74 - Property of little value

My Kiss of the Lake training stood me in good stead. Still, he stayed a cursed long time after I stopped moving; I was close to truly panicking, and thrashing, which would have ruined everything, when I felt his sword in its hip-scabbard turn and go. It took every shred of my will not to spring upwards, but straighten my leg slowly.

Chance was merciful. The thing stood firm.

Once my head was out, I wiped my lips and gasped for air, then wiped my eyes. A double arms length of quicksand still lay on every side of me; so I struck out for the grass again, with a slug-slow breaststroke, not knowing what else to do. I sank again, but my hand found a root, and I pulled myself out onto the bank that way.

For a time I lay with my heart racing, and tears washing the grime off my face again. Then I shook it off, and thought. If I went eastward, steering by the sun and the streams, which I knew ran north-northeast here, into the Ereala, I would come to Yeola-e. The Arkans, once they raked the pit and found no dead Chevenga (let them find their own instead, and Nikroda get what he deserved), would track me with horses and dogs, like a runaway slave; so I should make it as difficult as I could for them.

Where the forest was thick enough to travel through the branches like a tree-ape, I did, and used the stream trick at every opportunity. I ate lightly from my pack and from berry bushes, expecting to take longer than I would have with guides. It was utter wilderness, reminding me at every moment I had no real clue where I was.

Best that no people saw me, though, in Arkan territory; for all the mud and dirt and ashes on me from living like an animal, I was still dressed like a semanakraseye on a state visit, in a silk satin shirt, demarchic signet and the collar with the steel circles, as well as my wristlets and Chirel.

Being alone, I could not escape my own thoughts, but also had no one to impress, so when a memory came and grief stabbed, I just wept as I walked. Over and over, I composed in my mind what I would say to my people. We cannot doubt that they are coming; we must find some way to attack them first without breaking our own sacred covenant of defense only. Through the Roskati, perhaps, by lending them much greater aid? By making treaties with our neighbours—most of whom had proof I’d been betrayed in the copies of Kurkas’s safe conduct? Now my spirits were better, I saw there were many possible ways. I could think uninterrupted while I walked.

The next day I came to a cluster of houses made of bark and sticks, such as Roskati would never build. The people I saw, faintly though the trees, wore skins and shell-beads, and bore spears and arrows with stone heads. I went far around, staying well away; people that backward might know nothing of the world outside, and think of someone from it as inhuman and thus nothing more than goods, or even food, for all I knew.

A little beyond that, I came to a stream whose bottom was covered with strands of some kind of white water-vine and whose water looked clear and good. I knelt for a drink.

The plants that grow in that stream, I have never seen anywhere else, in any country or climate, and no scholar knowing botany I have asked has ever heard of them. I think they were the spawn of some Fire-altered seed, or the work of some mad clan of plant breeders, long dead, one would hope. I drew up the first double handful of water, and drank; then when I dipped my hands again, I felt them seized as if by living wooden cords. The vines were a trap, like the leaves of a fly-catching plant, alerted by my hands’ first presence.

I tried to tear free with speed first, too late, then main strength; the roots were well-grown into the rocks, and held as strong as shackles. I thought of biting myself loose, but then my head and neck would be seized and I’d be strangled and drowned in a moment. This plant’s usual way of nourishing itself came to me then; any animal that drank here would be killed so. Yet I wondered why I saw no bones. There was no way of reaching a knife, or Chirel; kicking at the vines would get my ankles caught.

I ran back over my luck. Betrayed by Arkans, saved by Roskati, betrayed by one Roskati, saved by some dead Arkan’s bones, only to die of thirst with my hands in clear fresh water, killed and eaten by a cursed plant; I almost wept, and almost laughed.

Then it occurred to me I could call for help. These people might sell me, eat me, immolate me for some skin-wearing god, or free me; better the risk than certain death here. So I called.

They came. The moment they saw me, they started a high wordless ululation, that in a moment was echoing from other throats all around in the forest. A crowd ringed me. No one moved to aid me; but they might be waiting for someone more qualified. Trying to raise my voice over their tuneless song, I cried, “Do you speak Enchian? Yeoli? Lakan? Arkan?” None answered; and though their faces all gazed at me full of seriousness, the note, I noticed, had more of a festive tone than one of alarm. It was hard to tell; they did not seem even to have expressions I could recognize.

I knew my dice had rolled bad when four young men came to me, uncoiling ropes. One of them took me in a stranglehold, two more took one of my arms each and the other persuaded the plants to release me by dropping thick fresh chunks of meat all around my hands; the tendrils seemed more drawn by bleeding flesh than unskinned. I tried to wrench loose and draw Chirel—which I was surprised they hadn’t unslung from my shoulder—but savages are invariably strong, and they bound my wrists behind my back. Well-rewarded the stream-weed was, perhaps as well as Nikroda would have been, though in its own way, for capturing me.

They plundered me of my pack, my pouch, which had only Kurkas’s safe conduct and some other papers in it, my boots and all the cloth on me, which they cut off me with obsidian knives, even though none of them was wearing anything made of cloth—so that I imagine the demarchic shirt ended up being used in some atavistic ceremony. They left everything else including Chirel and my wristlets, seeming to have no use for metal, or a crystal; same as Lakans, they seemed spooked by my father’s wisdom tooth.

Then they poked and squeezed my body all over with quick rough hands, weighed my privates in their fingers, made me open my mouth so they could peer at my teeth. It was as if the past three years had fallen away and I was back in Klajen’s possession; if I’d closed my eyes, they could have been Lakans. At least it let me know their intentions for me.

There are cracks in the walls for captives, I reminded myself, trying not to remember my last words with the person whose words these were. But this was different; while more young men of the primitives led me back west, through land sickeningly familiar, I played it out in my mind.

Would Mirko, though I was sure he had no pigeons homing to anywhere in Yeola-e, send a runner to the border with word of what had happened and that they should expect me? I should have asked it, I realized; but likely he would anyway. Then Artira, as acting semanakraseye, would write him back saying I had not appeared, and he would spare the strength he could to search for me.

I would be long gone from here, I realized, by then; those who catch slaves both want money as soon as they can get it, and know that the closer a slave is to where he was captured, the more likely he is to escape or be rescued. We were keeping a fast pace. Not only that, but there would be Arkans searching for me, once they did not find me dead in the quicksand as Nikroda would promise them; they probably already were. They would turn towards Yeola-e, knowing I would head there; luckily my captors seemed to steer us further south.

They kept my arms bound tightly and my ankles hobbled, and a rope around my neck that they never for a moment let go of, as far as I could tell, even when I slept. They could tell I was a fighter.

Once when we were on an Arkan road, one of them froze and hissed the others still, then they hustled me fast into the underbrush. A party of ten Arkans on horseback came clip-clopping by. I thought of calling to them; if they weren’t aware that Kurkas’s order for me was assassination (no doubt only very few knew that), perhaps they’d rescue and free me, or at least in the fight between them and the savages I might be able to slip away in the confusion and get my hands loose by rubbing the ropes against a sharp rock. But one of the savages guessed I might call, and clamped one hand over my mouth and nose and the other around my throat, cutting off my breath two ways. They were anything if not assiduous.

They took me to an Arkan town I had not passed through. So they did deal with the outside, after all, which must be keeping them in ignorance of the worth of metal. I wasn’t about to enlighten them.

No one recognized me or anything about me, even as blond-haired men who had the hardened faces of slave-dealers fingered the signet and the brand-scar, still new enough to be pink. I was pulled up onto a stone block on the ground, and realized from the one man pattering and the rest signaling that I was being auctioned off, rather than turned in to anyone official. (I couldn’t understand a word, but I think the intonation of an auction is the same everywhere on the Earthsphere.)

Most of the dealers had looked with great interest at Chirel, which was still on my shoulder just as I’d slung it the morning I’d been captured, drawing it, testing the edge, examining the blade and grip and guard, but then always sheathing it again and leaving it on me, by which I understood it would be sold together with me.

Some of them spoke to me in bad Enchian, asking how long I’d been a warrior, how much I’d fought and how often I’d been decorated, to which I kept a stony silence as if I didn’t understand. Do they want me as a captive warrior in some campaign, the other side of the Empire? I wondered, hopefully; to fight I’d have to be unbound, and once that happened, there’d be a thousand ways of escape. That will show you how laughably innocent I was, of Arko.

The bidding over me, and Chirel, was lively, even contentious. The winner was a man who I only ever knew as Daisas.

The Arkan way of breaking new slaves is very different from the Lakan. He hacked off my hair, which I expected, but then, right there in the open, uncaring if the whole town saw, he flung me down face-first onto the ground, and while his apprentice pinned my neck with his foot so my face was in the dust, raped me. I remembered the Lakan and Rigratora-e; that was how it looked, I thought; this is how it feels.

Like most Arkan slavers, he got a surge in the groin the moment he laid his hands on a slave’s chain; by the time I was down he was like an animal in rut, and jabbed into me, panting and moaning with joy, the moans growing all the more joyful from my flinching and then my trembling. No one around seemed the slightest bit taken aback; most turned their eyes to the next person on the block, and those few who watched him did absently, by which I understood it was customary.

It was harder to bear silently than a flogging. The physical pain is less, but the shock stabs to the heart. “Get used to it,” Daisas said to me, in rough-cut Enchian, between thrusts. “You are a slave of Arko now... and always will be... for you were born to be... as are all barbarians... To serve Arko... will be your life... for all else is death.” It reminded me of Jinai saying Arko-ness would be entwined with the rest of my life. I suffered his ecstasy at a great distance.

Daisas had a mule and just the one apprentice, a sullen-faced boy of fourteen or fifteen, so I thought escape might be easy. But of course he’d bought me as a fighter; he had a stake in thinking me feisty. He put me in an Arkan slave-collar, one of those with the screws that can be tightened against the windpipe, the throat-arteries, and the nerves on the side of the neck, whichever the slaver chooses. He never whipped me when I resisted somehow, just tightened the collar until I was choking or dazed or my skull screaming with pain, a punishment almost worse, for it brings home one’s helplessness so hard.

I tried feigning stunned or exhausted, stumbling and going glassy-eyed and so forth as we marched, to get him to loosen it, but he had seen all that a thousand times.

At night he consummated the bond, as Arkans call it, often. They have particular ways of breaking Yeolis; what they do with one’s crystal doesn’t bear writing down. He ground my face in the dirt, made me eat it and breathe it. Sometimes he forced me to climax, at the same time as causing me pain somehow; I had not known this was possible, and the first time was a shock beyond description, a thousand times worse than what I’d suffered being put to stud in Laka.

There is a word, fikken, that only the Arkan language has, that I could not have conceived before I went there; it means both love-making and its rotten shadow, rape, as well as to harm in an unspecific sense; both pain and pleasure. Though I was yet to learn the word, Daisas taught me the meaning: pleasure for one, pain for the other. Arkans are right, to consider it obscene. The dull-eyed boy would watch with satisfaction; sometime along that trail of agony, I realized it was because my presence kept Daisas off him.

What was almost the worst torture was still wearing my wristlets on my bound wrists, and having Chirel so close while I was so helpless. He took it off my shoulder and would sling it with the packs on the donkey when we were traveling. A thousand motions of it in my hand I remembered, and a thousand more I imagined, as I walked, seeing it bobbing on the donkey’s back, feeling it in weapon-sense, tasting its feel. But it was as far away as the moon, that humanity set only one small step on, once, before the Fire.

All through this, I still wore the demarchic signet. When Daisas asked me what it was, I said the sigil of my family, so that when he took a mind to make use of it in breaking me, he wounded me worse than he knew. He pulled it from my finger and slid it onto his own, then held it before my face as he fikked me, and said, “This is yours... so now it’s mine... because you are mine... And one day... all Yeola-e will be ours... to serve Arko... and I’ll sell off all your family... yes, your little child... and your granny too.”

Afterwards, when he’d put it back on my finger, I knelt in the firelight, thinking. I was long past tears; my eyes were deserts these days. He was right; on my finger, it was still not mine. It was Yeola-e’s; on my finger, it could only be defiled. The best thing to do came to me.

I remembered Saint Mother’s words, about the sacred sword: “This is nothing but a piece of steel, without a living hand to wield it.” The signet was the same; its meaning didn’t reside in in the nephrite it was made of, but in Yeola-e, in Assembly, in the vote, in thought and choice, and in me, but only while I had been semanakraseye. Here, now, I was not; I had left that life behind, at least for a time, and must accept that.

I had learned by then I was being taken to the City Itself; it seemed I would visit after all. There, where someone might know it, the signet would be nothing but a liability.

Even so, it took a long time of meditating to make myself do what I must. Part of my heart at least felt I was throwing myself and all my hopes away too. It was hard to get enough leverage with my hands bound, as well; all the force had to come out of my wrist.

Somewhere in the forested hills of northern Aijia, as Arkans call the province, there is a shallow marshy pond, at the bottom of which lies the semanakraseyeni signet of Yeola-e, worn by my father and grandmother and great-grandmother and so on, five hundred years back. Daisas punished me, though not severely by his standards, when he noticed it was gone. I had thrown away a piece of his property, but one of little value.