Freedom's Apprentic

by Naomi Kritzer

  “When we were standing outside Helladia you were free. You didn’t have to go with Boradai. You put yourself in her power. Your mistake.”

  “I hope you rot in hell.”

  “We’re already in hell. If you’re lucky, I’ll get us out.”

  I wondered where Tamar was, right now—what she’d done when she woke up and found us gone. She’ll go back to the Alashi, the darkness whispered. She’s stuck around out of loyalty, but after this—this betrayal—she’ll shed you like the deadweight you are. You’re on your own. I shook my head. I could trust Tamar; she was out there, waiting for night, and we’d manage this together. She’d had plenty of opportunities to leave me if that’s what she wanted to do.

  Not since winter ended, though.

  I could trust her.

  You used to say the same thing about Kyros.

  Tamar was my blood sister.

  Kyros is your father.

  When the shadow had fallen over me in the winter, I had taken to my bed and scarcely moved until it lifted, finally, weeks later. Here I didn’t have that luxury. I had to keep moving, keep the hammer moving, keep my mind working on our escape. I’d forgotten, during my months without the shadow, how hard it was to think in the darkness. It felt as if weights were chained to my mind, at least for any reasoned thought. My fears—about Tamar abandoning me to my stupidity, about Kyros finding me, about Prax killing me—continued to chase each other around and around like little yapping dogs.

  Someone up above struck a large bell; around me, everyone gathered up their stone chips into their baskets and went up, one by one, to dump them into the barrel. I followed. The barrel went up, lifted on chains by slaves turning the crank somewhere above. Then it came back down with a steaming pot and a stack of wooden bowls. A ladle for each of us; everyone slumped against the wall to eat. I’d hoped for stew, but what came out of the pot looked like cooked horse grain. I was still hungry enough that I scraped the bowl clean to get the last of it.

  As we were bringing back our bowls, I heard a quiet voice say, “I heard someone say your name is Lauria.” I turned—it was Prax. He’s still alive—but his eyes burned silently, and I swallowed hard, wondering what I could say with the guards so close.

  Nothing, as it turned out. I was shoved back to my spot, Prax was shoved in another direction. Anything I had to say to him would have to wait until later.

  I picked up my hammer. My hands were beginning to blister; my arm muscles were sore. As I swung it, the yapping dogs started up again. Even if you can swing it now, what about tomorrow, what about the next day? This plan was doomed; you only came up with it as a way to atone by dying. So let them make an example of you. Prax will see, maybe he’ll be satisfied. But it certainly sounds easier than swinging that hammer one more time, doesn’t it?

  Prax. He hates you, and for good reason. He has every right to hate you, far more than the whining bastard on your left has. Even if you want to help Prax, why should he listen to you? Maybe as soon as the guards are out of sight for the night he’ll pick up one of these hammers and beat you to death.

  Well, if that’s what he wants to do, I guess I’d better keep swinging this hammer so that the guards don’t kill me first. Prax sure has a better right to kill me than the guards do.

  And then Tamar will try to find you tonight, and . . . what? If you’re dead, you won’t be able to talk to her. She’ll think she just didn’t find you, so she’ll stay close, and try again . . . and again . . . How long before she gives up? How long before one of the detachments from the Greek Army stumbles across her and kills her out of suspicion that she’s Alashi?

  I tried to clear my mind, as I would when I was meditating, but the fears crowded in anyway, swarming through my thoughts, nipping at me. Tamar, I thought, swinging the hammer with a clink against the rock wall. Tamar. Tamar. Tamar. Tamar. I focused my mind on her name like a bead on a chain, willing that to banish the other thoughts and worries. I could do nothing more until evening, nothing more until I’d spoken with Prax and—I hoped—Tamar. Wait until evening.

  We heard another bell. Up went the rocks, and down came dinner—more gruel. Our hammers went into the barrel with our empty bowls to go up. I guess Prax will have to kill me with his bare hands. Down the ladder came the slaves who’d worked that day washing rock chips. Down came a barrel of blankets—one each—plus a pot to piss in. Up went all the lamps save one, leaving us nearly in darkness as the barrel was pulled back to the top. Finally the guards went up the ladder, and last of all, the ladder itself was pulled up.

  It was a remarkably secure prison.

  As the guards were leaving, the slaves from up top were looking for places to lie down and sleep for the night. The slaves from below were waiting, though, and I thought I knew why.

  Prax approached me from the back of the mine as I stood, gaping up at the hole where the ladder had been. “You are the Lauria I remember,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “This makes no sense. You weren’t owned by Kyros. And half a dozen from the line swear they saw you last week, a free woman. What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to give back what I took from you.”

  “Are you drunk? What the hell do you think you can give me here?”

  The slaves from above had gotten back up to listen, and there was a ripple of hard amusement at Prax’s question.

  “I mean, really. Do you see a way out of here? Do you see a ladder? Every slave is put down here at night.”

  “I have a friend on the outside,” I said. “A shaman, and my blood sister. Once we know what we’re going to do, we can have her come and let us out.”

  “There is a wall. There are guards. They are constantly watching for bandits, and you think your friend has a chance?”

  “I think she’ll have a chance if we can poison the guards.” I pulled the packet from my pocket. “Who cooks for the guards?”

  A long pause. Then . . . “He does,” Prax said, and pointed.

  I held out the packet to the man. He was cleaner than the rest. “Would you use this?” I asked.

  “What will it do?”

  “Make them sick.” I hope.

  “If I make them sick, they’ll take away my job and send me back to the bottom of the mine.”

  “No they won’t. Because while they’re throwing up, my blood sister will come throw down the ladder, and we’ll come up and kill them all, and escape to the Alashi. And then we’ll all be free.”

  The cook looked at Prax. Prax looked at me.

  “I swore last fall that I would free the people I sent back to slavery,” I said. “I found Nika, and took her to the Alashi. I took Uljas to the steppes. And . . . and Burkut as well.”

  “What happened to Burkut? You’re trying to hide something,” Prax said.

  “Burkut died. He was free, but he died.” I waited for Prax to say something. When he didn’t I went on. “I don’t know where Thais is. But I spent all winter trying to think of a way to free you. I thought that if I was willing to risk everything by going inside, I might be able to help you get out. And all the other mine slaves.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you really need to know the answer to that?”

  Prax stepped close to me and for a moment I thought he was going to try to kill me with his bare hands. I could smell him, fetid and sweaty with a faint odor of rot and death. His breath was terrible. “I dreamed of you, some months ago,” he said. “We faced each other, and you promised to free me.” I nodded. “So tell me. Why? And why now, and not two years ago when you took me back to Kyros?”

  “I was Kyros’s servant then.” I swallowed hard. “Now . . . now I am Alashi.” And always will be. No matter what they say.

  Prax’s eyes swept over me and he nodded, finally.

  “There are two guards down here during the day,” I said. “Why not kill them and break out, even without poisoning their
food?”

  “The ladder is pulled up unless someone needs to go up or down,” Prax said. “Also, there is air to breathe here at the bottom only because a djinn blows fresh air down a shaft. If they sent the djinn to do something else, we’d all suffocate.”

  “What about the slaves above?”

  “There are far more than two guards on top,” Prax said. “They protect the mine from bandits. They could certainly fight off slaves.”

  “Well.” I turned back to the cook. “Will you put this in their food? It’s possible that it won’t do anything at all.”

  He took it, crumpling it in his hand and hiding it, finally, inside his shirt.

  Prax took his blanket and lay down in the tunnel. “You probably need to sleep now,” he said. “Speak with your blood sister. Then tell us if she’s willing to help us.”

  I wrapped my blanket around me, then lay down and closed my eyes. Around me, I could hear the shuffle of other slaves settling down. The tunnel floor was cold, even through the blanket, and uneven. And despite my exhaustion, I couldn’t fall asleep.

  I rose, finally, and sat up, leaning against the wall and trying to meditate. Around me, in the dim light, I could see silent humps, the sleeping slaves. Then Prax sat up and came to sit next to me.

  “I couldn’t sleep my first night here either,” he said. I thought he was going to go on to give me grief—after all, it was my fault he’d wound up here—but he just scratched his knee, his eyes a little distant. “The floor is awfully hard.”

  “I need to talk to Tamar,” I whispered.

  “Maybe tomorrow night.”

  “I gave the cook the packet . . .”

  “Well, and tomorrow night we’ll know if it’s worked.”

  My eyes felt like they were crusted with sand; I was so tired, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t been able to just sleep. “Why are you being kind to me?” I blurted, resting my forehead against my knees.

  Prax shrugged. “Why not?” When I didn’t answer, he went and lay back down. After a few minutes I lay down again as well.

  I slipped into a gray twilight sometime very late in the night, but I couldn’t find Tamar, or she couldn’t find me; I thought I heard the echo of her voice, but I couldn’t make out her words over the clatter of a bell. Then the ringing of the bell woke me, and I was back in the mine.

  We ate breakfast below; more cooked horse feed. Then a different group of slaves went up to work on the surface for the day. We rotated, apparently. I wondered when it would be my turn to go up, and hoped that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to find out. Prax was down with me, still. He worked beside me today, his eyes on the rock as he chipped away.

  “How much of what we’re breaking here is gems?” I asked as we worked.

  “In a good week we find a handful. Up above, they get a bonus if they find any. Extra food. Down here, they don’t expect us to be able to spot anything. There was one time, though, that someone found a big swath of something in the rock—they had us chip away the rock around it to pry it all out, and then everyone got the rest of the day off.”

  “When was that? Recently?”

  “No. I don’t know when it was. Maybe last spring? Or last summer. It’s hard to keep track of time.”

  I wondered what had kept Prax alive, all this time. How he’d survived the work, the hunger, the abuse. He was rail-thin now, hard and spare; anything extra he had had been burned away, eaten by the darkness. He saw me looking at him and returned a measuring look before going back to his task.

  The hammer was rubbing blisters onto my hands; I tried to change my grip, but that helped very little. I thought about tearing loose some strips of cloth from my shirt to pad my hands, then discarded the idea. Just endure it, I thought. Either we’ll escape and I’ll have time to heal, or I’ll die anyway. Attracting attention from the guards now isn’t worth it. By the time we stopped to eat lunch, my hands were slick with blood.

  I watched carefully to see what the guards were eating. They had a separate meal, which they ate, leaning against the barrel and chatting with each other. I wondered if the cook had slipped the packet in. The guards didn’t seem to find anything wrong with the food. One glanced toward me as the meal was ending and I quickly looked away.

  Not quickly enough. “Hey, girl,” the guard said, ambling toward me. I looked down—then, afraid the guard would be angry at me for not answering when he was clearly talking to me, I looked up again. I stood up and instinctively tried to square my shoulders and straighten up before thinking, no, he wants me to cower, just give him what he wants. It didn’t matter. I could smell my own fear, and I’m sure he could, too.

  “What did you do to piss off your old master, anyway?” The guard wasn’t fat, but he was fleshy, and soft, for a soldier. Stark contrast to the hungry slaves. His clothes were dirty, but pressed and mended. No doubt some privileged slave had laundry duty.

  “I don’t know,” I said, my voice ragged.

  The guard poked me in the chest with the handle of his whip, hard enough to knock me back down. Then he uncoiled his whip and lashed me once on the legs. The tearing pain caught me by surprise and I yelped like a puppy. “Sure you know,” the guard said. “They all know. Are you going to tell me now?” The whip snapped out again and I cringed, trying to pull away with nowhere to go, biting back my own sobs. He wasn’t hitting me hard; I knew that. From his perspective, this wasn’t punishment, but teasing.

  “I’ll tell you,” I said, my back pressed against the tunnel wall. “I can tell you my guess.”

  The whip snaked out one more time as I was saying that and I almost broke down into sobs before I got some sort of shaky control over my voice. “I went for water and got lost. He must have thought I was trying to run away, since we were so near bandit territory. He said he would make an example of me, so he sold me here, not even for a very good price, to be rid of me. To make sure everyone knew.”

  “Got lost. Sure you did.” The guard nodded, and for a moment I thought he might press the issue, but he’d tired of his sport. “What are you all gawking at?” he roared, and everyone picked up hammers and went back to work.

  My hands were shaking, and my legs, but the tears dissipated as I let the darkness swallow me again. Nothing matters, nothing matters, wait it out, wait it out.

  Before I had left with Sophos, he had promised that I would be treated respectfully—that he wouldn’t forget that I was a free woman. Then he’d raped me. But that had happened just before I left Sophos’s house for the Alashi. For most of my time with him, I’d thought myself untouchable; my fear had been feigned. Here, I was truly a slave. Reflecting on that even briefly made the panic rise up in me like the urge to vomit. There’s only one way out now. Only one way out. So keep going.

  The guards did not look ill. Not even slightly. Maybe the evening meal would be different? Dinnertime came, we ate again, and the guards and the ladder went up. All eyes turned to the cook.

  “I put it in the noon meal,” he said. “That stuff you gave me. It smelled terrible, I thought they’d all notice, but no one complained. But they’re not sick, either. It didn’t work.”

  It didn’t work. I felt dizzy with dismay.

  “We need a stronger poison,” Prax said. “We’ll mix together the stuff in the night pot tonight. Scoop out a little, let it sit in a packet for a day, then try giving them that.” He squeezed my shoulder. “This will work.”

  “Why are you so certain?” I asked him as we lay down for the night.

  “The djinni promised me I would be free,” he said softly.

  “Are you sure it was the djinni?” I asked.

  “Are you thinking of the dream where you came to me? I’m not thinking of that. This was different. Not long after I first came here, I decided that I’d rather die than remain a slave. I didn’t want to be beaten to death—too painful—so I didn’t dare just stop working. Instead, I stopped eating. For two days; no one noticed. Then that night, a djinn came to me and told me
that I needed to eat, and survive, and trust them, because I would be free. I asked when, and the djinn wouldn’t tell me, but it did say that an Alashi woman would come and lead me to freedom. I thought that was strange. I didn’t know a great deal about the Alashi, but I did know that they never free slaves. You’re supposed to free yourself, and then if you reach them, they figure you’re worthy. The Greeks say the Alashi sacrifice newcomers to their gods, but they don’t, really—the desert does it for them.”

  “But I’m not Alashi. They cast me out. Alibek . . .” I trailed off, not wanting to tell the story. “They took my vest,” I finished, lamely. “I’m not one of them.”

  “You said yesterday that you were Alashi.”

  “It was the easiest way to explain. And—I am more Alashi than I am anything else, even if they don’t want me anymore.”

  Prax almost smiled. “The djinn meant you.”

  I could see Tamar, but she was a terribly long way away, across the steppe, riding her horse. I shouted her name, and she turned toward me, but though she urged her horse forward she grew no closer.

  “We’re going to poison the guards,” I shouted. “Once they’re sick, we’ll need you . . . we’ll be trapped, below the ground, we’ll need you to lower the ladder . . .”

  She was still distant, but I could see her face, tight with fear. “Can you hear me?” I shouted. “Do you understand? Please . . .”

  She was yelling something back, but I couldn’t hear her; the wind whipped her words away. They reached me, finally, echoing in my ears as I woke up. I’m going to kill you for doing this to me. You and Jaran both, I’m going to spit you on sticks and leave you for the vultures . . .

  I lay awake in the dim light of the one lamp. Tamar wants to help. She must be willing to help, because I have to survive this in order to give her the satisfaction of killing me. But that’s not what she’d have said if she heard me. If she’d heard what I said, she’d have given me more of an answer.

  Maybe she heard me just as I woke, the way I heard her.

  The message got through.

  Surely it did.