Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

Blackbeard turned our little caravan down a zigzag alley so narrow that we had to ride single file.

After five minutes, Blackbeard halted us in front of a yellow-and-red awning that fronted an enormous tent, from which music bubbled. Beneath the awning sat a droop-eyed, turbaned Marini. Cross-legged on multicolored carpets stacked two feet high, he clenched the carved mouthpiece of a woven fabric hose between his teeth.

The hose snaked down into the belly of a bubbling, glass-globed water pipe. Beside the man’s pipe, a spectacular, dark-eyed woman lay curled like a cat. Unlike our lunch porters of the day before, her costume left no doubt about her gender.

Howard leaned toward me, and pointed at the pipe. “Do you suppose that’s tobacco?”

Droop-lids raised his palm to Blackbeard. “Peace of the Fair, Captain.”

Blackbeard raised his own palm. “And of the One True God, may He smite those who lie with the devil.”

Droop-lids snorted smoke out of the corner of his mouth. Evidently the Fisheaters didn’t like being accused of sleeping with devils.

Then the Marini smiled and bobbed his head, counting back up the alley along our line of mounted guards and prisoners. “A dozen for your men, then? And two for so considerate a commander as yourself, at no charge.” He reached down and stroked the woman’s hair. “On my honor, my girls have copulated only with royalty.”

Jude whispered, “Whoa!”

The woman blew Jude a kiss. On her, the droopy Marini eyelids looked great.

I groaned. When I swore to Munchkin that I would protect her sixteen-year-old son, I didn’t expect it to be from extraterrestrial hookers.

Blackbeard waved a gauntleted hand at the pimp. “I’m selling. Not buying. You know the flesh trade. Where can I ransom these four back to their kin?”

“Ransom is good business.” Droop-lids nodded. Then he snorted. “But Marini don’t ransom half-breeds.”

“What?” Blackbeard bristled. “These four are as Fisheater as you, old man.”

“Not with those eyes. We all look alike to you Plains hicks, hey?” The pimp made a shooing motion with the hand that held the pipe tube, and smoke curled from its mouthpiece. “Get this filth away. They block paying customers.” Then Droop-lids’ eyes brightened. “Of course, my girls would service them, and your men, with extra enthusiasm, if you change your mind, Captain.”

We couldn’t turn around in the narrow alley, so Blackbeard led us on down to its opposite end, cursing as he rode. He told Yulen, “It’s just a matter of finding the right match. We’ll go visiting tonight.”

Jude kept turning in his saddle, gawking back at the woman reclining beneath Droop-lid’s awning, and muttering, “Whoa!”

Blackbeard reconfined us to our tent, left our hobbles on, and made our guards stay inside the tent with us. Yulen slipped us more flatbread on the sly, and we slept through another party night at The Great Fair.

In the morning, Blackbeard sent Yulen to spruce us up, like the day before. But this morning, more guards crowded into our tent behind Yulen, pistols drawn. Yulen replaced our rope hobbles with leg irons, and, as he locked them around our ankles, he knit his brows. Unpromising.

As we dressed, I asked him, “Hard night, Sarge?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t drain one horn. When my Captain’s unhappy, I’m unhappy.”

“Why’s your Captain unhappy?”

“We passed the night going tent-to-tent among the Fisheaters. None will ransom you.”

Uh-oh.

I looked at Yulen sideways. “So you’re gonna let us go, right?”

Yulen turned up his mouth corner in a failed smile. “In a fashion. To the highest bidder.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

A HALF HOUR LATER, Yulen halted the duckbill caravan of us four, the guards, and our gear at the edge of a vast meadow that sloped from The Fair’s tent city to the River Marin.

He sat back in his saddle and sighed to the young soldier alongside him. “In a month, we’ll strike our yurts, the Marini will sail into the downriver fog like ghosts, and the Tassini will slink back to the desert.”

Yulen pointed at two structures one hundred yards from us, close enough to one another that I could have thrown a baseball between them. “But The Pillars and The Block will remain here, like they have for three hundred years.”

The young cavalryman squinted at a row of stones set with iron rings. The stones lined the riverbank, each one as big as a sleeping duckbill. Chains as thick as men’s thighs branched from the stones, and anchored ships out in the river. The young man pointed at the anchor stones. “My mother said, ‘Good boys sail from The Pillars one day.’”

Yulen snorted. “Mine said, ‘Rotten boys go on The Block.’”

Given my record, I focused on The Block.

The Block was a three-foot-high cut-stone stage twenty feet long and ten feet deep. Situated halfway between The Great Fair’s tents and the river, it squatted in an open meadow that had been trampled to lifeless dirt by crowds. The Block’s more complete name, which I had heard around the campfire, was The Slave Auction Block.

That morning a crowd of a thousand spectators and a hundred bidders surrounded The Block. Awnings on poles, placed to protect the crowd, not the merchandise, hung limp, and the sun shone in a clear sky.

When Yulen cantered our caravan up behind The Block, Blackbeard met us. He flicked his eyes to the sky, and said to Yulen, “Sun makes a man open his pockets, hey, Sergeant?”

Yulen shrugged. “For half-breeds? At least they have property.”

From my campfire eavesdropping, I knew that the Clans of Bren didn’t mind bigotry, chopping one another into lunch, religious intolerance, gender inequality, public drunkenness, or slavery. But the Clans agreed on three inviolable rules. First, no chopping one another at The Fair. Second, once the auction hammer falls, a deal’s a deal. And, third, private property is private property.

When a seller offered a person for sale, he had to include as a package deal all property he captured along with his prisoner, down to the captive’s last peppercorn. The buyer had to bid for the whole package, too. No cherry picking. In the meantime, the prisoner owned his own stuff (or her own stuff; they were even-handed that way).

It was a fig leaf of decency, because incoming slaves seldom owned more than what they wore. But our four tons of gear, consisting of sealed Plasteel Tamperproofs, four suits of Eternad armor, and our four inanimate Cargo’Bots, were just as much ours by law as some peasant’s peppercorn. For another hour or so.

An Apprentice Auctioneer, a Tassini wearing indigo eye shadow, made us unload all four tons of our own stuff from Blackbeard’s duckbills. Then the Apprentice looped a long chain through our leg irons, paid it out, and locked it to a ring set in The Block. Then he made us sit in the dirt alongside all our gear. Not quite all. Jeeb hovered high above the spectator’s awning, still unknown to the Bren.

On stage, a Tassini girl, maybe eighteen, held a baby. Her dress was coarse cloth that hung on her down to her ankles, and her feet were bare but for wooden sandals. Her hair had been gathered with a carved blue comb. The baby squalled, and she flexed her knees rhythmically, bouncing the child to calm it. Her lip quivered.

The Tassini Auctioneer stood alongside her, his face dyed indigo from the nose up. He pointed his polished wood mallet at the biggest Casuni I had seen yet, a broken-nosed mountain who sat in a raised chair, wearing jeweled armor.

“I have one hundred from My Lord, there. Who will say two?”

The enormous Casuni held a bid fan, but didn’t move it.

The Auctioneer looked out across the crowd. “A fine lady’s maid here to be trained. See the intelligence in those eyes!”