Still Teal’c said nothing.
“Nah,” the third man finally spoke up. “If Namaah’s willing to stick her neck out to get this joker out of the compound, I reckon he’s worth taking to Kiah.”
“You always did have a soft spot for that girl,” the leader said, but Teal’c noticed his casual stance and knew the risk of fighting was past. Violence was easy to read if you knew the signs to look for. He turned back to Teal’c, “So what do we call you, big fella?”
“I am Teal’c, son of Ro’nak.”
“That’s a right mouthful. What say we call you Bob?”
“I am Teal’c.”
“Okay, big man, it was just an idea. Keep your hair on.”
* * *
“Jubal Kane what brings you to old Kiah?” The woman inclined her head oddly, following the sounds on the old wooden boards of the stairs with her ears. It took Teal’c a moment to realize she was blind.
“Namaah sent us a little helper,” the leader said. His voice was different now, softer. Deferential. This old blind woman was obviously important to them. That in itself made Teal’c curious. What could an old woman with no eyes offer to their war effort? She did not look like a warrior, neither did she carry herself like one. He knew enough to understand that looks could intentionally be deceptive and that warriors could not rely on strength alone. Because of that, he did not dismiss her.
“Did she now? Well come up here and let me get a look at you. Don’t be shy.”
The others stood to the side, pushing Teal’c up the middle of the staircase toward the waiting woman. She held out her hands. She had surprisingly strong hands, thick with calluses. They were worker’s hands, shaped by honest graft. Teal’c took them and raised them to his face, allowing the old woman to feel out his features. Her rough fingers lingered over the gold of his tattoo. “Strong bones,” she said, appreciatively. “But, tell me, what is this?” Again her fingers returned to the gold of his tattoo.
“It marked me as First Prime of Apophis.” His lip curled. “Though that was another life.”
“Ah, we each of us have those,” Kiah said, with surprising compassion. “But I did not ask what the markings meant, I asked what they were.”
“My apologies, ancient one,” Teal’c said, earning a splutter of laughter from Jubal Kane. “It is a tribal marking of my people; as we approach manhood we are thus tattooed to mark our service to the false gods. It is the ‘honor’ of First Prime to have his inlaid with gold.”
“Barbaric,” Kiah said, but she didn’t take back her touch. “A slave brand, that is what you are saying, yes?”
Teal’c followed the train of her thoughts; she was drawing a parallel between his tribal tattoo and the raven brand used by Corvus Keen to subjugate the Kelani and mark them as outsiders. She was, in other words, letting Jubal Kane and his cronies know that they were not so different. They both had their supposed masters who profited at the expense of their people. He nodded. “Yes.”
“There is no honor in these brandings. These are not badges of war, no matter what they tell us. They are marks of hate meant to show the world we are less than we are.”
“Your people carry their own brand,” Teal’c said.
“Not ours.” She spat on the floor. “The raven was a plague carrier in the not-so glorious past of our people. The bite of the fleas they bore carried the blood plague. It decimated our people. To use the raven now is to bring back memories of that black time. It tells the world we are unclean.”
Jubal grunted. “And that Corvus Keen is a bloated parasite feeding on the corpses of decent people.”
“They hide us away here and turn our homes into a ghetto, thinking they will break us. They do not understand that all of this only makes us stronger.”
Teal’c bowed his head in agreement. “As it is with the Jaffa.”
“This city is our home. Our parents and our grandparents gave everything they had to carve this place out of the dust. He knows that. He knows all of it. And yet he spurns everything they were — everything he is — his heritage and his inheritance, in his quest to expunge us from history. It isn’t as though he is anything more than I am, or Jubal or Jachin here. He was always one of us. That is my greatest shame.”
Teal’c realized she was talking about Corvus Keen himself.
“You have no reason to be ashamed, mother,” Jubal Kane said. “You did not make him the way he is.”
“Didn’t I?” the old woman said, bitterly.
“Of course not.”
“But he is my flesh and blood, sweet Jubal. How can I not blame myself or wonder how it might have been different? Everything he uses now, all of the history he throws in our faces, he learned at my knee. He is my son every bit as much as he is your brother.”
“Which means he isn’t your son at all, because he is no brother of mine,” Jubal said. “The day he put your eyes out is the day he lost the right to call himself that. You didn’t put the sickness into him, mother. You didn’t make the monster. He was born wrong.”
The old woman had no answer for that.
And Teal’c understood now exactly why this blind woman was so important to the resistance fighters hiding out in the ghetto, and why Namaah hadn’t been willing or able to flee with him.
Kiah was the mother of the tyrant.
She was a symbol, every bit as much as the raven or the gold tattoo.
* * *
Teal’c hid in the darkness. Every nerve and fiber bristled. He wanted to fight, not hide, but the old woman had insisted he trust her. He did not feel like he had a choice. She led him into the bedroom and lifted a trap in the floor, ushering him down. He had to crouch, curling his legs in to his chest as she lowered the floor over his head. Less than a minute later he heard the floorboards groaning as heavy feet walked slowly across them. They seemed to linger for a perilously long time directly over his head. He did not dare breathe. His tell tale heart beat against his chest, so loud he thought they must surely hear it. The voices raised. He couldn’t tell what they were saying, but the tone spoke volumes. They knew the old woman was sheltering the fugitive and they would find him. She could play her games and hide behind her kinship with Keen, but there would be no mercy for her treachery. If they could prove she had sheltered the man everyone and everything she held dear would be taken away from her.
Teal’c flinched at the sound of the slap and her old body slumping to the floor. It took every ounce of restraint he had not to erupt out of his hiding place and tear the man limb from limb. Instead, he let his rage smolder. There would be a time for reckoning. The man would be held to account for his cowardice.
And then, even as he expected the light to invade his hiding place as the trap door came up, they moved away.
He risked opening the trap a crack and saw the woman lying on her side sobbing. He slipped out of his hiding place and moved across to the window. He crouched low, careful not to be seen, and watched as the two Raven Guard walked out into the street. He let his silent fury burn both of their faces into the back of his mind so that when the time came he would know them and they would pay.
* * *
Like the man who now called himself Corvus Keen, Teal’c learned some of the history of the Kelani at Kiah’s knee. She told of how they were the older race of this world, and how they were slowly being exterminated for their peaceful ways by the man she couldn’t bear to call son.
“Son,” she said the word like a curse, which Teal’c supposed it was, in a way. “I fell in love with the wrong man. It was as simple as that,” she explained, shuffling about her candlelit hovel, keeping herself busy as she talked. She was stubbornly independent, refusing his help to fill the water pot as she set the stove to boil. “Much to the chagrin of my father, I gave my heart and body willingly to Zellah, a Corvani soldier. Even then plenty thought it was a crime to mix the blood, even if they didn’t say it out loud. That was my crime. I fell in love with the wrong man,” she repeated, as though saying it over a
nd over often enough could somehow lead to absolution. “Zellah loved me well enough, but he was no real husband. It was too much for him, I suppose, the constant sniping and snide comments, the whispers and the looks. They never stopped. We thought they would. We thought people would accept us for what we were, but they never did.
“That was the world my son was born into. Is it any wonder he hates the people who drove his father to suicide? Zellah was weak. He left me alone with a half-breed boy and no home to call my own. I will never forgive him that. It’s easier to forgive Zarif than it is to forgive his father — yes that was my boy’s birth name, Zarif. Not this stupid affectation he’s given himself. Corvus, the crow, and yet he daubs the world with ravens as though he doesn’t know the difference between one bird and another! As if I didn’t teach him better than that! Zarif’s a product of his environment, twisted by the world around him, filled with so much hate, but it was the hate the world kept feeding him. There’s always a reason, isn’t there?”
She was right. He had visited many worlds and there were always reasons, no matter how shallow, for the greatest good and the basest wrongs.
“Zellah was just a coward who couldn’t stand the way people looked at him all the time. We were taken in by a good man, Jamal. He was Jubal and Namaah’s father. He took us off the streets out of pity, but he came to love us eventually. At first it was only pity, though. I have never flattered myself into believing he could not resist my looks.” She laughed at that, and so it went on.
Kiah needed to talk and, for a while at least, he could listen. If she sensed his urgency she did not let on.
“Perhaps it is a mother’s blind love refusing to die, but I can’t believe this is all his doing. Yes, he had his faults growing up but this thing he has become… it is monstrous, Teal’c. That is the only word for it.”
Teal’c nodded.
“Your silence condemns an old woman,” Kiah said, not cruelly.
“My apologies. I did not think. But you are correct,” he said, offering her the lifeline she needed. “There is a creature in his company capable of great evil. It is possible that this creature has twisted the darkness already inside your son. That is how this particular enemy works.”
“Do you speak the truth, Teal’c? Do not lie to an old woman… Do you mean that my boy might not be—? That this might not all be down to him?”
“There is evil there, I will not lie to you, but I believe the Goa’uld are capable of corrupting a good man.”
“This thing you called Goa’uld, tell me, what is it?”
Teal’c took her hand and raised it until her fingers brushed up against the gold of his tattoo. She flinched as though the branding had burned her.
“The monster that did this to you is here?”
“One of his kin,” Teal’c said.
“And so the evils of your life and mine collide.”
“Evil is drawn to evil.”
“It was ever so,” Kiah lamented.
It wasn’t until she began into the litany of her son’s crimes against his own people that she mentioned the death trains and the facilities he had set up in the outlying districts, and the evils perpetrated there in the name of racial purity. “It’s ironic, isn’t it, that a half-blood be so obsessed with purity?”
“I believe so, yes. But is it not also the case that we crave that which we cannot have, and by doing so torture ourselves into self-loathing?”
“Are you a warrior or a sage, Teal’c?” Kiah said, with something approaching a smile.
“I merely speak the truth.”
“There is nothing mere about the truth, believe me. Only the truth can set us free.”
“You have great wisdom, old woman,” Teal’c said.
She chuckled at that. “Am I so old to you? Perhaps I am. It has been years since I last saw my face. In my head I am forever a thirty-three year old woman, not beautiful but by no means ugly. Tell me, Teal’c, when you look at me what do you see? I would know myself through a stranger’s eyes.”
He thought about it for a moment. “I see hope and stone,” he said. “I see the foundation of this place. It is solid and unflinching. Stone is the cornerstone of these people. In the lines carved deep into the stone I see the remembered beauty of youth and the hope that the world might one day be that way again.”
“Flatterer.” She touched her face, her fingers lingering on the deepest wrinkles. “These lines are nothing more than where grief has chipped away at me year after year, but thank you. For a while at least I shall pretend to be what you see in me.”
“I merely speak the truth,” Teal’c said again, inclining his head slightly.
“And I will happily pretend that is so.”
They sat a while in silence. Outside the broken window the sounds of her son’s war raged. The gunfire was sporadic, the screams horrific. Together they made an ugly symphony. In the distance Teal’c heard the melancholy sigh of a train’s whistle.
“Tell me about the death trains,” he said.
“What is there to tell? We are being exterminated one by one,” she explained. “They make us wear silver ravens on our arms when we walk the streets. Anyone caught without their armband forfeits their freedom — such as it is. We can only walk where they let us walk, when they let us walk.”
“A prison without walls, your daughter called it,” Teal’c said.
“Namaah always did have a way with words. The trains run day and night. There are too many of us for it to be any other way. My son wants us gone — out of sight out of mind, I suppose. As if it could ever be that easy to wipe out all of those years of hurt. He has set up facilities in the provinces. They used to be factories, now they’re ‘facilities’. I shudder to think what’s happening there. The fact that no one who’s dragged off to one of those god forsaken places has ever come back tells me all I need to know.”
Teal’c took the old woman’s hands in his, moving forward to kneel at her feet. “I would like to see these trains.”
“It’s too dangerous.” She shook her head. “We can’t afford unnecessary risks, I am sorry.”
“You need not fear for me, old woman.”
“I don’t,” she said. “I fear for myself, for my children. If you’re caught you’ll bring the wrath of the guards down on all of us. There’ll be no petty vengeance from my son. He’ll cleanse each and every last one of his family. I cannot allow you to take such a needless risk. I am sorry.”
“I fear my friends have been taken on one of these death trains.”
“Then they are dead and nothing you could do now can bring them back. I am sorry.”
There was nothing he could say to that.
* * *
Still, as night’s dark masters stole in, Teal’c broke the promise he had never made. He crept down the stairs, past the curls of flaking whitewash and the splintered boards, out through the door and into the cold. The street was dark on one side where the silver of the gibbous moon failed to shine. Teal’c clung to the shadows. Window after window was blind. He trailed his fingers across the old stone, wondering what stories it might tell if it could speak. He felt out the pits of bullet holes and the chalky dust inside them, and followed them to the corner.
He listened before he stepped out, expecting to be challenged. It was only common sense to think that Jubal Kane must have set up some sort of night watch to patrol the streets. The man was too cautious to leave his family’s safety up to chance. After a few minutes of quiet listening, Teal’c heard the soft shuffle of worn-down soles nearing. There was no discipline to the step. He waited in the shadows.
It was Jachin. The small man smoked a thin roll-up and exhaled a raft of smoke that corkscrewed up across his face. Two more drags and he scuffed the cigarette out underfoot. He looked up, straight at Teal’c’s hiding place, and for one heart-stopping moment seemed about to challenge him, but then Jachin turned away and moved on. Teal’c crossed the street, crouched low, moving fast. On the other side, he sought ou
t more shadow. And so it went from street to street, alley to alley, stopping at every corner, listening, following the shifting shadow cast by the moon to the very edge of the ghetto.
Logic dictated that any death train needed tracks or it wasn’t going to get anywhere — and he knew where at least one set of tracks were because he had crossed them coming into the ghetto. He scrambled down the bank, scuffing up dust and dirt, then scaled the chain link fence.
The iron rails carved through the dark of the city, a straight line all the way to where he wanted to be.
* * *
Teal’c kept low, running point to point, breathing hard. In the distance he heard the deep-throated growls and barks of mastiffs or some other breed of watchdog. There was nothing he could do if they got his scent, so it was pointless worrying about them. He looked back twice; once to see if he was being followed by Jachin, once because his shadow suddenly stretched out before him, elongated and exaggerated by lights in the sky. He saw flames but had no way of knowing whether they were common in the ghetto or if the violence had escalated to some new flashpoint high. He turned his back on the fire in the sky and ran on.
On either side of the railway banks the shadows changed. Behind them the buildings became gradually more decrepit, covered with invective and daubed with rebellious slogans and angry fists. The walls crumbled but the graffiti remained.
The barking of the dogs intensified as he neared the station house. He didn’t need to get any closer to appreciate just what kind of hell Corvus Keen had fashioned. Thousands upon thousands of broken people huddled up against the darkness, coughing and whimpering and crying or simply sitting in silence, enduring. None of the faces had features — they were wiped clean by the distance and the moonlight shadow. He didn’t need to see the infinite sadness or the grim despair, it was enough to see the sheer mass of Kelani trapped in this filth-ridden squalor waiting for the next train to ship them out to their deaths. It was barbaric. That was the only word Teal’c could find that came close to encapsulating the horror of it all.
SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne Page 19
