to vouch for good behaviour under most circumstances. When they had first left Bey Sii the boy had hung back or stumbled away from the column two or three times; Chnesuru had put this down to his illness rather than to any wish to escape and had not even scolded him, much less had him beaten. Now there was a second puzzle!
“Here,” she said, and held out a sponge of water and a blob of greasy V'e-root paste for him to soap himself.
He looked up at her with some odd emotion showing in his eyes, and for a moment it seemed as though he would speak. But then his tongue lolled out, his eyes unfocussed, and he fumbled for the sponge with shaking fingers. Tlayesha poured water over his back and noted idly that the skin there was still sunburned and peeling. His previous owners must have kept him indoors. She wondered again what his history might have been.
“Hoi! — Ohe!” Someone called from the front of the column, and the slaves groaned and stumbled to their feet. The day’s march was about to begin.
Behind her the horizon showed as angry-red as that slave’s boil, but to the north the Kraa Hills still bulked black beneath diadems of cloud. Only the sword-bright pinnacle of Akonar Peak thrust above the foothills there, blood-splashed by the dawning sun. Tlayesha looked to the northwest, but Thenu Thendraya Peak was not yet visible. Once the road turned after the town of Tsuru, they would journey under the shadow of that granite monolith-“The Sentinel of Hrugga” people named it- for many more days before reaching the swamps surrounding old Purdimal. Thenu Thendraya Peak guarded the jumbled mountains and deserts of the impoverished and fragmented nation of Milumanaya, it was said, although there was nothing there to see but wild nomads and sand and barren stones. Beyond, however, lay Yan Kor.
Tlayesha picked up her bucket and medicines and walked along beside the caffle, ignoring the calls and obscene pleasantries of the slaves. She had heard all of that since she was twelve years old and had fled her clan in Butrus in Pan Chaka. Her deformity had stirred up the superstitious fears of her clanspeople. But the fault lay more with a certain facile rogue who had called himself noble and called her by many more honeyed names! Cha, he had sold her soon enough into the brothels of Jakalla! There she had spent five miserable years earning her freedom again by “the tasks of the bed,” as fat Tanere the brothel-keeper charitably named them.
Remembered hurt and insult arose to plague her memory. She was not unbeautiful. Were it not for her birth- curse, she might have attained the higher status of courtesan. As it was, she was forced to cater to those who were too low, too uncaring, too strange in their desires, or too drunk to notice. As Tanere said, “Darkness makes everyone beautiful.” She had taught Tlayesha to keep her room shuttered, the candle low, and to dance nude save for a veil upon her face. “Mystery adds attraction-and coins upon the brass plate.”
After Jakalla there had been a dozen cities. Freedom does not fill the belly, and those days were not easy ones. At least she had learned about medicines, drugs, and treatments-among other things-and when Master Chnesuru offered to hire her as physician for his merchandise, she had accepted gratefully. For two-no, almost three-years now she had accompanied the slaver’s caravan from Thraya in the southeast to Khirgar in the far northwest of the Empire. Twice she had gone beyond: once to Kheiris in Mu’ugalavya, and once to Pijnar on the shores of the foggy northern sea. Now she counted herself experienced, travelled, and able to look upon her Skein of Destiny without fear-though with no particular joy.
Qoyqunel, the chief of the caravan guards, was coming back along the column to pick litter bearers for the morning shift. The pretty girls, the trained courtesans, the dancers, the children, the old, and the sick were not required to walk but rode instead in palanquins or in the trundling Chlen-carts.
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
