The White Brand (The Eastern Slave Series Book 2)

by Victor Poole

  "Did you have any trouble at the gate when you came into the city?" Ajalia asked Philas. She had crossed down into Talbos through a tiny village that lay down near the harbor; there had been no gate down there. The wall had merely petered out into a short pasture wall that ended against the sea. Ajalia had climbed over it easily.

  "Anyone can come in and out of Talbos," Delmar told her, before Philas could speak. "No one cares if we're going to Slavithe, or if we came from there."

  "I didn't have a problem getting in," Philas told Ajalia.

  Leed came scrambling up the street towards them; he had a large bundle of wrapped cloth over his back; a rope of bread and sausages hung around his neck.

  "I got it," Leed gasped to Philas. Philas got aboard his horse. Leed handed up the large bundle to him, and Philas tied it to the back of his saddle, where a pair of leather thongs dangled from either end of the saddle.

  "What's that?" Ajalia asked Philas. He shrugged, but didn't say. "What's in the bundle?" Ajalia asked Leed. Leed bared his teeth in a fierce smile; the boy winked at Ajalia.

  "I can't say," the boy shouted happily, "it's Philas's business."

  Ajalia pretended to be disappointed.

  "You never kept secrets before," she lied solemnly to Philas, her face cast down in abject sorrow. Philas could not keep a straight face; a wild guffaw burst out of him, and the fat old gatekeeper glared over at the noise with a look of deep disappointment.

  "You've upset grandfather," Ajalia mouthed at Philas, who tried and failed to look apologetic. Ajalia lifted herself with an effort onto the back of the brown gelding; she suppressed a groan. Shooting pains travelled up and down her arms, and through the whole of her torso; her stomach churned. Philas extended an arm to Leed, and pulled the boy up behind him on the saddle.

  ON THE ROAD

  Leed's heavy necklace of shaped bread and cold meats dripped around him like enormous pearls. As soon as he was aboard the horse, Leed stuffed one of the rolls whole into his maw, and began to tear off and cram pieces of a sausage into the corners of his mouth. Leed's jaws worked vigorously up and down.

  Ajalia had eaten in the village near the harbor; she glanced aside at Delmar, and saw a look of pinched agony moving over his face as he watched the boy eat. She could see that Delmar was hungry. Philas kicked his horse forward towards the gate, where the fat old man was sitting on a stool.

  "Going away so soon?" the fat gatekeeper demanded, squinting up at Philas.

  "I have an important meeting in the morning," Philas told the gatekeeper. Ajalia noticed that the old man spoke clear Slavithe; she could understand everything he said.

  "You should retire from business, like me," the old man snapped. "I see everyone that comes in and out. I know everything."

  "Sadly, I do not have your good fortune," Philas told the old man. "Perhaps one day I may be as venerable as yourself."

  "Unlikely," the guard said, but a pleased grimace creased his cheeks. The guard's eyes slid to Ajalia. "You didn't come through here," he snapped.

  "I entered your city near the harbor," Ajalia explained. The gatekeeper grunted.

  "What are you doing together?" he demanded.

  "I heard that there are robbers from Slavithe on the road," Ajalia lied. "We go together for safety."

  The gatekeeper grunted again. Ajalia saw the fat old man open his mouth again, and then she saw his eyes move over to Delmar, who had just come into view behind one of the horses. The fat old man's face went ashen; his mouth snapped shut. He waddled to the gate, and pushed open one of the wooden doors; the hinges made a long squeak when they shifted within the frame that was set into the black stone wall.

  "Safe journey," the fat old man told them, and stood aside to let them pass. Philas rode through first; Ajalia was behind him, but she drew aside her horse, and waited for Delmar to walk ahead of her. After a moment, Delmar passed ahead of her. Ajalia studied the guard; when Delmar went by the fat old man, the old guard's fingers flicked up against his chin, and made the sign she had seen before, the sign of the dead falcon. Delmar did not seem to notice the sign; if he saw it, he pretended he hadn't. A smile crept over Ajalia's face; she urged her horse forward, and nodded to the guard as she passed him. The guard grimaced; Ajalia got the impression that he did not approve of her femaleness.

  When they had got a little down the path that ran out of Talbos, Ajalia caught up to Philas. Delmar was a little behind them, his hands in his pockets, kicking pebbles out of the road as he walked. Leed had succeeded in demolishing several more chunks of bread and sausage; the necklace of edible goods hung like a ravaged thing around his neck. Parts of almost every piece of the chain had been torn away and eaten; great bites had been taken out of the meats, and many of the breads dangled precariously upon the twine that threaded through them all.

  "What's in the bundle?" Ajalia asked Philas. She glanced back at Delmar; he was out of earshot. Philas caught her glance.

  "Dolls," he said. "And a few more pieces of rough cloth. We're going to make a killing in Talbos."

  "There may be trouble," Ajalia told him, "if we try to get the whole caravan out."

  "Not if you take the higher pass," Leed said through a mouthful of bread. "Take Delmar with you. My uncle would let you through. They hate Slavithe traders. They'll let you through the northern pass just to spite Slavithe."

  Philas twisted around in the saddle, and examined the boy.

  "Where does the pass connect in the city?" he asked. "What part of Slavithe would we need to go through?"

  "Only temples," Leed said, "and no one goes there. Hi!" he shouted back at Delmar. "Hi, you!" he shouted. Startled, Delmar looked up. "Catch this!" Leed called. He ripped a massive hunk of bread off the chain of food, and hurled it at Delmar's face. Delmar's hands came up reflexively, and snatched the bread out of the air.

  "Thanks," Delmar said, his mouth already filled with the bread.

  "That was nice of you," Philas said.

  "No it wasn't," Leed snapped. His eyes darted to Ajalia, who looked away from him. "The bread's going stale," Leed said aggressively. "I don't want it to get wasted."

  "Sure," Philas said, smiling.

  "The boy's right," Ajalia told Philas. "We could get attacked by animals out here if there were stale crumbs everywhere." She did not smile. Philas's eyebrows joined together in a skeptical line. He opened his mouth; Ajalia could see he was going to make fun of the boy.

  "Are there any other stale pieces?" she asked quickly.

  Leed pulled a long sausage that was mostly untouched from the end of his string, and passed it to her.

  "Thank you," she said, and nibbled on the end. She shot Philas a stern look; his mouth crabbed up until it looked as though his chin was attempting to consume his nose.

  "I think Philas is very hungry," she told Leed. The boy eagerly pulled another sausage off of his string, and held it out to Philas.

  "No," Philas mouthed silently at Ajalia. She widened her eyes, and bared her teeth in a sickening smile. Philas moaned.

  "Thank you," Philas told the boy, taking the piece of meat.

  "I'm very hungry," Delmar said brightly. He had finished the bread Leed had given him, and had caught up to the horses. Ajalia could see him gazing hopefully at the large sausages still hanging around Leed's neck.

  "Leed," Philas said carefully, frowning at Ajalia. "I think I am too drunk to finish my sausage. Do you mind if Delmar helps me?"

  "That's okay," Leed said. He was gnawing meditatively on a rind of meat. Philas passed his sausage down to Delmar; when Leed wasn't looking, Ajalia did the same. Delmar retreated with his hoard. Ajalia though she could hear him salivating with delight. When she looked back over her shoulder, she saw him munching ecstatically over the food, his whole body limp with delight. She thought that she really was going to have to do something about Delmar, when she finished up the business with the caravan moving to Talbos. He was beginning to occupy a space of her mind that she had reserved only for herself; sh
e would have thought it impossible, before she met him, and yet she found herself wanting to make him happy. Why she felt so was something she did not want to discover; she kept Delmar, and her feelings that were rapidly transforming about him, behind a curtain in her mind. She would care about him, and she would make plans about him, and she would figure out how to make him eat food, but she would not admit to herself that she liked him, or that his happiness was becoming material to her own.

  Marriage, for an Eastern slave, to one outside the East was impossible; it was never done. Once a slave entered the ranks of an Eastern household, that slave became a possession of some interest to the master. The slaves in the silk fields, and in the manufacturing houses, were interchangeable, and relatively worthless in their owner's eyes, save for the managing slaves, and those whose skills were in high demand for dying and painting the silks. The household slaves were different; they were looked on as extensions of the master's family, and were expected to marry within the estate. Occasionally slaves married between households, but such unions were rare, and were undertaken with greater expense than those between slaves within one estate, or between slaves and their counterparts in the villages, which surrounded the great Eastern estates.

  Many slaves married those who were not enslaved; their children were free, and their spouses could travel outside the East if they pleased, though they rarely did. The spouses of slaves who belonged to a household were often absorbed into the life of the estate; they worked in the fields, or tended to the animals of the master's house.

  The only way to marry outside the Eastern realm was to cease to be a slave, which meant either a lifetime of careful hiding, or escape to another continent. Ajalia liked Leopath; she had never been anywhere else, and she had no intention of finding a new home. She liked the sprawling desert, and the cities that peppered the coast in the north and to the south of the Eastern lands. She liked the way she lived, and she felt, as yet, no desire to pursue freedom. She would have felt differently if she had not belonged to her master, but she had gotten herself into his house with considerable care and expense, and she had no urge to change. Delmar was disrupting the even progression of her life; he was introducing complications that she had not considered before. If she had not felt such a flood of warmth towards the eldest son of the Thief Lord, she would have hated him. As it was, she could not find within herself the wherewithal to be even mildly annoyed. She did not realize that she loved him. She thought herself incapable of love.

  Leed, having eaten through the majority of his bread and sausage chain, surrendered the remaining pieces to Delmar, who promised to reimburse him when he got the chance. Ajalia saw Leed wave away this offer; the boy was clearly stuffed to the gills with food, and she could see in the boy's eyes that he saw Delmar's hunger. She was beginning to find that Leed made her squirm; the boy was honest, and kind, and his purity of character made her see herself more clearly than she had ever seen herself before. He made her remember things that she had forgotten, and the memory of her thoughtfulness to others who were hungrier, or sadder than herself made her blush with shame.

  Ajalia had a curious idea that she was a terrible person; she had gotten this idea early, and it had stuck. She had to protect herself, and she told herself that protecting herself made her selfish. She had to take what substance she could get, and she told herself that this was a kind of theft. Before she had come to Slavithe, and particularly before she had met Delmar, she had seen herself as a sort of dark stain upon the face of the earth, a creature of shadow that served a good man, and in this service, partially redeemed herself.

  Delmar's ignorance of his own power, and his acceptance of his father and mother as guiding figures in his life, turned Ajalia's inward gaze towards her own master; she did not like what she saw, and so she stopped looking. She repeated to herself, firmly, that her master was honorable. An honorable man, a just man, so she had always thought him. She felt as though she were standing on a great cliff, and that she had closed her eyes. Below her feet, the earth was being stripped slowly away; soon, she would be falling.

  Ajalia shook herself from her reverie. She turned her attention to her companions. Philas was grilling Leed on the location of the northern pass out of Slavithe, and of the position and condition of the temples that lay in that area of the city.

  Ajalia watched the boy from the quarries speak; his answers were quick. She thought again that the boy was like her, or like she had been, when she had first been a slave.

  "And where the road comes up against the wall," Philas said, "what is directly before the wall?"

  Leed was drooping a little against Philas; the boy's eyelids were heavy.

  "The temple right in front of the wall has a big horse carved on the front side," Leed said. "The wall runs in close against the building; you have to squeeze to fit through. You couldn't take a horse."

  "And what is the opening like in the wall?" Philas asked. The moon was bright, and it shed a silver-blue light over the whole landscape. Ajalia could hear Delmar gnawing on bread hungrily.

  "The wall meets the first mountain," Leed said. "There's a corner of the city wall that abuts a steep mountain face, and the mountain forms part of the wall. So the wall runs up against a cliff, but the cliff on the outside of the wall has been beaten away. There's a little gap, about two feet across, high up against the wall. You have to use a ladder, or lift each other up to the gap, but you can get people and goods through."

  "The robbers made the gap?" Philas asked.

  "They're not proper robbers," Leed said discriminatorily. "They're more like justice seekers."

  "They made the gap?" Philas asked.

  "Yes," Leed answered, his voice a tired drawl. "On the other side, where the wall runs out from the mountain, the wall joins up seamlessly to the rock. You can't get through on the other side, but it's so far west that it would be useless to try. That side runs out to the farmlands, and there's nothing there worth sneaking to. Just desert."

  "Did your uncle tell you this?" Ajalia asked Leed. When the boy didn't answer, she looked over at him. "I think he's asleep," she told Philas. Delmar had fallen behind them again.

  "I'll take the slaves out in the morning," Philas said. "Word of where we went tonight shouldn't be far behind us."

  "I agree," Ajalia said. "You'll have to take Delmar."

  Philas bristled.

  "I'd rather not," he said. "For obvious reasons."

  "The people, these robbers, they think he's a kind of prophesied figure," Ajalia told him. "The robbers will protect him."

  Philas sat up straighter in the saddle.

  "Are you serious?" he asked. He glanced behind at the Thief Lord's oldest son, who was chewing meditatively on a fragment of sausage as he walked slowly up the road. "What kind of prophesied figure?" Philas asked.

  Ajalia glanced back at Delmar; he wouldn't be able to hear them.

  "Delmar," she called. The young man looked up. He jogged a little until he was walked alongside the brown gelding's hindquarters.

  "What?" he asked. His eyes had moonlight reflected in them, and his hair was washed a pale tint in the darkness.

  "I'm going to tell Philas about you," Ajalia told him.

  "What about me?" Delmar asked, a blank look on his face.

  "About who you are," Ajalia said. Delmar shrugged.

  "I'm nobody," he said.

  "The cities of Talbos and Slavithe are connected somehow," Ajalia told Philas, "and Delmar's a link between the two."

  "They aren't really connected," Delmar argued.

  "Then you are the connection," Ajalia said.

  "Well, they are connected, a little," Delmar hedged. "I mean, Bakroth built both of them, so that's similar."

  "Wait, what?" Ajalia asked. "I thought Bakroth built Slavithe."

  "Well, he did," Delmar said agreeably. "But then his brother wanted to kill him, so he went over the mountains to the sea, and build Talbos, and lived there." Delmar tipped his head up to see Philas.
Ajalia saw that Delmar's eyes took in the form of the sleeping boy. "You can't talk about this stuff in Slavithe," Delmar told Philas helpfully. "They'll drive you out, or kill you. It's very upsetting to the Slavithe people."

  "Who's Bakroth? And who's the brother?" Philas asked.

  "The painting we have in the little house is of Jerome," Ajalia told him. "Jerome is supposed to have built Slavithe, but really it was his brother, Bakroth."

  "Bakroth and Jerome," Philas said.

  "So the brothers are slaves, yes?" Ajalia asked Delmar. As the sandy-haired young man nodded, Philas put one hand into the air.

  "Wait, stop," Philas complained. "Now the founders are slaves?"

  "Yes," Ajalia and Delmar said together.

  "When did this happen?" Philas demanded. "I thought Slavithe was a city of nomads from the far west."

  "Not nomads," Delmar said. "Slaves. Escaped slaves." He looked up at Philas, and then at Ajalia, his blue eyes calm and unperturbed. "Bakroth was a ship builder from the East, up on the coast. His brother, Jerome, was a slave in the far west. They had been separated when they were very young, and sold to different traders. Their parents had tried to escape, and were executed. Bakroth was sold to an Eastern ship builder, and he became a great director of the shipping works, and Jerome was an unskilled slave in the fields, way out west, with the savages and the wild beasts."

  "There are no ship builders in the East," Philas told Delmar.

  "There used to be," Delmar said, "before the oasis sprang up."

  "The oasis has always been there," Philas said hotly. "My master has lived in the East with his clan for seven generations."

  "This is before that," Delmar said easily. "This is before silk, and before the trade routes were established."

  "This is an old wives' tale," Philas scoffed.

  "It isn't," Delmar said dreamily, "it's true."