The Prince of Shadow (6 page)

“Change my shirt?” At first, Llesho thought Jaks meant with magic, and he almost asked what he should change his shirt into. Not that he could do anything of the sort, of course, but he could try, if magic was required of gladiators—he didn't want to begin by showing any more ignorance than he already had. Then he realized, not change the shirt, change himself, by putting a clean shirt on. In Thebin he'd had a clean shirt for every day of the week, and special shirts made of yellow silk embroidered with bright colors for holidays and feast days, for banquets and for public days. Since he'd been a slave, though, he'd had one shirt and one pair of pants, nothing to go under them, and one day a week to wash them in, after which, for modesty, he would wear them wet until they dried. But he didn't think Jaks wanted to know about the domestic arrangements of pearl divers.

“I don't have another,” he said, and waited while the gladiator blew out another gust of annoyance like a belch.

“Stupid to even think it,” Jaks muttered. Llesho held his tongue with an effort rewarded when Jaks finished, “Of course, Markko doesn't know what he is doing. Not a single freaking clue.”

Llesho waited out the storm as it broke harmlessly in another direction.

“You can't see the overseer like that,” Jaks pointed out as if it should be obvious. “We'll have to find something for you to wear.”

The gladiator led him across the practice yard to a low building made of coral blocks. A covered porch ran along its length to keep out the sun and provide a cool place to rest after a day of practice in the yard. It was more solid than the longhouse of the pearl divers, but obviously meant for the same purpose, which Jaks soon confirmed.

“This is the barracks,” Jaks told him, “Master Markko will decide where you will sleep, but you'll need to be able to find the laundry wherever he puts you.”

The laundry was actually several rooms clustered at the end of the barracks, each devoted to a particular task in the process of keeping the competitors dressed and supplied with protective coverings. They passed through the leatherwork shop but did not stop, though the strange scents drew Llesho like an old dream. Not fighters, but horses. He remembered horses, and the image in his mind when he thought of that word made him want to weep. But Jaks was leading him through an open courtyard cluttered with vats of soapy water and ladders of vines with clothes and long stretches of plain white cloth pinned to them. The steam pulled the heat up into his face and he felt the slick of sweat on his temples, dripping down his nose and over his lip.

A man with more rolls of fat than Llesho had ever seen sat on the edge of a bubbling vat. Naked to the waist, he reached in to his elbow and drew out bits of clothes, some that Llesho recognized and some that he didn't. The water smelled clean, and the bubbles released their own sharp scent when they burst, tickling Llesho's nose. Curious, Llesho trailed a hand into a vat for himself and pulled it out again, shaking the burned fingers.

“Where did the midge come from?” the fat man asked, and Jaks answered, “Thebin, originally. The pearl beds more recently, and without a stitch to wear.”

Jaks was laughing at him with this strange man, who gave a clipped bark of his own laughter. “Madness,” the stranger gave his opinion with a little shake of the head, then gave Llesho one of those long, measuring looks that made him squirm. This man seemed to have no status, but Jaks treated him like a confidant, and the man himself looked at Llesho as if he were something discovered on the bottom of his sandal.

“Thebin, eh? Well, he won't be easily winded. That's one thing in his favor.” The washerman scratched thoughtfully at his backside. “As far as I can tell, that's the only thing.”

Regal was easier in front of an obvious servant, and Llesho's jaw came out, his head tilted just so, his shoulders straight and at ease.

Both men stopped laughing. “It can't be,” the washerman whispered.

“Madness,” Jaks agreed softly, and added, for Llesho, “Pull it in, boy, if you want to stay alive.”

Danger. Llesho remembered the precise timbre of a warning rippling through time at him, and in reflex his eyes darted, looking for a place to hide.

“Dear Gods,” the fat man muttered, expression broken in shards of fear and denial. “Have you been on Pearl Island all along?” he asked.

Llesho did not answer. He figured the men must know that, and he wanted to understand what they were up to before he said anything in their presence. He had a feeling they'd know his whole life story if he opened his mouth at all.

“Does Markko know, do you think?” the fat man asked Jaks, as if Llesho were not in the room. “What do you suppose he wants with the boy?”

“Get him a shirt, Den,” was all Jaks said, but his voice had gone completely blank. “Not a new one. Old, patched.” So the washerman had a name.

“Pathetic,” Den muttered, but Llesho did not quite understand who or what was pathetic, so he decided to keep his mouth shut.

Den stood up, wearing nothing but a cloth wrapped between legs as thick as the logs in the outer palisade and covered with their own forest of coarse hair. “Off with it, then,” he said, and wiggled his fingers until Llesho had stripped off his shirt and handed it to him.

“We don't have anything in his size.” The mountainous launderer wandered ponderously between the ranks of hanging cloth. “But this should do until I can get the stitchers on it.”

Llesho had lost track of the washerman somewhere behind him when the scuffling footsteps faded out of his hearing, and so he jumped when a thick arm reached over his shoulder and handed him a shirt. Not ponderous unless he wanted to be, then. Llesho stored that away for future reference while he pulled the clean shirt over his head and smoothed it into place. It came almost to his knees, and his hands were lost in the long sleeves. He made a face, but Jaks ignored it.

“That will do,” he agreed. A look passed between the two men that Llesho had the good sense to worry about, but Jaks took him by the shoulder and back-tracked them through the laundry. When they were outside again, the central practice yard had emptied of men, leaving only the broken tools of combat behind. Jaks crossed the space without a glance or a word, and opened a door into a small stone house that sat a little apart from the sleeping barracks and equipment rooms.

“The pearl diver has arrived,” he told the man who sat at a desk in the elaborately decorated room. “What do you want me to do with him?”

“Leave him here. You may go.”

Jaks did so at once, and again Llesho found himself facing a stranger who looked at him with cool, incurious eyes. This must be the overseer, Master Markko, he figured, since that was the name the boy had given, and the same that Jaks had mentioned to Den in the laundry. From the way people had spoken of him, Llesho had expected someone huge and powerful, or grim and forbidding at least. In fact, Llesho could find nothing of distinction about the man at all. He had the golden skin and the dark hair of the boy who had come to fetch him, but Llesho could see no family resemblance beyond the most common ties to a place and a people. Master Markko seemed to be about as tall as the boy with no name, but with his full height, while the messenger had overlarge hands and feet, like a puppy who would be a much larger dog. The man, Markko, wore several layers of plain robes that marked him as a minor official in the lord's household.

He seemed to be ascetically slim beneath the robes, but his face showed no feature of remark, nor could Llesho find any sign about his person that he was or had been a gladiator, or had ever fought in any way.

Markko looked up briefly from the work that lay scattered on his desk. “We've already had an offer for you, from Lord Yueh's trainer,” he said. “Do you suppose you are worth such a lordly sum?”

“I don't imagine so, sir,” he answered. He didn't know how much Lord Yueh had offered, or what it meant in the scheme of the buying and selling of gladiators. However, Llesho didn't want to go anywhere they knew enough to offer for him when he had no obvious skills or value.

“I suspect you are right,” the overseer said. “His lordship has declined the offer, which means you will be under my direction.”

“Yes, sir.” Llesho couldn't think of anything else to say, so he hung his head as submissively as possible, and hoped that the overseer would soon tire of him.

After another penetrating look through eyes like chips of flint, Markko returned his attention to the paper on his desk.

“The mop is in the corner,” he said. “You can fill the bucket at the laundry, and begin with this room. Then the barracks floors need washing. When you are done, you may report to the cookhouse for dinner before you return here.”

“There must be some mistake,” Llesho suggested, hoping it was true. “I don't know anything about washing floors.”

“How difficult can it be?” Markko asked him reasonably, “Mop, bucket, water, floor. In that order.” He turned back to his desk, but looked up when Llesho did not move.

“But I thought I was here to become a gladiator.”

Markko looked him over with a critical eye, as if he were buying fish in the market. “Do you like to bed men, boy? Large, hungry men with the bloodlust still running in their veins?”

“That would not be my choice, sir.”

“It is, however, the only choice I have to offer you,” Markko explained to him reasonably. He had not changed his tone of voice, but Llesho realized suddenly that the mildness was a mask, that Master Markko already knew too much about him, and that this was one person he did not want to challenge. He ducked his head and looked as pitiful as possible in his patched and oversized shirt until Markko dismissed him with a wave of his free hand. Then Llesho picked up the bucket and the mop and crept out of the room, unwilling to turn his back on the man who had stared at him with no feeling in his eyes. That, Llesho decided, was what made this man dangerous. He had no feelings at all.

Chapter Four

LLESHO spent his first day as a gladiator in training learning how to scrub barracks. He hadn't been exactly surprised when he found himself on mop duty. A long time ago, it seemed, he'd been the new pearl diver in his quarter-shift. For weeks he'd cleared out dead oysters with empty shells while his shift-mates gathered the pearls that should have filled his sack. Shen-shu had beaten him after each shift from which he returned empty-handed, but that too seemed a kind of initiation with no real anger behind the blows. After a period of testing, the divers had accepted him as one of their own. Llesho had expected no less from the gladiators, and had braced himself for much worse than a mop when he followed the messenger up the hill.

Still, he was exhausted when he returned from cleaning the floor of the latrine, just in time to see the golden boy leaving the stone cottage. The overseer sat at his desk as if he hadn't moved all day, but set his pen down when Llesho bent his head and stood in a proper submissive silence at the center of the room.

“Lord Chin-shi has requested my presence,” Markko told him, and rose from the desk with majestic grace. “I will be at Lord Chin-shi's house for much of the evening. You will doubtless wish to sleep before I return, but as you can see, I am ill-equipped for housing boys here. You will have to make do with a corner of the workroom in the back—” Markko gestured at a closed door shrouded in shadows under the stairs. “Don't touch anything, and don't go upstairs.”

“Yes, sir.” Llesho did not look up until he heard the door open and close again behind the overseer. With a careful, darted glance to make sure Master Markko had actually departed, he raised his head and reached for the timbered ceiling in a great stretch to unkink his back. He looked at his hands ruefully. He had worked hard in the pearl beds, but his new duties with mop and pail left him with peeling blisters butting up against old calluses. His feet hurt, his back hurt, and his arms hurt, but none of that was going to keep him awake past his exhaustion. Not even his excitement that he seemed to be one step closer to escaping Pearl Island could do that.

After another careful stretch, he looked around him, wondering why he was supposed to stay clear of upstairs. Curiosity was one of Llesho's greatest weaknesses, but the looming shadows painted on the still and dusty air dampened any interest in exploring the upper region of the cottage. He did not want to know what cast those shadows, and so he ducked under the stairs and opened the door.

The workroom was the same size as the office. An L-shaped worktable ran the length of two walls. Above the long side of the worktable, a window with its shutter propped open let in the damp evening air. Shelves ranged above the short side of the table and from floor to ceiling on both sides of the doorway were packed with tools and pots and jars and strange mechanical devices and scrolls and codices. Everything seemed to be neatly in its assigned place, but the workroom felt cluttered. Over everything hung the faint scent of purgatives and something more ominous.