stonily at a bulkhead. “I'm sorry I bungled the questioning.”
She was becoming intractable. If he'd had two good legs under him, he'd have strode up to her and pushed her onto her back on the bed and reminded her what she was. Instead, he'd have to flatter her. He tried to think of something nice to say to her, to make her pleasant again. But the interminable throbbing of his missing leg had suddenly become a pounding pain. He wanted only to lie down, to go back to sleep and avoid all of this. And he'd have to ask her to help him.
“I'm helpless. I can't even get back into my bed alone,” he said bitterly. In rare honesty he declared, “I hate for you to see me this way.” Outside, the music changed. One strong man's voice took up a chant, at once forceful and tender. He cocked his head to make out the oddly familiar words. “Ah,” he said softly to himself. “I know it now. ‘From Kytris, To His Mistress.’ A lovely piece.” He tried again to find a compliment to give her. He couldn't think of any. “You could go out on deck and listen to the music, if you wished,” he offered her. “It's quite an old poem, you know.” The edges of his vision wavered. His eyes watered with his pain. “Have you heard it before?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady.
“Oh, Kennit.” She shook her head, suddenly and inexplicitly contrite. Tears stood in her eyes as she came to him. “It sounds more sweet to me here than anywhere else. I'm sorry. I'm such a heartless wench sometimes. Look at you, white as a sheet. Let me help you lie down.”
And she did, as gently as she could manage. She sponged his face with cool water. “No,” he protested feebly. “I'm cold. I'm too cold.”
She covered him gently, and then lay down along his good side. The warmth of her body was actually pleasant, but the lace on the front of her shirt scratched his face. “Take your clothes off,” he directed her. “You're warmest when you're naked.”
She gave a short laugh, at once pleased and surprised. “Such a man,” she rebuked him. But she rose to obey him.
There was a knock at the door. “What?” Kennit demanded.
Sorcor's voice sounded surprised. “I've brought you the prisoner, sir.”
It was all too much trouble. “Never mind,” he said faintly. “Etta already questioned him. I've no need of him anymore.”
Her clothing fell to the floor around her. She climbed into the bed carefully, easing her warmth up against him. He was suddenly so tired. Her skin was soft and warm, a balm.
“Captain Kennit?” Sorcor's voice was insistent, worried.
“Yes,” he acknowledged.
Sorcor jerked the door open. Behind him two sailors held up what remained of the captain of the Sicerna. They met their captain's eyes, then both gaped at him in amazement. Kennit turned his head to follow their gaze. Beside him in the bed, Etta held the blanket firmly below her naked shoulders and just above the slight curve of her breasts. The music from the deck came more loudly into the room. He turned his head back to the prisoner. Etta had more than blinded him. She had dismantled the man a bit at a time. Disgusting. He didn't want to look at that just now. But he had to keep up appearances. He cleared his throat. Get it over with.
“Prisoner. Did you tell my woman the truth?”
The wreckage between the two sailors lifted a ruined face towards his voice. “I swear I did. Over and over again. Why would I lie?” The man began to weep noisily. He snuffled oddly with his nostrils slit. “Please, good sir, don't let her at me no more. I told her the truth. I told her everything I knew.”
It suddenly seemed like too much trouble. The man had obviously lied to Etta and now he was lying to Kennit as well. The prisoner was useless. The pain from his leg was banging against the inside of Kennit's skull. “I'm… occupied.” He did not want to admit how exhausted he was simply from taking a bath and getting dressed. “Take care of him, Sorcor. However you see fit.” The meaning of his words was plain and the prisoner's voice rose in a howl of denial. “Oh. And shut the door on your way out,” Kennit further instructed him.
“Sar,” he heard a deckhand sigh as the door closed behind them and the wailing prisoner. “He's going at her already. Guess nothing keeps Captain Kennit down.”
Kennit turned very slightly toward the warmth of Etta's body. His eyes closed and he sank into a deep sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Vicissitudes
It didn't quite seem real until they laid hands on him. The old keeper he could probably have fought off rather easily, but these were heavy middle-aged men, stolid and muscled and experienced in their work. “Let go of me!” Wintrow cried angrily. “My father is coming to get me. Let go!” Stupidly, he reflected later. As if simply telling them to let go would make them do it. It was one of the things he was to learn. Words from a slave's mouth meant nothing. His angry cries were no more intelligible to them than the braying of an ass.
They did things with his arm joints, twisting them so that he stumbled angrily in the direction they wished him to go. He had not quite got over his surprise at being seized when he found himself already pressed firmly up against the tattooist's block. “Be easy,” one of the men bid him gruffly as he jerked Wintrow's wrist shackles tight against a staple. Wintrow jerked back, hoping to pull free before the pin could be set, but he only took skin off his wrists. The pin was already set. As quickly as that they had him, hunched over, wrists chained close to his ankles. One of the men gave him a slight push and he nudged his own head into a leather collar set vertically on the block. The other man gave a quick tug on the leather strap that secured it a hair's-breadth short of choking him. As long as he didn't struggle, he could get enough air to breathe. Fettered as he was, it would have been hard to draw a deep breath. The collar about his neck made even his short panting breaths an effort that required attention. They had done it as efficiently as farmhands castrating calves, Wintrow thought foggily. The same expert callousness, the precise use of force. He doubted they were even sweating. “Satrap's sigil,” one said to the tattooist, and the man nodded and moved a wad of cindin in his cheek.
“My flesh was not made by me. I will not puncture it to bear jewelry, nor stain my skin, nor embed decoration into my visage. For I am a creation of Sa, made as I am intended to be. My flesh is not mine to write upon.” He had scarce breath enough to quote the holy writ as a whisper. But he spoke the words and prayed the man would hear them.
The tattooist spat to one side, spittle stained with blood. A hard addict, then, one who would indulge in the drug even when his mouth was raw with ulcers. “T'ain't my flesh to mark either,” he exclaimed with dim humor. “It's the Satrap's. Now, his sigil I could do blindfolded. You hold still, it goes faster and smarts less.”
“My father… is coming… to pay for me.” He fought for air to say these essential words.
“Your father is too late. Hold still.”
Wintrow had no time to wonder if holding still would be an assent to this blasphemy. The first needle was off target, striking not his cheek but the side of his nose and piercing into the side of his nostril. He yelped and jerked. The tattooist slapped him smartly on the back of the head. “Hold still!” he commanded him gruffly.
Wintrow clenched his eyes shut and set his jaw.
“Aw, I hate it when they wrinkle up like that,” the tattooist muttered in disgust. Then he went swiftly to work. A dozen jabs of his needle, a quick swipe at the blood and then the sting of a dye. Green. Another dozen jabs, swipe, sting. It seemed to Wintrow as if each time he took a breath, he was getting less air. He was dizzy, afraid he would faint, and furious with himself for being ashamed. How could fainting shame him? They were the ones doing this to him. And where was his father, how could he be late? Didn't he know what would happen to his son if he was late?
“Now leave it alone. Don't touch it, don't scratch it, or you'll just make it hurt worse.” A distant voice was speaking over a roaring in his ears. “He's done, take him away and bring another.”
Hands tugged at his shackles and his collar, and then he was being strong-armed again, being forced off to somewhere else. He stumbled, half-dazed, taking one deep breath after another. His destination turned out to be a different stall in a different row in a different shed. This could not have happened, he told himself. It could not have happened to him, his father would not have left him to be tattooed and sold. His captors halted him by a pen set aside for new slaves. The five slaves he shared it with each bore a single oozing green tattoo.
