My Name is Stab

Chapter Seven - Girl for Sale

It was a day or two later that the gang met the trader. It was another day of mindless trudge and, when the command came to halt, Theodora did so without really thinking about it

She first noticed something was happening when her pack was taken from her and she was hustled forward. There was another group there and they had some sort of wagon. There were more people in the other group but many of them were... well, the only word was slaves.

Some of them - men - were hitched to the front of the wagon like horses. Others, girls - definitely girls not women - were tied to the back of it by ropes which also tied their hands together.

Deemo was negotiating with the other group's leader.

He was a short, fussy man and, almost unthinkable with the way the world was, he was slightly chubby. He seemed to exude an air of disdain for the things around him. He was smartly dressed and you could tell he was the sort of man who would normally wear a jacket and tie even when he wasn't at work. He was carrying a short, highly polished stick which he used to raise her chin, forcing her to look at him. He studied her appraisingly.

Theodora immediately decided his name was 'Fat Git'.

"Well, get her clothes off," he said to Deemo... it was as if it was obvious and he was annoyed that they hadn't already done it.

She was stripped and Fat Git inspected her, occasionally prodding her with his stick and making her turn round and bend over and things.

"Lift her up, legs apart," he directed.

Two of the gang lifted her up whilst another two held her legs apart. And there, in front of everybody, Fat Git started to inspect her private bits. He probed around, inside her, with his swagger stick and fingers. In a way, she didn't really care. Any trace of personal dignity was long gone and, whilst he was treating her like a piece of meat, at least he wasn't being unnecessarily cruel about it.

"Still a virgin," he said at last. "I might be able to do something with her."

She thought she would never be shocked again after they offered her her mother's flesh to eat but, nevertheless, she was shocked when they agreed a price: two bottles of whisky and seven tins of food.

She knew that she was being sold as a slave but she thought she would have been worth much more than that.

Apparently they were good bottles of whisky.

She was given some sort of skimpy, revealing underwear and, when she had put them on, she was tied on to the back of the wagon with the other slave girls. Nothing much had changed about her situation except that she was now much colder.

She trudged on again, almost oblivious to the world around her.

Life in the trader's caravan was marginally better than with the gang. She was a slave and she lived and died at the whim of another but at least there wasn't the random cruelty of that gang. As long as you did what you were told, you seemed to be relatively safe. There wasn't enough food, of course but there was never enough food around these days and you sort of got used to that.

The caravan trudged on, occasionally meeting with other traveling groups or stationary communities and here some trading took place. There was other stuff for trading on the wagon but it was made very clear to the slaves that they shouldn't go anywhere near it. Theodora overheard a conversation between two of the guards about a slave being flogged to death for taking something a few weeks before. She guessed that they wanted her to hear it.

In the evenings, some of the girls would whisper to each other when they thought no one was listening but Theodora didn't want any part of that. She didn't want to have anything to do with the others. If you didn't care about people, they couldn't hurt you by dying. She just sank into herself, trying to avoid, as much as possible, feeling or even thinking. At night, they shared a canvas shelter and a couple of blankets with Fat Git. He never did anything to them, though. He was probably just trying to protect his property from being molested by the guards.

After a couple more days of trudging, it became obvious that a girl called Lorraine just couldn't keep up. This in spite of frequent prods from Fat Git's swagger stick and occasional shoves from the guards. She would stumble and trip and occasionally be dragged along by the rope around her hands until somebody could be bothered to pick her up.

'Of course she can't keep up,' part of Theodora wanted to scream. 'She's twelve years old and starving and you're making her march around the countryside in the middle of winter with just a pair of court shoes on her feet and dressed like a cheap trollop.'

Even in the privacy of her own mind, Theodora felt a bit embarrassed about using one of Old Ghastly's phrases but she didn't know how else to describe how they were dressed. Absolutely nothing in her background had prepared her for life as a slave girl.

Of course she didn't say anything out loud. There was nothing she could do to help Loraine... and if she tried to say anything, it would only cause trouble for herself... and that would reduce her chances of revenge.

And the thought of revenge was the only thing that was keeping her breathing.

At last they got fed up and dumped Loraine on the wagon. Everybody knew what was going to happen to her but nobody said anything about it.

But even here, they were less gratuitously cruel than the gang had been. The guards took her slightly away from the rest of the group to rape and murder her. Of course, everyone knew what was happening as Lorraine's weak screams echoed round the clearing where they had stopped for the night but at least they could pretend they didn't.

Interestingly, fat git didn't have anything to do with it.

And of course Theodora ate the stew the next day. She was, literally, starving and, having already eaten her sister, she wasn't going to refuse to eat somebody she hardly knew.