Enslaved: Chapter Two Scene Two

Davani clansmen do not kneel, it is not our way. Nor do we own men or claim their allegiance. A clansman may owe a debt, or be owed one. He may and should show deference to his elders, respect for his women, and hospitality to his guest; but his actions are his own. The Subjugated forgets what it is to direct himself, and the Dominator grows detached from the consequences of his choices. Both of these functions weaken a man’s heart and leave him open to spirits of excess and degeneracy. This is not the way of the Davani.

Arvad recited the tenets of manhood to himself as he chopped the old man’s wood, unsure of whom he hated more, his father, his owner, or himself. His left temple ached and his vision swam when he rested the axe to dab at his sweat-stained brow. Erunian had given him more than a week to recover and he had spent those long days stretched out on a straw mattress, interrupted only by Mistress Eleanor, who served him bare and uninteresting meals of gruel and bread, and the old scribe, who would stop by in the late afternoon to inspect the condition of his new purchase. Nevertheless, his body still bore the scratches and aches of the beating he had taken in the Slavers’ Square.

The scribe was not a cruel man, merely austere, and with a keen attention to detail that he expected those under his supervision to emulate. It shamed Arvad how quickly he had found his rhythm in the schedule that Erunian had dictated for him. He spent the early hours of the morning preparing the study hall for the scribe’s students, assisting with the preparation of meals, hauling water, and other menial work that now left Erunian overtired.

The middle hours of the day were spent assisting Mistress Eleanor, Erunian’s niece, who operated a chandlery two streets over from Erunian’s school. Arvad found the young woman’s trade fascinating, and might have enjoyed the setting of scented waxes and tapers, if not for Eleanor’s uneven temper. At times she would warmly compliment the products of his labour, sympathetically explaining the finer aspects of her trade. Her pale cheeks would warm and her green eyes would grow distant as she recited long recipes by heart. At other times, she would scold Arvad for no sensible reason, critiquing him for leaving work undone that she had previously allotted for herself due to its complexity. Her long auburn hair would grow frazzled, escaping its sensible white cap, as she railed at him in a precise and rhetorical style she had clearly inherited from her uncle. At first Arvad had thought her scatterbrained, simply forgetting which tapers she had set aside for herself, or that she had considered the recipe to be delivered to a supplier too complex for Arvad’s untried memory. By the end of the first month of his labour he could recognise the moods before they arrived. Often it would be shortly after a moment of recognition of his good work. Eleanor’s eyes would grow unfocused for a moment; she would frown, her small mouth clenching, her lips going white. She would remember that the boy was not merely some absentminded relation conscripted to help her, but property bought and paid for, to be kept at a distance and never quite trusted.

During the late afternoon and early evening, Arvad would return to the school, and assist Erunian in the maintenance of the hall and the adjacent residence. He would scrub down the desks with water and, every second Sixthday, with a thick caustic soap that left his hands red a sore, but removed ink far more efficiently than mere water could. He would cut up enough firewood for the hall, which grew achingly cold in winter, and also for Erunian’s smaller hearth. The old scribe had him leave kindling close enough to his desk that he could keep the chill at bay without being forced to test his endurance overmuch. Erunian would stay up till the late hours working on commissioned scrolls or codices, usually far beyond the capabilities of his students.

 In the early days of his convalescence, Arvad had been regaled with a short but descriptive recount of Erunian’s past and present work, and the slave’s place in supporting the aging scribe as he approached his dotage. The man had a fierce eye for detail that was clearly mirrored in his ability to construct memoir in rhetorical style. Unlike other master scribes, Erunian did not oversee journeymen or apprentices, and had not done so since his niece joined him in Dyre half a dozen years previous. Instead, he tutored groups of students; mostly sons of merchants or foreign nobles, resident in Dyre for some time, but unable to avail themselves of the court scribes. The teaching was manageable for the experienced but aging scribe, but his students did little of the menial labour for which apprentices were traditionally responsible. Erunian had come to rely on Eleanor as he grew increasingly frail, but as she would have to travel beyond Dyre in the early months of the new year, Erunian had seen the need for additional assistance in the management of his household.

There was much left unsaid, such as Eleanor’s reasons for joining Erunian in Dyre, or why that necessitated a change in Erunian’s trade. It seemed to Arvad that much of the work he now did would have fallen to the apprentices Erunian no longer trained, and that it was the extra physical demands of tutoring that had necessitated Arvad’s purchase. Whatever piece was missing from the puzzle he laid out, Erunian did not see fit to share it; favouring instead monologues on the dignity of labour and the legal responsibilities Arvad now faced as a member of the Duchy’s emerging slave class.

Arvad judged the current load of wood cut finely enough for kindling and began to stack it for carriage to Erunian’s study. The abrupt sound of loosely coordinated movement within the hall told him that the scribe had ended his afternoon class. A dozen students stepped into the street, ignoring the shorter boy holding the armload of wood; their minds already turned to their evening’s leisure. The last boy to leave was a hulking brute named Ragnar, whose father was a minor Thane in the islands off the north-east coast. Even though Arvad was standing at least two feet clear of the sandy-haired noble, they collided, and Arvad’s armload went sprawling into the loose dirt of the street.

“Watch yourself runt,” Ragnar chuckled, kicking Arvad’s arm as the latter bent to pick up his load. The Thane’s son called out to his companions, who had turned at the sound of the impact, “the scribe should get this one marked so he’s easier to keep an eye on.”

Arvad shuddered at the idea of Erunian marking his face with an ink tattoo favoured by those more proficient in the flesh trade, but did not otherwise respond to the jibe. The students soon departed for a night spent in and out of some of the district’s more discrete inns and taverns. Arvad shouldered the wood and entered the study hall, prepared for a long evening’s tending to his aging owner’s needs.