Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

Stowe snorted. "I could wear out my whip arm and they'd still be slipshod. I expect better from you, and by Christ I'll get it." His arm went back, then forward, fast as a striking snake. The whip cracked less than a foot from Jeremiah's eye. He flinched. He could not help it. "The next one you'll feel," the overseer promised. He paused to let the message sink in, then moved on to keep the sims busy.

Jeremiah had a shirt of dark green silk. He mostly wore it for show, when his master was entertaining guests. He had never noticed it was the exact color of hemp leaves.

Now he did, and told himself he would never put it on again.

The day seemed endless. Jeremiah did not dare look at his hands. He did know that, when he shifted them on the handle of the sickle, he saw red-brown stains on the gray, smooth wood.

Craach! "God damn you, Jeremiah, I told you what I wantedl" Stowe shouted. The slave screamed at the hot touch of whip on his back.

"Oh, stop your whining," the overseer said. "I've not even marked you, past a bruise. You keep provoking me, though, and I'll give you stripes you'll wear the rest of your life."

Several sims watched the byplay, taking advantage of Stowe's preoccupation to rest from their labor. Work more, work better, one signed at Jeremiah. Its wide, stupid grin was infuriatingly smug.

"Go to the devil," Jeremiah muttered. For once, he hoped sims had souls, so they could spend eternity roasting in hellfire.

He thought the day would never end, but at last the sun set.

"Enough!" Stowe shouted. This time Jeremiah had no trouble understanding the sims' whoops. He felt like adding some himself.

Stowe collected the tools, counting them as carefully as he had in the morning to make sure none was missing. His chilly gaze swung toward Jeremiah, "I'l see you tomorrow come sunrise. Now that you know what to do, I won't have to go easy on you anymore." The whip twitched in his hand, ever so slightly.

"No, sir, Mr. Stowe, you surely won't," Jeremiah said.

The overseer nodded, for once satisfied.

Jeremiah had been afraid he would have to sleep in the sim barracks, but Stowe did not object when he went back to his room in the big house.

Probably hadn't thought of it the slave decided. He stopped at the kitchen for leftovers from the meal Jane Gil en had cooked. They were better than what the sims ate, but not much. His lip curled; he had forgotten more about cooking than Mrs. Gil en knew.

His hands felt as if they were on fire. He could not ignore them any more. There was a crock of lard in the kitchen. He rubbed it into both palms. The fat soothed the raw, broken skin.

Jeremiah went to his room. His back twinged again when he took off his shirt. Stowe knew exactly what he was doing with a lash, though; he had not drawn blood. But Jeremiah remembered the overseer's warning. His aching muscles contracted involuntarily, as if anticipating a blow that was sure to come.

Looking back, Jeremiah thought that unwilled, mortifying twinge was what made him do what he did next. "I don't care how white he is, he ain't gonna get the chance to whip me again," he said out loud.

He put his shirt back on took out the pouch with his hard-saved sesters and denaires opened the door, stepped into the hallway, shut the door behind him.

He could have gone back with no one the wiser, but from that moment on he was irrevocably a runaway in his own mind. Being one, he stopped in the kitchen again, to steal a carving knife. He had held that blade in his hand a hundred times with the Gillens or their children close by, and never thought of lifting it against them. "No more," he whispered.

"No more."

And yet, as he left the dark and quiet house, he had trouble fighting the paralyzing tide of fear that rose inside him. He had his place here, his known duties and expectations. His master had let him earn the money he was carrying just so he could buy his freedom one day.

He turned back. His hand was on the doorknob when the pain that light touch brought returned him to his purpose.

How was it real y his place, he wondered, if Gil en could take it from him whenever he chose?

The question had no answer. He walked down the wooden steps and into the night.

Eleven days later, he came down the West Norfolk Road into Portsmouth.

He was ragged and dirty and thin and tired; only on the last day had he dared actually travel the highway. Before that, fearing dogs and hunters on his track, he had gone by winding, back-country paths and through the woods.

Those held terrors of their own. Spearfangs had been hunted almost to extinction in Virginia years ago. Almost, however, was the operative word; Jeremiah had spent an uncomfortable night in a tree because of a thunderous coughing roar that erupted from the undergrowth a few hundred yards to his left.

He also had an encounter with a wild sim. It was hard to say which of the two got a worse fright from it. In the old days, Jeremiah had heard, sims would hunt down and eat any humans they could catch. But now, brought low by gunpowder and by man's greater native wit, the wild sims were only skulking pests in the land they had once roamed freely. And when this one saw the knife Jeremiah jerked out, it hooted and ran before it had a chance to hear his teeth chattering.

After those adventures and a couple of more like them, he wished he had taken his chances on hounds and trackers. With them, at least, he knew what to expect.

Portsmouth was the biggest town he had ever seen, ever imagined.

By the bay, masts of merchantmen and naval vessels made a bare-branched forest against the sky. The gilded dome of the commonwealth capitol dominated the skyhne. Jeremiah did not know that was what it was. He only knew it was grand and beautiful.

People of every sort swarmed through the streets, paying no attention to one more newly arrived, none-too-clean black man. Even the four sims bearing a rich trader's sedan chair looked down their broad, flat noses at him. And no wonder, he thought. Charles Gillen was a long way from poor, but he did not own a suit of clothes half so fine as the matched outfits of silk and satin the sims were wearing.

Jeremiah blessed the half-thought-out notion that had brought him to the city. Among these thousands how could anyone hope to find one person in particulari His confidence took a jolt, though, when he passed a cabin whose sign declared: "JASON BROS: RUNAWAY SIMS AND NIGGERS

CATCHED." The picture below showed a sim treed by hounds with improbably sharp teeth and red mouths. Jeremiah shuddered and hurried on.

Before long, his grumbling stomach forced him to face another problem.

On the road, he had raided fruit trees and stolen a couple of chickens, eking them out with fruits and berries. He did not think he could get away with that kind of provisioning for long in Portsmouth.

Food was harder to get at and thieves more likely to be hunted down.

He could eat for a while on the money he had with him, but he would have to find work if he did not want to deplete it. The twenty sesters he paid for a bad breakfast only reinforced the truth of that.

Here he would not have turned down the kind of hard manual labor that had made him run away in the first place. He would have been doing it for himself, of his own free will, and he reasoned that employers who wanted only strong backs would ask few questions.

But no such hauling or digging or carrying jobs were to he had: sims did them all, for no more wages than their keep. "You must be just off the farm, to think you can get that kind of work and get paid for it," a straw boss said. - Jeremiah's heart leaped into his mouth, but the man went on, "If you have a skilled trade, now, like carpenter or mason, I can use you.

How about it?"

Jeremiah had used saw and chisel and plane often enough on the Gillen estate, but he said, "Sorry, sir, no," and left in a hurry. The straw boss's chance reference to real status, even if nothing was behind it, made him too nervous to stay. He wandered aimlessly through Portsmouth for a while, marvelling at the number of buildings that would have dwarfed the Gillen house, till then the grandest he had known. One imposing marble structure near the capitol had an inscription over the columned entrance way. It was in large, clear letters, but even when he spel ed it out twice it made no sense: EIAT IUSTITIA FT RUANT COELI. He shrugged and gave it up.