The Ruins of Ambrai

by Melanie Rawn

  Scraller had no need of another steward to count his wealth, his slaves, or his crimes. What he did require, for the elevation of his court to elegance, was a truly gifted musician. And this was what became of the boy spared from death by the wind.

  He retained precisely one possession from the time before the wind and the brigands: his name. Though he was given a new one, he stubbornly clung to the only thing he owned. So, after a few weeks of slaps when he did not answer to the new name, they shrugged and gave in. He was only a little boy, after all. He couldn’t be expected to learn as swiftly as an older child. And what did it matter what he was called, as long as he caused no trouble?

  It was the first of Collan’s victories, and for many years was his last.

  2

  His first summer at Scraller’s Fief, Collan was judged deft enough with his big, long-fingered hands to leave Cradle Quarters and start justifying the gold the Slavemaster had paid for him. At first he was assigned to the kitchens. Simple tasks: shelling nuts, washing vegetables, plucking fowl. Scraller’s household numbered well over three thousand, and feeding so many was a lot of work. Col also spent many hours on the hearth treadmills, walking or running as the cooks demanded to turn spits over the fire. He remembered little of that time except exhaustion and heat. But never in his adult life would he enter a kitchen in castle or cottage without feeling slightly nauseated.

  Although he couldn’t have spent more than a few hours each day at this exhausting task, it seemed his life consisted solely of treadmill and pallet for years. The work toughened him at an early age—which was part of the process. Toughening the body while breaking the spirit was the rule.

  They underestimated Collan badly.

  One morning—he must have been about six—he was liberated forever from the kitchen. For reasons he neither knew nor cared about, the galazhi had fawned early that year. He and many others were sent to the high pastures to help the herders. It was new spring and incredibly cold, the crusty snow patched with blood like a gory quilt. He learned swiftly that by reaching into a doe’s body, first to tug the fawn out and then for the afterbirth, he could keep his hands warm. Twins were best; he could plunge his fingers thrice into hot slick blood and mucus, and keep from freezing just that much longer. He gave thanks whenever the Chief Herdsman announced that a doe he tended bore twins.

  The rest of him didn’t fare as well. His socks were more holes than knitting; nothing but his thick hair protected his head from cold, acidic rain. By the third day his nose was streaming, his hair was falling out in clumps, his scalp was burned, and he reeled with fever. He was returned to the Fief and banished to the infirmary. When the fever broke he pretended a slow recovery. This deception led to his being taught to read and write.

  It happened because Flornat the Slavemaster had whipped Taguare the Bookmaster to within a sliver of his life, for what offense Collan never learned. Taguare occupied the other sickbed before the hearth, and as they recuperated together, the Bookmaster discovered a mind worth training.

  Not that Col knew anything. But to distract himself from his pain, Taguare told his own favorite stories, and found an appreciative, perceptive audience. He encouraged questions, trying to get a feel for Col’s wits. They were promising. Taguare asked for and received permission to add him to the small class of slave children deemed teachable. Now the boy spent his mornings running errands for various functionaries, his afternoons in the animal pens, and the time between dinner and bed in a tiny schoolroom with four other boys and six girls under Taguare’s tutelage. All were older than he, and far ahead of him in learning. But Collan rewarded the Bookmaster’s instincts. A talent for words and numbers was revealed. And he was always hungry for more.

  He learned reading, writing, and ciphering; basic geography (limited to The Waste, which no slave of Scraller’s ever left); what botany was applicable to a notoriously barren land; more than he ever wanted to know about galazhi; and multitudes of tales about Wraithenbeasts. These included no practical advice for escape—no one lived past a Sighting—and were intended solely as a warning; the threat of Wraithenbeasts kept slaves pent better than guarded walls.

  There were two other subjects to the curriculum: religion and music. Had this been brought to Scraller’s notice, he would have pronounced both a total waste of time for slaves. But Taguare taught his pupils the Saintly Calendar because he was a sincerely religious man, and he taught them to sing because he loved music. Collan was an indifferent student of religion (except for selecting his Birthingday in tribute to the only Saint who’d ever helped him; the others seemed pretty useless), but he soaked up music like a garden drinks clean spring rain.

  When his gift became evident, his morning duties were halved so he could be taught by Carlon the Lutenist—an average talent, but a kindly man. This worthy begged Flornat to add study with him to Col’s day, and after a demonstration of the boy’s raw talent, the Slavemaster heeded his request. Scraller was informed, and approved the plan. He kept Bookmaster and Lutenist as proof of the elegance of his court. He was, of course, both illiterate and tone-deaf.

  Collan’s life settled into a different routine. He still worked ten hours of the day’s fifteen, but at least he was liberated from the kitchen. Rising by torchlight at Fourth, he ate in the quarters, then washed and presented himself for three hours of delivering messages among Scraller’s stewards, who had not deigned to address each other in person anytime during the last fifteen years. Their universal ill-humor was expressed in various ways on Collan’s person until Taguare reminded them that the boy—particularly his hands—was Scraller’s property. They didn’t hit him after that, though they often looked as if they’d like to.

  From Half-Seventh to Ninth, he had music lessons with Carlon. Half an hour for another meal and a brief rest—Scraller was solicitous of his property—and a long afternoon of tending animals was followed by dinner at Twelfth and study with Taguare. Then, at Fourteenth, he would curl into a blanket and sleep like the dead until the bell clamored its demand five hours later. He never dreamed.

  It bothered him to come to his lessons with the Bookmaster stinking of the sty. Only Scraller’s personal servants were allowed to bathe more than once a week; in The Waste, water was rationed at the best of times. Along with an aversion to kitchens, Collan took with him from Scraller’s a lifelong hatred of being dirty. And he could never bear to eat pork—not because he’d conceived any fondness for pigs, but because he could never forget their stench.

  As his time with Carlon the Lutenist came in the morning, his hands and clothes were always clean for his music lessons—his escape into the cool, pure world of notes that summed into songs. He learned ballads and rounds, hymns and chanteys and lays, and as the strings obeyed the growing mastery of his fingers the words made strange and delightful pictures in his mind. Though he was unsure what love and desire and other odd words meant, any sound that accompanied music must by mere association tell of wondrous things.

  Taguare didn’t reveal, and Carlon never mentioned, what awaited him if Scraller found his performance pleasing—or, more to the point, if Scraller’s guests found him so. His voice was clear and fine. To keep it intact, at the first sign of maturity Collan would be castrated.

  Taguare said nothing because of his guilt; if he hadn’t discovered the boy’s quickness of mind, the gift for music would have gone unnoticed as well. But Collan’s only real joy came from the very thing that would unman him. One day, before it was too late, Taguare promised himself he would warn the boy to “lose” his voice.

  Carlon said nothing because it was to him a perfectly natural state. What was the loss, compared to privileged position? He himself had never minded.

  In Collan’s ninth year—more or less—he first sang before Scraller’s Court. For the occasion he was washed by bath attendants for the first time in his life. The scrubbing left his dark skin an angry red, but not a single flea or louse survived. He was then
dressed in a motley of cast-off clothing. The plain brown shirt, from a page recently promoted to footman’s crimson, billowed around Collan’s skinny chest and arms. The shortness of the same page’s brown trousers had been disguised by sewing a row of slightly snagged crimson silk ribbon at the hems, thus decently covering his ankles. (In fact, Scraller liked the effect so much he ordered the same addition to the livery of all his pages. It was the first time Collan set a fashion, but not the last.)

  The longvest, hemmed to proper knee-length, belonged to Carlon, unworn since his girth had expanded beyond the seemly closure of the buttons. A gaudy creation of turquoise flame-stitching on thick yellow tapestry silk, the padded shoulders extended a full five inches beyond the boy’s arms. Stiff, heavy, and so big on him that one glance in a mirror told him he looked ridiculous, the longvest’s effect on his appearance irked him mightily—so much so that he forgot to be nervous about his performance.

  At least the slippers fit. They were soft new doeskin, and Taguare’s gift, made by his friend, the cobbler. “You’re like a Senison puppy,” the Bookmaster told Collan, smiling. “You’ll grow into those hands and feet of yours, Col—and top me by at least a head when you’re finished!”

  The slippers were the latest absurdity in style, with elongated, pointed toes. But they were new, and his, and so comfortable that he didn’t mind too much that they made his feet look even bigger than they were.

  He would remember the slippers and the longvest for reasons having nothing to do with survival. Cobblers and tailors would moan in later years when they saw Col coming, for his insistence on perfect fit took hours. After he began his infamous and highly lucrative career, he would never again wear any garment that had belonged to another man. His clothing from head to foot was his and his alone. And he never wore a coif if he could possibly avoid it.

  They had virulent arguments about that, he and she. It completely escaped him how a woman who could exert every particle of her formidable powers to the overthrow of the existing government—and the social order that nurtured it—could be so utterly dedicated to the preservation of some of its customs. “Bred in the bone,” the old man told him once, with a mild shrug. “You must remember Who She is, my lad.”

  The hated coif was a woven hood that fit tightly to the skull and fastened at the throat with buttons or, in the case of Bloods and the First and Second Tiers, sigil pins. Modesty dictated that every male’s head be hidden from brow to nape. Not a single hair could show. Saints knew how many ladies would be scandalized—not to mention Scraller, who according to rumor was balding—if even a slave-child appeared with his head uncovered.

  So when they dressed him before his first appearance at court, he submitted to a garish crimson coif. After strict inspection, Flornat the Slavemaster pronounced him fit to be seen by polite company. Collan was taken to a dark hallway off the banquet room to await summons.

  Carlon had lent his own second-best lute for the occasion. Col clutched it by the neck as if strangling a snake. He was sweating in the heavy longvest and his scalp itched even though he knew there wasn’t a live bug on him anywhere. This alone was an odd enough sensation to start his nerves twanging. But worse was the coif: a bad fit around his abundance of curling coppery hair, the throat strap made it difficult to breathe.

  So he took the fool thing off.

  No one came to fetch him; a door simply opened and a hand waved him into the banquet hall. He’d never been inside it in his life—indeed, never been in any of the public rooms, only the kitchen and work chambers and the warren of halls. Collan was as startled by the place as the people within were by him.

  Not a hall; a cavern, cut into living rock and festooned with the banners of Scraller’s guests—and dozens of inevitable galazhi. Long tables formed a hollow square around a blazing bonfire. Dogs and cats slunk and scrabbled underfoot, their yowls underscoring the babble of three hundred diners. All the ladies wore bright gowns and elaborate headpieces, some so fantastically antennaed as to imperil their neighbors’ eyesight. All the men were formally robed and coifed, though some dared to leave their top shirt buttons undone to hint at a furred chest.

  Scraller himself was one of these. His crimson coif was embroidered with his cherished sigil and decorated with jewels, and his robes were properly concealing as befitted a modest male, but his shirt was open to the breastbone. The wiry black hair thus revealed had bits of dinner clinging to it.

  Collan strode forward and made his bows to the ladies and then to Scraller, as instructed. He ran a nervous hand through his hair as he straightened up. This unconscious emphasis on his uncovered state did not amuse Scraller. He drew breath to condemn the boy—then noted that all but the stuffiest of his female guests had begun to smile.

  He scrutinized his possession. A handsome child, no doubt of it: manly, despite his scant years; well-formed, for all his scrawniness. The ladies were imagining him fifteen inches of height, ten years of age, and eighty pounds of solid muscle into the future. And Scraller saw not just their admiration but his own profit gleaming in their gazes.

  “Sing, boy,” he commanded, and eased his spindly form back in a chair with galazhi-horn finials.

  Anyone less proud—or more perceptive—would have sought to please his audience. Collan never made music except to please himself. Carlon deplored this fault in presentation (“Sing to me, not the empty air! Look in my eyes!”), but had to admit that the boy’s aloofness was intriguing. Collan never sang for anyone; he merely allowed others to listen, not much caring if they did or not. In his whole life he found only two people he truly wanted to sing for—and when he did, the music was such to win and break hearts.

  But because those two persons did not yet exist in his life—indeed, one of them was not yet born—Col played and sang for his own satisfaction. His very indifference to audience reaction made him a triumph that night and at every banquet thereafter for the next four years. Word spread that Scraller possessed a slave with a voice and fingers inspired by St. Velenne herself. Offers were made, all of which Scraller turned down. Col was excused from running errands, tending animals, and any work that might damage his hands or expose his voice to dangerous weather. His sole daily occupations were music practice with Carlon, lessons with Taguare, and acting as Scraller’s personal page.

  Oddly, he missed the animals, even though it was nice not to stink anymore. Pigs and galazhi and horses demanded nothing of him but friendly care. He definitely did not miss scurrying around the maze of the fief at the whim of ill-tempered stewards.

  He purely loathed the hours he spent with Scraller.

  There was no physical abuse. He was much too precious a commodity. Scraller’s taste didn’t run to boys, anyway. But his very praise and attention, growing more lavish as Col’s worth grew, became emotional abuse. When it was found that the boy spoke as pleasingly as he sang, the abuse became intellectual as well. In those four years, he read aloud more excruciatingly bad poetry, more blazingly false history, and more disgustingly turgid pornography than anyone should have to endure in four lifetimes.

  Collan knew the poems were dreadful because Minstrel’s instinct told him so. He knew the history was untrue because Taguare had let him read secret copies of treatises from the time before the First Councillor. (Besides, one of Scraller’s own books had Avira Anniyas winning the Battle of Domburron and killing Warrior Mage Lirsa Bekke with her own hands, and everyone knew the two events had occurred on the same day a thousand miles apart.)

  The pornography simply nauseated him. Scraller, however, found it vastly romantic. He would slump back in his chair, tears of enjoyment trickling fat and slow down his cheeks as the Humble Whomever yielded his tense and trembling virginity to the erotic mastery of the Blooded Lady Thus-and-so, who then proceeded to fuck him blind. Such forthright terms were never used, however; Scraller preferred his titillations couched in coy and cloying euphemisms. He savored descriptive metaphor: “burning monolith
of manhood” and “fierce craving cavern of womanly desire” brought gusting sighs of sensuous delight. He adored scenes of bondage, but only if silken cords were specified. The word “rape” made him scowl horribly—even if it was obvious that rape was precisely what the story was about. By the fifth night of reading this offal, Col knew that if he vocalized the Humble Whomever’s impassioned grunts and the Blooded Lady Thus-and-so’s litany of You’ll-love-what-I’m-going-to-do-to-you-you-handsome-peasant-brute one more time, he’d vomit.

  But he learned how to keep saying the words with the feeling Scraller deemed appropriate, while his mind disconnected and roamed elsewhere.

  Scraller’s evening entertainment might have given him a warped view of sex. That it did not was due to his own good sense and his observations in Quarters. Slaves were forbidden marriage, but they could bedshare with whomever they pleased. Collan learned that such activities sometimes occasioned soft laughter, sometimes muffled weeping, and occasionally bruises. But the persons he liked and respected, whichever sex they bedded, were always attended to their blankets by laughter. Nobody in Scraller’s books ever laughed, except in virile triumph or cruel mockery—or perhaps it was cruel triumph and virile mockery, he’d stopped paying attention long since.

  Truly told, he came to feel rather sorry for Scraller. Forbidden by a sense of his own exalted worth from besmirching himself with slave women, adamantly refusing to marry and thus put his wealth into a woman’s hands, he had two choices: his female guests, if they felt so inclined, and his books.

  It was years before Col actually tagged those books with the term pornography, and others would have blinked in surprise at what he considered obscene—mild indeed by some standards. But Col never reversed his opinion of Scraller’s bedtime stories, for later experience taught him that bedding was obscene unless he lay down with a woman’s glad laughter as well as the woman herself.