'I don't need tying,' he tried to tell them in Arabic, but they ignored him and chained his ankles. He walked onto the platform feeling the baked air settle on him. Even to himself he emitted a powerful smell, and looking down he saw that his time in the empty land had left him about as fleshless as the little girl before him. But what was left was muscle, and he stood up straight, looking into the sun as the bidding went on, thinking the part of the Lapis Lazuli Sutra that went, 'The ruffian demons of unkindness roam the earth, begone! begone! The Buddha renounces slavery!'
'Does he speak Arabic?' someone asked.
One of his captors prodded him, and in Arabic he said, 'In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, I speak Arabic, also Turkic, Mongolian, Ulu, Tibetan and Chinese,' and he began to chant the first chapter of the Quran as far as he remembered it, until they pulled his chain and he took this as a sign to stop. He was very thirsty.
A short, slight Arab bought him for twenty somethings. His captors seemed pleased. They handed him his clothes as he stepped down, slapped him on the back and were off. He began to put on his greasy coat, but his new owner stopped him, handing him a length of clean cotton cloth.
'Wrap that around you. Leave the other filth here.'
Surprised, Bold looked down at the last vestiges of his previous life. Dirty rags only, but they had accompanied him this far. He pulled his amulet out of them, leaving his knife hidden in a sleeve, but his owner intervened and threw it back onto the clothes.
'Come on. I know a market in Zanj where I can sell a barbarian like you for three times what I just paid. Meanwhile you can help me get ready for the voyage there. Do you understand? Help, and it will go easier for you. I'll feed you more.'
'I understand.'
'Be sure that you do. Don't think of trying to escape. Alexandria is a very fine city. The Mamlukes keep things stricter than sharia here. They are not forgiving of slaves that try to escape. They're orphans brought here from north of the Black Sea, men whose parents were killed by barbarians like you.'
In fact Bold himself had killed quite a few of the Golden Horde, so he nodded without comment.
His owner said, 'They have been trained by Arabs in the way of Allah, and now they are more than Muslim.' He whistled at the thought. 'Trained to rule Egypt apart from all lesser influences, to be true only to the sharia. You don't want to cross them.'
Bold nodded again. 'I understand.'
Crossing the Sinai was like travelling with a caravan crossing one of the deserts of the heartland, except this time Bold was walking with the slaves, in the cloud of dust at the back of the camel train. They were part of the year's haj. Enormous numbers of camels and people had tramped over this road through the desert, and now it was a broad dusty smooth swathe through rockier hills. Smaller parties going north passed by to their left. Bold had never seen so many camels.
The caravanserai were beaten and ashy. The ropes tying him to his new master's other slaves were never untied, and they slept in circles on the ground at night. The nights were warmer than Bold was used to, and this almost made up for the heat of the days. Their master, whose name was Zeyk, kept them well watered and fed them adequately at night and at dawn, treating them about as well as his camels, Bold observed: a tradesman, taking care of the goods in his possession. Bold approved of the attitude, and did what he could to keep the bedraggled string of slaves in good form. If they all kept the pace it made the walking that much easier. One night he looked up and saw the Archer looking down on him, and he remembered his nights alone in the empty land.
The ghost of Temur,
The last survivor of the fisherfolk,
The empty stone temples open to the sky, The days of hunger, the little mare,
That ridiculous bow and arrow,
A red bird and blue bird, sitting side by side.
They came to the Red Sea, and boarded a ship three or four times as long as the one that had brought him to Alexandria, a dhow or zambuco, people called it both. The wind always blew from the west, sometimes hard, and they hugged the western shore with their big lateen sail bellied out to the cast. They made good time. Zeyk fed his string of slaves more and more, fattening them for the market. Bold happily downed the extra rice and cucumbers, and saw the sores around his ankles begin to heal. For the first time in a long time he was not perpetually hungry, and he felt as if he was coming out of a fog or a dream, waking up more each day. Of course now he was a slave, but he wouldn't always be one. Something would happen.
After a stop at a dry brown port called Massawa, one of the hajjira depots, they sailed east across the Red Sea and rounded the low red cape marking the end of Arabia, to Aden, a big seaside oasis, indeed the biggest port Bold had ever seen, a very rich town of green palms waving over ceramic roofs, citrus trees, and numberless minarets. Zeyk did not disembark his goods or slaves here, however; after a day on shore he came back shaking his head.
'Mombasa,' he said to the ship's captain, and paid him more, and they sailed south across the strait again, around the horn and Ras Hafun, then down the coast of Zanj, sailing much farther south than Bold had ever been. The sun at noon was nearly directly overhead, and beat down on them most cruelly all day, day after day, with never a cloud in the sky. The air baked as if the world were an oven. The coast appeared either dead brown or else vibrant green, nothing in between. They stopped at Mogadishu, Lamu and Malinda, each a prosperous Arab trading port, but Zeyk got off only briefly at them.
As they sailed into Mombasa, the grandest harbour yet, they came on a fleet of giant ships, ships bigger than Bold had imagined possible. Each one was as big as a small town, with a long line of masts down its centre. There were about ten of these gigantic outlandish ships, with another twenty smaller ones anchored among them. 'Ah good,' said Zeyk to the zambuco's captain and owner. 'The Chinese are here.'
The Chinese! Bold had had no idea they owned such a great fleet as this one. It made sense, though. Their pagodas, their great wall; they liked to build big.
The fleet was like an archipelago. All on board the zambuco looked at the great ships, abashed and apprehensive, as if faced with sea going gods. The large Chinese ships were as long as a dozen of the biggest dhows, and Bold counted nine masts on one of them. Zeyk saw him and nodded. 'Look well. Those will soon be your home, God willing.'
The zambuco's master brought them inshore on a breath of a breeze. The town's little waterfront was entirely occupied by the landing boats of the visitors, and after some discussion with Zeyk, the zambuco's owner beached his craft just south of the waterfront. Zeyk and his man rolled up their robes and stepped over the freeboard into the water, and helped the whole string of slaves over the side onto land. The green water was as warm as blood, or even hotter.
Bold spotted some Chinese, wearing their characteristic red felt coats even here, where they were certainly much too warm. They wandered the market, fingering the goods on display and chattering among themselves, trading with the aid of a translator Zeyk knew. Zeyk approached and greeted him effusively, asked about direct trade with the Chinese visitors. The translator introduced him to some of the Chinese, who seemed polite, even affable, in their usual way. Bold found himself trembling slightly, perhaps from heat and hunger, perhaps from the sight of the Chinese, after all these years, on the other side of the world. Still pursuing their business.
Zeyk and his assistant led the slaves through the market. It was a riot of smell, colour and sound. People as black as pitch, their eyeballs and teeth flashing white or yellow against their skin, offered goods and bartered happily. Bold followed the others past Great mounds of green and yellow fruit, Rice, coffee, dried fish and squid,