Chapter 6

Thankfully our procession rolled quickly past the nauseatingly displayed rotting skulls on pikes at the front gate. The town clung to the mountainside along several terraces, tiny, sturdy stone and wood houses dug into the sparse topsoil and presumably retreating into the bedrock. A row of greenhouses in the distance attested to the difficulty of agriculture at such altitude. The whole town carried an acrid, stinging smell. The tableau was dominated by a monstrously sprawling, two-story mansion toward which we gradually ambled, cheered on by a gaggle of females of varying ages. Some pulled my travelling companions down off one wagon and hugged and kissed them ... sometimes on the cheek, sometimes very much not. Alsoomse picked up a shorter woman bodily and swung her around before planting a sloppy kiss on her lips. I struggled to ignore the sight of a skinny twenty-something, bundle of market-goods over her shoulder, grabbing one of her peers by the ass and pulling her in for a breathless bout of tongue-wrestling. I did a double-take when she turned around and repeated the motion with another girl. Gradually though, the bulk of the now dozens-strong, all-female crowd pulled in around me in a cacophony of jeers accompanied by barking dogs.

“Hey-hey-heyyyyyy” a middle-aged woman waggled her eyebrows suggestively at me, crossing her arms beneath an impressive blouse-swaddled rack. Next to her, a teenage girl was eyeing me up and down, dropping her gaze shyly when she noticed she’d been spotted.

“Hey tall and upright” drawled another.

“Welcome to the mountains!”

“Where’d they sell you from?”

“What was your price? Not enough I bet!”

“Itoomawa likes ‘em lanky like herself, haha!”

“Yeah, don’t they feed you down in the plains?” a couple of teenagers elbowed each other.

“Wait, are you a tube stiff?”

“Tube stiff? That’d make three now. Pushing our luck aren’t we?”

“More than ten if you count the bitches.”

“How you liking the present so far?”

“Ask Boss Tara to send you to the hothouses!”

“No, the furnaces!”

Finally, Itoomawa waved her hand in the air and shouted them down:

“Alright ladies, alright, that’s enough for now, let’s not keep the boss waiting, make way, he’ll be crawling up your asses in no time anyway, leave him alone.”

To my surprise the crowd complied (though a few, confusingly, flipped me the finger as they backed away) taking with them the several other women who’d travelled with us. I found myself pushed from behind toward the mansion in the middle of town, Itoomawa leading the wagon to a side entrance. I whispered to Cam, who’d sidled up to us once more after being largely ignored by the welcoming committee:

“I didn’t think to ask, but is Itoomawa someone ... important?”

“If the big boss sends her to buy slaves, she’s probably the town’s slave mistress. Now shush, and be polite when you meet people.”

If being impolite got your head stuck on a pike, I might as well be polite, I cogitated. We obediently unloaded bundle after barrel of market goods and stacked them just inside what I surmised to be a servants’ entrance. From a dark little hallway, one uncomfortably low door led to the kitchen, another deeper into the house and narrow sets of steps crept up and down one wall to the second story and the basement, respectively. It looked exactly as I’d always imagined servants’ quarters must look: cramped and lifeless enough to constantly remind you of your place in the world.

“Rod? Rodney!” Itoomawa yelled, then to a scurrying female: “Fetch Rod unless he’s giving time.”

“Think he’s just cleaning up the boss’ table, ma’am. I’ll get him.”

After a minute, a mid-height, mid-build, mid-age black man ducked through one of the doors and bowed his head slightly at us.

“Mistress Itoomawa? Welcome back.”

My eyes bulged at his outfit. He was bare-chested, walking in shiny cloth slippers with pointed toes and his bright red pants ... if you could call them that ... fluffed out from just below his knees to a bulging silver codpiece and wide, ostentatious red leather belt.

“Hey Rod. Has Tara asked for us yet?”

“Boss Tara had lunch with the herder bosses and is still talking to them.”

“Ah, good, we have time. Get this one cleaned up before she gets a look at him. They just dug him up weeks ago, so you’ll have to show him how to do things”

“Yes, ma’am.” He smirked at me with one corner of his mouth.

She ushered Cam down the hall, then we split up along different hallways. The mansion was even larger than it looked from outside, with rooms dug partway into the mountainside. Unlike the other houses I’d seen though, cement featured prominently in its construction. We passed several bed-filled rooms which looked like barracks, half-lit by windows in the aboveground portion, in which a handful of men of varying ages slept, talked quietly or played cards, until finally reaching the showers. Rod touched his hand to a metal tank embedded in the ceiling.

“Hey man, you’re in luck, the water’s almost warm. Strip down and wash yourself, then brush your teeth and shave. Hey, don’t, um, don’t drink this water though. Lead pipes.”

He rapped a knuckle onto a thick grayish pipe leading from the tank to a shower head with a lever valving off the flow. Seeing me hesitate, he chuckled.

“Come on, if they bought and sold your ass, they made you show them the goods at least once or twice. No sense getting shy now. I need to get a look at your junk before Itoomawa starts sending you out there anyway. Relax, nobody’s as uptight as they were in the old days.”

“Out where? Wait, the old days? Are you...?”

“Tube stiff is what they call us.”

“Fuck! You have to –”

“Hold it. I don’t have to do anything. I didn’t know you before the war and we’re not automatically friends now just because we both got buried. Nothing against you, man, but I’m not sticking my neck out for you either. They play rough here. You see the town gate? Wash while we talk, they won’t give us much time.”

“Yeah, I saw those two ... examples, I guess?” I stripped off and stepped under the lukewarm at best shower. He handed me a lumpy bar of soap, nodded, looking me up and down. At least I might get some more useful information out of him than out of Cam.

“Bandits. One family each. Those are the mothers’ heads up on the poles. One of the daughters is working the mines now. Others got sold off.”

“Mines?”

“Didn’t they tell you? This is a mining town. Lead, silver, bit of iron. Made Boss Tara’s mother filthy rich, by today’s standards. By the way” he lowered his voice “don’t let the other slaves hear you disrespecting the bosses. It’s always ‘boss’ or ‘mistress’ or ‘ma’am’ whenever someone might hear you.” Then in a regular voice “From now on, you always wash like it’s date night. Boss’ll probably lie down a bit then wake up in the mood.”

“So, um, am I supposed to do anything special?”

“If you are, they’ll tell you. Otherwise, what these beauties mostly want is a good solid hump.”

“Wait: they? I thought this Tara bought me?”

“Boss” he emphasized “Tara bought you so she can whore your ass out to whoever she pleases. Trust me my man, you’re gonna be fucking more women more often than you ever thought you would. Here, finish shaving and dry yourself off.”

He tossed me a rough towel, stepped out for a few minutes, returned with a pair of pants and slippers like his own. Bare-chested, feeling my nutsack banging around inside the cloth padded metal codpiece, we made our way through the hallways to a luminous dining room. At the far end rose an honest-to-goodness stone throne on a raised dais. At the head of one long table sat a short middle-aged black woman in a long red dress with lace trim, sporting an impressive mane of crinkly hair swept back past her shoulders. Seated at her elbow, Itoomawa seemed to be running through some kind of checklist as I took my place beside Cam already standing at attention in one of the simple grayish-brown robes which seemed to serve as default garb these days.

“– and the tin just wasn’t worth it, but with all this linen and hemp we can trade for it next spring. Lamp oil was cheap. Picked up half again as much wheat since we could spare the money, usual price. That should be about it except for the guns. No deal. They won’t move on the price.”

The black woman shrugged with a sour smirk: “Let ‘em stew. They want lead shot for those noisemakers, they’ll come down. We can wait ‘em out.” Her smirk turned wicked as her eyes landed on Cam and me. “Oh now.” She got up and paced toward, then around us at a slow, unnerving pace. She barely came up to my shoulder but had a definite air of the over-entitled rich bitch about her. As Cam didn’t say anything, I bit my tongue too until she stopped in front of Cam and crossed her arms.

“What’s your name, mother?”

“Cam, Mistress.”

“Ever served food and such at parties? Know the routine?”

“Sure enough ma’am, I know enough to stay out of sight and not let the soup get cold, and pick up after the ones done with a dish. Did it now and then for every boss.”

“Alright then. You’ll be serving under Itoomawa mostly, and whoever she tells you to mind. As for you” she looked up at me “you’ll be serving under lots of women, I think!” She grinned widely at her own wit. “Sure looks like a tube stiff. My god but they kept ‘em scruffy in those days. Usual bet, Itoomawa?”

“Your loss this time boss. Sure.”

With no further warning, Tara slapped me across the cheek hard enough to make me see stars.

“What the fuck!” I lunged at her, tensing for a punch. She flinched but stood her ground. A memory from a week before, standing in the marketplace with Itoomawa slapping me, flashed before my eyes. I caught myself at the last second, gritted my teeth and took a deep breath, dug my fingernails into my palms and dropped my fists.

“F-ff-fuck. You, ummm ... fuck ... you’re testing me aren’t you?” I noticed Rodney and two armed women stepping back into the hallway, having been ready to catch me. As I stepped back and rubbed my cheek, Tara and Itoomawa burst into laughter while Cam stared at the ground. Tara went over to the throne and fished a little leather pouch from beneath the cushions, handed Itoomawa a couple of coins, still laughing.

“Well I’ll be dusted, you picked a clever one again.”

“I like the clever ones. They learn faster.” Itoomawa, though ostensibly responding to her boss, threw me a meaningful look to accompany this statement.

“Well, he still almost went through with it, so give him two lashes tomorrow just for a taste.”

“Sounds right.” Itoomawa nodded. My aching jaw dropped.

“Wait, what the fuck? I didn’t hit you!”

They both laughed again, but with a harder edge. Before the big boss could say anything to damn me further, Itoomawa cut in:

“Hey now, don’t ruin your luck with arguing. It could’ve been three or five. Could still be. Got it?”

I nodded. She flipped her braid over her shoulder and clucked her tongue at me.

“Say, ‘yes, Mistress Itoomawa’”

“What? Oh, ummm, y-yes, Mistress Itoomawa.” I kept struggling to breathe calmly and looked at the floor. Tara signaled to the hallway:

“Coat. What’s your name anyway?”

“It’s Adam, Adam Eden. Ma’am” I hurried to add.

She snorted: “Tube stiffs. Like one name’s not good enough for you. Pick one of those.”

“Umm, Adam.”

Rodney re-appeared with a floor-length fur coat, slid it up her arms and onto her shoulders, helped her tie her hair back then made himself scarce again without a word. She stopped to run a palm along my bare back before heading for the door.

“I need to see my daughter’s handling of that shaft reinforcement. Send Adam to dinner.”

With that she waved us away, flanked by two young men in ostentatious red-dyed leather pants and jackets hurrying to catch up to her. Itoomawa turned to us, smiling.

“I’m thinking I got a good deal on both of you.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Cam bowed her head slightly, smiling in obvious relief at this backhanded compliment.

“You come with me. You” she pointed me down the hallway from which I’d entered “find Rod, tell him I said to put you on an easy schedule. And get a nap or something before dinner. Make sure you can get it up for the boss.”

Flushed at hearing my erection discussed within earshot of not only old Cam but the multiple servants and guards apparently lurking in the hallways, I ducked back toward what seemed to be the men’s dormitories ... or as I now realized, Tara’s toy-boy hareem or maybe brothel? Of which I was now officially a part. The two female guards from earlier, hidden just behind the door-frame, hooked their thumbs in the direction of the same door farther down the hall, confirming they’d been eavesdropping, one of them staring at my chest, the other significantly farther down. In a room dominated by a large, luminous window and an equally large writing desk and bookshelf, Rodney was scribbling something into a notebook with a fountain pen. I rapped my knuckles against the doorframe. He sighed and wiped the pen’s nib on a rag.

“Man, I do miss that. Nobody knocks these days. They just barge in or yell stuff through the door.”

“Ito- I mean, mistress Itoomawa, told me to tell you she said to put me on an easy schedule?”

“Was gonna do that anyway.” He shrugged.

“Were they serious about, umm, beating me?”

His eyes snapped to me, then went distant for a second.

“Don’t worry about that for now. It won’t be too bad. Here, let’s get you a bed and some more practical clothes.”

The practical clothes turned out to be pants, shirt, and a robe to spare, all made of generic off-white linen. The red pants were apparently for special occasions like being presented to your new owner. I was glad to receive socks too, having suffered cold feet all week. The bed was as advertised: a bed, creaking plywood and a stiff mattress covered in cheap linen, in a stuffy windowless room barely big enough to turn around in, furnished with overhead shelves the better to bang your head on. The setup was mirrored on the opposite side of the room, where a black-haired teenage boy was fiddling with some kind of knotted string by the light of a candle.

“Adam, this is Chogan. Hey, didn’t the mistress tell you to stop wasting candles? You can do that outside.”

“Alright” the boy licked his fingers and snuffed out the wick, leaving us standing in near-darkness. Rod sighed at his barely visible bratty grin.

“He’s not usually this annoying. Anyway, I’m rooming you two together. Don’t worry Adam, you’ll rarely be in this room at the same time. Chogan, Adam here just got dug up recently -”