“I was not whipped today.”
“Alas no, I observe no marks,” Yasin acknowledged drily.
“I suppose what . . . what did happen was planned?” Yasin laughed and made a deprecating gesture with a stalk of celery.
“You do so long for a proper order, dear child. You would wish to be whipped by appointment?”
It was hard for Stacie to hold back the tears. He was such a charming man, she enjoyed his company. Under different circumstances she would be enjoying herself immensely. Yet the chains on her feet told her she was a slave, there had been no word of remission of her promised torture. “Why are you so kind to me?” she asked inconsistently.
“Am I kind?”
“Yes, this is heavenly.”
Yasin smiled as at a favourite daughter. “Have you forgotten the day, and the night preceding? It is a privilege of wealth that others perform my less agreeable tasks.”
“No, I have not forgotten. But Rannah does not hate me.”
“How could she! You are adorable.”
He meant it! She knew he did. She sought his eyes. “But you will torture me!” She made a rapid amendment: “You will have me tortured?”
Yasin smiled benignly at her bafflement. “Need we discuss it, dear girl?”
Stacie wanted to cry and laugh and scream. “My mind is full of it. I can’t forget what you have sentenced me to: that’s what it is, a sentence as though I had to go to prison to be punished.” She managed a weak smile.
He nodded in understanding. “Yousef makes a vivid impression.”
“Must it be . . . be, done to me by a man?”
“You would prefer Rannah?” His eyes glinted amusement.
“Yes, please! If in truth you do not hate me personally, then let her be the one to torture me.”
“She may not desire the task.”
“She would do it, I know she would! May I ask her?” Yasin smiled at her vehemence.
“You misjudge her. She is not a sadist.”
“She does not need to be. She is tremendously competent. It would be a woman thing between the two of us. It needs no name . . .”
He was so easy to talk to, so aware of her as a person as well as a female body. Stacie knew she should be frightened at her own temerity: a nearly naked girl with chained feet laying down the law! If she was truly slave she would be punished. She looked her penitence. “I’m sorry . . .”
“You are a delightful child. You have not offended me. Quite the contrary.”
The captive girl was suffused with a great warmth toward this man whose prisoner she was. Greatly daring she burned a bridge. “Take me into your . . . your . . . Harem—I suppose you have one? Please, I would like that! Please don’t have me tortured.”
He surveyed her gravely. She could not tell what her outburst may have earned. He sighed. “The eternal feminine!” His voice was sad.
Stacie sensed his thought. “You mean, give us an inch and we seek a mile?”
“Women do it constantly, even when they know they’ll be whipped.” He was amused by her perception.
“What else can we do!” Stacie protested. “We have to get everything we want through men, by earning it or wheedling it or cheating . . . It’s even more true of a slave girl.” She looked at him coaxingly, “Is that what I am?”
His wry smile was perplexed. “It is not what I planned for you, but you have a talent.” He mused quietly while they ate.
“I had never met you. You are not what I expected. I am curious, are you not surprising yourself?”
“How can I do that?”
“By your acceptance. Most girls would be in hysterics or sulky revolt.”
Involuntarily she laughed. “You have me nearly naked with my feet chained together. What revolution can I start!”
“You see! That is what I mean: that sentence. It was as though you were discussing this meal we share.”
He was right! Stacie examined herself, except for a few kicks at Salim she had not fought. “Am I really that submissive?” she queried doubtfully. “I’ve never seen myself like that. I’d have said the reverse. Remember, Rannah’s kept me handcuffed or tied almost all the time . . . or these chains on my ankles. I can’t run, I’d be silly to try.”
Yasin shrugged. “Perhaps you are right, but I will not concede the point. You have shown me something you do not know you possess, you harbour a treasure and are unaware. But I suppose the important thing is that you sit across from me now. The chains upon your feet are incidental.”
Stacie’s voice was mischievous. “I suppose I do have to admit to some annoyance with myself. The closer I get to my torture the less I believe in it. There was a little while today when I was tied and naked and very weary . . . But now . . . ! It is you who make your own threat unbelievable. Will I be tortured tomorrow?”
“I do not wish to torture you at all.”
“Why do it then!”
“I have told you. My father would have said it was the will of Allah.”
“It is your will, and no one else’s. Tonight will I be tied in that rotten little hole in the stone?”
Yasin held up an admonitory hand. “My dear child, you tear a man’s heart. You are one of those women whose beauty is so great and their spirit so alive that a mere male can cope with you in only two ways: he must love you or he must whip you. In the middle ground you will always defeat him.”
Mischief still held her. “Your problem is simple, whip me and love me too.”
Mohammad Yasin sighed deeply. Beside him was a gong.
He struck it a single blow. As the wave of resonant sound washed over her Stacie knew she had gone too far. Yousef carried her across his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, beating her fists against his back was like hammering a castle door. The chain linking her ankles defeated her frantic kicks. Stacie fought only for pride, she had no expectation of escaping anything. The torturer chuckled as he walked and patted her well bent bottom with his free hand. She continued to struggle furiously all the way to the torture chamber. It kept her from thinking.
Yousef unlocked her fetters. “Must take off all pretty things,” he ordered cheerfully. “You put in little bag here.” He stood between her and the door.
Stacie stripped herself naked.
Yousef strapped her wrists and positioned her as she had been that day, but now she teetered on her toes.
He whipped her coldly and methodically.
Long afterwards, when Stacie looked back at her first whipping she remembered most vividly of all her reiterated exclamations between her screams: “Oh no! No! No! Oh nooooh!” Her moaning negative was a denial of her pain, a denial that such pain could exist, a refusal to countenance it as possible. Once she accepted its reality she was lost, she would feel the full agony of each blow as it cut at her. But her refutations dwindled away as her screams became continuous. They were replaced by pleadings and abasements she did not bother to recall. The eternal cry of a naked girl beneath the lash. “No more . . . ! Oh stop! stop it . . . stop! Please . . . ! Please . . . !” And then the offer of her body if only he would halt the steady rhythm of his blows. The blows that cut and cut and scored and striated the white skin that had never known pain. She screamed in ways she had never believed possible.
In the haze of her agony, Stacie knew her behaviour deplorable. She danced and kicked and moaned and lifted herself from the floor in futile efforts to ease the steady inflictions that would not cease. No matter what she pleaded or promised the lash curled round her flesh with the steady precision of a metronome. Yousef had been told to whip the slave girl well, and this he did. It was a joy of work. He enjoyed whipping girls, but he had whipped so many the thrill was wearing thin. He heard her pleas and her promises only in an abstract way. His job was to whip her nakedness from shoulders down to knees. This one was special, he was not allowed the use of her sex. He did not care, she was but one of many. He expended his lusts on all the rest, save one. She and this white bitch would fall his way soon enough. He had but to wait. He plied his whip to extract the loudest crack upon the shrinking flesh and the most piercing scream from the tortured lips. He had dreamed of this hour all day long. The white body and the sun tanned limbs danced their saraband of anguish to the measure of his thong.