This is an excerpt from A Queen From Eden, the fourth novel in my erotic science fiction series (see my profile for more details on where to obtain these novels). This is a sequel to the first excerpt (Sarah Finds Her Pioneer). Be the first to figure out what language the residents of Ooir are speaking!
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"Doostey! Doostey!" The man who called himself her husband was shaking her.
"I am awake," Mary grumbled. Awake enough for you, you drunken fool. She opened her legs for him, but that was not what he wanted.
"Jean siyr mir te!" He was shaking her to her feet. She didn't like the sound of that. She wasn't quite sure what it meant, but it was usually followed by a slap or a lashing to urge her along. Instinctively, she flinched, but he was not hitting her. Not yet. She whimpered, and he flew into a rage. Shastagh. She could pick that out, over and over. Shastagh streebagh. You barren whore, he was screaming, and seyry. You barren whore, I'm rid of you at last!
Barren! Barren! These strange primitive people with their strange language had no concept of birth control. She had struggled forever to learn enough to convey the idea that she needed a to take a pill to release an egg. "Ooh?" her husband had snorted, an egg? "Ushagoil?" You're a bird? Finally, he had understood that she needed a medicine to cure her barrenness. They had gone to a larger town to see a doctor! A doctor! These people were Millenialists, but not the second millennium, the first. They had retreated to the Dark Ages. Typhoid, diphtheria, whooping cough, the plague, those diseases had vanished long ago. But enough of them died of wounds, died of cancer, limped from bones that were not properly set, were lame from tendons that could not be reattached. Why? She could not believe that people would do this to themselves, do it to their children. A few generations had passed. They barely remembered, if at all, who they had been, where they could come from. But others could come, others could teach them how to hold a rifle, how to step through a wormhole, how to destroy another world.
They had come, literally, out of nowhere. There was no money for firewalls out on the frontier. No need, it would seem, with worlds so scattered. A planet with a few thousand people on it, who would ever bother it? But they came, in the middle of the afternoon, and she had watched as they killed her patron, absentmindedly raped the children in her charge, then turned their attention to her. Ten months! In ten months, she could have been free, she could have returned to Eden. But, she knew, she would never have left the children, never have left her master. She would have married him, she would have watched over him as he grew old. Then, perhaps, she would have returned. There was time, so much time, an eternity of time.
To find a doctor, her so called husband had dragged her to the town, a great, stinking thing inside a wall, erected more to keep the animals inside than for protection. People and horses and sheep milling around, all shitting in the muddy streets. The rain was constant, the mud was ankle deep. It was summertime, no one bothered to light fires for warmth. They had stopped at a tavern first, and her husband had gone off with a whore, leaving her alone, surrounded by leering strangers she could not understand. An hour later he had returned, demanding money. Argid! Argid! She had had no idea what he was saying, and he had taken coins out of his pocket, rattled them in her face. The men around her had laughed, and one of them had held up a few copper coins. No, her husband had shaken his head, held up a gold one instead. Rour argid! The other man had laughed. Too much money! She wasn't worth a gold coin. Her husband had slapped her, and dragged her back out onto the muddy street.
To the doctor then, a big room on the second storey, a room lined, improbably, with books. They were ancient texts, in Greek and Latin. Period pieces, she had thought. It was surprising that they were printed. That was an anachronism. Then there had been a brief moment of hope. Latin! The doctor would know Latin! And she had tried, haltingly, to explain her condition, but he had looked at her with complete lack of comprehension. He couldn't read the books, she had realized, they were just props. He had bled her then, bled her almost to death, and she had stumbled back to the village, barely conscious. It was then she had first heard "Jean siyr mir te!" She had bled more from the welts on her back as her husband whipped her along the muddy path.
"Wake up!" he repeated, snapping her out of her daze.
"Are you Mary?" a rough voice broke in. In English! Heavily accented, halting, but English!
"Yes!" she said.
"Let's check," the man said, and he jabbed a probe into her forearm. "Yeah, it's her all right. Lady, you look like shit." His nose wrinkled. "You smell like shit."
"It's dry season," she said. "There's no water, barely enough to drink."
"Boje moi," the man said, "how can you live like this?"
Her husband was jabbering away, and the man answered him slowly. "lhiasee!" Her husband was screaming.
"What is he saying?" she asked.
"He wants compensation." The man spoke some more, yelled out to his companions in another language, and they dragged in a girl, no more than sixteen. Not pretty, but well built, bursting with youth and strength. Her replacement.
"What is this place?" the girl screamed. "What's happening to me?"
"You've come to hell," Mary said. Goddess! She could not do this! She could not make this innocent take her place. But she had no choice. There was one last exchange. "Dragan bee!" the man who was dragging her shouted, and her husband, her ex husband, laughed hysterically.
"Dragon food?" she said. "You're going to sell me to the Saurians?"
"Nah! Not yet! Too smelly, too skinny! Got to clean you up first! Fatten you up!"
They stepped through a wormhole, right in the center of the village, and emerged in a metal building. They gave her a bath, they gave her a feast, but she was almost afraid to eat it. A nurse came to examine her, and they took her off to a medical center. They repaired her nose, they repaired her teeth. They gave her a soft bed, and she slept, slept soundly for the first time in months, in years perhaps. She could feel her nanobots kicking in, healing her at last. She awoke to find the man who had come for her, sitting at the foot of her bed.
"Better," he said, frowning, "better. Not good enough yet, but better. The big man, he wants you to look good. He doesn't want to drag you in like a turd."
"Drag me where?" To the Saurians, she thought with sudden terror. I'm going to be a snack, a delicacy. Why me? Why me? That other girl, she had a lot more meat on her bones, she wouldn't be so stringy.
"Why, to your queen, of course. I understand she paid quite a ransom for you." He started to guffaw. "She took a personal interest in your case, if you know what I mean!"
"My queen?" Mary was baffled.
"Queen Sarah," the guard said. "I understand the ransom is in two instalments, one already paid, the other to be paid upon delivery." He grinned again. "The big man wants your queen to be very, very grateful."
"Sarah!" she echoed. "Queen of Eden?" she ventured.
"Maybe," he said, "you aren't the right person after all." He jabbed the little device into her arm again, frowned. "Don't you know anything?"
"How would I know anything? I've been stuck out on the frontier, and then in that shithole of a planet. Goddess! What do they call that place?"
"Don't know if it has a name," he said. "Its people call it Ooir."
"Earth," she said, "that's their word for dirt. We're still in the new galaxy?"
"Could be," the man said, evasively.
"It seems too old," she said. "They've been around longer that the transit system bridge."
"Ships," the man said. "They could have come in ships. Long time ago, before the Troubles."
"Ships? That far? Make their own planet, all the way out here?" Mary was dubious. "There were so many Seed worlds, closer in. Why would they come out this far?"
"Come out where no one would ever find them," the man said. "Throw away all their technology, hide it at least, lock the door and throw away the key."
"Why?" Mary said, "why would anyone do that to their own children?"
"Save them, I imagine. Damn, lady, haven't you seem crazy planets before?"
"I was sacrificed at age ten," she said. Now, that seemed almost like a pleasant memory. "I was raped to death by a hundred men."
"You don't look dead," the man observed. "Not as dead as you did two days ago." Two days? It had seemed like one long night.
