46 - They breed slaves

They kept me in the house for the night, giving me a blanket, and freeing my hands to eat a little stew. It was no worse fare than a warrior’s, though it was full of kri, the spice Lakans put in every dish, turning it golden brown and hot beyond anything I’d ever imagined in my life, let alone eaten. They all ate without a blink, while I thought the inside of my mouth would burn away, my tongue charred to an ember, and they laughed at my tears.

They bound my arms in the position which immobilizes most comfortably, wrists before and elbows behind, and my ankles tight together, for sleeping, ruining my plans to creep out while they were asleep. On retrospect, I think they knew me for one who’d take a risk and not give up.

In the morning they loosened the ankle-ropes enough that I could take long walking-strides, though still not run, and took me out to the hearth-chamber again, where a man I knew as an underling of Klajen waited. He examined me as you would examine a horse at market, though perhaps less gently, as you don’t want to scare or hurt a horse. He pinched and felt my muscles all over, peered into my eyes and my ears, forced my mouth open with a whip-butt and poked my teeth with dirty fingers. He pored longest over my privates. I knew better than to struggle or speak, but soon I was quivering with anger. This he ignored, as if he’d seen it a thousand times. Then he led me out.

In the street outside the gate, which still hung splintered, scores of other Yeolis, naked and bound, stood in the bright sunlight. It struck me with grief first, then fear, and of course, shame. I tried not to see, or be seen by, anyone I knew. They might blurt my name, or show an expression that would tell the Lakans; at the very least they’d be disheartened to see me captive.

Once among them, though, I saw I was safer than I had thought. No one spoke, and we all avoided each other’s gaze, either ashamed in the sight of the others, or lost in our own pain and fear. We were all men; the women had been separated from us, it seemed; I felt for couples, torn apart. Some wept, which made raking pains through my own heart. Everyone else had been plundered of his crystal, and pierced with rings in the earlobes, same as me.

We were being linked into coffles, each bound to the line by the neck, close enough together that we’d have to march in step. I remember thinking it strange that it should be such even numbers, until it occurred to me, the slavers had come to buy twenty, or fifty, or a hundred. They must cling to Lakan armies, I thought, like a hybrid of ravens and lice.

My guard tied me onto the end of one coffle, and I saw no good chances to slip away would come until I was untied from it. Though only I and one other were hobbled, all twenty of us could not flee in such perfect unison that we could be as fast as unbound runners. I must have patience, I told myself, until the crack opens.

He and another man mounted up, the head hitching the end of our line to his saddle, and yelled something in Lakan which must mean “March!” That was the first time I felt the sting of the Lakan whip, sharp like a blade-edge on the skin, since unlike the Yeoli whip it is not made not to leave a scar.

So we set off on a journey none of us could know how long. Thus it starts, and for some ends only with death.

We found, if we kept to a whisper and did not look at one another, that we could talk among ourselves without getting whipped. I said little, frightened that someone might know my voice. No one asked names. When one does not want one’s own known, it is rude to ask others’.

That way I learned that Emao-e, and a number of others, had been thumbed, and would be ransomed so. “Most got away, but she was trapped under the wall, and surrendered. They did it in revenge, of course.” The speaker, who did give his name, just as Krasiya, laughed faintly. “She did the lefty trick, though—did you know, Steel-eyes is left-handed? Well, this Lakan general was finickety, wanted the surrender in writing. Smooth as water, she signed it with her right hand. And so thick she laid it on, at the head of the line, as if it were a terrible choice for her; I swear, she sweated.”

There was a silent chuckle, more felt than heard. One soon learns to be thankful, in defeat, for small victories. He seemed to know precisely who had been thumbed, and so was asked after many. Casually, as if they were just my Teachers, I said, “Did it happen to Esora-e Mangu? Or his wife?”

“Esora-e, yes,” Krasiya said. “And there was a woman he stayed in a clinch with afterwards, so that must have been his wife, and they did her too. Neither of them so much as grimaced.”

I thought of my day of reckoning with Esora-e, that he and I had agreed without words would come sometime, of having yearned all my childhood to know what age I would be when it came, when I proved better at sword-craft, if I ever did. I thought of his great iron fingers enwrapping my small weak ones, sinking me to my knees, and his words, “One day you will be able to beat me.”

Like any student of the School, he was trained to do fight one-handed with either hand, but his shield-hand had been his weaker, as with most people. When the time came I could defeat him, if I lived to get home, he would acknowledge me his better and never breathe a whisper that it might have been otherwise, were he whole; but in my heart, I would never know.

Back in Vae Arahi, he’d find sympathy, which would hurt him worse than anything. She will bear it better than he, I thought. I resolved, when I returned, to speak of it little and only with curiosity, hiding my pity. Then we would go on as before.

Someone asked Krasiya, “What about Chevenga—he didn’t get thumbed, did he?”

I was on the end, none of them facing me. Without Chirel on my shoulder, I was just another dark-haired youth to any Yeoli, or so I could hope. I bowed my head lower, in case one happened to look over his shoulder.

“I didn’t see him. No one knew what happened to him. Let’s hope he got away.” They all assented, sending up prayers.

No, I didn’t get thumbed, but I didn’t get away either; I’m here. As Yeolis, they had a right to know; but best, for many reasons, that they didn’t. That, and shame, made me hold my tongue.

Then someone asked Krasiya how he knew all this. There was a long silence, and the questioner suddenly said, “Never mind. I didn’t ask.”

“No, no,” he answered softly. “I was always taught, there is no harm in truth. Lakans don’t know how to thumb, and we were prisoners…” His voice thinned almost to a whisper. “I was in the crew.” Perhaps he’d chopped off my shadow-parents’ thumbs with his own hand. Best that I didn’t know. Of course no one asked more.

A day into Laka, as the sun was beginning to hang low in the sky and cool, they detached me from the coffle at a farm gate. What became of Krasiya and the others, I would never know. The handlers did some business with papers, and gave my rope-end to a tall ill-natured-looking Lakan with a switch in his belt, who spoke bad but understandable Enchian.

It is never wrong to be polite. “If you please,” I asked him, “to whom do I belong?”

“Akdan!” he snapped, bringing the whip out of his belt and across my shoulders, leaving a line of fire, in one expert move. “I did not ask you to speak! Akdan—repeat that.”

“Akdan,” I intoned.

“Remember that. You will always call me that. Think of yourself as belonging to me.”

He led me past a cornfield in which about twenty Yeolis were harvesting, without a link of chain or speck of rope on them, just like free farmfast members—were they slaves? Perhaps from hearing the expression “in chains,” I had thought all slaves were bound always. So close to the border, I thought, why are they still here? I sure as shit won’t be; when do they take the ropes off?

But Akdan left them on as he took me into a rough tiny hut, and gave me to an ash-blond Yeoli youth, about the same age as me, who was there. “Now you obey Mangk,” Akdan said to me, meaning the kid. He did not free me either, and spoke to me in Lakan, as if I had no native tongue; there was something in the way he moved that set my teeth on edge, too.

“Look, Mana, or Manga if he’s not mispronouncing that badly,” I said in Yeoli. “Are we forbidden to speak in our own language? Unless you know Enchian, we have to, because I don’t know that.”

He stared at me, and I felt horror with a thousand tendrils creep through me and onto my skin, like the horror of seeing a lamb born headless, or finding an apple that is perfect on the outside filled with blight, something utterly unnatural. His stare was uncomprehending; his brows, pale on his tanned face, drew down in anger, and he snapped something at me in Lakan, waving his hands senselessly as Lakans do. But several times, his hand chopped the sign for charcoal at me, in an awkward and unfamiliar way. I felt sick as understanding slowly dawned: he did not know his own language.

They breed slaves, like horses. He had been born and raised in Laka, as had his parents and his grandparents, who knew how many generations back. It was not that all things Yeoli had been taken from him; he had never had them, to even know what he missed. His name was indeed Mangk, not a mispronunciation of his true name; he had no true name.

Just then his brows knit harder. His hand flashed out to slap me across the face; I pulled my head back to evade it unthinking, as a warrior does, so he grabbed me by the shoulder so I couldn’t again, and this time got me, hard enough I knew it would come up red. I couldn’t understand, when if anything my face must have shown sympathy; it was only later I came to know that he didn’t see how he deserved sympathy, so he’d taken it as contempt. He yelled something at me, for a while, in Lakan.

If I ever needed proof that blood is nothing and breeding everything, I thought, this is it. Yet no matter how many generations his blood has been here, somewhere in Yeola-e he must have kin, who could be traced somehow and would welcome him, make him a whole Yeoli instead of the husk of one, a person without a name or a nation.

Now I understood why the slaves in the field wore no chains. They had never lived any other life; they didn’t know what freedom was, to want it.

By the wall of the hut was a wooden pallet, hardly wider than a bench; Mangk pointed to it, meaning, I gathered, I should sit there. My stomach was growling, but slaves eat when they are fed. He set to work crafting a shaft for some farm-tool, and now and then glanced at me, obviously assigned to watch me. I decided against trying to talk to him again.

That allowed time for thought. I leaned back against the wall, which, being stone, was pleasantly cool on my whip-welted and sun-burned shoulders. It was good to have my weight off my feet, too; they’d given me rough-hewn sandals that didn’t fit well. Being a slave sharpens your appreciation for such small blessings.

I either had to wait until my arms were freed or somehow arrange to cut them free before I could try anything; that was first and foremost. They had to either free my hands to eat, or feed me; with any number of warriors all around, it had been safe for Klajen to do so, but right now there was only Mangk, other slaves at some distance, and Akdan probably lurking around somewhere, all of whom I was sure I could outrun.

It would be more difficult if Akdan got onto a horse, or set dogs on me as I’d heard Lakans do with slaves; better then that I creep free at night rather than depend on speed, then.

Even if I got my ankles free at night, I could unlatch a door with one hand, get out and gone and deal with the arm-bonds later. Was I staying here now? Perhaps once Mangk ceased being angry at me I could beg him to free or least loosen me. While his eyes were turned to his work, I looked at the wall for sharp edges on the stones. The window-sill had good ones, I saw.

I’d already realized I could never pass myself off for a tamed Yeoli slave, even at a distance; because they tend to go shirtless they are evenly tanned from the waist up. Only my arms and hands and face were browned, my wrists showing very clearly the baby-white marks of wristlets. Another reason to act at night, the earlier the better. A day’s march could be half a night’s run.

After a while someone brought Mangk a bowl of stew with enough, it looked like, for two eating light, as slaves always eat. I saw him consider untying my arms, and tried to look as innocuous and timid as I could; it would soon be dark, so now would do, and there were plenty of sharp-edged things around the bench he was working on to cut through the ankle-ropes once I'd cold-cocked him. Maybe my true thought showed in my eyes, because he decided to spoon-feed me instead. That was after he was finished, of course, downing closer to three quarters of it than half. At least the stew was mercifully light on the kri.

Then he went on with his work; my slavish duties for now, it seemed, were to wait. I refined my plans. One thought that almost made me laugh: for the first time since I had learned of the Statute semanakraseyeni sections 21-1 and 21-5-7, I was in a place where I need not sweat in the slightest whether to disclose or not. Here it was beyond moot.

As it began to grow dark, the door was flung open, and Mangk barked at me in Lakan and made a motion meaning I should stand up. Akdan came in. I was too slow; again there was that expert flash of motion and I felt the end of the whip sizzle on the side of my arm. His skill with it, I saw, was such that he could land it anywhere on a person he wanted, at any speed or measure of force.

Behind him, a Yeoli woman, or should I say, a woman of Yeoli extraction, who looked to be in her late thirties or early forties, came in also. Her face looked weighted, and her eyes dulled, with cares. She looked at my privates, as if sizing them up, blearily.

“Down,” said Akdan, and then when I sat, “all the way.” I lay face-up on the pallet. “Any boy your age knows how to do what you’re going to now, especially a Yeoli,” he said, then guffawed at his own wit. With the whip-hilt he pointed to the woman. “She’s proven, catches quickly; it’s you who are not.” He pulled his sword a little way out of the scabbard, fingered the edge. “If she isn’t big in good time, I’ll know your balls are no good and cut them off.”

I lay numb, as understanding came. They breed slaves.