The Godspeaker Trilogy (2 page)

The woman nodded. He’d broken her nose with his goat-stick that time. The child, three seasons younger then, had heard the woman’s splintering bone, watched the pouring blood. Remembering that, she remembered too what the man did to the other she-brat to make it sorry for running. Things that made the she-brat squeal but left no mark because Traders paid less for damaged goods.

That she-brat had been a fool. No matter where the Traders took her it had to be better than the village and the man. Traders were the only escape for she-brats. Traders . . . or death. And she did not want to die. When they came for her before highsun tomorrow she would go with them willingly.

“I’ll chain her,” the woman promised. “She won’t run.”

“Better not,” growled the man, and then the slap of goathide on wood as he shoved the kitchen door aside and left.

The woman rolled her head until her red-rimmed eyes found what they sought beneath the kitchen table. “I tried. I’m sorry.”

The child crawled out of the shadows and shrugged. The woman was always sorry. But sorrow changed nothing, so what did it matter? “Traders coming,” she said. “Wash now.”

Wincing, breath catching raw in her throat, the woman clutched at the table leg and clawed herself to her knees, then grabbed hold of the table edge, panting, whimpering, and staggered upright. There was water in her eyes. She reached out a work-knotted hand and touched rough fingertips to the child’s cheek. The water trembled, but did not fall.

Then the woman turned on her heel and went out into the searing day. Not understanding, not caring, the child with no name followed.

The Traders came a finger before highsun the next day. Not the four from last time, with tatty robes, skinny donkeys, half-starved purses and hardly any slaves. No. These two Traders were grand. Seated on haughty white camels, jangling with beads and bangles, dangling with earrings and sacred amulets, their dark skin shiny with fragrant oils and jeweled knife-sheaths on their belts. Behind them stretched the longest snake-spine of merchandise: men’s inferior sons, discarded, and she-brats, and women. All naked, all chained. Some born to slavery, others newly sold. The difference was in their godbraids, slaves of long standing bore one braid of deep blood red, a sign from the god that they were property. The new slaves would get their red braids, in time.

Guarding the chained slaves, five tall men with swords and spears. Their godbraids bore amulets, even their slave-braids were charmed. They must be special slaves, those guards. In the caravan there were pack camels too, common brown, roped together, laden with baskets, criss-crossed with travel-charms. A sixth unchained slave led them, little more than a boy, and his red godbraid bore amulets as well. At his signal, groaning, the camels folded their calloused knees to squat on the hard ground. The slaves squatted too, silent and sweating.

Waiting in her own chains, the crude iron links heavy and chafing round her wrists and ankles, the child watched the Traders from beneath lowered lashes as they dismounted and stood in the dust and dirt of the man’s small holding. Their slender fingers smoothed shining silk robes, tucked their glossy beaded godbraids behind their ears. Their fingernails were all the same neat oval shape and painted bright colors to match their clothing: green and purple and crimson and gold. They were taller than the tallest man in the village. Taller than the godspeaker, who must stand above all. One of them was even fat . They were the most splendid creatures the child had ever seen, and knowing she would leave with them, leave forever the squalor and misery of the man and the village, her heart beat faster and her own unpainted fingernails, ragged and shapeless, bit deep into her dirty scarred palms.

The Traders stared at the cracked bare ground with its withered straggle of weeds, at the mud brick hovel with its roof of dried grasses badly woven, at the pen of profitless goats, at the man whose bloodshot eyes shone with hope and avarice. A look flowed between them and their plump lips pursed. They were sneering. The child wondered where they came from, to be so clean and disapproving. Somewhere not like this. She couldn’t wait to see such a place herself, to sleep for just one night inside walls that did not stink of fear and goat. She’d wear a hundred chains and crawl on her hands and knees across The Anvil’s burning sand if she had to, so long as she reached it.

The man was staring at the Traders too, his eyes popping with amazement. He bobbed his head at them, like a chicken pecking corn. “Excellencies. Welcome, welcome. Thank you for your custom.”

The thin Trader wore thick gold earrings; tattooed on his right cheek, in brightest scarlet, a stinging scorpion. The child bit her tongue. He had money enough to buy a protection like that? And power enough that a godspeaker would let him? Aieee . . .

He stepped forward and looked down at the man, fingertips flicking at her. “Just this?”

She was enchanted. His voice was deep and dark like the dead of night, and shaped the words differently from the man. When the man spoke it sounded like rocks grinding in the dry ravine, ugly like him. The Trader was not ugly.

The man nodded. “Just this.”

“No sons, un-needed?”

“Apologies, Excellency,” said the man. “The god has granted me few sons. I need them all.”

Frowning, the Trader circled the child in slow, measured steps. She held her breath. If he found her unpleasing and if the man did not kill her because of it, she’d be slaved to some village man for beating and spawning sons and hard labor without rest. She would cut her flesh with stone and let the dogs taste her, tear her, devour her, first.

The Trader reached out his hand, his flat palm soft and pink, and smoothed it down her thigh, across her buttock. His touch was warm, and heavy. He glanced at the man. “How old?”

“Sixteen.”

The Trader stopped pacing. His companion unhooked a camel whip from his belt of linked precious stones and snapped the thong. The man’s dogs, caged for safety, howled and threw themselves against the woven goathide straps of their prison. In the pen beside them the man’s goats bleated and milled, dropping anxious balls of shit, yellow slot-eyes gleaming.

“How old?” the Trader asked again. His green eyes were narrow, and cold.

The man cringed, head lowered, fingers knuckled together. “Twelve. Forgive me. Honest error.”

The Trader made a small, disbelieving sound. He’d done something to his eyebrows. Instead of being a thick tangled bar like the man’s they arched above his eyes in two solid gold half-circles. The child stared at them, fascinated, as the Trader leaned down and brought his dark face close to hers. She wanted to stroke the scarlet scorpion inked into his cheek. Steal some of his protection, in case he did not buy her.

His long, slender fingers tugged on her earlobes, traced the shape of her skull, her nose, her cheeks, pushed back her lips and felt all her teeth. He tasted of salt and things she did not know. He smelled like freedom.

“Is she blooded?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder at the man.

“Since four godmoons.”

“Intact?”

The man nodded. “Of course.”

The Trader’s lip curled. “There is no ‘of course’ where men and she-flesh abide.”

Without warning he plunged his hand between her legs, fingers pushing, probing, higher up, deeper in. Teeth bared, her own fingers like little claws, the child flew at him, screeching. Her chains might have weighed no more than the bangles on his slender, elegant wrists. The man sprang forward shouting, fists raised, face contorted, but the Trader did not need him. He brushed her aside as though she were a corn-moth. Seizing a handful of black and tangled hair he wrenched her to the tips of her toes till she was screaming in pain, not fury, and her hands fell limply by her sides. She felt her heart batter her brittle ribs and despair storm in her throat. Her eyes squeezed shut and for the first time she could remember felt the salty sting of tears.

She had ruined everything. There would be no escape from the village now, no new life beyond the knife-edged horizon. The Trader would toss her aside like spoiled meat, and when he and his fat friend were gone the man would kill her or she would be forced to kill herself. Panting like a goat in the slaughter-house she waited for the blow to fall.

But the Trader was laughing. Still holding her, he turned to his friend. “What a little hell-cat! Untamed and savage, like all these dwellers in the savage north. But do you see the eyes, Yagji? The face? The length of bone and the sleekness of flank? Her sweet breasts, budding?”

Trembling, she dared to look at him. Dared to hope . . .

The fat one wasn’t laughing. He shook his head, setting the ivory dangles in his ears to swinging. “She is scrawny.”

“Today, yes,” agreed the Trader. “But with food and bathing and three times three godmoons . . . then we shall see!”

“Your eyes see the invisible, Aba. Scrawny brats are oft diseased.”

“No, Excellency!” the man protested. “No disease. No pus, no bloating, no worms. Good flesh. Healthy flesh.”

“What there is of it,” said the Trader. He turned. “She is not diseased, Yagji.”

“But she is ill-tempered,” his fat friend argued. “Undisciplined, and wild. She’ll be troublesome, Aba.”

The Trader nodded. “True.” He held out his hand and easily caught the camel whip tossed to him. Fingers tight in her hair he snapped the woven hide quirt around her naked legs so the little metal weights on its end printed bloody patterns in her flesh.

The blows stung like fire. The child sank her teeth into her lip and stared unblinking into the Trader’s careful, watching eyes, daring him to strip the unfed flesh from her bones if he liked. He would see she was no weakling, that she was worthy of his coin. Hot blood dripped down her calf to tickle her ankle. Within seconds the small black desert flies came buzzing to drink her. Hearing them, the Trader withheld the next blow and instead tossed the camel whip back to its owner.

“Lesson one, little hell-cat,” he said, his fingers untangling from her hair to stroke the sharp line of her cheek. “Raise your hand or voice to me again and you will die never knowing the pleasures that await you. Do you understand me?”

The black desert flies were greedy, their eager sucking made her skin crawl. She’d seen what they could do to living creatures if not discouraged. She tried not to dance on the spot as the feverish flies quarreled over her bloody welts. All she understood was the Trader did not mean to reject her. “Yes.”

“Good.” He waved the flies away, then pulled from his gold and purple pocket a tiny pottery jar. When he took off its lid she smelled the ointment inside, thick and rich and strange.

Startling her, he dropped to one knee and smeared her burning legs with the jar’s fragrant paste. His fingers were cool and sure against her sun-seared skin. The pain vanished, and she was shocked. She hadn’t known a man could touch a she-brat and not hurt it.

It made her wonder what else she did not know.

When he was finished he pocketed the jar and stood, staring down at her. “Do you have a name?”

A stupid question. She-brats were owed no names, no more than the stones on the ground or the dead goats in the slaughter-house waiting to be skinned. She opened her mouth to say so, then closed it again. The Trader was almost smiling, and there was a look in his eyes she’d never seen before. A question. Or a challenge. It meant something. She was sure it meant something. If only she could work out what . . .

She let her gaze slide sideways to the mud brick hovel and its mean kitchen window, where the woman thought she could not be seen as she dangerously watched the trading. The woman who had no name, just descriptions. Bitch. Slut. Goatslit . Then she looked at the man, shaking with greed, waiting for his money. If she gave herself a name, how angry it would make him.

But she couldn’t think of one. Her mind was blank sand, like The Anvil. Who was she? She had no idea. But the Trader had named her, hadn’t he? He had called her something, he had called her—

She tilted her chin so she could look into his green and gleaming eyes. “He—kat,” she said, her tongue stumbling over the strange word, the sing-song way he spoke. “Me. Name. Hekat.”

The Trader laughed again. “As good a name as any, and better than most.” He held up his hand, two fingers raised; his fat friend tossed him a red leather pouch, clinking with coin.

The man stepped forward, black eyes ravenous. “If you like the brat so much I will breed you more! Better than this one, worth twice as much coin.”

The Trader snorted. “It is a miracle you bred even this one. Do not tempt the god with your blustering lest your seed dry up completely.” Nostrils pinched, he dropped the pouch into the man’s cupped hands.

The man’s fingers tore at the pouch’s tied lacing, so clumsily that its contents spilled on the ground. With a cry of anguish he plunged to his knees, heedless of bruises, and began scrabbling for the silver coins. His knuckles skinned against the sharp stones but the man did not notice the blood, or the buzzing black flies that swarmed to drink him.

For a moment the Trader watched him, unspeaking. Then he trod the man’s fingers into the dirt. “Your silver has no wings. Remove the child’s chains.”

The man gaped, face screwed up in pain. “Remove . . . ?”

The Trader smiled; it made his scarlet scorpion flex its claws. “You are deaf? Or would like to be?”

“Excellency?”

The Trader’s left hand settled on the long knife at his side. “Headless men cannot hear.”

The man wrenched his fingers free and lurched to his feet. Panting, he unlocked the binding chains, not looking at the child. The skin around his eyes twitched as though he were scorpion-stung.

“Come, little Hekat,” said the Trader. “You belong to me now.”

She followed him to the waiting slave train, thinking he would put his own chains about her wrists and ankles and join her to the other naked slaves squatting on the ground. Instead he led her to his camel and turned to his friend. “A robe, Yagji.”

The fat Trader Yagji sighed and fetched a pale yellow garment from one of the pack camel’s baskets. Barely breathing, the child stared as the thin Trader took his knife and slashed through the cloth, reducing it to fit her small body. Smiling, he dropped the cut-down robe over her head and guided her arms into its shortened sleeves, smoothed its cool folds over her naked skin. She was astonished. She wished the man’s sons were here to see this but they were away at work. Snake-dancing, and tending goats.