The Complete Liveship Traders Trilogy: Ship of Magic, The Mad Ship, Ship of Destiny. Robin Hobb
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the serpent’s heavily-scaled snout. Instead the blade cracked loudly against his weakened bone. She severed his leg just below the serpent’s teeth, cutting it off a nice bite, as it were. He saw blood gout from the ragged stump as she hauled him hastily backwards crabbing across the deck with him in her grip. He dimly heard the awe-stricken cries of his men as the serpent raised its head still higher, and then suddenly collapsed back into the sea, boneless as a piece of string. It would not rise again. It was dead. And Etta had fed it his leg.
‘Why did you do that?’ he demanded of her faintly. ‘What have I ever done to you that you would chop my leg off?’
‘Oh, my darling, oh, my love!’ she was caterwauling, even as the darkness swirled around him and took him down.
The slave-market stank. It was the worst smell that Wintrow had ever encountered. He wondered if the smell of one’s own kind in death and disease were naturally more offensive than any other odour. Instinctively, he wished to be away from here. It was a bone-deep revulsion. Despite the misery he saw, his sympathy and outrage were overwhelmed by his disgust. Hurry as he might, he could not seem to find an escape from this section of the city.
He had seen animals confined in large numbers before, even animals gathered together for slaughter, but their misery had been dumb and uncomprehending. They had chewed their cud and lashed their tails at flies as they awaited their fates. Animals could be held in pens or yards. They did not need to be secured with both manacles and leg-irons. Nor did animals shout or sob their misery and frustration in words.
‘I can’t help you, I can’t help you.’ Wintrow heard himself muttering the words aloud and bit down on his tongue. It was true, he assured himself. He could not help them. He could no more break their chains than they could. Even if he had been able to undo their fetters, what then? He could not erase the tattoos from their faces, could not help them flee and escape. Evil as their fates were, it was best if he left each one to face it and make the best he could of it. Some, surely, would find freedom and happiness later in their lives. This extreme of misery could not last for ever.
As if in agreement with that thought, a man passed him trundling a barrow. Three bodies had been dumped in it and despite their emaciation, the man pushed it with difficulty. A woman trailed after him, weeping disconsolately. ‘Please, please,’ she burst out as they passed Wintrow. ‘At least let me have his body. What good is it to you? Let me take my son home and bury him. Please, please.’ But the man pushing the barrow paid her no attention. Nor did anyone else in the hurrying, crowded street. Wintrow stared after them, wondering if perhaps the woman were crazy, perhaps it was not her son at all and the man with the barrow knew it. Or perhaps, he reflected, everyone else in the street was crazy, and had just seen a heartsick mother begging for the dead body of her son, and had done nothing about it. Including himself. Had he so swiftly become inured to human pain? He lifted his eyes and tried to see the street scene afresh.
It overwhelmed him. In the main part of the street, folk strolled arm in arm, dawdling to look at booths just as they might in any marketplace. They spoke of colour and size, of age and sex. But the livestock and goods they perused were human. There were simple coffles standing in courtyards, a string of people chained together, offered in lots or singles, for general work on farms or in town. At the corner of the courtyard, a tattooist plied his trade. He lounged in a chair beside a leather-lined head vice and an immense block of stone with an eye-bolt worked into it. For a reasonable price, the chant rose, a reasonable price, he would mark any newly-purchased slave with the buyer’s emblem. The boy calling this out was tethered to the stone. He wore only a loincloth, despite the winter day, and his entire body had been lavishly embellished with tattoos as a means of advertising his master’s skill. For a reasonable price, a reasonable price.
There were buildings that housed slaves, their specialities advertised on their swinging signs. Wintrow saw an emblem for carpenters and masons, another for seamstresses, and one that specialized in musicians and dancers. Just as any type of person might fall into debt, so one might acquire any type of slave. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, Wintrow thought to himself. Tutors and wet-nurses and scribes and clerks. Why hire what you could buy outright? That seemed to be the philosophy here in the slave-market, yet Wintrow wondered how those shopping for slaves could not see themselves in their faces, or recognize one’s neighbours. No one else seemed disturbed by it. Some might hold a lace kerchief fastidiously to the nose, distressed by the odour. They did not hesitate to demand a slave stand, or walk, or trot in a circle the better to inspect him. Latticed-off areas were provided for the more private inspection of the females for sale. It seemed that, in the eyes of the buyers, a failure of finances instantly changed a man from a friend or neighbour into merchandise.
Some, it appeared, were not too badly housed and kept. They were the more valuable slaves, the well-educated and talented and skilled. Some few of those even appeared to take a quiet pride in their own worth, holding themselves with pride and assurance despite being marked with a tattoo across the face. Others were what Wintrow heard referred to as ‘map-faces’ meaning that the history of their owners could be traced by the progression of different tattoos. Usually such slaves were surly and difficult; tractable slaves often found permanent homes. More than five tattoos usually marked a slave as less than desirable. They were sold more cheaply and treated with casual brutality.
The face-tattooing of slaves, once regarded as a barbaric Chalcedean custom, was now the norm in Jamaillia City. It pained Wintrow to see how Jamaillia had not only adopted it, but adapted it. Those marketed as dancers and entertainers often bore only small and pale tattoos, easily masked with make-up so that their status would not disturb the pleasure of those being entertained. While it was illegal still to purchase slaves solely to prostitute them, the more exotic tattoos that marked some of them left no doubt in Wintrow’s mind as to what profession they’d been trained to. It was easier, often, to see their tattoos instead of meet their eyes.
It was while he was passing a street-corner coffle that a slave hailed him. ‘Please, priest! The comfort of Sa for the dying.’
Wintrow halted where he stood, unsure if he were the one addressed. The slave had stepped as far from his coffle as his fetters would allow. He did not look the sort of man who would seek Sa’s comfort; tattoos sprawled over his face and down his neck. Nor did he look as if he were dying. He was shirtless and his ribs showed and the fetter on his ankle had chafed the flesh there to running sores, but other than that, he looked tough and vital. He was substantially taller than Wintrow, a man of middle years, his body scarred by heavy use. His stance was that of a survivor. Wintrow glanced past him, to where his owner stood a short way off, haggling with a prospective buyer. The owner, a short man who spun a small club as he talked, caught Wintrow’s gaze briefly and scowled in displeasure, but did not leave off his bargaining.
‘You. Aren’t you a priest?’ the slave asked insistently.
‘I was training to be a priest,’ Wintrow admitted, ‘though I cannot fully claim that title as yet.’ More decisively he added, ‘But I am willing to give what comfort I can.’ He eyed the chained slaves and tried to keep suspicion from his voice as he asked, ‘Who needs such comfort?’
‘She does.’ The man stepped aside. A woman crouched miserably behind him. Wintrow saw then that the other slaves clustered around her, offering her the warmth and scant shelter of their gathered bodies. She was young, surely not more than twenty, and bore no visible injuries. She was the only woman in the group. Her arms were crossed over her belly, her head bowed down on her chest. When she lifted her face to regard him, her blue eyes were dull as riverstones. Her skin was very pale and her yellow hair had been chopped into a short brush on her head. The shift she wore was patched and stained. The shirt that shawled her shoulders probably belonged to the man who had summoned Wintrow. Like the man and the other slaves in the coffle, her face was overwritten with tattoos. She bore no traces of injury that Wintrow could easily see, nor did she appear frail. On the contrary, she was a well-muscled woman with wide shoulders. Only the lines of pain on her face marked her illness.
‘What ails you?’ Wintrow asked, coming closer. In some corner of his soul, he suspected the coffle of slaves were trying to lure him close enough to seize him. As a hostage, perhaps? But no one made any threatening moves. In fact, the slaves