Then handlers appeared from the holding pits, their shaved heads gleaming with oil from the yellow light of the fish oil lanterns as the eunuchs whipped a line of women toward the front gate. Dressed in dirty rags, the slaves were all young, but looked almost as old as the witch, from their poor diet and the daily beatings.
Teams of slaves pushed at the wooden beam holding the front gate closed, the massive slab of wood sliding along a greased notch until out of the way. Now armed sec men pushed the gate open and spread out in a defensive pattern, while the handlers lashed their charges outside the ville. For most of the females, it was the very first time they had seen the other side of the thick stone walls of Hellsgate since they had arrived so very long ago.
Arching in a semicircle around the ville, the wall stood twenty feet tall and was nearly as thick, built entirely of slabs of concrete and pieces of broken warships from the beach. Many times coldhearts and muties had attacked Hellsgate, once even rival slavers from Old Mex, and they always failed to get through the imposing palisade. Even the front gate itself was composed of a framework made of railroad ties, overlaid with slabs of sidewalk concrete. It took twenty strong men to move the gate, and nothing could blast through.
It was a formidable barrier made impregnable by the titanic cannons removed from the Navy ships in the sea, six breech loaders more than twenty feet long with a foot-wide barrel. There had been a larger undamaged cannon in the wreckage down the coast a mile or so, but it was simply too enormous to move by hand and machine. But the six were enough, more than any other ville had in the known world. The cannons weren’t movable, resting in beds of crushed stone and timber. But the elders of the time had been very careful to aim the blasters in different directions to cover the entire arch of the great wall around Hellsgate. The few times the cannons had been used against invaders, there had been no survivors and few body parts remaining to scrape off the cliff to feed the pigs.
“Okay, strip!” the chief eunuch ordered, lashing out with a bullwhip. The knotted end cracked in the air like blasterfire, making the girls flinch. “Remove every stitch! And be quick about it!” Relaying the command, other handlers also cracked their whips, urging the confused slaves on to greater speed.
Hesitantly at first, the women began to remove their simple clothing, many weeping as they obeyed. Watching from the shadows outside the circle of light, the cannie guards leered at the display of flesh, and some reached out to cup the tender breasts of the women and brutally squeeze until tears of pain replaced those of shame. The eunuchs tried not to scowl in disapproval at the lustful actions, but few succeeded.
Soon the rags were piled on the rocky ground, and the twenty women stood shivering in the cool sea breeze.
“Chain them up!” the chief eunuch ordered, trying to keep a watch on the slaves as well as on the road near the cliff. The muted noise of the motorcycle engines could be faintly heard now, getting steadily louder. Time was short. “And be quick about it!”
Now the eunuchs pushed the sec men aside and got busy shackling the naked girls to iron rings set into the main gate. Some of the smaller women couldn’t reach the ground with their feet, and hung painfully from their wrists, fighting to hold on to the stout chains with their hands or else their own weight could painfully dislocate a shoulder.
Surrounded by armed guards atop the wall, Thomas watched the procedure below and scowled unhappily at the terrible waste. These were farming folks, not gaudy sluts, prime meat for the Blood Feast. But now their only value was that of living armor, their lives protection against the enemies rumbling toward the ville.
When the task was done, the sec men and eunuchs fled back inside Hellsgate and the gate was ponderously closed, the massive locking bar noisily sliding back into position.