F Campbell - Chain of Jedrah

“Forgive me, Master, I cannot. Nor do I know why.” She held out the key.

He gestured it away. “You would curse yourself in other months and other years.”

She nodded. “Perhaps. I do not know.”

“I said you were no slave, but I was wrong. Rannah saw you for what you are.”

“I am a slave, Master. Don’t ask me why.”

“You are one of the richest heiresses in the world.” Stacie shrugged.

“It is gone . . . past.”

“Your father . . . what of your love for him, and his for you?”

“Fathers lose their daughters. It is the nature of life.”

“You choose slavery . . . knowingly?”

She nodded, without hesitation she again proffered the key. Once more he swept it aside.

“Those wounds in your flesh and beneath your feet? They are slavery.”

“They were of my torture, Master.”

Yasin waved an impatient hand. “As a slave you would be constantly whipped: if not for disobedience then because of the stirring in the loins your sensuality provokes in those who own you.”

The thought was new to Stacie Blair. She examined it and found it no more than curiously exciting. “A slave is a slave,” she said demurely, eyes glinting.

“And have no mercy on your parent! Condoning my revenge?”

The captive had thought of it, but females are equal to such contretemps. She took a deep breath and challenged him: “We can tell him jointly I have entered your harem of my own will. It has the garment of respectability, he would accept it.”

“You are presumptuous beyond what any slave would be.”

“Then punish me.”

“If you keep harping on that tune I shall do so.”

“I would gladly tell my father I am slave. But that he would not accept. He could never understand. No one in that other world could understand. If you wish to be kind we can concoct a letter. He need never know that while I use the pen I wear your chains.” Hesitantly she extended the key.

Yasin’s features wore a strange mixture of incredulity and adoration. “No, child, go to him now or remain lost. It is best.”

“As you wish, Master.”

He surveyed his kneeling slave girl soberly. “Have you no idea what today brings you?”

“No master. Not beyond the . . . the whipping I must watch.”

“You are to be ringed.”

He saw her tense, her face shadow. She said no word, but looked up at him with the wide eyed innocence of a small girl. “As a punishment, Master?”

“No. You will be doubly exquisite,” Yasin laughed in retrospect. “I had cherished a dream of returning you years hence fully ringed and well marked by the whip as one final gesture of my vengeance.”

“These rings . . . ? In Jedrah they are considered beautiful?”

“They are beautiful, they are potently female.” In silence Stacie Blair envisioned herself.

“You need never wear them. The key is in your hand.” She looked at it, startled. Without further thought she tossed it in his lap.

Quietly he tucked it away. “You will always wear chains. If, from this moment on, you seek to change your mind or to escape you will be forcibly dealt with and punished.”

“Of course.”

“The whip will never be distant.”

“I have known other things here than pain, Master.” They looked at each other and smiled. They had made a pact.

It was a strange journey and a strange command. Stacie was glad there was none to hear the thumping of her heart as she traversed the now familiar passages. The servants who passed her on the way pretended not to see her shackled feet or to hear the clinking of her chain. She had learned again to walk with fettered feet. It took longer, that was all. She wondered whimsically if she would ever run again. Each step she took was a hurting reminder of Yousef and his cane.

On that score she was happy. Unless she foolishly erred with a thoughtless stupidity she need never be tortured again. Whipped yes! But in no worse ways than the one she was about to witness, terrible as she suspected it would be. Yet it would mark a limit to the pain that she might earn, there should be no more of Yousef’s sexually cruel ingenuities.

She knew it vital she should not dwell on what had taken place between herself and Mohammad Yasin. She could not understand herself and her motives, nor could she defend them against a reproachful conscience. Her slavery with all its love and its wonder would not withstand the attrition of an endless guilt. She had done what she had done, not from a conscious decision, but because for her there had been no other choice, she embraced slavery because of some deep seated need within her own psyche. She had no doubts now, she would close the door of her mind to any that might come.

Rannah was hanging by her wrists from the bar, only her toes touched the floor. Stacie remembered it as the final pose wherein a girl was whipped. The girl to be punished was still clothed. What she wore was scanty enough and might shred beneath the thong, but it could scarcely fail to offer some small protection to the loveliness it hid. Stacie breathed a sigh of relief, it was not seemly that the daughter of Mohammad Yasin be exposed naked to a torturer’s eyes, it was bad enough that he should search her body with his whip.

“I must watch you whip my Lady Rannah,” she told Yousef softly. “I am to be fastened in such ways as may please you so that I do not interfere. I need not be stripped. This is our Master’s order.”

The Torturer gave her his small bow and his little smile.

What a repository of secrets he must be! How intimate and knowing a part of this household that he served. He indicated a pillar off to one side of the place in which he must swing and curve his whip. “If it please you, Lady.”

Stacie Blair who had become a slave girl obligingly backed against the post. It seemed a natural thing to do. She was unconcerned about herself. If she was to be bound motionless throughout her loved one’s punishment, so be it. She did not care. Automatically she stretched her arms behind the pillar that they be secured.

Yousef tied her tightly: he would! Force of habit or the code of his profession, no doubt. To have simply tied her hands where she had placed them would have been enough to restrain her from mischief. But when the chafed wrists were firmly corded he cinched her waist and her shoulders too. Her chained ankles he left alone, there was nothing she could do with them. Precautionary restraints! Stacie smiled at the notion: when Yousef tied a girl she knew she had been tied. It hurt.

The kurbash was a fearful thing, a sinuous supple strip of hide tapering from its stock. Placed against the softness of a girl’s skin it had a cruelly contrasting wickedness. Yousef picked it up and ran it through his hands. “Our Master will not be present, my Lady?”

“He will not be present. Now that the slave girl is here you may begin my punishment.” There was no tremor in the Arab girl’s voice.

The deferential bow preceded an act that left the watching girl aghast. With deft and brutal clutch and tug the Torturer stripped the Lady Rannah totally naked.

“It is a ritual demanded by ancient custom, child,” the victim explained to her adored.

Yousef stood in reverence before the lovely nakedness he would now whip. “This is not by my wish, my Lady.”

“That is understood, Yousef.”

“I will make the blows as light as custom permits.”

The naked girl flashed him a look of scorn. “You will do no such thing, Yousef. I thank you for the wish, but you have my father’s order. You will whip me as hard as custom may decree. I shall not thank you for mercy.”

How beautiful she was! What courage! Stacie’s heart went out in tenderness and love. She shrank from the ordeal she must watch.