It wasn’t long before I was up on my feet and walking back and forth swinging my arms, working the final kinks out. Almost everyone in the tent was asleep, curled up alone or in small groups, sharing proximity rather than warmth. The warmth was enough to go around twice over, leaving a light sheen of sweat on my body as I moved through it. I moved and walked softly so as not to awaken the sleepers, and wound up beside the only other waking person in the tent, the woman who had untied me. She knelt before a cooking tripod, her attention solely for what she was doing, the misery in her mind complemented by the silent tears in her eyes. She was heating a small pot of the cereal grain, but since there wasn’t the slightest trace of hunger in her I didn’t understand why—until I realized she must have been commanded to eat. After a minute she took the pot from the fire and began to eat, reluctantly and distastefully but with no hint of disobedience. As I stopped behind her, the dim light in the tent finally showed the strap marks covering the entire back of her, red, painful-looking welts that would leave scars in her mind rather than on her body. She had been punished by hizahh for some reason, possibly for the extreme slenderness of her build. Hizahh seemed to prefer well-rounded women, just the same as other men on that world.
“You would do well to do as I do before being ordered to it,” she whispered, aware of me where I stood behind her. “New bedinn are punished more often than those who are owned longer, to instill a proper obedience in them.”
She continued eating the cereal then, knowing I wasn’t able to answer or argue with her. I stared around at the dim tent heated by the merciless sun blazing down outside, my mind filled with an impotent fury that was difficult to chase away. I didn’t want to have anything to eat, let alone a bowl of that cereal, but there wasn’t any other choice. Anticipate the wishes of the hizahh, or face their punishment. I knelt beside the woman, nearly trembling with fury and fear, and heated my own bowl of cereal grain.
After eating and cleaning up from the meal, I went back to my corner and lay down again. Eating the cereal had not only been distasteful, it had been ridiculously awkward with the veil in place. I’d been tempted to remove the veil until the meal was done, but the other woman hadn’t removed hers. Then I’d remembered that it had been put on me by the hand of a hizah, and realized that it couldn’t be removed by anything less than that same agency. If the meal hadn’t already been ruined, it would have been done for with certainty by that time. I finished up quickly, then went to find escape in sleep.
The next time I was awakened it was late afternoon, and opening my eyes showed me the male bedin my mind had already detected. He stood over me in his black haddin and bronze neck-chain, impatient and disdaining, and ordered me to see to my hair quickly and take a robe. I did as ordered then followed him out of the tent, pausing only for my sandals at the tent entrance. The other women had been awake by then, but only Findra had come over to hug me briefly before I left.
The heat and glare of the setting sun seared me as I followed the broad, bare back of the male bedin across the camp, but once we reached the tent I’d been in the night before, every consideration but fear faded away. As I left my sandals at the entrance and was led inside, I knew that the greatest aid the hizahh had was a bedin’s uncertainty. I’d been sent for, but I didn’t know why I’d been sent for, and the uncertainty was turning my muscles to water and my mind to quivering mud. Was I going to be punished again? Was I simply going to be used? What if I didn’t do well enough to please them and they had me whipped? What if I forgot I wasn’t supposed to speak and they had my tongue cut out? What if they knew how angry I’d been earlier and were going to hurt me for it? I trembled terribly as I hurried across the white silk, following my guide through the hangings, afraid to continue ahead to what awaited me but more afraid to attempt running from it.
What awaited me was the hizah Kednin, all alone in a small, curtained section of the tent, his robed body relaxing among cushions, his veiled face showing no more than impassive eyes. When the male bedin stepped aside to reveal me to the hizah, I clutched my robe tighter and immediately fell to my knees, bowing with my fists pressed to my forehead and my head to the white silk. Through the calm of his thoughts, it was impossible telling whether or not the hizah was angry, and I continued to tremble even as I held the bow.
“Approach and kneel before me, bedin,” Kednin ordered, his voice lazy and sounding recently awakened. I rose to my feet and dropped the robe behind me as I’d seen a woman do the other day, then hurried to kneel in front of the hizah as I’d been commanded. The male bedin was gone, having been immediately dismissed, and I barely felt his mind trace fading with distance. I was too wrapped up in the man before me, a man who was beginning to feel satisfaction.
“I see you tremble, bedin,” he said, and his hand came to touch my hair. “You are indeed lovely when you tremble, nearly as lovely as when you writhe beneath me. Have you spoken?”
I shook my head vigorously, feeling my eyes widen as my heart thumped louder in the silence. Would he believe me?
“Excellent,” he purred, deep amusement filling his mind. “It seems you begin to learn your place. Present your wrists to me and prepare to see to my pleasure.”
Filled with relief I bent and twisted, offering him my wrists behind my back, but he didn’t accept the offering. I felt his frown of disapproval as he touched the dark bruises on my wrists from the last time I’d been tied, then his hands moved instead to my thumbs. They were quickly lashed together with his leather, the rest of the strip being wound around my hands. I was still tied, but not in a way to increase the bruises already on me. Bruises are ugly, and detract from the beauty of a bedin.
Pleasing a robed man with your wrists tied behind you and a veil over your face takes a good deal of knowledge in proper technique. I’d had no chance to learn the technique, but that fact didn’t do a thing to sway the hizah. When I couldn’t reach him he beat me with a broad strap, one that nearly made me scream with pain. Through it all I kept the screams inside, knowing it would go harder for me if I voiced my pain and fright without permission, then worked frantically harder to reach the man when he put the strap aside. Desperation usually provides added incentive, and the second time I managed to work my way under his robe and around my veil. My back hurt and my bottom as well, and the sweat of fear ran in rivers down my body, but I soon had the hizah moaning with pleasure, desire flaring from his mind as his flesh swelled and hardened. The thought came that I might escape serving his pleasure any other way by being very good at that way, but Kednin wasn’t about to allow that. His fist in my hair stopped me when he wanted me stopped, put me back to the task when he wanted me at it again, and generally played me like a musical instrument, crescendoes and rests orchestrated by him alone. When he finally threw me to my back and entered me, he began his pleasure all over again and was a long time in seeing to it. I tried to pretend to helpless submission throughout the ordeal, but apparently some men know the real from the forced. After satisfying himself to the fullest, Kednin took up his strap and beat me again, letting me know that my body was expected to learn true submission to hizahh. I was then sent back to the bedin tent, to wonder if anything more would come of the incident, I thought, but the bedin tent no longer stood where it had been. Camp was being broken and I was set to work with the other bedinn, and in a very short time we were on our way out of the oasis and further into the desert. Away from everything we knew and deeper into slavery.
The nighttime desert is a cold place, but exertion usually warms one up fast enough. I stumbled along barefoot through the uneven mounds of sand, my bound wrists tied with a length of leather attached to the back of a large, wagon-like vehicle being pulled by four seetarr, my robe held closed with a sash, my wrists protected from the leather by strips of cloth. My sandals had been packed away before the caravan left the oasis, presumably to keep them from being lost. Retrieving a sandal is difficult when you’re tied to a moving wagon by the wrists.