Mordelet's Game

One

The day I was taken, it was still spring. The grass was sweet upon the air, the scent of blooms of all kinds upon the winds, and the land was busy with its bounty.

I had no family to miss me. I had no home to return to. Still, I am plotting. Still, I will not die a slave.

In my dreams, I still see the iron bars dissecting the piercing sunlight, the fetid air of miserable human bodies crushed together like a rotted unwanted harvest, the rucking of the wheels upon endless stretches of dirt. The first time, I had awoken on a scream. Two of the men - Haakon and Idar, I believe they are called for it is as much as I have gained of the slavemaster's language - dragged me from the bed pallet amongst the other slave women and flogged me until I could no longer utter a sound. The punishment for disturbing the peace of the steading where we were enslaved is severe.

My back was healed now, the skin raised but unbroken and no longer painful.

Still, I plotted.

I bent myself to the steading's will and hid from undue attention, but on occasion I sought the whip with my defiance for I could but cling to the memory of myself - who I am, that I had been born free. It cost me dear. In it, I nurtured my tiny flame, nothing more than a prick of light but which burned and grew my strength in my pain. I had long since ceased to count the days of my enslavement and the seasons in this land are different from my own. It had been a season or more, perhaps. I didn't hazard any more guesses. Urgency was the business of the minutes of each day. It served no purpose to calculate the sum of one's own desperation.

We laboured daily for the steading. Come nightfall, the torments did not cease for the women as the men came looking, snatching up any who captured their fancy. The slave men were luckier, for the steading's women abjured coaxing unwilling slave men to action, and the men's tastes lay elsewhere for the most part. My adamant plainness spared me on many occasions though not all; not when the feasting and drinking were especially convivial and appetites driven to their heights with it. I had also ceased to weep with relief when they passed me over. If not my lot then it would be another's. The relief is never complete. 

When I was free, I had yet been reviled and abased, for I had been the get of a madwoman, raped and left to bear the world's cruelty, spared upon her death while bearing me into the same cruelty that she left. The other babe, for I had been a twin, was stillborn, casting upon me the mark of murder and ill-fortune. The gods themselves had condemned me. The extreme of my enslavement is thus familiar in its hues.

Yet I had been free. Yet I had survived. I will again.

The days had begun to shorten and then I did think on my urgency, for it could not wait until the snow. The steading lay in a protected pocket at the foothills of densely forested mountains—in the snow, deadly, and it would be a laborious desolate death too. They forbad the path between the steading and the south, whence freedom called. I had to do it before the snow. But the key to my plot was uncertain and I myself uncertain what demands I dared.

All my plans depended on the half-mad slave from Torenne.

Torenne was the land bordering my own country of Artrebia. I recognised the tongue the day he was first brought to the steading. They had drugged him somewhat, and he had begun to rouse as the raiding party approached the Great Hall. They had just crossed into the yard before the Torennian had flung himself from the cart, hands still manacled, still half-hazed. Seething with all his impressive height, the Torennian pitched himself against the raiding party and all their weapons. He moved as a blur but even I could glean the warrior's discipline in his drug-hampered movements. The brutality of experience was writ in the dance of his limbs, the effortlessness of fluid motion which he must bear in his very bones. There was mindlessness in the way he hurled himself against his captors, a grizzled efficiency with which he dealt his blows and parries. It had taken fresh men from the steading at the raiders' aid to subdue him. Then they'd promptly hauled him off to the huts with the pigs and dogs whence he languished ever since. Later, I learned he'd attempted the same two more times on the journey, killing three of the raiding party before they'd reached the steading. The slavemasters intended to leave him with the animals until the exposure took him, or until he became amenable.