Chain of Jedrah

“Yes, it was me with whom your father’s crew had their sport,” Rannah laughed drily. “I tried to hate you for it but I failed. I cannot hate you, no one can. You have even touched the heart of Yousef: though you believe it not. Salim worships you. Next to our Lord, my father, it is you I hold most dear.”

Stacie’s world reassembled itself. She turned glowing eyes on the man who owned her. “Your daughter, Master: then you will not punish-”

The wave of his hand broke across her sentence. “A father who fails to punish serves neither his honour or his child.” He quoted coldly. “Ask she whom you love if this is not so.”

Rannah smiled lovingly into her slave girl’s anxious gaze.

“My father speaks truth, slave girl. Should he condone my guilt it would weaken all of us. Come, smile. We are not to die.”

Mohammad Yasin struck the gong. When Yousef came he smiled. He knew!

“You will take the Lady Rannah and give her twenty strokes with the kurbash.”

Yasin said without emotion. “Draw blood if you must, but not prodigiously. Fasten her in readiness, but hold your hand. This child must witness the punishment.”

It was as though rehearsed. Tradition had written the script, honour enacted it. Rannah heard her frightening sentence without visible emotion. Her first thought was of the girl she loved, she gave Stacie a reassuring and admonitory smile. Without a word she knelt before her father and kissed his hand. For a moment they lingered thus his fingers affectionate in her hair, his eyes sad but proud. Then, in serenity and purpose, the daughter of Mohammad Yasin preceded Yasin the torturer from the balcony.

“Please, Master, punish me instead. I love her.”

His regard was curious. “She has told me of this trait in you,” he acknowledged meditatively. “It is quite charming and clutches at the heart. I believe you truly would follow and exchange places?”

“Yes Master. Please give me permission.”

“If you were of Jedrah you would know the absurdity of your request. By our standards it has a certain impropriety meriting its own penalty.”

“I will accept the penalty, Master, if I may ease my Lady.” Yasin laughed at her solemnity. “You had best halt your submissiveness before it provokes me into erotically desiring to whip you myself. You exude an astounding sexuality. Cease your talk of punishments.”

She sighed in defeat. “I am not happy, Master. I am fearful for my Lady.”

“You are not supposed to be happy this day. Let it not concern you.”

“Master, may I speak of myself?”

“Of course, child, you are concerned with your torture?”

“Yes, Master. Has . . . what has been done to me sufficed?”

“If you are petitioning, come kneel before me as a slave girl should.”

Awkwardly in her new chains Stacie obeyed. Yasin turned his chair to face her. “Why do you call me ‘child’, Master? I am a woman.”

Again she had aroused him. “You are many times woman, your blood is hot, your breasts are ripe.” His voice gained tenderness, “But there is in you an eternal child, an endearing quality by which you defeat us all. Cherish it.”

She could not know. Jedrah taught a girl strange things about herself. If this masculine male saw her as a little girl she felt no affront. “Would you torture a child, Master?” she asked slyly.

“In the same way I whip a daughter,” he acknowledged. Jedrah held her captive too, not this man alone. Jedrah rationalized the unbelievable. She looked up, hoping he found her lovely. “Must I go on being tortured, Master? Are there not enough pictures?”

“If the tortures and the pictures are done, what should I do with you?”

“Send me back to my father’s house, Master.” Her suggestion was delicately tentative.

The atmosphere was charged. She hoped he could not see her tremble. Stacie knew how easily she could trespass on his tolerance.

“I had intended to torture you for months or years.” It was as though he was speaking to himself.

She kept a prudent silence.

He shook his head in wonder and amusement. “You have seduced us both with your witchery. Perhaps I should have a stake planted in the ground, tie you to it and have you burned.”

“Yes, Master.”

He slapped his leg in delight. “The way you say that I could believe you mean it. This submissiveness of yours is a menace. You subvert us all.”

His pleasure infected her with mischief. “I have not known I was a witch, Master.”

“Well, know it now.” Thoughtfully he tossed her a key and watched her face. She examined it, unsure, doubting. “For what, Master?”

“Your shackles. Unlock yourself and go.”

He was not jesting, she could tell. She looked at the small key within her hand. It had the weight of all the world. She looked up piteously. “I cannot.”

“There will be clothes and money.”

She examined the impossible and found a woman’s solution. “I will not go without, Rannah, Master.”

“Rannah is bound, awaiting punishment.”

“Yes, Master. I cannot leave her.”

“You quibble terms, child! I offer you freedom.” She twisted in misery. “I love her.”

“But you would leave me and my house?”

It was as though she saw him for the first time. Memory of the two nights was etched deep. It erased Yousef and his whip. She knew herself in the grip of some deeper slavery she could not name. She cast aside the word love as trite and unsatisfying. Here was something rich and wanton and darkly completing, it was of Jedrah. Stacie Blair had no weapons with which to combat it.

“Forgive me, Master, I cannot. Nor do I know why.” She held out the key.

He gestured it away. “You would curse yourself in other months and other years.”

She nodded. “Perhaps. I do not know.”

“I said you were no slave, but I was wrong. Rannah saw you for what you are.”

“I am a slave, Master. Don’t ask me why.”

“You are one of the richest heiresses in the world.” Stacie shrugged.

“It is gone . . . past.”

“Your father . . . what of your love for him, and his for you?”

“Fathers lose their daughters. It is the nature of life.”

“You choose slavery . . . knowingly?”

She nodded, without hesitation she again proffered the key. Once more he swept it aside.

“Those wounds in your flesh and beneath your feet? They are slavery.”

“They were of my torture, Master.”

Yasin waved an impatient hand. “As a slave you would be constantly whipped: if not for disobedience then because of the stirring in the loins your sensuality provokes in those who own you.”

The thought was new to Stacie Blair. She examined it and found it no more than curiously exciting. “A slave is a slave,” she said demurely, eyes glinting.

“And have no mercy on your parent! Condoning my revenge?”

The captive had thought of it, but females are equal to such contretemps. She took a deep breath and challenged him: “We can tell him jointly I have entered your harem of my own will. It has the garment of respectability, he would accept it.”

“You are presumptuous beyond what any slave would be.”

“Then punish me.”

“If you keep harping on that tune I shall do so.”

“I would gladly tell my father I am slave. But that he would not accept. He could never understand. No one in that other world could understand. If you wish to be kind we can concoct a letter. He need never know that while I use the pen I wear your chains.” Hesitantly she extended the key.

Yasin’s features wore a strange mixture of incredulity and adoration. “No, child, go to him now or remain lost. It is best.”

“As you wish, Master.”

He surveyed his kneeling slave girl soberly. “Have you no idea what today brings you?”

“No master. Not beyond the . . . the whipping I must watch.”

“You are to be ringed.”

He saw her tense, her face shadow. She said no word, but looked up at him with the wide eyed innocence of a small girl. “As a punishment, Master?”

“No. You will be doubly exquisite,” Yasin laughed in retrospect. “I had cherished a dream of returning you years hence fully ringed and well marked by the whip as one final gesture of my vengeance.”

“These rings . . . ? In Jedrah they are considered beautiful?”

“They are beautiful, they are potently female.” In silence Stacie Blair envisioned herself.

“You need never wear them. The key is in your hand.” She looked at it, startled. Without further thought she tossed it in his lap.

Quietly he tucked it away. “You will always wear chains. If, from this moment on, you seek to change your mind or to escape you will be forcibly dealt with and punished.”

“Of course.”

“The whip will never be distant.”

“I have known other things here than pain, Master.” They looked at each other and smiled. They had made a pact.

It was a strange journey and a strange command. Stacie was glad there was none to hear the thumping of her heart as she traversed the now familiar passages. The servants who passed her on the way pretended not to see her shackled feet or to hear the clinking of her chain. She had learned again to walk with fettered feet. It took longer, that was all. She wondered whimsically if she would ever run again. Each step she took was a hurting reminder of Yousef and his cane.

On that score she was happy. Unless she foolishly erred with a thoughtless stupidity she need never be tortured again. Whipped yes! But in no worse ways than the one she was about to witness, terrible as she suspected it would be. Yet it would mark a limit to the pain that she might earn, there should be no more of Yousef’s sexually cruel ingenuities.

She knew it vital she should not dwell on what had taken place between herself and Mohammad Yasin. She could not understand herself and her motives, nor could she defend them against a reproachful conscience. Her slavery with all its love and its wonder would not withstand the attrition of an endless guilt. She had done what she had done, not from a conscious decision, but because for her there had been no other choice, she embraced slavery because of some deep seated need within her own psyche. She had no doubts now, she would close the door of her mind to any that might come.

Rannah was hanging by her wrists from the bar, only her toes touched the floor. Stacie remembered it as the final pose wherein a girl was whipped. The girl to be punished was still clothed. What she wore was scanty enough and might shred beneath the thong, but it could scarcely fail to offer some small protection to the loveliness it hid. Stacie breathed a sigh of relief, it was not seemly that the daughter of Mohammad Yasin be exposed naked to a torturer’s eyes, it was bad enough that he should search her body with his whip.

“I must watch you whip my Lady Rannah,” she told Yousef softly. “I am to be fastened in such ways as may please you so that I do not interfere. I need not be stripped. This is our Master’s order.”

The Torturer gave her his small bow and his little smile.

What a repository of secrets he must be! How intimate and knowing a part of this household that he served. He indicated a pillar off to one side of the place in which he must swing and curve his whip. “If it please you, Lady.”

Stacie Blair who had become a slave girl obligingly backed against the post. It seemed a natural thing to do. She was unconcerned about herself. If she was to be bound motionless throughout her loved one’s punishment, so be it. She did not care. Automatically she stretched her arms behind the pillar that they be secured.

Yousef tied her tightly: he would! Force of habit or the code of his profession, no doubt. To have simply tied her hands where she had placed them would have been enough to restrain her from mischief. But when the chafed wrists were firmly corded he cinched her waist and her shoulders too. Her chained ankles he left alone, there was nothing she could do with them. Precautionary restraints! Stacie smiled at the notion: when Yousef tied a girl she knew she had been tied. It hurt.

The kurbash was a fearful thing, a sinuous supple strip of hide tapering from its stock. Placed against the softness of a girl’s skin it had a cruelly contrasting wickedness. Yousef picked it up and ran it through his hands. “Our Master will not be present, my Lady?”

“He will not be present. Now that the slave girl is here you may begin my punishment.” There was no tremor in the Arab girl’s voice.

The deferential bow preceded an act that left the watching girl aghast. With deft and brutal clutch and tug the Torturer stripped the Lady Rannah totally naked.

“It is a ritual demanded by ancient custom, child,” the victim explained to her adored.

Yousef stood in reverence before the lovely nakedness he would now whip. “This is not by my wish, my Lady.”

“That is understood, Yousef.”

“I will make the blows as light as custom permits.”

The naked girl flashed him a look of scorn. “You will do no such thing, Yousef. I thank you for the wish, but you have my father’s order. You will whip me as hard as custom may decree. I shall not thank you for mercy.”

How beautiful she was! What courage! Stacie’s heart went out in tenderness and love. She shrank from the ordeal she must watch.

“Do you wish to be gagged, my Lady?”

“No. I will try not to scream, but if I do then let me.”

“It is time then?”

“It is time, Yousef. Whip me.”

Yousef’s bow reminded Stacie of the deference accorded a good customer when it came time to tender an extravagant bill. The girl bound for punishment acknowledged it with a quiet smile. With her eyes she followed him as he took up his stance. When she had seen enough she turned her lovely head away, smiled one last time at her breathless slave girl, and looked straight ahead of her at the wall. Stacie believed she had never seen anything more beautiful.

Yousef whipped his Master’s naked daughter with immense competence. Having received his orders he followed them: no mercy but a modicum of blood. With a kurbash it was no easy line to draw. He whipped Rannah conventionally from her knees to her shoulders, but he allowed the lash to curl so that hip and belly and thigh were scored as was her back. With care and judgement he cut the tied culprit across the level of her breasts: great snapping thwacks of ringing leather that raised their weal but sent no searching tail to cut either of the twin cones with their scarlet nipples: nipples so vivid that the watcher resolved to enquire if they were dyed for the occasion.

The whipped girl swung and shivered beneath the impact of the length of hide, but she did not scream. She catered to the weakness of her flesh only by panting moans to accommodate the gasping breaths evoked by agony, soon she glistened with the sweat of shock, but her gaze remained steadfast on the wall. Stacie knew she was exerting every nerve and sinew of her will not to scream. For the daughter of Mohammad Yasin a scream would be dishonour.

Stacie watched the wounds mount upon her loved one’s flesh. They were terrible to see, here and there was blood. Yasin was less tolerant of fault in his daughter than in others. Rannah was paying a cruel price for failure to obey. Stacie longed to share the cost, then realised with a thrill of fear that her own day had scarce begun, almost certainly something awaited her.

When the twentieth slash had left its carmine wound upon the naked loveliness of the errant Arab girl the torturer who had delivered it circled her slowly to admire his work and to admire the body on which his tracery of stripes had found a worthy canvas for the brush of his kurbash. For Yousef all that he now beheld was wholly beautiful. Lust had left his eyes, he worshipped. After his protracted moments of homage he made his polite bow, set aside his kurbash, inclined his head once more to the girl bound to the pillar, then left the room and closed the door. Stacie and her mistress were alone.

The silence of the pain room seemed all the deeper for the anguished breathing of the whipped girl, it was the only sound. Stacie stood breathless and helpless watching her love. Instinctively she fought her cords. They fought her back with pain and held her tight. She did not move her feet, the rattle of her chain would have seemed a sacrilege. Rannah leaned against her tractioned wrists, her damp hair against a raised arm. She had not lost consciousness, but her eyes were closed as with a child covering its head with the bedclothes to find a sanctuary from demons. Intermittently her breasts rose from an inhalation that became a sigh, drops of sweat formed beneath her arms and trickled down her flanks, the weight her seeking toes could not support hung cruelly from her punished wrists.

It was a long time before she returned to the world where Stacie was. The bound girl watched the suspended nudity slowly tense, the toes accept a greater burden, the head shake itself into awareness. When the dark eyes focused on Stacie’s anguished gaze the red lips twisted into a half smile.

“Calm your fears, slave girl. I still live.”

“Oh, Rannah, you were wonderful! I would have screamed and screamed.”

“I envy you. It must be good to scream. It is a Jedrah thing that we be mute when whipped.”

“Why has Yousef left you tied now your punishment is done?”

“You should know, slave girl. You were tied as I am. It is a ritual that we stand naked and hurting to reflect upon our sins.”

“Oh Rannah! You have no sins. Are Jedrah fathers always so cruel to their daughters?”

“My father is not cruel. It is I who was cruel by my disobedience.”

Stacie tossed her head angrily. “It is neither of you. It is Jedrah. A girl is nothing here except a body to be used or to be whipped.”

“Come, slave girl, is that truly all I am!”

“I wish I could get free. I want to kiss you . . . No! That is not all you are. I don’t know what any of us are, I’m lost and I don’t care. Now that I’m going to stay forever I suppose I’ll sort myself into the scheme of things somehow.”

The dark eyes became intent. “Stay! Forever!” Rannah smiled, “You do not appear to be going anywhere.”

Stacie told her.

The Arab girl listened quietly, her features softening as though the stumbling words washed away her pain. She nodded understandingly feeling a great surge of love and something akin to awe. “Slave girl!” she laughed delightedly. “I told you, did I not! You seek slavery as a river seeks the sea.”

“Only to you . . . and to Yasin.”

“So you include my father! He has fallen prey to your seduction as have I. You are beyond the dreams of fantasy, I shall whip you daily.”

“Thank you, my Lady. But, please, not the kurbash.” Eyes sparkled.

“That is what I mean! You are a bundle of eroticism so potent you ignite us all, a walking explosive . . . And you don’t even know it.”

Stacie Blair examined the premise and was intrigued. She shook her head positively. “No, my Lady, I don’t know. I think you tease. But if it is so then I think it must be of Jedrah. I was not . . . what you have said, before you brought me here.”

“At least then, you owe this poor desert of ours some small gratitude.”

“l owe it everything,” the tied slave considered. “Oh Rannah, are you sure it is not just you . . . just us!”

“Can you explain away the adoration of Mohammad Yasin. He has just offered you more than any other man in this land would yield.”

It was true! Stacie knew it so. She absorbed the riches of adoration with gratitude, they would sustain her should she be ever tempted to look back. But she suddenly remembered another offering of which she was doubtful.

“Rannah . . . Those rings . . . ! I can’t believe it. But he said today?”

“Well? Are you not proud?”

“But it won’t happen . . . not really . . . will it?”

“Most certainly it will happen. I have just been whipped because I failed to have it done. I was expressly ordered. My father wished it.”

“Why aren’t you ringed?” Stacie asked triumphantly.

“Silly girl! I am not a slave. You are.”

“You have just been whipped as a slave is whipped.”

“I was punished. A girl being whipped has nothing to do with a girl being ringed.”

“If only slave girls are ringed it means some sort of degradation.”

“Don’t be argumentative. I am helpless now, but tomorrow I will not be tied. I can whip you then: if you insist on being difficult. For a slave girl to be ringed is the highest honour her Master can bestow. She wears them with pride. They are of love. Yours will be large and costly. You will adore them.”

“No anaesthetic . . . ?” The question was a vivid fear in Stacie’s mind.

The whipped mistress laughed at her slave girl’s dismay.

“Again you must forgive Jedrah. It is considered that a girl so honoured will bear her pain with the same pride she would bear a son.”

Stacie squirmed. Jedrah had all the answers. She was ashamed of her own feelings: thrill matched fear, excitement countered pain. If told now that it would not happen she would know disappointment. She confessed her mixed emotions.

“You see!” Rannah smiled amusedly, “You are a slave. You think like a slave. Why feel shame, your feelings are those of a bride on her wedding day. See the rings as wedding bands binding you to all you love.”

Stacie gave her companion in distress a look of mischief. “You should write poetry, Rannah. Those rings will hurt terribly. I’ll scream. I’m not like you.”

“Scream then, beloved. No one will think less of you.”

“I suppose I’ll be . . . fastened?”

“You’ll be tied so tight it will hurt. The artist’s work must not be spoiled by struggles. I may tie you myself . . . if anybody ever thinks to let me loose!” It was Rannah’s first evidence of irritation with her predicament.

“I’m tied tight now. Is Yousef a sadist?”

The punished Arab girl chuckled at the question. “No, I wouldn’t call him that. He gets terribly sexually aroused when he whips us or tortures a girl. But all men would. It is one of the mysteries. I think Yousef would give his life for my father or myself.”

Stacie giggled. “His arousal . . . if we must be polite. Is it because we’re naked or because we’re whipped?”

“The two go together, silly. Either one does it. Sometime, when you’ve been a particularly good slave, I’ll give you a special treat: I’ll let you whip a naked girl and find out for yourself. I’m sure that for men or for women it is the most potent aphrodisiac in the world. When I whip you I’m on fire. Poor Yousef! Right now he’ll have some poor serving wench on her back receiving the lust generated by my whipping. Usually the girl he whips has to endure his penetration as something extra at the finish. But I am forbidden as are you.”

Stacie grimaced. “I have much to learn.”

“As a slave girl, yes. When you made this incredible choice of yours I’m sure my father made it plain that slave girls are whipped constantly, mostly to satisfy their owner’s lubricity?”

Stacie giggled again. “You really flower up good old sex, Rannah. You should take lessons from Salim.”

“I dislike four-letter words. If you use them I shall whip you.”

“Very well, my lady, I’ll be frightfully proper and watch my foul tongue. But, yes, your father did warn me. Maybe I’ll get used to the idea. I don’t know about getting used to the whipping . . .” She paused to view a sudden thought. “I say, Rannah, was today your first . . . time?”

The Arab girl laughed in retrospect. “I’m afraid not,” she admitted cheerfully. “It is only my second whipping with the kurbash, but the number of times I have been whipped . . . ? I’ve lost count.”

The slave girl was curious. “But, Rannah, you are the daughter of a rich and powerful and educated man. Were all your whippings because you’d been a bad girl, or were some of them for that . . . that . . . other reason?”

The wealed mistress sparkled at her slave. “You want to know so much, don’t you! I’m not sure what I should tell. But yes, I’m quite sure I have been whipped to give someone joy. Never by my father, but he may have sanctioned it believing it would do me no harm. He is, after all, of this land where women and the whip are one.”

She chuckled at a memory. “When I was sent to school in England we all forgot . . . The head mistress wanted to call the police when she was informed by the matron of the whipmarks on my skin. I have never forgotten her face when I explained, or tried to explain, the truth.”

They talked of many things and of their love. The kurbash was forgotten, the blood had dried on Rannah’s skin before she was released. Yousef was deferential and solicitous. Stacie was left tied to her pillar. She could almost believe she had been overlooked.

The feeling intensified as the hours passed. But the sun was still high when Rannah returned: a quite different Rannah, clothed, groomed and svelte. Only a bare midriff bore evidence of the hide whip. She wore the wounds without concern, they had their own stark beauty on her skin. With her was a man. A man with two expensive leather bags.

Stacie knew! There was no pretense. The eyes of the two girls locked constantly as she was made ready. It was good to be loosed from the pillar and good to have the chains unlocked from her feet. The male was middle aged, small, obsequious and faintly clinical. Stripping before his curiosity evoked no blush. She guessed he had seen much of female flesh. His name was Mr. Mussa, his profession was to perform the service he had come to do to her. Stacie could believe him skilled.

There were two tables, a large and sturdy one with straps, beside it a small one on which were objects from their visitor’s bags. Things from which Stacie cautiously averted her gaze. Obediently she lay upon her back on the larger surface and allowed Rannah to strap her down into a perfect X. With the cinching of her waist she could no longer move. There was a soft leather band across her forehead and another over her neck. She closed her mind to their clear portent. A harness criss-crossed her breasts, when it was buckled she could take only shallow breaths. The little man’s work would not be hampered by any motion of hers, even her knees were tightly buckled down. She knew why that was too! In a little while Stacie Blair would be changed forever! She was possessed by a strange excitement. The familiar current between the dark eyes and her own throbbed doubly intense. Having rendered her motionless, Rannah went to the foot of the table and left the stage to Mr. Mussa.

The pain was of that sickening variety associated with doctors and dentists and the clinical probings of childhood. A pain against which there was no defense, and against which the whole being rose in revolt and anger that it should happen. For Stacie it was a series of agonies that came fast, one after the other. With her nose it was but brief moments before she felt an unaccustomed weight upon her lips and knew it for the first of the rings she was to bear. It seemed enormous, but she had schooled herself to meet the fickleness of new and strange sensations. Within her mist of agony she beheld Rannah’s anxious eyes and in them found her hope. With her nipples, she managed only to moan and gasp.

There was first the absurd minute in which Mr. Mussa frictioned them with his finger tips to ensure their maximum erection. But they had already responded to Rannah and the strapping down of her nudity. They were hard and ready. Ready to be forever changed. Mr. Mussa pierced them neatly and with dispatch. Almost instantly they bore an unfamiliar burden that the rigidly strapped head could not be raised to see.

Pain was throbbing and constant. She could see the swabs stained with her blood.

With the piercing of the lips of her vulva Stacie screamed.

Fear and outrage and the secret place itself were all a part of the cry that filled the room. But she screamed only once. The strange incredible thing within her nostrils moved as her lips moved beneath it. They were its resting place. It retaliated with pain. She moaned and wept, her tears falling back upon her hair. A beaming Mr. Mussa nodded brightly, packed his things and went away. His place was taken by Rannah, looking down with love at the nakedness she adored. She allowed the moans to subside before she spoke.

“Would you like me to free you, slave girl?”

To the hurt girl the question seemed redundant. She tried to nod but could not move. “Yes, yes please!” she gasped painfully.

“When you move it will hurt more. That is why I asked.”

“Please, free me. I want to be free.”

Rannah tugged at buckles. When the legs and feet were relieved of the bands of leather she tenderly locked the chains back on the slender ankles. It was Mohammad Yasin’s wish that the slave girl be chained, this time she would not disobey.

To sit up became a long and painful journey to be undertaken by slow degrees. But Stacie had her hands and her hands did not hurt. As she tenderly raised herself under Rannah’s watching eyes she admitted within her mind that the pain burning at her most secret places was no worse than she had expected it to be. She wished she had not been pierced everywhere at once, but she would cope. She smiled weakly at the dark and anxious scrutiny of her beloved.

“I’ll be allright.”

The effect of the ring on her voice amused them both.

Stacie tried to laugh. Cautiously she edged herself from the table. As she stood erect her incisions took the measure of the metal inserted through them. The pain flared anew. But Stacie was female! With a gesture of apology and with laughter in her words she said: “Please, Rannah, a mirror. I’ve just got to look. I don’t care how it hurts . . .”

Lovingly and with sparkling eyes the Lady Rannah helped her chained and naked slave girl hobble from the room. •••

Stacie wondered if all the black rulers of African states looked like Edie Amin. Not so huge perhaps, but similar contours. This one did. He sat at the dinner table like the Rock of Gibraltar. His voice was Oxford and Harvard and many other things, his dinner jacket was emblazoned and beribboned. He was lucidly articulate and at ease. His name was Amatar Moghere. He had come to Jedrah and the house of Mohammad Yasin to be offered the free gift of a white slave girl. There were, of course, some favours attached. But Mr. Moghere was well versed in such transactions. He preferred them.

Stacie felt sorry for the girl who still bore her name, Suzie, on the skin above her breasts and whose feet were chained as Stacie’s were. They exchanged surprised stares of commiseration at sight of the rings impaled within the other’s flesh. Both were naked, the wounds of the rings made any garment painful, they were still fresh. Stacie cherished a strong suspicion that Yasin wished to show her off. She knew he was immensely proud of owning her and of the splendour of the costly metal he made her wear. Suzie, of course, would be simply merchandise to be displayed to good advantage. The girl was quite lovely but desperately afraid.

Even after days the rings still left Stacie breathless with their beauty. She was never unaware of them. All her life she would remember that first confrontation in the mirror during which her heart had thumped painfully and Rannah’s hand had been reassuring on her arm. So many emotions had assailed her that she could name none of them, but they had clambered enough to drive away the pain and leave only the pride. They were far larger than she had supposed, they were arrogant and demanding of attention, beautifully crafted of some light and lovely alloy whose weight would not distort. She had expected shame from the one pendant from her nose, but she felt none: only an amused curiosity as to how she would adjust to it. The joy of Yasin in what he had done to her became her own.

There were several guests at the formal dinner, mostly the aides of Mr. Moghere. A quaking Suzie was seated next to the great man himself; Stacie drew one of the lesser dignitaries on her left and on her right Mohammed Yasin. It was a place of honour. Rannah faced her father at the end of the table. Amatar Moghere set the tone of the conversation by a frank appraisal of the chained girls and a pronouncement:

“This is as it should be: chained white recognizing their rulers. We have waited far too long.”

“You should emphasize the point at the next assembly,” Yasin suggested affably. If his voice held sarcasm he hid it well.

“My name is Hamid Boshan.” The youngish African at her side was regarding Stacie with a greater appreciation than he was bestowing on his shrimp cocktail. “You have very fine breasts too but they spoil them by too many babies too soon. Will you be available later for fucking?”

Stacie had been warned by a giggling Rannah. She was prepared for conversational shock. She glanced questioningly at her master, but Yasin’s attention was elsewhere. He appeared not to have heard.

“I belong only to Mohammad Yasin,” the slave girl said demurely, feeling smug.

Mr. Boshan sighed. “You have delightful whip marks.”

“They are lovely,” Stacie agreed pleasantly. “I’m so proud of them.”

Her partner digested this slowly. “You walk most gracefully with chained feet.”

“Thank you. I have to, y’know. If I don’t I’m punished.” There was a hissing sibilance to Mr. Boshan’s, “Ah . . . ! You are then truly a slave?”

“Of course! Only slave girls are ringed, haven’t you noticed?”

Hamid Boshan had been noticing steadily, as had the rest of the males present. He sighed deeply. “It is a custom we do not have. It is most becoming. If a man hooks his finger in a ring you would not be inclined to argument, eh!” He beamed at a private vision in his mind.

It was a thought that had occurred to Stacie also. She was now frighteningly vulnerable to control. One finger could reduce her to passive submission. “A true slave girl is always obedient,” she said sententiously.

“Yet you are white, you are American . . .” He looked at her searchingly. “Is it a game you play, or has the whip taught you your place?”

Stacie was enjoying him; it was a game. “My place is where my master desires, the whip keeps me from forgetting.” She felt it worthy of the Koran.

“I think you are: what do you call it . . . putting me on,” said Mr. Boshan.

“But I am not!” Stacie sparkled her eyes at him and placed female fingers on his arm. “I would be punished. Besides, it’s kind of you to talk to me . . . a slave.”

He beamed and seemed to expand. “You would make a very fine fuck, I can tell,” he said with serious judgement. “Are you sure you . . . er, master will not permit?”

“I’m afraid not. I’m terribly sorry.”

Mr. Boshan’s sigh of disappointment fluttered his napkin.

“It is a great waste,” he said sadly. “But tell me, why are your feet chained, do you run away?”

“We wear chains to please our master, he finds them beautiful. For him it is the ankles, for my Lady Rannah it is my hands. I have become used to them, I do not mind.”

“Do you not mourn for America and hamburgers?”

“Why should I? There I could not be ringed or chained.”

“I do not understand you,” Hamid Boshan admitted. He dealt with the fish course in a few mouthfuls, eyeing her shrewdly. “I do not think the young woman beside my chief is as you are.”

“She may not have been trained as cleverly. I think that the only difference between us.”

“She does not bear whip marks as harsh as yours. Perhaps there lies the real difference?” he hinted slyly.

“You could be right, Mr. Boshan,” Stacie conceded without guile. She knew she herself would never underrate the potency of the whip on the female psyche. There was the evidence of the lash on the skin of the sweet and frightened girl striving to keep abreast of Mr. Moghere’s redundancies. The whip made a girl see things as they were. Perhaps Suzie had not been helped enough! She smiled demurely at her companion. “Being whipped has helped me to understand a lot of things.”

“About men . ? Or the world?”

“Are they not the same?” Her smile made Mr. Boshan certain a section of the planet was beneath his heel.

“If it was I who owned you . . .” he surveyed her gravely, “would you be as obedient as you are today?”

“Of course!”

“There is a thing that is not . . . It is not done in my country. Would you suck my cock?”

Stacie trod hard on an errant giggle. “What slave girl would not consider it a privilege, Mr. Boshan!” Her wide eyes held all the innocence of girlhood.

“Do you have a sister?” asked Mr. Boshan.

With the cigars, both slave girls came into their own, they began to earn their daily bread. Each had been briefed. Their ankle chains clinked constantly as they flitted back and forth with the brandy, the cigars and the ashtrays. It was a beautiful little cameo Rannah had coached. Their movements were studied and gracefully stylized. When not actively engaged, they stood erect and waiting at each end of the room, their hands behind their backs so that their breasts attained their full contour and the nipple rings hung free. There were penalties for failure. Even Stacie had been promised a whipping if she failed to please. The threat did not worry her; she felt secure in all that she was.

But it worried Suzie. “I’m scared to death,” she confided in a whisper when they were together at the serving table. “I’m not as good at this as you. Besides . . . he’s . . . he’s impossible.”

How to console! Stacie could think of nothing but lies, the truth might be more than Suzie could handle. She saw herself as gloriously fortunate by comparison. Her soul revolted at the thought of being taken to Mr. Boshan’s “My Country” as a plaything for one of these men. It would be best for Suzie to put on a poor performance and be rejected. Rannah’s whip might be preferable to what she now faced. She was almost glad their brief moments side by side forbade her telling all she knew. But she need not have worried: Fate is always there! A slave girl in serving her masters must kneel, she does not stand. To proffer a small tray and whatever was upon it is most elegantly done by falling to one knee before the lordly male, eyes discreetly veiled so they neither impart or receive a message. It is not normally a hard thing to do. But when the serving girl’s ankles are chained it is no longer easy, it becomes both difficult and hazardous. The number of links between the anklets of the two girls were barely sufficient to make it even possible.

Stacie had mastered the art. Rannah had compelled her.

In any case she was by nature graceful and had a will to excel. Suzie would have had small incentive. She was in trouble from the start. Moreover it was she who must serve the honoured guest. Her distaste and her fear of him helped her not at all.

Amatar Moghere loved to harangue any Assembly of the United Nations into which he could insert his bulk. He now used his host’s lounge as a sounding board. His staff listened with reverence, Yasin nodded gently, his thoughts elsewhere. Rannah’s attention was anxiously but unobtrusively upon the two slave girls, one of which was unwittingly the raison d’être for the gathering.

“We have reached that point in time . . .” Mr. Moghere declaimed sonorously. “When, with the armaments of our allies we may sweep clean this continent of its polluting white -”

It was at this precise point that Suzie dropped the glass on his trousers. The glass was full of gin!

It is quite possible that Mr. Moghere’s desolation may have been considerably modified by this fortuitous proof of Caucasian decadence. It put a neat period on his sentiment. Unfortunately it also put a large and spreading wetness on his trousers. Stacie longed to giggle. Suzie did! Pure nervous hysteria, but ill timed.

“Let us whip her here where we may all enjoy her punishment,” said Mr. Moghere magnanimously.

In the flurry of servants and the brandishing of towels and napkins Suzie managed to get both her knees on the carpet, she buried her face in her hands and wept. Stacie and the lady Rannah exchanged glances of despair. The scent of juniper hung menacingly.

“Stop your crying, girl. Make amends. Show our guest you are capable to serve him,” Yasin’s voice held cold authority. For him there was more at stake than a pair of trousers or a slave girl’s bottom.

Both Stacie and her mistress were horrified. But the Master had spoken, neither dared contest his order.

The unfortunate source of the disaster managed to dry her tears and look fearfully around. Taking heart from the absence of cane or whip she stumbled to her feet. Showing about the same enthusiasm as Ann Boleyn approaching the headsman’s block she went forward to retrieve her honour. Stacie poured the drink and placed it on the tray.

It says much for Amatar Moghere’s courage and sense of destiny that he did not head for the door to seek refuge in his own particular emergent nation. He sat expectant and beaming. After all, any witch doctor will tell you lightning does not strike twice in the same place . . .

But Suzie and lightning had little in common. This time the falling glass decanted just below the senior Statesman’s vest inundating that portion of his person sometimes referred to modestly as ‘private parts’.

It became immediately evident that this alcoholic invasion of Mr. Moghere’s most secret asset was exacting a toll. He sat erect, his mouth fell, his eyes bulged. He showed all the evidence of acute distress. This time Stacie’s giggle would not be denied. With great presence of mind she held her hands before her face and pretended to weep—no doubt in sympathy for the great man’s pain! Suzie was already shedding copious floods of salt. An anxious aide retrieved the fallen glass. With a horrified exclamation the visiting head of State headed for the door.

Whatever stringencies of economy emerging Nations might be subject to they evidently were not reflected in the wardrobe of its ruler. Amatar Moghere returned resplendent, even to the decorations. The evil effects of alcohol, in the wrong places, no longer to be observed on his features. “Such a thing could never happen in an African State,” he proclaimed with satisfaction.

A stern rebuke from Rannah and an awareness of her Master’s regard cured Stacie of her ill timed hilarity. She busied herself with bottles and glasses and with a considerable flourish delivered their V.I.P. a fresh gin with an obeisance that captured the attention of all. However, while she continued her duties it became all too clear that every eye was focusing on the kneeling, naked, sobbing figure of Suzie in the centre of the floor.

“I think just twenty with a cane across her bottom will be enough,” said Mr. Moghere grandly. “I am a kind man.”

Stacie looked at Rannah askance. Only a girl to whom it has actually happened could know the awfulness of the sentence just pronounced. There was an excited susurration of talk among the men, Mohammad Yasin sat frowning, the tempo of Suzie’s weeping intensified. Mr. Moghere sipped his drink, happily expectant of entertainment to come.

For Stacie Blair it was one more graphic emphasis on her slavery. She felt a righteous compulsion to rise to the defense of the lonely girl kneeling in her grief without a friend, but she knew it useless and unwise. It might add to the punishment, certainly it would get her punished too. She was impotent. She was slave. She was unhappily aware that Yasin would have forgiven the first blunder. But in deference to his guest, and in hope of retrieving lost ground, he could scarcely forgive the second. Suzie’s sentence as pronounced by his visitor would stand.

It seemed that by mutual consent the weeping delinquent would be allowed to return to the world in her own time and in her own way. Possibly there was curiosity as to how she would comport herself in contemplation of what was to be done to her. Suzie took her time. When she emerged from behind her hands she used them on her tear drenched cheeks as she looked from one to the other of the intent faces as though seeking a friend and champion. She received a wide lipped smile from Mr. Moghere and a cold absence of expression from Mohammad Yasin. Inevitably her pleading eyes came to rest on Stacie and Rannah. Rannah knelt before her parent. “Please, Lord, may we counsel her, the child needs guidance?”

He nodded briefly, irritated by the contretemps.

Stacie and her mistress led Suzie from the room. The distraught girl clutched at them as though for sanctuary. “I can’t stand it, I know I can’t. It will kill me.”

Rannah caught Stacie’s eye. “She’s never been whipped as you have been,” she explained. “Her skin was kept unmarked. It was a mistake.” She shook Suzie’s shoulders. “You will not die. Ask Stacie, she has been terribly whipped.”

“You will not die, Suzie,” Stacie felt it a small comfort to offer. She turned to their mistress. “But, Rannah, she must be tied. No girl could keep still for twenty. I couldn’t! I know I couldn’t!”

“That is what I fear ,” Rannah admitted. “But she must. So much depends on it. Suzie, do you understand! You will have to bend over to be caned. You’ll have to stay like that until it’s done. If you go rolling on the floor you will be punished much, much worse.”

Suzie looked at them wanly. “I don’t know about such things. I do try but I’m no good at it. To be hit twenty times on my bare skin with a cane or a whip or something . . . It’s not possible!”

“It is possible,” said Rannah with a firmness she did not feel. “And you are going to do it. Come.”

They led Suzie back into the lounge.

“It is you who will punish her,” Yasin said to his daughter.

“You may go for the cane.” He looked at the trembling culprit. “You, girl, stand in the middle of the room and wait.”

Stacie sped to her duties. For the first time that evening she wished her ankles were not chained. Only her hands could hurry. Her feet would move only as fast as her fetters. For a little while she was a busy girl, drawing almost as many appreciative glances as did the sad and lovely child awaiting her penalty.

It was by no means the most severe of the canes Rannah returned with. “Bend down and clutch your ankles, do not bend your knees,” she ordered.

Suzie obeyed, her face a mask of anguish.

The Lady Rannah caned the slave girl methodically, but without inspiration. She did what she must. The visitors from another land watched avidly, their eyes hungry. Mr. Moghere beamed as Stacie replenished his glass. Mohammad Yasin was bored.

It was strange to see the rings in the nipples and nose of the bending girl fall away and hang apart. They shivered and trembled as did the rest of her with each blow. The blows were light, and Stacie wondered if they might not earn the girl who delivered them a penalty herself. It was at the seventh stroke when Stacie was almost ready with her sigh of relief at Suzie’s fortitude, that doom was pronounced.

“When do we commence to whip this stupid girl?” inquired black Africa.

Rannah stopped in mid stroke, turning a perplexed gaze upon the honoured guest. Suzie turned a stricken face in the same direction but maintained her bend. Stacie got the impression that the rest of the company, with the exception of Yasin whose face remained cold, were on the verge of clapping in applause.

“She is but a child,” Mohammad Yasin said tersely. “The punishment suggested requires she be tied: we have a room . . .”

“I am most comfortable,” said Mr. Moghere accepting another drink.

“She is not accustomed to punishments of such severity.”

“I am not accustomed to being bathed in gin.”

Yasin sighed. His case was weak. Resignedly he nodded to his daughter. Rannah struck a blow worthy of Yousef. Suzie yowled and rolled writhing on the floor, hands clutching her striped behind.

“It is as I say,” Mr. Moghere beamed at this confirmation of his thesis. “The white race is decadent and ready for the knife.”

Rannah sank humbly to her knees. “I fear we must tie her, Lord.”

“And so we shall,” Mr. Moghere agreed munificently. “But perhaps you will allow us to deal with the ridiculous damsel?”

Yasin nodded at his guest and at his daughter. Rannah laid down the cane and retired to the sidelines. Stacie knew she was trembling. The Ruler of tomorrow’s world signalled to one of his aides.

The watching girls had to admit it was neat and efficient as of long practice. The Aide, obviously gratified by his promotion, produced from the side pocket of his jacket a folded length of brightly hued foulard tie. Prodding the still writhing Suzie with a highly polished toe he requested. “You will stand up please.”

Suzie tensed and looked up in surprise at the new voice, but beheld no source of hope in what she saw. Hastily she stood erect.

“Your hands please.”

Suzie looked stupidly at her small hands as though seeing them for the first and last time. Dubiously she offered them. Mr. Moghere’s assistant bound them together tightly with the colourful strip. He was deft and expert and cruel. Suzie watched the coupling of her wrists with fresh dismay. She was trembling.

A fresh face entered the picture. It grinned cheerfully and turned its back. Suzie was lifted by her hips and deposited on the Saville Row Dinner jacket like a sack of oats. Hands reached up and lifted the tied wrists over a bent head, then pulled them down and held them in a huge and powerful grasp. Suzie’s nudity flowed down from the immaculate shoulders in a cascade of ivory, her bottom flaring pink, her chained feet far above the floor. As the man who held her bent so did she. Her bottom was delivered to the cane. She was shamingly helpless as a child across its parent’s knees.

“She will learn not to waste good Gin,” said Mr. Moghere. Aide number one whipped the girlish bottom with cruel competence. It could not be said he indulged in wild gyrations of power behind each stroke, but each was more brutal than the single lash from Rannah that had precipitated the African takeover of an essential service. White teeth shone from smiling black faces around the room. Mr. Moghere’s was the whitest and largest of them all. Suzie screamed wildly from the first, her chains clashed as she kicked frantically in the only freedom she possessed.

At the eighth stroke the ebony V.I.P. held up his hand.

“This screeching pullet has no regard for the ears of my colleague,” he complained. “Has someone a small handkerchief?”

It was instantly forthcoming. Stacie felt sure that had he requested a small elephant it would have been produced from somewhere. Suzie was instructed to open wide: an injunction she obeyed with obvious loathing. The caning of the white flesh continued briskly.

When it was done the small round bottom was swollen and livid, there were specks of blood. The Aide retrieved his tie, folding it neatly for further use. The sobbing Suzie, in a daze of pain and fear, was given but a few moments in which to compose herself before being ordered back to duty.

“It is you who will serve me now,” said Mr. Moghere prudently pointing to Stacie. He guffawed coarsely. “Someone else may have the privilege of being bathed in gin.”

Mohammad Yasin was irritated, his evening was going badly. Initiatives were in the hands of Amatar Moghere instead of his own. It was a moot point as to whether Suzie’s fumbling had endeared or damned her in Mr. Moghere’s eyes. His guest’s next insinuation added fuel to the fire.

“The young lady so merciful with the cane should perhaps feel a few strokes herself to teach her not to waste the time of men.”

“The daughter of Mohammad Yasin is not to be whipped in public,” Yasin’s voice was a controlled fury.

“No daughter of mine would so insult her father’s guests,” said Mr. Moghere blandly.

Stacie was horrified. That her beloved mistress be so humiliated was unthinkable. She sensed that Yasin’s tolerance of the evening’s buffoonery had reached an end. If his carefully nurtured plan was aborted because of Suzie’s fumbling he might well exact a further penalty of pain from the frightened girl.

But Rannah was equal to the contretemps. Her face proud and insolent, she knelt before her parent. “Lord, I admit my fault. Our guest is right, I deserve punishment. Permit me to yield myself.”

Stacie knew her Master’s dilemma. Pride forbade compliance. Yet much might be at stake. Rannah had stepped tactfully into the breach. Her pain could buy a compromise, but it was one Yasin was unlikely to accept. Quite suddenly she glimpsed what she must do. She knelt beside the girl she loved and looked up with pleading eyes.

“Lord, it is not meet that my mistress be so used. I am her slave: if a girl is to be whipped, let it be me.”

Stacie warmed herself in the affection that lit her master’s eyes. Beside her Rannah whispered: “No! Oh no!”

“I accept the offer,” said Mr Moghere with such alacrity that Stacie felt flattered, and also quite certain his concern was to see a girl whipped rather than discipline a fault.

Mohammad Yasin nodded thoughtfully. Stacie felt certain he was pleased, the knowledge would aid her in the ordeal for which she had volunteered. Faces were saved and tempers curbed. Only her bottom was forfeit.

“Very well, child, your wish is granted.” In his look was love.

“I would suggest the same number of strokes,” said Mr. Moghere as though making a generous concession.

Stacie quailed. Delivered as Suzie’s had been it was a brutal punishment.

“Certainly not,” Yasin said firmly. “It is not merited.”

“Fifteen,” Mr. Moghere offered hopefully.

“Ten,” said Mohammad Yasin.

“Twelve!” The honoured guest’s bid sounded final. Sensing a rising tension, Stacie did her best. “I am most grateful for twelve, Lord.”

The bidding was done. Now the slave girl had to pay the price agreed. She trod lightly and musically to the center of the room, smiling at Mr. Moghere in gratitude for his generosity. The staff from the African State viewed her with hungry approval. The aide rose and, once more, produced his many hued tie.

“We don’t need that,” Stacie said with more courage than she felt.

“I wish it used. It pleases me,” Mr. Moghere’s voice grated. Stacie held out her hands and watched them bound. She was not going to jeopardise her sacrifice by quibbling. She was surprised how well adapted this item of male attire was in robbing a girl of the use of her hands, she had never been more tightly tied.

A second major hurdle loomed. She was cringingly averse to being draped over a man’s back like a sack of potatoes. It would be more humiliating than the caning itself. It was reminiscent of the Victorian stereotype of lifted petticoats and lowered drawers. In hopeful appeal she looked pleadingly at Amatar Moghere. But her hope died at birth. Mr. Moghere was beamingly intent on her discomfort, shame would be an integral part of it, he would relinquish nothing. Resignedly she lifted her joined wrists and allowed herself to be hoist like a carcass in a butcher’s shop, her hands were securely gripped, somewhere at the back the cane sliced and whirred, her bottom dissolved into flame and fire.

She had not been gagged. She could not request it, but ardently wished she had been robbed of the ability to scream. She had found relief in screams, but after watching Rannah’s stoic acceptance of pain she felt certain that in this company she would gain much merit by remaining silent as the cane cut her flesh. But could she do so! Clenching her teeth she thought of Yasin and of her love. With every ounce of her being she resolved to neither wriggle or kick nor make a sound beyond the panting gasps that no heroics could control. In her blazing agony she lived only to do credit to her lord. She wanted desperately that he and his daughter be proud of her.

The cane cut and sliced forward in the relentless twelve. That night she belonged to Rannah and Rannah belonged to her. Mohammad Yasin had other things to think of. Stacie Blair took her burning bottom to her Lady’s bed and, for a little while, was happy. But the tidings were both unexpected and bad.

“It has all gone wrong,” Rannah mourned. “My father is angry.”

“Because of Suzie . . . ?”

“Moghere refuses her. The poor girl failed to please.”

“She’s lucky. I wouldn’t want to belong to him as a plaything.”

“If that was all it wouldn’t be so bad,” Rannah looked at her slave girl pensively with love. “But it isn’t all. My father’s deal has been rejected. To cap it all. Moghere doesn’t want Suzie, he wants you.”

Stacie froze. To be taken away and used as a carnal toy! It did not bear thinking about. She was frightened.

Rannah laughed at her dismay. “Do not fear, slave girl. My father adores you. Amatar Moghere can find his women elsewhere. There were many hard words. It is finished.”

“And poor Suzie?” Stacie had a vivid sympathy for the pain stricken girl who must now be quaking in her chains.

Rannah made a gesture of helplessness. “I know it is cruel, but my father intends to punish her. I can half sympathize with him. Surely she need not have been so unutterably clumsy,” she looked mischievously at her love. “This can be an opportunity for you. Our Master will leave on business tomorrow. Suzie’s punishment will be left in my hands. If I do not want the kurbash again and the skin stripped off my back I had best make the child howl and bear some marks. It can be you who places them on her skin. Would you like that, slave girl?”

“No!” Stacie was appalled. “I will make you, beloved.”

“I won’t!”

“I will whip you until you do.”

They looked at each other and laughed. In the midst of all else their love set them apart, between them all things were joyous. The slave girl shrugged. She was suddenly excited. Why not find pleasure in the inevitable! Rannah’s compulsion would absolve her from guilt. “Very well, my Lady, I will whip Suzie. Is she to be tortured too?”

“You would like to torture her? She would be delightful.” Stacie found herself considering something that a month ago would have been pure fantasy. To have a naked girl writhing beneath her whip or her hand. What power! What omnipotence! Her loins flamed. She saw Suzie’s doe eyes pleading, she heard the screams . . ."I will have to do what you tell me, my Lady.”

“You are an outrageous humbug,” Rannah declaimed laughing. “You can hardly wait, so you place the guilt on me to keep your little conscience clear.” She was suddenly serious. “Would you like to whip me?”

“Oh Rannah! Don’t tease.”

“I am not teasing, You saved me from being whipped today. Saved me the shame of baring my body for the stripes before that black ape. I owe you much. Honestly, slave girl, I would be happy to be whipped by you.”

It was another vista, the opening of another door in Jedrah. Rannah’s voice was soft, her eyes aflame. With one seductive hand she was lightly tracing her finger tips across the hurt bottom that had been striped before their visitor such a little while before. For the slave girl it was an intensity of sensation before which she was powerless, her wounds multiplied the potency of her mistress’s touch, she shivered deliciously. “You mean it, don’t you!” she was breathless.

“Of course I mean it, silly. You shall tie me and strip me and whip me. It will be my gift to you.”

Intriguing! Whether it happened or not, both were savouring its contemplation: wicked little girls whispering. “When I have you tied I will run away,” Stacie said dreamily.

“That will be good! When Yousef drags you back and throws you at my feet you shall enjoy fifty with his kurbash.”

“I would die.”

“But happily, beloved.”

They laughed together and made love, Stacie’s whipped skin flaring her into new ecstasies as they rolled and hands sought and found. When they lay quiet again Stacie said quietly, “I’m going to do it. I’ll do both if you’ll let me . . . I’ll whip Suzie and I’ll whip you. I feel as though I’ve let you seduce me. You’ve made me want to do it.”

“You have always wanted to. I have simply made you look at yourself. Tell me: When I was whipping you, did you not long to have me tied as you were tied and the whip in your hand . . . ? come.”

“Yes,” Stacie grinned sheepishly. “But that was wanting revenge.”

“I think we all seek revenge,” Rannah mused slowly.

“Revenge for having been born a girl. Girls in Jedrah know so much of whips, the whips men hold and use on us. Why wouldn’t we dream . . . !”

“If you could choose, would you be a man?”

The mistress’s hand stroked a hard nipple, her little finger searing the curve of the breast with its lightest touch. “We are so inconsistent, we women: No, I would not be a man. They have only strength, who of them would ever know what you and I have now! To be a girl is worth ten thousand stripes upon our skin.”

“That’s about the number I can expect to collect in my life as a slave girl,”

Stacie snickered in happy melancholy.

“More! Far more, little slave girl. I promise.” Hungrily they feasted.

In the middle of the night Stacie felt her wrist handcuffed to the bed by hands made dilatory by love. It was a postscript to her day.

A new day does not always sustain the enthusiasms of the day before, trepidation infused erotic excitement, Stacie found herself shivering with both. She knew Rannah was immensely enjoying her anxiety.

But she was not the only one who trembled. In the middle of the floor of the familiar chamber Suzie stood naked, her hands tied behind her back, her feet still chained. She had the appearance of someone who had been waiting a long time. Stacie’s heart and conscience were smitten by the welcoming light that irradiated the girlish features when she beheld their entry. If only the poor child knew!

The feminine radiance slowly dimmed as Rannah broke the news. As though to modify its bleak message she untied the small hands so that their owner stood chafing her indented wrists as she absorbed the edict of Mohammad Yasin.

“But I’ve been punished! That awful thing they did to me yesterday. My behind’s still on fire.” Appealing eyes sought her visitor’s. “It’s so terribly unfair.”

Rannah grinned at her slave girl. “You see, Stacie. It is as I said, for women nothing is ever fair. We will always feel abused.”

Suzie was groping as Stacie had groped, she looked at the Lady Rannah pleadingly. “What does your father want done to me now?”

“He wants you whipped, properly.”

Suzie digested the statement. “Properly means terribly, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And . . . how . . . how many?”

“That is none of your concern.” Rannah’s voice asserted authority. Suzie twisted her nakedness unhappily. “Am I to be whipped in front of all those awful black men?”

“They are gone.” Rannah paused to gather her full enjoyment from the bomb she was about to drop. “It will be Stacie who whips you.”

Suzie ceased all motion. Her bafflement was obvious.

“Why? I’ve never hurt her?”

“Because it’s my wish. If her hand is laggard as mine was with you she shall herself receive two for one from me.”

Suzie flashed a protest of despair. “All this whipping! It’s so . . so hard to take . . . to understand. What good does it do!”

“It tells that you belong to Jedrah, that you had best forget the past.”

The scared and naked girl was unappeased. “But why me! There’s Wendy and Jane and . . . and you!” she looked at Stacie accusingly.

Rannah was amused. “If you fear discrimination I will have the other two brought here and tied and whipped as you are whipped. Would that make you happier?”

“No.”

“You have only to look at Stacie. Does she not bear enough marks to suit you?”

“I’m sorry. I’m just scared.”

With swift grace Rannah stripped and pirouetted. The kiss of the kurbash had left vivid weals and the evidence of broken skin. The marks were lividly beautiful but frightening. She stood naked and proud, displaying herself. Beside her the quivering white girl seemed slight and pitiful. “You will not ask why I bear these,” she ordered tersely. “Be thankful that I too know pain.”

We humans are strange in our seeking for balances and justifications. We need eternal reassurance that it is not us alone who an omnipotent and callous fate has chosen for its sport. Suzie brightened perceptibly at the visual evidence. As she watched Rannah resume her clothes her eyes held reverence, the kurbash wounds were worse than anything Stacie bore.

Suzie was contrite. “I’m sorry, I suppose I’m a sissy. But it’s all so . . . so impossible. I know you’re trying to help. I think what you’re saying that because a man’s business deal went wrong a girl has to be whipped and I’m the girl . . . ?”

“A girl in Jedrah,” Rannah approved. “You begin to understand you are a woman. Come, we will fasten you.”

Suzie was resigned. Sight of Yasin’s daughter’s striated nudity had told her more than a thousand words might have done. As though eager to make amends for a fault she had not committed she offered herself helpfully as her wrists were strapped to the bar and then lifted to stretch her taut. She flushed as she made her pitiful request. “Could I be gagged please? I’ll scream so terribly . . .”

“No, you may not be gagged, child.” Rannah was firm on the point. “The female sounds a girl makes beneath the whip please me, they are potently erotic. Yours are delightful. I may rape you when we are done.”

There was a rapport between them, three members of a club whose insignia was the wound of a whip. Suzie teetered on her toes, her girl’s nudity appealing and inviting, her bottom a rampant scarlet and purple from Moghere’s caning.

When the whip was placed in Stacie’s hands by her smiling mistress she felt like a novice at a banquet whose speech must be the keynote of the function. It was a beautiful and wicked thing, supple and heavy and balanced, wonderfully tapered. At the feel of it she would have gladly fled the room, yet the blood was coursing madly through her veins in an unfamiliar excitement. Suzie’s slight pale loveliness was waiting, beckoning.

“I will allow you only one error, slave girl. A second tender-hearted stroke, and I’ll thrash you until you both scream. Understood?”

“Yes, my Lady.”

The naked girl whose back was about to be whipped looked apprehensively over one shoulder. Rannah found herself a chair. The stage was Stacie’s. She knew not how many strokes she was to deliver on the innocent flesh, she dared not ask, she dared ask nothing . . . she swept back her arm and struck.

It was a blow worthy of Yousef himself. It snapped across the beginning of Suzie’s back above her hips and curled to bite her concave belly. She writhed so that the frantic rattle of her ankle chain was continuous, her head was thrown back so that her hair was wild, but she did not scream. Consciously or unconsciously she was striving to join the Stoic Club.

But it was upon the girl with the whip that the potency of the occasion was to be most vividly and indelibly impressed. All her life Stacie would remember that first sweeping impact of her lash upon the skin of a bound female. After it life could never be the same again. Absurdly she remembered the whispered confidences of a grubby little girl who had explained graphically the origin of babies. It was a landmark in self discovery. Her sex flamed demandingly. Rannah laughed in understanding. Suzie gasped and fought her bonds.

There was the white back! Hers to etch with stripes, to paint with scarlet lines. Aflame with a great need Stacie struck again and ridged the responsive flesh high under the shoulders so that the thong’s tip buried itself in the curve of a breast. As though hypnotised she circled the furiously plunging nakedness to view her work. Entranced, she bent and kissed the crimson weal beneath the engorged nipple. As she straightened up her eyes were close to those of the girl she was whipping. In neither was there either hate or love, only a great wonderment in what was happening. It was quite spontaneous that each should smile. Stacie went back to once more wield the whip, Suzie made no plea.

It was exciting to watch the lines spring up across the swaying back. Gradually Stacie knew that it had become most necessary and urgently desirable that Suzie scream. The crazily plunging girl was moaning and sobbing in erratic gasps, but the true cries that would touch Rannah’s heart and loins had been denied: now Stacie desired them too. Pivoting on her toes she cut the tapered leather down across the swollen bottom that after its ordeal yesterday should have been inviolate.

Suzie screamed most satisfyingly. Again and again the young voice pealed out its desolation at the violation of her flesh. The cries were never the same. Screams of fear, screeching bursts of anger, shrill paeans of pain. Stacie plied her whip across the young back and livid rump to evoke more and more of them in wider and wider ranges of anguish. Experimentally she sliced the soft thighs and discovered new and edifying sounds . . . When Rannah held her hand and took away the whip she was, for a wild rebellious moment, quite bereft.

Stacie was drunk with ecstasy, dazed with the violence of emotion engendered by what she had just done. She allowed her mistress to gently lead her to a seat, together they watched the lovely sweat-drenched, white body fight its terrible battle with its pain. Then the grip on her arm was firm, she was led to the room where she shared Rannah’s bed. In a wild tumultuous abandon they feasted upon each other in their own demanding love. It was a long time before they returned to the naked girl who was hanging by her wrists.

With Mohammad Yasin absent, the two girls returned to the lotus land of their adoration of each other Stacie wore her handcuffs as a bride might wear her ring, her ankle chain was set aside until the return of the master. Yasin would insist on chained feet, but for Rannah and her slave the handcuffs were sufficient and infinitely pleasing. Suzie’s punishment had been enough for the moment, the day before Yasin was to return she would be whipped again so as to shockingly proclaim upon her skin the badge of his displeasure. Rannah judged that to be enough to save her own skin harmless from the kurbash.

They had both known and cherished the knowledge of what they would do. Each found herself intriguingly obsessed by the thought of the act they would perform. They rolled it over in their imaginations and knew their concern with it and their determination to go through with it as being purely erotic, a sensual carnality to delight them both. Over a lazily long drawn out breakfast one day Rannah mischievously took their dream into reality.

“You know what we will do today, slave girl?”

Stacie’s nostrils flared. She knew. For very sure she knew!

“Yes, my lady.”

“It is I who should call you that today.”

Stacie considered the proposition. “No, please! I am not the one who owns a slave girl.” She was quivering with nervousness and with love. “Can’t we just be two girls exploring their femaleness?”

Rannah nodded. “Yes, that is good.” She grinned intimately. “Neither one of us . . . ever before . . . ?”

“I’m shivering with fright,” Stacie admitted. “I think I’m . . . willing to renege.”

“Don’t be absurd. You’d be heartbroken if I forbid.”

“You’re still terribly marked by that awful kurbash.”

“Don’t start getting noble, slave girl, or tomorrow you may find yourself naked with Yousef. Surely that should deter sweetness and light.”

“Yes, my lady.” Stacie gave herself over to the game. “You wish me to make you scream?”

Rannah gave more attention to the question than the questioner had anticipated. “Yes . . . I think I would value that. There is an inborn resistance in me to making a noise: I think it will be so even with you, I will long to be proud and haughty. Break me of it.”

“How many strokes, my lady?”

“I do not care. Whip me as much as you wish, but make it last throughout the whole day. I insist on that, it is an order. One of my last. Once I am tied you must pay no heed to any order I many be foolish enough to give. That too is a directive as of this moment. Understood?”

Stacie trembled with happiness. “Yes, my lady.”

“There is a thing I have learned, slave girl. I have never known a woman fail to scream when her breasts are whipped: I think it would be so with me.” She smiled amusedly at Stacie’s anxious eyes. “I will not forbid you to whip me on those two nice things we wear in front, but if you do not I will be grateful.”

The idea that a girl had be whipped both front and back sent Stacie’s heart pounding again, it invoked incredible possibilities. “You have never whipped mine, my lady. I will not whip yours.” It was a promise easy to make. Thoughts of marring the roseate buds of love by whip wounds was frightening, either Rannah’s or her own.

“It is true I seem already well whipped, slave girl. But with the skill you have acquired I think you can place your own lash between the others. They are mostly on my back, so you have my bottom and my thighs.” She smiled archly, “and any other places you may discover . . .”

Stacie blushed furiously.

They laughed in genuine amusement at her carmine admission of her thoughts.

Awkwardness was inevitable. Stacie felt the world upon her shoulders as they walked to the fatal room. Rannah seemed determined to enjoy the awful experience. She would do this through the words and acts of her slave. Stacie knew herself an instrument and longed to acquit herself with distinction. The strangeness of what they were about to engage in set them to trembling. They laughed about it and made fun, but tension was there. Rannah had ceased to order or direct. She had become passive and very feminine. Stacie sensed the reins had been passed into her hands, there would be no more help, no directives, no decisions other than her own. She felt proud and scared. There was an amused glint in the mistress’s eyes that would take note of all she did.

Rannah stood meekly. She presumed nothing. She waited. “Strip naked!” So easy an order to give, so potent. Slowly and deliberately Rannah removed her clothes. “Go stand beneath the bar.”

The girl to be whipped inclined her head in subservience and obeyed the order. She moved with a touching grace.

When the moment came to strap Rannah’s wrists to the bar the atmosphere between the girls was so charged that Stacie felt sure sparks must surely arc between their fingers, it was an intensity of something shared beyond any previous experience. Rannah’s eyes were dark sardonic pools in which she feared to drown.

“Put your wrists against the straps.”

How beautiful the obedience! But it was precise, it assumed nothing, it demanded orders. The dark eyes bent submissively and watched while their owner’s wrists were circles by the wicked straps and buckled tight. Then came the moment when they were eye to eye and breast to breast. The scent of female musk was heavy from them both. They acknowledged it with small female smiles. Stacie longed to cast aside the straps and take her love to the consummation of the fire she knew was devouring them both. But she believed such feminine weakness might be unforgivable. She had no wish to spend time on the morrow in this place with Yousef. Breaking the compulsion of the eyes she turned to the wall and touched the switch. When her former mistress balanced only on her toes she turned it off. “You are the most beautiful thing in the world, Rannah,” she said with innocent simplicity.

It was a good feeling! Stacie felt it welling within her loins and in every crevice of her being: She owned a girl! The naked body of a lovely female being was hers! She could do what she liked with it. Under a sudden compelling impulse she found the ankle chains and locked them fast upon the helpless ankles of the girl who stood bound upon her toes.

Rannah frowned and kicked, then smiled delightedly at the clatter of the links and kicked again. “I have never been chained,” she admitted. “There is a strangeness . . . I shall learn much today.”

Stacie found the whip. They had already agreed that the one she had used on Suzie was best suited to their need. She seated herself before the tractioned girl and allowed the thong to play back and forth between her hands. She was thrilled to observe that Rannah found it hard to divert her eyes from the thing with which she would be scored.

“You should be made to wait for your whipping. It is de rigueur, is it not?”

Rannah sighed; her eyes sparkled. “That is according to your pleasure, Miss Blair,”

she said demurely.

Again the surge of lust! Stacie too was learning. Why should submission in a girl make you long to whip her! It should be the reverse, but it was not! To whip her or to feed upon her! The more douce she was the greater the hunger she aroused. The dark eyes watched her discovery. They had made it themselves long ago.

“I think I will make you ask for your whipping,” Stacie decided.

“Of course, Miss Blair. But you must tell me when.”

“Why not now? Don’t you want to get it over with?” How wonderful to play with this gorgeous girl!

“My whipping cannot be got over with, Miss Blair. It is to last all day.”

“Don’t call me ‘Miss Blair’. It sounds sarcastic. Call me Stacie. And you can ask for your whipping to begin whenever you like. If you leave it too long I’ll simply whip you harder and faster.”

“You’re doing this beautifully, Stacie. You’ve got me all hot and wet. I don’t know why you were nervous.”

“Well, I was. Terribly! If I’m doing everything right it’s because I love you. Isn’t it nuts!”

“No, it isn’t! It’s delightful. You’ve got me in the most awful female dither I’ve ever been in.”

“Ask me to start whipping you then. That will cure your dither.”

Rannah drew a deep breath. She was uncertain how long her lovely state of euphoria would survive the first blows of the whip. She was reluctant to relinquish her sensuous glow. But she was also femininely curious: about herself as much as about the girl who held the lash. “Please start whipping me, Stacie. I want you to,” she requested firmly.

The quivers were gone, they were replaced by a deep content. She owned the girl she loved, owned her utterly. How great and incredible this privilege! To whip the slender loveliness all day long in a nirvana of sensory delight scented by their own secretions and the sweat of agony.

It was past midday before the Arab girl screamed. Stacie did not mind. The sinuous writhings which the whipped girl substituted for the pealing of her voice were beautiful to watch. In them was all the pain of being a woman and all the sensuality of being loved. To see Rannah whipped was to be given a too intimate vision of all womankind from the beginning of the world.

It had begun with the compelling impulse of three swift and awful slashes as hard and as fast as Stacie could make them. She knew not why, but they happened. They had been waiting for their victim all her life, it fell to Stacie to make them real. While the successive blows fell the tied girl held statuesque in shocked immobility. She absorbed their impact as though breathlessly receiving a gift long promised and overdue. When they were done she trembled and gasped and shook one foot against its chain. The nerve tremors beneath her skin were far more eloquent than screams.

Of the two, it was Stacie who panted the hardest. In a strange need for reassurance she dropped the whip and went to where she could kiss the lips of the girl who could deny her nothing. With a great hunger she clasped the slim nakedness with all her strength and welded her moist lips to those dry from the gasps of agony her whip had evoked. Frenziedly, she cast away the small covering she wore and rubbed her own nudity against that of the girl who could herself make only the smallest motions of response. Sex to sex they moaned their own strange penance. Stacie had gone away and stayed away long enough to cool the hot blood racing through her veins. She was afraid to stay with this palpitating heated flesh for fear of freeing it from its bonds or whipping it in a frenzy of lust beyond control. She wanted neither of these, so she went away and left her love suspended by her wrists and seeking to bear her weight upon her toes. No word had been exchanged.

When she returned the glint was back in Rannah’s eyes; the toes were firm upon the floor. “I won’t do that again,” Stacie said, her words more a threat than an apology. She laughed at her captive. “You talk about me radiating sex, but what about you! I can feel your heat ten paces distant. The way I’m going we’ll never get through the day, I’ll let you free for sure.”

“And keep your appointment with Yousef tomorrow?”

“Would you give me to him . . . honest?”

“I would not want to, but I would do it. I will not spoil you with indulgences. Today is important to me, I’m not sure why, but it is. So keep our pact, slave girl.”

“I’m not your slave girl today,” Stacie reminded indignantly. She curled the whip around the chained legs twice. “Must I teach lessons too.”

When the gasping was done, Rannah managed a penitent:

“Forgive me. It is so easy to forget. Always punish me when I do . . .”

Stacie kissed her captive and promised. She whipped her intermittently through the morning. Rannah did not scream.

It was in the afternoon Stacie got the idea. She supposed it unsporting and unkind and a lot of other things. Grudgingly she was compelled to give credit to Yousef. She found a cord, circled her prisoner’s narrow waist, looped one slender foot below its shackle and tugged it back and up as far as it would go, then tied it there. She found a cane.

“I know what you are going to do,” Rannah said without accusation.

“Am I too cruel?”

“You could never be too cruel. But if I fail to scream do you intend to continue beating the sole of my foot?”

“What other way can I make you scream?”

“You could separate my feet and whip up inside them . . . perhaps I would scream.”

Again Stacie clasped the tied girl and held her tight and found her lips. Rannah was pivoting on one foot, her other raised invitingly and waiting, snared helpless for the cane. “You don’t have to scream, Rannah. I like you as you are.”

“I must scream. You must make me. It has to be that way.”

“How silly we are,” Stacie said sadly. “I love you.”

“You are weakening. Do it quickly. Now!”

Stacie found the cane and with all her recently acquired skill slashed the poor raised sole from toes to heel.

Rannah screamed. It sounded like the jubilation of release.

After that she screamed often. Stacie hurt her cleverly and cruelly and with female skill and cunning.

That night their love was as violent as their day, But, once more, Stacie Blair was handcuffed to the bed.

The plane coasted with little sound to the courtyard wall.

The two helicopters sank to earth within the courtyard itself. Within minutes the entire staff of Mohammad Yasin’s house was safely locked away or struck down senseless if they resisted, among these latter was Yousef. It was a very easy victory.

When the bedroom door was thrust violently open and the light switched on, Rannah and Stacie sat up in bed, startled from their sleep of repletion, both were naked. Blinking in the strong glare it was several moments before they recognized Hamid Boshan. He had gone military. His uniform indicated some sort of rank, his ribbons might have meant anything. His white-toothed smile was the easiest thing to recall.

“And so we meet again!” he exclaimed as though he had invented the phrase.

“Go away,” said Rannah. “Can’t you see we’ve got no clothes on.”

“Very lovely ladies,” Mr. Boshan acknowledged. “You come with me please.”

“It’s the middle of the night. We want to sleep. There’s a hotel in the town. Get out of here.”

Mr. Boshan sighed. Walking over to the bed he struck Rannah on her cheek knocking her sideways. He dragged her from the bed, pushed her on the floor and locked her wrists behind her back with handcuffs. He then turned his attention to Stacie.

“You are not trusted, eh,” he chuckled as he indicated her fettered hand. “The keys are all the same.” He unlocked the cuff from the bed, thrust her on her face and re-locked the metal band behind her back. His strength was prodigious, frightening. The two girls looked at each other askance. “In my country we deal properly with lesbians,” said Mr. Boshan. “Your cunts are made for men to fuck. You will find out.”

It happened too quickly for them to adjust. With their hands locked behind their backs they could not resist. Two soldiers appeared with guns. They were prodded from the room. “It is nice you have no clothes,” approved the officer in charge.

In the courtyard were three other naked girls. They too had their hands behind their backs. They were joined by a long chain and metal collars round their necks. Wendy, Jane and Suzie were as lost as was their former captor and her slave. It took but a minute to add Rannah and Stacie to the coffle. They shook their heads angrily at the confinement of their necks and their linkage with the other girls, but it was a beautifully simple arrangement. All five girls were neatly controlled. Where their leader went the others must follow. From somewhere Mr. Boshan had produced a longish riding crop, with a flash of white teeth he demonstrated its quality on Wendy’s rear. She gave a startled yelp.

“If you do not obey I whip you ’till you do,” he explained amiably. “We walk now to the plane. You make no noise if you please.”

So easy! It was infuriating. The machines employed may well have been the entire air strength of the emerging nation, but they sufficed to effect the efficient kidnapping of five naked girls. Within ten minutes all were airborne.

The girls sat on a long bench against the fuselage of the transport plane. They were quite helpless, any rebellious motion immediately snubbed their collars against their companions on the chain. It was best to keep still.

“My father will kill you,” said the daughter of Mohammad Yasin.

Mr. Boshan acknowledged the tribute to his importance. “Alas no. Your father is a reasonable man.”

“Where are you taking us?”

“Where else but to my country! Mr. Moghere will make good use of you.”

“You mean he’ll fuck us?” Stacie asked inelegantly. “You will be whipped for such impertinence,” Mr. Boshan said importantly. “But not here in the plane. We will do it properly.”

“You mean to tell us that black gorilla has used his damn Air Force to kidnap us all?” Jane demanded furiously.

Mr. Boshan sat very still, his teeth ceased to be on view.

“Gorilla? Our beloved leader?” His voice was cold.

All five girls cringed. They all approved the word, but not its consequences. “He is insane to do this thing!” Rannah affirmed.

Mr. Boshan’s teeth reappeared. “Five kidnapped girls will have disappeared. Who will know or care?” he asked pleasantly.

“Do we have to be chained together like cattle?” Stacie asked.

“It is the way your forefathers chained us not so long ago,” Hamid Boshan pointed out reasonably. “You but pay a debt.”

“What’s going to happen to us? What do you want us for?”

“Four of you will become Mr. Moghere’s handmaidens. One of you has a bargaining function.”

“We’re slaves?” Suzie laid it on the line.

“You are correctly concise,” the officer’s English was beyond criticism.

Five female heads turned back and forth to its fellows on the chain that made their common bond. Ten hands tugged at five handcuffs. “You will never be free again,”

Mr. Boshan explained helpfully. “You will be properly whipped for disobedience.”

The plane droned through the night.

They stood in a line before the King! How else could it be described! Stacie thought bitterly. Five naked girls joined by a chain and collars about their necks, their hands linked behind their backs, they stood for inspection before their conquerer.

“Five cunts all in a row,” intoned Mr. Moghere. No one spoke.

“That is what you are,” Mr. Moghere explained pleasantly.

“Cunts! You know the function of a cunt?” He looked up and down the line.

“You will answer when spoken to,” Mr. Boshan went down the line of female flesh, striking vigorously with the riding crop. “You will also address our Leader as ‘Sir’.”

“Yes, we know, Sir,” five female voices responded in pain. “Good!” Mr. Moghere surveyed his recent acquisitions with satisfaction. “If it were not that it would cheapen our association I would address you in no other way. Cunt! It is a most satisfying word. It is really all you are: slits in female flesh.” His eyes roved and settled on Rannah. “You have been remarkably whipped, I do not understand?”

“Need you understand! I have been whipped, that is enough,” Rannah’s voice was bitter and angry.

“Ah, but by whom?” Mr. Moghere’s eyes were alight with interest.

“I think, Sir, it is a lesbian indulgence,” Mr. Boshan dropped tentatively.

“So!” The Great Man’s eyes roved up and down the coffle.

“We will deal with lesbians. But I believe one among you mentioned the word gorilla?”

The silence was intense. No one but Mr. Boshan looked at Jane. Jane wept.

“So!” the head of State looked pensively at the slight figure of the naked girl. “Perhaps fifty with the sjambok may alter your opinion of me.”

Mr. Boshan was prudently conscious of waste. “Fifty will kill her, sire.”

“Very well then, twenty-five. She can come to my bed when it is done. She should be most grateful.”

The white shoulders shook with sobs, the girl’s head bent so that she saw only the floor. Jane knew herself lost.

“Perhaps someone else would wish to mention the word, Gorilla?” The omnipotent eyes scanned the coffle of girls.

“I could call you many things, you black bastard!” Rannah exclaimed with bitter vehemence. “Send us home before more harm is done.”

Mr. Moghere sighed. “I had hoped to find love among you,” he said sadly. “Cannot you curb your lips.” He looked at his henchman, “Can this daughter of the desert stand twenty strokes?”

“She has been sorely whipped already, sire. I would not take that risk.”

“Ah! Well, we will find ways to tame the bitch. And this one, the one of my delight,” he looked squarely at Stacie.

“I think she could endure a moderate number with the sjambok, sire.”

The brown eyes and the beaming smile focused on Stacie.

“You have a choice, girl. Give me your cunt freely and with love or ask for the sjambok.”

“The sjambok, sir.”

Stacie shrank inwardly, her courage would not last long under the hide whip. For the moment they were finding a frail refuge in the courteous exchange of words beneath which lay torture, rape and perhaps death. These civilities would not last: in them was bathos. Five naked girls were being used for the entertainment of a black despot. Yet she sensed that somewhere in this scene were pathetic cross purposes. Mr. Moghere’s comic opera mention of the word love had not been in satire. If one of the five chained girls could have brought herself to reach out and touch him with affection she would probably be treated as a Princess. Did his surface buffoonery condemn him utterly! How rational was their loathing! Stacie did not know the answer, she only knew her choice of the sjambok had been instant and instinctive.

A silence lengthened. Amatar Moghere examined his five captives pensively. They found no comfort in his scrutiny.

“This is the young lady who comes from influential sources in the United States, Sire. She has a similar potential for possible advantages as has the whelp of Yasin.” Mr. Boshan seemed anxious to conserve expendable female flesh.

“I am not prepared to keep the skins of too many of these wenches inviolate for too long,” Mr. Moghere said irritably. “The other three . . . can they be available for a man’s pleasure?”

“Immediately Sire.”

Decision was swift then. “I leave for New York tomorrow,” Moghere said decisively. “I will explore possibilities. You will deal with these absurd creatures as I shall direct. I have thought of an ideal way for them to spend the time until my return. For now, put them away for the night.”

The cell was bare except for two pails, one held water. The two soldiers who had been their escort withdrew, leaving Hamid Boshan to view his prisoners dismay with an amused eye.

“You’re not going to leave us chained like this!” Rannah demanded.

“And why not?” his voice was bland.

“There’s no need. We can’t escape, that door would hold an army.”

“You do not wear the chain to hinder escape, you wear it because too many others in the past have worn it too.”

“Can’t you forget that!” Wendy demanded hotly. “There were a lot of white people who weren’t getting such a good deal at that time either.”

Mr. Boshan nodded appreciatively. “Very well then: you are chained because you look very pretty chained and because the chain will keep you most uncomfortable. For our Leader and myself this is enough.”

“You’ll take these handcuffs off us, won’t you?” Stacie felt sure she knew the answer.

“You will wear your handcuffs, and for the same reasons.”

“But we can’t do anything . . . ! We’re so damn helpless!”

“What did you have in mind to do?” Hamid Boshan inquired pleasantly.

“Well, at least you can handcuff us with our hands in front instead of behind our backs!”

“I will bid you ladies good-night.” With a fine military salute their mentor departed. His passing was heralded by substantial thuds as the bolts were shot home in the slammed door.

“The dirty sons of bitches!” Suzie summed it up for all. It was an abominable night. The floor was hard. Between the handcuffs on their wrists and the chain that linked them together they could move but little. The only virtue of their metal collars was that they were loose enough that they could turn their necks without dragging at their partners. Jane wept piteously in contemplation of her sentence with the sjambok. One by one they fell asleep striving to comfort her. Stacie was uncertain whether she too might not feel its bite.

The U.S. equivalent would have been a Prison Farm. In Narousse it was called ‘The Estate’. It belonged to Mr. Moghere as did most things in the emerging nation. It absorbed the five captives with remarkable dispatch. Under the watchful eyes of their armed and uniformed male escort they were released from handcuffs and coffle. Each was tossed a scanty slip of a sheath like garment and a ragged straw hat against the sun. They were taken to a smithy where heavy medieval irons were riveted on their ankles, the links of the chain so heavy that the heart of each girl sank in hopelessness as the hammer pounded the rivets flat upon their liberty. Hobbling awkwardly they were taken to a field and presented with a hoe.

Stacie wanted to sink to the ground and weep. Everything was wrong. There were no bright spots anywhere. The sun was hot, the field enormous, the rows of young cane waiting to be hoed were endless. At each end of the field a soldier with a rifle sat beneath a tree. A female wardress as massive in her way as the Great Man himself sauntered from prisoner to prisoner to check their work. She carried a slender, smooth and shining cane. Her manner was jocular, her English erratic. She seemed a very happy woman.

“You run any time you want, girl,” she told Stacie with a vast chuckle. “Don’t let them things on yo’ feet bother you none.”

On her next round she was more earnest. “You work damn hard, if not I whip your arse.”

Or later, as the friendship ripened: “My name’s Ermie. But you call me ‘Miss’. One thing I gets from you white bitches is respect. I can cane your cunt as well as your arse.” Ermie passed on her way laughing hugely.

Stacie assessed what she could see. About thirty girls, save for the new arrivals they were all of various shades of black or coffee. All were hobbled, all wore the same dress and hat, all worked steadily under Ermie’s watchful eye. The place was undoubtedly some sort of prison. Perhaps it was the place where girls were sent after their rejection of Mr. Moghere’s favours!

She was a millionairess hoeing sugar cane under the hot sun of an African plantation. She was nearly naked, her feet were brutally ironed. How easy to scream hysterically in anger and frustration at a fate so utterly improbable. Who in her former life would dream of her being where she was! None . . .

She supposed she had best apply herself to the punishing labour. Her hands would become blistered and calloused, her back bent. How easy it was going to become to long to offer her body to Moghere for release from pain and degradation! She wondered miserably if that day would come, and how soon. As she plied the hoe Stacie realised the virtue of the heavy chain and anklets. For the work she was doing they impeded nothing, even completely free her progress down the row would be slow and shuffling. They implacably inhibited escape, even if the soldiers and their guns were not there it would take her an hour to shuffle a mile, perhaps longer, by which time her ankles would be chafed raw. But it was their mental effect that was most potent. The knowledge there was no key was frightening, the burred rivets mocked all normal possibilities of being rid of them. And then their weight . . . ! Their weight was a constant reminder of a hopeless slavery, a servitude in which frightful punishments always hovered, and which might go on and on for the rest of her life. Her eyes brimmed.

“You ain’t do so good, girl,” Ermie’s voice held stern reproof.

Stacie looked up, startled. The wardress was pointing to a lusty weed the hoe had missed. She pulled it up for exhibit.

“I’m sorry, I’ll watch more closely.”

“Best give you help, girl. You bend over and pull up that there dress.”

Why protest! Stacie obeyed. The slash across her buttocks was cruel and awful, but it was alone. She rearranged herself and wondered if she should offer thanks for her ‘help’.

Here was another kind of slavery, grim labour and swift grim punishment with nothing to look forward to . . . ever! With deep shame, but with increasing urgency Stacie wondered how long it would be before Mr. Moghere returned. She knew she would not again choose the sjambok.

“A commendable diligence, Miss Blair.”

Startled, Stacie looked up from beneath the wide straw.

Hamid Boshan was giving her his whitest smile. Sweaty and tired she felt a million miles removed from his immaculate presence. “You are enjoying The Estate?” he enquired politely.

Sarcasm, bitterness and anger were tossed aside. Stacie’s pride went with them. Passionately she desired no fencing with words, no saving of her face. Instant surrender was her most ardent wish.

“I’ll do whatever you want.” She managed a pale smile. “I’ll be a good girl.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “A great change from yesterday!”

She prayed he would not be stubborn and make her crawl.

The frightened girl searched desperately for the right thing to say.

“You have given me time to think. Thank you,” she said humbly. “I needed The Estate to make me understand what I am.”

“And what are you, Miss Blair?”

“I am a captive and I am a slave. I belong to a man.” He laughed his pleasure.

“You have found out all this while using your hoe?”

He was playing with her! Somehow she must reach him.

“Please, Mr, Boshan, I was a slave when you first met me in Jedrah. If a girl is a good slave it is hard for her to exchange masters overnight. I was a good slave to Mohammad Yasin. I would wish to be a good slave to whoever owned me.” She contrived a warmer smile, “I am only a girl, I am as afraid of the sjambok as I was of the kurbash.”

“Yet yesterday you chose it. Had I not intervened, your back by now would be sadly cut.”

She sank to her knees in the soft hot soil. “I owe you much. A thank-you seems so little. Yesterday I had pride, today I have none. I will yield my body to you gladly.”

He sighed, looking down at her, his smile departed. “I can take your body now, and I can leave you here in the sun with your hoe.”

“I am a slave. If that is what you prefer . . .”

For a long time they held their pose, the proud erect man and the kneeling subject girl. Hamid Boshan said no word, but suddenly turned and strode away. In utter desolation Stacie scrambled to her feet and retrieved her hoe. For the second time that day tears found their way across her cheeks.

The two soldiers wore wide grins and carried no guns.

They picked her up bodily and carried her to the smith. In a daze of chaotic emotions she watched the hammer and the punch beat back the stubborn rivets and free her feet. When the clanking metal fell from the anvil to the floor she knew a thrill of joy, but also guilt. Rannah’s feet were still ironed as were the others, they still hoed the long rows beneath the sun . . . Was she a traitress! She did not know . . . Stacie Blair was lost in an ocean of bewilderment.

“Rest after Labour is a pleasant thing,” said Hamid Boshan.

Stacie wholeheartedly agreed. It was infinitely good to kneel on the rug and sip the drink. It had been equally good to take the bath and fasten round her hips the scanty thing that was her total garb. Mr. Boshan’s premises were palatial. It was cool.

“You are exceedingly good in bed.”

Stacie tried not to blush. She was neither naive or shy. She had been possessed before, both as a free girl and as a slave. What they had done together was not new. It was these casual references between pedantic speech that were disconcerting. Her reply was genuinely sincere. “You are very good yourself, Mr. Boshan.”

“You will call me Hamid. I will call you Stacie. Why should we not be friends as well as make love. This small idyll we now enjoy may be short lived.”

“Will Mr. Moghere take me when he returns?”

Hamid shrugged. “Who knows! He was much enamoured of you. Certainly of the five you are his choice just as you are mine.”

“Why me?”

He laughed and gazed down at her with amused affection.

“You truly do not know?”

Laughing in her happiness at release she shook her head.

“No, honestly! What is there to know?”

“Has no one told you of your gift! You are a slave, the role fits you like a glove. In slavery you are totally natural, you glow. That night I first sat next to you at Dinner I had an erection the whole time.”

Stacie was delighted by his frankness, from him it did not offend. Perhaps it was the greatest compliment he could pay. She found it puzzling that he should tell her what Rannah and Yasin had said too. “But I only accept the inevitable,” she protested. “How else do you expect me to behave!”

“Oh, I am sure the whip has had a part in it,” he conceded. “Perhaps too it is the knowledge of what you once were. It has a piquancy . . .”

“How are the mighty fallen . . . !”

“Yes, there is that. It is a human trait regardless of color. But also this . . . this acceptance, as you call it, triggers something within that causes you to exude sex in a degree I have never previously known.” He grinned ruefully. “Our Leader confirmed your effect on him too, no man is safe with you.”

“Aren’t you safe with me now?” She twinkled at him mischievously.

“Only for a little while. I can feel you already undermining my defences.”

“You mean I’m a sexpot?” she pouted.

“Good Heavens no!” Hamid’s denial was emphatic. With you it is beautiful, but I have no name for it.”

“Hamid . . .” Stacie’s tone was thoughtful, “will Mr. Moghere allow my father to ransom me?”

“I do not think so. Your greatest value is in the seeking of advantage. The tables are turned, Moghere may offer you to Yasin for value to be received.”

“And if Yasin will not play the game?”

Mr. Boshan looked sad. “You must not allow what I tell you now to dwell in your mind, it may not happen. But it is known Yasin adores you . . . Some pictures of you being tortured might speed his compliance.”

Stacie had a hysterical need to laugh or scream. What an infuriating irony! “I am only a girl,” she said unhappily. “These men who trade empires . . . surely they are not going to part with kingdoms for a slave.”

“I would,” Hamid said simply.

She rose and replenished their drinks. When she knelt before him to offer his glass she kissed his hand.

They sipped in silence for awhile, happy with each other.

“Hamid, the other girls . . . What of them?”

“They will serve their time in the fields. When The Leader returns they will be grateful for his notice.”

“Hamid, why am I not chained?”

He laughed at her earnest features. “Must I tell you that too! You make love much better without them.”

“You trust me . . . to be free?”

He shrugged indolently. “Go. Run if you wish.”

“In the middle of the night I might.”

“I know what you are angling for,” he told her shrewdly. “You wish to be chained. Not ironed as in the field, but daintily. Am I not right?”

Stacie’s blush was answer enough.

“And you protest you’re not a natural slave!” Hamid laughed at her.

“I suppose it’s silly,” she acknowledged, “but I’ve got used to them, handcuffs mostly. I’d always choose them if I am allowed to.” She laughed back at him. “But in some ways it’s not silly at all. When I wear them I know where I am and what I am. I’m not thinking should I run or later. And it’s the same with everybody else: I’m handcuffed so they don’t have to worry about me. It’s a bit like a bride wearing her ring.”

“Allright. I’ll chain you, but not now. Come, finish your drink. There is a thing that we must do.”

The flogging of Jane was shattering. Stacie had supposed it forgotten, a thing easily set aside in the absence of the Great Man. But Hamid had been given a directive. In spite of Stacie’s pleading it was an order he would obey, in fact he had no choice. He himself was not as concerned as the girl he had rescued from The Estate, but he would have willingly forgotten the punishment had he been able. Stacie understood his obligation and ceased to pester him for a reprieve he could not give.

“Can I go to her, Hamid?”

“Why?”

“To give her what comfort I can. To tell her I’ve been whipped and lived.”

“The other girls will do that. Your Arab girl is a walking testimony to a girl’s survival after the lash.”

“Does she know it is to happen in the morning?”

“I have thought it kindest not to tell her.”

“How . . . how are they kept at night?”

“I suppose you want to be chained with them to show sympathy. It would teach you a lesson if I ordered it.”

“But Hamid, how? Perhaps it’s better than I think.”

“It’s probably worse!” He kissed her lightly. “Stop worrying.”

“But how . . . please, I’m curious.”

“Just an open shed, lots of fresh air. The girls sleep on the ground in rows. A chain passes between their legs above their irons. It is locked to concrete at each end. They are not tightly held, but they are quite safe. None has ever escaped.”

She pictured herself among the line of girls, seeking rest on hard ground, the metal heavy on her ankles. She shivered. “I’m lucky! Oh, Hamid, thank you!”

“We are both lucky,” said Hamid Boshan. “Let us hope it lasts.”

In the morning he broke the news. “You will have to watch.”

“Why?” She was uncertain whether she wished to witness the flogging of a girl.

“These things are ceremonial. They are done with a flourish. Everyone must attend and witness her punishment and understand why it is done. It has a salutary effect. Behaviour improves amusingly.”

“But her crime . . . how can you justify?”

Hamid grinned. “That is simplest of all. At the least the girl is guilty of lèse-majesté. We will call it Treason. In Narousse it will be understood.”

Stacie did not argue. It was a force in motion, she could not halt its momentum. She made no protest when two soldiers appeared to escort her.

“It is best,” Hamid assured. “They will return you in good order when all is over. They will even tie your hands.”

“Can’t I be handcuffed?”

“No. The cord they will use is made here. It is coarse and will hurt your wrists. It will be appropriate.”

“What about clothes?”

“As you are. There will be breasts of all colours around you.” Hamid grinned cheerfully. “But none as fine as yours.”

Stacie crossed her wrists behind her back and allowed herself to be tied. Hamid was right, the cord was indeed prickly. It was also very tight, she had best not struggle. She walked between her proud escorts as though she herself was going to the scaffold.

There was a natural slope that was the Grandstand. At its lower centre stood the post. It was stark and grim and cruelly lonely. Stacie shivered.

The audience was conglomerate. It sought the best view it could find. But there was privilege, the front row was strictly reserved. But it appeared she was the most privileged of all. Her escort took assured possession of the front row ccntre, the post was no more than fifteen feet away. She felt foolish in her prominence, her hands bound and her breasts bare for all to see. She was suddenly glad of the two soldiers, there were hostile glances at her white skin and pink tipped breasts.

The Estate was there in force. Ermie marshalled Rannah, Wendy and Suzie to where they would enjoy an unobstructed view. They had been delivered in a jeep. Their heavy irons precluded walking. Their wrists were tied as were her own. They exchanged pathetic glances, but could not wave a hand or exchange a word. All three looked tired and grubby and scared. They wore their prison dresses and straw hats. In that they were far more fully dressed than she.

It was a long wait. Stacie wondered how Jane was facing it. For the victim it was a time of pure terror. She remembered her own journeys to the fatal room in which she had received her pain. The wait ended with the advent of a jeep that came to a jerky halt beside the post. It contained a driver, an officer and Jane.

It all became very official. Jane, stony faced and wide eyed, was made to stand. Her feet were still captive to the irons, but they were her only bond. The elevation of the vehicle placed her in the prominence needful that she be viewed by all. Stacie saw her tense and stiffen at the order to strip herself, but after a moment of hesitation she obeyed and stood white and naked for interested inspection. Her pubic hair was shamingly in evidence as a black patch upon a field of white.

There was then a proclamation and the crime and sentence. The officer read it out in three different languages, none of them English. While this was taking place Ermie made her preparations at the post. The dreaded sjambok was draped in coils from her belt. At sight of it a great sigh billowed through the assemblage. Jane took one quick fearful glance and turned away.

They lifted her down, the jeep was driven away. Jane hobbled to the post and for a moment faced it, savouring the last of what small freedom she possessed. Ermie must have briefed her on what she must do, for without instruction she embraced the pillar as though in love with it, clinging and pressing as though wishing to weld herself to the timber itself. Even her fettered feet were as snug on each side as the length of chain would permit.

Ermie enjoyed herself and took much time, she shared top billing with the naked girl she tied. She looped and tugged with an intent precision worthy of a better cause. At the end of her performance it seemed improbable that the girl to be whipped could even twitch a single muscle. Cords held her at wrist and elbow, at waist and ankle and knee. Her breasts had been thrust inward and flattened against the wood.

Stacie realised, with a thrill of thankfulness, that perhaps there was mercy in the post and the bindings. No matter how terrible the whip it could not wrap around the slim nudity nor could it cut the pert and lovely breasts. Ermie knew what she was doing. No one would thank her for a corpse.

There was now a roll of drums. It was faintly comic, but terrible in its progression toward the act of cruelty. Stacie squelched a desire to giggle. At the staccato sound Jane strained to look back over one shoulder, but quickly she turned her face to the post, pressed one cheek against it hard and closed her eyes. Ermie gathered the soft hair and tucked it down within what was left of the cleft between the captive breasts. She shook out the sjambok so that it fell limply as an extension of her arm.

How describe the sjambok! Or the method of its wielding, or the cries of the slender girl whose back it cut! The sjambok was designed for use on oxen, yet a girl named Jane must receive it and absorb it and perhaps live. The white back was heartbreakingly lonely tied to its post. Jane’s screams did battle with the African day and were lost with all the other agonies of girls on a continent that had known too many such scenes too many times. The word flogging was correct, this was a whip beyond whips, an awfulness apart.

Stacie was thankfully glad her hands were as painfully tied as they were. Had she been free she would have leaped at the swinging arm and held it down. She and the other captives would have fought if given liberty. How strange a condition to be grateful for cord and chain! How wise the centuries had been in using them! Their discipline took command when reason lost control. Deliberately she hurt her wrists by twisting to reaffirm her impotence.

The rhino hide on female flesh had a sound exquisitely its own. It seemed too that the screams were screams apart and different from those other screams by which a girl pays tribute to the thong. They spoke not only of pain but of a life crying farewell to hope.

The watching girl with her bound hands twisting against the rough fibers of Narousse cord judged Ermie to be withholding a part of her great strength. From the first response of blood beneath the lash it had been evident the sjambok could kill. Stacie recalled books in which its lethal capacities had been stressed. Sentences in which the victim’s back had been ‘Cut to ribbons’ recurred often. Now before her eyes was the visual truth. Memory brought cringing fear of how she had brashly and with unconscious bravado stated a preference for Mr. Moghere’s sjambok rather than his bed. It could so easily be she who was tied against that post!

But, of course, that was the motive for this ritual exercise!

There would be few in the assemblage who were not vicariously flinching in the same knowledge of vulnerability, half of them would also be carnally excited. Stacie was ashamed of herself, she knew her pubic hair was wet. What was the magic of a whipped girl that did this to almost everyone! The connotation of endless orgasm . . . perhaps that was it! Jane could not writhe, but her head had taken on a frantic life of its own, her cries were avowing some strange homage to a pagan god.

Why speak of weals and scarlet lines and tender ridges of bruised flesh! Ermie’s sjambok scorned them all, the sjambok dealt in wounds. Even used with compassion its etchings on the skin would leave their mark for life, blood was implicit in each cut. The small white back and bottom became latticed by the successive impacts. At the eleventh stroke the screams died. Jane fainted.

But Narousse was equal to the emergency. No fiery liquor, no pungent aromatics beneath the nose. Two soldiers each with two buckets of water appeared with commendable dispatch. With evident amusement one of them emptied one of them over the naked girl tied to the post. It took two more deluges to bring Jane back into a world she wished to leave. Her body was soaked and glistening. Stacie wondered if it was true the whip bit more cruelly on wet skin.

It was measure of Jane’s loss of hope that she did not plead, she uttered no lucid words at all. Returning from the void in which she had found a small respite she moaned to find herself still bound tight against the post. Stacie did a quick count. Fourteen more strokes! Was the helpless girl counting them too! Hamid had been right: fifty with the sjambok meant death. There came a fleshy thunk as the strip of hide once more sought and found the sacrifice to Mr. Moghere’s hurt pride.

Twice more Jane found unconsciousness and was shocked back to punishment by the drenching cold. At the end of her twenty five strokes her head again fell limp, but no one cared. The crowd slowly dispersed, the three captive girls were driven back to their Labour in the fields, Stacie’s escort turned her about the marched back from whence she came. The pathetic wounded flesh of the white girl tied to the post was left in lonely agony. No doubt sight of its condition would serve as a useful warning to all!

Mr. Moghere was prepared to cut his immediate losses and enjoy himself. He was in the position of the merchant who, unable to sell his produce, eats it, thus nimbly turning loss into pleasurable profit. His seat was comfortable, his potation cool and satisfying. The view which absorbed his interest was beautiful, it was unique, it completely gratified his sense of what was right and proper. Always on his return to Narousse from foreign lands he felt a comfortable sense of belonging. After all, most of the emerging nation belonged to him! This too was as it should be.

The slow pendulum motions of the two naked girls was pleasantly hypnotic. The key by which it might be endlessly renewed was the slender whip with which he idly toyed. A single slash on torso or limb provided a momentum that sustained itself for a surprising length of time, a small miracle of dynamics for which Stacie and Rannah were supremely grateful. As yet their skins bore only a few of the thin red lines.

“You find it an interesting position?” Amatar Moghere inquired politely.

It was cruelly functional, neat in its simplicity. The wrists of each girl were crossed and bound behind her back, from them she was suspended from the ceiling, he roes a couple of inches from any possible contact with the rug. The cord was long enough to provide the twist between the bindings of their hands and the ring in the ceiling high above. Their shoulders were cruelly and quite incredibly wracked and close to dislocation.

“We’ll do anything you want,” Stacie said tonelessly. “No we will not!” Rannah declaimed as vehemently as she was able.

“An interesting divergence of opinion,” Mr. Moghere commented affably.

“Please don’t keep us like this,” Stacie gasped. “If you let us down we can talk.”

“We can talk now. You are not mute.”

“We can’t stand this. It will kill us.”

“I assure you, dear ladies, it is not fatal. I recall one reluctant damsel who hung thus for two days and then came to my bed and performed commendably.”

“I’ll go to your bed now, Sir,” Stacie wanted no heroics. “Stop it, slave girl, you’ll do no such thing!” Rannah’s voice was a definite command. Mr. Moghere thoughtfully slashed the Arab girl’s legs. The heavy irons had been taken from the trim ankles. Rannah kicked out at the sudden pain, but made no sound.

“Black bastard, if I remember right?” the ruler of Narousse inquired pensively.

There was no answer. Fear was vibrant in the air. This time the thong curled round soft thighs. “You will answer when I speak.”

“Do you wish me to say you are not a black bastard?” the Arab girl asked sardonically. “I can tell a lie.”

Mr. Moghere cut a belt of red round the slim waist. The pull of the whip gave fresh impetus to the nudity turning on its cord. “You are a black bastard,” Rannah declared without emotion.

Stacie was desperately afraid for the maiden who she loved. Rannah might invite herself to be cut to pieces before she would surrender her provocations. The Great Man had seated himself again and slowly sipped as he watched Rannah’s whip marks deepen their crimson. “I can understand your father not wanting you back on my terms,” he said bitterly. “You are a vixen with a shrew’s tongue, Tomorrow the sjambok may knock some sense into you.”

“Oh please no!” Stacie’s exclamation was involuntary. “And do I not recall a young woman who stated clearly her preference for the sjambok as compared to myself?” Mr. Moghere’s voice was deadly with sarcasm.

“Yes sir.”

“But have you changed your mind!”

“No, she has not!” Rannah’s voice was firm.

“Have you changed your mind?” Moghere repeated quietly.

It took more than Stacie’s normal store of courage. But Rannah was the essence of her life. If her Lady was to know the hide upon her flesh then so should she! Besides, there was the question of obedience . . ."I belong to the Lady Rannah,” she said softly. “I am her slave. No, sir, I have not changed my mind.”

Mr. Moghere nodded understandingly. He was enjoying this play of fears and motives. “I should whip you both now. But I prefer the more ritual affair tomorrow. You shall have your twenty-five each. Your little friend still breathes lustily after hers today. She will share by bed, the next night will be yours. I am more than equal to the two of you. Did you know a maiden is doubly passionate when she lays upon a back cut deep with many wounds!”

To talk and talk! And of such frightfulness! To hang like this in agony at the mercy of a black buffoon. Stacie longed to weep, but feared to show tears to the mistress she so loved. She hung silent awaiting the next stripe of the whip and thinking of the sjambok and the awful post.

Mr. Moghere sat and surveyed his prizes. He felt quite secure. Yasin would yet come to terms. Certainly when he received the photographs . . . ! The two girls swinging on their cords were quite extraordinarily beautiful. They made a picture of unique appeal. He resolved to enjoy the aesthetic treat quite often. It was one more of those perquisites of office of which he so heartily approved. He rose and replenished his glass and took the opportunity to slash each round bottom as he passed.

It was a frightful way to be tied, the strain upon the naked shoulders was appalling. Such suspension was a torture, it could be called nothing else. Stacie mused miserably on what she might have done or said had Rannah not been hanging beside her, a prideful hawk watching its young. She felt certain she would have begged and abased herself. But even so it might not have saved her from the sjambok. It was evident their captor approved its use and its effect. Could a naked Rannah survive it and retain her pride! Probably she would! But Stacie was not so sure about herself. Cold fear clutched her at Moghere’s next words.

“I gather you and our good Hamid Boshan found each other mutually agreeable while I was gone?”

“Yes sir.” What was the use! He knew everything. “You rejected me. I am chagrined.”

Nothing she could say would be right, but she had to try. “The training on the farm you sent me to made me see how silly I was, sir.”

“An unusually rapid conversion!”

“Yes sir.”

Mr. Moghere beamed. “You will be happy to hear that Mr. Bashan’s execution was painless. He was a soldier before the firing squad.”

Horror on horror! Stacie was shocked at the instant welling of tears. She had a vision of the smiling white toothed face of the man who had been kind to her and with whose body she had found a strange affection. It was the death of a brother, of someone loved without passion. He had died because of her, because of his desire for her. Had he known of his risk! She might never find out. She sobbed chokingly in a fresh desolation.

“You are a black bastard,” Rannah said bitterly. “That was fratricide. He was your man. He respected you.”

“He fucked the woman I had chosen.” The Ruler’s voice was bland.

“You killed him for that! For pride! You can penetrate my slave girl and I endlessly, we can’t stop you. You men are absurd!”

“I am a man and you a chattel, remember it.”

“Lower us then, and show your manhood. I’ll spread my legs for you. I may as well do it first as last.”

“Why the change of heart, bitch?”

“Why should we hang like this! Enough’s enough.”

“Excellent! You do not like the pose I have arranged for you. But you will hold it, and I shall continue to use this whip on you. You are both quite beautiful as you are now. I will not forego the pleasure.”

“Very well, enjoy our bodies. But when you tire of us allow our fathers to ransom us. You can only gain.”

“I will make myself another drink,” said Mr. Moghere. When Amatar Moghere finally left them alone the two naked tortured girls hung motionless and moaning. Neither made pretense of bravery or anything else save despair. Both were well marked by the slender whip, mostly on their legs and thighs for, as Mr. Moghere pointed out as he slashed at them, it was a pity to waste the backs and bottoms that the sjambok would slice on the morrow.

“The swine will leave us like this all night,” Rannah deplored.

“Then we’ll be half dead when they tie us to the post. He won’t want that,”

Stacie clung to hope.

The hope was justified. Two soldiers lowered their feet to the rug and removed the cord, but the hurt wrists remained tied as they were. The two girls, not caring about their nakedness before the men, sought each other’s eyes in thankfulness and gasped and panted with the pain of shoulders and arm sockets returned to normal. They could not struggle to free their hands, their arms were lost to them in numbness. Even the dreary cell with its two pails and its chunks of bread seemed a blessed haven. They ate and drank as best they could without hands, then slumped against the wall in painful weariness. Each felt a devastating sense of total captivity. They were lost without hope.

It may have been one hour or two before the men returned.

One held a length of chain, the other a padlock, both were grinning hugely. They also carried a heavy rug they threw upon the floor.

“For sleep. Very nice,” said number one.

Number two placed his chain across the heavy mat and waved invitingly to Stacie. “Please to lie on back.”

Glimpsing possibilities, none of which she liked, Stacie obeyed. Her hands were tied so that she could dispute nothing. But the crossed wrists at her back made the laying down awkward.

But it was not awkward for the men. They knew what they were doing. “Come,” said number one to Rannah. “Now you on top . . . other way round.”

Rannah was as helpless as her slave. With a shrug and a sardonic grimace she did as she was bid. The chain was brought up on each side, a heavy foot exerted its weight on Rannah’s back, the chain was pulled and cinched and padlocked. The slenderness of the two waists were made as one, stomach flattened on stomach, two nudities were welded as a single entity.

“And a pleasant lesbian goodnight to you both,” said Mr. Moghere from the door. He held up a key. “See. I put it on this hook in the passage. If you can open your door you may reach it.” He gave them one of his broadest smiles and slammed the door. They heard it lock.

“Oh Rannah . . . !” Stacie’s mind was a whirl. For the moment she was conscious only of the heat of her beloved’s flesh. The chain hurt, her hands and arms hurt, she felt the welling of an irrepressible giggle. Rannah’s furry sex was before her eyes, its pungency vivid to her senses. For that moment only the intimate closeness mattered.

They fed avidly. The last meal of the condemned! The surge of lust that drives men to the prostitute in times of ultimate travail. Mankind has always turned to its genitals when faced with that it dare not see. Tomorrow the sjambok, tonight their love. Before morning Mr. Moghere’s inspiration might torture them, the chain was brutal. But for a little while they wallowed in ecstasy. The hurt of their tied wrists did not matter, the hurt of the chain could be forgotten, but not their need. Flesh of each other’s flesh, blood of each other’s blood, they found surcease in the wiry hair and within the swollen lips of woman.

“If Jane lived I suppose we can,” Stacie said after a very long time.

“We will live, slave girl. You and I will outlast that black pig.”

“I wish I had my hands, I love you so.”

“You have your lips, child. Use them. I am on fire.”

“I have never called you darling, Rannah. May I?”

“It is you who are the darling, but yes . . .”

“And tomorrow . . . with our cut backs, our wounds bleeding on the sheets . . . Can’t it be?”

“Of course, slave girl. We will not be the first or the last to have our backs sliced by the sjambok.”

“Moghere will . . . he will . . . fuck us?”

“It does not matter, child. We have been pierced before. What does one more matter!”

“I wish I had my hands. I want to hold you. Damn this rotten chain!”

“Slave girl! Be just with Fate. We could be in worse condition. I would not want still to be hanging as we spent the afternoon.”

“Darling . . .” Stacie savoured the word with joy.

“Darling Rannah, do you think we might turn, that you might take me for a little while?”

They laughed, their helplessness was comic. They struggled and achieved. Rannah moaned with pain and then with ecstasy. After a long time she asked dreamily: “Can you free your hands, slave girl?”

“No, I have tried and tried. What about you?”

“No, the bastards have me foxed, damn their rotten souls! With out hands, this awful chain might not be so bad. If we are to sleep, it must be on our sides.”

“How can we sleep, my Lady. I keep thinking of that post and one of us tied to it with the other watching.”

“Stop thinking. Use your tongue. What have I got a slave girl for!”

Stacie used her tongue. While she sought the clitoris of her mistress she remembered her father’s house in New York: the world was crazy, insane. Yesterday Mr. Moghere was addressing the United Nations.

“If we ever got back to Jedrah, my Lady, would you still chain me and whip me?” she asked dreamily.

“Of course, you are mine. Get on with your work. Must I do it all!”

Stacie Blair, formerly of New York and Cape Cod, graduate of Vassar, applied her tongue to the sensitive bud of flesh within the vagina of an Arab girl whilst she herself moaned in delicious anguish from the contact and friction of a similar attention.

The door burst open.

“Get them out of here,” said Mohammad Yasin.

It was all kaleidoscopic. She heard Rannah’s desperate voice: “The key, the key!”

Then suddenly the pain in the small of her back was gone and the Narousse cord was cut swiftly from her wrists. Stacie could not use her arms, they fell limply at her sides, but she was free! Gloriously incredibly free. Mohammad Yasin picked her up and carried her from the cell.

A grinning and supercilious Yousef met them in the passage. He gave the impression of having dealt with a herd of yapping curs. He held a revolver. “The stairs, Lord.”

Then to Rannah, “My Lady, let me help . . .”

The leaping strides! The power of a man! Stacie thrilled.

She was consumed by joy in Yasin’s arms. He was leaping up with her in his grip when Amatar Moghere appeared at the head of the stone steps. He was pointing a gun. Behind them was an explosion, the barking of a .45. A look of utter astonishment crossed out the beaming smile. Mr. Moghere fell sideways and over the rail, Yasin scarcely paused.

There were other shots, other eyes that suddenly went blank. Stacie heard what seemed a war cry from a jubilant Yousef. Mohammad Yasin strode out into the night carrying a burden who wished she had her arms to clasp around his neck.

“The dogs, the yapping mongrels!” She heard him mutter the words in fury. “We should kill them all . . .”

Suddenly in the plane Stacie did not care. Narousse was gone, and with it Moghere and all his kind. But her conscience still functioned. “The girls . . . those poor girls . . .” Her eyes implored.

“We have not time. There is an Army . . . they have planes . . .”

Gently she was placed upon a seat. Rannah was there.

They held each other in a great thankfulness. The engines roared . . .

Stacie Blair was not tied, she was not chained, she was free!

A single sheet of paper, a few words scrawled by a feminine hand. Stacie wondered how often such scraps had collapsed a world. She had but one hand to reach for it, the other was handcuffed to Rannah’s bed. She gazed up at Yousef’s sombre face in mute question.

“Read it, lady.”

So few words! ‘Obey Yousef: it is my order. He will explain what you need know. Forgive me.’ It was signed: Rannah.

Stacie restrained her free hand from striving to cover herself. Yousef had seen her naked often enough. She sensed a greater concern. She proffered him the missive. “You have read this?”

“Yes, lady.”

“I will be obedient.”

“Thank you, pretty lady.”

“Yousef! There is something wrong, what is it?”

“Our Master is dying.”

Yasin dying! They had spent days and nights of love before he had flown to Geneva and left the slave girl to his daughter, Rannah. Stacie tried to comprehend the unacceptable. She pulled absently at her cuffed wrist. “How . . . ? Why?”

“An assassin, at Geneva airport. A cur of a student from this land. He had the usual profession of a noble cause. The guards shot him down before he could fire a second time. It is done.”

She might believe it tomorrow, but not now! “And my Lady . . . she has gone to him?”

The grave inclination of the head, so much a part of him.

He made it now. “Our Lady will stay with him until the end. She will then do all that must be done. The time of her return here is with Allah.”

A naked white girl chained to a bed! Surveying her the muscular solidity of an Arab torturer! Both sharing a common grief. How typical of Jedrah!

“My Lady says for me to forgive. I don’t understand. What have I to forgive, Yousef?”

He shrugged. “That too is with Allah.”

Yousef unlocked the cuff from the bed and clasped it round Stacie’s free hand so that her wrists were joined in front of her. “It is as you usually wear them, I believe,” he said drily.

“Thank you, Yousef.” There was a strangeness she could not penetrate.

“All will be as usual now. In two hours you will attend me. Is it enough time for your female needs?”

Puzzling! But what did such things matter now. Stacie followed an instant hungry impulse. “Yousef, have the meal with me . . . It will be very lonely.”

His eyes kindled. “You do me honour, lady. But no, it is not possible.” He turned and went away.

The naked girl threw herself upon the disordered bed and wept violently into her chained hands.

Stacie ate little, she sat with ghosts. She used the time in the female arts, wishing to look her best but not knowing why. She presented herself punctually. “It is time, Yousef.” She held out her locked hands and eyed him questioningly.

He used no key, but led her to the room she knew so well. “Am I to be punished, Yousef?”

“I know not the name of it, lady. Make your own.”

She let him tie her as he had that day long ago before she had been ringed. During the methodical progression into this fresh travail Stacie thought idly of the rings in her flesh and of how much a part of her they had become. She was no longer conscious of them, they had ceased to be painful, they could be slid back and forth within her providing an endless delight to Rannah and to the man who lay dying far away. Even the circlet through her nose no longer shamed, she had learned to eat and talk with its weight upon her lip.

“You are going to hurt me, Yousef. Why?”

“Such questions are forbidden, lady. If you persist I must gag you.”

She accepted the incomprehensible. Somewhere a truth would emerge. She drifted into pain and more pain as her arms were drawn wide and her legs stretched until they were taut and horizontal and threatened to split her loins asunder. She knew this man better now, but still she blushed. “Yousef . . . Am I . . . am I open . . . ?”

She had made him smile. “No lady. It feels so but it is not.”

“Are you going to whip me?”

“You wish me to, pretty lady?”

“Of course not. But are you?”

“Yes. You may remember, lady, last time we did not finish.”

Stacie remembered. Ten strokes with the cane on the sole of each of her feet. “I fainted . . .”

“It does not matter. We have much time.”

He threw away his loin cloth, he was immensely male. “It is no longer forbidden, lady.”

“I would give you more pleasure free.”

“It pleases me as you are.”

He clasped her with one arm and guided himself within her between the ringed lips. She was suspended at precisely the right height.

“Tortured and fucked! It excites you,” Stacie accused.

“It excites you also, lady.” He used both arms and pulled her very close.

“If you cane my feet I shall not be able to walk, Yousef.”

“I will carry you, lady.”

“I am frightened. I don’t want to be lame.”

“They will heal. The cane is slim, it breaks no bones. But first I use the whip as I did before. It will make a lesser outlet for your distress.”

Stacie watched the scarlet circles form upon her strained thighs. The lash met itself as the blows rapped down. She made sounds she could not name as she looked without hope at the bands on wrist and ankle. She could not move. Only her head . . .

“And now your cunt, lady.”

She moaned without protest. She tried to see the impacts but could not. They cut at her in surprising ways and angles. Yousef changed position often. Her moans when he next impaled her were the same by which she had expressed her pain. But they were not of pain. The swollen labia welcomed him.

The whipping of her feet took all afternoon. Nature was cruel and denied her oblivion for the first strokes. She became a panting breast-heaving organism dedicated to screams: pealing screams that denied and denied what was being done to her but availed her nothing. After her feet had been beaten five times each Yousef asked in curiosity, “Is it bad for you to have no bribe to offer?”

It had been fifteen minutes since the last stroke. Stacie had regained a weak control. She smiled in new wisdom. “Fuck me, Yousef.”

“I could refuse.”

“Yousef . . . please!”

It was nearly an hour before he struck her foot again. During the times when she fainted Yousef went away and let her hang. Coming back to awareness by herself her first thought was always of the strokes yet to be borne. When her mind was not in a turmoil of agony she thought of Mohammad Yasin and of her love and of why Rannah had given her to the torturer. But she concerned herself little with reasons. It was all a part of the flowing stream of sensation and sentience that began on the day of her seizure from the plane. There was a pattern. If it pleased her Lady to order her feet beaten so that she would not walk it was no more than a part of the mosaic. She looked from side to side at the foot beyond the tight anklet. She could not see the sole, but the rest seemed little changed. It was impossible . . . !

“It grieves me that there remain but four strokes,” Yousef mourned. “In agony you are more beautiful than a man’s dreams.”

“Give them to me quickly and have done, Yousef. I wish it.”

“Alas, lady, you will faint. I can only strike when you are conscious.”

“I will not faint, Yousef. I promise.”

He struck the four swift blows as hard as all the rest.

Stacie stayed in the world, but saw it only through a mist of throbbing agony. After a long time and many screams she asked: “Is it done?”

“It is done, lady.”

“Yousef . . . please . . . please . . . please!”

He coupled her fiercely. She screamed again. It was a cry of victory. They were both of Jedrah.

The afternoon had fled when he loosed the cords and the bands. Stacie allowed her nakedness to curl limply on the rug Yousef had thoughtfully provided. Apart from her beaten feet it would take her system minutes to revive her shoulders and her legs. She grinned up at her torturer. “Nothing works, Yousef. Give me a minute like this.”

Stacie did not examine her feet. She was afraid to look.

When the time came she tried to rise, but fell back panting, her eyes wide in realization that her feet were lost to her.

A stone chamber without light save for a candle flickering on the floor. On her limbs were chains. “I am more chains than girl,” she protested as Yousef locked the collar on her neck.

“You are a woman!” It was an accolade.

“I am a captive chained in a dungeon, Yousef.”

“You will stay here while your feet heal.”

“For days and days . . . ! And chained . . . !”

“You are exquisite, lady. Wear them always.” He locked her in . . . alone!

Stacie examined herself in the dim light as she rested on one hip on the stone. She was fettered at wrist and ankle, neck and waist. All the chains led to rings bedded in the stone. They could not be to keep her captive: one would have sufficed. They were to punish. Or because she looked erotically lovely in them. She grinned ruefully. It did really matter. She was a naked girl chained in a dungeon and that was that! Hesitantly she grasped a foot, pulled it toward her and looked. What she beheld once more unleashed her tears.

She never knew the days, he would not tell her. But he came again and again through each one of them to allow his manhood to pay homage to her flesh. His visits held away the ghosts and kept her sane. She moved only to the rattle of chains. Even in their lovemaking the links sang their laughter on her limbs. They knew this dungeon time ephemeral, and so made terror delicious and fear a fantasy.

Thus is the nature of man. Sometimes in the night she wept.

When Rannah released her, Stacie’s joy was such that she spoke not of her feet, but bore their pain as she was led to the room in which they shared their flesh and their love. Hours later across a dinner table the slave girl forgot the crusts and the apple of her dungeon fare. Her eyes were alight with splendour.

“It is in the past,” Rannah said sombrely. “Let us not dwell on it.” She looked with amusement at her slave girl’s eagerness. “We will speak only of you and me.”

“What becomes of us, my Lady?”

The Lady Rannah made a little moue of sadness and shrugged her shoulders at Fate. “I will carry on where my father stopped. His death has made me one of the richest women in the world. I must keep the jackals at bay. You, beloved child, will go back to your parent.”

The silence was tangible, it seethed with ghosts. “You know I will not go.”

“I will deliver you to him neatly trussed in a crate.”

“I’ll come right back.”

“Then you will be chained in the dungeon as I found you today.”

“You’re teasing me, Rannah.”

“Not entirely. You were bastinadoed and chained by my orders. In rejecting liberty you must contemplate these things. They could happen again. They will! Firstly you will earn punishments, and secondly you are so damnably erotic you invite them . . . I am only human.”

“I don’t care! I’m your slave girl. Don’t let’s talk of anything else.”

“You see! You are incurably impudent. You will be forever striped.”

“By you, my Lady . . . please! Yousef . . . he’s a man . . .”

“I love you beyond bearing. You know it, child.”

“I adore you, my Lady. Beat me and keep me chained.” Rannah sighed. She fumbled in her bag and produced a small square box. “This is yours, slave girl.”

Stacie moaned in ecstasy as she held the silver handcuffs up to view. “Oh, darling! They’re gorgeous . . . and different.”

“They are made for you alone, of silver. Put them on.”

“I can’t. You must.”

The bands were wide, they encircled the chafed wrists snugly and made but a single locking snap on the captive flesh. They were joined by only two silver links.

The chained slave girl knelt before her mistress and wept in gratitude.