Mercedes Lackey: Joust

The hot wind out of the desert withered everything in its path—including anyone so foolish as to be out in the sun at midday. It carried reddish dust and sand on its wings, and used both to scour whatever it did not wither.

It did not howl, for it had no need to howl and rage for its power to be felt. It only needed to be what it was: relentless, inescapable, implacable, and ceaseless. This was the dry season, the season when the wind called kamiseen was king. It swept out of the sea of sand, bearing with it the furnace heat that drove man and beast into shelter if they were wise, and sucked the moisture and life out of everything. The earth was baked as hard as bricks, as hot beneath a bare foot as the inside of an oven. Add to that the hammer of the sun, which joined with the kamiseen in a conspiracy to dry up all life; nothing moved during the kamiseen at midday, not even slaves.

Except serfs, like Vetch. Altan serfs, the spoils of war, who were less valuable than slaves.

Little Vetch hunched his shoulders against the pitiless glare of the sun above him, and licked lips gone dry and cracked in the heat, as dry and cracked as the earth under his feet.

The walls of his master's compound offered some protection from the wind, but none from the sun. To his left, the back wall of tan mud brick around Khefti-the-Fat's workshop and house cast no shade at all on the path upon which he trudged. To his right, lower walls of the same material surrounded his master's tala field.

Calling it a "field," however, was something of an exaggeration. It could not have held more than five hundred tala plants, a single green oasis in the sand and baked earth, all of them heavy with unripe berries. It was here, only a few steps from the village where Khefti had his workshop, for two reasons. The first was that tala had to be irrigated during the dry season if it was to bear any amount of fruit at all. The second was that Khefti would never have let anything as valuable as a tala plant grow where he could not put his eye upon it on a regular basis. Vetch was fairly certain that Khefti counted the berries themselves twice daily. Fortunately, the husbandry of the precious tala was not his concern, for Khefti would never have entrusted anything so important to a serf. He was not even allowed to set foot inside the enclosure.

Vetch kept his head bent down as he heaved his heavy leather water bucket along. His arms and shoulders ached and burned with fatigue, and his stomach with hunger; his eyes stung with the sweat that dripped and the dust that blew into them, his mouth was dry, full of kamiseen grit, yet he dared not take a mouthful of the water in his bucket or use it to wash the sand from his eyes. That water was for the tala plants, not to quench the burning thirst of a mere serf.

He kept his eyes fastened on the hard-packed, sandy clay of the path under his dirty, bare feet. This was not because he was afraid to look up, and possibly incur the wrath of any freeborn Tian who might happen by for showing "insolence." He was watching for a particular little spot on the path that led from Khefti-the-Fat's well inside his compound, to the cistern that irrigated his tala field. This spot was marked only by the fact that the soil there was a slightly different color than the rest.

He wanted so badly to put the bucket down; the rope handle cut into his hands cruelly. It was all that kept him going, knowing that spot was there, marked by the dirt he'd dug up and replaced last night.

Ah. There it was. He fastened his gaze on it, and labored toward it, trying not to pant, which would only dry his mouth further.

Vetch made no outward sign that he had noted the place, for the last thing he wanted anyone to think was that there was anything unusual about the spot. He couldn't have sped up if he'd had to. The water bucket that had been tossed at him by his master this morning was unwieldy, and quite full. If he wasn't careful, most of what was in it would slosh out before he got to the cistern.

The bucket was far too big and heavy when full for someone as small as he was to carry easily. Not that he had a choice. Serfs made do with the tools they were given, and kept silent about any complaints they might have in the presence of their masters, or they suffered whatever consequences the master chose to mete out. A man might hesitate to scar a slave who had cost him money to buy, and might earn him more money when sold. He would have no such compunctions about a serf, who only cost him money in the housing and feeding, who could not be sold unless the land to which the serf was attached was sold also. How many times had Khefti told Vetch that? "You're of cursed little use to me alive, insect!" he would say. "Your death would mean nothing, except that I need not waste my bread in the mouth of one so useless as you!" He sometimes wondered why Khefti kept him alive at all, except that Khefti-the-Fat was so grasping that he never willingly let go of anything he owned, no matter how useless or worn out it was. Every scrap, every bone, even the ashes from his fires were used until there was nothing left. So that was probably it; Khefti was determined to use Vetch up, as he did everything else.

There were laws regarding the treatment of slaves. There were no such laws protecting serfs, for serfs were Altan, and the enemy: spoils of war, prisoners of war.

Even when they were only little boys.

And in Vetch's case, very little boys indeed.

He had never been big, but now he hardly seemed to grow anymore, on the poor fare that Khefti-the-Fat allotted him. A weedy little boy he was, named for a weedy little plant the Tians judged not even fit for fodder. Not fit for anything, as his master would say. And never mind that it was Altan custom to give their boy children unpleasant names while they were young to mislead the night-walking ghosts into thinking they were worthless rather than snatching them up in the darkness. "Vetch" he was on the Tian inventory rolls, and "Vetch" he would now remain for as long as he lived. And properly named, too, according to Khefti-the-Fat.

"What have you done to earn your bread?" the master would say, his fat belly shaking with rage, his pendulous jowls trembling, as he delivered another blow to a back already scarred. "You steal from me, you are a thief, who takes my food and gives me nothing in return!" This was usually right after Vetch had attempted and failed at some task, and Khefti was beating him to teach him to do better.

This was, often as not, some chore that should have been given to a man, or at least, a larger boy—but that was never an excuse for failure, and took not so much as a single stripe from Vetch's chastisement.

Teach with the rod, for stripes improve the memory, said one proverb, A boy's ears are on his back, he hears better when beaten ran another. These were Khefti's mottoes, and he lived by them. He even beat his apprentices just as much as the law and their parents permitted, though them, he dared not starve. But he saved the heaviest punishments for Vetch.

Vetch deviated from the center of the path just a little, and shortened his steps so that he was able to come down—hard—on the off-color spot.

Upon Khefti-the-Fat, every misfortune will fall. My sandal to grind his head into the dust, he chanted to himself, just as he had chanted over the finger-long abshati figure he'd made out of river clay yesterday in the image of his master. My foot to break his back. The thorns of the acacia to pierce his belly, and the food turn to thistle in his mouth. Cursing a master was a thing absolutely forbidden; if he were caught doing so, any beating he'd had before this would seem as nothing. He knew that, but if he could not curse Khefti, there would be nothing in his life worth getting up for in the morning.