Shared by the Barbarians (2 page)

Chapter Two

Pag of the Trestrimar took his place beside his brothers, Kar and Hed, just behind General Kroban as they stepped off the shuttle and onto the flight deck of the general’s palace in Vion City. It was an unusual place for three barbarian mercenaries to be, but the Trestrimarian Brothers, as they had come to be known among the Vionian general staff, had played an unusual role in the conquest of Sherdon.

Now, as what they seemed to be expected to regard as a reward, the barbarians of the Trestrimar would be treated to the delights of the Sword Festival.

“You will sit by me at the table,” Kroban had said when the last city on Sherdon had surrendered, after Kroban had told the mayor that he would have no compunction about letting loose his mercenaries on the city if he did not order his bedraggled resistance forces to stand down. “You will see at last what true civilization is like, and I can only hope it won’t make you soft, like my officers, for we have many campaigns ahead of us, you and I!”

Standing waiting for Kroban to go through the tedious ceremony of greeting his servants, Kar said under his breath to Pag, “These Vionians can’t even welcome a conqueror properly, can they?”

Hed grumbled. “Where are the girls? They sent forty girls for the feast, didn’t they?”

Kar decided to take the opportunity to needle Pag. “Yes, and you know that all Pag wants is to see that redhead again.”

“Hold your tongue, Kar,” Pag growled.

But Hed kept going. “Oh, but didn’t they say she would go straight to Kroban’s chambers? We’re not going to see her at all.”

Pag didn’t dignify this teasing with any response at all. He watched Kroban turn to the ten officers and ten legionaries who had filed off their two shuttles and taken up their positions to the side, at strict attention in their red dress uniforms: three colonels, five captains, and two lieutenants in the front row; proud legionaries, each responsible for some valorous deed, behind them. Pag had to admit that the Vionians knew how to put on an impressive show; he just didn’t know what the show was supposed to mean, when every time he had sparred with a Vionian soldier, the Vionian went down in a heap almost immediately, and Kroban invariably turned to his barbarians, the Trestrimar above all, when he needed something done on the field of battle.

Pag supposed that before the advent of the preemptive EMP as a battle tactic, warriors from the barbarian worlds like his own Mara would have been worse than useless on the battlefield. But now that the Vionians had adopted the drastic but terribly effective practice of rendering all an enemy’s technology useless before sending in a force armed with edged weapons that had not changed much in three thousand years, he and his brothers and their men had no equal when it came to combat. With the lingering electromagnetic pulse still making sparks fly through the city, they would secure the center of government, slaughtering every man who stood in their way and capturing every woman and child.

He often reflected on the terrible irony of it. The Trestrimar, Pag’s tribe, lived alongside thirty—at last count—other tribes, all descendants of men who had chosen a primitive way of life in hope of averting the cycle of brief prosperity and age-long squalor that, the tribal records said, had made human history so dangerous and had robbed men of their natural right to dominate women. Now, thanks to Vionian rapaciousness and those first barbarians’ descendants’ restlessness, the Trestrimar fought in service to that same cycle, helping the Vionians achieve an empire that Pag could already see, knowing what to look for here on Vion 4, had begun to fall apart from within.

“Look at that dark patch to the East,” he told his brothers. “That’s the slum we heard about. They take all the young men from there for the army and think that means they don’t have to worry. When the people there destroy the power grid, the emperor and the council say good riddance. What do you think would happen if we decided we wanted to sack this city?”

Hed gave him a disbelieving look. “Don’t be an idiot. Why would we want to do that?”

Kar laughed. “Ah, Pag’s just off on one of his little dreams. Thinking of the redhead.”

Pag rolled his eyes, but the general saved him from having to respond. He had finished inspecting the officers chosen to feast with him while the rest of the army feasted in the barracks, shaking the hand of each one and thanking him for some specific service rendered to the cause of bringing the whole of the Bridge Cluster, with its fifty-seven star systems, thirty-two of them already under Vionian control, to its knees.

“My barbarian brothers!” the general said in that warm voice he used to secure the loyalty of his army. Not a tall man even by Vionian standards, he stood a full head shorter than the three Trestrimar, his close-cropped blond hair presenting just as great a contrast to their long raven locks, gathered for the occasion not into their battle topknots, but with golden hair-rings into manes that flowed down their muscular naked backs, just past their shoulder blades. “At last the time has come for you to show us your legendary prowess. The feast is prepared, and the girls are waiting.”

The banqueting hall of Kroban’s palace, placed just below the flight deck, spanned the entire length and breadth of the tower, so that on every side a view of the twilit imperial city, its millions of lights beginning to glow everywhere but in the slums to the East, stretched out before them, seen through windows so high and broad that the ceiling seemed to float far above them, and Pag had the impression that the room had no walls at all.

As soon as he saw the preparations for this third-night feast, though, he stopped looking out the windows and concentrated on the scene in the center of the hall.

Lovely, naked girls’ bottoms, bound in place over a rail that ran round a dais raised two feet off the floor. Around the dais stood the feasting tables, close enough that above each setting of cutlery rose a bottom that would present itself to the diner’s view at a range only of six inches. The girls’ faces, facing inward and lowered submissively as they presented their cunts and rumps to the room, could not be seen. For a moment Pag let himself wonder whether Jalinda was among them. He couldn’t decide, in that tiny moment before he forced the thought away, whether he wanted hers to be one of the pretty bottoms offered to the victorious army for Third Night.

“Silly imperials,” Hed said. “Do we have to get on the tables to fuck those asses?”

“And we won’t get to have the mouths?” Kar asked.

“Wait and see,” said Pag. “Remember, everything is more civilized here.”

The general walked to his place in the center of the head table, and reached out his hand casually to stroke the pale moons of the bottom that it seemed would adorn his feast. A little cry emerged from the other end of the girl into the formal silence of a feast about to begin. Idly, the general ran two fingers along the cunt, which Pag noticed, like all the cunts he could see, had been bared, a custom the Trestrimar also enforced on their women when they came of age to be available for fucking, and of which Pag heartily approved.

The girl moaned at the general’s touch, even when, to barely suppressed guffaws from some of the legionaries, he sank his middle finger into her anus, though the moan quickly became ambiguous as Kroban pushed the finger in and out of the bottom, a broad smile on his face.

A servant had run up with a basin and soap. As soon as the general removed his finger from the girl’s bottom, the servant reverently washed his hand.

Then at last the general turned to his men, who waited by the double doors through which they had entered the hall, and addressed them.

“According to our ancient custom,” he said in a grave voice, “Third Night is the true night of swords. It is the night when, if a Vionian army has won victory in the field in the previous year, they reward themselves with the virgins they have taken from the conquered. In the barracks, the men are already enjoying the concubines from the women’s tower over the tables in their messes. But for you, my officers and my chosen legionaries, I have a more refined reward, though I promise it will be no less satisfying. With the ancient Vionian art of erotic cuisine, my chef has paired the food and wine of this meal with the taste and scent of virgin quim.”

“See?” Pag said under his breath to his brothers.

“I’d still rather just get up on the table and fuck the lovely ass I’ve got coming to me,” Hed said.

“And there’s nothing like a pretty face, when the mouth has your cock inside it,” Kar grumbled.

Kroban turned back to the bottom served up at his place. He leaned forward and, just the tip of his tongue extended, licked delicately at the girl’s cunt.

“Ah,” he said in a satisfied tone. “Delicious.” He took a glass goblet full of an amber wine and sipped. “My brothers in arms, I hope you can appreciate this greatest of delicacies. I fear that perhaps our barbarian friends may not, but…” He turned to address the Trestrimar. “I can promise that after dinner we will give them fare more suited to their tastes.”

Again he spoke to the entire assembly. “For these girls, once dinner is over, will of course be at your command. Pag of Trestrimar?”

Pag felt his brow furrow at being addressed directly. “Yes, general?”

“Is it not the custom of the Trestrimar, like so many barbarian tribes, to fuck in public, as a sort of display?”

Pag smiled. “It is, general, at celebrations—and for public punishments.”

“Will you and your brothers consent to show us how it is done? My Vionian officers and men will benefit greatly from your example. They know how to fuck, of course—most of them, at any rate.” A laugh went up from the legionaries. “But even when they have a conquerors’ night like this one, the polite, civilized Vionian custom is to pay attention only to a man’s own cock and the girl it’s inside. Tonight I want you and your brothers to show us how it’s done. After dinner, the dais will be cleared and the tables taken away. You will fuck your girls like the stallions you are, as we all watch, with our own girls serving us at our knees.”

Pag didn’t
think
Jalinda was the owner of the bottom in front of General Kroban now. Was Kroban saving her for later, somewhere? That suited Pag fine; the one thing he thought he might not have strength to bear was actually to watch Kroban fuck Jalinda.

“Yes, general,” he said, glancing over to see that Kar and Hed now looked much more satisfied despite the boredom they must expect from the meal itself, no matter how diverting the sight, smell, and taste of the cunt they would soon deflower. Pag rather looked forward to it; of the three of them, he had by far the most interest in learning about what civilization might have to offer.

“And, because the ancient customs of the Sword Festival demand that the victorious general claim a special reward, the most beautiful girl found on Sherdon—the lovely redhead whom you, Pag of Trestrimar, brought to me, a service I hope to repay tonight—who waits now tied to my bed and well prepared for fucking, will be brought to me. I shall whip her in front of all of you, and then I shall give her a fucking that I believe will not dishonor the efforts of my Trestrimar inside their own prizes!”

Chapter Three

The majordomo came for Jalinda just after the sun had set completely, through the windows in the general’s bedchamber. The majordomo and Yeb had traveled in the underground train with the many girls—thirty-five?—forty?—going to this feast. Jalinda had quickly realized that all the girls in the bathing hall had been taken from Sherdon just like she and the three with whom she had arrived on Vion 4, and that they were now to be displayed in some way at the banquet.

Then, however, Yeb had taken all the other girls up in one lift, and the majordomo had taken Jalinda in another, to the general’s chambers, where he had tied her naked to the bedpost, fastening a stout rope to a locked leather belt they had put around her waist after they had shaved her private part. He offered no explanation, and Jalinda knew not to speak, for the majordomo’s strap hung ready at his side.

Now, after sunset, he returned in all his frightening, fat ugliness. “It is time for you to go to the feast,” he said in a tone that Jalinda felt must mean that something terrible awaited her there.

She had no way of knowing, however, just how terrifying and shameful the scene would be. Led by a leash clipped to her belt, Jalinda came through the double doors to hear the cries of girls like her as three enormous men, on a platform in the middle of the hall, did something to them that Jalinda didn’t understand.

The three girls, one of whom, Jalinda saw, was Renda, lay over a long bench, with their heads down and their bottoms up, almost as if to be punished for some infraction. But the huge men, obviously the same kind of barbarian mercenaries Jalinda had seen on Sherdon, and of whom she had already been so frightened, were not whipping them—though the girls cried out in a way that suggested they were being disciplined somehow. The men stood behind the girls, in nearly identical postures, holding their hips fast and seeming to pump their own hips back and forth, slamming into the girls’ upturned bottoms over and over. With each thrust made by a barbarian, the girl under him cried out.

Jalinda must have made a startled, frightened sound, for the majordomo turned to her with a cruel look upon his face. “Don’t worry, girl. A Vionian feast is civilized. Those girls aren’t getting anything they didn’t ask for, to be spared harder duties. When they were brought here, the servants got them nice and ready with gentle fingers on their quims until every one of them said they would submit willingly to their conquerors.”

“But I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Jalinda said. She tried desperately to figure it out. What did men do to women, when they were naked? Girls had always whispered, but on Sherdon 2, with its strict segregation of the sexes until twenty-one for the good of intellectual development, good girls never listened to those whispers. Here on Vion 4, it was obvious of course that the concubines in the women’s tower had come there, thanks to the cruelty of the Vionian Empire, to do that—whatever it might be—when the majordomo decided they should do it with one man or another.