"'S blood!" swore Enoch Evans, as he pushed his hard prick into Thasra's vagina. "You ain't getting any less tight, are you girl?"

Thasra, or Molly as she'd been rechristened by her master, was not at all flattered by this observation. Any slackness in her down there was only ever caused by him. And it wouldn't be something she'd have ever chosen to have if she'd not been so frightened of the bull-whip he was so fond of applying whenever she showed any reluctance to accept his gropes or other violations of her body. She looked up at her master above her, with his coarse rough stubbled face and long grey hair falling over his shoulders.

He pushed harder against the resistance from her dry unlubricated vagina, each thrust hurting her but no more than it did on the countless other occasions he had taken advantage of his status as her slave-master. As so often happened, a dribble of saliva detached itself from his slack rotten-toothed mouth and plopped messily on her small black breasts. He continued to wear his baggy cotton shirt which came to just below his waist. His other clothes, including his tall black hat, lay in a pile where he'd left them just before summoning his favourite slave to his quarters. She lay on her back, her head on the pillow she had spent so long fluffing up earlier in the day in the cause of her duties.

On the wall was a not especially life-like portrait of her master as a younger man in the military uniform he'd worn so proudly in the fight against the British yoke when he fought on the side of what had been formerly known as the Thirteen Colonies. He was proud of his valiant contribution to the liberation of the American people and for the values of the Declaration of Independence: the self-evident truths of which he would remind his slaves every day. This was when he would gather them together for morning prayers not long after he woke up and several hours after most of his slaves had themselves been awoken and coerced into service.

His demeanour on these occasions, standing in front of the flag with its stars representing every one of the free states of the Union, could not have been more different to that he was taking now, as his hard white penis pushed backwards and forwards between Thasra's legs, supporting his weight by two arms pinioned on either side of her, the dribble occasionally seeping through his stubble and onto her. He insisted that his slaves cover themselves during these prayer meetings, intent that he was that his servants and slaves should all serve the Lord Jesus Christ as well as he. Though Thasra could recall no passage in the large Holy Bible from which he habitually declaimed that said that her body was to be the plaything of her corporeal master as her soul was of her spiritual one.

"You should all consider yourselves lucky to live in the land of Freedom and Democracy," he would sometimes tell his slaves, regarding them in their well-worn ragged clothes; their hands and feet rough from labour in the house and in his extensive farm, and all struggling to comprehend a language which wasn't their own and of which they had differing levels of fluency. Thasra was in the awkward position of sharing with the other slaves no other language than that of her white devil masters with which to communicate. But she understood enough to realise that the freedom and liberty of which Enoch was so proud did not extend to those who so recently had been free in another continent where white men were rare and it was never as cold in the dead of the American winter. Life had not been easy for her in her African village, but it had never been as hard as here. True, there were more material goods here, but she remembered fondly the few cattle her family grazed and the wild animals whose flesh supplemented their meagre diet.

Enoch removed his erect penis from inside Thasra and proffered it towards her face. She regarded it with some distaste, but it was the only penis which she'd ever known with such intimacy. She took it in her thick dark lips, tasting again of its strong odour and its curious warmth. She moistened it with her tongue and saliva: Enoch's buttocks thrusting with a mechanical vigour while his face became ugly with passion. He groped at a breast with one of his hard hairy rough hands, with their broken nails. He gripped one of her long thin nipples between forefinger and thumb, trying to harden it such that it might seem that she too was enjoying their sexual adventure. Thasra preferred this, however, to his fucking. She was not too happy that she, like Sunidla, known by her Christian Name of Catherine, might become pregnant and bear a child who was neither fully black nor white, and would be a source of shame to her rather than of pride.

She raised her eyes to look into Enoch's face above, and grimaced at his uneven teeth with its many gaps. The white devils always had such poor teeth, unlike the good strong ones of her people and of the other Africans whom she'd met since she and her people had been forced into slavery. Her eyes wandered to the wall where Enoch kept two crossed swords and a musket. The former were mementoes of his service in the War of Independence. The latter was used when he went hunting for deer or boar on his estate. She was now so accustomed to such firearms that it was sometimes difficult for her to remember what a shock it had been for her and her tribe when they were first confronted by them.

Her people were themselves only one generation of freedom away from the tyranny of another tribe, against whose enslavement they had rebelled and run away to found their own village many miles across the forest from where her parents had been born. She had been born a free woman, as her mother would proudly tell her as they gathered fruits in the forest. But not free for long, as their one-time masters reappeared, but this time armed with the rewards of their trade with the British slavers. Thasra remembered the terrifying sound of gunfire: a sound the like neither she nor anyone else in her village had ever heard before. And then the confusion and the horror, as the bolder men and some of the just unlucky in her village were killed or wounded by these terrible, terrible weapons.

And then, along with all the women of the village, in full sight of their husbands and fathers, she was raped by the savage Hurati warriors, on the sad day which ended the freedom of the Thuralili people and, of course, her own. As Enoch restored his penis to her crotch and brutally thrust it back in, she contemplated bitterly the day when her virginity was torn away from her in blood, sweat and tears, leaving her collapsed on the ground, moaning and wailing, with the ache and agony of a pain that emanated from somewhere inside her violated crotch. To the side of her was her mother in similar agony, no doubt exacerbated by seeing the same happen to her daughter so soon before the sacred ceremony in which she would have otherwise had her maidenhead broken.

And then, with blood dripping from between her legs and also from her forehead where a Hurati had hit her with a musket butt, she was tied up in cords, like the men had already been, harnessed by rope around the neck and to the ankles, and then led away in a caravan of misery on a trail of many days and many miles to the coastal port where she was to find her worth in British shillings. Every day, she and what was left of her village, marched along with the cattle which the Hurati had taken for themselves through forests and grasslands, past herds of zebra and antelope, skirting past prides of lions, under the hot unremitting sun, the soles of her feet torn on rough stone and pricked by sharp grasses. And every evening she and the other women were again to endure the predations of their hated masters: a pattern of violation she now knew was not to end on their arrival at the coast.

The Hurati fucked her with the same lack of concern and love that Enoch was now expressing to her, however often he reminded her that she was his favourite slave-mistress. As many different penises penetrated her as there were men in the slaving party, and although each penis was different, the fucking always seemed the same. Brutal, uncaring, but thankfully brief.

And then she was at the coast. She'd never even suspected that so much water could exist in the world. All the water she'd ever seen before had been in the river near her village, but here was an expanse of water where there just did not seem to be another shore. But she was soon to know this water well enough, when, along with what was left of her tribe she was sold to a British slaver moored to the shore. And as the Hurati departed with more muskets, trinkets and valuables, she was to spend what came to seem like an eternity, shackled lengthwise in the hold of the boat, along with the rest of the human cargo, unhealthily close to other captors, most of whom were from tribes other than her own, who spoke in tongues she couldn't understand at all, less well than even that of the brutal Hurati.

When Enoch lectured his slaves on the hated British, Thasra could only agree with him. In her experience, the British were the most hateful people in the world. She couldn't understand however what was so bad though about the British yoke that Enoch found cause to complain. Taxes on tea. Restrictions of the freedom of movement and the right to bear arms. The rule of a tyrannical King from as far from the United States as they were from Africa. All this seemed abstract compared to the very real injuries she and the other slaves endured on the ship, as they were shackled together, with rats running freely around and on top of her, as the ship lurched and swayed over the ocean waves as it carried her towards what she was now persuaded to believe was the land of free men and free speech. Every horror she could imagine was magnified, as other people on the ship died in the hold, including her parents, and she felt continuously ill and wretched and miserable. She was constantly sea-sick. She caught a fever, which thankfully waned before she might be diagnosed as too sick to carry to the ship's destination and she would be cast into the sea alive like so many other slaves. The only blessing of the dreadful death rate of the journey was that gradually the hold became less crowded, although it became no less fetid and smelt no less disgusting. The only thing that prevented her being continually sick was the emptiness of her stomach as a result of the poverty of the rations that the British white devils allowed their captives.

As she regarded Enoch as he thrust back and forth into her, snarling and grunting all the while, Thasra was reminded of the first time she saw him, at the slave market, where she and all the other slaves brought on shore by the Thanks Be To God. He was just one of many men who were eyeing her up as she stood, topless and vulnerable, on a small platform which raised her feet above the ground and put her own eyes on the same level as her potential masters. They were all men and most were dressed rather better than the majority of sailors whom she'd seen on the boat, but few as well as the ship's captain or the slave trader who was soon introduced to her, very briefly, and in a language she still barely understood, as the one she could consider her master.

Enoch examined her, as did all the other men flocking around, by pulling open her mouth and looking at her teeth, rather as her father would when examining his cattle. He admired her small naked breasts and her slim, almost emaciated waist. And later, after the bidding had finished, she found that it was to be he, rather than the fat man with the ugly scar down his cheek or the well dressed gentleman with a demure wife, who was to be her master for what she knew would probably be the rest of her days. At this stage, she was so depressed and miserable that all she cared about was to end the uncertainty that had plagued her for so many months. Not that she would have had more choice were she less demoralised. Her main thoughts, when she had time to reflect, were still on her dead mother and father, whose bodies she saw dragged up onto the deck where she knew they were to be thrown to the sharks at sea.

"I' the name of the Lord!" swore Enoch, after releasing a thick viscous glob of semen into Thasra's vagina (where she knew she would soon be spending many hours with cold water to wash out what might otherwise cause her pregnancy). "This lovemaking is damnably thirsty work!"

He pulled himself off her, and lowered his hairy, spindly legs over the side of the bed, rubbing his eyes with the back of his fists. "I need ale. And good strong ale at that. Where is that damned whore, Lizzy?" He lifted himself off the bed and pulled a cord which rattled a bell nailed to the wooden walls of his chamber. Within a minute, Lizzy arrived, a tall proud black woman in a flimsy sack cloth, her full breasts loose and free in the capacious robe, her legs bare to the top of the coarse cloth which reached barely below her buttocks. She carried a flagon of ale and a wooden beaker on a tray which she placed on the table, next to Enoch's Holy Bible. She dared not smile, but her eyes sparkled warmly at Thasra, as she lay naked and ravished on the ruffled linen sheet. Thasra knew her not as Lizzy but as Thazilandrali, who had once been a chieftain's daughter in her own tribe before she too had been dragged away by other Africans as spoils of war after her father and his wives had been slaughtered. Now she was no more a chieftain's daughter than was Thasra, the people of her village now scattered over the many farms and plantations of Connecticut and Maine.