The Last Hour of Gann (123 page)

He brushed the back of his hand along
her cheek, then gripped her chin and lightly squeezed. “You are Zhuqa’s woman, never fear. Now shift your skirts.”

As comfort went, it was a cold puddle of piss indeed, but it wasn’t like she had any real choice. She
lifted her dress up to her waist, shifting uneasily as Hruuzk hunkered down to get a better look at her pubis. He grunted, then raised his hand and gave Zhuqa a second inquiring nod.

Zhuqa’s
approval was a long time coming, but it came. “Hold still, Eshiqi.”

But she couldn’t, quite. Hruuzk’s hand was huge and abrasive, repulsive in every touch no matter how impartially he prodded at her. She shuddered,
twisting the fabric of her shift to keep from slapping him away, and shut her eyes as he wedged one thick finger inside her.

“She’s open,” Hruuzk said, amused.

“I’m beginning to think she’s always open.”

“Oh, that’s a seller, if it’s true.”

“Isn’t it.”

Hruuzk got his finger up as deep as it would go, rubbing at her in a clinical fashion, then withdrew to clasp both hands between his bulging thighs and study her some more. “If you ever decide to sell that, I want it,” he said at last.

“Vek has my promise of first refusal. She took his hand off.”

“So I heard, but there’s good coin in this thing. Let me have it for one year,” he said, rising to his feet again. “Vek can have it back in just this condition and if I pour less than fifty thousand strips in your hand, you can have my other eye. Not points. Not rounds. Strips.”

“Take it up with Vek, but for now, she’s mine. Put your clothes right, Eshiqi.”

Hruuzk grunted and shifted his gaze to the other lizardladies, the matter closed to him. While Amber
adjusted her clothes, he moved out to get a better look, catching at their heads to examine their teeth or eyes, turning them around to pass a hand down their spines, and stopping at every one of them to pry their slits open and test at their insides.

“Weak batch,” was his ultimate judgment. “Were you told these were virgins?”

“No,” said Zhuqa, flexing his spines in a careless, shrugging gesture. “But they must be fresher than the ones we have, surely.”

“Those
two,” he said, pointing, “are the pick of the lot. Virgin, or close enough, since I guess you let your runners go at them. If you put them up for bidding, they might go for as much as two hundred rounds each, maybe more. But with respect, sir, if you want me to stable them under you, I’ll only send you back a quarter of their coin until I see for myself that they don’t come with cargo.” He gave the slave nearest him a pat on the belly. “They don’t turn a dip this pretty out of Praxas on a whim.”

“A point, but I’m bidding them all out. If there’s cargo, it’ll fall in the hands of the man who buys the cart
.”

“
Please yourself.” The slave-master turned his good eye back on the ladies. “This one’s not as fresh, but she might go for as much as a hundred rounds. Slant-Eyes is the tightest of the lot, but she has a good case of the twist coming on—”

“Yes, I saw that on the run.”

“—and Black-Stripe’s mouth isn’t right. Could just be bad feeding, coming from Praxas.” Hruuzk shrugged again. “But I think it’s the juun.”

“Piss,” said Zhuqa disgustedly, his spines going flat.

“Won’t hurt for fucking.”

“I am not selling a dip with the juun to my men.” Zhuqa thought about it, stroking at his throat, where faint streaks of yellow were beginning to show. They faded while he pondered the matter, and at last he said, “Catch her up with Shu’ir and Ila, see if Ghelip wants to buy them. I don’t mind cheating him.”

“He might not be feeling very receptive. You know we killed three of his patrollers while you were gone.”

“
Throw Salahkthu in with them and call it an apology.”

Hruuzk snorted laughter. “Done. The rest of them ought to go straight to the
stables in my opinion, and if I see fifty points by year’s end for the lot of them, I’ll pay you back in rounds. They’re worn loose already and two of them have been cut.”

“The piss you say!” The color flared in Zhuqa’s throat. “By my men?”

“No, they’re good and scarred. Probably done when they were hip-high, so they could take an early poke. Bunch of perverts in Praxas,” the slave-master remarked, his gaze once more straying to Amber. “But you may as well keep them because, as you say, they’re fresher than the ones we have, and besides, we lost some while you were away.”

“So I heard,” Zhuqa said coolly.

The slave-master spread his huge hands. “What would you have me do, stand over them and help push?”

“It’s
a very simple thing, Hruuzk. If a man can’t be trusted not to break the toy, he doesn’t get to play with it. If you have to kill a few men to make that lesson clear, do it. I can always get more men. The dips are hard to come by. So.” Zhuqa looked the new slaves over one last time. “Gather those three…no, those four and show them around to whoever’s got coin to spend. How soon can you have them ready for the block?”

“How ready do you want them to be?”

“They’d ought to know their way around the workpit.” Zhuqa glanced over at Amber. “My Eshiqi needs to know how to care for her man’s House.”

“Ah, you’re doing this again,” the slave-master remarked with a small smile. “All right. I’ll start it on lamps for now. Does it talk?”

“Not much, but she understands you.” Zhuqa pinched Amber’s jaw again and put his face very close to hers. “And she’s going to behave.”

Hruuzk grunted and gestured for Amber to stand beside him, watching with undisguised amusement
as she obeyed. “Ugly little thing, but I did like the grip of that cunt. How would you feel if I took a dip?”

“Murderous,” Zhuqa replied mildly.

“All right,” he said again, in much the same easy-going way. “Yllgami, come get the rest of the cattle and put them to work. Not you, Gold-Eyes. Stay right here and wait for me. We’re going to take a walk. Come, Eshiqi.” His huge hand dropped comfortably over her shoulder as he took her into the next room. “Let’s get you started.”

7

A
mber’s first jobs were plainly tests of her ability to understand and obey Hruuzk’s orders: she wiped down tables, bagged fluff, hauled water around to each of the work stations, swept without a broom, washed without a sink, and did it all without a word. When Hruuzk was satisfied, he put her to work cutting lamp wicks and left her there while he took one of the slaves out on her ‘walk’. Even this simple task was trickier than it seemed. They didn’t have scissors, or maybe just didn’t trust slaves with them. Amber had to feed the rope through a blocky guillotine-like device and smack a spring-loaded lever to make the cut. She’d worked a lot of monotonous factory jobs; she soon had the fiddly business of feed/measure/cut/pull/feed down to a comfortable routine.

When Hruuzk
returned from showing ‘Gold-Eyes’ around to potential buyers, her table was piled high with dry wicks and he made her stop and soak them. While he took ‘Shivers’ out on her walk, Amber swished wicks around in a jar of xuseth oil, then hung them up on rods to dry. The oil ran down her arms each time she reached up to hang more wicks and soon the front of her shift was soaked and clinging to her like a second skin, exposing every line and shadow of the body beneath. Hruuzk’s interest when he came back to drop off ‘Shivers’ and pick up ‘Crook-Toe’ was evident, but he kept his hands to himself.

“Good girl,” he said, patting her head after she’d hung up the last wick and put the xuseth oil away.
“Unless I tell you different, you start each day with wicks. This camp runs through about two, three hundred a day and they have to be fresh. You seem to be quick enough with those freakish little hands…you can make lamps.”

Back he went to the door, to bellow at someone outside to bring him two blocks of clay. He waited, watching Amber clear off her table and fiddling absentmindedly with any slave who caught his eye, and soon after, a knock on the door heralded the arrival of the clay. Hruuzk inspected it as intently as any slave, judged it acceptable, and thumped both blocks down on the table in front of Amber.

A lamp began with a clay-snake, just like the kind she’d once made in state-care art class out of colored dough. The snake was coiled into a fat, shallow bowl with a bit of a lip for a mouth. Smooth down the sides, pinch the lip tight at one end to hold the wick (but not all the way closed), set it on a tray to be fired, and that was a lamp.

“Use it all,” Hruuzk ordered, patting her on the head again. “Do a good job and I’ll tell Zhuqa what a hard-working woman he has.”

“Fuck you and him,” Amber muttered, concentrating on smoothing her lamp without thinning out the side.

“Good girl. Crook-Toe, let’s go.”

So the next time she heard the door unlock, she thought it was Hruuzk again. She’d only made four lamps and she was a little relieved when it opened on the raider Dkorm instead, along with Xzem and two crying babies.

Dkorm looked around the workpit with an expression of profound disgust, kicked an empty bag out of his way, and stomped over to sit on a crate. The children who had been squabbling and playing through their work all morning withdrew very quietly to another room. The lizardladies bent their necks and focused even harder on whatever task was at hand. Dkorm pulled a heavy-looking sack of something over, punched it down in the middle, and put Rosek in the depression. She tried to climb out at once. He slapped her and thumped her down harder.
Xzem flinched at the sound of the blow, but only bent her head at her child’s howl of pain.

“Fucking sprat. Shut up and lie there. Xzem, I swear before God and Gann, if you don’t quiet your little dip—”

“She’s hungry,” Xzem whispered.

“Then feed it! Do I have to tell you to do everything?”

Xzem crept over, hesitated, and held out the baby.

Dkorm
folded his arms. “I don’t want it. Put it down. Anywhere,” he added as Xzem looked helplessly around. “Just put it—
shut the fuck up
!” he roared suddenly and Rosek, who had in fact been winding down now that her mother was beside her, went right back into screams.

Amber gave her lamp a vicious finishing pinch and stalked over to take Zhuqa’s baby. It turned toward her at once, its small cries quieting. Xzem snatched up Rosek and retreated. Dkorn leaned back and laughed at both of them.

“Prick!” spat Amber, taking it with her to her table.

Dkorm laughed again, but in a puzzled way. “
What
was that?”

She remembered suddenly and with a sharp pang that ‘prick’ was also a dumaqi word and that she’d just called him a hingepin or something. It brought Meoraq right back to the surface of her th
oughts, made her feel taken all over again.

Amber looked down at Zhuqa’s baby and watched its tiny hand flail and punch
until she gave it a finger to latch onto. Its grip was surprisingly strong. It squeezed once and then towed her finger up under its chin. It bit her, gumming harmlessly at her fingertip while she watched, transfixed by the working of its jaws, the minutia of its tiny fingers wrapping her giant one, the impossible detail of each individual scale. It was hypnotizing her and she wanted to be hypnotized, wanted to forget where she was and why and how long she was likely to stay because rescue was coming, sure it was, but it he wasn’t here yet.

“It’ll
piss all over you,” Dkorm warned, watching her wrap the baby in the loose folds of her oversized shift.

She ignored him. The baby was singing,
its chirring breaths gradually lengthening to fall into rhythm with the rise and fall of her breasts. It relaxed, arms and legs falling slowly open like a bud in the sunshine. Basking in her. Not her warmth or her scent or the sound of her voice. In
her
.

She lost herself in it. She never heard the door open
, never knew anyone was behind her until she felt the weight of his hand on her shoulder.

Amber stiffened, her
own hand cupping protectively over the baby’s hot, wrinkled back, but that was all she did. She didn’t try to shrug off Zhuqa’s touch. And it was Zhuqa. She only had to look as far as the lizardladies bending their necks or Dkorm standing at attention next to Xzem to know who was behind her now.

The hand gave her a pat, then took itself away. Zhuqa stepped out from behind her and walked around the table, moving toward Xzem, whose breath quickened but who did not quite dare to cover her baby in the huddle of her own body. She crouched, rigid and in anguish, as Zhuqa peeled back
Rosek’s wrap and watched her nurse.

The silence was a hammer on Amber’s ears
. She could hear every wet sound as the baby sucked at her finger, every happy grumble and purr as it nestled close.

“Am I making you nervous?” Zhuqa asked mildly, still gazing at Xzem’s baby.

“Isn’t that what you’re going for?” Amber countered.

“Not you, Eshiqi.” Zhuqa’s eyes shifted, shining lazily back at Dkorm. “Am I making you nervous
, Dkorm?”