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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.
The first blaze of sunlight dazzled him for a moment. When his eyes adjusted, he found himself standing on a wooden platform, at one end of a large square paved with filthy brown flagstones. Brick walls rose on either side of the square, trapping the heat of the day, seeming to bounce all of it toward the auction block. Blade felt sweat breaking out at once, and the auctioneer looked as if he'd been fished out of a river. His long robe was almost black with filth and sweat.
Scattered across the square were at least two hundred people, some standing, some sitting on cushions or rugs, a few lucky ones sitting on donkeys or under canopies held over them by household slaves. Blade smelled beer, fruit, and smoke from carved ivory pipes, and read weariness, heat, and boredom on all the faces.
The auctioneer waved his ivory baton at Blade. «Honored sirs, I offer this man-strong, fit, in the prime of life, suitable for any task.» He prodded Blade's shoulder muscles and biceps. «Taken by the Riders under the Forbidden Desert Edict of our noble Baran, he is unwounded, well-fed, ready to train. Imagine this matchless physical specimen bearing your chairs, shifting the burdens of your household, standing guard over your valuables. Consider-«
«Consider how long we've been sitting out here!» shouted someone. «Get to the point! How much?»
«Honored sirs, I beg you to consider the many uses to which, a man of such size and strength may be put. I beg you to-«
«How much, you pissing jackass?» roared another voice, louder and angrier than the first one.
The auctioneer's face turned noticeably paler. «A hundred and ten mahari,» he gasped.
Several people growled angrily, and others turned away and began to drift toward the gate. «In the name of Junah, have mercy, honored sirs,» cried the auctioneer. «It is not my judgment of this man's worth that has set the price where it is. Nor is it my place to question the judgment of the Baran's officers.» The growls died away into silence, but the drift toward the gate continued.
The auctioneer's face turned still paler, and he looked as if he was about to get down on his knees and beg the crowd to put in a bid. «Honored sirs, I am at a loss-«
«Oh, send him back down and bring on another girl,» someone snapped. «A hundred and ten mahari for that wild bull? And him not even trimmed? You think anyone'd want something like that in his house, or within a mile of his women?» There was a growl of agreement.
Blade realized that the size and physical condition he'd expected to be an asset were turning out to be almost a liability. His best chance now was being sold for manual labor, but anyone who had a hundred and ten mahari to spend on workers coud buy three of them for that price. It looked as if he might be going back to prison, or else facing the trimming knives of the surgeons.
«Ho, auctioneer!» One of the mounted men slipped down from the back of his donkey and pushed forward, a servant striding behind him. «I bid a hundred mahari, for the desert man.»