Lion's Blood

by Steven Barnes

  Aidan shaded his eyes from the light and waited for normal vision to return. His first glimpse of the world above made him fear the strain of captivity had broken his mind at last.

  Standing astride a stone island, its titanic back turned to them, stood a colossus. Taller than thirty men, the great columns of its legs were like the spurs of a mountainside, its shoulders as wide as the horizon.

  Aidan gawked, his mind refusing to connect what he was seeing to the world of flesh and blood.

  The captives, bound as they were, were silent as their ship glided past the titan. Runes of some kind were carved at the base. Nessa turned to Deirdre. "Can you read it, Mama?"

  Deirdre merely shook her head. "No. And I don't think I'd want to know."

  As they glided into harbor Aidan was finally able to see the man's face, towering above them. It was strong, but not cruel. After a moment of superstitious awe, Aidan realized that this immense statue was the work of men, not some living being frozen by ice or magic. The unknown artisans had given the face a sublime nobility. The features were clearly those of a black man: thick lips, blunt nose, and hair like wool. However mortal, this was also a man of great spirit, suffused in full waking with the kind of vision that most mortal men could barely hold in their dreams.

  The screwship slid past a dozen resting steamscrews and sail ships, then nestled into a dock fronting a half-mile of wooden buildings. After the lines were tied on, the captives were herded down, still blinking against the sunlight and fighting for balance.

  When his feet touched solid ground he almost fell to his knees in thanks. He had lost track of the time that he had been at sea. Had a moon passed? Two? Perhaps. Too many days had been spent in a kind of stuporous haze.

  They were immediately surrounded by black people wearing costumes as strange as those in the last port, without quite so much gold and jewelry. They wore brightly colored robes and hats of wound cloth, and save for the color of their skin and blunt features, reminded him of his own tuath: these were strong, hardy folk, filled with physical energy and vigor. They stood and walked erect, and their words, though beyond his comprehension, were bright and loud. Nowhere did he see the likes of the fat monster who had sent them on the ship, or his effeminate lackey.

  There were no buildings here even half so tall as those in "Tarifa," and Aidan saw none of those strange flying boats. He sensed that this was a newer world, one still being built, as his great-grandfather had once constructed O'Dere crannog. Some buildings were mere skeletons, still gathering flesh. Most of the walls seemed constructed of stone or some kind of hard, grainy mud: there wasn't much wood in use. In addition, this city contained far more open, cleared spaces, where in Tarifa he had seen only a tight-packed confusion. There were still trees and grass and bare ground in sight. It would take endless labor to transform this world into the one he had seen a few weeks before.

  Was this their fate? Lives of endless labor, constructing a kingdom for these dark demigods?

  Many of these blacks wore leather aprons, gloves, heavy boots, and he guessed them to be laborers and workers. Not gods, humans. They stared at him with open contempt, speaking in voices that seemed guttural and unrefined. Some of them carried fishing hooks and some variety of fancy netting. Fishermen, then.

  Some say they are going to sell us, he thought. Perhaps they will sell me to a fisherman.

  A very few members of the crowd wore more gold and jewelry. One woman had something that looked halfway between a tiny man and a hairy squirrel perched on her shoulder. It had a gold ring about its neck. One of the Little People?

  Her mate was half a head taller, wore a crimson robe trimmed in silver and jeweled rings upon his black fingers. They looked soft-bodied, their wealth obviously produced by the labor of others. The couple was unmistakably high-caste, perhaps even king and queen of this place. Wealthy, at any rate, and Aidan revised his hopes. This was the preferable fate. Sell his family to one of these soft ones. He would kill them, escape, steal a boat, and find a way back to their homeland. Somehow.

  The black men evaluated them with hungry eyes, ravenous eyes, caressing every curve of the women who had survived the journey. They yammered amongst themselves, obviously speculating about the slaves. Despite their haggard state one bone-thin man leered at Aidan's mother. Through huge fleshy lips he laughed something to a shorter companion. Deirdre pulled her tattered dress around her, covering a length of exposed thigh, and turned her face away. Aidan wanted to leap and savage the dark throat with his teeth.

  But as they were marched onward, one man grabbed Deirdre's arm, gobbled something in that alien tongue, and pulled at her soiled dress. Aidan snarled, but before he could move the whip came down on his head. Stars exploded behind his eyes and Aidan sank to his knees, could only lie there dazedly as his mother's breasts were exposed, as dark fingers poked at her belly. She kept her face tilted up at the sky, as if there were answers hidden in the clouds. When the men were finished, Aidan was hauled to his feet and marched onward.

  Behind him Nessa seemed to shrink within herself, perhaps trying to make herself appear as young as possible. Where before she had been proud of her budding breasts, now as the soot-men stared at her they seemed a source of terror.

  The men clearly bid the captors expose the girls to view, and Brigit was halted right then and there, roughly turned around, her remaining tatters torn from her so that she stood naked and trembling before the crowd. They cheered and laughed, appeared to be making bets with each other about something.

  Aidan was numb by now, felt little or nothing. The blow to his head seemed to have broken some crucial connection between heart and mind. This was a dream. A dream. This was a dream, and he would awaken. He had to awaken.

  A black man in fine purple robes stepped forward and examined Brigit more carefully. She slapped at him and he snapped his head back, braying laughter, and spoke to their captors, holding up three fingers. In reply, the guard held up seven. The man laughed and stepped back into the crowd. The procession continued.

  They walked between rows of shops and market stalls for a half hour, pelted, laughed at, and spit on as they did. At last they reached a long, low building that smelled as if it had been used for animal storage. The floor was strewn with straw and the walls set with rows of the loathsome iron restraining rings. The gang-chain was unfastened and they were herded in lots of ten into small rooms walled with metal bars. The door clanged shut on them; Aidan stared out.

  What was this world? What possible horror would tomorrow bring? Nessa trembled against him, and their mother wrapped her arms around them both. In this cruel place such a gesture seemed more symbol than substance.

  Suddenly Aidan could no longer restrain his emotions. Fresh tears streamed down his face. He felt as if someone were standing on his chest. He pushed his way through the crowd of captives until he reached the barred doors. "Let me out!" The scream was like some clawed bird that had nested in his throat.

  His scream was taken up by the others, and soon more than a hundred of them wrung the bars and stomped the floor in a shouting, screaming cacophony.

  A gigantic brown-skinned guard approached the bars and peered at him. For just a moment, Aidan thought that the man might have understood. Certainly the blacks didn't know that Aidan possessed land, and cattle, and skills. That in time he might have been leader of his tuath, and that his great-grandfather had founded O'Dere crannog. Certainly, if they knew those things, they would free him and his family.

  With casual brutality, the guard slammed a leather truncheon against Aidan's fingers. Then with a roar he slammed the club against anyone in reach, sending them reeling back with bloodied hands and gashed scalps.

  Aidan gasped and reeled back, sucking at his wounded hand, trying to dampen the bright flare of pain. The holding pen was filled with screams and sobs. Aidan wanted to curl up and seal himself off from the world, shut himself away from everything but his own pain and misery.

  Deirdre drew Aidan clo
se, trying to comfort him. "It's all right, Aidan," she crooned, as she had a thousand times before. "We're together."

  But as she spoke a growling sound just outside the bars caught her attention. The sun had passed the line of the horizon behind the giant's statue. His shadow swelled to fall across them, dimming the streets. The alleyway between their prison and the next building was now dark, growing darker by the moment.

  Something lived and moved in that darkness. Aidan clambered back to the window, peered out. A strange, quasi-human shape lurked just outside the bars. He couldn't see what it was, but it seemed to be something misshapen and hideous, perhaps as tall as he. It shambled by in the darkness, and Aidan pulled back before it passed, not wanting to attract its attention. What in heaven's name?

  The holding area was closing up now, and their captors laughed, one of them making some kind of mocking, bestial face as he left. He heard the single word "Thoth-maimun," then the door clanged and there was silence, and deeper darkness.

  They heard the animal sounds again, growling sounds. Distant and bestial. Close, and then distant. Aidan's nose wrinkled: this was an animal stink, something unfamiliar, something that made the hair on the back of his neck twitch and creep. Danger. Danger here. . .

  Nessa's eyes narrowed. She smelled it too. "There's something out there, Aidan. It's not a man."

  "What, then?"

  She shook her head. "I don't know." She sounded less afraid than he felt. Once again, the strength seemed to be flowing between them, among them, fluid as the tide of the lost Lady.

  A water bucket sat just beyond the bars. As the night grew deeper and day's heat abated, their thirst grew more intense. One of the men gazed at the water bucket, and finally, unable to repress his thirst any longer, he reached out through the bars, his fingers almost brushing the bucket. Just a little further, just a little more . . .

  With blinding speed, something that looked like a thin, hairy human arm lashed out of the shadows. Aidan heard a sharp doglike bark as a furred, taloned claw raked skin from the thirsty man's outstretched hand. The captive reeled back, holding his bloodied fingers. Animal snarls mingled with brays of human laughter from beyond. Beast? Demon? Aidan didn't know, couldn't be sure, but their human captors were grotesquely amused.

  Hatred raged within him. To kill or capture men and women might be considered the fortunes of war. His people had many stories of heroes and bloody battles, villages burned and pillaged, captives taken.

  But to rejoice in their pain was something else, an evil for which he had no name. What he could not define made him uneasy, and he would rather feel hatred than the weakness of fear.

  Beside him Deirdre held his sister with desperate strength. Nessa's hands no longer clenched in return. They hung limply. By the poor light remaining to them, it seemed to Aidan that Nessa's life was simply draining away from her. Her skin seemed almost translucent, the cheekbones protruding, eye sockets clearly visible, and he felt he could see her skull despite the layer of flesh.

  Morning came at last. The door swung open in the corridor, and brown guards bearing whips entered the cell area. The slaves huddled back as their door was opened.

  One of the guards had white skin. Aidan's heart leapt as he realized that this man might be an ally, might have been of Eire or even one of the neighboring villages . . .

  But a steel collar clasped the white neck, and there was no kindness in his eyes or manner. When Brigit stumbled, his whip strokes fell just as readily as those of any black man.

  A chain was threaded from Aidan's neck collar to Nessa's, and then to their mother's.

  When they passed out of the holding cell they stumbled down a narrow alley and into a wider courtyard packed with soot-people. Here there were buildings with six or seven horizontal rows of windows, fewer than those in Andulus, but still dwarfing anything in the land of his birth. Rectangles of crimson cloth emblazoned with a crescent moon and the face of some great catlike beast flew at their corners and upon poles. Some buildings were flat-roofed, and seemed constructed of white stone or precisely hewn wood, of a workmanship such as he had never seen.

  The ground beneath his feet was plated with carefully joined stone, or hard-packed gravel set in a binding of dried mud.

  As they were herded into a corner of the courtyard, hundreds upon hundreds of the strange dark people jabbered at them. Blue-black and brown-skinned, gaping and gawking and chattering in the strange language as the captives were poked and prodded, forced to display hands and breasts and genitals. Those who resisted were beaten to their knees, then pulled erect and forced to submit.

  The black men wore billowing, colorful shirts, their women generally less colorful dress, and often a rectangle of thin cloth across their faces. Sometimes the facial cloths completely obscured their features, but in other cases he could clearly see dark cheeks, full lips, white teeth.

  The captives were filed past a table where their wrists were stamped with black paint in the shape of a crescent moon. Then they were ushered through another double row of gawkers who chattered to each other and pointed and laughed.

  Some waved a fistful of paper. Others displayed gold coins. They're bidding against each other, Aidan realized. He had seen fish and grain sold in such a fashion. These people were . . .

  Buyers. He had to let that word into his mind, that realization into his consciousness. Buyers. They were being bought and sold.

  Sick and weak at the knees, Deirdre watched the entire process of wrist stamping. A wooden dowel as thick as the circle of her thumb and forefinger was pressed into dark paint, and then rolled against the outstretched arm.

  The stamper then took a thinner stick, dipped it in ink and made marks upon a sheet of paper. This man was branding and counting, as she had seen merchants and traders do since girlhood. It was then that she fully understood what this was all about, what she and her children faced. Late at night, when the children were asleep and the adults of the crannog gathered around the fire, some of the Druids and the older folk told stories of the Northmen and how they raided villages, stealing women and children to sell to dark people they called "Moors." A very few of those had escaped and found their way home, with tales of a fabulous land of unbelievable wealth and power. But they also whispered that many were sent across the sea to another world, from which no one had ever returned at all.

  This was, she knew in her numbed and aching heart, that very land. She felt a shell of herself. The weeks of breathing foul air, eating foul food, and drinking water not fit to slop hogs had broken her. But with the power found only in the depths of a mother's loving heart, Deirdre summoned up what strength remained to her and hardened her spirit. If there was no hope of ever finding a way home, then she must resolve to find the best life she could for her children here in this new and alien world. But how?

  Blurred by fever but sharpened by fear, her mind raced. She had all but given up hope when her time came for the wrist-stamp. Then, inspiration struck. She lunged forward, snatching the ink-stick from the trader's hand. The guards leaped to restrain her, but before they could she had scrawled the letters DEIR on a piece of paper.

  The guard ripped the stylus from her hand, but the trader stopped him before he could strike her. The interest and intelligence in the trader's dark, slightly slanted eyes was evident. Her heart almost stopped. This was what she had prayed for. In the previous land, the place they called "Tarifia" or perhaps "Andalus," it seemed that those who could write were destined for a better quality of life. Perhaps the same applied here. She could only hope that among these people, reading and writing might be skills of sufficient value to give her the slightest bit of leverage.

  The trader studied her with open curiosity. Then to her astonishment and vast relief, began to speak to her in her own tongue.

  "You can write?" he asked.

  Her answer tumbled out with desperate speed. "Yes," she said. "And read."

  "Ah . . ." His eyes did not see a human being standing before him. H
is eyes counted gold.

  "Keep my family together, please." She reached back, grasped Aidan and Nessa by the arms, and pulled them close. "My son and daughter. Please. I'll work myself to death for you."

  He examined her collar and noted the number thereon. A smile curved his lips, then was gone. He waved her on, glanced at Aidan and Nessa's collars, then returned to his papers, first scrawling something illegible by their numbers.

  She and the other captives were taken to the block, paraded back and forth. Deirdre shuddered at every bid, every jeer and catcall. A brown-skinned man was bidding fiercely. Some around him laughed and repeatedly said Oh-Koh, as if it were his name. ,

  The auctioneer slammed his palm on the podium. A guard tugged at her chain, and she turned to Aidan and Nessa, who had watched her machinations with wonder and hope.

  "Come, now . . ." she began, but as they stepped forward a guard stepped brusquely between them, pushing Aidan toward his mother and pulling Nessa away.

  Shock followed shock as another guard grabbed the chain between Nessa's wrists and pulled her toward a tall, imperious black woman in butter-colored robes. Three white girls Nessa's age or younger already cowered in the dust at her sandaled feet.

  Nessa's eyes rolled white, flashing from the tall woman back to her mother.

  "Ma?" she whispered, the single syllable repeated again, growing from a disbelieving whisper to a banshee's wail. "Ma!"

  Aidan surged toward her, and was whipped across the face. Deirdre felt that blow as if it were her own flesh that had been torn. Aidan stumbled bleeding to the ground. Deirdre was able to take only a single step before a tug at her collar chain nearly ripped her feet from under her. She turned to meet the pitiless face of a burly white guard, his own throat collared. He held her chain in a hand broader than her head. "Please. She's supposed to come with me!" she begged. He could not, or would not, understand.