The repeated impact of the cane slowly turned Amy’s bottom and thighs bright red, cruelly striping the suffusion with darker lines, closely spaced. Knowing that precisely the same punishment would come in turn to her, Rebecca squeezed her eyes tight, but as the strokes multiplied into double figures her sister’s screams continued to be inescapable. The policeman had a powerful arm and was giving Amy a harder time with his cane even than Zahd. The unfortunate girl danced on her toes, her body shuddering and squirming under the cane, seeking escape without avail, until at last as her screams wobbled and cracked becoming mere groans, the ragged gown began to slip. It slid from its resting place like a curtain descending upon the scene so that the last few strokes mercifully intercepted by the fallen cloth raised a cloud of dust.
As she took her sister’s place at the wall bars, Rebecca wished she had counted the number of strokes; at least she would have had some idea of progress. But the policeman just as he seemed about to commence, was interrupted by the breaking out of a vigorous debate. The woman teacher who had complained about the damage was being urged to come forward to take the cane. Her arm was presumably less muscular than the policeman’s but Rebecca had no means of comparison and the reverberating echoes that resulted as it cracked across her backside sounded much the same in her ears. Her own shrill cries soon went up and down the scale like her sister’s, while she wriggled desperately in an attempt to dislodge her skimpy garment from about her shoulders.
Chapter Sixteen
It was full dawn when the two sisters staggered from the empty tent in which they had spent their first night in the internment camp for women aliens to which they had been consigned. They had been elated, imagining that the judges who had ordered their thrashings had at last relented thus far. It would be a step nearer to freedom. Freedom, however, proved only to be a provisional condition.
The camp had been placed far out in the desert amid baked and waterless rocky hills, a great enclosure of rusting barbed wire enclosing a sorry-looking oasis were a thin scatter of dusty date palms and thorny scrub occupied a damp depression. Originally housing internees and later refugees it might have been once well appointed and properly managed, but disintegration had overtaken it like everything else. Amy and Rebecca had arrived to find little remaining, only the foundations of huts, a few gutted brick buildings and a loose scatter of crumpled, corrugated metal sheets, bits of canvas and broken glass. There was no-one to receive them. The two female escorts walked a few yards here and there, calling out around the gutted buildings. Receiving no reply they conferred together and then, gesturing to Amy and Rebecca to stay where they were, they climbed back aboard their donkeys and rode away. At first the twins imagined that they had gone in search of some form of authority, but the pair kicking the animals into a trot with their heels, kept straight on through the gaping gateway and back down the road they had come.
The journey there, trudging after the donkeys, had already revealed some disorder. Columns of smoke were visible all round the horizon and, a few miles beyond the village, a mob of soldiers were looting some kind of food store unhindered by any authority. The girls’ two warders had detoured nervously, following empty tracks, passing battered military signs and military litter of all kinds but seeing few human figures and no vehicles or planes. The twins had no urge to run after the pair who had beaten them mercilessly along the way, but they slowly discovered that they were in a new plight.
A few wrinkled, haggard crones still occupied a little cluster of drab khaki tents. They existed by eating mouldy dates and sieving small shrimps from the brackish pools. They hurled what seemed at first to be gratuitous abuse at Amy and Rebecca but when the girls finally made sense of the mad jabbering, they realised it was a combination of fear and envy. The burden was that men would come for them. They were the rejected it seemed. All the more presentable women had been carried off by glib, supposed rescuers, by stray parties of deserting soldiers, or latterly by roaming Bedouin. The mad women were afraid to allow Amy and Rebecca to stay with them, for fear they would attract such raiders.
The girls spent only a single night in the tent. Next day, a long trail of dust became visible, approaching the site of the camp from out of the desert. There was nowhere to hide in the flat desert terrain. The dust cloud was gradually revealed to emanate from a small string of donkeys. They stopped briefly by the old women’s tents but soon moved on and as they came nearer, Amy and Rebecca saw that the leading rider was the officer who had intervened at the trial and behind him was their former captor, Zahd.
“You have not been forgotten, you see, Amy and Becky! A lady called Madame Zurra has a use for you!”
Chapter Seventeen
Isolated by her inability to comprehend her captors, Lady Elizabeth had no idea what was happening beyond the walls of the brothel. On her dawn return from the excursion outside, she had seen through the eye slits of her veil that the streets were full of abandoned vehicles, both trucks and armour, even untended guns. Mules, donkeys and even camels seemed to have replaced motorised transport. Soldiers and civilians alike carried crude weapons, clubs, bayonets and makeshift spears as if war was being fought under more primitive conditions. Could this be the forecast Catastrophe? Had it passed over without her knowing? Madame Zurra seemed even more single-minded than ever, concentrating solely upon increasing the business of her brothel, no doubt still having confidence in her powerful protectors but making preparations for survival of her own. Sensitive to their changes of mood, Elizabeth sensed a desperate recklessness in the men who paid to use her, as if they sought to forget reality in orgiastic excess. There was a huge and disorderly attendance therefore when once again Madame introduced Lady Elizabeth to the Exhibition stage.
Once again the brothel courtyard was lit for the show. Power had failed long since and the brothel was lit entirely by guttering oil lamps. This time the lighting was primitive flares set above the heads of the audience and disguising with their reek the smell of sweating men and over-scented women, the tobacco smoke and hashish fumes that made the senses swim. A team of live musicians played hot throbbing music calculated to stir the blood of men already brutalised and reckless.
The two shaven-headed recruits whom Zahd had delivered to Madame she now found at target practice. Poised face upwards on a table top, with her raised body supported on widely planted feet and elbows, Rebecca was peering between her sharply conical breasts and along her belly at a vertical marker on the opposite wall. Her pubis bulged prominently between the stretched tendons of her thighs. Within the glistening red lips of her vaginal opening appeared an emerging white roundness as if she was about to lay an egg. Sighting her line of fire by shifting her bottom until the mark was central between her spread knees, she tensed in a supreme release of muscular energy and a little white plastic ball shot from her vaginal passage in a long outward curve, plinking into a small rush basket gripped between the teeth of her sister kneeling on the floor several yards away.
They were being trained to appear as the prizes in a game of chance to be presented to Madame Zurra’s customers. The men who took part, having paid to bet upon one of the Arabic numbers black-daubed on the plastic balls, would load them into whichever twin was firing, to the total of half a dozen. The first man to have his numbered ball plonk neatly into the bucket would win her services. The twins had just about mastered expelling the smooth balls at speed. Controlling direction and distance was difficult, but since even firing at random a ball was bound to plop into the basket sooner or later, the customers would be quite happy.
“They need rigorous training!” Madame Zurra said, greedily examining the two demoralised recruits. “Lady Elizabeth’s muscular development is such that by now she can beg for one of the good Cuban cigars we supply to our customers, then lie on her back to allow the bemused donor to inserted it firmly into her vagina and expel blue puffs of smoke from it! But if we have a whole family to be broken-in there is n
o time to waste. Find a suitable viewpoint for them. They can work out their fate by watching their mother’s performance!”
This was no elaborately rehearsed production. As the music built up to a climax, Lady Elizabeth was already on stage. She had the sort of generous curves exactly suited to the taste of the audience. They eyed her naked white figure with expectant lust, rumours of the nature of the performance having gone before.
Prostrate upon a low, stout, wooden bench, her head projected beyond one end and her bottom thrust clear just over the other. Her blonde hair had been piled up and pinned on top of her head, giving a clear view of her face and revealing the heavy dog collar encircling her white neck, from which a short length of chain fastened her to a staple in the end of the bench. Her thighs were drawn forward, knees widely parted by the bench top the other end of which her arms embraced. She was fastened securely down at knees and elbows by heavy straps. Since her rear was elevated higher than her head, propped up upon a fat leather cushion, those of the audience who had a clear view of it could remark the glistening redness of her slot, rouged and greased, the former for effect, the latter for lubrication.
The drum rolls came to a climax; there was a final clash of cymbals. In the sudden expectant silence, a boy in a short white gown led forward a small grey donkey. It was the ordinary sort of beast to be seen in any village street, but an unusually lively specimen, dancing and snorting. It was also conspicuously male. As the audience buzzed and sniggered, it gave vent to a tremendous bray. Strapped to her bench Lady Elizabeth could barely twitch or turn her head, but to her ears, the donkey’s frisky outburst, ludicrous as it sounded to the audience, evidently carried dire connotations. To their collective amusement she let out a wail of alarm that competed for expressiveness with the donkey’s bray.
The courtyard crackled with tension as heads craned and men at the back rose to gain a better view. Her pale figure strained fruitlessly, her bottom cheeks were uplifted like twin moons, white thighs split wide displayed the well-used female orifice, reddened and glistening and gaping a little with the effect of her pose.
Holding on to the excitedly dancing donkey, the boy delved within his garment and displayed to the audience, flourishing it aloft like a conjuror, long and tapering, a bright red carrot. Stepping up to Lady Elizabeth’s rear he stooped and quickly thrust the vegetable deep into her undefended slot. Its recipient let out a shriek and then after that evoked a burst of brutal laughter from her audience, a loud groan. The boy extracted the carrot with an easy twist of the wrist and thrust it under the black nostrils of the donkey. The animal brayed again, its dark eyes rolling and ugly yellow teeth exposed. The carrot had emerged glistening with female secretions. Lady Elizabeth’s combined with those of a ripe jennet, in which bestial vagina it had been before hers. Lady Elizabeth’s own blue eyes were rolling too, in an attempt to see what menaced her and she was making almost as much noise. The donkey however had more freedom of action. With a skitter of hooves the animal lunged forward. With outstretched neck and bared teeth, it looked for a moment as if it intended to take a bite out of the plump white bottom, but it had forgotten the carrot in favour of sex. Excitement stirred the audience as they saw for the first time the beastly cock spear forth beneath the animal’s belly, a long black wobbling thing that grew and dangled as if it never meant to stop.
The audience reaction was not lost upon Lady Elizabeth. Evidently sensing what they could see she repeated her hoarse cry, straining against her bonds and jerking at her tether. Collar and straps creaked but gave not a finger-breath.
Behind her the donkey reared on its hind legs, braying repeatedly. Its extended penis bobbed like a length of black rubber, the reaching end sagged under the long, unsupported weight. Lady Elizabeth managed to lift her rump just clear of the cushion, but then sank back, panting, unable to close the yawning division and having only emphasised the glistening red crevice at its parting. Fore-hooves pawed the air briefly then came down solidly on the wooden frame either side of Lady Elizabeth’s extended figure. The donkey’s forelegs folded gripping her torso between bony knees as it subsided half-kneeling, so that its monstrous cock was directed like a giant black poker right between her parted thighs.
There was open-mouthed, near silence. The donkey boy moved swiftly to assist his charge, reaching a hand to steer the prodding black-knobbed end, home onto its target. Evidently the donkey recognised its lodgement at once for its tail whipped upwards, it let go a wild bray and then lunged vigorously, its hind hooves scraping on the timbers. Lady Elizabeth squealed on a rising note. At the very last moment and with great difficulty, the donkey boy pulled the animal back. Several members of the audience ran to help him hold the demented beast, denied its chance at the gaping sex. There was a roar from the audience, half in frustration, the other half in gleeful anticipation that the donkey might yet be released to complete its task.
For some time there had been a distant rumbling half heard, but ignored by the audience at first, in the cruel excitement of urging on the performers. Neither did the noise register with the disparate pair on the stage. Lady Elizabeth was oblivious to everything bar the likelihood of being speared from end to end like a roast on a spit by the thrust of the bestial donkey-shaft. Nor was anything likely to divert the randy male animal from doing its best to do that if he was allowed the chance to do so. But now the noises off expanded into uproar and a shuddering of the whole building began as if heavy trucks were passing. All about the courtyard, loose dust and fragments of woodwork were tumbling down. The lights flared out sideways, driven by a gust of air instantly setting fire to the nearest wooden pillars. Black smoke belched upwards. Screams and yells and the sound of pounding feet came from the dark entrance passage.
Even Lady Elizabeth made a dazed attempt to focus. With the donkey stallion still attempting to reach her, she strove to attract attention in a desperate panic. In its desire for depth, the randy beast seemed prepared to recognise no limits. As if fearing an interruption to its purpose, it threw up its tail and ducked its head, preparing to give such a buck as would hammer the buried knob solidly into its straining, gasping, unwilling partner. Simultaneously, though, a sudden rush of foaming water burst through the entrance, carrying tables, chairs and people before it and crashed into the stage. Aloft, the donkey attempted to deliver its desperate lunge just as the whole grouping, the form, its helpless burden and the braying animal, were carried away together with the whole tilting platform. Crashing and thundering the building seemed to split open, tons of water pouring and spouting everywhere, extinguishing the flames in great billows of steam.
The stage was a solid platform on a base of heavy timbers meant to hold firm against violent action on its surface, but no one had anticipated a flood. It was lifted bodily on the surge and swung this way and that. Steam, spray, smoke and dust created a dense fog through which Elizabeth, frantically twisting her head this way and that, caught brief glimpses of leaning pillars, splintering galleries and tumbling bricks. The stage was somehow carried through this chaos and was discharged still afloat into open. As it did so the donkey reared wildly, its long black cock showing like a length of wet hosepipe. The animal, apparently losing its footing and braying in terror, subsided backwards into the flood and was left behind. The raft, as the platform had become, rocked so wildly that Elizabeth might have followed the beast had she not been fastened in place. It emerged from the steam upon even keel at last, but turning slowly in circles. Even from her upside down position it gave Elizabeth a view of the whole flood upon which she was adrift. Where the town had been was a waste of tumbled walls and rafts of debris with only a few modern structures still standing. Beyond it were only the very tops of date palms protruding in rows above the brown water, like battered cabbages in a flooded field. The brothel stood only partly above the flood as a steaming ruin with a few flickers of fire still burning among the wooden galleries.
Elizabeth was swept, bobb
ing on the swirling currents, first inland away from the scene and then brought back again the other way. As she passed the brothel ruin, she saw a large dhow, a fishing boat or trading craft, coming swiftly after the raft, following the curving line that marked the course of the former creek and being manoeuvred by several pairs of oars with its big sail folded about the long spar. A short barrel-chested man with a greying beard was at the steering oar. Heaving on the oar before the vessel seemed about to sweep by, he brought it momentarily alongside the crumbling wall of the brothel.
“Zahd! Zahd!” he roared and at once several figures appeared, leaping down from the ruin of a collapsing gallery, into the nearest gap; the donkey boy with Zahd close behind, each carrying one of the twins slung over his shoulder, bald heads gleaming and legs kicking and following them, a dark-skinned female, naked except for a skimpy pair of lace pants, tugging a pale-skinned boy on the end of a chain leash. The girls were slung bodily aboard, their captors tumbling after. The naked boy was impelled aboard in turn by a vigorous kick in the behind from his conductor who made her own leap in the nick of time, as the dhow swung away, carried onward, moving upon the same current that was bearing Lady Elizabeth’s accidental raft towards the conjectural position of the sea margin. The triangular sail rose jerkily and the pursuing vessel notably increased its speed to overtake her, the sharp bow parting the layer of debris before it. Upside down, she saw youthful brown faces gawping as they passed her before a bearded crewman, more quick- witted than the rest, sprang onto the side and a loop of rope, expertly flung, settled over her form. Encompassing her elevated rear portion, the rope settled across her lower back and around her thighs, then as the vessel continued to surge onward, the line tautened and the loop came tight in turn, cutting deeply into the soft crease between bottom and thighs, so that Lady Elizabeth and her raft of debris, began towing together in the wake of the dhow.
Elizabeth Enslaved Page 11
