Raising his voice, Mimses called to the pair of guards. “Get her out of here. Take her to the women’s quarters, but keep her isolated. I’ll talk to that old bag of bones after supper.”
She heard footsteps, then felt hands close around her upper arms and heave her up to her feet. The two men hustled her away from the terrace and out of the hall. By the time they went through the doorway, she was able to breathe more or less normally again, though her stomach muscles screamed with pain.
Mildred was escorted into a corridor that led off to the left from Mimses’s hall. The passageway wasn’t very broad, but it was long. She noted an absence of guards prowling the corridors. She could only presume that Pharaoh was so confident in his power, he saw no reason for security forces other than the Incarnates.
The men turned Mildred right at an intersection and stopped before a door bound with strips of brass. One of the men hammered on it with a fist. A small wicket in the door slid open, and a dusky face peered out with bland eyes.
“Open up, Grandmother,” the guard said. “Mimses wants this woman looked after, but locked away from the rest of your bitches.”
The wicket snapped shut, and an instant later the door swung wide. From within came an echo of laughter and scraps of feminine voices. Mildred didn’t move. The place smelled like a trap. The very air reeked of danger and worse.
One of her escorts planted a hand between her shoulder blades and propelled her over the threshold. The door slammed shut immediately behind her.
Mildred whirled, and just managed to bite back a cry of revulsion.
A woman stood beside the door, her incredibly obese body covered with a linen caftan that covered her from neck to ankle. Only her arms were bare, two shapeless masses of flesh ending in blunt-fingered hands. Her features had long ago blurred into a sagging mass. Her hair was thin and white and hung about her shoulders like a tattered shroud.
Her eyes were a bright sky blue, and her voice, when she spoke, was surprisingly mild and sugary. “We haven’t had a new arrival in a long time. Everybody here calls me Grandmother. What are you called?”
“Mildred.”
Grandmother smiled. “Well, Mildred, if you do as I say, we’ll get along fine. Come with me.”
In a shambling, lumbering gait, she led the way through a series of doorless, box-shaped chambers. Torches burned here and there along the walls, and by their flickering, smoky glare, Mildred saw rows upon rows of narrow cots and many, many women, most of them so young they were still girls. They were engaged in all manner of activities—sewing, sweeping, chatting, scrubbing the floors or stretched out on the cots sleeping the sleep of the utterly exhausted.
She saw very little modesty among the sea of girls—most of the women walked, worked and talked in the nude. Mildred wasn’t surprised, inasmuch as the standard articles of women’s clothing were so scanty or diaphanous they might as well not wear anything at all. Aten was a patriarchy in every sense of the word, a sexist pig’s fantasy world come to life. The whole atmosphere was charged with an anything-goes kind of erotic energy, wicked yet disturbingly arousing at the same time.
Mildred understood she was in the dormitory for the female servant class of the city, not the handmaidens of ranking citizens such as Mimses, but the drudges, the cooks, the scullery maids. Their situation probably wasn’t as extreme as slavery, but it wasn’t very many notches above that state, either.
Mildred followed the jiggling bulk of Grandmother down an aisle formed by two parallel lines of large wooden tubs. A few women soaked in them, while others sponged an oily brown substance over their bodies.
Grandmother wheezed, “At least you won’t need a treatment before you’re sent out to perform your duties.”
“What is that stuff?” Mildred asked. “Some kind of vegetable-derived stain?”
Grandmother shot her a steely glare over one sloping shoulder. “It is the color of Aten, the people of Pharaoh. That is all you need to know.”