Not my characters, not my universe. Not-for-profit, just-for-fun. Belongs to Widen, Panzer, Davis, Rysher, Gaumont, etc.
The Voice of Death
by Parda
March 1999
ROLAND AND CASSANDRA
By the Rivers of Babylon, 1311 BCE
When he woke, it was still dark. He was hungry, but he knew he could not ask for food. If he asked, the big man with the angry voice would hit him again. He was scared, too, in this new village, but he did not cry. They didn't like it when he cried.
Tesba used to hold him when he cried. He had felt safe then, with her arms around him. She used to share food with him, too, and sing songs. There had been another woman before that, in a house somewhere. She had played games with him, using pebbles and pieces of grass. He didn't remember her name. He had been little then. He was almost five now.
But Tesba was gone. A man had come and bought her, three villages ago, just like a man had taken the other woman, long ago. The man who bought Tesba didn't want him, of course. He was too skinny, and wasn't strong enough, the man said. Not even worth feeding. Tesba left with the man, walked away with him. She didn't even look back at him when he called out her name. The big man hit him, though, for making noise. Hit him again and again with the stick.
No one had held him when he cried that day.
He huddled close to the ground and wrapped his arms around his legs. He was cold, and the only clothing he had was a loincloth. Later today it would be hot, and then he would be thirsty, but the sun wasn't even up yet, and it was still cold. He crawled into the corner of the slave-pen and lay down close to one of the men, but he did not touch him. They didn't like it when he touched them.
He cried himself to sleep, but he did it quietly, so no one would know.
Later that day, when the sun was hot and the marketplace was crowded and noisy, they brought food to the slave-pen. Tesba used to make sure he got some food, but he didn't know any of the slaves now, and none of them knew him. They were all new ones, bought at the last two villages. There was only a crust of bappir left. He scraped the hard bread with his teeth, letting the crumbs melt in his mouth before he ate anymore. It took him a long time to eat the bread. He was still hungry.
The big man came and told them to stand up, so he did. He tried to stand up straight, to look strong. The big man hit him anyway. He did not cry.
Two of the men-slaves were bought right away, by a woman dressed in long red veils. He hoped someone would buy him today. He was tired of walking from village to village. His feet were bleeding again, and they hurt. Another woman-slave was bought next, and then another of the men-slaves. He tried to keep standing straight, but he was tired.
The big man yelled at him, and he froze, then stood as tall as he could. But the man came over and hit him, then grabbed his arm and pulled him along. He walked fast, half-trotting, trying to keep up.
"A fine boy, Lady," the big man said, when they reached the gate to the pen. "Biddable, young enough to train. Cheap, too, at this age."
He did not look up, knowing they would hit him if he did. He stared at the lady's feet. She was wearing sandals, instead of bare feet, and copper toe-rings. The hem of her long green gown was embroidered with red butterflies. They floated above her ankles. Maybe she was rich. Maybe she would feed him.
He heard the money being counted, but he kept his head down. The big man moved away, and he was left alone with his new mistress. He did not move.
The lady bent her knees gracefully so that her face was at the same height as his, but he did not look at her. The red butterflies dragged in the dust of the street, and the straps of her sandals had creases in them now.
"What's your name?" his mistress asked.
He had to think about that. No one had called him by his name for a long time. "Roland," he said finally. Her hand moved toward his face, and he froze, knowing she was going to hit him for not answering soon enough.
Her hand stopped, and she said, "I won't hurt you." Her voice was soft and gentle. "Look at me."
Roland did, slowly. She was smiling, and her eyes were as green as her dress. Her long red-brown hair was braided, with little bells at the ends of each braid, and she wore a light-green veil over her head. She was very pretty.
"My name is Cassandra. You can come home with me," she said. She held out her hand to him, and waited for him to take it. "You're safe now."
He didn't believe her, not at first, but she fed him as soon as they got to her house, cucumbers and barley porridge. He was hungry, but she gave him only a little. "You can eat more soon," she promised. "You'll be sick if you eat a lot now."
Roland didn't care. If there was food, you ate. Everyone knew that. But she put the food away, and he knew better than to ask. She would hit him.
But she didn't. Not all day, not even once. She washed him, twice, and scrubbed his hair, and put some cold oily paste on his feet. It hurt at first, but then he couldn't feel it anymore. Then she gave him more to eat, a roasted turnip this time. He didn't like the washing, but the food was good. She asked him some questions, like how old he was and where he came from and how long he had been with the big man. He couldn't answer them, not really, but she didn't get angry even then.
"Do you have any questions for me?" she asked, sitting across from him on a small wooden bench.
Roland said nothing. Slaves didn't ask questions. They were silent.
"Anything," she said, smiling again. "Go ahead. Ask."
"What work do I do, Mistress?" he asked finally. Asking about work should be safe. He hoped. Masters liked slaves to work.
His mistress nodded gravely. "Yes, you need to work." She looked about the little house. It was one room, with a sleeping place hidden by a curtain, and a long table along one wall. There were a lot of pots on the table, some painted, some not. The walls were painted, too, bright patterns on one wall, a picture with birds and trees on another.
Then she looked at him, and Roland tried to sit up tall. She said, "I want you to sweep the floor, and carry water, and keep the fire going."
Roland nodded, relieved. He already knew how do those things. He would be careful, and then she wouldn't have to hit him when he made mistakes.
"I'm going to teach you how to pound the clay when we make pots."
Roland wasn't quite so sure about that, but it didn't sound too hard.
His mistress smiled at him again. "And you have to eat and sleep and play."
His mouth opened in surprise, but he said nothing.
But his mistress had seen and she wanted to know. "Tell me," she commanded.
He had to answer her now. "Slaves don't play, Mistress," he whispered, staring at the floor, digging his big toe into the hard-packed earth floor.
She nodded. "I know," she said, not smiling now. "But you are not my slave, and I am not your owner."
"But you bought me!" Roland said, shocked into speaking, then freezing in fear as he realized he had just told her she was wrong. Would she sell him now?
"Roland," she said, taking his hands in her own, "I did buy you. But you are not my slave, and I don't want you to call me mistress, or lady."
"Then, what...?"
"You can call me Cassandra, if you like. But I would like it if you called me Mother."
Roland could only stare. He had never had a mother. Only Tesba and the other woman, for a little while, and they were gone.
"You're safe now, Roland," Cassandra said again, and she took him into her arms and onto her lap, and she held him while he cried.
"Mother?" Roland called, as he and their neighbor Jarie came back from the marketplace.
Cassandra was painting a pot, but she set it down and held her arms open to him. Roland took off running and she swooped him up and twirled him around, his feet flying out. Roland laughed. He liked that. They did it every time he came home.
"How's Roland?" she asked, setting him down. "How's my boy? How was the market?"
"I saw the most biggest ram ever, Mother. He was huge, and his horns were that wide!" He held his hands as far apart as he could. "And he was loud, too! When they fed him he went BAAAA!"
Both his mother and Jarie laughed, and Roland said, "I carried Jarie's basket for her, all the way home."
His mother bent down and hugged him. "You're very strong."
Roland stood tall and proud. He was getting stronger every day, and bigger. He was six now, and he had already lost two of his teeth.
His mother said, "Roland, I am going to visit Haram tonight, so you will stay with Jarie until tomorrow morning."
Roland nodded, a little sad and a little excited. He liked staying with Jarie, but ever since spring Cassandra had been spending a lot of time with Haram, the tall man who made drums and lived by the village gate.
She added, "But, this afternoon, before I go, we will paint the pots together, yes? And you can help me pound out some clay."
Roland smiled. He loved to do that. And tonight, he and Jarie could play with the kittens. "But first, Mother, can we eat? I'm really hungry." He spread out his arms again. "I'm this hungry! Hungry as that ram!"
Cassandra and Jarie both laughed, and his mother said, "As hungry as that? Well, little ram, let's eat."
Jarie went home, and he and Cassandra ate lunch, then painted some pots and pounded the clay. When they were finished, he went next door to Jarie's, and Cassandra said good-bye. "I'll be back tomorrow morning," she said and gave him a kiss. Roland and Jarie played with the kittens, then ate dinner and went to bed.
When Roland woke up, there was a man standing by his bed, and they weren't in Jarie's house anymore. Roland's head hurt, and when he touched it, his hand came away sticky with blood. "Where's Jarie?" he asked. "Where's my mother?"
The man shook his head, his eyes dark. The moonlight made his face look half-gone. "Didn't she tell you? She sold you to me this afternoon."
Roland shook his head, and that made it hurt even worse. But it didn't hurt as much as the cold knot in his stomach. "She wouldn't," he said. "She promised. She said she would keep me forever."
The man just laughed and sat down next to him on the bed. His eyes showed white at the edges, and his teeth looked gray. "She lied. Women do that."
Roland swallowed hard. "She's my mother. She wouldn't."
"She's not your mother," the man said. "Not really."
"She is!" Roland insisted. The man slapped him, hard, and the room went around. Roland held onto the edge of the bed and tried not to throw up.
"Don't talk back, boy," the man said, and now his voice was cold. "She should have taught you better manners. She told me you were a handful. She told me she didn't want you anymore."
Roland shook his head numbly. It couldn't be true. She wouldn't do that. But the numbness turned to coldness as he looked at his new master. She had.
The man's voice was warm again as he smiled and laid his hand softly on Roland's bare shoulder. "I'll teach you what you need to know."
There was no one to hold Roland that night when he cried.
By the third day, he had given up crying. The man hit him when he cried. The man had left for a while, but had tied him to the post in the center of the room. Roland couldn't untie the knot. He huddled under the table and waited.
The door opened, and a woman came in. "Roland?" It was her voice, sounding strange.
He didn't move, and he didn't open his eyes. She came closer; he could hear her clothes rustling.
"Roland?" she said again. "Oh, Roland." Now she sounded sad.
He didn't know why she had come. He didn't belong to her anymore. He opened his eyes a little when he heard a scraping sound. She was cutting through the rope. His master would be angry at her for doing that. She cut all the way through it, then held out her arms.
Roland didn't move.
"Please come to me, Roland," she said. There were tears on her face. "Please come."
He shook his head. He knew the law. He belonged to his master. She had sold him.
"I've been looking for you," she said. "Three days. Three nights."
"Why?" he asked, surprised into forgetting that slaves didn't speak.
"Why?" she repeated, a soft whisper now, looking surprised, too. "You're my son."
He shook his head again, feeling nothing. "You sold me to him."
"Oh, no, Roland," she cried. "Oh, no." Her face was crumpled. "I would never do that. He lied."
"I called you," Roland said. There were tears on his face, too, even though he knew he should not cry. "I called you, and you didn't come. He said you didn't want me anymore."
"He lied," she said again, so soft he could hardly hear it. "I love you, and you are my son." She held out her arms again. "Please come to me."
Roland could not move. The man had told him not to, and he was afraid of that man. He was afraid of her, too. Maybe she was lying now, the way the man had said she lied before. The man had said that all women lied. The man had said that all women left you, went to be with someone else.
But Cassandra was still there. "I swear to you, Roland," she said, her voice strong. "I swear I did not sell you. I swear I will never leave you, never sell you. By the Mother of All that is Living, I swear to you that you are my son, and I will never hurt you." She held out her hands again, and her voice was soft now. "Please, Roland. Please come home."
Roland didn't want to stay in this house, with that man. He wanted to go home. He crawled out from under the table, and he went into her arms.
But they didn't go home. They left the village and went somewhere else. Roland didn't like that, but he didn't say anything. On the way there, Cassandra started to teach him some special words.
"What does the word mean?" He could not call her mother, not yet. He needed to be sure.
"It's just a word, little one," she said. "A new language for you to learn. You're good at languages, and this one will be useful to you." She sounded very serious when she said that, but Roland didn't ask her why. He didn't ask her about Jarie, either.
That night they slept by the side of the road, and she held him in her arms and sang him to sleep as she usually did, but he didn't really feel safe.
He never felt safe again.
When he was sixteen, and they had moved twice more, she stopped teaching him the language. Roland knew what it meant now. It wasn't really a language; it was the Voice -a way of speaking other languages, hearing the tones and the special way the words went together, and using words to tell people what to do.
Roland liked knowing how to do that. It was fun to tell the baker to give him a flat-cake, and then tell him to forget all about it. His friends Terg and Sheqru thought so, too, even though they laughed at him when the Voice didn't work, because then the baker got mad. The Voice only worked sometimes for him.
Cassandra was better at it, but she almost never used it. Only once, when soldiers had stopped them and started to take their money. Roland didn't understand why she didn't use it more often. She told him he would understand later. She said that about a lot of things. He was tired of hearing it.
His friend Terg didn't have to hear things like that. He was an apprentice, living with the beer brewer near the well, with wages of his own and a place to live, and he was two years younger than Roland, only fifteen. Cassandra had taught Roland a lot about pottery, but he didn't want to be a potter all his life. He had told her that once, and she had said simply, "You won't be," but it was still the only real training he had had. He had started to work for a smith in the last village, but then Cassandra said they needed to move. She didn't say why. Roland hadn't found a new smith to work for yet.
Sheqru was sixteen, and he wasn't going to be a potter. He didn't live with his parents, either. He was apprenticed to the weaver, and she had said he would be his own master in just a few more years.
But it was the Feast of Marduk, and no one had to work now, on this three-day festival honoring the God of the Sun. "What should we do?" Terg asked, as the three of them wandered about the marketplace. The drums were already beating in the temple ziggurat. "Watch the donkey races?"
"I heard they are going to have camel races in the village down the river," said Sheqru. "Let's go there!"
"I need to tell Cassandra," Roland said. He never called her mother in front of his friends.
"Why?" Terg demanded. "Do you tell her everything you do?" He sniggered. "I hope not." Sheqru started to laugh, too.
Roland didn't laugh. "Let's go then," he said, heading for the gate in the village wall.
"Don't you need to stop and tell your mother?" Terg asked, still snickering.
"No," Roland said, then used the Voice on him. He knew how to use it on Terg. "Be quiet." And Terg was.
They went to the village and watched the camel races, and then joined the dances at the temple. They spent the night in an abandoned house outside of town, and went swimming in the river the next afternoon. There were girls swimming there, too. "I like that one," Sheqru said, watching the water drip off the girl's nipples as she stood naked in the water.
"You like any girl as long as she even looks at you, which that one won't," retorted Terg, lying on his back in the shallows, squirting water between his hands. "No girl will."
Sheqru came up from behind and dunked him. "Like any girl looks at you, either." The two of them started to wrestle then, in the water and the muddy sand, and the girls began to laugh, pointing.
Roland stood and bowed, knowing the girls would look at him. He had all his teeth, unlike Terg, and his eyes weren't squinty like Sheqru's. The three girls looked, and one of them even smiled. Roland smiled back. Sheqru and Terg stopped thrashing about, realizing something was happening, and then the three of them approached the girls slowly. The girls were still laughing, but it sounded more like giggles now.
There were more smiles exchanged and more giggles, and then all six of them went swimming. The water was cold though, fed with the melting snow from the surrounding mountains, and they soon climbed out and lay on the sandy beach. Two of the girls were sisters; the other was a friend, the one who had smiled at him. The six of them paired off, and Roland got the friend. She was the prettiest, with black hair that hung to her waist and eyes the color of dates. Her name was Astip. They talked some more, and told jokes and laughed, but the sun grew lower in the sky, and the girls started for home.
"Don't go," said Terg, but the girls shook their heads reluctantly and kept walking.
Roland caught up to Astip and took her by the hand. "Don't go, Astip," he said, using the Voice with all the power he had. She stopped walking immediately, and Roland blinked in surprise. Terg and Sheqru looked surprised, too. The two sisters had stopped, waiting for their friend. "Don't go," Roland said to the sisters, and now they were just standing there, too. He looked at his friends, and both the boys were grinning.
Roland grinned, too, as he realized what he had done, and what he could do. "Come with us," he said, and the girls did, back to the empty house. They didn't need a lot more convincing after that, but if they did, Roland knew how to do it.
His friends weren't laughing at him the next day, as they made their way back to their own village. They were impressed, and eager to be with him again. Roland liked that.
Cassandra wasn't laughing, either, when he finally got home near mid-day. "Where have you been?" she demanded.
Roland did not feel like answering that right away. He sat down at the table and picked up a bunch of grapes, then leaned his back against the wall. He carefully selected one, then popped it in his mouth. "Out."
"For three days?" she asked. "With who?"
Roland waited before he answered that, too. "Friends." He knew she didn't like Terg and Sheqru, but he didn't care. He could have his own friends, go where he wanted. She did. She had a lover again, a new one, the soap-maker, near the center of town. Terg and Sheqru had seen them together and told him all about it. As if he needed to hear.
"Where?" she demanded now, but he didn't answer that at all. "Where were you?" she repeated.
"Why should you care?" he demanded in return. "Why shouldn't I go out?"
"Roland," she started in on him again, "you're only seventeen."
"So?" That was old enough to be a man. He popped another grape into his mouth and chewed slowly, knowing how much that irritated her. "Do you really want to know where we were?" He smiled, wanting her to know, just like he knew about her. "We were with some girls. They weren't very happy at first, but I convinced them to be. After that, they had fun." He grinned at the memory. "And so did we."
"You didn't...," she whispered. "You didn't use the Voice on them. Not for that."
"It wasn't the full Voice," Roland said. Not the way she could use it anyway. "I just talked to them a little at first. They didn't mind after that."
She shook her head. "Roland, you cannot...!" She started again, "It's a violation, it's..."
"It's just talk, like a lot of my friends talk to girls." He was just better at it than Terg and Sheqru were.
Cassandra shook her head again. "You shouldn't -"
He dropped the grapes on the table, then stood. He was sick of her telling him what to do. "You go out at night, too. You aren't here."
Her face flushed at that, and Roland continued, glad to get some reaction out of her, "Who are you to care what I do?" He walked over to her, and realized suddenly that he was taller than she was. "I've heard the stories about you in the marketplace, on the street." Terg and Sheqru weren't the only ones who had told him about the soap-maker. And the tanner in the other village before that. And the drum-maker, long ago, when she had left him behind.
She was just glaring at him now.
He didn't like that, either. "Are you out at night with one man?" he asked, remembering something else he had heard in the marketplace about her. He made an abrupt and unmistakable gesture with his hands, a gesture Terg had taught to him. "Or maybe two?"
Cassandra went white, and her hand started to come up, then fell to her side.
Roland had seen it. He knew what that meant. He remembered. "Are you going to hit me now?" he taunted, wondering if she would break that promise, as she had broken her promise to keep him safe, all those years ago.
"No," she whispered, then continued more firmly, "But what I do is no concern of yours."
Roland was not going to put up with this anymore. He was not a child. "And what I do is no concern of yours." He looked her up and down, seeing her now as a woman, a woman who had not changed since he had met her. He had no idea how old she was, and he didn't care. He wanted her to know that. "You are not my mother."
Cassandra's eyes darkened, but with rage, and she snapped at him, "I do not want to be!"
Roland blinked once, then nodded, a hollowness spreading in his chest, an empty, aching loss. So it was true. She did not want him. She never had.
"Roland...," she began, not looking angry now.
He could not stand to be around her anymore. "Fine," he said, telling himself fiercely not to cry, to feel nothing, to show nothing. "I'll leave then."
She called his name again, but he ignored her and walked out the door. She followed him down the street and out the gate, and still he did not answer. She caught him by the sleeve to stop him, but he shoved her away. "I never want to see you again," he told her, then he said some more things - ugly, hurtful, hateful things - desperately needing to be alone so he could cry.
If she really loved him, she would stay no matter what he said, and he desperately needed her to stay.
But she didn't. She bit her lip and nodded, her face wet with tears, then she turned and walked away.
Roland waited until she disappeared behind the village walls before he started to cry.
Continued in Chapter 2: Roland and Kronos
