Present Day, Qasrath Wastes
Many confuse freedom with liberation.
Freedom is the power, or the right, to act, speak, and think as one pleases. Liberation, however, is something quite different. It is the act of setting another free, the deliberate severing of the chains that bind one to a life they did not choose. One is a condition of existence; the other, an intervention. Yet the distinction between the two becomes rather less apparent when the chains in question are made of iron, and the person wearing them has long since forgotten what it feels like to live without them.
When a prisoner is unshackled, are they granted freedom, or have they merely been liberated?
It was a question the girl was about to discover the answer to, though she had little reason to believe that the answer would be a pleasant one.
The shackles fell.
They struck the sand with a dull, metallic clatter, sinking a fraction of an inch into the pale dunes before settling into the hollows they had made. For a moment, the girl did not move. She stared at them with the peculiar, detached fascination one might afford a dead insect, something once intimately familiar that had, without warning, become a thing entirely separate from oneself.
Then she looked at her wrists.
The skin beneath the iron was raw and discoloured, encircled by angry bands that stood in stark contrast to the rest of her arms. She turned her hands over, examining the delicate bones beneath her skin, the faint blue veins running along the insides of her wrists, and the unfamiliar sight of her own fingers without metal clasped around them. She flexed them once, then again, as though testing whether they still belonged to her.
She could not remember the last time she had seen her arms bare.
The memory, if it existed at all, had retreated into some distant recess of her mind, buried beneath years of iron, dust, and the monotonous procession of days that had offered little distinction between one sunrise and the next. She had grown so accustomed to the weight that its absence felt less like relief than an amputation. Her wrists seemed unnaturally light. Her hands, unburdened by chains, hung at her sides with an awkwardness that was almost comical.
She curled her fingers into fists.
Opened them.
And looked up.
A man stood several paces before her, his mouth moving with considerable enthusiasm. He was broad-shouldered, sun-darkened, and possessed of a magnificent black beard that had been braided into three uneven lengths, each fastened with a small brass ring. His turban, once perhaps white, had surrendered to the desert and acquired the colour of old parchment. A curved blade rested at his hip, its scabbard decorated with intricate patterns that the girl might have admired under different circumstances.
He was saying something.
She knew this because his mouth was moving, his brows were drawn together, and one hand was gesturing towards the line of slaves behind her with an impatience that suggested he considered the matter urgent. But his words reached her as they always had: not at all.
The world, to her, had never possessed a voice.
It had possessed movement. Faces. Light. The tremor of a wooden cart passing over uneven ground, sometimes perceptible through the soles of her feet. It had possessed the violent punctuation of a door slamming, felt in the shiver of a nearby wall, and the distant shapes of people laughing, their mouths opening and their shoulders shaking in ways she had learnt to recognise without ever knowing the sounds that accompanied them.
She had learnt to read lips, though the skill was imperfect, and she could not make sense of a language she had never been taught. The bearded man might have been asking her name, threatening her life, or explaining the finer points of camel husbandry.
His expression suggested that none of these possibilities would be especially pleasant.
The girl stared at him.
He stared at her.
His mouth moved again, more slowly this time, as though the principal obstacle to their understanding was the speed at which he had been speaking.
She blinked.
He threw his hands into the air.
The girl, having no intention of apologising for a disability that had inconvenienced him, merely lowered her gaze to the shackles at her feet.
He followed her eyes, muttered something to the man beside him, and seized her by the upper arm.
She flinched.
It was a small movement, scarcely more than a tightening of the shoulders, but it was enough to make the man pause. His fingers remained clamped around her arm for a moment longer before he released her with a dismissive gesture and pointed towards the caravan.
The girl followed.
She had little else to do.
Beyond the encampment, the desert stretched towards the horizon in a vast, undulating wilderness of copper and gold. The sun hung above it like a molten coin, bleaching the sky until the blue had become so pale it seemed almost transparent. Dunes rose and fell in immense, silent waves, their crests sharpened by the morning light and their slopes rippled with the delicate ridges of windblown sand. Here and there, the skeletal remains of shrubs protruded from the earth, their twisted branches clawing at the empty sky.
The caravan waited beneath this pitiless expanse.
There were camels, dozens of them, some kneeling beneath loads of leather-wrapped bundles and wooden chests, others shifting restlessly against their reins. Their long necks curved with an ungainly elegance, and their narrow faces bore expressions of such profound contempt that the girl found herself wondering whether they, too, had been enslaved.
If they had, they seemed considerably less inclined to endure it gracefully.
Beyond the animals stood the slaves.
Men and women of varying ages, some little more than children, had been arranged in a long, uneven line. Their clothes were threadbare, their faces gaunt, and the dust clinging to their skin lent them the appearance of figures carved from the desert itself. Iron circled their wrists and ankles, joined in several cases by lengths of chain that forced them to remain close together. Some stared at the ground. Others watched the approaching girl with expressions that ranged from dull resignation to wary curiosity.
None of them looked free.
The girl took her place among them.
A guard moved along the line, checking restraints and counting heads. His lips formed numbers she could not understand, though she recognised the rhythm of counting from years of observation. He carried a short wooden baton, which he struck against his palm whenever someone shifted too far out of position.
The girl looked down at her wrists once more.
Then, with a strange and almost reluctant determination, she raised her head.
The caravan began its journey before noon.
For the first several hours, the girl paid little attention to her companions. She concentrated instead on the landscape, which changed so gradually that the passage of time seemed an illusion. The dunes became lower, their slopes strewn with dark stones; the stones gave way to broad stretches of cracked earth, where thorny bushes grew in sparse clusters and the occasional bleached skeleton of a camel lay half-buried beneath the sand. Heat shimmered above the ground, distorting distant objects until the horizon appeared to waver like the edge of a reflection.
The sky was enormous.
It made everything beneath it seem insignificant, including the caravan, the guards, the slaves, and the girl herself. There was something almost offensive about its indifference. The sun shone upon them all with precisely the same generosity, warming the shoulders of the men who held the chains and the wrists of those who wore them. The wind swept across the dunes without distinguishing between master and captive. Even the vultures circling high above seemed unconcerned with the question of ownership.
The girl found the thought comforting.
If the desert recognised no masters, perhaps there was something fundamentally absurd about the men who claimed to be them.
She was considering this when someone stepped on the back of her heel.
She turned sharply.
A boy stood behind her, rubbing his own shoulder with an expression of exaggerated suffering, as though she had personally arranged the entire journey for the purpose of inconveniencing him.
He was perhaps a year or two older than she was, so not older than 16, though the desert made age difficult to judge. His face was narrow, his cheekbones pronounced, and his skin a warm brown beneath the film of dust that coated nearly everyone in the caravan. A mop of dark, unruly hair escaped from beneath a faded headcloth, curling over his forehead and around his ears. His clothes consisted of a loose, sand-coloured tunic with a tear near the hem and trousers that had long ago lost any claim to being a particular colour. A length of rope circled his waist, securing a small cloth pouch that looked disappointingly empty.
His wrists bore shackles, though his were connected by a short chain rather than the longer length some of the others wore.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
He pointed at his own foot, then at hers, and pressed a hand to his chest with the wounded dignity of a man who had just been struck by an arrow.
The girl stared.
He sighed, rolling his eyes towards the heavens.
Then his hands moved.
The signs were quick but distinct, each formed with a precision that suggested long practice. He raised two fingers towards his eyes, pointed at her, then gestured down at the ground between them before rubbing his shoulder and making an elaborate expression of despair.
You nearly killed me.
The girl looked at his perfectly intact shoulder.
Then at his foot.
Then back at his face.
Her hands rose.
You stepped on me.
The boy's expression changed at once.
It was not merely surprise. It was the look of a man who had discovered, after a lifetime of searching, that the universe had finally provided him with an audience.
He straightened, brushed an imaginary speck of dust from his tunic, and signed with solemn dignity.
I beg your forgiveness. I was unaware that your foot occupied that particular section of the earth.
The girl watched his hands.
Then she looked at his face, where the corners of his mouth were beginning to betray him.
She signed, You are an idiot.
His grin widened.
An observant idiot, at least.
She looked away.
It was the first time in years that she had encountered someone who could speak to her without forcing her to guess at the shapes of his mouth. Sign language had been the language of her childhood, a language of hands and brows, of movement and meaning, and she had almost forgotten what it felt like to use it without fear of punishment or the impatient waving of someone who believed that shouting could cure deafness.
The boy, however, appeared entirely untroubled by the circumstances of their introduction.
He walked beside her for the remainder of the afternoon, despite the occasional reprimand from the guards, and made a series of increasingly elaborate attempts to determine her name. When she refused to answer, he tried guessing.
He began with the names of flowers, moved on to those of queens, and eventually arrived at the names of three different varieties of camel.
The girl watched the performance with the impassive expression of a stone statue.
He signed, Daisy?
She shook her head.
Rose?
Another shake.
Cleopatra?
She gave him a flat stare.
He considered this.
No? I thought you had the temperament.
She folded her arms.
He tapped his chin thoughtfully before gesturing towards a nearby camel.
Margaret?
For the first time, the girl's composure threatened to betray her. The corner of her mouth twitched, a movement so slight that anyone else might have missed it.
The boy did not.
He pointed at her triumphantly.
There. I knew you were capable of facial expression. I was beginning to suspect you had been carved from the same stone as those ruins we passed.
She signed, You talk too much.
He pressed a hand to his chest.
And yet you have not walked away. A devastating blow to your argument.
She glanced towards the guards.
He followed her gaze, and the humour in his expression softened. For a moment, neither of them moved. The line of slaves stretched before and behind them, a procession of exhausted figures beneath the burning sky. A guard near the front turned his head, and the boy immediately lowered his hands, adopting an expression of such innocent misery that the girl suspected it was not his first attempt at appearing harmless.
When the guard looked away, he leaned towards her and signed with one hand hidden against his side.
My name is Sami.
The name was formed slowly, the movements clear enough for her to understand without difficulty. He touched his chest, then repeated the signs, making certain she had seen them.
She hesitated.
Names were dangerous things. They made people easier to remember, and being remembered had not always proved advantageous.
Nevertheless, she lifted her hands.
I know.
Sami blinked.
She raised an eyebrow.
You have been trying to tell me for the last ten minutes.
He stared at her for a moment before breaking into a grin so broad that it transformed his entire face.
You could have saved us both a considerable amount of effort.
She shrugged.
I was enjoying the silence.
He placed a hand over his heart and bowed his head as though accepting a grave personal insult.
Cruel. Absolutely cruel. I offer you friendship, and you respond by praising the one thing I cannot provide.
She turned away, but this time her smile was unmistakable.
It was small, fleeting, and gone almost as soon as it appeared. Yet Sami saw it, and for the remainder of the journey he behaved as though he had accomplished something of extraordinary importance.
Perhaps, in a way, he had.