The crowd was hooting and cheering. It looked as if there would be another fight; this time between Damon and the Godfather's men, especially the one called Clewd.
Elena's head was whirling. She could catch only disjointed phrases.
" - only six strokes and promised me that I could administer - " Damon was shouting.
" - really think that these little flunkies tell the truth?" someone else - probably Clewd - was shouting back.
But isn't that exactly what the Godfather was, too? Just a bigger, more frightening, and, undoubtedly, more efficient flunky who reported to someone higher up, and didn't cloud his mind with dope-smoke? Elena thought; and then ducked her head hastily as the fat man glanced toward her.
She could hear Damon again, this time clearly above the hubbub. He was standing by the Godfather. "I had believed that even here there was some honor once a bargain was struck." His voice made it obvious that he no longer thought negotiations were possible and that he was about to go on the attack. Elena tensed, horrified. She had never heard such open menace in his speaking voice.
"Wait." It was in the Godfather's lackadaisical tones, but it caused an instant of silence in the babble. The fat man, having removed Damon's hand from his arm, turned his head back toward Elena.
"I will waive, for my part, the participation of my nephew Clewd. Diarmund, or whoever you were, you are free to punish your own slave with your own tools."
Suddenly, surprisingly, the old man was brushing bits of gold out of his beard and speaking directly to Elena. His eyes were ancient, tired, and surprisingly discerning. "Clewd is a master at whipping, you know. He has his own little invention. He calls it the cat's whiskers and one blow can flay the skin from neck to hip. Most men die from ten lashes. But I'm afraid he'll be disappointed today." Then exposing surprisingly white and even teeth, the Godfather smiled. He extended to her the bowl of golden sweetmeats he'd been eating. "You might as well taste one before your Discipline. Go on."
Afraid to try one, afraid not to, Elena took one of the irregular pieces and popped it in her mouth. Her teeth crunched pleasantly. A walnut half! That's what the mysterious sweets were. A delicious half walnut dipped in some kind of sweet lemon syrup, with bits of hot pepper or something like that clinging to it, all gilded with that edible gold stuff. Ambrosia!
The Godfather was saying to Damon, "Do your own 'discipline,' boy. But don't neglect to teach the girl how to cover her thoughts. She has too much wit to be wasted here in a slum-brothel. But then why do I not think she wishes to become a famous courtesan at all?"
Before Damon could answer or Elena look up from her genuflection, he was gone, carried by palanquin bearers to the only horse-drawn carriage Elena had seen in the slums.
By now the arguing, gesticulating civic leaders, egged on by Young Drohzne, had come to a sullen agreement. "Ten lashes, and she need not strip, and you may give them," they said. "But our final word is ten. The man who negotiated with you has no more power to argue."
Almost casually, one lifted by a tuft of hair a bodiless head. Absurdly, it was crowned with dusty leaves in anticipation of the banquet after the ceremony.
Damon's eyes flared with true rage that set objects around him vibrating. Elena could feel his Power like a panther rearing back against a leash. She felt as if she were speaking against a hurricane which cast every word back into her throat.
"I agree to it."
"What?"
"It's over, Da - Master Damon. No more yelling. I agree."
Now, as she prostrated herself on the carpets before Drohzne, there was a sudden keening of women and children and a fusillade of pellets aimed - sometimes badly - at the smirking slave owner.
The train of her dress was spread behind her like a bride's, the pearl overskirt making the underskirt a shimmering burgundy in the eternal red light. Her hair had fallen free of its high knot, making a cloud around her shoulders that Damon had to part with his hands. He was shaking. From fury. Elena didn't dare look at him, knowing that their minds would rush together. She was the one who remembered to say her formal speech before him and Young Drohzne so this entire farce would not have to be reenacted.
Say it with feeling, her drama teacher, Ms. Courtland, had always excoriated the class. If there was no feeling in you there could be none in the audience.
"Master!" Elena shouted in a voice that was loud enough to be heard above the women's lamentations. "Master, I am but a slave, not fit to address you. But I have trespassed and I accept my punishment eagerly - yea, eagerly, if it will restore to you but one hairsbreadth of the respectability you enjoyed before my unwonted evildoing. I beg you to punish this disgraced slave who lies like discarded offal in your gracious path."
The speech, which she had shouted in the unvarying glassy tones of someone who had been taught each word by rote, hadn't actually needed to be more than four words, "Master, I beg forgiveness." But no one seemed to have recognized the irony that Meredith had put into it, or to find it amusing. The Godfather had accepted it; Young Drohzne had already heard it once, and now it was Damon's turn.
But Young Drohzne wasn't finished yet. Smirking at Elena, he said, "Here's where you find out, Missy. But I want to see that ash rod before you use it!" - stumbling to Damon. A few practice swishes and blows to the cushions surrounding them (which filled the air with ruby-colored dust) satisfied him that the rod was all that even he could want.
Mouth visibly watering, he settled on the gold couch, taking in Elena from head to toe.
And finally the time had come. Damon couldn't put it off any longer. Slowly, as if every step was part of a play that he hadn't rehearsed properly, he sidled alongside Elena to get an angle. Finally, as the gathered crowd became restless, and the women showed signs of losing themselves in drink, rather than in keening, he picked his spot.