Men. Desire.
Although Tessa was not yet twenty-five, she knew enough of both. As she lay in her cramped bunk of the tradeship, she thought back over the times which had cursed her.
It had been her father who first initiated her, falling prey to the feelings which had stabbed most of the village men, even when Tessa was no more than thirteen years. She could not help her early maturity, or the way her clothes refused to conceal the ripeness, the fullness of her young body. The innocence of childhood had been a merciful veil, but she still felt ashamed when she recalled those early years.
She had been fifteen when the mother had died, and it was raining the day the family buried her on the high hillside, where her father’s sheep grazed. The rain washed away everyone’s tears, but never the memories. It was late that evening, after all the other children had been sent to sleep. It was understood that Tessa, being the oldest child, would assume the duties of the mother, although Tessa did not realize how completely her father had decided the change of roles would be.
As she stood tending the cooking fires in the iron stove, banking them and adding an extra log for warmth during the night, her father came and stood close behind her. Even as he touched her shoulder and bent to kiss her slender neck, she knew what he wanted.
His hands were rough, calloused, clumsy. His breath smelled of stale bac and garlic, his body greasy and heavy with the odor of his sheep. Turning, she saw the burning in his eyes, the slight trembling in his hands and his voice as he told her how beautiful she looked, how much she resembled her mother. He mumbled something about how a man’s need did not die with his wife as he pressed his large sweating belly against her. Edging away from the hot iron of the stove, she moved to the wall where her father’s hands fell upon her, touching her, exploring her with an urgency that was terrifying. It was as though he had been waiting only for his wife to die so that this moment would be at hand.
He would not look her in the eye as he forced her down to the divan, pausing only to turn down a kerosene lamp. Then he was upon her, sweating and heaving, taking her in the darkness. She was so sickened that she could not scream; she could not even cry.
For ten years he abused her until he became stricken with a disease which slowly sapped him of his strength and his ability to walk. The slow paralysis heralded an end to her abuse, but not the degradation. Deprived of his profession, unable to herd his flocks, the father became a businessman. A wealthy trader from the city of Prend offered her father a small fortune enough to support him for the rest of his wretched life—in exchange for Tessa. Although the merchant dealt primarily in spices and herbs, there was a thriving, though underground, trade in servants and concubines.
The bargain was struck and Tessa was taken aboard The Silver Girl, which would follow the Kirchou into the G’Rdellian Sea, with stops in Eleusynnia and Voluspa before putting in at Taithek, where the demand for Scorpinnian concubines brought the World’s highest prices—sums which made the amount paid to Tessa’s father meaningless. It was a civilized World . . . only when it chose to be.
And so she sailed now, with a cabin of other unfortunate young women, to the southern end of the G’Rdellian Sea. She knew the government of Eleusynnia would take issue with slave trading, and that she would be safe if she could jump ship once The Silver Girl put in at that magnificent city. Tessa had reached the point in her life—which up until now had been a long and featureless repetition of events—where she must begin to live for herself, or finally die. Life as it had been previously mapped out for her was simply not worth the living. She would take chances, she told herself, as she lay in the darkness listening to the sails flap in the night breezes, the groan of the wooden decks, and the occasional grunted commands of the ship’s crew.
She spoke to no one of her plans, not even her fellow prisoners, of whom she found none worthy of trust. Most of them were worse than she, a shepherd’s daughter. Street whores, orphans, and beggars to the last. Tessa listened to them carp and laugh among themselves, picking up their uneducated accents, trying to place their origins. One was obviously from a settlement north along the Cairn River. Another from the gutters of Hok in Pindar. Still others from the backward provinces near Baadghizi. They all eyed her with, at first, suspicion and, later, hostility because she did not join in their coarse amusements.
There was also the problem of the crew. Hardened men with few pleasures available during the long cruises, they were more than agreeable at the prospect of cargoing a cabinful of future concubines. As each watch changed there were wholesale invasions and impromptu parties, and endless indignities.
By the time The Silver Girl reached Eleusynnia, Tessa did not care whether she lived or died. The only thing she knew was that she would not be sailing any farther. She hated her father and she hated the other women and she wanted to kill the men, all of the men. They were animals—panting, sweating, stinking animals—who did not speak to her, hardly looked at her, when they hung over her on
