Chapter 4

Ivory threaded the pubic hair through her front teeth where it had lodged and then buried her face back into the rich aroma of Glade's vulva. Above their naked bodies the Sun shone high in the sky, but not as high, Ivory knew now, as the Sun climbed in Glade's homelands far to the South. She huddled up against her lover's warm body, hoping that this would compensate for the biting chill of the wind.

Every day these days, Glade and Ivory would leave the village just before dawn and tramp across the steppes to another patch of woodland that the shaman knew was good for foraging. They wouldn't return to the village until the Sun had dropped, which at this time of the year wasn't long before the sun rose again.

There was a similar rhythm, Ivory learnt, to Glade's procession when she and her tribe were marched out of the forest by their captors, although in the southern lands the night was always almost exactly as long as the day. Their daily trek, however, was always accompanied by distress and pain. None of those being herded along had any notion when it might end and those slaves who spoke the language of the Forest People were never allowed near enough to tell them. The black warriors striding ahead were in high spirits. They laughed and sang gaily, followed behind by a column of despondent captives watched over by slaves whose duty was to prevent them from escaping. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that an attempt at escape would be dealt with swiftly and bloodily.

Although Glade much preferred the shelter and familiarity of the forest, particularly as the Sun rose higher and higher into the sky, there was much to admire in the savannah. There were many unfamiliar beasts and some of these were much larger than she'd believed an animal could ever be. There were giraffes, elephants and rhinoceroses. There were vast herds of gnu, zebra, antelope and oxen. Scattered amongst the savannah were predators such as lions and leopards of which Glade was already familiar, but there were also ones new to her and the more terrifying for that, such as cheetahs, running dogs and hyenas. Huge vultures flew above their heads. The predators rested from the Sun in the shade of the few trees but, as much as the grazing animals, they avoided the sullen procession of captured slaves that was winding through the plain.

Ivory was astonished to discover that there were beasts taller than even a mammoth and wanted to hear more about the giraffes. Glade was happy to tell her about them and the other strange animals she'd seen. "There are elephants on the shores of the salt plains bigger and taller than mammoths. Their tusks are straight rather than curved. But the giraffe is the tallest animal I've ever seen. It's taller than four men in height!"

As her pate and crotch blistered in the direct sun, Glade wondered why the black warriors chose to be closely shaven. She would welcome back her hair as much as defence against the harshness of the Sun as to restore the beauty she associated with it. It must be worse, she thought, for the men whose beards had been shaved and whose faces were now blistering under the Sun's unforgiving glare.

The pattern of each day's trek was established from the first day of captivity. The procession would pause at a waterhole or stream when the Sun was at its zenith almost exactly above their heads and their shadows were most short. These breaks were not really a time for rest, although the captives were able to sip the dark brown water under the trees' shade, wary of the unwelcome presence of crocodiles and hippopotami. They were also thrown scraps of the least choice cuts of meat from the animals the black warriors had slaughtered on the trail. Glade had eaten antelope and deer before, but never gnu or zebra. If there was anything to admire about the black warriors, it was the efficiency with which they brought down their prey.

"Did they also hunt elephant and rhinoceros?" asked Ivory.

"No," said Glade. "Although these people were much better at hunting than the Forest People, their hunting skills weren't as expert as yours. They never hunted animals any larger than an ox. But why would they want to kill such large animals? They had no need of the fur or hide. It was only the meat they wanted."

The black warriors also took advantage of these respites to ravish a selection of the prisoners. With such a large number they had as wide a choice as they liked but Glade was guiltily relieved to note that it was the men, particularly the younger ones, that they preferred. The women were mostly left alone, although some of the younger girls did not escape. Perhaps they'd been mistaken for boys.

If anything, the trauma of rape was worse for the men than it was for the women. Although the Forest People's main sexual preference was not for anal sex, it was common enough that all women, except the very young, would have had some experience of it. In an earlier life, Glade had been proud of her adventurousness in that capacity as it added to her kudos as the sluttiest and most sexually promiscuous girl of her clan. However, only a few of the men had previously had sex with one another and fewer still had experienced anal penetration. Now they were being violated with exactly the same relish as the black warriors took in buggering each other.

"They seem to have been a peculiar lot!" said Ivory with a shudder as she clambered through a thicket of trees.

"It may seem strange to you as your tribe associates manhood with virility and fatherhood, but as I was later to discover the black warriors associated manhood with close intimacy. For them, the physical companionship of other men, in whatever activity, was preferable to any with women."

"Was that true of all the black warriors?" wondered Ivory who thought the intimacy she shared with Glade was peculiar enough and still believed that the same between men was a perversion.

"Not really, but the pressure of custom was such that it was a brave man who would express any other preference. Amongst my tribe we just followed our desires and for most of us this led to intimacy with the other sex."

"Are there other such perverted tribes in the world?"

"I'm sure there are. The world goes on for ever and ever, bound only by the snowy wastes, and there must be others just the same. But I've never seen it so prevalent elsewhere. Perhaps if homosexuality was practised more widely, there would be no children and all humanity would soon become extinct."

At the time, Glade knew nothing more of her captors than what she'd witnessed and endured. The wounds from her violation gradually eased and she could walk more easily. The soles of her feet were toughening from the abrasive savannah soil she walked on, but her ankles, wrists and neck smarted from the cords that bound her to her companions.

"Why have we been taken?" Glade whispered to the man ahead of her to whom she was bound and from whose anus still trickled the evidence of recent violation.

"Perhaps they'll eat us," he said bitterly. "They've violated us in every other way. They have dealt worse with us than anyone in our tribe would treat an animal. Perhaps they'll sate their vicious appetite on our flesh."

Glade shivered as did Ivory on being told this tale.

"Do people really eat each other?" asked Ivory.

"They do," said Glade firmly.

"And did the black warriors mean to eat you?"

"No, thankfully," said Glade. "Cannibalism happens and I have witnessed it. But it is usually ritualised and, it may seem strange to you, is most often practised to venerate the very people whose flesh they eat. And sometimes a tribe does it for reasons of extreme hunger. But if there was one thing the black warriors had never known it was hunger. There is so much game in the open savannah that anyone who knows how to hunt need never go without."

Glade and Ivory returned home smiling and laughing from their foraging. They carried the joyful memory of their intimate moments together on a sunny rock in the middle of the wood. The air was so mild and they were sufficiently sheltered from the wind that for the first time in her life Ivory experienced the warmth of the Sun on her bare flesh. It had to be brief though. Too long naked and the two women would catch a fever from the relentless chill that pervaded the air, but the heat of their bodies in full sexual fervour kept the risk at bay.

As the two women parted the deer-hide door to Glade's tent, they were astonished to see Chief Cave Lion sitting patiently alone on the bed.

"The time has come," the chief said simply after Glade and he had exchanged the customary pleasantries and obeisance.

Glade blanched and looked distinctly uncomfortable. Ivory recognised the expression of guilt on Glade's face.

"The time has come for what?" she asked in alarm.

A moment of arrival had come for Glade, as well, on her trek through the savannah. The black warriors, their slaves and their long train of captives arrived at last at the village that had been their destination. It had been a whole moon since Glade last saw the forest and she no longer believed that her wandering would ever end. She'd almost resigned herself to the notion that her destiny would be to trail forever across the broad savannah in the gaze of giraffes and elephants. Perhaps this was how the black warriors always lived.

It was a half day earlier that Glade observed a wave of excitement break out amongst the black warriors, though it wasn't one shared by the slaves. They broke into a song that sounded to her not unlike the howling of wolves or the barking of dogs. It even had some of the disconcerting hilarity of a hyena's laugh. She strained her eyes, as did all the other prisoners, for whatever it might be that had caused so much excitement, but it wasn't anything she could see.

It was after much more marching across the arid plain, unbroken by the usual midday rest, when Glade saw the object of the black warrior's joy. Spread ahead of them, like a frozen herd of gnu and antelope, were the first permanent manmade structures Glade had ever seen. And there were so many of them. From the distance they resembled ant-hills arranged in an unusually regular design. As their procession approached, they could be identified as circular structures of mud, rock and wood topped by straw roofs and through the roof of every single one of them wafted a thin trail of smoke.

The buildings were not all the same size. Most were relatively small, perhaps the size of a tepee, although at the time Glade had no more notion of such things than she had of any other kind of building. Some were quite large in comparison and clustered close together. Around these larger ones were fences of branch and cord that resembled the pen that had imprisoned Glade and her fellow captives in the forest.

Chief Cave Lion sat cross-legged and expectantly on the bed the shaman shared with her apprentice. From the way he gazed at Ivory, it was clear that whatever he was expecting was to come from her.

"As shaman, I have to observe the needs of our village," Glade said to Ivory carefully, paying attention to both the demands of etiquette and her role as guardian. "As you know, the needs of the village and the needs of the chief are one and the same thing."

Chief Cave Lion further clarified Glade's words. "The shaman must minister not only to the needs of women who have lost their men or whose men have lost the desire or ability to satisfy them. The shaman must also administer to the needs of her Chief."

Ivory began to guess what was being asked of her, but it still shocked her. Was this the bargain that Glade had struck with the Chief when he assigned her as the shaman's apprentice? Was she to follow her mother into the Chief's arms? He was, after all, much older than her. His mottled hands, crinkly skin and hunting scars more frightened and repelled than attracted her.

Ivory shivered as she was disrobed. Glade was already naked, but with much less ceremony and rather more haste. So too was the Chief. Although the tent was as warm as ever from the flames of the fire and the thickness of the furs, Ivory felt a prickling chill on her skin and it excited her nipples to an erection that was a lesser likeness of the Chief's somewhat prouder appendage. She reflected, as her thoughts struggled to focus on anything other than her all too soon fate, that nakedness was as much an attitude as a physical fact. Glade, for all the bare skin she exhibited, was somehow not as naked as Ivory felt she was.

She might also have reflected as she lay next to the Chief who put an arm around her, with Glade holding one hand for comfort, that her anxiety for what was to come was little compared to the fears experienced by Glade's tribe as they were at last dragged into their captors' village.

There was so much that was strange and new in the black warriors' settlement. Most obviously so was the presence of buildings. It soon became apparent that these housed the villagers who streamed out to welcome the black warriors. Those most eager and most delighted were shaven and black-skinned like the warriors, and most of them were women and children. Accompanying them and in greater numbers were others, also shaven and mostly women, who had a miscellany of skin colour, complexion and physical features. But it was not the slaves who were most vocal in the cacophony of welcomes that were a higher-pitched echo of the barks and cackles of the black warriors' tongue.