Nomads

 

Sel stared down at Bucharest, still beautiful even in these troubled times. The hill on which they had camped overlooked the city; she could see its lights stretching for miles.

"They still have electricity," she said softly.

Poivre, lying naked between her friend's legs, grunted. The slavers had pushed the coffles hard to reach this place by nightfall. Tomorrow, they would enter the city itself, and the slavers would herd them into the pens of one of the auction houses for a week of "preparation."

"Do you think they will feed us?"

Poivre nestled more tightly between her friend's legs, pressing her hip into Sel's mound. They had been on reduced rations for days.

"They will do whatever they need to do. They want us as attractive as possible for the bidders when we step up onto the block."

She could feel Sel's body stiffen. Sel hated the idea of "the block," of standing naked before a room full of men and having them shout out their bids as if she was a farm animal. Poivre lifted her bare arms, manacled at the wrists, over her friend's head and began to massage her neck. She could feel the tension in her trapezius; she had done the same for Khalil each evening in Algiers during happier times.

"Ah, that feels good."

"Forget about what happens tomorrow, Dani. Neither you nor I have any control over our lives anymore. Let's just be happy we are together now."

She only called her "Dani" during their times of intimacy. Her real name was Danielle Dupont. The monster who had taken them had renamed them Sel et Poivre (salt and pepper) because he wanted the oddity of diverse twins in his harem. He used to discuss their differences with his friends as they hung naked on their toes.

"Do you think we will be sold together in Bucharest...?"

The question was like a dagger in Poivre's heart. She had been trying to avoid it since they had left Arabia. Of course, it was possible the auction house would sell them as a pair, but it was equally possible that they would auction them separately. It was all about maximizing their profits. She just didn't know, and she was trying not to guess.

Kidnappers had abducted them because they met the perverse specification of an Arabian prince. Keeping them together was perpetuating this sick perversion, but it might be the only reason the auctioneers would sell them as a pair.

"Sure, we will," she lied. "We are a unique pair. Who would not want us in their harem...?"

She could feel Sel's muscles relax. The girl lived in constant fear that someone would separate them, and she would be alone in her slavery. Poivre felt the same, but she was tougher, more capable of facing such an outcome."

She slipped the girl's nipple into her mouth and began to suck and gnaw on it the way she liked. Neither of them was a lesbian, but they found comfort in each other's arms. Orgasms were the only real pleasure they had in the coffle.

"I wonder ... oh ahh, that's nice. I wonder if our new master will whip up often."

"Uh huh," Poivre said, her mouth of tit.

She pushed her hip harder into the girl's mound, rhythmically rubbing it up and down as she softly bit on her nipple. Sel enjoyed a mix of soft pain and hard pleasure. The combination always brought her to climax quickly. After that, Poivre knew she would move purring into a "69" position and use her full lips and darting tongue on her.

Who knows? This might be their last night together.

Introduction

 

Most people moved to the cities after the Second Great Depression of 2129.

This was simply a matter of survival. The cities offered food, water, shelter, and security to anyone willing to work their farms and factories. It was also a matter of civilization. The cities offered people the last dying vestiges of modern life. So many people moved so quickly, in fact, that there was a short lived, mini recovery in slum housing. The resulting ghettos became more than neighborhoods, they were cities within cities.

Nations still existed of course, but national governments had almost no popular support and no real power to govern. It was too hard to govern an entire nation in this time of depression. Cities were the more practical alternative. More importantly, people felt connected to their local city governments: they had elections, legislatures, laws, police, and enough military capability to defend their limited borders.

It was different for the land between the cities, the outback. In most of these rural areas, marauders and bandits eventually gained the upper hand and ruthlessly dominated the population. To protect themselves, people began to come together in powerful kinship and affinity groups--tribes, led by an autocratic strongman. These tribes, especially those in harsh climates, found it difficult to cultivate enough land to survive and most adopted a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The people became nomads: moving with the changing seasons and living off the growing animal herds and the forests' resources.

Within a generation, the two distinctly different cultures--urban city dwellers and nomadic tribesmen--began to clash. It was inevitable, just as it had been inevitable that the Romans would clash with the nomadic tribes at the end of their empire. The cities viewed the nomads as savages; the nomads considered city dwellers mindless drones. The nomads also thought of the land between the cities as their "hunting ground" and objected violently to any intrusion, even to transiting caravans. This made trade, especially trade between the cities, a high-risk proposition, increasing the cities' feelings of isolation.

It was a strange time, full of scarcity and fear.

To make matters worse, the modern lifestyle craved by the city people began to slip away: it was increasingly more difficult to sustain the specialized knowledge, the sophisticated tools, and the widespread infrastructure of the past; reliable supplies of energy, fuel, replacement parts, and machinery were scarce; keeping roads, bridges, tunnels, ports, terminals, and other structures in good repair was impossible; and global trade, which had sustained society for centuries, effectively collapsed.

This collapse of modern life and the threat of nomad raids fostered even more isolationism and drove the cities to build their defenses. The nomads, encouraged by the success of their early raids, continued to hone their fighting skills and to become more aggressive. It was obvious to everyone that a war of some kind was coming.

Ironically, the trigger for this conflict came from the cities, the "bastions of civilization," with the adoption of the "VolServ laws." These laws gave people the right to enter Voluntary Service contracts for a fixed period and guaranteed compensation. Many people called them soft-slave-laws, but VolServ proponents argued that the fixed term and the guaranteed compensation put them squarely in the category of "work for hire." This was the rationalization most people, including the cities' poor, accepted.

The nomads saw the VolServ laws very differently. To them, the laws created a "new morality" and legitimatized a feudal culture, including serfs. To them, the cities had effectively surrendered the moral high ground. The addition of the "thrall provisions," which made it legal to include sexual services, bondage, and discipline in the VolServ contracts, made the cities seem even more hypocritical. Thralls were the last nail in the coffin of evolved human rights.

And so, began the new order.

The cities had their VolServ contracts and their thralls, the nomads had righteous justification for their raids and for holding war captives as slaves. These were disturbing and potentially explosive developments, but the scale of them was still small. Many people, in fact, believed that the VolServ laws would disappear over time as people reasserted the need for basic human rights, and that this new humanism would pacify the nomads.

They were dead wrong.

Instead of stepping back, the people of the cities, especially the rich, enthusiastically embraced the VolServ laws and the thrall provisions. The poor said the new laws "gave new freedoms to people, allowing people to make their own choices about their labors and their bodies." Even the sight of near-naked girls, bound and being led around on leashes by their contract owners, did not sway this popular opinion. The VolServ Abolitionist Movement, in fact, lost members as people quickly adapted to the new morality.

It was during this time that visionary entrepreneurs like Bob Cushing capitalized on the movement by building commercial empires based on the VolServ and thrall platform. Cushing led the way with the AmerromA's, town-sized "thrall parks" with a bondage theme. Under the AmerromA International banner, he built an entire global industry (one of the few still in existence) to support the hedonistic pleasures of thrall-mania.

Within a few years, VolServ workers, thralls, serfs, and slaves had become commonplace in both the cities and the outback. The tribes even viewed their slaves as their de facto common currency. Owning thralls and slaves was a clear sign of a man's power and wealth whether he lived in a city or in the outback. This led to the rise of the slave trade, still small, but growing like a cancer. This insipient business even extended back into the cities as entrepreneurs sold their slaves to city dwellers with the forged paperwork necessary to prove they were legal thralls.

Once the cities' rich discovered they could buy slaves at a fraction of the cost of a VolServ contract or a thrall, and without any of the legal restrictions, they flocked to the black-market. It was a repeat of the widespread abuse of liquor in the 1920s and drugs in the 1970s..

The stage was now set for war.

In 2155, the Hun, Attila, aka Flagellum Dei (the Scourge of God), who claimed to be a direct descendant of the 5th Century Attila, attacked the city of L'viv in eastern Ukraine. L'viv was a small city of one million people; it fell in three months. Two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand residents of L'viv were middle- and upper-class residents, and 750,000 were poor living in L'viv's slums. Attila ordered the rich, except for the saleable young girls, killed and the poor enslaved.

The "rape of L'viv," as people called it, shocked the entire world. The other cities of Eastern Europe panicked, and at once conscripted thousands into their militias. They also began to actively combat the nomads in their local area, which sparked even more conflict. By the time the first wave of panic had subsided, most of the cities of Eastern Europe were at war with their nomadic neighbors. This drove more tribes to Attila, and soon he had a dozen tribes aligned with his Huns. His army could now challenge any city in Europe.

This war that followed was not like past wars. First, the scale was smaller. The cities were not nations or alliances of nations with hundreds of millions of people poised to fight. The largest army in the post-Depression field, Attila's, had less than a million men. Second, neither side had access to the resources, nor the ability to build or maintain modern weapons. This was a primitive and savage fight where old rifles, sidearms, arrows, swords, and knives were the primary weapons. Third, this was not a war fought for global domination. Most of the fighting was ad hoc, largely dependent on where the Huns needed to migrate to find food. Their goal was slaves not territory.

Many people worried that this was the beginning of a new Dark Age, one that could last another thousand years. Their fears were well founded.

 

 

Chapter 1 - The Block

 

Sel hated the heavy slave-hood.

She found most aspects of her slavery vile, but the heavy hood was the worst. It was especially wretched when someone was snapping a limber rod on her bare ass and legs. Not knowing when the next stroke was coming or where it would land made the white-hot pain of the stroke even more horrible.

Why was that, she wondered in a moment of hysterical calm? What difference would it make? Even if she could see the stroke coming, even if she could hear the rod cutting through the air, she couldn't do anything about it. She was helpless with her arms manacled behind in a slave-square and her body held upright by the hood chain. She was a fucking marionette dancing on the end of a string; a beautiful, long-necked Barbie doll twisting her naked body to a tune played by a plastic stick. Her role was to entertain the crowd, to stoke their lust, and ... and to endure, to endure the terrible agony that swept through her like a searing flame.

A Barbie doll... She could only imagine how she looked with her feet pointed, her long legs flailing, her abdominal muscles wildly clenching, her pointed tits jerking from side to side. She was the show! Her body and its frenzied twisting were the main attractions.

Men were cruel. She never known that men could be so cruel, so inhuman. It was only in the last few months that she had discovered the truth: men could enact any cruelty they could imagine especially when they had a purpose.

Her tormentor had a purpose. His goal was to get the best price he could for her and Poivre. If he needed to use his rod to do that, then that's what he would do. If he needed to get them to writhe in a sexually exciting way for the audience, then that's what he would do.

Were all men sadists, she wondered. Did a woman's pain, her helplessness, her humiliation arouse all of them? She understood that the auctioneer was not selling statues, that the men wanted to see how their prospective slave could move, but was it necessary to hurt them so badly to prove their responsiveness?

Without warning, the rod struck again, and she screamed twisting desperately to extinguish the flame burning the back of her thighs. No one could hear her screams inside the hood, no one could hear her panting, hear her frantic pleas for him to stop. She would happily grovel at his feet, joyously suck his cock, or lick his asshole if he would stop ... anything. Anything...? She had come a long way in a brief time. The arrogant debutant, the Equine Club's dressage championship, was gone. That person had existed in another life, she thought, another life on another planet.

"[We] ... are selling them as a pair, as Sel et Poivre, Salt and Pepper," she heard the auctioneer say.

The rod struck her ass again and the hideous pain made her lose her footing, her legs flailing wildly on the block. The hood chain kept her upright, but its thick leather collar stretched her neck, threatening to pull her head off. Desperately, she struggled to find her feet. She could hear Poivre screaming. Her friend was standing on her own block just a few feet away, displayed in the same way.

It was strange that their salt-and-pepper pairing aroused men so intensely, she thought with surprising calm. Together, the two of them tickled their fertile imaginations: it was a turn-on apparently to have two beautiful but vastly different girls under their control. Then there was the discipline... They seemed to enjoy punishing them together. Whatever their master did to one, he did to the other. It was as if he needed to compare their responses. Even now, the crowd was fascinated by the symmetry of their punishment and the subtle differences in the way they responded.

Men...

Ironically, this perversion, this need to keep them together, had made her and Poivre close, closer than friends, closer than sisters. They were two halves of the same coin, one slave with two faces, two bodies.

As if to underscore her thoughts, the auctioneer began to explain their pairing.

"...They were abducted on the orders of a prince of Arabia, a man who thought it would be interesting to have two beauties in his harem, two beauties who were as different in their background as..."

His last few words did not seep through the hood's thick leather, but she didn't need to hear the story again. The Prince Farid and his bastard agent, Rocco DeCastro, had targeted her and Poivre (Pepper) because of their differences: she was from a large wealthy family, Poivre was an orphan from the slums of Algiers ... she had been a thin almost gaunt French fashion model, Poivre had a generous mud-flap-worthy body ... she had pale skin, Poivre was latte-brown ... her original captors had shaved her head bald, Poivre had a magnificent mane of curly black hair ... she had been an inexperienced virgin when they took her, Poivre had been a man's mistress, an accomplished cocksucker and lover... The list went on and on.

The auctioneer put the rod to her calves and her legs did another pain dance, invoking a lusty roar of approval from the crowd.

"FACES...!" she heard several men shouting. "Faces...!"

Others picked up the call turning it into a chant.

"Patience, gentlemen, patience please...," the auctioneer urged.

Suddenly, someone was lifting her off the block by the waist. He handled her 105 pounds as if they were nothing. She could feel the smooth grain the stage's wooden planks under her feet. How many girls, she wondered, had stood here naked and barefooted before a lustful crowd of men, trembling in lingering pain, sweat dripping onto the porous wood? In another second, a naked body jostled hers. It was Poivre, she was standing beside her. She could feel her hood chain tightening, forcing her onto her toes, forcing her body into a bow-like arch.

She could hear the crowd drawing its collective breath, and she knew they were stretching Poivre's pulchritudinous body the same way, arching it into a sexy, sensual model of the female form. Strangely, she felt glad that they recognized her beauty; she was magnificent.

At once, the aromatic memory of horseshit filled her mind and she could see a horse auction. She had attended hundreds of horse sales in her former life, sales in which the sellers had put their horses through the same indignities as they were now experiencing. No one had purposely hurt those animals for the spectacle of it, though; no one had twisted their bodies to appeal to the audience's sado-sexual instincts. Those horsemen had treated their animals far better than these men were treating her and Poivre.

Why, did men have more affection for horses than women?

Someone turned a crank and her head chain pulled her higher, forcing her to lift her ass and arch her back even more severely. She could hear the crowd whooping and clapping. She moaned to herself, unheard inside the hood.

When Prince Farid's man, Nasib, had told her the prince was selling her and Poivre, she thought he meant to one of his Arab friends. They were indifferent about that, about moving from one Arab harem to another. But he had no intention of keeping them in Arabia; the prince's plan was to sell them back to Rocco DeCastro, the architect of their abduction, so he could sell them on the open market in Bucharest.

Alfonso Ruiz, an agent of the AmerromA company, had disrupted Farid's plan and put an end to DeCastro's kidnapping. They thought he was their savior, that he would set them free. Instead, Ruiz had sent them on to Bucharest.

She and Poivre spent long nights in the coffle trying to understand why until they finally hit on the thought that Ruiz, that AmerromA could not allow them to go home. The AmerromA corporation couldn't afford the publicity that Rocco DeCastro, one of their senior managers, had been involved with illegal abductions, that he was part of the Eastern European slave trade. The repercussions for AmerromA in Paris and other Western cities would have been too devastating for the company to bear. To prevent this, they had sacrificed them, denied them their freedom. To protect itself, AmerromA had continued their slavery, condemned them to a life of harsh bondage.

"They could have killed us," Poivre had said, trying to put the revelation in the best light. "Dead slaves don't tell tales."

Her rationalization didn't console Sel. It was only when they saw DeCastro struggling in his cock-and-ball coffle chain that they felt some satisfaction. Ruiz had sold him to Armenian slavers who were taking him to the Armenian copper mines. No one ever returned from the Armenian mines, people said. She prayed it was true; prayed that he lived a long time suffering every day for his villainy. It was only right.

"...Notice their legs," the auctioneer was saying, "notice their length, their perfect shape. Imagine these wonderful limbs wrapped around your waist; imagine teaching these twins, in turn, the fine art making love, introducing them to the rewards of slave-love."

Slave-love... It was just another slave myth perpetuated by the profiteers.

She could feel the plastic rod touching her skin, moving down her thighs. It felt cool despite the heat it had raised on her body. The man shifted the loathsome device to her inner thighs, raising it slowly from her knees to her crotch then pulling it between the wet lips of her labia. She could feel her lips flowing over it smooth wet surface.