THE PRIZE

by Sean O'Kane

  It was early days but Peter was fairly sure, as he clicked his fingers and Ayesha came and knelt beside him, that not only had he won his prize, he had created something special for the arenas.

  Chapter 14

  Once the longed-for phone call had come through, Karen had immediately had her husband’s secretary make the necessary arrangements. It was convenient that he himself was not in town at the time and the plane was free but after the long weeks of waiting without any news of Ayesha, Karen felt she was due some luck. As the plane levelled out in the blinding sunlight above the heavy English cloud cover, she leaned back in her seat and as her eyes roved over the blonde stewardess lustfully she let her thoughts drift ahead; to the remote principality of Bakhtar - and Ayesha.

  The call had come late on, two evenings previously. Someone who was working with Brian on Sir John’s case had told her that at long last they had had a breakthrough. Brian himself had flown out to Bakhtar and was waiting for her to join him. Everything was poised and ready to go, the caller told her, so on no account should she attempt to contact anyone on any of the numbers he had given her as it might alert Sir John, who was becoming suspicious and might have set up bugging arrangements. She should just get to Bakhtar as fast as possible and Brian would meet her there.

  Languidly, she stretched her legs out in front of her and thought about how a reunion with Ayesha might go. If her kidnappers had kept her in reasonable conditions then it might only be a few hours before she was ready to fuck Brian and let her watch. Then Ayesha would make her lick his spend out of her and with luck both of them would beat her. She was sure they would like each other. Through heavy-lidded eyes she watched as the blonde approached with a gin and tonic and bent down to put it on the table beside her. The top three buttons of her blouse were open and as she leaned over, Karen was treated to a sight of the deep, smooth valley between her breasts. The drink was deposited and the girl smiled at Karen without standing up.

  “I take it my husband hired you to provide any services the passengers might want,” Karen said, her throat tight with excitement.

  The girl nodded and smiled again.

  “Right. I want you to fuck the flight crew one after the other while I watch. Then, if I ask you very nicely, you’ll let me eat you out.”

  The girl was unperturbed and stood up to strip while Karen crossed her legs to trap and hold the growing excitement in her belly. While she didn’t have Ayesha’s lusciousness, the stewardess was nonetheless a good-looking girl and while she sauntered casually out of the cabin and into the cockpit, stark naked, Karen stood to unzip her own dress and step out of it.

  The two women had hardly regained their dresses and their composure after an exhausted sleep before the plane touched down and taxied to a halt. The stewardess opened the door and unfolded the steps, then stood back to usher Karen out. She emerged into stifling heat and squinted down at the long black limousine Brian - of course, who else? - had sent to meet her and the big, swarthy man standing, holding the door open for her.

  “Enjoy your stay,” the blonde whispered as Karen began to descend.

  “I’m sure I will,” she replied.

  The Arab smiled and beckoned her into the luxurious, air conditioned interior of the car.

  Some two hours later, the Prince and Peter Lang leaned on a balcony with cool drinks in their hands and watched as Karen received her first thrashing in the royal household. She was staked out, arms and legs spread wide and face pressed against the grass in one of the palace’s innumerable atriums while Mahmut worked on her. She had long since run out of breath with which to scream and only a residual twitching of her body answered the lashes now, the smacking of the leather echoing off the walls and mingling with the excited giggling of the other household slaves who were watching from another balcony.

  Mahmut stopped eventually and wiped the sweat from his brow, looking up interrogatively at his master.

  “Hood her and bring her to the Music Room,” he ordered.

  As the two men walked slowly along the marble corridors towards the room, they discussed the forthcoming show.

  “Ayesha’s having her number tattooed today,” Peter was saying, “and once you’ve tested her yourself I’ll put her in the squad for this show and then we’ll see.”

  “You’re quite confident that you’ve won your prize, Peter?”

  “Absolutely, Your Highness. And I really think she shows a lot of promise. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she can join the solo fighters after just this one show.”

  The Prince raised his eyebrows. It would be the first time that a girl had achieved such rapid promotion, but Peter was an extremely shrewd judge of females. He would look forward to testing her out once he had decided the fate of her erstwhile lover.

  As the men entered, Mahmut was just standing back from having tied the hooded woman’s wrists to a hook on the end of a chain. She was staggering with exhaustion, her back, buttocks and thighs were almost completely covered in one huge raised area of pink, where the strap’s weals had overlapped and combined to form one continuous swelling. Mahmut stood back and grasped a yellow control which hung from the winch above. He pressed a button on it and the motor whirred into life, reeling in the chain and pulling the woman’s arms up. She screamed in blind terror but Mahmut stopped the motor while she could just about stand on tip toes.

  The hood was one complete with padded ear flaps and left just the slave’s mouth free so the two men made no attempt to whisper.

  “Even if she were not so eminently deserving of enslavement and not the wife of Sir John, she would still be a tempting little morsel,” the Prince said and Peter had to agree. She was shorter than Ayesha but her chest supported deliciously round and firm looking breasts, her thighs and legs were shapely and between them was a surprisingly capacious vagina. He had sampled it with his fingers once she had been staked out for her initial whipping and had recalled Ayesha, screaming under the relentless assault of the whip in her final catechism session, stumbling out tales of what Karen had liked her to put up it. The real surprise, he felt, was not how big it was but that it could still contract at all. Even he had never put a blow torch canister up a vagina, but apparently that was only one of the objects Ayesha had been able to introduce.

  Peter watched as the Prince’s hand reached out and stroked the woman’s stomach. She gasped in shock and tried to pull away as she felt the hand touch her. Mahmut slapped her rump smartly and she held steady while the Prince ran his fingers through her pubic bush and delved between the legs. At first she tried to keep her thighs clenched but a further slap on her backside made her shuffle her feet apart enough to allow the Prince’s fingers entry into her vagina.

  Peter smiled as he saw the look of surprise his boss’s face.

  “Ayesha told me that she’s a really dedicated masochist,” he told the Prince. “Some of the things she liked were frankly disgusting.”

  The Prince was still working his fingers inside the woman and she was trying not to gasp with pleasure. “If even you found her extreme, then she must be indeed,” he said grinning widely.

  “You wouldn’t believe the things she used to get up there,” Peter continued. “What plans have you got for her?”

  “I’ll have her sent to the women’s village and tattooed, then when she returns I’ll keep her to amuse guests and serve as a slave to the other slaves. She deserves nothing less.”

  Peter had been afraid that that was the answer he was going to get.

  “Your Highness, might I suggest that that might not be the best plan?”

  The Prince slid his hand out from between Karen’s legs, sniffed his glistening fingers appreciatively and began caressing her breasts.

  “Oh now don’t be a spoilsport, Peter. I’m looking forward to making her life one long punishment.”

  “I think once you see what Ayesha has become you will agree that anything which risks disturbing her is to be avoided. There is bound to be talk among the guards,
a wealthy Englishwoman gracing your household as a slave. Ayesha will pick up the gossip and will realise who it is. Believe me, we don’t want anything to unfocus her.”

  The Prince sighed. “I really do hope that this wretched girl is everything you say she is. What is your suggestion then?”

  “Send her to the village and have her tattooed by all means. I agree she should be marked permanently as a slave. Play with her for a few weeks and then sell her. I’ve got an idea I know who might like her and if you’ll allow me to talk to him first, then I think I might come up with something entertaining.”

  “Oh very well, Peter. I’m sure you know best.”

  They left Mahmut to take Karen down and lock her away for the night. The next day was going to be busy

  It was a tradition on the arena circuit that before a ‘show’ the owners and trainers of both squads would meet and discuss matters like the order of events, the weapons to be used, the protection - or lack of it - the slaves would wear, their accommodation and the amount of access the guests would have to them. On this occasion, as Peter had developed some new ideas and his was the home arena, the meeting was being held there. This entailed moving a sizeable part of the Prince’s household up country and for the last fortnight, the squad would move from the fort and lodge at the arena as well.

  A small convoy of vehicles left the palace in the quiet of early morning, in one four by four rode the Prince’s favourite chef, behind that in a truck came a considerable number of his harem behind them he and Peter rode in another four by four and after them came the Prince’s bodyguard.

  Chapter 15

  After her initial exploits in the courtyard, Ayesha had been taken to her master’s room and never had she felt so proud as when he had bent her over a table and taken her from behind. His urgency was such that he couldn’t wait for the dust of the training ground to be washed off and he took her just as she was, dirty, dishevelled and bruised but then, just as abruptly, he had had her sent away and put back in solitary confinement.

  The next day, as she lay on her bed of straw, a guard tattooed the number 63 where all the other slaves wore their numbers, just inside their left hip bone. She had watched the whole process in fascination and ignored the discomfort. As he worked the guard told her that her master had gone back to the capital, Bakhtar itself and would be gone for some days. In the meantime she would start training in earnest.

  The squad seemed to bear her no ill will and she settled in quickly under the watchful eye of Hassan who drilled them during the Englishman’s absence. She began to acquire some of the gladiator’s skills, such as the crotch hold in wrestling contests. It was a way of hoisting a female by inserting a thumb in her vagina and two fingers in her anus if the girls were face to face, or inserting the thumb in the anus and the fingers in the vagina if the hold was applied from behind. She learned that it was a hold which was used near the end of a contest when one girl was close to exhaustion; she also learned that there was a lot of theatre involved. The victim would teeter on tip toes begging the other girl not to complete the hold. Her pleas would be ignored and the hand inside her would clench, squeezing the septum between her passages. And then as the victim squealed the opponent’s free hand would chop down, jerking the hand out as the fingers still gripped. It was inevitably the beginning of the end. Alternatively, if the girl applying the hold was strong enough the victim could be lifted clear off her feet before the hand was withdrawn. Ayesha found she was capable of that feat and as slave number forty-one writhed at her feet, after her first successful lift, Ayesha was rewarded with an arched eyebrow and just a hint of a smile from grizzled old Hassan

  From the other girls, and from Hassan, she learned that the audiences liked to see the spectacles of female gladiatorial contests prolonged as long as possible, and as they were some distance from the onlookers, it was necessary sometimes to exaggerate. But never, never were they to fake anything, no punch was ever pulled, no lash delivered with anything less than full strength. They were to fight and compete to the bitter end in every event. Ayesha came to know and fear the studded boxing corset and thong but as with all the events she was aware that her master wanted her to excel at them and so she did. She learned to shrug off pain and control the arousal she felt at being constantly degraded and exposed in front of the men. Under the stern tutelage of Hassan, she was taught to think her way through a bout, spinning out of trouble and dodging an opponent’s whip or fists, acquiring almost balletic skills and never finding herself disgraced at the end of training when Hassan would pick on a few girls for slacking and put them to the whip. Her only problem came when bouts became long and very tough. When the pain was at its worst, that was when she found it hardest to contain her arousal. She gloried in the pain which obeying her master’s orders brought her; the more she suffered the more she redeemed herself and the more grateful she was to him.

  She was moved from her cell and joined the girls of Five Platoon. One of their number had recently been sold and Ayesha replaced her to bring them back up to strength. The platoon’s leader was the black girl - whose name was Miriam - Ayesha had beaten so comprehensively after her release from the catechism cell. Her performance then and the fact that she was known to belong to the trainer himself made her a bit of a celebrity. The five platoons were housed in different parts of the fort and only congregated out in the courtyard or for meals which were taken in silence in a huge echoing chamber where good wholesome food was served to the naked ranks of slaves by scornful women who were swathed from head to toe in traditional robes. The gladiators paid them no attention however. They might be the lowest of the low to the other women but it was the desire for their bodies that sustained the interesting bulges in the guards’ shorts and trousers. At first Ayesha was shocked at how relaxed the relationship between guards and slaves seemed to be. Five Platoon were quartered in a long, low sort of annexe to one of the main corridors. It was above ground and had narrow windows cut into the rock, overlooking the courtyard. Down one side of the room were five double pallets and beyond them were the showers and the toilets. She had expected to be chained in solitary each night, but instead she found that the girls slept together quite openly and with complete promiscuity. Furthermore the guards knew each girl’s name and called her by it. And although all the girls knew they had to address any man as ‘Sir’, they also knew their names. Sometimes a guard would drop by to beat and enjoy one or two of the girls before the evening meal and once he was finished he might let slip some interesting titbits of gossip as he lounged on a bed. For that reason the girls themselves were careful to be at their most obedient and passionate at those times.

  But that having been said, Ayesha found her new life every bit as cruel as she could have wished for. The days followed an almost invariable routine, they were roused in the grey dawn and their collars unpadlocked from the chains which restrained them overnight. Shivering, they had to perform their morning call of nature before a guard who noted the consistency and quantity of the stools before allowing each girl to wash in icy cold water. Still shivering they were herded out into the courtyard and made to run until they were warmed up and the sleep was cleared from their heads. Once more they were herded back to their barracks, the whips snapping at their backs and they were weighed and measured. One guard took the readings while another noted them down. The circumference of their thighs was noted, as was that of their breasts and even their calves. They were stood in front of an adjustable frame and the vertical distance between their collar bones and nipples measured.

  Miriam informed her succinctly that this was because the trainer wanted them fit and strong enough to put up good fights in the arena but he wanted to make sure they stayed sexy enough for “fucking and flogging”. So they were watched carefully for signs of developing too much muscle tissue and their breasts for signs of sagging - a crime punishable by immediate selling, Miriam informed her grimly. After breakfast it was back out to the courtyard and intense practice until the sun
drove them into the shade of the walkway where they were fed and watered and allowed to doze until the full fury of the heat had abated. Then they trained or ran until, as the shadows began to lengthen, any girls who were thought to have not pulled their full weight were put to the whipping posts on top of the ramparts and flogged in front of the whole squad.

  After that they were given an hour or so to shower and relax before the evening meal. After that they were allowed back to their barracks to attend to trimming pubes, washing, cutting and brushing their hair and the thousand and one feminine rituals even slaves perform. During this last part of the day, partners for the night were selected and usually by the time the guards came to chain them, they were locked in passionate couplings. The barracks would resound to the sounds of smacks and male laughter as the men casually slapped at exposed rumps and breasts as they padlocked the collar chains and only then did they lock the door as they left. Ayesha had been amazed at how much freedom they had.

  “Where would you run to?” Miriam asked when she mentioned it to her one day. And then the black girl had slipped her hand between Ayesha’s whip-scored thighs and her fingers had sunk easily into her humid depths.

  “And why on earth would you run anyway?” she murmured as she lowered her head to nip at an engorged nipple and fetch groans of helpless delight from Ayesha.

  Though the routine was tough, it wasn’t endless. Peter Lang acknowledged that the girls would fight better if they had breaks in their training. Consequently, every fifth week each platoon was excused training and allowed to rest up in the day and serve the guards at night. The fort was too remote to allow for being used as an SM brothel so no guests were involved.