by Nathan Long
She circled me, running light fingertips across my collar bone and shoulders. “And I have a penchant for big, strapping boys.” She caressed my jaw. “Particularly those with such smooth, youthful...”
I hated to piss on her parade. “Er, listen, sister, I...”
She frowned playfully. “You demur?”
“Um, it’s not that. It’s just...”
“Then why do we wait?”
And with that she ripped my shirt open—and came face to face with my sailcloth binding. She frowned. “What’s this? Were you wounded so badly?”
“Uh, not wounded, exactly.”
Before I could explain, she drew a twelve-inch pig-sticker and sliced open the canvas with one swipe. All that was missing was a cartoon “sproing!”’ My boobs split the cut wide and bounced out to fill my shirt.
She stared. “You’re... You’re...”
“I tried to tell you.”
She looked up at me, a strange quirk in her brow. “And so strong as well? It truly is a pity you cannot join us. You will find no happiness elsewhere as you are. I have traveled this world over. I know.”
I had the feeling she was right, but that didn’t matter as long as Sai came through on his promise of a ticket back home.
She sighed and saluted me with her drink. “My apologies if your appetites run in that direction, but you just won’t do. Right now I need a fat cock to fill my cunt and empty my brain.” She stood. “A pleasure and a wonder to meet so strong a sister. May slavery not break your spirit.”
She ushered me out and told Burly to put me in the women’s pen. He did a double take, then grinned. As he was leading me away she called after him. “Send up the pretty one. And have him washed. This one smelled like an Andag priest.”
I almost turned back and told her she was wasting her time, Sai didn’t go for bad girls, but why bother? I didn’t owe her any favors. She’d find out soon enough.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
LOCKDOWN!
Sai and Lhan were waiting at the bars of the men’s cell, eyes full of questions, but Burly pushed me past too quick and threw me in with the women before I could say anything.
A second later I heard Lhan and Sai protesting when Burly pulled Sai out. Sai called back as he was dragged down the hall. “Lhan! Protect Wen-Jhai if I die! Save her! Goodbye, my friend!”
I looked at Wen-Jhai. She was staring blankly at the wall.
The women’s cell was less crowded than the men’s—Wen-Jhai, me, some merchants’ wives and serving girls, and a top-heavy temptress in a gaudy peek-a-boo loincloth bikini who had sex-worker stamped all over her. She had that hard, eyes-on-the-prize look you see in strip clubs all across America.
It was as tense as a courtroom on sentencing day. The women were giving Wen-Jhai hard looks and sniffing like they smelled something rotten. I’m guessing Aldhanshais weren’t used to getting the silent treatment. Wen-Jhai did her best to pretend there was nobody else there, but her knuckles were white and her jaw was quivering. The only one who wasn’t looking daggers at her was the boom-boom gal. Maybe she knew what it was like to be shunned.
I wasn’t real happy with Wen-Jhai myself, but she looked so lost and pathetic that it was hard to keep my mad on. I gave her a smile to let her know not everybody was against her, but she made like she hadn’t seen me. Maybe since I was Sai’s pal she was tarring me with the same brush.
Things didn’t get any more comfortable when, a little later, we all heard, coming through the plank ceiling, the voices of Sai and our lusty captain Kai-La rising in pornographic ecstasy.
Wen-Jhai froze like Lot’s wife. The other women clammed up and didn’t know where to look. I glared at the ceiling. I know Sai had told me just the night before that fucking lower class chicks didn’t mean anything, but goddamn, he’d only called a tearful goodbye to Wen-Jhai less than half an hour ago. Didn’t he need a little time to switch gears? I snorted, disgusted. Maybe Oran guys wore those little love tokens around their waists to keep track of which chick they were supposed to be in love with.
Wen-Jhai was leaking quiet tears now. For some reason this pissed off the other women even more. They curled their lips. I heard one say, “Not fit to be an Aldhanshai.”
Wen-Jhai’s jaw started to quiver. She was about four seconds from bawling her head off. She jumped up and flounced to a corner, then kneeled down facing the walls like a school kid who’s being punished. The whole room watched her shoulders shaking. Her sobs clashed with all the huffing and puffing coming from upstairs. I wanted to cover my ears.
The worst part was, the shagging didn’t stop! Sai and Kai-La panted and gasped and screamed an hour, then after ten minutes of quiet, when I’d begin to hope it was over, they started the whole circus all over again! Little punk was Captain Viagra on top of everything else? It wasn’t fucking fair.
After a while the dancer—her name turned out to be Shae-Vai—crawled to Wen-Jhai and started petting her hand and murmuring in her ear. I lay down and tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t. All the noisy night long I kept myself awake thinking one thing. “What has she got that I ain’t got? What has she got that I ain’t got?”
A full head and an empty cunt is what I had—the exact opposite of what the captain was getting. The bitch.
***
The trip went on for days. So did the schtuping. Sai was giving it to Kai-La every night, all night, which meant that Wen-Jhai was weeping every night, all night. She and Shae-Vai became bosom buddies. They would talk together in a corner, mostly about Wen-Jhai’s horrible fate. More than once I overheard her say, “I know the sort of slave they will make of me. I’ll not do it! I shall kill myself before they take my honor.”
Shae-Vai was always sympathetic. “Poor, brave Aldhanshai. I, alas, had my honor taken from me long before I knew its importance.”
It got worse. One night while the orgasm Olympics were going on overhead and Wen-Jhai was weeping in Shae-Vai’s arms, I noticed Wen-Jhai’s moaning changing tone. I raised my head.
It took me a minute to make out shapes in the darkness, but finally I saw Shae-Vai and Wen-Jhai in the far corner. Wen-Jhai’s back was arched across Shae-Vai’s knee, grabbing the rough boards of the wall, while Shae-Vai’s hand moved between her legs. Goddamn it, everybody was getting laid but me!
Shae-Vai winked at me. I groaned and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to know. Shae must had pulled a fast one, moving from soothing Wen-Jhai to seducing her so smoothly the little fool hadn’t known what was happening until Shae’s “comforting” had started blowing her mind.
I couldn’t take it. Here I was, alone on an alien world in the middle of a fucking porno movie with only my hand for company. I don’t know if I was frustrated, or lonely, or just plain pissed off, but all of a sudden my eyes were wet and my throat closed up. Dammit, I missed Don! I wanted his big arms around me so bad it felt like somebody had my heart in a vice.
I frigged myself to sleep. It didn’t do a damn bit of good.
***
Unbelievably, the next day was worse. Shae-Vai was asleep in a corner, worn out from corrupting virgins no doubt, and the rother women were in their own corners whispering. Wen-Jhai was pacing, as edgy as a cat in a rocking chair factory. I ignored her, doing pushups and trying to remember all the words to “Folsom Prison Blues,” until she sat down beside me.
“You are called Jae-En?”
“Close enough.”
“And you have traveled with Sai-Far since—since my capture?”
I had half a mind to snap at her. Some shit about “now that you’re a sinner like the rest of us you can finally lower yourself to talk to me?” But I was a little lonely for conversation myself. “Uh-huh.”
She bit her lip, then kept going. “Believe you that... that he loves me?”
“It’s all he ever talks about.”
A little sob flew out before she could stop it. “But why then...?”
She hid her face in her hands. I quit my pushups with a sigh
and sat beside her. I obviously wouldn’t get any peace until we’d had this conversation. “What’s the matter? Sai told me that it didn’t mean anything—as long as it was with trash, that is.”
Wen-Jhai raised her head and sucked in a big breath. “He is correct. By law and custom it means nothing, a mere release of animal urges that touches neither heart nor mind. But though I try, I cannot...”
She buried her face again. Tears leaked through her fingers. “Look not upon me. I am ashamed, ashamed.”
I scowled. “You? Whadda you got to be ashamed of?”
She swiped at her tears with the backs of her hands. She looked like a kitten washing its face. “An Aldhanshai must be the epitome of Oran womanhood. She must uphold our sacred traditions of matrimonial fealty and be above petty envies. She should not be roused to jealousy by her Dhanan’s dalliance with outland filth!” Her little fists clenched at her sides. Her knuckles stood out against her purple skin like they’d been dotted with white paint. “And yet... and yet...”
I patted her arm. Probably a breach of etiquette, but she looked like she needed it. “Hey now, don’t beat yourself up. ‘Matrimonial fealty’ is great in theory, but when your man is bonking some bitch right over your head it’s kinda hard to be objective.”
I guess I struck a nerve. She beat her fists against her thighs. “How could he! Even the most debauched of Dhanans has the courtesy to be discrete. Here he embarrasses me in front of... merchants! And with her! The witch who condemns me to slavery.”
I had to agree with her, and not just because it wasn’t me Sai was giving it to. I know guys think with their dicks, but this was ridiculous. This was a world class lack of class.
Of course she hadn’t exactly been chanting her rosary, had she? I nudged her and grinned. “Well, at least you got a little revenge last night, right?”
Her purple got about five shades lighter. “Ah, no. You heard?”
“Uh, I’ve got good ears.”
She started leaking again. “The Seven have mercy. The shame! I know not what came over me.”
“I’ve got a vague idea.”
“Please, Mistress Jae-En. Can you make light of my disgrace? I can no longer call myself Aldhanshai. I have given in to the most base, vile...”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh get real, girl. Who threw the first stone here anyway? How can you feel guilty with Sai going at it like the Energizer Bunny upstairs? Hell, if my old man was bonin’ the chick next door, I’d be ridin’ another bull before you could say ‘saddle up.’”
That couldn’t have translated, but she caught the gist. “But... but that’s horrible.”
“Why?”
“Why? Women don’t... It, it is different for men. Men must slake their animal fevers or go mad.”
“And women don’t have animal urges? Sure they do. Better believe I do, and the captain sure as hell can’t get enough of it.”
“Women of breeding, I meant. You wouldn’t...” She had the decency to look embarrassed. “Only women of the lower classes enjoy this. A noblewoman is pure. Her love is the love of the soul.”
“Honey, the love of the soul only goes so far. You can’t have true love without a little true sex thrown in.”
Wen-Jhai recoiled. “You defile the word, mistress.”
I leaned back, staring at her. “Oh, come on. Are you honestly telling me you’re not supposed to like it?”
Wen-Jhai started shading toward pink. Her voice changed like she was quoting. “Only the love of her noble Dhan, within the bounds of holy wedlock shall spark the flame of desire within the breast of a true Dhanshai of Ora. All other... hungers are unnatural and depraved.”
I smacked the floor. “That’s crap! You’re acting like you’re a whole ’nother species. You may have been born with a silver spoon in your mouth, but you got the same ‘hungers’ as every other woman on this planet.”
Wen-Jhai’s eyes flashed. “How dare you suggest that I have kinship with...”
“Come on, sister. Wise up. You’re your own proof.”
“What... what do you mean?”
“You’re a princess, right? An Aldhanshai? Who’s got more breeding than you?”
She looked uncomfortable.
“So, can you tell me you didn’t like playing Jiffy Lube with Shae-Vai last night? And even though you’re mad at him, don’t you get a little turned on when Sai and the Captain are hitting the high notes?”
“Stop! Stop!” She covered her ears. “’Tis a disease. My father’s physician said it was a disease. He made me take cold baths and drink salt water.”
“Fucking... It’s not a disease! It’s nature!” Goddamn backward planet. Back on Earth—well, actually, back on Earth there were still places where women weren’t allowed to show even their faces, and they had their clits cut off so they couldn’t enjoy sex. Maybe I didn’t have room to talk after all. Where were the good planets? “Come on, Wen-Jhai, why should men have all the fun and women all the shame when they’re both the same animal?”
I turned away. Maybe I should have been more patient with her. It takes people a while to get around shit they’ve been told all their lives. Try telling a gun nut they’re more likely to get shot if they own a gun than if they don’t. I started doing pushups again. I’d only done five hundred so far that day. I was falling behind.
Somewhere around rep eighty I felt a delicate finger tracing the line of my tricep as it flexed and relaxed. I stopped and looked up. It was Wen-Jhai. She wouldn’t look at me, just kept watching her finger as it trailed along the cords of my arm.
“Mistress Jae-En?”
“Yeah?”
She started again. Maybe she’d lost her place. “Mistress Jae-En?”
“Still here.”
“Mistress Jae-En. You know so much of all this. You seem to know both sides of... of it. You seem to... be both sides of it. You have the strength of a man, and the... ripeness of a woman...”
That other shoe was going to drop any minute now.
“Mistress, I wondered if... if you might teach me...”
Christ. All it needed was this. I restarted my pushups. Almost pushed myself to the goddamn ceiling. “Sorry, Princess. I’m... I’m not inclined that way, but I’m sure Shae-Vai will be more than happy to give you another lesson.”
“I... Forgive me.”
She hurried off, blushing. I felt like a jerk.
***
I did a lot of pushups that day. It was the only way to keep my mind off... other things. What with all the whoopie being made all around me, I was horny enough that the crack of dawn was starting to look good, and Wen-Jhai had looked so sad and snuggly that I wanted to eat her up with a spoon.
The problem was, even though I’d poured all that free love crap in Wen-Jhai’s ears, the idea of diddling the future wife of my oldest friend on the planet was more than the little red-haired angel on my shoulder could stomach. It killed me that me, the bad-ass biker chick, with more notches on my bedpost than Mae West, was acting like the biggest prude on board this goddamn love boat.
I didn’t get any sleep again that night. Sai and Captain Kai were hard at it upstairs, and down in our little nest, Wen-Jhai and Shae-Vai were tickling each other’s fancies and being none too quiet about it. Wen-Jhai was making up for lost time. She had Shae-Vai wailing like a siren.
I turned to the wall and covered my ears, pissed at Waar and Sai and Wen-Jhai and everybody else who’d been part of getting me into this fucking situation, but mostly at myself. I knocked my head against the floor.
“I’ve created a monster.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SLAVES!
Doshaan was the wettest place I’d been to on Waar—a swampy pit of a town with blue-green moss growing on gray stone buildings and big, ferny trees out of a dinosaur book. It stank like low tide in Galveston.
The buildings, at least the ones I saw through the bars of the rolling cage the pirates loaded us into for our trip from the shipfield to the slave market,
were wide and flat, with windows like mail slots and pitched swamp-grass roofs. Even though they looked like jungle shacks, they felt more like home to me. I finally realized it was because they were rectangles instead of hexagons.
The city was crowded with more different kinds of people—races, I guess—than you could shake a stick at. Back in Ora everybody had pretty much looked the same, which made folks like the Andag priests stand out. Here, nobody would have given them a second look. The locals were thin, maroon guys who wore dark blue togas, but I saw folks with skin tones from lip-gloss white to eggplant black, hair from straight to kinky, bald heads, bristle heads, braid heads, big noses, little noses, hawk noses, tall thin guys, short square guys, big round guys, all in wild costumes: Oran harnesses, kilts, robes, leggings, tunics, loincloths, furs, culottes for God’s sake, and more silly hats than a shriner’s convention.
I couldn’t understand them all either. Most of these guys spoke languages not included in my traveler’s translation package.
The slave market was a big square in the center of town. On a pedestal in the middle was a twenty-foot statue of some fat lady whose tits had eyes instead of nipples and whose belly had a mouth full of shark teeth. I bet the kids in these parts ate all their vegetables and didn’t sass back.
Around the edges of the square, rickety wooden stages had been set up. Some were big and fancy, some were small and dingy. Each had a duded-up barker shouting his lungs out in front, and cages around the back to hold the merchandise. That is, us.
The pirates paid some guy to rent a stage and hung out colorful banners and curtains. Burly, dressed up in a yellow and red caftan as subtle as a Vegas neon sign, did his best used car salesman act, raising his big voice to call in the suckers. The rest of the crew took care of the details like writing up bills of sale and collecting the money.