Then at last they came up to the outer gate. Four guards came out, bare to the waist except for blue necklaces and their bows and quivers. They examined the caravan leader's pass, ran quickly along the line of men and animals, then signaled to their comrades on top of the wall. Ahead, double gates of iron-bound timber twenty feet on a side creaked open. The caravan trotted forward. A moment of darkness and coolness, then the sun was blazing down on the caravan again. Richard Blade had come to Dahaura.
Chapter 12
A million people lived in Dahaura and it seemed to Blade that all of them were out in the streets at once. The caravan advanced one step, almost one inch at a time, down a wide street that was packed from curb to curb with other animals, men, women, and children, carts, wagons, and ornate carriages.
The air was thick enough to slice with the smells of animals, unwashed human beings, overripe fruit, herbs and spices, perfumes, and charcoal smoke from the braziers of the craftsmen in the little alleys opening off either side of the street.
Now traffic came to a complete halt as two wagons ahead locked wheels. One driver tried to jerk his vehicle free. The sacks piled high on the other wagon toppled into the first one. Several burst and showered the driver with yellow grain. The drivers cursed each other, everyone they were holding up cursed them, their oxen lowed angrily and tried to butt at each other. Eventually both drivers had the sense to back up, and the traffic untangled itself.
Blade saw similar scenes three more times before a massive gray-brown building loomed up at the end of the street. It had «prison» written all over it even without the armed guards at each gate and on the roof.
The caravan stopped briefly at the main gate of the prison and Blade was ordered to dismount. More of the barechested, blue-necklaced infantry of the Baran ran out to surround him.
«Dangerous?» one of them asked, pointing at Blade.
The caravan leader shrugged. «The Desert Riders took him alive, and he didn't give us much trouble either. Tries to talk out of turn, but that's about all.»
«Right,» said the soldier. He raised a spiked truncheon and prodded Blade in the buttocks with it hard enough to draw blood. «Come on, you. And remember the Law of Silence.»
By now Blade knew better than to do anything but obey. The guards hustled him off, and an iron-barred gate clanged shut behind them. A ramp paved with worn flagstones sloped down into the foundations of the prison. Blade's guards half-led, half-pushed him down it, and after another few steps the sunlight was gone.
How many prisoners had been hustled down this ramp, to wear the flagstones down? Blade wondered. He also wondered how many of the prisoners had ever seen the sunlight again.
The prison chamber for the male slaves was a stone-walled and stone-floored pit a hundred feet on a side. A narrow ledge ran around all four sides, where the guards walked. At one end was a solid iron door.
It was impossible to keep track of time there. Blade could find no routine in the meals, in the filling of the water buckets, or in anything else. The prisoners came and went quickly, and most of them were numb and apathetic.
The guards were efficient, alert, hard-working, and often brutal. The rule of silence for slaves was strictly enforced, with long iron-tipped whips. Blade saw one of those whips take out a man's eyes when he tried to complain about some totally spoiled food. Blade kept very much to himself, and endured in grim silence the crowding, the smells, the wretched food and scummy water, the lice and rats, and the screams and whimperings of his fellow prisoners.
A few of those prisoners resented Blade's aloofness, and perhaps also the obvious good health that gave him a chance of being sold into some service where he might hope to survive. The first man who let his resentment of Blade go too far got a broken wrist, the second got a sprained ankle and a knock on the head. After that the other prisoners let Blade alone. None of them wanted to risk serious injury at the hands of this silent, scarred giant. Slaves with crippling injuries were often slain outright, or sent to the salt flats at the mouth of the Da, a slower but equally certain death.
Time seemed to stretch endlessly onward, one hour hardly distinguishable from another. Blade began to wonder how long he'd be in this prison. He could endure filth and lice, but not the loss of all sense of time. Disorientation and perhaps apathy would follow, sooner or later. They would not kill him, not even in the prison, but they might leave him slowed down when he left the prison. That could be fatal.
Blade used every technique he'd ever learned to keep his mind and body in condition. He succeeded. He also succeeded in convincing his fellow prisoners that he was quite mad, and making them avoid him even more carefully than before.
At last a day came, when a guard cracked a whip at Blade and shouted, «You! The big desert man! Up and out of here!» The iron-weighted tip of the whip snapped just over Blade's head as he scrambled up the wall of the pit. For the moment he didn't care where he was going or what awaited him there. He only cared that he was getting out of the damned prison!
The guards scrubbed Blade with soap whose smell alone would have killed any germs or vermin. They shaved off every bit of his hair except his eyebrows, and oiled him from head to foot until he looked and felt more like a greased pig than a human being. Finally they gave him a meal-bread, porridge, boiled salt meat, beer-all be could eat and drink. One meal couldn't put back on Blade's bones the twenty pounds he'd lost in prison, but it gave him strength and peace of mind.
He slept well that night, alone in an almost-clean cell, and in the morning they led him out onto the auction block.
Blade had been a slave in a good many different Dimensions, but this was the first time he'd actually been put up on the open market. He couldn't help wondering what his market price would be. Doubtless that would depend on what he was being sold for. That was more than interesting-it could make the difference between life and death.
One of the guards prodded him in the back with a truncheon. Blade noticed that the young woman who'd been sitting on the bench beside him was gone. «On your feet, big boy!» grunted the man. «You're next.»
Blade rose awkwardly to his feet and shuffled to the foot of brick stairs that led up on to the block. His wrists and ankles were chained. At the top of the stairs was a square doorway that showed a patch of eye-searing blue sky. From beyond the doorway Blade could hear the brisk patter of the auctioneer, voices raised to bid, an occasional clink of chain as the girl moved, and a background murmur from the crowd. It seemed to take a lot of talking for the auctioneer to get each bid-apparently it was a slow day. Blade heard the bidding on the girl creep up to fifty mahari, make a single jump to sixty, then stay there. Finally the auctioneer's voice barked:
«Sold to [a barely pronounceable name whose spelling Blade couldn't imagine] for sixty mahari.»
The guard prodded Blade with the spike of his truncheon. One of these days, Blade decided, he was going to take one of those truncheons away from a guard and give it back as painfully as possible. Then he rose to his feet and climbed the stairs to the block.