F Campbell - Chain of Jedrah

She watched, not caring, as the steel bands closed around her wrists and clicked into the now familiar circlets. The eyes of the two girls locked, smiling in their understanding. Without a word the naked girl, her back so gaudily striped by the whip, positioned herself against the wall, her ankles finding their place within the clamps, her joined hands raised above her head. She looked at her mistress with impudent invitation. Rannah nodded in approval, her slave had passed the test. When she had fastened her prisoner securely she kissed her for a long, long time before she went away.

One could chronicle the days, but to what end! They passed! For Stacie they were never the same, each held its own question mark. There was much pain and much discomfort, yet the captive could never feel a certainty that, beyond the first time, she had not been tortured in the true sense of that dread word. Both girls avoided the term. Stacie was torn between thankfulness that her sufferings were no worse and fear of what would eventually befall. The things that happened to her each day could easily be called torture, but she knew they were not. She longed to ask, but did not care. Her owner was sufficiently capricious that a query might provoke the agony she wanted least. Each night her wrist was handcuffed to Rannah’s bed, she slept upon the rug without question or complaint.

Rannah was unpredictable. She sanctioned the intimacy of meals and the talk of feminine things, their companionship was real. At such times Stacie’s impudence might be rewarded with laughter or a whip. The captive felt a great need to know the fate of those other three who had been kidnapped with her, she intruded her queries whenever she deemed the moment propitious.

“Perhaps you would be happier not to know,” Rannah mocked.

“Please tell me. Don’t let me think terrible things.”

“Like you, they have disappeared . . . pouf!” Rannah made an airy gesture. “They are now the most costly merchandise in the world.”

“You mean . . . a . . . a . . . ?” Stacie could not bring herself to speak the ugly word.

The dark eyes sparkled with amusement. “A bordello, a whore house, a crib . . . ? You picture some evil Arab collecting cash as the clients enter to slake their lust?”

“It’s been done often enough. It’s what I half expected.”

“Come, slave girl, you underrate us. We do not deal in coins.”

“I suppose you’ll sell them to an oil sheik?”

“Even that is passé. Who needs money! We are deluged in it.”

“Yasin’s harem then?”

“That might be a last resort. Like those fire sales your merchants have in the U.S. No, they have a more potent value.”

The slave girl’s eyes pleaded.

“You are quite incorrigible,” Rannah protested primly. “I shall make you pay. If you must pester me, I will tell you their awful destiny if you are willing to ask me properly for ten with the cane across that pert behind of yours. There! You can’t say I’m not reasonable.”

Stacie was intrigued. This was one of their games. She must inevitably ask, but without certainly the penalty would be exacted. “Please tell me, my lady. And please cane my bottom ten times for having the temerity to ask.”

“For an additional ten you may have the privilege of visiting them.”

Stacie squirmed. Ten was bad but bearable. Twenty was unbearable by any standard. She was becoming knowledgeable in such matters. She cast her bread upon the waters. “Please give me the extra ten for a visit, my lady.”

Rannah was impressed. “I do not think I would bear twenty wounds for such curiosity,” she admitted. “I’d have thought you tired of pain.”

“I have to know, my lady. It’s a sort of duty thing.”

“Very well, you shall. But you won’t like the price Now, no more of it. I will arrange.”

“Thank you, my lady.” But Stacie’s gratitude was much subdued.

“I love your screams, Stacie, but let us mute them for once.” The slave girl looked askance at the rubber ball and the strap. “Will that thing go in my mouth?” she asked dubiously.

“Let us try. You may use your own fingers to insert it. I think it is not easy.”

Stacie took the seemingly innocent thing in her handcuffed hands and raised it to her mouth. By dint of compressing and see-saw motion she got it inside, her tongue retreated in confusion, she could make no sound. Rannah buckled its strap tightly at the back of her neck.

“And now the little hands behind the back.”

The captive stood passive as she was made trebly helpless.

The handcuffs made such changes so very easy. Rannah stood back and surveyed the effect. “You look delightful, slave girl. I will take it out when you have received those twenty strokes with the cane you so prettily asked for.”

So that was it! Her penalty and her privilege had come.

Two days of wondering had passed since the pact had been made. Now her bottom was to pay the agreed price. Perhaps it would be nice not to scream. Stacie was often shamed afterwards by the noise she had made. But the gag was frightening in its effectiveness. It was total. The rubber ball filled her mouth, she longed to swallow but could not, the strap bit unkindly at the corners of her lips.

She was to pay the price before she received the reward!

Obediently Stacie followed her mistress down the passage. What did it matter! It would hurt as much one time as another, perhaps it was best to get it over. Whimsically she debated whether to show the girls what she had paid to visit them. What strange currency a slave girl lived by!

She would be fastened for the twenty. It was the only way she could bear them. The room would provide a way. But, suddenly, the passage was strange, a new direction. They were not following the familiar path to her daily quota of pain. When they reached the door it was quickly opened and she was quickly thrust inside, it closed behind her with a decisive thud, a lock clicked, a bolt shot home.

It was pure nightmare, one of Salvador Dali’s most surrealistic creations. Not to be taken seriously . . . impossible!

It was another stone chamber such as she knew so well.

But this one was bare of furnishings. It held only three naked girls, and now herself. The abundant daylight, the lack of dungeon gloom made what Stacie saw the more incongruous.

The stewardess first, she held the center of the bizarre stage. Naked, she was hard to recognize as the trim girl who had served them on the plane, but it was the wracked contortion of her pose that made the recognition doubly difficult. She hung by her left wrist only, her right wrist being tied with cord to her left ankle. The toes of her right foot had been allowed to rest upon the floor to take some of her weight from the overtaxed arm above her head. Her plight was pure cruelty. She was gagged as was Stacie herself.

The mouths of the other two were also distended by the rubber balls and the straps. One girl was tied to a pillar, her arms from wrist to shoulder were corded on either side as were her ankles, but she was thrusting herself painfully away from her bonds, her body in an outward bow or curve to avoid impalement on a spike protruding from the post to which she was bound, the tip of which was already lost to sight in the upper cleft of her buttocks. She was as naked as her companions, her miserable posture thrusting her sex into a distorted obscenity.

The third girl hung like an impaled butterfly against the stone of a wall, her arms spread out and up. She hung from her wrists, her toes striving vainly for the floor.

The tableau held a strange and erotic beauty of its own. How cruel! How well contrived! Three pairs of female eyes focused on the visitor and implored, three female heads shook wildly in negation of the silence of their gag. Stacie knew guilt at her own absence of agony in such a place, knew the greatest frustration of her captivity in her inability to help. With an eloquent shrug she turned her back that they might see her handcuffed wrists.