By the time the fourth stroke fell, the man was feeling nothing but what I wanted him to feel. His boredom over the job he was doing was nearly making him yawn, his strength was draining out in sweat from the heat of the sun, and one contemptuous look at the semi-conscious girl hanging in front of him showed that the lesson had been thoroughly taught. He recoiled the whip as he basked in the pleasure of having done such a good job, then turned to the rest of us and gestured at us to be on our way. As I got to my feet I deepened the stupor Findra had fallen into, and walked away from a completely unconscious victim.
Findra wasn’t returned to the bedin tent for hours, but as soon as the male slave put her down and left, I was immediately by her side. Her back had been cut open by the strokes of the lash, but the beating hadn’t been as bad as it could have been. Her wrists were badly bruised from having held her weight so long, and the front of her body showed that she’d been driven into the body of the Y frame by the force of the whip blows, but nothing was broken or irreversibly damaged. As I knelt above her, feeling the way her mind fought against being overwhelmed with pain, another woman joined us and brought what was badly needed: a salve for the wounds and welts the beating had left. I waited until the woman had begun spreading the salve, then adjusted my efforts to hers, easing the pain far more than the salve alone could do. Findra drew in a deep breath and shuddered, then let her eyes close as exhaustion took her, as swiftly and nearly as deeply as unconsciousness had earlier. Her breathing slowed to the pace of sleep, and I was able to sit back and look around.
The woman who had spread the salve had finished her job and was going back to the place where she’d been sleeping, intent on resuming her temporary escape. The other women around her were pretending nothing had happened, but only to keep themselves from picturing their own bodies savagely beaten. I became aware of several minds concentrated on me, and turned my head to see the women of Tammad’s city, their minds concerned but also in some manner confident. Their eyes touched Findra, then found my face, and smiles suddenly gleamed in those eyes before their owners lay down to try to sleep again. They knew I’d done—something—to help the girl, and they seemed to be almost as relieved as they would be to be delivered out of that horrible place. I lay down next to Findra and tried to sleep on my own, bitter with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to help all of them all the time. My ability was considerably stronger than it had been, but it still had its limits—which were all too confining. I needed something more, something totally overwhelming, but I wasn’t likely to find it. The only thing I could do was cope with what I had—and pray that none of the hizahh found out about it.
That night, after eating and play time, we moved on again. The people around us were a tribe of the Hamarda, nocturnal desert nomads who moved from oasis to oasis for no reason I was able to fathom. Daytime was a time of sleep—and punishment—and nighttime was a time of traveling—and sometimes battle. The third night out our hizahh were suddenly attacked by a large band of men who wore the same sort of veils and robes that they did. Swords sung from their sheaths to answer the attack, but the greatest amount of anxiety during the battle came from the minds inside the silk-covered wagons. The women of the hizahh would always fear during such battles, for should their men be bested they would then become bedinn, to be used and abused by the men of the new tribe. Conversely, the bedinn tied behind the wagons felt very little fear; what difference did it make to a slave which man held the whip over her? That third night the men of our tribe won easily, led to victory by none other than hizah Kednin, the man who had taken such interest in me at first. I wouldn’t have minded seeing him cut down from his seetar, but he was much too good with a sword and much too able a leader. They met the attackers, took the lives from some and routed the rest, but didn’t pursue them into the desert. They weren’t about to leave their caravan unguarded, not even to finish the good work they’d started. We continued on until it was time to camp, then double guardposts were set about our perimeter in case the brigands came back. I would have known nothing about the guardposts if I hadn’t been one of the ones sent to serve the men out there. The only positive part about the whole thing was the fact that the men were too keyed up to notice whether or not we were any good.
The first night after the whipping Findra was tied to a narrow platform on the side of one of the wagons, but after that she was put on a tether again. She took the first opportunity she could find to hug me in thanks for what I had done to help her, and she seemed to have a very good idea about what that help had entailed. We made no attempt to discuss the matter between us, but for her part discussion seemed entirely unnecessary. Her gratitude was a strong, real thing, undiminished by the passage of time.
The days and nights passed slowly and unpleasantly, but they gave me ample time to practice my abilities against the mighty hizahh. When a man looked at me, he usually found himself totally uninterested, for no reason he could clearly understand. He didn’t feel displeased or dissatisfied in the slightest, but he did feel uninterested. I was able to extend the attitude to Findra and the rest of the women who had been taken with us, but not too often and not if there was the slightest chance the ploy would become obvious. The last thing I wanted was to have the hizahh find out there was something different about me—and what that difference was. When I did have to let myself be used, the man involved always felt full satisfaction—even if he didn’t get it. The one time I was chosen to spend the daylight sleeping hours with a hizah, the man experienced such total exhaustion that he spent the time doing nothing other than sleeping. When he awoke I made sure to beg him for his attention, but it was too late in the day for even a token showing. He ignored the tears glistening in my eyes, stretched to show how good he felt, then sent me back to the bedin tent with a fond smack on the bottom and an amused laugh. If I needed more than he had time to give me, it was just too bad for me.
Early on the fifth night, we reached another oasis. This one was true, deep sand on only three sides, with the fourth consisting of gravelly, pebbly ground flatting out into the distance. The bathing pool was larger than that at the first oasis, and I couldn’t wait to get to it. Water in the desert was too precious to waste on bathing or clothes washing, but there’s a limit to what airing out can do for clothing and bodies. I was tired of smelling bad and wearing robes that smelled bad, and wasn’t about to let anything keep me from that water.
Getting to the lake took considerably longer than I wanted it to. After the tents were up and we had unpacked everything, it was time to celebrate arriving at the oasis. The other women and I hadn’t been in the camp during the last first-day oasis stop, so we were taken by surprise at the way things went. The first hint I had about something being different about the stop was the misery in the minds of the more experienced bedinn in the tent. Despite the fact that we were all in real discomfort from the “treatment” given us by the male bedinn during the march, none of the bedinn were showing frantic haste to get their work done and themselves over to the men. I’d tried doing something to stop those middle-of-the-night treatments, but even after suffering through five nights of it I hadn’t been able to get a grip on the problem. There were no emotions short of fear and loathing that would keep those men away from me, and neither of those emotions would have done anything other than get my throat cut.