this settled. I have other business to attend to.'
'Where did you get that?' demanded the outraged merchant.
Kesh waited a few breaths, letting the other man stew. In his head, he tallied up the coin he owed Tebedir, a goodly amount. Everything now hinged on the treasure.
'Well?' Feden looked ready to burst.
With an exaggerated sigh, Kesh bent to close the chests, then straightened, fussing with his sleeves. 'This is not the only merchandise I brought out of the south. You didn't bother to look into my accounts book because you were in such haste to cheat me. But we have already sealed that these items settle my debt price.'
The clerk stared at the coins, which Feden had not touched.
Feden laughed. 'Twice cursed, you are,' he said to Kesh. 'None of your aunts or uncles made the least effort to hold you after the death of your parents. Did I ever tell you that? They were eager to take the money and sell you flat, whatever they could get for a boy of twelve. They couldn't even be bothered to pay the temple for a legitimate debt mark, but only that botched tattoo from a back-alley vendor. That scar can never be altered, the mark of their dislike for you. What makes you think they'll want you back?'
'What makes you think I'm going back to them?'
'But you must!' The stout man looked genuinely alarmed. 'Every man must cleave to his family and his clan. So the gods have set down.'
'Settle the stabling debt,' said Kesh to the clerk.
She did not look to Feden for permission. Kesh was a free man, now. She acted at his orders. She wrote; Feden fumed; Kesh wiped his brow, thinking that he ought to be sweating but he was cool, collected, wrung dry. He was free.
As soon as she was done writing, and marks made and seal set, she handed him the accounts book, the mark of his freedom. He tucked it into the lining of a sleeve, offered her a half leya as a tithe, which she took. Then he twisted the bronze slave bracelets off his wrists. Their weight, in his palm, seemed so heavy that he did not comprehend how he had borne it all these years. Deliberately, looking directly at Feden, meeting his gaze, Kesh placed the bracelets on the table. Feden turned away.
It was done.
Kesh left by the customers' door, which he had never once used in all the twelve years he had lived in this house. He did not look back.
' Where we go?' Tebedir asked as they rolled out into the plaza. The heat made the beasts slow, and Kesh's throat was already parched. 'Here, we roast, like fowl in the oven.'
One slave trudged across the plaza, wearing sandals to protect his feet against the hot stones. He wasn't carrying anything visible, but his shoulders were bowed nonetheless. Gates were closed and awnings furled along the long porches of the clearinghouses. Beyond the flat plain of Merchants' Walk rose the inner city on its rocky bed, buildings pressed shoulder-to-shoulder. Tile roofs and white walls baked; heat shimmered off them. The sun made the air a furnace. Only a wisp of pale cloud floated off above the eastern high plains, where, in the Lending, the grassland herders might have hope of a spatter of cooling rain.
Kesh was sweating, and dizzy. I'm free. But she isn't.
'We'll go now to Crow's Gate Field. I'll pay off the remainder of your contract.'
'As agreed, the remainder, it is one hundred, eighty, and seven of leya. As agreed, in addition, my costs to stable at the hiring ground, for five days. There I seek hire for journey back to empire.'
'That's right,' said Kesh absently, because his thoughts were already plunging ahead. 'I'll ask around and see who is hiring to go south before the end of the year and the rains. There'll be a caravan south within the week, I would wager. There's a particular chit I can see you get, so merchants know you're an honest and loyal hire. I can never thank you enough for standing beside me at Dast Korumbos…'
Tebedir nodded. 'The Shining One rewards his faithful worshipers. Do not despair unless your heart is dishonest. Do not despair unless you have broken the vows you make in the name of the King of King and Lord of Lords.'
Kesh barely heard him. Whatever calm had sustained him in Feden's house evaporated out here under the sun. His ears roared with the tumult inside him; sweat dripped from his fingers as his heart raced. Do not despair. He had stumbled onto the two Mariha girls in a frontier town and purchased them for a desperately cheap price, and for a while he had played the numbers in his head: Should he hire a drover and two donkeys to convey them with the other, smaller goods? Should he let them walk the entire months-long road to the Hundred, carrying the chests themselves, knowing that the journey might kill them but that he would save coin? Alone, they could not gain him what he wished, and indeed, they had brought him a greater profit than he had expected, enough to more than cover the expense of hiring a driver and wagon for the long haul once he had stumbled upon the treasure. They had enabled him to travel in what was, for him, relative comfort with his chests of carefully chosen luxury goods.
He had made his choices. He had bought his own freedom.
That night he slept on the hiring ground, under the wagon, with his strings of leya tucked against his chest.
In the morning, he bespoke a pair of bearers and their covered litter, nothing fancy but its cloth walls opaque and tied tight. Once he concluded his business and his contract with Tebedir and paid him the bonus he had promised, he had cleared all of his debts.
Only one thing remained: It was time to cast his last and most desperate throw.
27
The path out to the village of Dast Olo led along a raised stone causeway that ran first through grain fields, then through the pond-like dari fields, and finally into the tangle of reed flats and minnow channels that marked the edge of the navigable delta waters. Kesh walked briskly, but for all his travels he had trouble keeping pace with the two bearers who carried the curtained litter.
'Yah, so,' said the talkative one, who walked at the front rails. 'Brother and I, you know, it is the tradition out there in the Barrens border country, the village sends lads in to the green lands to work three years, and bring home coin and salt and silk. Maybe a wife, but that's hard to come by considering green-land women don't like the Barrens.'
They were short, with broad shoulders and torsos and powerful hands. Talker wasn't even out of breath, and while Kesh had already broken a sweat under the clear early-morning sky, these two had not bothered with a drink from their leather bottles.
'Probably we'll marry Lariada, from out by Falls.'
Silent grinned appreciatively.
'Yah, so, she's a strong girl, and more important a smart one who apprenticed to the Lantern, so she can keep accounts which is a powerful skill to have, to my way of thinking, if a pair of brothers are thinking to tenure good pastureland and build up a herd of cattle like our father and uncles never could do because of the drought back in the Year of the Goat, that would be the Gold Goat before either of us were birthed, not this last one. They lost everything but for the one heifer and the one dray.'
'They didn't lose the goats,' said Silent.
'Maybe not, but those goats'll survive anything, and grand mam said their milk was sour for two year after.'
'How's the caravan trade going up the Barrens Road these days?' asked Kesh, wiping another waterfall of sweat off his brow. He carried a slight enough burden, a satchel slung over his back with nothing more than a change of clothes, his accounts bundle, and the detritus of traveling life: knife, spoon, eating bowl, worship bowl, a pair of wax candles, flint and steel to light them, one day's worth of food, a leather bottle full of cheap wine. His weapons. The coin tied into his sleeves. It weighed like bricks already, because it was everything he owned.
They got within sight of Dast Olo before Talker got through with his description of the last twelve-year of caravan stories, and given that no more than a pair or three of caravans braved the Barrens Road every year, he took a long time telling an awful lot about not much.
