by Mark Andrews
Both Ingawa and I developed our babies as well as all the others we had seen and since they had been conceived at much the same time, Ali had decided they would be dropped (again a quaint expression for birthing) during the coming galley racing carnival.
I’m not sure how well our western doctors can control the moment of birthing but the Arabs are past masters at it and can usually work it so that the baby is actually dropped during a race. Not always of course, for the vagaries of the human body are many and various but usually so ...
As my belly swelled right out during the last weeks of my pregnancy, rowing became hard. Fortunately, the position of my feet spread wide allowed my now heavily protruding middle to droop between them as I leaned right forward during the reverse stroke and now I understood why our feet had been placed so.
As I said I dropped my little baby during a race and it happened to be one of the early races in the season. The event took place when we were pulling at the normal rate. Zanda had been watching me carefully for they knew it was coming, as was Ingawa’s a day or so later, both of them perfectly natural births and he had the straw-filled basket ready.
The pains were slight. I could feel them of course but they were nothing like I had heard of from my mother and other older women. During them I just continued rowing and then suddenly, there it was. A little red head appeared between my thighs. There was almost no pain at all. Zanda knelt beside me to ensure the sucker dropped into the basket he had placed under me and he also attended to the cord and placenta while Ali continued to watch the galley from the poop, but watching me intently at the same time.
Beside me, Andy’s love washed over me. I could feel it in every pore of my body and across the way, just behind me, I knew Sadiki and his wife were also with me.
As soon as it was born, of course, Zanda took it away. I wasn’t even allowed to wet-nurse it once, let alone touch it. Probably a good idea, I suppose. I had carried it for nine months but without really seeing it, touching and holding it, there was no sense of it being mine.
I watched sadly as Zanda took it away to the little cabin under the poop where he had installed a wet-nurse. She would look after the infant until it was flown away to be brought up as a slave. Hell, I didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl! I just had to keep rowing and I did, relieved only that now the huge swelling in my belly was gone and I could bend forward more easily.
Ingawa dropped hers during the twenty-four hour race, at about midnight. She was behind me so I didn’t see the actual birth but as Zanda moved down the aisle, the basket in his hand, I knew it must be her time for he rarely left the poop unless there was some emergency.
After the races were over Ali allowed us another day together and we each congratulated the other on successfully carrying Ali’s two new little slaves. Weird? Of course it was but we were living in that so weird environment and were part of it. It seemed perfectly natural to congratulate each other despite not really having seen our progeny and knowing that the pair of them were going to a life of slavery. What that slavery meant, we really didn’t have much idea but we knew they would be raised in a special nursery and then trained for their future roles, whatever they might be.
Chapter 7
Our lives got back to normal after that. Well, as normal as life could be on that island. We exercised, trained with the gigs and cart, and on the galley and worked as hard as we ever had. By we, I mean Sadiki and Ingawa as well as Andy and me. And because we worked so hard and so willingly, Zanda (for Ali had now returned to his own country) allowed us more days off. These had now come to one every ten days or so.
Some of the other slaves were also rewarded with days off for good work but none as much as we four and never ever with another couple.
We often discussed why we were so privileged but we never came up with an answer. Not a satisfactory one anyway. Ingawa and I also wondered about our respective babies. We discussed them endlessly, only between the two of us for it seemed insensitive to do so in front of our men, wondering where they were and how well they were being looked after. Oh how little we knew ...
Of course we made love on those occasions but not together. Sadiki would take Ingawa’s hand and lead her off to another little grassy spot and then Andy and me would sink down and make wondrous love for an hour or so for of course, in the stables, we were still chained apart and could only look, not even being able to touch.
All four of us made the most of these outings. We knew we were highly privileged in having them bestowed on us at such regular intervals and as a result we worked even harder at the oars and at our other exercises. Our bodies became even better, Ingawa’s and mine as well as the boys ... None of us built any more muscle but it became even more defined. I suspect Western men would find Ingawa and me to be too athletic; too muscly, probably but our men said we were perfect for them.
Certainly it was reflected in our love-making, at least for Andy and me, and I suspect Ingawa and Sadiki were no different. We could make wondrous love together for hours if we chose and even at the end of say four or five bouts during our days off, were never tired but returned to the house with as lively a step as we had left it.
Did we never consider trying to escape, say on one of the motor cruisers moored beside the galleys? No. It would have been stupid. Our chances of success were highly limited for we had no idea how to sail them or in what direction, or what security arrangements were in place, and failure would probably mean a slow and painful death - certainly castration for all four of us and that was unthinkable.
During the next months more slaves disappeared and new ones arrived to take their places, each being initiated as we had been. It seemed to us each slave might last between one and two years at most. Later, we discovered that even the best slaves were not kept on to boost a master’s chances of winning. The rules the masters had set themselves allowed a time frame to keep a slave of one year minimum and two years maximum.
We had now been there just on eighteen months but at that time were still very unsure what our future fates might be. It is true we had seen that one male slave from our crew working as a guard for another master, but it didn’t seem to be universal. Of course we couldn’t be sure for some of the guards were well into their thirties, we guessed. We asked Zanda (when he was in a good mood) but he just smiled enigmatically, shrugged and said we would find out in due course.
A couple of months later, during the next racing season, Ali sent for us - all four of us. “I know you have been curious as to your futures here ...”
“Yes, lord,” we chorused dutifully.
“I shall explain it to you ...” He went on to outline some of the rules the masters had made about us slaves including the time frame permitted for us to remain. “And after that time, it is customary to find suitable employment for you. Employment that will ensure you do not go back to your countries and, how do you put it, spill the beans about our little island.
“In some cases, that means a departure from here to work on my estate at home but always as an overseer, trainer or guard over others of my slaves and in receipt of a salary that will for ever compromise you.
“In your cases, I would like you to stay here for another year or so and help Zanda train my up and coming new slaves to be as good as you have been ... If you accept, there will be a further bonus ...” and now he gestured to his secretary who went to the door and opened it, to reveal Zanda holding two little infants in his huge arms. He strode into the room and handed one of them to me and the other to Ingawa.
I stared down at the bright little thing in my arms and I started to cry then looked up at Ali, seated in his chair before me. “Are you saying, lord, that we may keep these if we stay here with you?”
“I am. I will allot you houses and you males will act as trainers to assist Zanda while the girls will rear their babies ...”
I looked at Ingawa a
nd raised my eyebrows in a silent question. It wasn’t whether or not we would accept his offer, that was a foregone conclusion given the carrot he had held out to us, it was about an entirely different matter; one that hinged on the mixed parentage of the two little babies in our arms. She grinned back at me and nodded while our husbands looked at us in mystification.
“Might it be possible, lord, for us to share a house ...?”
Now it was Ali’s turn to smile. “It shall be arranged, assuming you two men agree?”
I had noted he now termed them ‘men’ and not slaves and I hugged my baby to me in happiness. We were already free!
Andy and Sadiki looked at each other, grinned and then shrugged. “We agree, lord...”
“Good. And now that you are free, you may address me merely as Excellency since that is my title to free men ...”
From that moment, our lives changed radically.
We were given clothes. The men, their work clothes: the bright red silk pants and fez and some casual clothes for their time off, while we were given garments that would not have been acceptable in Ali’s own country but were certainly suited to a tropical island. They felt very strange at first after nearly two years of total nakedness but we put up with that feeling in the exultation of actually being able to cover our breasts and sexual organs after all that time.
The men took to their new roles with relish. They were eminently suited to them of course, partly from their partially completed physical education courses but more from all the months they had spent as galley slaves themselves. Zanda’s methods were tried and proved and while they might not have been acceptable in a free society, they certainly bore fruit and Andy and Sadiki now applied them to the slaves placed under their control during the callisthenics, the heavier gym work, the track sessions pulling the gigs or pushing the massive cart, and finally on the galley itself.
For Ingawa and me, at least at first, it was quite wonderful. We got up, made our men’s breakfast and then saw them off to work then tended our babies and did the housework and then went off with our infants strapped to our backs for a walk and a picnic on the beach. We delighted in our freedom to do what we wanted but as I say, that was only at first.
After a month or so of this, that freedom began to pall. Oh, running our little house was great and when our husbands got home all four of us delighted in our babies and in talking over the day or the next galley races or whatever, but the time in between, at least on the days the men worked - and that was five out of the seven, we began to pine for our former rigidly controlled days of hard exercise.
Even more worrying was the way the fine definition on our bodies began to blur. We were still athletic but the perfection of our bodies was no longer there and we commiserated with each other about it.
We began to gravitate towards the places Ali’s slaves were working: the gym, the track and then down to the wharf to watch as the coffle of slaves pranced down from the house, all in perfect formation, knees up high, bodies erect, hands properly clasped behind their heads and all looking perfectly straight ahead until they reached the galley, boarded it in style, were seated, and then, on the drum beat, leaned back and raised their loins in the humiliating so sexually provocative salute to their absent master, the males cocks all rigid, the girls’ vulvas pulsing in adoration of him...
And we mourned that we were no longer part of it!
You don’t believe it? Well it’s true. Oh we loved our babies and running our house but we had also thrived on the hard work and even the back-breaking toil on the oars. We talked about it all the time and then we quietly asked Zanda if we could work out in the gym when the slaves were elsewhere.
“Missing the work, eh, girls?”
We blushed and nodded, smiling behind our discomfiture at what to us seemed a bizarre request. But he just smiled back and agreed.
We waited until the slaves had gone and then, stripping off our shorts and tops, eagerly attacked every one of the pieces of equipment there, even the machine we had hated so much when forced to work there: the belly exerciser.
Zanda found us there one morning, both naked and on a pair of those machines set side by side and grinning from ear to ear, walking up between us, laying one each of his huge hands on our bellies.
“Hmmm, getting back to scratch already, eh girls?”
In any other situation, we would have been outraged that a man not our husbands could so intimately feel our flesh but then we had been slavegirls - galley slaves and this man had been our trainer. Things were not normal.
We also contrived to work out on the track, picking a time when no other household was using the gigs and we really punished ourselves during these sessions, too.
We took our babies everywhere with us, of course.
You may be wondering how they looked, these little infants that were the progeny of all four of us, but with the ‘wrong’ fathers, so to speak. Both were café-au-lait in colouring but while my baby had dark hair, almost black, already beginning to curl, Ingawa’s had straight brown hair, reflecting Andy’s genes. We had no difficulty in telling them apart but it wouldn’t really have mattered since, because of the two matings and the outcome thereof, we now considered ourselves as a sort of unitary family and began to grow together as such from the very first night in the house we shared.
Did we not want to get home to our respective countries, see our families and take up our old lives? Yes - and no. Of course we were anxious to allay the worry our families must have felt at our respective kidnappings but on the other hand, our university careers were long gone and in any case, we now knew far more than any professor about how to best train and develop the human physique to achieve the ultimate sporting performance. Not that we could use these methods in a free society of course, but we had the knowledge. Going back to university would be pointless.
We knew all too well we couldn’t really use our knowledge to full effect. Perhaps we might have been able to train track athletes to do better but we would always be wanting more out of them than they were prepared to give and there would eventually be frustration on both sides. No, a return, or at least a permanent return home was not on.
Besides, with our new melding of raising a family in beautiful surroundings, free from worry and the stress of modern living; and the ability to work our bodies as hard as we wanted, we now had everything we could wish for.
We did go home, Sadiki and Ingawa to Khartoum and Andy and me to the Gold Coast of Queensland. We had dreamed up a plausible story that mixed the truth with some fiction - that we had indeed been kidnapped and held as worker slaves, toiling in a quarry in some Asian country that we couldn’t identify due to our never learning the language, etc, etc, etc ... Our coffee-coloured baby we explained by saying I was force-raped by a black slave during my time as a slave for the gratification of our Asian captors, which was near enough the truth, anyway and when our parents saw how Andy accepted little Scott so well, they said nothing more about it.
They wanted us to pursue the kidnappers and slavers of course but we said it was pointless. We also told them that after escaping, we had been taken to a place where we could recuperate and there found peace and happiness and that after a month or so at home, we were going back there. Of course they wanted to know where it was but we told them it was a special place kept only for people such as us who needed sanctuary and others were excluded. We salved their hurt by promising to return home often and this we have done.
But now the island is our permanent home.
Sadiki and Andy are now Zanda’s top lieutenants and know as much as he does about human physical development. Ingawa and I continue to punish our bodies and to eat only the most healthy of foods, although it is rather more tasty than the slave fare. Our bodies are back to the condition they were in when we ceased to be slaves and we glory in them.
One day, we approached
Zanda. Rather shyly, we offered ourselves as galley slaves - the pair of us, if ever he was short of a pair of his own slaves.
He stared at us in astonishment. “You mean you are actually offering to ply the oars for a day?”
We nodded, grinning widely. “We are.”
He shook his head. “Two girls ... I wonder if you would have the strength without a male to assist ...?”
“Try us?” we said.
“All right, I will. Report to the stables after lunch today.”
We did, naked of course, our babies strapped to our backs to be handed over to the temporary nurse in Ali’s house. And we then submitted to the collars and chains, the humiliating prance down to the wharf, the boarding and taking our place, the even more humiliating royal salute to the absent Ali and then the actual rowing.
Did we manage it?
You bet we did! We were both determined to prove that although we mightn’t have had the muscles of a male, we were still strong and as fit as anyone on that island. The slaves stared at us of course. They didn’t know who we were but they could see that unlike any of the other pairs of one male, one female, we were both female and they must have wondered who we were.
But yes, we did manage and while Zanda didn’t offer us a place at the oars again, we were pleased with ourselves. Sadiki and Andy weren’t as happy about it, though.
“What if we had had to whip you?” they complained.
“But you didn’t, did you? We worked just as hard as any pair of slaves and we kept our oar moving in perfect time ...”
“Yes you did,” they had to admit - and then we disappeared into our respective bedrooms - and there, that night, Caroline was conceived ...
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