The Wanderer's Mark: Book Three of Imirillia (The Books of Imirillia 3) (6 page)

It was long past dark before they stopped. So delirious was she in her agony that she gave no thought to food, although someone offered her water. It tasted of blood, but she drank what she could then set her head on the ground. The sand beneath Eleanor’s side, as she lay in dumb pain, was the softest thing she could recall to memory. She was too tired to feel much of anything save despair.

After the company had settled, Eleanor watched the slavers walk the perimeter with their torches, a hole as big as the sky eating her from the center of her body outward. Dantib was dead, torn apart by dogs, and left to the mercy of the sands for his burial. Basaal’s dearest friend, sacrificed. She cringed at his memory.

***

Nothing had been left inside Eleanor but pain. Whatever native strength she had drawn on—from the moment she had put herself into the hands of the Imirillian army—had dissipated, had fled. And now, being empty, the loss of Dantib, the whipping, and the heat had broken her. She knew she would never see Aemogen again.

Sleep was not kind, neither were the long, wakeful hours of silence and starlight. Eleanor’s open wounds screamed against the harsh fabric of clothing, so she lay perfectly still, the edges of her torn flesh pulsing feverishly. She knew she could not go another day. Her fate would no longer move her towards home. So Eleanor thought of nothing. Nothingness was a refuge, it could not trespass through the pain of being separated from all that she loved. Nothing. Nothing. She repeated this thought. And the night wore on.

Eleanor must have dozed, giving in to some thin form of sleep, for the image of Basaal, leaving his garden after prayer, appeared before her eyes just as she opened her lids against the heavy weight pounding in her head. The night was still dark, and the image faded. Eleanor bit her lip then gave a quick intake of breath, her eyes watering at the painful reminder that her lip and chin had been split open by the whip’s tongue. But she clung to the image of Basaal from her dreams. Basaal and his rituals. Basaal and his prayers. Basaal and his Illuminating God.

“Oh, God,” Eleanor groaned, an expression of futility more than a plea for comfort. “Oh, Basaal’s God.” She pressed her cheek into the sand and spoke aloud in her native tongue.

“For whatever comes from uttering your name, I ask for it.”

And, finally, Eleanor slept.

***

When she woke, a dim light was in bloom above the horizon, and the filthy camp was beginning to stir. She knew that they would soon eat a dried crust of bread and then continue farther south into the Shera Shee. But, the despair she had known just hours before was…gone.

Spare as you are spared
.

These words spread out in Eleanor’s mind. She moved her impossibly stiff neck. Her eyes felt swollen as she blinked, and she knew that the pain in her back would be hellish as soon as the slavers lifted her to her feet.

Eleanor again looked towards the lightening sky.
Spare as you are spared.
It was not a line she remembered from her studies.

“Up. Up!” came the call as the slavers walked among their inventory. “Up!”

Chains began to scrape and clink, and Eleanor tried to lift herself but could not. She almost felt patient as she waited for the one-eyed slaver to yank her into the pain of the day ahead. As she moved her feet, a soft resistance responded, and Eleanor, with great struggle, propped herself onto her elbow, gritting her teeth as the chains moved against her swollen wrists, her curiosity outweighing her pain. The girl. A little girl who had been watching Eleanor for days with hungry eyes was curled up like a kitten, her head resting against Eleanor’s ankles.

“Up! Up!” the slavers demanded.

Eleanor was forced to her feet and given dry bread. She grimaced but did not call out. But the child, yanked up onto her knees, seemed dazed and dropped the bread they’d given her to crawl towards Eleanor’s skirts, where she whimpered.

Too tired to speak, Eleanor moved her chained hands down towards the girl’s head, brushing the hair back from the child’s eyes as best she could.

“Shh,” she managed to say.

Eleanor bent down and retrieved the child’s bread from the sand, brushing it off and offering it to her. As the girl took the bread and opened her mouth to eat, Eleanor saw that her mouth was an infected, bloody mess, for the child had no tongue. It had been cut out.

“Of all—” Eleanor began and closed her eyes, for her misery-laden back now felt like a gift in comparison.

“Here,” she said as she took the girl’s bread and placed it between her own lips to soften it, helping the girl eat what little she could.

“Better?” Eleanor asked.

The child, who could have been no older than five—maybe six—stared at her blankly. She was a thin, small little thing with wide eyes. Eleanor helped her eat what she would. Then the one-eyed slaver walked by and chained them together. He showed no remorse for Eleanor’s pain but was human enough to secure the child to Eleanor with a strong, rough rope rather than with a heavy shackle.

“Stay close to me,” Eleanor said in Imirillian, hoping the girl could understand.

The call of the slavers went up, and they moved on into another unrelenting day.

***

Following her astonished surprise of finding herself yet alive, Eleanor made a decision. She was in captivity and had no control over her days, let alone over the wretched outcome of this filthy venture. What she did have, Eleanor repeated to herself, was her mind. She was a scholar. She was a thinker. For years, she had cultivated her ability to reason, to question, and to press and pull on thoughts. And so, Eleanor began to use her mind.

She decided she would count steps, she would study any break in the blank, sand-filled landscape. When, in the heat, hunger was beat out only by her tremendous thirst, Eleanor would retrieve any thought or quote she could call to mind, repeating the words over and over and over. When the child faltered, Eleanor would carry her, for a quick reminder of Dantib’s fate was enough to keep Eleanor clinging to the girl so that they would not catch the ire of the one-eyed slaver or of Kale, the leader, who, since the day she’d been whipped, had marked her with his eyes as he rode alongside the column.

One morning, to Eleanor’s surprise, the child wrote out a name in the sand in large, off-balanced characters.

“Sharin?” Eleanor confirmed. The girl grinned and wrapped her hands around Eleanor’s fingers. “Can you write anything else?” Eleanor asked.

Sharin shook her head. No, she could not.

Her back did not feel like it was healing. Rather, she woke each morning in terrible pain as the filthy garment, torn in several places, ripped away from the infected skin that had seeped into it while she slept. At night, especially, she could feel the pulsing heat of fever. And so, in an effort to defeat the madness of the pain, Eleanor would begin again—counting, quoting, and mapping the stars.

***

Finally, the caravan stopped in a dust-filled crack that the locals called Katerah, the Imirillian word for
memory
. This town wound through a narrow crack between the cliffs, a forgotten pit of the earth filled with the poor of the Shera Shee. Several buildings had been constructed in precarious layers going up the steep cliff faces. The dust covered locals looked at her and the other captive humans with mild disinterest. Children even ran through the caravan, calling out and laughing, while the slave traders tried to kick them out of the way.

Stumbling over the hardened dirt of the road, Eleanor was relieved for the shade the gap provided, hoping that they would rest the night here. A dozen or so long days had come and gone since Eleanor had lost Dantib, but the infection from her whipping had stayed in her back. It still throbbed, but did not move into the rest of her body. She wondered if this was a grace from Basaal’s Illuminating God and had tried to think of him each night when darkness again claimed the day.

Her wrists, still swollen and numb, bothered her no more than the whipping did, for having caught the eye of Kale, the head slaver, and the way that he watched her—laughing with the other men, passing his eyes over her with interest—distracted her from the physical pain.

Pressing against her mind was the thought that he might want to use her for his own pleasures before they sold her to another master. The dye in Eleanor’s hair was now fading, and, in the sun, the copper of her natural hair had begun to shine through. The one-eyed slaver, who still watched her with suspicion, had called Kale over to see the copper hair near her scalp. She was certain the slavers now knew she was from the South.

Eleanor pushed these thoughts from her mind and looked at the forsaken town around her. Hearing a whimper from Sharin, Eleanor offered a dim smile of encouragement before getting jerked ahead, nearly losing her balance.

The caravan halted, and a man stepped into the narrow street. Well-dressed and hawk-eyed, he spoke to the slavers and pointed farther down the gap. After a brief argument, the few animals still in the train were ushered down the road, disappearing around the stark stone bend. Eleanor kept her head bent, trying to avoid any attention from the wealthy man who eyed the chain of slaves with discernment as he bickered with Kale. The line of slaves waited, downtrodden, and filthy, until, finally, a price to satisfy both men had been reached.

Then Kale, along with the other slavers, herded their captives into what, at the onset, appeared to be a stable, but that revealed itself to be a deep cave. Metal rings were attached to the base of the walls, and the slavers set about unchaining every slave from the column and securing their shackles to the walls. Kale attended to Eleanor himself, placing her in a separate cove from the others. He locked her in and placed his fingers roughly around her chin, speaking words she did not understand.

Sharin had remained with her to this point. But, when Kale began to lead the girl away, Eleanor cried out.

“Please!” Eleanor did not know if calling attention to Sharin was best, but she could not bear the thought of her being chained among strangers. “Let me see to the child’s needs,” she pleaded. “I will care for her.”

Kale thought for a moment but then shook his head and took Sharin away. Eleanor breathed out in frustration, tears that long since should have dried up coming to her eyes. Leaning her head back against the cold stone, she tried to steady her breathing and defeat the desire to cry.

People were beasts. They were cruel and petty, self-serving. No wonder Basaal had been so incredulous when he’d first come to Aemogen. Eleanor lay down, wondering if Aemogen had ever been as good as she had truly believed it was. Far into the night, as Eleanor waited in fear for whatever Kale might do, she told herself Aemogen had been as she had remembered, and that people were what she had always believed them to be.

***

He never came. Eleanor woke cold yet so grateful that she forced herself to her knees and uttered a prayer to Basaal’s god. The slavers, tired themselves from the desert trek, slept late and made no hurry to feed their captives. When they finally did, the meal was seasoned rice with a small portion of meat.

Eleanor ate hungrily and almost laughed aloud. She had never, in all the feasts of Zarbadast, tasted anything so good. Her outlook improved when a woman entered, bearing a pitcher of water and some rags. They were to be cleaned, made presentable. Eleanor washed her calloused feet first then her face, and she laughed at the order of it. She asked the woman humbly if her hair could be braided. And, after saying no three times, the woman acquiesced.

Later, Sharin began crying somewhere in the cave. Exacerbated, the one-eyed slaver brought her to Eleanor and instructed that the child should be kept quiet or else they would both be thrown into a snake pit. Wrapping her arms around Sharin, Eleanor vouched for her good behavior. She held the girl close, braiding her hair and singing Aemogen lullabies to her in a whisper.

Chapter Four

Basaal heard his father’s voice outside their tent. Then the large curtains were held open, and Emperor Shaamil, dismissing his generals with a wave, entered alone. Basaal stood, bowing his head in respect, then returned to his seat, studying a map while his father served himself from the refreshments table.

“The terrain is pretty enough,” Shaamil said as he seated himself at the table.

Basaal looked up then leaned back in his chair, bemused. “What, no lecture?” Basaal said, unable to stop himself. “No scathing comment? Just a pleasantry about the landscape?”

Shaamil took a sip of his drink. “Save your sarcasm. I can be civil.” Basaal looked for the edge in his father’s eyes, but it had softened.

“It is beautiful country,” Basaal replied, surprised he felt almost hungry for his father’s sincere conversation. “The farther south, the more beautiful it becomes, especially Aemogen.”

“Your mother certainly thought so.”

“Did she?” It was the first time Shaamil had referred to his mother since her death. As a youth, Basaal had supposed this was because his father had been indifferent to her.

“Yes—” Shaamil said. He looked as if he would say more, so Basaal waited, watching closely. The emperor’s hand carried a slight tremor—what any of his warriors would have called
the death mark,
a symbol of having lost complete control of your physical faculties. Basaal frowned and studied his father’s face.