Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

Curse him crown

Bolodo Man live in love

gold fine gold

Bolodo Man live in love

pearl and emarald.

Parnalee stood on his cot, straining his restraints, hunched over, slapping his shovel hands against his massive thighs, his burring basso waking echoes until his words got lost in them.

Thump them, dump them

Down among the dead men

Ekkeri akkari oocar ran

Down among the dead men

Bolo Bolo B’lodo Man

Down among the dead men

Blood and bone, heart and stone

Down among the dead men

Fillary fallary hickery pen

Down among the dead men

Blackery luggary lammarie

Eat the brain, the bod dy

Gut and liver, black kid ney

Rowan rumen mystery

Down among the dead men

The Curse Song went on and on, the transportees taking turns at soloing, their curses growing more extravagant, more surreal as each dipped into his or her culture to surpass the contribution of the last. The rest belted out the refrain until the hold rocked with it. Round and round, Churri playing variations on his verses, the Omperiannas adding flourishes, round and round until, finally, the transportees collapsed in exhaustion and laughter and fell into extravagant speculation about where Bolodo was going to dump them.

“Yo, I remember you. May’s Ass.”

“Aslan.”

Abruptly realizing what he’d said, Jaunniko went bright red, so red his ears and the tip of his long nose were nearly purple. “Ah,” he said. “Thing is,” he said, “May sort of went round saying you had the neatest ah um derriere he uh… He turned even redder. “The time we met,” he went on hastily, “it was at a party, you probably don’t remember me, you brought your mother along and that wasn’t being too successful, I talked to her a while, she was bored out of her skull, one icy lady…” He sneaked a look at her. Her expression must have been rather daunting, because he stopped talking altogether.

After she calmed down, she took pity on him and changed the subject. “How’d Bolodo get you?”

He stretched out on his cot, crossed his ankles, laced his fingers over his flat stomach. “I’d just got my papers. Junior Master. May found me a commission, he’s good about that, you know, Jeengid in the Blade, the Keex of Jelkim. I was one of about fifty she hired, she liked my part of the piece well enough to give me a little bonus, I was feeling whoooo no pain when this stringman came on to me. Woke up in a Bolodo scout tied down and sick as a… well, sick.”

“Any idea where we’re going?”

“None. Except we aren’t coming back from it.”

“So Xalloor thinks. I expect you’re right.

1. Still two+ years till Aslan’s Mama meets Quale/ four months after she woke in the belly of the transport/the voyage is finished.

Lake Golga/Gilisim Gililin/Imperator’s Palace/ afternoon.

The Bolodo transport decanted Aslan and the others on Tairanna four months after it collected them at the Weersyll substation. Smallish dark men with cold eyes supervised their transfer. Others of the same type loaded their gear on carts pulled by stocky stolid beasts with horns like half smiles curving up and away from round twitchy ears.

Aslan stepped onto the ground, braced herself to endure the extra weight and found a moment of quiet while their new guards prodded them into line. They’d been stuffed with the local language and a sketchy outline of local customs so they had no trouble understanding the terse commands. Despite the circumstances she was momentarily happy. There was an infinity of possibility stretching out before her, new worlds always did that to her. She stood docilely where the guards put her, sniffing at the wind that whipped around the base of the transport, sampling the smells it brought to her. Fish and rotting flesh, dung and mud and the sharp green bite of trampled grass, the dank musky odor of the beasts, the subtler odors of cart woods and working metal, over all this the faint burnt-cabbage stink of the men. That wind wailed and whined; the carts rattled; her fellow slaves snapped irritably when impatient guards shoved at them, barking guttural monosyllabic orders; behind her the drones servicing the ship clanked and hissed; overhead, racy white birds circled in flittering flocks, their eerie cries a most proper accompaniment to the debarking of slaves into the land of their servitude. The extravagance of word and image made her laugh. Xalloor looked a question, flinched from a guard’s goosing prod (an elastic grayish cane a meter long) and in her indignation forgot what she was going to ask. Aslan sighed and started walking as the guards marched them toward the towered city a kilometer or so away. Nothing to laugh about. She had no control over her life; whatever happened to her depended on persons and events she had no way of manipulating, not now, not until she had sufficient grasp of local verities to do some planning. Her first flush of interest and excitement quickly wore off; she was a slave here, not a scholar. She rubbed at her lower back. Though the gravity of this world was uncomfortable rather than unbearable, she was already feeling fatigue and fatigue made her depressed, diminished her ability to deal with her problems.

She risked a look over her shoulder, winced as a guard stung her with his prod. There were other ships down on the pad, three of them. Cargo transports. Insystem ships. Not good. Apparently the only way home was through Bolodo. She clung to a faint hope that her mother would be able to find her because there wasn’t much else to keep her from the black despair that sometimes overcame her; she couldn’t afford that now, it sapped her will worse than any gravity-induced fatigue. Once the Bolodo transport left… she scowled at the rutted track… if she could organize some sort of group… she was enough of a pilot to get them back to busier starlanes… we can’t be the only shipment of slaves to this place, the guards are too casual, we’re nothing special… why not take the ship, security was lax, it was obvious the Bolodo crew weren’t worrying about their cargo turning on them… surprise them… if I can get the right people… weapons… we’ll need weapons of some kind. She strained to get a look at the guard without letting him see what she was doing… the prods… knife in an external bootsheath… some sort of pistol in a leather holster clipped to his belt… what kind? Depends on the technology here; I doubt if Bolodo is supplying weapons… self-interest would say no… I don’t know… What is the level of technology here? Hard to estimate. Nothing from Bolodo on that and what she saw around her was ambiguous. The carts had shock absorbers, bearings in the wheels and pneumatic tires, but they were pulled by beasts and the road itself was little more than ruts and mud, no sophisticated land traffic here despite the landing field and the size of the city ahead of them.

They were led round the edge of the city, past walls about twice manhigh, pierced at intervals by pointed archways where Aslan could look down narrow crooked lanes meant for walkers not wheels, lanes paved in carved and painted stones, the simple repeating design echoing the pattern of bright, glazed tessera set into the cream-colored bricks of the walls. Her steps slowed as she tried to see more, fascinated and frustrated by the tantalizing glimpses she got into the life of this world; one of the guards laid his prod across her shoulders, reminding her once again that she wasn’t here to study-though why she was here…