“No! No! Of course not!” Kip interrupted as if aghast at the idea.
“So you do know—”
“No, why would I? And I don’t need to know. I was taught better than to draw attention to the disabilities of my guests. I’d never! It’s uncouth to comment on things a man can’t fix: say, a cleft lip, or a lame foot, or even a . . . a regrettable clumsiness at shaving.”
The room erupted in shocked laughter.
The laughter hit Daragh the Coward so hard that Kip felt momentarily sorry for him. No one likes to be mocked, but mock a noble and he’s still a noble. Mock a shopkeeper, she still owns her shop. But a bandit leader lives on his reputation. Turning this man’s fearsome scars into an object of ridicule?
That could be fatal.
“But might I suggest”—Kip paused, as if he’d bumbled into rudeness and wanted to extricate himself—“perhaps . . . just let the beard grow out?”
Murder shot through Daragh the Coward’s eyes. He shot a glance at stony Cruxer and then Big Leo, whose expressions said, ‘Don’t even think about it.’ Clearly in the camps he’d lived in for nearly two decades, when one mocked another man, the possibility of personal violence was always on the table. He was unaccustomed to dealing with insults when that was gone.
“I bring five thousand men and you—” Daragh said, raising his voice.
“Five thousand?! Five?!” Kip interrupted. And here was where, if Tisis or Antonius was wrong, he was going to get his ass handed to him. “You have three thousand four hundred men; three hundred more who are casualties, well enough to walk but not to fight; and a thousand more camp followers. And that’s counting the cavalry you were hoping to conceal twelve leagues from here in Little Wash. What kind of counting is this? The Count Who Can’t Count indeed! Did you really never progress beyond using your fingers and toes?” Kip ticked off numbers on his fingers. “ ‘Three, four, five . . . oh fuck it, many!’? Or do you expect to negotiate with me while you lie?”
“I assure you our strength is felt far beyond our numbers,” Daragh said. “Three hundred fifty drafters ride with us—three hundred forty-eight, for those of you who hold an abacus in one hand while you jerk your cock with the other.”
The room went quiet again.
“Well, then, finally. Now we can begin,” Kip said quietly, suddenly deathly calm. “Would you rather have a sign-up bonus of twenty denarii per soldier and fifty per cavalryman who brings his own horse and one hundred for every drafter, or would you like one-seventh of all our eventual loot, which will include anything we seize that was formerly the satrap’s?”
Daragh the Coward blinked, blinked. Then the weasel came to the fore. “The sign-up, paid up front.”
“Half up front,” Kip countered. “Half after freeing Green Haven.”
“Done.” Daragh extended his hand to clasp on it.
Kip didn’t move. “So, as it turns out, you’re a bit of an abacus man yourself,” he said, sneering. “Get out. You’re small-time. Do you think a tattered peacock strutting in the mud impresses eagles?”
“So no deal?” Daragh asked, baffled.
Kip laughed derisively. “No, no deal.”
Orholam damn it. Three hundred–some drafters? That was a real prize. And it was completely possible that Daragh had that many. A drafter was more likely than anyone to flee slavery or indenture, and the most likely to escape successfully.
But Daragh the Coward didn’t leave.
He couldn’t.
The reason for that was right there in his reputation. ‘No scars on his back.’ He’d surely put up with his men’s complaining about his not raiding Kip’s undefended lands. Daragh couldn’t leave without at least an insulting offer on the table for him to reject.
Being sent away, like he hadn’t been taken seriously by a boy half his age? A boy who’d mocked him?
That would be death to his reputation.
If the man weren’t an inveterate murderer and rapist and many other things Kip knew but wished he didn’t, Kip would have felt bad for treating him so unfairly.
Sold by Ilytian slavers to a rural Ruthgari lord far up the Great River, young Daragh had had the great misfortune of his master being murdered. The locals were intent on following an old custom: if a man was murdered, all of his slaves were killed for not stopping it.
The theory was that a man couldn’t be murdered without his slaves being aware of the plot, or at least deciding not to step in to save him. Besides, who was more likely to murder you than your slaves themselves? One way to dissuade slaves from turning on their masters was to give all the slaves in a household the greatest possible incentive to protect their master, especially from each other.
The Chromeria had eventually succeeded in outlawing such communal punishment, but outside the bubbles of direct influence they exerted in the cities and on the Jaspers, such slave massacres were rarely reported, rarely investigated, and rarely punished.
Daragh had escaped—some said it was the last time he’d ever run from a fight, thus his title. Then he’d crossed the Great River into Blood Forest and taken up banditry.
What else could an escaped slave do?
Having not grown up with slavery, Kip was still unsettled by the entire institution, and his discomfiture had only grown, the more familiar he’d become with it. His own first experiences with slavery, even with as uncomfortable as they’d been, hadn’t been representative.
Speaking with Marissia, a slave to Gavin Guile? Marissia had more power and wealth than most nobles. Similarly, though technically slaves, in certain areas the Blackguards had authority above most lords’, also often retired with wealth, and commanded far more respect than most drafters.
The Chromeria had slowly eroded the extent of slavery, believing it as intrinsically prone to abuse but also as ineradicable as lending at interest or prostitution. How else could debtors be forced to honor contracts when they might have no way to pay other than their own labor? What else could be done with enemies during war?
Would it please Orholam more if His people massacred all captured enemies? Were they supposed to build giant cages for the captured until hostilities ceased?
What if the hostilities lasted decades? Who would feed their foes for so long? Would they feed them still if war led to famine, as it so often did? Who would stand guard over these men? What kind of horrors must happen in such cages? Aside from being economically impossible, was it really humane to sequester men away from society and family? Man is a social animal. Even slaves were allowed human connections, the company of peers, perhaps the love of a woman or a man, and the hope of children—if often blighted hopes. What would long-term prisoners have?
So the Chromeria compromised. The biggest concession they’d won was that children of slaves were now born free.
With slaves’ children born free, the only sources of new slaves were suddenly criminals, war, and piracy. Unsurprisingly, more things were made illegal, especially for poor young men and young women; piracy increased dramatically, and small wars were started on pretexts to allow raids for slave labor—which had, indeed, fed the fires of the unending Blood Wars.
When Gavin had violently ended the Blood Wars, he’d demanded that all the slaves taken by each side be allowed to return home.