Chapter 3. This is going to hurt.

"Fetch three of the men," Alessandra said to Aramisa. "They will need to hold her down while I do this." Aramisa curtsied and fled the room and Alessandra then placed her hands on the stranger's buttocks, cupping them gently. She could feel her quiver below her palms.

"Do not speak Languani again in front of the others," she said quickly, applying a little pressure. She was ascertaining the extent of the hip problem. "It would not be wise. I will try not to hurt too much, but there will be a moment of agony as I reposition your hip. Then I want you to do exactly as I say.

"Accept with grace the gifts we are giving you. You will be fed, and your ribs will be strapped with a comfrey poultice. I will have my people help you to a cot, where you will stay and sleep. I will give you herbs to ease your pain. When you have recovered I will demand a full report on what is happening beyond the border. I do not believe everything up north is as we are told, and I know you have travelled a long way to end up here."

There was no time to say more, as Aramisa returned with Daron, Brogan and another strong young slave from the farm. Alessandra ordered them quickly to hold the stranger down, and before there was time to think about it, she grabbed her right leg and pulled it very quickly down and out and then back up into place. There was an immediate loud crack.

"Aieeeh!" The stranger screamed, clearly not being able to help it, but Alessandra knew she'd fixed the woman's hip. She had been taught well as a youngster in Ilkennia. The men's work was done. It had all been over in ten seconds.

The servants all stood around with their mouths open. This was a side of their princess they had never seen before, and they were astonished how physically strong and skilled she was at bone setting. She spoke briskly to them.

"Good, men. You may all go now. Aramisa, cut a large basket of comfrey leaves from the garden, and tell Hesta to return to me with it. Also tell the cooks to prepare a light meal, something like chicken soup with eggs, and soft bread. Our guest must be fed."

Aramisa looked hesitant. "As you wish, Princess. But will you be safe here alone with the . . . the prisoner? We know it's very violent."

Alessandra treated Aramisa very differently from her reaction to Hesta's concerns. "Thank you Misa, I will be fine. Now go!" And the serious, flat-chested slave-woman hurried away, her uniform intact and her face un-slapped.

Alessandra turned back to the table where the woman lay on her front, still and silent. "Now, I know you don't want it, but I am going to shave every hair from your body, so you will be freed from those unbearable body lice. Sit up now. Your hip will be sore for some time, but it won't be in agony anymore and you won't be crippled."

The woman slowly raised up her body. She looked down at it, and sighed, biting her lip. Alessandra helped her sit up, naked on the towel. She thought she knew just what she was thinking.

"I know, you were in a very bad way when you arrived, and you're still rather a mess. But things will improve. We'll soon have you fit and strong once more. Do you trust me to know what's best for you?"

The woman looked up into Alessandra's face, and her eyes filled with tears once more. She said, in that strangely beguiling deep voice, but in the pure vocabulary of the court, "You already promised what is best for me earlier. If you have any kindness in you, you will kill me now, quickly. I beg you. I wish only to die. Kill me like the soldiers and your servants advised. It is what I want."

Alessandra was shaken. This wasn't what she had expected. But she rallied and deflected the request.

"Certainly not! Not after I have wasted half the afternoon on you, and a bottle of my best salve! You can ask me any other favour and I might consider it. But you are not going to make me kill you. So no more of that! I am in charge here and within these walls my word is law. You are not to die!""

It was an odd conversation, but Alessandra realised that her worst threat had now somehow been turned into a promise she couldn't and didn't want to keep. But they were talking. It was a start.

"Sit up straight and wrap the towel around you. I will cut off your hair myself."

"No . . ."

"A moment ago you wanted to be killed, and then your whole head would go flying across the room! So no complaining. Just sit still and let me do the job properly."

"Are you any good with a razor?"

This was a surprisingly cheeky question.

"Of course. I can do anything. I had to shave the emperor himself sometimes when I was in his service."

The woman wrinkled her nose in disgust. She looked sympathetic.

Alessandra said, "Yes, it wasn't an easy time. Now be quiet and let me work."

Hesta, bare-breasted and looking very embarrassed, returned at that moment. She carried everything needed for shaving, and a basket of comfrey leaves. The country name for the herb was 'bone knit' and its juices were a powerful aid to heal fractures. The stranger stared at her large naked bosom with obvious curiosity but made no comment.

Alessandra picked up the fine bone comb and small hair cutting shears, and explained. "Hesta spoke out of turn. This is her punishment. You will learn our house rules very soon," she said firmly. "Now bend your head and we will catch the lice and nits in the basin."

And the woman meekly bowed her head. Maybe she was tamed after all, but Alessandra rather hoped she wasn't. There would be no fun in such an easy victory. She turned her attention to cutting away all the matted hair, privately enjoying the sight of Hesta's breasts bouncing about just in front of her face as her servant held the bowl steady for the clippings.

Superwoman and beautiful princess, Alessandra might be, but she never claimed to be a saint. She found women, especially older women, deeply attractive, and Hesta's breasts were two of her favourite playthings. They would definitely be in her bed again later that night.

The new woman was such a pitiful wretch, sexual attraction to her didn't enter Alessandra's mind, but she wanted to remake and rebuild her new possession as the woman she might once have been. The thought that the woman ungratefully claimed she wanted to die made her all the more determined to keep her alive. She would heal and restore her and yes, make her pitifully grateful for the favour in the end. Oh, and she would also learn her name, which as yet, she hadn't even had time to ask.

It took a while to shave the stranger, even though Alessandra was a skilful operator with a razor. She had to be. Once she had caused a tiny nick to appear on the bald head of her Emperor, and had been forced to spend twelve hours in a snake pit as punishment.

Only the gods or the spirits of her ancestors must have saved her life then, for she had learned to sing a strange and hypnotic song which came into her mind the moment she was thrown into the disused water tank. It seemed to make the deadly cobras as docile as baby kittens.

That incident during her years of trial had reinforced her view that her life was being saved for a reason. Similar small miracles had kept her alive on several other occasions. She felt like a cat with many lives already taken, but more to come.

As she now clipped and soaped, and worked to remove all the hair from the foreign woman's head, memories came back to her. What was the point of it all? So much misery in the world, so much unnecessary violence, such brutality in the way people treated each other. There had to be a better way.

Here at least, in this quiet triangle between her Hesta and their 'patient', three battered women, three mothers of different ages, different cultures, she could exert a small influence for good. She would clean the lice, the dirt and the matted blood away and anoint her visitor with the best of her scented oils. It would be a small but significant gift, the first act of personal kindness perhaps the stranger had ever received.

Her hair was interesting though, under the filth. Black at the tips of the long rope, it had grown greyer in more recent years, and from her shoulders upwards, the hair close to her head was platinum silver, as if it had turned pure white with shock over the last several seasons or so. Alessandra wondered why her hair hadn't been chopped off earlier. Most prisoners of war and nearly all slaves had shaved heads, or at least a very short rough cut.

When the bulk of the festering plait was removed, Alessandra told Hesta, "Take it quickly and throw it all into the kitchen fire." Then she looked again at her faithful slave and repented her earlier spiteful teasing. She added, "And you may replace your blouse. I am no longer angry with you."

Hesta bowed. "Thank you, Mistress", was all she said. Then she allowed herself a small smile and disappeared.

While they were alone, Alessandra spoke once more in the courtly language to the woman sitting bent and silent in front of her. She was now smoothly and repeatedly shaving her head, and she could feel the woman's scalp trembling under her hand.

"Stay very still and this won't hurt at all."

She finished. "Now, lie back and lift your arms. I am about to shave off all your body hair."

The woman lay down on her back and raised her arms above her head. She had certainly given up her resistance. It was as though she no longer cared what happened to her. Alessandra fetched a pillow from the bath house couch, and placed it under her head, resting her injured hand very gently onto it as well.

The care she took seemed to astonish the woman who looked up at her with those bruised blue eyes. Alessandra didn't want to see any more tears, nor hear yet another plea to be killed.

"Sshh, lie still. I will be gentle. Think of it as being born again."

Then she applied her barber's art to the woman's under-arm hair, and then her dark grey pubic hair. She had to work very delicately, pushing one leg aside and then another. She was glad to do this alone; it was unavoidably intimate, and for some reason she didn't want Hesta staring at the procedure with those large, sad, kind eyes.

When she had finished, she brushed all the hair not onto the floor, but into a bucket. It too would need incinerating. Then she reached for some healing lavender and rose petal oil and rubbed the woman's entire sexual area gently but firmly to soothe away any burn from the razor's scraping.

She also poured some lavender oil into the hollow dip of her belly and rubbed it in there as well. The perfume rose up and enveloped them both. She could see her patient was breathing it in through her nose. Her eyes were closed.

"Good, isn't it? My years as a courtesan of the emperor did teach me some useful lessons. Now all my own female slaves can mix and make essential oils and salves like this."

The woman on the table suddenly moved her right arm down and Alessandra was worried she was going to try something aggressive, but she merely touched Alessandra's hand and tugged it slightly up from her belly towards her breasts. "Some here as well. . . please.," came out as a whispered plea.

The 'please' disarmed Alessandra. She poured out another fifty millilitres of oil directly over the woman's bruised breasts and very, very lightly rubbed it into her nipples using two fingers in each hand, one on each breast.

This was work normally given to slaves. Aristocrats never touched other human's intimate parts, unless they were abusing them as sexual toys. But Alessandra and this stranger were already defying every convention in the Empire.

As the scented oil disappeared quickly into the woman's skin, Alessandra could feel a change in the breasts under her hands. They were hardening and plumping up. Ye gods, she was seeing a classic sexual arousal. She kept up the massage, instinctively wanting to excite some response even more. From wanting to die, this poor creature was now acting like she wanted to do more than merely exist, her body was telling her there was a life to be led, pleasure to be taken.

The woman then surprised her even more. She writhed on the table and moaned. "Do you want me to stop?" asked Alessandra. This was becoming alarmingly sexual. She felt like a body-slave herself ministering to a rampant mistress.

"No, no, no . . . "Then again came the magic word, 'Please!'.

They were both too far gone now for it to stop. Alessandra leaned over the bed, so much easier now that the woman's scent rose up in a pleasant aroma, rather than a stink, and gently replaced one hand back down between her legs.

It was gripped by strong thighs, and she felt the slippery moisture from an aroused and pumping vulva and vagina. The woman's whole body bucked against her fingers. There was no time to withdraw and stop what they were doing, even though this was quite outrageous, and Alessandra brought the stranger to an obvious sexual climax with only a few more thrusts. She felt a responding arousal burn between her own legs. A trickle of wetness ran down her inner thigh, purely as a result of seeing the effect she had on the other. This was beyond crazy.

Then they heard the sound of Hesta's sandaled feet padding down the corridor, and sprang apart, almost as those they were guilty lovers. Alessandra jumped back a full metre and literally threw the towel across the woman's body, hiding her shorn nakedness.

Hesta came in, now carrying in her arms a small pile of clothes, a female slave's uniform. She was modestly attired herself once more, and Alessandra handed her the second bucket of clippings.

"We are finished here," she said coolly. "Help her wash again, and dress, and then take her down to the staff refectory to eat. Give her a headscarf to cover her scalp. She may sleep in your bed tonight. You'll attend me in my chamber."

"As you wish, mistress." Hesta's voice was mild and compliant, but Alessandra could read her face like an open book. She clearly didn't think her nice comfy bed at the end of the women's dormitory appropriate for such a down and out. Alessandra would have to tease her about that later.

Now though, she was simply grateful for Hesta not interrupting them earlier. Surely Hesta hadn't noticed anything untoward. Hoping so, Alessandra stood, blocking immediate sight of the woman on the treatment table; she was giving her enough time to calm her body down. It was now early evening and growing dark, and a young house-slave had entered behind them to light all the wall oil lamps.

"When do you wish to take dinner, Mistress?" asked Hesta. "Cook would like to know if you desire to eat in your solar?"

"I will eat there now, but I will go to inform the kitchen staff myself. Stay here and deal with our guest. Oh, and if you put her into a clean neck-ring, make sure it's the lightest we have. Wrap it in white cotton. There will be no need for Brogan to solder it permanently shut until her wounds heal."

The woman was surely now sufficiently recovered for her to risk letting Hesta move forward and take over care duties. Alessandra rose, picking up the cut-throat razor to take away with her for safe keeping. She avoided looking at the stranger directly, but asked the air above her head, "Who are you? Tell me your name. You must have one."

The stranger replied in slave language readily enough, "My name is Theodosia, Highness. But I usually answer to Thea."

"Good. Thea. God lover. We can cope with that. Use the name, Hesta, when you speak to her. Treat her as you would one of your staff."

"Of course, as you wish; your wishes will be shared with all the household, Princess."

Calm and order were thus restored. Alessandra walked away, head in the air, her gown and veils floating around her. But her mind was full of beguiling scents of lavender and roses, and the sure knowledge that nothing would ever be quite the same again.

One other thing she was sure of, the woman had fibbed about her name. Theodosia was a name taken by many religious women, who served in the temples praying to a range of various gods and goddesses. The woman in her bathhouse had certainly never been a nun, nor a virgin devoted to religious life. She had had a name prepared but clearly wanted her real name to remain a mystery.

"I'll soon get it out of her," thought Alessandra to herself as she walked out into the cool night air, "one way or other!"

The she put her hand in her pocket, and realised she still held the peach. Tomorrow it would be riper still, and she would enjoy feeding it to the new slave herself. Or maybe not. Maybe she would feed it slice by slice to Hesta in bed that night, rubbing its juices over her own breasts and then making Hesta lick them off. She was sure Hesta would enjoy that very much, and so would she.