Freedom's Gate

by Naomi Kritzer

  “How long, do you think, until we’re missed?” I whispered.

  Tamar shrugged. “Boradai usually checks on the harem at some point during the night.”

  I hoped she wouldn’t do that tonight. I bit my lip. Sophos might find some excuse to keep them from searching for me, but would he refrain from searching for Tamar? “We’ll have to move quickly once we’re over the wall,” I said, and we picked up our pace.

  We reached the wall quick enough and after a short walk along the edge, I found the spot that Sophos had mentioned. As with the Elpisia wall, there was a crumbled spot, and several handholds. I climbed up quickly and lowered my bag gently to the ground. “Come on,” I whispered to Tamar.

  Tamar had clearly not spent her childhood clambering over rocks in the desert plains outside of Helladia as I had in Elpisia. Still, she scrambled awkwardly to the top without my help, and dropped down gracefully enough to the ground below. “Do you want me to carry something now?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” I said, glancing up quickly to orient myself. “Come on. It’s too dark to search on horseback, even if Boradai finds us gone. When it gets close to dawn, we’ll find somewhere to hide, but let’s try to get as far from here as we can.”

  “Wait,” Tamar said, grabbing my arm as I turned toward the desert. “You are going to check your pack, right? Make sure the guard gave you what he promised?”

  I swung the pack off my shoulders and opened it quickly. Despite my comments to Kyros about how I’d take water but no food, Sophos had packed me seven waterskins, not eight, along with food—bread, cheese, apples. Apples. Well, at least they would give us a bit of water as well as strength. I gritted my teeth. We’d need to find water soon; for two people, this wasn’t even a two-day supply. Sturdy clothing was in there, too; rather than carry it, I yanked off my shift and pulled on the shirt and trousers. Then I realized what was missing, and rooted through for a frantic moment. He didn’t give me a knife. My anger rose up in a hot choking cloud. I forced it back down. The guard who I’d supposedly bribed wouldn’t have been foolish enough to promise me a knife. Tamar couldn’t see my anger.

  “It’s what was promised,” I said, and tied the pack shut again. I started to swing it onto my back, then paused and looked at Tamar’s bare feet. “You’re going to cut your feet to ribbons if we don’t at least wrap them in something.”

  “I won’t hold you back,” she said.

  If I had a knife, I could cut some of the wool from my trousers—or, better, leather from the tops of my boots. No knife. I hope Kyros boils you in cooking grease. I tugged experimentally at the cloth, but it was well woven and was not going to rip, at least not without a knife to get it started. Well, at least the shift would tear easily. I ripped it into strips and wrapped Tamar’s feet in them.

  “This won’t last long,” she said.

  “It’ll be better than nothing. I’ll think about it.” I swung the pack onto my back. “Try to keep up.”

  Tamar did keep up, to my surprise. We spent several hours walking and occasionally climbing before we slowed to look for a hiding place. The hills around us had turned from gray to gold in the sunrise; we found a hollow in a hill, screened by some bushes. Not quite a cave, but as close as I thought we’d find. “I think this is the best we’re likely to find,” I said. “They’d have to be right on top of us to find it.”

  “We should keep going,” Tamar said.

  “Then they’ll definitely find us.” If they’re looking. “They have horses; it will be broad day in another half hour. They’d spot us walking like a hawk spots a hare.”

  “What about Sophos’s djinn?”

  “Djinn aren’t actually all that good at finding people who are trying to hide. Or, or so I’ve heard, at least.”

  Tamar shrugged and sat down, squeezing herself into the back of the hollow. I set the pack down and sat beside her.

  “Can I have some water?” she asked in a small voice.

  I pulled out the waterskin. “Two swallows,” I said, and passed it to her. She drank, then I drank.

  “That won’t be enough to get us to the Alashi, will it?” she said.

  “It wouldn’t have been enough even if you hadn’t come with me. There’s water on the plains—somewhere. We’ll find it.” I took out one of the apples and gave it to Tamar, then ate one myself. That would get us through the day with less water, and apples were heavy—not something I wanted to carry far.

  “Let me see your feet,” I said, when I’d licked the last traces of sticky sweetness from my fingers.

  Tamar stretched out her legs, her face rigid. Despite the wrappings, she had cut her heel and it had bled. I swore softly.

  “I won’t hold you back,” Tamar said again.

  “Not unless this festers and you fall into a coma from fever,” I said, biting back You fool before the words spilled out. “Besides, your blood will make an easy trail for anyone to follow.”

  “You can just leave me.”

  I rolled my eyes. I’d have to use some of the precious water to wash out the cut, but then what? Wrap her feet again in the linen? I poked my head tentatively out of our hollow and spotted a few plants with thick, tough leaves. I crawled out, ripped some of them up, and brought them back. Pouring water into my hand a drop at a time, I cleaned out Tamar’s wound as well as I could, bandaged the injury with the cleanest fragment of shift, then tied the tough leaves to her feet like sandals. She watched me work in silence.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do about your feet,” I said, sitting back on my heels. “You really ought to have shoes, or at least sandals.”

  “Well, feel free to go knock on Sophos’s door and ask for them,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”

  I shook my head. “Try to get some sleep.”

  Tamar pulled the shawl over her shoulders and closed her eyes, leaning her head against the packed dirt. I closed my eyes, but I was too keyed up to sleep, and I think Tamar was as well. If we’re found, I thought, maybe we can try to bribe the guard who finds us the way Alibek tried to bribe me. And then grab his knife and stab him in the back. That would solve all kinds of problems, if it worked. We’d have his boots, his knife, and his clothes. He’d probably even have a horse. Tamar was small, so we could ride double on a horse, though there was the problem of water for the horse, and food . . . The guard would have extra water, too, and probably some food. And a sword! I found myself almost hoping we’d be found, though of course there was no guarantee that the guard would be tempted by the bribe. It would be foolish in the extreme for him to take us up on that sort of offer. Still, I found myself straining my ears through the afternoon with a mixture of fear and anticipation.

  Tamar stirred at dusk. I gave her a little more water and drank a little more myself.

  “Are we going to walk through the night?” she asked.

  “It’s cooler,” I said. “And the moon is almost full.”

  Before the last of the daylight vanished, I went for a quick walk, alert for the sound of hoofbeats, looking for something, anything, with some sort of edge, or even just a point. An animal’s tooth. A sharp rock. Anything. After hunting for a while, I found a rock that had cracked in half, leaving a sharp edge, and a weathered stick that with a few minutes of effort I could sharpen to a point. I slipped off my trousers and managed to drive the pointed stick through the thick black cloth. Then I held the edge on the ground against the cloth with one foot, and yanked the cloth with my hands; the cloth gave at the weak point, and I was able to tear a strip loose. I did the same with the other leg of the trousers, then put them back on.

  “They’ll still wear out,” Tamar said, as I bound the doubled-over wool to the soles of her feet with more of the linen.

  “Not as fast,” I said. “If you see something else we can use, while we’re walking, let me know.”

  When the shoes were ready, it was quite dark. I stepped out of our hole and stretched, looking around. A quick movement in the corner of my vision
turned out to be a fluttering hawk. I looked up at the stars: there was Alexander on his throne, and there was Bucephalis, with the faint star in his tail that marked the north. We were headed mostly north and a bit west; I set the star a little to my right.

  “I can carry something,” Tamar said.

  Two of the waterskins had straps to let you sling them over your shoulder, so I gave those to her to carry, and shouldered the pack again.

  “How did you learn to navigate?” Tamar asked.

  “From one of the other stable hands,” I said.

  “Were your parents stable hands, too?”

  “My parents are both dead.”

  “Oh.” Tamar glanced at me. “I thought Kyros was probably your father.”

  “I heard Meruert say that.”

  “Well, you’re clearly part Greek. And that explains why he never raped you. Some men are squeamish about it when it’s their own daughter.”

  I should have claimed him as my father, I thought; it would have explained a great deal. Too late now. “Kyros bought me when I was a child, along with a whole lot of other slaves, from an officer who was being transferred back to Penelopeia.”

  “Were your parents already dead?”

  “Yeah. Why are you so curious about this?”

  “My mother died a year after I was sold to Sophos. I couldn’t be with her.”

  Ah. I nodded. “There was an epidemic of dysentery the year my parents died. I’m not sure why I lived, and they didn’t. Kyros bought me pretty soon after that.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Eight.”

  Tamar glanced at me, and I thought that she was probably trying to guess what I looked like as an eight-year-old. Why Kyros would have left me alone.

  “The stables are pretty dirty,” I said, trying to offer an answer to the question that hung in the air. “I think all Kyros ever saw when he looked at me was the dirt. Now . . .” I shifted my pack, which was digging into my shoulders. “Tell me about your family.” Anything to get her to quit asking about mine.

  “We were all owned by Androcles—he’s a friend of Sophos, and lives in Helladia. My father got sold to someone in Elpisia before I was old enough to remember him. I lived with my mother until I was ten, and then Sophos saw me and took a fancy to me. I never saw my mother again. It was the Fair One who told me that she’d died.”

  I swallowed. “What was your mother like?”

  Tamar was quiet for a moment, thinking over the question as she trudged along behind me. “Some slaves just give up, at some point. You could throw the gates open and say, ‘Look, out there—four days of walking and you’ll be with the Alashi, no one is watching, let’s go,’ and they wouldn’t move. My mother was like that. Even when she knew Androcles was going to sell me away from her, I don’t think it ever crossed her mind to run away with me. She gave me a hug and a kiss and said, ‘Be a good girl, and maybe your new master will let you visit sometime.’ ”

  “Would it have done any good to run?”

  “Probably not. I was young. Slow.”

  “Maybe she figured that if you tried to run, he’d never let you visit.”

  “I’m sure that’s what she figured.”

  I wondered where Tamar had gotten her spirit, if her own mother had been such a compliant servant.

  “What do you know about the Alashi?” Tamar asked a few minutes later.

  I thought of all the horrible stories. “I’ve heard that they’ll take in any slave who reaches them,” I said. “But I’ve also heard that they sacrifice humans to Prometheus.”

  “Oh yeah. ‘Burning them alive on a fire.’ I don’t believe it. The Fair One talks about the Alashi sometimes, and she says that’s a lie.”

  “What about the other stories?”

  “What else have you heard?”

  “That they make newcomers prove their worth with a spider bite.”

  “Ugh! I’d never heard that story.” Tamar shuddered. “That can’t be true.”

  “And I heard they eat horses.”

  “I think by the time we get there, we’ll eat horse if it’s offered to us.”

  My stomach growled. “Yeah,” I said. “You’re probably right.”

  “I heard that their most committed warriors are mutilated,” Tamar said. “The men are castrated, the women have their breasts cut off. I don’t believe it. Too many would die from that; it’s not something you’d do to your best warriors! I don’t believe the spider-bite story, either. Too many people would die.”

  I had to agree that they were unlikely to risk their best soldiers, but I wasn’t so sure that these scruples would apply to strangers asking to join them. “What else has the Fair One said about them?”

  “Mostly stuff that doesn’t make a lot of sense. But she’s always made them sound better than Sophos, at least.”

  “That wouldn’t take a lot.” The words slipped out before I thought them over.

  Tamar laughed a little. “You know there are plenty who are a lot worse, don’t you?”

  “I know,” I said, and we fell silent. The pause stretched into a silence that lasted for several hours.

  The spring rains hadn’t completely ended yet, and in daylight the steppe beyond Helladia had been a muddy green. By moonlight, the ground around us was gray and silver, and the light wasn’t always strong enough for us to see whether we were stepping on firm ground or loose gravel. I slipped and fell badly twice, once scraping my knees and my hands; Tamar fell more than that. The plant life was scrubby and often thorny, clinging to the dry soil with roots that went deep. Some of those roots would be full of water, but the plants I’d recognized so far were poisonous to humans.

  Despite my best efforts, we were already running low on water by the time we found shelter for the day. I thought it was best to keep walking at night and stay put during the day; even once we were beyond the range of searchers, saving our exertion for the cold of the night would allow us to conserve water. Even so, drinking only sips of water when we were very thirsty, we were running out. I wondered if we should both eat our fill of the meager food supplies immediately and lighten our load. I couldn’t stomach the idea of bread and cheese without a few sips of water to wash it down; it would be a shame if the food went to waste because our water was gone. Of course, if we didn’t find more water soon, we’d probably die before we reached the Alashi. I knew I wasn’t thinking entirely coherently, and after meditating on it for entirely too long, I tore off a slightly more generous portion of bread and cheese for both of us, then tucked the rest away for later.

  “We need to find water tomorrow, don’t we?” Tamar said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know anything about finding water out here?”

  “Follow the birds.” That was the first lesson I’d learned: watch for birds at dusk and at dawn as they fly to the water holes.

  “I don’t see any birds,” Tamar said.

  “Me, either. I’ve been watching for them since we set out.”

  “What else?”

  “Bugs. Animals. Anything alive has to have water, so if you see a crawling thing, watch to see where it goes. Water flows downhill—if we’re going to find it, it’ll be someplace low.”

  “The rainy season wasn’t that long ago. We’ll find some.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  We dozed through the day. I thought once or twice that I heard hoofbeats, but I stayed where I was and they faded away a short time later.

  At dusk, I crept out of our shelter to watch for birds. Tamar followed me. “There,” she said, and pointed; I saw a sudden blur, and then it was gone.

  “Did you see where it went?” I asked.

  “I didn’t see where it landed. Can’t we just head where it was going?”

  “I guess we’ll have to.”

  We both drank some water; we had barely a cup of water left. It occurred to me that even if we found the water hole, we’d need to find another one in another day or two. I pushed
that thought out of my mind; at least if we found a water hole now, we could drink our fill. Drink our fill: the thought obsessed me as we walked. I could hear the slosh of our meager remaining water in the pack on my back, and it took all my self-control not to stop and simply drain it all on the spot.

  “There!” Tamar hissed. I thought she meant she’d seen the water, but she was pointing at another bird. It skimmed over the dry brush and then dipped down. We followed, and minutes later the sound of our approach sent a cloud of screeching birds into the air.

  The water hole was a stagnant, scum-covered pond, but the water was fresh and not brackish. We covered the mouth of the bottle with a layer of the cleanest remaining part of my shift to strain out the weeds and as much of the dirt as we could. We filled one of the water bottles, drained it, filled it again, drained it again. It was quite dark by the time our thirst was slaked.

  Once I was no longer thirsty, I realized how hungry I was. Shivering in the night wind, I broke off small hunks of cheese and bread for Tamar and myself. We ate silently, washing them down with more slightly gritty water. Tamar huddled in her shawl, trying to stay warm.

  Though we would run out of food soon, it was tempting to stay put for the rest of the night, and through the next day. Surely we were beyond Sophos’s searchers by now. And at least camped by the pond, we wouldn’t run out of water. “How are your feet?” I asked Tamar.

  She stretched them out so I could see. The makeshift sandals were wearing thin, but there didn’t seem to be any new blood. I considered unwrapping the bandages to take a look, but something in me cringed at the idea of washing her injuries again with this filthy, scum-laden water.

  “Do you want to rest here for a while?” I asked.

  “What do you mean, a while?” Her teeth were chattering.

  “Tonight and tomorrow.”

  “No,” Tamar said immediately.

  “I think Sophos will have stopped looking . . .”

  “I don’t want to risk it.”

  I shrugged and stood up to fill the rest of our waterskins. We refilled all of them, drank still more water, and then topped them off again. The birds were still circling furiously overhead; I glanced up apologetically. “You’ll have it back soon,” I said aloud.