CHAPTER SEVEN

I woke as the sunlight was dimming. A breeze made my skin rise in goose pimples, and I shivered. I opened my eyes to see the Attolian already sitting up, wrapped in a blanket. I began to unroll my own.

“Kamet,” said the Attolian in a low voice, “I am sorry. I hope you will forgive me.”

I looked up at him, speechless. How many times had he apologized to me already? “I’m sorry,” he’d said on the riverside in Ianna-Ir at the very start of my deceit, when I let him believe he had misspoken “after noon” for “after dark.” He’d apologized when it was the Namreen who had sliced open my head, apologized for having only caggi to offer me, apologized for leading us into Koadester. I’d paid little attention, assuming his apologies were the result of habit, not intent. How many times does a slave hear the word “sorry” made meaningless? “I’m sorry, Kamet, but you must fetch another scroll, bottle of wine, set of linen, robe from the tailor. Kamet, I am sorry, but the accounts must be completed by morning. I’m so sorry, but there’s no bed for you. Sorry, Kamet, there’s nothing left for your dinner.” How many times had my master used that word? As many times as I had bowed my head and said, “Yes, master, of course, of course.”

I opened my mouth, and no words came. I didn’t know what to say when “sorry” meant something, what to say to an apology that was so obviously sincere.

I fell back on habit and apologized myself. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was afraid.”

“I know,” said the Attolian. “I understand. I made a poor slave.” He smiled at the irony, both of us thinking of Koadester.

We sat quietly for a while after that. There was no wood for a fire, and we couldn’t make one anyway as we couldn’t risk being seen. We also couldn’t move out from behind the rock that was hiding us from view. From where he was sitting, the Attolian could watch for new activity at the mine. He said there had been no sign so far that the slavers had been discovered, so we just sat, each picking at our meager handful of dried food, trying to make it last. I noticed the Attolian’s earring was back in his ear. I’d feared that it had fallen from his mouth when I’d kicked him or that he’d swallowed it.

“Is it because they are your enemies that they are so easy to kill?” I asked hesitantly.

The Attolian looked up, and then down again at the sliver of dried meat in his hand as if it were going to crawl away if he didn’t watch it carefully.

“You have seen men die,” he said. “You were not so squeamish about the Namreen.”

“I’ve seen many people die,” I agreed. “I’ve never held a man’s life in my hands.” I looked down at those hands, scraped and very dirty now, but still free of calluses except the one that came from holding a stylus. “I was no threat to the Namreen, certainly, and I was too worried that I was dying, I suppose. But last night’s work was . . . different.”

“I wondered when I was training to be a soldier if killing a man would be hard, but I learned that it’s usually very easy. It’s like throwing up a hand when you are startled, or wrenching at something that is stuck. You do it in a moment and without a thought, really. Afterward it can be like an avalanche . . . sometimes. In the nights after a battle, we always drink. A condolence if we’ve lost and a celebration if we’ve won, but it’s always a little of both. I think mostly we drink to drive the ghosts away. We all know it. When you think of all the deaths—our comrades, and the men who were someone else’s comrades—you drink to get through the night, because you won’t sleep otherwise. Some men haunt you longer than others. I haven’t thought much of the Namreen, though I suppose I will tonight.” He turned his head to look across the rocky hillside toward the open sky.

“Will these slavers stay with you?”

“I hope not. I have killed better men.”

“Because they were Medes?”

The Attolian looked puzzled. “But they weren’t Medes. I couldn’t understand a word they said.”

“They were Setrans.”

“Your countrymen? Kamet, I am more than sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“I don’t care,” I said, and I didn’t. I had no connection to those men just because we might have been born in the same place. “I meant, if they had been Attolians?”

He shrugged. “They could just as easily have been Attolians, buying and selling slaves here in the empire. I am sure there are any number of Attolians equally despicable. Were they enemies of my king, then I would kill them. I am a soldier, Kamet. I am sorry if that distresses you.”

He was quiet for a time before he continued, as if he were sorting his thoughts.

“I might have been more reluctant to kill them if they hadn’t been murderers, but I wouldn’t have killed them just for that. That is not my right. I couldn’t have fought all the men if they had awakened, but I couldn’t honestly say when, in killing, I stopped doing the work of a soldier and began doing . . . some other thing.” He looked away, uncomfortable. “Battles are more straightforward.”

He was quiet again.

I thought of my master, Nahuseresh, in a rocky tomb by now at his family’s estate. That was one death I didn’t want the Attolian to know about. I wished more every day that I didn’t have to lie to him, but I saw no other choice. I knew that I had to separate myself from him in Zaboar. To go all the way to Attolia would be to invite my own death at the hands of the king when he found that he’d been tricked. Or at the hands of the emperor when he learned where I was.

“Kamet, is there nothing that you liked about Attolia?”

Startled by the change in subject, I again had no words.

The Attolian laughed a little at me. “You won’t hurt my feelings. Why do you hate it so?”

Gods help me, it was his home. “What makes you think I don’t like Attolia?” I asked disingenuously.

“You said so. After the fight with the Namreen. You called it a backward, stinking cesspit.”

“I did?”

“So.”

“I was upset,” I said. “I didn’t mean it.”

He looked me in the eye and called my bluff. “You did.”

I searched for the least insulting thing I could say. “In Attolia,” I explained, “slaves are used for physical labor. Even free men rarely read and write. I was . . . an anomaly.” I wasn’t sure he knew what the word meant. “I was the only slave in the upper palace,” I said. “Free men in Attolia have nothing to do with slaves, so they had nothing to do with me. And the few slaves in the palace had just as little to do with a man who was educated and a secretary to his master. In the empire, the Medes respect their slaves.”

He looked as if he disagreed. “And fear them,” he observed.

That was certainly true. There was little that frightened the citizens of the empire like the possibility of a slave revolt.

“What of the queen’s indentured?” the Attolian asked me.

“They especially wouldn’t have anything to do with me.” The queen’s indentured, those who were paying off their families’ seven years of freedom from taxation with the same number of years in service to the crown, were snobs of the highest order. Their families had indentured them to pay for their educations, to raise their status, not to hobnob with slaves. “They will be free men and quite powerful when they go back to their provinces.”