Blood and Iron: The Book of the Black Earth (Part One) (7 page)

Horace collapsed. The smells of cooking were intoxicating, but he couldn't even summon the energy to sit up when a servant brought their evening meal. He sucked down the two ladles of water he was allowed and ate lying on his back. It was more of the flavorless mush, but he hardly cared. He longed for the solace of sleep, for a few sweet hours when he could forget he was alive at all.

As he closed his eyes, a soft voice whispered in his ear. “I am Gaz.”

Hearing the words spoken in stilted Arnossi made Horace bolt upright. Beside him sat the short, bald target of the guard's abuse, with his legs folded under him. His head gleamed in the firelight.

After a glance at the guard, who was busy eating his supper, Horace replied, “I'm Horace. You speak Arnossi?”

“Yes, a little. Good to mat you, Sire Horace.”

“Huh?” Then Horace understood what the man had meant. “Oh, yes. Good to
meet
you, too. Are you Akeshian?”

The small man scratched under his armpit as he bowed from the waist. “Indeed. I am born in J'gunna. You will please tell about your land? I am very want to know.”

“Ah, sure.” Horace rubbed his forehead. After days without anyone to talk to, he had a hundred questions. “But first, where are they taking us?”

“We are on road to Nisus. We are….” Gaz pursed his lips and looked up at the purple sky. “Gift. Yes? We are gift.”

Horace didn't like the sound of that. “A gift for who?”

Gaz said a word that sounded like
amanamatturi
, but Horace didn't catch it all. “Is that another lord?” he asked.

“No, no. Is the god son.” Gaz pointed up to the sky. “Son, yes?”

It took Horace a moment to understand. “The sun! The sun god.”

Gaz nodded while Horace tried to put the pieces together. They were being taken to a place where they would be given to a cult of sun-worshippers. It wasn't as shocking as he might have guessed. The pagans’ worship of false gods was the driving force behind the Great Crusade. He had listened to the
Archpriest of Avice deliver a sermon on the front steps of the basilica the day they set sail. The words still rang in his head.

“The pagan masses of the East are beyond our Prophet's redemption. Their souls cannot be saved by the staff, and so their existence must be ended by the sword. This Great Crusade is the instrument of the Almighty. Go forth, my sons, and suffer no heathen to live.”

“If you're Akeshian,” Horace asked, “why are you a captive?”

“Yes, yes. I am Akeshai. I am slave.”

After several attempts, Horace finally got the man to comprehend his question. “I am very poor,” Gaz said. “You understand? Sell ox. Sell farm. Then nothing left to sell. Must sell self.”

That made no sense at all. “Wait. You sold yourself?”

Gaz wore a dejected look as he nodded. “Yes. Master demanded it, or take my life.” He touched his collar. “Better than death, yes?”

Horace wasn't sure he agreed, but he kept that to himself. He spotted a copper disc hanging from Gaz's wrist by a thin leather cord. The disc had squiggly lines drawn on its flat surface. “What's that?”

The man held up the talisman. “
Gigim'libbu.
A charm against spirits. You get one. Very good protect your
qa
from night-demons.”

Night demons?
“What kind of hell is this place?”

“Yes, you are man of the gods. But we Akeshai see this as the natural way. The
zoanii
rule from heights, and rest must suffer in this life. If we serve well, we be birthed again after our long resting. You understand?”

Horace didn't, but he was getting the sense that there were a great many things about this land he didn't understand. He was about to ask what a “zo-ah-nee” was when a cry echoed through the camp, followed by coarse laughter. On the far side of the slave ring, three guards were standing over a chained woman, one holding her by the hair. The nearest slaves cowered away from the spectacle as far as they could move. While the other guards watched, the woman's captor tore away her thin tunic. Her shrieks filled the air. Horace could guess what was going to come next. He started to get up.

“No!” Gaz put a hand on his arm. “You must not.”

“To hell with that.”

A few slaves looked up as Horace stood, but he saw no camaraderie in their eyes. Only painful acceptance. That made him angrier. He pulled on the chain attached to his collar as he took a long stride toward the disturbance. The guards took notice. The two watching the show advanced toward him, their hands going to the whips at their belts. The third guard leered as he continued to fondle the protesting woman. Horace didn't have a plan, but he wasn't going to sit by while they molested her.

The first blow caught him across the chin. He ducked under the follow-up, but the next one landed on his shoulder with enough force to make him grunt. Horace tried to lunge at the guards, hoping to knock them down, but the chain jerked him to a stop. He bent under a barrage of whip blows. When one of the guards grabbed him by the neck, Horace lunged and wrapped his arms around the man. They both tumbled to the ground, but the guard punched Horace several times. Bright spots exploded in front of his eyes as the guard lifted his whip.

A large hand closed around the guard's wrist and hurled him backward. Horace flinched as a whip cracked, but it didn't land on him. The giant had waded into the brawl, throwing punches. Whips cut into his dark skin, but the big man didn't seem to notice as he picked up a guard by the throat and a leg and threw him into the campfire. Blinking to clear his vision, Horace climbed to his knees. He barely saw the boot coming at his face in time to bring up his arms to block it. Then something hard struck him across the shoulder. The breath rushed from his lungs as he pitched forward. A few paces away, the giant bowed under the weight of several soldiers who had joined the fight. Horace covered up his face as the blows continued to fall.

They beat him savagely and kicked him dozens of times in his ribs and back. Curled up in a tight ball, Horace lost all sense of time. The blows stopped falling, and there was only pain for what felt like hours, and then…nothing.

“You live!”

Horace cracked his eyelids and winced. The sun was only a couple fingers above the horizon, but already its light was blinding. He started to sit up and groaned as pain erupted all over his body. His entire back felt like one huge bruise.

“Slow! Go slow. Here.”

Gaz knelt beside him holding out a cup. Horace accepted it and savored the warm water. Then he laid back and sighed. What had he been thinking last night?

I wasn't thinking. Just reacting. Again. What's gotten into me?

Reacting was all that he'd done since the shipwreck. He felt like a dinghy swept up in a hurricane, at the mercy of the winds, and he didn't like the direction they were blowing him. He needed a plan, some star to set his course by.

“Must not drag attention to self,” Gaz said.

“Draw,” Horace said, handing the cup back. “Don't
draw
attention to yourself.”

“Yes. Hate them in your heart, but not show it. This is best.”

Horace stretched his sore shoulders, feeling the skin pull taut across his back. The soldiers strode around the camp, packing up to depart. The big slave who had come to his aid last night sat a couple paces away. Several new bruises marred his skin, but otherwise he looked little worse for wear.

Then Horace turned his head. Several guards were approaching with their whips held ready. Horace braced himself for another onslaught, though he didn't know how he could survive another beating like he'd gotten the night before. When the guards yelled, the slaves rose to the jingle of rattling chains. Horace began the slow process of standing up as the coffle was dragged and shoved into a semblance of order. The soldiers lined up in formation, and then everyone waited. Horace risked a glance over his shoulder to the elaborate pavilions where Lord Isiratu and his entourage had spent the night. A manservant
emerged from the largest tent, a long wooden chest in his arms, and was soon followed by his masters, Lord Isiratu and Lord Ubar, and the priest Nasir.

My masters now, too.

Horace found it difficult to accept the idea, but this was his reality. He was a slave.

While Isiratu entered the wagon, his son walked to the center of the camp. Horace watched as the young noble closed his eyes and held out both hands at waist height. It almost looked like he was praying. A dark spot appeared on the ground at Lord Ubar's feet. The spot grew wider and became a muddy puddle. Horace almost swallowed his tongue when a knee-high jet of water spurted from the wet earth. Ubar stepped away from the newly made spring, and several slaves approached with buckets, which they used to refill the caravan's water barrels.

Horace grunted as a line of pain sliced across his back. A guard growled in his ear. Horace balled his hands into fists, but he didn't move. Fortunately, another guard called down from the front of the line, and his tormentor hurried off. Horace kept his head down as the procession started moving and focused on maintaining the pace.

As he had already learned, the end position was the worst place to be. He was continually breathing in the dust kicked up by the many feet ahead of him, and if he failed to keep up, the others could simply drag him along. Yet being alone at the back also allowed him the illusion that his suffering had no witnesses, even if he was only fooling himself.

The big man glanced back every once in a while. The guards didn't notice, or perhaps they were willing to let it go as long as the giant kept moving. Horace caught one of these glances and acknowledged it with a nod. The big man did nothing in return.

He probably thinks I'm insane, and he might be right.

Horace couldn't help but admire the man, who marched with a straight back and shoulders thrust back as if he were leading a victory parade. The nearby captives gave him as much space as their chains would allow, and even the guards left him alone. Horace tried to emulate him, standing up tall as he marched along.

The sandy waste continued ahead of them for as far as he could see. This was, he comprehended with a shock, what they called a desert. He'd heard of such places. Apparently the east was rampant with them, great dry seas of sand where a man could die of thirst in hours. The sun's heat became even more oppressive as the day wore on, but Horace didn't die, though he began to feel light-headed and his mouth became so dry he couldn't summon enough saliva to swallow.

“What is this place?” he croaked.

“The Iron Desert,” the big man said.

Horace blinked and tried to clear his throat. “So you speak Arnossi.”

“I'm better with Nimean. Arnossi is too hard. The words have too many meanings.”

Horace might have laughed if his situation weren't so dire. He held out his hand. “I'm Horace from Arnos. From Tines, specifically. What's your name?”

The big man ignored the offered hand. “Jirom, son of Khiren of the Muhabbi Clan.”

“Good to meet you, Jirom. Where are you—?”

A guard walked by, brandishing his whip, and Horace closed his mouth. Jirom faced forward as if he hadn't said anything. The procession stopped for a break at midday. A man came around with the water barrel, and Horace gulped down the cup offered to him. While they rested, he shaded his eyes against the intense sunlight and tried to make out the landscape ahead, but all he could see were a few clouds in the eastern sky, highlighted in gold. And more sand. Leagues of it.

Keeping an eye on the guards, Horace leaned over to Jirom, who lay beside him, stretched out on the hot sand. “So you're obviously not Akeshian. Where are you from?”

“The Zaral, far to the south and west.”

Horace had heard of such a place, supposedly a land of vast plains and mountains that touched the sky. “How did you get all the way up here? It has to be…” He tried to calculate the distance in his head from his recollection of seafarers’ maps. “…at least five hundred leagues.”

“Closer to a thousand. But I've been farther from my homeland than this.”

Jirom listed all the distant lands he'd traveled as a sellsword, some of them places Horace had never heard of before. “That's incredible,” Horace said, trying to imagine all those years away from home. He gestured to the man's iron collar. “So what happened?”

“I ended up on the wrong side of the wrong war. I was given the choice between death and becoming a slave. Now I fight for our masters’ pleasure.”

Horace studied the man beside him. A hardness showed through past the scars and raw branding welts that marred his dark skin, until you looked into his eyes. Rather than the dull, brutish eyes Horace might have expected in a foreign mercenary-turned-gladiator, Jirom's gaze held quiet intelligence. “Do you have a wife back in the Zaral? Children?”

Horace regretted the questions as soon as he asked them. He most of all should have known better than to inquire about someone's family.

Yet Jirom answered without ire. “No. No one.”

Horace was quick to change the subject. “So what lies ahead for us?”

“I've heard that the priests of Akeshia worship their gods with blood. Perhaps we go to our deaths on their altars, but I won't kneel for them like a goat. They'll have to fight if they want to feed me to their demons.”

Gaz glanced at them in alarm but said nothing. Horace nodded. He liked the big man's attitude.

After a short rest, the caravan resumed its trek. The sand dunes became taller until they often blocked out the horizon like long, rippling hills. Dust devils chased each other across the desert floor. Whenever one approached the procession, some of the slaves muttered words that sounded like prayers and touched their foreheads. Each time this happened, Gaz clutched his talisman to his chest, but Horace didn't see anything menacing about the tiny whirlwinds.

Not long after high noon, the caravan was reaching the top of a dune when Horace spotted a pair of reddish-brown dots on the horizon ahead. The spots grew with each passing mile, from small pebbles to narrow boulders until they were finally revealed as towering pillars of rock. Eventually, Horace began to notice features carved into the stones. They were statues.

“Holy God,” he whispered.

He tried to guess their height but stopped after his estimation surpassed two hundred feet. He couldn't imagine the technical skill required to construct such immense effigies. They must have taken an army of artisans years to finish.

The road passed between the statues, giving Horace the chance to see them up close. The colossus on the left was male, the right female. Both were carved standing up. The male statue wore only a long skirt down to his ankles and a crown of circles on his brow. The female had a long gown belted just under her high breasts. Her head was unadorned, her long hair hanging down past her shoulders. Both had expressions of peaceful serenity, or so it appeared to Horace. He wondered who they were supposed to be. Guardian totems? If so, they weren't very frightening except for their titanic proportions.

Horace was so preoccupied with the statues he didn't notice the view beyond them. Several gasps made him turn forward and look down into the canyon of deep red stone that opened before them. Lord Isiratu's wagon had already started down the road, which cut through the center of the valley, but Horace's gaze was drawn to the structures built along the steep walls on either side. They looked like stone palaces, scores of them. Most had extravagant entrances with columned arcades and statuary, surrounded by high walls. A few of the larger edifices had two or even three layers of concentric fortifications. Yet he saw no people among the buildings.

“The Valley of Souls.”

Horace looked to Jirom, who had stopped a few paces in front of him. “What is it?”

The big man looked back. “A city of tombs.”

Horace gazed about in awe as the caravan descended into the valley. The necropolis was about five miles long and half that across at its widest point. The road descended farther than was first apparent from above. Once they reached the floor of the gorge, the cliffs loomed several hundred feet above their heads, enclosing them in a cocoon of ruddy stone.

The caravan halted midway across the valley at a square platform beside the road. The square was made from a deep-red stone shot through with black veins. Lord Isiratu's wagon pulled up beside it while the guards spread out to
make camp on the opposite side of the road. The sky turned deep lavender as the sun went down behind the canyon walls, and long shadows reached across the tombs, shrouding them in gloom. A cool breeze floated across the camp.

Lord Isiratu, his son, and Nasir emerged from the wagon. Usually when they stopped for the night, the lords retired directly to their tents to eat and bathe, but tonight they climbed onto the platform and knelt in the dust with their heads bowed. Braziers were produced and set alight at each corner. Then Nasir led the nobles in a slow chant. They repeated this ritual three times, each time turning to face a different direction. Food was brought forth and thrown into the braziers. Wine was poured onto the stone floor, making Horace lick his cracked lips. Yet even as he was haunted by his thirst, a strange feeling intruded on his thoughts. He felt warmth coming from the direction of the platform, though the braziers were more than a dozen yards away and the temperature on the valley floor was dropping. The warmth played along his skin like the touch of a furnace. Thinking it might be heat-sickness, he sat down.

After the libations for the dead, the ritual ended. By that time the tents had been erected, and the masters went inside. The guards came around with water and hard bread for the slaves.

Chains rattled as Jirom sat down beside him. “Want company?”

Horace nodded as he sipped from his cup. “Sure. I'd be glad for it.”

The other slaves were eating and lying down on the ground, trying to get what little sleep they could. Horace was exhausted, too, but sleep wasn't on his mind as he gazed upon the rows of tombs and mastabas dotting the landscape and tried to imagine what would compel a people to put so much labor into their final resting places. “This is beyond belief.”

Jirom grunted around the last bite of his supper. “The Akeshii bury their dead in stone mansions if they're rich enough, or in the dirt if not. They believe their souls pass down into the earth to the afterworld to be judged.”

Horace shook his head. His own faith taught that only the evil descended into Hell, while those who had been saved by the Prophet's grace rose to the glory of paradise. Yet he kept that to himself, not wanting to insult Jirom in case he shared the Akeshians’ beliefs. “Whatever the reason for these tombs, I
never thought I'd see any place like this. It makes me feel small, like a child getting his first glimpse of the ocean. Except here, the drops of water are measured in years. Some of these temples must be centuries old.”

“Older than that. These high walls protect the tombs from the winds and weather. They'll still be sitting here when the world ends.”

“And here we sit before them, a couple of slaves on our way to discover our fates.”

Horace chuckled at the absurdity of his life. Jirom looked over and then laughed. A handful of guards glanced up but didn't bother to quiet them. Finally, Horace took a deep breath and let it out, feeling better. “So how does a man from the southern continent find himself here?”