A Gentlemen's Agreement (16 page)

“No, ma’am. I certainly won’t.”

She had broken the mood. Nickel
pushed herself off the cot and minced toward the door.

Irene noted a spot of blood on her
blanket. The last thing that she saw before the lights went out again, was a
smear of Nickel’s blood on her finger.

Taking a shit had to be
excruciating. If Nickel were wise, she would limit herself to soup and juice until
she healed. Better, she should mention her anal trauma to the
kennelman
and get it repaired.

But Nickel would rather tough it
out than admit any weakness.

Irene didn’t care. If that were
the way Nickel wanted it, that was the way she could have it.

* * *

Irene marked the second day of her fast by the second visit
of the
kennelman
in the morning and by the second
time that Nickel came into her cell to get her cunt serviced in the middle of
the day.

This time, Irene didn’t try to
ream out her asshole. That would be fun only once. As she was licking Nickel to
a climax, she wondered why Nickel didn’t order one of the other slaves to
service her.

It was risky for Nickel to
interrupt Irene’s isolation this way. Nobody except the
kennelman
and Lord Snow had permission to enter Irene’s cell when she was being confined
for punishment.

That Nickel insisted that Irene
had to be the slave to service her could be taken as a compliment to her skill.
Not the kind of complement that she desired, but a complement, nevertheless.
But Irene was not deluded. Nickel liked the way she licked cunt, but she liked,
far, far more, that she was humiliating Irene by forcing her to her knees and making
her to give service. It was all about power. Nickel loved that Irene had once
been one of the fine ladies who looked down on slaves with hateful contempt and
now she could look down on Irene’s bobbing head with her own contempt.

If Irene had even a slight
inclination toward other women she would have not minded having her face buried
in Nickel’s crotch. She might have even found some pleasure in it. But even
that wouldn’t have ameliorated the humiliation of forced submission.

But Irene didn’t complain. The
humiliation of forced submission was exactly what she had accepted when she had
mounted the auction block to sell herself into slavery half a year ago.

So, on the third day of her fast,
when Nickel entered the cell and announced that she had, once again, brought
something for Irene to eat, Irene, once again, forced herself to kneel between
Nickel’s widespread thighs and push her face into the dripping crotch.

She tried to feign enthusiasm, but
she had no energy for it. The slaves were kept svelte. At the best of times,
hunger gnawed at their bellies for most of the day. Irene had no reserve of fat
to sustain her through a three-day fast. Even the fat in her breasts was being
depleted and they were beginning to sag on her chest.

“Lick me properly, little bitch,
or I’ll strap your cunt raw. Put some effort into it.” Nickel’s voice was loud
and demanding.

Irene tried harder but her head
was foggy. She felt faint.

“Lick my cunt, bitch! Get your
goddamn tongue into me!” Now Nickel was shouting. “Work it, bitch! Work it!”
Her voice was cracking as she shouted as loudly as she could. The small cell rang.

The cell door banged open.

Both slaves looked up to see Lord
Snow standing in the doorway. “What in hell is going on in here?”

“Nickel brought me her cunt to
eat,” Irene said. She wasn’t trying to be funny. She simply wasn’t able to
think clearly and was repeating what Nickel had told her a few minutes earlier.

“Well, I hope you like it because
that’s all that either one of you is going to eat for the next three days. You
can both break your fast on Saturday morning.”

He slammed the door shut and the
cell went dark, leaving Irene kneeling on the floor with her head between
Nickel’s widespread thighs.

Irene began to sob quietly. Three
more days! She had already been fasting for three days. Her last meal had been
on Saturday night and she wouldn’t eat her next meal until the following
Saturday morning.

She wouldn’t survive.

Wrong. She would survive. Six days
without food would be pure hell, but she would survive. She would lose weight,
come out rail thin, but she would survive.

Unless Nickel
decided to turn cannibal.
To strangle Irene in her sleep and snack on
her flesh.

What about Nickel? Both of them
were locked in the same cell now, and there was only a single cot that was
barely large enough for one. There was no way that Nickel would share. Irene
was going to have to sleep on the concrete floor.

Unless she
wanted to fight Nickel for the cot.
But that wouldn’t turn out well.
Even if she won the cot, she would suffer some even more terrible punishment
for fighting.
Maybe an additional three days of fasting.
Nine days? Endless days until she starved to death. That really would kill her.

She rose to her feet in the dark
and dried her eyes. The fog was lifting from her head and she felt like she was
thinking clearly again.

“What the hell do you think you’re
doing?” Nickel asked. “You get back down there and finish me off. In fact, you
can stay down there and keep licking me for the next three days. You’re going
to keep your face in my cunt, even when you’re asleep. You’re going to keep me
entertained until I get out of here.”

“I don’t think so,” Irene said. “A
few minutes ago, you were
whiphand
and spoke with the
authority of Lord Snow. It was right that I obey you. But now you’re under
punishment. Your authority over me is suspended for the duration.”

“My authority over you comes from
my strap and I’ve still got it right here. You get down and get licking or I’m
going to start swinging and I won’t stop until every inch of you is bruised
black from head to toe.”

“You can try it if you like. But
you’re going to have to explain to Lord Snow how you were enforcing your
discipline on me when I was already being disciplined exactly as he wished. Listening
to you try to explain that might well be worth the price of admission. Assuming
that I don’t get the strap away from you and give you a taste of it myself. If
you want to get into it with me, then you might be surprised what I can do when
I’m not obligated to obey your orders.”

There was a long silence from
Nickel. She was seriously thinking about the pros and cons of getting into a
full-scale brawl in this tiny cell with someone who might turn out to be a lot
tougher than she expected.

Irene felt her way around the cell
and sat down on the cot next to her. “You know that it’s your fault that I’m in
here in the first place. If you’d been enthusiastic about giving the
marquette
the pleasure that was
his due, he wouldn’t have voted to punish me. And if you hadn’t come in here to
force yourself on me just now, Lord Snow wouldn’t have doubled my punishment.”

“Don’t blame me for your
failures,” Nickel countered. “I was doing just fine hiding in my corner during
the entertainment. If you’d left me alone, the
marquette
would have been serviced to his
satisfaction by the other slaves and you would have had him on your side. And
if you’d been as enthusiastic about servicing me today as you usually are, I
wouldn’t have been so noisy trying to get your attention and Lord Snow wouldn’t
have come in here and found us.”

“My god, you are a piece of work,
aren’t you? In your mind, everyone but you is to blame for your shortcomings.”

“You think that everyone but you
is to blame for your bad judgment. You think you’re still a fancy lady with
high hair who can do no wrong. And Lord Snow goes along with it, treating you
like you’re some kind of special person instead of just another piece of
property. You think that I don’t know that you send the
kennelmen
on shopping trips to buy things for you. You order new clothes for yourself.
You tell the lord how his billiard room is going to be decorated. You think
you’re still more lady than slave. Lord Snow better damn well put you in your
place or he’s going to end up married to a slave.
A man who
marries his slave is no gentleman
,
let me tell you
.
He’s no better than a slave himself.”

“Don’t you worry yourself on that
account. Lord Snow isn’t going to marry me because I’m already married. I was
married before I sold myself and, as near as I can figure out, my husband has
never bothered divorcing me.”

Nickel hooted. “Wouldn’t that be a
fine how-de-
do.
A gentleman married to a slave by
default. You think that’s possible? Don’t be an idiot. You’re property.
Marriage is between two people. The minute you were sold, you stopped being a
person,
so
you stopped being a wife. Your ex-husband
can no more be married to you than he could be married to a rubber doll. And
Lord Snow can’t marry you, either, for exactly the same reason. There’s not a
court in the land that would authorize such a contract. And why the hell should
he try? He can get anything he wants from you already. Cooking. Cleaning. Sex.
Babies. What in hell can a wife give him that a slave can’t?”

“Status,” Irene said. “Don’t ever
underestimate the importance of social status.”

“Status. Fuck status. You can’t
eat status.”

“You’re wrong. The aristocracy
feasts on it. It’s all they have. They don’t work the fields or labor in the
factories. They don’t produce a damn thing yet they own it all. And the only
reason that the commoners don’t take it all back is because the aristocracy has
status and they don’t. Within the ranks of the aristocracy, every step up in
status gives them more power to lord it over more people.

“You wouldn’t believe how much of
a gentleman’s status comes from his choice of wife. She organizes the social
calendar, manages their friendships,
enforces
the
cultural rules.”

Irene sighed. “You know what I was
doing just before I sold myself into slavery? I was destroying the happiness of
the oldest daughter of a dear friend. Her daughter was infatuated with a young
man whose father was a knight. He was a lovely boy and would have someday
managed and eventually inherited his father’s fishing fleet and other commercial
concerns. Technically, the knight’s title is not inherited, but as the heir to
his father’s interests, he would have been elevated to knighthood almost
automatically when his father died.

“All that sounds good, but it’s
not good enough for the daughter of a lord. She would have stepped down two
full ranks on the social ladder. Instead, I was arranging for her to step up.
She was beautiful enough to have attracted the attention of an earl. True, the
earl was fifty-two and she was only eighteen. True, he was one of the dullest,
most pedantic men that I’ve ever met. True, she would most likely be over forty
when he finally kicked the bucket and widowed her. But he was an earl. Her
family would have been invited to a much higher class of social events. They
would have been rubbing elbows with other earls and
marquettes
. They would have been the envy of all
their friends.

“I was in a position to arrange
that marriage. I was the go-between who was ensuring that the daughter and the
earl attended the same dinners and sat in adjacent seats. I was there to prop
up the earl’s conversation and make him look like he was urbane and witty. At
the same time, I was always quick to disparage the knight’s son. Not stage a
direct assault – that would have raised the daughter’s hackles –
but drop sly comments about other men who smelled of fish, who struggled to
marry above their rank, who were so good-looking that they had to have male
lovers. And then there were the frank talks with the daughter about the honor
that a good marriage would bestow on her parents. I knew how to pile the guilt
on in great heaps.

“I knew that I was condemning the
poor girl to a long and loveless marriage. But you know why I was doing it?
Because it enhanced the status of my own family.
I was
putting both my friend and the earl into my debt. I was ensuring that my
husband and I would be frequent guests in both their houses.

“You have no idea what a huge
favor I did for that unfortunate girl by selling myself into slavery before my
plan was complete. If she’s smart, she’ll have married the young knight
immediately, not waited until her mother found some other lady to do her dirty
work for her.”

“So you sold yourself into slavery
out of remorse,” Nickel said. “You let yourself be beaten and humiliated by me
and others to relieve your guilt.”

Irene laughed lightly. “No. You
don’t get it at all. I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about arranging an
unhappy marriage for that girl. That’s what ladies do. They scheme and
manipulate and oppress each other mercilessly. At the same time that I was
plotting to climb over the wreckage of that poor girl’s happiness, a dozen of
my friends were plotting against me in various other ways.

“No. I sold myself into slavery
because all that plotting was so easy. I’d been doing it since I was a little
girl. I was good at it. I was the daughter of a knight and I
rose
two ranks when I married a lord. That’s how good I was. For me, those kinds of
campaigns required barely more thought than breathing.

“I sold myself into slavery
because I was bored beyond belief. My husband cared more for his slaves than
for me. My friends cared more for their social schemes than for their happiness.
My life as a lady offered nothing interesting any more.”

“So now you get down on your knees
and eat my cunt every day and you like that better.” Nickel sounded sardonic.