‘What happened to your leg?’ said Damen.
Erasmus had gone ivory white. He didn’t want to answer, but would force himself to because he’d been asked a direct question.
‘What’s wrong?’
Erasmus’s voice was barely audible, his hands clutching the hem of his tunic. ‘I am ashamed.’
‘Show me,’ said Damen.
Erasmus’s fingers loosened, trembling, and then slowly lifted the fabric. Damen looked at what had been done. At what, three times, had been done.
‘The Regent did this? Speak freely.’
‘No. On the day we arrived, there was a test of obedience. I f-failed.’
‘This was your punishment for failure?’
‘This was the test. I was ordered not to make any sound.’
Damen had seen Veretian arrogance, and Veretian cruelty. He had suffered Veretian insults, had endured the sting of the lash and the violence of the ring. But he had not known anger until now.
‘You didn’t fail,’ said Damen. ‘That you tried at all proves your courage. What was asked of you was impossible. There’s no shame in what happened to you.’
Except for the people who had done this. There was shame and disgrace on every one of them, and Damen would hold them to account for what they had done.
Damen said, ‘Tell me everything that has happened to you since you left Akielos.’
Erasmus spoke matter-of-factly. The story was disturbing. The slaves had been transported aboard the ship in cages, below deck. Handlers and sailors alike had taken liberties. One of the women, worried about the lack of access to any usual means of preventing pregnancy, had tried to communicate the problem to her Veretian handlers, not realising that to them illegitimate birth was a horror. The idea that they might be delivering a slave to the Regent with a sailor’s bastard growing in her belly caused them to panic. The ship’s physic had given her some sort of concoction that induced sweats and nausea. Concerned it would not be enough, her stomach was beaten with rocks. That was before they docked in Vere.
In Vere, the problem was one of neglect. The Regent had not taken any of the slaves to bed. The Regent was a largely absent figure, busy with affairs of state, served by pets of his own choosing. The slaves were left to their handlers, and to the vagaries of a bored court. Reading between the lines, they were treated as animals, their obedience a parlour trick, and the ‘tests’ thought up by the sophisticated court, which the slaves struggled to perform, were in some cases truly sadistic. As in the case of Erasmus. Damen felt sick.
‘You must crave freedom more than I do,’ said Damen. The slave’s courage made him feel ashamed.
‘Freedom?’ said Erasmus, sounding scared for the first time. ‘Why would I want that? I cannot . . . I am made for a master.’
‘You were made for better masters than these. You deserve someone who appreciates your worth.’
Erasmus flushed and said nothing.
‘I promise you,’ said Damen. ‘I will find a way to help you.’
‘I wish—’ said Erasmus.
‘You wish?’
‘I wish I could believe you,’ said Erasmus. ‘You talk like a master. But you are a slave, like I am.’
Before Damen could reply, there was a sound from the paths, and, as he had done once before, Erasmus prostrated himself, anticipating the arrival of another courtier.
Voices from the path: ‘Where’s the Regent’s slave?’
‘Back there.’
And then, rounding the corner: ‘There you are.’ And then: ‘And look who else they let out.’
It was not a courtier. It was not petite, malicious, exquisite Nicaise. It was coarse-featured, broken-nosed Govart.
He spoke to Damen, who had last faced him in the ring in a desperate grapple for purchase and mastery.