Bristling Wood (51 page)

Over the weeks that followed, he dredged up a few bits of memory from his past, and he’d woven them into a story that defined what he knew of his self. Now he had a bit more to add.

“I am Taliaesyn of Pyrdon, a merchant’s son once, now a slave—but a valuable slave, mind. They tell me I ran up gambling debts here in Bardek. I remember that Deverry law can’t save a free man when he’s this far from home, so I was arrested and sold to pay the debts. I must be the son of an important merchant; why else would a Deverry man be in Bardek?”

For a moment he considered the question, came up with no answer, and dismissed it. He had three actual memories to fit into the story. The first, of course, was his old tutor in the Bardek tongue, a memory that fit smoothly into the tale. The other two, however, were difficult and troubling. First, there was the beautiful blond lass. Now, although it was logical enough that a merchant’s son would have a wife or mistress (because in the memory she was getting into bed with him), why was she taking off men’s clothing instead of a dress? The second memory made even less sense. He saw a man’s face and shoulders looming in what seemed to be smoke or heavy fog; the man was wearing chain mail and a pot helm, and blood sheeted down his face. With the image came the words: “the first man I ever killed.” Merchants’ sons, however, didn’t kill people—unless perhaps the victim was a bandit?

Taliaesyn smiled in relief. It would make sense if he’d been leading a caravan and that fellow had been a bandit, and as he thought it over, another memory stirred, mules braying in a crisp dawn. Of course. Of course! And if the lass were his wife, traveling with him? Why, it would be hard to ride in long dresses—why not wear men’s clothes? He felt a deep satisfaction at knitting the tale together at last.

Yet the satisfaction was only momentary, because he was always aware that his captors might be lying to him. Although their story was reasonable, and in line with the general knowledge he remembered about the world, he could confirm none of it. There was this business of it being so hard to think. At times, he could barely put two words together or remember a thing he’d been told not a minute before; at others, the whole world seemed strange, far away yet brightly colored, and his mind made odd jumps and lapses. As he thought about it, it occurred to him that he often felt that way after being fed. They were probably putting strange drugs in his food. He knew that somewhere in his mind was a reason for thinking that these people were the sort to drug their prisoners, even though he couldn’t quite put a mental finger on it. Over the past weeks he’d come to think of knowledge, which he’d always taken for granted before, in terms of a very involved metaphor, that each thing a man knew was like a water lily. Each blossom floated in the sun on top of the pool of his mind, but it was dependent upon its long stalk and roots underneath to connect it to the earth and to all the other lilies. He felt as though someone had swung a scythe through his mind, leaving only a few broken flowers to wither on top of the pond, cut off from any connection or possible meaning. Although the conceit was peculiar, it fit in a satisfying way. Something had sliced through his mind. He was certain of that.

In a few minutes he heard a small commotion on deck, and the ship rocked once as voices called out. Someone’s boarding, he thought. It occurred to him that he’d been on ships before, that he knew a certain amount about them, provided they were small ships, like a galley. He remembered, then, being on a war galley, standing near the carved prow and feeling the spray break over him. What was a merchant’s son doing on a war galley? He had no chance to examine that disturbing question any further, because someone threw back the hatch at the bow and light spilled into the hold.

The mute climbed down the ladder and made the gurgling sound in his throat that did him for a greeting. A bent and wizened black crab of a man, he’d had his tongue cut out many years before, or so Gwin had said, without adding why. Behind the mute came the man called Briddyn, with his oily hair and even slicker beard, and behind him a tall, dark brown Bardekian whom Taliaesyn had never seen before. Dressed in a fine white linen tunic with one red sleeve, the fellow carried a pair of wooden tablets, smeared with wax, and a bone stylus. As Briddyn gestured at various bales and crates, the other began jotting down figures and symbols on the wax. Customs officer, Taliaesyn thought.

The mute knelt down and unlocked the ankle chain. Taliaesyn’s relief at having it gone died abruptly when the old man handed him a collar and pointed at his neck. When Taliaesyn hesitated, Briddyn turned to him.

“Put it on. Right now.”

Taliaesyn buckled it round his neck and made no objection when the mute padlocked on the chain. Although he had trouble remembering the details, he knew that Briddyn had caused him pain—intense pain—once before. The not-quite-memory persisted as a gut-wrenching fear whenever Briddyn looked his way with his pale, lashless eyes. The customs officer cleared his throat, then asked a long question, of which Taliaesyn understood nothing.

“Yes.” Briddyn handed over a strip of the thin-beaten bark the Bardekians used instead of parchment. “Here.”

Nodding, lips pursed, the customs officer read it carefully, glancing Taliaesyn’s way every now and then.

“Expensive piece of goods,” he remarked.

“Barbarian slaves are rare these days.”

It was then that Taliaesyn realized that the officer had been examining his bill of sale. His cheeks burned as the shame overwhelmed him: here he was, a Deverrian and a free man, sold like a horse in a foreign land. Yet already Briddyn and the officer had turned their attention elsewhere. To them he was nothing but a routine transaction, worth neither pity nor mockery. When they were done in the hold, the mute led Taliaesyn up onto the deck after them. While Briddyn and the port officials haggled over duties and taxes, the prisoner got his first good look around him in weeks.

The harbor was a narrow inlet about half a mile wide, cut into tall cliffs of pale pink sandstone. Four long wooden piers jutted out from the shallow beach, where a jumble of shacks and sheds stood among beached fishing boats and palm trees. Up above on the cliff tops were what seemed to be more substantial buildings in the long rectangular Bardekian style.

“A city?” Taliaesyn said.

The mute nodded yes, and a nearby sailor glanced their way.

“Myleton. It’s called Myleton.”

Taliaesyn repeated the name and added it to his small store of facts. As he remembered, Myleton was on the island, Bardektinna, that had mistakenly given part of its name to the entire archipelago when Deverry men had first sailed its way. Shading his eyes with one hand, he studied what few of the cliff-top buildings he could see. One in particular interested him, an enormous wooden structure at least a hundred feet long and three stories high, its roof curved and swelling like the overturned hull of a ship. Standing next to it was a wooden statue, some forty feet tall, of a man with a bird on his shoulder.

“Temple?” Taliaesyn asked the sailor.

“Yes. Dalae-oh-contaemo. The albatross guide, the wave father.”

“Ah. So his temple is in the harbor.”

The sailor nodded. With a jerk of the chain, the mute led Taliaesyn away from the fellow as abruptly as if he were dangerous and made him stand near the gangplank. When Taliaesyn happened to glance over the side, he almost cried out. The blue-green water was alive with spirits, faces and hands and manes of hair that formed only to dissolve again, eyes that stared out at him from sun glints, voices that whispered in the foam, long thin fingers that pointed at him, then vanished. Instinctively he knew that he had to keep silent about them. When he glanced furtively around, it was plain that no one else had seen a thing. He felt smug, almost sly; in this, he was superior to his captors, that the Wildfolk knew and recognized him. He only wished that he could remember why. All at once, the deck was full of gnomes, tall blue fellows, brown fat ones, skinny green beings with frog faces and warty fingers, all clustering round in a comforting sort of way. They patted him, smiled at him, then vanished as suddenly as they’d come. He looked up to see Briddyn walking over, studying what seemed to be a bill of lading. Taliaesyn’s heart thudded, then settled when it was obvious that Briddyn hadn’t seen the Wildfolk—or could he even do so? Taliaesyn thought he might, but he couldn’t quite remember why.

“Well, that’s all in order,” Briddyn said to the mute. “Let’s take the slave to the market. No use feeding him any longer.”

The mute winked and grinned with a sly glance for the customs officer striding away down the pier. This gesture was the first confirmation Taliaesyn had for his hunch that something was wrong with these merchants. He was sure now that the bill of sale was not quite legal. Although he had the brief thought of calling to the officer, Briddyn was watching him again. The silver lizard clip in his beard winked in the strong sun.

“At times you remind me of a child,” Briddyn said in Deverrian. “I can read everything on your face. Do you remember what I did to you when I had you tied to the deck?”

“I don’t, truly, not in any detail.” Yet the fear made him swallow heavily and force every word through dry lips.

“It’s doubtless for the best that you don’t, lad. Let me warn you this. You’re a legal slave now. Do you understand what that means? If you try to escape, you’ll be hunted down, and they’ll catch you. No one in this demon-haunted country will life a finger to help a runaway slave. Once they catch you, they’ll kill you—but slowly, one small piece at a time. What I did to you was naught compared to the way an archon’s men treat rebellious slaves. I heard of one poor wretch that took two months to die. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

Briddyn smiled, the lashless eyes blinking once or twice in remembered pleasure. Taliaesyn winced and looked away. The memory was pushing closer and closer to the surface of his mind, a searing pain like fire, and all caused by the pressure of his tormentor’s fingers. When he shuddered, Briddyn laughed under his breath, such a self-satisfied sound that Taliaesyn felt his fear break like an old rope. No matter what pain it cost him, he would have to fight back, or he would never be a man again. He looked Briddyn squarely in the face.

“I’ll make you a promise. Someday I
will
escape, and when I do. I’ll come for you. Remember that: someday I’ll kill you for this.”

Briddyn laughed again, easily, openly.

“Shall we flog him for that?” he said to the mute, in Bardekian. “No, it would lower his price. Maybe I’ll take a minute to show him who’s master here, though.”

“No.” It was Gwin, stepping in between them. “You’ve done enough to someone who’s twice the man you are.”

Briddyn went dangerously calm, dangerously still, but Gwin stared him down.

“There’s no time, anyway. Take him and sell him, and be done with it.”

Muttering under his breath, Briddyn gestured at the mute, who jerked the chain so hard that Taliaesyn nearly stumbled, but under Gwin’s watchful eye he never jerked it that way again. As they went down the gangplank and across the beach, all of them stumbling a little in the soft sand, Taliaesyn was trying to remember how he’d earned Gwin’s respect, but no memories came. Switchbacking stairs, cut deep into the stone, brought them to the cliff top directly by the temple, but Taliaesyn had no time to inspect it. He got a general impression of a vast arched doorway, carved with rows of human figures and birds, before the mute growled at him and made him hurry on.

The city gates, lay directly across a wide road from the temple. As they went in, Taliaesyn’s first impression was that they were walking into a forest. Everywhere he looked he saw trees lining the wide, straight streets and covering them with a shady canopy of interlaced branches, or planted thick around every house and building. Although he recognized a palm tree here and there, most were varieties he’d never seen before: a shrubby kind with tiny red flowers in clumps; a tall thick-trunked tree with narrow, dust-colored leaves and a spicy scent; yet another with purple flowers as long as a man’s finger. Vines twined around the trees and threatened to take over the various wooden and marble statues he saw scattered in the small public squares or at the intersections of streets. Among the greenery stood the rectangular longhouses with their nautical roofs, some guarded by tall statues of the inhabitants’ ancestors; others, by pairs of what seemed to be wooden oars, but made large enough for a giant, standing crossed on end.

Sauntering down the streets or crossing from house to house was a constant flow of people, all dressed in tunics and sandals, men and women alike. The men, however, had brightly colored designs painted on one cheek, while the women wore broochlike oddments tucked into their elaborately curled and piled hair. He vaguely remembered that both ornament and paint identified the wearer’s “house” or clan.

What surprised Taliaesyn the most, however, were the children, running loose in packs down the streets, playing elaborate games in the public spaces and private gardens alike without anyone saying a cross word to them. They were also mostly naked, boys and girls alike wearing only bright-colored pieces of cloth wrapped around their hips. Watching them made him think that yes, he must be a foreigner here, because back in Deverry children would have been dressed just like their parents and working at their sides in the family craft shop or farm.

As they went along, the houses grew larger and stood farther apart. Some were isolated by high stucco walls, painted with pictures of animals and trees; others, by flowering hedges and vines. All at once they came between two blue walls and out into an open public square, as large as three Deverry tourney grounds. Shallow steps led down to a cobbled plaza, nearly deserted in the shimmering heat. An old man drowsed on a marble bench; three children chased each other around a marble fountain, where dolphins intertwined under splashing water.

“What is this?” Taliaesyn said, “A marketplace?”

“No,” Gwin said. “It’s the place of assembly, where the citizens come to vote.”