When the whipping was done, Wulfsson tossed the whip back to Kawsa. “Here. Tell me when she’s recovered enough. Back to finish my dinner, now.”
He stalked away, and the overseers stepped aside to let the women slaves untie poor Greta and carry her sobbing into the barracks. The slaves turned and filed back inside, a silent, shaken crew.
“Rega!” Kawsa snapped.
The small woman stopped in her tracks and turned slowly to look up at the overseer with utter dread. “Yes, sir?”
“Into the barn and up to the hayloft with you, quickly!” Rega turned away toward the huge dark outbuilding with its lowing of cattle, her steps dragging.
Gar felt outrage and fury, the more bitter because he could do nothing to stop it. He went on in and sat down on his pallet. From farther down the darkened room, he could hear Greta’s voice, thick with sobs, saying fiercely, “I don’t care! I’d rather this than have to bed that beast again!” Then she broke off into more tears.
Gar reached out with his mind to try to speed the healing of her back, but could feel no response. In desperation, he let his awareness expand, feeling, listening, for Kawsa’s mind. He felt a huge surge of relief when he found it, glowing in the mental, darkness like a coal on the hearth, burning with lust and cruelty. He reached inside, found the ganglion that would give the signal to stop the the flow of blood in exactly the right place, thought hard at it—but the synapse functioned as smoothly as though his thoughts were nowhere near it.
As indeed they were not, for he could listen, could hear another’s thoughts, follow the nerve-signals down individual pathways—but his numbed brain couldn’t send out the impulse to change that path, to change anything. Magnus withdrew quickly, not wanting to hear. anything, to feel anything secondhand, feeling completely useless, completely alone, in the dark.
Someone started a slow and mournful song, almost a dirge. Others joined in, until half the slaves in the barracks were singing, adults and children all. A cry came from across the way, but they sang all the louder for it.
A hand grasped Gar’s shoulder, and his glance leaped up into the gloom, body tensing to fight—but the man’s eyes were only a little higher than his own, even though Gar was sitting while the other was standing, and the gaze was gentle and filled with pity. “First time you’ve ever had to witness something like this, is it, lad?”
“No,” Gar answered, “but it’s the first time I haven’t been able to do anything about it.”
He had never felt so helpless in his life.
When full darkness fell, and the gloom thickened so that he could scarcely see a foot in front of his face, Gar stretched himself out on his moldy pallet, writhed about to try to find a way for none of his bruises to come in contact with the straw, and listened to the sounds of the other slaves as he lay waiting for sleep. There was the muffled sobbing of Greta, Rega, and the other woman whom one of the overseers had chosen for a few minutes’ pleasure; there were snores from those who had been lucky enough to find slumber and, here and there, the gasps and little cries of delight of pairs of slaves who had found the only pleasure left to them. Gar reflected bitterly that Steward Wulfsson couldn’t even afford privacy for them, though they didn’t seem to need it.
A soft rustle of cloth near him made him look up to see a small woman folding her skirts to sit beside him, looking down with a quizzical smile. “I’ve been watching you all evening, stranger.”
“I’m Gar,” he whispered. “You?”
“Hilda,” she said. “Life’s bitter, lad. We, too, could find a little sweetness in it.”
“Thank you, but after what I’ve seen tonight, I’d hate myself if I reached out to touch a woman.” Gar groped to give her hand a quick squeeze anyway, then dropped it. “I’m surprised the steward allows his slaves to have any pleasures at all. Why doesn’t he just keep the men and women apart?”
“Why?” Hilda actually giggled. “Why, he can’t depend on enough free women bearing children who are too large or too small, lad. He has to make sure he’ll have more slaves tomorrow.”
“Breeding,” Gar said sourly.
“He calls it that,” Hilda told him. “We call it love.” She looked off into the darkness in disdain. “Poor fools out there—two couples trying to make normal babies, one a big woman with a small man, the other a small woman with a big man. Even if the babies do grow to Midgarder size, they’ll still be slaves.”
“Even though they look just like the masters?” Gar asked in surprise.
“Even though,” Hilda assured him. “They carry blood that might be a giant’s or a dwarf’s, after all. The son or daughter of a slave is still a slave.”
That left the question of why she had sought him out, but Gar had tact enough not to ask. “Poor souls,” he muttered. “Aren’t we all?” Hilda looked down at him again. “It surely seems to have taken you sorely, lad, watching Greta whipped. Have you never seen the like before?”
“I have a weak stomach,” Gar explained.
“Well, let it heal, and seek me out when it does,” Hilda sighed. She touched his hand, a light caress, then slipped off into the night.
Gar let her go, realizing why she had come, why the slaves went on making babies even though they knew the children would grow into misery like their own—because he had never felt so bitterly alone as he did that night.
By the time he went to sleep, Magnus had learned all he needed to know to justify overthrowing Midgard’s government. He wasn’t sure what that government was, but he felt totally justified in conquering the country—as bloodlessly as possible, of course, but he doubted how bloodless that could be. The depth of anger and hatred in the slaves was hidden, but very great.
That anger, though, was completely directed toward the masters, and only struck at other slaves in brief flashes, the sort of quarrels that are bound to crop up between people anywhere who are forced to live too closely together. Gar was amazed that the men didn’t try to browbeat the women, especially seeing how the overseers exploited them—but perhaps that was why: the slave men, sickened by the bullying, were determined not to imitate it.
He was also astounded to see that the big slaves didn’t try to beat the small ones—that, in fact, all the slaves seemed to cling together for comfort, regardless of size or gender. He wondered if it might be because they shared a common bond of suffering; semi-dwarf and demi-giant united in misery, and in the need to care for one another in order to survive.
Of course, it also might have been that they were simply too tired to try to intimidate one another, but Gar doubted that; he had seen people in very deprived circumstances still trying to bully their fellows.
There was no question about the overseers’ power, though. Each of them took a different woman every night, and during the day, seemed to be alert for the slightest excuse to strike a slave. They always found excuses to yell, to insult, to browbeat, and seemed to enjoy every minute. As his concussion healed, Gar read their spirits more and more accurately, and realized that they did indeed enjoy their work. The position seemed to attract sadists.
He felt no compunction about reading their minds. There could be no doubt they were the enemy, or that he was at so severe a disadvantage that he would have to use every psi power he had to escape and stay free.
He also felt no compunction about rummaging around in Steward Wulfsson’s mind—there was no question that the man was an enemy, or that Gar would need every scrap of knowledge he could gain to topple the power structure of which Wulfsson was a part. He learned that Midgard was split into a dozen kingdoms, and that each king governed his own little domain as he wished—but that in practice, he followed the policies laid down by the Council of Kings. The Council ruled all year round, so the kings had to leave the day-to-day running of their kingdoms to their barons while they themselves lived in the capital. The barons, in turn, divided their holdings into twenty farms, each run by a steward.