“Or for bed,” he added.
“Or that. So, let them pay you to see and get.”
He shrugged. “Undo your hair,” he said.
She had worn it plaited and bound on her head by a thong from the shirt. Now she thought he wanted her long-haired as an inducement. But when she obliged him, taking a blade, he cut off her hair just below her ears. “For the wigmakers,” he said, deigning to give her explanation.
The urge to kill him fell on her again like the wave upon the city, or, as she had imagined it. The one she had been was coming back to her.
The slave-market opened in the cool of the evening, when the more prosperous of the port idled down to the quay. To Panduv’s eyes these had themselves slight means enough, and would have passed for street-cleaners in the south. For the slaves, they were a dismal lot, and the captain turned cheerful, seeing his wares were so superior.
As they waited their turn for a rostrum, a brief procession parted the crowd. The captain and his second officer each spat on the dusty ground.
“Infidel priests!”
They were the votaries of Cah, identifiable by their robes of dark red and ocher. Foremost walked the Chief Priest, shaven hairless, even in the twilight with a boy to hold aloft a parasol of feathers over the bald head. A few paces behind this apparition came another, a fat woman swaddled in gauzes, but her lolloping breasts bare, her arms clattering with bangles. Unmistakably, the mistress of the temple brothel.
The captain discussed her demerits with his second. They laughed, but not too loudly now, for these idolatrous priests would be venerated here, and even the fat holy-girls thought worthy.
Torches were being lit. Presently it was Panduv’s turn to mount the rostrum.
She stood there, looking only into the sky beyond the muddle of lights and roofs. As the stars hardened, she heard her supposed virtues described. Her strength, the elasticity of her body, her sterling health.
A flash of brass attracted Panduv’s attention, and her eyes were drawn after all into the crowd. She saw the blubberous woman, her bracelets colliding, pointing at her. Panduv, too, had made out what the woman was. There had been, in the courts of Daigoth, a dancer or two from Iscah.
A priest at the back of the cluster was now approaching the rostrum. He was pointing, in turn, and offering money. The captain of Owar swore. There could be no haggling with a priest. He snatched the slave-seller’s arm and began to remonstrate, to no avail. The money had been accepted, the priest already turned away. Panduv realized she was bought by the local temple. And since no woman was permitted to serve Cah save as a prostitute, she had been purchased as a whore.
The temple crouched on a platform of stone. Black trees grew all about it, full of carrion birds by day that had smelled the offal from the altars. In a precinct behind, the whorehouse of Cah was situated.
The first night they drugged her with a beverage she was too thirsty not to drink. In the morning two young girls, already slopping with loose fat, brought dishes of food.
Panduv ate a little. She did not like the meal. Sweet sticky solid porridges and sweeter leaden breads.
Her abode was a cell, no larger than a latrine. It gave on a yard, or did so when the door was unlocked. She had already noticed temple guards oversaw the outside of the wall, and all the exits from the fane.
At noon, the fat girls came to remove the dishes, bringing more. Panduv asked, seeking to be plain in an approximation of the slur of Iscah, if she might answer the needs of nature. One of the girls, not speaking, indicated a lidded clay vessel in the corner. Not only, it seemed, was the cell the size of a latrine, it was to become one in fact.
Panduv ate no more of the food. She performed certain exercises, raising her feet to the wall, looping her body over—but the space was so confined it frustrated her, as the public jouncing restriction of Owar’s deck had done.
In the evening, another meal was served.
As dusk, star-flushed, began to fill the meshed grating in the door, the holy-mistress came to visit, audible before entry from her bracelets and her heavy, labored breath.
She stood in the doorway, perhaps fearful she would be wedged forever should she enter the narrow cell. She smelled of sweat and perfume and displeasure.
“You must eat,” the mistress said to Panduv.
Panduv smiled.
“To increase my weight?”
“Yes, that’s so. To make you appealing.”
“The men of your town like slugs for women.”
The mistress, understanding her, pursed her lips. She was coppery, dark for Iscah, though nothing to Panduv, with tough black hair much-braided and strung with beads. Under the slabs of her porridge-built flesh, an old beauty peered out bewildered. But her eyes were flint.
“Who is it you worship?” she inquired.
“Zarduk of fire. Daigoth of the warriors.”
“You are Zakr. Free, or under the whites?”
“Neither. I am a slave of Alisaar.”
“You know the name of Cah?”
“I have,” said Panduv, “no quarrel with Cah.”
“Cah has bought you. Cah requires you to serve. To serve, you must plumpen.”
“Your food nauseates me. I can’t eat it even if I would. Look at me. This body is used to exercise. I was a fire dancer.” (The mistress made a little hissing noise.) “Cage me this way,” said Panduv, reasonably, while her blood roared in her ears, “and I’ll become sick. You’ll waste your goddess’ money.”
“You will grow accustomed to the food. If you’d gone hungry since your birth, you would be glad of it, as the other girls. It is an untroubled life.”
Panduv could no longer restrain herself—the one she had been.
“Damn your untrouble, you wallowing sow! Am I to become a thing like you? I’ll starve. I’ll die rather. Take me out and kill me.”
She thought then of her beehive tomb she had given to the white Amanackire bitch. The tomb was swept to pieces by the wave, no doubt. And the witch-bitch had promised her long life, that would not need it—
But the fat woman had gone away, her attendant was closing the door.
Panduv upset the plates of sticky food. (And considered an instant the temple guards, but they were too many.) She stood on her hands against the wall. She blazed with futile anger and did everything so poorly she might as well not have attempted it, finally striking her head against an uneven place in the plaster. Then she beat her fists there, and cursed all things.
Later, she flung herself on the pallet. The truth, reality, had come to her now with a vengeance. She felt at last the end of Saardsinmey, the loss of what she had been, at first with raging agony, though this settled gradually through the void of night into a disbelieving despair.
She had no longing for Zakoris, Free or conquered, she had only wanted the Ahsaarian fame that to be called the Hanassian would have meant. The world was gone which had been hers nearly all her knowing life—but it had never been hers, she had been its. She belonged nowhere.
Near dawn she slept. She woke and found tears cold on her face. She could not recall the dream which had summoned them. But she considered, belonging nowhere, everywhere had some possibility for her.
She rose, and kicked the spilled dishes aside. She waited for the holy-girls.
Three of them duly arrived, opening the door with caution, looking at her nervously through the kohl on their eyelids.
“Tell the mistress,” said Panduv, “I’ll make a bargain. I’ll eat these messes if she will let me exercise in the yard. Otherwise, I will die.”
They gazed at her as if she had spoken in an unknown tongue. Panduv strode forward and thrust all three away from the door. Frightened of her, the caged leopard now loose, they did not resist, only lumbered quickly off, leaving her at large.
The yard was nothing much, a stone space contained by the precinct on two sides, and elsewhere with two high walls covered by yellowish plaster. A few inartistic doodlings in dull pink and gray did the office of patterning, and here and there a pot stood with a flowering shrub. Nevertheless, sunlight lay on the court, and the flowers, freshly watered, gave out a clear and hopeful smell.