“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 Salomé? 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