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If his man didn’t appear soon, he’d try and find another vessel. But that would not be easy. The seas of the eastern Mediterranean were reputed to be jostling with pirate ships this year—all on the prowl for the booty crusaders were bringing back home. There were few vessels with masters brave enough to risk the sun. And those that were were loaded themselves to bursting point to make it all worthwhile. Everyone, it seemed, wanted passage west.
Rannulf scowled into the heat haze, no longer seeing the glares. Where was the man? Beautiful though this island was, he did not want to watch the year out here. It was time to go home. He sighed. It was beginning to look as though the man he’d met in the tavern had been spinning a yarn. John Beaufour was not here. His scowl deepened, and he fingered the scar that stood out pale against the tanned skin of his face. He’d cause enough to dislike Beaufour; but his brother’s knight had trading links out here and, if meeting with Beaufour secured passage home for him and his comrades, he’d do it willingly.
The captives, roped together like beasts going to auction, were being driven along the quayside. A crowd of onlookers appeared out of nowhere. Despite himself, Rannulf found he was watching. Some of the poor devils were women. Their clothes were little more than rags, and barely covered pale limbs that had been incarcerated too long away from the sun. Rannulf frowned. He did not like to think where they would be going.
Slavers. Suddenly a memory stirred in Rannulf’s mind and his face lightened. He was back in the Chase at home and he saw again the bright blue eyes looking up at him, torn with indecision. Even after all these years he still thought of her. Judith. She’d said slavers had been seen in Mandeville Chase. She’d mistaken him for one. He had never forgotten the way she had looked at him that day, half afraid, half wanting to trust…
Some of the women being bullied along towards the harbour perimeter were blonde. They looked drugged, poor souls. He wondered if any of them had been snatched from home. A wooden platform had been constructed in the square at the end of the quay. The slaves were to be sold here, then. Rannulf folded his arms and leaned against the wall. He would have nothing to do with such traffickings.
The heat shimmered upwards from the stone flags in the square. The haze blurred his vision. He shook his head and blinked sweat from his eyes. It must be like a cauldron out there. His gaze sharpened. A fellow knight—the one he was looking for—detached himself from the crowd and joined the slave master on the rostrum. John Beaufour. Rannulf swore under his breath. His skin crawled despite the strength of the sun. Surely even as disreputable a man as Beaufour would not treat with slavers?
Judith’s words came back to haunt him. “Slavers have been seen in the Chase. Where’ve you been that you’ve not heard the warnings?” He’d always felt he’d failed her back there in the Chase. Perhaps, for her memory’s sake.
Tucking his helmet under his arm, Rannulf pushed himself away from the harbour wall and walked towards the block. He could not help the slaves, he was being sentimental—there was no denying that. Judith had been dead for nigh on four years.
Rannulf’s mouth twisted, but memory drove him on. Before he knew it, he had crossed the square and was standing, with the sun beating down on his bare head, at the steps of the auction block. Beaufour had vanished.
Judith blinked and tried to focus her eyes. The light was so bright it burned. They must be in the harbour, as she could hear the sea slapping the sides of the ship. Her head felt thick and muzzy. She shook it, and her shoulder-length hair rippled about her face, but still her head did not clear. She’d been all right till they’d told her to strip and wash. When she’d refused to obey, they’d forced that drink down her throat, and her limbs had suddenly felt as though they belonged to someone else. Then they’d scrubbed her themselves and they’d dressed her, unresisting, in a clean smock.
She wondered, dully, why she could not see straight. Her mouth was dry. Maybe it was the heat. The harbour wavered and swam before her eyes like a desert mirage in a Bible story.
She was conscious of a vague feeling that she should be angry. She should be frightened. But she could not dredge up any feeling at all. Later…later she would…With difficulty, Judith directed a scowl at the hard-faced goblin of a man who was dragging her along the path. Could he not see she was going as fast as she could?
The path was dusty, and flanked on both sides by row after row of people, all staring at her, all eyes. Judith giggled. So many eyes, they looked like silly, staring sheep. The slave-driver jerked on the rope, and her wrists burned. She tried to remember what all these people had come for, but her mind was no clearer than her vision.
The dust was the colour of amber. It swirled around in little eddies scuffed up by her bare feet. It scorched her soles, and this, rather than the proddings of the fiend at her side prompted her to greater speed. At the back of her mind fear was slowly crystallising. She tried to identify it and failed. Her head ached. It was much too difficult to think.
She forced her head up. The landscape was as alien as her strangely unresponsive mind and body. Thin spiky trees, unlike any she had ever seen, arched upwards. The sky was a rich, deep azure. Its perfect complexion was unmarred by even a single cloud. The pellucid waters around the bay echoed that pure, untainted colour. A donkey’s discordant braying threatened to split sea and sky and her head apart. She stifled a moan.
The sheep-eyed watchers wore clothes whiter than any fleece. The brightness dazzled Judith’s drug-dazed eyes. What were they all staring at, these dark-eyed, dark skinned men?
She licked her lips. The fear shifted uneasily in her mind. She was being shepherded towards a platform. She stared. Her mind emptied. There was a void where her innards should be.
She began to struggle, and tried to cry out, “No! No!” She only managed a mumble. That drink had robbed her of voice as well as will. Her breath came fast. She saw a wooden stage, the height of a man, and on it swayed some half-clad girls, roped together. She recognised them. They’d been with her in the hold. It was on these girls that the men’s eyes were fixed.
Judith stopped in her tracks, as a lamb will when it scents the stench of slaughter. She’d got in the wrong way round…the men with the eyes were not the sheep…the real victims were trussed up on the platform.
“Move, girl,” her captor snarled, and thumped her in the back with the butt of a spear.
Judith stumbled towards the dreadful platform. The fog in her mind had quite vanished, leaving it horribly, starkly clear. This was a slave market. And she was about to be sold, like a beast of burden. Wildly she looked about, eyes glazed not with the drug but with blind panic. These men were assessing her worth. And behind the calculating stares, Judith glimpsed something else. Lust. Her legs turned to jelly.
A hundred dark eyes impaled her with the same unwavering, evil desire—the desire to possess and dominate. Far better to be a simple beast of burden than suffer this. Would that she had been ugly, or a crookback…
“Sweet Mother, help me.” Her lips felt stiff, the words came out slurred and indistinct. She was at the bottom of the steps. She tossed her head, and her cropped hair caught the sunlight. An appreciative murmur ran through the onlookers. Judith baulked. The spear butt drove into the small of her back.
“No!” Her tongue was still disconnected from her will, and her shriek emerged as a husky, broken whisper.
Another crippling blow jarred her spine. Judith pitched forward into the dust.
She choked on sand. It filled her mouth and eyes. Someone touched her arm and Judith braced herself for another clout. But the pressure on her arm was gentle—not designed to cause pain. Someone raised her to her feet.
Judith blinked furiously and tried to see through the grit in her eyes.
Her heart began to pump. The drug had dissolved her brain. She was gazing into green eyes, eyes with gold and brown flecks in them, warm eyes, tender eyes. Eyes the colour of the Chase in high summer. The grip on her arms tightened. She heard a sharp intake of breath.
She blinked again, but the manifestation was still there. She must have been driven mad. “R…Rannulf?” She felt dizzy.
“Shift yourself, wench!” her gaoler bawled, in English, placing his rank person belligerently between Judith and the green-eyed apparition. “Who do you think you are? Princess Salomе? We’re waiting for you. Aye, you. ’Tis your turn.”
The spear prodded. A hard knee jabbed, and Judith stumbled up the rostrum steps.
The auctioneer was a spindly man. She spared him no more than a glance. She twisted her head, soured the white-robed figures at the bottom of the steps, and tried willing the clouds out of her mind.
She must have been mistaken. How could it be Rannulf? He did not belong here.
She could feel sweat trickling down her back. It was hotter than a blacksmith’s forge. The auctioneer began his patter, but Judith could not understand a word. The rows of eyes were eager. The auctioneer’s gnarled hands moved behind her, pulling her robe tight round her body. The eyes flashed. Judith cursed her slender female form, and her Saxon colouring. She could see the latter was a rarity in these eastern parts. Who would buy her? She shivered. She clamped her teeth together, and thrust the thought aside. Where was the man who had helped her up? The one she’d thought was…
He stood unmoving at the base of the platform. His eyes, like all the others, were fixed on her, but they looked puzzled, not hot with greed and lust. Judith swayed. She felt faint. The sun shone directly into her eyes. She could not see him properly. He was bare-headed. Like Rannulf, he had brown, wavy hair. But his clothes were all wrong. He looked like a…
“Show us your teeth.”
A new tormentor had appeared at her side. He spoke in French, badly, but there was no doubting his meaning. Wrinkled hands caught hold of her chin and prised her jaws apart.
This unholy wretch was short. He wore the same flowing robes she had seen on others in the crowd. His face was dark, and sun-shrivelled like his hands. Judith caught a sickly sweet smell in her nostrils and shuddered.
The man saw the movement, and his examination of her mouth completed, bared his own discoloured teeth in a snarl. “You must learn to veil your distaste, my dear…” he hissed, snaking his hand down Judith’s arm. He pinched her cruelly. “Or you will suffer.”
Judith opened her mouth to frame an angry retort, but her eyes caught those of the figure by the steps. Rannulf’s twin shook his head. She snapped her mouth shut.
“Very good,” drawled her new tormentor. He turned to the auctioneer. “I like the look of this one, my friend. Hair the colour of gold, eyes like sapphires, and it would seem she can be taught. I like her. She will do my House proud.”
The auctioneer clapped his hands. He fingered her cropped locks, indicated her eyes, made much of her unusual colouring.
Someone made an opening bid.
Judith shut her eyes.
The withered runt bettered the offer.
She tried to shut her ears.
Another bid from another quarter. That hideous wretch again. Another bid. Another.
Judith caught the word “virgin”. Her eyes sprang open. Someone laughed. She found the brown hair of the man who resembled Rannulf, and locked her gaze on him. If she had to be sold, she would rather he bought her. She could see him watching her. Why did he not bid?
Please, she willed him, make a bid for me.
He did not budge. She could hear others bidding, but he made not a move. He simply stared. Green eyes, startling against sun-kissed skin, staring out of the crowd as though it were he and not she who had been drugged.
Please, please. You bid for me, she shrieked in her mind.
He shook his dark head sharply as if to break a trance. He glanced at the auctioneer. He frowned. He reached for his purse. He weighed it in his hand.
“Oh, please, please. You buy me. Please,” Judith whispered out loud.
The wizened man glared at her. Judith bit her lip. Someone tossed in another bid.
People began to mutter.
The runt held his hand aloft. Dangling from it was a bulging leather purse.
The muttering ceased.
Judith’s nostrils flared. That smell…
Coins rattled. Another bid from the stunted midget. Judith’s stomach cramped. The crowd sighed. The stick-man grinned like a wolf.
Judith staggered backwards. “No!” she got out.
“Yes.” The auctioneer smirked. “Balduk here has offered many gold bezants for you.”
“But…but there may be another bid,” Judith protested, eyes turning instinctively towards the dark stranger at the foot of the steps. He looked pale under his tan. He shook his head and spread his hands. She read his thoughts as easily as if she could see into his mind. His purse was not as fat as the one the auctioneer was clutching. He did not have enough money. Judith groaned.
“Ah, no! No one else would pay that much for you. Only Balduk is able to give so many bezants for a girl. You’d better not disappoint him.”
“I won’t go,” Judith declared, and noticed with surprise that she sounded drunk.
Balduk leaned towards her and fixed her with unblinking, snake’s eyes. “You will come quietly or you will suffer,” he said quietly. Death lay in those serpent’s eyes.
Judith believed him.
Balduk picked up the rope trailing from her bonds and led her from the dais.
The man with the dark, tousled hair watched their departure. His green eyes were full of shadows.
Evening. It was cooler now. There was an odd singing noise outside Judith’s luxurious prison. One of her companions had roused herself sufficiently to tell her it was made by an insect called a cicada.
“What is this place?” Judith demanded. But the girl, who was lazing on a couch eating sweetmeats, smiled, and giggled, and would say no more.
Judith was not sure what she had expected when she had been led away from the market, but, whatever it was, it had not been this. She was lodged in the most beautiful room she had ever seen. The walls were a cool, clean white. Semi-circular arches allowed tantalising glimpses of flowershaded courtyards. Silver fountains played. The smooth marble floors were scattered with soft, exotic rugs of such quality and texture that they looked as though they’d come from paradise.
Judith had been bathed. Healing oils had been rubbed into the scars on her wrists and ankles. She’d been clothed, after a fashion, in floating silks that revealed more than they hid. She’d been given strange foods to eat. She’d tasted olives, and octopus and swordfish. She’d been handed sweet fruits called oranges. But all this attention had not allayed her suspicions. She was being treated like a sacrificial lamb, and any moment now the officiating priest would appear and demand she paid her dues. No, however heavenly this place appeared, it had not been designed with her in mind.
“Do you understand me?” She raised her voice. “Where are we? What is this place?”
“She finds your tongue difficult.”
Judith whirled round to see a plump woman standing behind her. The woman’s leather-soled slippers had made no sound on the tiled floor. She had glossy raven-coloured hair. Her sloe-dark eyes had been carefully painted. Her lips were tinted ruby red.
“She managed it a moment ago,” Judith said waspishly. The drug had worn off and she was both angry and afraid. “Who the Devil are you?”
“I am Zoe.” Zoe’s voice was low, Judith could hardly hear her.
“Where am I? Where is this place?” Judith demanded.
“You are in the House of Balduk.”
“I know that,” Judith snapped. “But where on God’s earth is that?”
Zoe’s dark eyes stared coolly at her. She seemed quite unaffected by Judith’s anger. “Does it matter?”
“It matters!”
Zoe shrugged. “As you wish. This is Cyprus. We are under Byzantine rule.”
The name meant nothing to Judith.
“You see,” Zoe said, sweet as honey. “It does not matter. You are no wiser for knowing the name of this island.”
Judith lifted her chin.
“I came to see if you were ready,” Zoe said.
“Ready? For what?” Judith demanded. “To serve your master? Balduk, he is called, is he not?” She could not keep the bitterness from her voice. “Is this his harem?”
“Balduk is your master,” Zoe confirmed. “But he did not buy you to minister to him. This is no harem.” She laughed. “You are here to please his guests.”
“I don’t understand—his g…guests?” Judith did not like the sound of that.
“I will be plain, my dear,” Zoe smiled. “You are in a brothel. Balduk runs a House of Pleasure. We are all his ladies and must do as we are bidden.”
Judith felt as though a pit had opened up beneath her. Her mouth opened and closed, before she found any words. “A…a…brothel,” she got out. “I don’t believe you! I’m not a whore! What right do they have to steal me from my home and bring me here! I’m a free woman. I’m no slave!” And in a different tone. “You’re lying!”
Zoe laid a hand on Judith’s arm. Judith wrenched herself free. “You have no choice, I’m afraid,” Zoe sighed.
“I won’t! I couldn’t! Never!” Judith swore. Surely she had not kept Eadwold’s warriors at bay all these years to end up as a prostitute?
“Listen to me, my dear,” Zoe said, not unkindly. “What is your name?”
Judith scowled and kept her tongue firmly between her teeth.
Zoe’s eyes clouded. “You will tell me soon enough.” Her tone became confidential. “Now, listen, my dear, for your own sake. You can make it easier for yourself. Give in now with a good grace, because if you don’t…well…it will go hard for you.” Zoe paused and looked enquiringly at Judith.
Judith glared.
“My dear—”
“I am not your dear! And I am not a prostitute! I’ve lived for years as the only woman in a company of outlaws, and not once have I been tempted to surrender to any of them! And it was not for lack of them trying, I promise you that!”
