Master Of The Hashomi

Chapter 12

A million people lived in Dahaura and it seemed to Blade that all of them were out in the streets at once. The caravan advanced one step, almost one inch at a time, down a wide street that was packed from curb to curb with other animals, men, women, and children, carts, wagons, and ornate carriages.

The air was thick enough to slice with the smells of animals, unwashed human beings, overripe fruit, herbs and spices, perfumes, and charcoal smoke from the braziers of the craftsmen in the little alleys opening off either side of the street.

Now traffic came to a complete halt as two wagons ahead locked wheels. One driver tried to jerk his vehicle free. The sacks piled high on the other wagon toppled into the first one. Several burst and showered the driver with yellow grain. The drivers cursed each other, everyone they were holding up cursed them, their oxen lowed angrily and tried to butt at each other. Eventually both drivers had the sense to back up, and the traffic untangled itself.

Blade saw similar scenes three more times before a massive gray-brown building loomed up at the end of the street. It had «prison» written all over it even without the armed guards at each gate and on the roof.

The caravan stopped briefly at the main gate of the prison and Blade was ordered to dismount. More of the barechested, blue-necklaced infantry of the Baran ran out to surround him.

«Dangerous?» one of them asked, pointing at Blade.

The caravan leader shrugged. «The Desert Riders took him alive, and he didn't give us much trouble either. Tries to talk out of turn, but that's about all.»

«Right,» said the soldier. He raised a spiked truncheon and prodded Blade in the buttocks with it hard enough to draw blood. «Come on, you. And remember the Law of Silence.»

By now Blade knew better than to do anything but obey. The guards hustled him off, and an iron-barred gate clanged shut behind them. A ramp paved with worn flagstones sloped down into the foundations of the prison. Blade's guards half-led, half-pushed him down it, and after another few steps the sunlight was gone.

How many prisoners had been hustled down this ramp, to wear the flagstones down? Blade wondered. He also wondered how many of the prisoners had ever seen the sunlight again.

The prison chamber for the male slaves was a stone-walled and stone-floored pit a hundred feet on a side. A narrow ledge ran around all four sides, where the guards walked. At one end was a solid iron door.

It was impossible to keep track of time there. Blade could find no routine in the meals, in the filling of the water buckets, or in anything else. The prisoners came and went quickly, and most of them were numb and apathetic.

The guards were efficient, alert, hard-working, and often brutal. The rule of silence for slaves was strictly enforced, with long iron-tipped whips. Blade saw one of those whips take out a man's eyes when he tried to complain about some totally spoiled food. Blade kept very much to himself, and endured in grim silence the crowding, the smells, the wretched food and scummy water, the lice and rats, and the screams and whimperings of his fellow prisoners.

A few of those prisoners resented Blade's aloofness, and perhaps also the obvious good health that gave him a chance of being sold into some service where he might hope to survive. The first man who let his resentment of Blade go too far got a broken wrist, the second got a sprained ankle and a knock on the head. After that the other prisoners let Blade alone. None of them wanted to risk serious injury at the hands of this silent, scarred giant. Slaves with crippling injuries were often slain outright, or sent to the salt flats at the mouth of the Da, a slower but equally certain death.

Time seemed to stretch endlessly onward, one hour hardly distinguishable from another. Blade began to wonder how long he'd be in this prison. He could endure filth and lice, but not the loss of all sense of time. Disorientation and perhaps apathy would follow, sooner or later. They would not kill him, not even in the prison, but they might leave him slowed down when he left the prison. That could be fatal.

Blade used every technique he'd ever learned to keep his mind and body in condition. He succeeded. He also succeeded in convincing his fellow prisoners that he was quite mad, and making them avoid him even more carefully than before.

At last a day came, when a guard cracked a whip at Blade and shouted, «You! The big desert man! Up and out of here!» The iron-weighted tip of the whip snapped just over Blade's head as he scrambled up the wall of the pit. For the moment he didn't care where he was going or what awaited him there. He only cared that he was getting out of the damned prison!

The guards scrubbed Blade with soap whose smell alone would have killed any germs or vermin. They shaved off every bit of his hair except his eyebrows, and oiled him from head to foot until he looked and felt more like a greased pig than a human being. Finally they gave him a meal-bread, porridge, boiled salt meat, beer-all be could eat and drink. One meal couldn't put back on Blade's bones the twenty pounds he'd lost in prison, but it gave him strength and peace of mind.

He slept well that night, alone in an almost-clean cell, and in the morning they led him out onto the auction block.

Blade had been a slave in a good many different Dimensions, but this was the first time he'd actually been put up on the open market. He couldn't help wondering what his market price would be. Doubtless that would depend on what he was being sold for. That was more than interesting-it could make the difference between life and death.

One of the guards prodded him in the back with a truncheon. Blade noticed that the young woman who'd been sitting on the bench beside him was gone. «On your feet, big boy!» grunted the man. «You're next.»

Blade rose awkwardly to his feet and shuffled to the foot of brick stairs that led up on to the block. His wrists and ankles were chained. At the top of the stairs was a square doorway that showed a patch of eye-searing blue sky. From beyond the doorway Blade could hear the brisk patter of the auctioneer, voices raised to bid, an occasional clink of chain as the girl moved, and a background murmur from the crowd. It seemed to take a lot of talking for the auctioneer to get each bid-apparently it was a slow day. Blade heard the bidding on the girl creep up to fifty mahari, make a single jump to sixty, then stay there. Finally the auctioneer's voice barked:

«Sold to [a barely pronounceable name whose spelling Blade couldn't imagine] for sixty mahari.»

The guard prodded Blade with the spike of his truncheon. One of these days, Blade decided, he was going to take one of those truncheons away from a guard and give it back as painfully as possible. Then he rose to his feet and climbed the stairs to the block.

The first blaze of sunlight dazzled him for a moment. When his eyes adjusted, he found himself standing on a wooden platform, at one end of a large square paved with filthy brown flagstones. Brick walls rose on either side of the square, trapping the heat of the day, seeming to bounce all of it toward the auction block. Blade felt sweat breaking out at once, and the auctioneer looked as if he'd been fished out of a river. His long robe was almost black with filth and sweat.

Scattered across the square were at least two hundred people, some standing, some sitting on cushions or rugs, a few lucky ones sitting on donkeys or under canopies held over them by household slaves. Blade smelled beer, fruit, and smoke from carved ivory pipes, and read weariness, heat, and boredom on all the faces.

The auctioneer waved his ivory baton at Blade. «Honored sirs, I offer this man-strong, fit, in the prime of life, suitable for any task.» He prodded Blade's shoulder muscles and biceps. «Taken by the Riders under the Forbidden Desert Edict of our noble Baran, he is unwounded, well-fed, ready to train. Imagine this matchless physical specimen bearing your chairs, shifting the burdens of your household, standing guard over your valuables. Consider-«

«Consider how long we've been sitting out here!» shouted someone. «Get to the point! How much?»

«Honored sirs, I beg you to consider the many uses to which, a man of such size and strength may be put. I beg you to-«

«How much, you pissing jackass?» roared another voice, louder and angrier than the first one.

The auctioneer's face turned noticeably paler. «A hundred and ten mahari,» he gasped.

Several people growled angrily, and others turned away and began to drift toward the gate. «In the name of Junah, have mercy, honored sirs,» cried the auctioneer. «It is not my judgment of this man's worth that has set the price where it is. Nor is it my place to question the judgment of the Baran's officers.» The growls died away into silence, but the drift toward the gate continued.

The auctioneer's face turned still paler, and he looked as if he was about to get down on his knees and beg the crowd to put in a bid. «Honored sirs, I am at a loss-«

«Oh, send him back down and bring on another girl,» someone snapped. «A hundred and ten mahari for that wild bull? And him not even trimmed? You think anyone'd want something like that in his house, or within a mile of his women?» There was a growl of agreement.

Blade realized that the size and physical condition he'd expected to be an asset were turning out to be almost a liability. His best chance now was being sold for manual labor, but anyone who had a hundred and ten mahari to spend on workers coud buy three of them for that price. It looked as if he might be going back to prison, or else facing the trimming knives of the surgeons.

«Ho, auctioneer!» One of the mounted men slipped down from the back of his donkey and pushed forward, a servant striding behind him. «I bid a hundred mahari, for the desert man.»

«Kubin, you-!» the auctioneer began, then bit off his words. He even managed to stop his hands from shaking before the approaching man reached the block.

Blade stared down at the man, and their eyes met. The man called Kubin was nearly as broad as Blade, though a head shorter. He wasn't fat, either. His bare arms and the chest revealed by his silk tunic were layered and ridged with muscle. In his sash Kubin carried a scimitar nearly large enough for one of the Hashomi, and his servant carried another. Blade noticed that the men nearest to Kubin were inching away or trying to look elsewhere.

The auctioneer tore his eyes away from Kubin and shouted, «Is there another bid? Another, honored sirs? Another bid than that of Kubin Ben Sarif? Another? What, no other? I call once.

«I call twice.

«I call three times-and the desert man is sold to Kubin Ben Sarif, for one hundred mahari!»

There was a collective sigh of relief from the crowd, almost loud enough to drown out the sigh of relief from the auctioneer. He bowed deeply to Kubin. «Is it your wish that the man be trimmed? For thirty mahari extra, the surgeons of the house will do it for you, and keep him until he recovers.»

«Or dies,» said Kubin. He looked Blade up and down, seeming to examine each muscle and tendon, each limb, each scar. Blade did his best to remain impassive under the man's inspection. Kubin Ben Sarif was not precisely the master he would have chosen. There was something about the man to make others fear him. Still, he was better than a return to prison, perhaps as an unsaleable slave destined for trimming or the living death of the salt flats.

Kubin's examination of Blade went on so long that the auctioneer began to fidget again. «Honored Kubin, it becomes difficult to spend any more time upon this man. There are other slaves to sell this day. Will you have him trimmed or not?»

Without moving a muscle, Blade got ready for action. If Kubin said yes, there was going to be blood all over this auction block in the next minute, and not all of it would be Blade's. There were enough soldiers in sight to make sure he wouldn't be getting out of here alive, but that wouldn't save the auctioneer, or Kubin.

Kubin's eyes rose again, and this time they met and held Blade's. Slave and free man stared hard at each other, then both looked away in the same moment. Slowly Kubin shook his head.

«No, I'll take him as he is.»