Kindling (Flame of Evil)

by Mick Farren

  Her normal practice was to slip from her cot in the officers’ slave pavilion and remain as invisible as possible until Phaall had departed for his duties of the day, but on this particular morning that was not possible. On a final alcoholic whim, Phaall had ordered his manservant Reinhardt to escort her to her cot and chain her as regulations dictated. Normally the rules concerning the chaining of concubines were not scrupulously observed. It created too many problems and too much work for the orderlies and the menservants who had to see to their enforcement. None of the slave girls in this Teuton camp were captured Virginians, or even Americans. They had all made the long ocean voyage with their officers from Cadiz or Lisbon, so if they attempted to escape, where exactly were they going to go? A few concubines had tried to run, just as a percentage of soldiers, especially the Provincial Levies, tried to desert, but most were caught and brought back to either be hanged or burned, while the others either perished in the swamps to the north, among the snakes and mosquitos, or wandered until they starved in the forests to the south or were eaten by wolves, foraging pigs, or wild dogs. Why Phaall had suddenly decided that Jesamine was a flight risk was a mystery, but she could only take his final order to Reinhardt at face value.

  “Better hook her up tonight. Don’t want her fleeing the coop in a snit because I decided to freshen her up a little. I’ve put in too much fucking time training the bitch. I don’t need all the bother of breaking in a new one.”

  Thus she greeted the morning wearing a padlocked leather collar attached to a meter and a half of light steel chain that was, in turn, fastened to the iron frame of her folding cot. Reinhardt had the responsibility of keeping collar and chain polished and gleaming, and it was also the manservant’s duty to free her at the start of the day. Unfortunately, releasing Jesamine was only one of the demands on his time as the new day got underway. Phaall needed his breakfast; he would have to be shaved and might also require a bath. Papers and maps had to be located, and although Reinhardt would have polished the colonel’s boots and filled his flask with schnapps the night before, a Teuton colonel of Engineers could find a dozen or more tasks for his manservant before he went about his duties. Jesamine might wait, hungry and confined to her cot, until close to lunchtime before Reinhardt came to unlock her restraining collar unless Phaall wanted to fuck her during or after his breakfast, and that was rarely on his menu of morning desires. In the minimal way that reasonable kindness might be defined in any camp of the Mosul, the manservant Reinhardt treated Jesamine with reasonable kindness. He did not slap her around, subject her to intimate indignities behind Phaall’s back, or otherwise abuse her the way some of the servants did. He rarely carried tales about her to the colonel, and, now and then, he would slip her small treats like unfinished bottles of schnapps, chocolate, candied fruit, and pastries from the officers’ mess. In the hard world of the Mosul, however, kindness was always a matter of transaction. A manservant did not merit his own concubine and had to be content with the small selection of ugly native whores who were sent to the front to be used by the rank and file. In return for the titbits and the blind eye he turned to her indiscretions, she would allow him to touch her body and sometimes pleasure him with hand or mouth. She would never, however, permit Reinhardt full penetration, since discovery of such a violation would certainly slow-hang the both of them.

  The officers’ concubines were housed in a large, pavilion-style tent of camouflaged canvas where some two dozen women slept in cots identical to Jesamine’s. Beside each cot was a steel locker in which each woman kept her cosmetics, folded clothes, small personal vanities, and the inevitable copy of the Yasma. When not in use, each concubine’s chain and collar hung from a hook at the side of the locker. A tiny measure of privacy was afforded each cot by the tent of mosquito netting that protected it from the troublesome insects that seemed to thrive in the constantly flooded wetlands beside the wide river the Americans called the Potomac. As on any other morning, the slave pavilion was a chaos of sleepy women preparing for another day in their particular kind of servitude. It smelled of bodies and bad perfume, stale cooking, fear, and the pervading damp of the bottomlands beside the river that, according the current rumors, the army would soon cross in what promised to be a bloody and final assault on the kingdom of Albany. Women’s voices surrounded Jesamine, some sleepy and complaining, others bickering and petulant.

  One of the problems that beset the officers’ concubines was that they had far too little with which occupy their time or their minds while the men who owned their lives were away about their duties. It had once been suggested, probably by a priest or an agent of the Ministry of Virtue, that, here in the Americas, the concubines on the campaign should be put to work just like any other collection of servants or slaves. To the religious mindset, this made perfect sense. Idle hands did the devil’s work, and food needed to be prepared and laundry to be done. Clothes required mending, and a hundred things had to be fetched and carried on any given day in the camp. They might be the playthings of the military elite, but they were also slaves, and slaves were supposed to work. This idea, however, was unanimously vetoed by the officers. They didn’t want their women with rough red hands and dirt under their fingernails. It spoiled the illusion. And thus the concubines at the front succumbed to the chronic and narcissistic boredom that had beset seraglios, harems, and whorehouses all down the centuries. They retreated into an almost mindless pettiness of gossip, intrigue, jealousy, backbiting, and fantasy. One of the favorite illusions was for women to imagine that they would make their officers fall in love with them and thus gain their freedom. Maybe for one in a hundred the dream came true, but for the great majority it was a chimeric escape into a refuge of impossible hope. Jesamine had seen this romantic absurdity happen for real a few times on the other side of the ocean, in the permanent garrisons where the men also had little to do and time on their hands. Here at the front, though, in the New World, she doubted that it was possible when the officers had an entire campaign of conquest to keep them occupied and amused. Jesamine’s desire for a way out was as strong as any woman’s in the tent, but she refused to attach any kind of hope to the hard and professionally cruel men who controlled their lives. Jesamine prided herself on being a complete realist.

  Kahlfa, the concubine of a cavalry major called Urman, approached Jesamine’s cot. She nursed a cup of hard Mosul coffee, probably sweetened with honey if she had any. Kahlfa and Jesamine were both from the mountains to the southeast of the Mamaluke homelands, and both had the caramel complexion, large dark eyes, straight noses, and black hair for which the mountain women were famous. They had been blessed with similar smooth and muscular bodies, and it was the combination of those faces and bodies that had saved them the hard labor and ceaseless toil of the common working slaves. The women of the mountains were accustomed to the idea of slavery, if, indeed, anyone could become accustomed to slavery. The Mamalukes had been raiding their lands and carrying off their people apparently since the beginning of history. Jesamine and Kahlfa weren’t alike enough to be taken for sisters, but perhaps cousins, and they had one other thing in common. The mountain women were also famous for their voices, and they both sang. It was a talent both Kahlfa and Jesamine put to good use in the officers’ mess, and, as performers rather than objects, it gave them moments when they were more public property than merely the toys of Urman and Phaall, respectively. Kahlfa had confided in Jesamine how she hoped that her singing might lead to a betterment of her situation, but while humoring her, Jesamine had inwardly dismissed the idea as one more wistful but ultimately forlorn hope. All that Jesamine expected from her singing was that maybe, if Phaall abused her too badly, some other officer, more appreciative of her worth, might buy her from the colonel or win her by making her an object of a wager. In this, though, she was little better than a thoroughbred horse that was being overridden and beaten by its owner in a way that caused another to step in and stop the wanton waste of good flesh.

  Kahlfa pulled back t
he mosquito netting, thinking that Jesamine had overslept. “You’d better wake up, girl, or you’ll be in trouble.” Then she saw that Jesamine was chained. “He had you hooked up? What did he do that for? What did you do?”

  Jesamine threw back her blanket and rolled over to display her welts. “He freshened me with the quirt, didn’t he?”

  “You’d displeased him?”

  Jesamine shook her head. “He made it clear it was just for his amusement.”

  “And did you like it, too?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “There are some who do, girl.”

  “I know that.”

  “By all accounts, Ravenna can’t get enough of her colonel’s cane.”

  Jesamine nodded. “So I’ve heard.”

  They both glanced at a tall, dark, full-bodied woman cooking eggs for herself on one of the three communal hotplates while talking to the pale blond twins, Mai and Leah, who performed a different kind of act for the officers in the mess. “I heard she provokes him to get him to beat her.”

  “I heard that, too.”

  “It might be guilt.”

  Jesamine eased herself up, letting the chain fall between her breasts. “Guilt?”

  Kahlfa sat down on the end of the cot and lowered her voice. “She’s suspected of being our Virtue girl.”

  “She’s a zed-hunter?”

  “Our very own.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You remember when they arrested Yvonne, a month or so back?”

  Jesamine looked surprised that Kahlfa even asked. “Of course I do.”

  “I was standing next to that Ravenna. Everyone else looked terrified, but she seemed like she was expecting it.”

  “It took me completely by surprise.”

  “And there was something else, too.”

  “What else?”

  “She looked pleased, smug almost, as if she’d just won some kind of victory or scored points.”

  “Maybe she was just pleased it wasn’t her. I mean, she’s been in the cage more than once.”

  In a corner of the pavilion, near the row of hot plates and the common washing facilities, was a low steel cage, three feet deep by three feet high and a little over four feet long. It was used as an alternative punishment to the routine beatings, both formal and informal, and also as a lockdown for new arrivals who were deemed to need time to acclimate to their status and surroundings.

  Kahlfa shrugged. “Believe what you like. I’m going to be watching her.”

  Jesamine trusted Kahlfa as much as she trusted anyone in the camp, but she was far from sure that Ravenna was their current snitch. Identifying who might be a spy for the Ministry of Virtue was another of the more popular pastimes in the concubines’ pavilion, second only to the constant discussions of the means and machinations by which the woman who believed they could win their freedom by impossible romance might achieve their desired objective. “Look at her now. Even when she’s doing something, she also seems to be watching. See the way she’s looking at the twins?”

  Jesamine turned over and again lay on her stomach, regarding the blond twins. Mai and Leah were unique among the concubines in that they were the only ones who did not belong to any particular officer. They had been brought to the camp by the celebrated—although some said insane—Mamaluke cavalry colonel Hussa Kastar, the leader of a troop of Mu-Kadar, one of the Immortals, who was reputed to have had no less than a half-dozen horses shot out from under him in the advance through the Carolinas and Virginia. Unfortunately, he had apparently begun to assume that he really was immortal in more than just title, and that his invincibility was absolute. The errors of these assumptions had been proved just three months earlier, when, on an ill-considered and foolhardy intelligence gathering raid into enemy territory, Kastar had been shot dead by an Albany lookout. According to normal custom and protocol, that would have been the end for the twins, but some of the other officers had intervened to save them from the quick deaths that would have followed after the demise of their owner. This was no act of compassion, though, merely Kastar’s brother officers realizing that Mai and Leah were simply too rare an item to be wastefully strangled or to have their identical white throats cut. A consortium of officers had worked out a deal whereby Mai and Leah had become the collective property of all the members of the mess, acting as a syndicate. If any officer wanted them for his private use, he had to make a sizable donation to mess funds. The twins had seemingly taken the dubious step up from slavery to a form of controlled prostitution. Only the Teutons could have worked out such an unprecedented arrangement, and how it was reconciled with the complexities of Zhaithan law, even in the more relaxed form of the combat zone, that allowed a certain leeway in personal behavior, was a mystery to the other women in the pavilion.

  Jesamine had seen the twins act a dozen or more times, either on evenings when she and Kahlfa were required to sing, or on what were euphemistically called “lady’s nights,” when the officers brought their concubines with them and the girls found themselves passed around like schnapps, beer, and the cigars that had become so popular since the conquest of the tobacco-growing lands of the Americas. Their performances were gymnastic, innovative, highly pornographic, and, of course, incestuous, and the officers’ mess could not get enough of them. Men en masse were both fascinated and aroused beyond reason by two women having ornate and flamboyant lesbian sex one with the other, and the sight of twins so publically engaged was treated as even more of an erotic charge. Jesamine knew this from firsthand experience. She had seen and felt the effect that the twins had on Phaall, and suffered his engorged excitement in the aftermath. The twins’ popularity, and the perquisites and small measure of freedom it allowed them, had set them apart from the rest of the concubines. Jesamine personally considered them a little stupid and felt the airs that they put on were probably not a good idea in the long run. Right at that moment, the two were dressed in matching, pale blue, hooded jellabas that would have been fairly modest garments had the outer seams not been slit from hem almost to armpit and the neckline not plunged nearly to their navels, revealing a considerable area of white and intimate, naked flesh. Jesamine was of the opinion that to walk around like that, first thing in the Mosul morning, was courting an eventual disaster. To be too noticeable was to risk coming to the attention of the Ministry of Virtue, or, at the other extreme, to court the bitter envy of the other women. Indeed, a few whispered threats had been made against Mai and Leah, but no woman was going to follow through while they were such a hit with the officers. Others, on the other hand, actively sought their friendship in the hope of making use of their supposed influence with the officers in the camp, just as Ravenna seemed to be doing right then. The woman who Kahlfa suspected of being a Zhaithan spy was actually cooking up another batch of eggs for the twins, who seemed to accept the gesture as no more than they deserved.

  As Jesamine stared thoughtfully at the twins, Kahlfa traced the curved stripe of one of Jesamine’s welts with a cool finger. “I could probably find some salve for that.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll live. I just wish Reinhardt would get here soon and unlock this damned collar.”

  “I’d kiss your bruises better if there weren’t so many to see.”

  Jesamine laughed. She had no shame that Kahlfa and she had now and again taken comfort from each other’s touch. Before she could do more than laugh, though, a cry went up. “Male in the tent!”

  It was a routine warning, but, always fearful of trouble and a sudden visit from the Ministry of Virtue, the women all stopped whatever they were doing and warily looked to the entrance. When it turned out to only be the manservant Reinhardt, they made noises of relief and went back to what they had previously been doing. Presumably he had arrived to free Jesamine from her collar and chain, and that was no cause for alarm or comment, but Jesamine noticed that he was carrying a small napkin-wrapped bundle. Treats? Jesamine could use a treat right there and then, although obviously
Reinhardt would expect her favors in return.

  She smiled jokingly as he approached. “About time. I thought you were going to leave me like this all day.”

  A certain familiarity existed between Jesamine and Reinhardt that went beyond private and public manners of address between servant and slave of the same master. Jesamine could hardly see how it might be otherwise. She had taken him in her hand and mouth too often, and listened to his moans of forbidden pleasure, for him to pretend they were strangers. Like everything else in the camp, however, the familiarity was a calculated transaction. He could hardly betray her, since she would immediately betray him, and they would slowly and painfully hang together. Most times Reinhardt would have laughed at her bantering complaint, but instead he scowled. “I am in no mood for jokes. Our colonel has one full and foul hangover. I fully expected him to take the quirt to me as well.”