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The Chime of Six

Numikès woke at the first chime of six. To be truthful, she always thought she heard that first chime, and that must mean she was awake an instant before… but how could she, asleep, know? If you stood close by the clock you could hear it stirring just before it began to strike, but surely you could not hear that soft sound from the far end of the passage and through a closed door.

She flung back the covers, pushed feet into slippers, and hurried to the bathroom. One good thing about being an early riser, you could be sure that there were still plenty of jugs, and that the water within was still decently hot. Numikès grabbed one whose felted jacket looked less threadbare than most, decanted it into a basin, and washed with brisk efficiency. She padded towel-wrapped back to the bedroom, finished drying, and got into her clothes, the plain plum-coloured dress that all the housemaids wore.

Being early meant, too, that there was no great queue for the shaving-room. She leaned against the wall, but kept an eye out; you could catch it if one of the overseers came by and you weren’t stood straight, specially if it was Varwen. And woe betide you if it were Lordship or one of his daughters, though it would be rare indeed to see any of them down here, especially at this hour.

The clock was striking the half-hour as barber Berravoe called her to the chair. And who shaves the barber? she wondered suddenly; but she wondered something else too: I wonder if I’ll see Gethren? He was a gardener, but commonly took his shave, and his breakfast, with the household slaves. A big dark man with huge hands that could completely enclose hers, powerful but unfailingly gentle.

As if on cue, as she emerged clean-headed into the kitchen passage, there he was; but instead of his usual white wide grin, his face was twisted as if in grief.

"Geth, what is it?"

He sighed. "I come lookin’ for yow, Numi; only right I tell yow soon as ever I could."

'Tell me what?"

"I’m to be sold away."

He grabbed her arms; else, she thought, she might have dropped to the floor. She couldn’t breathe, felt as if her whole chest was empty. "Oh, Geth…" was all she could say.

"And there was I just yesterday, tellin’ myself to get my courage up and ask yow to set troth wi’ me… and now I see I left it too late."

"Yow know Lordship don’t always set store by slaves bein’ married anyways. Remember Cleulow? How they had to drag Criset off him when they took him? E’en after they’d threated her wi’ a whippin’."

"Aye," he said, "Wept for a week, they say." It was poor consolation, but if it stopped him blaming himself quite so much…

I’ll weep for yow, she thought, and hoped her eyes carried the message, but there were others about them now, a line forming for shaving, and she could not say it. They stepped away a yard or two and he wrapped his hands around hers. He could crush her fingers if he chose, but she had not the least fear he ever would. "When?" she asked, though she dreaded the answer.

"Today, around mid-day. Lordship’s sellin’ me to some gentleman as wants a good man wi’ herbs."

"Yow’re that, all right," she said. He smiled a little, but sadly.

And then there was a harsh voice behind her. Course, she thought, it had to be Varwen. “None of your loitering about. You shaved, trull?” She knew all the slaves’ names, but it was beneath her to actually use them, save when reporting some infraction to the Steward, or occasionally Lordship himself. “Then get to your breakfast, I’ll not have you flopping around half way through your work and claiming you’re hungry. You—" She turned her little black eyes on Gethren. “Get yourself shaved and tell Berravoe to make it good. We’ll not have you make a poor impression on your new owner.”

This was a slur on Berravoe, who always took pride in his work, but that was the least of it. There was nothing to be done but to do as they were bidden, and nothing they could say in front of the watchful chatelaine. A moment’s look into each other’s eyes had to stand in for all the words they might have said.

***

There was nothing to do but eat what breakfast she could, though she hadn’t half her usual appetite, and then go about her duties. Varwen would be on watch, she was sure; though, in truth, when ever was she not? The woman had a nose for 'idleness', it seemed, or perhaps ears that would not just hear a clock preparing to strike, but fix on the momentary silence when a duster was not being wielded, a grate not being raked over.

If she could have changed anything, or if it would make anything an ounce easier for Gethren, she would have risked Varwen’s watchfulness, risked whatever punishment would follow. If you could say one thing for Varwen, she wielded the whip herself, and she did not have the weight of arm of the male overseers.

She’d heard, that in former days, Lordship had sometimes taken a fancy to delivering the beatings himself, but she’d not heard of that in recent years. He could hardly be too feeble for the task; he was still upright, still strode about the place at a great rate, and still took after pleasuring himself with his female slaves now and again.

That might be one small mercy, she thought. She knew that, seventeen going on eighteen, she was just at the age he liked above all. And if she had married Gethren, that would be the surest way to draw his eye upon herself.

There were six or seven she could name, with a minute’s thought, who knew full well what it meant, how it felt, to be bedded by your lord before you could ever know the pleasure of your own private chamber with your own lawful husband.

As mercy went, it was small indeed.

Numikès wiped her eyes with her sleeve and kept the polishing rag moving. What else was there to do?