by Hall, Denise
Chapter Four
Shipe kicked open the dining room doors and swung into the hall, his customary gait that of an avenging fury. Mercy’s bare feet softly slapped the floor as she hurried along behind him, sometimes walking, sometimes jogging just to keep up. His stamina was amazing. As they walked down the center aisle between the rows of tables, benches, and the Lessers standing at silent attention while they awaited the command to sit, Mercy couldn’t help but admire the bunching, flexing muscles playing along his shoulders, arms and back. He was a powerful man, despite his partial limb. But also humorless and very quick to temper.
It was also plain to see that the other women were afraid of him. Now and then, she thought she caught a sly sideways glance from a Lesser here or there, but not one of them—not one—turned her head to look at them directly.
Far to the front of the room was the dais upon which the masters sat to eat their meals. The food at the high table was of considerably better quality than that served to the Lessers, and made Mercy’s poor fare all the more unpalatable. And worse, she was segregated from the rest as though she were diseased. Being alone had been easier to ignore in Boyden’s barracks, when she hadn’t seen the others, but in public it was much harder. When Shipe led her around the dais to the small table, set up in the corner with only a single place setting, she could feel the eyes of the Lessers on her back. She felt very conspicuous.
“You’ve been whipped once today,” he said. “And you’ve got another one coming later tonight, so don’t think you’re entitled to the privilege of sitting down during supper.”
Mercy wasn’t about to complain. She was still very, very tender along the tops of her thighs, and the wooden stool had no cushion. Just the thought of having to settle her weight upon its flat, unyielding surface stirred up echoes of pain.
They were the last to arrive in the dining hall. As Shipe hopped up onto the dais to take his seat, Tane’s command, “Be seated,” echoed throughout the cavernous room.
Very little in the way of conversation took place, and what talking did occur was mostly done in respectful whispers.
“Face the wall!” Shipe barked at her, the one time she dared to glance behind her at the others.
And Deaton’s harshly called out, “A Demerit to Comfort for looking at the Drone,” must have kept the others from making the same mistake, because that particular sentence was only passed out once.
Drone? Was that what they’d chosen to call her? It was a name as unappealing as her tunic. As unappealing as her food: plain mashed potatoes, boiled chicken ground into a paste-like substance, and a leafy green salad without dressing. But having already received from Boyden one lesson on the sin of wastefulness, she ate all of it anyway.
The task of cleaning one’s plate while standing up was significantly more difficult than Mercy would otherwise have thought. She ate slowly, although more to keep from spilling food sloppily about her plate, as she negotiated the fork to and from her mouth, than from any desire to savor the unappetizing fare. Of course, knowing that she faced another beating as soon as she was done gave her plenty of motivation to chew her food as thoroughly as possible.
Mercy took so long that she was just consuming the final bite of potato when a loud bell rang the completion of the dinner hour. Knowing better than to turn around, she listened as the Lessers noisily stood up. She heard them file from the dining hall, some laughing and talking, until the shuffling of their many feet was muffled by the closing of the doors and the only sound to remain was the quiet conversation of the masters on the dais. Then came the heavy tromp as Shipe hopped down the dais’ steps.
“Nice try,” he told her. “You can delay all you want, but it’s not going to change the fact that you’ve still got a whipping coming.”
He caught her by the lobe of her ear and Mercy came right up onto her tiptoes, wincing expressively as he dragged her from her corner table.
“So,” Tane asked, coming off the dais himself. “How do you like having your own Lesser to command?”
“I don’t!” Shipe snapped, and pushed Mercy ahead of him. “Back to your room!” He let go of her ear and his broad hand swung down to sharply smack her bottom. The blow was hard enough to cause her hips to jerk and sent her skipping forward several steps. “Don’t drag your damn feet, girl. Move!”
Behind her, well accustomed to Shipe’s volatile moods, the other masters only laughed, and he swung past Tane, grumbling fiercely under his breath.
It was only sheer reflex that caused her, when she reached the exit ahead of him, to stop just across the threshold and hold the door for him. It was not a gesture he appreciated, however, and the look on his face went from cross to seething in the space of a heartbeat.
“Did I ask you to do that?” he growled. “You think I need you to hold the damn door for me?” His voice lowered and his expression grew increasingly blacker. “I don’t need you to do a goddamn thing for me! You get your skinny ass back to the room!”
She let go of the door, turning to flee even as it swung shut on him. Behind her, she heard the reverberating crash as he kicked it open and bellowed after her, “You do what you’re told when I goddamn well tell you to!”
Lessers parted out of her way as she ran. She even heard some snickering as she passed them. Her face burned, and she ran faster.
By the time she reached his room, her hands were shaking and her heart hammered at her chest as though it would break straight through her ribcage. She was so rattled, she forget even to turn on the closet light. Her room was as dark as a tomb when she slammed the door behind her.
A dry sob choked from her throat as she crawled onto her bed. Grabbing her pillow, she hugged it to her chest and that’s where she stayed, curled against the wall in the pitch blackness until she heard an outside door open and shut, and the unmistakable sound of Shipe crossing the floor.
The closet door swung open. She tensed, clutching the pillow so tightly that her knuckles whitened. Even her toes curled. But he didn’t yell at her again. After a moment, the light flicked on and he leaned in the doorway to look at her.
Mercy cringed, waiting, but he still didn’t yell. Instead, coldly, calmly, he said, “Get out here.”
Mercy couldn’t remember a time when she had ever feared the wrath of a man more. Not her father when she’d been young. Not Richard in his foulest mood. Not even Boyden when, in her second week at Judgment, for the sin of talking back, he’d taken her to the Demerit Hall and given her two vicious swipes of the heaviest cane he could find.
Struggling for obedience, she uncurled herself from around the pillow. Her legs refused to support her weight. They felt like rubber under her as she crept out of the closet to stand quaking before him.
“I may not have two legs,” he told her. “But I am not a cripple, and you’ll not treat me that way again.”
Anger still trembled in his voice, but at least he wasn’t yelling at her. Mercy jerked her head into a shaky nod. She bit her bottom lip, but it was too late. She could no more hide its betraying wobble than she could hide the tears that stung her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to offend you—”
“You offend a friend,” Shipe snapped. “I’m not that to you. Get on your knees.”
It hurt her shins, she hit the floor so hard and so fast. The tears poured down her cheeks as she clasped her hands behind her back and bent to press her forehead to the cool stone beside his boot.
“Less than a day out of Boyden’s care, and you already need to be reminded of your proper place.”
She clasped and unclasped her fingers, sniffling loudly and choking back her tears. But it wasn’t the inevitable punishment she feared, that ominous black threat which she could feel growing and swelling all around her. Instead, she wept out, “Please don’t send me away. I’ll do better, I will! I promise!”
Shipe swung away from her and crossed the room, as though heading for the door. Certain that she was about to be
cast out, Mercy covered her head with her arms and began to cry.
“Take off your clothes,” Shipe ordered.
She wouldn’t even be allowed to keep her tunic.
Mercy was so ashamed, she didn’t bother to get up off the floor. She striped the ugly fabric from her body, lifting her forehead off the floor only far enough to slip the uniform over her head. Leaving it in a crumpled heap, knowing she didn’t deserve even to touch it, much less to wear it, she took her hands away.
He passed her again and she heard him lay something heavy on the table. “You think me so incompetent that I can’t train you?”
Mercy covered her face, crying harder as she shook her head.
“You answer when I talk to you!”
“No, master!” she cried out.
“That’s what you said!” he barked. “I am so incompetent as a master that I must send you away because I can’t train you. I am ineffective! I am weak, in your opinion!”
She shook her head no.
“Now I’m a liar?!”
She shook her head even harder. “No, master, I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
“Get up.”
She scrambled to her feet and stood shaking before him, her face flushed and wet with tears, her nose red and running.
“Hands behind your head.”
She placed them there immediately and her chest heaved as she gasped to control her sobs.
Shipe stood at the table, a suitcase-sized box before him. He watched her with his angry eyes, considering her a moment before opening it. Quietly, he lay the lid upon the table. Inside was an assortment of paddles and straps. “Come here.”
She bowed her head, her knees all but knocking together as she crept to his side.
He selected a small hand paddle. Only ten inches in length, it had a wide, round head that was large enough to cover half her bottom with a single smack. A light oak color in shade and possibly a half an inch thick, Mercy caught her breath when she saw it.
Taking hold of a dining chair, he pulled it back from the table and turned it around to give himself plenty of room to swing. He sat down, sliding his crutch on the floor underneath the seat. With one hand braced upon his thigh and the other holding that paddle, he gave her his coldest look.
“Well,” he said, then pointed to a spot on the floor beside him. “Get over here.”
Oh, how those few small steps seemed like a mile. Her knuckles went white as she clutched her hands behind her head. Her knees trembled; her breaths were ragged pant. Her stomach, as she edged into place at the right of him, tightened so hard for an instant she was afraid she might vomit.
His gaze never leaving her own, he reached up to take hold of her left wrist. He had no trouble whatsoever pulling her down across his thigh. His left one. His other leg came down across the backs of both of hers, effortlessly pinning her over the stump. The arm he held, he kept a firm hold on.
“Give me your other hand,” he ordered, and Mercy quickly offered him her other wrist. He held them both between the fingers of his left hand and pinned against the small of her back. It hurt to be held like that, the press of her wrist bones one against the other making her wince. But that pain was quickly made secondary to the one that exploded through her bottom at the very first crack of the paddle.
Master Shipe was not a scolder. There was no lecture, no reprimand. He simply spanked her, the paddle flattening first one buttock and then the other, the blows falling rapidly and hard, the sound in the close room deafening her even as the hurt overwhelmed.
She howled into his leg, first throwing back her head, then instantly tucking her chin to her chest as she curled into his lap. Her whole body stiffened. Her feet snapped back as far as his blocking leg would allow. She fought so hard not to struggle against his hold—she wanted so much to submit in a way that might please, or at the very least appease, him—but the pain wouldn’t let her. Despite all of her best efforts, before the first twenty strokes had fallen, Mercy was screaming at the top of her lungs and writhing over his thigh without the slightest bit of control.
Judgment sang with the sounds of her suffering. The halls echoed the crack of the paddle. The bearskin rug drank up her tears. Unable to help it, Mercy bucked frantically, her crimson bottom humping upon his leg, fighting to twist in any way it could to avoid the next punishing blow. The summits were already turning blister-white and a hint of deep burgundy had suffused along the outer edges of her plump nether cheeks and beneath the chubby base above her tightly clenched thighs.
“Thaaaanggk yeeeeoooowww!” she screamed until her throat was raw, and then she just cried.
Her strength to fight was literally paddled out of her, leaving her bottom swollen, blistered, and raw, and Mercy too exhausted to move. Not even when Shipe lay the paddle on the table and began the same punishing rhythm with the flat of his broad hand, spanking down the backs of her thighs. He spanked all the way to her knees and, as tired as she was, she somehow found the strength for a few feeble kicks as that alabaster skin was slapped to a hot cherry red.
The fire ignited by the paddle swallowed the hurt of his hand. It blazed down the backs of her legs, consuming her skin until all she felt was only the muted impacts of each hard slap. Her skin shone with sweat. Her voice left her entirely. She couldn’t even say for sure just when the spanking stopped, or when Shipe sat back in the chair, resting his hand upon the surface of one aching thigh to wait.
“What do you say?” Master Shipe asked, his tone the calmest she had yet heard.
It was a long time before she could catch her breath. “Thank you,” she rasped, her voice almost gone.
Her eyes closed. She lay panting and aching, her body felt so on fire and yet sated at the same time, both pleasantly and painfully wrung out. Only belatedly did she realize he might have been expecting her to apologize for her behavior, rather than thank him for his correction.
He said nothing, however. His hand merely soothed all the places he had so savagely punished. It felt as warm upon her skin as the heat flaring beneath his palm.
He removed his leg from the backs of hers. “Up,” he said.
She couldn’t. She just couldn’t. Her legs wouldn’t support the attempt, and she slid off him onto her knees instead. Groaning, she could only cup her sizzling backside in the cradle of her gentle hands.
There was the lightest touch against her hair, and when she looked up, Mercy caught her breath. For the first time since she’d met him, Shipe didn’t seem quite so angry. The demon within him had been assuaged. He looked almost...pleased with her. It had been a long time since she had last pleased anyone.
Letting go of her hair, he leaned back in his chair. “Go to bed. You’ll get your twelve with the cane tomorrow.”
Her every muscle protested having to get up. Walking was sheer agony, but Mercy felt the pain almost as though it were someone else’s. He needed her. He needed her the same way Richard had, to exorcize the fury inside. For the first time in a long time, she—not China, not Mahogany—was actually useful to somebody. She almost burst into tears all over again.
“Don’t forget your tunic,” he told her. “I’m not your damn maid. I’m not picking up after you.”
Mercy reclaimed her uniform. She hugged the coarse, pea-green fabric to her chest as she limped back to her tiny closet and her bed on the floor. He shut the light out and closed the door immediately behind her. She had to feel her way along the edge of her bed with her toes and fit the sheets to the mattress in the dark.
Lying down was impossible in any position but flat on her stomach. She couldn’t even bare the slight weight of the blanket upon her incredibly raw backside, but for the first time in two years, Mercy went to sleep feeling needed. Wanted.
Loved.
* * * *
One moment it was dark, and in the next the light was on, the door flew open and Master Shipe snapped out, “Get your skinny ass out of bed!”
Mercy jolted into wakefulness. Judgment days started at six
every morning, though her burning eyes told her it had to be much earlier. She rolled onto her side, sliding the inch or so off the narrow mattress and onto the floor. The first shock was the cold of the stones against her flesh, which made her gasp out loud. The second was the sharp stab of pain the instant her horribly bruised bottom touched the cool, grey rock. The cry was past her lips before she could bite it back and she scrambled to get back on her stomach.
“Oh!” She reached back with gentle hands to touch and soothe her battered flanks. That one slight brush against the floor reignited the full burn and ache from the night before. She throbbed, and beneath her hands, her flesh felt very strange. Stiff, almost as hard as wood.
“If I have to drag you out of there,” Shipe called from beyond the door, “you’ll be reacquainted with the paddle before breakfast.”
She pushed herself up on her knees, muffling the groans that were wrung from her at each aching movement by gasping them into her bedding. She crawled into her tunic, quickly making her bed as was proper, and shuffled to the door.
“Stiff?” he asked, when she limped out of the closet. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, pulling on his boot. He’d donned pants, but hadn’t fastened them and his shirt was still lying on the mattress next to him. A smattering of dark hair decorated his hard chest, trickling down his abdomen in a black line that disappeared into the ‘v’ of his open fly.
From his glaring expression to the terseness in his tone, he was every bit the angry man that Tane had introduced her to the day before. Mercy lowered her eyes respectfully. “Yes, sir.”
“Exercise is good for that.” He stood up without his crutch to fasten his pants. “Give me fifty jerks and twenty push-ups. You can do them balanced on your knees if you have to. But by the end of the month, I want at least half that count done off your toes the proper way.” Ignoring his shirt, he went into the bathroom. “And you can take your tunic off. You don’t get dressed in the mornings until I say you can.”
Mercy couldn’t remember the last time she’d done jumping jacks. High school, maybe, more than a decade ago. But she obligingly took her tunic off and laid it over the back of a chair by the table. As her bottom clenched and her thighs stretched into the first half of the jump, she squeezed her eyes shut and grit her teeth. Her wounded buttocks flared with heat as her battered muscles fell into the rhythm of the exercise.
