Work Text:
Gothmog rolls a cigar for himself, thick as a finger, and lights it.
“Ye can have one, if you like.” This, with a gesture at the leafy heap, the rolling paper.
Larsen shuffles forward. Stops short. He doesn’t know how to roll a cigar, and the chief must know that.
“Clever lad.”
(Laughter.)
Larsen’s never been called clever in his life. With his father dead in the ground, his mother put him on a boat leaving Sweden. He liked to kill rats there, across the sick green sea. Was good at killing rats, and is rather better, now, at chasing down grey-backed slaves.
Larsen does not consider what his mother, reduced to filmy daguerreotype in the pocket of his better (and only other) coat, would say to see her son’s America. He does not even know if she still lives.
Goodley and Harris and the rest are here. (The laughter.) Gothmog blinks across them, a shepherd counting sheep.
“Pay up,” he says.
Harris bet on Lem. Goodley on Lem. Larsen on Lem. Gothmog on Big Red, which is why they owe him back their wages now.
Larsen imagines arguing. Turning on his heel. Snatching the cigar, crushing it under his heel.
A little shiver of fear runs through him, tantalizing. He took away Red’s heel of bread at Goodley’s prompting and did what he imagines now. Then Goodley nodded, and Larsen said,
Pick it up and eat it
And Red did.
(Gothmog would kill him.)
They all wait, now. What are their orders? Larsen envies Connors, Raleigh, Elliot, all working on the railroad. When did the air get so close here? And now he’s had to go and give his gold back, because the betting was a sight too high.
“Keep on eye on the Soldier,” Gothmog says. That’s all. Doesn’t so much as mention Red. Why does Larsen want him to? Why does he want Gothmog to talk, to drip savage honey, to tell them all about the shameful secrets Red hides?
Gothmog brought him here and Larsen saw. Gothmog put a nasty scrap of metal straight into the slave’s mute mouth. Turned the slave’s back to them, raked like something had gnawed and slashed it.
When Larsen saw his face, the mask gone, the sick thrill was for the fact that Red wasn’t very much older than he was.
But Red isn’t human no more. Not a man. Larsen is a working man, and even if he isn’t on the railroad, he will earn back his gold.
(Why won’t Gothmog say anything else? Why does he give two stones for the battered grey Soldier?)
“Get stepping,” Harris says. Goodley’s quiet, close-lipped grin reveals nothing. They head to their quarters, away from Gothmog’s private room.
“What in hell,” Larsen sighs. For once, no one teases him over his accent. No one treats him like the nearest thing to a dog. That is why men have to have slaves, this side of the water.
They don’t know much about kings.