* Umbar * The Slave Market.

[Raithen Anar]

From all over the world, slaves poured into Harad, some captured from the north by Corsair raiders, or bandits, for the Slave trade in Harad was the source of great wealth.
Sales were held each week, but once every half-year there was ten days of frantic selling, the cream of the crops, from Harad and all Arda, were displayed and bid for here.

[Raithen Anar]

Raithen , using the roads which was the first thing he had attended to when claiming the Opal Throne, made good time from the south and Pashaar to Umbar. The climate around Umbar, in places, was different from the Great Erg and the jungles and Savannah's, due in part to the air masses that came into the great gulf from the sea. It was good wine growing country, the vineyards produced a golden, stony-tasting wine, which was his preferred drink, - never as fine as Elven wine, it was nonetheless far more palatable than the palm and date wine,sticky and resinous, drunk by the poor. He was having a villa built in the rolling hillsides north-east of the great port, because Umbar was an important, strategic city, and he wanted a base near it.
Alone, and veiled in clothes which showed him as perhaps a well-off merchant, but not a great merchant prince, he entered the slave market and took a seat in the tiers, in full sunlight, since his mothers fiery glance did not disturb him. Arianne, his once favorite had been found floating in one of the garden fish pools in Pashaar palace, suicide, many said, because she had been obsessed with both her position and the King. And he wanted fresh stock.
He waited until the cooler afternoon, when the women were brought out, bathed, perfumed, clad in simple white robes which the factor pulled from them to show their bodies before the crowd. Some with a blue sheen to their blue-black skin, some milk pale, and those were always the most expensive since they had been captured in raids to the north , many with the golden skin of the desert tribes. His wealth was bottomless. Over millenia he had bought mines of opals, diamonds, gold, iron, had money in the Slave Trade, in cocoa-beans, in olive oil, in many things, and there was an old man in Umbar whose family had dealt with his wealth for generations. It was impossible to count it, Akhbar had said some years ago. But money meant little to Raithen except for what he could buy - and what he was buying here, was hopefully, fertile beauties.

[Raithen Anar]

Raithen sat up as the woman was shown, interested . She was unusually beautiful , with strange eyes and she seemed to look down at the crowd, unintimidated, even haughty, - he sensed a darkness within her that he responded to instantly, darkness and fire, and he did not even bother with the opening bids, her figure would stop a man in his tracks, and she would go very high, all he would do was top the highest bid. So he sat back, and relaxed. He touched her mind with his and saw her head turn. Ah, so she had powers, not like his, but knowledge, arts, the mysteries of women, she knew she need be afraid of no man. yet, that would change, but she had more spirit than he had seen in any woman of these lands, and he would have her.