Time Slave

26

By the Dirt People Hamilton had not been fed well. Too, she had been worked hard and long, ordered from the kennel shortly before dawn, thrust back within it, and locked within it, after dusk. She, and Ugly Girl, who had escaped when the gaunt man had secretly come for her, before the attack of the Weasel People, had been fed on barley cakes and water, and roots pushed through an opening in the kennel gate, after dark, which they had found on the straw and eaten. She had also, when she could, stolen apples. Once, detected, the young, dark-haired girl, now the slave-by-capture of the Weasel People, had, ordering her to remove her long, woolen garment in the brush, beaten her unmercifully with a supple switch. She had not dared to resist, not wanting to die. She had not stolen apples thereafter. She had done her work with the digging stick, and carrying water to the fields, well. But her diet, actually, had not been much different from, or too inferior to, that of the Dirt People themselves. They were less well nourished, at this early stage of agriculture, than the surrounding hunters, whose diet included the fats and concentrated proteins of fresh meat; and were inferior in physical stature to the hunters; and were less self-reliant and were mentally slower than the hunters, and more prone to superstition and fear, the latter properties perhaps functions, in part, of their inferior nourishment, with its attendant psychological consequences, and their greater dependence upon factors beyond their control for their livelihood, in particular the weather and temperatures of the seasons. Thus it was perhaps not surprising that the shamans, wizards and priests exercised more power among the Dirt People, and their kind, than among hunters. Yet, if their men were physically smaller, more bent by labor and inferior diet, than hunters, their women were not always, to hunters, without interest. It was not unknown for hunters to come down upon such communities to kill their animals and strip and lead away, tethered, the more interesting of their daughters. Hamilton knew that her own people, the Men, might well have raided the Dirt People, slaughtering sheep, and carrying off, for their slaves, the best of their women; surely they would have at least taken the dark-haired girl and the wench, proud, raped, who had attempted to conceal herself in the barley; but Hamilton did not believe they would have slaughtered the Dirt People, as had the men of the Weasel People; the Men, she did not believe, would not have indiscriminately slaughtered, certainly not the weak, the old, the children, the less desirable females; the Men would simply have left the less comely of the females free; they would not have wanted them; only the wrists of the most beautiful would have been bound behind their backs for the return trek to the shelters; only they would have been coffled; only they would have been taken for slaves; only on the necks of the most beautiful would the Men have deigned to tie the leather collar that marked its lovely wearer as their slave. The men of the Dirt People would not have been injured, unless, perhaps, they had dared to resist. There was little honor in a Hunter slaying a man of the Dirt People, or of that type. Such an act would not entitle a boy, for example, to enter the Men’s Cave, any more than the slaughter of a sheep or the killing of a female. Accordingly, the Men would, presumably, had they known of the Dirt People, and been interested in them, raided them in darkness, taking what animals and women they pleased, leaving the rest. The Dirt People might have awakened to find sheep killed and carried away, and some of the village girls missing; that would have been all. This was not because the Men would have feared the Dirt People, but because they did not wish to bother overly much with them. Later, Hunters would impose tribute on the small agricultural communities, letting them survive, taking from them a levy of produce, animals and, annually, a female or two; but, unmolested, permitted to survive and thrive, in time the agricultural peoples would accumulate the numbers to withstand the hunters, and, eventually, to resist them. Then, over the period of millennia, patiently, felled tree by felled tree, acre by spreading acre, the defeat of the hunters would be wrought. The hunters would be gone; the priest and the wizard would triumph; the bow and the spear would be exchanged for the hoe, and the horizon for barley.

But this would not come about for thousands of years. This was, and would remain for hundreds of generations, the time of the hunters. They were not yet dead. Gunther, Hamilton recalled, had conjectured, in a bare room in Rhodesia, under a dim light bulb, that perhaps the hunters were not dead; that perhaps they only slept, and might awake; Herjellsen had told her, Turn their eyes to the stars; but Herjellsen was mad; and she had not understood him. How could she turn their eyes to the stars; what could she do in such matters; she could do nothing; and why should man turn his eyes to the stars; the stars were far away; the journey was long and cold; Earth was the home of man; let him stay at home; let him be happy; there was much to do on Earth; one might always, sometime, look to the stars; do not think of the stars, for now. The hoe waits; the barley must be planted.

Hamilton recalled that the men of the Weasel People ate human flesh. She wondered if that was why the men of the Weasel People had killed so indiscriminately, to obtain food. It was a law of the Men that this not be done. This was one of the laws, Old Woman had told Hamilton, which had been made by Spear. He had made many laws. He was a giver of laws. Spear is a great man, had said Old Woman, though he had killed Drawer, whom Old Woman had loved, when he could no longer hunt, when he had grown blind and was old. But Hamilton did not think that the men of the Weasel People had killed so indiscriminately because they wished food. She had seen them. They had enjoyed themselves. It had given them pleasure. Hamilton supposed then that perhaps the men, her masters, though the thought made her shudder, were not too different. She supposed they, too, had their blood been aroused, in a similar situation, might have enjoyed killing, the ugly carnival of it, the sport; in all humans, she knew, there was a terribleness, the ecstasy of carnage, the joy of ferocity, the joy of the biting lion; but even then she did not think they, the Men, would have killed so indiscriminately, not the weak, the old, the females, for they were the Men; had they chosen to raid in the light, in a game of war, of intraspeciflc aggression, they might, she conjectured, have slain the males of the Dirt People had it pleased them to do so, had they offered resistance; but she thought rather they would prefer simply to make them grovel and while they knelt trembling, to tie their best women and take them away from them; it was not the killing that the Men would have wanted, for there was little honor in killing so miserable a foe, but the victory, the demonstration of their will, their dominance; “We are taking your women, and tying them and leading them away,” might have said Spear; “We want them and thus we are taking them.”; they would not have wanted the blood of the Dirt People, for they would have despised them, only their humiliation, and their best women; they would hate the Dirt People and would have, thus, enjoyed making their females their total slaves; and, too, Hamilton smiled to herself, and knew in the secret heart of her, the ancient heart, the heart in the blood of her, which had never been irradicated, not even by her studies or the civilization in which she had been raised, that the captive females, bound, led away, would have then, in spite of their superficial crying out, weeping, have experienced a strange, wild, surgent elation, knowing by the thongs that bound them that they were now the slave-brides of men mightier than those of their kind, that they were now, helpless, doomed to feel mighty arms about them, from which they could not escape, strong, rough hands on their pitching bodies, arrogantly forcing them to climax after climax; and that they would be forced to serve as rightless wenches; and would be forced, too, in time, to bear the children of their mighty masters, that the Men, that group, might increase and wax great. How eagerly, soon, in their thongs, being led to servitude and ravishment, they would have followed their masters, the hunters. Hamilton threw back her head and laughed. She knew herself, she, too, Hamilton, was a slave of the men. Her veneers of culture, the eroding crusts of her conditioning, the slimes, the sick varnishes, the cosmetics, the concealing, confining garments of an antigenetic, diseased civilization had been stripped from her. They had been stripped from her by a man called Tree, leaving her naked, and a female.

She closed her eyes, and felt the forest breeze on her body. She imagined returning to Tree, and the joy of being taken in his arms, and carried to the recesses of his cave, and being hurled to the furs in its shadows and him bending over her, and, first, swiftly, knotting about her neck the necklace of the Men, the thongs, claws and shells and then, that done, unhesitantly and ruthlessly inflicting the might, the power, of his will on her beauty; she smiled to herself, thinking, if only to prolong her pleasure, of trying to resist him; how amusing he would find that; then, when he tired of her game, he would force her to yield herself, regardless of her will, totally to him; he would rip from her what control he had, until then, permitted her to retain, and, in torrents of sensation, she would find herself then his shrieking prize, and nothing more. Hamilton stumbled. She was weak. She felt fevered. The diet and the exhaustion of the village of the Dirt People told upon her. Her eyes suddenly failed to focus. A strange smell came to her nostrils. She turned about, suddenly, startled. On the trail, behind her, some ten yards away, was a short, broad, squat, thick-legged shape. The eyes were large, the chin receding, the hair like greased string, black. It was a woman, a mature female, of the Ugly People. She carried a bone, a femur.

Hamilton backed away from her, her hand out. The woman did not approach her.

A large hand, immensely strong, closed on the back of Hamilton’s neck. It was like a vise. She felt the thumb and fingertips, like blunt gouges, deep in her neck; she could not move her head, or turn; the woman approached her; then she felt herself, a captive, turned about; she looked into the broad, heavy face of a male of the Ugly People; it was the first of the males of the species she had seen; the face was incredibly broad and swarthy, the eyes, black, large, set back, beneath heavy brows, the chin receding; the face, powerful, seemed, at once to her, simian and intelligent; it frightened her; he was short legged, round-shouldered, long armed; he was only five and a half feet in height but his body, not fat, was heavy and thick, heavy boned and deep chested; it weighed nearly three hundred pounds; he was not human; be was of the Ugly People; she whimpered; she felt herself, by the back of her neck, lifted from her feet, as a small, sleek animal might be lifted; the arm which lifted her was long, longer than that of a human, and much heavier; the bones within she knew could be as large as twice the width of the comparable human bone; a gorilla might have lifted her as did the male of the Ugly People; then he put her to her feet, bent partly over; he regarded her head, which had been shaved by the Dirt People, with interest. He turned to the woman and together they spoke. Hamilton would have found it difficult to repeat the sounds. It was swift, their speech, and it was not human. “Please,” wept Hamilton. Then he took her, by the back of the neck, to the side of the trail. He put her head down across a rock, holding it there. Her left cheek pressed hard against the rock; his left hand, by the back of the neck, held her in place. She saw the woman regarding her; too, she saw the face of the man regarding her. In their faces she saw disgust. “Please!” she wept. She understood, trembling, that they found her repulsive. In the right hand of the male was a stone ax, its head bound with leather, hafted in a stout shaft, a foot in length. “I will do anything,” she cried. “Don’t hurt me!” But she saw only disgust in their faces. “No!” she cried. “Please, no!” She wept. “I will serve your pleasure,” she cried. “I will lay for you! Turtle will kick for you!” She slipped from English to the language of the Men, both unintelligible to her captors. Sick, she realized that the one shield, her sex, her beauty, which might protect her from death at the hands of human males was now of no avail. The leopard had its claws, the hawk its wings, the deer its fleetness, the human male his strength, the human female her beauty; but the beauty of the human female was useless save against the masculine predators of her own species; it might disarm a human male, he being moved to keep her as his slave, should she beg piteously enough, and perform instinctual servile submission behaviors, tears, smiles, grovelings, mouth and hand caresses, rather than slaying her, but against a male of the Ugly People the very lineaments of her beauty, her slender, lovely legged, subtle voluptuousness, so different from that of his own females, she could see, produced only repulsion. “No!” she cried. “Please!” The ax lifted. Her head was pressed down on the rock; the huge hand held her by the neck; she could not move. “Please, no!” she cried. The head of the ax, in falling, with the strength of the male of the Ugly People, she knew, would dash through her skull, like a hammer through an egg, the stone striking even against the stone on which her head was held. “Please, no!” she wept. The ax, she knew, was at the height of its arc. “No!” she cried. “No!”

Suddenly, piercing, shrill, she heard, fierce, imperative, a cry. And a head thrust itself between her and the ax. She felt a girl’s arms about her. The ax lowered, slowly. The fingers of the great hand removed themselves from her neck. Hamilton felt Ugly Girl kiss her. “Ugly Girl,” she wept, then lost consciousness.