The Last Ring-bearer - Kirill Yeskov [86]
The slave caravan, personally led by Mdikva, arrived at the appointed time – a hundred eighty men and twenty women. Despite the messenger's boasts, the chained men had a poor appearance: worn-out, covered in bruises, their wounds haphazardly bandaged with banana leaves. However, the women, paraded totally naked at the head of the column, were of such qualities that the entire garrison crowded around them, salivating and unwilling to look at anything else. This proved their undoing, for the chains were fake, the blood was paint, and the slaves themselves were the Emperor's personal guard. The banana leaf bandages concealed star-shaped throwing knives lethal up to fifteen yards, but the guardsmen could have done without any weapons: every one of them could outrun a horse in a short sprint, dodge a flying arrow, and break eight stacked tiles with a bare fist. The city gates were captured in mere seconds, and Slaveport fell. Fasimba commanded the whole operation himself: it was he who led the 'slave caravan' dressed in Mdikva's leopard-skin cape, wellknown to the entire coast; the Emperor knew well that the members of the master race have never bothered to learn to tell 'all these blackies' apart. Mdikva himself had no further need of the cape; by that time, the ferocious fire ants in whose path he had been staked (this was now the punishment for slave-raiding) had already turned the coastal ruler into a wellcleaned skeleton.
Two weeks later a slave ship from Khand tied up at Slaveport. The captain, somewhat surprised by the deserted piers, went into town. He came back escorted by three armed Haradrim and in a voice shaky with fear told the crew to come ashore and help load the cargo. To be fair, the nature of the cargo they were to take on would have shaken anyone.
It was 1,427 tanned human skins: the entire population of Slaveport, save seven infants whom Fasimba spared for some unknown reason. Each skin bore an inscription made by the town's clerk (who was paid honestly by being killed last with a relatively easy death) – the owner's name and a detailed description of the tortures he had to endure before being skinned alive. The women's skins bore a notation of exactly how many black warriors have thoroughly appreciated their qualities; the town women were few and the warriors were many, so the numbers varied but were invariably impressive. Only a few inhabitants of Slaveport were lucky enough to merit a brief note 'died in battle.' The top of the bill was a stuffed effigy of the governor, a relative of the Caliph himself. Professional taxidermists probably would not have approved of the material used as stuffing – the very beads the Khandians used to pay for slaves – but the Emperor had had his reasons.
Some will say that such monstrous cruelty has no justification; the chief of the Haradrim must have simply passed off his personal sadistic tendencies as revenge on the oppressors. Others will talk of 'historical retribution' and blame the 'excesses' on what the Haradrim, who were no angels, have suffered over the previous years. Such a discussion seems senseless on its merits, and is in any event irrelevant in this case. What Fasimba did to the inhabitants of the ill-fated town was neither a spontaneous expression of the chief's cruelty nor revenge for ancestral suffering; rather, it was an important element of an fine strategic plan, conceived and carried out with a totally cool head.
Chapter 33
The Caliph of Khand, having received a gift of his subjects' skins and a stuffed relative, reacted in precisely the way the Emperor was counting on. He had the captain and crew beheaded (choose your cargo better next time!), publicly swore to have Fasimba stuffed in the same manner, and ordered his army to Harad. His advisors, forewarned by the sailors' sad fate, did not speak against this dumb idea; they did not dare to even insist on some scouting