The Last Lagharis Pt. 07

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.

And Samar did look. Years ago, before joining Laghari's band, he would have been tempted to choose one and buy her, then watch her purr with gratitude as he treated her kindly. But he was not here for that. He was a man of the Laghari company, and his captain needed him. That came first.

He reflected on that. In all his twenty-seven years, no one would have described Samar as a loyal man. And yet, here he was. It occurred to him that he could abandon the mission, spend company money on a slave girl and abscond with her, but the idea didn't appeal. At first, he told himself it was because it would have been a poor financial decision. To be on the run with nothing but a slave, that was bad business. But Samar had done dumber things. Maybe, he mused, he wanted to rescue the captain and bask in the glory of having done it. But that didn't ring true either; he'd given up on honor and glory long ago. Something else had taken hold on him. He wanted to do this because he wanted to set the Laghari company right. Because there, under the captain's leadership, he'd felt safe and happy, sure that he'd had a decent future ahead of him. There, he'd felt at home.

"I have a home," he said aloud. The words tasted odd on his lips, but they were true. And he would not rest until that home was whole again.

He came out of his musings. At the stake in front of him, a flat-chested slave girl with blue tattoos wrapped around her chest stared quizzically at him, seeming to think he was talking to her. He chuckled and turned away to see a guard eyeing him much the same way.

The guard, when asked, was happy to tell him that the auction would be held shortly, in a place called the Stone Stage.

From the name, Samar expected the Stone Stage to be a grand, elaborately carved edifice, covered on top but with hatches in the roof that showmen could open up to let in dramatic shafts of sunlight. When he found it, what he saw instead was a dark sandstone cave with a mouth that opened onto a great sheet of smooth rock. Around that sheet, the ground rose, creating a natural auditorium, and rows of rocks and boulders formed a crude set of benches for the bidders. It was indeed a stone stage, but made by the hands of gods, not humans.

As the time for the auction drew near and Samar took a seat, he tried to calm his nerves. He had never done anything like this. Saving Laghari from this place was a job for a master of intrigue, not a farmboy turned wanderer like him. But he tried to be crafty anyway. To one of his men, he said, "They must be getting the girls into the cave some way. I haven't seen them go through the mouth, so try to find where they're going in. Find it, and find Laghari if you can." To two other men, he said, "Go with him, and if you can rescue her, do it. If you're caught, don't resist. I'll buy you out of jail." To his last man: "Find maps of the surrounding area. If I can't recue her or if she's not here, we need to be able to find her owners as fast as possible."

"Will you be fine on your own?" asked one of the men, a southerner like himself.

Samar fingered the pouch of gold the chief had entrusted him with. "I'll keep a low profile. And if she's here, I'll buy her. These buyers can't possibly want her as much as the company wants its captain back."

From the smirks on his men's faces, Samar could see that he had just played into the rumor that he was in love with Laghari from his time as her slave. He didn't care. The rumor was starting to amuse him. He could imagine company veterans, years in the future, telling the story of Brave Samar, Captain Laghari's smitten love-slave turned rescuer. It made a good story. He decided to let it be.

The men all scattered to their tasks, and Samar settled in as the rock stands filled with eager bidders and the auction began.

A slave girl brought a great woven rug out onto the stage, which struck Samar as a pointless extravagance until he remembered that the slaves were barefooted; the cloth would provide a modicum of protection against the harsh stone.

The girl retreated. A man came out, fabulously dressed, and stood on a rock in the center of the cave mouth that elevated him from the stage. He boomed at the crowd in a voice that carried all the way to the highest rows of bidders. Samar knew his language, but not his thick, warbling accent, and he strained to understand.

The auctioneer took less time on his preamble than a hungry traveler would take eating his first meal in days. In no time, a young woman came trotting up out of the cave. With a wispy, bright red dress covering her from neck to ankle, she was clothed like a high-born steppe girl. Her hair proved otherwise. Dark brown and pulled into a shoulder-length ponytail, her hairstyle was pure peasant farmer. The collar around her neck, too, clashed with the nomad-aristocrat look she was trying to put on.

Samar noticed all these things, but none of them held his attention. Instead, his eyes were fixed on her face. She wore a sly, suppressed smile, and her eyes darted between the auctioneer, the guards and the crowd before her.

'She's going to try to escape,' Samar thought. It was unmistakable; she was giddy with anticipation. If she did that, he did not know how the guards would respond, and not knowing was dangerous. He scrambled to think ahead.

The auctioneer began to introduce her, and a few brightly decorated men filed out of the cave mouth, carrying exotic stringed instruments that Samar knew to be popular among the landed peasants up north. Lutes, he thought they were called. At some signal, the troubadours all launched into the same lively tune.

On stage, the girl spread her arms and cocked her hips. She turned a lazy circle to the lazy tune of the lutes. Then the tempo picked up, and she raised her arms in the air, spun in place and spread her arms down. When her hands came down, part of her dress came away with it. Somehow, the lower portion stayed on, while everything from the waist up flew away behind her. Small breasts, slightly saggy, were open to the air, nipples so dark they were almost black.

She leapt into a spin, grinning like an idiot, and with a flourish, she undid a ribbon on her back, a ribbon Samar hadn't noticed because it had blended so well with her dress. More cloth came away, and Samar could see her stomach, flat and smooth-curved. He could see her thighs, strong from peasant-work. Finally, with one more leaping twist, she kicked away the last of the dress. The music reached its crescendo, and she struck a pose with her arms out and cocked diagonally, one arm pointing at the sky as if beckoning an angel to float down and join the bidding. None came, so she stood there for a few heartbeats longer, every part of her on display. Finally, she knelt. A man materialized behind her, and she tilted her head back so he could slip a pure white blindfold over her eyes. Then she tilted her head forward, fingered the ground between her knees and chewed on her lip, grinning as hard as ever.

Samar was puzzled. She had looked like her escape attempt was imminent, but now it was hard to imagine what she might be planning. Then he saw her lick her lips, and he realized he had guessed wrong. She had been excited, that was a fact. But she had not been excited to escape the leash. She had been excited to wear it.

And here it came. The auctioneer held up a simple leather leash and started taking bids. The peasant girl's grin only deepened as the numbers climbed higher. Customers promised prices that a more reasonable man would pay for an ox, or a house, or an entire farm. Finally, the auctioneer clapped his hands, the bidding was closed and the lucky customer took to the stage. He took up the hand-loop of the leash and brought the collar down on the slave girl.

She heard him coming and arched her back--arched her entire spine--to help him put it on her, then she leapt to her feet. As soon her new owner removed the blindfold, she smiled at him, evidently pleased with how he looked, and sashayed after him, off the stage, to the uproarious, jealous applause of the crowd.

Samar caught himself joining in. He had imagined himself in the girl's position, not the man's, and it gratified him that she would take such pleasure in becoming a slave. Captain Laghari, he guessed, would not share her enthusiasm for servitude. That was all well and good--it was why he was here.

The auctioneer waited some time for the excitement to die down. One of the bards even struck up a soothing tune to fill the time, but the auctioneer motioned him to stop, and he marched back into the cave. The crowd fell eagerly, hungrily silent.

He came back with a leash in his hand, and trailing behind him on that leash was a small woman with coppery skin, a sharp-featured face and straight black hair that hung down to the small of her back. It was not braided, bound or even ornamented, but left to hang like a curtain. The feather-light strands twitched in the breeze.

The woman wore a colorful dress that appeared to be one piece, as the peasant girl had, but the resemblance ended there. The peasant had sizzled with energy, as if it had been her privilege, not the men's, for her to dance and strip before them. This woman, on the other hand, was ponderous. Every movement, whether she twitched an eyebrow or adjusted her posture, was slow and deliberate. She moved as if she weighed three hundred pounds, though Samar would have been shocked if she'd weighed as much as one hundred.

The auctioneer started another introduction, this one slow and serious as if to accommodate the woman's crypt-keeper demeanor. Samar had an easier time picking out the words: she'd been a priestess, he was saying, given by her monastery as tribute to a lord who'd sold her to the kurultai. He then swept his arms at the priestess, prompting her.

She did nothing. The silence dragged. Then, just when one entitled troublemaker in the crowd began to boo, she started.

She did not dance, as the peasant girl had. She did not twirl, flip her hair or even pose. She stood almost as still as the stone amphitheater around her, and her voice boomed out from her.

She sang a song. Or maybe it was more of a chant. Or maybe it was a prayer in whatever foreign religion she'd worshipped in her previous life. Her voice was rich, crisp and deeper than Samar would have thought possible for her tiny frame. The place had no echo, so it was a poor stage for singing, but she seemed to notice the open air and infinite sky sucking away her voice, and she raised her volume and met the challenge. And Samar could hear her clearly. The music--it seemed like more music than pure song, even though the bards were silent--suffused him, pricked the hairs on the back of his neck, transported him to he-didn't-know-where. It was haunting, beautiful in the way old ruins could be beautiful. It made him feel sorrow, and it made him love it.

She finished her song, and her face settled back into its stony frown, as if she resented her audience for every second of rapture she'd given them. Samar cringed. Had he been in her position, a woman up for sale before a crowd of men, he would have moaned and writhed and begged for a kind master to take her leash and whisk her away. It would have been a wound to the pride, to be sure, but Samar had found that pride was of little use, and that it could be traded for precious things.

The crowd started clamoring, and a cheer rose: "Take off your clothes!"

It was dismally predictable, and the priestess' reaction was equally predictable. She scorned them by doing nothing. But the auctioneer would not deny them, and he stepped behind her, seized her little right arm in his big right hand, and shucked her out of half of her dress. The other half came next, and the auctioneer helped her--or, rather, manhandled her--out of the rest, and she stood like a little, ancient tree, bare against the cool air.

And then the bidding began.

Samar did not listen to it. He was already trying to see into the cave behind her, or to see past it, looking for some clue as to when Captain Laghari might be displayed. He did not have to wait long. In a pitifully short time, the bidding ended, and the priestess's leash was handed over to a scholarly-looking man, who took her and silently led her from the stage.

Next came the darkest woman Samar had ever seen, her skin closer to black than brown. Curly hair bundled into myriad braids behind her, and a bright, milky-tan halter top held up her heavy, spherical breasts. Immediately, the crowd raised a murmur of interest. They were not the right audience for the sublime beauty of a priestess' song. They wanted to see hips and bosom, and now they were getting it.