Thick as Thieves Read online

  The emperor provided the enclosed site to keep trade safe and regulated. Those who used it paid taxes on the goods they moved or paid a small fee to enter and seek employment from the merchants within. The Attolian showed the keeper at the gate the dye on his finger, proving that he’d paid a fee once already to enter the site. Then he paid the fee for me, and I dipped a finger in the dye pot. It was the first time I’d done so, though I’d often passed through sites such as this one with my master. My master didn’t dip his finger because he was above such things. I didn’t because as a slave I was beneath them. Unused to the sensation of the slick dye, I rubbed at it and managed to smudge it all over my hand. I only barely stopped myself from trying to wipe it off on my new clothes.

  Some caravan sites are just walled courtyards with a well in the middle, but Sherguz was a large trading center where goods were shifted from caravans to boats and sent down or up the river. Its walls were three or more stories high, lined with stables and warehouses. One wall had a covered terrace with an arcade where a row of entryways were pitch-black holes in contrast to the bright sun shining down in the open yard. Inside each would be a business office rented by the day or week or year. Above the arcade, and on the roofs of the warehouses, was another level—rooms for housing and more storage. Above that was a wooden gallery where guards would have walked around the tops of the walls if they’d been needed. In Sherguz, it provided a space for people not afraid of heights to loiter and conduct their business above the stink below.

  The Attolian had started across the teeming courtyard filled with animals and men but was looking over his shoulder to see why I lagged. I stepped quickly to catch up. He seemed quite comfortable ducking around the back ends of horses, but I noticed he gave the camels wider berth. Either they were unfamiliar to him and he gave them more room, or they were familiar to him and he gave them more room. He approached several people and asked in his heavily accented Mede for a particular caravan master by the name of Roamanj. He worked his way around the edge of the courtyard, never stepping more than a pace ahead of me, keeping me in the corner of his eye. If I slowed, he lifted an arm around my shoulder, as if in friendship.

  We eventually found the man he was seeking, an enormous shaggy-haired Ferrian. Like many of their traders, he had probably spent most of his life in the empire. He was directing the packaging of some bales of fine cloth—each length of worked fabric wrapped in less-fine material that in turn was being wrapped in a larger and coarser cloth, in a meticulous order meant to keep it from the dust and dirt.

  “Careful with that, you’ve got it too close to the edge of the baling cloth, move it in and don’t step on the baling cloth, you fool—and who by the gods eternal is this?” the caravan master asked, looking me over with suspicion. “He had better be a paying passenger.”

  “Extra guard,” said the Attolian.

  The caravan master was unimpressed.

  “Good with a sword,” said the Attolian, and I squared my shoulders.

  Roamanj snorted. “I don’t need one more guard. He pays passage.” And turning his back he bellowed, “Queen of the Night devour you, off the cloth!” at a poor unfortunate who wasn’t even on the cloth, just too close to it for comfort.

  Seeing the Attolian still standing beside him, Roamanj raised his bushy eyebrows, as if surprised. The Attolian looked pointedly at the other caravans mustering around us. He could find work with any of them, but there was no way to know how long that might take and no way to know if there were bounty hunters coming up the river after me. I didn’t want to dawdle for a day or two in Sherguz to find out.

  Roamanj crossed his arms. “I’m not paying him. He’s paying me.”

  The Attolian lifted one shoulder and let it drop.

  “All right, he can travel with us half passage, as he is a friend of yours.”

  The Attolian waited, far and away the most eloquent nonspeaker I think I have ever known.

  “By gods, I have no time for this!” shouted Roamanj.

  The Attolian took a half step away.

  “Fine,” said Roamanj, throwing up a hand in defeat, “he comes with us, but I am not giving him a single hennat, you understand?” He shook his finger in the Attolian’s face.

  The Attolian waited until Roamanj turned again to his cloth before he said, “Needs a sword.”

  “May the Queen of the Night take you!” Roamanj turned back to him. “I should provide a freeloader with a sword, and you are asking this because I look like your generous old uncle, maybe?”

  I shuffled farther away, but the Attolian only nodded. “Just like,” he said with a straight face.

  The caravan master chuckled. “Fine, fine,” he said. “Go to the quartermaster. So long as you stop wasting my time.” He waved toward a man counting cooking pots not far away—and that’s how I became a caravan guard heading toward the city of Perf.

  The Attolian led the way over to the quartermaster. In a few minutes I was holding the sword he’d selected for me from the limited armory. I buckled it around my hips with a sense of unreality. I’d never touched a knife longer than my finger. Even when I dressed my master, I did not touch his weapons, nor did any of his other slaves. He racked and unracked his sword himself and a free man sharpened it and cared for its leathers.

  I looked up at the Attolian, who nodded approvingly and clapped me on the shoulder. The chill in his demeanor had thawed a little. Following directions from the quartermaster, we circled the courtyard looking for an entryway with a green-striped curtain. As we walked, the Attolian explained that earlier in the morning he’d gone to pick up a job as a guard at the West Caravan site. With his qualifications obvious, it had been easily done, more easily than if I had been with him. Once he’d secured a position with a large caravan, where he would have been only one new face among many, he’d gone looking for other mercenaries in the job market. When he’d found a likely prospect, another foreigner from the southern coast of the Continent, the Attolian had offered him his job for the westbound caravan, explaining that he’d made a mistake and would earn more money heading east. The mercenary wasn’t stupid, and in exchange for a little palm grease he had agreed to the swap and to tell people he was Attolian if asked.

  “Will he not reveal your plans if slave hunters catch up with him?” I asked, but the Attolian shook his head.

  “He was happy to fool whoever was pursuing me in exchange for most of the coin I got for my ring, but he didn’t know a slave was involved. I understand that imperial law takes a very dim view of people who aid escaping slaves, even unwittingly.” So he had taken my warning seriously. “If that guard finds out he’s helped a slave escape, he is most likely to lay very low and pretend he never met me at all.”

  “Perf is the wrong direction, though.” I almost didn’t say anything, still unsettled to have misjudged him, wary of seeming to doubt him, but he answered without any sign of offense.

  “We can go northwest on the road from Perf to Koadester, then cross the Taymet Mountains into Zaboar. There’s an Attolian trade house there, and Attolian ships often trade in the Shallow Sea. Any of them will take us at least to the Narrows, where we can get another ship to carry us home.”

  He had an open face and an honest one, and I’d mistaken that for stupidity. He was not a liar by nature, certainly, but he was not the fool I had taken him for.

  “Not the fool you took me for, Kamet?” he asked.

  Wrong-footed, I could only wring my hands. I’d not only underestimated him, I’d let my opinion show. “It seems to be me who is all kinds of fool lately,” I said. I almost added “master” but bit it back in time.

  The Attolian snorted. “Look up, Kamet, you’re a free man.”

  I raised my eyes to his face.

  He shrugged. “We all spend our time under the sign of the idiot,” he said, and the matter seemed settled, at least as far as he was concerned.

  We found the entryway with the striped curtain and made our way up the steps that led t
o it. Inside, on bales and boxes, were the other guards for the caravan, sitting at their ease with cups of tea. The Attolian nodded to the men. I did not miss their measuring glances—I don’t think I looked “good with a sword.” Once the Attolian picked a bale for himself, I settled on a box nearby. Raising the height of the floor above the courtyard to keep the dust and dirt out seemed to have been a futile effort. Everything was coated in a fine grit. One of the guards shouted through another doorway that led deeper into the warren of windowless rooms, and a skinny boy appeared with a tea tray and poured from a large pot into the men’s cups. Silently he handed two more cups to us, filled them, and then slipped back into the darkness.

  My cup was cracked and mended with staples, ugly but serviceable. The crack was a ragged black line like a road on a map, surrounded by stains that might mark deserts or seas, if only I could read them. I ran my finger along the rim to make sure there was no rough edge before I put my lip to it. Then I sipped the hot tea and listened as the guards talked. Most of them were longtime retainers of Roamanj. One of them looked like a westerner. I thought he might be from the Greater Peninsula, but he greeted us in the round vowels of a Southern Gant and said his name was Benno. Another guard, new like us, was a Braeling, with fair hair and the bright blue eyes of the north. He had loosened his shirt, and his fair skin was a motley of red where the sun had burned it and white where the sun hadn’t touched.

  He had been in the midst of introducing himself to the others when we arrived, and he backtracked to tell us that he had come down the inland waterways from Mûr to the Shallow Sea with a company of mercenaries. It was a common story. Men set out in companies, and one by one, the companies were whittled down either by death or by disagreements. The Braeling, whose name was Skell, or Skerrell, I was never certain which, had parted ways with his friends when they had decided to return to the north. He was working his way to Perf and meant to press on farther to the empire’s eastern frontier. In the mountains there, he thought his experience of winter would make him valuable. He said that he would have to regrow his heavy beard when he reached cold weather again.

  “And you?” he asked the Attolian.

  “Aris,” he answered, pointing to himself. “Metit,” he said, pointing to me. There was a moment when the other guards waited for more, but it passed quickly. One by one, the men offered their own names. They answered questions about Roamanj, saying that he orchestrated his caravans well and that there were rarely problems from bandits on the road to Perf. There might be more trouble heading south from there, but the caravan would join another, and more of Roamanj’s regulars were waiting in Perf to sign on. They were all old hands, and it appeared that the caravan was going to be safe even if I was one of the people responsible for protecting it.

  We whiled away the afternoon, the guards exchanging stories about the merchants and the caravan masters and the various jobs they had worked up and down the emperor’s roads. The Attolian nodded along at the appropriate moments, his Mede evidently good enough to follow the conversation. The boy from the back room eventually brought us food, and after some reshuffling we slept there on thin mattresses rolled out on the floor. Long before the first light of day had dawned, we would be up and on the road.

  I woke to the sound of the animal keepers leading out the horses and the camels and loading them with their burdens. The guards around me yawned and stretched themselves and called for more tea and cakes for breakfast. One by one, the boxes and bales we were sitting on were carried away until we were sitting cross-legged on the filthy stone floor. In several more hours all was prepared outside and Roamanj put his head through the curtain to call us to our work.

  The other guards had bundles that they dropped into an assigned wagon. The single bundle that the Attolian and I had shared was much smaller, just a change of clothes. Again, we drew measuring looks, but no one commented. As guards we took turns on horseback, moving up and down the caravan. When not riding, we sat on one of the wagons or walked beside them. They went slowly enough and rattled so much that walking was almost a relief. There were sixteen wagons altogether, with about three times as many beasts of burden interspersed between them. When I had nothing else to do, I tried to count them, but never came to a number I could trust. The merchants traveled with their goods, and many, also, with their families. Wives, children, livestock roamed in every direction. It was part of the guards’ job to make sure none wandered too far. As the caravan traveled, its components would slowly spread out, and then at Roamanj’s direction those at the front would stop and wait until it had been collected back together before moving on.

  No one seemed able to speak in anything but a shout. By the end of the first, very long day we were still climbing out of the fertile valley of the Ianna and I was surprised anyone still had a voice, but evidently some did. There was a great deal of loud swearing as the animals were staked for the night and the camp set up. There were arguments about everything, from where tents would be pitched to who would water what animals in what order. Roamanj was the universal arbiter and walked the camp with a guard at either shoulder.

  There was no caravan site to protect us that night or for the next several nights; none seemed to be needed this close to Sherguz. (I felt we had traveled halfway to Perf and was dismayed when I learned the actual distance we’d covered.) With no bandits to fear, our responsibility was to prevent petty theft. Cook fires were started, and food made, if you could call it that, and the guards arranged among themselves to take the night shifts in turn.

  As the camp quieted down, I regretted not breaking my slave chain in the town behind us and dropping it quietly into the river with my shift. I’d kept it because its heavy gold links were my only asset, but I’d underappreciated its danger. If anyone else in the caravan saw it, it meant certain betrayal, yet I couldn’t risk being seen trying to pull it off, and even if I could, it was less safe in a pocket than it was around my neck. I could keep my shirt pulled tightly shut, but couldn’t keep my pockets so private. I’d felt the little fingers of the children in the caravan dipping in and out of them already.

  I could leave the camp for my private business and yank the chain loose in the dark, but if I went far enough away to be out of sight, it would be noted. If I tried to bury something out there in the hard dirt, everyone would be curious. If I dropped the chain without burying it, it might be found, and suspicion would fall on me instantly. Already I had drawn inquisitive looks—I was so obviously not a guard—and it would be foolish to draw even more attention. I resolved to sleep lightly and with the blanket the Attolian had purchased drawn close around my shoulders.

  The next day I left the horseback riding to the real guards. The men had taken their measure of me and seemed content to pretend I was one of them, but no one wanted to rely on me for defense. That evening the food was even worse than it had been the night before. The Attolian silently laughed at me when he caught me looking at my meal in consternation, and I tried to be good-humored about it. It would be two weeks or more to Perf. I thought I might starve on the way.

  The Attolian ate the swill, slept heavily, and woke alert. He got on well with the guards, and if he listened far more than he spoke, he had his broken Mede as an excuse. He sparred with them in the evenings, or wrestled in the dirt, testing himself against their skill and strength. They had invited me to join them the first time, and I had refused—with some haughtiness so that they would not ask me again—and so they were friendly with the Attolian but eyed me sideways. I knew my anxiety had made me appear arrogant, and I tried to be more ingratiating, but that seemed to draw even more questioning looks. I longed to be in Perf already, but even more I longed to be back in my alcove, just off my master’s main room with the curtain to give me a pretense of privacy and my daily tasks before me and my master living and breathing in the outer room. Then I remembered Laela and told myself not to be so stupid.

  The Attolian frequently volunteered the two of us for the least attractive shifts of
guard duty, though he always glanced at me first to see if I was amenable. We worked as one man, he and I, so that no resentment built up over my inabilities.

  Late at night, as we sat alone at a watch fire, the Attolian voiced my thoughts for me. “We could have made it to Perf on our own much faster.”

  He scratched at a row of bug bites on his arm and explained. “I would have needed to buy supplies, and that would have taken time we didn’t have. I didn’t have money for a horse, maybe for a mule or a donkey once I’d sold my ring, but it’s hard to buy a decent mount from strangers. And people notice who buys their animals.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. I was coming to understand how narrow my world had been and how little I knew of others’ experiences. “I am not familiar with this kind of traveling,” I admitted, after clearing my throat. I didn’t want the Attolian to think that I felt he was under any obligation to justify his actions to me.

  I had been many places with my master, and I may have slept on the floor next to his bed, but I had slept wrapped in fine linen with a soft cushion for a pillow. Here I slept on the dirt. I had never walked so far in my life and never been so bone weary. I considered the journey still ahead in this new light and wondered if the Attolian had any idea how challenging the Taymet Mountains were. If they weren’t so formidable, the tiny nation of Zaboar would be part of the Mede empire instead of its own little city-state on the Shallow Sea. It was too dangerous to discuss our plans, though, even if we believed all those around us were asleep. There was nothing else we had to speak of, so we fell silent, sitting together by the fire.