Thinking the battle was hopelessly lost, the young queen tried to escape in disguise with her attendants and a small party of guards. In the ensuing chaos she eventually was left alone undefended, and trying to flee on her own was captured by a small party of slavers. She had been disguised as a lowly serving girl. So the slavers naturally stripped her naked, collared and chained her, whipped her mercilessly into abject submission, branded her, and passed her around among themselves since they did think she was pretty. But at the moment they happened to need more work slaves rather than more pleasure slaves, so they branded her a work slave, and after a sleepless night of being used, she was added to the coffle of work slaves which was harnessed to the slavers' wagon in two long rows. The cart was loaded to capacity with what the slavers had scavenged from the wastage of the war. The slavers with their pleasure slaves climbed on board and with the crack of a whip the young queen was straining with her new sister slaves to move the heavy load forward.
'Horrible as my condition now is', she thought, 'at least it is better than being captured'. That would have meant being tortured mercilessly till she was forced into betraying her followers, as she knew she would eventually, and after divulging every shred of information about what lingering troops were still loyal to her side, she knew she then would be humiliatingly displayed before her enemies, and finally executed in the most painful way possible.
She trudged along exerting herself to the full while yet being picked out for the whip more than others - her pampered body being unused to such demands. 'Could I even be feeling grateful to my captors? I could not ask for a better disguise or way to conceal myself'.
She spent the next week pulling the cart with the other slaves through most of the daylight hours. She was grateful for the merciless sun that burnt her fair white skin into a deep dark tan, to the dusty state of the road which disheveled her hair and streaked her naked skin with grim. She was even grateful for the extra whip lashes her flaccid legs and arms earned her, and for her being several times at night singled out for individual motivational floggings.
She realized at some point that they were trudging towards her country's capital city.
'Of course it has been overrun with the enemy's troops' she thought.
When the slavers finally reached her home city, she was hopeful that she was now wearing the best possible disguise, her transformed new bedraggled work slave self. Fed up with her uselessness, the slavers immediately put her on display in the market place, ready to sell her cheap. Hoisted onto her toes and dangling from her bound wrists, she spent a day and a half in full view of her former people. Their former queen, her face on all the minted coins, was fully placed on display; she was so relieved that no one seemed to recognize her.