He picked up clean clothes and headed for the communal baths, one of the few luxuries in the barracks.
On this late-fall day, the shutters of the bathhouse were thrown open, light shining in as steam poured out. Most of the soldiers had duties during the daytime, so Theos had the place to himself. It was nice to be warm enough to strip right down, to look at the Torian tattoo on the rounded ball of his shoulder, the Sacrati brand on his hip. He’d gotten the tattoo as a young man, and it had stretched and faded a little as he’d grown, so he checked on it now and then to be sure it wasn’t gone entirely. The brand had been hard-won; he liked to look at that too, sometimes, to run his fingers over the roughened skin and remember what he’d achieved.
And it was always good to pull the leather bracers from his wrists. Every Torian warrior used them, not just to protect their arms but to keep the bracelets underneath them safe. Now that he was in the barracks, though, he could shed the bracers and let the bracelets be seen. He ran his hands over them all, then stepped into one of the large communal tubs.
Theos soaked for a while, then scrubbed himself clean, rinsed off in the fresh water, and headed to the mirrors to shave. He was almost done before he noticed that he had company.
Theos knew the soldier’s face, but not his name. There were well over two thousand men on active duty in the valley’s military, with a couple hundred new recruits each year to replace the men who were killed or who went east to fight on the other border. This was just another soldier in a long line of them.
“Shouldn’t you be on duty?” Theos asked, wiping the last of the shaving oil from his face.
“I’m the night guard this month,” the soldier said. “It’s not a bad job, but there’s no one to spend time with when I’m not at work.”
“But there is today.” Theos moved closer, and the soldier smiled.
“There is today,” the man echoed, and he pulled his tunic up over his head.
Their coupling was friendly, casual. The soldier just shed his remaining clothes and dropped to his knees, using his mouth to bring Theos to hardness, and then smeared some of the shaving oil on his cock. Theos buried himself in the other man’s body, and the soldier braced himself against the wall and arched his back.
It was nothing special, yet it was just what Theos needed. A return to the ordinary, a reminder of the simple things in life: tight, slick heat; a body strong enough to take whatever Theos gave; grunts of enjoyment and encouragement; and a climax that took them both away, at least temporarily, from their worries.
They rinsed off together under the flow of water, and then Theos clapped the soldier’s shoulder and wished him luck staying awake on sentry duty, and that was it. Theos dressed in clean clothes and set his laundry to soak in the tanks next to the bathhouse.
Fresh and clean, he went down to the kitchen in search of food. Technically the soldiers were all supposed to eat at meal times, but Theos was Sacrati, he was just back from the field, and he was hungry. The recruits scurried around to put food together for him, and he grinned. Life in the barracks was a nice change from the mountains.
Theos took his meal outdoors, intending to eat it while he watched the drills under the warm sun. But before he got to the drill yards he was stopped short by a procession in front of the holding pens.
Prisoners were being taken out of the pen and lined up in the road. Not the Elkati Theos had brought in; these men must have come from someone else’s patrol. They already had heavy iron slave collars around their necks, and as they joined their fellows, the blacksmith was hammering red-hot iron into chain links, her hands quick and sure as she worked. She was fastening the prisoners together into a web that would hold until their heads came off or someone with a forge and the proper tools released them.
This was the preparation for a mass slave transport. Not that uncommon, but they usually happened after significant battles, and Theos would have heard from the captain if there’d been one of those lately. He strode forward and spoke to a one-armed man who was watching the work with an overseer’s critical eye. “Where are you taking them?”
“Who are you to ask?” The man’s accent was subtly different; he wasn’t from Windthorn valley.
“I’m Sacrati.” But why was Theos wasting words on this man? He moved a little closer and made his expression dull and threatening. “Where are you taking them?”
The man sighed as if he were tired of stupid questions. “Back east, to the central valleys.”
“Why?” Slaves were usually kept in the valley that captured them until they’d been trained for their new lives. If they proved useless as soldiers, they might be sent to the mines, or if they had special skills, they might be transported to where they were needed, but it wasn’t routine.
“I was told to,” the slaver grunted.
“It’s going to be winter before you get anywhere. You’ll be lucky to make it to the next valley before you’re snowed in.”
“Extra risk means extra rewards,” the man said with an oily smile. Then he turned away.
Theos stepped back and tried to find sense in the situation. The chosen prisoners were young. They were all male, but that made sense; females were captured when the Torians took over a valley, not when they captured trespassers, and there’d been no new valleys claimed recently. But still, there was something about the prisoners . . .
The boys were all pretty, and didn’t seem to have anything else in common. “You’re taking them to be bedwarmers?”
The trader wagged his eyebrows. “They’ll fetch a good price back east.”
It didn’t feel right. This many young, healthy men had failed to meet the army standards? It was unheard of. “Who authorized this?”
“I did.” The voice was chilly, and Theos turned to see the warlord striding toward him. Tall and lean with a hawklike face and eyes that seemed to see everything, the man was imposing. But Theos was Sacrati.
“Why are you sending them? They haven’t been here long, have they?” The pens had been almost empty when Theos had left on patrol. “They haven’t been given a chance.”
“Remember yourself, soldier. Remember your place.” The words were wielded like a whip, but they didn’t sting when they landed.
