As he thought about the foray, he realized that they had been lucky indeed, and that their success was due not at all to him, but to Bedh. If Bedh had told them to do so, the Allulu would have ambushed and killed the soldiers before they ever reached the other village. The slave had saved them. His loyalty seemed natural and expectable to Bela, but he honored it. He knew Bedh and his sister Nata, Bela's brother's wife, were fond of each other, but could rarely see each other, since Bedh belonged to the Hans. When the opportunity arose, he traded two of his own house-slaves for Bedh and made him overseer of the Belen House slave compound.

Bela had gone slave-catching because he wanted a girl to bring up in the house with his mother and sisters and his brother's wife: a young girl, to be trained and formed to his desire until he married her.

Some Crown men were content to take their Dirt wife from the dirt, from the slave quarters of their own compound or the barracks of the city, to get children on her, keep her in the hanan, and have nothing else to do with her. Others were more fastidious. Bela's mother had been brought up from birth in a Crown hanan, raised to be a Crown's wife. His brother's wife, caught on a foray when she was four, had lived at first in the slave barracks; but within a few years a Root slave-merchant, speculating on the child's beauty, had traded five male slaves for her and kept her in his hanan so that she would not be raped or lie with a man till she could be sold as a wife. Nata's beauty became famous, and many Crown men sought to marry her. When she was fifteen, the Belens traded the produce of their best field and the use of a whole building in Copper Street for her. Like her mother-in-law, she was treated with honor in the Belen household.

Finding no girl in the barracks or hanans that interested him, Bela had resolved to go catch a wild one; and had succeeded doubly.