The bidding began about noon.
A pair of Yllumite girls went first, sniveling, and a piece from Marsak next. Bandar began to be troubled. He led his prize forward and called out at the crowd. Had they no eyes for beauty—such a face, such limbs and breasts . . . and so meek. Had they ever seen so pliable and genteel a woman? She was built for pleasure.
It displeased him intensely that they still hung back. It never occurred to him that she might be too beautiful, too exquisite to appeal.
At last a big rough man came pushing through the crowd. He was tall for a Thaddrian, and heavily constructed, but under his matted hair showed a gold collar, and he wore a mantle of good cloth.
“You, sir. I see you understand the refinements—”
“Stop your squawking, merchant. I’ll take her. Here’s three bars.”
“That won’t do, my lord. This girl’s worth much more. Look at this straight spine. Think of the boys you can get on her—”
“Three bars are my last offer. You’ll be offered no better.”
No one bid against him. Bandar began to have suspicions that the lout was bandit stock, secreted in Tumesh, on the proceeds of his garnered wealth, since Amrek’s forays in the mountains. At last, with ungraceful resignation, he sold his wares and took the measly payment.
“What’s her name?”
“Silukis,” snapped Bandar.
“Seluchis,” said the man, corrupting the name at once with his Thaddrian-Zakorian slur.
Bandar, even his mother affronted now, thrust the girl into the brute’s keeping and wished them both ill of each other as he pocketed the silver bars.
His name was Slath, and he had made his money in robbery, as Bandar supposed, and also in hiring himself out as a cutthroat to the various lords of Thaddra. He bought the girl because she represented a form of elusive culture. He had seen it sometimes in old wall paintings in the ruined city of Rarnammon, where occasionally he holed up when things were uncomfortable for him. He was a romantic villain, and impulsive, and he knew he had made a mistake with her as soon as he got her into his house.
He gave her some wine and meat nevertheless, which she scarcely touched, and afterward he took her to his bedroom. She was as dull in that as in everything. Slath liked a woman with some spirit—a grunting bandit mare or a clever whore who pretended.
“A pleasure slave are you, by Zarduk! You’ll have to try harder than that.”
He reduced her position. She swept out hearths and carried water. After three days he whipped her for her negligence. She was simple and he had been cheated. She did not even wail and weep at his blows. He contemplated the blood trickling down her satin back. She was useless, fit only to be looked at. He held off the lash then and considered another possibility—perhaps some Thaddrian lord would buy her. She would look good beside a supper table in some little kingdom—a king’s ornament. Slath hung up his whip and sent one of his aides running for a salve.
There was a lord in the jungle forest, many miles northward. Slath had been meaning to hire out to him, if he wanted men. Slath disliked being long idle and, besides, had a certain reputation among his kind which would stand him in good stead. The lord was a great one for conquest, he had heard, a man of vague beginnings, like all lords in Thaddra it seemed, who had built his power from a store of treasure and gold, displaced the petty king and thereafter annexed five other kingdoms. Such a one offered good pickings. His shadow had been growing for years.
Slath did not travel light but with servants, to show his essential rank. After four days’ riding they reached one of the nameless rivers of Thaddra and poled upstream into the thick wet gloom of the forest.
At this time Slath kept his girl Seluchis on his own craft, under a shady awning, and tried to see to it that she was well fed. She sat like a statue, never moving, and seldom ate. He had not laid a finger on her since that first time. He pampered the bitch; nevertheless, he expected she would lose her looks, damn her. Somehow she did not. She seemed unaware of the languid heat, and once he observed a butterfly settle undisturbed on her wrist for nearly an hour. On the whole she made him uneasy, and he would be glad to be rid of her.
They were five days on the river. On the sixth there was a challenge. Slath, who had once bought a certain password in the ruined city, with a knife, was conducted from the creeper-grown jetty to a hacked-out jungle road.
By evening they had reached the walls of a large Thaddrian town with, clustered about them, an overspill of rough hide tents and wooden huts. Cook fires spangled the dusk, and in the untidy streets dogs ran and women stared. At the far end of the town rose the Guardian’s palace, a three-towered mansion of stone.
Astaris raised her head to look at it. It seemed to have some meaning for her, though what, she could not understand as it reared out of the twilight of her brain. For some time past there had been a curious glimmering, a disturbance in her mind, as if he were there, alive once again. But this could not be. She had felt his passing from her, and comprehended it. Raldnor. She suffered the false expression of his life in her, therefore, as if suffering the pain of a long-healed wound, something which stirred without reason, and for which nothing could be done.
In the wild garden at the palace’s foot ruby blossoms drooped and ruby birds slept. One of the blossoms opened its petals and flew away into the forest.
It was an old palace, rough built but strong. There were massive but unornamented pillars in the great hall, and a smoke hole in the roof to serve the fire pit, there being no hearth.
Slath was well received, given a couple of no-more-than-average drafty cells for himself and his servants and promised an audience after dinner with the lord Hmar. Slath used the hour before dinner well, strolling about among the gaudy hangings and the snarling dogs, casually questioning here and there. When the meal was served, he found himself at one of the lower tables, and the food was plain but good. No one began their meat, however, until the lord was seated at his upper place.
Slath observed him closely and with a practical cunning. Hmar was a thin, oddly elegant man in his middle years. He ate with a niceness not common to the lords of Thaddra and seemed to expect those at his high table to do likewise; for the first time in a decade, Slath took care with his food. The face of Hmar was strange. It was like brown polished bone, of light complexion for a Thaddrian, and it gave nothing away—except, that was, for the eyes. They were narrow and flickering. They seemed in an eternal motion of search as if he quested for someone in the hall, some visitor he expected might be there at any moment. Slath recognized them as the eyes of a man in fear or very great unease.
And there had been talk. Slath had heard that Hmar had claimed, once or twice, to be the son of a goddess.
On the whole, Slath was pleased with the two aspects of Lord Hmar. If he was afraid, a little unbalanced, he would appreciate a strong and ruthless man to protect him, and, if he was so elegant, he would appreciate also the man’s slave.
He noticed then the woman standing at Hmar’s shoulder.
A swarthy Thaddrian, short and wide-hipped, with wiry black hair constrained in two plaits that fell below her waist. No woman in Thaddra or Zakoris would sit by her lord at table except the King’s High Queen at Hanassor. To stand at his side showed rank enough.
“Who’s the girl at the lord’s elbow?” he inquired of a neighbor.
“Not for your plate. Panyuma’s her name, the lord’s slut for five years.”