haul away the crop, and left the payment in advance for the next year.
Of course, the new slaves had cost a handsome sum, the new handlers needed to be paid, and with no food grown, food enough for the workers needed to be bought. In the end, the gold from the first payment wasn't enough to cover the costs and his many debts, but it was little concern. This year's payment more than made up for the difference. All that needed to be done was to match the prior year's harvest and his debts would be clean with more than enough gold left over make him as wealthy as he'd always behaved that he was.
Alas, the soil that had so faithfully served his father for all of these years seemed to have no such loyalty to him. The northern fields, those which had been forced to endure two years of rakka without rest, were reluctant to suffer a third. Few bushes sprouted, and fewer still survived long enough to produce any fruit. Ben used every trick he knew to pry another useful season from the land, and to squeeze extra from the fields that had not yet been taxed to their limit. The end of the season brought a harvest that was still well short of Teht’s requirements. With most of the gold spent upon his debts, and thus without the ability to give it back as the mysterious woman would require, Marret was forced to pay dearly for rakka from other plantations to make up for the shortfall.
It was then that Marret finally managed to accept that he could not provide another harvest like this one, and refused to do business with Teht any longer, but the damage was done. There was not a single field on his overworked stretch of land that could yield a decent crop any longer. Before long, new debts began to replace the ones that had so recently been paid. When the time came to pay his yearly tribute to the lord, he could not afford it and was forced to give up the best of his fields and the best of his slaves.
More time passed, and things only grew worse from that day.
#
Five years since the deal with Teht had sealed the doom of Jarrad’s once-great plantation, Marret’s two sisters had taken their families and moved on, but some combination of pride, stubbornness, and stupidity kept Marret and his brood in the sprawling manor. The young man was convinced that he could somehow scrape enough of a survival from his father’s land to one day build it back again—and he was unwilling to give up his home. All that remained of what had, for a time, been nine fields, were the same three that Jarrad had worked when Ben and the malthrope had been purchased fifteen years ago. Combined, there was perhaps enough worthwhile soil among the unsold land to bring in what would have been a shamefully small yield from a single field in the old days.
Worse than the state of the land was the state of the workers. All of the single-stripe slaves had been taken by the lord, and most of the double-stripe slaves as well. Many more had simply escaped. The hellish conditions and starvation rations convinced them that the life of a fugitive—or even the death of one—would be preferable to enduring another day on the land. Only the dozen with bodies or minds too broken to contemplate escape and too weak to be worth selling remained now.
Among them were Menri, Goldie, Gurruk, Ben, and the malthrope. Menri and Goldie were husks of their former selves, the former thanks to the ravages of a hard life finally catching up with him, and the latter thanks to a series of poorly-treated injuries all but crippling him. Gurruk, who had been ornery when drunk and more so when sober, had gotten in more than
enough fights to earn three stripes and too low a price to be sold. Ben was nearly bent double with age and had no value elsewhere, and the malthrope refused to leave his mentor's side and could not be sold regardless. The others were mostly the remnants of stopgap purchases made to keep the farm afloat in recent years.
To keep them hard at work and to discourage further escape attempts, there were no fewer than eight handlers, nearly one for every slave. Their leader and most eager member was, naturally, Bartner.
“Up! Up and out!” barked the slave-driver as he marched along the row of rundown shacks that housed the remaining workers. “I want all of you on your feet and ready for the day’s orders now!”
Slowly, the haggard slaves stumbled from their homes and formed a line. Bartner stalked up and down, teeth fairly grinding as he looked them over, almost eager to find a misstep or misbehavior. When it became clear that they were too weary and beaten to misbehave, his mind churned until he found something suitable to growl about.
“Blind man!” he bellowed. “Get out here!”
The malthrope turned to the door of the shack, his motions slow to avoid drawing a lash from Bartner. It opened, and Ben shakily made his way out. The years had been harder on Ben than anyone else. Now ancient by any measure, the last five years had ruined him. His wrinkled skin hung loose in a malnourished way. What little hair he still had was reduced to a thin, downy, white tangle. He tried to stand tall, but he was bent and stooped with time; if not for his walking stick, the old man likely wouldn’t be able to stand.
Bartner scowled and pounded over to the frail old man.
“Listen, blind man. In all of the years I’ve been here, I’ve seen you talk, I’ve seen you teach. I’ve seen you sit down and tinker. I’ve never once seen you work. All of these men and the mally get out there and get dirty and sweaty and do the job. Considering how bad this patch of dirt is doing, I think it is time you got out there and put your back into it.” His words were delivered with the flicker of a grin at the corners of his mouth, like a boy who had just discovered a brand new toy.
“The spirit is willing,” Ben stated. “But—”
“But nothing! If you can lean on a stick, you can lean on a shovel. Get out there and do your job.”
“You can’t do that! Ben can barely stand!”
All eyes turned. It was the malthrope who had spoken. Though the trying conditions had helped to ease the hostility toward him amongst the slaves, if only by making the slave handlers even more despised than he, he still tended to stay quiet when in groups. When his voice was heard, it was a few quiet words, always the answer to a question. This outburst represented the most that any but Ben had heard him speak all at once in years.
When he realized who had objected, the fury poured off of Bartner. He thundered up to the creature, foregoing the strap for a punishing backhand.
“Don’t you ever speak to me unless I order you to speak to me,” he roared, hammering home his words with a second and third strike. “You. Filthy. Malthrope!”
A final devastating blow upon the groggy and stunned creature was enough to drive him into unconsciousness. When the light slowly returned to his vision and the fog began to lift, the creature found himself secured in a leather harness and attached by way of it to a plow. His rattled mind tried to put the pieces together. The tool—a stout, wedge-shaped blade with a pair of handles to guide it and a sturdy rope to pull it—hadn’t been used to till the fields since the work animals had been sold two years prior. At the handles was the graying, worn-out man that Menri had become under Marret's leadership.
With muzzy clumsiness the creature worked at the straps, trying to free himself.
“Don't,” warned Menri. “Bartner said with Ben as an extra hand on the field, we finally have an animal free to pull the plow.”
In the past, the slave would have reveled in the current situation, but the fight had long ago left him. He knew all too well that if the monstrous head slave-driver thought he could get away with it, the scoundrel would have a slave strapped to the plow every day, just to watch them struggle. Somehow, there was no fun in watching suffering when the next day it could easily be your burden to bear.
“Ho there!” came Bartner's voice from the edge of the field. “If our new ox is through with its rest, get a move on!”
The malthrope shuddered and turned to Menri.
“For what it's worth,” the man said quietly, “even you don't deserve this. Now get moving, before he beats both of us.”
After a deep breath and a resigned sigh, the malthrope strained at the straps until the blade began to cut through the parched and ruined soil. The work was back-breaking. In minutes, his muscles were screaming and his lungs were burning. It took every ounce of his strength to keep the plow moving, and if a stubborn clump of dirt or cluster of stone managed to bring it to a stop, he had to fight madly to get it moving again. Making matters worse was the agonizing throbbing in his head, a lingering reminder of the throttling Bartner had given him. His vision had yet to clear completely, and the baking sun and suffocating heat wrung the strength from his limbs, but he pressed on. There simply wasn't another option. Stopping even long enough to catch his breath drew Bartner or one of his underlings to administer a lash or two, and threats of worse if he didn't finish the row.
The sun crept through the sky. When it finally reached the horizon, somehow the malthrope was still breathing. Long ago he'd lost the strength to haul his burden with his legs alone. Now he'd resorted to digging his toes and fingers into the dirt and heaving at the straps to inch the blade forward. Most of the other workers had finished their tasks and trudged to their shacks already, leaving at least one handler free at any given moment to provide motivation. The only respite came during the occasional grudgingly-allowed water break.
It was during just such a break, Menri drinking from a dipper and the beast plunging his head into a bucket, that a commotion was heard.
“What's going on over there?” Menri asked, wiping sweat from his brow.
“It looks like they're giving the proper encouragement to the only worker doing a worse job than you two,” muttered their current handler, one of Marret's most recently hired. “The blind man.”
The words roused Ben's apprentice from the near-trance he'd fallen into. His head shot up and he fought his red-rimmed eyes into focus, scanning the fields until he spotted the meager form of his mentor. The old man was on his knees, clearly without the strength to stand. Bartner was over him, studded strap in hand and vicious grin on his face. The slave-driver muttered something the malthrope couldn't make out over the pulse pounding in his ears. Ben wheezed an unheard reply. Whatever it was, it was enough to prompt Bartner to deliver a lash to the old man's back, knocking him to the dirt.
“No!” the malthrope urged.
“If you're through with your water, you can get back to work,” said the slave handler overseeing the beast. “Move.”
The words were delivered with a threatening brandish of his own tool of punishment, a cat o'nine tails, but the beast did not heed them. Another blow was delivered to the fallen old man, and the beast shook as though it had struck him instead.
“You've got to stop it! You'll kill him!”
“You should worry about yourself, monster. Now back to work!” the handler ordered with a lash of his weapon. When the blow failed to silence the desperate pleas for mercy, more followed.
Blow after blow rained down on malthrope and blind man alike. Each strike made the creature more desperate, drawing the attention of other handlers, each adding his own lashes and barked orders. They did no good. Each strike was shrugged off as their target screamed for Bartner to stop, tears streaming and voice wavering. He struggled at the straps that held him to the plow, inching it toward his ailing mentor and trying with all of his might to pull free.
#
Half a field away, Ben slumped after another blow.
“Please . . . please . . . you don’t understand what you
are doing . . .” the blind man struggled to say.
“I am giving you what you deserve for not working,” growled Bartner with another lash.
“You can’t do this . . . not now . . . not in front of the malthrope . . .”
“Don’t worry, old man. The beast will get what he deserves soon enough. Now, are you going to work?”
Another blow knocked the wind from Ben’s lungs.
“I . . . can’t . . .” he croaked.
The strap tore at him again.
Fingers digging into the soil, Ben pulled together what little strength he had left. “Do not show him . . . this side of humanity. You don’t understand . . . how important he is. You don’t understand . . . what he’ll do if . . . he is a . . .”
The words were cut short by a savage blow.
“He is a monster. And there is only one way to deal with monsters.”
Ben coughed weakly, blood speckling his lips. “Yes . . . only one way . . . to deal with monsters . . .”
#
The beast watched with pained eyes as finally there came a blow upon the old man that did not prompt a shudder of pain. There was no motion at all. Ben was still. As the realization of what happened reached its icy fingers into his brain, the malthrope dropped to his knees and hung his head low. The world seemed to dim. Agony, fear, anger . . . each dropped away. All expression drained from his face as a cold, dark emptiness wrapped itself around his soul. It snuffed out the anguish of his mind, then snuffed out the mind as well. In its place rose something else . . . something primal. A smoldering ember inside of him, one that had been stoked by each moment of sorrow and each act of cruelty, flared and sparked.
Ben was not the only thing that had been broken by that final blow. It had snapped the tattered threads of restraint within the beast, torn away the layers of humanity built with such care.