With a sharp sweep of his hand, the Attolian dismissed prosperity and civilization and the Medes entirely. He said, “Nothing is certain in this world.”
“True,” I agreed, myself an example of the maxim, “but the emperor breeds that uncertainty and uses it to his advantage.” I thought of the times he had elevated a member of the court only to turn around and humiliate him a short time later. I thought of the death of my master. Oh, what consternation that was going to cause! The emperor was probably chortling himself into phlegmy coughing fits. I said, “The longer it is unclear if he means to invade, the longer he can prepare his armies without drawing the Greater Powers in.”
The Attolian took a swallow from the waterskin. “My king believes that your own master is a threat to his brother.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. Although maybe that was why he’d been poisoned, for all I knew.
“Perhaps he will lead a rebellion.”
Well, that wasn’t going to happen, because he was dead. I thought the rest of what the Attolian had said was equally unlikely. If there were threats to the empire, then the emperor eliminated them. The Attolian king was a fool and, as a fool, hoped his enemy might magically disappear overnight. I wasn’t that silly.
In the morning, we found a path that turned off our road and headed north into the hills. The Attolian asked me what I thought of it. “Shall we press on and see if we can find something more traveled?”
The hills were steep and rocky. Eroded by the winter rains, they were ridged with ravines and punctuated by cliff faces. I would have preferred to stay on the more easily navigable wagon track, but the Namreen might ride along at any moment—and moreover, the track wasn’t going to carry us in the direction we wanted to go. It would eventually merge with the road from Koadester to the western coast, and that road would certainly be traveled by Namreen.
We took the path and struggled upward. I imagined the Taymets as I climbed, worrying about what their slopes might be like. The trade road we had been making for, the one we had been diverted from at Koadester, was known as a hard and narrow way over the mountains. It had to be hard or there wouldn’t an independent Zaboar on the other side. If the trade road was narrow and hard, I hated to think what any other route was going to offer us.
Our path wasn’t wide enough for a wagon, but it seemed quite reliable at first. It rose quickly, and became rockier, until it was no more than a broken ribbon twisting into the hills. We lost the track for a while and veered off course. We ended up retracing our steps, and that’s when we first saw our pursuers—or at least, the Attolian did.
“There’s a party out on the road large enough to throw up a dust cloud,” he said. “And a smaller group coming up behind us.”
“Namreen?”
“I can’t tell,” said the Attolian. “Try not to silhouette yourself against the sky. We’ll wait here until they have gone past.” He led the way to a spot where we could be unseen and still overlook a bit of the trail below.
When he next saw them, they had made up almost half the distance between us. “Probably coincidence,” the Attolian said, trying to sound optimistic as we waited for them to go by.
It was a tense wait. I wasted it being anxious instead of enjoying the rare opportunity to sit down. Eventually we saw them again as they crossed below us. I relaxed, but the Attolian didn’t, insisting we wait where we were. We were sitting there, sweating gently in the sun, when the party of men came back down the trail, watching the ground carefully as they came.
Hissing, the Attolian pulled me from where I was sitting and hustled me higher up the hillside.
“Not a coincidence,” I whispered.
“So,” the Attolian agreed, and proceeded to haul me bodily uphill.
As we climbed, we came to an open expanse of solid rock where we could move quickly. I thought this was lucky. The Attolian, still with his hand under my armpit, pulling me faster than I could safely go, didn’t seem to feel the same way. He risked many anxious glances over his shoulder as we went at a breakneck pace. Only when we reached cover did he slow and begin to pick his way more carefully.
They couldn’t possibly follow us, I told myself. We’d left no footprints behind on the rocky ground. Hadn’t the guards on the caravan been extremely watchful in similar hills—because bandits could disappear so quickly into the hills? Surely we could do the same.
When he thought we were well ahead of our pursuers, the Attolian tucked me into a rocky crevice and told me to wait while he climbed up to get another look at those hunting us.
“They aren’t Namreen,” he said as he dropped back down beside me.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“If those ratty pieces of trash are Namreen, I’m emperor of the Medes. They are slavers and bounty hunters.” He appeared to be considering a fight.
“There are still—what, seven, eight of them?” I said, thinking that the Attolian had killed two Namreen, but that did not make him invincible.
The Attolian reluctantly took his hand off his sword.
“Have they found our trail?” I asked.
“Not so far,” he answered.
“Then we should keep going,” I said. I started up the steep-sided valley that would carry us farther into the hills, and the Attolian followed.
CHAPTER SIX
It was clear by sundown that we were in desperate trouble. I could no longer pretend to myself that we could escape. We’d run up against a cliff and moved as quickly as we could along the face of it, weaving in and out of rockslides that had come down. We’d found an opening that we’d thought might lead us upward, but the ravine had narrowed as we climbed, and we’d reached a point where the ground rose too steeply for us to continue without using our hands as well as our feet. Even the Attolian would find it a challenge, and I was almost out of strength, hunched over and gasping, when he looked up in alarm and dragged me backward under an overhang.
“What is it?” I asked. “What did you see?”
“They’ve skylighted themselves, probably on purpose. I’m sorry, Kamet, at least three of them are at the top of the slope above us.”
“Can we go back?”
“No. They revealed themselves because they know we are trapped.” He dropped the bag he’d been carrying, with the remains of our purchases from Koadester, and the waterskins as well.
“What now then?” I suppose I thought he’d produce another lion’s den for us to shelter in.
He didn’t. He loosened his sword and began to draw it out.
“No,” I said, pulling his hand away. He looked at me, startled, while I racked my brains.
“We’ve hardly seen them, and they haven’t had a good look at us. Take off the sword belt and your breastplate. They aren’t the Namreen—they don’t know for certain who we are. If we are two escaped slaves instead of one, then maybe we are not the prize they are hoping for.” Stripping the Attolian as I talked, I took his belt and the sword and the plate and hurried to push them deeper under the overhang where they would be out of sight, then directed the Attolian to empty his purse. Making a face, he tipped almost all of our coins out into the grass and replaced the purse in his belt. Then he helped me pile what loose rocks there were until our cookpot—I was really going to miss that pot—and his armor were well hidden.
When we were done, the Attolian stood staring at the rocks, like a man bewildered. I had to take him by the shoulders and turn him away.
“Don’t look anyone in the face,” I warned him. “Don’t say anything if you don’t have to. Let me talk. Don’t disagree with anything, don’t even think to yourself that you know what they do not because it will show on your face. Everything shows on your face, so just try to think of nothing at all. Look at the ground, do you understand?”
He nodded. I helped him to reshoulder the bag that had held our provisions, hoping that the men who pursued us would not notice any decrease in his bulk now that his armor had gone. Then I had to think how I could pa
ss off someone with muscles like his as a slave. That he was a foreigner was not a problem—many slaves were. He was a field hand, perhaps, but that only raised the question of how he and I might be escaping together. Field hands would have little contact with the house slaves. If I’d ever planned an escape from my master, it would not have been with one of his ditchdiggers. The Attolian was very good-looking, though, and I chose that fact to guide my story. He might be a field hand brought into the house as a pet for the mistress. That was not uncommon, and it would only be helped if he played stupid and kept his mouth shut. I could only hope he would do so. He was far from arrogant, but his stubbornness might do us in.
Confident that they had us pinned, the slavers made no attempt to hide their approach. When I heard their voices, I began to berate the Attolian, blaming him for everything under the sun. He was slow, he was stupid, if he’d done as I’d told him, we would have been safe and—in ridiculous counterpoint—that we never should have tried to escape and it was his stupid idea and I shouldn’t have listened when he suggested it. The Attolian went along with me, punctuating my rant with bumbling attempts to interrupt me or accept the blame.
“Morik,” he said, giving me a common name, “Morik, I didn’t know. I’m sorry,” he said humbly.
Trying to conceal his Attolian accent, he spoke each word with deliberation that made him sound appropriately thickheaded. His accent really had improved, I noticed, but gods save us, he still had his earring in his ear. I fell silent, staring, and the Attolian hastily pulled it out of his ear and popped it into his mouth. Better to have thrown it away with the coins, but there was no time to argue with him.
“Ho,” said the leader of the men hunting us. “What have we here, a slave and his friend thinking they could run off?”
Only then did it occur to me that he could very well mention the death of my master. I was completely unprepared to have that revealed. Panicked, I began to babble. I blurted out an invented name for our mistress and the farm outside of Koadester where we had come from, explaining that our disastrous mistake was entirely the stupid field hand’s fault. He’d been brought into the house as the mistress’s pet and it had led him to ideas about his own importance and I was terribly, terribly sorry to have been misled by him and was prepared to be taken home and would be a very good slave in the future.
I was so frantic and so stupid that I think this alone convinced them I could not be the murderous, conniving slave described on the bills posted in Koadester. The slavers looked shocked as I rattled on, at first merely skeptical that the hulking Attolian could be the mastermind of our escape and then disappointed.
The leader of them, to my surprise, swore in Setran, and I wondered if all of the men were Setran. Their features were indistinct, but they may have been from the Goli tribes, who’d scattered after being put down by the empire. The Attolian looked at me, but I ignored him, praying that if the Setrans talked of my master and his death, they might do it in a language the Attolian couldn’t understand.
Behind us, we heard clattering rocks as the slavers who’d been on the heights above us finished making their way down.
“This isn’t them,” said the disgusted leader in Setran.
The men cursed, casting their hate at us, their disappointment dangerous.
“Two of us could have collected these,” said one burly slaver. “We’ve left the rest with Kepet, and he’s probably asleep again.” He reached for his sword, and the Attolian tensed. He didn’t need to understand the language to know that the slaver meant to kill us outright. I turned a little to lay a warning hand on his arm and leaned against him, retreating from the slaver and discreetly nudging the Attolian back as well.
I licked my lips and said, “I am my mistress’s majordomo and amanuensis. Q-quite valuable.”
“Put up, Shef,” another of the slavers said.
“They’re still worth more than the others put together,” added another.
Shef lowered his sword back into its sheath, but then he punched me so hard that I fell straight to the ground, leaving the Attolian without any guide. I could only cover my head and pray that he would follow my example and take the blows he had coming to him.
Evidently he did. I heard him grunt as he hit the ground. We might have suffered longer from Shef’s disappointment, but someone above spoke after only a few more blows. “Let’s go. We still have to catch up to Kepet, and you’re right that he is probably asleep by now.”
The slavers pulled us to our feet and efficiently tied our hands, looping a rope around our necks to make a leash to lead us back down the ravine and from there back to the trail we had been following. Even in the dark, they seemed familiar with the terrain. I fell several times and heard the Attolian go down as well. I winced as one of the slavers said, “Oh, you don’t like that, do you?”
We followed our previous trail only a little while and then left it to travel overland. The slavers led the way to a much wider path, a clearly well-used cart track we would have come to if we had continued along the road skirting the hills just a little farther. We walked uphill until we reached their camp on a patch of flat ground just off the road with a curving rock face behind it, like an outdoor room, made by chance. It was obviously a regular stopping place, with iron staples sunk into the rock at head height to tether the mules. There was a mortared fire ring in the center and a stack of firewood next to it. A lively fire was burning, and as predicted, a man was asleep beside it.
The slaves they were transporting were chained together, as close to the fire as they dared get, close enough to attack the man in his sleep, but he was hardly in any danger. When I saw the slaves, my heart constricted, and I squeezed my eyes momentarily closed.
There were perhaps twelve or fifteen of them. They were skeleton thin and covered in filth and sores, their clothes only rags. These were not the slaves of the imperial city or even of the outlying farms. They were the cheapest of slaves, the most miserable souls of the human race, bound for hard labor in the mines. They could have been anchored to the staples in the rocks, but weren’t. Even with surprise on their side, all of them together would not have been a match for the healthy and well-fed Kepet. They sat or lay, indifferent, as the Attolian and I were brought into the circle of the firelight and chained at the end of their row.
One of the slavers cursed and lifted an empty ankle cuff. A slave had slipped away, and not for the first time evidently. The slavers kicked Kepet awake and swore he would pay for the missing slave from his share. Kepet argued that the man wasn’t worth any money anyway, but the other slavers drove him off into the dark to fetch the missing slave back. Then they argued about who would make food.
One man was finally bullied into the task. He put a pot onto the fire, pouring in water and dried meat and a few vegetables to make a thin soup and then adding a scoop of grain. When it was obvious that nothing was coming to either of us from that pot, I told myself that the meat in it was probably caggi.
I heard the Attolian whisper under his breath, “Not nearly as tasty as grilled rodent,” and essayed a weak smile.
The other slavers’ dinner had been cooked and eaten before Kepet came back. He was alone, but carried something in his hand. He walked along the group of slaves, kicking each awake and showing it to him, and then moving on to the next. When he reached me, I saw that what he held was a severed hand. He walked to the fire and threw it in.
“Gods all damn you,” the other slavers shouted. “Why did you do that?”
“You said you’d keep his price from my share, so keep it. I told you he wasn’t worth the trouble he makes.”
“You didn’t need to throw it in the fire,” snarled the man who’d been doing the cooking. He fished the hand out and threw it onto the road.
Then Kepet sat and ate what was in the pot, complaining that the other slavers hadn’t left much. Only when he was finished did they feed the slaves. I saw there was another pot, not in the fire, where they had put grain to soak. Shef ca
rried it along the row of chained men, scooping out a handful of grain, then squishing it into a cake and dropping it into the outstretched hands of the slaves. Each time he held it in the air first as the slave begged for it. He was followed by a man with a water sack and a cup who did the same.
“Please, please, master, please”—the whispered supplications like the voices of those already in the gray lands.
The Attolian wouldn’t beg and got neither the grain nor the water. I took the wet lump the slaver had given me and divided it, handing one half to the Attolian. Then I picked out the grains from the cake and ate them one at a time to make them last. The slavers meanwhile passed a wineskin among themselves. As the drink loosened their tongues, they talked about their new slaves and where the best place to sell us would be. Dishonest to the core, they would make no attempt to return us to our supposed owner. They were on their way into the hills to take the slaves to a tin mine, but that wasn’t the place to sell a trained slave and a healthy field hand. They would take us with them to the plains below. One suggested that our invented owner might have posted a reward, but none of his colleagues thought it worth the time to go back to Koadester to see. Better, they thought, to see us as a windfall, take us west to the first market, and sell us there. As we had no slave chains, they could plead ignorance of our owner’s identity if they had to. Unethical but predictable. After a while the talk turned to the Attolian’s good looks, and I grew more concerned. I had been too successful perhaps in casting him as the pampered lover of our imaginary owner. Swigging from a flask of wine, one of the slavers stood up and strolled over. He passed me and squatted next to the Attolian.