Lord of Raven's Peak - Catherine Coulter [3]
Not that it concerned Merrik. The boy was a slave and would be sold, perhaps to a cruel master, perhaps not, perhaps to a master who would let him buy his freedom someday. It was a common practice and perhaps the lad would be lucky. It didn’t matter. Ah, but there was something about him that held Merrik very still, that wouldn’t allow him to look away. But he forced himself to look away. He wanted to sail from Kiev this morning and there was much he still had to do before leaving. He turned to go when the boy suddenly looked up and their eyes met. The boy’s eyes were a gray-blue, two colors that sounded normal, even common, particularly in Norway, but this boy’s eyes were different. The gray color was deeper than the rich pewter bowl Merrik’s mother had received as a gift upon her wedding to his father, and the blue darker than a sea in winter. He could tell that the boy’s flesh was very white despite all the dirt. His brows were dark and well-drawn but the tangled, filthy mat of hair on his head was too dirty and oily to determine its true color. It was simply dull and dark and filthy. The boy was beneath notice were it not for those eyes. They caught Merrik cold. Eyes weren’t made filthy; but eyes could reflect a man or woman’s thoughts, and the boy’s eyes were drained empty, dull, accepting. Certainly that wasn’t odd. But then, quite suddenly, there was a remarkable shift—where there’d been emptiness, there was now coldness and a look of defiance that would probably get the boy killed or beaten to death if he didn’t learn to mask that spark better. In a flash that look of defiance turned to one of anger, immense anger that held such violence and rage, it shook Merrik. Then, just as suddenly, the boy’s eyes became blank again, all that fury and passion buried beneath hopelessness and awareness that his lot in life was that of a slave and probably would remain so until he died. It was as if Merrik could see the boy withdrawing into himself. He could see him dying and accepting death before his eyes.
Merrik roused himself from this ridiculous revery. The boy was a slave, nothing more. It didn’t matter if he’d been captured from a hovel in a small village or from a rich farmhouse. Merrik would never see him again after he left the slave pit. He would cease to think about him the moment his hand was on the rudder of his longboat and the wind from the sails was sharp in his face. He shrugged and shook his head. He turned then when Oleg tugged on his arm to point out another slave.
He heard an agonized cry and turned back. The very fat merchant, the same Swedish merchant Merrik had seen the night before, the same merchant who had just been dealing with Valai, had grabbed the boy’s arm and was pulling him away from the line of other boys and men. He was shrieking that he’d paid too much silver for the filthy little garla, or puny pig, and he would shut up now or be very sorry for it. But the shouts and cries weren’t all coming from the boy. The most piercing ones were from a small child who had a death grip on the boy’s other hand. By all the gods, Merrik thought, it was the boy’s little brother and the man hadn’t bought him. The child was screaming, terrified cries that were pathetic, and it made something deep inside him twist and cramp and he didn’t understand it. He took a step forward, then saw the fat merchant slap the boy, for he was now trying to grab his little brother. The merchant then kicked the child hard.