One of the men was bold enough to ask a question: “Suppose we don’t raise even enough for you?”
“We figure one of two things in cases like that,” the Sauron woman said with another of those dangerous smiles. “You might be lazy, in which case we kill you and bring in harder-working cattle. Or you might be holding out on us, which is treason to the Race--in which case we kill you and bring in cattle who know better. Anyone want to know anything else?”
Glum silence from the crowd. Several Saurons gestured with their gun barrels. Svetlana had seen that peremptory motion so many times in the past few hours, and each so nearly identical to all the others, that she wondered if the Soldiers practiced in front of a mirror.
A few at a time, the intact families shuffled toward Tallinn Town. All but a handful of the guards turned back to the men and women--mostly women--they still held. Svetlana did not like the expression on their faces. Again they reminded her of stobor, a pack of stobor sitting in a circle around a calf they’d cut out of the herd, waiting for the moment when they’d all leap together and tear the little animal to pieces.
The woman Sauron nodded to a man who came up beside her. It was not exactly a salute, but it was a deferential nod. He was older than she, and wore fancier collar tabs--his had four stars and a stripe, while hers bore three stars only. He said something in shrill Americ which sharpened that--hungry--look in the Saurons’ eyes. A couple of them let out quickly stifled whoops. The--officer?--spoke to the woman Sauron.
She turned his words into Russki: “Base First Rank Shagrut tells me to inform you of what will happen next. You are spoil of war, as should be obvious to you. Now you will be awarded.”
Awarded. It was a word without any particular flavor. Svetlana found out in moments what the Base First Rank--pompous, outlandish title, she thought before those moments passed--meant by it.
He spoke in Americ. The woman Sauron translated: “Assault Leader Uldor, you have first choice among the cattle women, as reward for having saved two comrades’ lives in hand-to-hand fighting.”
Uldor stepped out from among his fellows. The pack of them bayed, once more like stobor, then fell silent in eager, animal anticipation. Uldor was older than most of the Saurons, a rather weather-beaten man with gray at his temples and bags under his eyes; had he not worn field-gray, he might have been a farmer or, more likely from his broad shoulders and big, powerful hands, a smith: no one to notice in particular.
But he wore field-gray, and was noticed. The women shrank from him as he strolled slowly through their number, all but a couple of brazen wenches who cast sheep’s eyes at him because he was a conqueror. Soft questions and guesses ran through the crowd of captives: “What will he have us do?” “Cook his food--?” Wash his clothes--” “Go to his bed--?”
“Hush!” three women said at once. “Don’t give him more ideas than he has.”
Uldor already had all the ideas he needed. He walked up to a young woman, reached out and gave her breast a considering squeeze, as if he were contemplating the purchase of a pig and was trying to decide what sort of hams it would yield. The woman--Katerina Katushova, her name was--had been free a few hours before, and did not yet grasp what slavery meant. Crimson with indignant fury, she knocked his hand away.
Without change of expression, without particular malice, but with Sauron speed and strength, he hit her in the belly. She took two stumbling steps backwards, folded in on herself as she did so, hit the dirt hard, and lay there struggling to breathe. Uldor took no more notice of her, but went on to examine another girl. When he fondled her, she stood quiet and submitted, however much she trembled. Among the women, that was the instant when fear crystallized into terror.
Uldor strode on, looking at this woman, groping that one, until he came to Olga Ryzhkova. She was not as young as most of the others for whom he’d paused, being close to his own age. She glared at him when he touched her, but did not pull away--as if that would have done her any good. Perhaps he felt her up for something other than mere amusement, for as he took his hand off her bosom he said in bad Russki, “You have had childs.” It was not a question.
“Two,” she admitted, forced by his stare to reply.
“Young enough for more,” he said. With no more ceremony than that, he shoved her to the ground, jumped on top of her. When she screamed, he hit her, not as hard as he had Katyusha Katushova, but as a warning he could do worse--much worse--if he cared to. She struggled as hard as she could, but she might as well have been Tallinn Town fighting the Sauron aircars. He hiked up her skirts, tore off her drawers, dropped his field-gray trousers far enough for what was needed, shoved himself into her. She screamed again, but he ignored her now.
Svetlana screamed too, curses fouler even than the one she had directed at the leering Sauron guard. She threw herself at the man atop her daughter. Had the other women joined her, Uldor might have had a bitter time, Sauron though he was, before his comrades could free him. But Svetlana leaped alone. Fear held her friends frozen.
And the Assault Leader remained a Sauron, too. Hardly interrupting the up-and-down motion of his hairy buttocks, he leaned up on one elbow, caught Svetlana in the side of the head with the point of the other. The impact was like a bomb going off. She lay on the cold ground, dazed, while Uldor finished raping her daughter.
By the time Svetlana’s senses returned, Olga and Uldor were back on their feet, the Sauron matter-of-factly zipping up his fly. Olga tried to tear herself away, but he held her with fingers like iron. He said something to her. She shook her head. He hit her, hard enough to snap her head back. She bent over and vomited. He waited till she was through, then hit her again.
“Hear me, woman,” he said. Maybe he spoke louder, maybe Svetlana’s head was clearer, but now she heard him, too. “We do. We do like just now if you fight, we do nice if you good. But we do.” Now he took her head, made her look at what was going on all around. “You think you--how you say?--special? You not special. Others same like you. You cattle, you belong to Soldiers now. You ours.”
The Saurons were busy proving that to the people of Tallinn Town in the most literal way imaginable. Half a dozen of them mounted the women they’d chosen. More screams mounted to the deaf sky. And more Saurons prowled through the captives, choosing new victims.
Olga’s shriek rang through the rest. “Not Yelena!” she screamed. “Not my daughter. God have mercy, Uldor, I’ll do anything you want, but keep that man from my daughter. She is too young.”
Svetlana followed her daughter’s trembling finger. She had already died a hundred times since Byers’ Star crawled up over the horizon. Now she died a hundred more, for a Sauron stood thoughtfully before her only granddaughter. Yelena’s eyes were wide as dinnerplates, as if she did not, could not, believe what they were taking in.
With a single motion, quicker than a cave lion’s leap, the Sauron ripped her blouse, baring her small young breasts to the chilly air. She turned and tried to flee. He was on her before the motion truly began.
And Uldor told Olga, “You do what I want because I want. Is enough.”
So this is what slavery means, Svetlana thought numbly. When her husband was still alive, he’d sometimes hit her if things did not suit him. She’d thought her lot very hard. She would have thought it harder yet, were that not the way of most husbands in Tallinn Town--common misery is easier to bear than misery unique to oneself. Now all of Tallinn Town had more misery to bear than she’d ever dreamed of.
The Sauron who had leaped on Yelena grunted, twitched, got to his feet. His cock was smeared with blood; more blood stained the girl’s inner thighs. The Sauron said something in Americ. His comrades, those who weren’t busy enjoying their own crimes, laughed heartily.
Yelena’s little brother Yuri screamed: “You son of a pimp, you hurt my sister!” He dashed at the Sauron. “I’ll kill you for that!”
Two or three people had a chance to grab him. Somehow, they all missed. Face white and determined, small fists
flailing, he did his best to make good his threat. But the Sauron was not only a man grown, he was a combat veteran with genetically engineered strength and reflexes. He lashed out with a booted foot. The hard toe caught Yuri under the chin. His neck bones parted with a noise like a dry board broken over a knee. His body as limp as a sack of beets as he fell, and Svetlana knew he would never get up again.
Yelena had not screamed while her maidenhead was ripped asunder. She screamed now, and went for the Sauron with nails like talons. Laughing, he caught both her hands in one of his. She tried to kick him, with no better luck. He bore her to the ground and methodically set to ravishing her a second time.
Olga’s face went white as curded cheese, but she did not leap to her daughter’s defense even though her own new master’s grip on her was for the moment light. She’d already begun to learn the lesson the Saurons were teaching, the lesson and the futile, bitter taste of slavery.
Svetlana was learning also, though she did not fully realize it. She knew she could not fight the Sauron, knew what she’d got for trying once, knew she was likely to get worse if she tried again. And so she stood, hating herself for her weakness (another lesson of slavery), swaying back and forth as she had in front of the ravaged church. The church, though, was only wood and metal and paint. It might, God willing, be rebuilt. But how to go about rebuilding a ravaged girl? It was a question without answer, or hope of answer.
Hope? Hope was ravaged, too.
Svetlana looked around at the people who had been townsfolk but now were only fellow slaves. The Sauron woman straddled Misha Sikorsky, rocking up and down on him, raping him as shamelessly as any of the other Soldiers violated women. Svetlana had never imagined such depravity. That men, who securely fancied themselves the lords of creation, who prayed their thanks to God for not having been made female--that they could be used as callously as the tenderest maid left her even more dazed and confused than he had been before. Now everything on Haven seemed topsy-turvy.
Not all the Saurons resorted to public rape with the women they chose for themselves. Those who did, in fact, were a distinct minority. But they made quite clear the fate that awaited any girl who thought of resisting. When a Sauron picked someone, she came with him. Her eyes might be numb with horror, but if she had a brain in her head she did not try to make matters worse than they were. As Uldor had said to Olga, they could do it nicely or rough, but if a Sauron wanted to do it, he would.
And already some of the women began to measure their status in terms of their new masters’. Not far from Svetlana, a pretty young thing sneered to an older woman, “Your Sauron has blank collar tabs. An officer wanted me.”
The older woman opened her mouth, no doubt to curse her tormentor, but closed it again without saying anything. If she angered the pretty girl’s master, how could she be sure a simple trooper could protect her?
There were more captives than Saurons. Several picked a second wench for themselves; the Sauron woman, having wrung poor battered Misha Sikorsky dry, chose another stalwart man. Before long, only the rest of the single men and a few old babushkas like Svetlana remained unselected.
The Base First Rank spoke to the woman Sauron. She had not bothered to put her trousers back on, but strode around careless of both cold and decency. Still half naked, she translated for her commander: “You men, gather in a tight group over there.” The bachelors and widowers obeyed her gesture, moving about fifty meters away from the Saurons and the women who were now theirs.
If the Base First Rank gave a signal, Svetlana never saw it. But a dozen Soldiers together opened up with their hand weapons. The single men went down like winnowed barley. The women screamed, but the Saurons took no more notice of them than if they’d been so many kermitoids croaking by the riverbank.
The woman Sauron said, ”Single men are dangerous-- as dangerous as any cattle, anyhow. They have a habit of doing stupid things like plotting, and will try to kill without caring what happens to them or to anyone else afterwards. We see no point in exposing ourselves to any risk, no matter how small. The Race does not breed fools.”
What the Race bred, Svetlana thought, was monsters. But they were strong, deadly strong, monsters. Tallinn Town had fallen to a small detachment. All Haven had to lie under the Sauron’s grip now. What choice was there to obey, at least until God granted that the mighty but wicked fall?
Her mind formed the question without realizing it might have another answer. After a moment, though, she saw one: she could die.
The woman Sauron said something in Americ. Whatever it was, it had no visible effect on the Soldiers to whom she spoke. She turned to the Base First Rank, asked a question. He looked over toward Svetlana and the other old women. His eyes were flat and blank and cold as the night sky with both Byers’ Star and Cat’s Eye gone from it. Under those merciless eyes, Svetlana felt cold herself. She could indeed die. Finally, to her relief, Shagrut turned away with a shrug.
The woman Sauron switched to Russia: “The Race is not wasteful, either, nor would Haven let us be even if we cared to. We see little point in feeding crones who cannot breed--and no Soldiers seem to want them. So--”
From too far away to hear what she said, Svetlana saw Olga urgently talking to Uldor. The Sauron laughed and shook his head. Olga persisted. He backhanded her; the blow was not hard enough to knock her down, but blood trickled from a corner of her mouth.
A few Saurons moved away from their slaves, started drifting toward the babushkas. Svetlana knew she should scream, knew she should run. What point, though, when screaming would gain her nothing and running perhaps another second or two of life but surely no more? If she was to die now, she would die with dignity, for her own sake if nobody else’s. She stood where she was, began to make her peace with the God who had so hideously betrayed Tallinn Valley.
In spite of the slap from Uldor, Olga kept talking. He raised a closed fist in warning, but she persisted, and with more than talk. She set her hand on his crotch, let her fingers close round the cock that had so recently ravished her. And she pointed toward Svetlana.
Uldor laughed again. Svetlana knew she would die and was glad, glad she would not have to see what her daughter was forced to sink to. Now that fate had rolled over her, rolled over all of Haven, like an avalanche, better that she not live among the ruins and miseries the Saurons would leave her people. But when God summoned her before His golden throne, she intended to give Him a piece of her mind.
Resigned to death, she scarcely noticed Uldor pat that obscenely groping hand and step away from Olga. When he came toward her, she merely expected him to kill her himself and pile more sorrow on her daughter. Instead, he studied her with the same intent seriousness he had used in choosing a younger woman to rape.
She stared back, without hope and thus without fear, ironically drawing strength from her absolute weakness. Uldor did not look like a monster. But then, only the young thought looks matter for much, and Svetlana felt as if a thousand T-years weighed on her bones.
“Old woman,” he said in his halting Russia, but the bald, rude words were not a tithe of the age Svetlana knew inside. “Old woman, you can work?”
“I can work,” Svetlana said. What was life but work? As soon as she could walk, she’d worked in the barns and the henyard and the garden plot. She’d swung a scythe at harvest time, singing songs that went back to ancient, legendary Earth. She’d cooked and cleaned and swaddled and washed and sewn and chopped wood and ... Of all the questions the accursed Sauron might have asked, she’d never expected one to make her laugh in his face.
He reached out to feel her arms, her shoulders, her back, as if she were a muskylope he might buy. Whatever he found must have satisfied him, for he said, “You can cook?”
“I can cook.” When she said those words, she began to think she might live. She knew one thing for certain: having seen death up close, she would never fear it again. For a slave, that was knowledge more precious than gold.
Very well, the Sau
rons could kill her--but they could do it only once.
Uldor kept looking at her. All at once, he made his decision. He took her by the arm in the same unbreakable grip he had used with Olga when Yelena lay spreadeagled on the ground, dragged her away from the other babushkas.
A couple of Saurons pointed at Svetlana, laughing and rocking their hips forward and back. Even in the midst of catastrophe, she felt her weathered cheeks heat. Uldor growled something and made a list. After that, the filthy jeering stopped.
The woman Sauron pointed to the rest of the old women, asked a question. Though it was in Americ, Svetlana could guess what it meant. “Anybody else want one?” No one seemed to. The flat, harsh cracks of rifle fire began behind her.
She staggered as if the bullets pierced her own flesh instead of her friends’. Had it not been for Uldor’s strong arm, she would have fallen. He frogmarched her back to where Olga stood. By then, the gunfire was over. There hadn’t been that many babushkas, and how was an old woman even to try to run?
Uldor let go of Svetlana. She stumbled forward into her daughter’s arms, the two women clung to each other. “Olga, I should have died. I was ready--you should have let me die? “Why should I go on living now?”
Olga’s tears mingled with hers. “I wanted to die, too, when Uldor, when he--” She had to stop; she was crying too hard to talk. “But if I die, mother, who will look after Yelena. The Sauron who--” She broke down again, but Svetlana knew what she meant. A man who found sport in raping a virgin who was barely a woman--what could her granddaughter look for from such a man but more abuse as long as she lived?
“But what you did, to get Uldor to come for me.” Svetlana shook her head. “Better to die, better to die.”
War World IV: Invasion Page 27
