Transformation

by Carol Berg

  “I’ll consider it.” He cocked his head to one side. “Before he left the city, the Khelid emissary Korelyi offered me a sleeping potion. He had heard that I was not sleeping well. I refused it and said I was sleeping like a bear in winter. He spent that entire evening’s conversation talking of it, trying to find out what remedy I had used. Said he once trained as a physician himself and still collected remedies when he traveled to new places. At the end of it all, he asked who was my adviser on such matters. I thought that a curious question ... especially as you had predicted it.”

  “And what did you tell him?” I could not fail to ask, as the sudden pounding in my chest required easing.

  “I said I had taken no one’s advice since I left the nursery.”

  Some nine days later, at the ceremony marking the end of the Dar Heged, I watched as a slightly leaner, clear-eyed Prince Aleksander raised a tall young woman with pale gold hair from her obeisance and allowed his hand to wander from her elbow to her breast. From his look and her unblushing smile, I had no further anxiety about my remedy, only the usual discomfort I got after satisfying the unseemly wishes of a Derzhi. But Aleksander would have what he desired, so I had to take meager satisfaction that at least no slave girl would suffer because he could not do as he pleased.

  Though the Khelid was away, echoes of demon music lingered in my ears like the odor of distant death on a summer wind.

  Chapter 9

  Involvement in such matters as Aleksander’s bedchamber difficulties does nothing to help a celibate Ezzarian suppress unwilling and uncomfortable fantasies. Though I maintained sufficient self-discipline in the daytime, and I still managed to keep more serious dreams at bay when sleeping, unwanted visions did creep into my nights. It was in the midst of such a dream that Durgan roused me late one night just after the end of the Dar Heged. “Ezzarian, up with you.”

  “Does the Prince do no business during the daylight?” I snapped, before my tongue was awake enough to keep better counsel. Guilt battled with a ferocious desire to follow my interrupted dreamland liaison to its consummation.

  “It is not the Prince who summons you, but myself.”

  I sat up—always somewhat awkward when one’s wrists are attached to a wall with short lengths of chain—and forced my uneasy urges aside so I could pay attention. “What is it, Master Durgan?”

  “We have ten new slaves brought in from tax levies, and one of them is headed for trouble. I thought perhaps it would make things easier for all if you were to have a word with him.”

  I was fully awake by this time, ready to spit at the burly man crouching beside me. There were slaves who spied on other slaves, who reported infractions or intemperate speech. There were slaves who lashed or branded others, or wielded the power of food and drink, thinking to raise their own pitiful status above the rest of us. Had I not considered us all half-mad from bondage, I would have throttled any of them cheerfully. I knew the limits of my existence, and I stayed within them. But if Durgan had mistaken my compliance for a willingness to be his surrogate, to buy his favor by becoming his ally, then I needed to set him straight. “Ah, no, Master Durgan. I’m not one you can trust to do such bidding. I’d not be good at it.”

  “Faugh! It’s not what you’re thinking. This one will be dead within a day if you can’t make him come to his senses. Come on.” He unlocked my wrists and led me to the trapdoor of the underground cell. He shoved a small lantern into my hand, then unlocked the door and dropped his ladder down. His voice fell to a whisper. “If you think it worthy to save a life, even a life in bondage, then go down. Knock twice when you’re ready to come out.”

  My curiosity was certainly roused. If Durgan wanted to confine me in his dungeon, it was hardly necessary to trick me into it. He could throw me down there any time. But his creeping about in the night seemed to say that he didn’t want his assistants or other slaves to know of these dealings. So I descended the ladder and held up the lantern.

  He was no more than sixteen, huddled in the corner, shivering with cold and exhaustion. His skin was bronze, his shorn hair black, as were his wide-set, slightly angled eyes, grown huge with terror and pain and anger. His unscarred back was marked with a few streaks of blood, and the crossed circle burned into his shoulder was still swollen and angry.

  “Tienoch havedd,” I said softly. Greetings of my heart. It was a very personal greeting. Inappropriate for a stranger. But the boy could be no stranger. He could be no one but myself, sixteen years in the past. He was Ezzarian.

  All the work I had done to forget my own first days of horror was unraveled in a moment’s glance. A Luthen mirror, reflecting evil back upon itself, could be no more destructive than was the sight of that young man to my inner defenses. In an instant I lived again the degradation of being paraded unclothed before strangers, the humiliation as they touched and probed and joked of things they had no right, the torment of the Rites of Balthar, the pain as they destroyed faith, hope, ideals, honor. And well I remembered my determination that I would die rather than exist in such a way.

  “Would that I could ease your pain,” I said. Such futile, useless words. “Would that I could give back what has been taken from you or, at the least, share all I’ve learned that might help you take another breath.”

  An untouched cup of water and a fist-sized chunk of bread lay beside him. He had probably neither eaten nor drunk for some days.

  I sat down in the straw facing him. “You need to drink. It’s no use waiting for water you believe is clean. You won’t get it.”

  “Gaened da,” he whispered, his anger and disgust made childish by his chattering teeth.

  “I know I am unclean. I have been from the first day I was taken. As have you.”

  He shook his head in denial.

  “It’s not your fault. Never think it. I know what our people say about those of us taken captive, but there is nothing ... nothing ... you could have done to deserve what’s happened to you.”

  “M ... must have done.”

  “You don’t believe me now, but you’ll come to see it, if you give yourself the time.”

  I wanted to pour all of it into him, to make him see, but I knew that was not yet possible. All I could do was get him past the moment.

  I closed my eyes and pressed a clenched fist to my breast. “Lys na Seyonne,” I said, giving him an Ezzarian’s ultimate gift of trust and kinship. “I beg you listen to what I say. You have only one choice left to you. Live or die. There is no going back, no bargaining with fate. I wish I could tell you otherwise. Live or die. It comes down to that. And what does Verdonne teach us of such a choice?”

  I waited for him to say it. It would not take long. The passion for life is so strong in a youth of sixteen ... even when faced with horror and ruin.

  “Live.” He closed his eyes and tears ran freely down his bruised face.

  I was cheating. He still believed in gods that might have an interest in what he did. Perhaps by the time he learned the truth, living—even living in bondage—would become a habit he was unwilling to break. I gave him some time, then I placed the cup of water in his hand.

  “Only a sip now,” I said, easing the cup away before he drained it all at once. “It will carry you through a whole day if you let it. Do you have any injuries save the lashing and the burns?” The branding was bad enough, but the smiths were never careful when closing the steel rings about ankles and wrists.

  He shook his head. “They said I would be kept down here until I died. Why did they send you?” Suspicion croaked out with his question.

  He was already learning what he would need. I laughed a bit. “Durgan’s let me come because you are valuable alive and worthless dead, and it makes his employers most unhappy to have valuable slaves turn into worthless ones. If you refuse food and drink, they’ll force it down you. If you run, they’ll beat you or brand you on the face—much worse than this on mine—and they’ll cut off one of your feet. A crippled slave can still work. They won’t kill yo
u, no matter how you provoke them. They’ll only do that when they’ve damaged you beyond use ... and that’s a very long way. Durgan, unlike many slave masters, doesn’t like all that mess.” I was frightening him worse than ever, but it was necessary. “Durgan also understands something of Ezzarians, but you mustn’t presume on it.”

  I longed to ask where he had come from. The few Ezzarian slaves I had encountered in my early years of captivity had been taken as I was, on the day of Ezzaria’s fall. The assault had come so quickly on that last day. We who had fighting skills had tried very hard to give the last survivors time to escape, but at the moment I had drawn my last free breath, every man, woman, and child within my view was dead. Where were the living? Who were they? Names danced on my tongue, demanding to be spoken. He could be the child of my friends. Memories flooded into my mind, crying to be shared with one who might understand. Questions about what exactly had happened after the first Derzhi lash had fallen on my shoulders ... an unfocused hunger for understanding, dressed in a strange, quivering anxiety that set my teeth on edge ... crept to the edge of my tongue. But I could not indulge my desires. I had to teach the boy truths for his new existence.

  “Be easy about one thing. The Derzhi won’t ask you about the others, because they don’t really care all that much. We’re not worth the trouble to hunt down. It was an accident you were taken. You did something stupid and got yourself noticed by a Derzhi magician. Am I right?”

  The boy nodded hesitantly.

  “The magicians are the only ones who care about us anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “Afraid we’ll put them out of a job. They can do very little but make illusions. They happen upon things by chance, but they’ve lost any memory of melydda. They know we have power to do real sorcery, but they don’t understand it and can’t figure out how to get it themselves. They can’t seem to grasp that we don’t care about entertaining Derzhi nobles with it.”

  “I was just trying to find my way back to ... Just trying to get home.” He almost bit a hole in his lip.

  “You’re right not to trust me. Don’t trust anyone. There is even a rai-kirah housed among the people here—in a Khelid emissary—”

  “Rai-kirah?” His eyes grew huge. Panicked. Trapped. He hadn’t even thought of such a possibility. But then, neither had I.

  “It can’t know you. Just be exceptionally cautious. You no longer have any defenses. All in all, it’s safer to keep to yourself, but if I can help you, I will. Ask me whatever you wish.”

  He didn’t want to talk to me. He kept looking away as if he could not bear the sight of one he would have shunned as unspeakably corrupt only a few days before. Yet then his eyes would flick back to me, to the mark on my face, to the scars on my shoulders and arms, to my fading bruises. “How long have you been ... like this?” He could not bring himself even to say the word.

  “I’ve been a slave for sixteen years. Since the fall of Ezzaria when I was eighteen.” His whole lifetime. It must have sounded like eternity.

  “What were you before? Did you have melydda?”

  I could hear what he was really asking. If he had been blessed with true power, but I had not, then he might do better. He might escape my fate.

  “This is the only thing I will answer about the past,” I said, “because I’ve left it behind ... as you must also do.” I looked him directly in the eye so he would know I was telling the truth. “I was a Warden.”

  I hadn’t thought he could get any paler. I put the bread in his hand and encouraged him to eat. He did so, then did as he needed to do ... spoke of the present.

  “They try to make me speak my name, to wear their immodest clothes, and kneel to worship them as if they were gods. They say I’m to serve at table. I would have to touch their foul meat and rotted foods, and use their unclean water to bathe their hands.”

  Of course they would want him to serve at table. He was a handsome youth ... unscarred ... naive ... innocent. My heart boiled with hatred, and I hoped the rai-kirah was not hunting at that moment or it would find a proper vessel in me. “There are a few more things I should tell you about Derzhi table service. ...”

  It was half an hour more—a bleak half hour—until Durgan opened the trap and bade me come out. I took the boy’s trembling hand and said, “You will survive it. Your purity is inside your soul. Untouchable. The gods will see the light in you.” I wished I could believe it.

  As I let go and started up the ladder, the boy closed his eyes, clenched his fist to his breast, and said, “Lys na Llyr.”

  “Tienoch havedd, Llyr. Nepharo wydd,” I said. Sleep in peace.

  I struggled with what to do about Llyr. Instinct demanded I stay away. Loneliness was safety, just as I had told him. And the boy had to learn his own lessons—the quicker, the better. Yet the prospect of gaining his trust and having my questions answered was so tempting as to be physically painful. Fate, in the form of Aleksander, removed my choice.

  On the very next day I was moved into the palace so it would be easier for the Prince and his staff to make use of me. Preparations were under way for Aleksander’s dakrah, so there were a thousand writing tasks to be performed: invitations to the local nobility, proclamations of all sorts, unending correspondence with merchants and suppliers, friends and guests.

  It was a week until I saw Llyr again. The Prince summoned me, one evening at dinner; to read some poem that had been written about the coming festival and left at his place by an infatuated woman. Aleksander did not dismiss me when I finished reciting the maudlin verse, so I sat in the shadows behind him, and I watched the Ezzarian boy begin to wash the hands of the guests. His eyes were dark hollows; his skin almost transparent, stretched over his bones. My heart sank. He was not eating. He was still fighting the battle of how to avoid those things we had been taught were impure, while not killing himself—the ultimate corruption, according to Ezzarian law. It was so hard to reverse the teachings of a lifetime. And there was no answer to the dilemma unless he learned new truths to live by. Llyr could scarcely bring himself to touch the hands of the brawny Derzhi warrior. And when the man reached out and fondled his short hair, leering in unseemly anticipation, I felt Llyr’s despair as if it were my own. Which, of course, it had been ... and was.

  Two nights later, as I was sitting in Fendular’s cold anteroom, writing a list of extra linens needed for the two thousand guests who were expected some six short weeks ahead, a young female slave appeared at the door. “Master Durgan commands you come to the slave house.”

  It was an absolute breach of protocol for me to leave my assigned task to obey a lesser-ranking official, but I did not hesitate. I knew what I would find.

  The fool of a boy had not known how to do it quickly or painlessly. He had put the dull shaving knife in his belly. Durgan had laid him in the darkest corner of the slave house, and thrown a blanket over him to quiet his shivering.

  “Ah, child, what have you done?” I said.

  He did not answer, but turned his head away from me. It was not my corruption that he could not face. Quite the opposite. “Gaenad zi,” he said. “Go away.” He was ashamed.

  I gathered him in my arms and held him to me, feeling his warm blood soak my tunic. “I am not afraid of corruption, Llyr,” I said. “I’m just sorry. I wish ...” Well, what did it matter? Softly I sang the chant for the dying, hoping it would give him some comfort.

  “Were you truly a Warden?” he whispered once I was done with the ancient prayer.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you look ... inside ... and tell me what you see?”

  “There’s no need—”

  “Tell me please. I’m so afraid.”

  “If you wish.” I gazed deep into his dark, pain-filled eyes, but I used no Warden’s skill to read his soul and make my answer. “There is no evil in you, Llyr. No corruption. You are Verdonne’s child and Valdis’ brother, and you will live forever in the forests of light.”

  He relaxed and closed his
eyes, and I thought he was gone. But he smiled sleepily and said, “Galadon told me he once knew someone who was a Warden at seventeen. He said I would never have such melydda as that one in a thousand years of trying.”

  “Galadon ...” I came near forgetting everything in the magic of the name.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “He never spoke such flattery in my hearing. He always said I was ‘incompetent, ignorant ...’”

  “‘... imperceptive, and ill-suited for your gifts.’”

  I smiled at the echo of lost joy. “Galadon lives ...”

  “There’s ...” He choked on blood that came bubbling from his mouth, and his thin body wrenched in spasm. I held him close.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Be easy.”

  “... five hundred ...”

  “Hush, boy.”

  “... hiding, hiding, hiding. Cold and clean ... ah ... shhhh. Don’t tell where. Gyrbeast leads the way ...” He was drifting away and his words fell into a faint singsong like a childhood rhyme. “... find the way ... find the way home ... follow the gyrbeast ... lead you home. ...”

  He sighed, and said nothing more.

  “Nepharo wydd, Llyr,” I said. Sleep in peace.

  If Llyr was in peace, I was not. Durgan tried to speak to me as I rinsed the blood from my tunic and put the wet garment back on, but I would not stay to hear him. “I must return to my work,” I said. “Do not call on me for such a matter again, slave master. I’d not wish the Prince or the Chamberlain to find me absent from my duties to wait upon a barbarian slave.”

  It was a bitter time. I would have preferred to sleep freezing in the slave house and be set to shoveling out the middens with my bare hands, than to be drawn deeper into Derzhi life. But as the weeks passed I became too busy to dwell on it much. I was ruthless with myself, forbidding any thought, no matter how fleeting, that could have an association with the past. I dreamed no dreams, permitted no visions, spoke to no one outside my assigned work. And I completely banished from my mind the astounding news that five hundred Ezzarians were hidden somewhere in the world and that among them was one who had been my mentor from my fifth birthday, the day I was found to have melydda. My encounter with Llyr had done nothing but confirm that I had been right to stay apart, right to forget, right to pretend that there was no other life beyond the moment in which I existed.