The Path Changes the Traveler Ch. 03

"The reason that I'm here is 'cause I was idiot and got caught, sir. I reckon that if I keep my yap shut, it might take a little while before everybody else 'round here cottons on to that fact."

-----

It was nearly five o'clock local time as they ground slowly through the winding streets. The going wasn't particularly difficult, though Morgan wondered how they'd find the room to get turned around, since they'd need to at some point.

He just hoped that they didn't snag anything which hung across the narrow streets, from power lines to the ones which held only washing. He chose to sit in the back and converse through the hole where the window had once been. Priest was there with him - as talkative as usual, though now awake and alert. He sat silently scanning, his eyes flicking around, looking for details, saying nothing.

They wore garments like what the locals wore and their faces were shrouded by the headgear. Priest's was more shrouded than that, since he kept the hood almost closed over a dark, bandit-style mask which was a little hidden. He'd keep out of sight most of the time, that was the plan.

He had little if any speaking role and that was fine with him, since his Georgia/Texan accent was bound to fuck up any attempt that he might make at speaking Arabic. He'd taken the courses - there was just no way to hide that slow accent of his.

Deciding on their garb had almost driven Maggie nuts. It would have been possible to dress Morgan in the conventional clothing that a lot of people wore there. The place wasn't any sort of a cultural center and it did border on farmland. Aside from the lack of Levis on the people, there wasn't all that much difference to a lot of out of the way places in many countries. Trousers, rough shirt, shoes, done.

But Morgan was coming along.

His size would attract the eye no matter what, since he was noticeably larger than the run of the mill around there. Blonde hair and green eyes ... well they thought that they'd just go with old-fashioned and that was it. Besides, if things got sticky, he could hide almost any weaponry under the robe and cloak.

----

The old merchant heard them coming long before they came around the last corner. With the small and always-present hopefulness of his profession, he motioned at the younger relation with him to get all of the ones for sale up and onto their feet. He also said what he wanted of them out loud, though not all of them understood him.

None of them moved from their sitting positions against the wall. They'd been there all day and other than a few raised eyebrows, there had been no one among the passersby who had expressed much of any form of interest. As well, being a slave on display in the super-heated and stale air against a sun-baked wall of the little square wasn't the sort of circumstance which might tend to make any of them jump up and want to show themselves off to any degree.

But the young assistant was there for just such a thing and when he walked out to wind up the old canvas awning which provided the only shade which they had, they all stood up slowly.

The seller barked out something and the man motioned for one girl to remove her jelabeeya so that her body would be displayed to best advantage.

Mena shook her head in weak refusal, but the man knew just how to use the little lash which he carried, He could cause just enough pain with it and leave little if any mark at all. Though it was incorrect, her interpretation was that he was only doing what the old man said.

Mena took off her clothing and dropped it at her feet.

----

As the truck ground its way around the last bend into the square, Morgan sat in some amazement. As much as he tended to believe the things that Quan told him on just about any subject and as much as he liked to rely on Maggie ...

Holy shit, he thought, there really were still slave markets.

He guessed that he must have set the notion aside in a little disbelief until now, when there was no possibility of denying it any longer.

He was looking at one now and as far as a first effect on him went, it humbled him that in this day and age; there was still something like this going on. It had been a long time ago, but he knew that the country of his birth had little to hold its head up over either. But at least they'd stopped the practice.

No, he thought, seeing the difference, really stopped it and not just made the noises.

It also raised something else inside of him. He might have supposed that it was the grown-up Boy Scout in him or something or, ... maybe it was just the white-hat-cowboy thing that Quan often made jokes to him about, but he felt a desire to do something to right what he was looking at across the square.

All the same, he knew that he couldn't.

They were here to buy one person, get her to her father and collect the reward, not to do the guns-blazing thing to rescue all of them.

None of them knew it at this point, but a little later on, what gunplay there was would be memorable to just about everyone involved.

Until this moment, he really hadn't considered that there might be several slaves here and how he'd feel about that - getting one out of this puddle of shit and having to leave the rest behind.

All told, there were about a dozen of them, Morgan guessed, give or take; one young man with a bit of a build who regarded the man with the lash coldly - as though it was all that he could do not to give in to his want to kill the idiot with his bare hands. But even that was out of the question as he looked at the chains on his wrists.

But he was the only one who carried a look like that on him. The rest all looked as though almost the only quality still left in them in any sort of abundance was their weary submission.

Most of them looked as though all that they owned were the bedsheets with which they seemed to want to wrap themselves a little tighter in, and yet knowing that if a prospective buyer showed even a little mild interest, they'd be forced to reveal all of themselves and then submit to some rather basic and rude examinations.

He saw a woman standing next to a young boy of maybe four years of age. Morgan couldn't tell, but he thought that she might have been of Italian descent and he didn't even know why he'd had the thought. She had her sheet and the boy stood next to her, naked and tired-looking. Morgan wondered if they were a set to be sold together - or if that even happened here.

Next to her, he saw a woman with the sort of complexion that a westerner might expect to see on the semi-nomadic sub-Saharan people far from here. There were no Arabic features on her and her skin was very dark. That one looked out from under her eyebrows with what he took to be proud and rather hate-filled eyes, not that it surprised him in the least to see that.

Another black woman stood next to the nomad with the very same look about her, but in her case, Morgan guessed that the look was wearing away to hopelessness at least a little bit. To the right of that one, he saw a fair-skinned woman holding her sleeping baby against her bared breast, and next to her stood a smaller nomad, he supposed, though her skin was not quite as dark as the others and he could just see a large and thin silver earring peeking out from her clothing.

She looked at the people in the truck with a bit of suspicion somehow and Morgan thought that there must be some sort of difference between her and the others who were similarly attired. He'd have thought that there would perhaps be some commonality between the desert dwellers, but then he knew nothing of the various kinds as a people.

Then Morgan had a thought and wondered what would happen if say, a pair of people whose kinds were ancient and implacable enemies were to find themselves here in circumstances like this.

Right about in the middle of them all, he saw one girl standing not all that proudly, but absolutely naked and doing her best to gainsay that fact with her impossibly long hair. The bit that he saw hanging behind her was long enough to reach half of the distance from her crotch to her knees if she were to be allowed to have it in front of her.

He couldn't tell, but he supposed that she'd had her mound shorn of pubic hair to enhance her sale-ability. Recognising her as Mena from the photos in their briefings, his eyes moved farther on.

There was a girl there who was a little heavyset with pale white skin and red hair. Next to her was a rather tall woman who he gathered must be fairly new at this, standing as she was with one arm over her eyes as though she wished that she was dead rather than to be seen standing here in this way.

It was the last pair who caught his eye and he had to wonder about them, as detached as he told himself that he had to remain.

The last woman that he saw had her bedsheet wrapped around her hips, but in such a way that left her long legs bare for better cooling, he guessed. She was very dark and her hair was a mass of long ringlets.

She just held his eye, standing there the way that she was with her aquiline nose and from where he was, Morgan saw that she had the sort of eyebrows which women the world over shaped their own in imitation of. She stood with one of her thin arms across her smallish breasts and the other around a boy, holding him against her in a way that shielded her a little.

The thing was that the boy was white with longish and slightly puffy dark brown hair, as though it was only barely manageable. He looked to be perhaps a slightly tall thirteen, standing with his thin chest bare and a long dark cloth around his hips which covered him to his feet. They looked to be about the same height.

They made quite a striking pair, standing together as though they took a little support from each other. The dark-skinned girl looked to be maybe twenty and her eyes were downcast, whereas the boy looked around at the truck with some interest and an unreadable expression otherwise.

"That's our girl," he heard Maggie say, meaning the one with the long hair, and as Rashid prepared to step out of the truck, she whispered to Morgan a little urgently as she pulled her clothing up a little higher so as not to trip getting out.

"Stay here, Morgan. Just stay in the truck and keep your eyes open. I already know you well enough for this and this right here is no place for that American shit of yours. You keep staring at them like that and you'll want to get them all out and we can't do that.

I can see that you want to help every one of them, but you can't buy every puppy at the pet shop."

He knew that she meant well, but her remark annoyed him all the same. "I don't want to buy a puppy, Maggie," he growled a little in spite of himself, "I just can't stand this."

"Then look down," she advised him, "Don't look at them again if you can't do anything else. Just stay here."

She was gone the next instant and Morgan found himself looking at the rear profile of the driver as he leered though the windshield. He had to look away then, not trusting his ability to override the suddenly intense desire that he felt to hit the man.

The driver lit another of his foul-smelling cigarettes then and he muttered a few things in a tone which was right on the border of offending Morgan.

And though the driver didn't know it, offending Morgan would take some doing under most circumstances.

He knew himself and he understood the way that women and most especially men were hardwired by their own biology. He looked out at those women and he knew that - language issues and everything else aside - he supposed that he could have gotten out of the back of the truck in different circumstances and picked any of those women, bought her and then likely found himself doing the whole Pygmalion thing in his efforts to want to help her.

He didn't know where it came from in himself, but he knew that it was there.

And though he knew that it might be the right thing to do in some cases, the best thing was to get all of those unfortunates out of there, but how?

And then what?

The driver made more noises about wanting to fuck at least a few of them.

He stopped in mid-sentence as Priest reached in to tap him on the shoulder.

All the man saw were the eyes, cold and hard, a very dark shade of gunmetal gray - and that is to say, they looked at the man with a pointed glare which revealed nothing of a soul. Those eyes were the only features visible. The rest of the face under that hood was hidden in shadow.

The silent one shook his head and the driver got it, deciding to shut up.

Morgan jumped over the tailgate of the truck, pulled his own disguise around him, made sure that his features were hidden as well as possible and then he began to walk over slowly. Another minute of the driver's shit and Morgan would have killed him.

Standing near to her white-skinned friend, Junah didn't know what to expect, other than perhaps more groping as some man or other pretended to be interested in making his purchase of her. She didn't want the groping and she didn't want the purchase either.

Most especially not that; because when that dark day finally came, she knew that it would likely be the last time that she'd ever see her only friend.

But she heard the almost-whispered exclamation that was made in some amazement to no one as it slipped out between them.

"Amirikanskaya."

Junah asked her friend to repeat it and the kid began to reply very quietly in an Ahmaric dialect which they were both familiar with, so that only Junah could understand.

"That one. The tall one there. He is American. At least he looks like one to me. See his eyes there in the shadow. What is he doing here in this place?"

Junah looked then and for all of the combined misery that the two had shared in the past year or so, she felt something. She didn't know what it was, but it was there in her anyway.

Until then, it had only been the Arab man who was speaking to the merchant in quick terms over the price of the naked Greek girl. They'd all seen the woman as well who'd looked them over and nodded to the man to begin dealing for the girl after pointing to her.

That was unusual in itself, though it sometimes happened that a woman was put in charge of buying a slave or two to help with the work of running a large household. Something like that was about the best that anyone in their position could hope for, because it might mean that there would be less sex forced on them if they went to a place like that. They knew that it would likely still happen, but not as much for sure.

Then what was this other man here for? He looked so out of place despite the clothing. He was too tall. No wonder that he hid his face.

The smaller figure looked up at the man who now looked at the two of them and it was plain to the kid that he was wondering about them - what they were doing here and maybe what they were doing together.

It made for a small feeling of hope.

"Hey Joe," the kid said a little hopefully in a quiet way when the man was close enough, "Hey Buddy ... Amirikansky, why you come here?"

Morgan caught the Russian accent and his jaw almost fell open in surprise. After the shock of it had passed he found himself smiling at least a little just because and also for the chance to try to remember the Russian that he'd had to learn once upon a time.

"Atkooda vi, tovarisch?" he grinned in spite of himself, asking where the kid was from and adding the 'Comrade' as a bit of a friendly joke.

The kid sighed a little, "Is long story.

We are together," the kid indicated the pair of them, "Long way to go home when there is no home anymore for us, her and me.

You help us? Buy us maybe?

Junah is girl from Ethiopia. I from Moskva. We want to be together. Old friends, yes? We work hard for you together. You buy us, I do anything for you - any work you need, Boss.

You choose us; not be sorry, Buddy."

There it was, he told himself, the moment that he knew would come and now that it was here; he found it every bit as uncomfortable as he'd imagined that it would be. Morgan looked at the deep brown downcast eyes of the dark-skinned beauty and her friend the hopeful Russian kid and he even knew that his Pygmalion moment was upon him.

It was just stupid, he told himself. He even knew how this would probably turn out either way. He'd read the damned book, for Christ's sake. He'd even seen the fucking movie.

'My Fair Lady', he reminded himself, that was it. And he was looking at two people who needed help among a whole bunch who, ... well, needed help.

Fuck.

Her eyes began to rise as her gaze went higher on him until she looked into his face and she made it worse for him.

A thousand times worse.

There was despair in her voice as she whispered to him and it was made worse than even that when he heard the different accent as she struggled to say something in English - a language that she hadn't used since she'd learned it from one of her tutors in Moscow.

"Please ... help us."

He looked over at Maggie and found only her eyes looking back at him from the shadow of her own jelabeeya as she shook her head at him.

He took a step toward her and she looked like she was thinking of stepping away to maintain the distance so that she wouldn't catch whatever seemed to have infected him. The seller went to another level in his pitch and that was when Morgan realised that Maggie was not exactly immune either as he saw her hand motions.

She was negotiating her own purchase with the man directly.

Morgan found that, because it was Maggie - the one that he trusted most - it was becoming difficult to keep his surprise from turning into anger.

From there, it was usually a short hop to fury except in perhaps this one case.

"Ask about those two," he hissed in his crude Arabic, his voice cold with an edge that spoke of his not wanting to hear why it was that they had to leave all of these people here and yet she was negotiating to buy a second girl while he was just supposed to stand there and ...

Maggie looked at him and she shook her head again.

He pointed to the pair at the end.

She tried to shake her head and he jabbed the air in the direction of the dark girl and the kid.

The merchant grinned.

He began to speak to Morgan in a very carefully appraising tone. Morgan didn't catch all of it, but just the way that Maggie's eyes opened in a bit of shock told him that he had to know exactly what had been said.

When he asked, he could see that maintaining a cool and disinterested front in the face of what had been said was really taxing Maggie at that point.

"He says that he can see that you are a man who appreciates a slave who shows a bit of spirit and feistiness. He says that this is not for everyone, but he knows that some men like to show their slaves who is in charge at times.

Fuck, I want to kill him right now."

"Yeah well, you'll have to wait a little for that," Morgan said.

The merchant took their half-whispered conversation as some sort of opening which might be exploited, so he nodded to his nephew and indicated one of the others.

The woman with the glaring eyes was dragged forward and her poor and plain garments were almost pulled off her. She was really glaring then, her eyes smouldering with her hatred.

Morgan really didn't want to look at her, since he wasn't supposed to be expressing much of any interest and he figured that he'd gone out on a limb pretty far in mentioning the pair who had spoken to him in the first place.

But he was looking now, not so much out of wanting to check this one out as his eye was drawn to her no matter what he told himself - and true to form for him, it wasn't out of any particularly prurient interest under these circumstances.

She was amazingly beautiful and her seething anger and what outrage she could muster couldn't do a thing to hide that.