There was excited, appreciative chattering, and ribaldry, and thrown missiles, mostly in the form of garbage. Fruit was too precious here to think of wasting. Dried excrement, however, was not, and Elena found the first tears coming to her eyes as she realized what she was being pelted with.
Courage and indifference, she told herself, not even daring to sneak a look up at Damon.
Presently, when the crowd was felt to have had its due playtime, one of the hookah-smoking civic elders stood up. He read words Elena couldn't understand from a creased scroll. It seemed to go on forever. Elena, on her knees, with her forehead against the dusty carpet, felt as if she were smothering.
At last the scroll was put away and Young Drohzne leaped up and described in a high, almost hysterical voice, and flamboyant language, the story of a slave who attacked her own master (Damon, Elena noted mentally) to tear herself free of his supervision, and then attacked the head of his family (Old Drohzne, Elena thought) and his poor means of living, his cart, and his hopeless, impudent, slothful slave, and how all this had resulted in the death of his brother. To Elena's ears, at first, he seemed to be blaming Lady Ulma for the entire incident because she had fallen under her load.
"You all know the kind of slave I mean - she wouldn't bother to wave away a fly walking across her eye," he shrieked, appealing to the crowd, which responded with fresh insults and a renewed pelting upon Elena, since Lady Ulma wasn't there to punish.
At last, Young Drohzne finished recounting how this bold-faced hussy (Elena) who, wearing trousers like a man, had caught up his brother's own ne'er-do-well slave (Ulma) and had carried away this valuable property bodily away (all by myself? Elena wondered ironically) and had taken her to the home of a highly suspicious healer (Dr. Meggar), who now refused to give her, the original slave, back.
"I knew when I heard this that I would never see my brother or his slave again," he cried, in the shrieking wail that he had somehow been able to maintain throughout the entire narrative.
"If the slave was so lazy, you should have been glad," a joker in the crowd called out.
"Nevertheless," said a very fat man whose voice reminded Elena irresistibly of Alfred Hitchcock's: the lugubrious delivery and the same pauses before important words, which served to make the mood more grim and entire business even more serious than anyone had heretofore thought. This was a man with power, Elena realized. The ribaldry, the pelting, even the hawking and spitting had fallen silent. The large man was undoubtedly the local equivalent of a "godfather" to these painfully poor residents of the slums. His word would be that which determined Elena's fate.
"And since then," he was saying slowly, crunching with every few words some irregularly shaped, golden-colored sweetmeat from a bowl reserved for himself, "the young vampire Damien has made reparation - and most generously, too - for all the property damage." Here there was a long pause as he stared at Young Drohzne. "Therefore, his slave, Aliana, who started all this mischief will not be seized and put up for public auction, but will make her humble obeisance and surrender, here, and of her own will, receive the punishment she knows is her due."
Elena found herself dazed. She didn't know whether it was from all the smoke that had floated down to her level before curling away, but the words "put up for public auction" had sent a shock through her that almost led her to black out. She had had no idea that that could happen - and the pictures it brought to mind were extremely unpleasant. She also noticed her new alias, and Damon's. It was actually quite fortunate, she thought since it would be nice if Shinichi and Misao never heard about this little adventure.
"Bring the slave to us," the fat man concluded, and sat back down on a great pile of cushions.
Elena was lifted off her feet and roughly marched upward until she could see the man's gilded sandals, and remarkably clean feet, as she kept her eyes down in the manner of an obedient slave.
"Have you heard these proceedings?" The Godfather-type was still munching on his delicacies and a waft of breeze brought a heavenly smell to Elena's nose, and suddenly all the saliva she could ask for flooded to her dry lips.
"Yes, sir," she said, not knowing what title to give him.
"You address me as Your Excellence. And do you have anything to add in your defense?" the man asked, to Elena's astonishment. Her automatic response of: "Why ask me, since it's all been fixed up beforehand?" was stilled on her lips. This man was somehow - more - than any of the others she had met in the Dark Dimension - in fact, in her entire life. He listened to people. He would listen to me if I told him all about Stefan, Elena thought suddenly. But then, she thought, regaining her normal level-headedness, what could he do about it? Nothing, unless he could do some good and turn a profit out of it - or gain some power, or take down an enemy.
Still, he might make for an ally when she returned to level this place and freed the slaves.
"No, Your Excellence. Nothing to add," she said.
"And you are willing to prostrate yourself and beg my forgiveness and that of Master Drohzne?"
This was Elena's first scripted line. "Yes," she said, and she managed to get through her prefabricated apology clearly and with just the hint of a gulp at the end. Up close she could see flecks of gold on the large man's face, in his lap, in his beard.
"Very well. A penalty of ten ash rod strokes is laid upon this slave as an example to other mischief-makers. The punishment will be delivered by my nephew Clewd."
Chapter 21
Pandemonium. Elena whipped her head up, confused as to whether she was supposed to be the repentant slave any longer. The community leaders were all babbling at one another, pointing fingers, throwing up their hands. Damon had physically restrained the Godfather, who seemed to regard his part in the ceremony as concluded.