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VICISSITUDES

I T DIDN’T QUITE SEEM REAL until they laid hands on him.

The old keeper he could probably have fought off rather easily, but these were heavy middle-aged men, stolid and muscled and experienced in their work.

‘Let go of me!’ Wintrow cried angrily. ‘My father is coming to get me. Let go!’ Stupidly, he reflected later.

As if simply telling them to let go would make them do it.

It was one of the things he was to learn.

Words from a slave’s mouth meant nothing.

His angry cries were no more intelligible to them than the braying of an ass.

They did things with his arm joints, twisting them so that he stumbled angrily in the direction they wished him to go.

He had not quite got over his surprise at being seized when he found himself already pressed firmly up against the tattooist’s block.

‘Be easy,’ one of the men bid him gruffly as he jerked Wintrow’s wrist-shackles tight against a staple.

Wintrow jerked back, hoping to pull free before the pin could be set, but he only took skin off his wrists.

The pin was already set. As quickly as that they had him, hunched over, wrists chained close to his ankles.

One of the men gave him a slight push and he nudged his own head into a leather collar set vertically on the block.

The other man gave a quick tug on the leather strap that secured it a hair’s-breadth short of choking him.

As long as he didn’t struggle, he could get enough air to breathe.

Fettered as he was, it would have been hard to draw a deep breath.

The collar about his neck made even his short panting breaths an effort that required attention.

They had done it as efficiently as farmhands castrating calves, Wintrow thought foggily.

The same expert callousness, the precise use of force.

He doubted they were even sweating. ‘Satrap’s sigil,’ one said to the tattooist, and the man nodded and moved a wad of cindin in his cheek.

‘My flesh was not made by me. I will not puncture it to bear jewellery, nor stain my skin, nor embed decoration into my visage. For I am a creation of Sa, made as I am intended to be. My flesh is not mine to write upon.’ He had scarce breath enough to quote the holy writ as a whisper.

But he spoke the words and prayed the man would hear them.

The tattooist spat to one side, spittle stained with blood.

A hard addict then, one who would indulge in the drug even when his mouth was raw with ulcers.

‘T’ain’t my flesh to mark either,’ he exclaimed with dim humour.

‘It’s the Satrap’s. Now, his sigil I could do blindfolded.

You hold still, it goes faster and smarts less. ’

‘My father… is coming… to pay for me.’ He fought for air to say these essential words.

‘Your father is too late. Hold still.’

Wintrow had no time to wonder if holding still would be an assent to this blasphemy.

The first needle was off target, striking not his cheek but the side of his nose and piercing into the side of his nostril.

He yelped and jerked. The tattooist slapped him smartly on the back of the head. ‘Hold still!’ he commanded him gruffly.

Wintrow clenched his eyes shut and set his jaw.

‘Aw, I hate it when they wrinkle up like that,’ the tattooist muttered in disgust. Then he went swiftly to work.

A dozen jabs of his needle, a quick swipe at the blood and then the sting of a dye.

Green. Another dozen jabs, swipe, sting.

It seemed to Wintrow as if each time he took a breath, he was getting less air.

He was dizzy, afraid he would faint, and furious with himself for being ashamed.

How could fainting shame him? They were the ones doing this to him.

And where was his father, how could he be late?

Didn’t he know what would happen to his son if he was late?

‘Now leave it alone. Don’t touch it, don’t scratch it, or you’ll just make it hurt worse.’ A distant voice was speaking over a roaring in his ears. ‘He’s done, take him away and bring another.’

Hands tugged at his shackles and his collar, and then he was being strong-armed again, being forced off to somewhere else.

He stumbled, half-dazed, taking one deep breath after another.

His destination turned out to be a different stall in a different row in a different shed.

This could not have happened, he told himself.

It could not have happened to him, his father would not have left him to be tattooed and sold.

His captors halted him by a pen set aside for new slaves.

The five slaves he shared it with each bore a single oozing green tattoo.

His shackles were secured to a pin set in the floor and the men left him there.

The moment they let go of his arms, Wintrow lifted his hand to his face.

He touched it gingerly, feeling the puffing and seeping of his outraged flesh.

A pink-tinged liquid ran slowly down his face and dripped from his chin. He had nothing to blot it.

He stared around at the other slaves. He realized he had not said a word since he had spoken to the tattooist. ‘What happens now?’ he asked dazedly of them.

A tall, skinny youth picked his nose with a dirty finger.

‘We get sold,’ he said sarcastically. ‘And we’re slaves the rest of our lives.

Unless you kill someone and get away.’ He was sullenly defiant, but Wintrow heard it was only words.

Words were all that were left of his resistance.

The others seemed not even to have that much.

They stood or sat or leaned, and waited for whatever would happen to them next.

Wintrow recognized the state. Severely injured people fell into it.

Left to themselves, they would simply sit and stare and sometimes shiver.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Wintrow heard his own voice whisper.

‘I can’t believe Torg didn’t tell my father.

’ Then he wondered why he had ever expected that Torg would.

What was the matter with him, why had he been so stupid?

He’d trusted his fate to a sadistic brutal idiot.

Why hadn’t he sent word for his father, why hadn’t he told the keeper the first day?

Come to think of it, why had he fled the ship?

Had it really been so bad there? At least there had been an end in sight, a two-year wait to his deliverance from his father.

Now there was no end to it. And he would not have Vivacia to sustain him.

The thought of her brought a terrible pang of loneliness welling up in him.

He’d betrayed her, and he’d sent himself into slavery.

This was real. He was a slave now. Now and for ever.

He curled up in the dirty straw on his side, clasping his knees to his chest. In the distance, he seemed to hear a roaring wind.

Vivacia rocked disconsolately in the placid harbour.

It was a lovely day. The sunlight glittered on fabled white Jamaillia City.

The winds were from the south today, ameliorating the winter day and the stench of the other slavers anchored alongside her.

Not so long now to spring. Farther south, where Ephron had used to take her, fruit trees would be cascades of white or pink blossoms. Somewhere to the south, it was warm and beautiful.

But she would be going north, to Chalced.

The banging and sawing from within her were stilled at last; all her modifications for being a slaver were complete.

Today would be spent loading the last of the supplies, and tomorrow her human cargo would be ferried out to her.

She would sail away from Jamaillia, alone.

Wintrow was gone. As soon as she lifted anchor, one or more of the sluggish serpents in the harbour mud below would uncoil and follow her.

Serpents would be her companions from now on.

Last night, when the rest of the harbour was still, a small one had risen, to slink about among the anchored slavers.

When it came to her, it had lifted its head above the water, to gaze at her warily.

Something about its stare had closed her throat tight with terror.

She had not even been able to call the watch.

If Wintrow had been aboard, at least someone would have sensed her fear and come to her.

She dragged her thoughts free of him. She’d have to take care of herself now.

Loss clawed at her heart. She denied it.

She refused it all. It was a lovely day.

She listened to the waves slap against her hull as she rocked at anchor. So peaceful.

‘Ship? Vivacia?’

She turned her head slowly and looked back and up. It was Gantry, standing on her foredeck and leaning on the rail to speak to her.

‘Vivacia? Could you stop that, please? It’s unnerving the whole crew. We’re two hands short today; they didn’t come back from liberty. And I think it’s because you’ve frightened them off.’

Frightened. What was so frightening about isolation and loneliness and serpents no one else ever saw?

‘Vivacia? I’m going to have Findow come play his fiddle for you. And I’ve got liberty myself today for a few hours, and I promise you I’ll spend every moment of it looking for Wintrow. I promise you that.’

Did they think that would make her happy?

If they found Wintrow and dragged him back to her, forced him to serve her, did they think she would be content and docile?

Kyle would believe that. That was how Kyle had brought Wintrow aboard her in the first place.

Kyle understood nothing of the willing heart.

‘Vivacia,’ Gantry asked with despair in his voice. ‘Please. Please, can you just stop rocking? The water is smooth as glass today. Every other ship in the harbour is still. Please.’