He had been in the room eleven minutes with nothing on. He counted because counting was a thing he could still do.
He was cold and getting colder. Wherever they had scrubbed him hardest the soap had dried into his skin and gone tight, and across the back of his neck it had got past tight and started to itch. He did not put a hand up to it. There was nobody in the room to see him, and he did not put a hand up to it anyway.
He clenched his hole. The grease in it had gone warm and there was nothing to close on. He did it again to be sure, and it did the same thing.
The room had been white once, in the corners up near the cornice where nothing had ever touched it. Everywhere else the walls had gone the colour of old tallow. A gas lamp burned high on a bracket by the door and had scorched a hard brown ring into the plaster above it, and the rest of the ceiling was brown the way a man’s fingers go brown. People had stood in this room smoking for a great many years, and they had not been in a hurry about it.
Beyond the door there were people. He could not hear words, only boots, and a door somewhere below, and a woman’s voice going up at the end of a sentence. Every time a sound came nearer he stopped breathing until it went past. Going past was no relief. It only meant the one that would not go past had not come yet.
The floor around the low platform was marked. He looked at the marks for a while before he let himself work out what they were, and then he looked at the wall instead.
Before this room they had put him and nine others through a wash block with mildew in the grout and a row of heads that dripped even when the water was off, and the air in there had been bad enough that two of the men had gagged and been caned for it. He had not gagged. He had held his breath in twenty-count intervals, smoke drill, four years of it, and he had thought that was worth something. Then a slave with grey in his beard had taken him aside, and bent him over a bench without a word, and greased him with two fingers and the flat boredom of a man trimming a lamp wick, and had not looked at his face once, not going in and not coming out. He had washed his hands afterward in a bucket. That was the part Wren kept coming back to. The bucket.
There was a table to the left of the platform with bowls on it and a folded cloth, and on the shelf beneath it a wooden rack drilled through with holes, and standing up out of the holes a graded row of dark rubber phalluses, the smallest about the size of his thumb and the largest a good deal bigger than that.
There was a second table beyond it, smaller, with a strip of green felt laid across it, and on the felt a row of steel rods set out in order from thin to thick, nine or ten of them, each one longer than his hand. At the end of the row, laid open on the felt beside them, a man’s watch.
The rubber he understood. He had looked at it once and had not needed to look again.
The steel he could not place at all. It was too thin to be for anything. Surgical, he decided, and was still deciding it when the door opened.
Three of them came in. The factor first, the man selling him, soft-shouldered, a folio under his arm, in and out all morning and never once addressing Wren directly. Then a woman in dark grey, no jewellery, a ledger held against her hip with the ease of long habit. Then a man in shirtsleeves with his cuffs already turned back.
Wren’s spine did it before he could stop it. Heels together, chin level, hands going to the seams of trousers he was not wearing. Four years of a door opening and a man coming through it. He got his shoulders down a fraction and then left the rest of it alone, because undoing it would have been a movement too and they would have watched him do that instead.
“Number thirty-one,” the factor said. “Infantry. Twenty-one. Taken at the crossing with the rest of his company and condemned with them, slave for life, no term and no redemption, papers all in order and countersigned. He’s the last of the lot and I’ve kept him back for you.”
“Kept him back,” the woman said. “You’ve had him a week.”
“I’ve had him a week and shown him to nobody.”
He had been naked in front of men for four years. Sergeants, surgeons, the whole company at once in a river in summer, and none of it had ever meant anything. He had never in his life been naked in front of a woman who was not about to get into bed with him. He stood on the platform and worked out that there was no way to hold himself that would help, and then he stopped looking at her. Stopping was work. He was going to have to keep doing that work all afternoon.
The man in shirtsleeves had gone round behind the platform. Wren felt him back there and did not turn his head.
“He’s stood a week in a pen and he’s still holding his shoulders like that.” A hand settled between his shoulder blades and stayed. “Look at him. He’s still at attention. Vaudrey, come and see this.”
“I can see it from here.”
“You can see it. You can’t feel it.” The hand moved down his spine, unhurried, pressing in at intervals as though counting something. “It’s in the muscle. They put four years of standing up straight into him and it doesn’t come out in a week. It doesn’t come out in a year.” He said it the way another man might say the wood was well seasoned.
“How long does it come out in.”
“It doesn’t. That’s what you’re buying.”
Wren kept his eyes on the far wall, on a place where the tallow-coloured paint had blistered, and the blister had a shape like the coast north of Halbeck, and he held on to that.
“Turn round, boy.”
He turned round. Hess, that was the name the factor had used. Mr. Hess had a broad plain face and grey coming in at the temples and nothing in it at all. Wren had come up the stairs braced for cruelty. There was none of it here.
Boy.
Making him a slave had needed papers and seals and countersignatures, and even then they had done it to fourteen of them at once in a yard and nobody had said his name. This one had done something worse to him on his own, in one syllable, without looking up from his cuffs.
The blood came up his neck and into his face and stayed there. He was twenty-one and the word fit, and the fit of it was the smallest part of what was wrong. In this house it meant something else. It was the word for what he was. It would be the word for him at forty.
Slave was written on a paper in the factor’s folio. Boy was what he was going to be called every day for the rest of his life.
Nobody remarked on the colour in his face. Nobody had been watching for it.
“Hands behind your head.”
He put his hands behind his head.
Hess was a head shorter than him and gone soft through the middle, and his forearms had not carried anything heavier than a ledger in twenty years. Wren could have put him into the wall. He knew the step and the turn and where the elbow went, and he had done it to bigger men than this in training and once for real at the crossing, and it had taken about two seconds. He stood with his hands laced behind his head and everything he knew how to do sat in his arms and did nothing at all.
“There it is,” Hess said. “There. He didn’t have to be told twice and he didn’t do it slow to make a point. Some of them do it slow to make a point. This one just does it.”
Vaudrey came closer then and opened the ledger against her forearm and looked at him for a long moment, and there was nothing in her face either, and she said, “The face is a problem.”
“The face is not a problem.”
“It’s a hard face. He has watched men die and you can read it on him.”
“He has, and half the house will pay extra to be in a room with a man who has.” Hess reached up and took Wren’s jaw in his hand and turned it to the light, and turned it back. “Ridley at the auction rooms will pay for this face on its own. He does not want to be the worst thing that ever happened to a boy. He wants to be the second worst, and a face like this one tells him somebody got there first. Ashfield off the sentencing bench will pay because that kind takes it quietly, and does not make a fuss, and does not cry where it can be heard through a wall. That is two of your four good names and you know it.”
Vaudrey wrote something.
“And the other two?”
“The other two want a boy who’s never seen anything, and we have four of those, and one of them is going off in a month because you won’t spend on his teeth.” Hess let go of his jaw. “Open.”
Wren opened his mouth. Fingers went in. They pushed his lip up and rolled it, and went along the back teeth on the right, and then the left, and pressed once at the join of his jaw, and he tasted soap and tobacco and something underneath both.
“His teeth are better than yours,” Hess said to the factor.
“They fed them. It was a quick war.”
“Tongue out.”
He put his tongue out. He stood there with it out while the two of them looked, and then Hess took hold of the end of it between two fingers, and pulled it, not hard, testing something, and let go.
Hess wiped the ends of his fingers on his turned-back cuff. “Fine. That’s fine.”
They came to his cock without ceremony and without any change in their voices, the same as they had come to his teeth.
Hess weighed it on his palm first, lifting and letting it fall back against Wren’s thigh, and then took it in his fist and drew the skin down off the head in one movement and held it there while Vaudrey looked.
“Uncut,” she said.
“Uncut.”
The factor cleared his throat. “Do you skin all of them? I have never been clear whether it is required.”
“Required by nothing but the trade. A slave with a foreskin looks like a free man with a collar on. It unsettles them, and an unsettled patron does not come back.”
“And how is it done?”
“Knife. Merrow straps them to a board and takes it off in two cuts and stitches the edge, and it’s over inside a quarter of an hour.”
Wren jerked.
He had not decided to. All of him went at once, one hard snatch backward out of Hess’s hand, and Hess’s fist simply closed and held him where he was and he did not go anywhere.
Hess looked up at Wren’s face, which he had not done since the teeth.
“Ah,” he said. “No. Look at me, boy.”
Wren looked at him.
“Nobody is cutting you today. Merrow is not in this building and neither is his board, and nothing happens to you until money has moved and papers are signed, and no money has moved. You are not sold.” He said all of it in exactly the voice he had used for the figures. “Now settle. I have another hour of work to do on you and I cannot read you while you are shaking.”
And Wren settled. He heard himself breathe out and felt his shoulders come down. The shame of that arrived somewhere lower than the rest of it.
“He steadied when you told him to,” Vaudrey said.
“He did.”
“Fast.”
“Very fast. That is not fear going away. That is an order being obeyed by a body that has stopped asking questions.”
“What does Merrow charge now.”
“For a clean one and no complications, eleven. Fourteen with the after-care, and you want the after-care, because the last one we did on the cheap went bad and sat in a room another nine days after he should have been earning, and that’s nine days of nothing coming in.”
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen, and he’s off the floor a fortnight, and then he’s off the floor another week when it goes tight on him, and they all go tight on them.” Hess ran his thumb along the underside, up, over the ridge, and Wren’s body reported it, up through his belly and out into his shoulders, and he stood absolutely still, and the standing still cost him more than the touch. “Call it three weeks and the cost of Merrow.”
“Against.”
“Against forty years of every patron who walks in this house and puts his hand on it. Three weeks against forty years. You have done that arithmetic before and you did not need me to do it for you.” Hess drew the foreskin back up and let it lie, and then drew it down again, slower, and this time Wren’s cock began to fill in his hand and there was nothing to be done about it. “There he is.”
“Note it,” Vaudrey said, and wrote.
“Note it kindly. That’s not nerves. That’s not the cold. He’s stood here twenty minutes being handled by two strangers who are pricing his skin off him and he’s coming up hard in my hand like a boy in a hayloft.” Hess said it with plain approval and no heat in it. “That’s the whole trade, Vaudrey. That’s the thing you can’t teach and can’t buy back once it’s gone.”
The factor made a small satisfied noise.
The blister was behind him now. He had turned his back on it when he was told to and had not noticed losing it. He put the coast up on the wall in front of him instead, the road along it, the place where it came down off the headland and the whole bay opened at once, and he had marched it twice and it would not hold. It kept going back to being a wall in a room with three people in it, and his cock stood up out of Hess’s fist and would not go down.
“Then measure him properly,” Vaudrey said.
Hess set his thumb at the root, pressed it in against the bone so nothing could be stolen, ran his other hand to the end, and said a figure.
“Say that again.”
He said it again.
“Weight.”
“Heavy for the length.” He laid it across his open palm, and she lifted it twice with two fingers and let it drop.
Her fingers were cold. His balls drew up hard and tight against him, all of it climbing away from her, and he could not send it back down.
She was on him about two seconds. Then she took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped her fingers. Hess had been holding him for twenty minutes and had not wiped his hand once.
“Put your fingers back on him.” Hess had him in his hand still and kept him there. “I want to see that twice.”
She put two fingers against him again. His balls climbed a second time, the same as before, and he could hold them down no better than he had the first time.
“That is only the cold on him,” Hess said to her. “But it will do exactly that for a patron, and the patron will believe he did it himself, and he will be pleased with himself, and he will book the room a second time. Write it down. It is worth more than his teeth.”
Hess turned it once in his palm. “Soft he is an ordinary man. Hard he is not. Half of them come up the same prick, only stiffer. This one changes, and they pay for the difference.”
“How does it sit.”
“Beautifully. It stands out from him and stays there instead of leaning off to one side, which most of them do. On his knees a patron is looking straight down at it. On his back it lies up along his belly where it can be seen without anybody moving him.” He let go to demonstrate, and it held its place. “Half the stock in this house has to be arranged before a man will look twice. This one arranges itself.”
“The skin.”
“Silk.” He took it again and ran his thumb up the underside. The board creaked under Wren as his weight went across onto the other foot, and the creak was how he found out it had. “Some of them go dry when they are hard, rough as rope, and the patrons feel it and they say so to other patrons. This one moves.”
“Does it hold.”
“Twenty-five minutes of being handled and priced in front of him and he is harder than when I picked him up. He holds.” Hess weighed it once more, satisfied. “Add it to the rest. There is nothing on this boy I would leave off the price.”
“Chest,” Vaudrey said.
Hess wiped his hand on the cloth. “Arms down, boy. Let me see the chest.”
Wren put his arms down.
Vaudrey gave his chest the same flat attention she gave her own columns, and she said, “Good breadth,” and wrote it. Hess put his palm on Wren’s sternum and pressed.
“Breathe. No, properly.” He kept the hand where it was. “Low, and he doesn’t hurry it back. They notice that in a room and they never work out what it is they are noticing. Half the stock in this house pants like a dog for the whole hour and the patron goes home tired.”
“He’s got hair on him,” Vaudrey said. “Ridley won’t like that.”
“Ridley will like it for a month and then we’ll take it off and he’ll like that too, and we’ll have charged for both.” Hess pressed his thumb into the muscle above the nipple and moved it. “Feel the difference between him and the last one we took. Go on.”
She reached out and put two fingers on Wren’s chest and pressed, and moved them, and took them away.
“Yes,” she said.
Hess brought his thumb up onto the nipple itself and rolled it once against the crook of his finger. Wren’s cock jumped where it stood, and a bead came up at the end of it and hung there.
Both of them looked at it. Neither of them touched it.
“Do the other one.” Hess kept his thumb where it was. “Yours are colder.”
She took the left one between finger and thumb, dry and exact, and did what he had done. A sound came up out of Wren and he shut it off halfway.
“It comes up faster than the right,” she said.
“They mostly do on that side and I have never learned why.” Hess was still working the right of him, slow and flat, while she worked the other. “Harder. Take it between your nails and hold it.”
She took it between her nails and held it, and Wren’s back went hollow and his heels came up off the boards, and the bead broke off the end of him and fell.
“He moved,” she said.
“He moved and he stayed where he was put. Write it as steady.” Hess let go. “Two of us on him at once and he stands there and leaks for it. Enter that under the chest and not under the cock. A patron who finds it on his own thinks he has found something nobody else knows, and he comes back for it.”
She wrote it where he said.
Then she said, “He is two colours.”
“Four years of sleeves rolled and collar open.” The line ran the tops of his arms and round the base of his throat, saddle-brown above it and the colour he was born below. Hess ran his thumb back and forth across it where it crossed the shoulder, as though it might come away on his hand. “Every free man alive has that line somewhere, because a free man decides what the sun sees. It is the last thing on him that still says what he used to be.”
“Cost.”
“Eight. Roof, staked out, turned twice a day, a month, and he comes down one colour. It is eight because somebody has to carry the water up.” He let go of the shoulder. “Do it before he goes on the floor. A patron does not want to be shown where the boundary was.”
Vaudrey wrote it in the column under Merrow.
Wren looked down at his arm. He had never once thought about the line. It was where his sleeve had ended, and every man he had served with had one in the same place, and at forty yards it told you what a man was, and he had been proud of it without ever having put that into words.
His shoulder was still cold where the thumb had gone back and forth over it. A month on a roof. He tried to get a picture of his arms all one colour and the picture would not come.
He stood there while the two of them worked out over his head how much of him to take off and when and what it cost, and neither of them looked at his face at any point in it.
“Bend and spread.”
He bent. He put his hands on his knees and spread his feet and looked at the stained floor between them and at his own cock hanging into the space under him, still hard, gone dark with it, the wet already at the end of it. There was no way to stand like that and keep anything. He had just long enough to understand it, and then Hess’s hand came down on his back to settle him and it stopped being a thought.
He expected it to go straight in. It did not. Hess laid one finger against him and did not push, only moved it, a slow circle round the outside, learning the shape of him.
“Colour’s good. Come and see him before I open him.”
She came and saw him.
“Nothing torn, nothing thickened, no white in it. Half of what comes through that door has been had by somebody in a hurry and you can read it from three feet.” The finger kept going round. “They look, Vaudrey. They will never tell you they look, and they all look, and they pay the difference.”
He worked the circle in silence for a while and said, “There. Watch him breathe.”
The ring of him moved with his breath, tightening and easing, and Hess’s finger sat exactly on it and took a fraction each time the easing came. He had lived in this body twenty-one years and was learning what it did from a stranger’s hand.
He clenched.
The hand came down warm on his flank, no weight in it.
“No. Don’t hide from me, boy. There is nothing in there I have not seen and I will have it either way. You are only making me take longer.”
He let it go. It took him a moment to find out how, and then he found out how.
Then the finger went in.
The sound that came out of him was not a word. His back went hard under Hess’s hand and stayed hard.
“Steady, boy. It’s a slave’s hole and there’s no trick to having one.” The finger did not stop. “Every one of them comes in here still thinking it’s his.”
It was not rough. That was the thing. He had braced for rough, he had spent all morning bracing for rough, and instead there was a finger in him going slowly and thoroughly around and stopping at intervals to press, and it was the thoroughness that undid the bracing. Rough he would have had something for. He held the position with everything he knew about being handled by men going useless in him, one piece at a time.
“Greased before?”
“Just now,” the factor said. “An hour, near enough.”
“Well done. It’s usually a mess by the time it gets to me.” The finger went deeper and turned. “He’s tight and he’s not scarred and there’s no give in him. Twenty-one and never used, or used once and badly and a long time ago, and I’d say never.” A second finger joined it and the stretch of that went up Wren’s back in a long line. “Vaudrey. He’s never had anything in him.”
“You’re certain.”
“I’m certain.”
She wrote for a while.
Hess found something inside him with the flat of one finger and pushed, and Wren’s arms gave, and he went down onto his elbows on his knees, and the sound that came out of him on the way down went into the ledger before he had finished making it.
“There we are,” Hess said comfortably. “Up. Back to the position.”
He got back to the position.
“Now. Grip.”
Wren did not know what that meant.
“Grip my finger, boy. Clench. Like you’re stopping yourself.” A pause. “That’s it. Hold. Hold. Now let go.”
He let go.
“Again. Grip. Hold.” Hess’s other hand rested on his flank, feeling for it. “Hold. And let go. Grip. Hold, I said. Let go.”
There was a rhythm to it after a while. He did not decide to find the rhythm. His body found it and settled into it and matched it to his breathing, one two, one two, march step, and the grip and the letting go went on and on, and he was good at it, he could feel that he was good at it, and something in him came apart.
“Feel that,” Hess said, to Vaudrey, over Wren’s back. “Feel the control on him. That’s four years of doing what he’s told with his body while his head does something else. They come out of that army with a nervous system that already knows how to take an order. It’s half the training done and we haven’t paid for it. You will not buy a better-started slave off a block this year.”
“Note it against the price?”
“Note it against the price.”
Four years. The drill yard in the dark, the winters, the crossing. All of it had been going into this and nobody had told him.
Wren’s arms were shaking. A clear string had drawn out of him and touched the floor and gone on drawing.
“Grip,” Hess said.
He gripped.
“Up, boy.”
He came up. The string that had drawn out of him onto the floor came with him and broke somewhere on the way.
Hess crouched at the shelf under the first table and drew one of the smaller dildos out of the rack, third from the left, and stood up with it and held it in front of Wren’s face.
“You’ll take this in your mouth. I’m not going to fuck you with it. I want to see where your jaw stops and what your throat does. You can be sick if you have to be, there’s a drain.”
He took it in his mouth.
Hess had told the truth about that, and the truth was no use to him. Hess put it in slow and level and stopped every inch or so, and turned it, and pushed on, and stopped, and at each stop Wren had to hold it there in his mouth and be a thing with a measurement being taken out of it. At the fourth stop his throat went and he heaved and Hess drew back two inches and held there until it passed, and Vaudrey wrote without being told what to write, and then Hess went on.
“He’s got no gag on him to speak of,” Hess said, around Wren’s coughing. “There’s one at the back but it’s shy. Two months of drill and it’s gone entirely.”
“Then we can sell the throat as well as the other end.”
“We can sell the throat before we sell the other end. It takes no preparing, it heals overnight, and it can be let twice in an evening where the other cannot.”
He drew it out. The spit came with it in a long rope off Wren’s chin and onto his chest, and nobody wiped it away, and nobody was going to. He stood there and felt it move on him. Down over his belly, slowing as it went and cooling as it slowed, and it stopped somewhere above his hip and stayed.
The second one he took out of the rack was a great deal thicker, and it was not going anywhere near his mouth.
There was grease in one of the bowls. Hess put two fingers flat on Wren’s chest instead, where the rope lay thickest, and drew them down through it, and worked what came away onto the rubber. He did it a second time. There was still enough left on Wren for it to go on moving.
“He runs wet,” Hess said. “Good. Half of them go dry on you by the second hour and then you’re into the jar all night.” He worked the last of it in with his thumb. “Enter that under the mouth.”
Wren watched it come off his chest on another man’s fingers. It went onto the thing, and the thing went behind him, and he lost sight of both.
Hess set it against him and spread his free hand on the small of Wren’s back, and said, “Knees. Down onto your elbows. Nothing’s going to happen fast.”
Nothing happened fast. It went in like the finger had gone in, in stages, with pauses, and at every pause Hess said what he was seeing and Vaudrey wrote it, and Wren knelt on the platform with his forehead nearly on the boards and his breath coming back at him off the wood and let a stranger take the measure of the inside of him for what felt like a very long time.
It hurt at the third stage and he made a noise and did not move. Hess waited and went on, and it hurt again further in, and he took that as well.
“Grip,” Hess said. “Same as you did on my finger.”
He gripped. He had it before the word was finished, the drill running off in him with nothing asked twice, hold and let go and hold, on a thing that had nothing to do with the thing he had learned it on. His body had been taught that ten minutes ago and it did not stop to ask what was different about this one.
“There. Feel that.” Hess held the rubber where it was and let him work against it. “Ten minutes. It took ten minutes and it will not come off him now. You would pay a trainer three months for that and get it done worse.”
“Note it.”
“Note it twice.”
He was good at this too. He could feel it in himself the same as before, and there was no way to be worse at it on purpose.
“He’ll hold this one all night and never complain.” Hess sat back on his heels. “By the spring he’ll take the fifth in that rack and take it well. Anything past the fifth and you’re buying trouble.”
“Which is the fifth.”
“The one Ashfield sends word ahead about.”
Vaudrey wrote him down for the fifth.
Hess drew it out. It came out easily and made a sound coming out, and he dropped it in one of the bowls without looking where it landed.
Wren stayed down. The word to get up did not come. There was air on him where the thing had been, and he could not close.
They went and stood over by the lamp and priced him.
He stayed on his elbows with his knees apart, because that was where he had been put. From down there he could hear the difference between the two of them. Hess moved while he talked and the boards gave under him. Vaudrey stood still. The platform was wet under his left knee. The rope off his chest had dried enough to pull at him when he breathed.
“Six a night to start,” Hess said. “Not five. Six.”
“For a soldier.”
“For a soldier who’s never been used and stands like that with his hands behind his head. Ridley alone will take him three nights in the first fortnight at whatever we ask. Ashfield will want him twice and never comes alone.” He was rolling his sleeves further back as he talked. “Six a night, four nights of the week, and after the first year we’ll want to see, because he’ll have thickened and he’ll have learned things and some of them will pay more for that and some of them won’t.”
“And then.”
“Then he comes down to the middle floor at four, and he does that for two years or three, and then he’s at two and doing whatever walks in, and then he’s not ours.” Hess said it without any weight on it. “You know how it goes. Same as every slave in the house.”
“Say five years.”
“Say five if he keeps his temper and six if he keeps his teeth.” Hess thought about it. “And put him in front of the auction rooms early. Ridley always asks whether you handled the stock yourself before he gets it. He likes knowing a woman priced the thing he is paying for. I have never understood it and I have stopped trying.”
“Ridley is a strange man.”
“Ridley is four nights a month.”
His arms had started to shake again. He put more weight onto his forehead to stop it and the shaking went down into his thighs instead and stayed there.
Nobody was looking at him. The two of them were over by the lamp and the factor was somewhere behind him turning pages, and there was nothing in the room that would have stopped him closing his knees. He worked out how it would go. Left knee in, then the right, and back out again before any of them turned round.
He did not do it. Bend and spread was the order and nobody had taken it off him.
He heard Vaudrey’s pen go down a column. Four small dry sounds and a stop.
“Fourteen for Merrow and eight for the sun. Say thirty by the time he’s collared and marked and I’ve fed him a fortnight.”
“Six weeks,” Hess said. “He’s three weeks off the floor for Merrow and he’s a month on the roof after it, and he eats the whole way through.”
Bread at dawn and nothing since. He listened to two people argue about how much food to put into him, and he was on Hess’s side of it before he caught himself.
“A fortnight is what I said.”
“It is. It isn’t what he’ll eat.”
“That’s seven, not six.”
“Six. He’ll not eat much the week Merrow’s done with him. They don’t.”
“He eats very little,” the factor said. “I have had him a week on bread and he has not lost anything off him.”
Neither of them answered him.
Her pen went back up the column and stopped where it had started.
“Thirty-four.”
“Thirty-four.”
“He’ll have paid for himself inside a fortnight.”
“Inside.”
Wren knelt and listened to himself being worked out on a column, and the answer was a fortnight. Not the five years. Not the middle floor, not the two-a-night at the end of it. A fortnight. Six weeks of feeding him and a fortnight to get it back, and the six weeks was the part that had been worth arguing over.
Thirty-four at six a night was six nights. He did the sum without deciding to and it took him no time at all, and then he found the hole in it. There was a figure underneath the thirty-four that neither of them had said out loud, and it was what he cost, and they were going to settle it standing over his back.
Six nights and whatever he cost on top of them, and he would still be sore from what Merrow was going to do to him when the house had its money back.
He had been a slave since the sentencing and had never once used the word about himself. He used it now, kneeling in his own wet while two people he had met that afternoon settled how many weeks he would take to pay for.
It went in easily. Everything was going in easily today.
And something else came with it, kneeling there with the woman’s voice going on above him. She was never going to use him. Not once, not ever, not in five years. She had looked at his mouth and his cock and his hole with more attention than anyone had given him in his life, and every part of it had been for other men’s hands.
He put his forehead down on the boards. It changed nothing and he did it anyway.
“Get him in the chair,” Hess said. “I want to see him under a rod before I say anything to you about money.”
The chair had been in the corner the whole time. He had seen it in his first minute in the room and had looked at the floor instead, and had gone on not looking at it all afternoon, and that had been work, and he had never once let himself say what the work was for.
It was oak. It was bolted down. The back was raked so that a man in it lay half reclined with his head in a shaped rest. A channel ran down the seat and there was a drain under the channel. There were straps at the wrists.
Two iron rests for the ankles, set wide apart and set high. Buckled into those, his knees would come up and open and his own groin would be the nearest part of him to his own face.
One broad strap across the chest. It buckled at the side, where he could not reach it.
They opened the straps and stood waiting, and Wren looked at the chair and did not move.
It was the drain that stopped him. The rest of it he could read as inspection. A drain cut into the boards under the seat meant they expected something to come out of him in quantity, and had expected it for long enough to have the joinery done.
Hess did not come any nearer and did not raise his voice.
“That is not Merrow’s board. Nothing comes off you in that chair and nothing gets left on you either. I am going to play with your body for a quarter of an hour and then you are finished for the day and then you eat.” He let that sit where Wren could reach it. “You have done every single thing I have asked you today and you have done all of it well. Do this and it is done. Go on. Sit down, boy. We need it.”
He got off his knees and crossed to it on his own feet.
He sat down.
Nobody had threatened him all afternoon. He kept going back to that and could get nothing out of it. Refusing had never been made to cost him anything, and there had been nothing to set his feet against, and he had not noticed until he was already across the room. He had put his hands behind his head at the very start because he was told to, and everything after that was the same act done to a different part of him. He was not proud of it.
He had stopped counting a long way back and could not say when. After that the afternoon had no length to it, only an order somebody else was keeping.
The factor drew the straps. Hess washed his hands in the water bowl and dried them and came and stood at Wren’s right hip, and took him in his hand, and began to stroke him.
And it was good.
The hand came on dry and closed all the way round and took a few strokes to find its pace, and then it had one and kept it. Slow. No hurry in it anywhere. It worked the skin up over the head and waited there a moment with the head covered and then let it come back down, and on the fourth or fifth pass his wet came up under the palm and the drag went out of it and the sound changed, and Hess loosened his grip a little to suit the change and altered nothing else. The man had done it a great many times. It was all in the wrist. After all the weighing and the opening and the measuring and the pricing, somebody was doing something to him instead of taking something out of him, and his whole body went toward it. His head went back against the wood. His eyes closed. Something in his throat let go and made a sound that was almost comfortable, and the hand kept going, easy, going nowhere, and Wren was grateful.
He was still grateful when Hess let go of him and dried his hand on the cloth.
Then Hess reached across to the green felt.
The rod was the fourth from the left. It was as long as Wren’s forearm and no thicker than a wheat stalk and it had a slight sweep to it, and when Hess held it up against the lamp it threw a thin line of light along the ceiling.
“What is that,” Wren said.
It was the first thing he had said since they came in the room. His voice came out wrong.
Hess did not answer him. He hooked a low stool over with his foot and sat down on it at the end of the chair, in between Wren’s raised and open ankles, close in, so that when Wren looked down the length of himself he was looking past his own knees and past his cock at Hess’s face on the other side of it.
Hess said, “Vaudrey. His head.”
She put the ledger down on the first table, which was the only time all afternoon she put it down, and she came round behind the headrest and took Wren’s head, one hand over the crown of it and the other up under his jaw.
It was the first time she had touched him with both. Her palms were cool and dry and smelled faintly of ink, and they were the steadiest thing in the room, and the touch was empty. It was a clamp with a pulse in it. Her fingers stayed exactly where she had set them down. Any man in that house holding a boy’s head like that would have been doing something to him with it. She was making sure he faced the correct way.
She held his head as a thing to be worked on. Nobody had ever held his head like that in his life. Then she tilted it, a small exact amount, until his chin came off his chest and his eyes were level with Hess’s, and she stopped it there.
“You’ll want to know what this is,” Hess said, “so I’ll tell you once and then I won’t discuss it again. It goes in the end of your cock. It’s going to go a long way in. Nothing about it will damage you and nothing about it is a punishment. I need to know what you do.”
“No,” Wren said.
“I know.”
Hess dipped the rod in the glycerine and it came up running, and he took Wren’s cock in his left hand and held it upright, and set the tip of the steel against the slit, and did not push.
The cold went into him a half inch.
And Wren came up out of the chair.
There was no thought anywhere in it. He fought like something in a snare, all of him at once, in every direction he had. His wrists took the straps. His heels came up against the iron and the iron did not care. His back left the wood and the chest strap caught him across the ribs and put him down again. His head, the only part of him with anywhere left to go, turned perhaps an inch inside Vaudrey’s hands before her hands stopped it, and she took all of it up through her forearms and her grip stayed where she had set it. She had been holding it correctly the whole time.
Then it was finished. He was exactly where he had started. The room was exactly as it had been, and his breath was tearing in and out of him.
Nobody in the room remarked on it. The factor’s pen went on scratching somewhere behind his head. Hess waited for him to finish.
And Wren understood the straps. Hess had watched him do it and had waited for him to finish. They had known he would come up out of the chair. They had known it well enough to pay a joiner.
Then the rod moved. The hand around it only held and steered, and Wren could see that it did, and the steel went down into him under its own weight, sinking, the way a plumb line drops, and his own body opened and took it and there was nobody to fight because nobody was doing anything.
He made a sound.
“That’s the weight of it. That’s all that is. Let it go where it wants.”
It was wrong before it was anything else, and that was the part he had come in unready for. Deeply and comprehensively wrong. A fullness in a place that had only ever been empty, a pressure arriving from inside him with nothing outside it to account for.
Then it burned. It came on at about four inches and it was bright and it went all the way up him and he heard himself and did not recognise it.
“Ah,” said Hess. “There. Breathe out.”
“Take it out.”
“Breathe out.”
“Sir, take it out.”
It was out of him before he heard it. Four years of putting that word in front of anything he said to a man standing over him, and it had come up on its own and gone to a stranger in shirtsleeves who was buying him by the night, and he heard it land in the room, and the hand under his jaw was there while he said it and felt all of it go through him.
“I’m going to piss.” He said it fast and he heard how it sounded and could not stop saying it. He had not sounded like that at the crossing. He had not sounded like that in the yard where they read the sentence out to fourteen of them at once. “Please, Sir, I’m going to piss myself, please, take it out, I can feel it coming, please.”
“You’re not.” Hess had stopped moving the rod. He was simply holding it in place with two fingers, and he was looking Wren in the face, and Vaudrey’s hands stayed exactly as they were. “That’s the neck of your bladder telling you a lie. It’s the only thing it knows how to say. Every man in that chair says it back to me. Wait.”
“He called you sir,” Vaudrey said.
“He did.”
“Nobody asked him to.”
“Nobody ever has to.” Hess had not looked away from Wren’s face. “It’s the army in him and it does not wear off, and it comes out fastest when he’s frightened, which is when they want to hear it. Hold on to that one. It goes on the price when you’ve a hand free.”
Wren waited. He had nothing else. He lay strapped in an oak chair with steel in him and his heels up in the iron and waited, and the certainty crested and broke and drained out of him, and he was not going to piss.
“There,” Hess said. “Gone?”
Wren nodded. Vaudrey’s hands allowed it.
“Good boy.”
And it went in another inch on its own weight, and the burn came back and thinned out into heat, and the heat did not stay in his cock. It went outward, into his groin, into the tops of his thighs, a spreading warmth like a coal under a blanket, and he lay in it and breathed and something in his back came unlocked.
“Better.” Hess let it sit another moment. “That’s better. Now.”
Hess took his left hand off the cock. It stood up out of Wren on its own with the steel standing out of it and nothing anywhere holding either of them. Then he passed the rod across into that hand and brought his right up under Wren’s balls, took the whole weight of them in his palm, and began, very slowly, to roll them.
Then he began to work the rod.
He drew it back. Not out, only back, an inch, and then two, and the drag of it going the wrong way lit up every part of him it passed and Wren came up hard against the chest strap. Then he fed it down again, and it went a little past where it had been before.
“Vaudrey,” Hess said. “Let him see it.”
Her hands moved. She tipped his head forward and down, chin toward his chest, and set it there and held it, and the whole room narrowed to the length of his body: his belly, the jut of both hips, the insides of his raised thighs, his cock standing up dark and wet with nothing holding it, and four inches of steel standing up out of that and holding a thin line of gaslight down its length.
He had not wanted to look and he did not get to decide. He looked.
He watched it go down into his own cock and shorten and disappear, and the sound that came out of him then did not sound like him. Hess drew it back and the steel came up out of him slick to the air and the sound came again on the way out.
“There. Now you know what it is.”
He kept doing it. Short passes, an inch and a half of travel, and every time it went down it went a hair further than the last, and every hair further came with the burn arriving fresh at a new depth and thinning out behind into that same spreading heat. Wren’s belly drew up hard and stayed there, ridged where he could see it. His hips tried to get away from it and could not, and then tried to follow it and could not do that either.
“He’s watching it,” Vaudrey said.
“They all watch it. That’s the half of what it’s for.”
Then it stopped.
Hess had not stopped it. The rod went down as far as it went and stopped there, and he let it stop, and Wren felt the thing halt inside him like a bolt going home.
“Ah,” Hess said. “There he is.”
“What,” said Vaudrey, above his head.
“He’s shut. That’s him.” Hess’s right hand went on rolling, easy and even, and the left held the rod exactly where it was and did not move. “Push and I hurt him and it stays shut. It goes when he lets it go, and letting go is the one thing deciding cannot reach. That’s the size of it. Every man I’ve ever had in this chair stops in the same place.”
Wren lay with his head still held down where she had put it and looked at the thing standing out of himself, motionless now, going nowhere, and there was nowhere else for him to look.
“How long does it take.”
“Depends entirely on the man.” Hess adjusted his grip on the balls, took them a little more firmly, kept rolling. “Some of them are an hour. Some of them are three minutes.”
“And this one?”
“Ask me in a minute.”
He looked down at Wren then. His face was the same face it had been at the door, with the same amount in it.
“Relax, boy.”
“I can’t.”
“I know you can’t. I’m not asking you to do it. I’m telling you what has to happen.” The rolling went on. The heat went on spreading. “Everything here waits on you giving it up. Not me pushing and not you trying. You have to put your body down.”
“I can’t.”
“Then we’ll work at it.”
He drew the rod back. Further this time, most of its length, until Wren could feel the taper coming up through him and thought for one bright second that it was over, and then Hess turned his wrist and started it down again and it was not over.
The second pass he had the shape of. He knew where the burn started and what was waiting at the bottom, and his body braced ahead of the steel at every inch and had to be walked back out of the bracing an inch at a time. Hess talked to Vaudrey while he did it. Depths. What he could feel. Something about the last boy and how long he had taken.
And Vaudrey answered him from where she was, which was with one hand over the crown of his head and the other up under his jaw and her mouth a hand’s breadth off his ear.
He got all of it. She asked what the resistance told him. She asked whether it went by trade or only by man. She said something about the ones who came out of the mines. She did not raise her voice and did not lower it, because she was talking to Hess and there was no reason to adjust anything, and every word of it went into Wren’s ear at the volume of a woman speaking quietly across a table.
Her fingers lay along his jaw with the ends of them almost at the corner of his mouth. If he turned his face down into them he would have them.
Her hands did not allow it. But the thought was in him now and would not come back out, and it lay down alongside the steel and the heat in his thighs and would not be told apart from either.
It hit the same place and stopped.
“Again,” Hess said, to nobody.
“Please,” Wren said. “Sir. Please stop.”
Hess did not answer him. A refusal would have been something to hold on to. The words simply went past him, and the rod came back and went down again.
“Please.”
Back, and down. Back, and down. The rolling under his balls kept exactly the pace it had started at, all the way through, and that steadiness was what did the damage, because it meant this had a rhythm and the rhythm was going to go on for as long as it took. Somewhere below in the house a door closed and someone laughed, one bark of it, and it seemed to come from another country. The gas lamp hissed. Wren lay in the chair with his eyes running and fought.
He fought it the way he had been taught to fight things, which was to hold. That was what he knew. You held a line, you held a position, you held your water and your temper and your tongue, and every year of him said hold, and he held, and the rod came back and went down and stopped in the same place, and stopped in the same place, and stopped in the same place.
The factor turned a page. “The countersignature is on the reverse,” he said. “I mention it because the last one you had off me went back to the office twice.”
“Downstairs,” Vaudrey said. She did not take her hands off Wren’s head.
Vaudrey’s hands moved again and tipped his head back up, level, and took the sight of his own body away from him and gave him Hess instead.
Hess was close. A forearm’s length, sat on his stool at the end of the chair with Wren opened around him. And his eyes were on Wren’s face. They had been on Wren’s face for a long time, and they stayed there while the steel went down. He watched with that flat total attention, patient, entirely unbothered, and he had all afternoon.
He was going to lose.
He held anyway. It went on not working, and the holding began to be the only work left in the world, and he began to be very tired.
He let go.
It was a hand opening. And the rod went down into him half an inch, and then a full inch, and warmth went through his hips like water going through sand, and he heard the noise he made and let it go on.
“Ah,” Hess said softly. “Good.”
Another inch.
“Good boy. More.”
More. He gave it more. He had no idea how. It went down and down in slow half-inches, each one arriving with that same wash of heat, and his eyes were running freely back into his hair now and Vaudrey held his head and let it run, and Hess said good, and good, and there, and Wren went on giving it up, an inch at a time, in front of two people who were writing him down.
“How far,” Vaudrey said.
“Nearly all of it.”
“In how long.”
Hess looked at the watch lying open on the felt.
“Nine minutes,” he said. “Nine. Remember it for me, you’ve no hand free.”
Now that he was open, Hess used the whole length of it.
Long passes, the full travel, drawn up until only the last of it was still in him and then let down again in one slow unbroken sink, and Wren took every one of them and gave nothing back but noise. He was open all the way through. There was only the steel going down and coming up and going down, and the hand rolling underneath, and Hess saying good, that’s good, that’s very good, mild and absent, his hands busy and his mind on the price.
Nobody had touched his cock. Nobody had touched his cock since Hess took his hand off it and let it stand there on its own.
He kept arriving at it and losing it, arriving at it and losing it, as it built. There was a hand under his balls and there was steel moving inside him, a palm and a rod, and it was coming anyway. It was coming up from a place he had no name for, low, behind everything, deeper in his body than he had known his body went, and he could not have told anyone where it started because there was no word for the room it started in.
His thighs began to shake in the straps.
“Mouth,” Hess said.
Vaudrey moved the hand that had been under his jaw all along and put two fingers into Wren’s mouth and left them there.
His mouth closed on them and kept them, his tongue going at her knuckles, the spit going down over her hand and off his chin onto his chest.
Hess looked up from the rod and saw.
The two of them looked at each other over the top of him.
“He’s going,” Hess said.
“Without your hand?”
“Without my hand.”
“Should you stop?”
“No.”
Hess let the rod down its full length one last time and left it there, seated, and took his left hand off it entirely. Then the only thing on him anywhere was the palm under his balls, still rolling, at the exact pace it had kept since it started.
The pace held. The two of them simply went on doing what they had been doing and let it come and watched him while it came. Vaudrey left her fingers where they were. She turned his head half an inch with the hand on his crown so she could see his face better, and he saw her look, and she was not looking at his cock. She was looking at his face. His face was the part she was pricing.
It went through him.
It went through him from the base of his spine outward and his back came up off the wood and the chest strap caught him and held him bowed like that, and everything in him fired at once, and it drove forward and hit steel and had nowhere to go.
He heard himself. It was a long low sound and it did not stop.
Nothing shot. It welled. He felt it come up around the rod inside him and stop and come again, thick and slow and hot, and it seeped up out of the slit around the steel in a fat rolling bead and broke and ran back down over Hess’s fingers, and then another, and another, each one on its own long pulse, and it went on and on and on past where it should have stopped, and his hips worked against the straps and the straps took it, and it kept coming out of him in a weld of heat and would not finish.
When it finally began to thin, Hess was still rolling his balls in exactly the same way, and had not once looked away from his face.
Afterward there was a long time when Wren was not doing anything.
Vaudrey took her fingers back and dried them on the handkerchief out of her sleeve. His mouth stayed open after them, and his tongue went where they had been and found nothing there and went again anyway. It had been grateful. That was the word for it.
The gas lamp hissed. His chest was sore high up on both sides, her nails on the one and Hess’s thumb on the other. He was wet from his cock down to the channel in the seat and he could feel it moving on him, still coming, in thick pushes he no longer had any part in.
Hess’s hand had stopped. It was simply resting there, holding the weight of him.
He could do this.
It came up from underneath the way the heat had come. All morning he had braced for something there would be no living through, and it had turned out to be nine minutes and a hand under his balls. There were slaves in this house doing it four nights of the week and going down to their food after.
Hess drew the rod out of him. He took his time about it, and it came with a long wet drag, and Wren shuddered from his shoulders to his heels and the last of it ran out of him freely now with nothing in the way, straight down into the channel, and Hess wiped the rod on the cloth and set it back on the green felt in its place, fourth from the left.
“Note that he came with nothing on his cock,” he said, not to Wren. “Put it where Ridley will see it.” He was looking at his hand while he said it. “There are men in this town who will pay a full night to watch that happen and never take their coats off.”
Hess got up off the stool and came round to the side of the chair.
Vaudrey tilted Wren’s face up. She held it there and looked into it for a while and did not say what she found, and then she patted his cheek twice, flat, the pat you give a horse that has stood well for the farrier.
Hess’s right hand was still wet. He did not look round for the cloth. He put two fingers into Wren’s mouth, turned them once against the tongue, and took them out clean.
Wren swallowed. Nobody had told him to, and it was his own, and he knew it was his own, and he went on swallowing after there was nothing left.
Nothing was said about that either.
Vaudrey took her hands off Wren’s head and stood back.
Hess leaned down. He put one hand on the side of Wren’s face, and he kissed him. It was brief. It was the sort of kiss a man gives to something that has done well, closed-mouthed, warm, over in a second, and Wren, strapped down and shaking and wet to the knees, kissed him back.
“There,” Hess said, close, still holding his face. “You’ll make a good slave.”
Hess straightened up, and that was the last of it.
Her hands had been on him a long time and she had not hurried to take them off, and Hess’s hand had been on his face, and now neither was, and for the first time since they buckled him in nobody was touching him anywhere. He had not known he was leaning on any of it until all of it came away and his head had to hold itself up, and the places where the hands had been went cold faster than the rest of him.
He wanted one of them put back. Either hand. It did not matter to him whose.
And he wanted the man to say it again. Not the kiss, and not the taste that was still in his mouth. The other part, the part about being good. He lay strapped in his own mess with his heels still up in the iron and waited for both, and neither came.
The factor closed his folio.
“They pay more for one that does that,” he said. “Seventeen.”
Vaudrey had already picked the ledger back up.
“Sixteen,” she said, “and Merrow does the skin before he’s collared.”
