Guy Kay - Sailing to Sarantium

There was an extreme, disconcerted silence, then two of the soldiers laughed. "Go to sleep, Rhodian," one of them said. "With luck, your head will be working again in the morning. Better men than you have been knocked senseless or bested in a drinking bout by the tribune."

"Not too many've had both happen," the Soriyyan added. "All hail the Rhodian!" More laughter. The Soriyyan grinned, pleased with himself. They left, closing the door with a bang.

Kasia winced, then walked over and slid home the bolt. She heard the four of them pound, in sequence, on the merchant's door across, then their boots sounded on the stairs descending to the ground-floor sleeping room.

She hesitated, then walked back towards the bed, looking uncertainly at the man lying there. The firelight made unstable shadows in the room. A log settled with a snapping sound. Martinian opened his eyes. "I begin to wonder if I was meant for the theatre," he said, speaking in Sarantine and in his normal voice. "Two nights in succession I've had to do this. Have I a future in the pantomime, do you think?" Kasia blinked. "You aren't. drunk, my lord?" "Not especially." "But…?"

"Useful to let him best me in something. And Carullus can hold his wine. We might have been down there all night, and I need to sleep."

"Best you in something?" Kasia heard herself say, in a voice her mother and others in the village would have recognized. "He knocked you senseless and nearly broke your jaw."

"Trivial. Well, for him it was." Martinian rubbed absently at his bearded cheek. "He had a weapon, no great achievement. Kasia, they carried me here. And carried a servant who struck an army officer. I made them do that. He lost a lot of prestige, Carullus did. Decent-enough man, for an Imperial soldier. And I wanted to sleep." He lifted a booted foot and she wrestled the boot off and then did the same with the other.

"They said my father could drink most men down onto the tavern floor or off their couches at a banquet. Guess I inherited that from him," Martinian murmured vaguely, putting his tunic over his head. Kasia said nothing. Slaves did not ask questions. "He's dead," Martinian of Varena added. "On campaign against the Inicii. In Ferrieres." He wasn't entirely sober, she realized, whatever he might say. The drinking had gone on a long time. He was bare-chested now, had matted curls of dark red hair on his chest. She had seen that when she bathed him yesterday. "I'm.. Inici," she said, after a moment. "I know. So's Vargos. Odd, in a way."

"The tribes in Sauradia are… different from those who went west to Ferrieres. The ones who went are… wilder." "Wilder. I know. Why they went."

There was a silence. He pushed himself up on an elbow and looked around the room in the wavering light. "A fire," he said. "Good. Build it up, Kasia." He didn't call her Kitten. She went over quickly and knelt putting on another log, pushing at it with the stick.

"They didn't bring you a cot," he said from the other side of the room "They'll assume there's only one reason I bought you. I must tell you I was informed at great length downstairs that Inici girls, especially skinny ones, are evil-tempered and a waste of money. Is this true? Carullus did offer to spare me the duty of bedding you tonight while I was in pain. Nice of him, I thought. They should have put a cot in here."

Kasia stayed where she was, looking at the fire. It was difficult to sort out his tone sometimes. "I have your cloak to sleep on," she said finally. "Over here."

She busied herself sweeping ashes into the hearth. He probably did like boys, she decided. The pure-blooded Rhodians were said to be inclined that way, like Bassanids. It would make her nights easier.

"Kasia, where's home? Your home?" he said.

She swallowed abruptly. This was not what she'd expected.

She turned, still kneeling, to look at him. "North, my lord. Most of the way to Karch." He had finished undressing himself, she saw, and was under the blanket now, sitting up, arms around his knees. The firelight moved on the wall behind him.

"How were you captured? Or were you sold?"

She clasped her hands in her lap. "Sold," she said. "Last autumn. The plague took my father and brother. My mother had no choice."

"Not so," he said quickly. "There's always a choice. Sold her daughter off to feed herself? How civilized."

"No," Kasia said, clenching her fists. "She… we… talked about it. When the slave train came. It was me or my sister, or we'd all have died in the winter. You won't understand. There weren't enough men to do the fields or hunt, nothing had been harvested. They bought six girls from my village, with grain, and coins for the market town. There was a plague. That.. changes things."

"Oh, I know," he said softly. Then, after another silence, "Why you? Not your sister?"

She hadn't expected that, either. No one had asked these things. "My mother thought she was. more likely to marry. With nothing to offer but herself."

"And you thought?"

Kasia swallowed again. Behind the beard and in the dim, uneven light it was impossible to discern his expression.

"Why… how does this matter?" she dared to ask.

He sighed. "You're right. It doesn't. Do you want to go home?"

"What?"

"Your village. I'm going to free you, you know. I have not the least need for a girl in Sarantium, and after what… happened to us today I do not propose to tempt any gods at all by making a profit on you." A Rhodian voice, a firelit room. Night, the edge of winter. The world being remade.

He said, "I don't think that. whatever we saw today. spared your life to clean house or heat bath water on a fire for me. Not that I have any notion why it spared my life. So, do you want to go back to your… oh. Jad. Jad's blood. Stop that, woman!"

She tried, biting her lip, wiping with the sooty backs of her hands at her streaming face. But how did one not weep, confronted with this? Last night she had known she would be dead today.

"Kasia, I mean it. I will throw you downstairs and let Carullus's men take turns with you! I detest crying women!"

She didn't think he really did. She thought he was pretending to be angry and fierce. She wasn't sure of what else she thought. Sometimes things happened too quickly. How does the riven tree explain the lightning bolt?

The girl had fallen asleep, close to what remained of the fire's warmth. She was still in her tunic, wrapped in one cloak, pillowed on the other, under one of his blankets. He could have had her come into the bed, but the habit of sleeping alone since Ilandra died was entrenched by now, had become something mystical, talismanic. It was morbid and spirit-ridden, Crispin thought sleepily, but he wasn't about to try to break free of it this night with a slave girl bought for him the night before.

Though slave girl was unfair, really. She'd been as free as he was a year ago, a victim of the same plague summer that had smashed his own. There were, he thought, any number of ways a life could be ruined.

Linon would have declared him an imbecile for having the girl sleep by the fire, he knew. Linon wasn't here. He had laid her down on wet grass; by wet leaves in a forest this morning and walked away. Remember me.

What happens to an unhoused soul when a body and its heart are sacrificed to a god? Did Zoticus know the answer to that? What happens to" the soul when the god comes to claim it, after all? Could an alchemist know? He had a difficult letter to write. Tell him goodbye.

A shutter was banging along the wall. Windy tonight; would be cold on the road tomorrow. The girl was coming east with him. It seemed, both of these Inicii were. So odd, really, the circles and patterns one's life made. Or seemed to make. Patterns men tried to impose on their lives, for the comforting illusion of order?