The Prince of Shadow (3 page)

“Where's your rake?” Shen-shu, the foreman, asked. Llesho pointed below him, to the bay. He saw the pinched, anguished expressions on the faces of his shift-mates, and then the winch was lowering him again.

“Find it. You are wasting time,” Shen-shu warned him, and then he was plunging headfirst into the bay almost before he could grab a breath, dropping, dropping. There it was. He had the rake in his hands, but he was exhausted, and hanging upside down, and he could not reach up to take hold of the chain above his feet, nor had he slack to tug on. Llesho wondered how long the foreman would leave him in the bay, and if he would survive. Black specks filled his vision, and the laughter of spirits in the kingdom of the dead filled his ears.

Then Lling was beside him, and Hmishi, and they held his shoulders, trying to lift him. Hmishi pried the rake from his numb fingers and swam for the surface, and the winch grabbed his chain. Llesho was rising. Lling, at his side, breathed air from her mouth into his own, until finally they broke the surface.

“Don't fling him about!” Lling shouted as she clambered over the side of the boat. She and Hmishi took his shoulders again, as the winch released his chain. He fell, feetfirst, to the deck.

“What did you see down there?” Lling whispered, but Llesho could only gasp like a landed fish. Rolling to his stomach, he vomited salt water over the side of the boat, and hung there, draped across the gunwales, gathering his strength with each choked breath and trying to see his future in the gentle ripples of the bay. He was so exhausted that he hardly noticed when the foreman searched his body, probing in his mouth for hidden pearls after he had done the same to the other cavities for the pleasure of a minor cruelty. “Rotten teeth!” he grunted, and Llesho realized that yes, the black pearl was real, and that perhaps the spirit had told the truth after all. His brothers were alive somewhere on the mainland. But how was he to find them?

Chapter Two

“WAKE up. You need to get off the boat.” Lling shook him by the shoulder, rousing Llesho from the questions going around in his head.

“I'm coming.” He bestirred himself, but found he could not control his arms or legs. The boat rocking gently beneath him seemed distant, his body not quite real except for the tight buzzing in his head.

Hmishi offered a hand, and pulled him to his feet, but Llesho's legs seemed to have turned to water. He stumbled, grateful for the shoulder propping him up while he made his wobbling way to the shore. Familiar hands reached for him and hauled him into the slat-sided wagon for the ride back to the slave compound. Llesho found an empty corner on the flat bottom of the wagon and curled in on himself. Lling followed, and then Hmishi, each taking up their post to either side of him. Secure in their protection, he let his eyelids fall, lulled into a shallow sleep where the afternoon puzzled itself out in his drifting mind.

Sometimes, he knew, divers who had suffered enchantment of the deep and survived to tell of it described vivid waking dreams that came to them as consciousness fled. Llesho had not felt like he was losing consciousness while he talked to the spirit under the bay, but his mind must have been starved to convince him Lleck had appeared to him and that he had spoken with the spirit of his old mentor. His heart told him otherwise.

Desperately he wanted to confide in someone, to ask if any of it could be true, but he knew better than to take such a risk, even with Lling or Hmishi. The Harn hadn't always needed to steal Thebin children for the slave trade. The Thebin pearl divers on his quarter-shift all came from small-claim farms scratching out a marginal living on the fringes of the Thebin landhold. Harn raiding parties had robbed their homes and burned their crops, leaving them with nothing but their children and an agonizing decision. They needed the money that selling their children would bring just to feed the younger ones until they, too, were old enough to send to market. He once asked Lleck why the king did nothing to help his people. “In some ages, the gods favor their people, and in others they turn their backs.” The minister had wept softly after that. Llesho hadn't understood, but he'd started a list right there of questions he would ask when he met the gods.

For the children trained to dive for pearls, however, slavery was little worse than the devastation they left behind them in the mountains. They knew nothing of kings or princes or palaces laid waste in that last great and terrible invasion. How could they understand his need to rescue his brothers when they could not imagine any rescue for themselves, or any reason to expect one? If they did not believe Llesho mad, they would believe him a danger. It surprised him to realize that he could not bear to lose the only companions he had left in the world.

“Kwan-ti will know how to help you.” Lling touched his arm, for comfort and for strength. The jokes and challenges that usually marked the trip home from the bay were silenced today, the pearl fishers watching him somberly. Llesho remembered the first time he had seen a drowning, when Zetch, a diver well past the age at which most had fed the pigs, had stayed below for almost an hour. When they brought him up, his sack was full of pearls, but so were his mouth, his nostrils, his ears, and he had jabbed mother-of-pearl shells into his eyes. Gone mad, the foreman had announced, but the Thebins knew better. The pearls in Zetch's body would pay his rent in the kingdom of the dead, and buy him a new body—a free body—for his next turn on the wheel.

“I had a dream,” Llesho said, but gave no description of his conversation with the spirit. Lord Chin-shi, it was said, feared witches, and dreamers could sometimes fall within the web of his superstition. For his part, Llesho wondered if he must be a witch, to have the dead visit him in waking dreams, but he dared not ask. The question alone would be enough to send him to the flames. So he only said, “I didn't mean to frighten you. I must have let my mind wander.”

“We'll talk about it later,” Lling answered. “Kwan ti will know what to do.”

Llesho knew her to mean that he should say nothing more in the crowded wagon. Good advice, and easy to follow. He leaned his head against her shoulder and closed his eyes.

“Be careful with him. We could lose him yet.”

Kwan-ti, that was, and with a tone of command she only assumed when real trouble threatened. For a moment, Llesho wondered what had happened. As his companions jostled him awake, however, he realized that he must be the emergency.

“I'm all right,” he protested, struggling to disentangle the hands that reached to gather him up.

“No, you are not,” Lling contradicted in tones almost as commanding as those of Kwan-ti. “His mind drifted down below, during quarter-shift,” Lling explained to the healer, her voice shrill with her anger. “Then, because he'd dropped his rake when he was fading, Shen-shu lowered him back into the bay to find it. If I had not breathed into his mouth, he would have died with his head stuck in the mire.”

“Lleck would have saved me,” Llesho objected.

Lling took this as a sign of his condition. “See,” she said, “He thought he saw his father below.” Like many of the women in the camp, Lling believed that Lleck was the true father of the slave Llesho. And what would be more natural than that the son, dying, should see a vision of his father come to save him?

But Kwan-ti had gone very still; Llesho could feel her tension, like the fizz of lightning about to strike. “When did this happen?” she asked.

“On second quarter-shift,” Hmishi gave the answer. “The second hour of the quarter.

“I see.” Something of the tension faded, but Llesho felt, though he could not explain why, that Kwan-ti still listened for something the rest of them could not hear. “Bring him inside,” she finally said, and Llesho found himself tumbled out of the wagon into the arms of his Thebin shift-mates.

“I can walk,” he said, and squirmed out of their grasp. He nearly sank to his knees when his legs would not quite bear his weight.

Kwan-ti raised him by the elbow. “I see you can,” she said tartly, and then turned to his companions. “I'll take care of him. You may come by to see him after you have dressed and had dinner.”

Hmishi took her at her word, and turned toward his own bed and the clothes basket at its foot, but Lling was not so easy to convince.

“Are you sure?” She touched his arm again, the question in her eyes for Llesho and not for the healer.

“About the clothes? I'm sure.” Llesho tried to lighten the worry in her eyes. “It's hard to forget you are a girl when we are on dry land.”

“Hard seems to be the operative word,” Lling admitted with a teasing glance at places on his body girls were not supposed to look. “I suppose you will live after all.”

“Reassure his shift-mates in that regard. Unless he decides not to follow orders, of course.” Kwan-ti smiled to take the sting out of the mock threat.

Lling turned to do as she was bid, but swayed her naked hips like an invitation when she walked. After a few choice paces she looked back at Llesho with a little laugh before running to find her clothes.

When Kwan-ti was sure that the girl had turned her attention elsewhere, she sighed heavily. “Come on, boy. We have to talk.”

Llesho allowed her to lead him to the corner of the longhouse where she isolated the sick, but he would wait no longer for news. “Lleck is dead, isn't he?”

“Yes.” Kwan-ti pushed him down onto a fresh bed just a short distance from the one where Lleck had died. “He wanted to see you very badly before he died, but I don't have the authority to interrupt a work shift, unless a diver is at risk. Now I wish I had tried anyway. I might at least have spared you from drowning.”

The healer covered him in his bed with a light cloth. “You're shivering,” she said, and added a blanket.

Llesho realized that it was true, but he seemed less to feel it than to observe it from a distance.

“Rest,” she ordered. “You can explain it all to me after you've had some sleep; you're too tired to make sense now.”

Llesho stopped her before she could leave him alone. “He left a message for me, didn't he?”

“Yes.” She said nothing else, and hesitated even before saying that much.

Kwan-ti had always made Llesho nervous, though not as an enemy might. She had a way of going completely still and looking at him with eyes as sharp as a hawk's that made him think she was reading his soul. In some ways Kwan-ti reminded him of the way his mother had looked at him when he was six and he had sworn he hadn't broken the vase in the great hall. It had comforted him, as a child, to feel in her gaze that his mother could see everything, and love him in spite of his crime. Kwan-ti did not love him, however. He closed his eyes to hide his soul, afraid that it was too late, but with no strength to do more.

“Your secrets are safe with me, Llesho,” she whispered. “You don't have to be afraid.”

Fear had kept his mouth shut and his identity hidden all the years of his slavery. Lleck had made it clear that only his secrecy kept him alive. But he wanted to believe the healer, and he wondered, as he drifted into sleep, if it could hurt him, just this once, to trust someone.

That night Lling and Hmishi did come to visit, with others from their shift, but Llesho was sleeping, so they went away again with a promise to return. In the morning Llesho still slept, and Kwan-ti sent word to Foreman Shen-shu that her charge had suffered enchantment of the deep, that state in which a diver forgot the difference between air and water, and became a danger to himself and his shift-mates. Foreman Shen-shu sent a message back that Lord Chin-shi had no use for a pearl fisher who could no longer walk the oyster beds, but Kwan-ti ignored the threat, for now at least. With his dying words, Lleck had convinced her that the young Llesho had more pressing business to attend than plucking pearls from their homes in the mouths of shellfish.

When Llesho finally awoke, it was to sunlight breaking through the clouds high overhead. He could count on one hand the days when full sunshine parted the clouds over Pearl Island. What this portended, he did not want to consider, but he knew it was time to talk with Kwan-ti.

“May I have my clothes, please?”

“Of course.” Kwan-ti handed him a set of bleached and faded trousers and shirt, and politely turned away while he pulled them on. Llesho piled into his clothes as fast as he could.

“You can turn around now,” Llesho called, and Kwan-ti rejoined him, taking a seat on the bed next to his.

“You said he left a message. . . .” When Llesho thought of Lleck, so many conflicting emotions filled him—anger and sadness and wonder—that his throat tightened on the name. But of course, Kwan-ti knew what he meant.

“Your father loved you very much,” she began, but Llesho stopped her with a gesture. “My father is dead.”