Chapter thirty four
COUNTRY MATTERS
When he got up and went to the bathroom I rose from my mattress and laid myself across his bed as far as my nipple thether would allow, to be ready for him to give me my morning beating. But when he returned, instead of taking down the strap which hung over the bedhead as usual, he sat down beside me and began to stroke and fondle my arse.
"You've a nice bum, boy" he said, adding after a pause, "This morning I've a mind to take you up to the shippon after breakfast for your beating"
I didn't know what a shippon was, then. As a Southerner and a city boy, how was I to know that a cowshed was called a shippon in these parts? But I knew better than to ask.
After serving him his breakfast and clearing away, I was doing the washing up in the kitchen when he entered and told me to leave that and to put on the clothes he threw at me. There was a pair of white, cotton, elastic waisted gym shorts and a khaki shirt. I dried my hands and struggled into the shorts which were very tight - and very short. If the legs had not gripped round my thighs so tightly I would have feared that my dick would have hung out the bottom! The shirt was a bit on the small side too and I wondered if it might not be one of the Corporal's left-offs for it had epaulettes and breast pockets, military style.
As we went out through the scullery, he told me to put on my trainers and led me out across the rear courtyard. The Corp was just emerging from his quarters as we passed and he stopped and gave me an odd, intense sort of look. Strangely, I felt very embarrassed to be seen in my obscenely tight shorts and was furious to find myself blushing under his gaze. This made no sense as the Corp knew well enough that I was his master's bum boy, but this early in the morning I just felt ashamed to be seen so blatantly attired.
We went through a gate into a field and walked uphill in silence alongside drystone walls, me a pace or two behind him. We came to a clump of nettles and he stopped to pick a spray of the fresh young top shoots, indifferent to their stings on his tough hands.
"Unbutton your shirt." I did.
"Open it." I did that too, proud to flaunt the "FUCK SLAVE" message tattooed across my chest to him. It was a dull, humid day and the uphill walk had worked me into a sweat so I assumed he was going to indulge in one of his unpleasant sweat-feeding sessions, but no, he brushed the young nettles to and fro, lightly over my nipple. It stung of course but was not too painful. Then he picked a second spray and treated my other nipple likewise before tossing the leaves aside. Next he broke off several long stalks of nettle and thrashed them across my chest, forehand, backhand, several times till they hung broken and limp. That didn't really hurt that much either. There's not enough weight in nettle stalks to give real impact, and the leaves as they swish through the air slow each lash and cushion its fall. So what was the point then? I'll tell you. Being thrashed with nettles across your bare chest SOUNDS cruel, and standing there passively, ALLOWING it to be done to you, is a very powerful demonstration of submission, just as requiring someone stand and submit to being thrashed with nettles is a wonderfully potent demonstration of power.
At the top of the field stood a derelict stone building, doorless but with most of its roof still on. The old shippon indeed. He led the way into its gloomy interior. There was a bale of straw on the earth floor and laid across it was a slender switch of young ash, trimmed of its leaves. So much for this being a sudden whim! As always, everything was carefully planned and prepared.
I guess I should say a bit about the nature of ash. Left to itself it will grow into a big tree but when grown in a hedgerow where it is trimmed back every year or two, it will throw up straight, whippy stems, three or four feet long in a single year. The leaves grow in pairs either side of the stem and in September, when this event took place, the buds of next year's leaves are already forming so that when you strip off the leaves these buds are left exposed. They are hard and black and pointed and they grow with alternate pairs at right angles to each other, spaced out along the length of the stem. This means that when used as a cane, if one pair of leaf buds lands flat, the next pair will present one of its pair of sharp, hard buds face forward to dig into the target area and it is this feature which makes an ash switch such a cruel implement. And do not imagine that the pair of buds which land flat have no effect. You have only to look at the weals on the skin of an ash-thrashed man to read the tell-tale sign of those vicious bud pairs printed into the beaten flesh as hard, bright nodules of pain either side of the main welt.
I did not know any of this then - but oh boy, was I about to learn!
He, picked up the slim cane and tapped the straw bale with it. Obediently I knelt and lowered my stinging chest onto the rough straw, lying along its length with my legs stretched out straight, toes on the earth. But I was still wearing the shorts. Surely he was not going to give me my morning beating while still dressed? It was puzzling too that he was standing directly behind me, between my splayed legs rather than to one side in the thrashing position. What was he up to? I lay there tense and uneasy for several moments - and then I felt the warm wetness on my backside. He was pissing over me! He drenched the tight thin shorts and I felt his piss running down the backs of my legs.
Only when he had finished did he move to the thrashing position to one side. I sensed that this would not be the normal type of casual, even token, couple of lashes which normally made up a regular morning beating. This was going to be something much nastier. I heard the hiss of the ash switch through the air a couple of times as he got the feel of it, and the it came down across my soaked shorts stretched taut across my buttocks. I yelped at the vicious stinging pain of it and imagined the fine mist spray of piss that must have exploded from under the impact. I gripped the straw bale and hung on for dear life, desperate to hold my position as he beat the shit out of me, knowing it would be the worse for me if I flung myself off the bale in my pain.
Eventually he stopped but my relief was short lived because he only went round to the opposite side and began again, this time caning the backs of my wet thighs as well as my arse. I imagined that the thin switch must surely have sliced through the thin wet cotton and ripped it to shreds, though that was not so.
At last he did stop and I could hear him breathing heavily from his exertions as he stood over me. "A very nice bum" he repeated, adding "and all the nicer when it's well striped. Those shorts get transparent when wet and I can see the bright red weals shining right through them" he gloated. Then he gripped the waistband and fought to strip them off me, dragging the tight waistband across my wet buns and down my thighs, scraping the elastic agonisingly over the raw welts. He lowered himself onto my nakedness and pleasured himself on me with greedy abandon.
I felt as if I had been fucked by a freight train but eventually he got off and ordered me to my feet and to dress. I retrieved the wet shorts from where he had tossed them and eased them up over my bum as gently as I could feeling shocked and shaken by his violence and brutality. But I was not allowed time to recover. "Come" he said and strode off into the open air, leaving me to scramble along behind him as usual.
We went on up a narrow wooded valley till we came to a tumbled heap of stones that had once been a cottage surrounded by old trees. In the green shade under the tress was a long, narrow river of waist high nettles such as you often find near sites of human habitation.
"Drop your shorts" he said and walked away from me as I did so, down to the other end of the bank of nettles. "Look at me" he said, and from a distance of perhaps twenty paces he locked his eyes onto mine and held them.
"Come to me" he said. And I did, wading waist deep through the river of nettles, my eyes fixed on his. It was if he were reeling me in like a fish on a line. The nettles swished through my naked legs, caressing my thighs and my genitals as I walked toward him in beaten submission. Whether it was the ecstasy of submission or the myriad stings of the nettles or both I don't know, but I developed a massive erection and the helm of my uncut penis protruded from my foreskin. The nettles were now stinging my most tender part which aroused me even more. I strode on down the length of the green river, offering myself, my nakedness, my obedience, my evident arousal to his eyes as my body burned with the fire of countless stings. And there was a rapport between us, an unmistakable communion as I drowned in his blue gaze. I was his, his, totally his, to do with as he liked.
Finally I emerged from the nettles and stood before him, my nakedness ablaze with stinging and longing. I knew that he would reach out his hands to me and pull me towards him. Knew that he would enfold me in those powerful arms. And indeed he did reach out - to take me by the shoulders and spin me around, to scoop my hands behind my back and bind them swiftly and deftly.
I was shocked by what I saw as an act of crude betrayal. Had I imagined that moment of communion between us? Was he deliberately erasing it by this brutal manhandling? I was shoved through a nearby gate into a steep cow pasture and the cows stopped their lazy feeding to watch us. I was prodded onwards up the slope, then suddenly halted and shoved to my knees. He pushed me between the shoulder blades and with my hands bound I could not save myself from sprawling on my face onto the greensward that rose steeply before me. Except that where my face was to land it was not green. A large fresh cow pat lay there. Not so much a cow pat as a cow pie, deep with a small puddle of brown liquor in the top and a buzz of flies on it.
At the last moment I instinctively twisted my head sideways to avoid going face first into the revolting mess and landed on my ear. But my bastard master's intentions were not to be so easily thwarted. He clamped one boot on the back of my head and rolled my face to and fro through the stinking squelch of khaki-green cow shit, grinding my face into it again and again.
Finally he yanked me up into a kneeling position and laughed as a gob of dung-slime slid down my face and plopped onto my chest and slowly slithered over my belly into my crotch while his infernal camera clicked and whirred.
"Had enough, Sweatpig?" he sneered.
"Yes Sir" I mumbled.
"Wrong!" he gloated, "there's worse to come!"
"Why am I being punished Sir?" I whined.
"You are not being punished."
"Then why are you doing this to me Sir?"
"Because I enjoy it" was the smug reply. There's no answer to that! He leaned down to bring his face close to mine and added "And because YOU enjoy it" There's no answer to that either and I hung my head in shame.
He yanked me to my feet and prodded me on up the field, swishing the ash switch menacingly as he walked. At the top it levelled off at the edge of a wood and there was a huge dung heap where tractor loads of cowshed mucking out had been dumped over many months. It was about thirty or forty yards long, five or six wide and as high as my head. The earth around it was churned into mud by tractor tyres and the hooves of livestock and in the deep ruts and hoof prints a foul liquor had gathered where it had leached from the steaming pile. It was black, evil smelling on had an oily film floating on top. My heart sank.
As I feared, he ordered me to strip and crawl on my belly through the polluted ooze until I lay sprawled on the slope of the dung heap. Then the switch was brought into play a second time only this time across my back and shoulders. I squirmed under the stinging pain, as if trying to protect myself by burying my nakedness in the dung heap. Then, suddenly, a voice "What the hell's going on here?"
I peered round to see a hiker in shorts and with backpack. He must have come out of the wood and taken Hugh unawares. He stood over my sprawled nakedness, cane in hand, and the hiker must have seen at least a couple of strokes administered. But Hugh was completely at ease. "He's being trained." he answered, casually, as though it were the most natural thing in the world and offering the cane to the hiker, adds "Care to have a go?"
The hiker, outfaced by this insouciance backs away uncertainly and heads off down the hill, pausing only once for a backward glance. But at least the thrashing is not resumed and I am ordered to the bottom of the adjacent ravine to "wash as much of that muck off as you can" in the icy stream at the bottom. I clamber back up, still shivering despite the muggy heat of the day and am told to dress. We then head back home, but not down the hill the way we had come but through the wood. Pity, we might have seen that hiker again. He had strong brown legs ...
The wood is mostly of slender young trees but Hugh pauses by a stouter one and asks if I know what sort of tree it is. "A sycamore?" I hazard. "No," he replies, "that is my flogging tree" I look at him in alarm but he adds quickly "But don't worry, you've had enough for today, we'll save that for another day." and to my huge relief he throws the cane down.
I am left wondering what I would have done if he had wanted to tie me to that tree for yet another beating. Would I have refused? Would I have dared defy him? For the truth was I had had all I could take that day. Perhaps he sensed that he had pushed me to my limit. But it left me uneasy, then and later. It was a new element in my servitude, this realisation that there could be and end to total obedience.