His face was covered with fading black, purple, and yellow bruises, and there were a pair of savage cuts healing on his forehead. But these weren’t the worst of his injuries. No, not when compared to the one eye that was swollen so badly as to more closely resemble a fist than an elven eye; no, not when compared to the split lips that parted to reveal missing and broken teeth.
She sobbed once and wrapped her arms gently around his neck, clutching him to her.
“It’s all right, Baera-Ni,” he said. “Things are bad, but we’ll survive them if we’re strong.”
“I want to go home,” she said, pleading. She realized how childish it made her sound, but she didn’t care. “I don’t want to be here.”
“None of us do. But we have to make the best of whatever situation we’re in.”
“Father, what are they going to do with us?”
His silence frightened her more than any answer he could have given her.
“I don’t know,” he said at last.
“Will they—?”
She was interrupted by the sound of boots descending the ladder into the hold. A pair of barbarians leapt to the floor and began shouting incomprehensible orders and kicking prisoners. The elves scuttled out of reach of the boots that struck at them, letting themselves be herded into a pack.
One of the barbarians pointed at a dozen or so elves and gestured for them to follow him. They did, and he led them out of the hold. The next barbarian approached and started to do the same thing. It was the barbarian with the drooping mustache, whom Waeh-Loh would shortly kill.
* * *
Ah, there was the shove, just as she had foreseen. Waeh-Loh’s precarious balance on the gangplank was disrupted as her father stumbled into her back. She fell to her knees and then glanced up. The brilliant sunlight blinded her for a moment. She heard her father scrambling to remain on the bowing plank.
“Father!” Waeh-Loh spun on her knees to catch her father’s twisting hips in her hands. For a moment, they both teetered on the brink, but then she yanked him downward and he clutched the plank with quivering arms.
“I’m all right, Waeh-Loh. Your reaction was very timely. Thank you.”
Her lips tightened as though to contain her grief.
“I’m so sorry, father. I—”
The barbarian who had shoved her father barked something at her in that unintelligible language of theirs. Waeh-Loh leapt to her feet and shouted at him: “You almost hurt my father!”
“Waeh-Loh, no …” King Kral-Sus had been reduced to pulling at the hem of her skirt. The enormity of what these barbarians had done to her world staggered her.
The barbarian with the drooping mustache sneered at her, seemingly amused by her wrath. He folded his arms across his chest and grinned at her, his teeth yellow and ragged. Fury boiled in her.
“My father is a king. You have no right to lay hands upon him!”
“Waeh-Loh, let it go,” her father was saying. He climbed slowly to his feet, as though he had aged centuries in the last few days.
The barbarian said something that sounded like “bark mark mek mark,” and started chuckling.
Now, thought Waeh-Loh. Now is when I accidentally kill him. Only, I won’t because I know better.
But even as she thought this, she was already charging the barbarian, her palms stretched forward. She was almost as surprised as the barbarian when she shoved him from the plank.
“Waeh-Loh, no!”
It was too late. She watched appalled as the barbarian did a half somersault and cracked his forehead on the end of the dock below. He sank into the murky depths, trailing blood and clumps of hair.
Waeh-Loh fell to her knees and vomited over the side of the gangplank. She had never killed a living thing in her life until now. She felt fundamentally changed inside, and not in any way she would ever have chosen.
The gangplank shook, and she turned to see two barbarians running up towards her brandishing their axes. Fierce scowls adorned their faces; their hairy biceps bulged.
“No!” cried her father. He interposed himself between Waeh-Loh and the barbarians. “Please …”
The lead barbarian swung his axe at her father’s skull.
“Father!” shrieked Waeh-Loh, her hands outstretched towards him. There was no way she could reach him in time.
Sparks flew as the axe was deflected by another axe before reaching King Kral-Sus. The second barbarian had intervened. A heated interchange commenced, with both barbarians pointing at Waeh-Loh and her father in turn.
Tempers increased. Faces reddened. Weapons were brandished.
And then a gentle female voice sweetened the air, and both barbarians lowered their axes and dropped to their knees.
Waeh-Loh gasped.
Walking across the sandy beach towards the gangplank was a completely nude woman followed by two burly men who might have been slaves or servants of some sort. She was fair-skinned, with long dark tresses. The beauty of the human woman was so great that it hurt to even look at her. The two barbarians who had been squabbling addressed her in soft, reverential tones, as docile as baby cordons.
The woman spoke to them in soothing coos, and then gestured for Waeh-Loh to approach. Waeh-Loh stared at her, dumbfounded.
A slight frown crossed the woman’s face, detracting from her beauty. She said something in a voice less sweet than it had been; almost a growl.
There was a sudden flash of light and blinding pain in the side of her head. Then the barbarian who had struck her grabbed her by the torso and hoisted her from the gangplank.
The naked human smiled and nodded, and the barbarian dropped Waeh-Loh onto the sandy beach where she lay stunned. Her head rung and she could barely breathe.
“Waeh-Loh!” her father shouted. “Waeh—”
She didn’t see the blow that silenced her father but she heard it. Behind her, his voice trailed away to a groan.
The woman was talking again. It sounded like “Murr leek bar bar?” or some other such nonsensical stream of phonemes. Waeh-Loh looked up, staring stupidly at her. Again the frown, and Waeh-Loh’s heart thudded in her chest. It hadn’t taken long to figure out that it was bad when the naked human frowned.
The woman walked towards her with a grace and deportment at great odds with her state of undress. Each bare foot was placed in turn into the sand, one after the other, causing her hips to undulate enticingly.
“Murr leek bar bar murr murr bar bar?” This woman was speaking what sounded like nonsensical baby talk. Waeh-Loh stared without comprehension.
The frown deepened. The naked woman raised her hand, showing Waeh-Loh her palm. Then she slapped Waeh-Loh so hard that Waeh-Loh fell to the sand again.
Waeh-Loh cried out, but before she could react, the woman had reached down and inserted her index and middle fingers into Waeh-Loh’s nostrils and lifted. Excruciating pain forced Waeh-Loh to her feet.
Waeh-Loh reached for the fingers but the woman lifted higher. Waeh-Loh shrieked, and dropped her hands to her sides.
“All right! All right! I’m sorry! Please, stop!”
The woman transferred her grip from Waeh-Loh’s nostrils to her earlobe and led her towards the tree-line at the end of the beach.
“Father! Fath—Ow!” A sharp yank on her ear silenced her cry. She began to whimper, her nose bleeding and her ear hurting intolerably. Queen Tee-Ri fell into step beside her, not being coerced but looking miserable anyway.
“Don’t fight them, Waeh-Loh,” her father called to her. “Be strong. Watch them, and learn about them. Find out what you need to survive!”
The last thing her father said to her before they were separated was: “Be disciplined, Baera-Ni! Be disciplined and strong for us all.”
She would not see him again for nearly a year. She would think upon those words of his nearly every hour of every day in that time.
Be strong. Be disciplined.
Chapter 77
They called her Mistress Affliction.
Not within earshot, of course. That would result in one of her dreaded frowns, which would lead only to pain. No, when she was near, it was only “Yes, Mistress Aflishia,” or “No, Mistress Aflishia.”
Mistress Affliction never wore clothing. Even when the weather outside was gray and so cold that Waeh-Loh’s teeth chattered while she was wrapped in her wool blanket, Mistress Affliction would glide from room to room in the Pleasure Palace without so much as a hairpin. On those days when her fertility cycle prohibited walking around naked, Mistress Affliction simply retired to her chambers and did not venture out until nature had run its course.
Waeh-Loh had never seen a human before the barbarians had arrived in Ignis Fatuus, and now she was bedding among them in the barn-sized wooden dormitory annexed to the Pleasure Palace. In many ways, humans were very much like elves. A bit stockier, perhaps; much shorter-lived, definitely; but overall, so similar it clearly spoke to a common ancestry or creator somewhere in the mists of the past.
If one thing stood out to Waeh-Loh about these human women, it was their incredible fertility. The typical elven female was fertile perhaps once every fifty years or so: sometimes more frequently, sometimes less, but usually about that. But these humans were almost always fertile. Indeed, the women in the dormitories seemed to always be having their cycles; they were so fertile, it seemed impossible that the world wasn’t already covered end-to-end in humans.
In fact, there was one woman there who, once Waeh-Loh and Tee-Ri had started learning Kardic, confided that she was the fifth child in a family of twelve children. Twelve children! It seemed an impossibly high number. Why, Peeri, the famous matriarch of elven myth, was only supposed to have given birth to five elven heroes. A brood of five children was a true bounty; twelve seemed decadent and obscene.
After the initial shock of her arrival had worn off, Waeh-Loh soon settled into the dormitory life. There were two women to a bunk, two bunks in a bed, and fifty beds, yielding a grand total of two hundred women in the dormitory, almost all of them human except for Waeh-Loh, Tee-Ri, and the ten serving women from the castle. They were told that more elves would arrive once this group had been trained.
Trained. They were not supposed to know what this meant, but Waeh-Loh had started remembering parts of the future, and so had an inkling of what was to come.
First, they would learn the language. Here, the elves were at the greatest disadvantage, since although most of the human women didn’t know Kardic, they knew some other human language and thus had a head start on the elves. In addition, humans had a fascinating ability to learn incredibly quickly; as though, because their lives were so short, they felt compelled to learn and do as much as possible as quickly as possible before it was too late.
Waeh-Loh supposed this made sense. After all, by the time she was old enough to legally marry under Elven Law, every single human in this dormitory would have died of old age. It seemed unutterably cruel that such a vivacious and inventive race was cursed with such a brief lifespan.
So, first, then, were the language lessons. Those commenced almost immediately upon the arrival of the elves, after which no conversation was permitted in any other language. Those who broke this rule were quickly disciplined.
Be disciplined. Her father had said that, but Waeh-Loh wondered if he had imagined the degree to which his words were prophetic. For if there was one thing every woman in this place would learn, it was how to be disciplined. The wrong word, the wrong act, even the slightest failure to maintain perfect composure instantly brought a frown to Mistress Affliction’s human face. And whenever Mistress Affliction frowned, her male assistants would leap into action, grabbing the offending female, throwing her to the ground, and beating her nearly to death …. and sometimes all the way. Five women died the first week of Waeh-Loh’s stay in the dormitory. Waeh-Loh herself was beaten eleven times in that period. After that, the lesson seemed satisfactorily learned. There was no dissent in the dormitory, no disobeying, no spirit whatsoever.
But not for Waeh-Loh. This was discipline after all, and it was what her father had told her to do. Perhaps not to this degree, perhaps not in this way, but the skill was useful and Waeh-Loh paid attention to every lesson. She would be disciplined. For her father’s sake.
For instance, she pushed herself with ruthless determination to learn the barbarian’s language. Sure, that’s what they wanted her to do, but it was also a useful tool. Watch them, and learn about them. Find out what you need to survive! She would do that, and the first step to understanding her oppressors was to understand what they were saying: not so much what they were saying to her, but if she could learn what they were saying to each other … Surely, that could be useful, couldn’t it?
Once the women in the dormitory had mastered the basics of Kardic, then the second stage of the training began: domestics. They were taught how to cook meals and how to serve them, how to sew and weave, how to dance and dress.
Tee-Ri had the most trouble in this phase of their education. Serving others was a concept unknown to her, and perhaps unknowable. After her first complaint to Mistress Affliction brought her a savage beating, she turned her efforts towards the other women in the dormitory: appealing to their sense of history, to their natural respect and obedience for royalty, to their sympathies.
Though not as skilled with women as she was with men, Tee-Ri nevertheless lied, begged, cajoled, and backstabbed her way to the top of the pecking order in the dormitory. Soon, other women were dressing the elven queen, cooking for her, singing to her, and so on. It was as though she had never left the comforts of her castle at Ignis Fatuus.
After perhaps months of this training, the third and last phase descended upon them.
One moment the women were sitting on their bunks, chatting with each other or knitting, and then the next, all the doors to the dormitory opened and there were fifty huge men of the type that Mistress Affliction brought with her wherever she went.
Without a word, the shirtless and muscle-bound men stomped into the room and rounded up the women. They were gathered shrieking, whispering, and crying into groups and led from the dormitory.
All of them, that is, except for Tee-Ri and Waeh-Loh. The two of them were told to remain in the dormitory, and that they did. Hours crawled by while the two were left alone in the echoing emptiness of the barn-shaped room, among the empty bunks with only each other for company.
They didn’t exchange a single word, nor even look at each other. They spent their time sitting alone in their respective beds, or gazing through the cracks between the timbers out towards the night-darkened outline of the Pleasure Palace. What was going on in there, Waeh-Loh could only imagine.
She had been long asleep when the women were herded back into the room, sobbing and moaning. None of them would speak of their experiences in the Pleasure Palace, not then or ever, except for the first night when one of them, a chubby red-headed girl Waeh-Loh’s age, began rocking back and forth, crying and muttering, “It was to be for my wedding night. It was to be for my wedding night. It was to be …”
The women worked at the Pleasure Palace every night for three weeks, and then were given the fourth week off. On those days they had off, they lay in their beds immobile, staring up at the ceiling or the bunks above them, or perhaps knitted. The human vivacity and spirit that had impressed Waeh-Loh so much had been utterly extinguished within just a few nights.
Waeh-Loh supposed that she should have been relieved that she was excluded from the trips to the Pleasure Palace. But even if she had not had glimpses of the future, she would have realized that she and her mother were being singled out for another, darker purpose. These other women, these humans and elves of common blood, they were everyday pleasures for men.
Waeh-Loh and Tee-Ri, on the other hand, were being groomed for a special occasion.
What this special occasion might be, Waeh-Loh didn’t know and couldn’t guess. But she did know that she had to be disciplined and she had to be strong, as her father
had said. And she spent those long days and even longer nights lying in her bunk, and meditating on a single word: discipline.
Over the rest of the year, that one word would occupy her mind almost exclusively. The sound of the word in her head helped blot out the wailing and sobbing in the dormitories at night. It helped her overcome the shock when all the elven servants from the castle committed suicide together, slitting their own throats. It helped overcome her horror when those women who conceived with child were led from the dormitory and never returned. It helped her endure the frequent beatings. It helped her disregard the looks of reproach from her mother.
It helped her survive. It was a wonderful word, really, discipline. Perhaps she didn’t fully understand it yet, but she would.
Oh yes, she would, indeed.
Chapter 78
“You,” said one of the two men standing beside her bunk. “Get up.”
The first word that sprang to her mind was “Why?” but she bit it back. What was the disciplined way to deal with this situation?
Her heart pounded as her mind raced over the possibilities and then she decided that the disciplined response would be to swallow her curiosity and fear, and simply follow them.
She climbed from the bunk and stood between the two men. They were huge, with muscles that bulged obscenely, yet Waeh-Loh was taller than both of them.
“Very well,” she said.
As the bare-chested men escorted Waeh-Loh through the dormitory, the eyes of the other women turned away. Waeh-Loh didn’t blame them: women who were led off in this manner never returned.
She reviewed her actions of the last few days. Had she done something wrong? Had she infracted on one of their rules, offended Mistress Affliction in some way?
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