The King

CHAPTER 28

“On your back, on the table, Filene,” said Ronisius, the severe officer.

Corelius, the young, blond officer, stood to one side.

The blonde rose quickly to her feet, from where she had been kneeling in her place in line, with the other girls, and took her place on the table, as ordered.

She glanced once at Corelius.

She wondered if he would be jealous at how swiftly she obeyed Ronisius.

It pleased her, of late, she had discovered, to obey, and promptly, at least men such as Ronisius. Too, stricter masters tend to be better obeyed. Too, she did not wish to feel his quirt. Her form of livestock, after all, assuming that he might regard her in that fashion, was not that of the horse, but of the woman. To be sure, in her case, as in that of others, assuming he viewed her as a domestic animal, as the others, he would permit no doubt, nor had she any, in his case, as to who was master. It pleased her to sense that Corelius envied Ronisius her obedience. She knew vaguely, deeply within her, despite what she would have preferred to tell herself, that she despised Corelius for his weakness.

“Put your head back,” said Ronisius, “over the back of the table.”

She obeyed.

Corelius, standing to one side, seemed angry.

Perhaps, she thought to herself, he is polite, he is gentle, he is kindly, he is tender, he is understanding, he is sensitive, because he knows that I am free, and he is my contact, the agent who must supply me with the dagger?

Else, if he thinks me a slave, why does he not treat me as a slave?

Is he so weak, she wondered.

She felt a light chain, in a leather sleeve, jerked about her neck, rudely, closely, and then snapped shut, locked.

She shuddered. It was the first time she had worn a collar, one not a portion of a chain, serving to fix her in place.

To the collar a metal disk was attached, which, in three languages, including a Herul pictograph, identified her as the property of the Telnarian empire, to be returned, if found, to the office of the provincial governor in Venitzia.

“You look pretty in a collar, Filene,” said Lysis, the supply officer.

“Thank you, Master,” she said.

How easily, how naturally, it now seemed to her that she used the word “Master” to men, and how appropriate, this frightening her, it had now begun to seem to her!

She could see, as her head was back, the ceiling of the preparation room, a vestibule of the slave shed.

She sensed that she could not slip the collar. It was on her well.

She was naked.

She felt two of the governor’s men pulling the fur sack up, beginning at the feet, about her body. It had a hood, and would be tied shut, about her neck.

She knew that she, and the other girls, were to be taken from Venitzia, out, somewhere, on sleds, into the winter, into the wilderness, and thus that the collars were a judicious mercantile precaution, not that one could count on their import being respected, no, not on the other side of the fence.

The heavy fur sack was pulled up, tightly, about her, and its drawstrings were tied about her neck. Then the hood was pulled up and adjusted, and it, too, was tied beneath her chin. There was a tiny clink from the metal disk on a bit of the chain, it exposed outside the leather, in the front, near the lock.

The porcine stockman, whose name was Qualius, from the bottom, pulled the sack down a little. He pressed down on her knees. Her legs straightened. Her feet were still several inches from the bottom of the sack. Such sacks come normally in but one size. She was not a large woman but one who was well turned, one with a body of the sort that could drive men mad with desire, one which would sell well in slave markets. She closed her eyes as Qualius moved his hands about, over her. Did he think she was a slave? She restrained herself, that she not lift her body within the furs to his touch. She opened her eyes when he was checking the knots, that at her throat, and that beneath her chin. There seemed about his lips the slightest trace of amusement. Had he detected her incipient movement within the sack? She desperately trusted not! She quickly turned her head in the hood, to the side, looking away from him. Once she had found herself yearning to press her cheek against the knee of Ronisius! And once, in the early morning hours, when she had been helpless at the foot of the barbarian’s bed on the Narcona, kneeling, tied to the bedpost, her mouth taped shut, she had squirmed, with strange sensations, and whimpered, and moaned, begging him to awaken, and yet fearing that he might. She did not know what was becoming of her.

Parts of her were stirring, and becoming so alive and meaningful that she dared not even think of them.

And yet they forced themselves upon her terrified consciousness.

What if I should yield to these feelings, she asked herself. What would I then be? What could I then be?

I would be so different, and yet my true self!

No, no, she wept to herself, I must not think such things! Oh, I must be given the dagger soon, I must do my work soon! Unknown colleague, make yourself known to me!

Qualius turned her about and lifted her, lightly, to his shoulder, her head to the rear, and carried her outside. She felt the cold, pure air of the Tangaran winter. A light snow was falling.

She was placed on a broad sled, her back against the backrest, in the single row, the last of five girls for that sled. The horse was already hitched to the sled. The sledsman, from Venitzia, once she was placed, drew the broad leather straps, two of them, fastened on the right as one would face the sled from the front, across the goods, and buckled them on the left. This arrangement was intended less as a custodial precaution than as one designed with the safety of the cargo, and the convenience of the drivers, in mind. In this fashion it was less likely that the goods, in the event of a rough trail, would be dislodged, or pitched, from the sled. Custodial arrangements, which might have been handled differently in benign weather, were now considered well satisfied by the goods’ lack of garmenture and the severity of the season. The wilderness, and the dangers of animals and others, too, added, so to speak, bars to their cages. Too, on the neck of each there was a collar and disk.

“I am afraid,” whispered one of the girls on the sled, when the sledsman had left. “They are going to take us into the wilderness.”

“They will use us as trade goods!” wept the girl the farthest to the blonde’s left.

“I do not understand. I do not understand,” said the girl closest to the one who had spoken.

“They will do with us as they want. We are slaves,” said the second girl to the blonde’s left.

“But I do not understand,” repeated the one closest to the girl on the left.

“I do not either,” she was told.

Phidias, captain of the Narcona, to the blonde’s surprise, was in the muddy, snowy yard.

There were better than twenty sleds in the yard, several which bore slaves, readied for transport, just as the blonde and her companions were. Most of the sleds, however, bore boxes, and tenting. There were also several horses to one side, pawing in the mud, fastened to a rope. Two treaded, armored vehicles were near the gate. And the canvas had been thrown back from two hoverers.

“The shuttle is ready to blast off,” a mariner informed Phidias.

Phidias nodded.

The Narcona was doubtless somewhere above, invisible in the morning sky, in orbit.

“When will the Narcona return to Inez IV?” one of the governor’s men inquired of the captain.

“Shortly,” said the captain.

The blonde looked wildly to the captain, and almost cried out to him. They could not, truly, be thinking of leaving without her!

The last of the slaves were now loaded, and secured. The blonde had been near the end of the line.

Some men were mounting.

The motor of the first treaded vehicle turned over, and then that of the second.

Several soldiers from Venitzia, in line, with rifles, emerged from a barracks at one end of the yard. Sledsmen finished hitching up several of the horses. One of the hoverers began to hum, and then the other.

Snow fell on her eyelashes.

She blinked.

Lysis, the supply officer, emerged from the slave shed. He wore furs and boots. The yard was muddy where men and horses trod, and white with snow about the edges.

“It is some mission to barbarians,” said one of the sledsmen to one of his fellows, some three gathered near the sled.

“I don’t like it,” said another.

“We are taking enough armament and force equipment to protect us from the Herul nation,” said another.

Lysis entered the first of the two treaded vehicles; the second, eventually, would bring up the rear. The hoverers, open to the air, would be used largely as scout craft. There were also two broad sleds, these drawn by four horses apiece, on which they could be transported, if needed, as fuel was inordinately precious.

“Mistress,” whispered the blonde to the girl at her left. The girl was not first girl, but it had been decided, after the blonde’s outburst in the slave shed, in which she had threatened, incomprehensibly to them, to buy and sell them all, that she must henceforth be as a slave to them all, as though they might be free persons, serving them with deference, and addressing them all as “Mistress.” At first she had, of course, haughtily refused to do so, but, in a day or two, she had begun to do so, desiring to be clothed and fed.

“Have you requested permission to speak?” inquired the girl to the left.

“May I speak, Mistress?” asked the blonde. How she hated to address a slave as “Mistress”!

“Perhaps.”

“Please!”

The other girl looked about. It might not do for them to be caught speaking to one another. They did not know. Speech had not been expressly forbidden to them, but, on the other hand, that privilege, that of conversing with one another, had not been explicitly accorded to them at the moment either.

“Very well,” she said.

“You were serving in the officer’s mess yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“The barbarian, the brute, he called Ottonius, has not returned, has he?”

“I do not think so.”

“Why are we leaving?”

“They are seeking him in the wild, it seems as part of an original mission. It is surmised he may have made contact with certain barbarians, Otungs. Thus, those, with perhaps the help of natives, Heruls or others, are to be sought, it being hoped to thusly make contact through them with the barbarian.”

The blonde lay back against the backrest.

“You may thank me for deigning to speak with you,” said the girl.

“Thank you, Mistress,” said the blonde. She said this deferentially, as it was cold, and she knew that later she would be terribly hungry, and would wish to be fed. Once she had used the appropriate words, but had spoken with the least tincture of some slight irony in her voice. She had then been seized and beaten. She had not made that mistake again. Her lesson had been well learned.

“You are welcome,” said the girl, dismissing her.

The giant metal gate of the yard was swung open, and the first treaded, armored vehicle, with Lysis now in its cab, rumbled out the gate. The two hoverers now rose into the softly falling snow, some twenty or thirty feet in the air, and then, some two hundred yards apart, soared away to the south. The first of the horse drawn sleds then, harness bells jangling, followed the treaded vehicle. Other sleds followed, several flanked by horsemen, with rifles. Sledsmen, with their vehicles, were generally on foot, often beside the horses, with rope quirts, but some were on runners, and some on what were, in effect, wagon boxes, some of these at the front of the vehicle, and others at the rear. Sledsmen mounted on the runners, or the wagon boxes, utilized whips, of various lengths, some coil whips, and others little more than light, supple rods.

The blonde’s sled was about a third of the way back in the line of vehicles.

There was a jerk and her sled moved. It slipped through the mud, which bubbled and squeaked beneath the runners; then, with a sudden scratching, startling her, it rode over some gravel; then, in a few moments, it was outside the gate, and running smoothly on snow.

In some fifteen minutes they were through the charged wires, which served as the walls of Venitzia.

Corelius was captain of one of the hoverers, and Ronisius of the other. Neither hoverer could now be seen. As visibility was decreasing they would doubtless soon rejoin the column, setting the hoverers down on the sleds designed to carry them. Qualius, the porcine stockman, was in the second armored vehicle, which would bring up the rear of the column.

Snow was falling more heavily now.

The blonde moved a little inside the fur sack. It was soft, and warm, and, within it, she was quite comfortable. Outside it, of course, she would be naked, and helpless, in the Tangaran winter.

Who is my confederate, wondered the blonde. Why has he not made himself known to me? Is he even on this world, and, if not, what might that mean for me?

What if some terrible mistake might be made?

I have no way to prove that I am a free woman, an aristocrat, even a patrician, of the senatorial class! I could be taken for a slave girl. I could be given away, as a gift, on a provincial world. I might have to remain here, forever, as a chattel of barbarians.

But the blonde knew that the ideal place for her work to be accomplished was the wilderness, that, surely, into which she was now being taken.

This must be part of a plan, but what if it was not?

Surely the deed should not take place in Venitzia, under the jurisdiction of the provincial governor, where she might be simply taken as a murderess, and executed, or returned to Inez IV, under secure guard, with affidavits, to be tried there, and then doubtless to suffer the same fate. No, the wilderness was the place, she thence, after the deed, to be whisked away to safety, perhaps in some hoverer, or armored vehicle, to some secret rendezvous with the shuttle, and thence to a second rendezvous, that with the Narcona, in orbit, and thence to return to civilization, and new-found wealth, position and power.

She heard a jangle of spurs to her right and a soldier, riding there for a moment, looked down upon her.

She looked up.

How men looked at women they thought to be slaves, she thought.

Her face, startled, exquisite, was almost hidden, framed in the furred hood.

He seemed a handsome fellow. In the last few weeks she had become acutely conscious of such things.

She squirmed a little, in the sack, under the two broad leather belts, one above her knees, the other about her waist. He spurred away.

“You learn quickly, Cornhair, slave slut,” said the girl next to her.

The blonde was startled. Then she said, deferentially, “Yes, Mistress.”

“Beware, slave girl,” said the other. “You are a slave, and men may call your tease, and have exactly what, and anything, they want of you.”

“Yes, Mistress,” whispered the blonde, deferentially.

The blonde then squirmed down in the warm sack. She turned her head, brushing away the snow on her eyelashes, against the edge of the hood. Within the sack she was conscious of her nudity, which she gathered could set men afire, and she reluctantly sensed, as though from afar, how she herself might be set similarly afire, how she might be swept up, like a sheet of begging flame, helplessly, in passions so fierce, so intense, so irresistible, that she had always denied, hitherto, that they could exist.

She thought she sensed then how it might be that a slave could crawl to a man, begging.

I will buy and sell all of them, she told herself.

Within the fur, she clutched the disk on its chain, on her throat. She jerked at it. It was on her, like the chain. She could not remove it.

I wonder what it would be like, she thought, to be truly a slave girl.

The column continued on its way. The sky was darker now. Snow continued to fall.