Before reaching the main gates, Zera veered off to one side and addressed a tall, rawboned solider clad in voluminous trousers the color of sand, and a boiled leather breastplate bearing no insignia or mark of any sort. His arms flexed as he slanted his long spear across his chest. Like his brothers-in-arms, he was better fed than the common rabble, though just. Eyes black and stern, he peered at the two of them from an open-faced leather helm snugged tight to his skull.
Leitos thought trouble was coming, but the man simply inclined his head at Zera’s softly spoken words and said, “You and your prisoner may pass, Hunter.” He opened a small wooden door set in the wall, stood aside as they strode through, then closed the door behind them.
Past the small gate they again joined the steady trickle of incoming traders and crofters heading down a main thoroughfare that stretched ahead, arrow-straight. A young boy with a harried expression sprinted by, heading for the gatehouse. Leitos thought nothing of it, captivated as he was by the press of folk around him. They had not gone a hundred paces when a roared command drew up short those closest to hand.
“You there, potter, halt. Halt, damn you!”
Anyone with more than three ranks of people between them and the gates bustled ahead a little quicker. Everyone else froze in place. Zera kept on, Leitos at her side, craning his neck to see what was amiss.
A pair of guards marched briskly to the potter’s cart that Leitos had noted earlier. The man stood a little apart from his small family, as if in an attempt to draw the guards’ eyes from his wife and son.
“The king has sent word that he has a need for wares such as yours,” said the guard in command, fingering an ewer at the end of the cart.
At the door of the gatehouse, bent double with his hands on his knees and gasping for breath, waited the runner Leitos had seen. He had no preconceived expectations of what a king’s runner would look like, but the child seemed ill-suited and poorly clad to be a messenger of any highborn.
“Of course,” the potter mumbled, bobbing his head in acceptance. “But these vessels are poorly made, meant for trade amongst the lowborn, unfit for the king.”
The guard was unrelenting. “The lot of it.”
The potter’s placid gaze blossomed with alarm. “All of it?” he breathed. “If you take it all … I cannot trade for food, for cloth, for clay to make new pottery. You have already taken the required obligation, and more.”
Leitos halted. Weighing what he saw now and what he had noticed earlier, he judged that the cart bore far less than half the load it had earlier.
“Please,” the potter begged, “find another to fulfill the king’s need. When I return, I will bring more pots and pitchers, crocks and bowls, all finely made, a proper tribute to the king.”
“The lot,” the guard repeated. His eyes then fell to the ox. “And the beast, too. The king is feasting his court this night, and has need of meat.”
Desperation flooded the potter’s eyes. “This wretched creature is no fit fare for the king,” he babbled, running his boney hands over the beast’s even bonier flank. “If you take it, I cannot draw my cart … and if not that, I cannot meet the king’s required obligations.”
The guard struck the man a backhand blow, knocking him into the dust. A collective, fearful murmur went up amongst the crowd. Once curious eyes turned inward, and people began shuffling hurriedly away, as if afraid that what was befalling the potter was a catching sickness.
Lolling in the street, the potter groaned. The blow had smashed his lips, crushed his nose, and blood dribbled from both. Indifferent to the man’s suffering, the guard cast a leering grin at the potter’s wife and son. “Take them, as well,” he ordered his fellow. “The king can fatten them both … and use them as he will.”
The woman wrapped protective arms around her son, drawing him close, even as she backed away from the advancing guard. She made a sound then, a strange mewling, whimpery noise that caused a sickening wave of anger and disbelief to rush through Leitos.
“Come,” Zera said, drawing him away. “All belongs to the king, and what is the king’s belongs to the Faceless One.”
“Is there nothing that can be done?”
“Indeed,” Zera answered. “The better question is would it be worthwhile to die by halting one small trouble of many hundreds in a given day?”
“She needs help,” Leitos insisted, pulling away from Zera.
“Perhaps one day you can help, if you still have the mind and will to do so-but not this day.”
Leitos flinched when the woman began screaming, a high crystalline wail that sliced to his soul. He was turning back when Zera wrenched him around.
“Keep your fool head down,” she said in an icy, uncompromising voice. “There are greater troubles in this land than that of one idiot’s wife and their wretched get. He should have let the guards have what they would, without a contrary word. Now he has lost what little he was allowed to have. Short days from now, even his life will be taken from him.”
Leitos went along, unable to do otherwise with Zera’s grip threatening to pop his head from his neck. Behind them the woman’s screams ceased with a finality that brought to mind images of a sudden and violent end. Leitos thought he might vomit, but managed to quell the urge. The throng of people behaved as if they had neither heard nor seen anything out of the ordinary.
And, of course, they did not, Leitos thought darkly. To them such screams, such groundless outrages against their fellows, must be commonplace to the point of acceptance.
“How can people live like this?” he demanded. “How can they tolerate such injustice?”
Zera looked askance at him, as if to confirm to herself that he would not do anything foolish, then released his neck. “They do not know or expect anything else. This way of life is all they have ever known.” And so it is with slaves, Leitos thought.
They went deeper into the city. The life he had believed he would see was no life at all. Rather it was a twisted, accursed form of living death. Listless trading went on everywhere: grain for stunted vegetables, vegetables for tiny loaves of hard bread, bread for wedges of moldy cheese, cheese for coarse cloth. Goods of every sort were bartered, but at the end of it no one seemed better off for what little they had gained. Having food this day meant going hungry on the morrow, when food would be needed to trade for some other necessity.
King’s guards strode every street ahead of high-wheeled wagons. With a word and a cuff to the head, they took additional obligations in the name of the king, and tossed them into the wagons.
“What can one man do with all that,” Leitos asked.
“King Rothran is little more than a provincial gaoler of Zuladah and its nearby territories, which in turn is but a parcel of land that serves as an open prison in this region of Geldain. There are many such kings of the same purpose across this and all lands. They are men chosen by the Alon’mahk’lar hierarchy to serve as the human representative of the Faceless One.”
She stepped into a crowded alley reeking of excrement, urine, and sweat. “As to what is done with all the obligations,” Zera went on, “King Rothran makes a fine show of squandering them for his Alon’mahk’lar masters, while at the same time secretly hoarding much wealth.”
“Why hide anything?” Leitos asked.
“Humans are forbidden to amass wealth or goods-this keeps them weak, and ensures that they can never have the means to mount a rebellion-not that Rothran would ever risk his position by staging a revolt.