by Tom Kratman
Then they took the last of her clothing and tied her, face down, to the oaken table.
It isn't me; it isn't me; it isn't me, Petra repeated in her mind, over and over, as the boys took turns with her. Her arms and legs were tied to the table legs with crude rope. Her belly and young breasts pressed to the smooth surface of the table. A thin trickle of blood ran from between her legs and onto that surface at one end; tears gathered in a puddle at the other. The forced rubbing of her nipples on the oak was beginning to hurt almost as much as her nether regions did.
It isn't me; it isn't me; it isn't me.
She'd lost count of how many times she'd been violated, though she could remember the ways. The times had been many; the ways only three. Of those, one had hurt and still did, while the other had been so agonizing the boys had gagged her first to keep her from screaming. The gag remained, even after the last of them had pulled out of her anus.
It isn't me; it isn't me; it isn't me.
And then, with a final gasp and groan from Fudail, it was over and the boys were untying her from the table.
"Cover yourself, bitch," Fudail demanded, tossing her torn clothing across her back. "And if you think you can do any good by telling anyone, I assure you it will be far worse on you than it will on us."
In a daze, Petra arose and pulled her garments over herself. In a daze she staggered back to the room she shared with Besma. It was only when she'd collapsed into a corner that she finally screamed.
Not far from the door to Besma's room, al Khalifa smiled wickedly. Perfect, she thought.
Besma found Petra there, later that afternoon, no longer screaming but quietly rocking and weeping, her head in her hands and self-inflicted scratches across her face and upper torso. When Besma knelt before her friend she saw bruises that had turned ugly—black and blue and swollen.
"What happened? My God, what happened?"
Petra didn't answer. She lifted her head from her hands but stared off into the distance blankly. At this distance, Besma saw the scratches, little lines of blood welling up, clearly. She looked down at the ones lower, those across Petra's chest and breasts. Around them, the material of the slave girl's garment was plainly torn. Two rounded red spots marked where Petra's abraded nipples had touched the cloth. Looking down still further, Besma saw the blood stain where the garment touched between Petra's legs.
"Who DID this!" Besma demanded. When Petra didn't answer she shook the girl violently, repeating, "Who DID this?"
Petra's lower jaw shook as more tears welled up. "Fudail . . . " She gasped out. "Fudail . . . and his friends."
Besma's hands were curled into claws. Her long red nails—her father indulged her in the vanity—ached for the eyes of Fudail. Her teeth longed to rip out her stepbrother's throat. She walked with purposeful steps to the house's main room. Ishmael, standing at the inner door, backed away when he saw her face.
Her father sat on a cushion on the floor, reading an expensive, leather-bound copy of the Koran. al Khalifa, wearing a satisfied smile, sat demurely in a corner opposite Abdul Mohsem, busying herself with knitting. Fudail sat near his mother, eating some nuts from a bowl. If anything, his smile was even more satisfied than his mother's.
"Monster," Besma whispered, as she closed the distance between her and her stepbrother. "Monster," she said aloud as she neared his sitting form. "Monster!" she screamed as she launched herself, claws outstretched, for his eyes.
Fudail barely managed to get his arms over his eyes in time. That didn't stop Besma. Though normally he was much stronger than she was, sheer hate and rage had given her a strength beyond her age, size, and sex. Blocked from his eyes she still managed to bowl him over onto the floor. While one of her claws raked his throat, the other sought his penis, intending, if at all possible, to rip the thing off. At the same time her teeth chewed one of his arms, causing blood to squirt out over her face.
She got a good grip on his penis, but discovered it wouldn't tear out so easily. Instead, she let it go and grabbed his testicles. Those she grasped and squeezed, bringing forth from the rapist a gagging shriek: "Mother! Help me!"
Al Khalifa was the first to try to drag the little she-demon off of her prized son. Besma managed to get one kick to her stepmother's face, sending the woman sprawling.
"Abdul Mohsem, do something!" al Khalifa screamed from the floor. "Stop her!"
As shocked as anyone present by the attack, Abdul Mohsem called, "Ishmael! Help me!" Between them they managed to draw Besma's head away from Fudail's throat (the boy had been losing the battle to keep her teeth away). Her father and his slave also managed to pull her off of Fudail, but the last thing she held onto was the boy's scrotum. He screamed again as his testes were nearly forced out of their sack by Besma's fanatical iron grip.
"Hold her, Ishmael," the father ordered. "And just what in the ninety and nine beautiful names of Allah is going on here?"
"That filthy bastard raped Petra," Besma cursed, still showing her now bloody claws and struggling to get out from Ishmael's control. "He and two of his pig friends. I'll kill the swine, I swear I will." Her struggle to get away from Ishmael intensified. "Let me go! Let me at the piece of pig filth!"
Abdul Mohsem took a deep breath. He looked over at Fudail, still gasping and now beginning to vomit onto the rug on the floor, the yellowish, chunky stain spreading even as it sank into the carpet. Al Khalifa had recovered and had positioned herself protectively in front of her son.
"What happened?" Abdul Mohsem demanded, quite despite Fudail's obvious distress. "Tell me what happened!"
"Hanif . . . and Ghalid . . . and I . . . were in the kitchen. The little . . . Nazrani slut . . . threw herself . . . at us."
"Liar!" Besma shrieked, twisting like a python and redoubling her efforts to get out from Ishmael's grasp. "Filthy pig liar!"
"My son is a good boy," al Khalifa insisted. "He would never do such a thing. And I've seen the little slave wench wriggling her ass in front of the boys whenever she had the chance. It's obvious what happened; that he's telling the truth."
"You fucking cunt! You liar! You bitch-whore-slut-twat! You cocksucking, manipulative, vicious tramp!"
Abdul Mohsem's eyes widened in shock. He'd never imagined his dear Besma even knew such words.
"Father," Besma nearly wept, "she beats Petra all the time for no reason, beats her like an animal and for no reason. She put her stinking bastard of a son up to this; I know she did."
"Nonsense," al Khalifa insisted, her chin rising haughtily. "I maintain discipline in the household, as the hadiths insist I must."
"There must be a trial," Abdul Mohsem announced. In truth, he simply didn't want to get in the middle of a domestic dispute if he could dump the responsibility elsewhere. "Let the judges decide where the truth lies."
Besma wept alone, seated in the back of the courtroom. In the front, fully draped and in chains, Petra was even more alone. Even so, she did not weep. Tears were, for the nonce, beyond her.
"The law is very clear," the turbaned judge explained patiently, and even perhaps a little sadly. "We have one Nazrani female, not even a woman yet by their reckoning but still we will give her testimony the full weight of a woman, under ours, and even of a woman of the faithful. That is to say, we have one half of a story claiming rape without provocation.
"On the other hand, we have three males, all of whom agree that there was no rape, that the slave threw herself upon them. Each of these witnesses counts fully. Thus, by a weight of six to one, the testimony is that the rape, if it was a rape, is the fault of the slave girl. This is corroborated by the testimony of the woman, al Khalifa, that the slave girl did not even cry out until the supposed rape was over. Not even the slave's own words refute that."
The judge opened a heavy volume and began to read, verbatim: "If I came across a rape crime, I would discipline the man and order that the woman be jailed for life . . . because if she had not left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn't have snatched it.
> "If you get a kilo of meat, and you don't put it in the fridge or in the pot or in the kitchen but you leave it on a plate in the backyard, and then you have a fight with the neighbor because his cats eat the meat, you're crazy. Isn't this true?" The judge looked up for confirmation. All the men present nodded their heads with the wisdom.
Continuing, the judge said, "If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park, or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, then whose fault will it be, the cats', or the uncovered meat's? The uncovered meat is the disaster. If the meat was covered the cats wouldn't roam around it. If the meat is inside the fridge, they won't get it."
The judge cleared his throat, then looked left and right for agreement from his two co-judges.
"It is the judgment of this court that the slave girl, Petra bint Minden, shall be taken from this court to the pens reserved for slaves for sale, that she be auctioned next Friday to the highest bidder. That the proceeds from that sale shall go first to the court's fees, then to her current owner, Abdul Mohsem. As for the boy, Fudail, who suffered injury in the attack by Abdul Mohsem's daughter Besma, we judge that no recompense is due him and further adjudge that he and his two friends, Hanif and Ghalid, shall each receive thirty lashes on the soles of their feet—"
At this patent injustice al Khalifa gasped with indignation.
The judge sneered. "And if you interrupt this court again, woman, you shall be next in line for lashes after your son and his friends."
"They won't even let me see her," Besma wailed to her father.
"I gave those orders," Abdul Mohsem said. "It would do neither of you any good to be together again."
The Moslem girl's eyes flashed with anger. "We will be together again, father. I love her like my own child and I will not be separated from her."
"You will never see her again."
"Let me tell you something, father," Besma said, her voice very firm and sure. "If you do not go and buy her back, bidding against yourself if necessary, you will never have a moment's peace out of me." Besma turned away, went to the bookshelf, and withdrew Abdul Mohsem's prized Koran. This she held flat in her left hand, placing her right above it. "This I swear, father. If Petra is not returned here and freed— Do you hear me? Freed!—I shall become the greatest whore in the province, a greater whore even than that vicious slut you wed. I will bring shame to our clan that will last until the final generation. There will be no cave deep enough to—"
Of its own accord Abdul Mohsem's hand lashed out, slapping his daughter across the mouth with a force hard enough to spin her to the floor. "I am your father and you will be silent."
Besma smiled through her pain. "You can silence me now, father. Do you not think my voice will carry when I writhe in heat under slaves and stable boys? Bring me back my friend!"
"It will not happen!"
Again, listening from around a corner, al Khalifa thought, Perfect.
There was really nothing in Islam to prevent a slave from owning a slave. Shamsuddin Iltutmish, for example, a sultan, had been the slave of a slave. Thus, Ishmael, armed with the money Besma and Petra had saved towards Petra's freedom, went to the slave barracks not far from the crooked tower.
"Please buy her, Ishmael," Besma had begged, pressing the coins into his hands. "Buy her so that we can free her. Don't let what is planned for her happen. She's too pretty. You know what they'll sell her to be."
He'd agreed, of course. He'd never really been able to deny Besma anything. And when she'd said, "I would give you my body for your enjoyment, if you thought you could make use of it," his heart had melted.
"I will try," he'd promised, then added, with a very sad smile, "I wish I could take you up on your offer."
At the slave barracks, Ishmael walked from cell to cell, looking for Petra. Though the cells were full of wretched, hungry, dirty and miserable slaves, and even though some of them were women, Petra was not among them. Ishmael looked for the barracks master or the chief slave dealer to ask about her.
"The reddish-blond Nazrani?" the slave dealer shrugged. "She's too choice to let rot down here. Or she will be, once her bruises and scratches heal. In any event, I'll get a much better price for her all dolled up and in proper clothing. Still, if you want to inspect her, she's upstairs." He pointed as a flight of stone steps. "Remember," the dealer cautioned, "look but don't touch."
Bowing his head and thanking the dealer, Ishmael made his way up the stone steps to a corridor. There were perhaps a half dozen doorways, each of them barred. He called out, "Petra?"
A pair of small, delicate hands appeared at one of the barred doors. "Ishmael, is that you?" a desperate voice called out.
He ran to it . . . and stopped dead once he saw. Suddenly, the purse at his belt seemed very light indeed. Clothes, hair, face . . . despite the bruises, Petra had been transformed from a skinny twelve-year-old into something—
"Beautiful," Ishmael said, despairingly. "They've made you beautiful. Allah have pity; I'll never be able to buy you for Miss Besma now."
Interlude
Kitzingen, Federal Republic of Germany,
13 February, 2005
They hadn't moved Mahmoud from the hospital at Erfurt to the Kreisskrankenhaus Kitzingen until he'd come out of the coma and shown some fair progress towards recovery. This had taken six days. On the seventh he was moved. By the ninth, he was spending almost as much time awake as unconscious, though a fair amount of that awake time was spent in pain and nausea. Three days after that the hospital pronounced him well enough to go home with Gabrielle. The next day, she'd picked him up.
"I can't stay here anymore, Gabi," he said, on the drive home.
"In Kitzingen, you mean? Why? There's no trouble here."
"No . . . I mean in Germany. I mean in Europe."
"But where would you go? Where would we go?"
"I am thinking . . . America, if we could get in there."
"America," she sneered, not at her lover but at the thought. "Why ever would anyone want to go to America? I couldn't, I mean I just couldn't abide it. I think you're still distraught and not thinking clearly. Just because some thugs attacked you—"
Mahmoud sighed. How to explain?
"It's not because they attacked me personally," he began. "It's that they attacked me as a Moslem, not even caring that I am not much of one. Now you think it's an isolated incident, I am sure. But it's not. How long do you think it will be before they, or people like them, attack another?"
Before she could even begin to form an answer he said, "I would be surprised if it hasn't happened already, a half dozen times. And even that isn't the main problem."
"Then what is 'the main problem'?"
"My people will begin to strike back. You've heard the sermons; you've read the papers I've shown you. Troubles are coming here, troubles are coming to all of Europe. Bad troubles. People like me, reasonable people, are going to run. And who will be left? The lunatics. And don't tell me about self-fulfilling prophecies; some prophecies are self-fulfilling because they're destined to come true."
"I can't go to America," she said definitively. "Canada, maybe."
"Canada's as badly off as Europe," he said. "Lunacy is coming there, too. Australia?"
"Too militaristic," she answered, "too much in the Americans' camp. Too much a willing tool for American imperialism. Why, anyway? Why are you so certain everything's going down the tubes."
"Because my people could fuck up a wet dream," he answered, putting his head down in his hands. "And I'm beginning to think that yours can, too."
Church of St. Vinzenz, Kitzingen, Federal Republic of Georgia, 5 March, 2005
It didn't appear to Mahmoud to be a very old church, certainly nothing like the age of the town. Stuccoed off-white, with three inset crosses framing a niched statue of its namesake, the church's roof was red tiled. A blocky square tower jutted out from the left. Mahmoud entered the church by passing under a small overhang, l
ikewise with tiled roof, the whole being held up by twin columns. His footsteps were still a little unsteady, the legacy of his beating.
It was a decidedly odd feeling, entering a Catholic church. There were some in Mahmoud's native Egypt, of course, and rather more Coptic churches. Yet he'd never been in one.
In the dim shadows toward the front, by the ornate altar, Mahmoud saw a priest going about some inexplicable business. He cleared his throat, nervously, causing the priest to turn.
"Can I help you, my son?" the priest asked.
"Possibly . . . sir," —for Mahmoud didn't yet know to address the priest as "Father"—"just possibly."
Chapter Seven