The Farside of Never -Book 1- Daphne -3- Skaynos (Patreon)

I don't remember what happened next all that clearly. I guess I was in shock, and I didn't really feel present in my new body. For a while, things seem to happen to me as I just watched, not involved emotionally. I felt numb.

First, the men in the Cowboy-Greek costumes divided us into groups, and we were required to close a metal cuff attached to a chain around our left ankles. Each chain had a few girls attached; I'm not sure how many. I ended up in the middle of one chain, and Joan and Carol each in another. I think the men deliberately broke up groups of girls who had been talking together.

They pinched and prodded us, and I know they made lewd jokes about us, though I couldn't understand them since they only spoke Greek to each other. I may have still been crying, but when one of the men grabbed my left nipple and twisted it, I almost fainted. It didn't hurt as much as getting kicked in the crotch used to, but it hurt a lot. That was the only sensation that really penetrated my numbness for a long time.

They had us put our left arms back and reach forward with our right arms to grab the left hand of the girl in front of us. Then they marched us out of the long narrow room, up a ramp and out into the daylight. They slapped our thighs and butts as we passed them, and they laughed.

I didn't get angry; I guess I was just too terrified. I thought I must be feeling what an animal on the way to a slaughterhouse must feel, and I wondered if they were going to kill us. But of course, they weren't. We were too valuable and probably too expensive for men who worked as low-level guards. They were just amusing themselves by terrorizing us with slaps and pinches that didn't hurt that much, except for that nipple twist.

When we came out into the daylight, at first, we couldn't see much because of trying to blink the sun out of our eyes. We were led along a narrow street then turned onto a wider one. All the way, we had to listen to more men making remarks in more different languages than than I had ever heard in a career of banging around oil fields all over the world. I even heard a shouted, "Oh, baby, baby, baby." Though maybe that was only what it sounded like, and it wasn't really English at all.

No one touched us, though. The guys with us, and two more who joined as we left the room, turned out to be guards not to keep us from escaping but to keep the crowd of rough-looking men from doing what such a crowd of men would probably like to do to a bunch of naked women.

I didn't look around that much, too scared. But I didn't see any women at all. Some of the men were in the peculiar mix of Old West and Ancient Greek that our guards wore, but there were more different sorts of costumes than a backlot in Hollywood. The buildings had no common design either; many of them seemed to be stalls selling vegetables, meat, cloth, leather or metal goods. We passed at one point what I thought of as a Used Horse lot, with tired-looking ponies in corrals.

It didn't do to think about that too much.

There was a lot of yelling, and not all of it was at our guards or us. Some of it was at the animals in the street, being ridden or pulling carts or wagons. Most of them were horses or mules, maybe, but there were also camels, llamas, oxen and stranger things. One fancy-looking rig was being pulled by four big black-maned lions. Another had two lizards built like tall alligators as draft animals. And one man was riding a miniature sort of elephant, miniature for an elephant, meaning that its back was taller than I was.

That added to my fright, the fact that I felt so tiny. Everyone seemed enormous. A few of the girls were smaller than me, but not many of them, and besides being short, I was sort of skinny. Except for the melons on my chest, that is. And every step I took made them sway and jiggle. I wondered if it would be possible to get a bra to wear; the wobbling bothered me that much.

But none of us wore anything except our ankle chains. Nothing. The pavement in the street was mostly cobblestones, but it varied where we were walking from bare earth to stones set in cement to wooden planks. Those were the worst. I think all of us picked up a splinter or two.

I don't know how far we walked. It occurred to me that we were being paraded through the business district of town to draw a crowd to bid on us and watch us be sold. And even that didn't make me mad. I felt about as low as a person could feel who wasn't up to her neck in shit, but I was still too scared to be angry about things. And that didn't seem odd at the time.

I haven't mentioned the smell. Mostly, sweat, manure, woodsmoke, and a metallic tang I eventually found out came from smelters outside town. I didn't smell the odor of human shit and garbage that filled many third-world cities on my Earth. I could be grateful later for whatever rude authority influenced garbage and sewage laws, but right then, I didn't notice the lack of gruesome smells.

It was loud as well as smelly. Besides the shouts of the men we passed and traffic noise, there were street musicians, people beating drums in front of their shops, and the rattle-clank-rattle of our chains hitting whatever passed for sidewalk. And the sound of crying, I think more than half of us were weeping by the time we reached the site of the slave auctions.

This turned out to be a sort of low platform attached to a large building. We were led inside the building, up a short ramp and out onto the platform. A crowd had already begun to gather. Again, all of them men and nearly all of them shouting at us and making gestures. The gestures were rude enough; I was glad I didn't understand most of what they were saying.

I said they were all men, but it turned out that was not entirely so. As we came out onto the platform, we saw that the guards there were different from the ones that had led us to this place. Instead of kilts, they wore loose trousers to just below the knees. They had sandals on instead of boots, and their tunics were cloth instead of leather. They were taller, heavier and had no beards at all when almost all the other men we had seen had full beards or at least sideburns and mustaches.

Eunuch is actually a Greek word, and it was shouted at these men from the crowd a lot. Well, eunucho, not eunuch. Not always insultingly, sometimes just as a "Hey, you!" Being eunuchs was sort of their job, like on my world some men are taxi drivers. I wondered if they had come in from some other world where they had been completely male and had done something like drive a cab for a living.

I thought about a lot of stupid things while my mind was mostly shut off. I wondered when the auction would begin. But first, there would be more show.

We had gotten pretty dirty walking through the city. Dust covered our lower legs heavily, and we had a light layer of it everywhere else, even our hair. Not that some of us had been exactly clean before, but nothing worse than a few smudges. The men didn't seem to care.

But now, the eunuch guards produced hoses and proceeded to spray us down. With motions, they indicated that we were to scrub ourselves and our chain-mates in the spray. The water wasn't exactly cold but chilly enough that some of the girls had chattering teeth within a few minutes, and there wasn't a flat nipple in sight. The water pressure wasn't enough to knock anyone down, and we had been lined up next to rails so we could hold on. The pressure was strong enough to sting a bit if it hit you in the face, or the tits or someplace else tender.

We splashed back and forth, turning our bodies and lifting our hair until every inch of our skin had been sprayed several times. It continued a lot longer than necessary, and that was when I realized it was part of the show.

The male crowd went wild, of course.

The stage, I guess I could call it a stage, was only a bit over waist-high, and the ground around it sloped up and away, so all the guys had a good view. A few of them had better views, standing on small platforms themselves. These tended to be better dressed, some of them even wearing visible jewelry. And a few of the best-dressed ones were quite obviously more eunuchs. They tended to be flamboyantly well-dressed -- in bright colors with lots of decoration.

Somehow, they reminded me of pimps. I hoped I was wrong about that.

After a bit more washing, the eunuchs turned the water off. In the sun and the dry air of the mountains, we were soon dry, except for our hair which most of us kept combing with our fingers, trying to get tangles out. I even did it myself and helped the girl in front of me as the one behind me was helping me. Neither of them spoke English, but I learned a few words of Greek. Treekoi was hair, kairo was hand, cantho was blond, mawro was black. Mastiko meant breast, even if it sounded like something you would chew -- which made me blush to think of it. Mamo also meant breast, or I guess, titty. Plurals you made by adding -i, so hair was a plural. Made sense. Mastikoi meant breasts, but you didn't say mama; you said mamamo. Irregular plurals, great.

I didn't find out until much later than most people here, especially slaves and other low-class types, spoke a kind of pidgin Greek with simple grammar and almost no word endings. And it wasn't the Greek of my world or even the Ancient World. It was barely Greek at all, being to real Greek more like what surfer English is to real German.

I realized that I was back inside my head—well, my new blonde head. I could think about my situation, but some things were still wrong. I tried to count how many girls there were on stage and kept losing track around eight or nine. Using my fingers helped, but all I could say for sure was there must be more than twenty girls.

I tried to count how many girls were in a skayno, a group chained together, and multiply by how many chains. That didn't work either. Some chains had five or six girls, and some had more. There were either six or seven chains. I wasn't sure; I kept forgetting which ones I had already counted. But that seemed like too many girls for how many I could see. "Six times six is ..." I said aloud, but I had no clue as to the answer.

So I got scared all over again and lost maybe another hour being out of my head with fear. What had they done to my mind? What other things could I no longer do? I chased the tail of that terrifying thought until I wept again and had to be comforted by my chain-mates, philoi tow skayno mas.

When I came back to myself, the auction was already in progress, and the skayno that held Joan was being led off stage toward men who seemed to work for one of the pimpish eunuchoi. I waved and called to Joan, then one of the eunuch guards took my arm and hit me in the face with my own hand two or three times. I got very quiet and almost went away mentally again.

"Why did he do that?" I asked the girl in front of me when I had recovered a bit.

"Analoraynos," she answered, putting her chin against her chest in the way that I knew meant no or not. Lifting and turning your head at the same time meant yes. It took some getting used to since if I nodded an English yes, it looked to them as if I were trying to say yes-no-yes-no very rapidly. And shaking my head apparently meant I thought something was funny.

I gathered that she meant he wasn't allowed to hit me but could cause me to hit myself. The earlier male guards had hit us, not hard but repeatedly. These guys had not heard of chivalry, but they had an odd code of behavior.

The auction continued. Another skaynos of girls was delivered to another eunuch amid catcalls from the wholly male audience. Almost all of the bids were coming from the people on their little elevated stages and among them, mainly from the eunouchoi.

"What's with the snip-snip boys buying all the girls?" I asked one of my companions. "What do they need girls for?" I demonstrated what I meant by snip-snip with hand gestures that had the girls around me shaking their heads in laughter.

One of them said, "Agorazon ti pornes."

And I understood that, fractured Greek that it was. Agora is market, porno is whore. She had said, "They're buying whores," or something close to that. The fancy eunuchs were pimps, after all.