The night was dark, but Muarim's eyes were sharp. Somewhere within him, buried even deeper than the years of slavery that had sunk beneath the skin, were instincts that had yet the opportunity to awaken — until now.
He had never wandered the streets of Sienne at night. Although the night was moonless and cloudy, his eyes picked up even the faintest traces of light. It was easy to see where he was going. He would not lose his way.
His heart thudded in his ears, a deafening beat to which his feet danced along the road. His nose caught the scent of other laguz, other slaves escaping from the senator's manor. They were as swift as they were quiet; the only sound of their passing was the thin whistle of the air behind them. Stealth was key. If they were caught, their punishment would be no mere flogging. They'd be made examples to the other slaves. They would be broken.
Muarim was terrified. He'd never known any life but slavery, couldn't even imagine something beyond the endless days of grueling labor, the years upon years of punishment, of careful, measured, tired service. But the elderly cat that shared quarters with Muarim and a few others had murmured feverishly of their homeland, of freedom, of days long gone when they had once been free. His words were like fairy tales, flights of fantasy — but Muarim saw fleeting images in his dreams, a place he had never seen with his eyes but whose ancestral memory survived in his heart.
The escape plan hadn't been his. He had balked at the idea at first, his belly flooding with cold dread at the mere mention of it — because surely, if anyone heard them even idly entertaining such thoughts, they'd be sent back to the beorc who so gleefully wielded his whip. Muarim's scars itched just thinking about it. The idea was pure folly — even if they could leave, where would they go?
The mysterious land called Gallia was too far to run to, said the old cat. But there was a desert to the east, lawless and empty, where no beorc dared enter. If they could make it there, he had said, they would find freedom. It wouldn't be an easy journey. But he would help them any way he could.
The old cat was probably dead by now, Muarim realized, and if he wasn't now, he would be when Lord Entellus inevitably discovered that he'd abetted their escape. They had to move quickly, or his sacrifice would have been in vain. It was strange — he'd known the old cat probably his whole life, but he realized now that he'd never known his name. A bitter taste stung his mouth with the regretful thought that he never would now.
The plan had been to split up and rendezvous outside Sienne, where there were not so many watchful eyes and tree cover would be more plentiful. They might have been silent and swift through the streets of the city, but there was no way they could travel in a pack undetected. It was all the more terrifying, out on his own. Even though he knew his comrades were out there, tracing winding routes through the streets, he felt alone. But as he ran, he began to shed the cold fear that had filled his belly for the past few days; it seeped through him and left through the skin, evaporating into the cool night air. It was just as soon replaced by a seething heat that originated in the pit of his throat and spread like wildfire throughout him, like a tightly balled fist springing open. It was as if the years of torture and slavery had finally caught up with him — as if he had only just seen his life for what it was. His skin prickled with nameless furor.
The hubris of these beorc, to enslave them and make them theirs and break them as they pleased like cheap toys. Muarim felt the blood of Gallia boiling in his veins as his bare, calloused feet thudded against the ground. It gave him strength renewed — the fatigue of his day's work (his lastday's work) seemed to have dissipated away, like sweat wicked from the skin. Now he understood — at last, he understood. How could he have ever doubted the old cat's plan?
Somewhere in the still night of the city, he heard the sound of an infant crying.
His feet came to an involuntary stop, his body hunched low into the shadows cast by a stone wall that lined some estate. His breathing came in low, quiet hisses through his nose. He listened.
The sound was not so far away as he had initially thought. In fact, it was quite near. A baby's cry, cutting clear through the air — at this hour of the night, it was the last thing he had expected to hear. Gripped with morbid curiosity, Muarim slunk along the wall toward the sound. He sniffed the air delicately. It stank of decomposing food and waste. He wrinkled his nose. He was familiar with this area. It was where the wasteful beorc dumped their trash, only to collect it and bury it by the desert later.
He rounded the corner and found, just as he was expecting, an enormous heap of burlap sacks filled with rotting garbage, slumped against the stone wall. He balked at the stench of the garbage as it filled his nose, sick and fetid and cloyingly sweet. But there was something else mixed in there — a fresher scent. Muarim smelled beorc.
He heard the cry again, a thin, reedy wail clawing its pitiful way through the air. Muarim's ears stood on end as he crawled around the sacks of garbage. The origin of the colicky cry was not obvious at first, but then he spotted a tiny shape nestled between two bulging sacks, haphazardly bundled in a ragged blanket. Muarim reached out and scooped it up with one broad hand.
Part of the dirty blanket fell away to reveal a tiny, pink face, its toothless mouth open in a helpless cry. The faintest dusting of red hair crowned its scalp, and its impossibly small hands were balled into tight fists. It was an infant beorc.
Muarim stared down at the baby, aghast. His lip curled into a snarl, and all of a sudden, all at once he felt that seething heat clench in his throat again and he raised his other hand, the fingers taut and trembling —
The infant quieted.
Muarim let out a long, thin breath he hadn't even realized he was holding in. His outstretched arm fell limp at his side. He couldn't harm this tiny beorc. Even though he had spent his entire life enslaved by this limp-limbed, hairless race of thieves and bigots, none of it was the fault of this child. He had no idea how old it was, exactly, but it fit neatly into the palm of his hand. It couldn't have been very old at all. And he had found it swaddled in garbage, crying to a city that wouldn't hear.
The thought only made the rage within him churn and froth again. He wanted to snarl and thrash and roar at the city and its people, they who had thrown away this tiny infant like a piece of rotting food. Their own kind! They did this to their own kind! They had treated one of their own children with the same hateful abandon that Muarim had suffered his whole life. His shoulders tensed and quivered.
The infant beorc was curiously silent now, as if calmed by the warmth of Muarim's hand. There was a dirty smear of something dark and ugly on its cheek, and the laguz reached to wipe it away with his thumb. The baby grasped his finger in both its tiny hands and closed its eyes with a barely audible sigh.
Beorc or no, he couldn't leave this infant to waste away in a pile of garbage. To do so would make him no better a man than the lord who had left him with a thousand scars on his back. Rearranging the blanket around the infant, he raised its tiny, helpless body and kissed it on the forehead. "You'll come with me, little one," he murmured and, cradling it gently in the crook of his arm, he took off into the night.