Chapter Four
A day went by followed by another and another. They fed me surprisingly well and none of them so much as laid a hand on me.
The environment around me had changed. There were more trees and for the first time I actually saw some rocks. The next day I smelled salt in the air and that evening my captors made camp on a bluff overlooking a stone walled fortress of a small city that lay along a windswept expanse of the coastline below us.
As usual they left me off in the darkness alone as they gathered about their small campfire. I watched the lights come on in the city below and imagined of all the things that tomorrow could bring.
Horrible visions assailed my mind and I found myself unable to put them to rest. The messenger had said that I would suffer and well could I imagine how that could come to be.
Lots of girls in the hills would run off with the boys and do whatever it took to gain attention, but I never had. I was a virgin, but I doubted I would be so by the end of tomorrow.
Pulling my knees up I pressed my face into them and cried. One of the men over by the fire came close and I felt a blanket settle about my shoulders.
Looking up I saw him point to the city and then me before shrugging and saying, “It is our way for a long time now.”
“Well it shouldn’t be!” I said with deeply felt hurt for the things of tomorrow that hadn’t even happened yet, but that already felt like daggers being pushed into my side.
He started to move off and I forced myself to say, “Thank you for the blanket.”
He paused a moment before nodding and going back to the others by the fire.
It was colder here on the coast then it had been in the prairie heartland and I cuddled within the blanket hoping against hope it could shield me from what lay ahead of me. Somberly I watched the lights of the city, until it grew so late in the night that one by one they were all put out.
*****
It was hot, but I couldn’t be sure that it was all due to the heat of the day or partly from the embarrassment that I felt. I stood in a lineup of other women, who seemed to feel the same as I about the proceedings.
I’d had my mouth opened and my teeth looked at so many times my jaw fell bruised. I was of a leaner build than the other women and strangely somewhat different from them in other respects as well. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but they didn’t seem quite as human as me.
They looked human enough, as did the men of the city around me, but there was something that said they were not of my kind the way for instance the Cherokee men who had brought me here were.
There were other surprises as well. These people or whatever they were seemed to have different motivations then the normal humans I had encountered in life before. Buyers would squeeze my shoulders look at my hands and get a distasteful look on their faces, before then moving to the next woman and smiling at the sight of callused palms and shoulders with more muscle than mine had.
It was all rather quite surprising. The slave auction seemed to operate on a completely different set of rules than how I would have imagined. It seemed to me that if all of us women in the lineup were horses then I in the eyes of the buyers, was the scrawny one of the lot.
Instead of having my dress torn from off me or being groped as the men of Earth had been always want to do these foreign men looked at me as if I was something beneath their interest as well as a waste of their money. In comparison with the other women, who possessed physiques more similar to that of a man’s, I was the odd woman out.
The sale went on and eventually I alone was left on the selling block. One of the few remaining buyers through a single coin at the auctioneer. I had been sold, cheaply at that.
All these foreign men wore black mustaches and their skin colors ranged from white to olive Brown. The most notably different thing that I could pick out about them from that of other men was that there was something wrong with their eyes. They were bigger than they should be and seemingly darker of aspect of anything that could be called good.
*****
My buyer pulled me hurriedly along through the city and again to my surprise I didn’t attract much attention at all. Did I look that bad or was God just keeping me in some way from being noticed?
I tended to side with the latter.
A large construction of stone lay ahead of me. Reaching it I was pulled down through narrow corridors that stunk. Eventually we reached a gallery of sorts and I was led into a large kitchen like area.
The kitchen was full of other women at work all of which stopped to watch the proceedings of my entrance into the space. My hands were unchained and the rope about my neck was removed.
I was shoved toward a table littered with cabbage heads. There was one woman there already tearing the cabbage into chunks and I got the impression that I was to help her.
I picked up a cabbage head and started repeating the other woman’s task of tearing it into chunks. The man who had brought me here gave a grunt and left the kitchen.
The other women looked up from their tasks about the room towards the closed-door the man had just disappeared through. Unlike the women I’d been sold with today all these women appeared to be full blood Cherokee and thankfully fully human.
Tearing chunks off the cabbage I had to fight against the urge to eat. The woman beside me picked up a chunk and held it out to me.
Nervously I brushed my hair back from my face, was this permitted? I looked to the other women and several nodded as if reading my mind.
I took the chunk of cabbage from the woman beside me and in Cherokee said, “Thank you.”
Instantly there were exclamations from around the room and smiles from all the women at large. In surprise I watched them converge on me as one mass group.
Several of the women began running hands through my hair commenting over the redness of its color. One woman took my face in her hands and felt along my cheek bones as if determining if I was Cherokee or not.
“My great-grandmother.” I said.
The women reacted with more smiles and soft pats to my person here and there. One by one they drifted back to their workstations and resumed their tasks.
*****
I munched on the cabbage as I tore more of it loose. Within the kitchen a softly murmured conversation took place between me and the others and I answered all their questions as best as I could.
When it came to the part about men of their own blood having been the ones who had delivered me to the city the women around me to a one hung their heads down in shame.
One shrugged and said, “Our men do not respect us for they do not respect themselves.” “Their spirit is broken.” Said another.
I didn’t see how any of that could condone the selling off of these women to a city of strange men who, to me, seemed to be as outsiders to this world of endless prairies. Obviously there was more going on here than just a matter of respect.
The food being prepared by all the women was thrown into bowls, which were then set on trays. One woman pulled me down a hall and pulled a homespun tunic of drab brown color such as she wore from a pile and indicated that I should wear it.
She left and dutifully I took the stained shreds of my dress off and put on the garment of a slave. It was a loose fit and for that I was grateful as all the men on this planet couldn’t be blind to the fact that I was a girl with curves.