Lavina left the small town of her birth,

not knowing where she would head, what she would do.

She wanted to return to the capital,

to find what had become or would become

of her comrades in the harem.  But she knew,

as she strolled through the managed fields

between those small towns, that she had no chance

to free anyone.  Isabel was dead.

And then she thought of the sea

and how she had never seen it.  And so

she idly wandered towards the sea, dozens of miles off

and knowing only the general direction.

She strolled from town to town, begging for food,

and families took her in, little town after little town.

To each she told her story over soup or bread

or whatever else they had to offer her.  After a night’s rest,

she would ask the direction of Minesea, the nearest port,

and set off in that direction.  Some nights

she slept in the wild, chilled by the night wind,

curled up to protect herself without

the silken blankets of the harem.  She would wander

dirty into the next town, begging food and bath,

eventually finding some kind soul whom she’d pay

with her tale of woe and of

the lust of the nation’s three kings.

In the little town of Firnesp, halfway in her journey to the sea,

the husband of the family who took her in

climbed into bed with her in the night.

Lavina resisted, but he persisted,

and had to beat her to quiet her down.

She briefly tied but could not sleep

and left afterwards,

taking some clothes and blankets

as recompense.

Later, in the streets of the village of Takendei,

a woman of forty years took pity on her

in the name of the Lord.  The woman

had a large home, a husband and children,

two teenage sons with one daughter

in the middle.

They had a fat maid who cleaned and served

the dinner Lavina ate, after bathing, with the family.

They heard her tale, and Lavina went to bed.

The next day, when she asked instructions to the port,

the man of the house begged her to stay,

promising her wine and cheese that night with supper.

It would not hurt, she thought,

to rest her calloused feet but one day,

and she agreed.

She played with the children and, at night,

ate again with the family, who treated her

as one of their own.

The next day, she again agreed to stay,

but that day, saw the eldest boy having sex with the maid.

He was rough, though incompetent,

and when he was through his brother took his turn.

It was clear the maid saw this as an obligation,

and the boys stood over her bragging,

using her completely as an object.

She told the lady of the house, who only said

“boys will be boys,” as if it surprised her not.

When she told the father, upon his return

from the fields, he merely said his son

took after him.  As they prepared supper, Lavina tried

to take her leave, but the boys together stopped her.

She struggled and made it outside, where the boys

raped her in the dirt.  The whole family must have heard her cries,

and the father came outside – to stop his sons,

she thought.  But instead, he took his turn

and joked with his sons as they had before

at their grand conquest of the maid.

Again, Lavina left at night, this time

with only the clothes they had pulled from her body.

By the time she made it to Minesea,

she had been raped

during the journey

by more men than had penetrated her

in all her time in the harem –

and she’d lost any love of the countryside

outside of a nostalgia, kept in a bubble,

for those distant years when another girl

had grown up in Halyptus.

In Minesea, she asked the way to the shore,

then walked to the docks and saw,

for the first time in her life,

those gentle waves caressing the pebbles of the beach,

rocking the small crowd of ships.

She looked to the horizon and saw that the waves

had no end, and she wondered at the possibilities

held on what seemed infinite foreign shores.

It does not take long, for a strange woman

of Lavina’s appeal, standing on the docks,

to be approached by a local man.

She did not dismiss him, but asked if he’d like

to buy her a drink.  They went to a nearby tavern

where the other men hooted at their friend,

who they all knew, and asked him about his new prey.

He and she ignored them, and he bought her a beer.

It was only then that he introduced himself

as Hireneld, a crewman on a merchant ship.

They sat, and before long

she told him her story.

“You know Guyesp was a fan of the eastern lands?

Perhaps he learned of the harem

on some voyages abroad.  Some claim

those eastern kings have great harems,

and great wonders besides, though none I know

have ever seen them, and we travel there often,

ferrying merchants’ goods – all the things

they value more than us, while we bring back

their strange spice and Arab silks.”

Lavina had heard little of the region

or its strange customs, and he explained

as much as he could:  how they spoke another tongue,

how they had a different god,

how they were barbaric in some ways,

but how he’d known good ones.

When she asked if any ships were sailing to this place,

Hireneld volunteered that he would be soon,

though his ship would stop along the way.

She asked what she would have to do

to get aboard that ship.  He leaned forward

and whispered in her ear.  She promised to comply,

but only after she was aboard.

He did not tell her he had a wife.

That night, they snuck on board the old rig,

moored in the Minesea dock, as it was being loaded

for the morning’s departure.  Hireneld

could not bring his wife with him, let alone a mistress,

and so he put her in a crate

he borrowed from one of the loading docks

and carried her on board.  She barely fit

and had to curl up within a wooden box

before he nailed it shut.

It was only through her passion to leave

that she could allow him to do this:

nothing could compare to what

she’d already suffered.  In the ship’s hold,

Hireneld set her down as delicately as he could

and had to leave her there, alone, cooped.

Others were coming in and out with crates,

and Hireneld could little afford to stop

and unpack one.  And so he left her.

Shortly before dawn, Hireneld and the other crewmen

came on board, and the ship sailed as the first rays of dawn

lit up the sea and the sky.  Poor Lavina

had never imagined how much boats rocked,

even so close to shore.  She began to panic,

locked away in her swaying crate,

no sign of the man with whom

she’d made her deal.  She began to wonder

if she wasn’t to be left in the crate, screaming

with legs unable to outstretch, if

she wasn’t to be sold to some foreigner:

no one knew she was there,

no one save her would protest.

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