'I will say ‘thank you’' A dull monotone.
It was beautiful. It was pure artistry. It was cruel.
Reba was a mistress of her art. Dorinda wondered where the girl had picked up her skill and her grace. To watch her deliver each stroke was a study in flowing motion, a delight. Hulda suffered and delivered her thanks. But her writings and sounds of distress intensified with each blow so that the end was inevitable. She fell writhing and crying to the floor. 'I can’t…. I can’t. It’s no good.' She crawled to Hakim’s feet. 'Please kill me,' she asked flatly. 'I cannot do these things you demand.'
He pushed her sideways with his foot as one does a dog. Reba grasped the hair of the bent head and dragged its owner back to the center of the floor. She was offered brandy which she drank avidly.
'Stay here.'
When Reba returned she led by the hand a man. He was clearly the village idiot. A huge beaming vacant smile. Dorinda guessed he had played this part before. His roving gaze settled upon the naked girl who would find her deepest shame in servicing him. He stood gawping.
'You know what to do, bitch.'
Hulda knew. In wild despair she buried her face in her shackled hands. Her head shook negatively. 'No… No… oh no!'
The whip played upon her already straited nakedness. Reba cared not where she struck, but applied her aim to whatever part of the naked body and legs its agonised squirmings presented. The half-wit watched the proceedings with satisfaction. To him it may have been a familiar prelude. His chin became moistened with saliva. He knew himself an object to which victory was assured.
When Hulda had salved her honour with the whip, she thrust out her fettered hands in surrender. Reba immediately stepped away and joined the audience.
The shamed girl looked at no one, but immured herself and her vision in the task before her eyes. Disdainfully she pulled at the nondescript garment and dragged into site the rigid thing that was to be the instrument of her abasement. The idiot grunted and grinned at all present as though inviting them to share his good fortune. Hulda Cohen took the ugly thing within her mouth.
She did what she had to do with great competence, even coping adequately with the grand finale. Expelling the now clean penis from her lips, she looked at Reba. But the creature she had pleasured was engrossed with her. His idiot hands fondled her breasts, played with her hair and traced the contours of her face as though to familiarise himself with the source of such ecstasy as she had given him. Reba smiled knowingly at a scene wellplayed.
'Again,' she instructed.
Perhaps it was no more than Hulda had expected. She took a quick glance at the whip, then resignedly resumed her humiliation. Her subject gasped with joy and clapped his hands.
When he was, at last led away Hulda Cohen remained kneeling, her eyes focused on the rug before her. She was a girl to whom too much had happened. She was numb with despair. If hope had germinated in her mind it was soon shattered.
'You will stand with your legs spread very wide. You will clasp your hands at the back of your neck. You will stand thus, while I whip your cunt,' Reba directed pleasantly.
The kneeling girl got stiffly to her feet. Her eyes mirrored her disbelief at what she had heard. In mute appeal she sought the faces of Hakim and the girl whose function to her still was an enigma. In Dorinda’s she saw infinite sympathy. In Hakim’s only implacability and satisfaction with Reba’s competence. She shook herself as though dazed. Then obeyed her instructions.
Again the eroticism was overwhelming. The pose itself provocative enough. But the handcuffs and the marks of the whip and the cane endowed the exposed nudity with a quality deserving of immortality on canvas. After a lingering look at those who held her in their power, the victim lifted her gaze above their heads and waited.
Dorinda need not have wondered aghast at how female flesh could be expected to stand for further slashing. Reba had the matter will in hand. The curving strokes with the full force of an arm were set aside. The arc of a downward cut was discarded for more subtle employment of the thong. Standing at the requisite distance from the target Hakim’s servant brought the leather flickering up from the floor to bite with its tip and snap in small licks at the open sex and loins.
Hulda had courage. She winced, she cringed, she twisted her body. But she held her pose. Shaming and hurtful as the new infliction was, it was probably less awful than her expectation. It was also a test of Reba’s skill and accuracy. They stood the test. Before long she gave another command. 'Turn your back to us. Same pose.'
The victim obeyed. Dorinda shrank in her own knowledge of what would come. Now the last sought out the topmost crevice of the ‘V’ and spent itself within. Hulda yelped and cried, but once again endured.
'Do what you like. Stand or hold yourself in whatever way you please. I shall whip you as I choose.'
In it’s way the cruellest of all. Now there was decision. Now each move would invoke the fear of revealing an unsuspected vulnerability. Each movement would enhance shame. A cat and mouse which ended before the general’s chair: a weeping crouched girl across whose bent back the lashes still fell in rhythmic cadence.
'Please… Kill me. I do not want to live.' Without theatre. A cry in truth from the heart.
'You will live a long time, my dear,' said general Hakim.
That night it was Hulda Cohen who slept in Dorinda’s cell.
Corporal Kahdin was apologetic. No handcuffs. They were too much of the West. Today was of the East. The saboteur maiden was to be executed without comfort. She must be bound with rope, as painfully as possible. Dorinda shrugged. 'I’m all yours,' she said playfully. 'Do what you please with me. I’m paid for.'
Once more the cage. The corporal explained that custom decreed her being dragged through the streets at the end of a rope. But this he would not countenance. It was doubtful that would arrive alive. The bridge had been a valued asset. She had destroyed it. Angry merchants whose produce had not arrived on schedule might vent their national spleen… Dorinda herself was thankful for the cage.
But before she had been placed therein the corporal had completed a task not to his liking. It was not to Dorinda’s liking either. She suspected that it would be less and less. Her hands had been tied tightly with cord, palm to palm. Her elbows had been joined by two severe strands that cut into her flesh like burning coals. A strap was beyond bearing. These two bitter circlets were pure hell. Her eyes had pleaded. She had twisted her shoulders helplessly. She had asked him, begged him – quietly and without hysteria – to lighten the bonds that she must bear. He had kissed her nipples gently and told her that she must suffer. The people must see her suffer. It was expected. Sometimes a girl was whipped, or a hand cut off before she was killed. The bands around her elbows were merciful. She must be content.
She was not content. But she did what she must do. It was frightening to realise that this was real. She might be an unrecognised proxy. But to all intents and purposes she was going to her death. It was impossible not to feel, here and there for brief moments, that she was indeed Hulda Cohen going to pay with her life for a single bomb…
Once more the shaming dog collar and chain. How the crowd howled. She hated them, all of them and their turgid passions. There was not a man among them who would not give half of what he owned for the right to bed her. To take her now at this moment when she was near death and plant seed in a womb in which it could never flower. She knew instinctively that the short span of her life before her final choking death made her double desirable. To fuck a girl, vivid with life, a moment before she died! To what greater height could a man aspire?
The dreary route ran its course. She could not quell the thrill of fear as she saw the scaffold against the wall of Castle Rahbeal. There a girl was to die. But there was comfort in the enclosure below the trap. Comfort, too, in her memory that there was a lesser door in the wall within the limits of that enclosure. General Hakim had planned well.
The things men did to possess a woman’s body. This whole charade was for no other purpose than to enable a man to enjoy the body of a girl that was forfeit to the state. She was desirable to him because she fought. Because she was subject to the ultimate punishment. There was a for in Hulda that he sought to quench. Thus this whole play of which she was part. Thus the money that would enrich the house of Rabin. A dancing girl with equally functional vagina and breasts could have purchased for a fraction of the sum. Thus do men enslave themselves.
Dorinda fought her bonds in misery and wished a man might stand where she was now.
The crowd adored her. She was completely nude. That, too, had been apologetically insisted upon. Her nakedness bothered the corporal more than it did her. They howled and cheered her breasts. Lewd jokes she could
