Star of Cursrah (3 page)

“Opp!” A comb flew in the air as Amber jumped. “Mother, you’ll give me a heart attack.”

“I’ll give you more than that. Where do you think you’re going?” Amber’s mother asked. She folded her arms like a queen, giving Amber an eerie preview of herself in middle age, since daughter resembled mother. Age had piled on a webwork of wrinkles, sagging breasts, and even wider hips from birthing a batch of brats, all features that made Amber resolve to never marry nor have children.

Too, Mother’s voice got shriller year by year. “Your father hunted for you all morning, and his language was something awful. Now I find you dressing like a tramp in the middle of the day—”

“I’m going out,” Amber interrupted. “Whisht!” Her command word sparked an oil lamp over her tall mirror. Daintily she wound her kaffiyeh over her hair. Her voice turned prim, a formality for their eternal arguments. “I’m embarking with friends on a holiday—”

“You are not! You’ve work to do, and I won’t have you gamboling through the streets like some painted houri with a common rug merchant’s son and a beggar. Our family has a reputation to uphold, and you will learn to comport yourself like a rafayam, an ‘exalted one,’ not some fishmonger’s daughter.”

Amber bit her tongue. This argument was so old it creaked. She flung open a carved sandalwood chest and withdrew a camel hide rucksack and rabbit-felt traveling cloak charmed to repel rain. She stuffed in a spare pair of horsehide sandals, silk socks clocked with red-eyed tigers, and a fat purse jingling with silver “worms” and electrum “wings,” her spending money. After a moment’s hesitation, she jammed a dog-eared Tales of Terror atop it all. Slinging her rucksack over her shoulder, she strode for the door.

“You can’t imagine,” her mother rattled on, “or else don’t care how the neighbors’ tongues clack, but I’m sick and tired of hearing Sarefa Zahrah maligning my tomboy daughter—are you listening? Where are you going?”

“I’ll be back in a week, maybe,” Amber answered, slipping out the door. She marched down the cool, windowed corridor, swinging her rump sassily to further aggravate her mother, who scampered after in soft slippers.

“Amber! You can’t go gallivanting around wherever and whenever you wish. You have duties! Obligations! Yuzas Iamar’s cousin is coming on a caravan, and her son is said to be comely and charming—”

Amber stopped so fast her mother skittered past and had to circle. The young woman announced, “I’m not meeting any snotty yuzas’s sister’s cousin’s son. I’m not getting married, nor settling down, and I don’t want to learn the family business, so I see no need to loll here plucking my eyebrows—”

“Won’t learn the family business?” Her mother’s mouth fell open. “You ungrateful harakh! You rebel! Six generations now we’ve traded in—”

“Slaves! I know,” Amber shouted, whirled, and pointed across the courtyard.

The family compound, called a khanduq, had begun life as an ancient frontier caravanserai along the northern coast road to Myratma. Solid as a fort, it boasted walls of mud brick and stone eight feet thick, a triply defended portcullis, a high archway, and four minarets at each corner. Former soldiers’ barracks had been converted into slave pens without roofs that could be watched from a sheltered wallwalk. Even now, Amber saw through an open iron door her brothers and a sister wrestling a slave to the ground to sear her thigh with a cherry-red branding iron. The slave’s shriek echoed off the walls and made a horse kick in the stable.

“There,” Amber spat. “A proud family tradition! Well, I’ve tried it. I’ve wrestled slaves, drugged them, tattooed them, whipped them into submission, yoked them for market—and decided that I don’t like it!”

“This ‘business’ you despise”—Mother’s tongue dripped acid—”puts food on the table and bread in your mouth, which has been running all too freely lately. Many fine families in Calimshan move cargo—”

“Slaves, mother. They’re people!”

“People with bad luck, forejudged by the gods.” Mother’s hand waved the objection away. “See here, little princess. Without trafficking, we’d be nothing but—”

“Pirates? Bootleggers? Assassins? Housebreakers? Why can’t we pursue a peaceful pastime? Why must we live like jackals, sneaking up behind people and cracking their skulls? ‘Slavery walks Oppression’s Road.’ You may live by oppressing others, but I shan’t. I plan to pursue some other career, something—something—”

“Oh, surely,” Mother cut in, rolling her eyes in imitation of her daughter, “you could find work in the marketplace, patching pots or cleaning fish or applying gold leaf to chamber pots. You’d have all the money you need—”

“I don’t need money, and I don’t want a common trade. I want something … uplifting!”

“It’s those benighted books of yours,” Mother carped. “It’s dangerous for a girl to read. It’s loaded your empty head with stupid ideas. Your father and I should have arranged your marriage long ago, so your husband could ply a rod to teach you—”

“Any man who touches me gets his rod sliced off! And since I don’t believe a wife should support her husband in every decision, I’ll never be a pliable partner. Now please excuse me, Mother. I’m late for an engagement.” Amber clattered down glazed stairs recklessly, too fast for her mother to keep up.

Cutting across the scorching courtyard, passing her sweating, swearing brothers and sister without a word, Amber ducked into the slave keeper’s office. From a wall rack she grabbed her favorite capture noose, a tall hook of steamed ebony with a rawhide handle. The staff was mounted with rings like a fishing rod and threaded with ten feet of tough sisal rope ending in a noose. Amber had handled slaves since she was ten, so she knew grabs, blocks, arm locks, chokeholds, and other wrestling tricks. With a capture staff, she could knock a slave flat, trip him, snag his neck, or pin him before sapping him with her sleeve cudgel. Competence meant life or death around unruly slaves, and Amber could subdue almost anyone except an armed fighter.

Slipping from the shack, she debated raiding the kitchen but decided to buy rations in the marketplace. Her mother might yet rouse Amber’s siblings to wrestle her into a locked minaret. It had happened before.

Whistling merrily, Amber flipped the capture noose over her shoulder and skipped for the tall, studded gates. Recognizing her, the doorway’s charm automatically opened the smaller night portal, and Amber laughed as if escaping slavery herself.

“We’ll sail that gig all the way up the river,” Amber announced to the air, “and no one will pester me there….”

The 383rd Anniversary of the Great Arrival (-6048 DR)

“Go, djawal! Toss him over!”

“Break his wrist, Rosey! Pitch him through the roof!”

“Hit him, Tafir! Kick him where it counts!”

“Pull, Taf! No, push … that way!”

Tafir, slim, fair-skinned, and blond, hung on grimly and strained until his face burned red. Atop a slippery table, he grappled hand-to-hand against a soldier with knotty arms and a wicked grin. Both men held wobbling, slopping flagons of corn beer in their free hands. Soldiers, cavalrymen, laborers, merchants, servants, cooks, and washing women hooted and jeered and hurled bets. In a corner sat Tafir’s two friends, a young man with nearly black skin and tight curls in workman’s white and a young woman in the simple shift of a palace maid, who oddly wore a veil across her pointed nose.

The big sergeant, drunker than his companions, bore a strawberry birthmark on his cheek, which earned him the nickname “Rosey.” The birthmark crooked as Rosey grinned and taunted, “Is this the best you can do, puppy?”

Struggling, beer mug wobbling, Tafir leaned into the sergeant’s right arm. Surprisingly, the arm bent until Tafir and Rosey stood nose to nose. The soldier laughed, his breath stinking of wine and onions. Toying, the burly sergeant abruptly cocked his arm. Tafir had to crane on tiptoe or crack his wrist.

Rosey smirked, “This is more fun that drilling on the parade ground, eh, djawal?”

“I could—order you to—quit—askar!” Tafir gasped. Crushed in the soldier’s paw, his hand throbbed, but Tafir kept his feet atop the slippery table.

“Ha! You are a wet-nosed puppy. I’m not an askar, a common soldier, I’m a musar. See my red braid? Twelve years I’ve served our thrice-blessed bakkal, may he live for an eternity.” A table of veterans with scars and eye patches and missing fingers whooped. A few wore the flat collar of a citizen, but more went collarless, being mercenaries from other countries.

As an officer cadet, Tafir wore a yellow tunic and red kilt that glowed like bird’s plumage against the infantrymen’s blues. Tafir grated, “Why don’t we—split an amphora—at a table—not on it!”

“Are you buying?” Chuckling, Rosey flexed an arm solid and brown as an oak branch. Tafir was hurled backward. Beer from his mug cartwheeled across the ceiling, walls, and patrons. Tafir pitched onto a table of stonemasons in dusty aprons, landing with a spectacular clatter and crash of crockery. Wine splattered his new uniform. A mason flipped him off the table to thump in a tangle of arms and legs.

Hopping off the table, Rosey shook his head in mock disgust and said, “Shame to waste good beer, cadet, but officers are wasteful of everything, especially infantrymen’s lives.” Saluting, he drained his mug to another round of cheers.

Tafir’s two friends threaded the crowded tavern. The dark-skinned man was Gheqet, and the palace maid was named Star. The two hauled Tafir to his feet.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“Glad to hear it. We salute you!” boomed Rosey. Fast for such a big man, the sergeant snatched a tankard off the masons’ table and dumped it over Tafir’s blond head.

Red wine splashed and his friends yelled. The veterans howled with glee, pounded their fists, and called encouragement and names. Rosey crowed, “Now you’ve been baptized into the army!”

Tafir’s teeth ground as he glared through dripping eyebrows. Everyone in the cellar laughed, but he was surprised at the guffaws and titters coming from behind.

Gheqet held his ribs, pointed at the pink trickles, and, laughing, said, “Oh, T-Taf, you look so delicious steeped in red wine! Like a v-verdach plucked from a p-pond for the pot!”

Star giggled so hard her veil drooped, and she fumbled to cover her dusky features. “That should sweeten you up,” she said. “You’ve been too much a sourpuss since they enlisted you in the army.”

Everyone in the tavern roared as Tafir blushed red as the wine. A soldier hollered, “Hey, don’t be greedy! Where’s our wine?”

That did it. With a yell, Tafir jumped for Rosey’s throat. Cheers bounced from the high plaster ceiling. Even drunk, years of training let Rosey dodge, grab Tafir’s skinny wrists, and sling him headlong in the same direction. Stumbling out of control, Tafir flopped across a table manned by fresco painters in color-smeared smocks. Blackware mugs tumbled and shattered, beer splashed into foam, and sunflower seeds stuck everywhere. Tafir never gained his feet, for Rosey scooped him off the floor, straightened him like a crumpled cloak, and thumped him atop the table.

“A good start, djawal, but you need more training. Publican, more beer.”

“I’ll buy,” called Gheqet, bright eyes shining in his dark face. That earned more cheers, and Star trilled merrily.

Hopping onto a bench, Rosey vaulted to the tabletop, toe-to-toe with Tafir, and grinned like a hungry panther at the soggy cadet. The tavern keeper, who’d decided the entertainment was worth a few broken mugs, handed the sergeant and Tafir two full ones.

Rosey waved his mug and said, “Remember, first one to spill his beer or get pitched off the table buys another round. Grab on!”

Wishing he were somewhere else, Tafir looked to his two friends, but Gheqet and Star craned to watch. Reluctantly Tafir put his right hand into the sergeant’s iron fingers.

Before they could tussle, Tafir called above the roar, “Whoever spills his beer first loses? Then I lose!”

So saying, Tafir chucked his beer into Rosey’s face. Gagging, spluttering, Rosey let go Tafir’s hand to wipe his burning eyes. Immediately the cadet lunged. A sharp shove sent Rosey reeling and cursing. Packed around the table, patrons tried to leap aside as the big sergeant keeled for the wet floor.

Grabbing wildly, a huge paw snagged Star’s veil and ripped it loose. Chirping, the maid hooked her voluminous sleeve across her face, then peeked to see if she’d been identified. The crowd seemed distracted by the combatants, and Star sighed with relief.

Two pairs of hooded eyes had glimpsed Star’s face. An unsmiling couple, man and woman, conversed quietly without moving their lips, then skulked out the door.

Howls of protest and glee answered Tafir’s bold maneuver. Still on the table, the cadet accepted a victory mug from the innkeeper. Tafir watched warily as Rosey clambered to his feet and mopped his face, then vaulted to the table again.

“Not bad, puppy. We’ll make a soldier of you yet!” Rosey extended a calloused hand. “But three bouts make a winner. Grab—”

“Soldiers of the bakkal, come to attention!” bellowed a voice full of authority.

Framed in the doorway, at street level, stood a shyk, an army commander, resplendent in twin ostrich plumes, gold breastplate, and a red kilt with gold buttons. Two servants in paler uniforms trailed.

The shyk’s parade ground bawl brought every soldier to rigid attention. Tafir straightened as he’d been drilled for three months to do, though he felt foolish nudging a big sergeant atop a beer-stained table. Even civilians dared not move and catch the officer’s hot-eyed glare.

“Look at this hole! Look at you men!” The officer stamped down stone steps. “You’re a disgrace to the bakkal, may we exist only to further his reign. You fools, get off that table. Just because you’re off-duty is no excuse for slovenliness….”

Abuse was piled on the big sergeant, who was obviously known to the commander, but the severest acid rained on the army’s newest cadet, Tafir.

“… fail to understand the gravity of your role. As an officer in training, you are forbidden to lay hands on a soldier lest you take advantage of your higher rank. And brawling! If I ever…” On and on, to a final bark, “That’s all! The lot of you begone!”