“No, Khai, none of that. There have been boats down the river—several. There’s a bend just up ahead. At any moment, there could be another boat. One with soldiers, perhaps—real soldiers! So get up now, quick as you can, and on your way.”
He could hardly credit his ears. Was this the girl he had loved, who had given him her body so completely, this cold creature who now hastened him to be on his way? He propped himself up on one elbow.
“I may never see you again,” he said, half-stumbling over the words.
Mhyna’s face softened. She leaned over him and kissed him tenderly—but stopped his hands when they began to wander. “Khai, Khai!” she said shaking her head. “We know each other now—all there is to know, as much as any man and woman may know of each other in so short a time—so let it go at that. Don’t you understand? You have to be on your way.”
He turned his face away from her. Lines half-remembered and hidden in previously unexplored recesses of his mind suddenly floated to the surface. They were meant to be tender lines, but now Khai used them bitterly:
” ‘My beloved spake, and said unto me: rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.’”
“Oh?” said Mhyna, twisting the hairs at the back of his neck and inhaling the smell of his skin with delicate little sniffs. “And are you a poet, too, sweet-smelling boy?”
Khai answered: ” ‘A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.’ “
“Would that I could have you, my fine young man,” she answered, “but I can’t!” In one lithe movement, she stood up and stretched. “Where did you learn such poetry?”
“They are the words of a wise man, I think,” he answered, “not a poem but a song.”
“The Song of Khai,” said Mhyna, smiling.
“No, of … of a king!” he answered.
“A king?”
Khai frowned, forcing himself to remember—but the memory was fading, clouding over in his mind. In another second it was gone, and with it went Khai’s bitterness.
Suddenly, seeing the girl standing there against the mast, her young body proud and free, he felt that his heart was being strangled.
She was the last thread connecting him with Khem, the sole remaining symbol of an otherwise disordered universe. He got to his knees, threw himself at her and pinned her to the mast with his arms. Burying his face in her skirt, he kissed her belly through the coarse material.
“Will you not come with me, Mhyna? Flee Khem now and be mine in Nubia?”
She stroked his hair and looked down at his upturned face. The look in her eyes was one of surprise. “Do you love me, Khai?”
He made no answer.
She shook her head. “And what of my husband, and his child which I carry ? Should I forsake the one and ask you to be father to the other ? I think not.”
“Husband?” he slowly stood up. “Child?” his eyes went to her belly.
“Oh, he’s not showing yet, Khai—but he’s there all the same.” She patted her slightly rounded belly.
“Husband,” he said again, shaking his head.
“He’s an old man of—oh, thirty,” she explained, “and he’s good to me. Better than I am to him. He’s my father’s partner....”
Khai said nothing but simply stared at her, his mouth half open.
She framed his face with cool hands. “Khai, I didn’t intend you to love me, only my body. I only wanted to seduce you—not to break your heart.”
He pulled sharply away from her. “My heart’s not so easily broken, Mhyna.” But there was a catch in his voice. He stooped and snatched up his bow and quiver of arrows, took two short paces along one of the boat’s wooden ribs and leaped over the outer bulwark of reeds into water that was waist deep.
“Khai—” she began, then checked herself.
He waded ashore and climbed up onto a bank shaded with leafy branches. Only then did he pause to look back. Mhyna looked at him where he stood on the bank. “Will you remember me, Khai?”
His eyes were hot and angry, but he nevertheless nodded his answer.
Mhyna turned her sail into the wind and the barge began slowly to slide off the silt into deeper water. Khai wanted to wave, to call out to her, to wish her well. Instead he concentrated on the lump in his throat, which refused to be swallowed.
Then she was gone around the river’s bend, and only the ripples on the river remained to say that she had ever been there at all.
PART SIX
I
The Slavers
By mid-afternoon, Khai was unable to remember exactly what Mhyna had looked like. His nostrils could detect her perfume, the scent of her body, the pungency of the oil she had rubbed into her skin; but try as he might, he could not focus his mind’s eye upon her face. Sensibly, he took this as a sign that he had not been and was not in love with her, and he put her to the back of his mind.
He must concentrate now on making good progress through the forest, and indeed he had made progress. He must have covered a good nine or ten miles since leaving Mhyna’s barge. The forest was mainly still, shady, dappled with patches of sunlight and furtive with hidden animal eyes. Tiny creatures moved in the leaves and grasses; the occasional bird would rise up in a clatter of wings at his approach; more than one group of wild pigs had rushed off through the undergrowth as he came trotting through the trees.
Twice when he had paused to get his wind and check his direction of travel (he used the sun, which he kept at his back and on his right), he had noted an odd effect. It must surely be his eyes which were playing tricks with him in the gold-dappled gloom, but it sometimes seemed to him that he stood on a vast carpet of yellow sand, with huge dunes stretching away on every hand and lizards that moved underfoot instead of small rodents and leaf-mold beetles. Indeed, if he half-closed his eyes he could conjure the vision out of thin air, could draw the sand down from the sky and drown the entire forest in its mighty drifts. It frightened him a little, and he wondered if it could possibly be the harbinger of some fever contracted in Asorbes’ slave quarter. Best to put it out of his mind, along with Mhyna and her forgotten face, and stop worrying about it. Still … he wondered if the forest’s floor had ever actually been a desert, or if it ever would be—and then he wondered why he wondered.
When next he paused Khai heard a sound from somewhere not far ahead. At first, he thought it was the cry of a bird, but its paced regularity and rising, sobbing note was not the call of any creature he knew of. Moving carefully forward toward the source of the sound, he soon became aware that it was only one of a series, which as the distance between closed came more clearly to his ears. First there was a hissing, then a sharp crack followed immediately by the cry, and then the whole thing would repeat. And now Khai could make out that cry to be nothing less than a scream of agony. Someone was suffering a whipping!
Since the awful sounds were very close now, Khai proceeded with even greater caution. Presently, he came upon a natural clearing where, through a screen of ferns, he saw a scene of great cruelty. Inured as he had almost become to horrific sights, still the youth cringed at what he saw. From a slender tree near the center of the clearing hung the naked, lifeless body of a black man. A noose of rope was round his neck; his body was covered with blood from a dozen deep wounds; his sightless eyes hung out on his cheeks and the empty sockets were already full of flies. Khai shuddered unashamedly, knowing that the black had suffered hideously before he died.
There were six other blacks in the clearing, four males and two females, all naked. Five of them were bound and tied together with ropes, tethered to the same tree from which their former colleague now hung. They were slaves— or would be soon, when they had been sold in the slave-market in Asorbes— and their captors were Arabbans from across the NarrowSea.