THE SPOILS OF WAR by Pete Brown. petebrownuk @ yahoo.com
Read all of Pete's stories in groups.yahoo.com/group/petebrownseroticstories
Part 34
I found myself on the horns of a terrible dilemma. As I re-read my account of those times I see that I am constantly referring to "our army", "our country", "our people", when I mean the gallant fighters and people of Ali's country. I was - am - an American, and you will remember that this history began with my cruel and totally unjust enslavement by the rebel South when it began the "second civil war".
It's hard to give up your country, and everything that you have learned and know about it, knowledge that oozes into you by osmosis almost, as you grow and mature in that society. I was a true, loyal, red-blooded American, with good parents, a nice home, and all the other things that form part of "The American way of life." I was even patriotic - I knew our country sometimes did wrong, but, on the whole, compared to the other sink-hole places in the world, we did pretty good and generally acted on the side of right. That probably conditioned my thinking when I decided to join the marines, rather than go to college as my parents had wanted: I thought it was important to defend America, our way of life, and the values we stood for.
But then the second civil war changed everything, and I found myself part of the spoils of that war, enslaved by the victorious South. Hey, these were Americans, too! And they simply took their fellow citizens and turned them into slaves. What now of the American way of life, and American values? Even so, I guess I'd have remained basically "loyal to the ideals", even though I would accept that the South had failed to implement them! But it was the behaviour of my fellow Americans that really was wrong: Prexmire's government may have reintroduced slavery and enslaved us, but it was thousands of my fellow Americans who acted as guards, overseers, auctioneers, and performed all the other duties that a slave-based economy needed to keep running. And Americans were not slow to buy and use slaves, and to enjoy the southern lifestyle that slavery enabled. I am irresistibly reminded of the situation in World War II - as you read it in the history books, supposedly it was this small group, "the Nazis", who ran and controlled the war and the concentration camps. But it was millions of ordinary Germans who acted as soldiers and guards, and who did jobs such as driving the trains to the death camps. History tends to brush out this responsibility of the ordinary citizen for the crimes that his government commits in his name, preferring to blame it all on the leadership, and I see that there is now a tendency for the South to start being referred to as "The Prexmirists", as if all those millions of ordinary Americans had no part to play in it! I had anyway therefore become somewhat disillusioned by the way that many millions of Americans had failed to stand up for the ideals in which I had previously thought we all believed.
So I was in a dilemma - was I still an American? Or, having served three years on a coffle with Ali and my coffle mates, been instrumental in winning the war through my guidance and advice to Ali, probably having fathered sons by Ali's wives, and being totally fluent in the Arabic dialect we all spoke, was I now indeed a citizen of our country? It's hard, as I said, to give up your former life totally. And Americans find it especially hard to renounce their birthright. Part of me wanted to go back "home", as I still thought of it, to help with the reconstruction. But part of me knew that I must stay to continue to help Ali guide and rule our people.
I seemed incapable of making a decision - something that is rare for me, as normally I am not one to vacillate and find it easy to consider the facts, and make an instant decision. But this one seemed incapable of resolution - I found myself waking in the middle of the night, not to enjoy Ali's body, but to lie there next to him, feeling the warmth of his body against mine and smelling his male scent. His presence inflamed my senses and made it even more difficult to think rationally, and I tossed and turned, as my mind endlessly rehashed all the elements of the decision I needed to make.
My lack of sleep caused me to be irritable and fractious during the day, and my general mood of uncertainty seemed to be affecting Ali, too - he became sharper with me, less tolerant of my presence, and became more inclined to listen to his other advisors rather than to me. Of course I should have done something about it - I should have sat down with him, quietly and calmly, and explained what was troubling me. But we don't always do the rational thing, do we? Especially when our brain is churning on a problem that it can't solve, it seems incapable of discussing that very problem with others. Relations with Ali got worse and worse, and one night they reached a head: We were in bed and he stretched out luxuriously, moving his long limbs sensuously against the stark white linen sheets. He looked so completely desirable that I wanted desperately to fuck him, and pushed his legs apart and knelt there, massaging his hole ready for my entry. Then something happened that had never troubled me before - as the tip of my dick touched the sensuous softness of his hole, I lost my erection! I pulled away slightly and started to jerk at my dick to try to revive it, but it was no good. I began to experience that shame that I had read about in others when their erections fail at the crucial moment.
Ali is not a person who tolerates failure in others well. He had been moaning and sighing as I massaged his hole, and was all primed and ready for our usual bout of totally enjoyable sex. Finding himself deprived of it, he rounded on me and began to list all my many failings that he had observed in the past weeks. I know it's stupid - when a lover has a failure to perform, as happens to even the most virile of us occasionally, you are meant to be understanding and concerned, not angry and abusive. But that is not Ali's way - his has always been hot tempered and intolerant of failure, and this occasion was no exception..
He accused me of being bad tempered (I had been fractious, I admit, due to my lack of sleep), of failing to support him properly in the Council by not volunteering proper advice (yes, I had been tired, and not thinking straight), and then, worse of all, of "falling out of love with him." I should have simply listened to him, then told him what was the root cause of my difficulty. But I am indeed hot tempered, too, and when that cruel accusation of being out of love with him was made, it was more than I could bear! I flew at him, accusing him of huge ingratitude for all that I had done for him, and of failing to understand that I too had problems. And he in turn reminded me that he was the Leader.... And so it went on - before a few minutes were out, we were screaming and shouting accusations at each other and making the situation far, far worse. Finally, we were standing by the side of the bed, our faces red, our voices hoarse, and then he struck out at me!
Well, that was it. You know I was a marine, I was a trained fighter, and my time at Gleeson's Gladiators had honed my fighting skills even more. Even as Ali's hand struck my cheek, my body reacted and soon we were savagely fighting each other, rolling around the huge bedroom like two wild animals, desperate to hurt each other. It was no real contest, of course - Ali had been a hardworking slave whose body had been hardened and strengthened by his labours, and then a leader of our troops in the guerilla war, so he was nominally a "fighter". But I was a real fighter, skilled in hand-to-hand combat. He really could not hope to win in a fight against me, but this display of sheer physical violence seems to have been good for both of us as it moved our intellectual shouting argument onto a different plane - we were now doing what men had been doing since primeval times, working out our differences in the way that males do, by fighting.
A you might expect, the fight ended in the way that I had learned - my tiny erectile dysfunction disappeared in the excitement of fighting and dominating another man, and I soon had Ali on his belly, pried open his butt cheeks, and thrust my dick home into his ass. This was no vigorous but exciting fuck where both of us enjoyed it - I was in the heat of passion from winning, from utterly vanquishing my opponent, and all I wanted to do was cement my victory by brutally fucking him until my animal lust was satisfied. I gave no thought to the discomfort - no, the pain - that Ali was in as my dick rammed home repeatedly, my pubic bone slamming into his firm butt muscle on each stroke. In the background I vaguely heard his cries of anguish, but I was totally unconcerned - he was just a loser, a man who had lost out in that perpetual struggle for dominance that goes on between men. And a victor has no need to consider the needs of a loser, as evolution has taught us: all I wanted was to satisfy my own needs for sex, and to demonstrate my utter and complete domination of this piece of flesh that was there only to serve me.
It took only an incredibly brief time, of course - my passions were so inflamed that it needed only a few strokes for my dick to fire and for my seed to once again be pumped up into Ali. Then I lay there on top of him, feeling his hot sweaty skin sliding under mine. And all at once the "real world" snapped back into focus - I heard his whimpering as my body continued to crush his, and I realised that I'd hurt him - hurt him terribly, not only physically, but by showing him that he was not the man he thought he was.
He might be the Leader, in charge of millions of people and a major economy, but now he was just a powerless piece of meat, skewered on the dick of a real conquering man.
As my own anger subsided and I realised what I'd done, and how Ali probably felt, I pulled out of him, gently, sat beside him on the luxurious carpet, pulled him to a sitting position and wrapped my arms around him. I tried to kiss him, but at first he refused, keeping his lips clamped tightly shut. I had to start to tease at his nips and even give then gentle tweaks to make him open up, and then, our tongues beating together, I let one of my hands slip down and begin to play with his dick. As soon as he was erect, I knew what I had to do - I pushed him gently back to lie on the floor, then knelt over him and began to suck his dick hungrily. And then, as his passion mounted, I would occasionally let it slide over my face as I murmured "Oh, I want this, I need a dick like this, I need a big strong dick like this inside me....".
I was able to engineer my body under his, and Ali responded as he often wanted to, but was never allowed to, by poking his dick at my hole. I knew it was going to be tough as I was not lubed or stretched, but it had to be done - I just had to take it as Ali pushed himself through my sphincter, and began to fuck me. I cried out, just a he had done, as it really hurt. And I remember feeling my hands beating up and down on the carpet as his fucking continued, as if in some strange way this would help to take away the agony I was experiencing. But it's a funny thing about sex, isn't it - the line between pain and pleasure is so finely drawn, that even though my body was telling me that it was suffering, my brain was going into that special place it does when it's in ecstasy. I think I could have tolerated the force of Ali's fucking for ever, and of course as it went on it got easier for me as my own ass juices slimed his dick and acted as some sort of lubricant. But he shot relatively quickly, and we were soon once again locked in each others arms.
"Ali, I'm sorry....", I began.
"You're a good fuck, Steve! I'll do that more often, I think."
"Don't be so sure - I took you out first, remember?"
We both began to smile, smiles that turned into laughter, and as we carried on just enjoying being close together, touching each other and sliding our bodies over each other in that comfortable way you do after sex.
"Steve, my friend, what has been troubling you?" Ali began. Although he could be hot-headed, he could also be incredibly wise on occasions.
It was almost as if I'd been given "permission" to talk about all those things that had been troubling me, all those doubts and concerns I'd had, and as the flood gates opened I poured out my feelings to Ali - my love for him, but my duty to my country. Finally, when I'd gone around and around the dilemma for about the fourth time, Ali said, quietly, but using his usual way of commanding and expecting total obedience, "Stop! Enough, Steve. I wish to hear no more of this."
"But Ali, you know I love you, but I think I ought to go back to the USA, to...."
"I said 'Enough'! There is no question of you going back. You are needed here, to continue to advise and counsel me. You are a soldier in my army, and I have given you an order, and I wish to hear no more of it. You are always a wild one, Steve, who wants to disobey, but this time I want no further argument: you will stay here, and that is the end of it."
"But..."
"Oh Steve, that's why I love you! You never let it rest, do you? Now, just this once, do as I say, without question or further comment."
A huge silence fell in the room I'd heard that word from his lips that he had never used before. We "knew" we loved each other, and, physically, we were of course lovers. But sometimes in a relationship "knowing" isn't enough - you need the reinforcement of hearing it. But had he just used it as a casual vernacular expression, or did he mean it in the way that my whole being hoped he did? Should I remain silent, or should I risk it? Dare I ask? If I didn't, I could probably fool myself into believing that he meant it in the "right" way. But, as you know, I like to push the boundaries, to live on the edge. And I suppose that somewhere deep inside me I did need that ultimate reassurance - I didn't want to be still asking myself that question years later.
My body began to tremble and I knew I was asking the most important question of my life. I could barely control my voice as I whispered "What did you say....?"
There's a thing between lovers, isn't there, when you know that there's one of those pivotal moments in the relationship. Ali sensed this, looked me squarely in the eyes, and whispered "I said 'I love you', Steve. You may not leave me. You are the love of my life, not just the lover in my bed, and without you I am less of a man, and you may not leave me."
I couldn't help it. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I felt them running hotly down my cheeks.
"Steve, you are shedding tears for me.... Now I know that you feel the same. A fighter like you would not shed tears, or be seen to shed tears, unless he was moved to the depths of his being."
Tears began to flow from Ali, too, and we clung together in a joy and passion such as we had never known before, and which has continued with us since.
And so, my sons, no - our sons - that is the history of Ali and me. I needed to write this for you as you will not otherwise understand why we are doing as we are: no simple explanation that we could give you verbally would convince you that what we are doing is right! But perhaps, in later years, as you re-read this story you will understand how those events that even now seem to be so long ago in the distant past shaped the world in which we live, and the relationships we have.
All of you have repeatedly asked us why we meet in such secrecy with your six "uncles" each month, and now I will tell you. Our time as coffle slaves brought not only Ali and me together, but formed other unbreakable ties between all eight of us. You know that we all fought in the war to liberate our country, even though the others could easily have returned to their families once they had been returned here and freed by Ali's father. They risked their lives to remain with us, and our "brotherhood of the coffle" was at first the only resources that Ali and I had to combat the invaders. Men do not live and work naked, chained together for three years, and then do not risk their all for each other, without forming bonds that cannot be broken by time. But, like chains that can weaken and rust if they are left exposed to the earth, so we were all concerned that our bonds might be weakened if we did not take action to keep them clean and bright.
So once a month, without fail, for all the intervening fifteen years since our country was liberated, we have all met. Nothing prevents this - you may recall the outcry in the world's press when at one time Ali flew back from the United Nations where he was part of the reconstruction task force at what was perceived to be a crucial moment. But for us, this meeting, this maintenance of our bonds, is the supreme duty we have to each other, and it takes precedence over everything else.
We meet and remove our clothes, so we are once again all as we were when we were slaves: in our naked flesh we are all the same, and one cannot tell the difference between Ali, our ruler, and your uncle Kali, who returned to being a peasant, tending his meagre date crop. We have glorious, uninhibited sex, as is only possible between men who have known each other intimately for so long. It serves to remind all of us about what it means to be a man, what it is that truly binds men together. As we slither and slide our bodies over each other, there are no rulers, no peasants: we are once again just men, ordinary men, doing as we did when we were all slaves. Truly it reminds us all that we are the same. And that the love we learned for each other is the most important thing in all our lives.
Of course there are some differences - although Ali and I work out and are reasonably fit and muscular still (well, it's one of those unspoken little "competitions" that even the closest of lovers have between each other!), and some of us are as thin and wiry as they ever were, like Kali, others have "matured"! Faisel, for example, has lived a life of luxury and indulgence, and it shows in his bloated belly and the rolls of flesh that hang from his frame.
But it doesn't matter- we know that the love we have between us transcends these mere physical characteristics.
About three years ago as we all lay in that pleasurable state when we were satiated from our sexual endeavours and were talking over the goings on in the world, we all started to voice concern about our sons. You four have grown up in the Palace and are used to the life of ease and luxury as the sons of some of the most wealthy men on the face of the planet, but even Kali's sons, in their mud brick house out at the oasis, were beginning to cause him concern as he knew one day they would inherit his wealth (yes, he lives as a peasant, but that is his choice: all the Brotherhood Of The Coffle shared in the spoils of war when beat the South, and all are rich beyond any reasonable comprehension).
To all of us, the Brotherhood is the defining influence in our lives, and we believe that it is a precious gift that we ought to bestow on all of our sons: mere wealth you will have of course, but in this world it is hard for rich men to know who their true friends are, as opposed to those who hover around appearing to be friends but who are merely looking for opportunities to exploit the relationship. So we debated for many sessions how we could achieve this, how we could pass on to you, our sons, that thing that we hold most dear in the world.
All eight of us are in total agreement. We all have two sons (well, Ali and I have four between us!), and we have decided that the only way you can understand and learn what it is to be truly men, experiencing the heights of male to male bonding that so few men ever truly enjoy, is to repeat the experiences that we had.
You are all sixteen now, and as I write these last paragraphs our police are rounding you up from your schools and bringing you to the Palace. The Brotherhood will strip you, shave you, collar you, brand you, and then take your virginity (although we suspect that some of you have already lost it!). For the next three years you will live as naked coffle slaves, as we did. You will receive no special treatment, and we will auction you off as two coffles of eight to buyers who do not know your origins - we want you to be worked hard, beaten, whipped and used as slaves just as we were, so that when we buy you back after three years you will have that lifelong commitment to each other that we all share.
So do not treat us harshly, my sons, when you look back on your sixteenth year and those that follow. Read this history, and understand why we did this to you. I always complained that people did things for me that were "in your best interests" even though those things seemed cruel and harsh to me at the time.
Now I find myself in the same position, and I hope that you will understand when you read this testament.
THE END Pete Brown, January to April, 2005. London and France.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
That is the end of this story, that went on for much longer than I had planned at the beginning. I was inspired to write it by reading a couple of chapters of "The Second Civil War" (no reader has yet told me if there is more of that story), and had planned on only a few chapters. But the story of Steve and Ali got a hold of me, and although I got bored somewhere around the chapters in the earl twenties, my interest quickened again and the last few chapters fairly flew onto the screen.
I rarely write sequels, so please do not write and ask me to recount "what happened next" to Steve and Ali, or to describe what happened to the two coffles of sixteen year olds! Use your own imaginations - I'm not going to churn out more pages describing their feelings of humiliation as their "western" style clothes are stripped off them, how they feel as their "uncles" and fathers, the members of The Brotherhood Of The Coffle who they have known all their lives, rape them, or of the agonies they experience as the white-hot branding irons sear their youthful butts! I am sure they will have interesting adventures as, chained in their coffle, they are whipped and beaten as they perform menial manual tasks - tasks that will harden and toughen their bodies, turning them into desirable pieces of man flesh, as their fathers were. And of course they will bond with each others, as their fathers did, as eight virile naked men will. All of this you can imagine as easily as I can!
Two readers have however sent me notes which arose after chapter 32 of the story had appeared, posing questions that I had not addressed in the story as the circumstances they ask about were not "in the main line" of the plot, and so had not been considered by me. Thinking of what else might have gone on in the story universe was a mildly interesting intellectual challenge for me, and so I am answering those questions for the two readers here.
FIRST QUESTION: "One of the things I don't see in your story is what happens to the returning Southern slaves. Are they accepted into Southern slavery or released as free men. If they are taken as slaves then they could be returned to the East as slave soldiers. Does this happen?" ANSWER: As Steve is told somewhere in the story, "slavery is for life". Once a slave, always a slave. Steve and Ali remain the property of Ali's father in law, if not in practice, and as we see in chapter 33, the Leader uses this as the excuse for seizing Ali without the necessity of a further trial. This practice was that adopted by the South, and so the returning Southern soldiers are in fact slaves - they have been "bought" by their families or communities, using as currency coffles of Ali's countrymen.
The South was by now deeply committed to slavery, and Prexmire arrogantly would not change the laws to make exception for these men for fear of weakening the whole edifice of slavery. After all, if the enslaved Southern soldiers could be freed, what about the enslaved Northern soldiers on whom the South now relied?
Many families did not want their sons as slaves, and were deeply upset by the idea that they owned their sons, some of whom were of course married with sons of their own! It has to be said, though, that some parents who had been worried about their sons drinking, or driving fast cars, or contracting "unsuitable" marriages did not on the whole think it a bad idea that they now had total control over their sons' lives and could order the sons to desist.
Similarly where the families were too poor to buy their sons and a huge community effort went on in small towns to raise the money to buy a coffle to trade, the whole town was proud of its returning soldiers and earnestly wished them once more to be free. There were of course a small number of returning soldiers who were widely regarded in their communities as "rotten apples", and where the town thought that keeping them in slavery, acting as street cleaners and the like, would be the best thing for everyone. Those towns probably only bought the slaves as they conceived it as a patriotic duty, and one in which they had to be seen to play a part.
There was therefore a huge degree of confusion - at one level, many "free" soldiers could not do simple things like write cheques or get credit cards without their parents' or their towns' permission, and this was seen as both irksome and degrading. It caused annoyance at gymnasiums and public swimming pools and similar places where it became unclear whether the guy changing next to you and swinging his dick around was a "free" man who still bore the brand on his butt from his experiences as an enslaved soldier, or was genuinely a slave, one of the Northerners, perhaps, who was using the facility illicitly. And for those "free" soldiers who had themselves got families, what was the status of the children? - were they free, and had to bear the shame of having a slave as a parent, or were they too slaves: the American Civil Liberties Union protested vigorously that it was manifestly contrary to those children's rights that their liberty should be taken away just because their father had been sent off to war and got enslaved.
In an effort to resolve this situation, some states, like Southern California, pleaded "states' rights" and passed new laws that redefined these returned slaves as being "indentured", and as such, after a suitable time they could be freed as their indentured period was over. As no specific times were specified in the law for the period of indenture, parents who wanted to free their sons immediately could do so by setting a short indenture term, and those that wanted to retain control could equally easily do so by naming a period of many years. Of course this actually solved nothing: in addition to making it even harder in California to justify what was happening, there were consequent problems when Californian families with an indentured son had to relocate to other states as a result of a change in job, or when a freed indentured person moved to another state that did not recognise the Californian system and he found himself once more a slave, and so on.
I have only touched on some of the difficulties that having the returning soldiers as slaves caused, and organisations such as the ACLU were engaged on taking some hundreds of individual cases through the courts, a process which threatened to further slow the South's legal processes and which caused even more dissent amongst the population as a whole. The Californian experience also meant that many issues could not be resolved in one state's supreme court alone, and so there were starting to be appeals to the Supreme Court of the South.
The matter was never satisfactorily resolved, as the collapse of the South at the end of the third Civil War overtook it. The North decreed that in the newly reunified USA, slavery would henceforth be confined to criminals, and so enslaved soldiers from both the North and the South were at that point freed (unless of course the slaves had committed crimes, in which case they could be quickly be re-enslaved, but under the simpler criminal code).
In relation to the last part of the question, there never was any suggestion that there could be "soldier slaves", though. The returned Southerners could not be redeployed as soldiers again. It remained a fundamental tenet of US society that the army is a "citizen's army", composed of the people, fighting on behalf of the people. As such it was inconceivable that slaves could form part of it.
SECOND QUESTION
Further interesting twists to this story... but why did the Southern troops not just re-arrest the slaves who were exported back to Arabia, why did they let the newly enslaved soldiers be sent to the South, and how did the freedom-fighters effect the exchange of the newly enslaved soldiers and the freed slaves without interference from the Southern occupiers...??? Especially at first, there were few freedom fighters and many more Southern troops to disrupt the first handover of "freed" slaves
ANSWER
"Why did the (occupying) Southern troops not just re-arrest the salves who were being exported back to Arabia ...... Especially at first, there were few freedom fighters and many more Southern troops to disrupt the handover of "freed" slaves."? Well, for the first few coffles who arrived back home, it was simply not realised how important this was to become! When Steve and Ali traded their first coffle of Southern enslaved soldiers for sixty four of their freed fighters, the authorities deemed it wiser to stand back and simply let it happen. There seemed to be few enough men involved, and it was believed that the freed slaves would in any event return to their homes and families and pose no further threat - having seen life as a coffle slave, it was believed that they would not wish to risk being captured again if they joined Steve and Ali's army.
By the time it was realised that this was a wrong assumption, and that returned slaves flocked to the cause to continue the struggle and free their fellows, it was too late as the "feedback effect" alluded to in the story was really rolling. The constant skirmishes, ambushes, captures, and general sabotage of the oil facilities that Steve and Ali's troops were doing was tying up so many of the Southern occupiers that there was simply no available resource to attempt to track down and arrest the returning slaves.
The slaves could not be arrested before they left the South, as Steve and Ali cannily insisted that the slaves were en route for home before the Southern slaves being used to pay for them were allowed to leave the country.
".... how did the freedom-fighters effect the exchange of the newly enslaved soldiers and the freed slaves without interference..."
Steve and Ali used the time-honoured means that opposing armies have always used when negotiating terms and conditions relating to prisoners and the like: they involved the Red Cross. Steve and Ali proposed a settlement to the Red Cross and offered Southern slaves, and in turn the Red Cross received the coffles of Arabs. As has always been the case, neither side attempted to "double cross" the Red Cross who acted as honest brokers throughout.
The physical transfer was easy - slaves moving in both directions were easily transferred as cargo on the many oil tankers criss-crossing between the Gulf and the South.
THE END