Until Dawn

by Laura Taylor

  On the north side of the camp, the tents were crowded in, running almost up to the tree-line in a design that was not at all defensible. If she ever had an excuse to go into that area of the camp, the forest would provide good cover for an escape attempt.

  On the south side, there was a makeshift wall built of logs, but a good solid blow from a battering ram would knock the thing over. There were no solid buildings in the main camp, everyone making do with tents and marquees of various sorts. There was an old corrugated iron shed on the south side, which was apparently used to store the horse tack and long-term food supplies, but it had only three and a half walls, and would be exceptionally easy to loot, if anyone managed to get close enough.

  Around the centre of the camp there were an abundance of guards, armed with swords and machetes, and wearing various pieces of crude armour. Bits of leather, thin sheets of metal or even car tyres had been cut and shaped into arm guards and chest plates. But further out in the camp, the men seemed both less alert and less prepared to fight, not wearing any armour, and only about half of them were armed, from what Dusk could see.

  But suddenly, her reconnaissance time was over. “You! Come on, on your feet.” A guard grabbed Dusk’s arm and dragged her up, shoving her towards one of the marquees. At the same time, another two guards came for Mei-Lien and Flame, leading them towards a different tent.

  Inside, there were thirteen other women seated on the dirt floor, all of them filthy and dishevelled. A pole ran the length of the tent, concreted into the ground, and each of the women’s hands were chained to the pole, with just enough room to let them eat or relieve themselves in the trench that was dug into the back of the tent. In fact, one woman was doing so right now, and Dusk noted that she showed no signs of any sort of embarrassment at being interrupted by the guards bringing a new resident into the tent. She just finished her business, pulled her pants back up and shuffled awkwardly back to her seated position. Even standing up fully wasn’t possible; the chains were too short to allow it.

  “Sit down,” the guard snapped, shoving Dusk to the floor as they reached an empty spot about a third of the way along the pole. Her hands were swiftly shackled, then the guards left without a word.

  At first, she was rather surprised to find that she was being put by herself. Given the fight that had gone down, she’d rather expected Flame to have been the one who was isolated from her friends. There were three women’s marquees, and with five women from their tribe, there was little option but to put two in each of two tents, and one by herself.

  But then she remembered the odd exchange she’d had with The Wolf, before he’d tried to dismiss her. It seemed her conclusion had been right after all; he saw her as a greater threat than the others, if he wasn’t prepared to risk her conspiring with even one of her comrades.

  Now that the guards were gone, Dusk looked around, quickly getting the measure of the other women here. Most avoided looking at her, but one or two were watching her with curiosity. But before she could introduce herself or ask anything about this place, the tent flap was pulled back and three more guards strode in, carrying trays of bowls. They handed them out without a word, not even bothering to leer at Dusk as they gave her hers. Perhaps they were low-ranking men who had no reason to be excited about a new slave, she mused. Plenty of the other men had made comments about ‘fresh meat’, but she supposed that in a place like this, sexual privileges probably came with rank.

  She picked up the spoon that was in the bowl – it looked like porridge, but made with too much water – and moved to taste it. But then she felt a pressure on her arm, a firm but subtle gesture as the woman beside her pushed her hand down again.

  “Don’t.” It was only a shadow of a whisper, and Dusk glanced at the woman. She had her head down, staring at the bowl in her hands. By all appearances, she’d said nothing and Dusk had imagined the word.

  But she heeded the warning nonetheless, toying with the slop in her bowl until the guard had finished serving the meal and left the tent again.

  Then she raised an eyebrow at the woman. “I’m Savage,” the woman said. She glanced down at Dusk’s bowl. “Don’t eat it. On the first night, they always drug new women. It makes it easier for the men. And once you come to the next morning and realise that six or seven men have already had you…” Her lip quivered. “Well, it takes some of the fight out, you know?”

  “I get it,” Dusk said. The cold weight of her current predicament was pressing down on her. It was all well and good to believe that Aidan was going to come and rescue her, but what would she have to endure in the hours and days before they arrived? She felt a rolling wave of terror at the thought of it. It is always worth fighting, she told herself, a mantra that had kept her going through harsh and fearsome circumstances in the past. It is always worth fighting.

  “Tip it in the sewer channel,” Savage told her, so she did, feeling a faint pang of concern about the wasted food. It was possible this woman was toying with her, merely wanting her to go hungry…

  “Here,” Savage said, slopping a few spoonfuls of her own gruel into Dusk’s bowl. The woman on her other side did the same, and then, at Savage’s prompting, the next one up the row on either side did as well.

  “I wouldn’t usually intervene,” Savage told her, eating her gruel slowly. Dusk supposed it lasted longer that way, a trick to make the brain think it was getting more food. “They’ll have you, one way or another. But we heard you’re special.”

  “Oh?”

  Savage nodded sagely. “Your lot started that fight in The Wolf’s palace.” Her face lit up a little. “Been a long time since we saw spirit like that! So I just thought I’d lend a hand.”

  Dusk didn’t bother hiding her surprise. “News travels fast around here.”

  “We’ve learned to pay attention. Women get taken off for the men to have sex with them, or have to go and serve in the main tent. The Wolf likes to be hand-fed by his ‘Pretties’. Or they polish his shoes, or bathe him. And if you keep your head down and don’t make a fuss, they forget you’re there, and talk amongst themselves, and that way, we learn things.”

  “But it doesn’t do you any fucking good, though, does it,” another woman hissed from further down the row. “You listen, and spy, and conspire, but you’re still here, chained to a fucking pole like the rest of us. Stupid bitch.”

  Dusk steadfastly ignored the naysayer, eager to take what information she could get. Any idle detail could potentially be of help. “So, tell me what you’ve learned,” she invited Savage, stirring the porridge idly. Bloody hell, it looked foul. “What of The Wolf? Any weaknesses in his defences? Is there any time the women are unchained? Has anyone tried to kill him at any point?”

  “What?” Savage looked aghast at the question. “How the hell would we manage to do that?”

  “You said some of the women bathe him. That means they must be getting close enough to do some serious damage, if they chose to.”

  Chained to a pole, with Mikey on one side and Julia on the other – both of them also in chains – Willow reached deep inside herself to maintain the pretence of calm. She’d long ago learned to put aside her own fear and pain to help her children through these trials, and though it took a lot of effort, she was grateful that she had them. If she had just been fighting for her own sake, she might have given up long ago. Now, though, she brought to mind the image of a female brown bear. On some nature documentary, years before, there had been a standoff between a mother bear with two cubs, and a male who wanted to kill them. The mother had been lean and hungry after a long, cold winter, but that she-bear hadn’t hesitated. The male had weighed at least half as much as her again, but she’d snarled, clawed and bellowed until he’d finally got the message and gone off to find easier prey.

  She was the bear, Willow reminded herself. She would care for her cubs and see them safely out of this hellhole. She would fight, and she would win.

  “I don’t like it!”

  Willow opened
her eyes at the plaintive cry, seeing Julia almost in tears as she pouted into the bowl of bland slop they’d been given for dinner. Mikey was finishing his bowl, eating with gusto from sheer hunger. But Julia was not so easily appeased.

  “Okay,” Willow said, trying to sound calm and confident. “Well, remember when we played those pretend games, about a year ago? We didn’t have any food, but we all imagined we were eating a big, big plate of chicken, with lots of potatoes, and thinking how full we felt, and that we just couldn’t eat any more?” Julia nodded. “So, we’re going to do the same thing now,” Willow told her. “You remember what peaches taste like?” They’d had more than their fill of them over summer, sweet and impossibly juicy, just minutes off the tree, and she chose the taste as it was likely to be a vivid memory that Julia wouldn’t have any trouble bringing to mind. Julia screwed up her face a little and thought hard, then nodded. “Very good. Now we’re going to pretend the porridge tastes like peaches. Fresh, sweet, juicy peaches…” Willow had to stop, her throat tight, tears pricking her eyes as she remembered eating that fruit. They’d sat by the river, talking, laughing, juice dribbling down their chins. Whisper had pointed out a goanna, climbing a tree on the far side of the river, much to the children’s amazement. Hawk had tried to teach Mikey to do a forward roll, and they’d all ended up in hysterics. They had been days filled with happiness and joy that somehow Willow had started to take for granted.

  “You’d be better off smothering the pair of them,” a harsh voice said, the woman two places down the row sneering at her.

  Willow had realised very quickly that there was no particular sense of solidarity here among the women. She’d expected them to work together, to help and support each other. Instead, they seemed only to squabble and snarl at each other. Willow ignored this particular comment, generously reminding herself that the woman was speaking out of fear and pain.

  “That girl’s going to be ripe fodder for the men as soon as she’s ten years old. The boy, when he’s a bit younger. You want them to grow up knowing that’s their future?”

  “Bite your tongue, you mangy bitch,” Mist called from further down the row. She and Willow, while being in the same tent, had been placed far enough apart to make plotting together an idle dream. If they were going to hatch any sort of plan, every other woman in the tent was going to know about it, and Willow didn’t currently trust any of them enough to take that risk. “You might have given up on life and see yourself as nothing more than a cock-house for the slavers, but some of us still believe we’re worth something.”

  The woman laughed, a cold, hollow sound. “You might have caused a stir when you arrived,” she said, and Willow wasn’t surprised to know that word of the fight had already spread. “But you won’t last more than a week before they break you.”

  Mist smiled at her, the hungry, daring look a cat might give a mouse before it pounced. “Then it’s a damn good thing we’re not going to be here that long.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Dawn brought with it a cool mist that filled the Gully like a giant bowl of soup and melted up into the trees in swirls of white, reminiscent of ghosts. The forest wasn’t dense, small bushes and plenty of new saplings taking advantage of the sunshine to create a space that was all tangled shadows and tricks of the light. There was little true cover, if one was trying to avoid arrows or bullets, but with the right preparation, there were also plenty of places to hide.

  Birds flitted about in the trees, screeching their opinions gleefully. A lizard crawled across damp leaves, suddenly alert and joyful as it found a snail wandering across its path, and with a few lazy chomps of its jaw, the snail was gone.

  Sitting motionless inside a net of camouflage webbing, Aidan, Faith and Whisper peered down at the camp from their perch halfway up the hill – far closer than could really be called safe, but far enough, in the morning gloom and with the expertly designed mesh, that there was a one-thousand-to-one chance of them actually being spotted.

  The camouflage gear was one of the vital purchases that Whisper had argued for, back when they’d been setting up their village. Many of the men had argued that it was a waste of money, their limited funds better spent on more fruit trees, or axes, or livestock. But Whisper had stood his ground, and there had been a dozen times since then that the whole tribe had been profoundly grateful that he had.

  As they watched, a woman was led in chains from one of the long marquees in the centre of the camp, over to a collection of small tents clustered together beneath a gum tree. A tarpaulin had been set up as a makeshift gazebo, a place for the men to rest out of the sun and rain, and there were a couple of straw bales set out as seats. Apparently, the men were hungry enough to have realised they needed to cultivate a couple of acres of wheat, though from what Aidan had seen, they were extremely bad at making use of the straw left at the end of the threshing process.

  Upon arriving at the tents, one of the men tossed two straw bales on top of each other, bent the woman over the top and unzipped himself. He started hammering into her with no other preliminaries, and when he was finished, a second man took over, while a third watched on, waiting his turn.

  Aidan felt sick as he watched, cold rage bleeding into barely-restrained disgust. He made no attempt to hide his revulsion at what was happening – Dusk was down there in that camp, and at some point in time, she’d be subjected to the same sort of treatment. God help him, but he was going to enjoy killing any men who’d harmed her. But as ugly as it was, they needed to know what they were going to be up against, how the men interacted with each other, how they treated the women, what security measures were in place for all the various activities going on about the camp. They carefully counted the guards they could see, the number of horses visible, and made note of the number of men up and about, from pre-dawn through to full daylight. They meticulously observed the layout of the tents, possible access routes to various areas, and obstructions or weapons that could slow their progress.

  “Let’s get back before it gets any lighter,” Faith said finally. The mist was beginning to burn off, and if they stayed here much longer, they would have trouble moving without being spotted, even with their disguise. In a coordinated shuffle, the three of them retreated slowly up the hill, taking fifteen minutes to move a hundred metres or so, and only then did they dare to emerge from beneath the camouflage mesh.

  Another kilometre or so on, and they arrived at their own makeshift camp. About half of each tribe was here, having been brought by ute, along with a large collection of weapons, emergency food supplies, and various tools that would help them in their assault. Scouts were keeping a close eye on the surrounding forest, ready to take out Gully scouts if they got so much as a sniff of their camp. Meanwhile, the rest of their members were taking a painstaking trek north with the horses, while a skeleton crew had been left at each tribe’s village to take care of the livestock. Choosing who stayed and who went had been easy – some of the men had been injured badly enough that they wouldn’t be able to fight and, denied their prize and an outlet for their anger, they were more than willing to make themselves useful keeping an eye on things at home so that others could exact revenge in their place.

  Back at the camp, Faith wasted no time in getting down to business. “The central marquee is where the chief lives,” she reported to the group gathered around them – about thirty men and women all eager to hear the first reports and start planning the attack. “The three long tents are for the women. From what we’ve seen, they use chains and handcuffs to keep the women restrained, so we’ll need someone to kill the guards and get the keys.”

  “Our main attack should be from the north,” Aidan said, reviewing the layout of the camp in his mind. A new map was slowly being put together, spread out on a wide, flat rock, and he added a few landmarks to it now. Sticks, rocks and pieces of bark represented their various forces. “We can take out twenty of them with arrows before the fighting really starts, but then it’ll just be a case o
f bludgeoning our way through to the tents. Under cover of darkness, I could get a man over to the women’s marquees, but there are too many guards for one person to be able to free the women alone.”

  “We should send ten or twelve men in from the western side,” Whisper said. “They’ll be camouflaged, so they should be able to get in close and thin out their numbers with a surprise attack.”

  Faith nodded. “It won’t do much to free the women, but it’ll mean there are fewer slavers to fight later on.”

  “They can work their way along the western and southern edge,” Aidan continued the idea. “They’ve set up the barricade on the south side, but they won’t be expecting an attack to come from within the bounds of the camp.”

  “We’re going to need a dedicated force to attack the guards at the marquees and free the women,” Whisper said, circling back around to their original goal. “The sooner they’re free, the sooner they can help fight, and that would weigh the odds of the battle significantly in our favour. Getting out is going to be as hard as getting in, and it may be that we just have to stand and fight until the slavers are all dead.”

  Faith raised an eyebrow at that. “Some of these women have been captives for a long time. You’ve seen them down there.” She waved her arm in the general direction of the Gully. “There’s no hint of defiance left in them. What makes you think they’re going to fight?”