Mindgames Ch. 05

The door flew open and a bearded master Mariah had not seen before strode into the room, taking in everything with his glance. Rose immediately fell to her hands and knees before him, prostrating herself, crying. The strange master, the breeze-voiced one, rushed in, looking about in confusion and dismay. "What happened?" he asked of all three.

Mariah looked him straight in the eye but did not speak. She had acted out of panic and instinct, and she would suffer for it, she knew. Whatever punishment they gave her, however, would be better than this mindgame. She would await their judgment. Insolently she forced herself to continue meeting the master's eye.

From the floor Rose lifted her head only slightly. "Please, Master," she said in a rush, her body quivering. "I didn't warn her it wouldn't be gruel. She was...she was just scared." She pressed her head back down onto the floor, kissing it, quivering.

The bearded master took a step towards her, but Mariah noticed with some surprise that his hand did not go towards his whip. He stopped short. "Rose, you're bleeding," he said. "You're hurt." Rose did not raise her head. The master sank beside her and examined her, and Mariah saw that blood was flowing from her shin. She must have been cut by a flying shard. The two masters exchanged a glance, brief, intense. Wordlessly the second master, the one with the breeze voice, bent and picked up Rose as if she were weightless, paying no heed to the blood that stained his tunic.

"Wait," Mariah called, compelled by her conscience as he carried Rose out the door. He stopped and looked back. "It's not her fault," Mariah said. "It's only mine. She did just as you told her. Punish me, not her." The effort of speaking exhausted her and she coughed weakly.

The master looked at her steadily, and then said in a patient, tired voice, "She is bleeding. I am attending to her cut." As he stood for another moment, Mariah noticed that Rose was relaxed in his arms, as if not afraid. The master turned and left.

The bearded master remained in the room. He said softly, as if to himself, "You'll make things complicated, that's certain." Then, briskly, he picked up the shards from the bowl and put them in a trash can. He looked at the splinters and the liquid on the floor for a moment, then shrugged.

He picked up the glass of water on the bedside table and turned to Mariah. "If you don't want to eat, then you can drink." He held the glass to Mariah's lips and tilted it, forcing the liquid into her mouth. Mariah was too exhausted to do anything but swallow.

When the glass was empty, the bearded master said evenly, "Here are some things you need to know. My name is Animal, and Rose belongs to me. I won't have you mistreating her. You belong to Gabriel," and he indicated with a toss of his head the doorway through which the other master had carried Rose. "My assignment from the Bearer is to take care of Gabriel, and he, for some strange reason, has decided to take care of you." Master Animal kept talking but his voice was replaced by a ringing in Mariah's ears. She felt like she was floating on the bed, and she knew no more for a time.

Mariah remembers

One chilly evening a couple weeks after Vancea has been tortured in front of them, the night guard gave the cohort permission to light a fire. Most of the group gathered around it. Mariah lay on a blanket outside the circle of light, the bright stars against the velvety sky making her dizzy.

She must have dozed off. She awoke to the excited whisperings of several of the cohort gathered close to the fire, and a high-pitched squealing. She rubbed her eyes and approached the group. A boy held some wiggling thing over the fire. It was a rabbit.

"Stop it!" Mariah hissed, horrified.

Samson looked at her coolly. "It's my rabbit," he said. "I snared it." The rabbit was wriggling frantically as Samson lowered its feet towards the flames.

"Let it go!" Mariah ordered.

"Shut up, Mariah." It was Karl, who, like most of the boys in the cohort, was bigger than Mariah. "Stop acting like a human." A couple of girls giggled at the insult.

Mariah ignored him. She grabbed for Samson's arms. Karl stopped her, shoving her back. Mariah fell, landing on her rear. Samson continued to hold the rabbit over the flame. When Mariah found her feet, several members of the cohort had joined Karl in blocking her way to Samson, standing firmly against her. For a moment Mariah felt afraid. Then she heard the rabbit squeal again. She charged, aiming to go between two of the girls. She broke through but the group tackled her, throwing her back down on the ground. Karl was on top of her. "You'll be next in the fire, Mariah," he said in her ear.

Mariah grabbed Karl's hair and yanked with all her might, pulling his head to the side. He howled with pain. Mariah took advantage of his lost balance, rolling him off of her. With a twist she was on her feet, through the crowd, and next to Samson. She grabbed the rabbit from him, saw with a glance how badly burned it was, and broke its neck. She threw the carcass into the fire. Samson started to yell, and Mariah slapped him on the cheek, hard. The entire cohort was silent. Mariah looked at her hand as if it didn't belong to her. She turned and walked away.

Present day

Mariah woke with a start. A hand was on her breast.

"I'm sorry," Master Gabriel said, pulling his hand away. "I didn't mean to wake you." Mariah remembered his face when they met on the path, outside the gate, how broad and sunny it had looked. Now it was drawn and shadowed. On the path where she had trusted him, Mariah reminded herself. Defiantly she refused to speak, but the master didn't seem to notice. "I'm going to touch you," he said, "But I'm not going to hurt you." Slowly he moved his hand back to just below her left breast, and lay it flat there. Mariah's heart pounded. Her body was so tortured that she was sure even gentle sex would kill her.

Master Gabriel drew his hand away. "Below your chest is your ribcage," he said conversationally. "And inside your rib cage are your lungs, which are what you breathe with. I think you have a cracked rib. I want to see if you can breathe okay. So I'm going to put my hand back on your rib cage, and I want you to take a deep breath." He held Mariah's eye. "All right?"

His voice was kind and urged her to trust him. The same voice as on the path. The voice that had promised freedom and had betrayed her.

"I hate you, master," Mariah said.

Master Gabriel flinched as if he had been whipped. He looked away from Mariah, and Mariah felt that she had won a victory. But he looked back at her almost immediately. "It takes a lot of energy to hate," he said. "And it takes a lot of energy to heal. You get better. Then you can hate me all you want."

Mariah knew he was playing a mindgame with her. He would heal her so the torture could begin again.

Gathering all her energy, Mariah spat on the master. Or she tried to. The saliva got no farther than her chin, where it dribbled down. Master Gabriel, expressionless, took out a pocket handkerchief to wipe her off. She jerked her chin away from his hand, but the sudden pain made her dizzy. She closed her eyes for a moment. "I hate you," she said, more weakly than before.

Master Gabriel said, "If you don't wipe the spittle off your chin, pretty soon it will start to itch."

Mariah said nothing, but as soon as the words were out of Master Gabriel's mouth her chin started itching, almost burning. She glared at him. Master Gabriel let her suffer before he handed her the cloth. Scowling, she wiped her chin. He took the handkerchief back from. "I still want to feel your ribcage. Okay?"

Slowly Mariah nodded.

Gabriel put his hand below her left breast, flat on the skin. "Breathe slowly, as deep as you can," he said. Mariah stared straight ahead and refused to obey. Gabriel said nothing, sitting still as a statue. Mariah resolved to outwait him. She closed her eyes, pretending to sleep.

Minutes passed. Mariah heard a soft sound from Gabriel. Opening her eyes, she saw that, without moving, he had fallen asleep, and was snoring softly. As she watched, he slowly slid from the edge of the bed where he was sitting down to the floor, his hand trailing down her side as he did so. At last he came to a rest leaning against the bed.

Mariah watched him warily. Was this part of his strange mindgame? Was she supposed to react in a certain way? As the rebellious runaway, should she do the opposite of what he wanted? Her arm ached, and her chest, and she had trouble thinking straight.

She started at the sound of a quiet chuckle from the open door. It was Master Animal, leaning on the door frame, watching the whole scene, his eyes glinting with amusement. When he looked to Master Gabriel sleeping on the floor his expression softened. Silently he crossed the room and sat in the chair on the other side of Gabriel. He leaned forward so he could speak softly to Mariah. "For a week he's hardly slept, watching over you."

"Why, Master?" Mariah asked, mystified that any mindgame could matter so much to a human.

Master Animal shrugged, his sardonic expression returning. "I guess he just likes your looks."

Mariah said weakly, "I'm just a torture cunt. I'm nothing to look at." Master Animal tilted his head and smiled slightly, and Mariah understood that he had been joking. She remembered how Vancea had looked in the field; caked with blood and excrement and covered with bruises. Someone had cleaned Mariah up, she knew, but she probably looked even more frightful than she felt. Suddenly embarrassed, without thinking she lifted her hands to put her hair behind her ears. Pain shot from her right elbow to her neck and to her fingertips. She groaned.

"Is it your chest?" Master Animal asked, something akin to sympathy in his voice.

Mariah shook her head, and this effort made her arm throb even more. "My arm, Master," she said, and she closed her lips against the moan that was coming.

Master Animal picked up the medicine bottle and spoon from the bureau. Carefully he unstopped the lid, saying as he did so, "This will just put you to sleep. When you wake up, if you can manage to behave for long enough, Gabriel will try to fix up your arm."

Master Animal held the spoon to her lips but Mariah defiantly refused to open her mouth. He frowned. "Open," he said.

Mariah sucked her lips between her teeth and shook her head. Master Animal lowered the spoon and reached for his whip without thinking. "You can beat me all you want," Mariah said. "I won't play your mindgame."

Master Animal's eyebrows came together in surprise and consternation. "You think this is a mindgame?" he asked incredulously.

"I'm not stupid, Master," Mariah said.

Master Animal appraised her. "Maybe you're not," he said. He looked at Gabriel, sleeping on the floor. "Maybe you're in a situation you can't understand." He sighed, slowly, and said, "Isn't there a slave saying about mindgames? About the only way to get through them?"

Mariah looked at him in surprise. How would he know this? She said reluctantly, from rote, "The only way to get through a mindgame is to play it through to the end."

Master Animal nodded. "In this mindgame," he said, "Gabriel helps you to get better."

"So they can torture me all over?" Mariah said. Her eyes welled with tears, and she writhed at the memory of the torment. The movement brought new pain. "I won't play."

Master Animal watched her silently for a minute. Then he said, "You wouldn't believe me if I told you that's not how it ends, would you?" Mariah shook her head. "Then believe this. If you're alive, you can try again."

"Try what again, Master?" Mariah asked.

"To go outside the walls," Master Animal said. "To escape." Mariah scowled. They knew her now. There would never be another chance.

Master Animal said, as if he could read her thoughts, "It couldn't have been easy before, and it won't be easy to do it again. This ... 'mindgame' gives you the hope of another chance. Without it, no hope."

Mariah realized that what he said made sense. They could not make her suffer more than they already had, for it would kill her. All they could do was put her through it again.

On the other hand, hope. She could not believe she would ever be given another opportunity to run away, but maybe she would be given a chance to talk to other slaves, to spread the word, as Vancea had talked to her. She would risk the torture for such a chance. Master Animal had seemed fond of Rose. She would start by talking to her. A tiny dose of revenge would be to sour the sweet slave, like a drop of lemon in milk. She looked at Master Animal and nodded her head. Then she opened her mouth for the medicine. As he lifted the spoon to her mouth, she panicked for a moment, jerking her head back. Master Animal waited, and she forced herself to relax. As Master Animal put the syrupy goo in her mouth she felt relief and exhaustion at the same time. "No one will hurt you while you sleep," she heard Master Animal promise.

Mariah remembers

Riders began coming every few days to take away one or another member of Mariah's cohort. Some of the others were scared, but Mariah viewed the development philosophically. They were of an age, after all, and there was nothing they could do about it. Despite what Vancea had told her, she was almost anxious to leave. Since the night of the fire the people she had spent years with refused to speak to her, and she found she felt no loss in that. She could not get what they had done to the rabbit out of her mind.

Nevertheless, when the rider on the black and brown horse came one midmorning and Master Timon pointed to her, her stomach clenched tightly and she fought nausea.

Master Timon had few words for her at parting. As Mariah had seen him do with the others, he placed black eyeshades over her eyes and tied them snugly around her head. Then he boosted her onto the horse behind the rider, and said, "Remember to always obey your betters."

The rider placed Mariah's hands on his hips and spurred his horse. Wishing desperately for one last glance at the field she had cultivated for so long, she choked back a sob. The rider said, "None of that. I'm not in the mood for punishing, but I could change my mind."

"My apologies, Master." Mariah had never been on a horse before. Her legs were painfully pulled apart over the horse's broad back and her knees started to ache almost immediately. Her crotch rubbed uncomfortably on the saddle, which dipped so that she was sitting almost under the rider. She wasn't quite sure what to do with her hands, so she left them where the rider had put them, trying not to squeeze. They rode for some time, the horse mostly walking but at times breaking into a slow jog which jounced Mariah like a ragdoll. She surmised that they had long passed her home cornfields, and the neighboring squash fields, and the tomatoes beyond that. Mariah had never been past the tomatoes.

They rode on and on. The rider hummed tunelessly. The blindfold let no speck of light through. Mariah could hear the birds and feel when the horse left the sunlight into the shade of trees and when he presently went back into sunshine. The fear still burned in her stomach like a hot coal, but with the monotony of the ride her mind wandered, her thoughts turning inevitably to Vancea. All that was familiar to her was gone now. She had only Vancea's mysterious words to guide her.

The ache in Mariah's knees grew worse. Without meaning to she shifted in the saddle. The rider flicked his whip backwards, catching her across the upper buttocks. "Forgive me, Master," Mariah said, but there was no reply. Mariah wondered what matter of man this rider was. He seemed to take no interest in transporting her, or in her at all. Why did he do it, then? Had he ever been dragged from his home? Could he be kind if the mood took him?

Of course, Mariah reflected, really she knew herself no better. Oh, she knew how many hills of corn she could hoe in a day, how many pounds she could carry, how many times she could be lashed before she cried out. But she knew no more about her own character than she did about this rider's. Why had she fought so hard to stop her cohort from torturing the rabbit? Gone against Samson, who until that night she had always felt a protective warmth for? And incurred the anger of her whole cohort? Was she brave? Or a fool? She had never thought of herself as either. Would this mysterious place where the rider was taking her teach her the answers?

How much time passed Mariah could not say. The horse stopped. The rider instructed her to take off her mask, and Mariah obeyed, the bright sunlight burning her eyes. "Get down," he ordered her, and clumsily Mariah pulled her left leg around so that she could slide off, crying out with the sharp pain in her knees and falling down when she landed. The rider dismounted and gave her a hard kick, the narrow toe of his leather boot going between her ass cheeks. Mariah fell forward onto her face. With his boot the master rolled her over on her side and then nudged her in the abdomen. Mariah struggled against crying out. He watched her for a moment, then said, "Get up and stop wasting my time." Mariah scrambled to her feet. The master quickly tied her hands behind her back and gave her a shove forward.

In front of them was the mansion. It was larger than she had ever imagined, looming seemingly endlessly in both directions. The rider whipped her hard, on the stomach. "No looking," he growled. "Walk."

The rider pushed her towards a doorway which was silently opened by a male slave. The rider gave her another shove. They were in a long, narrow empty room that seemed to go on forever, with occasional doors on either side. She spoke without intending to. "What is this room?"

The rider snorted. "It's a corridor." He flicked his whip at the back of Mariah's knees. Mariah walked forward, leaving the world she had known behind further and further behind her. As they continued forward they passed both humans and slaves but the rider spoke to no one.

At length the rider indicated that Mariah should enter a door to their right. It opened onto a new corridor, narrower and more dimly lit that the first. Once more, there were doors on either side, and the rider led Mariah down to the fifth door on the right. He opened it and pushed her inside, so roughly that she almost fell.

Looking up, she saw twenty or so slaves, their ankles and wrists manacled to the wall. The rider whipped her thigh, the lash curling around her leg and ending near her crotch. "No looking," he repeated. Mariah stood dumbfounded. Roughly, the rider dragged her to the far wall. He unbound her hands and, one by one, locked them into handcuffs at shoulder height, her arms bent. Then he kicked her legs apart and manacled them as well. Finally, he spit on his finger and rubbed the weird bump on her crotch for a moment. She shrank back, her buttocks hitting the cold wall. He laughed, turned, and left, the door clanging shut behind him.

Present day

When Mariah awoke her first thought was that Animal's promise that no one would hurt her while she slept had been another lie. There was pain in every corner of her body. Anger at the mindgame and disgust at herself for believing it cleared her head. Concentrating, she broke down the pain bit by bit.

A sharp pain in her chest, where Master Gabriel had manhandled her earlier. General aching in her pussy and asshole. Her pulse beating a steady throb in her face. Itchiness on her legs and most of the rest of her; that would be whipcuts healing. Most acute was her arm. None of these were new; they were all wounds from the Torment.