"I wouldn't, no, please..."
She couldn't believe the words had come out her mouth. She knew she mustn't say a thing or even raise her eyes or she'd fail the march of shame, but she couldn't help it. She couldn't stop herself. Her words were her shield against the words coming at her, which were even worse, insult after insult, imbued with so much anger and fury.
Still, she kept walking, kept moving her feet and feeling the peculiar discomfort of the sky blue dress she'd been given to wear. She hated the colour of it. She liked blue, but not a light blue. A true blue was as dark and deep as a lagoon.
She wanted to keep thinking of colours and keep getting closer to the Submissionettes' quarters, when a voice cut in:
"Such a hoity-toity ass, dressed like thinkin' she is better than us when it's us she's serving, born in some savage land beyond the black desert, where they still do the worship, and now she is processing through our own city in front of our own eyes and the eyes of our future generations!"
Someone spat on her.
"I'm not, I'm not. I am not better. I am not worse. I can't take it anymore. I just—" Again, the words surprised her. She didn't want to say them. She wanted to keep quiet and carry on, but this wasn't right. To be treated this way was savagery!
Though just as she'd built up that ounce of courage, it evaporated. Having opened her mouth on purpose for once, she couldn't force any words out of it. Instead, all that came out was a whimper that turned into babbling, which was washed away by the tears streaming down her cheeks.
The crowd around her cheered.
The twenty other Submissionettes—in yellow dresses and purple dresses, orange dresses and grey ones—kept their heads down and their attentions focussed on walking forward and their own survival.
Thus, she felt alone. The others had never been her friends, but sometimes they had smiled to one another and she had considered them her allies, despite how different they all were. Their common Novitiate had created a bond...
It was an illusory bond.
She heard the jangle of metal armour and a hand closed around her arm.
It ripped her out of the marching column of Novices.
She spun her head to look at it, the arm—at him, the man: the member of the Kingsguard tasked with carrying out whatever it was that would now happen to her.
She heard the crowd hold its collective breath and swallow its collective drooling.
They were dogs, primitives!
There it was again: her boiling anger. But it was as futile as it had been the last time. It bubbled once, then cooled. When the Kingsguard pulled her away, she was as flaccid as an old stick of celery.
As for the Kingsguard's face, she couldn't see much of it. He wore an ornate ceremonial helmet that covered him from the nose up, and from the nose down he looked like any other middle-aged man, freshly shaved, tense.
He was nearing the crowd with her.
The Novices had almost disappeared, continuing on their way.
She would never be one of them again.
She closed her eyes and anticipated the moment when the Kingsguard would fling her to the mercy of the crowd.
And she anticipated more.
And more.
And she heard the sound of ripped cloth. The crowd was getting impatient. It wanted its sacrifice, and it wanted it now.
Yet the Kingsguard yanked her along the edge of the crowd's outstretched arms without pushing her into them. His face, or as much of it as was visible, seemed to be scanning the crazed faces, looking for something, or someone.
"Do it," she said.
The Kingsguard didn't hear, but in the same instant his tension relaxed and he turned his jaw to look at her. "The Surreptitious Mongoose," he said. "Go in a straight line. Once you start moving, don't stop. You stop, you die."
She was shocked—barely more by what he'd said than by that he'd said anything at all, because his voice was shallow and boyish.
"Find Oxhide Drang."
He sounded her own age or even younger, barely twenty. He—
He flung her.
* * * * *
She hit the crowd with her shoulder, bounced away, and immediately dove into the small gap her impact had created. A few eager hands tugged at her dress, but it didn't tear, and she managed to run through them.
She was in a gauntlet. Knees, elbows and heads knocked into all sorts of places on her body. But, she told herself, she'd worry about the bruises later. When someone grabbed her leg, she hopped away on the other one. When a leg had sent her sprawling to the street, she was crawling even before all four of her limbs had touched the cobblestone.
The chaos reminded her of the night she'd been captured, when her regiment had been ambushed and destroyed. When the slaughter was over, one or other of the enemy commanders had recognised the symbol that had been hanging around her neck, plucked it off, and said, "Gentlemen, it looks like by the sheer stroke of luck, we have a princess on our hands."
Then, too, the commanders had fought with each other over the right to bring her in as their war trophy. One had ended up with eyes forever open and a knife in his chest.
Today, the only reason she was managing to slip through the crowd was because each commoner was as focussed on each other commoner as he was on her. It wasn't safe to grab her with two hands, for example, because that meant getting a fist to the jaw. So each grabbed with on hand, and one-handed grips are always tenuous, and so she kept moving, just as the Kingsguard had said: to the Surreptitious Mongoose, whatever that was.
However, when she glanced back and saw that despite what seemed like an hour she was only a few dozen paces from the street along which she'd passed while still a Novice, her movements slowed. She began dragging her feet. She dropped her arms, allowing the commoners to claw at her face and chest.
One of them grabbed her by the hair and yanked her backward.
Her scalp burned with pain.
And as the bottoms of her thighs hit the street, she resigned herself to defilement and defeat, to what should have happened the day of her capture. Everything between then and now was a dream, and she was back there again, in the valley, with the incredible sounds of the crickets and the plop-plop-plop of last night's rain showers dripping from the leaves of the surrounding trees, as enemy soldiers mopped up the surviving remnants of her escort, and she sat with her arms hugging her knees and her head between them. Any moment now the commander would come and instead of identifying her as a princess, he wouldn't care a whiff about that and, instead, he would mop her up no differently than he was mopping up the men who'd been guarding her.
Two commoners grabbed opposite handfuls of her dress and were pulling it apart, stitch by stitch, exposing her naked, sitting body. The dress, though tough, was not that tough. When the last stitch gave, the commoners both fell backward and she felt cold.
But instead of also feeling a hundred battling hands groping her, she felt nothing. She didn't have the gall to open her eyes and see what was going on, but the lack of any kind of touch was intolerable. It was like waiting for a bone to be set. You don't want the pain, but you want the waiting even less. Just set it already, she thought. "Oxhide Drang," she said. That's what the Kingsguard had told her.
"Speaking."
Now she did have the gall. She opened her eyes to see:
A massive, dark-skinned man, standing several paces in front of her with his thick legs spread double shoulder-width apart, ready to swing with tattooed tree-trunk arms the war hammer that he held in both hands. His beard, which was the colour of honey, was braided. His head was bald.
Groans came from her left, and she saw a man crawling away from her, clutching his midsection, and she'd no doubt that Oxhide Drang's hammer had been the thing had cracked his ribs.
Otherwise, the space around her was empty. The crowd still formed a wall, but it was set back. If cities were nature, she would be sitting in a clearing encircled by a thicket of short human trees—she and Oxhide Drang, who said, "If ye raise a hand against this woman, ye raise it against me, and the gods help ye if yer foolish enough to do that."
There was a hush.
"Are ye all right, lady?" Oxhide Drang asked.
It was strange to be addressed that way, and for a few seconds she didn't know if he was speaking to her or to someone completely different. She also wasn't a lady. She was a princess, but technicalities weren't important. His eyes assured her that she was indeed the object of his polite attention.
"Yes," she said, "I think so."
Behind him, in the twilight, she saw a building and sign set swinging by a sudden gust of wind. The sign said, "The Surreptitious Mongoose".
"What are the lot of ye gawking for? Ye seen yer piece, now scattered be."
He swung his hammer—one section of the crowd backed away—and flipped it round so that it was a cane, on which he proceeded to lean his body.
"As for ye, lady, may I offer food, drink and a warm bed?"
He offered her his hand.
She took it, and he lifted her onto her feet. Although she was naked, she no longer felt threatened. The day of her capture was now many lifetimes ago. Even the Novices were the past.
"My name is—"
But she stopped the sentence even before Oxhide stopped it for her, saying, "Unimportant. For me, ye are Lady Indigo."
It was the perfect colour of blue.
She left her own ripped blue dress behind her.
As they walked hand-in-hand, she so small and Oxhide Drang towering over her, a most unusual couple in any city in any world, the clearing moved with them. Not one of the short human trees dared raise his voice, let alone his hand. They knew and she knew that she was Oxhide Drang's now. For better, she hoped; or for worse, she didn't care anymore, because lifetimes had developed a tendency to pass quickly...
* * * * *
The Surreptitious Mongoose was a tavern, and a busy one. When they entered, dozens of loud, drunken heads lifted themselves from their mugs and card games and ogled Lady Indigo. She was nude, after all. Then, when she was just nude and not engaged in anything more exciting than breathing, their interest faded, and they returned to whatever they'd been doing. Flops came down. Mugs hit tabletops.
Oxhide pulled her along, never too raggedly, through the main interiors to a small door, through which she passed ahead of him and through which he passed only by lowering his head, that led to a corridor that branched out into a descending stairway and two adjacent rooms. One of the rooms smelled of sex and sounded of moaning. Oxhide opened the door to the one that didn't.
Inside, he took off his boots and more or less sat her on the bed.
He closed the door.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Do ye want clothes to cover yerself up?"
"I asked first."
Despite his size, she felt she could be honest with him. He wasn't terrifying, not to her, not in the way he'd been terrifying to the crowd.
"Oxhide Drang," he said.
