“Tell me it’s not real, Gunther!” she wept.
“You have been sold,” he said.
“Gunther!” she wept.
“Sold,” he said.
The end of the tether was freed from the wood beneath the platform and the free end drawn through the small circular hold in the floor of the platform, and taken in the hand of one of the men in a woolen tunic. She felt the tether jerk her toward the edge of the platform. She stopped, the tether taut and turned to regard Gunther. “Please, Gunther,” she wept.
“You brought eight sacks of barley,” he said, “and a bronze ax.”
She looked at him, aghast. She now knew the measure of her value in the rude economy of the Dirt People. Eight sacks of barley and a bronze ax was the barter equivalent of Dr. Brenda Hamilton, stripped. She now knew that women, though they might be urgently sought, and desperately desired, when the needs of men were upon them, were not, on the whole, considered particularly valuable. She was not worth much. She was a female. She doubted that she would have brought two bronze axes.
“The monster,” said Gunther, nodding toward Ugly Girl, “brought far less.”
She saw Ugly Girl being jerked from the platform, and being dragged away. She felt a jerk on her own neck tether. There were tears in Hamilton’s eyes. “Don’t leave me here in this place, Gunther,” wept Hamilton. “I beg you!” She flung herself to her knees wildly, weeping, and pressed her lips to his boots. She held his ankle, her small fingers about the dusty leather of his boots. “You have been sold,” he told her. Then she was dragged away, hauled stumbling to her feet by the neck tether and, choking, pulled from the platform and conducted between the huts.
“I have been sold!” she cried out, in misery. Then she screamed when she saw where they were going to put her.
25
For eleven days Brenda Hamilton had been owned by the Dirt People.
It was now late at night, almost toward morning after a night of a full moon. The insects were quiet. The birds, which began to cry at dawn were not yet active. The wooden plug, which had been forced into her, and secured by thongs, irritated her. Ugly Girl, who slept near her, had been similarly humiliated. In the darkness Hamilton put forth her hand, and felt, some six inches from her face, the logs of the kennel. It was a yard high and a yard wide, and some twenty feet long. The floor was also of logs, smoothed at the top, but separated by some four inches, giving access to the dirt. The logs were fastened in place by mortise and tenon joints, fitting over stakes first driven into the ground. The mortise was not open to the inside of the kennel. Hamilton and Ugly Girl could not lift the logs from the tenons, as the logs, in addition to their weight, projecting, were anchored under the front and rear of the kennel. The floor of the kennel was, thus, formed of bars of wood, in between which lay dirt. Over the dirt was thrown a straw of barley stalks. Ugly Girl and Hamilton shared the-kennel with four ewes, the other sheep being penned outside. The ewes were pregnant and were penned at night. The kennel, when not secured, opened into the general sheep pen.
Hamilton was curious that the insects were now quiet. She could tell by Ugly Girl’s breathing, that the simple creature was not asleep. She did not, however, speak to her. One could not, even though Ugly Girl understood some of the language of the Men, easily communicate with her. She could not even form the sounds of the language of the men. She was stupid.
Hamilton turned on her back, dry eyed. The wooden plug hurt her. She clenched her fists in the darkness.
On the first night, after she had been, in the afternoon, locked with Ugly Girl in the kennel, she had heard the heavy door of the kennel being unfastened. She had crouched within. Then she had been ordered out. She had crawled out on her hands and knees, to be seized by the hair by a reeling farmer and dragged after him to the drinking hut. The Dirt People, from barley, half crushed and germinated, made a simple bread. This they cut into small pieces, and soaked in water. The process of fermentation was initiated by air-borne yeasts. It took only twenty-four hours to make a brew. Sometimes they strained it through cloth; at other times they drank the fermented mash, thick with barley hulls soaked loose from the crude bread. Hamilton was startled. She had not realized the immediacy, the simplicity, the naturalness of the relation between grain and beer; yet they were almost as naturally consanguine as the stone hammer and the flint knife, and as expectable; bread and beer lay at the foundation of the agricultural revolution; perhaps it was only beer, Hamilton thought, that tempted men to give up the hunt, that lured them to the slavery of the soil; or, more likely, it, the alcohol, was the drug which kept them in their fields, which broke them and tamed them, in the deliriums of which they could, in sorrow and mock hilarity, drown the dreams of freedom and the pursuit of game. He who worked bent in the dirt, poking at the soil, under the sun, his body aching, might, at night, lose himself in drunken stupor, forgetting the heritage of the hunt, keeping him in the village another night, to waken again to the dirt, the stones and seed, the beating sun, and the sticks with which he scratched at the earth. She wondered if it were not for the alcohol men might have gone mad or fled. It gave them the narcotic wherewith to endure their lot.
Hamilton well remembered, and bitterly, the night in the drinking hut.
The Dirt People were not hunters, she soon learned, though they might be but a few generations separated from the game trails. They did not look at her as did Hunters, even those of the Weasel People. Their looks frightened her, but not as did the looks of hunters. They seemed small, avaricious, venal. They even seemed, leering at her beauty, furtive. It seemed they might be afraid of something. When a hunter had looked upon her as a mere female, it had terrified and excited her. Even when she had drawn back, trembling, from a hunter she had felt the tension the delicate erecting, the lifting, of her tiny clitoris, against her will offering itself, and herself, to his mastery. But here she did not feel the tension, or the sudden, frightened suffusion of warmth throughout her belly, the smaller body’s spontaneous readying of itself for penetration, for submission to a dominant animal. She only felt cold and miserable. She looked at them, from face to face. She suddenly understood, sick, that they were about to do something secretive, something sly. She understood, suddenly, that her beauty was something which, for some reason, was forbidden them. She tried to run for the entrance of the hut, but was caught and thrown back to the center of the men. Some of them laughed. Their eyes glistened. Before a hunter she had felt a helpless doe before a lion, who in his innocent might, his innocent cruelty, ferocity and joy, would wreak devastation upon her, overwhelming her, devouring her, until, helpless, she begged for mercy, crying herself his. But before these men, somehow so different, her fear was not that with which she might have faced a hunter, even one of the Weasel People. It was the fear with which she might, naked, kneeling back against a wall in a dungeon, hands apart, chained to it, have observed the timid, then bolder, approach of rodents. One of the men seized her. Then, as they drank and watched, she was handed from man to man. They made jokes about her as she was penetrated. They hurt her, for she did not desire them. They were quick, and brutal. She was a receptacle only, unwilling, miserable, into which they swiftly emptied the pleasure of their bodies. When she lay, looking into his eyes, her arms held, in the hands of the leader, he only then finished with her, there was, suddenly, a great shout. She was thrown to one side. He scrambled to his feet, frightened, trying to pull his garment about him.