John Norman

by Time Slave

  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.”

  “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 a
ddition 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.

  In the entrance to the hut there stood a terrible figure. Hamilton, her hand flung before her mouth, screamed. In the figure’s right fist was a handful of sprigs, with red berries. The metal face, horned, feathered, painted, striped, with yellow and purple, regarded her. In the figure’s left hand was a yellow stick, surmounted by a skull. He was very tall, and naked, gaunt and bony, save for a cord and strip of cloth. Through the slits in the bronze face, of hammered metal, the eyes looked upon her, in fury. On the cheeks of the horned bronze, engraved in the metal, were mystic signs. The figure’s body, too, was covered with such signs, tokens heavy with magic, yellow and purple, tattooed into the skin in patient, agonizing rites, the results of deliberately inflicted wounds, kept open, methodically contaminated over a period of weeks with colored earths. About his neck was a string from which hung small bags of herbs; to the same string, pendant, some four inches in width, hung a round disk of hammered bronze; on this disk was the representation of a personage, one bearded and of dreadful mien, many times the size of life, sitting on a great seat, handing a stalk of barley to a tiny man, reaching upward to take it. At the cord at his waist, too, on strings of woven grass, hung the bones of two hands. These were painted yellow. He uttered a great cry of wrath. He lifted the yellow stick with the skull high in the hut. The men, miserable, moaning, unable to look up, fell back before him. He thrust the handful of sprigs, with red berries, at Hamilton, and shook it. She was crouching down. She shrank back, shuddering. The figure turned away from her and regarded the men. They cringed before him, shrinking small. None met his eyes. Hamilton, the attention of the figure no longer focused on her, on her hands and knees, crawled to the side of the hut, and knelt there, leaning sick, frightened, against the mud and poles. The gaunt figure in the bronzed mask turned on the men, berating them. They looked down. The voice of the man in the bronzed mask was mighty in its denunciation, in its indignation, its outrage, in its condemnation. Suddenly the leader of the men in the hut, furtively looking up, blurted out words, and pointed at Hamilton. She looked up to see him pointing at her. The other men, supporting their leader, blurted their assent to whatever he had said. Hamilton, who did not even understand the language of the Dirt People, shook her bead, negatively. “No,” she said in English, and in the language of the Men. “No, No!” The tall, gaunt figure turned on her and looked down upon her. She shrank back against the mud and poles. “No,” she said. “No!” The impassive mask, the eyes cold behind it, looked down upon her. “No,” whispered Hamilton, and then looked down. The tall figure turned away from her. He said something, decisive, to the men in the hut, and then left the structure. None of the men left the hut. The men looked to one another. They seemed more confident now. And; too, they looked upon her, angrily. She looked down, and away. After a short time the tall, gaunt figure returned. No longer did he carry the handful of sprigs or the stick, surmounted with a skull. He carried, this time, a wizard stick, yellow, wrapped with cord, with feathers dangling from it. The men formed a circle in the hut, one point on the circumference of which was occupied by Hamilton, now ordered to stand, while, within the circle, stood the tall, gaunt figure. He began to chant, a monotonous, repetitive chant, which
was taken up by the men. Sometimes he closed his eyes; he began to turn and sway; the men, too, in their bodies, reflected the rhythm of the chant; then, within the circle, the gaunt figure, swaying, chanting, began to watch the stick which he held in his hand; so, too, did the men; Hamilton, too, in spite of herself, watched the stick. Then, to her horror, the stick, though it was moved by the tall, gaunt figure, seemed to hesitate and lift itself; obviously he controlled the stick, but, in the manner in which his attention was focused on it, and that of the men, there was almost an illusion that the stick, like a snake, moved of its own accord; the gaunt man, and the others, chanting, watched the stick; it lifted its tufted, feathered end, as though quizzically, and, as though it might have had eyes, or nostrils with which to smell, it seemed to peer at them, or to take their scent; it quivered, alert; it regarded the men, turning slowly about the circle; sometimes it lingered on one; meanwhile the chant continued, sometimes growing more intense, more frenzied, louder, sometimes less intense, more subdued, softer. The stick prowled the circle, like an animal, trying to smell out. something; the men, chanting, watched it with apprehension; Hamilton was terrified; twice the stick prowled the circle; twice it passed her; the second time it lingered longer; as the stick neared her the chant became more intense, louder; “No!” she said; then the stick passed her again, and she almost fainted, fearing only that it would, in its circle, return again, pausing before her, marking her out. The stick paused then before the leader of the men in the hut; he could not chant; sweat broke out on his forehead; he was terrified; then, as his knees almost buckled, the stick, as though it had not yet found what it wanted, left him, continuing its circuit; as the stick approached Hamilton this time, the chanting became ever more frenzied, louder; it rang in the hut; “No!” she cried; the stick paused before her, quivering; “No!” she cried; then it passed her, but only a yard or so; the chanting had become less, more subdued; the stick turned back, to again look upon her; “No!” she wept. “No!” The stick stopped before her, quivering. “No!” she cried. The chanting was now wild, insistent, powerful, overwhelming, irresistible. No longer did the stick quiver. Hamilton looked upon it with horror. It pointed to her.