The Rosetta Codex Read Free Page A

care. But do it quick, whatever you do. We have to get the hell out of here.”
    â€œPlease,” the boy cried desperately. “Take me with you.”
    â€œHe’s just a boy,” the first voice repeated.
    He didn’t know which way it would go. His fingers were numb and started to slip.
    Then the boy felt a large hand grip his forearm, and he was pulled up and out of the water, the boat tipping as he was dragged in over the side. He scrambled the rest of the way into the boat and sprawled face up in the bottom, his breath ragged. The cold bright stars in the sky and the face of a woman looked down at him. He began to shiver violently. The oars creaked and dipped into the water, pulling, and the boat slowly picked up speed.
    No one spoke for a long time. The sounds of the slaughter receded until he heard nothing but harsh grunts, muttered curses, the steady splash of water. Still on the bottom of the boat, unable to move, he sensed they were safe.
    â€œWhat’s your name?” the woman asked.
    His mind tried to work through the cold and the shivering. Petros and the others had given him a name, and they had called him other things; but he had always kept his own name deep inside his heart. Now it was there for him to take on again, and he brought it forth.
    â€œCale.”
    The woman nodded. “That’s a good name.” She laid a blanket over him, tucked it in tight. “A strong name.”
    He didn’t feel strong. He felt very weak. But he was escaping, and he had his name back. The stars seemed even brighter now above him, shimmering in the black sky. Eyes of the night, someone had once told him. Cale closed his own eyes, and soon he was dreaming.

TWO
    Rain had been falling for days and the village roads ran with rust-colored mud. Cale sat at the window of his room watching the downpour in the gray afternoon light; mud and water flowed and swirled through ruts and sinkholes, over river rock and crushed gravel, streaming toward the lower end of the village. He was grateful for the respite from work that the storms provided. It had been almost three years since the night he dove into the water and convinced the fleeing attackers to take him with them, and six months since he’d arrived at this village. He no longer suffered the beatings and abuse that Petros and the others had inflicted, but the villagers worked him hard, and until the rain hadcome he had been perpetually exhausted. Scraping, sanding, and painting boat hulls; cleaning crustaceans and shellfish by the hundreds; digging pits for new latrines; hauling rocks from the dry riverbed an hour away and then working them into the roadways. Blisters, scrapes, and cuts; sore muscles, aching spine, and burning eyes.
    He looked across the road and up several huts, hoping to catch a glimpse of Aglaia. Pale yellow candlelight flickered in her bedroom window, then steadied. Shadows moved, and a dark shape filled the window for a moment, then she put her head out into the rain and looked at him. Before, he would have pulled back, but now he didn’t move and they stared openly and frankly at one another. She was older than he was, but that no longer intimidated him. Her hair was long and dark, almost black; her eyes were large, and as dark as her hair. Cale thought she was beautiful. Although they had been watching each other for weeks, exchanging furtive glances, or more rarely the long mutual appraisals such as this, they had never spoken—the villagers kept him away from the older girls, the younger women.
    A sound broke through the pouring rain, a kind of sucking and splashing. Cale turned to see a man straddling the back of an enormous four-legged animal, riding steadily up the muddy road and into the village. The man was clean-shaven and wore a wide-brimmed hat and a long, shiny black greatcoat that repelled the rain so intensely that it seemed to leap away from him. Several bulging leather satchels hung across the