Ship of Magic

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 notice. Nor did anyone else in the hurrying, crowded street. Wintrow stared after them, wondering if perhaps the woman was 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 color 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 vise 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 specialties 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 folk 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 slavemart, yet Wintrow wondered how those shopping for slaves could not see themselves in their faces, or recognize one's neighbors. No one else seemed disturbed by it. Some might hold a lace kerchief fastidiously to the nose, distressed by the odor. 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 neighbor 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.”