The Slave
ERED ROWED.
Sun shone through the oarport to his right each afternoon. The air grew colder by the day. The slavers were pale as unpainted marble, and they spoke a sickly tongue.
Their vessel headed north and ever farther from home.
Ered rowed.
His captors had forged a collar shut around his neck. The collar had been chained to the bench. Now he worked and ate and slept beside two other men and lived for the beat of the drum.
The drum beat. Ered rowed.
The man to his left was a sailor from the cities of Tertaskra. Ered did not know the cities’ names or how to tell them apart. The tattoos on the Tertaskran man’s skin were unknown sigils of gods who should have been familiar. All those on this rowing deck knew Commerce and his angels well. But Ered did not know the meaning of the coins with burning faces twisted across the man’s bicep, or the schools of scaleless fish that swam up his uncovered back.
They shared no language. Ered could never ask.
The man to his right was Brakish. A long gray beard covered his bronze collar. He was not strong like the Tertaskran, nor young like Ered, but he knew how to hold his oar.
He had watched Ered when he first took hold of it.
“You’re using your arms, af,” he said. “You’re from Brak, ay? You can understand me? If you use your arms, you’ll drag us all down with you. Start with the brace of your feet. When the blade is out of the water, dide, we pivot it toward the bow, and drop it down—just so. Now: swing your torso toward the bow, and pull the handle to your body.” The man led Ered through the motion, following the drumbeat. “Dide. Pull the handgrips to your chest, and then lift the oar clear of Tide. Now push your body forward; we’re to do it now again.”
Ered pushed his body forward, and Ered rowed again.
There were benches ahead of his and behind. Groaning faces surrounded him. Some were dark and had the single-lidded eyes of Brak; others were round-eyed Tertaskrans, like the man with tattoos, and even darker, and they spoke their strange language in hushed whispers when the slavers were not listening. Most were men from Dinre, pale as those who had taken Ered captive. Speaking Athin spared them no misery.
No matter where they were from, they all rowed.
The drum beat slowly most days. The slaves took twenty-minute rests after every hour, as the air through the oarport grew chillier, and Sun’s fire seemed farther every time it touched Ered’s skin. The Brakish man was his only company. He introduced himself as Karek.
“You’ve almost got a hold of the matter of rowing,” said Karek. “Dide.”
“Why?” Ered said. “Why would we want these keradioa to sail faster?”
“Because if you don’t do your part with our oar, our bench falls behind. And if our bench falls behind….”
Karek peered up at the Overseer. He was one of the slavers who had stolen Ered from his father’s boat, and he never showed the face behind his helmet. A long bronze sword hung from his sling. He wore links of bronze chain woven into heavy linen, and his sandals slapped on the deck as he looked at each bench of slaves.
Karek looked away.
“There are worse keradioa than this,” he said. “So do your part, and row.”
So Ered rowed. But he could not imagine anything worse. His arms grew hard as the rest of his body became skeletal and thin. His body had not finished growing before his capture, and now it never would. The Sisters of Hunger plagued him every moment of each day. He soon preferred not to eat at all, for the paltry portions of salt pork and gruel the slavers gave only made his hungry goddesses hungrier.
Every day was the same. An hour of rowing. A twenty-minute break.
Then the slavers found a prize.
Ered saw the little galley over the Tertaskran’s shoulder. The slavers’ ship stuck to the coasts. There were always other vessels passing by.
This time, they would not pass the vessel. They sailed straight for it.
“Get ready,” said Karek. “We have nothing to offer the gods. Yet I hope they keep our muscles strong, and Pain as far from us as they can.”
Ered did have something left. There was a charm that the slavers had not taken, still in the pocket of his filthy clothes. He would never sacrifice it for the keradioa.
The drum beat faster.
Ered rowed.
Facing the vessel’s stern, he could not see the galley on the water for long. He breathed in deep, clutched the oar’s grips, and followed the motion of the men at his sides. He threw his weight forward, then pushed himself back, drawing the oar to his chest, cutting through Tide; and all of the men on the benches did the same in front and behind him, so that the whole deck rowed in unison, following the drumbeat, crashing forward and backward and forward again like the ceaseless rolling waves that splashed against the hull.
The drum beat faster.
He no longer saw the men around him. He could not notice Karek nor the Tertaskran. He closed his eyes and listened to the drum. He pulled the oar to his chest. He lifted it from Tide. He panted. Pain cursed his chest with spasms. The gods of Entropy stole his breath. He wanted to sob. His wrists were near to snapping. He could not push himself backward again. He pulled the oar back again—
Karek grabbed his shoulder, and he stopped.
The drum had fallen silent.
The galley was outside the oarport. The pale faces of men stared back at Ered through its oarports.
The Overseer stood in the aisle. He shouted an order in the horrible tones of Athin. Then he ground his teeth in Tertaskran. Then, finally, in Brakish, he said, “Pull in oar! Make room for board!”
The men on Ered’s bench lifted up their oar and drew it in. Hooks were being tossed between the ships. The two were brought together, and pirates began leaping between the decks.
The three men behind Ered were too slow. Their oar was caught against the galley. The vessel’s mass smashed it to pieces; it snapped and broke, and wood shot through the rowing deck, splinters raining across the slaves.
The Overseer drew his sword. He took the oldest man on the bench, a man so thin Ered could not believe he had lifted the oar at all, and pulled him to his feet.
He called out in Athin. Then in Tertaskran. Then, when he had everyone’s attention, he cut through the old man’s throat.
A splash of blood hit Ered’s cheek. His eyes fell to the ground.
“Useless slaves,” said the Overseer in Brakish at last, “meet useless ends.”
The body of the murdered old man was dumped overboard. His head was hung beneath the ladders that led to the deck, nailed in place by the hair. Ered saw it every time he looked to stern and readied himself to row.
The killing had nothing to do with the oar. The old man was poor merchandise. New slaves from the plundered galley were brought down to replace him. Those who did not fit around the oars were chained to the wall at the deck’s prow, ready to be moved into position when another man failed.
The cramped vessel became a flooded tomb. Ered could not find room to breathe around so many other bodies.
The next day, when the drum beat again, Ered did not row.
“Will we get old as galley slaves?” he whispered to Karek when the Overseer was not near. “Then all of us will die like that old man.”
“You might be sold and go to land. You might die first,” Karek said. “But if you don’t row, you will die.”
“The Silent Kingdom would be better than this. Any fate would be better than this.”
Karek shook his head. “You don’t know Dinre’s Blood Sea, af. You’re blessed by Andalata that these slavers were the ones to catch us. We could have fallen into the claws of the Mircasa and been eaten while we were chained, or been captured by the Corsair-Lords of the City of Arrows, and then you would wish to meet Death rather than work.”
“Who are the Corsair-Lords?” Ered whispered.
“They who take to Tide in ships of black and white, and fly the vexilla of Violence’s crossed spears.” Karek spoke like he conspired, whispering. “Grip the oar and row, and I’ll tell you of their kind.”
Ered obeyed, keeping his eyes on Karek while the severed head of the slave stayed in view.
“They know of ancient magics, preserved from times long past. Violence is the only god they feel in their souls, and so they call him ‘the God’, for they cannot feel any other. All they do is done for him, and they offer the souls they take as blood-rites for his glory. Their vessels are the fastest in all the Six Domains. Storm conjures himself into their sails when they command. And when they plunder keradioa, I hear, they speak no words, and make no sound, but the whistling of the arrows from their longbows, and their chants in dedication to ‘the God’.”
“Longbows?”
“Ay, twice as tall as you or I, so huge they can only shoot through aid of Treak. And they dress all in black, as a sign to Pain that they are her servants, and they spread her wherever they go. I’ve seen their ships, how they sail against the wind on the horizon. But I have only heard stories of how they work their slaves and treat their crew. No slave who sets foot in a Corsair rowing deck ever sees Sun again. He’ll be worked until he dies, for the next slave is cheap for men who live by war and plunder, and they care little for finding replacements.”
They swept themselves forward. In unison they pulled themselves back.
“So you may hate this life, Ered. But remember that it only lasts a little while, no matter how poor it is. Then you have until the Death of Time to be within the Silent Kingdom. There’s no rush to get there, I say. For now you should thank ‘the God’ you ended up with these gentle keradioa who feed you, and who treat us all well, so long as we serve Duty. You could have been a rower for the Corsair-Lords instead, and then you would be sure to die, whether you wanted to or not.”
Karek was right. Ered was grateful his soul still roamed the Dying Lands, and he thanked Wisdom for letting him see clearly, for a moment, how much worse his short life could be.
But Wisdom wasn’t strong enough to keep Sorrow from his soul forever. A tear still gathered in his eye.
“I don’t want to row forever,” he whispered.
“Perhaps you will, or perhaps you won’t,” said Karek. “Andalata is not for us to fret over. Our part is to follow Duty, and to row.”
Ered nodded. And Ered rowed.
There was no company but Karek, but Karek’s company was good. He told stories of his journeys from Brak as a boy, and of all the years he had spent in slavery. It was not the life that any man would have wanted. When he spoke of home, of the village called Netli that had raised him when his mother drowned, where the greenest leaves grew from the grayest branches around waves that broke with the whitest bubbles, Ered thought of his own village, and he remembered what he was certain he would never see again.
Remembering was agony for Ered. But Karek spoke like Memory was one of his own friends.
Slaves around them were worked to death. A man clutched his heart and screamed. A boy collapsed and would not wake. Their bodies were tossed overboard, and new bodies took their seats.
A week passed.
The ship reprovisioned at a city. The Athin peoples built tall walls around ports that swarmed with ships like insects buzzing around a hive. They made their houses from strange white stones, and when they used wood, they painted it white, so that it, too, looked like white rock. Ered had never imagined that a place like this would exist while he lived on Brak Island.
A quarter of the slaves were taken from the oar deck. The Tertaskran’s chains were cut, and he went with them.
“Where is he going?” Ered asked.
“To the market,” Karek said. “He’s still strong. They’ll sell him, no doubt.”
They must have, for he did not return. Now there were no replacements. The keradioa set sail from the white city with undermanned oars.
“We can’t pull our oar without his help,” Ered said.
“We can,” Karek said.
“But I’m already tired.”
“You’ll row anyway. That’s our Andalata,” Karek said.
So they rowed. But chasing the drumbeat became harder every day. Ered knew he would fail if they tried to board another ship. He was starving. It would not be long before he became like the boy who would not wake up.
They took their twenty-minute break. Ered had not walked in a month. He was filthy, and his clothes were tattered. He had no muscle that Pain did not torture.
He leaned against the oarport. Drops of briny Tide splashed his cheek. He wondered what gods he was meant to ask for aid, and why they would let his Andalata lead to this. His eyes were closed for a long time as Sun kissed his shut lids and he longed for freedom and home again.
“Push out oars,” called the Overseer in Brakish. “Row!”
“Here we go,” Karek said.
Ered opened his eyes. The calmness of Tide reached out to the horizon. Sun glared atop the waves. He saw one ship out on the water, parallel to them, coming in awkwardly against the wind.
He squinted and saw sails of black and white.
“Karek,” he said.
“Take up the oar, af. There’s nothing else to be done.”
The drum began its beat.
“Karek,” Ered said again. Above the black sails, over the mast, a red vexillum flew in the wind. Two crossed spears of gold billowed on its surface.
“Ered!” Karek said.
A slaver shouted down the ladders. The Overseer turned to listen. He called to the drummer, and the beat quickened.
“What is it?” Karek said.
“The Corsair-Lords,” Ered said. He slid into his seat. The great oar was still withdrawn, and he took its grips, supported its weight, and let the blade fall beneath the waves.
The Overseer screamed. The drum’s rhythm quickened again.
Forward, into the water, backward, and up again. Forward, into the water, backward, and up again. Forward, into the water, backward….
The drum’s rhythm was too quick to follow. The oar was heavier each turn. He had to support more of it than ever before. Each time the blade dipped into Tide, he felt the force of his failing muscles pull the slave ship forward.
He had never wanted to row before. Now he was desperate to serve his new keradioa masters.
The wind was on their side. He had felt it through the oarport. They would escape if their oars caught the drum.
Into the water. Backward. Up again….
He looked to his side, and the Corsair ship was so much bigger. Then he could not row. He saw the armored prow, the ramming prow, cutting through the water. It had closed all distance. The figurehead of an armored goddess thrust toward him, sailing for his oarport like an arrow shot through Storm.
The Corsairs sailed against the wind. They should have fallen behind. Instead they were going to hit the slavers, and Ered could not escape.
The Corsairs’ oars moved in perfect unison, and they rowed faster than Ered ever could.
A shadow fell across his oarport as the Corsair ram struck the slaver galley’s hull. The ship was heaved from Tide; it rose and fell, collapsing onto the waves like skewered game onto grass, and it listed toward the Corsair ram.
A fault line cracked down the oar deck’s center. Nails flew from the walls. Slaves screamed. Ered jumped to his feet, and his collar caught against its chain.
The Overseer drew his sword. He spoke only in Athin, but Ered had learned enough of the language of Dinre to understand that he said, “Slaves, stay!”
But the slaves did not stay seated. No one stayed seated. Around them, the walls groaned like a dying whale. There was shouting on the main deck.
The fault deepened across the ceiling. Bands of bronze reinforcing the ship’s insides unraveled. An armored plate snapped free and was slung through the oar deck. It flew over the head of a ducking slave; Ered dropped beneath his bench, but Karek, watching the Overseer, was struck in the head.
He crumpled.
Ered grabbed him. He was too heavy to lift, but Ered lowered him slowly as the ship continued to list, and he heard the rush of water, the groan of wood becoming louder, the screams that were chained in place and could not flee.
Karek’s eyes were closed. Blood poured down his cheek.
“Stay seated!” snarled the Overseer. “Stay—”
Two warriors dropped down the hatch. The slaves’ screams stopped, and everyone on the rowing deck beheld them.
They wore black tunics, and their arms and legs were wrapped in blue and white and red cloth. One man was twice the height of Ered and wore a panoply of bronze plates, and his round shield was in his right hand, his sword held in his left. Spears and armored angels were carved into every surface of his armor.
The other was clad in silver. He gleamed in the deck’s lanternlight, as bright as Sun had been through the oarport. His shield was like the other man’s: round and painted with golden spears. But in his right hand he held a silver sword.
Their helmets were closed and topped with feathers and crests that stabbed the ceiling. Ered could not see their faces.
They raised their shields and approached the Overseer.
Other keradioa had been below deck. Three more climbed up from the hold, appearing behind the Overseer. They had shields and armor, too, covered with symbols and sigils for bloody rites that Ered did not know.
The Overseer screamed at the warriors in black, and the other slavers screamed, but the warriors did not seem to hear them.
They beat their swords against their shields.
“Alor inwataria…” said the giant warrior.
“…kare es mawei,” said the silver warrior.
Their blades were two fangs in a viper’s mouth. They struck in unison, arms descending, shields crashing forward. Their armors were mirrors for the lanterns. Ered did not see a battle but the dance of light across his eyes as the ship wailed and died and sank beneath his seat. With one flash a slaver fell, throat opened, face crashing to the deck. The second died in a blinding glare, and the third turned to run.
Then there was the Overseer, the man who had seemed invulnerable, whom Ered could not have imagined being bested by anyone but a god.
A gleaming shield knocked his arm aside. The warrior in silver thrust his blade through the Overseer’s closed helm.
The oar deck was silent. The warriors turned to one another. They let their blades touch each other’s shields and bowed.
They turned toward the aisles of slaves.
Ered sank beneath his seat, cowering, trying not to be seen, as the warriors began to cut. Their swords sailed through the chains that kept each oarsman bound. They helped men with broken bodies to their feet and kicked them toward the ladders. Soon other warriors in black, in shirts of bronze links or cuirasses of scale, had descended into the oar deck, and they aided the first two. Every chain was severed. Each slave was pushed toward the ladder.
The warrior in silver reached Ered last. Karek breathed but had not moved.
The warrior glanced to Karek, then to Ered.
He cut Ered’s chain and pointed toward the ladders.
The other slaves were herded upward. Most ran to escape, maybe thinking they were rescued. Ered knew better. He did not leave his bench. He would not go with these butchers, nor would he leave Karek.
One boy refused to be taken. The huge warrior in bronze grabbed his neck. He tried to fight him off, to kick him and scurry away, but he was a child, and the warrior was a giant.
He hit the boy with his shield and dragged him up the ladders.
Ered stayed in place. He tried to open Karek’s eyes and shake him awake. The ship wailed; another band of bronze fell from the ceiling. The rush of water was louder now. Ered was slipping on the bench. Soon he would fall from the oarport, into Tide, right at the edge of the Corsair ram.
But they were near to shore. He was a good swimmer. He could make it to the island. His Andalata there would be better than a brief life as a galley slave on a ship from the City of Arrows.
“Karek,” he said. “We have to swim. Get up!”
The last of the Corsairs was gone. The slaves had all gone with them. The planks at the center of the oar deck were cracking in half. Ered stood, and this time no chain kept him down. But Karek would not move.
“Karek!”
Oars toppled from their mounts and splashed into rushing Tide. Others at the ship’s stern spilled from a rack, pouring into the water. Saltwater crept up along the edges of the oarport. The ship was sinking.
Karek groaned but did not move.
Ered could not leave the old man from his home island. His gods would not let him. Duty shouted that he owed Karek his life. Far louder, Fear screamed that drowning would be better than the oar deck of a Corsair ship.
If Karek would not rise, Ered would die beside him.
Something crashed into the hold. The water was growing deeper. He dared to look.
The warrior in silver stood over him again. He pointed to the ladder, and Ered understood him when he said, “Go!”
But Ered shook his head and fell back against Karek.
The warrior grabbed his arm. Ered fought against him. There was water at their toes. They splashed through it, away from the bench, but Ered broke free, and he scrambled back to the spot he had been chained to for a month or longer.
The warrior in silver stared at him. Then he drew his sword and lunged.
His glistening blade severed the chain on Karek’s collar.
The warrior lifted Karek. This old Brakish oarsman had seemed like a giant, like the strongest man Ered had ever known, but compared to this Corsair-Lord he was thin and emaciated and weighed nothing at all. When the warrior had carried Karek to the ladder, Ered scrambled after him.
The giant warrior reached down through the hatch and pulled Karek to the top deck. Then the warrior in silver gestured for Ered to follow.
The Corsair-Lords would work them until they died. But at least they would get to live a little longer, together, before they dwelled in Death’s realm forever.
Ered followed the warrior up the ladder.
The Corsair ship was wider than the slaver galley, with larger sails and men who wore beige and tan and dwelled in the rigging like birds in branches. Words were written everywhere on masts and ropes and planks of wood. He had never seen this script but knew at once that it was Treak.
The slavers had been butchered without Mercy’s blessings. None were taken captive.
The man in silver was the Corsair captain. He had all those they had rescued gathered beneath the masts, and he divided them into groups from Dinre, Tertaskra, and Brak or elsewhere. This last group was the smallest, and only three others were placed with Ered and Karek. So divided, they were escorted below deck.
Now it began again. Now they would be chained to new seats, the replacements for the last slaves worked to death on this ship that was faster than any ship should be. Already the oars had been extended. The Corsairs made for open water quickly. They would need more bodies soon.
The group reached the oar deck, and Ered saw the man.
He wore a black tunic like the others. He stood at the deck’s center, where the Overseer once had been, and all around him were arrayed the hundreds of oars that a vessel like this needed to sail.
But there were no slaves. The benches were empty.
He shouted a word, and the oars rowed.
He shouted another, and they drew themselves out of the water and pivoted backward.
He shouted the first word, and the oars plunged downward and rowed again.
Each oar was scrawled with words of Treak.
The Corsair escorting the slaves did not stop at the oar deck. He led them lower, into the hold. The other groups had already been taken into cells. Now they were led into their own, small and dim. Torches lit wet walls.
A slave set Karek’s body down. The cell was locked. They were left alone.
But it was not like the slaver ship. They were fed often and given mead. Karek soon awoke, and Ered fed him more rations at once than they would have received in a week before.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“It’s the Corsair ship,” Ered whispered.
Those words belonged to Fear. The old man’s breath came slowly.
“Why are they feeding us so much?” Ered asked.
Karek looked at his meal. “To fatten us. So we’re strong again, and valuable to sell.”
Ered saw no other reason. He would not let that keep him from eating.
The dim lights strained Ered’s eyes. Teams of slaves came and went to a deck lower down. A single warrior with a spear and shield watched the cells from the stairs, totally unmoving. If he was always the same man or sometimes another, nothing told them apart.
Time was not interested in the lives of slaves. She did not dwell in that hold. Ered counted passing days only by his meals. He slept often, and when he was awake, he spoke to Karek and tried to learn more Athin from the other men in his cell, or from the whispers of the other slaves across from him.
They had been fed twenty meals by the time the gates were opened. Each group of slaves was gathered on the top deck. There Ered saw Tide and Earth’s shore again, and he felt Sun, and breathed in Storm’s fresh air. Shadow was in the breeze. The day was very cold.
They were in a busy harbor. Keradioa ships surrounded them, with decks upon decks of oars, and on the hills that enclosed this bay, an enormous temple stood. Its walls were fifty times taller than any temple built on Brak. It sprawled like a city unto itself over the ridge, spilling down into a market, covered in gold and silver and colossal mirrors that reflected the view of the city and the harbor. At the highest peak it ended in a towering statue of smiling Pride, gazing down into the waters of the bay, staring into his own painted reflection.
“This is Nerici,” Karek said, as he stared at Pride in the water. He couldn’t look at the majesty of the Great Temple.
The warrior in silver, the captain, stood at the highest point on the quarterdeck. He held his helmet in his hands and looked down on the slaves. Where Sun struck the helmet’s visor, it blazed like a lit torch. His reddish hair blew behind his head, and he held himself with the stillness of a god. He resembled one of the Anthara more than Pride above them, and though the sight of the Great Temple had been utterly awesome, Ered found it harder still to look away from the captain.
Warriors approached each group and began to ask questions. They asked every slave what skills he had, if he knew any trades, or if he had been a person of value before being captured.
When it came Ered’s time to speak, he had learned enough Athin to say, “I have no worth.”
The warrior laughed. “Born a slave?”
“A man of fish.”
“A fisherman,” said the warrior. “Then you can fish.”
“No,” said Ered. “Not good.”
The warrior crossed his arms on his chest and bowed, a religious gesture that Ered did not know.
“Deception is an ugly hag,” he said. “Honesty serves lords and slaves alike.”
He continued on.
These Corsair-Lords baffled Ered. He touched his collar and looked up at the captain again.
The captain was looking down at him.
An aging slave brought Ered to the captain’s quarters. Ered had expected scalps and severed heads and the fingers of tortured victims to be displayed in cases and along the walls. Instead the cabin was austere, marked only by a few trophies and icons to the Anthara.
The captain waited for him there. He was six inches taller than Ered, and twice his weight.
Dismissing the slave, he said, “Do you understand me?”
Ered pulled on one of his fingers. He noticed his own smell in this clean room.
“Little,” he said. “Learning.”
“That isn’t an easy thing to do while shackled to a wall,” the captain said.
“Shackle makes easier,” Ered said.
“Does speaking to me frighten you?”
Fear had never held Ered’s wrists more strongly. He could see her specter standing behind the captain and had to look at his own sandals.
“Yes,” he said quietly.
“But you seem to have Courage in abundance. You fought against me. You were willing to drown for the sake of your… father?”
“No.”
“No? But someone close enough that you would die for him.”
“No. Not Courage. Fear of your black sails was why I stay.”
The captain was motionless while he watched Ered’s dark eyes.
“Yet you did stay,” he said. “Then the man isn’t your father. But you would rather stay together.”
“I would rather go home,” Ered said quietly. “I am slave now. No one cares what I would rather.”
Ered felt the ship rocking under his feet. There were gulls in the harbor. Sun shone through solid screens on the windows that kept out Storm. They must have been enchanted wood. These Corsairs had magic for everything.
After a long time, the captain spoke again.
“My name is Tawic kir Koric. I am a shipmaster of the Corsair-Armada of Nis Daksi. Those men you rowed beside are my plunder. I am selling them today. What the gods have planned for them does not concern me. I think you’re wrong; Courage walks strongly with you, as does Duty.” A smile as kind as Love incarnate’s look spread across his face. “And Language, too. I’m always interested in men with powerful gods, and I would like a servant who could speak Brakish. I intend to keep you as one of my personal slaves. You will stay on this vessel. Do you understand what I say?”
“Yes. Captain.”
“Shipmaster,” said the captain, “for the moment. You will address me and the Corsairs on this vessel as ‘lord’.” He took a step forward. “I intend to keep you. But I also make no enemy of Duty. So I give you one decision. You can stay with your friend, if you desire. If that is what your gods demand. Or you can remain with me. What do you say?”
Ered frowned deeply, and he covered his face. This ship, and these men, were not what Karek had told him. That did not mean they sailed with Mercy in their souls, or that they were kind masters. But they were pious, and they respected the gods in themselves and others, and they did not use slaves for their oars.
He would never be an oarsman again if he stayed with Shipmaster Tawic. But if he went with Karek, his Andalata might be another slave galley. There could be another bench, and maybe without a friend beside him. He would meet another fate worse than the Silent Kingdom.
He no longer saw Fear behind the captain. Instead she waited for him by Karek, on the gangplank to Nerici.
“Can Karek—my friend—not stay?” Ered asked. Athin no longer sounded so hideous to him, but Language did not bless him with its words swiftly.
“He is an oarsman, and he is old,” the captain said. “I have no use for him.”
“He is wise.”
“Then perhaps he will have some value at market after all. Karek goes. I would ask that you be kept with him at the market. What happens thereafter is not my concern.”
They would be parted. And how much longer would the old man live anyway? He was in his sixth decade. Ered had only lived through fifteen turns of the Domains.
Ered had not chosen to be born on Brak Island, or to be a fisherman, or to be taken as a slave. These things happened without him. Now, for the first time in his life, the captain from Nis Daksi would let him decide his own Andalata.
“I remain, Lord,” Ered said. “I will serve you.”