Treason by Orson Scott Card

escape without using the door, trying to remember the layout of the village outside the room so I could plot the quickest possible dash for freedom.
    The door creaked open on its heavy wooden hinges, and a black man in a white robe came in. He carried no unguent, so apparently I had carried that point. He held out to me another robe, a light blue one.
    “Please,” he said, “come out.”
    I took the robe. He turned away and closed the door.
    I stripped away the trashy-looking Allison clothes I had been wearing, drew the robe on over my freshly healed back and shoulders, and bound it in front of me. I felt more confident now, less vulnerable. I opened the door and stepped outside, blinking in the light. The man in the white robe stood two paces back from the door.
    “I demand that I be set free,” I said.
    “Of course,” he answered, “and I hope that you will continue on your journey to Nkumai.”
    I made no effort to conceal my disbelief in the sincerity of his invitation.
    “I was afraid you’d feel that way,” he said, “but I beg you to forgive our ignorant soldiers. We pride ourselves on our learning in Nkumai, but we know very little about nations beyond our borders. The soldiers know far less, of course, than we do.”
    “We?”
    “I am a teacher,” he said. “And I have been sent to beg your forgiveness and ask you to continue on your way to our capital. When the captain applied for permission to put you to death for maiming one of our soldiers, he told us that you claimed to be an emissary from Bird. To him the idea of a woman on an embassy is absurd. He is from lower down the tree, where a woman’s true potential is not always recognized. But I know that Bird is governed by women, very wisely I am told, and I realized at once that your story must be true.”
    He smiled and spread his hands. “I cannot hope to undo what our officer has, in ignorance, done. He has, of course, been stripped of rank, and the hands that actually beat you have been cut off.”
    I nodded. That was probably the least they could do and still appear to be serious about punishment. But I also knew that I had done some damage, too. “The man I kicked,” I said. “I believe he has been punished enough.”
    He raised an eyebrow. “He didn’t think so,” he said. “You must understand—to be castrated by a single kick from a bound woman—he couldn’t bear to live with that story in his name.”
    Again I nodded as if I understood completely.
    “And now,” he said, “please let me escort you to Nkumai, where perhaps your embassy can still be offered.”
    “I wonder,” I said, “if our desire to procure alliance with Nkumai was wise after all. We had heard of you as civilized people.”
    He looked pained for a moment, but then smiled helplessly. “Not so,” he answered. “We are not yet civilized. But we are at least trying, which is more than can be said of many peoples here in the East. In the West, I am sure, things are different.”
    At this point I thought I still could back away, slip out of Allison with no further involvement with Nkumai, and from there disappear from Treason, at least as far as Mueller was concerned. But for good or ill I was still determined to complete my mission and find out what they were selling to their Ambassador that gave them iron in greater quantities than our bodies bought for Mueller. So I said words that would reopen the possibility of negotiation. “There are barbarians in all quarters of the world, and perhaps in troubled times one must befriend those who wish to be civilized in order to protect oneself from those who disdain the refinement of law or courtesy.”
    “Then indeed it will be good for you to converse with those in power in Nkumai,” he said. I nodded benignly, then accepted his invitation. Yet as we got in his carriage and started eastward toward Nkumai, I had the sickening feeling that I was caught in a whirlpool, already so far in that I would be sucked