As two of them began to climb down the swaying rope to her, Panduv considered slipping off the column, allowing herself to sink into the eternity under the sea. . . . The life-wish of the stadium-trained kept her where she was.
The men lifted her roughly and handed her up. She was wracked by pain and a sound escaped her.
“You’re alive then?”
“Oh, it’s alive.”
They dropped her on the deck.
The ship lord, the captain, was bending over her. A blond man with black eyes. Not good. Mixes were often the least tolerant.
“You escaped,” said the mix captain. “Ashara spared you, Inky. Are you off some other ship?”
She parted her lips to revile him. Perhaps then he would kill her at once. But no, the words would not come. Life-wish, or only that she had forgotten the means of speech.
The captain was indicating his cabin, an uncouth housing amid ships, and they took her there and cast her down by the man’s pallet.
Presently he entered, tying the leather door-flaps together, so they were alone.
“Don’t fear I’ll touch you,” said the mix ship-lord. “I wouldn’t dirty myself. But some of them might. They catch Star-itch and go with anything, with each other or the livestock. They’re muck. Ashara hear me, this trade is my curse. But you are my slave now. Do you understand?” He peered at her with his Vis eyes set in the filthy, unshaven white face. “Rest up,” he said. “Tonight you can eat, and then tell me who you are. You see,” he said, bending to her, “if you have a rich family, they’ll have to recompense me, to get you back.”
Panduv’s voice came.
“No family,” she said. She smiled a little, which it hurt her to do. “I am a slave of the city of Saardsinmey.”
“Not any more,” he said. “We went and took a look, after the storm passed. Nothing left of it, your bloody city.”
“An earthquake,” she said.
“And a great wave from the ocean. Your Rorn spat on your Saard rubbish-tip. So much for you.”
“And no ransom for you,” she said softly.
“So, I’ll sell you when we reach Iscah.”
When he left her again, she saw that the sky and the sea were still bright red. Although she had not fathomed what he said about Saardsinmey, an education seemed to be taking place in her mind. On some level, she knew perfectly everything that had happened as, unconscious and absent in the column, it had been rolled and tossed and borne her out to sea in the jaws of the returning ocean. A miraculous deliverance. Yet something also within herself told her that truly, the city was gone, and that therefore she, too, had died, everything of what she had been dashed from her. She had died once before, in Zakoris, on the day she was taken from her village. That first life lost she had never regretted. The life of an empress-slave—already she had passed far beyond it.
She wondered in that case what was left of herself, and who she now was. And searching through herself in the torpor of her physical shock and pain, she found at length the inner place, beyond sight and feeling and thought, and here she enclosed herself, with the peaceful sense that nothing actually mattered, what she had lost, or what had been destroyed, not even her nature and her name. Panduv slept.
The Owar was a ship from the harbors of northern Sh’alis, crewed by the lowest stuff of the northern quays. Sometime trader, and opportune pirate, she mooched about the seaways between the lesser ports of the Shansarian province and Vardish Zakoris, only sometimes venturing south to take in New Alisaar. On a rare commission to carry Alisaarian iron and breeding pigs to Iscah, the storm had caught Owar not far from shore. Blown about, she had seen fit, in the unholy sunset which followed, to detour farther southerly, on the lookout for others who had not managed the tempest. Easy booty was often come by after bad weather.
Nevertheless, a glance at the sea and land around the great southern city had turned Owar in her tracks. Later that day, sighting intact shipping, they had heard some of the news of a colossal earth tremor, a fire-mouth gaping in the sea off Saardsinmey, and a wave that had clipped the sky.
“The goddess lost her temper with them at last,” said Owar’s captain, an irreligious fellow.
That day’s sunset was as dire a proposition as the sunset that had attended the storm, and indeed the dawn between. One hour into it, the coast of New Alisaar fading on their right hand, they saw an object in the sea, and hauled it in. It was not much of a treasure, only some upset hollow thing with a black Vis woman on it. She might fetch a coin at Iscah, but frankly speaking, they had gone out of their way for nothing.
She was the captain’s handmaiden. He told her, if he had had a choice, she would not have been the fruit of it. Inky, he called her. He had an aversion to the touch of her skin, not realizing she was as allergic to his whiteness. To her arrogance and grace he was impervious, did not notice.
The aberration of the sunsets and the dawns grew less. As such evidence dispelled, the events of the quake and the wave became unreal for the men of Owar, and might not have happened. Only the Zakorian girl, who had witnessed less than they, remembered.
Her pride was integral, even though she was no longer Panduv. (Asked her true name by certain of the sailors, she replied, deliberately: Palmv. They found this as difficult on the tongue as once the name Panduv had been on her own, and clove to Inky.) With the pride, her well-tuned body had also kept its cravings, for good food and for exercise. That first was not available to her—or in fact to anyone on Owar, The second, being a possible enticement to the Star-peppery crew, she kept to a minimum, stretching and limbering in the bow, before the pen of pigs, when the last light and most of the ship’s activity subsided. Her hurts healed swiftly. Her body ached now only for use. She did not sleep well, and insomnia was so new to her, it did not much distress. In the corner of the cabin, she listened to the captain, snoring and grunting, and amused herself by facile plans for his murder. But he was her protector, she could not afford to get rid of him.
At Iscah she would be sold as a slave.
She neither doubted nor credited this.
She wore a ragged shirt the captain had given her. It had smelled unclean before she washed it in the sea. Beneath the shirt, about her neck, the economical knife stayed undetected in its closet of nacre. Would there come a time when after all she must use it, on another, or herself?
The non-physical core, wherein she habited to guide her body in the dance, to that place she went most often, out of the world. But otherwise she wondered sometimes if the battering in the drum had deprived her of sanity, she was so bland, she cared so little.
The ship came in at last to a shabby port of Iscah. News of Saardsinmey’s fall, garbled and spectacular, had already got up the coasts, filtered through Sh’alis on the way. Gossip was off-loaded with the pork and iron. The yellow mix sailors strutted through the town, cloaked in the power of Ashara-Anack, glaring down the dark Iscaians.
“Strip,” said the ship lord to Panduv. “You’re no eye-sore here. They’ll like you best that way. You can do your dancing for them. I’ve seen you at that. Not bad.”
Panduv stirred.
“I will not strip. I will not dance for you or for them.”
The man came and threatened her with his fist. He did not use it, not wanting to devalue her for the market.
Through the inner vision of Panduv there chased a line of scenes. That she might now kill this lout, that she might flee through the port. That she might find refuge or a living somewhere. But something restrained her. Iscah had no love, either, for Zakorians, who had plundered her when they were able, and were now accursed of Anack, a goddess recognized as dangerous.
Panduv said to the captain, “You’ll manage to sell me without putting me up naked or performing for them. They only want a slave to work, in a place like this.”