False Colors by Alex Beecroft Read Free Book Online Page A

countrymen— and worse, his countrywomen—their eyes raking narrow trails across his skin, imploring him for help, John half drew the sword twice before prudence drove it back each time. Horror started as a prickle on his lips and a weight on his limbs, drove inwards with every breath of the rank hot air, until it squeezed his heart like the dark pressure at the abyssal depths of the sea.
    “Nesim is in debt,” Dion whispered, falling back for a moment to walk beside John. “They will chop off feet of him, if he does not pay.”
    Pressing the hated headdress against his nose, John nodded. The huge pens stank. Within them, prisoners lay crammed together in their own ordure, sharing their misery and whatever comfort they might give one another. That was horrible enough, but then John noticed the edges of the pens were ringed with tiny cisterns in the shape of ovens. “The bad slaves, they go in there,” Dion explained. “No room. Very hot.”
    Cursed with a vivid imagination, John could almost feel it himself: the claustrophobia, the itching insanity of being unable to sit or stand, not even to move an inch; encased in a clay oven with the African sun crushing down like a tide of molten lava.
    From one of these cells a hand and arm had been thrust out into the comparatively cooler air of the main pit. With a wheedling speech in a tone that mixed servility with arrogance, Nesim smacked his stick down on top of a collection of other bruises visible on the pale arm. Dion said something in reply, and grudgingly the man unlocked and pulled the bars away, allowing them to lever out the semi-conscious form of Alfie Donwell.
    Stripped of most of his clothes, the thin shirt did not conceal the all encompassing burns. His face was so swollen from heat and thirst, so black with bruises that he could not open his eyes. When John stepped in and tried to get an arm over his shoulder, pull him upright, Donwell buckled in pain, whining like a kicked dog. Looking down, John saw that his beaten feet were leaving prints of blood on the sand.
    Nesim protested, violently slashing both Donwell and John himself with the cane. Turning to shield his lieutenant, John caught Higgins’ eye. As Nesim’s attention flickered between John and Dion, Higgins moved with cat-footed stealth behind the jailer’s back. “He say he did not know we meant this one,” Dion translated, his lip curling at the obvious lie. “He say he have some pretty young boy, just for you. Sweet like apricots. But for this one three hundred is not enough. He wants one thousand.”
    As Donwell leaned limply on him, John could feel the heaving breaths through his own ribs. The man’s burned skin was feverish against his own. He could feel too the thinness of the wrist he held, the skeletal lightness of the chest beneath his other arm. Donwell’s hair and ten day growth of beard stood out in heavy spikes, stiff with blood. John’s heart smoldered in his chest like one of the ovens, but the smoke of fury mingled with a perverse pride. They couldn’t tame you, could they? I thought as much. “Higgins,” he said.
    As Higgins’ pistol nudged him in the back, Nesim stiffened comically. “Explain his position to him, if you please,” John said. “I believe he has misunderstood my terms.”
    In the end it was far easier than John had feared. Clasping Nesim in a brotherly embrace that kept the concealed pistol pressed meaningfully into his spine, Higgins’ dumb eloquence proved persuasive.
    “Out through the graveyard, I think,” John instructed, lifting the long robe from Naftali’s shoulders and wrapping it around Donwell to conceal him. “There, he looks like just another dead slave. Nothing to worry about. Kelly, Naftali, you carry him. Dion, scout ahead. If the pistol in his back is not argument enough, I will also cover Nesim. Please tell him that if he opens his mouth, even to breathe, I will shoot.”
    Donwell made a terribly convincing corpse as they walked out