Author's Note:
I recommend reading this while the only noise is the ticking of a clock.
I also recommend that you don't read it if you can't stand sex, nudity, tattooing, lesbian sex, anal sex, old men, sick people, or anything that may be construed as torture or abuse of women.
If you're physically, emotionally, mentally or chronologically too immature to read this legally, safely or happily, may I suggest that you don't read it. You are hereby warned that you do so AT YOUR OWN RISK. Any complaints about the content or its affect upon you will fall on deaf ears and blind eyes.
Any other comments, criticisms included (constructive, by preference), are welcome.
The game of backgammon is a homage to Fritz Leiber, and the ending of this story really is meant to be like that.
* * * * *
"Harem School"
Or: "The Chancellor's Evening"
The room was large but appeared larger, the corners and furthest walls hidden and exaggerated by shadows.
Most of the light in the room appeared to come from a fire which, though burning low and red, still managed to wash its warm light over half the room. The fire's light, sensual and caressing to naked flesh and a body's curves, played over a young woman kneeling, naked and totally hairless on head, underarms and sex, back ramrod straight, breasts lifted by her arms stretched high above her head, joined by sheep-skin cuffs and held by a slender chain depending taut from the ceiling lost in the shadows above. Her eyes were shut, her face tranquil, no movement of breathing or impatience disturbed the perfect poise of her large but firm breasts, no sign betrayed discomfort in her knees. Between her thighs, attached by a brass fitting to the oak floor, a thick leather dildo spread her shaven lips and penetrated deep within her. It did not move and she made no sound or sign that she recognised this indifferent use of her sex, but the dimness of the firelight concealed flashes of colour spreading and fading from her breasts and from the halos of her nipples, the warmth from the fire making the erection of those small nubs clearly due to well-concealed arousal.
She was kneeling on the edge of a luxuriant Persian rug placed just off-centre of the room. Upon the rug a small desktop lamp with a green shade had been placed, throwing a hard, bright cone of light onto the chest of a young woman lying spread-eagled on her back, each ankle and wrist cuffed and each cuff linked to a chain that held her, taut, by rings set into the polished wooden floor at each corner of the rug.
Her bald scalp was tattooed as though with a cap, Polynesian designs flowing down from the crown of her head around her forehead and temples and around her ears. Her eyes too were shut, occasional movement disturbing the serenity of her face, a thick gag in her mouth preventing all but the occasional whimper from escaping, her body held rigid while a man, stocky but short, carefully tattooed a flame-like design upon her right breast from the edge of her pink aureole down almost to where the swelling flesh gave way to rib cage, the mirror image of the design already worked reaching from the nipple upwards. The whine of his needle as he infused her pliant flesh with black ink was a constant, little varying background noise somehow lost in the immensity of the room as the muted crackle of the fire was not.
Her back to this scene, the elegance of her poise not betraying her knowledge of its details, a young woman sat sheathed in a dress of purest silk, shimmering with skin-hugging caresses from the halter tied about her long graceful neck down her nubile flanks to her slender hourglass waist, then falling in fluttering waves to the barely revealed delicate ankles and naked feet. Her bare back was curved elegantly and moved barely more than a hair's breadth as her naked arms flowed like water above the table in front of her.
Opposite her, an elderly but still regal and statesman-like man dressed in a navy-blue shirt of satin, a worsted waistcoat of deepest brown and a smoking jacket of crimson velour paid no heed to the breasts uplifted, supported and boldly revealed by the dress that, skirting her nipples coquettishly, covered but did not conceal a single detail of her satiny skin. A spirit lamp placed against the wall shone dimly across the expanse of table in front of them, illuminating the ivory backgammon board between them, seeming to mute with its dimness the clatter of the ivory dice and the clink of the soapstone stones, stilling too the quick and rare sound of his dry baritone and her soft soprano as they played out the game at hand.
"Double."
"Redouble."
"Accepted."
"Four it is then."
The woman kneeling did not know how long she had been there; those things are best left unknown. The woman lying spread-eagled did not know either; she had, indeed, no interest even in the progress of the tattooing. The woman sitting had some idea, but only because the pad sitting by the man's bony but graceful long-fingered hand kept a marching tally of their progress steadily towards the 64 points that would end the battle in which they were engaged.
Suddenly there came a stilling of the incessant buzzing of the needle, a stilling that highlighted the sound before it. The tattooist rocked back on his heels, placing the needle point-upwards on the belly of his living canvas, standing slowly and with care as his ankles popped and his knees cracked, loudly, once. Neither of the two players gave the slightest sign of reaction to this, although both were aware, nor did the kneeling woman, who knew that this was a punctuation, but not a marker, of time.
The tattooist stepped around the woman on the floor, displaying the care one would for any work of art in the making, careful not to come close enough to her spread thighs to touch, before kneeling on the other side of her, moving his lamp to where he had been kneeling and then, taking up his needle, bend once more to his task, tracing the first line from memory onto the left breast in front of him, the right now adorned with four spokes in the style of a compass rose, a delicate tracery connecting the base of each spike around the aureole.
"You win gammon." The man's dry voice elicited a mere bowing of the head from his opponent, whose shimmering black hair, falling halfway down her back, did not even shift at the motion.
"That gives you sixty points." The man's statement, simply said, was heard by the kneeling woman, who, in the stillness of her mind, desperately shoved it from thought. It was heard by the woman lying, who recognised it for what it meant but did not feel affected by this knowledge. It was recognised by the tattooist who, knowing his master's habits, set himself to finish the spike he had just started. To the woman in the chair, whose rushing end-game had given her the victory, the man's bald recognition of her achievements was merely a mark upon the war between them, and she set herself for another battle as his long fingers deftly reset the stones.
At that instant a log in the fireplace broke, with a crack that sounded as a pistol shot in the stillness, a shower of sparks flickering redly on the poised torso of the woman kneeling, whose composure prevented even her pulse from racing. The tattooist registered it, but it did not penetrate his concentration or the desperate stillness of the woman beneath his fingers. To the players, it may well have been a trumpet upon the battlefield.
The dice rattled and the stones once more began their advance, until the tattooist's needle ceased for the last time that night and he exhaled slowly the breath that he always held as the last line was inked. Almost on the same moment the man's rearmost stone, played in a forced risk, was swooped upon and returned to the bar, his defeat almost certainly ensured in the face of crushing victory. Bowing his head in recognition, he extended his hand upwards towards his elegant opponent.
"I resign gammon."
"I accept."
The tattooist put away his needle, the needle itself to be replaced on the next night, returning his tools carefully to a cupboard against the wall, closing and locking it with a key that he slipped into a pocket on his leather waistcoat, drawing from a different pocket a larger and coarser key with which he unlocked the four cuffs of his canvas, helping her to her unsteady feet and escorting her out the door to the room, outside of which a tall, elderly man in the uniform of a butler was waiting with imperturbable patience and hands crossed in front of himself. After the two had passed him he stepped inside, drawing a like coarse key from his jacket pocket and undoing the cuffs of the kneeling woman, helping her courteously but firmly to her feet as she slipped easily off the wetly glistening dildo and escorting her as she walked, at first unsteadily, after her tattooed sister.
At the table the stones had been left as they lay, so that the next night could be started on the memory of the night before. Bowing her head slightly, the woman in the silken dress rose to her feet smoothly, no change to the line of her back or crease in the dress, turning and stepping, foot in front of foot and head still, from the table to the door, closing it softly behind her, leaving the man on his own in a room that seemed even larger than before, now emptier of people.
For a moment he sat, the darkness settling comfortably around his shoulders, then he bestirred himself, pushing back his chair with precise but flowing movements, taking up from where it hung by its top from the table an ivory-headed, brass-tipped wooden cane and, using it more as a punctuation to his walk than as an aid, walked slowly into the shadows of the room, leaving the lamp and the fire both still burning.
He came, in the middle of the farthest wall of the room, to a door leather-covered and set so thoroughly with studs that the handle, though a steel lever of not inconsiderable size, was almost lost to view. He placed one hand carefully on the handle and with a slight grunt of effort pushed it down. As the handle dropped, the door was pushed open. It opened slowly, emitting the rubber-rushing-air sounds of a seal broken.
As he stepped through the door it sealed itself behind him, well-oiled mechanisms snicking into place.
The corridor on the either side was hospital-broad and hospital-clean, white on walls, ceiling and floor, doors opening off, evenly spaced along, alternating from side to side.
The doors were all closed and sealed, as was the last. But these were plain steel, with rubber around the edges, and one plain button where the handle might be. Reaching out one steady hand, the finger crooked, he pressed the button on the first door.
It swung smoothly open with the protesting hiss of escaping air and the near-silent swish of hidden hydraulics but sound washed through it, the puffing of pneumatic machinery, the steady beeping of an electronic timer and the muffled sounds of a woman on the brink of orgasm.
In the middle of the room lay a woman bound with leather to a narrow bench, her arms stretched cruelly tight above her head, her thighs spread wide and lashed to her calves, her feet under her buttocks and her hips thrust upwards. Each breast was grotesquely extended by a large glass cylinder, the vacuum inside of which stretched the tissue of the breast cruelly upwards, her nipples huge at their tips. A small, almost dainty cylinder was attached to her clitoris which, subjected to the same unrelenting force, stretched inches long into the tube.
Attached to the end of the bench, a large hammer drill was itself attached to the end of a thick dildo, running at full speed as the dildo sat deep within her anus, spinning and juddering unceasingly. A woman tall and curvaceous, with arms lean and strong, her abundant breasts stretching her leather corset and her legs bare from leather G-string to high, buckle-covered boots, held a machine the size of a large toolbox. Pneumatic cables attached to the box drove a massive dildo in and out of the prostrate woman's slickly wet cunt.
The slave was arched, her muscles quivering, her face contorted, desperately trying to reach or avoid, it was hard to tell which, the orgasm swelling inside her.
The man paused inside the door, his strangely remote eyes scanning the slave's stretched and sweat-soaked form, his approval evident in his lack of reaction. His eyes passed to the flushed face of the mistress, her tongue compulsively wetting her lips, her breasts trembling as her own lust was held in barely concealed check.
"How is she progressing?" The man asked, his voice dry but crisp.
The mistress grinned, feral and bright. "She was born to be humiliated, master. I broke her with one orgasm and she's been begging for more ever since. She's going to be a hungry slut when I've finished with her!"
"Good", the man responded, his voice ambivalent. "Don't hurt her and make sure it's all caught on camera. I have buyers already for her. When you've finished, take another one."
