Beef was a big kid, but he knew that he had just missed something nasty, and he did not know how to fight a cripple twice his age and half his size. He allowed himself to be restrained. He even apologized, still not understanding his offense. The others were looking to Kettle, wondering why I was not being immediately hurled from Heaven for such a display of violence. Of course, my status in Heaven was not orthodox, and Kettle certainly was aware of that. Even more certainly, he was not going to discuss it in Cloud Nine.
With difficulty, I mumbled an apology, still quivering with the urge to maim Beef.
Kettle growled. “That’s not enough, Roo! You owe him an explanation. There were special circumstances. Tell them.”
I muttered mutinously, but eventually I explained how I had journeyed with the traders and found love.
Of course the traders were incensed. Mol Jar, the one who had bought me, insisted that the goods had been damaged after purchase. By then he had discovered my lacerations as well as my smashed knees, but my lacerations had been done beforehand, so he had no hope of recourse for those. Hobbling meant shackling, he insisted.
Hobbling meant breaking a leg, Minemaster Krarurh replied, and any time he had sold a wetlander to a trader, that was how he had delivered it. It was mere inexperience that had led Hrarrh to smash both my knees instead—a trifling excess of juvenile zeal. The esteemed trader had been offered free hobbling, not shackling, and he had accepted that offer. Had he wanted chains applied, then he should have said so and supplied them, because Krarurh did not include chains when he sold slaves.
The traders demanded their bale of silk back, offering to return the cat food. They threatened to blacklist the mine.
The ants leaned toward ripping the traders to shreds and feeding them to their panthers, while retaining the horses, wagons, and goods. Violence began to seem likely.
Meanwhile I was dangling head-down and feet-down across the back of a horse nearby. Even when the darkness lifted briefly from my mind, the thunder of my pain drowned out the talk. I learned about it later, at third or fourth hand.
Hrarrh eventually became fearful that I would not be accepted as valid merchandise, and he persuaded his father-in-law to settle the matter by throwing in another ten sacks of ore to compensate for the second knee. He also promised to work his gang overtime to replace it. Grumpily the traders departed with their loads, which included one crippled wetlander, who was unlikely ever to come out of his coma.
The relative value of ten sacks of phosphate ore and one bale of silk is debatable. It is possible to argue that the traders were being paid to haul me away like trash. And there, I think, is the most despicable of all Hrarrh’s villainies—that he was willing to torment his wretched slaves even harder, solely to provide himself with the personal satisfaction of sending me off to the worst fate he could imagine.
I wish I could have heard the settlements made over me. Traders’ business affairs are much akin to a school of minnows in a whirlpool, and I never came to understand more than one flicker of them. The men have incredible memories for the details of their dealings, all of which are done verbally. Mol Jar owned one bale of silk and in return could offer ten sacks of phosphate ore and one dying man. The phosphate had value; I did not. He obviously had no use for me himself, because he was heading in the wrong direction, and Kal Gos, who had owned the silk, did not want me either.
The argument between the traders and the ants would have been trivial compared to the bizarre and acrimonious hagglings that regularly took place between the traders themselves, both before they traded with outsiders and even more so afterward. The varied goods from a dozen wagons might be offered, but always one man would be deputized to do the dealing, with another sent along as witness. The respective values of everything sold and everything purchased must then be agreed upon and the profits fairly distributed. The system is contentious, inefficient, and utterly beyond an outsider’s comprehension. The traders love it.
As far as I ever could understand, I was exchanged by Mol Jar for one more sack of phosphate, then traded to somebody else for a quantity of assorted fabrics. After a few more exchanges I ended up being owned nineteen twenty-sevenths by Jat Lon, five twenty-sevenths by Lon Kiv, and three twenty-sevenths by Misi Nada. Her share was a conditional payment for services, if she could keep me alive. Had I died, then she would have owned no part of me, but that would not have stopped Jat Lon and Lon Kiv from disputing their respective residual interests in a worthless corpse.
And so I began my life with the traders. Astonishingly Misi Nada did keep me alive. At first I was barely aware of her. Between pain, shock, and loss of blood, I was barely aware of anything. Later my wounds became fevered, and I screamed and babbled insanely while she cradled me in her great arms. She fed and bathed me, and treated me with herbals and potions collected from all over Vernier, sternly denying me the release I craved.
Slowly the fogs began to clear, and I would catch glimpses of bloated features that seemed like one more figment of delirium—a face baggy and shapeless, with an obvious mustache, with brown skin as coarse as a wood rasp, rimmed by ragged lank brown hair. Always she wore a drab sacklike garment, long-sleeved and all-enveloping. I had heard in the mine that trader women were big, but I had not realized how huge they could be. I had seen few herdmasters, even, who would have outweighed Misi Nada.
Slowly I came to understand that I was not to be allowed to die. I saw her then as an enemy, imprisoning me in a life that held only worse terrors in store. Hrarrh himself had once warned me to stay away from traders.
“Why?” I whispered, staring up at that globular face hanging high above me, a brown moon against a sky of well-crafted wooden planks. “Why?”
For a long time I was too incoherent to frame my question properly, and Misi was apparently too stupid to understand. Trader women were not only huge but also moronic, or so I had been told. Eventually she seemed to grasp what I was trying to ask: Why did traders, who sold slaves to the ants, buy wetlanders from them?
Then Misi paused in her endless chewing of paka leaves. Her amusement reminded me of the leather sack in which Pebble had brought home live eels. Squirming and pulsing, Misi’s face rearranged itself in surges of apparently unrelated motions until it wore a parody of a smile.
“Lucky!” she boomed. “Wetlanders bring good luck.”
“No! No!” I wanted to weep. “You cant expect me to believe that!”
She nodded, all her chins flexing. A finger like a sausage stroked along my beard, which she had already trimmed short in trader fashion. “Hair gold, like Our Lady Sun. Eyes like sky. Dawn child!”
Then she chuckled, which in Misi was a huge subterranean woofing sound. She bent over. Breasts like meal sacks crushed briefly down on me as she placed a big wet kiss on my forehead. I caught a whiff of the turpentine odor of paka. “Dawn child!” she repeated.
I had heard of Dawn, of course, a land of surging glaciers and sudden catastrophic floods. It is a place where few travelers venture, in whose misty twilight landscape of snow and storms, blond, blue-eyed men like me skim their canoes through icy waters. Of all the peoples of Vernier, only the seafolk and the wetlanders live beyond the reach of trader wagons.