“If you expect me to believe all that garbage you’re a bigger fool than I thought,” Flam said with a snort as soon as Gordi fell silent. “I don’t know how you got me here, but whatever you did it was a waste of time. Keeping slaves isn’t what’s holding us back, listening to fools like you is what’s doing it. And if the drug worked on you and this other fool, that doesn’t mean it will work on me. I’m not as soft and womanish as the rest of you, so stop wasting my time with bullshit.” “If what you were told is bullshit, why are you still sitting on that blanket?” Jake heard Tain say as she came back into the alcove. He’d only been distantly aware of the fact that she’d left as soon as the three men were awake, but now she was back.
“I don’t answer to slaves, they answer to me,” Flam spat as he glared at Tain. “Go to your knees to me, slave, and beg me to punish you for insolence.”
“Sorry, sir, but I’m not allowed to obey the orders of anyone but my owner,” Tain stated, the look in her eyes even more feral now.
“And it so happens that my owner isn’t allowed to give me any more orders. The same, though, can’t be said for you. You have to obey anyone I tell you to obey, and now I’m telling you to obey these two women.”
Tain gestured toward the archway, and it was Risdin and Char who walked in. The second woman looked furious with what seemed to be terror hidden beneath, but Risdin didn’t look the same. And Risdin was also carrying a switch.
“I don’t like the looks of you, slave,” Risdin said to Flam in a hard voice. “Get to your knees and bow to me, and then beg me to punish you for being insolent.”
Flam went to his knees instantly, bowed his head to the floor, then said, “Please punish me for being insolent.” Gordi wasn’t as shocked as the other two men, but Jake could see that even Gordi was shaken by what was happening.
“It will be my pleasure to punish you, slave,” Risdin answered with a smile that was one of the most frightening Jake had ever seen.
“First, though, you can take that body cloth off. Slaves don’t cover themselves without the permission of their owners.”
Jake expected Flam to straighten up to take off his body cloth, but instead the man removed his covering just as he was. It came to Jake then that Risdin hadn’t said the man could straighten up, so he hadn’t even tried.
“You were too slow stripping yourself, so you’ve earned even more punishment,” Risdin said once Flam was naked. “Crawl over here and then position yourself properly in front of me.”
When Flam raised his head and began to crawl, Jake was able to see the man’s face. Someone else in Flam’s place would have been shocked, but this man was nothing but totally outraged and furious. He was so filled with hatred for what was being done to him that he seemed to have room for no other awareness.
“I don’t like the expression on your face, slave,” Risdin said while Char shivered where she stood behind the other woman. “If you reach the point of not being able to take any more punishment, you have my permission to beg for forgiveness.”
“That’s not going to happen, bitch,” Flam snarled from where he knelt facing away from Risdin. “I’m not a whiny female who can be made to—Ah!”
The first stroke of the switch ended Flam’s rage-filled attempt at defiance, a thin red line appearing on the man’s heavy buttocks. Flam carried more weight than a man of his size should, which made his backside a really easy target. Risdin gave him another stroke of the switch, obviously putting a lot of her strength into the effort, and Flam’s light-brown-haired head came up with his hiss of pain.
It wasn’t long before Jake was flinching with every stroke Flam was given, but Flam himself was doing more than just flinching. The man’s buttocks were being turned really red, and Flam began to writhe with every stroke.
After his first gasp he hadn’t made a sound, but Jake thought that Flam wasn’t keeping his jaw locked just to stay quiet. The man could see the other three men watching him being punished, and it looked like that awareness was almost as painful as the switching.
Flam took about two dozen of the hard strokes delivered by the switch before Jake noticed a slight difference in the man’s attitude. It wasn’t pain alone that was twisting the man around; humiliation rode Flam like something with spurs, and after the two dozen strokes Flam couldn’t take any more.
“All right, you’ve made your point!” he said suddenly, his tone less than even. “I can’t resist the drug any more than anyone else, so there’s no need to go on with this.”
“Is that your idea of begging for forgiveness?” Risdin asked, having paused in the switching. “If it is, I suggest you think again.”
Flam gritted his teeth again, but was only able to take two more strokes of the switch before he had to admit defeat.
“All right, all right, I’m begging!” he blurted, the hatred he felt thick in his voice. “I’m begging to be forgiven, so you can stop this now!”
“You know, I once begged my owner to stop punishing me,” Char said suddenly, stepping closer to where Risdin stood. “I was crying at the time so I sounded a lot more sincere than you just did, but all my owner said was that he wasn’t ready to forgive me. With that in mind, I don’t think we ought to be ready to forgive you.”
Disturbance flickered across Flam’s face along with a frown, but Risdin grinned and offered the switch to Char. Char looked at the switch for a moment with no expression, then her lips curved into a smile that turned her radiantly lovely and she took the offered branch.
Five minutes later Flam was shouting out his pain and doing a much better job of begging, but Char just kept striking his backside with that switch and all the strength she could muster. Jake understood how the woman felt, but he still had to force himself to keep watching. His own experience with punishment was still too fresh for him to watch without reacting, and when the first trace of blood appeared among the welts he just had to look away.
“All right, Char, that’s enough, I think,” Tain’s voice came a long minute later. “He’s crying just the way you were and he’s also begging, so let’s show him that you have more compassion than your owner did. Give me the switch.”
Jake looked up to see that Flam’s backside now bled in a lot more places and the man was more hysterical than simply crying, but Char was still switching him. The look on her face was frenzied and she didn’t seem to have heard Tain, so Tain didn’t waste her breath repeating what she’d said. She touched Char’s neck in the same way he and Tain had touched those guards the night before, and when Char collapsed into unconsciousness Tain caught her before she hit the floor. Risdin, looking seriously disturbed, took Char from Tain and carried the beautiful woman out of the alcove, the other native women stepping back from where they’d been standing just outside. Once all the women were gone, Tain turned back to Gordi and his supporters.
“You’ve now had the most striking example possible of how much damage slavery can do,” Tain said to the men over Flam’s sobs, undoubtedly seeing, as Jake did, how pale and shaken the three men were.
“That woman is so beautiful that she didn’t have a prayer of not being enslaved, and now she may never recover. She should have been someone’s loving wife and the doting mother of children, but she may never come far enough back to sanity to do any of that. Is being able to use her body any time her owner allows it worth losing her as a human being?”
“No, not for me,” Gordi said at once, his voice rough and his gaze haunted. “What about you, Artro, and you, Dimmis? How do you feel about it?”
“I feel like throwing up,” the larger of the two men said, looking directly at Gordi. “And not just because I know it could be me kneeling there instead of Flam. That woman… She looked afraid when she first came in here, but then the hatred took her over… I don’t ever want anyone to hate me as much as she seems to, and it kills me that I don’t know how to heal her. And it kills me even more that I would have used her happily if she were a slave and was offered to me.”