Lord of Raven's Peak - Catherine Coulter [2]
He said only to Oleg, “A farmstead and a wife are two decisions a man must weigh carefully.”
“That is what my father says, but he is always smiling at me when he says it. Think you he wants me out of his longhouse?”
There were at least eighty slaves in the pit, as it was called. They were of all ages, both sexes in nearly equal numbers, some few still proud, their shoulders squared, but most stood still as stones with their heads bowed, knowing what was to come, perhaps praying to their gods that the men or women who bought them would be kind.
Merrik walked slowly through the rows. The young women were lined up on one side, the older women behind them, and the boys and men on the other side of the pit. There were guards only behind the men, whips in their hands, watching, ever watching, silent and menacing, but they really weren’t concerned. None of this group would cause any problems. They’d been broken sufficiently since they’d been captured on raids, some of them had been slaves for decades, some even born of slaves.
It was a sight Merrik had seen since he’d been a boy when his father had first taken him to York to buy slaves. This was nothing new, save that this slave market wasn’t as grim or as dirty and didn’t smell yet since it was so early in the day and they were in the cool fresh air of Kiev and not in the Danelaw where the Saxons smelled as bad as the slaves, and their stench filled the air. Here a man could breathe as he made his selections.
Many of the girls were fine looking and appeared clean enough. They were from all parts of the world, some with yellowish skin and beautifully slanted eyes and the thickest black hair he’d ever seen, long and board-straight. They were slight, and all had their heads down. There were redheads and blonds from Samarkand, some very tall and broadly built, others squat with heavy torsos and short legs who hailed from Bulgar and beyond. Merrik saw a girl who pleased him. He realized she pleased him too much, for she had the pale golden hair of his people, pale clear flesh, and a long slender body. He felt a mild spurt of lust and shook his head. No, she wouldn’t do for his mother. His brother would soon have her flat on her back, if Merrik didn’t take her first. He wouldn’t provide another concubine for his brother Erik, for unlike his brother, he saw how much it hurt Sarla when her husband ignored her at night, then took himself off to bed with one of his women.
He must search for a comely face, but not too comely, certainly no more than a pleasant face, perhaps one on the broad, flat side. His brother disliked thin women; Merrik searched out females with hollow cheeks, showing bones. He selected three possible young slave girls, turned to search out the slave-auction merchant, Valai, to bargain. As he waited for Valai to finish with a Swedish merchant who smelled of rotted fish and stale sex, he realized he’d seen that same merchant—so obese he wheezed even as he spoke—the night before with a dozen more merchants at the house of a man who had many female slaves to sell. Each merchant was given a girl and they had, each one in turn, with all the others looking on, stripped the girls and had sex there on the wooden benches that lines the inside wall of the great hall. Merrik had felt immediate lust, for he saw that there were still half a dozen girls left and one would be his, until he saw a merchant over a girl, and the girl was lying there, her eyes closed, so still she could have been dead, and the fat merchant had shoved into her, huffing, his great belly shaking, until, finally, he’d spilled his seed inside her. She’d never opened her eyes. Merrik saw tears seeping from beneath her closed eyelids, streaking down her face. He had left.
He turned away from the fat merchant, and looked indifferently at the long line of men and boys. He froze.
He didn’t know why that of all the scores of men he looked directly at the boy, but somehow, once he had, he couldn’t seem to look away. The boy was perhaps twelve years old, not older