Byzantium's Crown (8 page)

"You laugh, Mor?" Nicephorus asked. "By Horus, you give me courage. I hope we are sold together." The scholar reached out to touch his taller friend's shoulder. Then, as a man gestured threateningly with his whipstock, he shrank back.

A warmth very different from fever or the merciless sun filled Marric. As a prince he had tended to have associates, servants, officers. But no friends. Especially not for him, because of the daily treacheries in his life. But here was friendship given him for the man he was, not for any imperial favors. Or did Nicephorus, with that sight of his, know who Marric really was?

It hardly mattered either way.

Overseers and hired swords herded the coffle into a warehouse where the factor entered into loud, anguished bargaining. Finally, the slave dealers allowed the slaves to be fed and watered like the rest of the livestock. One man tossed Marric a flask of cloudy oil. He worked it into his skin thoroughly, easing the aching stripes and wounds on his body. It would also serve to make his body gleam so that he would draw a higher price, perhaps from some wealthy lady bored with too many long, idle afternoons. But he could not cavil: to be clean, fed, and out of the foul slave hold and savage streets were blessings for which slaves quickly learned to thank the gods.

Marric watched them lead Nicephorus to the block and the thought made him feel sick. He had seen death, and had not shrunk from causing it. But this casual sale of a friend, reducing the scholar, the magician, the all-but-brother to sinew and muscle—if he retched here, they would beat him. He almost didn't care.

And since when, Marric, did you get so sensitive about slaves? You've owned enough of them, a voice commented inside his skull.

Since I became one. He grinned mirthlessly and forced himself to watch the transaction as if it meant little to him.

The bidding rose high. Professional counters translated prices in ingots, dirhans, even gold armlets into their worth in imperial solidi. Nicephorus' skills as a scribe found a ready market.

Finally, the bidding narrowed to two people: a priest and a freedman who was obviously the major-domo of some villa. The priest had his skull shaven and wore only a kalasiris of fine pleated linen in the archaic fashion. But his eyes caught and held first Nicephorus' gaze, then Marric's. He raised the major-domo's bid, then looked back at Marric.

"Can he handle accounts?" shouted another bidder from the crowd.

"You! Can you figure?" the auctioneer asked Nicephorus. He nodded. Despite the resignation he professed, he looked afraid. The new bidder topped the priest's offer.

The priest's eyes seemed to expand, engulfing Marric's consciousness. Under their commanding gaze Marric felt simultaneously lighter and more aware. And then he became the priest, who seemed outwardly only to examine a sturdy slave.

So that is the missing prince, thought the priest of Osiris.

Marric was stunned. He had known people were said to speak mind-to-mind, but had never believed it.

Tall, shoulders muscular from racing his chariot and reining in horses. Definitely a warrior: harsh tempered, stubbornly loyal, angry at the world and at himself. Those scars are healing well. Holds his head high, with the very falcon's pride. Is he a ruler yet, fit to be consecrated? The high priest ordered that he be tested . . .

The priest glanced aside, and Marric knew he had been examined, judged, and dismissed. Though that was no more than he expected, crushed hopes made him strike back. I am Marric, Alexander's son! he shouted inside his mind until his eyes ached. I am emperor, Horus-on-Earth! Listen to me, priest! By your loyalty to my father, aid his son. I am master here!

Priests. You could never make sense of them, like that old shavenpoll back in Byzantium. He had thought, though, that you could trust them. Now it seemed as if even the high priest knew of his plight and spurned him. He would never have believed that Irene could prevail with that one: his father had trusted him with his soul.

This priest stared at Marric. Master of no man, least of yourself. And thus, a slave.

He broke the contact. When the auctioneer appealed to him for a higher bid on Nicephorus, he shook his head. Then he and his entourage swept from the market.

Nicephorus was knocked down to the major-domo. A pity for Nico: he might have liked temple service. Then Marric clenched his fists, fighting the twin follies of cursing a priest or hurling himself after one. A push at the small of his back sent him stumbling onto the block. He breathed deeply to control his rage. Disgust rose like bile in his mouth. The auctioneer saw that and praised his chest expansion.

Set take you, I'm not a war-horse! Marric turned on the man, murder in his eyes. The audience gasped. Men with spears pointed them at him.

"Spirited," the auctioneer recovered his ready patter of encouragement to the crowd, "but high tempered as he is, he is biddable. Watch this, my masters!"

Holding Marric's eyes with his own the way Marric had trained horses, he slapped his face. Marric's head jerked to one side, and his eyes dimmed with shame.

Master of no man, least of yourself.

It wasn't just his line that was unsound. He himself was disastrously flawed, and Alexander had known it. His father had taught Marric that the priests of Osiris never did anything by chance. So Marric's enslavement must be ordained as surely as the Nile's next flood. Even if he escaped, though, Alexa was dead.

Marric fixed his eyes above the heads of the dealers, owners, agents, and passersby who stared at him. A big man hurled an overripe fruit at him, and it spattered over his face and chest. Marric started forward. As the spearsmen raised their weapons, he froze, but just barely.

"Did I not tell you?" the man said to the major-domo who had bought Nicephorus. His voice had a piercing quality that Marric could not shut out.

"The slave is dangerous."

"Of course he's dangerous. That's the challenge. But he could be broken, molded by a better man. Ahhh, Strymon, just let me work him over during the summer, and you'll have a slave-guard worth twice as much as he'll go for now. We could resell him." He grinned and poked the major-domo, an austere freedman, in the ribs.

"What d'ye say, Strymon? The mistress gets pleased by the profits, and maybe she splits it with us. Or maybe you and that new scribe juggle—"

Strymon raised a hand, increasing his bid for Marric.

"—juggle the accounts and she never—"

Again Strymon's hand went up.

"—guesses. And if he doesn't take to . . . training, why then, he isn't going for that much more than a field worker. Even after the sea crossing, look at the muscles on him."

"Do I hear another bid? You, sir? You, my lady?" A leer from the auctioneer set the audience laughing raucously. "No? Your loss then, on those long, dull evenings. Going once, going twice—"

Strymon raised his hand again. No one matched his bid.

"Sold!"

"Sutekh," Strymon told the bigger man, "I'm buying him not for your reasons, but because we can get good labor out of him—that is, we'll be able to assuming you're half the overseer you claim to be. But when you school this one, take care. Lose our mistress her investment again, and Maat witness I'll have you on that block yourself to pay her back. Am I quite understood? Do you want me to repeat it more slowly?"

Sutekh the overseer nodded, though his blockish face reddened under its shenti, and the muscles straining his coarse tunic swelled as he fought down anger at the threat. He glared over at Marric. And Marric realized that he had been sold for the price of a good cavalry remount into a household where the overseer already resented him.

Marric trudged with the other newly acquired outdoor slaves toward their barracks. The household for which he had been purchased was no great one. While the main villa seemed substantial enough, its looks might have been improved by a new wash of paint on the outer walls. The outbuildings showed that the owners and Strymon (now riding in a wagon with the more valuable indoor slaves) took decent care of the estate's livestock, animal and human.

Probably a regimental officer garrisoned in Alexandria had decided to retire here and had taken land outside the city walls fronting Lake Mareotis. Sensible of him, Marric thought. The man's descendants had obviously shared his good sense by tending the land, buying more, and adding a new wing onto the original house. As a general, Marric would have prized such an officer.

Master of no man, least of yourself. The Osiris priest's rebuke came continually to mind. Would Marric indeed have valued such a man?

The overseer, Sutekh, stalked past the line of slaves and pointed to the barracks with the whip he seemed to use as a badge of office. Given the number of men crowding into it, the long room was as clean as might be expected. Marric had seen soldiers housed in worse quarters and had shared them.

But the sun beating down on the lake and the breathless heat of the day would make the place not just stuffy but suffocating. Doors and windows might let a breeze in at night, but the windows wore set so high that Marric didn't think they would do much good. Not even brimstone would cleanse the place of the reek of too many bodies.

He turned quickly from the thin pallet beneath one of the windows and glanced about. Surely a household of this size provided bathing facilities for its slaves.

Deliberately Sutekh stepped into his path. Though the overseer was shorter than Marric, he was far stockier. He had the body development of a man who had overtrained solely to win at wrestling, not to achieve the all-around coordination of the charioteer that was the Byzantine ideal. Sutekh's powerful arms and chest would make him a nasty adversary. Marric examined him. The skull under the reddish headcloth would be quite as hard as the jaw that the man thrust out.

"Looking for a bath, are you?" Sutekh anticipated Marric's question with more shrewdness than he had expected. He laughed, as if Marric had told him a ribald tale. "There, slave!"

He pointed lakeward with his whip.

"Just don't let the crocodiles eat you. Around here, slaves who are too clean don't live long. But any time that you have time, go right ahead and risk a bath. Just don't expect me to come with a spear to pry you out of the crocs' jaws."

Marric returned to the barracks. He would watch the more experienced slaves and do as they did. Most of them seemed to avoid Sutekh. They stepped out of his path and looked down whenever his eyes swept over them.

At nightfall the slaves were fed: bread, onions, and thin, sour beer. Marric had eaten worse on campaign. He would simply have to think of this as one more battle to win.

* * *

In the days and weeks that followed, Marric found his resolve to survive and escape tested sorely. His barracks mates were none of them the sort of men he was used to. Whenever he had walked among soldiers they had been rough, cheerfully obscene, and wily with the craft of men who knew that if they survived this campaign, they would have money in their purses and the thanks of their officer. Most of his companions were spirit-broken fellahin. There were a few exotics from the Upper Cataracts, sold into slavery down in the Delta for reasons Marric never learned. There was even one Northerner—one of the Gepidae, Marric thought—who grunted incomprehensible hostilities at any attempt to speak to him. Like the others, he seemed only to understand the whip.

As scribe and account-slave, Nicephorus was kept within the house. Marric missed his serenity, his quiet faith that there was a purpose to the scant food, the hard labor in someone else's fields, and the daily, odious sight of Sutekh stalking in front of the sweating labor gangs, whip at the ready.

Once the major-domo had sent Nicephorus out into the yard to fetch a slave to move some heavy chests.

"You!" Sutekh had bellowed at Marric. "The bather! Clean yourself so you do not pollute the house."

The day had been so hot that the big crocodiles basking on the dried mud of the shore would probably be too torpid to move fast. At least Marric hoped so. He dived into the water, savoring the short minutes it caressed his dried-out skin, then stood dripping before the overseer and Nicephorus. Too quickly the sun dried him, and he followed his friend toward the house.

"How does it go, Mor?"

"I live."

"You are thinner." Nicephorus' concern made Marric feel more human than he had since he was sold. He was thinner, lean and muscular as he had never been despite his life as a field officer. "But still you endure—"

"All for a purpose?" Marric's mockery was gentle.

"Aye, whether or not you want to believe me. I but wish—" A man in a clean gray robe glided by, almost as if he were trying to avoid being seen. Marric stopped short. A druid? In Alexandria? The grayrobe glanced at Marric, and Nicephorus urged him on.

"Nico," he said. "That man. Surely he is—"

"This way," Nicephorus interrupted. "The Lady Heptephras has decided that certain chests and heavy tables must be moved immediately. And they are beyond the strength of the house staff."

Nicephorus led the way down a corridor toward the mistress' suite. The founder of the house had built in the Egyptian fashion, with the women's quarters in the secluded inner court, the coolest part of the villa. Some mediocre wall paintings adorned the hall. Rough tesserae of simple mosaics alternating with stonework provided cool footing.

"Does Sutekh trouble you, Mor?"

"Not beyond what I can stand—yet." From the moment of Marric's purchase, he had had an enemy in the overseer with the ill-omened name, and he had hated him in return. Hatred—except of Irene—was a new lesson for Marric. Few men had ever dared to show him anything but smiles, however forced. And he had always managed to transfer men he disliked out of his sight. But standing silent under abuse, taking orders—alien though they were to him—taught him more self-control daily.

Sutekh had the power of any freedman over slaves. More than that, he was the overseer. He relished his power and exploited it. Marric would not have tolerated such a man in the army training recruits. Sensing this, Sutekh seemed to find Marric, who carried himself soldier-straight, a challenge far more satisfying than the easily towed fellahin or the brutish Northerner.