TW: This chapter deals with themes of sexual slavery, and includes references to physical abuse. However, there are NO descriptions of or explicit references to non-consensual sex.
You allow yourself a few moments to breathe, eyes closed, fingers fisting and flexing compulsively in the hem of your tunic as though you could wring the words from it like a wet rag.
"If… if I'm going to tell you this story, I need to know that I can tell you the whole thing," you finally say, quietly. You open your eyes to look at her, where she stands opposite you, and far above you.
"Yes, of course," she says, like it should be obvious.
A harsh gasp of breath escapes through your teeth. "There's no 'of course' about it," you say. "There will be parts that you don't want to hear. Things I am certain you will wish you could forget after you've heard them."
"This won't be the first time you've underestimated my ability to handle things I don't want to hear," she says, too quickly. Her eyes flick down at you and you think, maybe, she didn't mean for that to sound as cruel as it felt.
You swallow hard and gesture toward the blanket where you sleep. "It's long. You may want to sit."
She does, and continues to eye you, impassively. "You're stalling, Helena," she says.
You nod. Inhale once, deeply, and let the air find its way into your tensed toes, your twitching fingertips. "All right," you say.
You start by telling her the story of growing up as the daughter of a warrior in Brittany; you tell her about your military strategies and how your brother would present your ideas to the elders before going into battle. You talk about how frustrated you were, that you could have these ideas but none of the recognition that went with them, but you buried that under the knowledge that you were helping to keep your family, your community, safe.
Then your brother began to refuse your counsel. When the elders took Charles' plans into battle, everyone you loved was killed or captured.
"I know you've heard some of this before," you say, "but it's important. Because I think—I think part of me began to fall apart even then, when I had this incredible gift, and I was so full of ideas that nobody, not one damned person, would listen to, after my brother stopped. So the first thing I lost was my voice. And I lost my freedom almost immediately thereafter."
Her eyes cut impassively through the dim cell, but she nods at you to indicate she's listening.
"When we were first herded off, I was surrounded by fellow prisoners from my home. We could, at least, talk to one another, offer each other support. But the army sold us in batches to slave traders in Caesarodunum. I was transported with slaves from other places—many who were born in Rome—from there to Augustodunum, where we were regrouped and sold again. So it went, on and on, from city to city. The travel was atrocious. Sometimes we would walk, tied to one another, scores of leagues in a day. Other times we would be crammed like packed fish into ox-carts. And by the time I arrived here, in Roma, nobody from my home was with me anymore. There was one man who spoke a language similar to mine, but when I was sold for the final time in the marketplace here—well, MacPherson bought me, but not him.
"The loneliness… there are no words, Domina. To be surrounded by thousands of people and unable to speak to a single soul. To find yourself in a city of stone, when you have always lived among trees and grass and moss the shade of your eyes."
They close, at that, and she turns her head away. "Helena," she says. "Just your story. Please."
You shift your feet, try to tuck your knees against your chest but the chains are too short. You do your best to wrap your arms around your legs, anyway, and close your eyes.
"MacPherson bought me and two others—a woman and a young man—but they were born into slavery and spoke Latin easily. When they dumped us in the brothel, those other two could follow directions from the procurers and the other slaves, but with only a few words of functional Latin, I was adrift.
"Have you ever been alone in a place where you can't speak to a soul, Domina?" Your eyes open, briefly, to look at her face; her eyes remain impassive, gazing back at you. "It's terrible. It's as though people assume you must be stupid, just because you speak a different tongue. Instead of speaking clearly and using simpler words and gestures to help you learn, they just get louder and perform asinine charades and then laugh when you still can't decipher their meaning." You close your eyes again.
"The second day I was there, one of the managers slapped me across the face for, I suppose, failing to obey an order I couldn't understand. But I was a soldier, and not one to simply take that kind of aggression. I punched him back. I knocked him over, pinned him to the ground, and needed no language to make clear that I could easily dislocate all of his fingers. He screamed and the guards came; they pulled me off him. I earned myself twenty strokes of the rod to the soles of my feet. Walking was agony for weeks.
"But being unable to walk did not make me unfit to work, though. From the first day, I worked. And, gods, it was horrible. For weeks, I wept every night, from the fear and the loneliness and the degradation. I learned the language relatively quickly, out of necessity, but in some ways that made it worse because then I could understand the words, the insults, they would hurl at me. At us—all of us, trapped in that hell."
"The clients would hurl insults?" Myka asks.
"Some of them," you say, without opening your eyes. "But the procurers, more often. All of the managers. And… and the Dominus."
You swallow the urge to open your eyes, to see how Myka reacts to that. You will let her process that information in privacy.
"MacPherson thought remarkably little of us, despite the fact that we were the source of his wealth," you say.
"That life will kill even the most resilient of souls. The important parts of me shrank, withered, curled up. My spirit became small and hard, like a pebble trapped in my sandal, but one that I couldn't dig free. All it did was cause me pain. If I could only purge myself of that tiny, remaining piece of myself, if I could turn myself into the thing they wanted me to be, I might have stopped suffering. But that, perhaps, is the worst trick of all: we can remove a broken, blackened, diseased tooth, but a broken, blackened, diseased soul, which hurts to much more, is inoperable.
"I survived by killing everything in me that was human except for my survival instinct.
"And then, I fell victim to the quickening that befell almost all of us eventually. I became pregnant." Your fingers finally release the hem of your tunic and curl into fists that you press, firmly, into your belly, on either side of your navel.
"I felt nothing, at the discovery, except the faintest hope that I might get a reprieve from the work during the final weeks before childbirth and perhaps the week after." You open your eyes and they seek hers out, again, cautiously. Her arms are wrapped around herself, but she meets your gaze.
"You know what happens to babies born in brothels, yes?" you ask.
She shakes her head.
"They are killed immediately after birth, most of the time. Often the mother is made to do it herself."
"Helena," Myka murmurs, one hand untucking itself and reaching, ever-so-slightly, toward you, before clenching back into a resolute fist. "Did you have to do that?"
You shake your head, corners of your lips quirking up a little. "No," you say. Then, after a pause, "I don't know why my child was allowed to live, but…" the words die in your throat. You see Myka's face surrounded by sand, under your foot: that look of betrayal.
"Helena," she says, again. "Please. 'But' what?"
You inhale deeply, hold it, and release it slowly before saying, "I suspect some primal instinct compelled the Dominus let my child live because of the likelihood that he was the father."
She stares at you through this news, her face an unreadable mask.
"You already know, Domina, that he makes frequent use of the women in his brothel." You shrug. "I was his favorite, for quite some time. I don't know why. For several months, he came to me often. Three, four days a week; sometimes daily, even. He wasn't… bad. Not really. Not violent or angry, like some of the clients could be. But never gentle or tender, either."
She clears her throat. "And the baby?"
The memory of your daughter's face as an infant, fat and round with thin, pursed lips that would smack contentedly before she fell asleep, pulls the slightest trace of a smile at the corners of your eyes.
"I felt nothing for her for the full duration of my pregnancy. I was a pebble trapped in the sandal of a doll, and neither dolls nor pebbles have babies. In the last weeks, MacPherson did pull me out of the beds, as was customary when this happened. He had me work in the house as a domestic. I met his wife there, too. He largely ignored me, and at first, she paid me as little attention as she could, which suited me fine. But as time passed, she became more and more harsh toward me. I remember filling the water basin in her room, one morning, and on my way out I tripped over a small chest on the floor, near the door, which hadn't been there seconds earlier. Between my belly and the pitcher in my hands, I couldn't see it. I was days from delivery, by that point, so was hard to stand up from where I had fallen. She looked at me and said, 'For a brood mare, you're not terribly sure-footed.'"
You hear Myka's sharp intake of breath, at that. You look at her and she continues to watch you, one carefully-trimmed nail grazing absently at her temple.
"She hated me, of course, because she knew what her husband had done with me," you say, in a tone you try to keep impassive. The implications of the statement are for Myka to draw, not for you to deliver.
"When I went into labor, they sent me back downstairs. A woman named Jane helped me with the delivery. It was nothing to me, really. It felt like removing a part of my body that had over-grown, like hair, or fingernails. But then, when it was all over—she cried. My little girl. I reached out for her and Jane tried to tell me not to do it, not to touch her, because that would only make it harder. She said she would 'take care of it' for me, if I wanted." You shake your head. "She was trying to do me a kindness."
You feel your fingers unclench, palms flattening against your thighs. "When I held her… something came alive in me that I had killed over those previous two years. She was the most beautiful child. She had a full head of black hair from the moment she was born, and dark brown eyes, like mine."
"Helena," Myka says, softly. You open your eyes and meet her gaze. "Your blanket is by your feet," she says.
Images and memories of your daughter are flooding your mind, and you can't quite decipher how to respond to her apparent non-sequitur.
"You're shivering," she says, after a moment. You look down and see your hands and thighs are, indeed, trembling against each other. You fumble for the blanket that fell to the ground when Myka tossed it to you, earlier, and pull it over yourself. The edge crumples in your fist, under your chin, and the whole thing trembles like a tent in a windstorm.
"I'm sorry," you mutter, to Myka, to your Christina, to yourself.
"Please." Myka's gentle voice warms like a sunbath. "Go on."
Your eyes fix on the weave of the blanket before you. "I kept her. My Christina. For the first days, I kept waiting for the Dominus to take her from me, but he never did. When I was recovered enough to work again, Jane and some of the other women were kind enough to help me. There was a boy who worked there too, as a cashier, and he became fond of her. He would keep her sometimes when nobody else could. Every night, I would sleep with her on my chest." Your hand finds its way to your sternum as the echoes of her warmth there, her sweet baby smell, flood your senses, and you smile.
"I came back to life after she was born," you say, as your eyes open. Myka smiles at you, sadly. I had purpose. I had this tiny person who relied on me." You shake your head a little. "It's a little ironic. I became the best slave they could ask for, after I had Christina, because I knew we were both at the mercy of the Domini. I worked hard. I never complained. I was determined that my child would not grow into slavery. I would earn coin or gifts, sometimes, from clients who were fond of me, and I put almost all of it away, hoping that I could save enough over the years to pay for her manumission. The only coin I spent was to purchase herbs that helped to keep me from becoming pregnant again.
"I listened to the people around me and worked hard to cultivate my Latin. I was determined to teach her to speak the language as the nobles did, not the accented, low version of the slaves. And I taught her my language as well. Before she was even old enough to speak, I began to tell her the stories of my homeland.
"She was a treasure, Domina," you say. "In this place of horror and misery, she could laugh, and smile, and play, and sing, and she could make do all of those things with her. She held the whole of my heart between her tiny, perfect fingers." Wetness wells up in your eyes and you scrub it away angrily with the corner of the blanket.
"During all this time, MacPherson continued to come to me. He never acknowledged Christina but once, when, out of nowhere, he thought it fit to remind me that he could be rid of her in an instant if she impacted my work." A humorless laugh escapes you. "As though I could ever forget that.
"As she got older, things became a little bit more challenging. By the time she was three, and running all over the place, it became difficult to keep her from seeing things she should not see.
"The cook from the house upstairs was a great help. She would keep Christina upstairs in a corner of the kitchen, where she would nap and play with dolls I made for her from rags and sticks, and I would fetch her at the ends of my shifts, so she could eat and sleep with me."
You swallow, deeply. Your shivering has stopped but every muscle is tense under your skin, prepared for flight. "And then one day, when she was four years old, I went to fetch her and she was gone."
Myka gasps. You quirk the corner of your lip at her and shrug, helplessly.
"The cook told me the Dominus had collected her earlier in the day. Apparently Christina had cut herself in her play, and began crying, and woke the Domina from her nap. She was furious. MacPherson came and picked my little girl up and took her away.
"As soon as she told me that, I ran into the house—a punishable offence, without invitation, but I was terrified. I found the Domina in the dining area. She was eating olives and dates, and drinking wine. Her gray hair was curled into an intricate, young woman's hairstyle and her eyes were lined with kohl.
"She was furious that I had come in, of course, but I told her that I was only looking for my daughter. And I swear she looked smug, she looked proud, when she said she'd had quite enough of 'that runt' disrupting her sleep and that the Dominus had taken her to sell to a trader."
A low sound escapes Myka's throat and you look at her. Her eyes are red and she runs the back of one finger under her lashes. "Gods," she says quietly, and sighs. "I hoped you weren't going to say that."
"It was within his right, and hers, of course. A slave's children belong to her masters. But, Domina—"
"Myka," she cuts in, and shakes her head. "I can't… gods. Just, call me Myka."
You incline your head. "I begged her," you whisper. "I begged her to reconsider, to ask him to reconsider. To bring my daughter back or to sell us both together. I had nothing to offer her in exchange but I fell to my knees and I touched her feet and I begged with a desperation that would have brought shame to my mother's eyes.
Your gaze flits up to where Myka's hands are fisted together, over her knees. "She laughed, Myka. She laughed at me in the most despairing, desperate, and humiliating moment of my life. And then—can you guess what she said?"
Myka shakes her head, helplessly, and shrugs.
"She said—and these words will be burned into me for as long as I live—'the calf must be weaned from the heifer if men wish to drink the milk.'"
You scrub angrily at your eyes, again. When you look at Myka you see a blackened streak of kohl tracking its way down her cheek. She runs the back of a hand under her nose.
"I think I can guess how this story ends," she says, "but please. Finish."
You let out a long breath. "I wish I could say something broke in me in that moment, Myka, but that wouldn't be true. I had broken a long time before that, but I had had a child who gave me a reason to hold the pieces of myself together and make myself human again. But then they took my daughter, and this woman, she laughed at my suffering and she called me nothing more than a cow, all at once, and—" you choke out a breath.
"There was a wine bottle," you say, voice dropping into lower registers. "One of the expensive kind, made of glass, on the table. I picked it up and, gods, I hit her. Just once, across the temple, but it was enough."
Myka's eyes slam closed and she drops her face into her hands. "James told everyone she was kicked by a horse." Her voice is soft, raspy.
"He should have said a cow," you say, dryly. It might be funny if it weren't true. "I suppose it would be bad for business to let it get out that your whores are of the murdering sort."
"I knew her my whole life," Myka says, finally. "She was always so kind to me."
For a moment, the silence lingers between you. You rest your head against the wall behind you and pull the blanket tighter under your chin, the chains on your wrists cold against your stomach.
"I'm sure she was," you say. "And I killed her. And I won't ask for your forgiveness, just as I never asked for his." You level your gaze with her. "Because I'm not sorry. Even that day, I never hid from what I did. I stayed there with her until MacPherson got home because I didn't want anyone else to be punished for what I had done."
Your hand absently crawls up over your shoulder and traces the top edge of the thick, welted scars under your tunic. "I had thought he would simply execute me. But he beat me bloody, off and on, for days. But after his wife had laughed in the face of my despair, I still hold this victory: that I never once asked for mercy, and I never once apologized."
"Gods, Helena," Myka whispers. "I don't know what to do with this."
You meet her eyes confidently, for the first time since she walked into your cell, and say, "We're the same, MacPherson and I. He took the person I loved from me, and I did the same to him. The difference is that I had nothing else to live for, but vengeance. Even my body hadn't been mine for years. He still has a business, and a home, and his health, and his freedom."
You feel one shoulder twitch up a little. "And now he wants to make you part of what he lives for, which is another thing that we have in common. Except that he has wealth and a home and status to offer you, while even my skin and bones are not mine to give."
Myka shakes her head again, desperately, as she looks down, lips pressed to the inside of her forearm, elbow resting on her raised knee. "You can't say that kind of thing now, Helena. Not after—"
"I know," you say. You lean forward, reach as close to her as you can without touching. "Go," you say. "Marry him. He will give you a good life, I'm sure. Forget about me when you walk out of this cell."
She's still looking down, shaking her head, and you can hear her sniff against her upturned arm.
"But right now," you say, "While you're still here, I hope you'll believe me when I say that I am so, so, so sorry for what I did to you. I wish more than anything that I could undo it. I was just… I was too broken and blind to see what you were offering me, not only from your love, but from your friendship and your respect."
You inhale deeply. "I was too broken to realize I was in love with you."
"Helena," she murmurs again, her breath hitching.
"I am in love with you. But even if I weren't a murderer, and even if I hadn't held a blade to your throat, I would still be a slave with nothing to offer. So go, and be as happy as your kind, beautiful, generous heart deserves."
Myka's gaze flits everywhere around your small cell, from all the walls to the floor to the ceiling, as though the room is closing in on her; she looks everywhere but at you. Her cheeks are stained dark with the kohl from her eyes.
With a soft cry that sounds like failure, she pitches forward toward you, her hands coming to rest on the sides of your face, and her forehead pressing into yours. Her knees grind her beautiful gown into the dirt floor. You grip at her wrists without thinking, your chains sliding down your forearms, but you keep your gaze down, away from her eyes. She turns her hands in your grip and slides them down your forearms until they close around the heavy cuffs, and then she tucks the tip of one finger of each hand between the metal and your skin. It feels as breathtakingly intimate as any kiss she's ever given you.
"I'm sorry," she whispers, quietly. "For what happened to you, and…" she trails off with a sigh. "Just—I'm sorry."
"You have no reason to be," you whisper back.
She tilts her head up and kisses your forehead, firmly, and then the top of your head, as she stands, her hands trailing back up to yours and squeezing them before she steps back.
"Thank you for telling me," she says. You nod, once.
And then, like a secret, she's gone.
What, you came for the angst and pain, right? (The comment from tantedrago shaming my cow cracked me up. My horse this time, perhaps? Or my dog, which is the only animal I actually own.) I will do my best to make all this suffering worthwhile in the long run.
I've reached the point where what I've published has caught up to what I've written, so subsequent updates may come a little more slowly.
