Freedom's Gate Read online

  Tamar checked my feet and hands; some of the ground-in dirt was beginning to come away. “You’re cleaner than I’d have expected for a stable girl,” she said. “Didn’t Kyros’s horses shit?”

  “Sophos paid Kyros extra to have me bathe before we left. He said he didn’t want to have that smell with him all the way back to Helladia.”

  Tamar smiled a little, reluctantly. I was relieved to see that. As short as my stay was going to be, I thought it would be easier if I had someone on my side. She took one of my hands out of the basin and scrubbed my skin and nails with a brush. My fingertips had wrinkled like raisins. I looked at my clean hand as Tamar scrubbed the other; the hand of a stranger. I lived a working life. My hands had never been this clean. Even my skin was a full shade lighter. I thought of Alibek’s soft, unmarked hands and pushed the image away.

  Tamar washed my feet, scrubbing them with a brush, too. Now it was time for my hair again. I tipped my head back, and she poured a small stream of water over my hair to wet it. She had a bar of harsh soap, and she scrubbed it into my hair, washing away dirt, oil, sand, sweat, and dead lice. It was a mass of tangles again when she was done. She rinsed away the soap with a little more water. “Dry off,” she said, handing me a towel. “We’ll go sit in the sun while I comb your hair and pick nits.”

  Tamar led me to an out-of-the-way spot in the courtyard, and pulled up a low stool to sit on. I sat on the ground. It was clear from her slow, patient work that she was in no particular hurry to get back up to the harem. “So you’re a virgin.”

  Of all the things I’d claimed that day, this was actually the truth. I’d had offers occasionally, usually obscene ones from drunken, rude men—some Greek, some Danibeki. Offers that wouldn’t have interested me even if the men had been attractive, which generally they were not. Everyone else in Kyros’s household was either my superior, like Kyros, or my inferior, like his Danibeki slaves. Myron was the closest to an equal that I saw regularly, and I certainly wasn’t interested in sleeping with him. If Nikon had lived, maybe . . . but he hadn’t. I shrugged and then nodded. “Yes,” I said.

  “Then I’m sure Boradai told you to stay clear of Jaran and the younger boys.”

  “She said if I wasn’t pure when my time came, she’d flay me, flog the rest of the concubines, and castrate the boy.”

  “Yeah.” Tamar raised an eyebrow. “She’ll flay me, too, since I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on you. So don’t.”

  “Has this happened before?”

  “No. But I’ve seen what happens when Sophos gets angry. Sooner or later you’ll see it, too. Believe me, you don’t want to be the target.”

  “He looks so . . .” I hesitated. How did slaves talk about their masters?

  “He smiles all the time,” Tamar said. “He smiles when he’s angry, too.”

  “I really hope I don’t do something wrong,” I said. “I don’t know anything about being a concubine.”

  Tamar shrugged. “There isn’t much to know. Spread your legs and close your eyes. Or open your mouth. Though usually if that’s what they want, they send for one of the boys.” Her voice was flat. I couldn’t tell if she intended any humor at all in what she was saying.

  “There must be other things I need to know. Maybe not about . . . but about other things.”

  Tamar laughed out loud at my hesitant speech. “You’re so sweet,” she said, and her tone was unquestionably mocking now. “Well. You’ve probably guessed that you’d better do as Boradai says. There’s a certain pecking order in the harem, just as there was in the stables, but who goes where depends on who you ask, just as in the stables. You’re at the bottom, of course, because you’re new.” She flicked a nit into a small cup of water. “I don’t know how the stable hands viewed the harem in Kyros’s household, but here most of the other servants think that we’ve got the easiest job, and that we make their jobs harder by adding to their work. And we certainly do that. The water for your bath didn’t walk itself to the bathhouse. How did you view Kyros’s harem, when you were a stable hand?”

  “I guess I felt kind of like you’re describing,” I said, faintly.

  Tamar laughed maliciously. “Well, lucky you. Now you have the easiest job in the household. No more shoveling horse shit for you.”

  “So what do we do? Other than—the obvious?”

  “Sophos has us do the mending, since we can do that without getting dirty. Also, sometimes Sophos has us dance for his guests, so we practice our singing and dancing. Jaran plays the dombra, and so do some of the women. Other than that, we amuse ourselves until called on. We nap during the day, since we’re usually called on in the evenings. Boradai will probably want us to teach you some dancing. I’d just wait and see, if I were you.” She paused. “How old are you anyway?”

  “Twenty,” I said. “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen,” she said. She paused for a moment, the comb resting lightly in my hair. “I haven’t been a virgin since I was ten.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that. Although—as my mother never failed to point out—the vast majority of women my age were married, I didn’t know any who’d married before they started their menses, at fourteen or fifteen. Although obviously Tamar hadn’t been married. After a short silence, Tamar began combing my hair again.

  “How careful do we have to be with water here?” I asked. “We had a small river that flowed past Elpisia . . .”

  Tamar laughed a little—a dry chuckle, not a friendly laugh. “That’s the biggest reason Sophos doesn’t have his concubines do any real work. He wants us clean for his pleasure, and that of his guests, and water is expensive. It’s cheaper to have a few slaves who stay inside all the time than to have to bathe them regularly.” She pointed to a small shelter near the bathhouse. “There’s the cistern; we fill it during the rainy season. Once that runs out, there are wells in town, but Sophos has to pay for that water.”

  Tamar’s voice dropped. “Of course, our great-grandparents drew water from the Great Rivers.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “As they flowed once, they shall return,” Tamar whispered.

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. That turned out to be the wrong thing; Tamar jerked the comb hard enough to hurt and said, “We worship the djinni here, even if, for now, they are slaves like us. Not Prometheus and Arachne. And not Athena and Alexander.”

  I knew I needed to bridge that chasm, and fast. I let my throat thicken a little from my worry and the pain of my pulled hair and said, “My mother worshipped Arachne. All my mother’s people did.”

  “Greek gods,” Tamar muttered. I didn’t say anything; the worshippers of Arachne and Prometheus whispered that, like the ancestors of the Alashi and the Danibeki who escaped to the steppe, their gods had escaped the Greeks and were now the protectors of any who sought freedom. But I wasn’t going to point that out, not when I was trying not to make Tamar even angrier.

  “I’ve never seen Arachne or Prometheus,” Tamar said after a moment. “I’ve never seen Alexander or Athena.”

  “Neither have I,” I whispered, though of course I’d seen Alexander on his throne in the sky.

  “And who hasn’t seen a djinn, shimmering in the air, at least once?”

  “No one,” I whispered.

  “So you see? We worship the true ones. Arachne and Prometheus are a fantasy. Athena and Alexander are old stories. We are the friends of the djinni, the only gods that all know to be real.”

  I nodded, and that seemed to satisfy Tamar; her hands became gentle again.

  A shadow fell over us. “Just how many nits did Lauria pick up in the stables?” Boradai asked.

  Tamar looked up, her voice becoming flat and slightly frightened. “I wanted to be absolutely sure I wasn’t missing any,” she said.

  Boradai sighed and took the comb; Tamar relinquished the low stool and Boradai took a moment to examine my scalp. “She’s clean,” she said. “Take the perfumes and go on back upsta
irs.”

  Tamar fetched some bottles of oil from the bathhouse, her steps as slow as she could get away with; I followed her back upstairs. In the harem, we withdrew to a corner and she combed a little sweet-smelling oil through my hair. I had never worn perfume, not once, and I found the smell cloying. “If Boradai gives us a little warning before you’re summoned, be sure to wake me if I’m sleeping. I’ll do your hair and put on more perfume.”

  I nodded, feeling a little sick to my stomach, as if this was something I really did have to dread. I tried to shake it off and saw Tamar looking at me a little curiously.

  “So what do you think of her?”

  One of the other women had padded over to our corner. She was beautiful: long lashes, full breasts, and perfect, white teeth. She was addressing Tamar, not me.

  “What do you think of her, Aislan?” Tamar asked, standing up. She was much shorter than Aislan, and much younger.

  “I think she’s ugly.” Aislan’s gaze swept over me briefly, then returned to Tamar. “Even uglier than you.”

  Her irritation made me wonder if I should apologize—and if so, what I should apologize for. I felt my cheeks go red, and lowered my eyes. I might not have anything to fear from Sophos, but the other slaves scared me. I wasn’t sure what Aislan could do to me if I gave her cause to be angry—slap me, presumably, and possibly beat me more seriously. Even if she wasn’t allowed to hit me, I had no doubt that there was plenty she could do to make my life difficult. I bit my lip, wishing I could disappear. I felt much like I had when I was nine years old and an older girl who lived nearby had refused to talk to me, on the grounds that I was half-caste and had no father.

  “Lauria.” Aislan’s tone was mocking. “Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”

  I looked up and met her eyes. “What do you expect me to say? I can’t help it if you think I’m ugly.”

  “What kind of name is ‘Lauria’ anyway?”

  It was a Greek name. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “And a stable hand.” She sniffed the air. “Tamar, I think you needed to give her a more thorough bath.”

  “Sorry,” Tamar mumbled. “I did the best I could. Maybe you’d like to take her back out and tell Boradai that you want to redo the job.”

  Aislan sniffed. “Just keep her well away from me; I don’t want to have to smell her stink.” She swept away. I noticed that she wore a gold bracelet with a stone set in it.

  Tamar followed my gaze. “Yes, she’s the favorite of Sophos’s best friend. He visits often, mostly to see her, and he gave that to her.”

  “He must be very wealthy,” I said.

  “Or the gem is paste. I haven’t ever gotten a close enough look to know.” Tamar’s voice was barely audible, but Aislan shot her a venomous glance anyway, as if she’d overheard.

  Dinner was rice and lentils, simple fare with few spices. I had eaten similar meals often enough at Kyros’s house, but this was bland, and there wasn’t quite enough of it. Aislan served the food; Tamar got less than Aislan, and I got less than Tamar. We ate early, and afterward the other concubines dressed and prepared to go downstairs. On Tamar’s instructions, I brushed her hair. There was paint on her face already, but some had smeared or worn off, and when it became clear I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with the pots, she took them back with an irritated huff and did it herself, telling me to watch carefully so I could help her next time. A fine white powder lightened her face; she rubbed a red stain into her cheeks, and painted a darker red onto her lips. With a stick that looked like greasy charred wood, she lined her eyes with black. There was a mirror that Aislan and some of the others used as they prepared to go downstairs; Tamar did not so much as glance at it. As Aislan was adding a touch more of the black to her eyes, Boradai opened the door and everyone else went downstairs.

  A short time later, a few of them returned: Aislan was missing, and Tamar, but Jaran had returned, along with two women whose names I didn’t know. The other two women wiped the excess paint off their faces so they wouldn’t get it all over the linens, then curled up on some of the pillows and went to sleep. Jaran sat down on a cushion and began to strum his dombra, the same sequence of strings, over and over again.

  I carried a pillow to the corner where I’d sat with Tamar earlier and lay down, but it was still very early, and I was too keyed up really to even close my eyes. I stared at the ceiling and thought, Fourteen days. Fourteen days. The repetition fell in time with the tuneless strumming.

  Jaran’s dombra went suddenly silent, and after a moment I rolled over to look at him. His eyes were closed; then they opened and he looked directly at me. “You,” he said. His voice was harsh and strained; his speech was thick, as if he were very drunk.

  I sat up, unnerved. One of the concubines who’d come back and gone to sleep turned over and opened her eyes. “Are you with us again, Fair One?” she asked.

  “You,” Jaran said. He was still speaking to me.

  The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I suddenly realized that he was possessed by a rogue aeriko. Even among the Greeks, possession was not unheard of—but slaves would occasionally seek it out, inviting the presence of any rogue aeriko that might be nearby. Was Jaran possessed against his will, or had he invited it in? Of course, he probably worshipped them anyway; Tamar had said they all worshipped aerika—djinni—and not any of the gods.

  The concubine who had woken up rose to her knees, then bowed three times and sat back on her heels. “Fair One, will the rivers return?”

  “As they flowed once, they shall return.”

  “Have you brought us a message?”

  Jaran pointed at me, his eyes wild and cold. “I have brought her a message.”

  “Why her?”

  “I know who you are,” the aeriko inside of Jaran said.

  I went very cold. Maybe the aeriko did know. What if it knew?

  “Are you afraid I’ll tell your secret?” it said. “That would be funny. Whatever would your old master say?”

  I bit my lip, aware that the concubine was looking at me with sudden interest. But the aeriko had said my “master”—it was bluffing, I thought. But then it said, “I see what the slaver in green did not.” With a final short bark of a laugh, Jaran’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he sagged to the floor against his dombra.

  “Wait,” the other concubine wailed. “I didn’t get to ask you whether I bear a son this time, or a daughter! Oh,” she muttered, cast a slightly nasty look in my direction, and went to aid Jaran.

  The slaver in green? I thought of the sorceress, of the glinting eyes that had searched my face. Was that what the aeriko was talking about? It’s another bluff. “Slaver” could be any slaveholder; surely any slave could think of a Greek who wore green clothes. But I didn’t want anyone to start demanding to know what secret I was hiding. While the others were distracted with Jaran, I went back to Tamar’s corner and feigned sleep as quickly as I thought I could get away with it.

  I must have slept for a while, because I woke when Tamar came in. “This is my corner,” she whispered harshly in the darkness. “You need to move.” Her face was damp and her breath was thick and rank with wine.

  I groped my way to another pillow and heard Tamar settle herself down where I’d been. Her breath was a little ragged, with a small catch in it. As I listened, it evened out, and finally, I thought, she fell asleep. I could hear someone snoring very loudly on the other side of the room. As uncomfortable as my trip had been, I wished that I were back chained to the wagon, under the night sky. Around the time I started seeing people’s outlines in the gray twilight of dawn, I fell back to sleep.

  Tamar had managed to wipe her face almost clean of paint by the time I woke up in the morning. Boradai had brought up a basket of mending, and all the concubines had threaded needles and were squinting through sleep-bleared eyes at socks and vests and robes that needed repairs.

  Tamar dropped a darned sock onto her pile of finished items, and pulle
d out a robe with a badly worn edge. She tucked the edge under and began to hem.

  “I heard the Fair One came to chat with you last night,” Tamar said.

  I felt my hands grow damp and surreptitiously wiped them on the vest I was mending. “I haven’t ever seen a djinn-possession before. Does that happen to Jaran often?”

  “He’s a shaman,” Tamar said. “The Fair One visits him often.”

  I hoped that next time the Fair One would talk to someone else. “When I’ve heard of djinn possession before, there usually seemed to be an exorcism involved.”

  “There was no shaman at Kyros’s?” Tamar seemed genuinely shocked by this. Across the circle, I noticed that other women were listening to our conversation, and looking at me. Two whispered to each other, shooting looks at me as they conferred. I bit my lip, certain now that someone in Kyros’s household was a shaman who talked to the aerika, just as Jaran did.

  “I didn’t know about one, but my mother worshipped Arachne and so did I,” I said. “Maybe he . . . wasn’t in the stables.”

  “Or she. There are women who are shamans. Jaran thinks I could become one.” Tamar adjusted the robe she was working on and continued hemming. “Not all the free djinni are friendly. Some are angry and quite dangerous. The Fair One isn’t like that. She visits Jaran often, and tells us things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, she always knows when we’re pregnant, and she can tell us early on whether the baby will be a boy or a girl. A few years ago, one of the boys got very sick and died; the Fair One knew that it was hopeless, he wasn’t going to recover. Sometimes the Fair One carries messages from other households. She also visits the shaman at the household where Jaran grew up, and carries messages from his mother and brother.”

  “And she says the rivers will return.”

  “Well, of course. Everyone knows the rivers will be free again someday, just like we will.”

  I nodded silently, hoping that this would close the subject. It didn’t.

  “Meruert said that the Fair One spoke to you.”

  “I really didn’t understand what she said. She said she knew my secret, but I don’t know what she meant.”