Herald of Steel

The following examples were how most working girls in Adhania ended up- maids, mistresses, cheap playgirls, vagabonds, or slaves.

And aside from the first two, the reality was far far less glamorous than what it looked from the outside.

This was also not counting the girls who simply 'fell out' mid way.

It was only natural for a great many to simply die from various sicknesses and diseases along the way- life in the cities was already hazardous enough, from all the plagues, cholera, smallpox, and other various outbreaks.

Then add to it the dirty, dingy places that were the brothels and questionable sources of its water and drinks, and it was hardly ever the face of hygiene.

There was also the ever looming threat of pregnancy and subsequent death from delivery as only the very top courtesans got to even hear about the miracle contraceptive, much less have access to it.

For the other 99.9%, they had to make do with cheap alternatives, scooping the 'cream' out manually with water and a special 'scraper' made of bamboo, prayers at shrines and temples. And if those did not work and they still got a bugger attached to them, there was the most dangerous of all options, a very crude form of surgery involving wooden 'chopsticks' and a 'doctor' moving his hand around the girl's lower parts and trying to literally tear out the fetus from the womb lining.

There was really no need to describe how dangerous or painful that procedure was.

Without even a modern flashlight to see where he was going, the doctor could be down there for minutes, blindly twirling his sharp tool around and praying for a catch, while destroying the surrounding delicate walls with the stick's sharp points.

It must have been excruciating.

And even if she somehow survived that, there was still the worry of the bruished place becoming infected or even the mildest outcome- just not that tight anymore.

Due to all the risks involved, most girls tended to keep that option as only the last resort, the desperate alternative.

However, even the most gentle method- the contraceptive medicine had side effects, such as ruining the womb, and turning it infertile.

This was also another reason such women had difficulty forming a family- because in this day and age, the main reason you started a family was to have children.

There might or might not be love involved, but there had to be kids.

So those married women who were unable to give birth, be it due to poor health, sickness, or even genetics, might feel like living in hell every day.

There were all types of rumors and superstitions going on about them- calling them cursed, abandoned, unlucky, and even witches.

….

Another type of working girls who fell out midway were the naive, foolish ones, who got duped into falling in love with their clients.

This was a whole nother topic of shenanigans, but the gist was these women would try to convince one of her clients to buy her out from the brothel and make him her mistress, promising he was the apple of her eye.

Trouble was it was hard for a woman seeing nine other men the same night to convince a man with just words. So the man would usually ask for some kind of proof.

This might be something fairly innocuous like a lock of hair or cut fingernails, to the macabre like entire fingers or toes, to the most damning of all, asking the woman to shave her head and tattoo the man's name on her back.

This was thought to be the ultimate show of love for any working girl.

But if the prostitute did do the last part and then her partner ghosted her… her life would basically be over.

As it could be imagined, brothels owners certainly did not like a work places romances, they wanted their girl to just stay in the building and keep earning them money.

So if a girl ever did such a thing and then was not bought out by her man, she would be immediately thrown out into the streets without a single penny.

Who customer would ever order a prostitute with a shaved head anyway?

….

But even still these girls were still not the truly unlucky ones. At least they could curse their own stupidity for getting this mess.

That credit would go to the girls sold to or taken captive by a slaver and ending up in the hands of people with 'peculiar' taste, which was euphemism for sadists and the mentally unsound, people who simply liked to hurt others, like Pasha Muazz's 'hunting' games.

Desperate girls who were just thrown out of their jobs would be their perfect type of prey.

Fortunately, such deviants were very rare as a whole and most of the women had a sixth sense towards such degeneration.

So the type of people that wanted them to have them, well most of the times, the women would refuse.

They would at best consent to becoming a working woman for a travelling band of mercenaries, although even that, few women wanted to endure that kind of constant hardship of travel.

This low demand was also another reason why most of the entertaining women did not end up in the clutches of the slavers.

Few slavers wanted to buy them, especially at their demanded prices!n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

Because be it the brothels or even the desperate women themselves, naturally both wanted to sell around the original prices of purchase.

However, the problem was beauty and youth were depreciating assets.

Hence these working women were often left to try and work out their lives on their own.

...

This was the brief history of the whole 'entertainer' economy in Zanzan and as a whole Adhania.

There were a few regional differences, but in general which was how things went in this country.

Also, for those interested what was the second reason why slavers paid fathers twice to buy their daughters, well it had to do with Adhania's law about slavery and contracts.

In Adhania, it was officially illegal to capture a freedman and turn him into a slave.

So you could not simply go on raids of remote villages and then sell them to the cities.

Instead, you had to buy these people first using a contract.

Adult men and women would make this decision for themselves, but in the case of children, it would be their parents.

However that changed once the child reached adulthood.

If both their parents were free people, the children had the right to demand their freedom or at least 're-sell' themselves when they reached fourteen years old, pocketing the money for themselves.

The law determined this as fourteen was the age where one became an adult, and thus capable of signing a contract by themselves.

Now in reality this legal procedure mostly existed only on paper, as nobody really cared about such child labor laws.

Young slaves were hardly even given back their freedom back when they came to age and even if they were bought, like those young girls, the money always ended up in their parent's pockets, not theirs.

In fact, most of the populace did not even know such slave laws existed because it was so rarely enforced. So those children most of the time did not even know to ask.

And the reason why the Royal court and the various lords turned a near complete blind eye to this was simply due to how much demand there was for slaves.

Extra hands were always needed everywhere and the regular methods- debt bondage, sale, children born of enslaved mothers, and wars and raids of surrounding lands were not always enough to fulfill them.

It was even an open secret that a large part of the slaves in the market were illegal, taken through kidnapping or coercion.

Yet there were occasional shortfalls.

So the last thing the nobility wanted was for more slaves to demand their freedom.

Some lords even discouraged freeing slaves in general, although this was also very rare.

Adhania had a culture of freeing slaves once they reached a certain age or served a certain number of years. It was an unwritten social rule and as they say, the hardest rules to break are the unwritten ones.

Thus unlike say in the Americas, it was quite hard to find generational slaves in Adhania. Most freed their slaves after a certain period and then rehired them as servants.

Now back to the topic of the pimps, as it could be seen, these contracts did not hold that much sway over them.

So why did they do it anyway?

Well, this was because these playgirls were special, they got to rub shoulders with the nobles.

So if the girls were just kidnapped or tricked into prostitution at a really early age, they might whisper their grievances to these powerful men.

And although a noble would never put similar cries of a peasant into his eyes, if he somehow fell for the girl and wanted to make his mistress… well then it would be bad news for the slave.

This was something the various pimps and slavers learned the hard way over the centuries, as the nobles used this law to snatch the girls away for themselves.

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