John Norman (44 page)

Hamilton found that the cylindrical pit covered with the roof of thatch, on poles, was at the edge of a clearing, which lay before some caves.

Some of the Weasel People were about. Some of the men, who had not been in the raiding party, as she was dragged past them, looked up swiftly considering her body, their eyes speculating on the pleasure that it, leaping to their touch, helpless in its slavery, might yield them. Women glared at her, their eyes stern and dour. One of them spit at her as she was dragged past. The red-haired girl struck her twice more with the switch.

Hamilton was dragged up a sloping stone ramp. On a ledge at its height, before the most imposing of the cave entrances, more than ten feet in height and width, was a block of stone, a throne. On this throne, a fur cape, from a cave bear, tied about his neck, grinning, his rifle across his knees, sat Gunther.

“Good afternoon, Doctor Hamilton,” said Gunther.

“Gunther,” she wept.

“Kneel, Slave,” said he.

She knelt before him. “Yes, Master,” she said. They spoke in English. The short girl stood near her, the tether gripped in her right hand, its free length looped, coiled several times, in the same hand.

At Gunther’s feet, naked, lay Cloud. Loops of rawhide, knotted, were fastened on her neck, as a collar. Behind Gunther and to his left, on another block of stone, sat William. Flower knelt beside him, on his left. She had been given a hide tunic, of the sort worn by the women of the Weasel People. It was brief; but it concealed her breasts. About her neck, too, were loops of rawhide, knotted, forming on her, as on Cloud, a collar. But, too, with them about her neck, was a necklace of shells, and, too, about her left ankle was an anklet, it, too, of shells. Gunther and William had taken Cloud and Flower as their personal slaves.

“Where were your hunters?” asked Gunther.

“My hands,” said Hamilton. “I cannot feel them. Please, Gunther. I beg of you to untie me.”

“We did not meet your hunters,” said Gunther.

Hamilton put her head down.

Gunther slapped the rifle which lay across his knees. “It is fortunate for them,” said he, “we did not meet them, else they would have fallen swiftly to my bullets.”

Hamilton lifted her head. “Had you seen them,” she said.

“The Weasel People,” said Gunther, “eat human flesh. If you do not please me, I will feed you to them.”

“I will try to please you, Gunther,” said Hamilton. “I will! I will!”

Gunther laughed. “But I have other plans for you,” he said.

Hamilton regarded him, puzzled.

“Do you not notice,” asked Gunther, “that the rock upon which I sit is of shaped stone, and, so, too, is that on which William has his place?”

Hamilton said nothing.

“Did you not notice,” asked Gunther, “that the pit in which you were confined was formed of shaped stone?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“And what then did you infer?” he asked.

“I did not understand it,” she whispered.

“Did you not see in its bottom tiny grains?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“And what did you make of them?” he grinned.

“Nothing,” she whispered.

“Females, even bright ones like yourself,” said Gunther, “are fools, fit only to be slaves.”

Hamilton was suddenly conscious of the tether on her neck, that she knelt, that she was stripped, that her wrists were confined helplessly.

“But it is impossible,” she whispered.

“Believe the evidence of your senses, little fool,” said he. “The pit in which you were confined is a storage pit used for the keeping of barley. The stones were shaped with saws and axes of bronze.”

“It cannot be,” she said. She had seen no tools or weapons of metal among the Weasel People, no evidence of agriculture. “Are we not exiled in the early Aurignacian Period,” she asked, “sometime during the late Pleistocene?”

“Herjellsen’s assertions, and the cultural and geological evidence,” said Gunther, “confirm that hypothesis.”

“Then, how?” breathed Hamilton.

“The discovery of metal, its utility, the discovery of food grains, their cultivation,” said Gunther, “I conjecture took place many times, perhaps hundreds of times, independently, perhaps centuries ago, perhaps again millennia in the future, given our current spatio-temporal coordinates. Such discoveries, by rational creatures, given an order of social organization, a tradition, would presumably be made many times.”

“But there is no evidence of such developments in this period,” said Hamilton. “Not even polished rock is known to the Men, nor, it seems, to the Weasel People.”

“Human groups are isolated,” said Gunther.

“But why would there be no evidence of such developments in this period?”

“The groups,” said Gunther, unpleasantly, “are small.” He grinned. “We may surmise they will not survive.”

Hamilton shuddered.

She supposed that it might be true that such developments as agriculture, before they became broadspread and irreversible, might have had tiny beginnings, perhaps over and over again failing, or being obliterated by fiercer peoples. Perhaps it would be only with the cultivation of the broader, lengthy river valleys, the Yangtze, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, with their capacity for supporting gigantic populations, that agriculture, and agricultural peoples, would have the numbers and power to become the dominant mode of humanity. For long millennia they might have remained the prey of hungry hunters, raiding from the hills and forests.

“I know of only one such group within trekking distance,” said Gunther. “In the language of the Weasel People, they are called the Dirt People. From them, from time to time, a bronze tool is purchased with fur, or supplies of barley. The Dirt People, incidentally, you will be interested to learn, herd sheep, though you are not familiar with the variety. They weave. They clothe themselves in wool.”

“They are quite advanced,” said Hamilton.

Gunther laughed unpleasantly.

Hamilton looked at Flower. She knelt beside William, smug. Cloud, lying at Gunther’s feet, would not meet her eyes.

“I am King here,” said Gunther.

“How many bullets do you have left?” asked Hamilton.

“Enough to keep me King,” said Gunther.

“And I,” asked Hamilton, gazing evenly at Gunther, “am I to be your queen?”

Gunther spoke abruptly. The girl with the bright red hair, behind Hamilton, suddenly began to strike her, viciously, with the supple switch. Hamilton cried out and fell, twisting, turning, struck across the belly, the legs, the back, by the switch, held by the short tether in the hand of the short, darkhaired girl. “Forgive the insolence of a slave, Master!” wept Hamilton. Gunther made a swift motion, and the beating stopped. Half choking, Hamilton was dragged again to her knees. She could scarcely see Gunther for the tears; she gasped for breath; her slave body, stung and ravaged by the switch, held in its tether, burning, shook with the misery of the sharp discipline which had been inflicted upon it.

“Perhaps,” said Gunther, “I should have so proud a girl as you eaten.”

“I am not proud, Gunther,” she whispered, “my master. I will do whatever you wish.”

“Eagerly?” asked Gunther.

“Yes, Master,” she whispered, “-eagerly!”

“Cut her hands free,” said Gunther to William. William rose and went to Hamilton, cutting the thongs which confined her wrists.

Her hands were white; in the wrists were deep, circular marks, the imprint of her former constraints: “Stand up,” said Gunther.

Hamilton did so. Gunther then spoke to the red-haired girl. He then turned to Hamilton. “Tonight,” he said, “you will eat well. Tomorrow you will be washed and combed, and again fed well.”

“What are you going to do with me?” she asked.

“Tomorrow, Brenda,” said he, grinning, “you must look your best.”

“What are you going to do with me?” she asked.

“I am going to use you in my plans,” he said.

“What are you going to do with me!” she cried.

He looked at her for a time. Then he said, “I am going to sell you, Brenda.”

She looked at him with horror, and then she felt the pull of the neck tether.

The hands of the man in the woolen tunic were on her breasts, roughly. He was pleased.

“Be docile, pretty little beast,” said Gunther.

Hamilton felt another man feeling her legs, from behind. He grunted affirmatively.

“Suck in your belly “said Gunther. “Stand straight.”

Hamilton did so. She felt a hand slap her belly, twice. She felt the man behind her testing the sweetness, the firmness of her buttocks.

“Stand straight,” said Gunther. Tears in her eyes, Hamilton did so. She felt her upper arms held and released, and again held and released. Another man held out her hair, which was now quite long, in his two hands, to the light, examining it for condition and sheen. She felt, from behind, her legs, one after the other, bent up and backward, as the arch of her instep was noted.

Hamilton wore no clothing, but there was a tether on her throat. She stood on a large, flat, wooden platform. Other men, in woolen tunics, stood about, watching the appraisal of the slave girl. Four men of the Weasel People, too, were about. The large, bearded fellow was he who held her tether. She had worn, in the march, and upon the platform, at first, one of the hide tunics of the women of the Weasel People, concealing her breasts. Gunther had first torn it to her waist, before stripping it totally away from her. Ugly Girl, naked, a leather tether on her neck, in the hands of one of the men of the Weasel People, crouched to one side on the platform. She had not been clothed from the beginning.

“It is my intention,” Gunther had told Hamilton, “to sell the monster, too, with you. Her presence on the platform will dramatically accentuate your beauty, my dear. It will make you seem twice as desirable, twice as beautiful.”

The man who had felt Hamilton’s breasts now thrust back her head and, roughly, with his fingers, pried her mouth widely open, inspecting her teeth. To one side, below the platform, Hamilton heard the bleating of a sheep. It was a large animal, long-haired, with soft wool beneath; its horns were spiraled, and yellowish in color. The platform was within a palisaded wall; there were several huts, too, some of them open, within the wall. Some children, too, idly, watched the men appraise her; in the background, before two looms, four women, too, in woolen tunics, had turned about to watch. One girl, a saucy, impudent, bright-eyed girl, perhaps seventeen years of age, with bare arms, and a copper armlet on her left arm, came to the edge of the platform. One of the women called angrily to her, and she, angrily, turned about and went back to stand with them, by the looms. Before she left, she made a face at Hamilton.

The man who had forced open the female animal’s mouth, to check its teeth, now stood back from her, sizing her up. Then he walked about her. Then he stood close to her, before her, and put his heavy hands on the sides of her waist, holding her. His eyes met hers. She looked quickly down. His eyes were those of a free man. Hers were those only of a female slave. “Look into his eyes quickly, deferentially,” said Gunther. “Then smile, and look down.”

“Gunther,” wept Hamilton.

“Do so,” said Gunther.

Hamilton looked up, into the eyes of the man in the woolen tunic. Indeed she did so deferentially, frightened, for she was slave, and he free.

“Smile Animal,” said Gunther.

Hamilton smiled, then sobbed and thrust her head down.

She felt the power of his hands, gripping her waist. He laughed mightily, and shook her, then released her.

Gunther was grinning. “Kneel,” he said to her, casually, as an aside.

She knelt on the wooden platform, sick, her head down. The tether was still on her neck. The man who had held it, at the indication of one of the men in woolen tunics, thrust its free end through a small circular hole in the platform; beneath the surface of the platform a child tied it about a piece of wood not large, but too large to be drawn upward through the hole in the platform. The men, and the child, withdrew. No one looked at her. She had been assessed; she would now be bargained for. She recalled Gunther’s words, “I am going to sell you, Brenda.” How far away then seemed her world her time, her friends, her education her degrees, her aptitudes, her former experiences; she recalled, idly, her apartment, buying a newspaper in Pasadena, noting the mountains, the low, earth-colored, Spanish-style buildings of the California Institute of Technology, her classes and seminars, the oral examination on her dissertation for the Ph.D. degree, the men coming up to her, shaking her hand, congratulating her. She had worn a light, white pantsuit, with Oxford shirt, buttoned, with tie. “I am being sold,” she thought. “I am being sold!”

She looked wildly about. It seemed impossible, unreal, but it was as real as the leather on her neck. The gate to the palisade was shut. Ugly Girl, tethered, too, hands bound, crouched at the corner of the platform; the line about her neck fell to the boards, lay across them, and then disappeared over the edge; beneath the boards, ascending again, it was tied, high, about one of the legs of the structure; both girls, Ugly Girl at the edge of the platform, Hamilton near its center, were alone. Hamilton closed her eyes. “I must wake up,” thought Hamilton, wildly. “I must wake up!” The heat and light of the clearing in the camp of the Dirt People was refulgent, red and warm, through her gritted eyelids. She could feel sweat beneath her armpits and between her thighs. The sun was hot, beating down, burning on her back. Beneath her knees and the tops of her toes, as she knelt, she felt the rough, splintery surface of the heavy boards of the platform. The tether, tight which could not be slipped, close on her, making her neck feel hot, broken out, she tried to reject. She tried, too, to reject that she was naked, that the deliciousness of her beauty, so curved, so soft and delicate, so vulnerable and helpless, which for no reason she clearly understood, but frightened her, so excited men, that drove them to lust for her and desire her, and wish to own her, was now, so against her will so publicly exposed for their gaze and pleasure. She tried, by sheer force of will, to thrust herself into another reality. She smiled to herself. She laughed. “I must wake up,” she thought. A warm wind, slow-moving, carrying dust, stirred by the feet of those in the clearing, moved across the platform. She felt it, fully, on the surfaces of her body, warm, moving, granular. It was a not unpleasant sensation. She recalled that at one time she would. have been scandalized to have been naked out of doors. She now had little choice. She was slave. Then she breathed in some of the dust. It was not pleasant. Her mouth felt dry. She did not open her eyes; she felt the particles against her eyelids. “This is impossible,” she whispered. “I must wake up! I must wake up!” She tried to thrust herself into an alternative reality. The men were. coming up to her. Her defense of her dissertation had been professional, and crisp. They would shake her hand, congratulating her. She wore a light, white pantsuit, with blue-pastel Oxford shirt, buttoned, with a yellow tie. The slave was jerked to her feet on the platform. A hand, hot, swift, heavy, exploded at the side of her mouth; she tasted blood, felt it running about her tongue and between her teeth; she looked into Gunther’s face; he was grinning; “Wake up,” said he, “pretty little bitch.”