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.