“Gamble for them,” said Abrogastes, laughing.
No sooner had he spoken than several of the men who had brought in the rings began to distribute dice among the tables. Another, with the heel of his boot, scraped a small circle, some three feet in diameter, outside of, and before, the larger, ditched circle. In another instant another of the men had reached over the ditch and seized one of the women by the hand and dragged her from her knees into the ditch and out of it, unceremoniously, and put her on her feet, in the smaller, just-scraped circle, in front of the ditched circle. He held her small wrists together, pinioned over her head, in one hand, and turned her about. Dice rattled on the boards.
“What of that one?” called a man, indicating Huta, who shuddered.
“Let the hound have her!” called another.
Those who scored the highest in the first roll of the dice rolled again, and so on, until a winner was established.
“Twenty!” called a fellow.
“Twenty-two!” cried another.
Abrogastes, standing upon the dais, seemed bemused by the gambling.
“What of the slut, Huta!” cried a man.
The first of the former ladies of the empire was soon won and was put down upon her hands and knees and hurried, by a boy’s switch, to her new master. She screamed, for it was an insectoidal creature, alien to mammals.
‘’You, quickly, to the circle!’’ cried one of the men to another of the former ladies of the empire and she, weeping, scrambled down into the ditch, and then up, out of it, and put herself in the smaller circle, and, once again, the dice danced, scattering about, on those broad, rough planks.
“Stand straight!” said a man. “Turn!”
“Do not leave the circle without permission or you die,” said another.
“Let me cut the throat of the abettor of treason, Huta,” said a man.
“No!” cried another.
The second of the former ladies of the empire, indeed, former high ladies of the empire, though perhaps we should now speak of them indiscriminately as slaves, for none, in her new condition was more than any other slave, any rural maid caught in the horseman’s noose, any fleeing, netted debtress, to be sentenced to a slave brothel, any scullery thrall, any dirty-faced guttersnipe who, rounded up by the police in the alleys of some teeming metropolis, her days of vagrant parasitism abruptly concluded, was then sold. She was won by Granicus, whose snout now was moist, and beaded with sweat, and, in an instant, she was thrust beneath his table, to be tethered there by an aide, by the neck, the leash tied to one of the supports of the table, to crouch there, fearfully, amongst gold and other possessions, at her master’s massive, leather-beribboned, clawed feet. And already Granicus scattered the dice from his mighty paw, for another woman, a brunette, on all fours, cowered within the tiny circle. And another woman was summoned forth, into the ditch, bells jangling, and then up, slipping at its side, to take a designated position, on all fours, near the circle, to be the next won.
“Huta!” cried a man.
“Huta!” cried another, howling it out.
Abrogastes seemed not to hear.
A fellow came from behind a table, bearing a double-headed war ax. “See the scale, mighty Abrogastes!” he cried. “It points to death!” He brandished his ax over Huta, who trembled beneath its heavy, tapered edge. A blow from such an implement can cut a shield in two. “I am your cousin, noble Abrogastes,” said he. “Do not give her to the dogs! Let me have her first, piece by piece! I shall begin at the left ankle!”
“No!” cried a fellow, his sword half-drawn.
“She danced well,” said another man.
“She abetted treason!” said the fellow who had earlier asserted this charge, one which surely none in conscience would care to dispute.
“Kill her!” said another.
“Her body is not without interest,” observed one of the more civilized of the guests.
“I know markets in which she would bring a good price,” said a merchant, Cang-lau, of Obont, he who had, incidentally, in a series of masked transactions, and at considerable risks to his shipping interests, from imperial inspectors and patrols, arranged for the delivery, from the client world of Dakir, via putatively neutral Obont, of the Telnarian rifles.
“Kill her!” repeated he who had cried out before.
“I will give you a ruby for her, a Glorion ruby!” called out a man. Such rubies are the size of a man’s fist.
Huta’s heart leapt.
She had value!
“Kill her! Cut her throat!” screamed a fellow.
Another woman, in the background, the brunette, was gambled for, and won. She went to a man, to whom she hastened eagerly, on all fours. Another was then put in the small circle, and another, bells jangling, brought to the place of readiness.
“Death is too good for her!” called a fellow. “Let her be the slave she is!”
“Slavery! Slavery!” cried a man.
“Keep her as a slave!” called another.
“Put the collar on her, Abrogastes!”
“Sell her!”
Were men so foolish, Huta wondered, to think that, for a woman, death was preferable to slavery. Did they know so little of women? Did they not realize, so many of them, the sweet, simple fools, why women made such perfect slaves?
“Kill her! Cut her throat!”
“Put her on a slave block!”
Huta pressed her tiny body into the rush-strewn dirt, terrified, while these cries rang about her.
She was, in legality, already a slave.
Too, she had begun to sense, deeply, the wonder of chains, and the whip, and obedience, and subjection to the master. She had begun to sense what it might be to be under discipline, with its identities, with its realities, its perils and ecstasies. Already a profound transformation of her consciousness had begun to come about. From puberty on, in its own inexorable time of unfolding maturations, of insights and intuitions, she had begun to suspect, and to be aware of dim mechanisms within her, genetic preparations, latent responses, awaiting longed-for, releasing stimuli, biological destinies and fittingnesses. She had begun to long for the unswerving master beast to whom her desirability and beauty would be categorically and uncompromisingly subject. Even as a girl, frightened and resistant, she had unaccountably begun to long for the mighty master of her dreams, the man before whom she could never be more than an eager, impassioned slave. She had begun to sense, you see, what it might be to be truly free to feel, and to be sexually free, truly, wildly and helplessly, as no woman can be who is not subject to command, and to love and serve, as she must, and as no free woman could.
In the background women were being gambled for, and won.
“Like this!” cried the fellow who was the cousin of Abrogastes, driving his ax into the dirt not more than an inch from Huta’s left ankle.
She screamed.
He looked up at Abrogastes, eagerly.
But Abrogastes seemed to give him no attention.
Another woman was forced into the tiny circle, on down upon her knees, and a fellow, his hand in her hair, bent her backward.
Well was she displayed.
Numbers were called out.
“She is a beauty, milord,” said the clerk.
“Yes,” said Abrogastes.
“Milord!” protested the cousin of Abrogastes.
“What of Huta?” called men.
“Throw her to the dogs!” called a man.
“Sell her!” demanded another, clutching a bag of coins, yet was not each, now, at those tables, rich? Had not Abrogastes, and the coffers of the Drisriaks, seen to that?
“Put her on the slave block!” called a man.
“Sell her to the highest bidder!” called another.
“Kill her! Kill her!” cried others.
Huta’s body shook with terror and tears.