Chapter 18: Auction

The slave auctions were held regularly and so Rubina spent only three more days in a cage at the auction house to which she was sent, hobbled and shackled. The cage itself was a form of torture, since it was roughly cubic, but only about five feet in each direction, and she was unable to stand or lie down in any comfort. The only possible position was to sit on the floor with her back to the bars; the chains on her ankles and wrists made even that uncomfortable. Water and food were placed in the cage from time to time but she resolutely refused to eat, though drinking water from sheer necessity. Of course, after three days thus held she was sitting in her own filth, and so they hosed her down, but at the last possible moment, after the sale had started.

It took two attendants to drag her from the cage and on to the sale rostrum where her wrist shackles were quickly attached to a chain which was pulled up until her arms were painfully high above her head, leaving most of her weight on the shoulders, while the hobble was fastened to a hook in the floor to prevent her kicking. The remnants of her clothing were torn from her body and a deft movement by the auctioneer set her twisting on the single support chain, thus displaying her body to the crowd of men in Arab dress who were gathered for the sale. She screamed vile imprecations in Italian again until a gag was thrust into her mouth.

"Italiano?" said one of the men.

Rubina nodded violently, hoping in vain that help might be at hand. The man approached the rostrum and reached out a hand towards her, and she tried valiantly to press herself forwards to him. His hand grasped her belly and a finger was thrust into her vagina.

"Hmm," the man debated with himself, sniffing his finger, "Italiano. Puta."

The auctioneer said something in Arabic which Rubina did not understand and the bidders laughed. Then the auctioning of this untrainable slave started, and the bidding was desultory, to say the least. Eventually, after much pleading the auctioneer swore and his hammer came down. She was unhooked from the hanging position and her feet were released from the floor hasp, though she was left handcuffed and shackled.

Rubina had not seen who bought her and did not find out, because as soon as she was down on the auction room floor she was roughly wrapped in an abaya with no eyeholes, bound round with a rope which prevented her moving her arms away from her body, and carried from the hall by a burly Negro who had run to fat and waddled. Enveloped in the abaya, Rubina was afraid she was in for another immediate rape, or at least a thorough groping, but the man carrying her seemed uninterested in the body he held. She was dumped unceremoniously into a vehicle of some sort and driven away to meet her fate, which she expected would involve many more men and many more beatings.

Taken from the van, she could tell by the temperature that she was outside as she was carried some distance by two men. Then she was dropped painfully on the floor, but she was neither unfastened nor unwrapped. After lying there for what seemed an age, but was actually only an hour, every muscle in her shoulders was aching with the strain of the unnatural position in which she was tied. She heard voices about her and she was untied and her abaya removed.

She was in a large tent surrounded by men she immediately recognised as Bedouin, and they were all staring at her nakedness. This she had grown used to over the past months so it did not inhibit her from diving at the nearest man and biting his leg hard enough to draw blood. The immediate response to this was a heavy cuff in the side of the head which knocked her flying across the floor of the tent with her head whirling. Before she could recover herself the men had pounced on her, dragged her over to a bed and bent her double on the edge of it so that her arse was sticking up in the air with all of her private parts displayed for anyone to see. However, the expected rape or sodomy did not happen. For some little time the four men holding her merely remained still with her in that awkward position, face down so she could see nothing.