John Dalmas - The Lion of Farside

Tiger barracks were different from Sister barracks-temporary squad huts with bath and latrine. Normally two half-sibling clones made a squad, and eight grinning Tigers were waiting when Varia was propelled into their breeding room. For a minute she was pushed-thrown back and forth among them like a beach ball, staggering, reeling around the small ring of naked Tigers, never allowed to fall. Then the shift was pulled from her, and the sergeant, exerting his prerogative, threw her on the bed and took her roughly.

The first round was quick. The sergeant took perhaps a minute, while the others, having watched, were mostly quicker, and she'd begun to feel hopeful that this wouldn't be as bad as she'd feared. But though their fertility was low, they had the sexual energy of youth. Thus those who'd finished, restimulated by watching the others, had a second round which took much longer, and in some cases sadistic forms. Long before that round was done, Varia was weeping silently in blind desolation. She wasn't really aware when the still longer, much rougher third round began, and was unconscious well before it was over.

She awoke in the empty bath. Awoke when the Tiger sentry threw a bucket of cold water on her, then threw her shift at her, and watched grinning while she pulled it on. A sober-faced guardsman waited outside, and led her to the kitchen, barefoot and in only her wet shift, through twenty degree cold and two inches of snow. She was hardly aware of it, though she shivered violently. Most of the Sisterhood had the power to produce additional body heat by mentally controlling cellular respiration levels and circulation. In Varia's state of shock, only shivering was available to her.

At the kitchen, a younger Sister waited, an adolescent. Big-eyed at what she saw, the girl showed Varia her duties, demonstrating and helping, while Varia emerged somewhat from shock, becoming more aware, watching and duplicating: Fires were laid, then lit, in the dining room stove, the stack of ovens, and the great ceramic cookstove, and replenished in the large ceramic water heater, for the hot springs weren't hot enough for kitchen needs.

It was now that Varia, hobbling and unable to stand straight, realized fully how sore she was. When the instructions were finished, and Varia, outside in the cold, had begun splitting the day's firewood, the girl vanished. Meanwhile, with the exertion and the partial return of her mental faculties, Varia had stopped shivering.

Fifteen minutes later the chief cook arrived, the Sister in charge of the kitchen, a large, strong-looking woman, handsome instead of pretty. Arrived well ahead of her usual hours, and came out to the woodpile to peer at Varia in the darkness. The woman's lips were as thin and twisted as Sarkia's had been at Varia's delivery.

Her voice was rough. "What's wrong with you?" she demanded.

Voice dead, face wooden, Varia told her, and began shivering again, violently. The woman took her arm and steered her brusquely into the kitchen where there was light, squinted at the black eye, the split and swollen lips. "Take off your shift," she ordered.

Varia did, without emotion.

"Good God!" The cook looked at the myriad black bruises and bloody spots on thighs and buttocks, arms and breasts, for when Varia had gone into shock, the Tigers had pinched and struck her, even jabbed her with knife tips, trying to elicit movement. "Here, girl," the woman said, and helped her onto a table. There, by the light of an oil lamp, she examined her as a gynecologist might have. Varia was literally raw, fore and aft, despite being slimed with semen, and undoubtedly had vaginal and rectal lesions that could become infected. Swearing, the woman turned to the now-shivering girl who'd fetched her.

"Go outside and bring me the guard."

The girl ran, and the guard came in, looking worried.

"Where did you get her?" the cook demanded.

He told her.

"That clone! Go back there and wake up the sergeant." The guard blanched; he was scarcely out of adolescence himself. "Tell that pile of shit his mother wants him in this kitchen within ten minutes, or I'll see his balls on my butcher block."

She hadn't raised her voice, but the intensity behind it allowed no noncompliance. As the guard reached the door, she shouted after him, "Make sure you tell him exactly what I said."

Then she sent Varia with the adolescent girl, hobbling off barefoot to the infirmary.

She was in the infirmary for three days. On the second, the chief cook came to see her. "I talked to the sergeant," the woman said. "He's one of my sons. He said Idri told him they should do whatever they wanted with you, the rougher the better. So when Idri came in to breakfast, I was waiting for her. I took her to the woodpile and shook hell out of her. She took it, too." The woman's smile was grim. "I was bred to produce Tigers. I could twist her head off if I wanted, and she knew I was on the edge. All she could say was, she was going to report me to the Dynast."

The cook laughed, a dry bark. "I'm eighty-eight years old, girl. At my age you don't have many years left before decline, and you think a bit, some of us, most of us, of how your points will balance after death; what penalties and penances might await you. Makes it easier to take the bull by the horns. In midmorning the Dynast called me to her. I told her what you'd looked like, and what my son had said.

"She didn't say a thing, but I saw her jaw tighten. Later her secretary stopped to tell me not to worry about anything Idri might want to do." Again she snorted. "As if I would. Sarkia told her she'd wanted you punished, not killed. And ordered her to latrine detail for a week; she'll love that, high and mighty as she sees herself.

"Then she had your sergeant in. Not that she raked him over the coals like I did; he's just a Tiger, the way she designed him. But she set him straight. You'll find things better when you go back."

The cook left then. And of all she'd said, the words that stuck in Varia's mind were four: "When you go back." She'd have to go back to that place.

8: A Plan Enacted

When Varia left the infirmary at the end of the third day, she was in better condition physically than she'd expected to be. She'd been enough years on Farside that she'd come to judge healing by the standards there. In the Cloister, what they lacked in science, they more than made up for with healing touches, and formulas spoken instead of manufactured.

She left wearing more than her shift, too. The healer had found a pair of work breeches for her, and mittens, and ill-fitting boots, all shabby enough to fit her punishment status, but far better than only the shift, which now became her shirt.

At the barracks, the sergeant had already given orders orally, rules of conduct toward their woman. The first was short term: she was not to be bothered that night. The second was, she was not to be struck or pinched or otherwise hurt. The third, she was not to be sodomized again, or anything done to her that could not result in pregnancy. Further, no man was to take her more than once every other night; a schedule would be posted. That still means four each evening, she told herself, and felt desolation wash through her again. The best she could do was remind herself it wouldn't start for another twenty-four hours.

That was the first night she thought of escape. She didn't let her mind dwell on it though; the difficulties would seem insuperable. Something she did look at was the season. She'd have no chance at all, fleeing through the wilderness, before spring came. Late spring. The mental power to warm herself was limited by her level of biological energy. On a winter night it would protect her for only a few hours, leaving her famished. It worked best when the temperature stress was moderate.