The Last Days of Magic (16 page)

That evening, as the sun made to hide behind the far west wall of the royal enclosure, Aisling walked her new hobby back into the stables. She did not notice the stableboy running toward her; she was too busy searching inside herself for that strange glimmer and hint of warmth she thought she had detected.

“My lady?” he called, intruding on her thoughts.

“Sorry. Here.” She handed him the reins.

He peered around behind her. “And Lord Maolan’s stallion, my lady?”

“Oh. I forgot. I’ll go retrieve him tomorrow.”

7

Republic of Venice

The Next Month

J
ordan sent the requisition to the legate’s secretary, who showed it to the legate, who found it surprising. The legate had been expecting a request for soldiers and weapons for the mission to the island of Great Skellig. Instead all Jordan requested were twenty slaves delivered to his ship. The legate sent back a note:
“Is this all you will need?”
Jordan replied,
“Prince Ruarc assures me all he needs are slaves for tribute. All I need is Ty.”

Jordan’s requisition had been quite specific: Ruarc required ten women of childbearing age, four young girls, four young boys, and two men not older than twenty-five, all Muslims with swarthy skin.

. . . . .

Najia’s skin, usually dark olive, had taken on an ashen cast from dehydration. She felt the slave wagon slow and heard the clang of ship’s bells, the call of men working. She cocked her head, wishing that the others would stop sniveling so she could hear better. Her hands were manacled in front of her, as were the hands of all the slaves. A thin rope, in her case about six feet long, attached each set of manacles to a heavy rope that ran down the middle of the group so they could move, caterpillar-like, when the slavers needed them to walk. Unlike the other slaves, her face was covered. Even so, she thought she could untie the rope and try to run away. But that would probably lead to another beating. She needed a more certain opportunity.

Najia’s wagon bumped to a stop. A rough hand grabbed her neck and dragged her out. The sack was pulled off her head, and she glimpsed a quay, men unloading slaves next to her, and her captor’s coarse face. She instinctively pushed her gaze inside him and saw malevolence
stirring excitedly; she perceived that he cultivated that maliciousness to fend off his harsh world, and she knew he would hurt her if he could. With most of her powers repressed and her hands bound, there was nothing she could do to stop him.

He must have sensed her fear, as a dog would, and he laughed, drew his knife, and held it in front of her face. “You scared I’m gonna cut your pretty face? Your throat? Well, I’m gonna.” He pressed the blade against her neck. “Unless you do as I tell you. Then I mightn’t cut you so bad.”

She saw him glance around to make sure the other men were watching. “When you find out what’s gonna happen to you on that ship, you’re gonna wish I’d cut your throat through and through.” He laughed again as he kicked her feet out and she fell hard on the paving stones. “You’d do as well to enjoy this while you can.”

“No, not that one!” shouted another man, pushing through the crowd. He grabbed her assailant’s shoulder and pulled him back. “Can’t you see she’s a witch?”

Her assailant seemed to notice for the first time the runes that the slavers had drawn in white paint around her neck to prevent her from working enchantments, more disappearing down the collar of her rough shift. His eyes widened when he realized that several were partially worn off, and he looked down at the flakes of paint on his hand.

Najia saw his terror and rose to her feet, snarling, but was able to take only a few short steps before reaching the end of the rope binding her to the other slaves. The man leaped backward, then fell to his knees, praying loudly and furiously. She squared her shoulders defiantly. She needed to make these men fear her, she thought.

His friend kicked him. “You’re stupid, that’s what you are. If the runes stopped working, she would’ve killed us all by now. Best fuck a different one.”

“They’re not for you.” The order came from a well-dressed man walking down the quay. He was followed by what she recognized as a
very large Nephilim. “Load them onto the ship. Now. Or I will introduce you to someone to be terrified of.” The men scrambled back to work.

“Does Jordan want Ty to help load the ship?” Ty rumbled.

“No. Let them do their own tasks,” replied Jordan.

The group of slaves shuffled awkwardly along the quay. Najia, at the tail end, leaned forward to her sister, who was two positions ahead, weeping. “Stop that,” she hissed. “You can’t cry and think, and if you don’t keep your wits, you’re going to die on that ship.” She searched for her young brother, saw him trudging head down near the front where she could not get to him.

She looked back at the newcomer walking behind them with his strange Nephilim companion. He was obviously in command, and there was something strange about him as well. She shuffled a bit slower, drifting to the end of her rope. She could not read him. He must be maintaining a protective enchantment, and without any visible effort.

The cluster of slaves paused at the base of the gangplank. She noticed Jordan catch her watching him. The slaves started up to the ship, and she allowed herself to be pulled along while she walked backward. He followed, looking directly into her eyes. Najia tried to read him again but could not reach any depth. There was just, faintly, behind his eyes, a certain light. This might be her only chance. “Admiral, may I speak with you,” she called in excellent Italian.

“Marshal,” Jordan corrected her.

“Marshal, would you like me for your cabin?” she asked. “It’ll be a long voyage.”

“How do you know?”

“By the amount of food and water they’re loading.” Jordan’s eyes played over the runes painted on her skin, and she saw him recognize them. A small smile crept up one side of his mouth. She was about to ask him again when she and the other the slaves were shoved roughly to the center of the deck. A group of sailors began unlocking
their manacles and directing them down a ladder to the hold. Her hands were freed.

“I’ll take this one,” said Jordan.

He offered her a scoop of water, which she drank so fast that she had to fight back a wave of nausea. He offered her a second that she forced herself to drink slower.

“Ty, lead her to my cabin and hold her there. Do not hurt her.”

She shied away from the giant hand, but Ty’s grip on her arm was firm, not painful.

. . . . .

Ty stood statuesque in the center of Jordan’s stuffy cabin, holding Najia’s arm. Even with his back hunched, his shoulders still pressed against the ceiling. Najia was exhausted, and before her was the first real bed she had seen since her capture, but Ty took Jordan’s instructions literally and kept her in his grasp.

She was a piece of chattel in a complex trade network. Slavery had become so common in medieval Europe that the Roman Church had to prohibit Christians from owning Christian slaves or selling them directly to non-Christians. “Directly” provided the loophole. As a result, for the past two centuries this profitable trade had been monopolized by Radhanites, Iberian Jews who ran vast caravans transporting Muslim slaves northwest to Christian Europe, where they picked up Christian slaves and transported them back to Muslim territories, in particular to the Ottoman Empire. Tens of thousands of people, primarily women and young boys and girls, were shipped back and forth along a route centered at the port of Caffa on the Black Sea, the largest slave market in the world, owned and operated by the Italian city-state of Genoa. When the Renaissance began in the fourteenth century, Italian city-states were the largest consumers of humans in Western Europe—all fashionable families had to have at least one slave to be considered successful.

The shouts of men loading Jordan’s ship eventually died down,
and a swaying underfoot told Najia it was leaving dock. She tried talking to Ty, tried reading him, but he was a complete blank. It was like being tied to a post, as she had been several times since being enslaved.

Jordan entered. “You can let her go.” Ty’s hand fell away. Jordan pulled Najia’s collar down far enough to see the runes on her shoulder, then circled her to see the rest.

“What kind of witch are you?” he asked from behind, his fingers tracing a symbol.

“I’m just a healer.”

Jordan’s examination brought him around to her side. “I expected you to lie to me. But the next time you do so, Ty will drag you to the hold and chain you up with the others.”

She wondered what answer held the best chance of saving her life. He was studying her so intently she decided that she would try the truth. “I see the play of darkness and light in people, and I can manipulate those forces.”

“What else?”

“I can work some enchantments, particularly for people I have read, and at times I can foresee their fates,” she added.

“Whoever placed these runes on you did not know much about you. They must have drawn every one they knew. Which one actually represses your powers?”

She guided his hand. “This one over my heart.”

“What did they miss? How do you still have the power to read people? I felt you trying to get around my protection.”

“They should have drawn the symbol for ‘night’ here.” She touched her forehead.

Jordan retrieved a small bottle of grappa from a trunk, moistened a rag, and began to clean the runes off her skin. She had not expected that.

“You believe yourself safe with me?” she asked, regretting the question immediately.

“I wouldn’t be much of a marshal to the legate if I couldn’t handle one witch. Besides, if you cast any enchantments on me or my men, Ty will crush you. Did you hear that, Ty?”

Ty swiveled his head against the ceiling so he could look at her. “Ty will know. Ty will do as Jordan says. Ty will kill witch.”

“Thank you, Ty. Go on out and find a comfortable spot on deck for yourself.”

“He seems quite attached,” she said as Jordan finished scrubbing off the runes.

“In many ways he reminds me of the puppy I had when I was a boy.”

“Did your puppy grow up to be an attack dog? That’s what Ty reminds me of.”

“No, it didn’t grow up. We were starving during the second winter of plague, trade had stopped, shops were shuttered, there’d been no harvest that year. I was out scrounging . . . well, stealing food, but my father didn’t trust me to find any, and he ate my dog while I was gone. Made him scrounge for his own food after that.”

Najia was silent as Jordan poured himself a pewter goblet of wine. “Where are you from?” he asked.

“Damascus. I come from a family of merchants there. Raiders attacked the procession carrying my grandmother’s body to the family tomb in the hills northwest of the city. They captured two of my sisters and youngest brother as well, and killed the rest. One of my sisters and my brother are in the hold.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t burn you.”

“They must have been more interested in money than entertainment. They sold me to the Vatican’s slavers, where burning was sure to be part of what awaited me. I was being taken to Rome when the shipment of slaves was diverted here. Was that fortunate for me, arriving here instead of Rome?”

“To be discovered. As you said, it’ll be a long voyage. Do you speak anything other than Italian and Arabic? Any that you can read?”

“Greek and French. Some bits of others.”

“Can you read Aramaic?”

“It’s close enough to Arabic that I can usually work my way through it.”

Jordan retrieved the thickest of his grimoires, the one he could not read. “Tell me what book this is.”

Gold Aramaic script flowed right to left across the black leather cover, faded but legible. “‘Sworn Book of Honorius,’” she read out loud. “There was a Greek sorcerer named Honorius, the son of Euclid the mathematician. This must be a translation of his grimoire.”

“How do you know all that?”

“As I was not born male, or the eldest daughter, or the most beautiful, I spent all my time studying. My father was a healer, and more, with a large library.”

“Married? Children?”

“No to both. I had five older sisters who needed to be married off first.”

Jordan filled another goblet with wine and handed it to her. “When you were being loaded on board, you offered to please me.”

“Yes. Do you want me to please you now?”

“It will please me if you translate this book. Do that and you can stay in my cabin.”

“You are a strange man, Marshal.”

Jordan sat at the small table, motioned for her to do the same. “It will be simpler if you call me Jordan.”

. . . . .

Najia’s olive skin, restored to health from four weeks in Jordan’s cabin, glowed faintly in the moonlight that entered through the porthole out of which her head hung. After emptying the contents of her stomach into the sea, she pulled her head back inside. The ocean had become rougher as their ship drew close to Ireland, unsettling her stomach and interrupting their evening passion. Opening the lid of the water cask,
she scooped a tin cup full, rinsed her mouth, spat out the porthole, poured a small amount into her hand, and washed her face.