She swallowed, feeling Tris’s focused attention. “Dancers, like me, are usually not owned by an individual for his personal use; the term that slave trainers use for them is ‘exotics.’ Dancers are expensive because they take time to train and require a certain amount of ability. They are owned by taverns, clubs and brothels.”
Rialla looked at her half-eaten roll without interest and continued to speak. “Slave trainers believe that a slave that has been turned into a pleasure slave has no spirit, no individuality. A dancer requires a certain amount of independence and arrogance.”
“You said that slave trainers believe that. What about you?”
Rialla shrugged. “A slave has no spirit, no individuality. It doesn’t matter if she is a dancer or a pleasure slave. A slave feels what she is told she feels, and does what she is told to do. Dancers follow the pattern established for them just as the pleasure slaves do. The pattern is no better or worse, just different.”
“I’m sorry,” said Tris softly.
Rialla tossed him a lopsided smile, and took another bite of the bread. “Don’t be. It’s hardly your fault.”
After a couple of days of working out, Rialla found that she wasn’t quite so worn out at night, but Tris continued to act as masseur. Under his ministration, the stiffness was leaving her bad leg, until she could stretch it out almost as far as her good leg. They had been discussing what he found while he kneaded and pulled until she was as limp as a lump of bread dough left to rise, but this night he was quiet.
“What’s wrong?” she asked finally, keeping her face in her arms. She could feel his distress at the edge of her awareness, but didn’t want to pry without permission.
“Nothing,” he said. “This place oppresses me. The cold stone keeps out the sun’s warmth and light.” He paused. “I thought about what you told me last night.”
“Do your people own slaves?”
“No,” he said. “But we knew about it. A slave came to the enclave once, seeking sanctuary. I understand that some of the religious communes offer a hiding place for slaves. Mine did not. The slave was held until the owners could collect her.”
“Was that your decision?” questioned Rialla, trying to get at what bothered him. She could sense his guilt, that he’d violated his sense of right and wrong, but she didn’t know how to help.
“No. I opposed the decision—for the wrong reasons.” Straw rustled as he moved away. “I felt that the commune had come to its decision from fear of discovery rather than out of any reasoned discussion. I was right, but too young to understand that there was never any other motivation for what the enclave did. The elders had offended my belief in them. I was more concerned with that than with the poor girl who rode off in chains.”
That bothered him, she could tell, but it wasn’t the cause of his disquiet.
“You’re doing something about it now,” she said, finally sitting up so she could see him. “Even if slavery continues for another five centuries, you are doing something about it.”
He stood with his back to her, in the faint area of fading light.
“Am I?” he said in an odd tone. “Yes, I suppose I am.”
He swung around and approached her, gesturing for her to take her former prone position. “I’ll loosen that muscle in your back and tell you about what I learned today. Do you know the ideograph that belongs to Altis?”
Rialla rolled facedown again. She could feel his pain, guilt and remorse churning strong enough to make butter; but she didn’t know what to do about it. She wasn’t sure that he knew how easily she read him—it wasn’t deliberate on her part. She didn’t want him to think that she was impinging on his privacy, so she allowed him to change the subject.
“I don’t know anything about Altis, except that he was one of the old gods.”
“Shame on you,” he reprimanded in his best healer voice. “Altis was the lord of the night. It’s in his shadows that the hunted escapes the hunter’s dinner table. He was one of the benevolent gods. Not only did he refrain from tormenting humans when he was bored, as a fair number of them did, but he actually was known to interfere with other gods at their sport.”
“What of the folk that weren’t human—the shapeshifters, the selkies, and the… the silfs.”
“Sylvans,” corrected Tris dryly, as he started to put pressure on the muscle in her lower back. “We were the children of the gods themselves, and better able to defend ourselves. We could call more readily on our parent god. Naslen, the lord of the forest, fathered the sylvans; Torrec, the huntress, bore the shapeshifters; Kirsa, goddess of the waves, bore the selkies. All of them minor powers, but strong enough to keep the others from lightly playing their games with us. Now, where was I…”
“Altis,” said Rialla. in a voice that was more of a moan as he caught just the right place.
“Yes, Altis. His ideograph is that of a stylized cat sitting on its haunches with its body in profile, and its head full face and lowered—”
“With a five-pointed star in the middle of its forehead, and in the center of the star a large emerald,” interrupted Rialla.
“I don’t know about the emerald,” said Tris, “but there is a five-pointed star. Where did you see it?”
“One of the slaves,” said Rialla. “She was thinking about it.”
“One of the slaves you dance with?” asked Tris.
“Yes” replied Rialla, smiling at the floor. “It was easy to pick up since she remembered it with some… er… fervor.”
“The slave was a follower of Altis?”
Rialla laughed despite herself. “No, actually I’m not sure how the cat came into it; she was remembering a glorious night of passion. I can assure you that it had nothing in common with religious devotion.”
Tris snorted. “You obviously haven’t met the same sorts of religious zealots that I have.”
“You did have something in mind when you brought up this cat?” asked Rialla.
“Yes, though it has lost what little import it had. I was asked to evaluate the chances of saving a wooden screen in one of the rooms on the upper floor of the castle. Once past the public rooms, there isn’t a room in the castle that is free of that cat.”
Rialla thought, then said, “To convince the servants? As with Tamas’s broken arm?”
“Then why would they be only on the private floors?”
“I can answer that,” said Rialla. “As a slave trader, Winterseine deals frequently with Southerners, merchants who would sleep in the guest quarters on the first floor. There is a new religion in the South; it was beginning to evolve when I traveled there with my clan. They worship someone they call the All-Mother. I don’t know much more about them, except that they would certainly not do business with a heathen who worshipped dead gods.”
A peaceful silence descended, and Rialla relaxed into the rhythm of Tris’s movements as he loosened her tight legs. “Tell me something about your people, Tris.”
She could feel him hesitate. “It is forbidden for one of us to tell an outsider about… Ah, well now, I suppose that I no longer have to listen to the dictates of the elders.” He thought for a moment.
“Long time past, humans were only a minor part of a world ruled by green magic.” His voice took on a classic story-telling rhythm, though a bit hesitant, as if he were translating as he spoke. “There were the little folk: the butterfly-winged people who played over the winds, and the stone workers who preferred the shadows of evening to the light of day. The forest people, sylvans, dryads, shapeshifters, haunted the woods and fought for territory. They all spoke to the spirits of the trees and the animals.
“The green folk, though, like the gods whose children they are, do not propagate well, and humans began to overrun their part of the world. As they spread into our territories, the dryads welcomed them as they did all things, while the other folk retreated and watched. First came the traders, then the wizards who sought to learn the secrets of our magic, but it was the farmers who spelled the end of the reign of green magic.