“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.
CHAPTER 29
“The meat will soon be cooked,” said Ulrich. “Then it will begin, the claiming.”
The giant nodded.
There was a tiny stirring beneath the table, to the giant’s left. There, beneath the table, head down, bent over, small, deliciously curved, her body oriented toward the center of the hall, her wrists bound together before her body, the right wrist bound over the left, the strand which had run from her bound wrists now taken back and used to fasten her crossed ankles together, knelt his slave, Yata.
He put one hand gently upon her.
She seemed afraid.
She whimpered.
“Be silent,” he said.
“Yes, Master,” she said.
He withdrew his hand.
He wondered why she was so afraid. She understands, perhaps better than I, he thought, the nature of this feast.
The fire in the fire pit, that long pit, was now sturdily ablaze.
The boar turned slowly, succulently, on the spit.
Its odor hung tantalizingly in the air.
But the men seemed dark, and tense.
Had it been another time and place, the giant thought, there might have been much fellowship in the hall, among such men.
But it was not so here, in this place, this Otung hall.