by KT McColl
After a few minutes, conversation started again, the young loud and brash, boasting and mocking, while the old spoke quietly amongst themselves. And I ran, the rhythm of my steps lulled me into calm for the first time in days.
I noticed a punching bag in a corner and made one more circuit of the yard before I stopped in front of it, panting. I stretched and launched a few tentative jabs at the bag, sending it swaying against creaking chains.
When I started living with Sol, he took it upon himself to teach me the basics. He'd been a scrapper in his younger years, had some martial arts, and judging by how often he put me on my ass, I believed him. Over my years with him, I grew stronger and faster, and more often than not was able to hold my own. Of course, he claimed that he was growing weaker and slower, but I didn't really notice. Every now and then I could almost detect some pride in him that his protégé was able to give as good as he got.
I took off my sweat-soaked shirt and threw it to the ground. On my toes, I danced in front of the bag, arms swinging loosely at my sides. I jabbed at it as I danced, getting into a rhythm, warming up. I gradually introduced heavier punches, ones and twos, followed eventually by quick flurries. I moved in and out, putting my body behind the blows the way Sol had taught me, punching through the target, enjoying the exertion of it. I didn't realize until several minutes later that I was again the center of attention. Save for the chains and the heavy thud of my punches against leather, there was no sound -- no talk, no clanking of weights. I continued to punch the bag, and it dawned on me that they were looking at my back. I renewed my assault, punching until my hands ached and my muscles burned.
Glancing at the clock above the exit, I noted that my hour was almost up. I picked up my shirt, turned and stalked past my audience on my way to the showers.
"Would you look at that. Sister appears to have you on a tight leash."
I'd just finished my shower and was drying off. The young posers had snuck up on me. Their leader, a young dark-haired kid with a square jaw and inflated muscles, pointed at Aisha's gift between my legs.
The young men grinned at me. There was nothing friendly about it. No time wasted in wanting to establish a pecking order, I thought.
"Who do you belong to?" he asked.
I straightened and made no effort to hide the object of their amusement. Nor did I answer his question. Unfortunately, no clever retort came to mind, at least nothing that was witty enough to bruise his ego. I had no doubt that I would come up with something tonight, but it would, as usual, be too late. Given the hardware I sported, I doubted his ego would be threatened by anything I could say, witty or not. So I settled on a statement that was more emphatic.
Regretting what it would do to a hand that was already sore, I unloaded a quick right to his grinning mug. It felt good, for me at least. There was a bit of a crunch that I assumed was his nose rather than my hand. My hand felt it too, though perhaps less than it would have had it not been for the adrenaline that sang through my veins. The young guy staggered back, blood already gushing from his nose.
The posers fell into a stunned silence. They'd been hoping for more sport at my expense. I heard one of the older guys let out a bark of laughter.
I appreciated the sentiment.
I took a step toward him and noted with satisfaction how his friends backed away as well. United, they could easily have taken me down, but that was the thing about posers -- they had no notion of the collective.
"Get up," I said, knowing that he would be smart enough to stay where he was.
Disappointed, I turned my attentions to his companions. "Anyone else?"
I really hoped there would be a taker -- I was feeling indiscriminate in the joy of violence. But no, they shrank from me. A second later, reality met me in the form of a prod wielded by the green-eyed Lozen. I understood then, as electricity surged through me, that they hadn't been shying away from me. They'd been retreating from an even greater authority. I would have laughed had I been capable of it.
I fell to the ground, boneless. I watched as the young freemen collected their bloodied leader, staring daggers at me. The older freemen, and one in particular, looked saddened. Maybe he was the one who'd laughed and was now disappointed that he'd been deprived of a show.
As the Lozen checked on me, the youngsters grinned at my comeuppance from a distance. I might have bested one of their number, but I'd been laid low by a girl. I had no doubt that they still thought in this way, which is why they would never recognize the irony of their name.
I glanced up at the Lozen. There was no anger in her green eyes, only concern. She nodded. The gesture confused me. What was it? Approval? Understanding?
Goyen entered the shower room. "First day out and already you're showing your true colors."
She easily dragged me to my feet. She was a strong one, this Goyen. As I wobbled, she draped a robe over my shoulders and led me back to the house, her hand a vise on my upper arm. "Sister Aisha won't be pleased with you damaging her number one. Not that he didn't deserve it."
I said nothing, surprised that Goyen had volunteered any information. Maybe I'd accidentally impressed her.
"Still, you're a fuck up."
Okay, maybe I hadn't.
Late that evening, Goyen fetched me. "Sister Aisha wants to see you."
"Do you have any idea what she wants?" I had a good notion, but had to ask anyway. What was the punishment for fighting? If it were up to Aisha alone, I wouldn't be surprised at being shipped off to prison or a labor camp somewhere.
"Move."
Okay, so she didn't feel chatty anymore.
She led me to the main part of the house and stopped in the hallway.
"You will wait here."
The Lozen left.
The door in front of me was ajar, and I heard voices from within. I dithered for a moment, but curiosity got the better of me. Taking two quiet steps forward, I nudged the door open a little wider.
Aisha had her back to me and was, save for her underwear, naked.
It took me a moment to notice the girl who was kneeling before her. She was in the process of lowering Aisha's panties down her legs. I recognized it; the panties were Jessie's.
Aisha stepped out of them and spread her long legs. The girl's hands eased around Aisha's waist, coming to rest on her ass, pulling the Sister's groin towards her mouth.
I might have closed the door again or stepped back, but I was frozen. I tried not to look and succeeded for the most part, at least until the noises of their activities drew my attention.
Aisha had her hand on the girl's head, more in benediction than for kind of control. It was dark outside and the window caught her reflection. I might have imagined it, but I could feel her reflected gaze boring into me.
Her head tilted back when she came several minutes later. She shuddered and a whimper escaped her lips. I hadn't known that she was capable of such a sound.
Aisha looked over her shoulder. She saw me but betrayed no surprise or embarrassment at having been observed. Instead, she smiled.
Looking down on the girl, she said, "You may go."
The girl hurried past me, eyes averted. I didn't recognize her, which meant that she might have been an unmasked Lozen for all I knew.
If Aisha thought that her little show would affect me, she was wrong, or at least wrong in the way she intended.
She turned to me, belting a robe around her waist. "You're early."
"You wanted to see me?"
"I did, but the reason escapes me now. I'll summon you if I remember."
"Very well."
Aisha smiled. It was theatre, I realized. It didn't matter that she was my daughter. It didn't matter that I'd messed up her favorite. She was telling me that even her favorite was insignificant to her. If that was the case, what did that make me?
The young freeman I'd punched had asked me whom I belonged to. Had I known that we shared a mistress, though admittedly in a very different sense of the term, would I have
held back? Probably not. Maybe I'd gone at him harder. Still, it was just my luck that I had to disfigure Aisha's prized plaything, or at least the thing she played with when she wasn't playing with others.
In any event, judging from the lack of food I was receiving, she was not amused.
Still, it had been worth it, although I might think differently after a few more days of fasting. Sol had taught me that if someone was intent on making life hard for me, I had to make it doubly hard for them. Maybe Aisha had learned the same lesson somewhere, in which case I was probably doomed.
On the evening of the third day of my liquid diet, a Lozen brought in a tray. Finally. It was soup and two crackers. Better than nothing, I thought.
There was no spoon, so I lifted the bowl to my lips. Glancing down, I noticed a scrap of paper on the tray. Setting the bowl on the floor, I unfolded the note.
Patience. You are not forgotten.
I looked at it for a minute, not knowing what it meant or who had reached out to me, but feeling somewhat better for the sentiment, even if I didn't know what I had to have patience for, who exactly remembered me, and what difference any of it made.
I tore the note into tiny pieces and stirred it into my soup with my finger.
Chapter 14
"Sister Aisha must have been quite cross, you bruising her favorite like that."
It had been a week since the melee and a few days since I'd been released from my room. I'd returned to the gym, and the rest of the freemen had kept their distance from me. Until now.
The freeman who addressed me was the one who'd laughed that day.
"Really? I thought her tastes..." I fumbled for the word.
"Are varied," he said with a knowing look.
I moved to the bench press.
"Shall I spot you?"
"Sure," I said, though I doubted the old man could help much if I ran into trouble.
"By the way, the name's Leonard. I'm one of Sister Aisha's freemen."
"Jude."
"I know."
"I haven't seen you around."
"You have been confined to quarters for much of your time here, so it's no wonder. You seem to have a knack for that kind of thing."
He said it lightly. As comforting as it was to hear a friendly voice, I wasn't really in need of a friend. "Yeah," I said as I settled onto the bench.
After I'd finished several sets, Leonard invited me to sit with him. "Have you been oriented?"
"I'm not sure I understand."
"Oriented... Have you been assigned someone to show you the ropes in the city?"
"No. I wasn't aware I needed orientation."
"Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps you have questions."
I pondered the questions: What am I doing here? How do I get out? In the end, I settled on: "What's the purpose of all this?"
"What? This motley collection of manhood?"
I wasn't sure what I had been asking, so this question was as good as any. I nodded.
Leonard leaned back and looked at the branches of a tree that overhung the yard. Perhaps he was expecting to see a bird. There wasn't one, so he looked back to me. "Well, in part it's to remind us of our diminished station in the world, in part it's to reinforce the knowledge that they hold the key now." He grimaced at the expression, and I remembered that he'd seen the cage. "Sorry."
"It's alright. But what do they do... all these supposed freemen?"
"You talk as though you aren't one of them."
"I'm not."
"Yet. You're not yet. You can make a place for yourself here. You could live comfortably."
I shook my head; he clearly didn't know what I was to Abigail. My place was at the center of a cautionary tale.
"Believe it or not, there is opportunity."
I made a scoffing noise.
"Depends what you want, of course. Some of the men are here for entertainment. Although they won't admit it openly, some Sisters still like real men."
"I haven’t seen too many of those."
He laughed. "Different strokes, Jude. Sometimes it's enough to look the part. And while some are here for the purpose of pleasure, some -- like me in case you were wondering -- fulfill minor administrative roles."
"Just minor?"
"It's enough."
"It seems limiting."
"More than your life in Lowville?"
Ouch. "Touché."
"Oh, it is limiting. It's the bitter cost of making amends."
"I don't understand."
"Jude, this is simply the other side of the coin that's been in circulation forever. I've had a long time to think about this, given the life of leisure and reflection I lead in the city, so bear with me. This is just the flipside of how it is elsewhere in the world. It's just strange because you still remember the way it was. You probably know that elsewhere, there are countries where men still rule the roost, so to speak, now as they did then. Did you know that there are still places where men have multiple wives? Places where men dictate to women what they can wear, with whom they can associate, what they can do; where, by the way, transgressions are met with flogging or worse? Sound familiar?"
"Surely not anymore."
"To this day," he insisted. "You see, Jude, we men have had millennia to get it right. We've been able to ride the biological accident of relative strength to the head of the table, never realizing that selfishness would ultimately take the chair out from under us. We had ages to temper our strength with sensitivity, but we never did, and so I can understand why it went the way it did here. The Ultimate Sin and all that rhetoric is just an elaborate monument to the fact that we pissed them off for the last time. Nothing is happening to us that hasn't been happening to them since before history was written."
I sat there, mute.
"Sad, isn't it?"
"Does it excuse..."
"Of course not," said Leonard. "But the Sorority should have a chance to get it right. It might take a while, but maybe they will. The Sorority has only been at it for decades, Jude. We had thousands of years to make a hash of it."
"I still don't see it." I found his mute acceptance of the status quo annoying. "I think you've been drinking their Kool-Aid," I said, not quite remembering where I'd heard the expression before.
"That's good!" Leonard cried. "I haven't heard that one in years!" Then, more seriously, he said, "Perhaps you're right, but at my age, it's all about the path of least resistance. I'm old and cherish my comforts. In your place and at your age, who knows?"
My age, I thought. Young enough to want more, old enough to know that nothing comes easy. "Do you feel guilty?"
"Personally?" he asked. "As in collective guilt?"
"Yeah."
"I don't know," he said.
"Well, Leonard, I don't. I'm not about to accept punishment for another generation's sins when I don't believe I deserve punishment for my own."
Goyen delivered a package to my cell.
"What's this?"
"Clothes. You are a member of Sister Aisha's house now, and she can't have you going beyond the compound looking like a peasant."
"I'm going outside?" The pathetically hopeful tone made me cringe.
"Yes. Time to start earning your keep," said Goyen.
"What's expected of me?"
"You will accompany Sister Aisha to the city. Get dressed."
Goyen leaned against the doorway and crossed her arms, making no move to leave. "Toss the old stuff in the corner," she said. "It will be disposed of."
I did as she asked, pulling on loose cotton trousers and a leather vest. This was how the fucktoys dressed, I realized with consternation. Senior freemen typically wore more -- trousers, shirts, and sometimes a robe. Evidently, I didn't rank.
She attached a lead to the ring on my collar.
"Is that necessary?"
"I could attach it to your cage."
"In that case..."
"You will remain three steps behind Sister at all times and ensure that the lead i
s slack -- not too loose and not too taut. You are not to make your presence known to Sister unless she requires it. Understood?"
So, I was to be paraded around the city like a dog. "Understood."
Once in the city proper, I saw a few other collared men, some with leads attached as I had. Most were not restrained, at least not physically. Restrained or not, they walked three steps behind their mistresses.
Most of the collared freemen glanced at me and then looked away. The uncollared ones ignored me entirely. I recognized a few from the compound where I worked out. They gave me as wide a berth as possible within the three-step rule, given what I'd done to one of their number. Occasionally, a collared freeman communicated to me a long-suffering grimness that I knew could not long be maintained. Soon they would be resigned. They must have been the new ones, as bemused by life in the city as I. Maybe it was wishful thinking on my part to imagine that there was still life and hope here, some resistance. In the end, I imagined that most of them would wear the vacuous expression of their uncollared brethren, satisfied with the occasional attention of a Sister or yearning for the comfort that Leonard sought.
I didn't belong here.
Aisha stepped into a shop and hung her end of the lead from a hook beside the door that was evidently there for just that purpose. Another man stood beside me. He was bald and rotund and wore no collar.
"Sister Aisha is your mistress?" he asked quietly.
I nodded.
"Lucky man."
"How so?"
"Have you looked at her?" he asked in an incredulous whisper.
That she was probably my daughter had little to do with my desire to punch him. Nor was it the misogyny. It was a profound sadness. Was that all it took to make men feel fulfilled these days? The proximity to beauty? The occasional attentions of a woman? Was it possible that we'd failed to evolve? After all that had befallen us, it disgusted me that we could still be swayed by our baser instincts and that I was evidently just like the rest.
I unclenched my fist.