Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

And later, the unspoken knowledge settled among the silent captives, also grinning, like some new, skull-headed companion on the coffle—the understanding that it could have been any one of them in Barat’s place.

“Yeah, and speaking of that,” Gerin told them grimly, when Tigeth had quieted under the gaunt man’s admonition. “You think that’s the only empty set of cuffs you’re going to see on this chain? Every day we don’t make the market in Yhelteth is coins dripping through these fucks’ fingers. You think they’ll stop or slow down for anyone who can’t hack the heat once we start across the scrub?”

“They have to sell us,” Tigeth insisted petulantly. “It isn’t in their interests to—”

“They have to sell some of us, Mister Commerce. Enough of us to make it pay. Like I said before, you think a trawl skipper cares if he spills a few fish on the dock when he unloads?”

“How old are you, son?” someone asked curiously.

Gerin skinned an urchin grin in the gloom. “Fifteen. And contrary to what Mister Commerce there tells you, I can count above five. I count thirty-five coffles on this caravan, thirty-two head on each. That’s eleven hundred and twenty, less Barat, and you saw what happened to him. You think any one of us is worth the extra water or the wait while they coddle us along? This is march or die, people, and Hoiran gather in the hindmost. You’re not citizens anymore, you’re slaves. You fall down out there, they’ll maybe kick you a couple of times to see if you can get up again. But if you don’t…” He spread his hands in the manacles, shrugged. “They’re going to cut you loose and leave you to die right where you fell.”

“Maybe that’s true,” said the gaunt man slowly. “But maybe we just like to think it’ll happen to someone else. Hell, maybe it will happen to someone else. We’ve all made it this far.”

There was a murmur of agreement through the huddled figures on the chain. But as it died down, the gaunt man was gazing blankly southward, and he seemed unconvinced by his own argument.

“Never been in a desert,” he said to no one in particular. “Never seen that before.”

Someone else sneezed violently.

“I’ve seen march or die,” said another man seated farther away. Half his face was nightmarishly scarred, poorly healed burns so severe that even in the failing light you could see the puckered contours of the scar tissue as he moved his head. “In the war, on the retreat from Rajal. Kid’s right, that’s how it works. They left the wounded where they fell. Made us march right past them, you could hear them calling after us, pleading. Begging us not to leave them for the lizards. And we weren’t even slaves back then, we were still citizens, we were soldiers. ”

Tigeth made an exasperated noise. “It’s not the same, that was a war . It’s not the same thing at—”

“What’s the matter, big man?” The gaunt captive stared at Tigeth with open dislike. “You reckon some rich Yhelteth widow’s going to buy you for a scribe and butler just cuz you can read and write? Think you’ll be too good for minework or carrying a hod till you drop?”

“Nah, just too fucking fat for it,” someone jeered.

“Too fucking fat for a widow ’n’ all,” said someone else. “ ’Less she buys him for a cushion.”

General laughter, low and mean. Tigeth bristled.

“He isn’t going to be fat by the time we get there,” said the Rajal veteran quietly. “March like we got ahead of us, he’s going to be just as burned down and blistered and broken as everybody else. If he makes it at all.”

Quiet welled up in the wake of the words. The captives looked at one another as the message sank in. Most of them had doubtless seen some casual brutality since they were arrested and sold; maybe a few of the younger and prettier among them had suffered—like Gerin—the same inevitable dungeon rapes as the women who now marched on separate coffles. But by and large these men had not yet had to face the idea they might die.

Faint, feverish chills moved along Gerin’s spine as he realized that up until now, neither had he. In all his twisting and scheming to get out of this, he’d envisaged a lot of bad outcomes, but none involved his own extinction. He’d foreseen various brutalities, improvising off those he’d witnessed himself in the past or had heard in campfire tales. He’d relived the memories of his rape in the debt cells, imagined that it might well happen to him again who knew how many times. He’d even brooded briefly, and unable to repress his shudders, on the chances of castration, which they said wasn’t uncommon for male slaves in the Yhelteth trade.

But he’d never once imagined his life might end. Never really believed he might be the one cut loose and abandoned, begging and babbling as the coffles trooped on into the desert glare. Never thought it could be him , Gerin Trickfinger, fifteen years old, life barely begun, lying there too weak to move, too weak for anything but husked prayers to the Dark Court, Hoiran or Dakovash, Kwelgrish or Horchalat, Firfirdar or fucking anyone who might be listening out there, entreaties bargaining down like a roped and filled bucket let slip through weary fingers and back down the well, hope failing; prayers to be rescued, then prayers simply to be found, albeit by more slavers or bandits; finally the simple plea that thirst and heat might kill him before he felt the first darting, tentative tugs at his flesh, as the scavengers circled his twitching body and the vultures spiraled down to take his eyes…

He shivered—this fucking cold—and stared miserably around at his fellow captives. The gaunt man looked across at the Rajal veteran.

“You, scar-face. You think you’ll make it?”

The veteran grimaced. Against the scarring, it wasn’t a pretty sight. Gerin thought of tusked and fanged statues he’d seen in the candlelit shadows of the temple to Hoiran at Trelayne’s southern gate. And they said that dark spirits were drawn to malformed and mutilated flesh. His father had once told him…

The scarred man shrugged.

“Probably would, yeah. But you got to think like that. It’s all over if you don’t.”

“Right.”

“Look,” said Gerin, desperate to shrug off the shiver of his own sudden fear. “I’m not saying most of us won’t survive. That’s not the point.”

The veteran’s ravaged features turned, fixed on him. With the onset of night, the long gleaming scimitar edge of the band could now be seen clearly, slicing out of the clouds overhead, spilling a soft, uneven light on whatever the Dark Court deemed it appropriate to touch. Some of that light seemed to catch and gleam in the man’s eye as he looked at Gerin.

“What is the point, then?” he asked softly.

It felt oddly like staging, like one of the tricked-up little pieces of street drama he helped set off down at Strov to pull in an audience or milk passersby for sympathy. As if there was a correct, fixed answer to this. Gerin, having no idea what that might be, looked around at his fellow captives and their stares.

He cleared his throat.

“We’re none of us used to desert heat,” he said. “And half of us are already coming down with the fucking snots and sneezes. We’re going to be sick and stumbling tired. We get a few days into the scrublands on the rations they’re feeding us, doesn’t matter who survives, who doesn’t, none of us is going to be in any fit state to make any kind of escape. This is our last chance for that.”

“Escape?” Tigeth snorted phlegmily. “You stupid fucking—”

And the Rajal survivor cuffed him savagely across the head. Tigeth yelped and fell over sideways with the force of the blow. He opened his mouth to say something more but the veteran stared him down and Tigeth thought better of it. Then the scarred man’s gaze swung back to Gerin again. He opened one chained hand in invitation.