Judgment (5 page)

At least I assumed it dawned. As deep as we were in the rock, there were no windows. From the moment of our arrival to the day of our individual sales, the closest we ever came to the Outside was the Crater, a garden and exercise area roughly the size of a football field, the craggy rock sides too steep to climb, the top of the walls like a two-story building all around us. There was grass here, plants, and an aviary with colorful birds of all sizes and species (although we, being unworthy creatures, were never permitted inside of that).

The only time we ever saw the mountain courtyard again, surrounded by its high stone walls and iron-toothed portcullis, was when we were displayed there—as a finished product—to potential buyers. An experience I would not have to dread for three years.

What woke me in the morning was my captor's roving hands and experienced mouth. He suckled my nipples, dipped his tongue into my navel and told me that I would be beautiful were I pierced there and decorated with a jewel. His mouth moved lower still and I could not stifle a moan of unwilling pleasure as he found my clit and suckled that, too.

He said I would look lovely pierced there as well, but that I would have to prove myself obedient before he granted me such an honor. I hoped to be never so obedient.

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Judgment

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And then, as though he could read my rebellious thoughts with his mind, he sat at the edge of the bed, put me over his knee and spanked me for the second time in all my life.

Because he felt like it, he said, but he left me crying before it was over.

Pushing me down to kneel on the floor, he put himself into my mouth and, with his hand on the top of my head, bobbed me up and down on that solid shaft until I thought I would choke it went so deep into my throat. I wished I was brave enough to bite, but still blindfolded and bound, I feared his retaliation. When he came, sputtering and gagging, I spat his seed from my mouth.

Without another word, he summoned a guard and I was blindly led away, taken to the same Spartan, barrack-like sleeping quarters where my sisters in suffering had spent the night. At last my blindfold and bonds were removed.

I didn't think it possible to suffer any worse than what I had endured all through my first night, but they quickly proved me wrong.

There were five of us bought from the gypsies. Brunette was Russian, and the only one I knew from my van. The others I didn't recognize, but none of us were of the same nationality. Black was a sweet, soft Italian girl—I don't think she stopped crying once that whole first month—and the two Blondes were German and French, respectively. I think this was done deliberately. It felt very isolating to have no one to talk to.

Within a few minutes of my arrival, a troop of men entered the barracks. Under the supervision of one master and ten, 41

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willow-switch toting guards, we were escorted, single file from the dormitory. Even I needed nothing more than to heard the hiss of the lithe switch slicing the air behind me to get me moving.

We were taken to a large, white-tiled bathroom. Naked and shivering, more from fear than any real sense of cold, we were lined up against the back wall, a guard flanking each of us at both sides.

The master began to speak, but not in any language that I could recognize. Everything he said was softly translated for me—indeed for each of us—in our native tongues by the guards.

"You will be bathed," one of my two guards told me. As the master spoke again, his voice booming with authority, he said, "When you become worthy of clothes, you will don the uniform provided you. You will learn our language and speak it solely. You will be obedient."

The guards left us lined up at the tile wall. With numbed acceptance, we watched as they unraveled a hose from a rack and turned the water on. The 'bath' was brutal and the water ice cold. All five of us shrieked and twisted this way, clinging together as our bodies were pounded by the spray.

Blonde German tried to run, but her two guards caught her and with startling efficiency dropped her belly down on the tile floor. They held her there for the master, who calmly shut off the hose. He approached her, already removing his heavy black belt.

I am ashamed to say we did nothing to help her. We huddled, shivering and dripping, and watched the price of 42

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disobedience unfolding with the length of leather that dangled from his hand.

The master spoke, his rich voice echoing through the shower room, and my guard translated for me, "You will be obedient."

She cried and pleaded right from the first mighty swipe, which flattened the chubby base of her buttocks and turned it scarlet. The sharp cracks of the leather mingled with her shrieks of pain, but he was pitiless. He turned her flanks a bright shade of wounded red, and though she writhed and fought her guards, their grips were inflexible and all she could do was scream.

Brunette screamed too, and it set off a chain reaction with the rest of us. When the master turned to glare at us, all but Brunette and the Blonde under the belt fell silent. His cold eyes settled on my Russian companion, and me as well, since I was huddled up next to her.

What he spoke, I didn't need to have translated. Not when a lilting smile curled the corners of his mouth and he raised a finger to his lips. "Shh," I discovered, was universal.

I don't think Brunette even noticed, because it wasn't until I grabbed her head and covered her mouth with my hand that she stopped screaming.

The master lay two more fearsome swipes of that belt across her chubby, red bottom and then allowed the guards to lift her from the floor. She was led weeping back to her place in line and the hose was turned on us again. They got very little protest from us at all after that.

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They soaked us down thoroughly, then turned off the spray. We were each handed a bar of soap and a rough gray wash cloth. They stared unabashed while we washed every inch of our bodies, then doused us with another painful round from the hose. As I had been last night, my companions all were shaved as bald as young girls again.

And this humiliation was just the beginning. Once clean and dried, we were led naked down barren, cheerless corridors. I tried to keep track of the path, but I was soon hopelessly confused. The dark, empty halls looked too much the same, and the direction for the door I most wanted—the one behind which lay my freedom—was kept a complete mystery from me.

We were brought to Judgment's medical center. The Master Doctor introduced himself as Moulton while we lined up against the wall, and he was very, very thorough in his examinations of us.

He collected blood in multiple vials. Urine and fecal samples were taken with each of us made to squat over a pot, without a shred of privacy as we made our

"contribution". When Black had difficulty, she underwent the added embarrassment of a public enema. The sight of that was enough to convince me to cooperate. When it came my turn, I accepted the fresh pot they handed me, turned my face to the wall as I squatted, and tried to pretend that I was alone.

Our hair was checked for fleas and lice. We were given eye exams. Our hearing and motor skills were tested. They looked in our ears, noses and mouths. They even seemed interested 44

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in our individual level of intelligence. While we waited for the final, and worst, aspect of the examination, we had to complete short written tests regarding mathematics, sciences, the composition of sentence structures and reading abilities.

It was almost like being back in school.

Blonde German was the first to be subjected to the gynecological chair. With a face as red as her flanks, she crept past the two masters and reluctantly hoisted herself up into the seat, wincing as her whipped bottom and thighs made contact with the black leather beneath her. She placed her legs into each of the stirrups and then she covered her face with her hands and cried as Master Moulton probed her private parts, looking for signs of sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, and opening her wide with a speculum to measure the size of her passage and search for abnormalities. With one final indignity, the tightness of her bottom was prodded and tested before a series of four vaccinating injections were dispatched and Blonde was allowed to get up.

It was no treat being the last in line. As I stood in trepidation, awaiting my turn, something in the speculum process hurt Brunette, for midway through it she stiffened and nearly came up off the chair, shrieking with pain. She had to be restrained after that, with a guard at each leg holding her open for Moulton, and the other master pinning her hands above her head. At a word from the Master Doctor, he reached down between her legs to fondle her. Though Brunette continued to arch and cry out, the pitch and tone of her protests minutely changed. By the end of it, she was 45

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flushed, panting as breathlessly as if she'd run a marathon, and her hips could hardly be kept still.

The exam concluded, but the master did not grant her sexual release. She got up from the chair slowly, walking as if in a daze to join the others. And then there was only me left to go.

Doctor Moulton wiped down the chair, as he had at the beginning of each examination, and patted the seat for me. I stared at it, at the other master with his dark and lecherous smile and the long solid bulge that pressed taut against the front of his black pants, and my legs just would not work. I pressed back against the wall, shaking my head. Indeed, I shook all over.

My defiance aroused him. The bulge in the master's pants became thicker and larger and incredibly more pronounced.

For the second time, he slid his belt from around his waist, beckoning me with one finger before firmly indicating the chair. I shook my head again, more frantically this time because out of the corners of my eyes I could already see my two guards coming for me.

He wrapped the buckle end of his belt around his hand several times, shortening the length as I was dragged, kicking, flailing and screaming, to the examination chair. They bent me over it, hauling me so far up over the top that my feet no longer touched the floor. My guards held me in place from the other side to give the master plenty of room to whip me.

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"You will be obedient," the master said in that other language. Having heard it twice now, I did not need an interpreter.

As horrible as it had been to witness, the belt was even worse to experience. Held as I was, I could not even see it coming before the first stroke sliced into me from behind, catching the middle of my thighs. I bucked and shouted, and the belt worked its way up my legs to brand my bottom with overlapping lines of sheer fire.

"This is the last time you will behave this badly," my guard told me.

"I doubt it." Even in the throes of agony, I recognized that low voice the instant I heard it. "Stay your arm, Boyden."

My whipping stopped and the guards released their hold on me. Exhausted from my struggles, sobbing with the hurt throbbing in my flanks, I more fell off than climbed gracefully down from the chair.

He stood in the doorway, tall, his head clearing six feet at least. His chest and shoulders were thickly built, with a lean waist and narrow, slender hips. His hair and eyes were black and a lazy smile graced his angular face as he looked at me.

This was my captor, the man who had taken me so mercilessly in the wee hours of the night. Who had reveled in my tears, hurting me until I could no longer cry, but just lie pinned beneath him, grunting and moaning as he thrust.

I backed up all the way to the wall. And my fearful recognition made him smile all the more.

"Come to me, infant."

Trembling, I shook my head.

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His smile hardly faltered. "I could have you taken to the Assembly Hall and put to the block," he said evenly. "I could have you whipped until this mountain sings with the sound of your screams, or I could leave you splayed there all day for the pleasure of each master's leisure." He beckoned with two fingers. "Come to me."

My only movement was in my trembling limbs. "You will anyway."

And he would, too. I just knew it. I could see the truth of it right there in his face.

Master Boyden ran the length of his belt through his hands, the leather rasping in his palm. Not far from me, the Master Doctor shook his head at my nerve, while the guards just glared.

He came up to me as though a lover, cupping my chin in his fingers and tilting my face up to his. "You are not afraid of me?"

If my knees knocked together any harder, I'd have fallen down. My voice quavered as I lied, "No."

Amusement danced in his black eyes. "Pity. It would have saved me some time."

Thinking back on this years later, it astounds me that he did not birch me then and there. Instead he merely tapped the tip of my nose with his finger, as though he found my disrespect utterly charming and cute.

"Have them brought to me when you are done," he told Master Boyden, then he looked at me and that funny half-smile turned the corners of his mouth again. "What a little mischief."

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In spite of all my defiance, I did not escape the humiliation of that intimate exam. In fact, the only thing it did for me was to place me squarely in the minds of the masters as a trouble-maker, and in the mind of the Mountain Lord as someone to watch more closely. Neither, as it turned out, was a good place to covet being.

Examination of my person was completed, my hymen was pronounced intact, and the five of us were marched to my captor's personal quarters as requested.

It felt very strange to finally see the places where I had suffered while blindfolded the night before. My captor's rooms were very opulent, mostly done in white. The bath was in a separated area from the bedroom. The chair he had spanked me upon was still sitting in the middle of the floor with the hairbrush on the carpet beside it, and I got a good look at my wood-backed nemesis. Were I a braver girl, I'd have abandoned my place in line, snatched up that beastly implement and thrown it past where Tane was standing, onto the fire that crackled in the stone wall. Had I any inkling of how soundly that brush and I were to be reacquainted, I might have tried harder to work up the nerve.