The Kingdom Beyond the Waves. Stephen Hunt

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СКАЧАТЬ in bush tongue. It’s not slyfish and game meat this one’s selling. Come on, you might as well see the sight along with everyone else. Their kind aren’t allowed within the trading post to conduct business.’

      Now Amelia really was curious. As she and Billy got closer she saw a folding table had been set up in the shadow of a wooden platform, a line of figures standing aimlessly on the boards, the centre of attention of the gathering crowd.

      ‘A slaver!’ spat Amelia, reaching down for her pistol holster.

      Billy’s hand snaked out and gripped hers with an uncanny accuracy. ‘No, quite the opposite in this instance. You might consider their vocation the liberation of slaves. It’s called a comfort auction. Watch and keep quiet, whatever you see or hear. Rapalaw’s citizens get very emotional when traders in this line of work visit the post. If you try and interfere we could both be ripped to pieces.’

      The trader in charge of this miniature market was looking very pleased with himself, biding his time until the crowd grew large enough for his satisfaction. A plate of meat had been brought up to the trader’s table, a flagon of beer by its side. The trader wiping his fingers on his sweat-soaked jacket looked like nothing so much as John Gloater, the cartoonists’ favourite Jackelian everyman. Living up to the image of Dock Street’s savage portly patriot, the trader gave out a belch and then waved at his craynarbian associates to push the goods forward on the platform. The figures Amelia had taken for slaves were a sickly-looking lot, gaunt, with vacant expressions frozen on their faces. Women, men, craynarbians, even a small grasper, all swaying slightly on the platform. There wasn’t much fight left in them. The trader’s assistants appeared to be there more to stop them stumbling off the edge of the platform than to prevent them from escaping. If this was an auction, it was one of zombies. But whatever their race, there was something the figures all had in common; it looked as if their skin had been scrubbed raw, the lines of their veins left exposed, an abnormal viridescent colour – a fretwork of green cables throbbing against their flesh.

      Pushing to his feet, the trader waddled in front of the platform and raised his arms to still the crowd. ‘Quiet now, my lovelies. My last voyage up river has, as you can see, been a fruitful one. But not without risks. It was a fierce expedition, our passage littered with the bodies of a dozen of our best porters. And in the dark heart of the jungle, on the edge of the greenmesh, we lay our ambush; luring two patrols into the pits we dug, dug with these hands …’ He raised his soft white hands, palms out. Whoever had been doing the digging, it hadn’t been the trader; those hands hadn’t raised anything heavier than a fork for a long time.

      Amelia looked at the platform with fresh eyes. The greenmesh. It began to dawn on her what this sale was about.

      ‘Now do you see?’ whispered Billy. ‘His “goods” travelled too close to the greenmesh and were absorbed by the Daggish Empire, made slaves within the unity of the hive.’

      Amelia felt sick. These trade goods had once been people with families and loved ones. Now what were they? Half-dead wasps waiting at the foot of Rapalaw Junction’s walls for a bargain to be struck.

      ‘He’s chemically cleansed them of the hive’s control,’ said Billy. ‘What you see up there is what the extrication process leaves. Although truth to tell, everything that made them who they were was scrubbed out of them a lot more assiduously by the Daggish when they were assimilated into the hive.’

      ‘Do any of you lovelies who have come before me today recognize any of these splendid emancipated souls?’ asked the trader.

      ‘That one,’ shouted one of the crowd, pointing to the man at the end of the line. ‘He was on a safari that disappeared in the interior two years ago; come up from Middlesteel, I think.’

      ‘Nobody here willing to pay for him, then?’ The trader looked wistfully around the crowd, noted the silence, then scribbled a note of provenance against the names on his list. Perhaps there would be someone back in the civilized world of Jackals who would pay. Rich enough to hunt thunder lizards, there’d surely be someone with deep pockets at the other end of the river that would want their father or their husband back.

      ‘What about this one, then?’ said the trader, waving a chubby hand at a dark-haired man standing over six feet tall. ‘One of my porters said they thought he was the pilot on a riverboat from Rapalaw that went missing a while back. An unlucky fellow who sailed too far east and ran into a Daggish seed ship.’

      From further back in the crowd came a shriek of recognition, a woman pushing forward with a girl of about twelve hanging onto her coattails. ‘Coll! Coll Ordie, don’t you recognize me? Look —’ she lifted up her girl so he could see ‘—it’s your little Maddalena. She was only nine when you were taken.’

      The ex-slave looked blankly down at the two of them from the platform, his face frozen in an emotionless rictus. Amelia saw the trader’s subtle hand signal, and one of his craynarbians gave the man a prod in the spine with a sharp stick.

      ‘It’s me,’ coughed the man. ‘I’ve come back.’

      Amelia’s eyes narrowed, and Billy gave her hand a warning squeeze. Whatever little was left of these unlucky wretches, the emancipated slaves of the Daggish had been well tutored to say one phrase since being freed. Amelia wagered that with a poke in the back, everyone standing on the platform could repeat that utterance.

      ‘It warms my heart,’ announced the trader. ‘Oh, it truly does. This, damson, is what makes the dangers and perils of my endeavours worthwhile. This is what I live for. But a river pilot, someone who knows the flows and tricks of the great river Shedarkshe, I cannot let him return back to you as cheaply as I might a mere trapper of hides and furs, oh no. I have to pay for my porters and my soldiers and I have to pay for the families, like yours, left lonely where my brave crew have perished in our sallies against the fierce Daggish. So many mouths that must be fed. Shall we say sixteen guineas for your husband?’

      ‘Sixteen guineas?’ cried the woman. ‘I should sell my house in the post and still be left five short!’

      ‘Ah, damson, can there ever be a price put on the return of a father for your beautiful girl? Look at her standing there beside you, weeping. You haven’t seen him for so long, have you, my little lovely? How you must have missed him. And you, damson, as much as you love your little one, you must have grown tired of being asked by her every night, “when will daddy return, when will I see him again?” Repeating the very same thing you must have been thinking yourself as you went to bed alone each evening.’ The trader raised his arms in a magnanimous gesture. ‘But your story has touched me. I shall let him go to you for only thirteen guineas. The price of your house and the good will and merciful coins of your husband’s old friends will carry you that little extra way towards me, I am sure.’

      ‘It’s me,’ repeated the river pilot after another poke. ‘I’ve come back.’

      Shaking and confused, the woman tried to withdraw back to the town through the press of the crowd, her daughter dragged against her will, fighting her mother every step of the way.

      ‘Ah well,’ laughed the merchant, winking at the men in the crowd after the woman and the girl had gone. ‘Hopefully she’ll come back with the guineas. Of course, sometimes they haven’t been going to bed so alone every night, and then they slip me a guinea or two to apprentice their old man far down river from the trading post.’

      Amelia’s hand was shaking above her holster and Billy stopping it from dipping down with an iron grip. ‘Whatever you think of this, these transactions are still legal. The comfort traders operate just the right side of the Suppression of СКАЧАТЬ