The Prince of Shadow (4 page)

“Yes—”

“No,” he contradicted her. “My father was dead before Chin-shi's men ever brought me here.” She had to know that his father would not have permitted a single day to pass with his sons in slavery if he'd lived.

“Lleck was a family servant. I loved him, but he was not my father.” He'd said too much and now he tried to keep the panic off his face. She would know that Thebin hardscrabble farmers didn't have servants.

“And he loved you,” Kwan-ti said slowly, seeming to ignore the second part of his statement. She looked into his eyes with that hawklike gaze. Then, as if the sun had touched her, she seemed to open up in front of him, her eyes wide with sudden insight, a tiny sigh escaping her lips before she clamped them closed again, lest she say something out loud that should not be spoken at all.

“I have to find my brothers,” Llesho said tentatively.

Kwan-ti nodded. “So he said to me on his deathbed.”

“So he said to me in a dream beneath the bay,” he agreed.

“You cannot go back to the oyster beds now.”

“What am I to do?” he asked; this conversation with the healer felt more like a dream than the one he had with the spirit under the bay. Something about Kwan-ti's eyes, the gentle touch of her fingers on the back of his hand, slowed time to a walk.

“For the present, you must consider what you
can
do that will not kill your soul in the doing,” she answered, and the spell was broken. She rose and spoke to someone behind Llesho in the longhouse. “Are you feeling ill, Tsu-tan?”

“Not at all.” The hopeful witch-finder bowed his head over the pearl basket he carried. “I just came to see how the young diver was faring. Shen-shu will want him back on the boat tomorrow.”

“Then Shen-shu can speak to me tomorrow. Now, we must permit young Llesho to rest.”

“Of course, of course,” Tsu-tan bowed and scraped his way out of the longhouse. He returned to his place beneath the coconut palm and took up again the pearl sorting basket never long out of his hands. He could see all the comings and goings of the longhouse from there, Kwan-ti knew, as she also knew he was watching her for evidence of witchcraft. She feared that Tsu-tan would now turn his attention on the young Llesho as well.

For himself, Llesho felt no inclination to rest. He had not regained his full strength, but he felt well enough to take a walk on the shore and watch for the red harvest boats to come in from the bay. So he left the longhouse while Kwan-ti was occupied in bandaging the cut foot of the cook's assistant, and wandered out past the cookhouse, onto the road.

Few slaves traveled the road at midday, but those he passed had heard about Llesho's double tragedy, the loss of Lleck and his own near drowning, and did not interrupt his brooding with idle conversation. Llesho had not quite told the truth about Lleck who, as minister of arts and education, was more a servant of the Thebin people than to the family of the king. Lleck had found him in captivity and joined him there, had taught the young prince not only reading and writing, but the arts of strategy that had come too late to save a king. As he walked, Llesho made good use of those lessons, setting evidence against probability, and examining methods to reach his goal.

If the apparition had been a dream concocted by his own starved mind, how had he known the minister had died? And if it was a dream, how could he explain the same message delivered to Kwan-ti? It must be true then: his brothers still lived, in servitude as he did himself. Llesho had to rescue them and together the brothers must free Thebin from the killing grasp of the Harn. If their mother still lived, languishing in the dungeons of her own palace—The thought stuttered out. Llesho could not imagine his beautiful mother reduced to squalor and filth, but the image of his battered sister bleeding into the refuse heap struck him to the heart. He hadn't wanted her dead, not really, he'd just wanted his mother back. By the time Ping had turned two, however, the little princess had adored him. He couldn't help but love her back. Couldn't—wouldn't—imagine her dead.

Since he had arrived on Pearl Island, he had been no farther from the slave compound than the oyster beds. There were no days off for good behavior, no visits to market or the city for a play or pageant. Once he had hated the duties that lined him up, smallest of seven brothers, to wave, nod, and bow at the side of his mother and father. He had longed for the day he was old enough to follow his brothers into the city for stolen pleasure in the night. That had all ended before Llesho even knew what pleasures his brothers found in the city. So why had Lleck come looking for the youngest and weakest, who was stuck on an island nobody ever got off of? Why hadn't he found one of Llesho's older brothers, who could actually
do
something about his deathbed revelation?

Trying to figure out Lleck's reasons wasn't helping him decide what to do. Llesho had walked all the way to the docks without even seeing the road he trod upon, but had only confirmed the impossibility of ever completing the spirit's quest. Who left the island, ever? Lord Chin-shi, of course, and his wife and daughters. Lord Chin-shi's son had not been seen on the island since before Llesho had arrived. The foremen, Kon of first quarter and Shen-shu of second quarter, sometimes accompanied their master to the slave markets to acquire new pearl fishers. But Shen-shu was the older of the two, and he was scarcely thirty. Neither was likely to give up their privileged position any time soon.

Pearl fishers never left the island, not living or dead. If they died of disease, they were cremated immediately to curtail the spread of infection. Rumor had it they did not always wait for death before feeding the fire with the struggling remains. When they drowned, or grew too old to work at all, they were fed to the pigs.

Kwan-ti had been right, though, he could not go back to the oyster beds. His lungs were fine, he could survive underwater as long as he ever could. But if he were visited by a vision again, he would surely drown while he argued with the demon who accosted him. He needed a second skill, one that would keep him out of the pig trough and get him off the island.

While he sat on the dock, thinking, the sun had dropped low, and he heard the taunting challenges of the pearl fishers returning home from the quarter-shift. He looked up, vaguely embarrassed to be wearing clothes when Lling and Hmishi and all of his fellow pearl divers were naked from work. He forgot all about the incoming divers, however, when he recognized the device on the prow of the harvest boat: tridents crossed over a round shield. Of course! Lord Chin-shi made his fortune on the pearl fisheries, but he
spent
his fortune in the arena. Renowned even in the longhouse for their prowess, Chin-shi's gladiators competed in arenas almost as far away as Thebin itself. And gladiators were given a cut of the purses they won. If a gladiator was good, and survived his battles, he might pay his way free before age and injury cut him down.

Llesho elbowed and apologized his way past his companions who were swarming off the boat, mocking him for his clothing and asking after his health. When he reached Foreman Shen-shu at the prow of the boat, Llesho fell to his knees and knocked his forehead on the dock in the formal style of a petition. “Honorable Foreman, sir, I respectfully request that you take my petition to your master, Lord Chin-shi of Pearl Island.” He carefully referred to the master as that of Shen-shu alone, accepting by implication that Shen-shu held that position over himself. He'd learned long ago not to show the anger that flared every time he had to kowtow to the foreman: strategy, Lleck had taught him, sometimes meant sacrificing today's pride for tomorrow's victory.

“The witch forbids you to go back to the beds, doesn't she, pig food?” Shen-shu answered.

Llesho lifted his head from the dock and sat back on his heels, his palms resting on his knees. “I know of no witch, Master Shen-shu,” he said, ignoring the more pertinent part of the foreman's statement for that which he could truthfully refute. “I come to you with a petition to Lord Chin-shi that I may train as a gladiator for the ring.”

For a moment the entire dock went quiet, as Foreman Shen-shu stared at him in amazement. Then the foreman began to laugh. “A gladiator, pig food? A short contest with the pigs, perhaps.” In the silence, Shen-shu's words rang sharply. “You pearl fishers are so skinny, Lord Chin-shi's gladiators will use you to pick their teeth.”

Llesho reddened to the roots of his black, wavy hair. Beneath his clothes, he knew himself to be as skinny as his companions, whose bones he could plainly see pressing against the thinly stretched flesh that covered them. He imagined the gladiators to be huge men, taller than mountains with muscles like carved rocks, and knew he could not compete against such specimens of manhood. But, he reasoned, even gladiators must once have been boys. They could not have been born with all that muscle and sinew, and they didn't have a Thebin's natural endurance. If they could become great fighters, so could he.

“If I am so skinny,” Llesho argued, “the pigs won't miss me, and the gladiators will have some fun breaking me into pieces.”

“That they will, boy, and feed you to the house dogs when they are done.” Shen-shu, who almost never displayed any sign of good humor, slapped his knee and laughed in agreement with Llesho's assessment of his chances.

“Forget about the old witch and her threats and warnings,” he chided with more of that good humor so alien to his nature. “Your shift-mates miss you, and it makes them inefficient.”

“They must learn to do without me,” Llesho countered, “because I am determined to be a gladiator.”

“You are a fool, do you know that, boy?” Shen-shu was no longer laughing.

Although at a disadvantage, being still on his knees, Llesho looked up at the foreman and held his gaze steadily. A good strategist knew when to hold his ground. “Then I am a fool,” he accepted. “But I am a fool who will die as a gladiator, not as a pearl fisher. Nor as food for the pigs.”

“We'll see.” Foreman Shen-shu would say no more. With his authority over the pearl divers came the responsibility to mediate their rare petitions. Those he could not negotiate to a standstill must be referred to the Lord Chin-shi. And the boy Llesho was clearly not going to negotiate.

“Your humble slave gives thanks for your beneficence, in taking this petition to your master,” Llesho answered, completing the formal petition ceremony.

His shift-mates, who listened silently while he argued his case with the foreman, stood apart from him with confusion and even fear on their faces. Llesho looked from one to the other, but found no understanding or support, not even from Lling, who turned away from him when he tried to catch her gaze. For the first time in his life as a slave, Llesho found himself embarrassed to see his Thebin shift-mates naked.

I am your prince,
he thought,
you owe me more than this.
But they didn't know, and he couldn't tell them, nor did he expect that they would thank him if he did. He turned his eyes to the ground and walked away, ignoring the wagon that silently filled with the divers going home.

Chapter Three

WEEKS passed for Llesho in an agony of suspense. Kwan-ti did not approve of his decision, but she could not declare him fit to work in the pearl beds either. They both knew that left little but the pig troughs for a growing boy with no useful skills. Kwan-ti said nothing, but went about her work with her lips pressed together and her eyebrows drawn down in a frown.

Llesho's strength returned quickly, and with it the need for movement. He missed work, realized that the danger of the pearl beds had kept his mind sharp and his attention focused. And he discovered, to his surprise, that he missed his shift-mates. He had never thought of them as friends when they spent each quarter-shift together in the bay. In the days since he had seen the spirit of Lleck and nearly drowned, however, the pearl divers had begun to distance themselves from Llesho. The experience had set him apart as his secretive reserve had not. The usual quarter-rest banter that bound the group with petty griefs and shared workaday mishaps could not absorb so great a challenge, could not take in this new shape of him and make it ordinary. Llesho recognized the sudden emptiness where Lling's smile used to be, and the absence at his back that Hmishi used to fill. It seemed that he had been wrong on all counts. Not friendless and, according to Lleck's spirit, not without a family either. And not aware of any of it until he found himself well and truly alone. Well, damn.

To fill the hours, he ran. Not fast at first, but as he recovered, his runs grew longer: around the island once, twice, before he stopped, gasping. Even Thebins needed to catch their breath eventually. Some days he had heard the measured tramp of feet falling in unison to a deep voice rumbling out the time—now faster, now slower, while the feet of running men kept the beat. Llesho had kept ahead of them easily, and soon enough they changed direction, moved off on a path Llesho never took, up the hill to the training compound at its height.