Chapter 5 – The Slave Caravan 
 
Long ago, when the sun and moon
Were but beginning their journey,
Times of earthly men were troubled.
In the absence of Ranaia,
Her people were as animals
And Sin was crowned King of men. 
During such wicked days as these
Corrupt men began to enslave
Those who had been chosen to rule:
The wise, the clever, and the just,
And for this they paid a great price.
 
Book of the Ancients – The Enslavèd Ones
 
 
   For the second time in perhaps as many days, the man in the light blue robe awoke not knowing where he was.  For several seconds after he first opened his eyes, he lay there on his back in the dark, unmoving, assessing his surroundings.  He was lying on a bare wooden floor, which was moving up and down with a steady clanking noise.   The entire room had a stale, beastly odor to it, but he could not quite determine what it was.  Camel.  Yes, that was it, the smell of camels was strong in the air.  The man pulled himself up with his palms, to the point where he was sitting against a wall of some kind, made of the same bare and splintery wood as the floor.  Moving his hands across the floor, he could feel the gaps in between the planks of wood of which it was built.  The room was pitch black, but there was a small rectangular area on the wall adjacent to the one he was leaning against which was slightly less dark than its surroundings.  On his hands and knees, the man crawled over to this single spot.  As he looked at it, he realized that it was a place in which the wall was damaged or perhaps rotting, and that a plank of wood was missing.  Gripping the wood surrounding this hole with his hands, the man peered through it.   
 
  Through the small hole he could see that it was night, and that moisture clouds were covering the stars, indicating that he was near the ocean.  The vehicle he was moving in seemed to be climbing a low-sloped sand dune.  As he looked down the slope, what he saw amazed him.  For as far as he could see in the dark night, rows upon rows of camel-pulled wooden carriages were making their way across the sandy desert in a vast caravan that stretched for what seemed like miles.  The carriage immediately behind his was being pulled by two camels on reins.  There was a small, stoop-like shelf at its front, about three feet above the ground, and on it sat two camel drivers, wearing only white, baggy cloth pantaloons and simple red caps.  The carriage had four wooden wheels, each turning quickly but bumpily as they traveled over the rough and uneven sand.  Its walls were wooden, solid planking on the sides, but in slats at the front behind the stoop where the camel drivers sat.  The roof was flat and wooden, and over it was draped a red shroud which hung over the sides about halfway down, but did not come over the slatted front wall of the wagon.   

   As the man looked back on the steady procession of coaches climbing the dune, he could see that they were all adorned in the same manner.  The dismal procession of coaches stretched all the way down the long slope of the dune, and beyond that, across the concave basin between dunes, and onto the slope of the dune behind the one whose crest he was now about to cross.  Hundreds of slave-filled carriages climbing the dune in a forlorn mile-long caravan, carrying men away from freedom into a life of enslavement – it was a sad sight, and for a moment the man turned away in disgust and confusion as to why he was a part of this woeful trek.  As he turned back, he saw that on either side of the caravan, one man for every three coaches or so, men were riding on horseback, wearing the same simple clothing as the camel drivers, except for the fact that red headdresses adorned their heads, rather than caps. They were likely slave drivers or slave gatherers, capturing free men to add to this sorrowful parade of slaves.  These horse-riding men seemed strangely familiar to the man in the light blue robe for some unfathomable reason. 

   As the man gazed through the back wall of the caravan, his eyes were again drawn to the dark night sky.  As he watched, the thin clouds began to subside, and the moon, now a strong crescent, became visible.  The moonlight streamed through the hole in the wall, lighting his face.  There was an old saying “Ka yorudh-sani i k’al a’tali pa balazir” – The true path is the one that shines in the moonlight.  However, this bit of wisdom did not seem to be holding true now, in this distant and sad place where the moon shone only on the dismal path of the enslaved.  The moonbeams fanned out from the hole in the wall and illuminated the insides of the carriage, so that the man was now able to see what had been obscured by darkness before.  The inside of the carriage was, as he had expected, quite plain, but he saw something which he had not noticed - sitting against the slatted wooden wall opposite the wall with the missing board was a man.   

   The man in the blue robe crawled over to the sitting figure, and saw that his eyes were closed.  Excited, he shook the sleeping man in an attempt to wake him, but his eyes did not open.  Suddenly, the blue-robed man realized that he recognized this face – from somewhere far away.  The dark brown hair, the small nose, the fine features – they all looked strangely memorable.  A name formed on his lips as the face became more and more familiar.  “Balazir!” he whispered.  And then, with the recognized name and this face bringing him out of this distant and disconnected world, it all came back to him.  He was Kashatar Alpana, Prince of Thieves.  His exploits were the stuff of legends, his riches the envy of men across the seven nations.  But how did he come to be here, in a caravan traveling through the desert?  The stream he had fallen into on the night of the attack must have carried him far away from his home, merging into the raging torrents of the Rainstorm to bring him all the way to the distant shores of the ocean.  Whatever strange and cruel miracle it was that had saved him from drowning, he could not curse it enough now.  There, on the shores of the ocean, he had likely been captured - yes, he remembered it now, he had been captured – by one of the nomadic groups of slave traders that roamed the desert.  Groups such as these preyed on travelers, lost wanderers, pilgrims, and any other poor and unfortunate men who happened to be traveling alone in the desert when a slave caravan was nearby.  He recalled that he had been shot with a tranquilizer dart of some sort, as, probably, had Balazir.  The man, the man in the red headdress – he remembered it now.   

   His home, his family, his comrades – all destroyed, vanished forever into the darkness of the night.  Now, he was no longer a prince of thieves or a prince of anything at all, just a slave being herded in a vast caravan, thrown together with a man who had once served as his musician at a great banquet.  As the swirl of emotions and memories in Kashatar’s mind began to turn into an ever faster and deeper whirlpool of confusion, it became unbearable.  Gathering his rage, Kashatar balled up his fists and pounded once, twice, three times on the wooden slats of the carriage’s front wall, much as Balazir had several nights ago knocked on his door.  The slats proved stronger than he had thought, however, and his pounding served only to create a great deal of commotion and to make his fists sore. 
 
“Quiet in there!” yelled a gruff voice which Kashatar assumed to be that of one of the camel drivers.  “Keep it down or I’ll run you through!”, yelled the same gruff voice.  Neither of the camel drivers had spoken even a word up until this point, and Kashatar wondered if he had woken them up with his noisy pounding or if they just weren’t very talkative.  Either way, Kashatar decided that he had better keep his temper down from now on. 

“Say, you can see the moon now, d’you see?” said a second voice, much deeper and clearer than the first.   
 
“Yeah, it’s turning out to be a decent night after all.  Tomorrow morning we get into Cavendish.  Maybe then we can get a good night’s sleep for once.”  
 
“It would be nice.” 
 
“Sure would,” replied the gruff voice.  The man seemed to want to be left alone to his own thoughts rather than converse with his fellow driver.  A few moments of silence passed, during which the gruff-voiced man stared up at the moon in peace, before the other driver again interrupted his reverie. 
 
“Say, do you ever worry?”, inquired the deeper voiced-man. 
 
“What, worry?  About food, yes.  About sleep, yes.  Everything else, no,” chuckled the gruff-voiced driver. “That’s all there is for us in this life, anyway,” he added in a softer tone. 
 
“No, I’m talking about the future.  There's a lot to worry about for the future.  For instance, what about Sumatria's growing power?”  Up until this point, Kashatar had been listening to the camel drivers’ conversation only half-intently, but upon hearing the name of his home nation, he became more interested and leaned forward to hear what the two men were saying, cupping his ear against the thin wall of wooden slats between himself and the carriage’s drivers. 
 
“What of it?” asked the gruff voice. 
 
“Well, I heard that the King of Alatria is beginning a search for the Forgotten City.  Very dangerous, that.” 
 
The gruff voice did not respond for several moments, but then replied, sounding somewhat annoyed, “By Ranaia, I swear that you are the most fretful person I have ever met.”  
 
“Don’t you realize how dangerous that is?  I tell you, the King over there in Alatria is really losing his mind!  He claims himself to be the Hand of Ranaia, and he’s looking for the Forgotten City of Alkashira!  Doesn’t it occur to you that he’s probably bent on conquest?”  The man with the deep voice was getting rather worked up now, struggling for words to express his concerns. 
 
“Where do you hear this stuff, my friend?  Honestly, you worry so much sometimes that I worry about you!”  He chuckled, finding his last remark quite amusing. 
 
“Sometimes I don’t know why I bother with you,” sighed the other driver.   
 
The driver with the gruff voice mumbled something, and that was the last either of them spoke that night.  Kashatar settled down against the front wall and closed his eyes. 
 

*   *   *   *   *   *   *
 
   Five hours later, the darkness that had settled over the desert that night began to melt.  Kashatar had not been able to sleep, even for a minute, his mind filled with pain, anguish, sorrow, and anger.  The spot on the wall where the plank was missing was now a dark gray color, as the lightening sky came through it.  The sun was soon to rise.  The thought occurred to Kashatar that he had seen hundreds of sunrises in his life, but now, for the first time, he was not free to enjoy it.  He was a slave now, and the rising sun was not his to revel in, nor were the vast rolling sands of the desert his to explore.  It struck Kashatar that he might never be free again, and this thought chilled the very marrow of his bone. 
 
“All halt, we are arriving at Cavendish!,” shouted a voice that Kashatar did not recognize as the voice of either camel driver.  It was, he realized, the leader of the caravan announcing the caravan’s arrival at its destination.  “All halt now, we are arriving at Cavendish!” the voice repeated itself, louder this time.  Kashatar could hear the sounds of the hundreds of slave-filled coaches in the caravan coming to a stop.  Camels snorted, wheels ground to a halt, and men shouted, both at the camels and at the slaves, two groups which they seemed to hold in equal esteem.  Balazir began to stir in his sleep, the effect of the drugs from the dart apparently wearing off.  Kashatar looked over at him.  He then put his large, dry hands on Balazir's shoulders, and shook him.  Balazir’s eyes opened slowly.  “Wha?”, he mumbled.  “What…is it?”, he mumbled again, rubbing his eyes, frightened and confused. 
 
Kashatar drew up his breath, and said to him “Wake up, we’re slaves now.” 
 
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