open to an offer.'
'That's beastly.'
'It's practical.'
'My father won't hurt you if I don't want him to.'
'But you can't make that promise about Aslam.'
He was right. A throbbing heat in her loins drove Corey on: 'I don't want to be sold. I want to stay with you.'
'Stretch your legs open, love. You can raise one foot if you like.'
'Did I sound that sulky I have to be punished?'
'You know damn well you did.'
Corey Gibson lifted one leg out to the side to expose her crotch. She managed to take two whistling cuts between her thighs before lapsing into a contortion of agony. When she was again standing straight and stretched and trembling she paid her dues.
'I'm sorry, Master. I expect I'll learn.' Desperately, she added: 'Please marry me. That would settle everything.'
He caressed her wealed skin tenderly. 'You little idiot, d'you suppose I haven't thought of that? We might get away with it. But then where would I be? I'm no nine to five type.'
Corey was breathless with pain and a new prospect. 'We could come back here. After we'd waved the certificate around and everybody saw I was happy it would seem perfectly natural.'
'What then?'
Corey flushed. 'So, O.K., this is crazy. But I want you to put me back on the coffle. I like it. It's healthy and exhilarating. I get along with the other girls… and there's an… excitement.' She twisted shyly against her tied hands. 'You don't have to sell me. You'll always have a chain around somewhere. Keep me on it.'
'That's the most damn fool thing I ever heard from a girl.'
'Well… yes, I know. I'd run away screaming from it with anyone else. It's just you. When I'm locked tight on your coffle I'm yours. I'm safe.'
Seth Burdett kissed his slavegirl softly with a new tenderness. 'You really mean that, don't you?'
'Of course I do!'
Silently, he untied her, led her back to camp, and padlocked her back in place among the other girls. Corey watched him seek his sleeping place. She was happy. No questions had been answered, but she had not been whipped for asking the last of them.
The girls delighted in her weals. Half viewed them dubiously as something that could happen to them. But the rest of them knew. Corey was much teased as having been chosen a favourite. She gathered that in this part of the world to be well whipped was to be well loved. It was whispered to her with many giggles that if a girl was not whipped, at least a little, on her wedding night she had chosen the wrong man. New York and Boston might never countenance such an erotic honesty, but Miss Corey Gibson in Africa was quite willing to believe.
She revelled in the coffle. She realised her happiness arose from the constant erotic arousal of her chains and from her heated fantasies of Seth Burdett. But there was something beyond these sexual sensations, something for which she had not yet found a name. She strode nakedly along the tiny path with a tremendous zest. Her feet had toughened, and she had never felt such tingling good health. She would have loved to run and leap and be a child again. But the chain restrained her in a reasonable decorum.
Her Master watched her amusedly from the corner of an eye. He had reverted to his policy of leaving her alone. She was not hurt. She knew his reasons. He was fighting his own battle to remain uninvolved. After her nightly chores she longed for him with an intensity almost painful so that she bestowed her sex as a gift upon the girls who shared her chain to either side. It took a good deal of wriggling and giggling to find the moist pungency they sought. She returned the favour, finding only pride in her circumvention of the chain on her neck and on her wrist. The reproving metal was simply one more zest in the scented lubricity of her newly found sexuality.
On the fourth night, her Master took her gain into the trees, and after he had whipped her cruelly and impaled her again and again as she hung with toes above the soil, he pinched her nipples and told her casually: 'I've decided not to sell you after all.'
Audrey Cotswold had grabbed her pistol and dashed from the bedroom in a panic of protectiveness. Corey Gibson must not be harmed. Whoever the enemy, he had best be coped with downstairs. But she found only a shambles and the inert figure that had been Reid Hunter. Venturing through the open door, she was grasped in strong smelly arms and swung off her feet. Instinctively, she thrust the small gun back against the bulk of her captor and pulled the trigger. When the arms fell limp she leaped into the night in a blind panic at the approach of dark figures by which her gun was outnumbered. Hiding behind discarded oil drums, she cursed her thoughtlessness in leaving Corey chained to the bed. Miserably, she watched the swift sacking of the village by a considerable force. She saw Corey taken, and was helpless to intervene. When, suddenly, there was only emptiness and the roaring of trucks in the distance she knew she had but one hope: to find a civilised man or a civilised place. Ben Sirah appeared to offer neither. Forgetting the nakedness that had become natural for her, the favourite slavegirl of Assef Aslam sped down the abandoned street.
Civilisation was closer than she supposed. The four policemen's uniforms were neat and clean, their berets businesslike. They carried rifles. It was obvious they had dressed in a hurry and were grateful for the absence of an enemy no more formidable than a naked girl. They eyed her gun with disapproval. Their greeting was not the one she wished to hear.
'You under arrest.'
It was too absurd! Audrey explained their error and what was required of them. They listened, tolerant and unconcerned, to the babbling of a woman.
'Please to hand me gun.'
With three rifles pointing at her breasts there seemed little else to do. Audrey parted with it reluctantly and felt doubly naked. The corporal extracted a yellow card and read from memory the classic warnings about anything she might say… Audrey listened in disbelief. It was pure opera Bouffe. 'But you can't possibly arrest me.' She protested. 'There's bandits you need to chase, and besides, I haven't done anything. Look, have you got a phone?'
They had a convenient faculty of hearing nothing she said. The corporal intoned solemnly while his companions beamed with pride and lust. 'For indecency. For exposing genitals in public place. For carrying gun without permit. For being female bandit…'
'Look here!' She expostulated. 'This is nonsense. If you'll just phone…?
And who said I was a bandit?'
'You speak of bandits. We hear much shooting. You bandit girl.'
'I'm not! They all left in trucks.'
'Ah, so you get left behind! We capture.'
'Please…! Do I look like a bandit?'
'Good girls do not run naked. You very bad girl. Good girls do not carry guns. You go to prison.'
The cold hand of realization clutched hard. These ineffectual members of the local constabulary were behaving correctly by their terms of reference. No doubt she was something of an anomaly in Ben Sirah. She could not hope to escape them. Surely, if she was taken before some intelligent authority it must bend a sympathetic ear! But the next polite request was like the knell of doom.
'Please to hold out hands.'
Audrey did the reverse. 'You don't need to handcuff me. Please don't. I can't possibly get away.'
'Resisting arrest.' The corporal intoned.
Audrey held out her hands.
'Is now behind back after resist.'
Resigned, she turned about and allowed her wrists to be encircled by familiar steel. The cuffs bit. Audrey Cotswold was helpless. Feeling ridiculous, she marched between them to whatever justice the law of Ben Sirah meted out to naked girls.
Being English, Audrey Cotswold recognized certain British features of the police station donated by British rule of years past. She could swear the two cells, actually big cages, had been fabricated in Sheffield and assembled in the big stone room in which they now stood. A massive padlock guarded each barred door. She was propelled within and the padlock proclaimed her safety with an impressive click. 'Is hearing in morning.' The corporal politely
