F Campbell - Chain of Jedrah

The door burst open.

“Get them out of here,” said Mohammad Yasin.

It was all kaleidoscopic. She heard Rannah’s desperate voice: “The key, the key!”

Then suddenly the pain in the small of her back was gone and the Narousse cord was cut swiftly from her wrists. Stacie could not use her arms, they fell limply at her sides, but she was free! Gloriously incredibly free. Mohammad Yasin picked her up and carried her from the cell.

A grinning and supercilious Yousef met them in the passage. He gave the impression of having dealt with a herd of yapping curs. He held a revolver. “The stairs, Lord.”

Then to Rannah, “My Lady, let me help . . .”

The leaping strides! The power of a man! Stacie thrilled.

She was consumed by joy in Yasin’s arms. He was leaping up with her in his grip when Amatar Moghere appeared at the head of the stone steps. He was pointing a gun. Behind them was an explosion, the barking of a .45. A look of utter astonishment crossed out the beaming smile. Mr. Moghere fell sideways and over the rail, Yasin scarcely paused.

There were other shots, other eyes that suddenly went blank. Stacie heard what seemed a war cry from a jubilant Yousef. Mohammad Yasin strode out into the night carrying a burden who wished she had her arms to clasp around his neck.

“The dogs, the yapping mongrels!” She heard him mutter the words in fury. “We should kill them all . . .”

Suddenly in the plane Stacie did not care. Narousse was gone, and with it Moghere and all his kind. But her conscience still functioned. “The girls . . . those poor girls . . .” Her eyes implored.

“We have not time. There is an Army . . . they have planes . . .”

Gently she was placed upon a seat. Rannah was there.

They held each other in a great thankfulness. The engines roared . . .

Stacie Blair was not tied, she was not chained, she was free!

A single sheet of paper, a few words scrawled by a feminine hand. Stacie wondered how often such scraps had collapsed a world. She had but one hand to reach for it, the other was handcuffed to Rannah’s bed. She gazed up at Yousef’s sombre face in mute question.

“Read it, lady.”

So few words! ‘Obey Yousef: it is my order. He will explain what you need know. Forgive me.’ It was signed: Rannah.

Stacie restrained her free hand from striving to cover herself. Yousef had seen her naked often enough. She sensed a greater concern. She proffered him the missive. “You have read this?”

“Yes, lady.”

“I will be obedient.”

“Thank you, pretty lady.”

“Yousef! There is something wrong, what is it?”

“Our Master is dying.”

Yasin dying! They had spent days and nights of love before he had flown to Geneva and left the slave girl to his daughter, Rannah. Stacie tried to comprehend the unacceptable. She pulled absently at her cuffed wrist. “How . . . ? Why?”

“An assassin, at Geneva airport. A cur of a student from this land. He had the usual profession of a noble cause. The guards shot him down before he could fire a second time. It is done.”

She might believe it tomorrow, but not now! “And my Lady . . . she has gone to him?”

The grave inclination of the head, so much a part of him.

He made it now. “Our Lady will stay with him until the end. She will then do all that must be done. The time of her return here is with Allah.”

A naked white girl chained to a bed! Surveying her the muscular solidity of an Arab torturer! Both sharing a common grief. How typical of Jedrah!

“My Lady says for me to forgive. I don’t understand. What have I to forgive, Yousef?”

He shrugged. “That too is with Allah.”

Yousef unlocked the cuff from the bed and clasped it round Stacie’s free hand so that her wrists were joined in front of her. “It is as you usually wear them, I believe,” he said drily.

“Thank you, Yousef.” There was a strangeness she could not penetrate.

“All will be as usual now. In two hours you will attend me. Is it enough time for your female needs?”

Puzzling! But what did such things matter now. Stacie followed an instant hungry impulse. “Yousef, have the meal with me . . . It will be very lonely.”

His eyes kindled. “You do me honour, lady. But no, it is not possible.” He turned and went away.

The naked girl threw herself upon the disordered bed and wept violently into her chained hands.

Stacie ate little, she sat with ghosts. She used the time in the female arts, wishing to look her best but not knowing why. She presented herself punctually. “It is time, Yousef.” She held out her locked hands and eyed him questioningly.

He used no key, but led her to the room she knew so well. “Am I to be punished, Yousef?”

“I know not the name of it, lady. Make your own.”

She let him tie her as he had that day long ago before she had been ringed. During the methodical progression into this fresh travail Stacie thought idly of the rings in her flesh and of how much a part of her they had become. She was no longer conscious of them, they had ceased to be painful, they could be slid back and forth within her providing an endless delight to Rannah and to the man who lay dying far away. Even the circlet through her nose no longer shamed, she had learned to eat and talk with its weight upon her lip.

“You are going to hurt me, Yousef. Why?”

“Such questions are forbidden, lady. If you persist I must gag you.”

She accepted the incomprehensible. Somewhere a truth would emerge. She drifted into pain and more pain as her arms were drawn wide and her legs stretched until they were taut and horizontal and threatened to split her loins asunder. She knew this man better now, but still she blushed. “Yousef . . . Am I . . . am I open . . . ?”

She had made him smile. “No lady. It feels so but it is not.”

“Are you going to whip me?”

“You wish me to, pretty lady?”

“Of course not. But are you?”

“Yes. You may remember, lady, last time we did not finish.”

Stacie remembered. Ten strokes with the cane on the sole of each of her feet. “I fainted . . .”

“It does not matter. We have much time.”

He threw away his loin cloth, he was immensely male. “It is no longer forbidden, lady.”

“I would give you more pleasure free.”

“It pleases me as you are.”

He clasped her with one arm and guided himself within her between the ringed lips. She was suspended at precisely the right height.

“Tortured and fucked! It excites you,” Stacie accused.

“It excites you also, lady.” He used both arms and pulled her very close.

“If you cane my feet I shall not be able to walk, Yousef.”

“I will carry you, lady.”

“I am frightened. I don’t want to be lame.”

“They will heal. The cane is slim, it breaks no bones. But first I use the whip as I did before. It will make a lesser outlet for your distress.”

Stacie watched the scarlet circles form upon her strained thighs. The lash met itself as the blows rapped down. She made sounds she could not name as she looked without hope at the bands on wrist and ankle. She could not move. Only her head . . .

“And now your cunt, lady.”

She moaned without protest. She tried to see the impacts but could not. They cut at her in surprising ways and angles. Yousef changed position often. Her moans when he next impaled her were the same by which she had expressed her pain. But they were not of pain. The swollen labia welcomed him.

The whipping of her feet took all afternoon. Nature was cruel and denied her oblivion for the first strokes. She became a panting breast-heaving organism dedicated to screams: pealing screams that denied and denied what was being done to her but availed her nothing. After her feet had been beaten five times each Yousef asked in curiosity, “Is it bad for you to have no bribe to offer?”