The Golden Slave by Poul William Anderson (best desktop ebook reader TXT) 📖

They stood with a sort of exhausted defiance between four drawn swords. The lamp, swinging from its chains, revealed them clad in rags. But they were no ordinary sailors. There was a burly redbearded fellow, his broad battered face speaking of Sarmatian plains. There was a young woman whose figure would have been good, in the skinny Greek manner, had she not lost so much weight; her hair was cut like a boy's and her hands were bloodied from ropes and levers. The strangest was a barbarian with yellow hair dyed a fading black and a sun symbol etched on his brow. He looked like a wild king, and yet he stood gloomily withdrawn as any desert eremite, showing no interest in who had taken him or what his fate would be.

The backs of both men had been whipped; the red one bore permanent manacle scars. Slaves, then. And doubtless the woman was, too. Their captured weapons had been laid at Arpad's feet—a rusty longsword, an ax and an iron-headed maul.

"Do you speak Greek?" asked Arpad. His Latin was limited.

"I do," said the girl. Her eyes—you didn't see violet eyes very often, and especially not with such long sooty lashes; really, it was her best feature—were hollow from weariness and wide from anxiety, but she looked on him without wavering. "What ship is this, and who are you?"

"What a way for fugitive slaves to address a Pontine noble!" exclaimed Arpad lightly. "Down on your knees and beg for your lives; that would be more in keeping."

"These men are not slaves," she said. "They are chieftains returning home."

"And you? Come, now, do not anger me. When a ship is found with only three slaves aboard, I can guess the tale for myself. Tell me your names and how it all came to be."

She said with a pride at which her exhaustion dragged: "I am merely Phryne, but I stand between Eodan of Cimberland and Tjorr of the Rukh-Ansa."

"I know them!" said Arpad.

"It is a long story. They were war prisoners, who regained their freedom by conquering the Roman crew—and even I have heard the King of Pontus is no friend to Rome, so is he not a friend to Rome's enemies? But the upshot was that we three alone remained on this vessel. We could do little more than set sail and run before the wind, hoping to strike a land, Crete or Cyprus or wherever the gods willed, whence we might make our way to Cimmeria. But we found two men and one woman cannot even keep a ship bailed out in such weather." She smiled tiredly. "We were debating whether to try and make landfall on that island ahead, risking shipwreck and capture if it is Roman-held, or steer past—if we could. Now you have changed the situation, Master Captain, and we throw ourselves upon your hospitality."

"What slave may claim hospitality?" asked Arpad. "And when he has mutinied, probably murdered, as well.... Would you feel bound to consider a wolf your guest?" He stroked his chin. The ship, he calculated, would surely be considered salvaged by him; the Rhodesian authorities had to have their share, but he would get something. If he did not dispute possession of the two men—the port governor could put them to work, or kill them, or give them to the Romans, whatever the law said—then the governor in turn would doubtless ignore the girl. There was a good mind under that tip-tilted face, and a hot spirit in that small thin body; she would make the rest of this voyage most interesting to Captain Arpad, and he could get a fair price at home after he had fattened her up enough for the Oriental taste.

Her pale, wet cheeks had darkened as he spoke, more with anger than fear. She rattled off a few harsh Latin words. The Alan growled and looked about. A guard's sword pricked his hairy flank; he would never cross the two yards to Arpad's throat. He said something to the tall blank-faced man, who shrugged. Mithras! Didn't that one care at all? Well, men did go crazy sometimes when the fetters were clinched.

Arpad listened more closely, interested. He heard the redbeard: "But Eodan, disa, they'll flay us!"

"Then thus the Powers will it," said the tall one in a dead voice.

The girl, Phryne, stamped her foot and shouted:

"I thought I followed a man! I see now it is a child! You sit like a wooden toad and will not stir a hand, even for your comrades—"

A wan wrath flickered in the cold green eyes. The one called Eodan said: "You lie. I worked my share during these past few days, to keep the ship afloat. If I did not care whether we sank or not, that is my concern."

She put her fists on her hips, glared up at him and said: "But you make it the world's concern! I understood you had suffered loss when Hwicca fell. Do you think I cannot imagine it, how it would be for me, too, did the one I cared for die in my arms? I said nothing when you made a raft for her, though we needed your help even that first day; when you laid her on it with the Roman sword and her dagger, though we needed both; when you drenched it with oil that might have nourished us; when you risked your own life to launch it and set the torch to it; and when you howled while it fell burning behind. A man must obey his own inward law, or be no man at all. But since then? I tell you, it has ceased to be your private mourning. Now you call upon the world and all the gods, by your silence and your indifference, to witness how you are suffering!

"You overgrown brat! If you want to sacrifice your comrades to her ghost, do it with your hands like a man!"

Arpad signaled his guards. "Take them out and give them food and dry garments," he said. "Bind the men and bring the girl back to me."

A hand closed on Eodan's shoulder. He pushed it off, impatiently, and made a huge stride toward the captain. His lean face was taut with fury.

"Do you dare treat a Cimbrian like a slave?" he said.

"Hoy!" The guards closed in. Eodan's fist jumped out. One man lurched back with a smashed mouth. Another circled, unsure. Tjorr growled and reached for the hammer on the floor. The remaining two men forced him away, but had no help to spare with Eodan.

A hand gripped Arpad's tunic so he choked. The long head bent down toward his. "You little spitlicker," said Eodan, "I do not know whether to string you to the mast myself or ask your king to do it for me. But I think I shall let him have the pleasure."

Arpad shuddered and gestured his guards back, for he had seen monarchs enough, and there was no mistaking the royal manner. A king born did not act as if it were possible men could fail to knock their heads on the ground before his boots. Eodan stood unarmed, nearly naked, and shook him back and forth very slowly, in time with the words:

"Now hearken. I am Boierik's son of the Cimbri. I have a quarrel with the gods, who have treated me ill, but it does not change who I am. I have been searching for a king to hear a message I bear. Since your vessel chanced to pick me up, I will speak first to your ruler. Obey me well, and perhaps I shall forgive you for what you said in ignorance. So!"

He threw Arpad to the floor. The guardsmen stepped in, hemming him between shields and lifted blades. They glanced at their captain. Arpad stood up.

One could never be sure.... If that big man was mad, then he might be the walking voice of—of anything ... or else, there were so many outlandish tribes, a prince of one might easily have been captured and—and truly great Mithradates would be interested to meet such a person, as he was interested in all the realms of earth. The king might even bestow favor on this Eodan, some of which might then reflect on Arpad. Or perhaps the king would have Eodan beheaded; but that annoyance would surely not be considered Arpad's fault, since Arpad had only brought this visitor in the hope of amusing the king. It was not too great a risk. And, if the tall one demanded treatment as a guest meanwhile, it was not unduly inconvenient, the ambassador's cabin stood empty....

"My master, the sublime one who knows all nations, must decide this," purred Arpad. His Latin was always equal to titles. "We shall seek his august presence."

The south coast of the Black Sea was good to look upon, where red cliffs and green valleys and their many streams met wine-dark waters; high overhead went summer clouds, blinding white, and thunder spoke from the Caucasus. Sinope lay on a small peninsula about halfway between Byzantium and Colchis. It was an ancient Greek colony, now become the chief seat of the Pontine kings.

Eodan stood in the bow with Phryne and Tjorr, watching the city grow as they entered its harbor, until the first loveliness of marble colonnades and many-colored gardens yielded to a tarry workaday bustle where the surface was crowded with galleys from half the East. He was well clothed in white linen tunic, blue chlamys, leather belt and sandals, the German sword polished and whetted at his waist. They had even shaved him so he could look civilized and worked the dye from his hair so he could look foreign. He wondered how that would affect his price, if Mithradates judged against him.

"Tjorr," he said, "since your folk have clashed with these before now, are you not in danger of his wrath? I have been wondering if it would not be wiser for you to stay aboard here until—"

The Alan, clad like his chief but still doggedly shaggy-faced, answered with a boy's eagerness: "From what I've heard, he is not one of those sour Romans. Why, if he has any honor at all, he will send me home laden with gifts, just because our raids kept his soldiers amused." He laid a hand on the hammer slung at his side. "Nor do I think anything can go too badly wrong while I bear this. Did we not win a ship, strike off our fetters, thwart our enemies, get pulled from the sea god's mouth and have a well-fed passage here, while I bore the Smasher? There's luck in this iron."

Eodan thought of Hwicca and his lips tightened. "It may be," he said. "Though I am unsure what that word luck means."

She had ceased to haunt him. First had been all those days when her face on the balefire came between his eyes and the world, though it had not been her, that cold white face, it was dead—but where then had she wandered? He would sleep for a little and wake up; a few times he woke so happily and looked about for her before remembering she was dead. But since Phryne called him to anger, with the biting unjustness of her words, he had been more nearly himself. There was a goal again, the beech forests of the North, with sunlight snared in their crowns and a lark far and far up overhead—yes, he wanted to go back and search for his childhood, but home-coming was not what it had been in his thoughts. Hwicca would not be with him.

Well, a man sometimes lived when they cut off a hand or a leg or a hope; he fumbled on as best he could, and what he had lost hurt him on rainy nights.

Eodan shut off the awareness and