Chapter 1. Prisoner 598.

It had been going on all summer.

Alessandra's palace, on the site she'd chosen for the spectacular views it had of the whole peninsula, now stood as an unwilling waymark for the military convoys taking the prisoners across the country and on towards the Capital. It also meant she had to endure a melancholy sight from all her windows and balconies.

The dry bright white of the hills, bleached by the drought, had been drearily striped for weeks by long lines of exhausted and defeated prisoners. They were chained together in stumbling crocodiles of men, women and even children, moving down from the skyline, making the long march towards enslavement.

The soldiers drove them cruelly on with whips and staves, the infantry men almost as weary as the prisoners, while the officers, on horseback or in chariots, rode back and forth barking out orders. Hour after hour, day after day, they trudged past her gates in misery.

It was in the middle of one especially hot and dusty afternoon, outside the tall front gates of her palace compound, that Alessandra heard soldiers shouting. There was quite a commotion going on. She stood up from her desk and went to the window to see what was happening.

Oh, down below, three of them were stripping off the rags from one of the prisoners and apparently preparing to flog her. Yes, it was a woman, although the wretched soul could hardly be distinguished as human, let alone female.

Alessandra decided that enough was enough. She ran down the three flights of steps into the front atrium and instructed her gatekeeper to open the great gates. Her imperial purple silk gown blew in the breeze and the soldiers on the road all immediately knelt in obeisance before one of the great ones, the aristocrats, the shoes of whom they knew they were not worthy to kiss. They dared not even look up at her.

"Why do you disturb my mid-day rest? What is the meaning of this unsightly outrage in front of my palace gate?"

She spoke sharply in the high courtly dialect, a language forbidden to the common population, but their officer who came forward on horseback to see what was happening, knew enough to understand her words. He dismounted and knelt as well.

Only the prisoner tried to stand, before being struck brutally on the head and knocked unconscious into the sandstone road by one of the men holding her. The whole column of soldiers and prisoners shuffled to a halt. The sun beat down, and everyone waited with bated breath.

The captain turned to his sergeant, who saluted and then explained quickly to the officer in their own army dialect, "The bitch tried to trip up the chain-gang and slow down the progress. She's been nothing but trouble the whole march, since we took her with others from a prison on the border beyond the mountains."

Alessandra understood perfectly what he said, but chose to wait for the captain to translate. He said, in broken language of the court, the go-between language allowed for army officers. "Highness, it is only a prisoner needing punishment. Fifty lashes should teach it manners. We are so sorry to disturb you. We will haul it down the road another kilometre and inflict the punishment there, so you won't have to listen to its screams."

Alessandra looked for ten long seconds at the woman, still semi-conscious in the dust. She was already covered in bruises and her feet were bloodied and the chains had rubbed her ankles and wrists raw. The gods must have given her some spirit to still fight back, starved and filthy as she was.

The relentless boredom of her own isolation from this never-ending conflict suddenly seemed unbearable. Alessandra decided to act, to do something positive for once.

"Don't bother flogging it," she said to the captain. "You have twenty more miles to cover today, and your men will need to keep the prisoners moving. Either kill it now, or give it to me. I will deal with it."

She deliberately spoke as though she was a loyal patriot to the empire, offering to clean some dirt off the road. She rightly supposed none of the soldiers wanted to get their swords mucky by killing a prisoner and then having to do something with the body.

There was a pause, and then the captain nodded. "Our gratitude and that of the emperor will surely rest with you for ever."

He turned to the Sergeant. "Take prisoner 598 out of the line. Hand it over."

Alessandra's gatekeeper, and two more of her outside staff came forward. They knew, of course, that the Princess would not personally touch such a dirty, unsanitary creature.

The sergeant handed over to her men the connecting chain to her shackles. The woman was still pretty well knocked out, bleeding on the road, but they bodily hauled her upright and dragged her away through the palace gates.

The shackles of the prisoner in front and behind the gap, 599 and 597, were then clipped together, the sergeant cracked his whip, and the procession began to move forwards. Alessandra looked at the captain as he saluted her and began to remount his horse. He said, "Thank you, Highness. You are to be given a thousand apologies for the disturbance. That thing can be killed at once if it even tries to cause you any problems."

Alessandra chose to ignore him, but pointed down the road. "There is a large, covered water-tank at the top of the next hill. It belongs to me, on my land. Make sure everyone, including the horses, and all the prisoners, are allowed to drink before you continue southwards. I will know if you don't. The custodian will tell me. I am sure my lord the emperor wants all the prisoners to arrive alive and fit to work if they are to be sold in the markets."

The war had already lasted twenty years. Like a clanging seesaw, going up and down, one side momentarily achieved an advantage over the other, only to see the land gained quickly lost again within a season. The recent defeat of the great uprising of the northern tribes in the spring offensive had been a bitter victory; the emperor's generals had lost more than 300,000 soldiers. The Empire demanded revenge, and now the Empire was determined to get it.

"Of course, madam. It will happen as you command." And he hastily cantered forwards towards the front of the column. The dust rose behind him, in great swirling clouds.

Alessandra adjusted her veils and returned through her gates. "They must be shut tight, Daron," she said to her gatekeeper as she passed through. "We must keep the world out, and our new houseguest safely in." Then she went past him to inspect the body in the yard.

What Alessandra saw now though wasn't a pretty sight, and could be smelt from a couple of metres away. The woman was truly filthy, her long plaited hair matted and stuck together in clumps, mixed with dung. She could hardly tell the colour. It would all need to be shaved off, as the prisoner was obviously covered with lice and where it wasn't purple and bruised, her skin was deathly pale, indicating she'd probably been locked up in a dungeon without any light for months. Her body was skin and bones with every rib visible, and one of her hands looked as though it had been crushed by a heavy object.

The new blow to her head had caused it to bleed and the blood still ran down the side of her cheek. But now she was coming to, and she growled deep in her throat like a rabid dog. She looked up at Alessandra, and her meaning was clear. "Fuck you" just about summed the look in her eye. She was like a captured she-wolf and about as friendly.

"Take her into the bathhouse," were Alessandra's first words. Then she said to Daron, "Fetch Aramisa and Hesta, and tell them to bring the medicine box, also Brogan, with strong enough tools to open these chains. We need to get her cleaned up before we can do anything else."

Her use of a personal pronoun wasn't lost on the men who served her. Loyal as hunting dogs, they knew Alessandra's staffing arrangements were highly unusual.

Inside her palace, slaves were treated as people, referred to as 'him' or 'her', instead of 'it', with names, decent food and beds off the ground to lie on. They need not kneel in her presence unless she had official visitors, and in private they were allowed to call her simply 'Mistress' or 'Princess'. Neither were they branded with her insignia, and any old branding scars were treated with soft ointment which she showed her women how to prepare.

As a result, they worshipped the ground she walked on. More importantly, she knew she could trust their loyalty. What happened in the palace stayed in the palace. All her male attendants were eunuchs, of course, so there were no outbursts of unbridled testosterone to worry about. But generally Alessandra ran a very happy household with contented staff. No-one ever wanted to be sold on to anyone else.

It took two of the men to lift up the prisoner and persuade her to enter the bathhouse, where even in this burning drought there was a cool bathing pool with a system of hydraulic showers and two massage tables. She fought like a tigress all the way there, but she was clearly ill and bone weary, and in pain. Alessandra knew she would not be capable of putting up a fight for much longer.

In an act of great significance, she herself poured water from a drinking jug into a long glass and offered it to the struggling prisoner's mouth. She didn't risk giving it into her hands, but she put it to her cracked lips, urging her to drink. Her staff looked on in horrified amazement, but she persisted.

"Go on. You need it."

The woman's eyes flashed with scorn, but then she drank, a long desperate, gulping draft of water. She would have drunk more, but after the first drink Alessandra pulled back the vessel.. "No, you can have some more later. You are parched and will be ill if you drink too much." She actually addressed the prisoner personally, and saw her men exchange shocked looks at such condescension.

She had no idea of the woman's language or whether she understood her, but there would be time to find out. At this moment Hesta and Aramisa, her two most senior female slaves, arrived with the large medicine box, and were clearly disgusted when they saw the state of the woman crouching in front of them.

Alessandra spoke slowly and very clearly, in slave patois, as much for her slaves' benefit as for the stranger. "Do not be afraid, but do not try to resist. These women will help you get clean and dress your wounds. Then they will shave you and give you a tunic to wear, and take you to a cot where you will sleep. You will obey me and them at all times. You must let us help you. If you do not, I will kill you. Believe me, for now, you have no choice about what you do or where you go. I have rescued you from certain death and expect complete obedience and respect. Do you understand?"

The woman said nothing. Her eyes, though, softened slightly, and she stopped fighting her chains. Instead she held out her arms in some sort of supplication.

"Brogan!" Alessandra turned to her bodyguard who had just entered with a heavy axe and some files at that moment. "Remove her arm and ankle shackles and take off that slave neck ring as well." This was the restraint every slave in the empire wore, without exception, even Alessandra's staff.

"Princess, please be careful!" Aramisa protested. "We could be all murdered in our beds by that thing."

Alessandra shook her head. "I doubt it. We may replace the ring tonight, once we have washed her and dressed all her sores. See how it has chafed her neck. Her skin is very soft."

Aramisa clearly disapproved but she did as she was told, and wrinkling her nose against the smell, began to strip off the prisoner, even as Brogan's file began to rasp back and forth across her wrist restraints. This took a while, and as they tore away the rotting hessian which was all there was to cover a pitifully abused body, Alessandra watched her servants soften their attitude. This woman was surely no danger to anyone. She looked as though a puff of wind would blow her away.

Finally the metal was all removed, as was the filthy clothing and Alessandra could see what she had to deal with. She herself had been at times held naked, exposed to the world in the emperor's throne room, and used as a toy-thing for his gratification, but she still knew the importance of respect. She looked the woman in the eye, and then reached forward, and gently cupped her face. Her fingers made a gentle contact with her flesh.

"Don't be afraid. You are safe here."

The woman looked as though she still might try to kill her, given the chance, but then a surprising thing happened. She looked away, her eyes closed, and two slow tears rolled down her cheek, as Alessandra thought she heard a low whispered "Thank you," in the courtly language of the nobility. It was barely audible, and in a foreign accent, but the woman had understood what she'd been saying. They had connected, so perhaps there was hope that she might be tamed.

Alessandra then told Brogan to get out of the room with a toss of her head. He picked up all the shackles and left. Then she withdrew her hand from around the woman's cheek, and stood back.

"I'm leaving you with Hesta and Aramisa," she said. "They will bathe you and shave your head. Then you may eat, and I expect you to sleep for at least eight hours. I will see you before then, though."

"Hesta, report to me when she is fit to be seen."

"Of course, Princess."

So Alessandra left them all to do what needed to be done.

As she walked away down the colonnade connecting the bathhouse to the main palace, she felt huge satisfaction that she had saved this prisoner from certain bloody death on the road. It wasn't exactly sabotage of the whole war effort, but at least it was something, an act of kindness, a small intervention.

But something clicked over in her mind, something which checked her satisfaction. It was the memory of those two tears rolling down that dirty cheek.

Alessandra had been too proud ever to shed tears through all her own years of torture and abuse, but this stranger's grief, and gratitude, had somehow raised up in her emotions she had buried for years. She walked through her gardens and listened to the fountains playing, luxurious recreational water in a thirsty world.

For the first time since the death of her family, Alessandra felt her heart stirring and beginning to pump just that little bit stronger. She had no idea what would happen next, but she knew it would be interesting.

Maybe the woman arriving at her gate would be the start of something new. She pulled down a peach from one of the espalier tree growing against the garden wall and bit into its soft flesh. The golden juices ran down her chin, and the taste was divine. Then she pulled off another peach and decided to try to feed it to her new slave.

She remembered how good the woman's teeth were, underneath all that dirt and blood, and wanted to see her eat it, enjoy it, and even smile. She'd not yet seen her smile. That would be something of a challenge, something to look forward to. She walked back into the building with a rare smile on her own lips, and bit again into her peach.