Shawna Pardot

Shawna Pardot was a woman who escaped along with Raymond Lech and who also shared an account of life under Kamian occupation. Unlike Raymond, who worked as a coppy miner in an outlying province, Shawna spent much of her life as a slave.

Shawna's Story

"I was fourteen when they took me. I had been born under the occupation and grew up in what could best be described as a refugee camp. People who'd been displaced from the regions the Kamians had taken for themselves. We were not kept there, but did not have anywhere else to go. When the Kamians came looking for slaves, my parents willingly gave me up to them. To be honest... I was happy to go. I hated my life in the camp, I hated my mother, I hated starving, being cold, being... looked at and prodded at by the men in the camp. I was told my life would be better as a slave, and while it wasn't good, it was better than how I grew up."

"Kamians don't practice slavery the way its traditionally interpreted. They didn't quite view us as property, but they also definitely didn't see us as on their level. Humans weren't fit to interact with the Kami, we weren't people to them. But they also were not given over to cruelty towards us. That was the true blessing: being cruel to me was like being cruel to a lamp: there was no point. You could yell at a lamp all day long, but it wouldn't turn on. If you beat it, you'd break it, and you'd need a new lamp. That was how the Kamians viewed us."

"They didn't call it 'slavery' either, they called it service. "You'll be in service to the Kami", they told me. I didn't quite know what that meant. I was afraid they were taking me to be a sex slave, or to a work camp, or something awful. Instead, I went to a large, beautiful manor-house, to be essentially a domestic servant. An unpaid domestic servant, with long hours, but a servant all the same. Kamians did not buy and sell slaves. They employed brokers, low-ranking Kamians who went out to the refugee camps to recruit slaves, and if a slave wanted to leave, sometimes they were even allowed to go. In fact, that's how I eventually 'escaped', but I'll get to that later."

"I began my career in slavery as an apprentice to one of the attendants to a high member of a wealthy Kamian family. This woman was not the house matriarch, but she was close to it, and had four slaves who did nothing but see to her needs around the clock. There were a little over a hundred Kamians living in the house, and they had about two hundred and fifty slaves, total. Our conditions were not good, but better than the camp. I shared a small room with the three other slaves to my mistress. I had to sleep on the top bunk, because two of the women were older and could not climb. I was scared because the bed was narrow and had no rail, but I did have the bed to myself. There wasn't much space in the room beyond the beds and a few old chests of drawers in which we kept our belongings. But the room was warm, and we were made to keep it very clean. It was a relief to me to live without bugs, without lice, to sleep on clean sheets and to be warm. Looking back, I don't feel I was ever mistreated much beyond the basic indignity of being treated as less than a person."

"I served the mistress, but my [immediate] master was her hand maiden, an older human woman whom I was being trained to one day replace. She taught me the basics very quickly: never make eye contact, eyes always straight ahead, never speak unless spoken to. The Kamians didn't like to interact with us much. As I said, we weren't people to them, or really possessions; we were just things, fixtures. The Kamian woman didn't even really say what she wanted, she had a series of commands she would use. Instead of ordering a cup of tea, she'd rapidly bark something like "Tea, hot, milk, two tea spoons, sugar, one lump. Go". She'd snap her fingers or ring a little bell."

"For the first few weeks there, I cried myself to sleep. The woman who was my master slept in the bunk bellow mine and ignored it, but the one across from me asked me what I was so scared of. I told her I was afraid of being raped. The Kamians had such power over us, I was terrified my mistress would order me to service her husband, or turn a blind eye... the other woman actually laughed at me. The two in the bunks below us asked her what was so funny, and she told them, and they laughed too... and that's when I found out how silly my concerns were. Apparently, the Kamians don't do that. Humans were seen as so far beneath them that they had no sexual interest in us whatsoever. Raping a human girl would be like raping a lamp: you were weird if you ever even thought about it. The woman told me it was so rare the Kamians didn't even have rules about it: it didn't happen. My master had been a slave to the mistress since the occupation began, [and] she had not once been touched or even threatened. She told me it happened sometimes in other houses, not by the Kamians, but by their other human slaves. But it wasn't a problem, here, because this house kept only women as slaves. They had three male gardeners who lived outside in a cottage, and that was it. She did say that sometimes, very occasionally, when of the young Kamian men might act inappropriately towards a slave girl, but that this behavior was very quickly corrected, and that I would not have to worry so long as I kept to the slave quarters."

"The work was simple, lots of cleaning, sewing, dressing, we were hand maidens. She had four of us because she never wanted to do a thing for herself, so I ended up spending a lot of my time just standing nearby."