When I had the male slave shouting and cursing, I was finally allowed to stop. I was trembling and covered with sweat and had my teeth clenched against Bellna’s screaming in my skull, but some cooler, more rational part of me had decided that my reward would for some reason be put off again. I didn’t want to hear that any more than Bellna did, but I was very much afraid it would turn out to be true.
When my golden-shirt announced that I’d earned my reward after all, I felt a relief and gratitude that was sickening. I was disgusted with myself for reacting that way, but there was nothing I could do to stop it – and then the kicker came. I could have my reward then and there, in front of everyone including all those very amused female slaves, or I could wait and have it later, at some unspecified time, but in private. The choice was given to me to make; I was almost too strung out to be suspicious, but suspicion is a disease I’ve had a lot of years, and it’s saved me pain and kept me alive more often than sweet trust ever could. Bellna wanted to wait, and so did I, but for some vague reason that choice didn’t feel right. The last thing I wanted was to be humiliated in front of a totally unsympathetic audience, but that was the way I would have to go. I hesitated no more than an instant, then looked up at golden-shirt.
“I-beg that you choose to reward me now,” I whispered, blushing furiously but still squirming where I knelt. “I-feel great discomfort-and-and-cannot wait.”
“You cannot wait,” he repeated in a voice loud enough to reach everyone in the room, satisfaction shining from his eyes to keep his chuckle company. “As you cannot wait, I shall give you the reward you have earned upon the moment.”
Again Bellna was shattered by the announcement and following laughter, but there was no longer any way out of the mess. Goldenshirt sat down next to me, took me in his lap and bent me backward, then began giving me my reward. I was so deeply lost to the sensations that every other consideration faded away – including the fact that the fingers of his free hand closed even more tightly on one of my nipples as he worked me. The pain was there but so was release, and once again I was thrown to the floor mat to recover.
I don’t know when the dirty suspicion came to me, but after an uncounted time of lying in a heap, I suddenly knew another facet of the conditioning I was being put. Through and the.difference between my training and that of the others. All the hints and unexplained happenings – the bastards were building a link between pain and sexual arousal and satisfaction. Taken one way to its ultimate conclusion, the infliction of pain would bring immediate, uncontrollable arousal; taken the other way, the infliction of that same pain would bring orgasmic release – or make release impossible without it. The set-up was right out of a sadist’s wet dreams, and I couldn’t help wondering what I’d bought myself with the response my golden-shirt had been looking for. His satisfaction at the choice I’d made had certainly been clear enough, as clear as the retrospectively seen fact that the deck had been stacked against that choice. A girl Bellna’s age and with her background should have been mortified at the thought of being done in front of so many snickering strangers, especially as most of them were women older than herself-unless she had been made so uncontrollably sensual that she couldn’t help herself. They’d wanted Bellna to react that way, and the next step could very well be what that solitary girl on the furs had been given. I’d noticed that she’d been beaten, but I’d also noticed that she was more worked up sexually than hurting from the beating. I lay on the floor mat of the room feeling physically exhausted, but my mind was darting around at light speed. I’d made the right choice but it had turned out wrong for me, which was the way the game went sometimes. If I wanted to avoid what the girl on the furs had gotten, I’d have to backpedal a little.
Sometimes making a decision doesn’t mean you’ll get to put it into practice, but that time I got lucky. When my rest time was over and I was ordered to my feet, it was to he taken to another, smaller room which contained all males. There were half a dozen slave males and two armed guards, the slaves only lightly chained and the guards casual and unconcerned. The slaves were obviously no worry, which told me that the training given the girls was also used to train the men. Male slaves who gave trouble were punished by being used as subjects for the girls to work on; those who cooperated were rewarded by being allowed to help in the training, probably also being allowed the use of ordinary slave females afterward. I was pushed into the middle of them, had one pointed out as my subject, and was told to serve that one no matter what the others did to me.
Use of the key word affected me less strongly than it was supposed to, but it still affected me. The reward I’d been given was largely negated, and the men around me laughed softly when I closed my eyes and squeezed my thighs together with a gasp. They all wore the faded green of slaves while I stood naked among them, and they obviously enjoyed the sight of me. Their hungry reactions were very unsettling, and then I was told to undress my subject in the proper way, the way I’d been told to do earlier. A well-trained slave kissed her master’s body when she undressed him, and the slave who had been appointed my master licked his lips in anticipation, eager to get on with it.
I’d decided to make it very clear right from the start that being among all those men made me nervous. I used an anxious expression when I reached out a tentative hand to my “master,” then jumped with a loud squeal when I was touched from behind by someone else. I whirled in the direction of the touch, gasped when two more of the slaves touched me, then began to cry.
“You fail to serve your master, slave,” my golden-shirt admonished, punishing me lightly by using the key word again. “Were you not told to ignore all others and attend him alone?”
“I cannot!” I blubbered, looking at him piteously over the shoulders of two of the slaves. “I have never been alone among so many men, not to speak of being-unclothed among them! And they all – oh! – touch me! I b-beg to be allowed to attend him in private.”
“You have already learned to attend a master in private,” he said with a frown, a lot less satisfied than he’d been till them. His brown eyes studied me in silence for a moment, and then he nodded his head. “This was, perhaps, to be expected. The distraction of the highly unusual is enough to overcome the recently learned. You must clearly be first accustomed to that which is strange to you, and then we may proceed. You all may toy with her a short time.”
The last was for the male slaves, of course, and they entered the game with a zeal I would have found commendable-under other circumstances. After throwing me to the wolves, my golden-shirt turned and left the tent room, but the three armed guards were still there to laugh their heads off while I screamed and tried uselessly to protect myself. The six slaves moved in as close as they could and began touching me all over, having no trouble getting past my flailing arms, driving me crazy and enjoying my near-hysteria. After a couple of minutes someone took my arms from behind and held them out and away from my sides, forcing the front of my body forward. So many hands touched me in so many places that I nearly lost control and defended myself, which would have scattered and smeared those six like so much firewood or so many rag dolls. I panted more with the effort to hold myself back than with what was being done to me, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t suffering. Bellna blubbered in the back of my mind and screamed for permission to obey, but I couldn’t allow that any more than I could allow what I wanted to do. Now that I’d broken the pattern of training, I had to keep it broken.
When my golden-shirt finally came back, I was down on my knees with my forehead pressed to the mat, one of the slaves kneeling on my hair. I was screaming almost nonstop from the way they were stabbing at me with their bodies without having removed their loincloths, teasing me with what they’d made me want so desperately. Hands fondled my breasts and toyed with the device, different hands taking turns doing different things while I was poked at and stroked and denied what I ached for. I screamed and struggled, trying to get loose to reach one of them – and then all of them were gone, out of reach and through with the game. I pushed myself up on all fours and raised my head, the tears streaming down my cheeks and my body flaming, just in time to see the gesture from my golden-shirt that I was to get to my feet. It was something of a struggle but I managed it, and once I was erect the golden-shirt stepped closer to me, took my wrist chain between my left wrist and the belt loop, turned, and dragged me behind him out of the room.
To be entirely accurate, I was dragged down to the end of the corridor, through a room that looked just like all the others, but which led outside. It was an hour or so past noon of another pretty day, but neither Bellna nor I were in any condition to appreciate it.
Bellna was having hysterics over the number of people stopping or turning around to stare at my naked, sweat-covered body, and I was mewling helplessly at the pace the golden-shirt was forcing me to.
When I could force myself to speak I begged mindlessly to be touched, but it wasn’t rewarding I’d set myself up for. The thin grass and stones and dirt I minced over barely entered my awareness, no more than the wide city of tents stretching in all directions throughout the large forest clearing. We crossed an open space, circled a dark green tent, then made for a large brown, yellow and white tent with flaps thrown back.
The large tent was too well lit with lamps for it to be dim even after the brightness of the day. It was filled with row after row and aisle after aisle of what had to be display platforms, five inches high for male slaves, three or four feet high for female slaves. The male slaves stood with wrists shackled to either side of their heads, their ankles held tight by manacles set in the platform floors, three platforms of females and one of males, then another three of females and another one of males. There was an open space on the female platform directly opposite the tent entrance, and that was where my golden-shirt dragged me.
When I was lifted up to kneel on the platform, it came through the cloud of mindlessness I was wrapped in that this particular platform was covered with silky, long-haired furs, and that although the other slaves on display wore their green slave shifts, the three on my platform were as naked as I. Golden-shirt took out a key, unlocked the two rings holding my wrist chain to the chain around my waist, unlocked the right wrist-cuff, then lifted the chain and my left arm to a thick wooden bar above my head. The chain was wrapped around the bar above and somewhat behind me, my right arm was raised and the wrist relocked in the cuff, and then golden-shirt turned and left the tent.
It took a couple of minutes to fight my way through Bellna’s constant howling and the clinging aftermath of what I’d gone through, but once I’d done it, all I could do was wonder how smart I’d been. I’d been trying to buy some time away from the slavers’ conditioning program, but all I seemed to have managed was to find another phase of it. A large number of people were strolling around through the tent, mostly male people with less than a handful of females, and all of them were there to look at slaves. Golden-shirt had decided to get me used to being “unclothed” in front of large numbers of men, and putting me on display was the way he was doing it. The other females on my platform had struck me as being as beautiful as Bellna during the few seconds I’d been able to see them, and that was probably why we were on the furred platform right in front of the entrance. Draw the suckers in and get them to look, and even if they can’t afford the best there’s always second or third best. I was being used as bait even while I was being trained.
I took a deep breath and moved my head around a little to loosen the knots in the back of my neck, but the effort didn’t do much; being comfortable in the position I’d been chained was just about impossible. Not only were my wrists tight to the bar above and behind my head, the bar itself was in exactly the wrong position in relation to the platform: too high to let me sit back on my heels, too low to let me kneel straight without bending. It took a minute or two of still befuddled thinking to decide that I would be better off if my wrists were directly over my head or in front of me, but I’d waited too long for the decision to do any good. A guard in a dark gold shirt stopped next to me, moved aside the furs right under my feet, then rattled briefly. When the rattling was over, the cuffs around my ankles were attached to what was probably a single, very short chain set in the platform, giving me no movement room at all. I was set in place, chained facing the entrance at a three-quarter angle, and that’s the way I would stay for a while.
“Pretty little slave,” the guard murmured with a half-distracted sound to his voice as his hands pushed my thighs apart. “You are to keep your knees wide at all times. It matters not whether you weep or smile; your knees must remain apart. Should you fail to keep them so, there is a device to see to it.”
His message delivered, he went on his way, not caring whether or not I wanted to say anything. If I didn’t obey there would be another
“device” to take care of the problem, so there was nothing to say.
Bellna whimpered miserably in my head, burning so urgently that it made me squirm, which in turn set me to cursing silently. I didn’t know how long I’d be there, but the past five minutes had already been too long.
Another five minutes passed, during which time I asked myself why I’d been stupid enough to decide to wait until dark to make a run for it, and then another group of buyers came through the tent entrance.
There were five of them, and from their clothes they must have been well-to-do merchants or very minor nobility, and they didn’t even pause to look around. Just as if they’d done it many times before, they came straight over to my platform and began examining each of us in turn, two of them listing our major sales points, the other three listening carefully and occasionally asking questions. I gathered that we four were a yardstick to measure the other female slaves by, and we had to be gone over carefully so that nothing important would be missed. Every one of those sons found it necessary to touch me, not once but any number of times, and once they were gone I trembled as much as the only one of the other three girls I could see. Bellna wanted to jump screaming out of my skin, and there was nothing I could do to calm her. Hell, there was nothing I could do to calm me, and I supposedly had a lot more control over me.