Author's note: This story is about male domination of women, and it does not contain any graphic female domination scenes. If that does not appeal to you, you may want to skim this story or skip to the next, final entry in this series.
For a time, Samar was excited to see how life in the Laghari company would change.
The company lost Captain Misha Laghari and her second, Chaarumathi, on the same day, at the battle of the Tumbleweed village. From then on, a new chief took her place. To the abject horror of the mountain women, he was male, but he placated them by promising a new era. Free of Laghari's cold, joyless leadership, he said, the warriors would be allowed to cut loose and indulge themselves. There would be no more restriction on drinking or noise, and warriors would no longer be punished so harshly for shirking their duties. Who hadn't, after all, welched out of mucking duty or guard duty, at least once? It would be a new era of compassionate leadership.
A few of the men wanted to take the loosening of morals even further. They confided in Samar that they hoped soon they would be allowed to enslave the women. They had even made agreements and planned out which of them would collar which woman. The men justified themselves by saying that, in their culture, a woman wandering without a man was guilty of waywardness, and the penalty was enslavement by the first man who brought her to heel. And almost all the women in the company had wandered alone at some point or another. But their plan was ridiculous. It fell to Samar to remind them that those customs were of their native culture, the one they had left behind when they had joined the Laghari company.
The only men advocating enslavement were barbarians from the far west, an infinitesimal fraction of the company. But they were not alone in their rapacious attitude. Just days after Samar's surreal conversation with those men, he heard a strange noise in a tent, poked his head in to investigate and found that two mountain women had wrestled down Shiro the bandit and were briskly raping him. One forced herself on his cock, while the other straddled his face, grinning and laughing as she demanded he please her with his tongue.
Samar broke it up, of course, but the women faced no punishment. It was, after all, a new era of compassionate leadership, and when warriors made "small mistakes," it was considered beneath the chief's notice.
This verdict was a nasty shock not just for Shiro, but for Samar as well. After his famous stint as Captain Laghari's personal slave, all the mountain women had pegged him as a submissive, and to make things worse, they were partly right. Since then, more mountain women had flirted with him, talked to him or asked about him behind his back when they thought he could not hear them--or when they knew he could. Someone had even started the rumor that Samar would sell himself for a high enough price. The mountain women's advances were innocent enough when they merely flirted, but that began to change. Now that Shiro's ravishers had gone unpunished, it set an ugly precedent, and some of the women's behavior toward Samar turned ugly to match. Some of them stalked him, waiting for their chance to take advantage of him. He had to watch his back, lest he find his own face forced between the thighs of a mountain huntress.
And then there was the looting. Under Captain Laghari, all loot taken in battle was to be thrown into a pile and then doled out evenly among all who participated. The warriors complained that it took all the joy out of the hunt for plunder, so the new chief struck that rule.
Then came their next battle. It was little more than a scuffle against an unprepared local militia, and it should have gone smoothly, but it did not. The exact minute the company won--in fact, a little before--discipline broke down, with every warrior scrambling for a share of loot. Sisters threatened each other with death. Brawls broke out that left both warriors angry. During the chaos, the whole company was vulnerable to counterattack, protected only by the archers, who complained in turn that they got no compensation for their part in the battle.
This, at last, opened the chief's eyes. He accepted that laxity would get them killed. It was time to tighten up discipline again.
Samar agreed, and he had another reason for agreeing. He hated to see the company act like brutes. It was not that he was a man of principle--God knew that--but under Laghari, the warriors had taken their duty to serve and protect each other seriously. He had liked being protected, and he didn't mind returning the favor by protecting his sisters- and brothers-in-arms. But now that had broken down, they acted like thieves, like wolves.
The change needed to be undone. Order had to be restored. It was agreed that they needed Captain Misha Laghari back.
So the chief sent Samar and a few other trusted men to rescue her. She'd been captured by the black-cloaks, who had dealings with the Belt Road pirates, so it was an easy bet that she would be taken down that road and auctioned off as a slave.
That was how, almost half a year after their disaster at the Tumbleweed village, Samar found himself at the Kurultai.
The Kurultai had once been a solemn gathering of the horse archers of the steppe, where the nomad chiefs would vote to elect a new leader. At least, that was what the older men told Samar. You wouldn't know it now. Now it was a raucous meeting of all the region's scum and scavengers, a lawless festival of trade and revelry. Samar had assumed that the hard part would be finding where it was held. Now that he and his band had found it, he saw that the hard part would not be finding it but finding their way in it. Armed-to-the-teeth gangs swarmed between trading posts, and pickpockets prowled everywhere. Chatter in many languages crowded his ears, and the smell of too many people and too many animals became oppressive whenever the wind stilled.
Through patient, methodical work, Samar got a lay of the land. When he asked where the slaves were to be auctioned, a helpful traveler laughed and said, "Why, at the cave mouth beyond the stakes. Do you not see the stakes? No man can miss them!"
Samar looked where the man pointed. He saw a woman, chained by the neck to a post in the ground, her hands tied behind her back, and those bindings were the only things she wore. She was colored a deep brown, with plump limbs, plump breasts and a slightly plump belly, all on display and glistening with sweat, or maybe it was oil the slavers had spread on her to make her more appealing.
Behind her, two dozen more women stood chained to posts, watching the gathering crowd with curiosity. There were women of every shape and color--one of the paler women had red hair, which Samar had never seen before--and a few of them wore jewelry pierced into their ears or their nipples, but none had any covering. Their only defense against the crowd was a halfhearted picket fence someone had hastily put up around them and a few tough-looking guards who paced around the fence, inviting men to look but not touch.
