Mercedes Lackey - Joust

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2024-12-22 0 0 784.1KB 355 页 5.9玖币
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Joust by Mercedes
Lackey
Chapter One
The hot wind out of the desert withered everything in its
path—including anyone so foolish as to be out in the sun at
midday. It carried reddish dust and sand on its wings, and used
both to scour whatever it did not wither.
It did not howl, for it had no need to howl and rage for its
power to be felt. It only needed to be what it was: relentless,
inescapable, implacable, and ceaseless. This was the dry season,
the season when the wind called kamiseen was king. It swept out
of the sea of sand, bearing with it the furnace heat that drove
man and beast into shelter if they were wise, and sucked the
moisture and life out of everything. The earth was baked as hard
as bricks, as hot beneath a bare foot as the inside of an oven.
Add to that the hammer of the sun, which joined with the
kamiseen in a conspiracy to dry up all life; nothing moved
during the kamiseen at midday, not even slaves.
Except serfs, like Vetch. Altan serfs, the spoils of war, who
were less valuable than slaves.
Little Vetch hunched his shoulders against the pitiless glare of
the sun above him, and licked lips gone dry and cracked in the
heat, as dry and cracked as the earth under his feet.
The walls of his master's compound offered some protection
from the wind, but none from the sun. To his left, the back wall
of tan mud brick around Khefti-the-Fat's workshop and house
cast no shade at all on the path upon which he trudged. To his
right, lower walls of the same material surrounded his master's
tala field.
Calling it a "field," however, was something of an
exaggeration. It could not have held more than five hundred tala
plants, a single green oasis in the sand and baked earth, all of
them heavy with unripe berries. It was here, only a few steps
from the village where Khefti had his workshop, for two reasons.
The first was that tala had to be irrigated during the dry season
if it was to bear any amount of fruit at all. The second was that
Khefti would never have let anything as valuable as a tala plant
grow where he could not put his eye upon it on a regular basis.
Vetch was fairly certain that Khefti counted the berries
themselves twice daily. Fortunately, the husbandry of the
precious tala was not his concern, for Khefti would never have
entrusted anything so important to a serf. He was not even
allowed to set foot inside the enclosure.
Vetch kept his head bent down as he heaved his heavy leather
water bucket along. His arms and shoulders ached and burned
with fatigue, and his stomach with hunger; his eyes stung with
the sweat that dripped and the dust that blew into them, his
mouth was dry, full of kamiseen grit, yet he dared not take a
mouthful of the water in his bucket or use it to wash the sand
from his eyes. That water was for the tala plants, not to quench
the burning thirst of a mere serf.
He kept his eyes fastened on the hard-packed, sandy clay of
the path under his dirty, bare feet. This was not because he was
afraid to look up, and possibly incur the wrath of any freeborn
Tian who might happen by for showing "insolence." He was
watching for a particular little spot on the path that led from
Khefti-the-Fat's well inside his compound, to the cistern that
irrigated his tala field. This spot was marked only by the fact
that the soil there was a slightly different color than the rest.
He wanted so badly to put the bucket down; the rope handle
cut into his hands cruelly. It was all that kept him going,
knowing that spot was there, marked by the dirt he'd dug up and
replaced last night.
Ah. There it was. He fastened his gaze on it, and labored
toward it, trying not to pant, which would only dry his mouth
further.
Vetch made no outward sign that he had noted the place, for
the last thing he wanted anyone to think was that there was
anything unusual about the spot. He couldn't have sped up if
he'd had to. The water bucket that had been tossed at him by his
master this morning was unwieldy, and quite full. If he wasn't
careful, most of what was in it would slosh out before he got to
the cistern.
The bucket was far too big and heavy when full for someone as
small as he was to carry easily. Not that he had a choice. Serfs
made do with the tools they were given, and kept silent about
any complaints they might have in the presence of their masters,
or they suffered whatever consequences the master chose to mete
out. A man might hesitate to scar a slave who had cost him
money to buy, and might earn him more money when sold. He
would have no such compunctions about a serf, who only cost
him money in the housing and feeding, who could not be sold
unless the land to which the serf was attached was sold also. How
many times had Khefti told Vetch that? "You're of cursed little
use to me alive, insect!" he would say. "Your death would mean
nothing, except that I need not waste my bread in the mouth of
one so useless as you!" He sometimes wondered why Khefti kept
him alive at all, except that Khefti-the-Fat was so grasping that
he never willingly let go of anything he owned, no matter how
useless or worn out it was. Every scrap, every bone, even the
ashes from his fires were used until there was nothing left. So
that was probably it; Khefti was determined to use Vetch up, as
he did everything else.
There were laws regarding the treatment of slaves. There were
no such laws protecting serfs, for serfs were Altan, and the
enemy: spoils of war, prisoners of war.
Even when they were only little boys.
And in Vetch's case, very little boys indeed.
He had never been big, but now he hardly seemed to grow
anymore, on the poor fare that Khefti-the-Fat allotted him. A
weedy little boy he was, named for a weedy little plant the Tians
judged not even fit for fodder. Not fit for anything, as his master
would say. And never mind that it was Altan custom to give their
boy children unpleasant names while they were young to mislead
the night-walking ghosts into thinking they were worthless
rather than snatching them up in the darkness. "Vetch" he was
on the Tian inventory rolls, and "Vetch" he would now remain for
as long as he lived. And properly named, too, according to
Khefti-the-Fat.
"What have you done to earn your bread?" the master would
say, his fat belly shaking with rage, his pendulous jowls
trembling, as he delivered another blow to a back already
scarred. "You steal from me, you are a thief, who takes my food
and gives me nothing in return!" This was usually right after
Vetch had attempted and failed at some task, and Khefti was
beating him to teach him to do better.
This was, often as not, some chore that should have been
given to a man, or at least, a larger boy—but that was never an
excuse for failure, and took not so much as a single stripe from
Vetch's chastisement.
Teach with the rod, for stripes improve the memory, said
one proverb, A boy's ears are on his back, he hears better when
beaten ran another. These were Khefti's mottoes, and he lived by
them. He even beat his apprentices just as much as the law and
their parents permitted, though them, he dared not starve. But
he saved the heaviest punishments for Vetch.
Vetch deviated from the center of the path just a little, and
shortened his steps so that he was able to come down—hard—on
the off-color spot.
Upon Khefti-the-Fat, every misfortune will fall. My sandal to
grind his head into the dust, he chanted to himself, just as he
had chanted over the finger-long abshati figure he'd made out of
river clay yesterday in the image of his master. My foot to break
his back. The thorns of the acacia to pierce his belly, and the
food turn to thistle in his mouth. Cursing a master was a thing
absolutely forbidden; if he were caught doing so, any beating
he'd had before this would seem as nothing. He knew that, but if
he could not curse Khefti, there would be nothing in his life
worth getting up for in the morning.
Not that he had any real faith that his curses would come to
pass. Khefti-the-Fat had too many charms hung about his person
and his house for the curses of one small serf boy to fly past them
and strike home. But it was something to curse the master, a
small blow, if only a symbolic one, something more than merely
enduring. And there was always the chance that Vetch would, by
sheer dint of repetition, or the chance that he contrived a curse
that Khefti didn't have a charm against, get some small crumb of
discomfort to plague his master past all the protections.
That one small hope was really all that Vetch had, and it was
what he lived for.
Yesterday, when Khefti had gone to sleep for his afternoon
nap without assigning Vetch a task to follow filling the cistern,
Vetch had seized the opportunity to run down to the river and
dig raw latas roots to hide under his pallet to eat later. Now, in
the dry season, the Great Mother River had shrunk from a
fruitful matron to the slimmest of dancing girls, and a languid
one at that. The latas was easier to reach, the roots now buried
in the mud flats rather than waist-deep in the river water, and
crocodiles disinclined to pursue potential prey over the mud flats
when so many fish were stranded in ever-shallower pools left
behind by the receding Great Mother River. While the latas had
been in bloom, the glorious blue flowers rising on their waving
stems above the surface of the river, Vetch had mentally noted
every patch, so he knew where even the smallest and least
accessible clumps were. He had to; he was in competition with
every other hungry mouth in the village. Perhaps none were as
starved as he, but unlike onions and barley, the roots were free
for the digging, and all it took was a stick and determination to
get them.
In digging up the roots, he had come across a generous lump
of nearly-pure clay, of the sort that Khefti would have been very
pleased to see. To Vetch, it had been a treasure as fine as the
roots he carried home, for any time that Vetch got his hands on
clay, he would make an abshati figure to use to curse
Khefti-the-Fat.
He certainly knew most of what there was to know about
molding abshati figures, for he heard the instructions bellowed
in the ears of Khefti's apprentices, day in, day out. The making of
such figures was usually for funerary purposes, not
cursing—there was a good living in the making of abshatis to
represent the deceased or to supply the spirit with servants in
the next life. A good half of Khefti's pottery income came from
funerary wares, or replacing such items as went into the tomb
from the household stores. Vetch probably could have made
abshatis as good as any of those turned out by the apprentices,
had Khefti allowed him. But no one would purchase an abshati
made by a serf, an Altan, the enemy, lest it carry some sort of
subtle curse against Tians that would render the magic the
priests would say over it ineffective.
Ordinary mud would not hold the detail he needed to make a
good figure, nor would it shatter the way a well-dried statue of
clay would. But although his master was a potter, there was no
way for Vetch to purloin his clay, for he guarded it as jealously as
his tola. Good clay was valuable, and a careful accounting was
made of every weighable scrap of it.
This time, through some quirk of good fortune, the figure
Vetch had modeled was a particularly good one. He had
managed to get the limbs all in the right proportions, and
Khefti's bulging belly, ugly frown and perpetually-creased brows
just right. Perhaps it was crude, and the face a bit blobby, but
anyone who looked at it would surely recognize who it was meant
to be. While it was still wet, he had filled the mouth with bits of
thistle, and shoved acacia thorns deep into the belly. Then he
had set it up on top of the wall in a hidden corner to dry hard in
the sun and the kamiseen, and when all of the work was done for
the day, because it was such a good likeness, he decided that
instead of merely grinding the thing under his heel while
chanting his curses, he would try something different.
He had dug a hole in the path in the moonlight and put the
figure in it. That way he could tread on it with every bucket
hauled to and from the well, reciting the curses in his head.
Maybe if he did that enough, one of them would fly home and
strike true. Knowing he would put his foot on his master each
time he traveled the path kept him going, even in this heat.
The dust that flew up in a puff from under his bare foot as he
planted it on the burial spot was nearly the same no-color as his
foot itself, coated with dried clay and dust as it was. All the
better; cursing was earth-magic, and maybe this time the links
would be strong enough to make the curse stick. Vetch had tried,
and more than once, to get something of his master's person to
put into the figures he made. But Khefti was a coward, always
afraid of magic and curses, and was so careful of such things
that he never pared his nails without counting all the bits before
burning them, and even made his barber burn the hair he'd
scraped off the master's misshapen head before Khefti would
leave the shop. Well, Khefti was not well-beloved among his
neighbors, so perhaps he was right to be so concerned.
Vetch reluctantly took his heel from the spot where the figure
lay buried, and heaved the bucket forward another step. His
arms ached so much, and his legs were so wobbly from
exhaustion that it was all he could do to keep from dropping to
his knees in the dust, but he dared not set the bucket down for
an actual rest. At any moment, Khefti might awaken from his
nap and look out to see if Vetch was working.
Every morning and every afternoon, as long as the kamiseen
blew, he filled the drip-cistern that fed the fragile pottery pipes
that in turn watered his Tian master's tala plants. The only
source of water for the cistern was the Great Mother River or the
master's well, and neither was easier than the other to get water
from.
If he fetched water from the well, it meant pulling up the
water one bucket at a time, bringing up the rope, hand over
hand, with the bucket feeling as though it was getting heavier all
the time. And the well was (of course) nearly as far from the
cistern as the river, though in the opposite direction. The river
was marginally farther away, though he would not have to drag
the weighty bucket up its rope. But the clear water from the well
wouldn't clog the pottery pipes the way that muddy water from
the river would, unless Vetch was very careful when he filled the
bucket. Being "very careful" meant wading out into the river, up
to his knees—which put him in the way of the crocodiles, who
would not turn down prey that came so obligingly within their
reach.
Vetch hated this bucket, too heavy, too big, too awkward, and
if he'd dared, he'd have put a hole in the bottom of it. But if he
did, Khefti would probably find something worse for him to
use— bigger and heavier, or so small as to be nearly useless.
Tala could only be grown during the dry season, after the
Great Mother River had shrunk to a shadow of her wet-season
greatness. It only set its berries after the sun-baked fields of
wheat and barley were harvested and reduced to bleached
stubble and the earth beneath the stubble was riddled with
cracks as wide as a man's hand. But tala fruits were worth their
weight in electrum, for tala fruits gave the Jousters their ability
to control their great dragons.
Dragons… dragons and tala were inseparable. The only reason
to grow the tala was because of the dragons, the creatures that
were the greatest weapons that the Tians had. Vetch had only
ever seen the dragons at a far distance, overhead, flying out from
the city of Mefis a little up the river, gold and scarlet, blue and
green against the hard, bright blue of the sky. They would have
been beautiful, if they were not so terrible.
Dragons—well, in part, they were responsible for his being a
serf. The war would not have gone so badly for Alta if the Tians
hadn't had so many more dragons and Jousters. He supposed,
dully, that he should be cursing them, too—but he could only
focus his hate on one target at a time, and at the moment, that
target was Khefti.
Vetch stumbled over a clod and trod down hard on a stone,
saving the bucket from going over at the last moment.
"Night-demons take you!" he cursed the clod and stone alike,
and thought, resentfully, that if Khefti were to allow him the
clothing that were allotted to a slave, he would have straw
sandals, and he would be saved stone bruises, saved the burning
heat that came up through his hardened soles. Khefti's paths
were like Khefti's heart; hard and uncaring. What could it
possibly cost to permit his one serf a simple pair of sandals?
That was the moment when a revelation, and a sickening one,
came to him. And he realized that one of his errors in cursing
Khefti might have been in the phrasing of the first part of the
curse. He had specifically said my sandal to grind his head into
the dust. But Vetch wasn't wearing sandals, didn't own sandals
(not even the cheapest, woven-straw kind every slave got) and
likely never would own sandals. Granted, that was the way that
the magician Vetch had spied on had phrased his curse for his
customer, but the customer had worn sandals.
Vetch ground his teeth in frustration, and jerked at the rope
handle of the bucket. Well, he would continue the cursing for the
entire three days, but how could he have overlooked something
so simple?
Better he should have cursed the tala fields—
But that would be a dangerous thing to do as well as an
audacious one, potentially more dangerous than cursing his
master.
Granted, the mud-brick wall held little shrines to every god
that could be invoked, and plenty of talismans for growth and
plenty, which should have prevented any harm whatsoever from
coming to the fields, but if Khefti even thought that Vetch was
cursing the fields, his stick would be out and drumming a beat
on Vetch's back for days.
Besides, Vetch wanted to hurt Khefti directly, not indirectly.
And anyway, as the son of a farmer, someone who loved and
served the land, something within Vetch shrank from wishing
harm even on a tiny plot of tala plants.
Vetch's master was not a farmer; he was a potter and the
master of a brick yard. Nevertheless, he made a great deal of
money from his little tala field; his workshops were for his daily
bread, but his tala bought him luxuries that his neighbors
envied. A harvest like this one would bring more than enough to
pay for a rock-carved tomb in the Valley of Artisans, a tomb he
could not otherwise have afforded, and for which his apprentices
were making a veritable army of abshati servants and pottery
funerary wares fit for a man far above Khefti's station. It also
paid for all manner of luxuries: fine linen kilts, many jars of good
date wine every day, melons, honey cakes, and roast duck on his
table on a regular basis. Khefti even had a melon cooling in his
well at this moment, a true luxury in the dry season.
Oh, melon…
Just the thought of a melon made Vetch's stomach cry out
with hunger. He hadn't even tasted a melon rind in an age.
Khefti thriftily had his cook pickle the rinds from his melons, in
keeping with his parsimonious nature.
And that thought led down the well-worn path of food. Good
bread and beer, melon and dates and pomegranate, honey and
fish; all the things that Vetch had not tasted since he became a
serf. For that matter, he had not had enough to fill his belly since
the last of the great Temple Festivals at the beginning of the
growing season, and that was only because it was the Temple of
Hamun that provided the bounty. The raw latas roots Vetch had
eaten this morning (in addition to his allotted stale loaf end) had
helped with the never-ending hunger, but nothing would ever
make it stop altogether.
From the moment Vetch had entered Khefti's service, he was
always hungry; as the savory aromas from Khefti's kitchen
tantalized his nose, he would be making a scanty meal of
whatever Khefti allotted him. Breakfast, a palm-sized loaf of
yesterday's dark barley bread (he could have eaten half a dozen
of the same size), or supper, a tiny bowl of pottage his family
wouldn't have fed to a pig and another little loaf of stale bread.
Sometimes the fare was varied by the addition of an onion
beginning to go bad. Lunch was whatever he could find, in the
hour when Khefti slept—a handful of wild lettuce, latas roots
grubbed out of the riverbank and eaten raw, wild onions so
strong they made the eyes water. Sometimes he found wild duck
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