by Sean O'Kane
Carlo sat up suddenly and looked around the auditorium for Gregor and Oleg of the Scarlet and Black team; an idea about the unexpected form of their chariot teams had suddenly occurred to him. He located them on the far side of the room, their faces betrayed nothing however and there was nothing that could be done in any case at this late stage.
The dining room was arranged around a mud wrestling ring and the guests’ attendants were matched against each other while the meal was served. Carlo’s girl won five straight fights before she was pinned down. Conor Brien came round the tables with Mark and Carlo had warily shaken hands with both. A few platitudes were exchanged but neither he nor John were especially welcome, but at least the conversation was polite.
On the morning of the second day, they were addressed by a fairly recent addition to the arena circuit. His arena was in a small African republic whose name was a byword for corruption and chaos. However, as he related, having finally got fed up with political wrangling, chicanery and incompetence he had given the top military men tickets to his owners’ box and suggested that the president should be removed and democracy restored. In a matter of weeks that was done and he gave the new MPs free tickets. As a businessman he ‘advised’ them on economic matters and the country began to prosper, any corruption meant instant banishment from the arena and soon the country’s newspapers were hailing him as the saviour of his people. He admitted with a big smile that the editors of those newspapers also had free tickets. But the point was there; politics and politicians needed to please the people, the arenas pleased people. Bring them together and nothing was impossible.
In the afternoon the whole conference was moved by air conditioned bus up to the actual estate and the arena. Carlo’s heart was pounding as the bus crested the hill above the village, and he could look out over his old home as it lay in a bowl before the foothills of the mountains that formed the backbone of the island. Much had changed. There were more barrack blocks around the arena, the new circus now stood on the field where he had drilled his dressage teams. But a lot was still the same. As they entered the training ground in the shadow of the arena, a wrist-suspended slave was being disciplined. The guard, clad only in shorts was delivering the lashes in a relentless rhythm, ignoring any cries or wrigglings from his victim. He looked over briefly and nodded at the guests and then returned to his task without missing a beat.
“What’s she being punished for?” a woman’s voice asked. The woman in question was the one the men were having real trouble adjusting to. The vet – Madeline Smith-Brookes, a bluff ‘county’ Englishwoman who took no nonsense from anyone – had established a place for herself but the other woman was different. She was quiet and as far as anyone could tell was Scandinavian, but what really made her so different was that she was the first female arena owner. No one quite knew how that would work. Could a woman be as relentlessly dominant as she would have to be? Could she control her male staff?
“She’s getting fifty lashes,” Gerd, Carlo’s replacement as the Blues’ trainer told her. “No particular reason, but Mick there had been laid up with a sprained wrist and needed a workout to loosen it up.”
Everyone looked at the woman to see how she would react. She watched the struggling and swinging figure of the slave as she was whipped.
“Good. There does not need to be a reason for whipping a slave,” she shrugged. “That is what they are for and should be reminded of it every day. They are at my arena, or I will be asking my men why.”
There was a sudden relaxation in the crowd. She might be female but she clearly ran a tight ship along all the right lines. The first female Owner had arrived and been accepted.
Taking a seat in the arena was another emotional moment for Carlo but he was soon too engrossed in the spectacles laid before him to get sentimental. Each prospective new event was discussed and argued about heatedly after it had been demonstrated and a show of hands decided if it should be considered further by the new committee.
Owners who thought they had a good idea had travelled with some slaves for demonstration purposes. Boxing with the studs on the gloves and the slaves naked was entertaining enough in its way but would be very expensive in slaves. Even in the demonstration, one slave had to be dragged out by her feet. Typically it was a Middle Eastern potentate who had suggested it – their populations almost insisted they had slaves and gave them to them, so they therefore never really understood how valuable they were to the other owners.
An obstacle race between two teams of slaves who were flogged over and under ramps and beams, carrying heavy timbers and had then to assemble them into large rectangular whipping frames at the end of each run was next. The losing team of course got to try out the frames which could take five slaves in a row. That part was fine, everyone enjoyed the finale of the spectacle but the actual race was considered rather too cumbersome and slow.
Only as dusk began to darken the sky in the west did two new events attract universal applause.
The first was presented by the Orange team which fought out of Asia and was where Trouble had come from. They had a reputation as a very hard school and it was all the more surprising that they came up with a new form of studded whip duelling which depended for its success on offering the slaves more protection.
The studded whips were too popular to be dropped but it was a continuing problem for the owners to work out how to get the best from them without it costing a fortune in replacement slaves. The current solution was to attach one of each combatant’s feet to her opponent’s with a steel bar so neither could take a backward step – which they were distressingly prone to doing, given an opportunity. Keeping them toe to toe made for good entertainment as the whips couldn’t miss and the widened ends to the lashes with their cargo of studs obtained instant results, but the contests were short lived affairs.
Standing down in the arena, the owner of the Orange team explained his thinking.
“We realised that the balance was wrong. It may sound strange but the slaves needed more protection.” There was a frisson of interest from the ranks of the owners; this was original thinking. “At first we gave it to them but it didn’t have the right effect. And then we made it harder for them by putting them in a ring and we think we’ve got it right now. Judge for yourselves.”
A simple wrestling ring was set up out on the arena floor and a slave was marched in. Carlo was fascinated to see that she carried a shield and wore a helmet. The owner demonstrated that they were both of lightweight plastic. “As you all know, the only slave that a slave hates is one from another stable, so Conor very kindly lent me probably the best slave on the circuit right now at studded whip fighting.”
Carlo and everyone else sat up as Snake was led out on her tongue leash. She was barely a week out of her last show and still bore livid traces across practically every inch of her skin.
“What the hell’s Conor doing?” John whispered. “You don’t put a slave of that quality up for a demonstration in that condition!”
Carlo didn’t answer, he had a feeling that Conor Brien wasn’t motivated by generosity, but what was it then?
The two slaves were given their whips and ducked through the ropes into the ring.
Half an hour later, everyone knew that the studded whip problem had been solved and the arenas had a new event. Giving the slaves shields had the advantage of making them much braver. They were inclined to take much greater risks with their hides if they felt they had a chance of protecting themselves and the resulting action was fast and furious, with full force overarm throws being traded, sometimes they were thrillingly dodged at the last second, sometimes they were blocked by the shields and sometimes they had to be taken full on. And there the spectacle was at its best, when the frantic ducking and feinting wasn’t enough and the heavy studs thudded home onto the tanned skin of backs and hips and thighs. But the helmets and shields meant that neither girl was in any hurry to go down to defeat. The ring meant that retreat was limited and so increased
the need for craft and skill, all the trainers could see that and appreciate it.
And the final advantage was that when at last the Orange slave did go down, she was well blooded but quite able to walk off. Snake turned to her audience in triumph and showed off her trademark tattoo of a nest of vipers boiling up out of her crotch, one of which stretched as far as her breast where its head was tattooed, encompassing the whole breast, nipple and all. A few trickles of blood only enhanced its savage beauty and she got a standing ovation for the way she had taken her opponent’s hardest lashes across her already marked back, buttocks and shoulders. Carlo looked along to Conor and saw the big Irishman applauding and beaming in delight.
As the applause died he turned to his audience of colleagues and rival owners.
“Now, I would like to present you with my stable’s humble offering. And I must thank my old friend, His Highness Prince Hassan of Bakhtar for loaning me one of his slaves for this demonstration. It’s a game we’ve developed called ‘Last Slave Standing’. Bring them on Gerd!”
Another ring was set up as two slaves were led out and what looked like the whole complement of the stable’s guards, who sat themselves around the rings in a gleefully anticipatory manner as a range of whipping frames and trestles were carried out together with racks of disciplinary items. The two slaves were of course naked and nervously paced their rings while preparations were made and Conor continued to address his audience.
“For some time I’ve reckoned that something we’re missing is more competition between the females and the males. Girl on girl is great fun, but a girl seein’ how long she can keep from being lambasted by a man….well we thought that might be fun too. And then we thought, why not see how many they can take. We all know that one of life’s greatest pleasures lies in seein’ how many lashes a pretty lass can take. So why not combine the two and this is what we’ve come up with.
Carlo had to admit to a sneaking admiration for the brutal simplicity of the rules as Conor expounded them. Two girls fought a man simultaneously in their own separate rings and tried to stave off defeat for ten minutes. A girl could wrestle, punch, kick and defend herself any way she could. But her opponent was likewise free to use whatever means he could to pin her down. The sooner he could get her down for a count of three he longer he could play with her on the equipment outside the ring. After she was taken down from that, she had twenty seconds to get back in the ring to face the next opponent. And so it went on until one or other couldn’t make it back. Every fifth round the two girls would fight each other and attempt to weaken their opponent. Conor waved to the men in the arena and two ducked into the rings. The slaves immediately adopted defensive stances and began to circle warily. On the terraces, the owners and trainers settled down to watch carefully.
After the fourth round the floodlights clicked on but Carlo hardly noticed. He was rooting for the prince’s girl. She had held out for seven minutes against her last opponent and all he had time for was a quick caning over a trestle and a wank over her back. The Blues’ girl had drawn a crafty, sinewy man who had posted her twice, then thrown her and got her into a folded press – legs bent up over her body, doubling her over on the ground. As she was naked, he was able to hold her down by sticking his fingers into both her passages and leaning on them. She had then had to take six minutes of hard beating and a fuck on an X cross.
The girl-on-girl round started out by being a massacre. The prince’s girl was able to throw her opponent and post her and toy with her for most of the ten minutes but then she had got careless and the Blues’ girl had come back at her, delivering some hard forearm smashes and throwing her twice with the dreaded crotch hold.
As the exhausted slaves staggered back to their corners, covered in dust, semen and sweat and prepared to take yet another pounding, Carlo looked around him. Not one of the owners had moved. They were hooked. Last Slave Standing seemed to sum up the philosophy of the modern arenas; see just how far a well trained slave can be pushed. But most of all it depended on her coming back for more, completely of her own volition. More sex, more punishment, more pain - all for the good name of her owner’s stable and all for the entertainment of the crowd.
But what Carlo was really most keenly aware of was that whoever owned the champion at this event would be the idol of the arena crowds.
Chapter 17
It made a pleasant change to attend an outdoor auction. The weather on Conor’s island being generally benevolent, he had staged it out on the training ground. The merchandise had been housed in the visitors’ barracks and now, on the morning of the third day of the conference, vendors were hurrying about, making sure their goods were displayed to their best advantage as John and Carlo studied the lots and waited for the inspection to begin.
The previous night had been a long one. Somehow the two slaves engaged in the Last Slave Standing demonstration had staggered back into the rings twelve times before finally the Blues’ girl had stayed down for the count of twenty. In between being thrown about like rag dolls in the rings, they had endured pegging and clamping as well as flogging with everything from paddles to stock whips and they had taken those on breasts, cunts, backs and buttocks. They had been suspended by wrists and ankles and had been penetrated in every orifice possible so that when they fought each other in the tenth round, they were so slicked with sperm that their desperate but largely ineffective efforts to throw each other had provided excellent light relief. They had been reduced to clawing, scratching, punching, kicking and hair pulling.
Conor had taken a standing ovation at the end as both slaves were carried off.
“And of course the owners can negotiate the individual contests, that’s the beauty of it,” he told the enthusiastic crowd over drinks back at the hotel. “We’ve experimented with having the ten opening rounds at fifteen minutes which means you can have your slaves take more punishment outside the ring; it makes for shorter bouts but is a crowd pleaser. On the other hand if you want a serious betting prospect and want the action centred on the ring itself – shorten the rounds. And if you know you’ve got two slaves who’ve got a real grudge against each other – let ‘em loose on each other every three rounds and make every other round fifteen minutes if the contest goes on too long. And there’s the punishment equipment, you can put whatever the two of you want out there for the bitches.”
Carlo sat and ran it all through his mind again. It was really very good. It would undoubtedly be adopted by the owners’ new committee but how could a small stable like CSL train its slaves for the repeated exposure to male opponents in a ring, one after the other. A big stable had the staff.
“I reckon your policy of trying to pick up good, solid all rounders is the one we should stick with,” John was saying. “The events are getting tougher, like you said they would. And every now and then we’ll get lucky and pick up a specialist runner or whip fighter as we go.”
Carlo shook himself free of his anxieties, a way had always presented itself in the past.
They got up from where they were sitting in a long colonnade just the other side of the estate’s big house from where the hotel bus had dropped them and followed the slow tide of other owners who weren’t selling but who were looking to buy, down across the lawns between the guest wings of Conor’s house and then past the barracks – much extended now – and filled today with restive slaves anxious for exercise. Out on the training ground a treat awaited anyone interested in purchasing naked and trained slaves.
For an auction house the problem was always how to allow the maximum display of the goods with the minimum of movement from the goods in question. The auction house contracted in for this sale had come up with a simple and effective answer; basic gibbet type hangings for an ingenious variation on the theme ‘cage’.
Hundreds of simple steel poles, dug firmly into the ground, dotted the training ground and each pole had a gibbet arm protruding from it about seven feet up and hung from each was a cage – but that wasn’t quite the
word for it, Carlo thought as he stared at them.
If you took the woman out of them, then what you’d have, he realised, was a sort of child’s drawing of a stick person. Each slave’s head was encased at the forehead by a thin steel band which could be drawn as tight as was needed to immobilise it. Down the neck and back ran another thin steel rod. At the slave’s arse it sprouted a thin butt plug, just to take her body weight. From there it bifurcated and two slender rods at an angle of about thirty degrees to each other ran down the backs of the legs. Plastic straps at thigh and calf kept the legs anchored to them. A simple horizontal pole kept the arms stretched and immobilised, again by use of plastic straps at bicep, forearm and wrist. With no support for her feet, there was little the merchandise could do about whatever examination was made of her. And any objections she may have made were muted into incoherent moans by ring gags.
A pinch of skin above each navel had been pierced with a safety pin – so as not to risk an owner or trainer pricking their finger while they were inspecting the goods - and a laminated card hung from it, summarising the slave’s experience, her disciplinary record, her achievements and her overall points tally.
At this auction, for the first time it would be possible to check the accuracy of the information by scanning her chip. That meant that pricing would be more realistic and with accuracy would come the confidence to trade more frequently. A much more fluid feel to the arenas was being forecast among the owners, with the added benefit of stables being willing to try out more combinations of slaves in different events so that form would be more difficult to judge but betting would be more exciting – and with the advent of vets, more honest too.
Carlo and John wandered happily from gibbet to gibbet, turning and spinning the exhibits to examine them, the clever mountings making it possible to assess the tone of thighs and arms, the tightness and elasticity of the vagina, the curve and firmness of the buttocks, the absence or presence of scar tissue on the backs. They were in heaven, imagining this one, with the spectacular backside, being whipped up in a chariot, or that one with the amazingly big areolas being in demand for needle play in the dungeons. They hauled back lips to check on teeth being genuine and in good condition, they parted buttocks to check the anus was tight around the plug and that no slackness had set in.
