At this hour Mother would have finished with the dinner, and I would already be setting the table, Alpheo thought as he watched the sun sink slowly toward its resting place. He was the middle son then, and yet it was him that his parents left all the responsibilities to.The dogs and cats they tired of taking care off, along with all the chores.
Then he thought it as a great injustice as any other. How stupid was to take such matter to account, he realised now. Useless and stupid.
The warm light stretched long shadows out across the camp and painted the dust in hues of gold and blood red, making something beautiful of a place that had no business being it.
Memories crept into his mind, each one a fragile shard from a life that felt as though it had belonged to someone else entirely. They came from another world, a world he had left behind fourteen years ago now, and he had many of them, more than he could count on both ruined hands. But one rose above all the rest and came back to haunt him in quiet moments precisely like this one.
Strangely enough, it was not a bad one.
He was seated at the family's dining table, flanked by his brothers, with whom he had never once got along. Across from him his parents smiled the way they always smiled when the day's work was finally behind them. At the head of the table stood his grandfather, a gentle man whose kindness had been as steady and as certain as the turning of the seasons.
Yet now, whenever Alpheo tried to picture the old man's face, it came to him blurred, as though hidden behind a veil of mist that thickened a little more each year he tried.At the start it was scary, than it just become a common thing.
The table itself had been a heavy thing, carved from dark wood and polished to a deep shine by generations of elbows. That night it had been covered with more food than any family could hope to eat in a single sitting. Platters of roasted meat glistening in their own juices, bread still steaming from the oven and torn open ready for the butter, pasta swimming in rich sauce, bowls of mashed potatoes with pools of gold melted across the top of them. It must have been a special occasion of some kind, though Alpheo could no longer recall which.
Perhaps Christmas. Perhaps someone's birthday, though he scarcely recalled a cake.
The details slipped away from him like water through cupped fingers whenever he tried to hold them still. The faces were familiar and strange both at once, the voices muffled as though heard from underwater. Yet the smell and the taste of that food lingered with a crystal clarity that shamed him. He remembered the crunch of bread between his teeth. The warmth of the potatoes on his tongue. The richness of the meat.
Did that make him a bad son? To remember a meal more vividly than the faces of the people who had given him life? His first parents had bathed him in love and asked nothing for it. His second had drenched him in an absent, casual cruelty that never even rose to the level of hatred. What kind of parents, he wondered, could sell their own child into slavery and still find sleep waiting for them that same night?
On those nights, after long days of labour beneath the merciless eye of his master, he would drift into restless sleep with his belly empty and his body aching in a dozen places, and in his dreams he was free again. He saw himself slipping away under the cover of darkness, running until the air burned like coals in his lungs. He saw himself standing before his old village with a torch held high in his hand, setting the house of his childhood ablaze.
He imagined the fire roaring up into the night sky, taking with it every last trace of the life that had betrayed him. But with each dawn those dreams dissolved like smoke off a dead fire, and the unchanging truth settled back into place: vengeance was a luxury he could not afford, and could not tend to even if he could.
This evening was no different. His thoughts scattered like frightened birds at the sound of the same barked order that came every night at the same hour.
"SPEED UP! EACH TO HIS CELL!"
It was always the same voice, coarse and sharp as a rasp drawn across iron, and it belonged to Menicus, the overseer. A gaunt man with a cruel mouth and a stick never far from his hand, he seemed to find genuine joy in the act of punishment, the way other men find it in wine or women. Alpheo often wondered whether Menicus loved anything in this world more than the sound of his stick meeting flesh.
He would not be given the satisfaction tonight. Keeping his head bowed, Alpheo moved quickly toward his cell, his bare feet making no sound at all on the packed dirt, his eyes fixed upon the ground a pace ahead of him. To meet Menicus's gaze was to invite trouble, and trouble was the one thing Alpheo could not afford, not now, not when he had plans of his own ripening.
Soon he reached his cell, though calling it that was generous to the point of flattery. It was little more than four sticks lashed together with rope, the sort of thing a child might fashion for a playpen and then grow bored of.
A determined man with a blade could cut himself free of it inside of a few breaths. But who would be fool enough to try? Beyond the bars the watchmen's eyes were always set, and anyone caught slipping out was granted a fate a great deal worse than the one waiting inside.
In his early years with the army there had always been some desperate soul foolish enough to attempt it. The first time Alpheo witnessed what followed had been enough to cure him of any thought of reckless escape for the rest of his life.
The young man had been small and silent and strange, and had never spoken a word to anyone, not once, no matter the circumstances. Perhaps his tongue had been cut out of him somewhere along the way. Perhaps he simply had nothing left worth the saying.
But Alpheo had heard him scream. That day, when they broke his knees and left him lying in the dirt to rot, he screamed until his voice gave out entirely, and then went on screaming without it.
The heavy thunk of wood against wood sounded behind Alpheo as the guard shut him in.
The space inside was cramped, barely enough for one man to stretch himself out, let alone four. The air hung thick with the stench of sweat and grime and damp earth. And yet, as much as he loathed the smell of it, this was the part of the day Alpheo almost looked forward to. Here, at least, they could talk without fear of a sudden blow arriving mid sentence.
Apparently nothing brings people closer than pain, he thought, turning toward his three companions: Jarza, Clio, and Egil. There had been others he had befriended across the years. Most were gone now, dead or sold or locked away in other cells on the far side of the camp, which amounted to much the same thing.
"Another day in this hellhole wasted," Alpheo muttered, leaning back against one of the rough wooden bars. "Though the night is certainly improved by your company.I can scarcely think of another worthy band of devils to rot with"
Of all of them he was the youngest, and he liked to think he was also the quickest and the sharpest. He lacked the brute strength of the others, true enough, but he made that up in other coin, and in his own private reckoning he was the brains of their little group.
"Was today a successful catch?" asked a deep gravelly voice.
It belonged to Jarza, the oldest among them. Deep lines creased his dark weathered face, yet he carried himself with a certain proud defiance that no amount of years or lashes had managed to sand away. Arlanians had a reputation for aging well, and Jarza was living proof of it even in his present state.
Like most lowborn Arlanians his skin was a deep rich brown that gleamed faintly in the dim lamplight. He was entirely bald, save for an uneven patch of stubble clinging stubbornly to one side of his jaw, and the overall effect was rather less than dignified. He looked, Alpheo had thought the first time he laid eyes on the man, like a dirty egg, or perhaps a chocolate truffle left out too long in the sun.
Jarza claimed not to know his own age, though Alpheo suspected he was well into his forties. Even now, beneath the layers of exhaustion and hunger, the traces of a once formidable fighter were plain to anyone who knew what to look for. In his youth Jarza had been a mercenary of some renown, and Alpheo knew with perfect certainty that if he ever had to face the man in battle he would sooner piss himself than draw his weapon.
Not out of cowardice, though he was no Theseus and had never claimed to be, but because Jarza radiated the particular kind of danger that comes only from a lifetime of surviving fights that other men did not.
Four years ago that danger had not been enough to save him from slavery.
Ironically it had not been any battlefield defeat that landed him here. It was debt. Crushing, patient, relentless debt. He had tried to stay ahead of his creditors, vanishing into distant cities and hiring himself out to new companies under new names before they could close the distance. They always found him regardless. Creditors, unlike enemies, never grow tired.
On the day his luck finally ran dry they took him in broad daylight, in the open street. No fight, no escape, just a man with empty pockets and an emptier future ahead of him. At the auction his broad shoulders and hardened frame fetched twelve silverii, a fair sum for a man of his build. Even now, after years of toil had pared him down, those remnants of strength were still there, the shadow a warrior leaves behind him.
Though of course it bothered Alpheo, in a small and petty corner of himself, that he had been worth barely a quarter of the man's value.
Still, what use was vanity to a man standing barefoot in the sand?