The whip-wielding test had been to see if the prospective woman was right or
left-handed. It transpired, so Meleta found out later, that left-handedness precluded any
chance of being a whip fighter. All combatants were right handed so that the whips did not
tangle or get in each other’s way.
Their first ordeal of the day was the final one before they were locked into the
slave barracks for the night and in truth, it was all most of them were good for after
they took their brand on the top of their right arm. Some cryptic script, alongside a
small figure standing with arms raised and legs spread, to form a tiny ‘X’. It was
Meleta’s second mark and she wondered if it would be her last.
The promise that the training would be hard was no exaggeration, for hard it was.
In the first instance, there was a prolific amount of whip-craft. Meleta had been whipped
herself times aplenty, but she never could have guessed that so much art and skill could
be put to making a whip do most anything a practised whip handler wanted of it.
For whip-craft skills, work was done on lay figures, wooden bodies that the
trainees would use as targets, constantly working to ply the whip correctly, to give
maximum force and damage for minimum effort. On top of whip-craft, enormous emphasis was
put on fitness and stamina. The maxim train hard, fight easy, was constantly vaunted and
the training underlined this. There was ordinary callisthenics, working weights, push-ups,
sit-ups, pulling ones self up on a bar, punching and kicking a heavy bag for hours at a
stretch. Everything and anything to build upper body strength. This sort of exercise came
relatively easy to the galley slaves and so Meleta became quite adept at all of those
actions quickly, but there were other challenges that did not come quite so readily. There
was hopping over a turning pole that had bars protruding through it. As it revolved, the
trainee had to hop at varying heights to avoid being smashed in the shins by the turning
bars. There was another device that trained a slave to duck, the same idea as the first,
but the bars were set to head height and one blow from them was enough to entice any
trainee to keep her wits about her when she was training on the thing.
Thereafter, stamina was another heavily emphasised requirement and here again, the
galley slaves had a good background, if they had anything, it was endurance and stamina.
One of the most odious of the tasks on this detail was known as the long haul. A team of
five girls would raise a long, broad diameter, heavy wooden beam. From each end of the
beam were bolted long, broad leather straps. These trailed behind the girls and were
fastened to a large and very weighty, stone block, which the girls, acting as a team,
would have to trail around the training compound for hours at a stretch. It was frequently
worked under the lash; a light, thin, driving quirt that was considered little more than
an incentive, but all the same, Meleta learned quickly that it held an unstinting bite and
hurt like a fury, it was the type of light whip that rickshaw slaves ferrying the idle
rich about the town laboured under and soon gained a grudging hatred from the training
slaves. The long haul was frequently used as a punishment detail, for though it
undoubtedly built strength and stamina, it was a tortuous way of doing so.
The promise that had been made that the training detail would also be punctuated
with hard discipline, was another of the promises made to the girls that turned out to be
wholly well founded, for the routine of constant, ritual beatings was, even for hardened
galley slaves, unreservedly brutal. The training master was a severe and brutal man, with
an undisguised love of flogging women. He was a large, ugly man, with an oversized,
potbelly showing his love of good food and drink. He would turn up for the training day
wearing a pair of coarse, sackcloth breeches and an open jerkin, with an ever present whip
either tied to his belt, or in his hand and as protection from the scorching Sun, he would
cover up his bald head with a grimy, white turban. He had severe, hardened features that
seemed to speak of a life that had been as savage as the treatment he enjoyed meting out
to the slaves under his charge. Always sweating profusely, he would bellow out commands at
the slaves learning whip-craft and, with his whip flying and often exploding on the
shoulders of some slave or other, he would drive them on as they sweated on the long haul,
or performed some other body building and utterly futile task.
The beatings he administered were hard and severe, though unlike the galley slave
punishment detail, they were almost invariably canings, rather than lashings. It was
considered bad whip fighting husbandry to unnecessarily lash a slave, thus rendering
damage to a body that might be needed in a fight in a matter of weeks, even days. Not that
the canings were in any way an easy option, for there were a variety of rods the evil
master used, depending on the perceived gravity of the offence, from birch rods, either
light or heavy, right up to whippy canes and on to the more dour rods that were
mercilessly drummed into the naked buttocks of the offenders with utter indifference to
the pain they caused.
Daily, women would be singled out and thrashed according to the vicious training
master’s whim. These beatings were not at the day’s end, like galley slave punishment
details, but would be administered at the time of the offence. Meleta’s first experience
of the ordeal came on only her second day of training, learning whip-craft. When she
failed to perfect a simple technique, she was pulled from the group and dragged to the
already by then, infamous whipping frame, a tall, wooden edifice, shaped like a stout
trestle and firmly anchored into the hard earth of the compound. Stocks locked about her
ankles, spreading her legs somewhat and then her wrists were fastened above her head,
firmly strapped to the vertical stanchions of the frame. Meleta’s wet, sweaty stomach lay
against the leather bolster of the frame that forced the frames captive to jut her
buttocks out, inviting attack. Finally, a broad strap went about her midriff, cinching her
firmly, so that her belly was pinned hard to the bolster.
Meleta felt that the frame was possessing her, almost taking her over, so that it
was part of her person more than holding and restraining her. She also felt utterly
powerless and mercilessly available, which of course, she was. Meleta was almost relieved
when she saw the ugly training master select the birch for her, four feet of five attached
wooden wands that she guessed would be far from easy on her hinds, but a tender prospect
when compared to the heavy wooden rod another of her companions had savoured only the day
before. Meleta was already stripped to the waist, for the training was done out in the
open courtyard, under the blazing heat of the Sun, so that all the slaves wore a
headscarf, but trained topless. The evil brute tugged at the crop legged, loose fit, white
pants that all the trainees wore, pulling them below her hips and allowing them to slip to
the stock boards that held her ankles fast. The ugly, sweating brute was in no way
diffident about showing his prurient and salacious nature towards his pretty slave either
and his fair gloated over Meleta’s voluptuous, shapely curves, tapping her buttocks harder
than playfully.
“I’m going to enjoy scribing that pretty arse you sweating slut!” He grinned and
then, pulling off his dirty open jerkin, he levelled the switch to Meleta’s buttocks. She
felt the wands kiss her backside, as if caressing her and then, slicing brutally across
her. Swish, smack. Swish, smack. Hard and fast and with unremitting rapidity, he slashed
her bare arse. Meleta felt the sharp buds of the savagely whippy wands, lick around her
buttocks and smack the side of her bum and thighs. It was hideously painful. For the first
five strokes, Meleta managed to hold her tongue, but thereafter, the master had the better
of her and she writhed as much as the restraining straps would allow and failed to
suppress all her squeals as he worked her. By the time he had exacted thirty strokes onto
her, not only was Meleta dripping with sweat, her buttocks were also smeared with blood
that the whip had scored from her arse in light flecks. Aside from that, her backside was
a maze of red, raised wheals and purple and blue ridges and Meleta felt like somebody had
stoked a bonfire on her arse. The training master, satisfied that he had driven some
urgency into his recruit, tossed the birch into the bin of rods and whips and grabbed his
jerkin.
“You can stay like that for a while and learn a little motivation,” he sneered as
he strode away. Standing naked, with a savagely decorated backside was not a terribly
flattering pose for her to take, but then, Meleta had little choice. She had been
standing, sweating in the frame for over two hours and her legs were paralysed with cramp
and her shoulders and arms were almost as painful as her backside. She had watched the
others training, both the physical training and the whip-craft and she longed to join
them, anything would be preferable to standing under the savage glare of the sun and the
critical glare of anyone who happened past.
Suddenly, her shame increased tenfold; when to her horror the handsome pirate
appeared on the scene, seemingly keen to learn how his new intake of trainees were taking
to their new tasks. Meleta hated the idea of him seeing her, her dark, hairy bush staring
brazenly at him, her savagely welted bum glaring him in the face. The pirate spoke to the
ugly brute and she could see they were pointing and discussing the various aspects of the
training the master was putting the girls to and then, her face red with dread, she saw
him look at her and obviously comment on her. It was a brief word and she watched him walk
away and cast her a long, almost lingering look as he went. Meleta was still burning with
shame from the encounter, when shortly after, the training master returned and set about
releasing her.
He tugged up her loose, white pants with their roll-top waistband and began
releasing her wrists. Meleta gasped with the relief of being able to lower her arms and
felt the blood begin to course back to her hands and arms. The training master grinned at
her.
“I think you have caught the master’s eye,” he noted. “He was taking an unusual
interest in you. It must have been the sight of your sweet round bush staring at him as he
passed that gained his attention,” the evil lecher quipped. It was an ignominious enough
start, but a start nonetheless of the vaguest notion that her interest in the pirate was
possibly reciprocated in him, but alas, she had been made perfectly aware of her lowly
status in the new order of things and so approach from her was as unthinkable as it would
have been for her as a galley slave to approach a fleet operator at the quayside.
The training continued and the beatings were frequent and often arbitrary. Meleta
felt it was as much a way of instilling discipline and fear as it was in actually
correcting behaviour, but despite the gruelling training that went on from dawn till dusk
and the common beatings, some of them appallingly savage, where floggings of sixty strokes
of the five foot cane was commonplace, Meleta found the life preferable to the sweat and
drudgery of the oar, where the surroundings were the dull and the sound of the creaking
boards of the old galley and the slashed, sweating, heaving backs of fellow slaves were
constant and unwelcome companions. Here she could see the sky and although blazingly hot,
she could feel the sun on her skin, not just its merciless effects in the sauna like
interior of the row-deck. To Meleta, this was better, much better.
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