“What are you doing?” Hyacinth asked. He was truly stupid. Even more stupid than I had thought. I stared at him amazed and never even felt the first blow, scientifically aimed, as it hit me in the face.
CHAPTER THREE
I woke slowly with everything hurting so much I didn’t know at first what it was that hurt. I put my hands to my face. That was what hurt: my head, my face. My whole head felt enlarged to twice its natural size. I couldn’t see more than a bright haze between swollen eyelids. Someone was sponging me off with a cloth, wiping down my neck and along my shoulders. My shoulders hurt, too, or rather my back, but it was a stinging pain, not the disabling pain in my head that made it hard to link my thoughts into any sensible order.
“Lie still, lion, while we get this dye off,” said a voice over my head. “We’re almost done with you. We’ll have you at rest in a moment.” As good as his word, he soon left off wiping and lifted me to my feet and helped me walk. We descended the ridge. I still couldn’t see, but I could feel the ground dropping out from below my feet. The bright haze visible through my eyelids faded as we passed into the shade, and my feet tangled in blankets. He held a cup to my swollen lips and I drank, tasting lethium and wine.
“Down,” he said, and I sagged to my knees and then to my side and lay there with my insensible thoughts linking up randomly and breaking apart again until I fell asleep and it was dreams, not thoughts, floating through my empty head.
I woke the next morning to a headache, a vast and tiresome pain that seemed outside my head as much as in it, a headache and a very sore and swollen face. I had a vague memory of Hyacinth whispering more tearful apologies into my ear, but he was gone when I opened my eyes as much as the swelling would allow and peered around me. Hyacinth might have been a dream. I lay under a striped cloth, which dropped to the ground on one side like a tent. When I sat up, the skin tightened across my back like lines of fire. I couldn’t seem to twist my head far enough to see over a shoulder, but on my upper arm I could see the red line of a lash. I blinked hazily, and for a moment wondered what I could have done to so infuriate Malatesta. My tongue caught painfully on something sharp; one of my teeth was loose, connected only by a narrow bridge of flesh.
The slaver squatted beside me. “You’ll be wondering, my lion, just what we are up to. You were right that we cannot easily get you off the island, but we mean to try. Your own mother, I’m sorry, may she journey safely, but even she wouldn’t know you.”
I lifted my hand away from its explorations of my face and up to the top of my head to find my hair all cut away and ragged.
“It’s darker now,” Basrus said. “No one will pick you out among my slaves. No one here but myself and my lieutenant, Gorgias, knows who you are. As far as the rest of my men and the other slaves know, you are a very troublesome slave who has killed another slave in a fight and you are on your way to the galleys.”
“And if I shout to one and all that I am the heir to Sounis?” I asked as clearly as I could, past my swollen lip.
“That’s the question, then, isn’t it?” He held up a gag with leather straps.
It’s not so terrible as it sounds. They loaded me into the back of the cart, where I lay for the first day, grieving for my mother and my sisters and cataloging my mistakes, unfairly blaming Terve for not warning me that the villa might be burned, hating Hyacinth, and the slaver, and all his men, and, most of all, with excoriating rage, myself.
We were stopped by the island’s guard, and each time they looked through the slaver’s receipts it was clear that all was in order. Basrus even pointed me out as his most recent purchase, and not one of the guard looked twice at a troublemaker sold off for fighting. The first time it happened, I shook my head as fiercely as the pain would allow, only to have the guards assume I was protesting a bad reputation. After that I gave it up as useless.
As I was bounced and jolted toward the town of Letnos, my uncle was lured out of the city of Sounis by news of fighting between two of the coastal barons. The two, Comeneus and his neighbor, had squabbled often enough that it was no wonder that the king rode out immediately with a century from the garrison at Sounis. He was to have been killed on the road just outside the city, and I was to be installed as a puppet in his place.
The assassination attempt was a catastrophic failure for the rebels. My uncle fought his way clear and pulled his men to order. He guessed correctly that the gates of Sounis would be closed to him, and instead of riding to the city for aid, he turned across country, eluding his would-be assassins. Heading north, with a handful of men, he made his way toward his loyal barons.
On the second day, I was well enough to walk. Gorgias, on the slaver’s orders, offered to leave off the gag if I gave my word to be silent. I tried unsuccessfully to spit in his face. I also screamed like a speared rabbit when he put the gag in. Gorgias looked at me in a puzzled way when I dropped almost to my knees and then struggled back to my feet, feeling utterly unheroic. My hands were tied behind me, and I was off-balance. The gag, pushing the loose tooth into my tender gum, was infuriating.
Basrus came over and pushed me back down. He efficiently removed the gag and tilted my head back, holding me pinned in the crook of his elbow. I struggled like a piglet in a farmer’s grasp. Like a farmer, Basrus expertly ran his finger inside my mouth, found the tooth, and yanked it out. I yelled again and kicked, but he held me immobile. Not ungently, he rubbed my head.
“It will be better now, lion,” he said. He put the gag back in, and he was right that it was far less uncomfortable with the tooth gone. When he released me, he stepped back carefully. I had seen Pol, captain of my father’s guard, treat an angry Eugenides once with the same caution, and for good reason. It was ridiculous that Basrus would treat me so, and humiliation made me more enraged. I would have run myself into him headfirst if Gorgias hadn’t grabbed me by the arm and held me back, saving me, not Basrus. My head was too sore to use as a battering ram, and I would have hurt only myself.
When we reached Letnos, we marched past the holding pens at the harbor and out the pier to a boat. I was so tired my only feeling was one of relief that we had arrived. The swelling in my face had gone down enough that I could see more clearly, but my head still hurt. My hands were still tied, my legs were shackled as well, and I had to be helped aboard. I’d spent the day twisting between extremes, crying at the thought of my sisters and my mother and snarling in rage. I’d used my feet to kick until Basrus had them shackled, and then I’d used my elbows until my hands had been retied, and my arms cinched tight to my body.
My back ached and stung like fire in turns, and my stomach had refused any food. Once in the boat, I was shoved to one side and locked to a thwart. It wasn’t a large boat, but the other slaves settled as far from me as they could. All they knew of me was that I tended, when I was on the ground during rest periods, to lash out with both feet together. As we settled in, the slave trader looked over at me. He pinched his nose thoughtfully and said aloud to Gorgias, “A lamb, they said. No more trouble than snatching up a little lamb.”
The center of town was alive with the king’s soldiers, like an ants’ nest that had been kicked to pieces. The king’s soldiers moved with no more direction than the ants, and I watched them balefully as we pulled away from the pier.