The Tattooed Princess

Abducted

            On the day Zaria was abducted by the soldiers from the East, her entire village was destroyed, their life-giving animals stolen, and with them several girls of the town whom the commander of the raiding party carefully selected for his king. Because she and two other seventeen-year-olds were beautiful and budding with nature, Zaria and her childhood friends were taken as the only survivors on the long trek east to the cold, bleak plains which her people for centuries had called the "Evil Lands."

            It was a long and arduous journey in the freezing wind—the girls were fed little and not bound but heavily guarded by warriors of the nomads who called their tribe the Pazyryk. Escape they knew was impossible, as they would be hunted down on horseback or eaten by the wolves  which roamed freely in the foothills of the Altai mountains by night. But the girls' Slavic roots had given them a will to live and a genetic tolerance of the harsh conditions which that part of the world presented. They had lived their young lives under the threat of invasion, and had even witnessed many skirmishes which their fathers and brothers had managed to ward-off over the years. Most were when Zaria was a child. She would now once again remember for ever the haunting sound of men's brutal screams, the thunder of the nomads' horses as they stormed the village in the early hours. And she would never forget the awful sound of metal swords striking shields and intermittently bones and flesh.

            Now the lives of Zaria, Svetlana, and Branka would be very different as they rode captive among the score of warriors back to their lands. The girls knew well the Barbarism of these tribes of horsemen to the East—how they were of a different race with different rules of life, and how they lived and died by the sword and swift arrow. Zaria's mother had always warned her of the dangers she would face as a female, how unfair a woman's life would be in any part of the world. But now that life was filled with even more uncertainty. It now offered only two prospects—that she would live the life as a slave or die resisting it.

            As the girls rode along, each on the back of a horse and forced to hold and smell a brutish soldier who had just destroyed their village and murdered their families, there was no more time for tears. It was a time of just anger—and the fear of what awaited them at the hands of king Sharvur, who ruled the vast Scythian territory on the eastern plateaus bordering the Asian continent.

            While en route at night the girls were given their own tent and extra animal skins to keep them warm in the freezing darkness. And early each morning of the journey, they were given bread and horse milk to last them all day. Once as a soldier had entered their tent in the night and tried to molest them, their screams brought the commander running. He had the man stripped and whipped with leather straps until his back bled. It was made patently clear to all the others in the warring party that these girls were a prize to be preserved and protected for delivery to their ruler. In the men's savage tongue, of which the girls knew only a few words, it was announced by their leader that  the next man who attempted to touch them would be executed.

            During those six nights that the girls were allowed to be together in a tent, they spoke in whispered tones. They pledged to fight for their lives and support each other any way they could, even should they be separated. Zaria was the more aggressive of the three, beautiful like the others, with golden hair and pale blue eyes. But she was known in her village for her temper and stubbornness since a young girl. Svetlana and Branka knew this would be a difficult burden upon her when it came to doing those things they would not want to do—and with men they had already learned that much of what women endure dealt with such resistance.

        Because of their more refined culture, all three of the girls were still virgins. They had not yet even had the time to learn to balance those constant desires of males with their own temporary and fleeting urges—sensations which nature had only recently given them. What used to be their delightful discussions with laughter, trying to outguess what sex was—would now it seem be morphed into the constant fear that they must perform it at some point with no joy and under the threat a captive must present a foreign land as a slave.

        On that last night together, the girls embraced each other and wished of the gods their best safety. They also prayed for kind treatment, by whomever awaited their arrival and would control their new life.

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