Cornhair cast about, wildly, and screamed, “Help! Help! Help a slave, a poor slave, Masters!”
“There is no one to hear you,” said the first man.
The nearest wagon, with its driver, and his assistant, was now far away.
“Tie her ankles together,” said the first man.
“Why?” asked the second.
“She will sink more rapidly,” said the first. “The business will be consummated more expeditiously.”
“One cannot swim in this muck,” said the second man. “It sucks one down, like quicksand.”
“If her legs are not tied, she might be able to keep her head above the surface for two or three minutes.”
“No one is about, what does it matter?” asked the second man.
“Do it,” said the first, angrily, and put Cornhair to her back, at his feet.
The second man, angrily, whipped a cord from his belt and crouched down beside Cornhair, to loop the cord about her ankles.
Cornhair screamed, for she saw, as the fellow bent over her did not, the knife. He did not even have time to raise his head, for the knife was driven into the base of his skull, into the back of his neck, severing the vertebrae. It took the second man only a minute to die. The first man then wiped his knife on his thigh and returned it to its sheath. He then rifled the purse of the second man, and withdrew from it three gold darins, a silver darin, and a handful of pennies. These he added to his own purse.
He then looked down at Cornhair.
“Keep me,” she whispered, “Master!”
“It would not be wise,” he said. “Slaves speak.”
“No,” she said. “No!”
“A loquacious slave is more dangerous than the three-banded viper,” he said.
“I will not speak,” she wept.
“It would be too dangerous,” he said.
“Mercy!” she said.
“I will not tie your legs,” he said. “Thus you can struggle for a time, perhaps one or two minutes, until your head is sucked beneath the surface.”
“I am only a poor slave,” she wept. “I beg mercy, Master!”
“It should be amusing to see you thrash about for a time,” he said. “Then you will disappear from sight, and it will be as though you never were.”
“Please, no, Master!” she wept.
He bent down, and she was lifted from the grass. Her weight was as nothing to him. One arm was behind her back, the other behind the back of her knees. She could see only his eyes, hard, above the bandages he had wrapped about his mouth and nose, to fend away the locale’s miasma.
Suddenly the bright glare of the sun was gone.
The man, holding the slave, looked up, startled, his face in shadow. It seemed as though some object, surely a cloud, had interposed itself between the sun and the foul, heated earth. But this was a broad cloud, and one of steel and flame, and one of several such clouds.
“Aatii!” he cried, casting the slave to the turf, turning, and running, stumbling, toward the distant walls of Telnar.
There were six such clouds of steel which lowered themselves gently on feet of fire to the earth. No sooner had these great forms, like platforms resting on legs of metal, come to rest than several ports in the hulls slid open and ramps protruded, descending to the earth. Down these ramps rumbled strings of armored vehicles, some on treads, while, from other ports, open hoverers with mounted weaponry emerged, like hornets streaming from a nest.
Cornhair struggled to her feet, frightened, but laughing hysterically with joy, elated to be alive.
Then she winced for she saw the running figure of the man who had held her, several yards away, burst into flame, and vanish in smoke, and a hoverer, low, only a dozen feet in the air, continuing on its way toward the walls of Telnar.
Vehicles, skirting the refuse pits, roared about Cornhair, who dared not move. Hoverers, like dark plates, dotted the sky.
There could be no landing, she had heard. The ensconced batteries might incinerate anything within range.
But here, in this place of stench and horror, in this lonely, vacant, avoided place, the walls of Telnar in the distance, before her very eyes, the air still hot and stirred from their descent, were ships, the fabled Lion Ships, six such ships, of the Aatii.
Cornhair screamed, and twisted away, nearly struck by a hurtling vehicle.
She stood upright, that the pilots of those armed, racing ground ships might see her, that she might not be caught in treads or crushed into the earth by broad, heavy tires.
Though she was not collared she was alone in this terrible place, and her hands were tied behind her, and she was tunicked, tunicked as was thought fit for a slave. Her slim, well-turned lineaments were well exposed, as would be unthinkable for a free woman. Surely there could be no doubt as to her status. If so, it might be instantly confirmed, by tearing aside the hem of her skirt, on the left side, revealing the slave rose.
Bondage has its terrors and its joys.
So much depends on the Master!
What slave does not wish to be owned by a severe, but kindly Master, one who has some sense of what it is to be a woman, some sense of what a woman wants and needs, one who will subject her to the domination without which she cannot be her true self, a female at the feet of a male, one by whom she, as she wishes, will be owned and mastered? How joyful to be subject to the whip and know that one will be punished if one is not pleasing, and then not feel the whip, because one is pleasing, and one finds one’s joy in serving, in loving, and being pleasing.
One advantage, of course, in being a property, is that, as one is a property, one can be owned. Properties have value, lesser or greater value. A slave is a property, one of greater or lesser value. Thus, she is in little danger of being killed, no more than any other domestic animal, of greater or lesser value. She, as other domestic animals, may be purchased, sold, gifted, stolen, seized, appropriated, and such, but she is likely to have little to fear where her life is concerned. Where a free man or a free woman might be summarily slain a slave is likely to be merely acquired. Where a free woman might have her throat cut a slave would be more likely to have a ring put in her nose and then, by means of a cord attached to that ring, her hands bound behind her, be hurried after a new Master.
Cornhair had little doubt that if she had been a free male, or perhaps even a free female, and certainly, if she had run, or resisted, she would have been burned to a burst of ashes, as the fellow who had fled from her side, leaving her at the edge of the vast, foul pit.
These men about now, in the vehicles, and the hoverers, passing about her, and over her, moving toward the city, were clearly of barbarian stock.
Although she was filled with trepidation, she had no immediate apprehension of grievous danger. She was more stirred, more excited and thrilled, than terrified.
These men were barbarians.
They had uses for women, she knew, particularly beautiful women.
Too, she was alive!
She knew that the blockade of Abrogastes could not have been emplaced and managed without a great many ships.
Here were only six ships.
This must be a small part of what must be a large, impressive force.
Clearly then this was not an invasion, but something very different, a raid, of sorts.
How was it that the batteries had been silent?
The swarm of land vehicles and hoverers which had issued from the hulls of the six great ships had now muchly abated, having apparently reached and entered the city.
Indeed, no hoverers were now in sight. On the other hand, at intervals, one or more of the smaller vehicles, treaded or wheeled, rolled down the corrugated steel ramps, and moved, though in a leisurely way, toward Telnar. Their purposes, we may suppose, were various, but, at a minimum, it seems likely that some were intended to establish and maintain a defensive perimeter within which the six ships might be relatively secure, should a sortie emerge from Telnar; others to maintain some physical communications between the preceding wave of attackers and the ships, for example, carrying personnel back and forth; others to safeguard exit routes and prevent attackers from being cut off from the ships, and so on.