The Master came down to look over his ponies when the wish took him, the way a man who keeps fine horses goes down to the paddock on a morning he has no work for them, for the pleasure of owning things well-made and the choosing of which to put to use. That last was the half of it I did not learn for some weeks. He came to look, and to see how his stock was kept. But he came also to choose, and the one he chose was sent up to the house that night, to his bed.
Months on I would know it, and wait for the day, and stand in the line praying his eye would stop on me, for to be chosen and sent up was to be wanted, and there is no hunger a slave comes to feel more sharply. But I am ahead of myself, and far ahead of the slave I was that morning, who knew none of it.
And the stable came alive at the word. A quickening went down the row, a stir in bodies that had been only bodies the moment before, the older hands waking to it as a paddock wakes when the feed-cart turns in at the gate. They stood to be washed before they were told to. They held themselves straighter under the cold pipe. It was not a lightness of the spirits so much as a thing risen in the flesh, a readiness, an eagerness, the low excitement of men who knew they were about to be looked at, and had come to live for it. I could not fathom it then, and was a long time fathoming it.
For I was the newest body in the place, only days off the road, with no one to ask and no question in me to ask it with. I did not know what an inspection was. I did not know what a new slave was to do with his eyes and his hands and his voice when the Master’s eye came down the line to him, whether to be looked at was a thing a man suffered or a thing he was somehow meant to perform. And beneath that ran the worse fear, the new man’s fear: that there were rules to all of it I had not yet been taught, and that I would break one without knowing it for a rule, draw the eye the wrong way, be singled out, do before the Master the one thing a slave must never do and not even know what I had done. The not-knowing was the whole of it. No one was cruel to me. No one had any need to be. I was unmade before he so much as showed himself, by the waiting, and by the size of a thing I had no measure for.
And that morning gave me a sense of him no greater sight ever gave me again. I have stood since in a field among two thousand men bent to the rows, and felt nothing in it to touch what came over me in that yard. There were thirty of us drawn up, the big ones, naked bulls every one, not a man who could not have broken a smaller across his knee. And he came down the steps among us, one unhurried gentleman who could not have lifted the least of us, his steward at his shoulder and one overseer behind and no one else, and at his coming I heard the breath go slow and quiet all down the line, thirty great chests easing into stillness at the nearness of him. That was the power, and it came over me like a tide and never after wholly went out: not in the three who came, but in whatever had been got into thirty bulls that three were enough. The one overseer was there only for the office a master keeps his own hands clear of, the cane and the breaking, so the Master might walk the line clean-handed and never, before us, be the man who hurt us. I did not yet see the use of that. I only felt the power, and was afraid.
I have the shape of it now. An inspection is the thing that makes a slave a slave, more than the brand, which is only the law’s word on him, and more than the collar, which any beast wears. The look improves him, as the knife improves the tree. I would be years coming to want it. That morning I only burned, and did not know that the burning was the first of the wanting, put in me as everything was put in me there, from the outside, by hands that were not mine.
They readied us first, in the grey, as they readied us every morning, for at Beauvert a body was kept as the box hedges were kept, clipped and smooth and immaculate whether a soul came to look at it or no, the estate’s whole pride being in the keeping. The clippers and the long razors went over me, the chest, the belly, the inside of the thighs, and last the groin, where a hand shifted my cock and my stones out of the blade’s way with no more thought in it than a man has shelling peas. Milo’s razor had drawn the worst from me my first day, under the soft slow care of it, and what it drew that day it drew every day after, so that by now I had stopped praying it would not. There in the line, in the cold, for any eye that cared to mark it, I rose. The body the cane had taught me was no longer mine answered hands that were not mine, in the one coin I would have died not to pay, and that it meant nothing to them was the whole of the shame. The rising had unmade me, that first morning under Milo. By this one it was only another chore, and the shame of it had worn to a dull and daily ache, worse than the horror had been.
And then they made us clean, at both ends and fit to be shown, which is slave business and I will not set down the drill of it. What they did to me I had half stopped feeling. But the sight of it done to Jack at the next trough I could not look from. They had him bent over the stone with a hand flat between his shoulders, the great back I knew bowed down and all its strength gone out of it to order, his thighs held wide for the grooms, the strongest and best made of us readied at both ends as he let them do everything to him, a thing long since not worth the fighting. Three nights gone I had lain against that back in the dark and kept my eyes off it. Now I could not take them away. And his face, which he could not keep from me, went slack and open and for a moment terribly human, and the look I had always given him turned over in my hands into something else. The fine animal I had been stalled beside became a man I wanted, the first clean want I had felt since the sea, and the place allowed it me because it cost the place nothing.
Then they stood us in the yard, washed and oiled and bare in the early cold, and we waited. A slave waits. The Master came when it pleased him to come and not before, and we stood for it however long it ran, kept ready against the hour he might want us, as a thing is kept on a shelf. The time was not ours. It never was again.
The Master came out in his own time, and came down the line without haste, the way he did everything. Only he spoke, low, and mostly to Milo, over our heads, as a man talks to his steward about the stock and not to the stock, so that we stood and were discussed and not addressed, which I would learn was its own lesson, and the first the morning meant to teach.
The Master stopped a long while at Finch. “The young runner,” he said to Milo. “I had this one up lately, when he was newly opened.” “He came of age for it at the spring, Master,” Milo said. “Kept to the running till then.” The Master weighed the boy a while, the smooth slight length of him among the big stalled brutes. “Let us see how he has worn since.”
A handler led the boy up to the mounting-block they kept for it and pressed him down across it, a hand at the back of his neck, his face to the boards, his hindquarters lifted and his sex hanging clear below, where the Master could come at all of him at once. The Master weighed the boy’s stones in his palm and drew a thumb up the length of his cock, and the cock, soft a breath before, filled and rose under the handling almost at once and stood hard against the belly, the tip of it wet before the looking was well begun.
“Milo,” he said, and held up the finger, and the steward bent and wet it in his mouth. Then the Master put it to the rim and worked it in, slow, to the knuckle and past, feeling whether it was torn or held, whether it had been used past its soundness or only as it should be. “Sound,” he said. “Tight still, for all he’s been had.”
He did not draw the finger out. He crooked it, and found the place that makes a body answer whether it will or no, and worked it, watching the boy strain and rise the harder, as a man looks over a dish he means to sit down to that night. “I like a virile young pup,” he said. “This one answers well. He will do very well for me tonight.” And the boy heard himself praised and shone the brighter for it.
I stood three places down the line, and felt it as if the hand were on me. When it bore down on the boy’s neck, my own neck bowed. When the finger went into him, the ring of my own body drew tight on nothing and shut, as though it were my turn and not his. And when the boy rose, something low in me reached toward it, unbidden, and would not be called back.
When the finger came away the boy turned his head and took it into his mouth and sucked it, slow, his eyes half shut, glad past all sense. The Master let him, idle, as you let a dog lick your hand, and did not finish him. There was no need, the boy being his for the night. He left him hard and wanting in the cold, and the boy stayed up as he was put and did not ask. His ache was his to carry alone, and had never been the point.
I did not pity him. The free man would have pitied him. I had none to give now, in the line beside him and not above him. What I felt was a flat sick wonder. Lucky pup, said a part of me I could not still, he does not even know to mind. And under it, lower: not how can he, but how long before me.
The Master was pleased. He gave the boy a pat, and another, the easy appreciative kind a man gives a beast that has shown him well, and the boy pushed up into the hand, glad of any touch that told him he had done right. “Send him up to my chambers tonight,” the Master said. “He pleased me before. He can please me again.” Milo wrote it on nothing, in his head, where he kept the whole running ledger of us. Then the Master turned to Jack, who stood at the head of the line where the big ponies stood, and gave him the only words he spent that morning on a slave and not about one.
“The boy’s hole is yours to keep now,” he said. “You’ll let none of the others use him hard, nor wear him loose. I keep that for myself. If he comes up to me marked, or slack, you answer for it.”
“Yes, Master,” Jack said, and lowered his head the small exact amount that was allowed him, and that was all. I did not understand then what had been laid on him: a thing half duty and half the only shape his fondness for the boy would ever be let take, and the two would never after come apart.
Then he came to the head of the line, where Jack stood, and to me beside him, and looked at the two of us together. And I felt the old pull I had felt on the block, when a buyer’s eye stopped on me and did not move on, only worse, for here there was no other buyer to hope past, and the eye that stopped on us had a pleasure in it I had not seen before.
“I have not had them side by side before,” he said to Milo. “I had not the chance. The Norwegian was a thing I bought in an afternoon, on no thought at all, for his face, and I did not haggle, and the house thought me a fool.” He came a step closer and looked from one of us to the other and back, unhurried, weighing. “But the eye does not lie when it is a good eye. Look at them. He will make Jack a match.”
He did not say it to me. There was no sense in saying it to me. But it made me, in a breath, half of a thing I had not been before: the warmth of being set beside the one body in that country I had begun, without leave, to want, and the cold of hearing that wanting turned, by the man who owned us both, into the matching of two beasts for a cart. My one good thing had begun that very morning, at the trough, where the buyer’s eye begins, in the weighing of a fine animal. And here was the buyer, weighing.
Then the overseer set to us at the Master’s word, and what the Master would not do with his own hand the overseer did with his, which came to the same. He weighed our stones, one heavy handful and then the other, lifted and judged. “See how they’re matched,” the Master said, and we were. And I thought of the boy my first night who had crowed about the balls on me. He had admired them. The Master priced them. I had crossed from the one to the other without moving my feet.
The overseer bent us back to back, spine to spine, and for the first time I had the whole warm length of Jack against me, his bare back on mine, his heat coming through the cold into the welts the cane had left three nights gone, the same back that had lain along them in the dark and asked me nothing. “Of a height,” the Master said. “Near enough.” I felt him breathe, and could not tell his breath from my own.
“Bring them up,” the Master said. The overseer’s hand went over each of us in turn and worked us, and I will not soften it: I came up hard under a stranger’s fist a foot from the man I wanted, and so did Jack, on the order of the man who owned the wanting. Then the overseer gathered us both into the one hand and laid us together to take our length, my sex against Jack’s and hot the whole way down it, the first time any part of me had ever touched any part of him, and it was done with a stranger’s fist around us both and the Master’s eye on the join. “A match,” he said. “Near enough.” He found one fault, a half-inch a coarser man would never have marked, and named it, dry, and went on.
It was made and measured and not chosen, and done with a stranger’s hand. And still, under the shame of standing to it, there was the fact of Jack against me at last, traitor and warm, and I was a long time forgiving myself the warmth.
Then he was done with the pair, and came to me alone, and this was another matter entirely. He went over me with his own hands, slow, and named what he found, low, to Milo, and he worked from the outside in. The colour, come up nicely now. The clean line of the limbs. A thumb to the breastbone for the wind. “Sound,” he said. “Good depth to him.” I stood and heard my own body said out, and what shamed me was not that he priced the low parts but that he priced them last, in the same flat voice as the rest, the part of me I would have died before showing set down like the final figure in a column. And still, God forgive me, I felt the small warm flush of stock reckoned high. I have not found the man I was since, only the price, and the long slow fall of it I had not yet learned to fear.
And the last of that reckoning was the place he had not yet touched. He parted me, and looked, and I braced for the finger as it had gone into the boy. It did not come. “Not yet,” he said, to Milo. I took the not-coming for a mercy and did not ask myself what a man means when he says not yet. And I rose under his hand even so, not as I rose under the grooms’ for any hand, but for him, and I knew the difference in the instant of it, and hated it more than all the rest.
Then he laid his hand flat over the brand on my flank, the one gesture I had no defence against, and gave me two pats, easy, the way I had seen him gentle the pony in the lane the day he bought me. “Easy, boy,” he said, low, to me and not to Milo, and something in me leaned into the hand before I knew it had moved.
Then he settled my fate over my head, the way a man settles a beast’s. “Does he settle?” “To Jack,” said Milo, and the Master weighed that too, and found it good. He gave his orders in the measured sequence of a man who has brought on young colts before: to the schooling first, to make the slave, then to the field and the wheel, to harden my wind and lay the muscle on and make the pony of me, and sent up to him after if I gave no trouble. He mulled a moment on whose hands to put me in, and named Boyd. Then, to me, the once: “You will be a good slave for me.” “Thank you, Master,” I said, and meant it, ahead of the dread that should have come first, which shames me yet. He nodded, satisfied, as at a sum that comes out right, and went on down the line, and did not look back.
A good slave, I came to see, was a slave the Master used, and kept, and used to the last of him. And Boyd was the hardest of his beast-overseers, the breaker the rest were measured against. I had not the wit yet to fear the name, nor to see the mercy folded into it like a knife: that to be given to Boyd and made ready was to be a thing the Master meant to keep, and have for his own bed. It was the best a slave could want.
