“Do as I say. Get everyone here in the square. Now.”
The day drew on into an early winter evening, but for the folk of Berrona it seemed that it would never end.
The Merduks had cleared out the town house by house, stabling their horses in the humbler dwellings. The menfolk had been separated from the women and children and marched away south over the hills by several hundred of the invaders. Then there had been the sound of gunfire, crackling out into the cold air endlessly. It had gone on for hours, but none of the women could or would agree on what it meant. A few of the local shepherds had been dragged in by the invaders, bloody and terrified. They said that there was a huge Merduk army encamped out in the pastures to the south of the town, but few of the people believed them or had time to consider the ramifications of such a phenomenon. Their own tragedy filled their minds to overflowing.
Arja had seen some women dragged off into empty houses by groups of the laughing soldiers. There had been screams, and later the Merduks had emerged restrapping their armour, smiling, talking lazily in that horrible language they had. One woman, Frieda the blacksmith’s wife who was held to be the prettiest in the town, had been stripped and forced to serve wine to the Merduk officers as they lounged in the headman’s house. Her husband they had searched out and trussed up in a corner so that he was forced to watch as they finally raped her one by one. In the end they had killed her. But they blinded and castrated the blacksmith before leaving him a moaning heap on the floor. No-one had dared help him, and he had bled to death beside the violated corpse of his wife. Arja knew this because some of the other women had been treated in the same manner as Frieda and then released. They had seen it happen.
Perhaps fifty of the women of the town had been herded up and were now in the town hall. They were the young, the pretty, the well-shaped. Outside, night was drawing in and the Merduks had lit bonfires in the streets, piling them high with furniture from the empty houses. They were sacking the town, looting anything of value and destroying what they could not carry away. Many buildings had been burnt to the ground already, and it was rumoured the Merduks had locked most of the old people inside them first.
Arja had not seen her father since the men had been taken away. Her brother, though barely eight years old, had been taken along with him. Now she was alone with a crowd of women and girls, imprisoned in the dark. A few of the women were sobbing quietly, but most were silent. Occasionally there were whispered conversations, most of them consisting of speculation on the fate of their husbands and fathers and brothers.
“They are dead,” one woman hissed. “All dead. And soon we will be too.”
“No, no,” another said frantically. “They have taken away the men to work for them. Why would they kill their labourers? The men are digging defences out beyond the town. Why kill those who can work for you? It makes no sense.”
This straw of hope seemed to cheer many of the women. “It is war,” they said. “Terrible things happen, but there has to be a sense to it all. Soldiers have their orders. So we are under the Merduks now-they have to eat too. We will adjust. We can be useful to them.”
A scraping and thudding as the double doors of the town hall were opened. It was full night outside, but the saffron light of the bonfires flickered in and the sky was orange and red with distant flames as the outskirts of the town blazed. The women could see the black silhouettes of many men outlined by the flames. Some held flasks and bottles, others naked swords. There was no talk of usefulness now.
Some screamed, some were dully passive. The Merduk troopers walked amongst them looking into their faces and running their hands up and down their bodies as though testing the mettle of an auctioned horse. When they found what they wanted they took the woman by the wrist or the hair and dragged her outside. When half the women had been taken, the doors were closed again and those who remained huddled in a corner embracing each other, bereft of speech.
Shrieks in the night. Men laughing. Arja cowered with the rest, her mind a white furious blank. Every sensation seemed to be dragged out, as in some hideous dream. She could not believe that this day had happened, these things. It was all utterly beyond anything she had ever known or imagined before, a window into another world she had not known could exist. Was this what war was like, then?
What seemed like hours passed, though they had no way of telling the passage of time, and their estimation of what constituted hours and minutes seemed to have been skewed and twisted until all frames of reference were useless in this new universe.
The screams died away. No-one slept. They sat with their arms about one another and stared at the black doors, awaiting their opening.
And at last the clumps and scrapes as their turn came and the portals of the town hall swung wide once more. Arja was almost relieved. She felt that she had been stretched so taut in the black time of waiting that soon she must snap like a green stick bent too far.
The selection procedure was swifter this time. A shadow which reeked of sweat and beer and urine seized Arja’s arm and drew her outside into the hellish light of the bonfires. There were waggons parked in the square filled brimfull of naked women who hid their faces with their hair. Some had blood matting them. A few bodies, con torted out of all humanity, sprawled upon the cobbles with their innards piled like glistening heaps of mashed berries around them. In one of the bonfires what looked like the trunk of a small tree burnt, but the sickening stink of its burning was not that of charring wood.
Arja’s captor plucked at her clothes. He was a small man, and to her surprise he was not dark-skinned or dark-eyed. He looked like a Torunnan and when he spoke it was in good Normannic.
“Take them off. Quickly.”
She did as she was bidden. All over the square women were undressing whilst a crowd of several hundred men watched. When she had stripped down to her undershirt she could go no further. The numbness was eaten through and she felt a moment of pure, incapacitating panic. The Torunnan-looking Merduk chuckled, swigged from a bottle and then ripped her undershirt from her back so that she stood naked before him.
Some of his comrades gathered with him, eating her up with their eyes. When she tried to cover herself with her hands they slapped them away. They were laughing, drunk. Some had their breeches unbuttoned and their members lolled and shone wetly in the firelight. Again, the panic beat great dark wings about Arja’s head. Again, a sense of the unreality of it all.
The soldiers spoke together in the Merduk tongue, as easy and unforced as men who have met in an inn after a long day’s work. Two of them grabbed her by the arms. Two more forced her knees apart. And then the little Torunnan-like trooper took his bottle and thrust it up between Arja’s thighs.
She screamed at the agony, struggled impotently in the grasp of the four soldiers who held her. The small trooper worked the bottle up and down. When he pulled it out at last the glass was red and shining. He winked at his fellows and then took a long draught from the bloody neck, smacking his lips theatrically.