Flying the Storm (8 page)

This time the m
an was quicker with his answer.

“He says six.”

“So there are eleven people in
there
,” Tovmas almost laughed. The shed would be unbelievably cramped with eleven people.

“Tell him to make one of the women speak
, or we shoot the shed to pieces,” he said.

Nardos smiled. He shouted the command to the Azeri-speaking man. When the reply fin
ally came, he laughed out loud.

“Apparently my Azeri is very bad, and he couldn’t understand
the question,” Nardos sneered.

“How convenient,” sighed
Tovmas. An idea struck him. He thumbed the transmit button of his radio. “Fredrick, could you bring the
Iolaire
close to the building on the point?”

“What f
or?” was the suspicious reply.

“Do you
think you could blow it down?”

“
Oh, I’ll huff and I’ll puff,” laughed the pilot.

Tovmas moved his line of men back
thirty paces or so as the
Iolaire
swooped in once more, this time flaring and coming to a hover a hundred metres above the crag. It descended slowly and ponderously, pressing the grass of the hilltop flat and blowing away several of the slavers’ tents. Soon it was above the corrugated shack, and the thunderous wash of its props shook the small structure violently. Then, with a deafening roar, Fredrick opened up the throttle, blasting it with the full force of the
Iolaire
’s twin wave-rotor engines. As the aircraft accelerated away, there was a terrible tearing sound and the roof of the structure lifted. It flipped off and the walls caved in, with pieces of debris flying out over the wooded valley. Then the
Iolaire
was gone, far across the valley and climbing hard. Amongst the pile of twisted metal and broken wood it left in its wake, nothing moved. Tovmas stood up and walked over to the wreckage with his men in tow.

Kicking away a corrugated steel sheet revealed the occupant of the shed. It was one man, not five, and there were no women with him. Tovmas grabbed him by the hair and heaved him from the wreckage. It was no
small feat either: the man struggled like a mad thing. Nardos stepped forward and pressed a pistol to the man’s groin.

Understandab
ly, he stopped struggling.

“Now,” Tovmas said to Nardos, “Ask
him where they take the women.”

Vika woke up on the hard stone floor. Her b
row was damp and her gown clung clammily to her skin. Her sleep had been dreamless and black, and she did not feel it had done her any good. In fact, as she stretched, she felt even more aches and stiffness than before she had given in to sleep. The other girls were still sleeping, huddled next to her in the corner of the small room. Even their fat guard was snoring.

Vi
ka froze as she realised this.

She
would crawl up to him, slip her tied hands over his head and strangle him, perfectly quietly. Or maybe she would steal his pistol, press it to his head and splash his brains all over the faded wall hanging behind his little chair. And she knew she could do it: her father had taught her how to shoot a gun almost as soon as she could walk.

Instinctively
, she had raised herself to a crouch and was making a first step forward when her ankle snagged. She was chained to a ring on the wall. How stupid she had been to forget.

Vika
sat back down, the faint hope of escape fluttered away and an awful wave of foolishness and despair washed in to replace it. Tears rolled uninvited down her dust-smeared cheeks. It was hopeless. She was never going home.  

Time passed. One by one the girls roused and the guard’s snoring stopped. A single shaft of sunlight was spearing in from the tiny high window, forming a perfect, blinding square on the
limestone floor. Motes of dust floated lazily in the thick air. The room became stuffier. Vika could hear the lowing of a cow outside, and every so often a distant reply framed in the constant shrill of cicadas. There was no sound of people, so Vika was sure they were in the countryside.

They
had been brought in at night, blindfolded, disoriented from the flight and exhausted with fear. She could have been anywhere, but from the Azeri her captors spoke, she thought it safe to assume they had gone east. She doubted that they’d crossed the Sea, since the flight couldn’t have been more than an hour. But it was impossible to be sure: every minute since her capture had passed like an eternity.     

Finally, the
re was the sound of a vehicle pulling up outside. The room’s door swung open. The fat guard got to his feet and the girls sat bolt-upright just as a man Vika had not seen before entered the room, greeting the guard in Azeri.

He was tall
, lean, and though Vika hated to admit it, darkly attractive. His brown eyes gleamed warmly when he turned to see the huddle of girls, and he smiled a perfect smile at them. Vika was oddly comforted by the man’s presence, but felt disgusted with herself, since she knew that men could be equally as cruel whatever their looks.

S
he would have to be careful around this one. He could well be more dangerous than the rest.

“
My ladies,” he addressed the frightened huddle in Armenian, “Do not be afraid. I am here to help you. We are going to a bath house, where you can wash and have clean clothes to wear.” He picked up a sack and walked over to the girls. “Here.” The guard started forwards in warning, but the handsome man waved him back, reassuring him. He crouched down to the girls’ level and reached into the sack, producing small loaves of bread which he pressed into the hands of each.

Vika took the bread eagerly,
catching herself staring at the beautiful man’s eyes just a little too long. He smiled at her, perfect and pristine, and she shied away, forcing her attention to the food. Her stomach growled and her mouth salivated for the first food she’d been given in two days. Despite herself, she found that she had warmed to the man, the first to have shown her a shred of kindness since her abduction.

The bread tasted wonderful
, and Vika ate greedily. It was gone too quickly, and immediately her stomach was demanding more. None was offered, and she did not dare to ask. Vika could see many of the girls were staring at the bread sack. The man brought forward a wooden bucket of water, and with a ladle he gently fed water to the girls in turn. None spoke; all eyes were on the kind man whose tenderness they almost couldn’t comprehend.

When the twelve girls and women had been fed and watered, they were brought to their feet, unchained and walked out of the door with the fat guard,
the handsome man and three other armed men behind them. Vika saw the building they’d been held in for the first time. It was nothing more than an old stone three-room farmhouse, sitting in the midst of miles of flat yellow grassland, all criss-crossed with fences.

In the blinding mid-morning sun the girls were loaded into the back of a lorry,
re-chained to each other and shut in. Once again, darkness and disorientation.

No-one spoke during the drive, which Vika
could not guess the length of. When the lorry finally came to a stop and the noise of the engine died away, they could hear the sounds of a town outside. The doors clattered open, and the fat guard was standing with his three cronies, shouting at them in Azeri and waving with his pistol for them to get out. The girls complied slowly, since the chains made the whole process far more difficult than it had to be. The chains were pointless anyway; none of the girls had the strength to run away, and even if they did, where could they go?   

The sun was
unbearably bright after their journey in darkness. They had stepped from the lorry into a wide, paved courtyard, ringed with an ornate low-roofed building. Directly ahead of Vika was the doorway into the building; a pillared, carven entrance set with a heavy wooden door. The door was ajar, but the interior was too dark to see. From behind them, past the lorry, the sounds of the busy street filtered through. Vika should have been out there, free with the other people; instead she was caught in a half-life of restriction and brutality, separate and aside from the world.

Vika
was not stupid; she knew these men intended to sell her. But to whom, and to where, she couldn’t say. She’d heard stories of slave-trade in the east, among the sultanates and warlords across the Sea. But to her they had been only stories; she couldn’t believe that a person could own another person. It was madness.

It had all seemed as far away as the moon until the day the big, brutal aircraft had roared into her
town, flattening homes and murdering her people.    

Within the low building, wide baths steamed. The perfumed water filled the air with a heady aroma and
as they were led inside by the guards, Vika became acutely aware of her grimy, unwashed body. She ached to get into the water; to cleanse her skin and hair; to feel the heat loosening her cramped muscles.

It was not long before
several older women filed into the wide bathroom, carrying bundles of towels and glass bottles of soaps and lotions. The guards were ushered out by the handsome man, who bowed slightly to the girls as he closed the wide doors behind him, leaving them alone with the bath workers.

One of the bath-
women clapped at them, ordering in Azeri for them to strip and get into the huge, deep baths. The captive girls complied, some more hesitantly than others, and began stepping one by one into the steaming water. Vika removed her filthy gown without a second thought, and slid into the gloriously hot water, eyes closed as her muscles slackened and welcomed the heat.

The bath-women went to work. They knelt by the edges of the baths, pouring the contents of their bottles onto the hair and skin of the girls in the water, massaging the soaps into a lat
her with their practiced hands. The captives submitted without struggle, too enveloped in the bliss of the hot, clean water and the heady aromas of the soap to shy from the contact. After the days of discomfort and terror, this was heaven. Vika felt it filling her senses, and for a short while, she forgot herself.

All too quickly it was over. Vika felt as if roused from a deep sleep as the bath-women led her and the others out by their wrists. They passed through a thick curtained doorway into another tiled room,
where the girls were brought to a halt, naked and dripping and aching to return to the water. The bath-women brought out white towels, and began rubbing the girls down roughly, discouraging any who shied away with short slaps.

Vika allowed them to dry her, though as she stood her skin
crawled at the sensation of strange hands all over her vulnerable body. Not even any of the slavers had touched the girls so intimately, though by their stares and gestures they had clearly wanted to.

Vika
, no doubt like most of the other girls, was not naïve. She had expected far worse than she had received: no men had forced themselves upon her; in fact, they had positively kept their distance after the raid. She supposed that damaged goods were hard to sell.

The notion that this
discomfort was comparatively tame did, strangely, help her to shut it out. Suddenly the old woman’s soap-softened hands were not so bad.

Then they were given new
, short, white gowns to wear, these ones clean and tighter-fitting, and their faces were painted copiously with makeup. Eyebrows were plucked, all body hair was sugared and removed, and each girl was given a pair of simple plimsoll shoes. Hair was curled or straightened, styled and trimmed until all the workers were satisfied. There were no mirrors and Vika felt like a painted doll. It was all a preparation for her sale, she knew. And yet, when they were finished and the girls were led back out to their guards, Vika could not help but blush as the handsome man’s eyes gleamed at the sight of her.

Though Vika did not
see it, his smile was the grin of a shark.

They were driven, in the lorry once more, to a market. It was a vast concrete plaza, kilometres long and lined with warehouses, glass-and-chrome malls and
myriad independent merchant stands. It throbbed with people, few of whom gave any more than a passing glance to the chained row of young women. Clearly it was not an uncommon sight at this bazaar.

The sun, though now past its summit, had left the entire place shimmering
hot. Vika could feel sweat beginning to dampen her armpits and thighs, and she was sure her thick makeup would run. They were shepherded towards one of the warehouses.

Inside
, the heat was less intense. On the floor of the warehouse stood five rows of caged and numbered podiums, each of which was lit by diode strips on the bars. Standing inside some of them, scantily clad like Vika and the others, were individual women. The majority of the cages were empty, and Vika suddenly felt sick. She knew she would be put in one of those cages, out on display like a show animal to be ogled and pawed at. If it weren’t for the chains pulling her forwards, she would have been rooted to the spot. 

One by one the Armenian girls were unchained and locked in the vacant podiums, some sitting, some kneeling and some standing: all petrified. A couple were crying. At these the fat guard shouted, cursing them for ruining their
makeup. He reached between the bars with his stubby electric baton and jabbed it into the side of one of them, making her shriek and writhe with pain. He held it against her much longer than was necessary and when he withdrew it her crying had reduced to a low moan as she curled up into a trembling ball. The other crying girl had quietened at the sight.

Vika was the last to be locked in a podium. She sat down cross-legged on the cold steel floor and adjusted her
skimpy gown to maintain some modesty. The diode lights were blindingly bright against the shadowed interior of the warehouse, so she let her gaze fall to her lap. Maybe she could sit and wait like that until it was all finished, avoiding the attention of buyers until her captors let her go. But she wasn’t stupid. When they wanted her to stand, they would make her stand; of that she had no doubt. And if no one wanted to buy her anyway? Maybe it would be better not to think about that. Vika didn’t want to know what happened to unsellable slaves.

Before long,
the warehouse was opened to the public. The place was soon almost as busy as the plaza outside. Many of the crowd were clearly just locals and ordinary Azeris, uninterested in purchases and merely there for the spectacle. Vika supposed that it was all very theatrical; the individual, bright podiums standing amidst the shadowed crowds like caged fireflies.

If you took away the
atrocious nature of the event, it might even have been considered artistic. Gleaming eyes and teeth smiled in at her as people pressed against the bars, but Vika did not hate them for their gawking. No, these were ordinary people attracted to the show, nothing more. What surprised her most was that she found their attention flattering; from the lustful stares of the men she knew they found her attractive. For the first time in her life Vika had an audience, and she was unsettled to find that it did not repulse her.

Amongst the crowds drifted people
whom, despite the light, Vika could tell were not locals. Some with dark skin and light robes, Vika guessed to be Arabs. These men were followed by retinues of sharply-dressed muscular bodyguards, whose gazes alone were enough to drive the crowds back from the cages. The robed men passed by each of the cages in turn, gazing with passive eyes at the woman held in each. Vika knew: these were the people who bought the slaves. 

Men of paler skin also moved amongst the crowds. Clearly they were from the north, but none passed close enough for Vika to hear them speak. Whether they were there to buy, or simply for the entertainment she couldn’t guess. One of them stood
staring at her for a long time, the corner of his mouth curled upwards as he watched.