Chapter 1 - The Market

 

The man stopped abruptly and stared at the slave girl forcing those behind to step around. She was stunning, standing straight and tall in her chains, ignoring the crowd's lewd taunts. It was unusual for a chained slave to exhibit such pride in the slave market; most of those being offered for sale were slumped down in fear and despair, their eyes averted. This one was different; she thrust herself boldly at the mob...at him, defying him with her body, her arresting glance. Her gaze had even locked onto his scar, something people generally avoided, and her expression had changed to one of pity. She pitied him!

The thought of it was disturbing to him but also...interesting. As a slave buyer, he was always interested in unusual slave behavior especially in one so beautiful. His customers enjoyed variety and vitality. Spirit, that was what made a horse or a woman so enjoyable. It could also be a fatal flaw, he reminded himself -- many spirited girls died under the lash for their lack of cooperation. Still, there could be great value behind such haughty airs.

Ahmed bin Fayed considered himself an artist when it came to female slaves. His inspired purchases had made his brothel one of the best and most exclusive in the city, a museum of living females...a temple for exercising sexual desires. Most of his competitors thought this business was about throbbing cocks and ejaculation; he knew that it was about imagination, flights of fantasy to wild sexual arenas. His instinct about a girl was rarely wrong.

He immediately decided that this one was high-born. Only a high-born noblewoman, even one as young as her, could muster a look of such absolute derision and distain. The high-born, whatever their nationality, defined their own perfection and viewed everyone not meeting their standard as inferior...not just inferior as in a different class as themselves, but a different species altogether.

Fayed had met many of noble birth -- he had spent his first few years on the sea, fishing...for men and women. He had seen firsthand the contempt the highborn had for pirates like him. Even when the old and useless ones were about to die, he had seen contempt in their eyes as if he were not worthy to take such a life. Of course, the most sublime pleasure came from enslaving them, turning their well-ordered world upside down. Over time he had learned that such satisfying actions were expensive; breaking them was something men would pay a lot of money to do especially when they were as beautiful and innocent as this one.

He was right. The haughty slave, Giulia, was high-born and unbroken. Before her capture, she had had almost no association with the lower filthy classes. But he was wrong thinking that she was innocent. She had known many men like Fayed, exploitive superior men who had no concern for anyone, high or low born. Many of the Venetian gentry had applied to her father to be her suitor, attracted by her face and figure, convinced by their own egos that they deserved such a beauty. Fortunately, her father had spurned them with the same coldness she was now showing him.

She knew that in truth her father's motives had not been so noble. He had been saving her and her sister for some person or some family who could provide him advantage. IT was the way things were done in Venice.

Fayed started to move towards her and his two muscular bodyguards immediately began to clear a path by pushing people roughly out of the way. Fayed seemed oblivious to the commotion. Giulia continued to stare rudely at him, confirming his initial opinion of her state of mind.

Suddenly, a scream broke their strange connection. The girl chained next to her was being mauled by a stranger who was fondling her breast through the thin cloth of her slave tunic. Giulia bared her teeth and hissed at him like a wild animal then kicked out with her bare feet, scratching at his legs with her long toes like a cat. There was little more she could do with her arms chained high overhead. The man ignored her frantic attempts to push him off.

"HEY, YOU!" the ham-fisted attendant yelled. "Unhand her. No touching without permission."

He stepped in front of the girl and cuffed the man sharply on the side of the head. The man fell off sideways dazed as the attendant pushed him roughly back into the moving crowd. The man's arms flailed comically for a moment as he was carried away by the stream of bodies. The attendant turned back to the crowd and stared at them aggressively as if challenging them to manhandle his charges.

Ilary, Giulia's sister, was crying, pulling fiercely on her wrist shackles. Giulia ran the inside of her bare foot along her calf to comfort her exposing her long shapely legs in the process. Fayed watched the incident with clinical interest. The secret to successful slave-buying was to learn as much about the prospective animal as possible. For him, every clue regarding her personality was important. He could see her body just stripping her naked, but the all-important personality, so important in his business, was more difficult to assess.

The attendant was still shaking his clutched fist indignantly at the surly crowd. Fayed, one of the governors of the Damascus bazaar knew that the fondler had gotten off lightly; the attendant would have been justified in breaking his arm. They had strict rules for inspecting slaves. If a buyer wanted to touch a nipple, or insert a finger into a woman's vagina, or weigh a man's balls, he needed permission. This didn't have anything to do with the slave's feelings; it was about private property and the spread of disease.

Generally, crowds were respectful of a merchants' property most just wanted to ogle the new women. Real buyers were rare were rare in the bazaar. The slave merchants knew this; rare European flesh like these two was prohibitively expensive, well beyond the financial reach of these commoners. They were being displayed in the open this way mostly to spur interest for the more affordable animals in their inventory. It was the idea of fucking and dominating women that was being promoted not the slaves themselves.

Girls like Giulia and Ilary were destined to be sold in the more intimate and revealing private auctions where the city's aristocrats would more fully evaluated their charms. The city's rabble was not invited to such events. Fayed trolled the bazaar on accession looking for bargains, looking to preempt the private auction and its aristocratic competition.

Giulia was still glaring defiantly at the crowd. It was obvious that most were rooting for the fondler; that they thought the attendant's reactions had been too harsh. No one cared that Ilary had been publicly molested. This was street drama. For them, the occasional fondling and follow on violence were all part of the bazaar's excitement, part of the spectacle of the slave market.

It was ironic Giulia thought angrily, that these downtrodden men treated them with such disrespect. They should be the most sympathetic to their plight; they were only a short step away from slavery themselves. She concentrated on relaxing her muscles and slowing her breathing. Maybe that was the reason for their general meanness, she considered; maybe they needed to accentuate the small differences between them and the slaves they taunted.

She shook her head in frustration and her blond hair flew in all directions; this might explain the crowd's motivation, but it didn't justify it. These people were all vile; their barely contained lust was detestable and their public display of such crude and lewd behavior was...disgusting...uncivilized. They were proving the point made by those of her class who claimed that the masses were savages, barely tamed animals. Of course, by definition she and Ilary were now animals as well.

Don't you understand that we are not here by choice? She wanted to shout. You shame yourselves by your outrageous behavior towards innocents like us. We are the hapless victims of a crime. You should be helping us not applauding the work of the criminals--the pirates and illegal slavers who put us in these chains.

In Venice, she thought, her mind raging, slaves were not displayed in public for the amusement of the common people. Those few they kept were discretely sold in private...and they were not stolen or kidnapped. In Venice, all slaves were legal -- military captives, debtors, members of a debtor's family, thieves, blacks.... In Venice, they didn't put highborn noblewomen in brief clinging tunics on display for commoners; they didn't hang them by their wrists in chains like a side of beef; they didn't cheer their misfortune.

She reached up again with her bare foot and ran it comfortingly along Ilary's calf. Selling them as slaves in a public market was an outrage...an abomination. Her sister was frightened by the noise, by the confusion, by the leering faces, by the unyielding bondage. She could hear her breathing hard, feel her body trembling. She was too young for this, only 19, too innocent and naïve for this kind of mistreatment. Ilary was decent and pure...and beautiful. Giulia was only a year older than her sister, but she had always been her guardian, her protector.

Some protector! She thought. She should have done more to prevent this atrocity; she should have hidden her younger sister the day the pirates had attacked their ship; she should have shielded her in some way; perhaps she should have even killed her. That might have been better than allowing her to be enslaved, to be humiliated, to be defiled like this.

Watching her suffer was God's punishment for her cowardice. Instead of acting righteously, she had huddled frozen in a corner of the deck when the pirates clamored over the side of their ship. Her failure to act had been the direct cause of her sister's capture and enslavement. The girl was an animal now, a pet, chattel to be bought and sold like a farm animal, to be used in any way a man desired. It was her cowardice that had condemned her, condemned both of them to a life of dishonorable submission. She felt a knot of shame tighten in her stomach.

Their Father had acted courageously. He had charged at the pirates, slashing wildly with his sword like a madman and wounding three of the savages before being speared from behind. She remembered running to him, watching as the light disappeared from his eyes, as his dark blood poured out onto the deck.

Incredibly, the pirates had seemed contrite about killing him, cooing in sympathy and gently moving them back away from the terrible fight, guarding them with their own lives. She had been stunned and stupidly grateful at the time assuming that they were honoring her Father's bravery. She had even urged her sister to remain calm...to follow their orders. It wasn't until much later that she realized that the pirates' concern for their wellbeing was motivated by greed -- two young Italian girls with long silver-blond hair and slender shapely bodies were worth a small fortune in Arabia as long as they were kept physically clean and mentally vital.

This duplicity wasn't obvious until they reached the port of Andifli where they had been stripped naked and lashed to the ship's mast. The slave merchant had touched them everywhere, even inspecting inside their mouths, before gently inserting his finger inside their vaginas and carefully stroking their hymens. His broad smile had confirmed the reason they had been treated so well by the pirates, why they had been guarded so closely. It was simple economics -- slavers paid more for virgins.

She had been a stupid fool and now they were paying the price. She looked down at the ground, unable to bear the shame; a pair of desert boots appeared in front of her eyes and she looked up into the face of the scarred man.

"Are you of a Roman city...?" he asked casually in Vulgar Latin.

Giulia turned quickly to the attendant standing nearby. Slaves were not permitted to speak without permission. It was one of the many lessons they had learned from a whip's end on the terrible journey to Damascus. The still-agitated attendant stepped over quickly and stood threateningly in front of the man. His bodyguards inched closer prepared to intercede as required.

"Are you a fucking buyer or just another lecher?" the attendant asked rudely.

The morning had been full of incidents...and he was justifiably annoyed. The scarred man looked down at him and spoke with the universal arrogance of aristocrats everywhere.

"Are you selling these slaves, you boob, or just displaying them for the city's perverts to masturbate over? I am Ahmed bin Fayed. I am a governor of this bazaar and I own the largest and best house of pleasure in the city. I often buy girls here if they are perfect and offered by honest dealers -- intelligent, law-abiding dealers. You should know this as a seller of slaves or are you just too stupid to understand?"

He made the question sound real as if he really wanted to know if the man was stupid. The attendant didn't answer; he just turned and signaled to a man sipping coffee at a nearby stand. The man rose quickly and walked towards them. Giulia watched; the man drinking coffee was the slave dealer, Hasid, the one to whom they had been sold in Andifli, the one who had fingered them on the ship to test their virginity.