The Man of Gold

by M. A. R. Barker

There were a few closed litters as well, tended by selected female slaves or by some of the slaver’s nonhuman henchmen: Shen, Ahoggya, a Pe Choi or two, and others. On this trip Tlayesha had been called to minister to the occupants of two of these. One was a beautiful little girl of ten or twelve, to whom she had given dream-potions to help her forget her lost home in Haida Pakala, a land so far away across the southern ocean that Tlayesha had heard no more than its name. The other was a delicate-looking, long-limbed girl, a victim of the dreaded Zu’ur, who lay like a corpse behind the heavy curtains of her litter. The Gods take pity upon that one! But then the poor wretch would never know what was done to her, and that, at least, was a mercy. Her mind was gone, and within a few months she would surely die. Such was the way of Zu’ur. Those who supplied it risked their lives, but there were those, even in the highest places, who made use of its addicts for their own morbid pleasures. This, to Tlayesha, was the worst part of slavery, and she realised only too well why the profession of slaver was held to be the lowest of the low in all the Five Empires. Master Chnesuru might become as rich as a God, but never would he be received within the gates of any clanhouse save those that followed the same greedy occupation.

  Qoyqunel waved his scalloped sword of hardened Chlen-hide and shouted. The fool had never used the weapon and wore it only to impress the village trollops. He chose a score of slaves from among the plodding field-hands and sent them trotting forward to help with the litters. Tlayesha saw that the boy with the shaking sickness was in the group. Well, he seemed fit enough to hold up a litter pole.

  Tlayesha let herself fall into the mindless rhythm of walking, her thoughts far away from the dusty vistas of yellowing grain and baked-brick hamlets. The morning passed.

  She was awakened from her revery by shouting and the sound of blows ahead. Someone was being flogged. She hitched her bag of medicines higher on her hip and went forward to see what was amiss.

  As she drew nearer she saw that Old White-Side, the Ahoggya overseer, had somebody down upon the roadway, belabouring him with its knurled cudgel and hooting obscenities in a mixture of human languages and its own gurgling, gobbling tongue. The victim was the boy with the shaking sickness! Tlayesha broke into a run.

  She had always disliked this particular Ahoggya for its needless cruelty. Now she ran up to it and snatched the staff from its four-fingered hand.

  “What do you, woman?” Old White-Side cried, and reached for its cudgel with another of its four arms. Everything about the Ahoggya came in fours: a knobbly grey carapace of homy material sheltered a brown-furred, barrel-shaped body. Just below this carapace, four arms were set equidistantly around its circumference, and below these, at the base of the barrel, four gnarled legs bent outward in a permanent crouch. Between each pair of arms, high up under the carapace rim, it had two wicked little eyes on each side. Below one of these pairs of optics was its fanged, crude-looking mouth, and in similar positions on the other three sides were its organs of hearing, smell, and reproduction. No human could pronounce an Ahoggya name, and hence Chnesuru’s people called this one “Old White-Side” because of a patch of bristly silver fur on one of its “shoulders.” The creature smelled rank, like a barnyard in a swamp, reminiscent of its homeland in the sea-marshes along the southern Salarvyani coast.

  Tlayesha held the cudgel out of reach. “Why do you beat this slave? Master Chnesuru has forbidden the flogging of slaves save for serious offences! You’ll spoil his value!”

  “What value?” Old White-Side wheezed. “No money in one who slobbers and soils his breechclout! And just now he would have pulled open the litter curtain and looked within.”

  This was more serious. None was allowed to see into the Zu’ur-victim’s litter. Chnesuru might indeed order a whipping for such a transgression.

  “You are mistaken. The boy is witless.”

  “Even witless humans make sex,” the Ahoggya retorted in its rumbling bass voice. It made obscene gestures with three of its four hands. “See!” It pointed with its remaining hand.

  The boy was sitting up now, looking at Tlayesha, but with one shaking arm extended towards the litter. He looked more appealing than lustful, and she could not imagine him opening the curtain for any purpose other than half-witted curiosity.

  “He has had enough,” she snapped at Old White-Side. “You know not your own strength. You may have marred him ”

  “No loss,” the Ahoggya grunted morosely; but it desisted. Then it added, “I say he be sold, woman. Tonight at Tkoman Village. Lord Fyerik comes to buy field-hands, and we can put this idiot into the midst of a lot where no one will notice. At least Master Chnesuru gets a Kaitar or two for him.”

  Tlayesha knew that the creature said this only to vex her. She tossed her head contemptuously and held out a hand to help the boy to his feet. She found him surprisingly strong and lithe for one with the shaking sickness. Other cases she had seen were always softer, flabbier, less muscular. The look he gave her as he returned to the caffle surprised her too: his eyes seemed to contain a spark of real intelligence. And something else: anger, perhaps, or was it determination?

  She motioned another man forward from the ranks and got the litter picked up and moving again. Then she went back to join Qoyqunel, leaving Old White-Side to stare maliciously after her from its back pair of eyes.

  They marched, then rested during the afternoon in the scanty shade of a Sakbe road tower, then marched again. By the time the sun sank down into the dust-haze on the western horizon Village Tkoman lay before them, a huddle of mean little buildings overtopped by a row of temple spires and the jutting stump of an ancient, ruined citadel.

  Master Chnesuru ordered his tent set up on the Sakbe road platform nearest the ramp down to the village gates. The litters were ranged in a circle, and some of the older women were sent to fetch cool water for their occupants. The others had to make do with the muddy tank at the base of the road platform wall. Miiru the cook got the commissary going, and soon the amber-gold twilight was filled with the pat-pat of dough being shaped into bread-cakes, the sweet-harsh smoke of charcoal fires, and the clatter of knives upon wood as the pulpy Shirya-tubers and fat A'ao-squash were chopped up for stew. Tlayesha helped with the buying of a great heap of black Hreqa-fruit, now at the best of its short season. Canny Chnesuru was a good provider; his slaves were sleek and healthy, and he had few problems with escapes. The Salarvyani were sound businessmen.

  The slaver himself disappeared into the village to look for buyers, and it was not long before a troupe of harlots arrived, true to Tlayesha’s prediction. The sounds of cooking became submerged beneath the clash of silver bangles, the thready notes of a Sra’ur, and the laughter of men and women. Tlayesha had never quite sunk to the level of a Sakbe road trollop!

  She strolled along the platform. This was a frequent stopping place for travellers, and there were peasants with fruits and meat to sell, peddlars bearing hampers piled high with cheap cloth and jewellery, itinerant priests, hawkers of amulets and potions, and what seemed like a legion of children selling wine, bitter beer, and Chumetl, the salted Hmelu-buttermilk that everybody preferred to the dubious-tasting water. There were other wayfarers too: a family of villagers in ragged breechclouts who ogled the harlots with interest, a party of sturdy merchants, some men from one of the Chlen-hide tanners’ clans, two or three litters belonging to the Temple of Avanthe by their blue curtains and insignia, several soldiers of at least three different legions—probably going north to join their units at Purdimal or Khirgar—and even a lesser nobleman, judging by the gaudy clan-symbols that swung from the pole before his tent.

  All of this was as familiar to Tlayesha as a well-worn sandal, and she went to stand in the charcoal-and-spice-smelling dusk to look down over the jumbled shadows of the little town. Soon she saw Master Chnesuru returning in the company of a slender, ageing man in the pleated kilt of a minor aristocrat: probably Lord Fyerik, whose fief lay about ten Tsan to the south of Village Tkoman. Two brawny overseers trai
led along behind. Her employer appeared a little tipsy, but she knew this to be part of his cleverness. When it came to selling his wares Master Chnesuru was a consummate actor.

  “Here,” the slaver cried, “you have strong hands for your crops, my Lord!” He called for torches, and Qoyqunel herded the slaves up into the light so that they could be inspected.

  Lord Fyerik made a sarcastic face, walked up and down in front of the group, and then snapped his fingers. “Fifty men—a score of Kaitars for each!”

  Chnesuru made the expected .gestures of astonishment and pain. “My Lord, you do not buy old wcSmen! These slaves are sound, perfect, industrious, experienced, willing...’’He seemed to run out of qualities and shifted to his hurt but honest expression—a good actor, Chnesuru. “You have dealt with me before. You have seen that I never wrong you!”

  They chaffered awhile, at first amiably, then with pretended acrimony. At last Chnesuru was satisfied with ninety Kaitars apiece for his brood. Not a bad sum, more than Tlayesha had thought he would get—but then demand was high during the month before harvest time.

  Suddenly she felt anger rising within her. There, in the midst of the group, stood the slave with the shaking sickness! Old White-Side had been as good as his—its—word!

  It was too late to do anything now, and Tlayesha could only stand and watch as the overseers herded him and the others down from the Sakbe road platform. Lord Fyerik took his leave, and then they were gone.

  She could not repress a pang of—something. She had no idea why she cared. Was it only because the Ahoggya had flouted her, or was she going all soft and motherly at the age of barely twenty summers? By all the Gods... !

  The following morning she sought out the Ahoggya.

  “You did it, didn’t you?” she accused. “You sold off the sick boy.”

  “What would you have done? Kept him to tickle you, as the priestesses of Dlamelish keep little boys and RenyuT'

  “Of course not,” she bridled, “but you did not have Master Chnesuru’s permission!”

  “He will be pleased. Ninety Kaitars for one worth less than ten.”

  “When Lord Fyerik finds out he has been sold a sick slave—!” “We shall be long gone.” The creature turned around so that she faced another pair of slyly wicked eyes. “Why did you not order the slave to lie with you? Master Chnesuru would not have minded. The boy might have enjoyed it—little enough pleasure for his kind in this world. And maybe later another infant to sell for a few coins!”

  “Tla! Cha! You talk foolishness!”

  “Or you might find a normal man to jolly you?” Old White-Side gurgled a chuckle. “Some say that your body is appealing in spite of your veil. Now if it’s pleasure you seek, then know that we Ahoggya have eight sexes and—”

  “Wretched pisspot with legs! Shall I give you a drug that will loosen your sagging bowels all over the road?’ ’

  The Ahoggya turned, flipped his dangling reproductive organs at her, winked broadly with one of the eyes on that side of its body, and lumbered away.

  They camped that night at a place called Ha’akel’s Wall, some twenty Tsan before the market town of Tsuru. Tlayesha busied herself with a pregnant woman slave and had almost succeeded in putting the matter of the sick boy out of her mind when she saw Master Chnesuru waddling toward the sick-cart. His expression told her that something was seriously wrong.

  “Where is the man with the shaking sickness?” the slaver asked abruptly in his accented, mushy-sounding Tsolyani. “Qoyqunel said you were treating him yesterday.” He laid a stubby hand on the lashing of the cart and peered within. “He is not here with the sick?”

  She knew better than to compromise Old White-Side; the creature was capable of a hundred devious little vengeances. Yet the situation seemed to call for at least part of the truth. “Why—I believe that he was among those sold to Lord Fyerik—” She got no further.

  “WHAT?” Chnesuru actually shook her, something he had never done in the years Tlayesha had known him. “The slave is sold? Somebody sold him? Who—? How—?” She had never seen him so furious. His features went to dirty grey, then to apoplectic red. Terror filled her for Chnesuru could be cruel.

  The slaver whirled and bawled for lanterns. The camp was swiftly searched from end to end. The boy could not be found. Nor could anyone recall who had made up the lot offered to Lord Fyerik.—Naturally.

  Chnesuru stamped and swore and fumed. Calling upon his unpronounceable Salarvyani gods. At last he ordered Qoyqunel to take two men and return to Lord Fyerik’s estate. Now. Tonight. Not tomorrow morning! The slave boy must be brought back—at any price! This last was easily the most amazing thing Tlayesha had heard her employer say yet. He vouchsafed no reasons for his concern but strode into his tent with all of the dignity a small, fat man can muster. He pulled the flap shut.

  Qoyqunel had wit enough to make no protests. Somebody would surely pay for his long run back down the Sakbe road and his return the next day under a scorching sun. If he ever found out that his discomfort was to be laid at the Ahoggya’s door, then the smelly old beast would need all of its eight eyes to keep watch over its skin!

  To Tlayesha’s even greater wonderment, Chnesuru did not march on at dawn. Instead, he had the caravan tarry at the road tower (and what Ha’akel’s Wall was—or had been—she never found out) until Qoyqunel returned in the late afternoon, panting and perspiring, with the boy in tow. He glared at his comrades, screwed up his mouth, and pushed the slave into Chnesuru’s tent. Presently he emerged and bellowed for Tlayesha.

  “He calls you, woman! The idiotic slave has been beaten, and you are summoned to coddle him.”

  The nameless boy squatted on Chnesuru’s elegant carpet, as filthy and sweaty as ever she had seen a slave. Old White-Side’s weals were livid upon his shoulders, and he had a new abrasion upon his belly as well, probably a kick from one of Lord Fyerik’s overseers when they discovered the nature of his malady. She bit her lip and began to wash his wounds. They were angry-looking but superficial. Chnesuru must be badly shaken to show such interest. There was more to this than met the eye.

  On impulse she said, “Master, this slave may have internal damage. Someone has kicked him. May I keep him with me to observe for a time?”

  The slaver raised a thick eyebrow. He seemed to ponder. “Why not? Why not? He’ll likely come to less trouble. Yes, girl, take him with you.” He smoothed his thick-woven Hmelu-wool tunic down over an expanse of hairy belly. The Salarvyani were always cold away from their hothouse southern lands.

  Tlayesha finished, bowed, and urged the slave out of the tent before Chnesuru could think of anything else. There were times when he conveniently forgot that she no longer had to cater to men’s needs for money.

  The more she thought the stranger the affair became. A Salarvyani might weep bitter tears over the loss of a copper Qirgal but never over the hurts of an idiot field-slave. Was the boy a “special,” then, to be sold to some customer with tastes odder than most? She did not think so. The slaver’s- mood seemed more that of a man who has safely managed to skirt a deadly peril.

  Tlayesha could not resist a further chance to interrogate the boy. As soon as the evening meal was done and her sleeping mat was spread beside one of the ponderous wooden wheels of the sick-cart, she sat him down and began to question him as gently as she could.

  His responses were as she expected: trembiing, infantile sounds, and meaningless gestures. She speedily verified the existence of some affinity between the boy and the Zu’ur victim, nevertheless. As far as she could recall, he had not been bought from the same person as that unfortunate girl. Or had he? Chnesuru had acquired both of them on the last morning before they broke camp outside of Bey Sii. But from whom? She wracked her brain to remember and came up with nothing.

  Then there was some enigmatic business about gold and Mtiru the cook. The slave took Tlayesha’s arm in his quivering fingers and clutched at her one gold bangle while waving at old Miiru, whose sleeping mat
was nearby.

  Did he mean Miiru specifically, some other man, or just people in general? Perhaps he was trying to tell her how he had been bought with gold?

  One thing puzzled her: unlike others with the shaking sickness, this victim appeared almost normal until he tried to communicate. In repose he hardly trembled, his face and body were still, and his long-fingered, sensitive-appearing hands lay quiescent in his lap. But when he had to respond to her queries his eyes twitched, his jaw convulsed, ridges of strain stood out upon his neck, his tongue refused to obey, and he made childish gagging noises.

  Tlayesha sighed and gave up for the night. Later, when she awoke in the pre-dawn chill, she found the boy sitting much as she had left him, staring down at her. He saw her looking at him and smiled back, as easily and normally as though there were nothing wrong with him at all.

  What would it be like, she wondered sleepily, to lie with him? Would it help to have a woman? The sleep-demons came and took her again.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chnesuru made up for the delay by marching throughout the next day. They halted at Tsuru the following night, quite exhausted, with the massif of Thenu Thendraya Peak a ponderous boulder hanging in the northwestern sky. The Sakbe road branched here: one route led directly north through craggy foothills and ever-narrowing canyons to the ancient and demon-haunted City of Sarkus the major pilgrimage centre for those who served the Lord of Worms. Another, broader thoroughfare continued on in a northwesterly direction amidst stands of black-leaved Tiu-trees to the swampy basin surrounding Purdimal. Still further branches then took travellers west to Mrelu, or northwest again to Khirgar and the Milumanayani frontier where the armies of the Imperium and of Yan Kor faced one another over an uneasy truce.

  The sick boy soon became Tlayesha’s apprentice. He followed her on her rounds, carried her bucket of water, and squatted patiently nearby while she diagnosed and prescribed and treated her charges. The slaves teased her, as was to be expected, calling the boy her Renyu, or her belly-warmer, or her long-lost child. She did not really care: to be truthful, she was unsure in her own mind as to her feelings for the slave. Qoyqunel was prevailed upon to give the boy a coarse kilt, just as though he were one of Chnesuru’s trustee slaves, and Tlayesha saw to it that he received all of his food instead of having half of it stolen by others. He was useful, she told herself, and she took pleasure in his silent companionship.