by Victor Poole
"Why, did you hide anything?" she asked him directly.
She could see him working over the possibilities. She saw now that he had meant to retrieve the ring. He had thought she would hand over the goods to him, and then he would have privately let their master know of the theft. He might have sent the squares in a message that arrived just ahead of the caravan, so that their master received the pink squares and the gold just before he saw Ajalia again. It had been a cunning scheme, and she disliked him for the subtlety of it. She would have given him the ring if he had admitted his plot. She was not waiting for an apology, but she was offended that he was going to stand by his lie after he had been exposed.
"You're a fool," she said softly, so that Yelin could not hear.
"Give it back, please," he said quietly.
"Why?" she asked. She met his eyes directly.
He would not admit to it.
"Fine," she said, and turned away.
"Wait," he said. She stopped, but did not turn around again. After he did not say any more, she went back up the stairs. She heard his door close, and the burbling voice of Yelin sounded faintly from behind the door. Yelin would tell the others, and by the time the caravan reached the East again, the pink squares would be notorious, and very old news.
Ajalia went to the attic, and sat down on the cold floor. There was no light, but there was a circular window cut into the edge of the wall, and the moonlight crept into the narrow space. Ajalia removed her ceremonial robe, and then folded her long black hair into a detailed braid that she knotted into place with a plain piece of string.
Beneath her ceremonial robe, she wore the plain pale clothes of a household slave. Slaves that worked the land in the East did not wear such nice things, but the Eastern chiefs had a fine sense of beauty, and they surrounded themselves in their houses with slaves clothed neatly, and in pale colors that made the chiefs' own remarkable clothing stand out wonderfully.
Ajalia pulled a jar of thin cream from her waist, and removed the face of her master's clan. She used the rags she had found in the attic to wipe away the black from her eyes, and the orange and gold from her cheeks and forehead. The rags were remarkably soft, and she would have admired the texture of the weave if she had not been so tired.
When she had finished, she removed the massive ring, and admired its design. It was heavy and exotic; she wondered where Lim had stolen it. She knew he had come from another house in the East before he had belonged to her own master, but she did not know how old he was, or when he had become a slave. Slaves were not born into slavery; they were always sold. Some slaves had been sold as babies, but almost all the slaves she knew of had been bred by their parents and raised to the age of six or seven before being auctioned to the slave traders that roved over the land. She had not been bred to be a slave, but she wished that she had been. She would then have felt at least honest.
Slaves that bore children usually raised them to be honest citizens of the country they were born to; masters had no right to the children of slaves. It was the one fine quirk of Leopath slavery that children were seen as free, until, of course, whoever had a right to their management sold them. Slaves who married and bore children were not blind to the disadvantages of slavery, and raised their children to be free on purpose. Parents who were not slaves themselves usually thought the life of a slave would be somehow less troublesome and more romantic than it actually was, and when their children were old enough to sell, but not old enough to earn money in more honest ways, these parents were blinded by the lure of easy money, and the promise of an easier life than they themselves led. It was a fatuous promise, an illusory promise, but it worked on people with an appetite for easy money, and Leopath abounded with slaves from every walk of life.
Ajalia's parents had been anti-slavery people. They had taught her from the cradle that Leopath was riddled with corruption, and that the answer to the ills of their lives lay in the easy, albeit impractical solution, of abolishing slavery once and for all. Ajalia had believed her parents, or at any rate she had believed that they thought what they said, but when her father had left, and her mother had begun to realize the economic practicalities of life, Ajalia had been sold.
This was the lie that she told herself. The truth was worse, but this was the story that she told, when a story was requested, and if the details changed every year or two, no one was close enough to her to notice. She knew that she lied, but she did not care to remember the truth, and it lay, quiet and unnoticed by the people around her, in the darkest shadow of her heart.
Ajalia did not sleep much. When the sun rose, she was down in the piles of goods before anyone else, and she had already begun to sort the fabrics into their specially folded, sheath-like arrangements.
The fabrics were displayed in rainbows of color. Each length was folded deeply against a contrasting color, and the silks, when displayed in a full row, made a multicolored sheen that was mouth-wateringly attractive. It was very difficult for strangers not to buy even just a fragment of the colored silks to take home with them when they saw the fabrics displayed in a row. Those who could afford an advantageous trade often took reams of the stuff away with them, to be made into clothes, or silken drapery for their homes. The fabric was tougher than it looked, and made for an impressive display of wealth.
The silks were difficult to steal once they had been prepared for sale. On the journey, the silk was wrapped tightly in furls, and packed closely with the other fabrics, but on the first day in a new city, the silks were unrolled and folded together into a woven display; a slave would have had to disentangle the whole folded row to reach a convenient edge, or cut a slice from the center of the silk, either of which action created immediately obvious damage to the whole row of silks. Capture was almost inevitable, and punishment was brutal for the damaging of silk. Masters accepted the possibility of theft, and Ajalia had never yet met a slave who didn't steal, but silks were for trading, and gold and other money stuffs were for stealing. The slaves who had taken pieces of silk on the caravan had taken extra robes and pre-cut pieces, fabrics that were far less valuable than the uncut silk. She had caught them, and they had expected to be caught. The pre-arrival stealing was a kind of ritual; the slaves wanted to know what Ajalia was like, and there was always the chance that she was stupid, and that the far-off city of Slavithe would not realize the lesser value of the extra pieces. The people of Slavithe had not known the value of the robes; the Eastern silks had turned out to be more distinct and incredible to the city than Ajalia had dared to hope. The plain clothing of the people, and the lack of shining fabric anywhere, had meant she could trade the slaves' robes for food and furnishing without cheating anyone. Even the old robes were actually valuable here.
Ajalia reflected on the massive pile of money she and Lim were going to earn in this city, as she rhythmically folded the pieces of silk over each other. Slaves began to trickle down the stairs as the sun rose higher into the sky, and she set them to work at what she had been doing. White light began to pour into the rooms, and she went up the stairs to rouse the rest of the slaves. She did not bother with Philas, who only did the final touches on arranging the goods when they had been carried to the market stalls, but she rattled Lim's door vigorously enough to wake the dead. She could hear Yelin's quiet murmuring voice, and Lim's grumbles.
The caravan had carried a majority of silk as its goods, but there were plenty of other things as well. Worked Eastern gold lay in bags of necklaces and armlets, and there were glassy jewels set in brilliant silver rings. Ajalia carried the heavy bundles of spices to the kitchen, and sent slaves to the market to procure suitable containers for them. Spices were packed into heavy leather bags that had been prepared to protect the flavor and dryness of the ground-up seasonings, and they were carried in caravans this way. It was tradition to pack the spices into local containers when caravans arrived at the destination city, and to sell the spices in smaller jars and cases.
The Eastern spices were valuable
and unique; the plants in the East were drier, and more flavorful than many of the plants in Leopath. Everyone could grow the solim peppers that were used to flavor soup and meat, but the colorful cadin spices, and the sweet mankin vines, grew only in the East.
Ajalia began to cut open the heavy leather bonds that sealed the spice bags, and by the time she had worked her way down the heavy line of leather, the slaves she had sent returned with rattling boxes of small glass jars.
Ajalia exclaimed with pleasure over these containers. They would showcase the brilliant colors of the spices beautifully; she was beginning to feel that they were going to sell all of their goods in this city. She made the slaves portion out the spices, and stood against the wall of the little kitchen, her arms folded, watching them work. The spices were valuable, and the slaves were apt to be sloppy with them. The little glass bottles had fussy small openings, and Ajalia watched the slaves closely. They could feel her breathing down their necks, metaphorically speaking, and they did not spill any spice.
Lim stormed into the room, mussing his hair into place. He shouted at Ajalia for opening the spices. He said that the fabric should have been finished first, and told the slaves to drop what they were doing and go into the other room.
Ajalia pushed Lim out of the room, and he blustered away like a tornado. Ajalia could hear him shouting all over the house. She thought the neighbors would probably be able to hear him through the walls of the adjoining houses.
"The neighbors can hear you," she called through to the front of the house, and he roared back.
"Thought you said we were to talk in Slavithe," he shouted irritably in the Eastern tongue.
"The neighbors are hearing you," she called forward in Slavithe, and the slaves in the kitchen laughed. Most of them didn't have any idea what she had said, but they loved watching the slaves who were in charge bicker with each other. It made them feel more powerful than they were, or at any rate made them feel as though position and pay weren't all they were made out to be. Responsibility came with, well, responsibility. There was something to be said for being a peon, and as Ajalia watched the slaves dip the measuring sieves into the leather bundles and shift the spices into the narrow glass bottles, she thought she could see them enjoying their relatively stress-free lives to the limit.
"The words are the same for spices," she instructed the slaves in the kitchen as they worked. "Cadin and mankin, just as they are for us. They haven't got them here."
"Who'll buy them if they haven't got them?" one of the women muttered, her sieve dipped into the bottom of a parcel of cadin.
"You'll use Slavithe, or you won't speak," Ajalia said pointedly, and went into the next room. She had been speaking Eastern herself, but she could hardly give the slaves directions if they hadn't any idea what she was saying. They would learn quickly enough in the marketplace. She sent one of the ambitious slaves into the kitchen to watch the last of the spices being poured, and to make sure the corks were tight, and wandered up the stairs to find Philas.
He was refusing to get up. She had seen him do this once before, in the far north, when he'd had a binge at a winery and had been confined to the house for a week by the managing slave. He'd moped then, too. She knocked on his door. He didn't even answer.
"I'm going to let Lim arrange the stalls if you don't come," Ajalia said through the door in Slavithe.
"You wouldn't," Philas said in a low roar that sounded like a complaining whale.
"I will, and I'm about to go out now," Ajalia said.
"Don't go," Philas complained again. "At least give us a kiss."
"Philas, he makes stacks by color. By color," she repeated. The threat was a fierce one. Lim had proven he could arrange a home, but Ajalia had seen him work in market stalls, and it was something abhorrent to see. He arranged silks and jewels as though they were soldiers marched in a parade, with straight lines and no overlapping flow.
The door opened with a businesslike click.
"You're a very bad woman," Philas told Ajalia. His voice was low, and he spoke in the Eastern tongue. Ajalia did not like the intensity in his eyes. He had not often been made to do things against his will, and Ajalia was growing more and more able to get him to do anything. He resented her power, but he enjoyed her use of it. He was beginning to dislike Ajalia almost as much as he was fond of her.
"Lim's a very bad man," Ajalia said lightly in Slavithe, and passed up the stairs.
"What did she say?" Lim demanded. He had come up behind them quietly on the stairs, and his brow was furrowed. He had gotten over his morning grouch, and was deep in the work of the unpacking and quantifying of items. Everything had been listed carefully when it had been packed, but now it all had to be counted and added together again, and the supplies from the journey had to be taken into account. Caravans had to be profitable in every way; slaves were expected to count the necessities of the journey into their expenses, and pay their way back home out of the profits of their trades.
Ajalia was sure that she could manage the calculations herself, but Lim was jealous of his accounts, and he didn't want anyone but himself getting into the minutiae of the inventory. Ajalia suspected that this was more out of a desire to cheat their master than from a true passion for accuracy, but she had not had a reason yet to cross-examine Lim's records.
She heard Lim and Philas arguing over the goods as she reached the next floor, and she climbed up to the top of the house before turning around and coming down through each of the rooms, sweeping through the corners and looking for missed packages and bags.
She came into the main room at last with several misplaced bundles in her arms, and added them to the heaps of bags and bundles that were growing around the edge of the room. In the center of the room, draped over tables and chairs that had been pushed together to make a long surface, the long folded colors of the silks were growing, like an endless ribbon of shimmering, colored sunlight. Five slaves were working together over the fabrics, moving them over and under each other to make the remarkable display that would likely be destroyed by tomorrow's nightfall.
PHILAS BEGINS THE CURE
The first day at market was the best, Ajalia thought. The goods were displayed in heaps and cascades, and everything burst out with a kind of impossible magnificence. They would not sell the most on the first day, or the second, but they would make the biggest impression, and the greatest first play in their true game of gaining a foothold in Slavithe trade.
The gold and silver had not been unpacked, and most of it would stay in the leather boxes and bags it had travelled in. Lim or Philas would select several typical pieces later this afternoon, and lay them out over the silks when the sunlight was growing the hottest and brightest.
The Eastern chiefs were showmen as much as traders; they understood how to make an impressive effect, and they taught their slaves to do the same. By the time the slaves had finished arranging the silks, and folded them together into a wide, long fan of color, and wrapped them in plain cloth sheaths for protection from the sun and the eyes of passerby, the sun had climbed into the sky, and the market had been open for several hours.
Lim had finished tabulating his lists, and Ajalia had made her own mental markups of where everything was and how much of it there was. The slaves were loaded with things, and two of the men were left in the house to guard the gold and the other goods that were being left behind. The time for stealing goods had passed; now that Lim had made his list, any missing items would be noted at the end of each day, and the slaves had nowhere to conceal anything they'd stolen. When slaves stole during a journey, there was some chance that what they'd taken would be missed in the shuffle between packing and itemizing, but once the goods had been counted and the city settled into, there was no good to be gotten from taking trading goods. Ajalia could feel the slaves settling down already, as the long line of their bodies, linked together by the snaking, wrapped-up silks, trailed out of the house and wound towards the marketplace.
She follow
ed in their wake, carrying a heap of plain ebony chains that would be used to loop the silks and gold necklaces up against the sides of the market stall. There were wooden boxes of paints made from the special dyes of the East, and some cloudy white dolls made out of wool, that were used for dressmaking and modeling robes in the East. The dolls would be tied up to the pillars of the market, and eventually, after a few days, their faces painted bright colors. They would be dressed in the spare robes and extra hair pieces brought along for that purpose, and their eyes would be fitted with silver rings that would glint in the sunlight and reflect the rays of the rising moon.
The Eastern chiefs' greatest ploy, in many markets, was to stay open later than any of the other market stalls. Especially when first in a city, their slaves would spend the bulk of the morning and early afternoon arranging the goods for display, and then when the rest of the market had closed down, the exotic silks and shining metals of the East would remain, shining and shimmering in the light of the moon and stars. The moon over Leopath shone blue at night, and the glistening glass gems of the East caught the blue light of the moon and turned it to shimmering silver.
The little house was still stuffed with goods; piles of silk lay in the corners of the main room, tucked securely away and holding their shimmering surfaces ready for the time when the wealthiest citizens of Slavithe came calling for custom orders of fabric and decorations.
Ajalia walked behind the last of the slaves. Philas was coming along behind Ajalia, his arms loaded down with packs of exotic spices in tiny glass jars. Ajalia didn't say anything to him, but she moved over on the road so that he could walk beside her if he liked. He did not catch up, and after a moment she moved over into the center of the road again. She thought he was angry about something, but she didn't particularly care to find out what he was angry about, and she didn't want to make him feel better. She was becoming increasingly ambivalent about Philas. He had seemed at first, on this trip, to be an entertaining companion, and a good fellow, but he was growing moodier lately, and more aggressively annoyed. She felt that he was attacking her more lately, just with the way he didn't speak to her, or the way he pretended not to notice her.
