Chapter 10

"You did well, my dear," Chief Cave Lion told Ivory the following morning as she and Glade lay together on the bed the Reindeer Herder chief had vacated.

"Thank you, my lord," said Ivory who still savoured the memory of her lovemaking. She didn't say so but she thought to herself that the pleasure in the duty was all hers. And she would gladly do the same again.

"The Reindeer Herder chief has complimented the shaman and you on your lovemaking," continued the Chief, running his hand over Ivory's bare shoulder. "He praised your beauty. He said that it is many years since he last fucked a woman as beautiful as you. But as you may have noticed, the Reindeer Herder women are poor, ragged wretches compared to the women of our village." He sniffed with slight disdain, as if reflecting on the quality of his reciprocal gifts.

"You are too kind, my lord," said Ivory.

"However, your duties are not at an end," continued Chief Cave Lion. "Nor are they likely to be while we continue to entertain our guests."

"Do you mean that I shall once again have to entertain the Reindeer Herder chief, my lord?" asked Ivory who didn't conceal very well her delight at the prospect.

"It is likely," said the Chief with a small smile. "But it is his responsibility to share his gifts with his court, just as it is mine with the gifts given to me. Your duties shall now extend to his brothers and uncles and the favoured men of his court."

Ivory's broad grin vanished. "Do you mean, my lord," she said after an uneasy pause, "that the shaman and I are to be fucked by the other Reindeer Herders?"

"Not exactly, my dear," said the Chief. "The shaman's duties lie elsewhere. It is you, and you alone, who shall honour the Reindeer Herders with the pleasure of your flesh."

This was not welcome news. It was one thing indeed to make love with one man, especially when that duty was shared with her lover. It was another thing altogether to be fucked by a whole series of strange men with no one else to share the burden. It was only with great restraint that Ivory held back her tears while Chief Cave Lion sat beside her, although her silence made clear how much the news shocked her. But when the chief departed, the tears and sobs she'd suppressed gushed onto Glade's shoulder.

"How can this be? What can I do?" she wailed.

Glade couldn't express more than the most empty of comforting words.

"It is an obligation that will soon be nothing more than a memory, my sweet," she said.

As Glade so often did when Ivory was in need of distraction, she recounted tales from her life. She resumed her narrative from the moment in the dark of the night when she stood unaccompanied in the Knights' village with no obvious direction to run while all around was slaughter and rape.

"I didn't know what to do," she told Ivory as she embraced her distraught apprentice. "I was inclined to run off into the starlit savannah where Demure and Quagga were fleeing together, no doubt, with other Knights. But I was as frightened of the lions and hyenas of the night as I was of the violence around me. Although I hated the Knights, their women and especially their children didn't deserve the horrors they were made to suffer. As my eyes adapted to the dark I could see the sprawled bodies of children and babies amongst the corpses, some of whom had had their skulls smashed open with stones. It's difficult to comprehend the atrocity of a mutilated body and my mind refused to do so, although my eyes were dragged towards it."

At last Glade recognised a friendly figure in the dark shadows. She could hardly call it a friendly face as Tree Shrew presented only a silhouette against the shadow of the chief's hut. He was shivering with as much terror as Glade. She ran over to him past the toppled holy stones that had been desecrated along with all the other totems of the Knights' religion. He responded with a shy smile when she greeted him, as was the custom, by gripping his penis in her hand.

"It was horrific," Tree Shrew said at last. "It was Ibex who began it all. Lord Valour demanded access to his arse as he does every night and Ibex simply refused to obey. Lord Valour hit him across the face and when he fell to the ground he ordered the rest of us to bind him in cords. And nobody did a thing. He commanded me but I refused too. We'd discussed it during the day. We would all refuse to let him fuck us. He then hit me too." Tree Shrew moved his face forward so Glade could see the dried blood under his nose. "Then Ibex struck Lord Valour from behind. And then the rest of us slaves laid into him as well. At first it was with only our fists and feet, but then some of us took hold of more lethal weapons. Rainstorm pushed a flint knife into his back and forced him to the ground. I was just petrified. It was Ibex who thrust the spear up his anus. He stood behind Lord Valour as the others held him to the ground, his nose pressed into the ground, and parted his buttocks as if he was about to fuck him just as Lord Valour fucked us each and every day and shoved the spear right in. That was when the Knight struggled out of the hut and also when we discovered that other slaves had also risen up in revolt."

"What shall we do? Where shall we go?" asked Glade in desperation as a man from Mimosa's tribe dashed by holding one of the Knights' children by its legs like a dead fowl while two women from another tribe were pushing over the tall staff that supported Rock Baboon's decapitated head. It fell to the ground and rolled over. His brains spilled onto the dark soil ground.

"I saw Macaque and Fern peek their heads out of one of the huts," said Tree Shrew. "Perhaps we are safest amongst people from our own tribe."

Glade nodded. Where else could they be safe?

They scurried over the dusty ground towards the hut Tree Shrew indicated and pushed inside through the antelope-hide door to where a small fire was still smouldering. It was one of the larger huts in the village and had belonged to Baron Peerless before he'd offered his services to his King. Glade expected to see only Macaque and Fern inside. She knew she wouldn't see Baron Peerless' wife because as they ran along she noticed her battered corpse nose-down in the dust, surrounded by her dead children and accompanied by one child, a small girl, who was wailing in unspeakable grief. There was no saving her mother, of course, as her head had been smashed in from behind and where she lay Glade could see the gashes in her chest where her entrails had been pulled loose.

There were more than just Macaque and Fern sheltering in terror in the tent. There were five or six others: a mix of men and women. Two of them came from Glade's tribe and the rest came from tribes less well represented in the village. The sight that surprised her most was that one of the women came from the Knights' tribe. She was a young girl who was sobbing into Macaque's arms.

Baron Peerless' hut was large by even the Knights' standards although it wasn't as large as Lord Valour's. Even so, it became steadily more crowded as other frightened slaves sought shelter within. These were mostly women and the majority were Forest People. Glade's tribe was the one least likely to celebrate in the orgy of violence that could be heard going on beyond the hut's walls.

One of the women from another tribe, who was brown-skinned like the Forest People but had an oval face and a flat nose, stared with disdain at Macaque and the girl in her arms. She jumped up and grabbed the girl by an arm in an attempt to pull her away. Macaque's reaction was to push her off with all her strength.

"How can you?" the woman demanded in the language of the Knights, which was still the only language with which the different tribes could communicate, when she slumped down next to Tree Shrew.

"Dignity is my lover," said Macaque. Such an assertion was more than sufficient for Glade and her tribe.

The woman was not satisfied with that. "She is one of the accursed," she said with no trace of pity. "She deserves to die."

"Why should she?" said Macaque firmly. "What has she done wrong? She's suffered just as we have. We've been secret lovers for years. She's never been able to confess her love to her family or friends because she would be killed just as we would be. And now she has no family and, other than me, no friends."

"She is an accursed Knight," insisted the women. "Death is too good for her."

She chose not to pursue the argument as she recognised that the company with which she was sheltering was unlikely to agree with her as they were mostly pacifist Forest People. She huddled against her companion: a man from her tribe too weakened by his freshly broken nose to offer her any support.

It was a long night during which Glade huddled together with Tree Shrew and desultorily masturbated him in an attempt to console him. Macaque and Fern assiduously guarded Dignity. They hid her behind their backs as more people thrust their heads into the hut, some looking for shelter and others looking for Knights that might still be alive. Outside the whoops and cries of triumph continued through the long hours, although Glade was sure that by now there couldn't be any other Knights that were still alive.

A pregnant woman staggered in with a small child. But she was a Knight and before she could take shelter or even ask of it she was dragged outside. Her screams were loud and alarming but lasted only as long as it took for her to be raped before she fell silent. Glade shivered. Revenge might be sweet, but it was also bloody and merciless.

It was well into the morning when Glade and Tree Shrew finally had the courage to leave the hut. The village was ominously quiet. All around her, Glade could see the aftermath of the night's carnage. Corpses in various states of mutilation and dismemberment were slumped randomly about. Most belonged to the Knights, although a few of the less mutilated belonged to slaves who'd been killed by Knights before they too were slaughtered.

The former slaves had already divided themselves according to tribal loyalty. Each hut became the territory of one or another tribe. Only those whose tribe was poorly represented in the village were forced to share huts with other people. And as the Forest People were the most tolerant of all tribes, it was in the huts in which they'd gathered that these former slaves found shelter.

Glade and Tree Shrew wandered from hut to hut, but only ventured into those occupied by Forest People. Although Glade hated the Knights for the suffering they'd brought upon her and her people she was glad to see that a few Knights other than Dignity had survived the massacre. Significantly, the only people who offered the Knights shelter or anything other than a savage death were the Forest People. She felt proud of her tribe, especially when she observed the respect shown them by other tribes for their principled disdain for violence.

There was a Knight who had, like Dignity, conducted an illicit love affair with a man from her own clan who'd never disguised his preference for male flesh. There was even a couple with their young child who'd managed to keep their own hut. Glade was told that they were an unusual pair amongst the Knights as even before there was any likelihood of a slave rebellion they'd expressed their hatred for the ways of their tribe, although they had kept this secret from their fellow Knights. They had treated their slaves more as members of the family and were now rewarded by fierce loyalty from those who had once been their slaves and were now their protectors.