Shared by the Barbarians (9 page)

Life as a mercenary in the Vionian Empire had shown him how many different women existed in the galaxy. Of Vionian girls he had fucked a score: the matrons and the virgins of the empire seemed to have an insatiable appetite for barbarian cock, and at first he had thought them simply perfumed versions of the women of the Trestrimar. Certainly they had the same need for a barbarian’s dominance around which Trestrin the Founder had organized the law of the Trestrimar.

But he soon found that the women of the empire, elegant as they appeared, regarded him as no more than a piece of hard muscle and a manhood bigger than any they had seen on a Vionian. He had enjoyed himself, but it was only on campaign that he seemed to find girls, among the peoples of the worlds he helped subjugate, who began to make him think there might be a sort of girl with whom a man would wish to spend more time than it took to pleasure until she knew not whether to beg him to stop or to continue, to spurt his seed inside her and over her skin to mark his dominance.

Still, on his first two campaigns, though he had formed liaisons with a girl each time, and cared for her according the law of the Trestrimar for couples who might wed, including of course sharing each girl with Hed and Kar, and he had wondered if he might be falling in love with each of them, in the end he had thought it best to return the girls to their families, after the Vionian conquest had swept all before it and left a peaceful, if unhappy, planet behind. Sharing the girls with his brothers had given all of them such pleasure, though, that they had discussed whether a marriage of brothers in one cunt might make them happiest in the end, if they could only find the right girl.

Sherdon had been Pag’s third campaign. He still didn’t understand why Jalinda had affected him as she had. Perhaps the customs of the Sherdonians, with their same-sex educational institutions, had imbued her with a kind of modesty he had never seen in a woman before, which, combined with her flaming red hair and the green eyes in her lovely heart-shaped face, had taken his heart as captive as Pag had taken her body. As he had walked her to the Vionian headquarters, through the eerily silent streets of her surrendered town, he had not been able to resist starting a strange conversation with the girl he knew he must deliver up to his imperial employers, asking her questions and thinking hard about her answers.

“Here on Sherdon, you go to a girls’ school?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like it?”

He had glanced back at her, where she walked a pace behind him, hands folded in front of her and eyes downcast.

She had looked up in apparent confusion. “Will I still go there? I mean, why
do
? And not
did
?”

Pag had felt his brow furrow. “I mean did,” he said. “You will go to a Vionian reeducation school now, I think, or…”

“Or what?”

Pag had hesitated, hardly knowing why. Surely he could tell this girl that she could expect a brutal fucking at the hands of the general or one of his officers? He was a man of the Trestrimar, and men of the Trestrimar told girls how it would be. When he fucked Vionian matrons, the most aristocratic of women, he told them to kneel and to raise their rumps and he fucked them there as long and as hard as he liked. At feasts, he told Vionian virgins that he would deflower them that night, in their bedchambers, so they should leave the door as open as their legs and cunts would soon be.

“Or,” he said, “you will be taken to Vion, to serve.”

“To serve whom?”

Pag’s face had gotten hot, then—the most unaccustomed of feelings for him. Maybe that was the moment he fell in love.

“You will know soon enough,” he had said shortly, and turned away to lead her down the rest of their road in silence.

* * *

To his surprise, and rather to his annoyance, Pag found that he had the same sort of hot-faced feeling as he and his brothers led Jalinda towards the center of the village. Forty ‘huts’—as the Trestrimar called them, though really the structures of synth-wood and synth-steel looked more like small houses and had all the basic facilities of any Vionian dwelling—stood in a radiating starburst pattern around the circular green. The Trestrimar had lived in this spot for all the two hundred years since the ten founders had come to Mara. From one ring of five huts the village had grown in the first fifty years to its present size. After that birthrates and genetic diversity had both been closely regulated by the council of ten that met every year on Marafall and the council of three that ruled the Trestrimar, and each tribe of Mara had stayed at a population no smaller than four hundred and no greater than six hundred.

Pag watched Jalinda take in the layout, the size, the simplicity. None of that made him anxious, as he saw them anew through her eyes, even after having been away from Mara himself for five years and having seen many of what the Vionians at least considered the greatest sights in the galaxy.

He felt anxious because he recognized the sounds coming from the platform at the center of the village green as those of the public punishment of a disobedient wife. He looked at Hed, who wore a faint smile on his face showing that he too had recognized the noises. Pag knew his middle brother too well to think that he would want to spare Jalinda this early demonstration of what she must expect should she show her new husbands any lack of respect.

They had gone twenty paces when the jump-jet’s rotors roared into life for takeoff, at least drowning out the screams of the punished wife—or perhaps wives, because Pag thought he could hear two distinct female voices crying out just before the pilot started his engines. Kar, too, had recognized the sounds from the green, and now he yelled into Pag’s ear, over the nearly deafening noise, “Pag, why don’t we take Jalinda to our hut. It will be much too chaotic on the green.”

He looked into Pag’s eyes to make it clear what he meant:
Let’s spare our girl this fright, at least.

Pag glanced at Jalinda, still naked, as the law of the Trestrimar prescribed for women in the lush climate of Mara, still in her training belt, and now instinctively holding her right arm over her breasts and her left before her cunt. Had she heard the screams? She must have. On her face she wore an expression of great anxiety, though Pag of course couldn’t tell which of the many things she had to worry about—or all of them—had caused her to suck in her lips between her teeth and wrinkle up her nose.

The jump-jet took off, the sound of its rotors fading into the distance. Hed had clearly intuited exactly what had passed between Kar and Pag. He said, “She must see. So that it is not her up there.” With his hard-set chin he gestured toward the green.

“What?” Jalinda asked. A cry of pain came from the platform. “What is it?” She looked from Hed, to Pag, to Kar.

“A wife…” Two women’s voices screamed together then.

“Two wives, at least,” Hed said with some satisfaction, as it appeared to Pag. Hed enjoyed seeing justice done.

“Wives are being punished on the green,” Pag finished. “We will take you to our hut.”

Jalinda’s eyes went wide. “Please,” she whispered. “I… I think I should see.” She looked at Hed. “It will be worse if I don’t.”

Hed growled, “Pag is eldest. You obey him, or I will spank you myself. And keep your hands at your sides. You are forbidden to cover yourself.”

“No,” Pag said reluctantly. “Jalinda must understand that she does have a voice in our home. If she wishes to see what is happening, and how wives receive public discipline in our village, that is what we should do.” He took a step forward and put his arms around her. “You will see, sweetling.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jalinda said softly to his chest.

Chapter Eleven

Jalinda knew she had made the wrong choice as soon as they got close enough to make out the figures on the platform. They were still ten paces or so from the edge of the crowd, though some of the men on the outskirts and their women had turned in curiosity to see who had arrived on the jump-jet, and though they remained gravely silent, they nodded at Pag and his brothers in greeting.

The women were all naked, like Jalinda, but only Jalinda wore the terrible belt. Only she had the exotic build and complexion of an off-worlder, compared to their black hair and tanned skin, their full hips and breasts. She watched the men’s eyes take in her fair skin and her red hair, then look frankly at her breasts and between her legs, not failing to smile at the sight of the leather that girded her waist and the chains that ran down alongside the little furrow of her bare quim. Her hands itched to return to hiding her private places, but Hed’s voice rang in her ears. The threat of a spanking from his huge hands seemed to drive her shame away.

It was thus not the nakedness of the women on the platform that made Jalinda feel faint, but their positions and what the two men up there were doing to them. They were bound to wooden crosses in the shape of an X, with their bellies to the wood. Their bottoms, forced outwards by some sort of padding under their hips, were toward the men who whipped them with many-tailed braided lashes.

They screamed and screamed. Their bottoms looked to Jalinda like nothing but red streaks from the whips, but the men kept grimly bringing the lashes down on the quivering, clenching cheeks. As Jalinda watched, the woman on the right began to pee uncontrollably, her yellow stream spurting down onto the boards of the platform.

“No, please,” Jalinda whispered.

“Hush, sweetling,” Pag said in an urgent, admonishing voice. “You must be silent, in respect to the men who see fit to guide you in respect and obedience, as we are silent in respect to our brothers of the Trestrimar. We will talk about this later, in our hut.”

Jalinda looked into his face, so like the faces of the men on the platform, twenty paces away, and she knew that he wouldn’t hesitate—any more than Hed would, or even Kar—to punish her the way the women on the platform were being punished, if he thought she needed it. Two days ago, she would never have thought that could make her feel anything but fear, but now a warmth spread through her at the thought.

When Pag put his arm around her shoulder and gently turned her back to face the platform, she noticed that many of the men in the crowd, dressed like Pag, Hed, and Kar in leather breeches and the fur sash that seemed to mark them out as part of the tribe, had their arms around their naked women. To her shock she saw that off to the right, one man also had his hand between the legs of his girl, and the girl, with a look of mingled fear and arousal, was riding the hand, clearly on the command of the man, as he whispered into her ear. As Jalinda watched, the girl, about Jalinda’s own age, reached her release, biting her lip and crying out very softly, as if she knew not to break her respectful silence, but couldn’t help it.

Up on the platform it appeared that a pause had occurred in the punishment. Pag said into her ear, apparently noticing that Jalinda had seen the girl whose quim her warrior fondled, “He is teaching her to crave his firm hand, and to love his discipline. Spread your legs a little.” Pag’s left hand drifted down her back, to hold the trainer gently, making Jalinda emit a tiny whimper at the fullness of her bottom. The fingers found their way further down to her private lips, then in, even to touch the special bud from below so that Jalinda’s legs shook so violently that she nearly fell down despite having obeyed Pag and spread her legs to shoulder width…

The men on the platform seemed to be displaying their handiwork upon the women’s rumps now; they dangled the whips over the punished bottom cheeks, as the women’s screams had become sobs and moans. Pag’s hand confused Jalinda terribly. How could she find the sight of those terribly marked backsides so moving, down in her quim, that she helplessly moved her own bottom against Pag’s hand, begging him with her body to treat her just as firmly?

One of the men broke the silence, suddenly, and announced, “Jera, here, and Korda, there, twin wives to twin brothers, Ter—who has whipped Korda—and I, Ot. They gossiped against their tribal sisters and started false rumors, and now they pay the price and learn their lesson.”

All the men, including Pag and his brothers, shouted, “Be it so!”

“Let them be turned!” Ot said. Instantly four other men sprang onto the platform and rearranged the moaning Jera and Korda, removing the padding that had made their backsides protrude and strapping them to their crosses with their naked fronts to the people of the village.

All the while, Pag did not cease gently caressing Jalinda’s bottom and quim, until she made tiny moans that seemed to increase the terrible pleasure the more she tried to stifle them. She noticed that a few men had turned to watch what Pag did to the off-world girl in the training belt, and she felt her face crumple in shame at their knowing smiles. One man said something in his woman’s ear, and she instantly dropped to her knees before him, took his cock out of his breeches, and began to suck it, while he, his hand atop her head to guide her mouth back and forth upon his manhood, continued to watch Jalinda’s forced pleasuring.

Now on the platform they had tilted the crosses somehow so that the women lay at a shallow angle, almost reclining, with their legs apart so that Jalinda could see, to her blushing arousal, the secrets of their quims.

“Harness the breasts!” Ot said.

“Powers,” Jalinda whispered helplessly, as she watched the men bind ropes tightly around Jera’s and Korda’s big breasts, and under them and around, until the wives screamed again, and their breasts looked so painful it made Jalinda want to close her eyes though she knew instinctively she must not.

“Bring the cunt-paddles!” Jalinda gasped to see the thing they had thought to use on her, on Zulin: a leather paddle with a reverse taper, wider at its end, set on a wooden handle so that a man could swing it hard.

Then Ot paddled Korda’s quim, and Ter paddled Jera’s. Jalinda came, shuddering, in Pag’s arms, and then Pag summoned Hed to make her come again as they watched the terrible punishment.