The captives, roped together like beasts going to auction, were being driven along the quayside. A crowd of onlookers appeared out of nowhere. Despite himself, Rannulf found he was watching. Some of the poor devils were women. Their clothes were little more than rags, and barely covered pale limbs that had been incarcerated too long away from the sun. Rannulf frowned. He did not like to think where they would be going.

Slavers. Suddenly a memory stirred in Rannulf’s mind and his face lightened. He was back in the Chase at home and he saw again the bright blue eyes looking up at him, torn with indecision. Even after all these years he still thought of her. Judith. She’d said slavers had been seen in Mandeville Chase. She’d mistaken him for one. He had never forgotten the way she had looked at him that day, half afraid, half wanting to trust…

Some of the women being bullied along towards the harbour perimeter were blonde. They looked drugged, poor souls. He wondered if any of them had been snatched from home. A wooden platform had been constructed in the square at the end of the quay. The slaves were to be sold here, then. Rannulf folded his arms and leaned against the wall. He would have nothing to do with such traffickings.

The heat shimmered upwards from the stone flags in the square. The haze blurred his vision. He shook his head and blinked sweat from his eyes. It must be like a cauldron out there. His gaze sharpened. A fellow knight—the one he was looking for—detached himself from the crowd and joined the slave master on the rostrum. John Beaufour. Rannulf swore under his breath. His skin crawled despite the strength of the sun. Surely even as disreputable a man as Beaufour would not treat with slavers?

Judith’s words came back to haunt him. “Slavers have been seen in the Chase. Where’ve you been that you’ve not heard the warnings?” He’d always felt he’d failed her back there in the Chase. Perhaps, for her memory’s sake.

Tucking his helmet under his arm, Rannulf pushed himself away from the harbour wall and walked towards the block. He could not help the slaves, he was being sentimental—there was no denying that. Judith had been dead for nigh on four years.

Rannulf’s mouth twisted, but memory drove him on. Before he knew it, he had crossed the square and was standing, with the sun beating down on his bare head, at the steps of the auction block. Beaufour had vanished.

Judith blinked and tried to focus her eyes. The light was so bright it burned. They must be in the harbour, as she could hear the sea slapping the sides of the ship. Her head felt thick and muzzy. She shook it, and her shoulder-length hair rippled about her face, but still her head did not clear. She’d been all right till they’d told her to strip and wash. When she’d refused to obey, they’d forced that drink down her throat, and her limbs had suddenly felt as though they belonged to someone else. Then they’d scrubbed her themselves and they’d dressed her, unresisting, in a clean smock.

She wondered, dully, why she could not see straight. Her mouth was dry. Maybe it was the heat. The harbour wavered and swam before her eyes like a desert mirage in a Bible story.

She was conscious of a vague feeling that she should be angry. She should be frightened. But she could not dredge up any feeling at all. Later…later she would…With difficulty, Judith directed a scowl at the hard-faced goblin of a man who was dragging her along the path. Could he not see she was going as fast as she could?

The path was dusty, and flanked on both sides by row after row of people, all staring at her, all eyes. Judith giggled. So many eyes, they looked like silly, staring sheep. The slave-driver jerked on the rope, and her wrists burned. She tried to remember what all these people had come for, but her mind was no clearer than her vision.

The dust was the colour of amber. It swirled around in little eddies scuffed up by her bare feet. It scorched her soles, and this, rather than the proddings of the fiend at her side prompted her to greater speed. At the back of her mind fear was slowly crystallising. She tried to identify it and failed. Her head ached. It was much too difficult to think.

She forced her head up. The landscape was as alien as her strangely unresponsive mind and body. Thin spiky trees, unlike any she had ever seen, arched upwards. The sky was a rich, deep azure. Its perfect complexion was unmarred by even a single cloud. The pellucid waters around the bay echoed that pure, untainted colour. A donkey’s discordant braying threatened to split sea and sky and her head apart. She stifled a moan.

The sheep-eyed watchers wore clothes whiter than any fleece. The brightness dazzled Judith’s drug-dazed eyes. What were they all staring at, these dark-eyed, dark skinned men?

She licked her lips. The fear shifted uneasily in her mind. She was being shepherded towards a platform. She stared. Her mind emptied. There was a void where her innards should be.

She began to struggle, and tried to cry out, “No! No!” She only managed a mumble. That drink had robbed her of voice as well as will. Her breath came fast. She saw a wooden stage, the height of a man, and on it swayed some half-clad girls, roped together. She recognised them. They’d been with her in the hold. It was on these girls that the men’s eyes were fixed.

Judith stopped in her tracks, as a lamb will when it scents the stench of slaughter. She’d got in the wrong way round…the men with the eyes were not the sheep…the real victims were trussed up on the platform.

“Move, girl,” her captor snarled, and thumped her in the back with the butt of a spear.

Judith stumbled towards the dreadful platform. The fog in her mind had quite vanished, leaving it horribly, starkly clear. This was a slave market. And she was about to be sold, like a beast of burden. Wildly she looked about, eyes glazed not with the drug but with blind panic. These men were assessing her worth. And behind the calculating stares, Judith glimpsed something else. Lust. Her legs turned to jelly.

A hundred dark eyes impaled her with the same unwavering, evil desire—the desire to possess and dominate. Far better to be a simple beast of burden than suffer this. Would that she had been ugly, or a crookback…

“Sweet Mother, help me.” Her lips felt stiff, the words came out slurred and indistinct. She was at the bottom of the steps. She tossed her head, and her cropped hair caught the sunlight. An appreciative murmur ran through the onlookers. Judith baulked. The spear butt drove into the small of her back.

“No!” Her tongue was still disconnected from her will, and her shriek emerged as a husky, broken whisper.

Another crippling blow jarred her spine. Judith pitched forward into the dust.

She choked on sand. It filled her mouth and eyes. Someone touched her arm and Judith braced herself for another clout. But the pressure on her arm was gentle—not designed to cause pain. Someone raised her to her feet.

Judith blinked furiously and tried to see through the grit in her eyes.

Her heart began to pump. The drug had dissolved her brain. She was gazing into green eyes, eyes with gold and brown flecks in them, warm eyes, tender eyes. Eyes the colour of the Chase in high summer. The grip on her arms tightened. She heard a sharp intake of breath.

She blinked again, but the manifestation was still there. She must have been driven mad. “R…Rannulf?” She felt dizzy.

“Shift yourself, wench!” her gaoler bawled, in English, placing his rank person belligerently between Judith and the green-eyed apparition. “Who do you think you are? Princess Salomé? We’re waiting for you. Aye, you. ’Tis your turn.”

The spear prodded. A hard knee jabbed, and Judith stumbled up the rostrum steps.

The auctioneer was a spindly man. She spared him no more than a glance. She twisted her head, soured the white-robed figures at the bottom of the steps, and tried willing the clouds out of her mind.