Slaves of Elysium (20 page)

The men washed out Rebecca's mouth and replaced her gag and the plug in her sperm-rimmed anus, together with the labial clamp on her swollen vagina. Then they pushed her cage back to its place in the ring.

Me next, me next! Jeni thought desperately. But the men went round closing their blinkers down, and Jeni was shut away with her frustration once again.

 

Over the next hours or days, each of the girls was used in the same way before the others, each of them, even the formerly fearful Cynim, responding eagerly to the pain and the pleasure, drinking in the stimulation after their long deprivation.

When her turn finally came, Jeni basked in the sting of the lashes and the filling of her every orifice with hard, demanding shafts of flesh. For the first time she tasted her own vaginal juices and delighted in her depravity. When they were done and before they gagged her once again, she mumbled the first words she had spoken in an age.

‘Thank you...'

 

Blackness, feeding, excreting...

 

Jeni was tipped onto the floor beside the other girls. She lay with them in a confused, groaning heap of flesh for some minutes, before realising she could see and hear. Her hands were free, even if temporarily lying limp and useless by her sides. She was unrestrained except for her collar and cuffs.

It was over. She had passed her test.

Numbed, stiff, hardly able to move, the five girls lay there, slowly flexing muscles they had almost forgotten how to use. They were as free as slaves ever could be, but their minds were still in the thrall of the cages and they did not know what to do with their relative liberty. Could they stand up, assuming they were still capable of supporting themselves unaided? Was it allowed? They were lost and confused. They needed direction.

Jeni realised Takydis Lev was standing over them, smiling in satisfaction.

‘Good. You have all done very well. Now Mistress Kara wants to see you. Form a line on your hands and knees behind Rebecca. Quickly now!'

Jeni felt a wave of unspoken relief pass though the group. A simple command they could obey without any uncertainty. They were back in their proper place once more.

As fast as they were able they struggled onto their hands and knees and formed a line. Jeni found herself behind Zarri, looking at the cleft of the small girl's tightly rounded buttocks and the crinkled bronze eye of her anus. As they started forward the pursed lips of Zarri's pubes played peek-a-boo from between her shuffling thighs. Despite her time amongst naked women Jeni had never looked at one like this before. Suddenly she understood the intimate beauty of the female form, with all its hidden secrets. That was why people wanted to own them as slaves.

 

Mistress Kara walked round them, as they knelt in a line on her carpet that highlighted their naked flesh with its darkness.

‘You have passed the first stage of your training. Have you learnt its lesson?'

They nodded dumbly.

‘What are you?'

‘Your slaves, Mistress Kara,' they chorused weakly, their jaws still stiff. Who could deny the owner of the voice that had been their only companion in the darkness?

Kara's eyes focused on Rebecca, and Jeni recalled the hesitation she had display at their first meeting with the woman, but she showed no sign of resistance now. Her posture was as humble as the rest of them, but had Kara sensed something she could not?

‘Rebecca, kiss my feet,' she snapped, and Rebecca instantly shuffled forward and dutifully kissed the toes peeping daintily from the sandal that Kara extended from under her dress, but Kara still looked thoughtful. She took a black cane that had been lying almost invisible on her ebony desk, and tossed it across the room.

‘Fetch!' she commanded.

Rebecca scampered after the cane on all fours, picked it up with her teeth, and brought it back to kneel at Kara's feet once more, holding the cane like a dog that had just retrieved a stick for its mistress. Kara patted Rebecca's head and held out her hand, and Rebecca carefully dropped the cane onto the open palm.

‘Good girl,' Kara said. ‘Now present your bottom.'

Rebecca turned and pressed her face into the thick pile of the carpet, lifting her smoothly rounded buttocks into the air; offering them up to whatever might come. Kara swung the cane and laid a sharp cut across both cheeks. Rebecca gave a muffled yelp, but held her position. A bright red stripe bridged the two hemispheres. Kara delivered a second blow from a lower angle, so that it cut into the heavier flesh on the under-curve of Rebecca's buttocks. This brought forth another yelp, but still Rebecca did not move from her position of humiliating submission. The last blow was the hardest of all. Jeni saw Rebecca's hips lift with the impact, which sent a shiver through her flesh and left a searing scarlet line behind. Rebecca's face screwed up as she bore it. Her breathing was ragged, as though fighting back sobs, but she remained in the pose she had been ordered to assume.

Kara took hold of Rebecca's hair and pulled her head up, so she could look deep into her wide, tearful eyes. After a long moment Kara nodded slowly.

‘That will be adequate,' she said. ‘Back in line.'

Favouring her stinging bottom, Rebecca resumed her place. Jeni's heart thudded, wondering who would be next, but Kara did not seem to feel the need to test the rest of them. Perhaps she could tell they were broken in.

‘You will be taken to your slave coops,' she told them. ‘There you may rest for the remainder of the day. Training proper will start tomorrow. Your first nokt in the House of Remnos has gone well. See to it the rest of your time here is equally productive.'

Jeni felt numb with surprise as they were led out.

Elysians had made their own compromise between the changing phases of the moon and the year, and had divided it into thirteen twenty-eight day ‘months', each of four nokts, plus one or two special days set aside from the normal calendar. A nokt was therefore the equivalent of a local week, and like its counterpart in Jeni's world, seven days long.

The age she thought she'd spent in the cages had in fact only been seven days.

The slave coops were a double wall of low cells stacked three deep along the two long sides of a high-ceilinged room. The upper levels were reached by narrow transparent plastic catwalks, or rather cat-crawls, Jeni thought, as they were expected to stay on their hands and knees whilst using them. Each cell was completely fronted by more of the clear plastic panels, with rows of small holes cut in them, presumably for ventilation. A small sliding door allowed access. The lower cells were slightly wider than the others and evidently intended for double occupancy. It was into one of these that Jeni and Rebecca were put, while Reena, Zarri and Cynim were placed in singles on the level above.

Jeni found their cell had about the same floor area as a double bed, and was even surfaced with some sort of deep foam rubber. However, it was not high enough to stand upright. There were two scalloped recesses let into the solid back wall of the cell. One held a basin with accessories similar to the one they had used in prison, the other a toilet bowl.

A couple of the cells opposite were already occupied, and the girls in them watched as the five newcomers were brought in, once again their eyes lingering on Jeni and Rebecca's hair. Jeni looked back at them through the perforated plastic. It made her feel like a hamster in a plastic cage, and provided about the same degree of privacy. Still, she had better get used to it. She would probably never know anything else.

She turned to Rebecca, who had run some water in the basin and was splashing it onto the stripes Kara's cane had sliced across her backside. ‘Are you all right?' she asked, finding it required concentration to shape the words correctly, but then, she had hardly spoken in a week.

‘They're not too bad, but I might have to sleep facedown tonight,' Rebecca answered ruefully.

‘I mean, about the time in the cages. What you went through. What we all went through. How it... changed you.'

Rebecca turned to look at her thoughtfully. She seemed more composed than Jeni had expected. ‘It gave me time to think,' she said.

‘About what?'

‘This place, the way things are done here, who has the power. That sort of thing.'

‘Oh, I see.'

Rebecca finished cooling her hot flesh and lay down on her front, subjecting Jeni to a faintly pitying smile. ‘You thought I'd been broken, didn't you?'

‘I thought you seemed, well, different. The way you reacted when Sak and Darro used you. You would never have behaved like that before.'

‘No, I wouldn't. But that doesn't mean I'm a natural slave like you. Kara's got her doubts, that's probably why the bitch tested me like that, but men are easier to fool.'

‘But when they did it, you looked like you were enjoying it. And I was sure you really came.'

Rebecca grinned. ‘I did. Those two know how to handle a woman, so why shouldn't I come? It was fantastic, rough, filthy sex, and I let myself enjoy it. But it doesn't mean I'm any different in here...' she tapped the side of her head. ‘It didn't turn me into a meek little submissive like you. That was what I had to work out for myself. I admit I panicked a bit when we first got here. I wasn't thinking straight. But while I was trussed up like a turkey in that cage I faced up to things as they are. It was a good time for thinking and I really got myself together. They wanted to break me, to make me accept being a slave. How could I keep them happy and still be me? I knew I couldn't simply pretend, they'd soon see through me. So I thought of imagining there was a switch in my mind. When it's on I'm me, when it's off I'm a slave. Obey without question, love your masters and enjoy everything they do to you. If I let myself believe that when it matters, people will think I'm genuine.' She looked quizzically at Jeni. ‘What? You don't think I'm smart enough to work that sort of thing out for myself?'

‘I've never thought you were stupid, just lazy at times,' Jeni said candidly. ‘Your life's been too easy.'

Rebecca shrugged. ‘You may be right, not that it matters. I've got everything straight now and I'm not going to feel sorry for myself any longer. I'm going to get to the top here and you're going to help me.'

‘How?'

‘They want to train us together and sell us as a pair. Well, we're going to be the best pair they ever had, because then we'll be bought by the best people.'

‘Does that matter?'

Rebecca looked at her contemptuously. ‘Of course it does. We'll be valuable. We'll be treated properly. If natural blondes are as scarce here as Cath said, we could go a long way. And the people who own us will mix with the best. And one of them will have a bit more money and they'll want us, and we'll be even more valuable. Here slaves are accessories, status symbols, and I understand what it means to have to have to get the best, the latest, the most stylish. Clothes, shoes, jewels, cars, slave girls. It can't be that different. If we're what people want, we can go all the way.'

‘I just want to find somebody I can be happy serving,' Jeni said.

‘Of course you would, miss zero ambition.'

‘I'm just being me, like you're being you; it just doesn't sound as ambitious as what you're talking about. Don't you want to be happy?'

‘This will make me happy.' Rebecca took a deep breath. ‘Fine, you be you. Maybe that'll help. Everybody will see you're a real submissive. We can make something of that.'

‘You make us sound like a double act.'

‘It's all an act, remember?'

‘Not for me.'

‘Then you can be the straight man.'

‘While you get all the laughs?'

‘While I get my freedom!'

‘Cath said we could earn our freedom if we're good slaves and respect Elysian ways.'

‘After maybe twenty years, and then we'd still be at the bottom socially,' Rebecca said scornfully. ‘You heard what Reena was sent here for: trying to marry out of her class. Well, I'm going to bypass all that. If we do stay young longer here then it gives me a chance to make things work out the way I want them to.' A wild glint came into her eye. ‘Maybe even better than back home. Get seen by the right people and find one right for me.' She grinned. ‘See, we're not so different.'

‘You mean, somebody rich enough who you can talk into giving you your freedom?'

‘Yes, why not? I'd be a prize. Servants married their masters back in the past. It must happen here. And I'd make a better wife to somebody in society than some former farm girl. As I said, things can't be that different at the top here. They've got royalty and a strong class system, and I know how people like that think; what they need in a partner.'

‘You seem to have it all worked out,' Jeni observed.

‘Do you think I can't make it happen that way?'

‘Does it matter what I think?'

‘No, as long as you do what I tell you.'