Transformation Read Online Free Page B

them.”
    There had been a time when I believed that drinking and washing from the same basin was impure, a sign of inner disorder that prevented one from discovering universal truths, and put one at risk of corruption. Youth can be so laughably serious. On that day the only difficulty was leaving any of the brown, brackish stuff to wash with. When I was dressed, Durgan informed me that I was to go to the Prince yet again. “Best behave yourself. He’s had me asking around for another reading slave. He don’t trust you.”
    Well, I certainly shared that feeling. If I had thought the only penalty was to be sent away, I might have considered misbehaving, but I knew better. I didn’t want to attract any further unpleasant attention from the future Emperor of the Derzhi. Survival was still of interest to me, though it was not the passion it had been when I was eighteen and still learning what manacles and whips were all about. “Thank you, Durgan. And thank you for the water. I’ll do nothing to draw his wrath upon you.” I gave him a bow of true respect. He had not been required to let me drink my fill before answering the Prince’s summons.
    “Off with you, then,” he said.
    This time the Prince was alone in a modestly proportioned map room attached to his chambers. The walls were covered with maps of the Empire. A rectangular table and most of the floor were littered with map rolls, and ebony pointing sticks, and gold and silver markers used to indicate troop positions and supplies. Massive candelabra hung low over the table, casting bright light upon the strategist’s tools. Prince Aleksander was standing beside one of the maps tracing his finger idly over a part of it and sipping a glass of wine. Unlike his larger chambers, this one had no perfumes sprayed about to cover the stink of gathered bodies. Though the Prince seemed reasonably clean, his race—a race with origins in the desert—was, in general, not keen on bathing. The only scents in the map room were candle smoke and wine.
    In the first months after my capture, I spent an inordinate time wallowing in the pain of looking backward. But another man, one who had been in bondage for forty years, had taught me the self-discipline required to stave off that particular madness. “Look at your hand,” he said. “Trace the bones and examine the skin and the calluses, the fingernails, and the iron band about your wrist. Now re-create the hand in your mind with the joints knotted, the skin hanging loose and dry like paper, the nails brown and thick, the flesh spotted with age like mine. The same iron band about the wrist. Tell yourself ... command yourself ... that only when there is no difference between your hand and the image ... only then will you be allowed to remember what has been. It will not be forever, so it is not an impossible command to obey. And when the time comes, you’ll not remember so clearly why you weep, and no one will take you to task for it.” I had followed his lesson faithfully and became quite good at it. But there were moments when the exercise failed, and I would glimpse a piercingly clear image from my true life.
    Such was the moment when I knelt just inside the door of Prince Aleksander’s map room and inhaled the homely scents of hot beeswax and strong red wine. There flashed before my eyes a vision of a comfortable room, lined with books, hung and carpeted with the rich, deep autumn colors of my mother’s weavings. My sword and my cloak lay on the floor, dropped after a long day of training. A beeswax candle burned softly on the dark pine desk, and a man’s strong and vital hand pressed a glass of wine into my grasp....
    “I said come here! Are you deaf or just insolent?”
    When I lifted my eyes, the Prince was glaring at me from across the room. I was up quickly, trying to regain my composure, trying to suppress a hunger that had nothing to do with food.
    The Prince motioned me to a stool. Paper and pen, ink and sand were