Besma's hands were curled into claws. Her long red nails-her father indulged her in the vanity-ached for the eyes of Fudail. Her teeth longed to rip out her stepbrother's throat. She walked with purposeful steps to the house's main room. Ishmael, standing at the inner door, backed away when he saw her face.
Her father sat on a cushion on the floor, reading an expensive, leather-bound copy of the Koran. al Khalifa, wearing a satisfied smile, sat demurely in a corner opposite Abdul Mohsem, busying herself with knitting. Fudail sat near his mother, eating some nuts from a bowl. If anything, his smile was even more satisfied than his mother's.
'Monster,' Besma whispered, as she closed the distance between her and her stepbrother. 'Monster,' she said aloud as she neared his sitting form. 'Monster!' she screamed as she launched herself, claws outstretched, for his eyes.
Fudail barely managed to get his arms over his eyes in time. That didn't stop Besma. Though normally he was much stronger than she was, sheer hate and rage had given her a strength beyond her age, size, and sex. Blocked from his eyes she still managed to bowl him over onto the floor. While one of her claws raked his throat, the other sought his penis, intending, if at all possible, to rip the thing off. At the same time her teeth chewed one of his arms, causing blood to squirt out over her face.
She got a good grip on his penis, but discovered it wouldn't tear out so easily. Instead, she let it go and grabbed his testicles. Those she grasped and squeezed, bringing forth from the rapist a gagging shriek: 'Mother! Help me!'
Al Khalifa was the first to try to drag the little she-demon off of her prized son. Besma managed to get one kick to her stepmother's face, sending the woman sprawling.
'Abdul Mohsem, do something!' al Khalifa screamed from the floor. 'Stop her!'
As shocked as anyone present by the attack, Abdul Mohsem called, 'Ishmael! Help me!' Between them they managed to draw Besma's head away from Fudail's throat (the boy had been losing the battle to keep her teeth away). Her father and his slave also managed to pull her off of Fudail, but the last thing she held onto was the boy's scrotum. He screamed again as his testes were nearly forced out of their sack by Besma's fanatical iron grip.
'Hold her, Ishmael,' the father ordered. 'And just what in the ninety and nine beautiful names of Allah is going on here?'
'That filthy bastard raped Petra,' Besma cursed, still showing her now bloody claws and struggling to get out from Ishmael's control. 'He and two of his pig friends. I'll kill the swine, I swear I will.' Her struggle to get away from Ishmael intensified. 'Let me go! Let me at the piece of pig filth!'
Abdul Mohsem took a deep breath. He looked over at Fudail, still gasping and now beginning to vomit onto the rug on the floor, the yellowish, chunky stain spreading even as it sank into the carpet. Al Khalifa had recovered and had positioned herself protectively in front of her son.
'What happened?' Abdul Mohsem demanded, quite despite Fudail's obvious distress. 'Tell me what happened!'
'Hanif… and Ghalid… and I… were in the kitchen. The little… Nazrani slut… threw herself… at us.'
'Liar!' Besma shrieked, twisting like a python and redoubling her efforts to get out from Ishmael's grasp. 'Filthy pig liar!'
'My son is a good boy,' al Khalifa insisted. 'He would never do such a thing. And I've seen the little slave wench wriggling her ass in front of the boys whenever she had the chance. It's obvious what happened; that he's telling the truth.'
'You fucking cunt! You liar! You bitch-whore-slut-twat! You cocksucking, manipulative, vicious tramp! '
Abdul Mohsem's eyes widened in shock. He'd never imagined his dear Besma even knew such words.
'Father,' Besma nearly wept, 'she beats Petra all the time for no reason, beats her like an animal and for no reason. She put her stinking bastard of a son up to this; I know she did.'
'Nonsense,' al Khalifa insisted, her chin rising haughtily. 'I maintain discipline in the household, as the hadiths insist I must.'
'There must be a trial,' Abdul Mohsem announced. In truth, he simply didn't want to get in the middle of a domestic dispute if he could dump the responsibility elsewhere. 'Let the judges decide where the truth lies.'
Besma wept alone, seated in the back of the courtroom. In the front, fully draped and in chains, Petra was even more alone. Even so, she did not weep. Tears were, for the nonce, beyond her.
'The law is very clear,' the turbaned judge explained patiently, and even perhaps a little sadly. 'We have one Nazrani female, not even a woman yet by their reckoning but still we will give her testimony the full weight of a woman, under ours, and even of a woman of the faithful. That is to say, we have one half of a story claiming rape without provocation.
'On the other hand, we have three males, all of whom agree that there was no rape, that the slave threw herself upon them. Each of these witnesses counts fully. Thus, by a weight of six to one, the testimony is that the rape, if it was a rape, is the fault of the slave girl. This is corroborated by the testimony of the woman, al Khalifa, that the slave girl did not even cry out until the supposed rape was over. Not even the slave's own words refute that.'
The judge opened a heavy volume and began to read, verbatim: 'If I came across a rape crime, I would discipline the man and order that the woman be jailed for life… because if she had not left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn't have snatched it.
'If you get a kilo of meat, and you don't put it in the fridge or in the pot or in the kitchen but you leave it on a plate in the backyard, and then you have a fight with the neighbor because his cats eat the meat, you're crazy. Isn't this true?' The judge looked up for confirmation. All the men present nodded their heads with the wisdom.
Continuing, the judge said, 'If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park, or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, then whose fault will it be, the cats', or the uncovered meat's? The uncovered meat is the disaster. If the meat was covered the cats wouldn't roam around it. If the meat is inside the fridge, they won't get it.'
The judge cleared his throat, then looked left and right for agreement from his two co-judges.
'It is the judgment of this court that the slave girl, Petra bint Minden, shall be taken from this court to the pens reserved for slaves for sale, that she be auctioned next Friday to the highest bidder. That the proceeds from that sale shall go first to the court's fees, then to her current owner, Abdul Mohsem. As for the boy, Fudail, who suffered injury in the attack by Abdul Mohsem's daughter Besma, we judge that no recompense is due him and further adjudge that he and his two friends, Hanif and Ghalid, shall each receive thirty lashes on the soles of their feet-'
At this patent injustice al Khalifa gasped with indignation.
The judge sneered. 'And if you interrupt this court again, woman, you shall be next in line for lashes after your son and his friends.'
'They won't even let me see her,' Besma wailed to her father.
'I gave those orders,' Abdul Mohsem said. 'It would do neither of you any good to be together again.'
The Moslem girl's eyes flashed with anger. 'We will be together again, father. I love her like my own child and I will not be separated from her.'
'You will never see her again.'
'Let me tell you something, father,' Besma said, her voice very firm and sure. 'If you do not go and buy her back, bidding against yourself if necessary, you will never have a moment's peace out of me.' Besma turned away, went to the bookshelf, and withdrew Abdul Mohsem's prized Koran. This she held flat in her left hand, placing her right above it. 'This I swear, father. If Petra is not returned here and freed- Do you hear me? Freed!-I shall become the greatest whore in the province, a greater whore even than that vicious slut you wed. I will bring shame to our clan that will last until the final generation. There will be no cave deep enough to-'
Of its own accord Abdul Mohsem's hand lashed out, slapping his daughter across the mouth with a force hard enough to spin her to the floor. 'I am your father and you will be silent.'
Besma smiled through her pain. 'You can silence me now, father. Do you not think my voice will carry when I writhe in heat under slaves and stable boys? Bring me back my friend!'
' It will not happen! '
Again, listening from around a corner, al Khalifa thought, Perfect.
