THE SLAVE SHOW
By Pete Brown. petebrownuk @ yahoo.com Read all of Pete's stories at groups.yahoo.com/group/petebrownseroticstories
Part Nineteen
Once we had Joe back "home" life did indeed become a bit easier - as there was now no question of showing him, we no longer needed to make sure he was in first-class "ready" condition, and could start to use him properly as my back-up and general assistant. He's a really nice bloke, actually, and if he hadn't been a slave he's the kind of man I'd like to meet regularly to go for a few drinks with in the pub, and to watch the football on TV with. Mind you, if he hadn't been a slave, I'd probably never have got the chance - he'd have been stuck in some awful suburb of little boxes, with his missus and two point four kids!
Joe had that knack of getting on with everyone - Julie really liked him, and after all she'd done to get him sold to us at a knockdown price, he seemed to hero worship her, and was always hanging around the house offering to do chores that were not really his responsibility, and look after the kids if she wanted to go off for the afternoon, and that kind of thing. Julie reciprocated by insisting that Dan and I treated Joe "properly" and invited him to join us for supper at least once a week, something that he looked forward to immensely. He'd sit there at the table with the three of us, and he'd never say much - just tuck into his meal, take seconds if he was offered them, then tell Julie how much he'd enjoyed it.
Somehow, seeing how Julie treated him as if he was a man inflamed me, and after one of these weekly meals I'd usually fuck him particularly hard. No, that's not quite correct: I usually fucked Joe two or three times a week, and it was usually hard - he had a big muscled bum, after all, which needed ploughing properly, and you expect a strong man like that to lie there and take it without thrashing around and crying and screaming. No, after one of those suppers, it was as if I had a special urgency to get my cock up him, and when we'd both said goodnight to Julie and Dan, I'd walk back across the yard to the stables with my hand gripping his neck to remind him I was in charge, and then I'd almost rip his clothes off him before throwing him down on the bed so I could get started. He was big and strong, as I've told you, and if he'd not been a slave, or even if he'd been a free man and resisted minimally, it would have been difficult. But Joe seemed to almost enjoy the experience of being taken so forcibly, and I sometimes wondered if all the stuff he'd occasionally tell me about missing women, and wishing he'd been able to be married, was just rubbish. Or perhaps all men secretly want to be dominated and controlled, as I now mastered him. Who knows. And who cares, really - when you're really having a hard fuck, who bothers about the motives of the guy whose arse you're ploughing?
Joe was good with the other slaves, too. We had a fair turnover, as they were generally only there for a couple of months, and Joe seemed to have this knack of "taking them under his wing" and getting them broken in to the tough training regime pretty quickly. And as he was so big and strong, I almost never had to worry about disputes and rows in the barracks - Joe was always in there, sorting it out with his fists if necessary. What was surprising, though, was how tender he could be with some of the slaves, especially the younger and weaker ones. It was particularly obvious with the cook - after I'd taken his cherry, he seemed to go through a very "down" patch, but Joe noticed this and began to take the cook into his bed whenever I didn't need Joe. After a couple of weeks the cook seemed to recover his spirits, and after that hung around Joe rather like a puppy does after his master. Still, Dan and I were glad - Joe and the cook were, after all, quite substantial investments for us even though on the global scale of thing they were not all that expensive, and a happy slave is a much harder worker!
Although the business was doing very well, and both Dan and I generally enjoyed the work, like anything you do need fresh things to keep you occupied. My visit to the slave auction to buy Joe had sparked off a few thoughts, and one day Dan and I sat down to seriously review the business. We were very profitable and were actually able to start putting money aside, making real savings for our future, but Dan was always concerned that the fashion might change, or we might run into a string of bad luck and our trained slaves would stop winning - I suppose he always had concerns for Shane and Liam, and needed to make plans that would ensure that they were financially secure. I didn't have quite those concerns, but I certainly didn't want to lapse into debt and be indentured again - once is enough! We decided that in addition to these slaves in training where we picked up regular fees, there might be money to made in buying slaves on our own account, training them up to be prize winners, and then selling them on at a profit. Dan talked to our accountants, and this was ever more attractive in terms of the tax treatment as the regular training fees were "income", whereas profits on slaves we bought and sold received more favourable treatment as "capital gains", and we could anyway offset more of our costs against the theoretical profits.
Dan thought that I was a better judge of the male form than he, and so it fell to me to scour the local auction marts and dealers, looking for "bargains". But it was tough - any reasonably good looking , young-ish slave with a well proportioned body and "potential" tended to be snapped up by the foreign dealers for export to places like Arabia, where "whiteys" were much in demand as the rich there were tired of an almost endless supply of Arabs similar themselves, and having had slavery for much longer than us, they were simply bored with the Asiatics and niggas who were so readily, and cheaply, available.
Having been a slave myself, it was at first rather odd to be going around selecting blokes for training - every now and then I got a strange feeling of how I might react to having this big tough man examine me in the most intimate detail, 'skinning me back, stroking me to an erection, and even pushing his gloved finger up my arse. I have to say that, perhaps drawing on my own experience, I tended to judge slaves who resisted and protested as potentially better buys, as their initial hatred of the system could be "turned", so that their natural desire to fight it would result in them working extra hard on the course. And, of course, a man who hates being used sexually but who has understood that he has to submit, is somehow much more of an exciting prospect than one who submits meekly, or even gladly.
The dealers gradually got to know me, and even to value my opinion - if I "spotted" a slave with potential but then failed to get a good deal and therefore didn't buy, they could anyway take him out of their general stock, do some small amount of "preparation" themselves, and sell him for an enhanced price. So it was a not unpleasant way of spending a couple of days every month, and if I fancied sex, the dealers were always more than willing to let me do a "trial run" on any of their stock. I have to say I wasn't bad at it, either, and at least half of the slaves I bought and trained turned into champions, netting us a very good profit.
I had an even better idea a few months later, and teamed up with our local dealer to "filter" the slaves for me. He would be on the look out for those "with a chance", and then I could go over and take a look at them before they were offered to the general public - he gave me a special "regular buyer discount", as he called it, although in fact it was a way of paying less as the owners sending their slaves in to be sold got a lower price because the slaves were not exposed to competitive bidding. In turn I cut him in on a small percentage of future winnings, and this worked well for everyone (except the original owners, I suppose).
One day Dave, this dealer, called me and said he had a particularly interesting property, and now I had time to pursue this as Joe could be left in charge of the exercises out on the course. I asked Dan if he wanted to come, but he was busy with that year's returns to the Department Of Trade And Industry and said he was wrestling with what Industry Standard Classification we were in: were we "Other Establishments Giving Training And Education", or more properly "Livestock Management And Other Related Services"?
"Does it matter, Dan? Come on, have an afternoon off - let's go and look over this bloke Dave has lined up for us - and we could stop somewhere on the way....?"
"Steve, it does matter. There are fines for making the return late, or wrong. So I've got to call them, and it always takes ages to get through. And don't you ever think of anything else except sex? My arse is still sore from last weekend." (we'd been staying away at a show up in Manchester, and I'd had a great Saturday night!).
Once Dan has decided something like that there's no shaking him - I've told you he's very punctilious about numbers and stuff like that - so I set off by myself. I quite like Dave, actually, and in normal circumstances, if we'd met in a bar or somewhere like that, I'd certainly have agreed to fuck him. I had offered, about the second time we met, as his office was perfectly comfortable and private, and Dave had thanked me but said he preferred to keep business and private matters strictly separate. We joked about it, actually: "How could I screw a good price out of you, Steve, when I'd just finished screwing the daylights out of you?", he used to say. Perhaps it was just as well we didn't get together and he discovered who really did the screwing when I was around!
The slave he'd singled out for my attention was indeed a beauty: he was a nigga, about six foot three, and twenty four years old. Beautifully in proportion all over, he positively shone with health and the best feature of him was that he wasn't grossly over muscled, but had a certain lithe elegance and grace that I could see would appeal to the judges. What I thought was the real differentiate, though, was his colour: so many of the niggas we see in English shows are the usual types from the streets, and they're mostly shades of brown, varying from very dark to pale coffee, reflecting the degree of integration and inter-breeding that has been such a desirable feature of our country. This one, though, was jet black, a really dark, inky black, and this simply emphasised his white teeth and sparkling black eyes. I just knew that in the show ring, that jet black skin shining with a faint sheen of slave oil could be a real winner. Dave told me he was an illegal immigrant from one of those African countries in the Francophone sphere, where there just hadn't been the amount of mixed-race marriages that the British had indulged in.
At one time we used to deport these illegals as soon as they were identified, but now it was considered more beneficial to make them useful members of our society: I remember vaguely the row that went on in Parliament as this amendment to the Involuntary Servitude legislation went through, with one party claiming that it took away their human rights, and the other countering that if they wanted to come to the UK so much, they could. In a typically British way we compromised, and the legislation went through, but the Home Secretary agreed to pay for an advertising campaign throughout North Africa warning illegals of the new risks they faced.
You'd have thought that after living most of his life in some piss poor very hot country the slave would have been used to going around nearly naked, but like a lot of niggas he seemed to have that exaggerated sense of modesty they show. I mean, most men don't like being forced to strip and display themselves, but whiteys seem to get used to it pretty quickly (especially if they know they're well hung, or at least above average: they are proud of what they've got, and want to show their superiority to the other men, I think). But in my experience niggas really hate having to strip off completely, and they always try to cover their cocks and balls with their hands rather than being proud of them - and I reckon it is mostly true what the old jokes say, and that most of them are much better endowed than most whiteys. Still, you rarely see niggas in porn movies and things like that, do you? I suppose that's another facet of this shyness.
Dave had evidently had some problems with him already, as the nigga just didn't want to do as he was ordered, and Dave had to get hold of his cane and threaten him with it before he very reluctantly undid the drawstring of his display shorts and dropped them to the ground. He was superb - a beautiful long cock in the same jet black as the rest of him, which was carried on top of really low hanging balls: he had one of those sacs with a very, very long neck, before the balls themselves hung almost below the level of the tip of the cock. I could see only two things we'd really need to do to turn this one into a winner: he'd need to be 'skinned, as I'd never seen a nigga win a class who was uncut; and, like a lot of niggas, such body hair as he had was, frankly, ugly. It was very short and very tightly curled, so that the small patch of it on his pecs looked more like dappling of the skin than any sort of real hair, and his pubes were similarly very tightly curled and looked more like an unpleasant fungal growth than pubic hair. Those of you who regularly attend slave shows will of course know that it's very much the fashion for niggas to be shaved completely smooth, mostly because of the texture of their hair not conforming to that which patrons like to see, and there's no loss of marks for this (a whitey, of course, would be marked down if he didn't display the proper amount of hair for his breed type, but that's a different matter).
I thought I ought to take a look at his cock head, and his arsehole, just to make sure there was no unpleasant surprise in waiting, and I told the nigga to 'skin back. He didn't do anything, and, thinking that he'd not understood me, I reached out to squeeze the end of his cock to pop the head out. He grabbed hold of my wrist and began to shriek and jabber away in his own language, and this was too much for Dave: he's quite a powerful man, and he grabbed the nigga and pushed him across his desk, then called to me to hold his neck and shoulders down whilst he administered eight strokes of the cane.
The nigga shrieked and cried, and it was quite a struggle to hold him there, actually - for a young bloke with the kind of slender body I've told you he had, he was surprisingly strong. And, I suppose, Dave was a bit excessive in giving him eight strokes of the cane - personally, I'd have stopped at four: just enough to let him know how much he could be hurt if he ever did anything like that again, without verging on the unnecessarily cruel. Mind you, there is something satisfying about the swish of the cane through the air and the "snap" sound as it hits the bum, isn't there? And it pleased Dave, evidently, so why should I care? If he was in a good mood, the price negotiation would be easier!
The jet black skin seemed to conceal the cane marks rather better than a stark white bum would have done, and as the nigga lay there sobbing I ran my hands lightly over his muscular globes to assure myself that Dave really had been thrashing him and not just pretending. Sure enough, though, the flesh felt much hotter than usual, always the sign of heavy punishment, and my finger tips could feel the ridges running across the muscle. Whilst there, so to speak, I took a look at his arsehole, as I had been intending, but I was as careful as possible in forcing his bum apart as I didn't want to make him suffer any more than absolutely necessary after the caning.
I suppose that I just don't show enough niggas to be able to tell anything about their arseholes just by looking - for a whitey, I can get a fair assessment of how his arse is from looking at the way it's puckered, and whether there's any trace of excessive usage. But the colour of the nigga really took away all those visual clues, and I had to ask Dave for a latex glove so that I could make a proper inspection. As he heard the snap of the latex as I pulled it on, the nigga began shouting something in his own language again, and now it was Dave who had to hold him there as I tested him properly - he was agreeably tight, and judging from the way he continued to object to my fingers, I suspected he was probably a virgin.
Dave and I had quite a long negotiation, actually. He knew that the nigga could be a real prize winner, and therefore wanted me to pay quite highly, and increase his percentage. I countered by pointing out that although training this one was superficially easy as he was in very good condition, the lack of proper English was a real concern as he needed to be able to obey orders promptly and accurately. "And, Dave", I added, "You've got to remember the effect on my other slaves in training - bringing a nigga like this in might cause upsets of all kinds, as some of them can be really prejudiced."
"Surely you can control them, Steve? If you want to have niggas to train, that's your prerogative as you're the master!"
"Oh I don't care about the prejudice - that's no concern of mine. No, I'm more worried that a beautiful piece of male flesh like that will inflame them so much that they're all forming a line to fuck him. I mean, not only is he highly desirable, but there' the novelty value for most of them in fucking a black arse. And when you've got one of the slaves so much more in demand than the others, it causes problems in the barracks, I've found. Still, it's worth the risk...."
We continued to negotiate, but we'd both been through all the arguments so many times before and both had a pretty shrewd idea of the other's business, that it was almost like a game. Just as we were about to shake on a deal, though, one of Dave's assistants rushed in and said that he was needed urgently as "That fucking little Scot was at it again."
"So, Dave, is it you in fact who can't keep the slaves under control?", I joked, as he'd been suggesting I had those problems a moment or so before.
Dave reached for his cane and asked me if I wanted to accompany him to "see the sport", adding "We've got this lad in for the next auction, but he's been nothing but trouble. He's always quarrelling with the others, and when some of the other slaves try to tell him to shut up, he gets really pugnacious. Then one things leads to another, and before you know where you are, he's scrapping! He's only sixteen, and to look at him you'd think he'd have more sense than to throw a punch at a mature man, as he's so slight and it must be obvious that he'd lose in a fight. But it doesn't seem to stop him."
"A sixteen year old? What's his indenture term?"
"Life."
"At sixteen? Did he kill someone, or something?"
"No, Steve. But he was taken into care when he was about ten, and lived in a succession of Council homes and stuff, all the time getting more and more out of control. The Social Services people took him straight to Court on his sixteenth birthday and they used some new provision in the Indenture acts to say that he needed to be indentured 'in the publici interest' before he actually committed real crimes, and having reviewed his record of disruption and violence in the various homes he'd been in, the judge agreed. And the judge thought that it was sensible to make it a life indenture, as there seemed to be little likelihood of him ever 'reforming'. So he got here last week, a day after his birthday, and I thought he'd be going in the sale next Tuesday - but seeing all the trouble he's been causing, that's looking unlikely: I can hardly sell a known troublemaker, can I? I've got my reputation to think of...."
"So what will happen to him?"
"I hate to say it, but he really is so pugnacious that I think the only solution is to calm him. So I guess it's off to the vet's, and then I'll auction him in three or four weeks when he's properly healed."
"Jesus, what a life! In Council care since ten, enslaved at sixteen, and castrated a week later."
"I know, Steve, and I feel bad about it. But what else can I do, in all honestly?"
"I suppose you're right, Dave. Reputation counts for a lot, and in your position I wouldn't want to put a 'vicious' slave into the market. I've never had to have a slave calmed myself, but they do say it can work wonders - I've got a mate, Ray, who works in the hospital and does work for me on the side: 'skinning, and that sort of stuff. If you're looking for someone to geld the boy, you could try him - I understand a lot of vets won't do it now."
"It's like all that tail docking controversy that went on in the first part of the century, Steve. Everyone said that it might be cruel to dock dogs' tails, but the breeders continued to do it. Then the vets changed their ethical policy at their annual conference so a vet would no longer do it, and before long there were no more docked tails. And I think it's a bit like that with calming - there's no actual prohibition on a vet doing it - yet - but it is hard to get one who will actually make the big snip, even when there's a lot of business at stake, as there is here. So I'll have the phone number of your mate... But we'd better get off to the pens, before there's any serious damage...."
As we strode across the yard I could hear shouting from the slave pens, but it was the kind of good humoured shouting mixed with jeering and laughter that men indulge in when there's something going on that shouldn't be. I know from experience, though, that this can quickly turn ugly, and Dave was right to be concerned.
Although he was only in business in a fairly modest way, Dave nevertheless had a good range of stock and kept them in pens holding up to about twenty slaves in each. As was usual, the women were kept separate from the men as the females were examined when they first arrived for pregnancy and then sold as "with child" or without, and it was clearly undesirable for a female slave who was sold "without" then to be found to be pregnant, as the new owner would rightly feel cheated as he couldn't work her so hard. I'd talked about this to Dave once, and he'd explained it all to me. "It's more work to keep them separate and I have to have a separate pen for them, and it's not usually full as there are relatively few females. So it would be good just to be ale to put them in with the men, but it causes so many problems! Either all the men find them so desirable that they fuck them until they're battered and raw, or one or more of the men gets kind of 'protective' and starts to treat one of the women as 'his', and that's a real problem: he'll fight all the others to 'protect' her, probably causing damage to himself and the others, and then, when they're sold to different owners as is almost invariably the case, the male and female sulk and are moody and hysterical and so on. And then there's all the menstruation stuff - most of the males don't want to be penned with females who are bleeding, and if one starts, she has to be taken out.... And so it goes on, and on. The customers like it as much of course, as when they're just taking a general look at the stock they find it very arousing to see the males and females naked together in the same pen, but honestly, it's so much bother that I've given up this marketing advantage and keep them separate."
Dave pulled open the door to the building holding the slave pens, and we went in. I was well used to it as when I was passing I sometimes came in just to cast my eye over the stock in case there was anything that Dave had overlooked, and I found the arrangement of having groups of slaves together in the barred pens quite convenient - Dave and his men usually managed to make a rough kind of grouping so that whiteys were in one or more pens, and the other races in others, so looking them over didn't take all that long. There was no privacy, of course, and Dave had a useful innovation: the rear wall of each pen was a huge mirror, running from floor to ceiling, so as a slave stood at the bars in front for you to get a good look at him, you could also see his rear in the mirror. Although I say I was well used to it, there's one thing that you never really get over when you go into a building like that, though: the smell! Although Dave kept his stock scrupulously clean and the entire place was hosed down and disinfected every single day, so many slaves in such a confined space inevitably gave rise to that special odour of sweat, overlaid with hints of piss and crap from the latrine holes at the rear of each pen. Some potential buyers find it intoxicating, and the scent taken with the sight of the naked slaves causes them to forget their cautious plans to spend only so much on a new slave and to open their pockets wide, but I find it a little off putting. Don't get me wrong - I love the scent of a male, especially when he's been working hard out on my course, or even more so when he's sweating from a tussle in bed. But somehow this cocktail of smells from so many men always makes me feel just faintly nauseous, and I'm always tempted to wrinkle my nose a little as we go in. Dan, who sometimes comes along when an investment decision is to be made, laughs at me and says it's because I can see the pen of women at the end and I worry that their smell might corrupt me and turn me back on to them.
Two big males were holding the arms of a very young slave, but it wasn't preventing him from writhing and kicking out at them in an effort to break free. Another slave was standing in front of him trying to calm him, saying things like "Come on, Scotty, calm down.... It won't do you any good as the owner will be here soon...."
The young slave's replies were so dreadful that I don't wish to record them here! I know that I use the occasional "fuck" in conversation myself, and I sometimes even do it with Julie and the boys in the room; but this young lad's knowledge of expletives was clearly very deep as he strung them together and spat them out in an unending stream.
"Silence!", Dave shouted at the top of his voice, and then he ran his cane along the bars of the pen to emphasise this, and gradually the whole place clamed and fell more or less silent.
"What the fuck's going on?", he demanded.
The slaves half hung their heads, and generally looked pretty sheepish.
"You two, you, holding the lad....", Dave snapped, when it was apparent none of them was going to say anything. "You must know something, or else you wouldn't be holding him like that. Now, what's happening? Tell me, and tell me now, if you don't want to feel this cane on your bums."
As you will probably remember the cook had not wanted to "rat out" on his fellows in the incident I described to you, and that's a fairly common problem with a group of slaves - they just don't understand where their rea loyalties lie and they're always trying to keep things form their masters. So too with these men now - they felt some sort of loyalty to the other slaves in their pen, and Dave had to threaten them again before one stammered "Nothing, really, sir.
The lad was just a little overexcited, and we wanted to help calm him down."
"Overexcited? About what?"
They all stood there, shuffling their feet slightly in the straw that covered the floor of the pen in an effort to make it a little more comfortable to sit or lie on. "Was he getting overexcited because you men were getting together and planning to gang bang him?"
"No, sir!", several of them snapped instantly, adding a touch of veracity to their assertion.
One of the men holding the lad added "I reckon he does need a good fucking, sir, to calm him down. But most of us here prefer the women, sir, so there was nothing like that...."
"So what's it all about? I won't hesitate to thrash you if you don't tell me now - even if that means I'll have to hold you back for the auction after next, to allow your bum time to heal...."
"It's stupid, sir, really. The lad is so passionate about football. And some of us were sitting around talking, to pass the time, about our favourite teams: I'm a Chelsea fan myself, sir, but the lad kept on about Rangers and Celtic and the other Scottish teams, and we told him they might be OK to play each other, but put them up against real teams, as they do in the European league, and then where are they?"
"Yes, and when has Scotland ever won the World Cup?" another slave shouted out, and there was a lot of laughter from almost everyone, as a voice from the back added "Well it must have been well before 1966.... Wasn't that when England last did it against the Germans?"
"Anyway, sir, the lad got more and more agitated, and you know how it is, sir, when someone's going on like that.... Well, we did lead him on a bit.... And then he lost it, and threw himself at us, fists flailing.... We had to hold him, sir, as he's so violent...."
Dave addressed the lad as he still almost hung there between the two slaves. He was only a strip of a thing, almost no muscle at all, and I could see his ribs quite clearly as he was so thin. "Is that true? You attacked these slaves because you don't share their views on football?"
His accent was very strong, as he snapped back "They've never seen Rangers or Celtic... Fucking marvellous they are... Those Chelsea players are real poofs, and foreign, most of them, bought in, they don't play real hard football, not like...."
"Shut up!" Dave commanded.
"You're as fucking bad as they are....", the slave shouted. "You know fuck all about anything...."
"I warned you, slave, last time you lost control of that temper of yours. I warned you that the next time it occurred you'd be trashed. I was lenient then, as I felt sorry for you, being newly enslaved. But since then I've read your record, and you've been a trouble maker for years. Well, there's something open to me to do that the bleeding hearts in the social Services couldn't do - which is a pity, as if you'd been properly disciplined when you were much younger, you might not be a slave now! But a slave you are, and no owner can tolerate a slave who's disruptive, and disobedient, and downright insolent! So you're going to get the thrashing of your life, slave, and then we'll see if that calms you down. And if it doesn't, then I'll take extreme measures."
Dave's tone changed as he snapped at the two slaves holding the lad "Bring him to the door, but keep a firm hold of him as I don't want him to injure anyone."
If you think about it, a dealer like Dave has to have stuff like a flogging horse, and even a whipping frame, I suppose, about the place somewhere as sooner or later there's going to be one or more slaves who need them. But it's not the sort of thing a dealer wants lying around in full view of the potential customers, is it? I mean, you hardly want to remind a buyer that the slave he's set his heart on might turn out to be disobedient or rude, and might therefore need such things! So there was a delay whilst Dave called to a couple of his own personal slaves who worked around the place (rather as I had Joe) to fetch the horse, and when they wheeled it in, I saw it was definitely a "professional" model. I'm no expert in these things as I usually like to settle matters of discipline with my fists or with a slave caned over my knee, but you do see adverts on the TV and in the newspapers for all sorts of stuff like this, as slave ownership spreads wider and wider: I've seen "Hepplewhite" style horses, "Arts and Crafts" ones, and even "Bauhaus" models, all intended to fit well into the domestic scene, but by comparison to what now appeared they were all flimsy and clearly not intended for hard, prolonged usage.
The sight of the sturdy steel frame with its leather-padded platform on top silenced the lad for a moment or two, but then his torrent of abuse and blasphemy directed at Dave started again. Dave's two worker slaves opened the pen and took the lad, and they were actually laughing as they lifted him off his feet and carried him bodily, squirming and shouting, to the horse. One held his body down almost insolently - the lad wasn't all that strong, and Dave's slaves were big giants - as the other pulled his arms and attached them to the front legs with the in-built cuffs. He looked at Dave then "Sir, the knee holders, or just the ankle cuffs?"
"Not the knee holders, you idiot! I'm going to cane him, not fuck him! And actually you can leave the ankle cuffs off, too - I want this one to jump around a bit as I work on him." Turning to me he went on "I find that if you have all their limbs restrained it makes it too easy for them as they start to think what's happening to them is out of their control and it's therefore 'not their fault'. But with the legs free they can move around and try to escape before the next blow lands - useless, of course, with the arms held down, but it makes the slave realise that in spite of his best efforts, a master is still in control of him. Don't you agree?"
"Actually, Dave, I've never caned a slave like this..."
"But you've got all those under training...."
"They're mostly pretty well behaved, though. They know they've got a pretty cushy number, being selected for showing by their owners, and they don't want to get busted back to ordinary workers. So we don't really have discipline problems - I use a cane of course, but only when we're working them very hard, just to 'encourage' them, and it's more of a quick slash at them as they run by, rather than as a defined punishment."
"Lucky sod! I have to do this quite often, and I reckon more and more frequently, actually. In the early days when we had the criminals and people like that emptying out of the prisons they sort of accepted their new status. But now, with all these free men coming along who went straight from home that morning to the Court, and then find themselves here in the afternoon, it's much harder: quite a lot of them have to learn that life has changed irrevocably for them, and a good caning helps - most men have never experienced real physical hurt, after all, and so when they recognise that this is the power their owner now has over them, it's a salutary lesson for them."
As he was speaking, Dave had positioned himself by the lad's bum, and all the time he'd been subject to the lad's vile shouting. And then the lad actually turned his head and spat at Dave!
He was a brave little buggar, I'll say that for him - as he saw the gob running down his leather jacket, Dave raised his arm and brought the cane down very hard, very hard indeed, on the lad's bum. This was no "taster", no "warning" about future conduct: it was a hard, almost brutal lesson to the slave in a master's control. I saw the lad's body jerk forward as the blow landed, and his flow of invective was stifled for a second or two. Then he began again, and Dave struck a second time, again with the lad's body almost driven forward on the horse by the sheer ferocity of the cane.
It took four strokes before the lad stopped swearing and his cries turned into ones of anguish and terror, great screams now splitting the air with every cane stroke. His body thrashed around on the horse as he desperately tried to do anything at all to avoid the cane, utterly hopelessly. I watched in fascinated horror as the big red stripes formed across the lad's deathly white soft skin on his bum, and then the flecks of blood starting to appear as the cane strokes were so violent that the skin was ruptured.
By the time the lad had taken eight of the strokes, and Dave was showing no signs of stopping (and, indeed, seemed to be working himself into a frenzy as his face was screwed up and drops of his sweat were flying off him), I began to feel very sorry for the lad. I remembered how I'd been at sixteen - wild and rebellious, and refusing to stay at school or work at all. It was only going into the army that had saved me, and this lad hadn't had that chance.
I could take it no more. I reached out and grabbed Dave's wrist as his arm was about to descent again. "Dave, no more...."
"Fuck off, Steve! Mind your own fucking business - this is my slave and he needs to be taught a lesson..."
Dave was glaring at me as he said this, looking really pissed off and very angry, and although I was stronger than him and could have forced him to stop (well, at least for the moment), that thing cut in that happens when you know you're in the wrong, as indeed the lad was Dave's responsibility. So I let go of his arm.
"Dave, please stop...."
"If you can't take the sight of a slave getting his just desserts, go outside! I never had you down for a wimp."
My temper flared and I felt blood surge to my face. My fists clenched and I went into a kind of "fight" stance. I reckon Dave was lucky that somehow I managed to restrain myself and hold back, and I didn't floor him! "Listen... I want you to stop...."
"And I've told you that's my business...."
"But maybe it's mine, Dave - I want to buy the lad, and I don't want him permanently disfigured."
What came over me I don't know. I'd no intention of buying a slave like this when I arrived, as he was useless for our purposes as there's just no way that you can get a slave to "show" status if he doesn't have the right underlying bone structure and so on. You can slim down obese slaves, put muscle on underdeveloped slaves and all sorts of stuff like that, and that's what we were good at, by there's no way that a small, skinny slave can ever be turned into a "best of show". But something about his courage, his frailty, his vulnerability, and Dave's story of the bum deal he'd got from life so far, stirred me. I'm not sentimental as a rule, especially as regards animals and slaves, and I don't suppose I'll really ever understand why I said what I had. But, there it was - and Dave at once lowered the cane. Silence fell in the pen building, broken only by the agonised sobbing of the lad as he lay there, defeated, on the horse.
End Of Part Nineteen