Though Hell Should Bar the Way

by David Drake

  Eight women lounged there. Two were playing a game with cards and tiles; three sat at another table and drank small cupfuls from an urn; and the final three read or stared at wood-screened windows, much as Monica had been doing in her room.

  The camera installation had been expert. It covered the entire top floor of the wing and showed the interiors of every chamber. The feeds must have come from extreme fish-eye lenses, but there was no distortion in what I saw because the console’s enormous capacity easily corrected the images.

  I wondered who had installed and connected the equipment; and I wondered also if they had long survived the task. It was possible that the work had been done by women or by eunuchs. My suspicion after my past experience with the palace was that the Admiral had bought slaves with the necessary expertise and then had executed them.

  The women were all dressed in loose garments and slippers. Monica wore a shift much like the one Giorgios slept in, though hers was white instead of patterned. Most of the others were in similar garments or skirts and blouses, though one of the game players wore only a bandeau above the waist.

  Monica walked to a woman reading. They moved to a bench without back or arms and sat. Monica began to play while the other woman watched her fingering intently.

  Another woman entered the hall from a door which had been closed until then. The observation cameras didn’t have sound—and I wouldn’t have dared use it anyway—but the roomful of women started as suddenly as birds raised by a gun dog.

  The newcomer was older than most of the others—midforties I would guess—but in very good condition. She was plumper than my taste, but that seemed to be the norm for ben Yusuf. The only slim adult woman whom I’d seen here was Monica.

  The woman who’d been sitting with Monica disappeared into one of the rooms. She left behind the book she’d been reading. Monica stood also, but she didn’t back away.

  The Admiral’s chief wife was Azul, fifty years old and born on ben Yusuf. I was certain now that I was watching her, though she wore her age well. I couldn’t hear the words the two women exchanged, but I could read them easily enough in the postures and expressions.

  Azul advanced. Instead of backing away, Monica picked up a lamp of turned brass from the table where her instructor had been reading. Azul halted.

  The older woman was dressed with greater formality than the other wives. Her long, pale-blue dress was cinched at the waist with a broad belt of leather dyed a darker blue which matched the material of her cut-work slippers. Her hair fell loose on the right side but was gathered by a gaudy barrette on the left.

  Azul looked over her shoulder. A moment later, two men wearing pantaloons and loose blouses joined her. They were thick bodied and soft looking, but they were also big. One spoke to Azul; then they moved on Monica from either side.

  For a moment I thought the girl was going to fight them. Then she hurled the lamp to the floor and handed the musical instrument to the man—the eunuch, obviously—on her right.

  That servant carried the instrument to Azul, bowed, and handed it over. The other eunuch shifted slightly so that he was directly between the women. He continued to watch Monica.

  Azul examined the instrument. The sound box was very small compared to the long neck. She walked to the outside wall where Monica could see her clearly. Raising the instrument in both hands as though she were using an axe, she swung it against the masonry. It shattered into scraps of light wood and the sturdier neck from which the four strings dangled.

  Azul tossed the neck to the floor. She turned and walked back into the room she had appeared from.

  Monica said nothing. She too returned to her room. She closed her door with a controlled motion instead of banging it.

  I blanked my display. I was trembling inside. Then after a moment I reopened the feed I had started with, the interior of Monica’s room. It was the last one the Admiral had been watching.

  Monica lay on her bed, her face buried into the bedclothes. Judging from the way her body shook, she was sobbing.

  I turned off the console. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do just now, but I knew I didn’t want to see more of the internal politics of the Wives’ Wing.

  * * *

  I was at work on the dry goods accounts, as best as I could. It was a tangled mess, with minimal data entered—usually a gross amount—and uncertain dates. At least a third of the entries were identical to the sou to one or more other entries. That didn’t necessarily mean they were false, however, because it was the nature of housekeeping expenses to be repetitive.

  I’d have been right more often than not to say an account was false, though. It’s not just that ben Yusuf existed by piracy. Its society was corrupt from bottom to top. I wasn’t taking a moral stance to think that it should be remade; that was just a pragmatic assessment.

  Abram rang a brass triangle right behind me. I jumped, but it’d been my idea. When I was working, I tuned out my surroundings. That was fine for most things, but if I ignored the Admiral when he visited I was likely to be alerted by a guard using the butt of his impeller.

  I blanked the display before I turned around. There was nothing wrong with me going over household accounts, but I might have been viewing the Wives’ Wing. I was training myself to react the safe way, every time. I didn’t want either gelding or impaling to become part of my work history.

  Abram stood with Lal, my shipmate from Captain Hakim’s crew. I surprised myself with how glad I was to see him. Lal and Abram were the closest thing to friends I’d made since I was shanghaied on Saguntum.

  “Say, spacer!” I said, getting up from the console. My eyes had to adjust before I could see him properly. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Well, when we landed at Salaam, I thought I’d see how you were getting on,” Lal said, looking around. “I thought you’d be all right, but I’m still surprised that you’re doing this well. From what I hear, you’re running things in the palace.”

  “No, not that,” I said truthfully. I didn’t add, “And if it were true I wouldn’t say it. Even Giorgios doesn’t find me so indispensable that he wouldn’t have somebody knife me if he decided I was a danger to him.”

  Aloud I went on, “Have you had lunch? Let me buy you lunch!”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Lal said. “We made a couple decent captures this time, but Captain Hakim won’t be paying off till the auction in a week or so.”

  I looked at Abram and made a quick calculation. “Abram,” I said, “let’s you and I find a place we can have lunch with my old shipmate. Some place the food’s as good as Martial’s but where we don’t have to stand outside.”

  “Right,” said Abram. “I really like Etzil’s down by the harbor, if you don’t mind a bit of a walk?”

  We didn’t mind. Of course.

  I’ve heard people say, “You’ve got to trust somebody!” and I’ve also heard them say, “You can’t trust anybody!” Neither of those things is true; both are just words that people shout when a plan or a relationship goes belly-up.

  I’ve known people who didn’t seem to trust anybody. My dad was one of them. Certainly neither my brother nor I had any notion of how he was getting his contracts. As for Mom, I don’t doubt that she was just as shocked as she seemed when the investigators and the bailiffs descended on us.

  But by the same token, none of Dad’s business associates betrayed him. He was unmasked when a new Minister of Defense took over and for her own political purposes forced a really serious audit.

  But that was the thing: Dad had lost—I don’t know a better word for what had happened—despite not trusting anyone. And I simply didn’t want to live that way.

  Sure, I could go off with Lal on my own without arousing suspicion in anybody but Abram himself (and maybe not even in him). He might be able to help, though; and anyway I just wanted to let him know what I was thinking.

  Etzil’s was a narrow frontage between a pair of large shops catering to spacers with clothing, cheap jewelry,
and personal weapons. Etzil had a satellite location, though, a combination of marquee and shed on an outcrop closer to the water. A sheet of structural plastic formed a floor flat enough for chairs, but because of the rock, nobody came ashore there.

  We took a table and were waited on by a boy younger than Abram. When he had scampered back to the main building to fetch our wine and food, I first nodded to Abram, then said to Lal, “I want to get off planet.”

  “I’d say you were sitting pretty,” Lal said. “Why would you want to leave?”

  “He doesn’t belong here,” said Abram unexpectedly. “There’s some from the big worlds that really take to it—Guido, the War Chief, he’s from Pantellaria, and the vizier of Eski Marakech is from Pleasaunce itself. But Roy here”—he nodded to me—“is scheming to get away. And some other stuff too, I shouldn’t wonder. He’ll lose his wedding tackle if he’s not lucky.”

  I didn’t say anything, but my heart was a block of ice.

  “Well, you’re out of luck if you think one of the captains is going to sign you on,” Lal said to me. “Even Hakim. He’d have been glad to have you before, but now that you’re the Admiral’s slave he won’t touch you. He wouldn’t be able to come back to Salaam if he did, and even if he was willing to lift out of some place else it wouldn’t do you any good. The admirals all stick together that much—they won’t harbor each other’s run slaves.”

  “What about other planets?” I said. My hopes were melting. “I could pay well.”

  “Where do you suppose a ship from ben Yusuf could land and not everybody aboard be hanged?” Lal said. “I don’t know of anyplace.”

  Our orders came. The food was a thick fish stew spread on a trencher of barley bread. We ate with spoons and our hands. It was the best meal I’d had on ben Yusuf, and I’m not complaining about Martial’s food.

  “If you had enough money …” Abram said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You could buy a ship.”

  “And then what?” said Lal. “Oh, sure, Roy could captain it and maybe work it alone—I don’t believe that, but maybe he could. But where’s he going then? To Blanchard or St. Julien? They’d more likely shoot him when he opened the airlock than they’d start cheering about his escape. If it’s a bigger place that has a guard ship, you won’t get out of orbit.”

  “Yeah,” said Abram without the animation of a moment before. “Anybody arriving on a cutter from ben Yusuf is a pirate when he reaches anywhere else.”

  “That’s not what I wanted to hear,” I said, scraping a spoonful of sopped bread from my trencher. I think I sounded calm. I sounded calmer than I felt anyway.

  “Look …” said Lal. “If I knew a way, I’d tell you. You saved my life, Roy. I’ll do anything I can for you.”

  “Boss, I don’t want you to leave Salaam, believe me,” Abram said earnestly. “But you’ll die if you stay here. I won’t turn you in but somebody will. So you better get out or quit looking at the wives.… And I don’t know how you can get out.”

  Etzil’s wine wasn’t very good, but we drank a lot more of it before Lal went off to his room and Abram led me to the palace. On the way back I said, “Abram, why do you think I’ve been looking at the place you said?”

  I didn’t want to use the words. I didn’t think anybody passing in the street would hear enough to be a problem, but I’d been sure that nobody could see the display when I was using it.

  Abram looked at me. “Look, boss, I didn’t know what you were doing and I figured I ought to,” he said. “The way you were acting, there was more than just money.”

  He grinned. “You don’t care about money,” he said. “You could make a lot more easy, but you don’t bother.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” I said. “But how did you see a display that was focused just for me?”

  “I rigged a mirror on the pillar in front of me,” Abram said. “I watched your fingers move. I can’t read, but I’m good on motion. And when you were asleep, I did what you’d been doing. If anybody’d asked, I’d have said I was doing it for you—but nobody asked. But when I got the place you mostly went to—”

  He put his hand on my arm and stopped me where we were, twenty feet from the gate of the palace. In an even softer voice than before, he continued, “I glanced at it and then I shut down. I never want to see that again. No matter how bad Giorgios needs you, he’ll have you impaled and probably me too if he ever gets a whiff of what you’re doing.”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Abram,” I said. “If you want to get a long way away from me before anything happens, I won’t blame you. But I’m not going to quit. And I’m going to get her away with me. Somehow.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I’d say that the lunch with Lal had changed my life, but it really didn’t. It just sort of reinforced my plan to keep on doing things the way I was.

  Particularly about trusting Abram. The worst Giorgios and the Admiral would do if Abram told them I was planning to escape would be to put me in shackles, but if Abram had told them what he’d figured out on his own—that I was spying on the wives—my punishment wouldn’t have stopped till I was dead.

  I kept watching the wives, but mostly I kept watching Monica. She didn’t belong as the Admiral’s wife, any more than I belonged as his slave. Maybe that was part of what was eating at me about Monica, the fact we were unfairly in the same boat, but I don’t kid myself that I’d have thought about her so much if she’d been old and ugly. I try to be a person I can smile at when I look in the mirror, but I never wanted to be a saint.

  There was plenty of work to do. I was combining the week’s food order—I wouldn’t put it all with the same broker, but bulk still gave me more leverage than I’d have had otherwise—when Abram brought me into the present by ringing the triangle.

  I shut down and turned as the chamberlain entered the gallery. I didn’t see Giorgios very often except when he was passing through, to and from his own apartments. He was so willing to leave the console to me that he didn’t seem to look at it.

  “We’ve bought a lemon tree,” he said, sounding flustered. “It’s being delivered this afternoon,”

  I’d gotten up, clearing the couch for Giorgios. “Yes, sir?” I said politely. I couldn’t imagine why he was upset by a purchase which didn’t sound particularly major. Nobody’d submitted an invoice yet, so I couldn’t be quite sure of that.

  “It’s for the wives’ garden!” Giorgios said. “The Admiral will be here shortly to unlock the alley entrance! Is the console working properly?”

  “It’s working perfectly,” I said. “I was just checking the food orders, but there’s no rush on that.”

  “Oh, thank the Great God,” said Giorgios. “I’m always afraid that it will fail again and I’ll be blamed!”

  “I’ll keep out of the way, then,” I said calmly. “I didn’t know there was an alley entrance.”

  I bowed to Giorgios, then slipped through what was left of the usual gathering of spectators. Most of them had disappeared as soon as they’d heard that the Admiral was coming.

  Abram followed without me needing to call him. I’m not sure whether he was coming with me or just dodging the Admiral.

  “Let’s see Martial,” I said, though what I really meant was “Let’s go outside.”

  When we got through the main entrance, Abram gestured to the left. Martial’s diner would have been to the right.

  “I figured you wanted to know about the alley entrance,” Abram said. “There’s a bit of a plaza at this end of the alley—there’s a common well. That’ll let us watch without, you know, getting caught up in it.”

  “I’m glad you’re on my side,” I said. That was the truth if I’d ever spoken it.

  There were lots of people in the plaza, which was a flag-stoned triangle with a street on one side and the sides of buildings built askew on the other two. There wasn’t any furniture, but a pair of local trees grew in terracotta pots which were as sturdy as the dry stone well cu
rb.

  We sat on the edge of a pot, and Abram began trimming the callus on his left heel with his long knife. The three men who’d been standing nearby moved away.

  “They’re house slaves,” he said. “They’re just here with the women—”

  He nodded in the direction of the well where heavily bundled-up women stood gossiping.

  “Down the alley there is where they’ll be bringing in the tree.”

  Six guards with impellers and wearing edged weapons stood in the middle of the narrow passage. They were led by an officer wearing a fur cap above which nodded a long feather dyed bright blue.

  “There’s a tunnel through the wing and into the little garden just for the wives,” Abram said. “There’s no door through the wall between the courtyard and the wives’ garden. Food and stuff you can bring into the wing through the regular passages, but this is a tree.”

  A pair of motorized platforms came up the street from the direction of the bay. They looked like the one Giorgios used when he went out, but they were linked back to back. A tree with a cloth-wrapped root ball rode the join. Men stood on either side, bracing the trunk with their hands.

  “I wonder why the Admiral uses the cameras to watch what he could be right there in person watching,” I said. I had wondered, and this was a chance to discuss it with the one person on ben Yusuf I could do that with.

  Abram snorted. “Hey, he’s getting on,” he said. “He’s fat, he drinks, and he’s bored. I don’t guess the wives get much personal attention, though you’d know that better’n me. If he can’t do it himself, he can still get a kick out of peeping at what the women get up to on their own.”

  I thought about it. “I suppose,” I said.

  Certainly the Admiral didn’t visit any of his wives’ rooms often. I didn’t watch what happened during those visits, but from the determination with which several of the women tried to entice him, he wasn’t terribly interested in sex.