I lay very still in the net.
It was damp, and cold, in this place.
The free woman does have one advantage, of course, over the slave, in eluding capture, which is that she is not a domestic animal. For example, let us suppose that a given city has fallen, and that effective resistance within it is at an end. In such a situation, where a male might expect to continue the pursuitof a free woman, who is, after all, at that point, still a free person, he might not wish to tire himself pursuing a slave. He might simply, rather, instruct her to halt, and command her to him, ordering her to present herself for his chains, or his bracelets or binding fiber, and thong and nose ring. The slave might then, if she is wise, hurry obediently to her new master. Has she not been commanded? Does she dally at the wall, against which she has been trapped? Does she hesitate in the room, within which she has been cornered? Is she not a slave? Must a command be repeated? She kneels at his feet, putting her head down, humbly licking and kissing his feet, perhaps his dusty, ash-stained, bloody boots, in timid, tender obeisance. Does she not now have a new master? And is it not he? Must she not hasten to her place at his feet, summoned even as might be another form of domestic animal, perhaps by a mere word, or whistle? She dares not disobey. She knows what might be the penalties for such. She is a domestic animal. She now, merely, has a new master. She kneels before him, submitted. She accepts, unquestioningly, as she must, her new bonds.
I heard again a movement below me, something like a twisting, a stirring, in water. It was, I conjectured, several feet below me.
I conjectured that I might be suspended over what might be the sump of a fortress.
I did not know.
Perhaps, rather, it was some sort of pool or reservoir.
I did not know.
Certainly it must be deep beneath the fortress, or city.
I twisted a little. My ankles were bound, tightly, to one another. My wrists were still secured behind my back. I was helpless. I had no hope of freeing myself. When men such as those of this world tie a woman, she remains tied. I had learned that weeks ago in the pens.
One of my first lessons in the pen was to have been bound hand and foot, and then ordered to free myself. I had then, while watched, twisted and struggled from more than an Ahn. Then at last I had wept, in futility, “Forgive me, Masters! I cannot free myself!”
“Do not forget it,” said a guard.
“No, Master,” I wept.
I had then expected to be freed, but they had left me as I was, helplessly bound, past the time of the evening meal and throughout the night. They freed me in the morning and I was permitted to relieve myself and crawl on all fours, as I could, my muscles and limbs stiff and aching, with the other girls, hungry, to my pan of morning gruel.
What was I doing here, I wondered.
I was to be a pit slave, it seemed, whatever that might be.
“the “pit master” was spoken of as “the Tarsk.” I did not understand the allusion.
Given the length of my descent, from which my body was still sore, I must be far beneath the fortress, indeed, or perhaps far beneath the city, as the descent had often seemed an oblique one. I could be hundreds of yards from the vertical axis of the tower.
The “pit” or “pits,” I thought, must be near here. Surely I was at least in their vicinity.
It was dark here, and cold.
what was I doing here?
Why had I been purchased, and by men who, it seemed seldom bothered to purchase women, preferring, it seemed, to acquire them in other manners?
Why did they wish a girl here who was ignorant, or muchly so?
I did not want to be here.
I was supposedly beautiful. But of what use would be my beauty, if beauty it was, in this place, in the pits?
Too, I was supposedly quite vital, unusually so, it seemed, even for this world. My vitality, my sexuality, had, of course, been disparaged, belittled, denied, and starved on my own world. I had kept it concealed, hidden. I had even tried to be ashamed of it.How strange was my world, one on which one was expected to pretend to numbness and insensitivity, one on which one was conditioned to be ashamed of health. Women who had feelings such as mine for men were to be denounced with all the epithets available to the anesthetic, to the perverted, to the freaks and frustrates. Did we really constitute such dangers, I wondered, to the pervasiveness and mightiness of their eccentric conditioning programs? Was it not enough for them to exercise an almost perfect control over media and education? Did they fear a tiny whisper of truth so much? Was it truly so dangerous? Must all reflection, all inquiry, all thought be suppressed? Was it truly required that the “free marketplace of ideas” be closed, except in name? What a tiny, small thing were the genetic codes of an organism! One could scarcely detect the traces of such things with the most awesome instruments. What a frail straw was truth! So a blade of grass grew between the paving stones, one tiny, green blade of grass among the stones? Did they fear that so much? Grass is so beautiful. It did not seem to me that feelings such as mine were really so threatening to prescribed “movements.” Did it really make it so difficult for them to continue to present their particular interest as though it were the general interest? Surely I was not stopping them from doing that. Could they not even find little truths amusing, they so weak and tiny, lost among all the littering, massive lies? Who could fear them? They were so tiny, those little truths. But perhaps they were right. Perhaps even little truths are dangerous. A match may be seen from far off in the darkness. The tiniest of sparks might imperil a mountain of straw. So, too, perhaps even a modest truth, no stronger to eons of history, might undermine the myths of a world. Did the moons of Jupiter not shatter the crystalline spheres? Destroy telescopes then, for they might see the truth. They see too far, and too clearly. They look too deeply into reality. Did not a handful of fossils overturn a world? Let men then not examine the earth beneath their feet, for they might learn on what it is that they truly stand. How insidious the modest, recurrent elements of a healthy organism, the components of a natural biological development. How subtle, how insistent and quiet, and yet how tenacious a foe of promulgated perversions are the whims of nature,that she should choose to be so constituted. But nature cannot read. Thus she does not know what she is supposed to be. She is content to let others read her, if they dare. How odd if we should truly be the end of history, if our tiny grasp of things, our demands flung into the void, should be the finality of the universe. Are we, familiar with the rise and fall of empires, who have witnessed the building of the pyramids and walked the streets of Babylon and Nineveh, who have heard the tread of the legions and watched the armada set forth, to take our moment, our brief afternoon, to be the summit and meaning of eternity.