“See how she is dressed!” exclaimed the woman in the pant-suit.
“That is called a keb,” said the minor officer.
The officer of the court felt weak.
“You would think,” said the woman in the pantsuit, “that she would at least have been permitted some form of slave tunic.”
“But she is at the stake,” said the minor officer.
There are many varieties of slave tunics. They are commonly light, sleeveless, quite short, one-piece garments, open from the hem to the waist on both sides, thus scarcely a tunic, no more, really, than a scandalously brief, revealing rag.
But the girl was not in such a garment, one so comparatively modest.
She was in a different form of garment, that called the keb. The garment, before it is worn, resembles a long, narrow sash. The material of this keb was a loosely woven gray corton. It is put on the slave by first haltering her breasts, snugly, the knot behind her back. The long, dangling end is then taken down, behind her back, and up, snugly, between her legs. There it is held at the waist with one hand while the other takes the continuing free end about the body. When the free end has circled her body, it is passed about the portion which was being held, holding it in place, and is then tied.
“How dreadful a garment,” said the woman in the pantsuit, approvingly.
“Yes,” whispered the officer of the court.
Yet the garment was not, really, too different from the intimacies which she herself wore beneath her “same garb,” only there, down there on the sand, of course, the woman was publicly so revealed.
The keb, of course, can be fastened on a slave in a variety of manners. For example, it need not be used to conceal the beauties of her breasts. It may simply be wrapped about the hips, and tucked in. An advantage of the keb, too, of course, is that it may serve a variety of purposes when not on the slave, such as hooding her, blindfolding her, gagging her, binding her, and such. Too, it might be remarked that it may be used as a sling for the carrying of burdens.
“You understand, of course,” said the minor officer, addressing the woman in the pantsuit, “that she would not be in even the keb at the stake, if this were not a civilized pleasure cruise.”
“Ah!” said the woman in the pantsuit, delightedly.
“Doubtless you are concerned for her,” said the minor officer, smiling.
“No,” said the woman in the pantsuit. “She is only a slave.”
The officer of the court, trembling, looked down to the sand.
Janina, who seemed frightened, and perhaps had never been at the stake before, clung to the metal of the pipe, pressing herself fearfully against it, the palms of her small hands, too, up, against the metal.
“Any ladies who care to do so may now leave,” suggested Pulendius, considerately.
But not a woman stirred in the tiers.
Pulendius smiled.
The officer of the court felt weak.
Pulendius turned to the barbarian, and, with his hand, indicated the girl at the pipe. “What do you
think of her?”
“She is merely another slave,” said the barbarian.
Janina moved a little, her chains making a tiny sound against the pipe.
“I do not understand,” said Pulendius.
“Like these others,” said Ortog, prince of the Drisriaks, king of the Ortungen, waving his hand toward the tiers.
Women shrank back. Many cried out in rage, in protest. Even men cried out, in anger.
“You let your slaves out of their collars,” said the barbarian.
“Those are free women!” cried Pulendius, as though offended.
“At best, slaves,” said Ortog, his arms folded across his chest.
“Absurd!” cried Pulendius.
Ortog then turned toward the young naval officer, he with the three purple cords at his left shoulder.
“Let them kneel before true men, and learn to be women,” said Ortog.
The young naval officer met his gaze dispassionately.
The officer of the court put her hand to her breast. How conscious was she then of the intimate garments she had concealed beneath her “same garb,” beneath the “frame-and-curtain.”
“Hinak!” called Pulendius, angrily.
Hinak came forth, half bent, his hands ready, toward the center of the sand.
The barbarian assumed a similar position.
They began to circle one another.
“Wait! Separate!” said Pulendius.
The contestants backed away from one another.
The door had opened, you see, that main door leading into the hold, and a minor officer had entered. He hurried about the ring, before the tiers, and spoke quickly, seemingly urgently, certainly confidentially, to the captain. The young naval officer watched, curiously.
The barbarian, too, interestingly, observed this intrusion.
In a moment the captain rose, and turned to the crowd. “Forgive me,” he said, smiling. “It is nothing. There is a small matter to attend to.” He then left, followed by the first officer and the minor officer, he who had just entered that section of the hold.
“Please continue,” said the second officer, he now of highest rank in the room.
“Begin!” said Pulendius to the contestants in the ring.
In a moment all attention was returned to the contest.
Madly was beating the heart of the officer of the court. She had never understood anything could be so real, so meaningful. Here, on the sand, knelt a girl, scarcely clad, a helpless prize, chained to a pipe, the stake. There, on the sand, men prowled about, eyeing one another, in a combat that might well issue in death for one of them.
A strange, wild, primitive dimension of possible existences opened up then before the startled, expanded imagination of the officer of the court, vistas of terrifying battles and rude kingdoms, with savage ways, vistas of huts and shelters, of halls and tents, of pavilions and palaces, of fortresses and castles, within which men were men and women, women, totally so, and other vistas, too, vistas of green leaves, and rocks, and the feel of wet earth beneath bare feet, vistas of dark forests, of the weaving of coarse cloths, of the cooking by open fires, of waiting anxiously, hopefully, for the hunters to return, vistas of truth and reality she had suspected, but had scarcely admitted could exist. How far away then seemed the dusty tomes of the law, the tedium of litigation, the procedures of the courts, the endless, meaningless trivialities of protocol, civility and discourse, which things seemed then but the remote semblance of a reality, a reality always somewhere else. There was reality here, the reality of the growth of crops, rising out of the moist earth, of rainfall, and storms, of the truths of animals, and of men and women. She had never realized the nature of reality before, that it was not documents and legalities, and banal conversation, and pretense, and hypocrisy, but that it was different, that it was as hard, and perfect, and as natural, and as simple, and as uncompromising, as wood, and stone, and iron and steel. The true world, the unsheltered world, was as real, she suspected, as a coiled rope or a diaphanous, clinging sheet of silk, as real as a weighty golden coin or the leather of a whip.