Slavemakers (5 page)

Chloe, who, like Jason, had stayed human by proving herself useful from the very beginning. By planting the fields in the first place, by showing she knew how to cook for a crowd.

Chloe, with her long, lanky form—so skinny now—darkly tanned face and limbs, and mass of blond hair tied back in a ragged ponytail, was the reason Jason was still here. The reason, many times over, that he was still alive.

Chloe, his blessing and his curse.

As he was hers.

*   *   *

ON MOST DAYS,
Jason and Chloe's paths barely crossed until night had fallen and the slaves were all heading to the sleeping quarters. These were chambers buried deep within the stone walls, separate from but not much different than the cells where the animals were kept—rectangular, stone-walled rooms, their dirt floors covered with dirty straw, a single small glassless window in one wall to let in dim moonlight and breaths of fresh air. Sometimes.

Twenty or thirty slaves slept in each chamber. Cramped, crowded, filthy, but nothing compared to the hundred or so who'd been forced into them during the great slave
trade of the nineteenth century. When the slavers had been some approximation of human themselves.

As they did every night, even in pitch-blackness, Jason and Chloe found each other near the corner of the wall opposite the window. Their usual sleeping spot. But even if it hadn't been, they wouldn't have needed to be able to see to recognize each other's bodies, Jason's compact and muscular and Chloe's seeming made entirely of long bones and taut skin.

By now, Jason felt as if he knew the shape and texture of Chloe better than he knew anything else on earth.

Having located each other and, together, claimed their patch of straw, they lay in silence. Talking, casual conversation, wasn't a punishable offense, until suddenly it was. And there was no way of telling when a slave—or even a thief—might take unexpected offense at even a casual sentence or two. So it was better to stay silent.

Sometimes this wasn't possible. Sometimes you had to risk speaking just to remind yourself you were still human.

But this wasn't one of those nights. So Jason just held Chloe in his arms, listened to her breathe, and on this chilly night absorbed the warmth of her body while giving her his own.

While all above and around them, coating the walls and ceiling of the chamber—of every sleeping and breeding chamber—were countless thieves, the cold-blooded creatures drawn to the mammalian warmth just as Jason and Chloe were.

Thousands of thieves, just inches or feet away from
them. Eyes reflecting the starlight coming through the window, wings briefly buzzing as they shifted position. A moving carpet drawing as close to the human engines as they could.

And tonight, as on other cold nights, Jason awoke to find thieves crawling all over him. Dozens of them, the sharp ends of their legs pricking his skin, their arched bodies brushing against the hair on his arms, their odor filling his nostrils.

Their stingers just a few centimeters away from his flesh.

He could tell that Chloe was awake beside him. Lying still, as he was, waiting for the night to pass and day to return so the thieves would rise and depart.

A thief walked across Jason's cheek. He felt the movement of mandibles at the edge of his mouth, and understood that it was not biting him—nor kissing him—but drinking his saliva where it had pooled between his lips.

This, too, had happened before. There was nothing to be done about it. Thieves loved salt, or salt in conjunction with the other chemicals that humans—primates—produced.

Jason thought this was why they always feasted on the eyes of their victims. They craved the salt in primate tears.

The Green Lands

THE WOODCHUCK CREPT
carefully from the shelter of the woods into the grassy field beyond. It moved with a strange, humpbacked motion, slow and awkward, and the way it blinked in the afternoon sunlight gave it a dazed expression. Mumbling at the tall midsummer grasses, it looked about as threatening—and as easy to kill—as a caterpillar.

But the boy knew this was all a lie. A subterfuge. A woodchuck could move fast enough when attacked, and those mumbling jaws would open to reveal sharp, yellowing teeth.

Jaws that were powerful enough and teeth sharp enough to deliver the sort of bite that could easily end the boy's life. Maybe not right away, but certainly as a little time passed. The boy had seen what a single bite could become, what it could do.

And anyway . . . anything that could live here, even
in the green lands, deserved respect. The boy had seen plenty of creatures that weren't strong enough to survive, and the bones of countless more that had already died.

So he didn't underestimate the creature shuffling through the grasses. He never underestimated his prey.

The woodchuck, perhaps ten feet from him, sat up on its haunches and looked around. Hidden in a thicket just inside the forest, the boy stood very still and kept his breath down to the slightest vibration in his chest.

The instant the animal went back down onto four legs, he flew out of the woods toward it. The sensation really was like flying, like he imagined leaping off the top of his aerie might feel.

The boy was fast and nearly silent as he flew across the grass. And even as the creature detected his approach and twisted around, jaws gaping, he was bringing his stone club down on its skull.

One blow was all it took, really. The woodchuck, its skull dented on one side, blood pouring from its snapping mouth, writhed and spun in the grass before him. He watched it for a few seconds, then raised the club again and ended it for good.

*   *   *

HE SAT ON
a big rock to skin and clean the carcass. Properly cured, the hide with its thick, glossy fur would become part of the blanket he'd use when winter came.

And the meat? It would be tough and gamy, but by midsummer, the woodchuck—itself preparing for winter—had begun to add fat to its flesh. The boy would get many good meals from it.

He was so intent on wielding his metal blade to cut every scrap of meat from the ribs that he didn't notice the lion until it was perhaps far too close to him. Whether it had come after his meat or had chosen to try to end him right then, it might well have succeeded.

But it didn't. It just stood there, half-hidden by the reeds that ringed the weed-clogged pond beyond, and stared at him. Long and slender, it had eyes that were the golden brown of the grasses that grew wild in the untended fields in autumn. The twitch of its long tail reminded the boy of the movement of the grasses as well, when the wind blew out of the northwest, bringing a hint of winter with it.

It was the first lion he'd ever seen, and its beauty seemed to fill his head. For a long moment, he and this magnificent cat looked at each other, neither moving. Then the lion gave its head a shake—the boy could hear the sound of its ears whipping back and forth—turned, and disappeared into the reeds.

Leaving the boy alone again, his heart pounding at what he'd just witnessed. Thinking about the animal he now shared the green lands with, and what that meant.

*   *   *

THAT HAD BEEN
three years ago.

After the first encounter, the lion had mostly stayed out of his way. They'd come upon each other a few times since, usually in the more densely forested areas, but only when it hadn't sensed his presence in time. It was inevitable that the two big predators' paths would cross since the land that was good for hunting was only a few square miles in size.

On those rare occasions, the cat was always the one to turn away, to give ground, to cede authority. Never instantly, though. Always there was the same moment's pause, the meeting of the eyes, the communication between them.
I'm not afraid of you.

Not fear, but respect. And then the cat would leave the trail and quarter off through the woods, moving like a ghost, vanishing amid the sun-dappled leaves.

Mutual respect. Still . . . the boy always kept his stone club handy.

But the lion was no longer alone. By now, the population had grown from one to five. The big male that the boy had first encountered joined by a slighter, slimmer female. And then three cubs, which were now about two months old.

The boy stood in his aerie, just below the ruined stone castle, gazing down the slope to where the boulders tumbled into a murky pond—the place he'd been sitting when he first saw the lion, and now the female had chosen the same spot to raise her cubs. It made sense: The boulders made for a warren filled with hiding places.

On this warm day, all four, mother and cubs, were fully out in the open. The female was lying on her side, idly washing herself—the boy catching glimpses of her rough pink tongue—but mostly just soaking the sunlight into her tawny golden fur. Beside her, and sometimes on top of her, the three cubs wrestled and chased each other, or pounced and chewed on their mother's tail.

The boy, watching, felt something move inside him. For just an instant, the control he always maintained slipped, and something more jagged emerged.

For that instant, he felt like bringing the cubs to an end.

It would be easy. Nothing was easier than a baby. He'd done it a few times, young birds taken from their nests, unwary squirrels venturing to the ground for the first time, even baby rats one long, icy winter when life had been especially hard.

He could have used a stone, or his club, on the female lion. A blow to her skull, and she would be no threat. After that, his strong hands would be enough to take care of the cubs, which he knew were still helpless without their mother.

It had never sat right with him, ending the young of any creature. But now the urge came on him, stronger than it had ever been. Powerful enough that it made his body shake.

He closed his eyes, knowing that he was leaving himself vulnerable. Part of him was still standing there, sensing every drop of sweat running down his face and tickling the hair on his arms and legs.

If some predator—like the male lion—chose this moment to stalk and attack him, he might not be aware of it until too late. Because most of him was far away, far beyond the borders of the green lands he ruled. Far beyond the wounded lands that bordered his kingdom on all sides, the jumble of people-made rock and steel.

And of bones, at least at the beginning. So many bones that he knew had come from creatures shaped as he was. But in his memory, only bones remained, and he knew that soon enough they, too, would vanish, and all that would be left would be the stone and steel.

The wounded lands, the dead place where he'd had the accident. He'd fallen, perhaps, or maybe a piece of crumbling stone had fallen on him. He didn't remember. He only remembered that the accident had almost ended him, that he'd barely made it back here to safety. Everything else was gone.

And realizing as time passed that the accident had also taken away his past. Leaving him as he was, alone. Alone in this world.

Standing still, the boy reached out. As always, he had but a single purpose.

At the beginning, after the accident, when he'd learned what he could do, the game had been easy to play. They were everywhere. They had no idea who, or what, he was. And they were swept away like grains of sand under the force of a great wave.

These days, they were warier, but that didn't matter. He could still find them, he could still reach them, and still they drowned.

*   *   *

WHEN HE WAS
done, he felt exhausted, as he always did. The sweat was cold as it dried on his body, and he shivered.

He wasn't hungry, but he knew he had to eat. He kept food caches all over the green lands now—he'd nearly starved making his way back after the accident—and his biggest stores were buried at the foot of the statue of the dog, where underground springs kept his supplies cold.

But he felt too worn out to walk that far. So instead
he turned and went up the slope to the castle ruins. He knew he had stored some smoked meat there.

But he'd taken only a few slow steps before something stopped him.

Another lion. But not in front of him.
Inside.

Inside his head.

And not like the slender cats that lived here in the green lands. It was of a kind the boy had never seen before: much bigger, much stockier, with a great black ruff of fur outlining its massive head and flowing over its shoulders.

Something he had never seen here, or even imagined.

Something
placed
there. Shared with him.

But by whom?

The boy was taken apart, overwhelmed by a flood of emotions. Terror, excitement, others he could not name.

With all his strength, he reached out. Not knowing whether it was to end things or begin them.

Hell's Gate, Kenya

AISHA ROSE LAY
at the base of her muhutu tree, dazed, a lump rising painfully on the back of her head, a trickle of blood tracing down her cheek. Above, the sun glinted through the leaves, and a colony of weaverbirds went about its business. Aisha Rose watched a black-and-yellow male using strips of grass to construct its globular nest, which hung like an ornament on the end of a slender branch. A brownish female perched nearby, watching the nest's progress with bright black eyes.

“What I like best about weavers,” Mama had said once, in the clear tone she used to state facts, “is that the males have to do all the work building the nest.”

Her eyes had gleamed. This was how she smiled, with just the slightest upward curve of the lips, but . . . eyes that shone. “And you know what the female does if none of the nests meet with her approval?”

Aisha Rose, hearing Mama's voice loud inside her
head, winced. Her vision blurred, turning the birds above her into dancing patterns of yellow and black.

“What, Mama?” she asked.

“They destroy every nest and make the males start over from scratch.”

Aisha Rose was thinking about this when she felt something drip onto her bare right leg, just below the knee. Something that started out warm but quickly cooled against her skin.

That was a new sensation for her, in a world, a life, with few unfamiliar experiences. And that was how, instead of thinking about weaverbirds, she raised her head to see what had caused it, and found herself staring into the pale eyes of the drooling hyena that was considering whether to start feeding on her.

Its bared teeth revealed long yellowish canines and a thick pink tongue. It breathed out, and she smelled its breath, the reek of rotting meat, as the rank exhalation wafted across her face. The hyena made a moaning sound in its throat, the sound echoed by another, a little farther off, then a third.

She'd seen hyenas before, of course, out on the grasslands below Mount Longonot and in the zebra-rich plains that fringed Hell's Gate. But none had ever come here, to the canyons she and Mama called home eight months a year. Aisha Rose had always thought that its narrow, red-rock walls and secret caves made it a protected spot, safe from the biggest predators.

Or safe enough, at least. That was one of the reasons that she and Mama migrated here every year from their other home in the compound in Naro Moru, where
Aisha Rose had been born. Why they followed the game into the Great Rift Valley and sought out the protection of these twisting passages. For safety as well as food.

Well. So much for that. You were a fool to think you were ever safe on the real earth.

Shifting her weight just a fraction, Aisha Rose saw the hyena, the alpha, tilt its head. Its gray pupils dilated as it took in the new information: This potential meal wasn't recently dead, like one of the lion or cheetah kills it frequently commandeered. This piece of meat was still alive.

Not that that mattered much. Alive, dead, hyenas took their food as they found it. If it needed killing first, they killed it.

“The locals always knew the truth,” Mama had said, the first time they'd seen a hyena, at a distance, on the shore of Lake Naivasha. “But we Europeans, in our racist way, judged everyone—and everything—by appearances. We saw lions as noble and brave simply because of how they looked, so golden and wreathed in a royal ruff. Hyenas, on the other hand, were sniveling, subservient, untrustworthy.
Native.
”

Mama had watched the hyena loping along. “Look at how it walks!” she'd said. “We called them crippled. Sneaky. Weak.”

Then she'd smiled. “But here they are, the cripples, doing a whole lot better than we are.”

Aisha Rose could see the other two now, the alpha's pack, closer, moving sideways toward her with that familiar hyena hobble. Yes, they did walk like their legs hurt.

“Don't believe it!” Mama had said. “Hyenas
are
sneaky, but they're also smart, opportunistic, and . . .
strong
. So strong. They can kill a lion in direct combat, and do. Back on the dreamed earth, the native people considered them among the most dangerous animals in Africa. We were easy prey.”

Aisha Rose could have reached out and touched the alpha, it was so close to her. She knew that the only reason she was still alive, the only reason it hadn't yet attacked, was because she was unfamiliar. Because it didn't recognize her smell.

“It's amazing, isn't it?” Mama had said. “Once, so recently, there was barely a creature on earth—from one-celled organisms on up—that didn't know our smell, our sounds, our
presence
, almost as well as we did. You never saw that world, the dreamed earth, but we were everywhere.
Everywhere.
And now we're the outsiders, the aliens.”

Aliens. Alien prey. Given the life span of hyenas and most other animals, it was likely that this alpha female had never encountered a human before. That was true of most wild animals although maybe there were still elephants alive that remembered the world as it had once been, the world that Aisha Rose herself had never known. Elephants and tortoises and parrots and other long-lived creatures that still possessed fading memories of the dreamed earth.

If any wild creature did remember that time, Mama had told Aisha Rose, it was with fear and disgust. “Just as I remember it,” she'd added. “As a world of nightmares. I'm so glad to have lived to see this one. The real earth.”

Aisha Rose had stayed silent. Even now, Mama didn't know about the stain. The spreading stain. She didn't need to know.

The alpha female opened its mouth wider and bent toward Aisha Rose, another string of warm saliva falling on her thigh.

Yet the hyena's gesture was strangely indecisive. Like a bow. It seemed almost . . . respectful. Polite.

Please pardon me while I kill you.

But polite or not, the result would be the same. Its first bite would pierce her skin and rupture her blood vessels and crush her bones. A hyena's first bite was usually the only one it needed.

But, finally, Aisha Rose's mind was clear. And even as she and the alpha had been staring at each other, even as she'd been thinking about Mama's words, her eyes had been taking in the surroundings. And her right hand had been creeping toward a stone she'd seen from the corner of her eye. A roundish stone, smooth, brown and yellow.

A little too large, a little too heavy, for a hunt, but perfect for her current purpose.

Inside her head, Mama was quiet. This was Aisha Rose's task alone.

With a speed and strength that surprised both the alpha and herself, she grasped the stone, reared up—getting her legs away from those dripping jaws—swung her arm, and bashed the stone against the hyena's brow, just a little above its eyes.

All the while letting loose with the loudest shout she could muster.

The blow didn't kill the beast. Aisha Rose hadn't
thought it would. Hyenas' skulls were thick, and she wasn't
that
strong.

She didn't want to kill it, anyway, not unless it gave her no choice. Aisha Rose didn't kill. Or at least she didn't kill indiscriminately.

The hyena's mouth closed with a click of teeth. It sat back on its misshapen haunches and, for an instant, its eyes went out of focus. Then they cleared, and Aisha Rose saw its body tense. At the same time, yowling, the other two came dancing in toward her.

Coming for her, but still sideways, with their heads partly averted even as they showed their teeth. Not the steady, headlong lope—somehow eating up the ground in their humpbacked way—they used when they moved in for the kill.

She'd hurt the alpha female, she could see that. But more importantly, she'd startled them, all of them. Even scared them. What was this seemingly dormant creature that suddenly sprang up and attacked? And what else was it capable of?

Aisha Rose knew the answer to that question: not much else. But it didn't matter. She had the advantage now. Before the dominant hyena could decide between attack and retreat, she made the decision for it. With another bellow—this one so loud that Aisha Rose knew her throat would hurt for days—she leaped at it, swinging the stone again.

This time it collided with the alpha's midsection, making a loud, hollow thump. The hyena staggered back two steps, and what came out of its mouth now was no terrifying howl or laugh, but an unmistakable whimper.

That was enough. She wasn't worth it. Game was plentiful in that season, and she'd seen at once that all three had the bulging bellies of the recently fed.

They'd approached her because normally that would have made no difference. Hyenas would eat until they could barely move, and sometimes kill even if they had no appetite at all.

But to have a nearly full stomach and confront an unfamiliar prey that fought back? No, thank you.

“Humans are the only creatures that kill because their feelings are hurt,” Mama had said.

Aisha Rose watched the hyenas depart, glancing over their sloping shoulders as they left to make sure she wasn't in pursuit. Surprising herself again, she gave a hoarse laugh at their cowed expressions. Hearing the sound, the three hyenas hurried their stride until they reached the mouth of the little side canyon that Aisha Rose and Mama had made their home this year. Then, with one last backward glance, they passed out of sight.

Still smiling, Aisha Rose tossed the stone aside and stretched her arms out in front of her. She knew these hyenas would never return, and if something else came hunting for her? Well, with Mama's help, she would deal with it, too.

Then she reached back with her right hand and touched the lump on the back of her head, wincing. The hair around it was matted with drying blood, but the wound itself had nearly stopped bleeding, and she could feel a scab beginning to crust over it.

The pain took her mind away from her encounter with the hyenas, and in that instant she remembered
what had happened to her. What had left her so vulnerable that, if she hadn't awoken when she did, she might have died in agony instead, or in unconsciousness, without ever realizing she'd been alive at all.

Or at least she remembered
some
of it. And, just like that, the joy drained out of her, and she felt cold.

No. Not cold. Afraid.

Afraid in a way she could never be, even facing hyenas or anything else the real earth could threaten her with.

Except this.

*   *   *

THIS WAS WHAT
had happened:

As she often was during the heat of the day, she'd been up in her tree, in her perch above the weaverbird colony. Sitting with her back against the massive trunk and her legs dangling over the wooden sleeping platform nestled between the trunk and one of the tree's sturdiest branches.

Not that there weren't any threats up here—she'd seen her share of snakes and scorpions—but she was doubtless safer in the tree than even in the rockiest, most inaccessible corner of the caves and canyons.

So . . . she'd been sitting safely on her perch, watching the world go by (as Mama put it), when . . .

When she'd seen the picture of a lion. But not one of her lions . . . something slighter, sleeker even than a young lioness. Something else. Something she thought she remembered from a book she'd looked at long ago, one of the picture books Mama had brought with her from the dreamed earth. Back when they had books.

A lion that lived on the other side of the world.

But . . . no. This wasn't a memory from some long-vanished book, but an image in her mind. Something that had come from far away.

And she knew at once where it had come from, and who was seeing it.

One of the others. The hundreds—or even thousands, she could not tell—of others out there who were like her. The ones she saw as lights inside her head, shifting constellations, galaxies wheeling and blurring. Never still, never fixed in place, but always changing shape and number as new ones arrived and others departed.

Always there with her, inside her, an earth filled with people who'd shared Aisha Rose's fate. And others, dimming, dwindling lights, who'd shared Mama's.

And still others, the ones that grew stronger every year. The spreading stain.

But
this
one, the one who had witnessed the lion, this one was different from all the others. He—and Aisha Rose was sure it was a “he”—was the most powerful by far. The fiercest light.

And the only one she could see. No: see
through
. See through his eyes, sometimes, just for a moment, just as she could see through the
majizis'
eyes.

Without knowing it, he gave her glimpses of the world he inhabited. A place of forests and streams and grasslands. Of
snow
, something she'd seen only from a distance, a white gleam atop the enormous mountain—Mount Kenya—that looked down upon her and Mama's house in Naro Moru.

Forest and grasslands and snow and ruins that seemed
to go on to the horizon. Ruins of a city gradually subsiding into itself as the years passed.

She'd glimpsed these things early on, when she was still learning about the lights, when she was still beginning to understand what they were and what she was.

But then she'd come to understand how strong he was. The strongest of all of them, besides her. But she was strong because she had Mama with her. From what she could see, he was entirely alone, and always had been—or, at least, had been for many years. Alone, and damaged, and terrifying because of it.

Terrifying to her because he didn't understand his own power. Because he didn't know what he could do to her, even to Aisha Rose, and how effortlessly.

She didn't think he even knew she existed. But she'd known. She'd understood the threat. And so she'd built walls, erected barricades, to protect herself from him. And she'd hidden herself . . . until today, when she'd let the barricades slip and seen his lion.