Beautiful Stranger
Copyright© 2003 by Ashley Young
Chapter 15
Erotica Sex Story: Chapter 15 - Book I. The High Empress came to her people from a distant planet far across the sky. This work tells of the beginning of the Slave War, and of the Empress before she rose to power.
Caution: This Erotica Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Ma/ft ft/ft Romantic Fiction Science Fiction Slow Violence
In the stillness of the early morning, the sounds of birds and the rustlings of small creatures were masked by the creaking of wooden carts and the pounding of horse hooves. As the night had waned, so had the storm. The merciless driving winds turned to a mild breeze, and the pelting rain tapered to a light drizzle. Already, the boiling clouds had thinned and calmed, and the warm light of the sun was becoming apparent even through the grayness.
Barrad Dain sat atop one of the carts, rain cloak pulled loosely over his head, eyes wandering among the dripping boughs to either side of the road. He took in a deep draught of the cool, damp air, sighed. The rains over Ninev had washed the toxins from the air, leaving a poisonous fog floating just above the ground - Barrad knew the fumes would rise again into the air by the time of his return. But there, on the edge of the Hai Lei, the air was pure and clean, without even a hint of the hashness he breathed every day. Even mingled with ozone in the wake of a storm, the air was fresher. And if the Hai Krun lord Darrak was to be believed, he and his pirate followers would at last be able to leave the Wastes of Ninev, to live freely and openly in the Hai Lei with all its wonderful air, to set up their shops publicly, with an almost endless supply of young and valuable girls.
Barrad sat on the hard bench with a hand gingerly covering his bandaged ribs, considered his new prospects. In his mind, he pictured a sturdy building, hewn from the massive forest trees rather than the salty rock of Ninev. He saw desks at the front by the door for customers to sit and discuss their prospective purchases; he saw tall shelves - rows upon rows of shelves - where he could keep record-bindings of all his business, girls of every age, shape, and size, catalogued and waiting to be indexed by an interested buyer; he saw large stone safes in the back filled with bags upon bags of gold; maybe he would even keep several cages in the building with showpieces inside, the very best girls on display, with the rest of the cages in a warehouse out back... He sighed again. Now that the possibility had presented itself, he longed to be forever rid of Ninev.
"Hager," said Barrad, turning to the man sitting on the bench beside him.
"Cap'n?" came the drawled reply. The bent man gave the reigns a slight tug to slow the team of horses on the rough road.
"You think the men can keep from fuckin'up?"
"D'know." A shrug. "S'the firs'time we tried it s'way. Might do good t'remind evry'n 'fore w'get there."
Barrad sighed, shuddered at the lazy slurring. "I was thinkin' the same thing."
"S'gonna be might'diff'rn't fr'm now'n."
"Yes it is." The pirate captain glanced from beneath his cloak at the men riding on top of the cage behind him, and at some of the men clinging to the tops of other carts. "We've been in hiding for far too long... I just hope th'men can adjust in time."
"Won't be t'bad, cap'n. 'll all be fine, just need a'little r'minder now n'then, s'all."
"I hope you're right, Hager."
For years - for as long as most of them could remember - the slavers had conducted every aspect of their illegal business in secret, and when Barrad stepped back from the last captain's dead body to claim the title for himself, he had continued the practice. Secrecy was so important, had become so ingrained in the very fibers of their beings, the all out assaults of late had thrown the pirates' way of life into an uproar. Their numbers were small when compared with the size of an army - even compared with the populations of the villages they raided - and they could afford to lose no one.
And over the past week, the pirate band had begun to take casualties. They had marched to engage a small army, suffered predictable losses during the clash - and had done so willingly. Then, wholly un-looked for, two young women - one with black hair and one with silver - had done even more damage by themselves. Now, their numbers cut almost by half and their slave cages filled only with worthless captured soldiers, the pirates were once again going about their business as if nothing had changed. The complete breakdown in discipline and control that Barrad had expected had not happened, and he was at a loss to explain it.
Yet, things were not the same as they were before the losses began. A larger number had marched into battle, certainly, but never before had so many pirates gone on a raid together. In the past, the cloak for their small bands had been the dark of night - a group of five to ten pirates could move stealthily from village to village, easily gathering over one hundred girls on raiding trips that would last up to two weeks; they kept to the shadows, above all else avoiding detection and confrontation. There were many reasons a young girl might go missing in the night: she might run off with a boy from another village, she might be caught and eaten by a pack of wild dogs, she might be overcome with a sense of adventure and wander off to find the sea; parents had many possibilities to worry about, and as long as the numbers of missing girls did not grow too high, the idea of pirates was little more than a myth. Thus, the pirates could live and work in secrecy and relative safety.
But now, two hundred pirates - almost the entire remainder of the band - rode atop their creaking and groaning carts on a raiding trip, all bound for the same village. Together, they would raid the village in broad daylight, then move on to the next. Barrad ran over the math again in his head: the raids would not always need to be this big, but to recover from their losses they needed at least three thousand new girls. Better to have four or five thousand. Perhaps if they could collect that many in a week's time, he could convince the shipping captains to make another run rather than waiting until the next month.
With two hundred men, five thousand in less than a week might just be possible. Barrad let a thin smile touch his lips; he had tried, since first agreeing to the alliance, to not allow himself to become caught up in the possibilities, to act calmly and rationally - that was the way to survive; now, riding into the Hai Lei with the cool, clean breeze in his face, the possibilities danced endlessly in front of him. The 'it' for which they had all been waiting was now upon them at last.
"Cap'n!" came a call from the front of the line.
Barrad turned his attention forward to see the lead carts had already pulled off the road. The trees were still thick on either side, and the large carts were pressed for space as they pulled one by one alongside each other.
The man from the front shouted again, "Hey, cap'n! This's it'ere!" He pointed emphatically to his left.
"Fine," answered Barrad.
"Right there! 'ere it is!"
"Fine! I heard you, shut the fuck up!" Barrad sighed. "Nothing like announcing ourselves to the frightened villagers. Let's give them all a fair chance to get ready... 'get the girls inside, honey, the pirates are here!'"
As Hager pulled the cart into place beside the others, Barrad leapt to the damp ground, followed by the others riding above the cage. Fifty pirates stood on the road outside the village, and more joined them as the trailing carts came to a halt as well. The band was loosely knit - tough men, good fighters to be sure, but by no means an army. Dressed in all manner of clothing, carrying all manner of weapons, the only thing which really unified the group was their salted, pock-marked skin and brown teeth. They bore no crest or banner, they held no loyalty except to gold, and they heeded no law, save for the one which says: 'Take what you can, when you can, and from whom.' There could be no doubt in the mind of any who passed on the road at that moment: these were pirates.
When the last of the carts pulled to a stop, and the final riders leapt down to join the growing mob, Barrad commanded their attention to the best of his ability.
"Now, listen!" the pirate captain shouted, making sure all two hundred could not help but listen. "Before you dumb shits go'n get any ideas, remember why we're 'ere."
"Killin," came a slur from the mob.
"What the fuck?" Barrad turned to face the speaker. "No! What the fuck!" It was exactly the type of response Barrad did not understand - and exactly the type type of response he had been expecting.
"S'all we been doin' b'fore..." The man stopped speaking as Barrad thrust his spear through his stomach; he coughed, clutched the wooden shaft.
"Fuck," Barrad spat on the man. Then to everyone, he shouted: "Now that's th'only killin' I wan'to see t'day! Right? Anybody else wan'to do any killin'?"
Grumbling silence.
"Fine," he continued. "We're not working for Hai Krun anymore. We're not killin' the villagers anymore, not unless we'ave to. This is a slaving run: we're only here to get the girls."
The grumbling turned toward approval at the mention of girls.
"We're gonna go in, force'em to surrender, then take the girls an' leave. No killin' this time. I fuckin' mean it, anyone I see stick their knife into one of th'villagers is gonna get my spear same's this dumb shit," he gestured down.
More grumbling, some angry.
"Hey! If you go an'kill all the men and women, how are we gonna get more girls? We gotta leave'em alive so they have more daughters."
Reproachfully, the other pirates saw the wisdom in this, and the grumbling generally turned to agreement.
"Good," said Barrad, sounding as if he did not truly believe his men would obey his order. "Then let's go."
Already, the quiet village was becoming alerted to the invading rabble. Though the view from the road was obscured by a thick line of trees and tangled undergrowth, the villagers had heard the sounds of the horses and carts, and listened to the muffled sounds of voices; there was yet no alarm raised, but more than one nervous mother hurried to see what her children were doing.
In the quiet, a scream broke out. Sofia Galo stood frozen in fear, eyes wide at the sight of the ragged band entering the clearing; she clutched her one-year-old daughter to her chest with white knuckles. Her breath came in quick gasps. She had been walking across the square, returning to her home after visiting with several other young mothers; the early morning had been spent picking out the perfect outfit for the baby; at eighteen, Sofia had taken for granted that she could fit into the same clothes she had worn before her pregnancy. So the morning had passed with idle gossip and discussion of the inconsequential. Then on her way home, a sight that had never been seen in the small village: two hundred rough-looking men sauntering confidently, menacingly, out from the trees by the road; all of them carried weapons, and looked like they knew how to use them.
And Sofia had screamed. All thoughts of the morning gone, she had reacted to the sight the only way she knew how. She had perceived the obvious threat, but did not fully appreciate its true nature. She did not immediately attach the label 'pirates' to the dirty men she saw. She did not stop to consider that she was a pretty girl in the prime of her youth, the perfect quarry for a band of slave traders. She did not realize in that instant that the alarm would have been better raised had she run through the square shouting about an invasion. All she saw was a faceless mob bearing down on her; her heart leapt, her pulse quickened, and she had screamed.
By the time the initial shock had worn off and Sofia realized what was happening, it was too late. She turned to run, tried to call out, to warn the others. A singular thought passed through her mind: she needed to find her husband; somehow that would fix everything. As the girl drew breath to shout out warning of the raid, even as she took her first running step away from the approaching pirate rabble, she heard a low whirring sound behind her. In the back of her mind noticed that the sound rapidly grew nearer and louder; it was the sound of something passing quickly through the air, like the sound of a whip, but much lower in pitch; interesting. Then, before she could shout her first word, the air was pushed violently from her lungs; she coughed. She felt a tightening constriction around her abdomen, saw a faint blur of motion moving in a tight circle around her; then another impact, and her body toppled to the dirt. The force of her fall jarred the baby loose from her arms, and the tiny bundle began to wail.
The pirates came closer.
Sofia found herself bound somehow, unable to move her arms, her face in the mud. Desperately, she struggled to locate her daughter; the baby's cries continued. She saw one of the houses nearby open, and a pair of feet come running out. With a twist of her neck, she saw it was her friend Rose Evan, coming in response to her scream. Rose had not yet seen the pirates; Sofia tried to speak, tried to warn her, but her breath was still caught in her chest. She heard the whirring again: it was a bola. The set of three weights connected by long cords, came flying through the air, spinning round about chest-height. It moved quickly, as if thrown with great force; almost too quickly to see. When it reached the running figure, the nexus of cords struck her body and the weighted ends began to spin back upon themselves, quickly wrapping Rose in a tight, inescapable coil. The weights spun around the girl several times before the cords ran out; one of the weights stuck her in the back and the other two in the arms, and she fell to the ground just as her friend had a moment before.
Three more girls appeared in the square at the sounds of commotion, and each of them were quickly captured by the spinning bolas. Still, no real alarm had been raised. The scream and the baby's cries had attracted the attention of the men working within earshot, who also came to investigate, but with no word to warn them, they did not come prepared to fight. The first real alarm was sounded when Fen Galo arrived in the square and saw what was happening; having recognized his wife's scream, he had rushed in from his fields without stopping to drop his spade.
Fen rounded the corner of a barn at the West end of the square, saw the bound girls lying helpless on the ground, saw the ever advancing mass of armed men. He turned, shouted to those who followed him from the fields: "Pirates!" The word carried with it a ring of uneasy terror for those men who followed behind. Pirates? Slavers? Such a thing was not possible, was it?
They did not really exist, did they? But the wide-eyed Fen said it again: "Pirates! It's pirates! To arms, to arms!" Even as Fen shouted his warnings, he spotted his fallen wife lying in the mud, with his baby girl beside her; he raced forward.
For an instant, Fen forgot about the approaching rabble of slavers, so intent was his focus on the bound woman. It was only as he reached her side, ready to drop to his knees and undo the bonds, that his awareness again flicked forward to show him a great dirty figure, running toward him from the opposite direction. His heart leapt. On impulse, he raised his hands in front of him - to his surprise, he found he still had the sturdy handle of the spade clutched in his hands - with two fists, he gripped the farming implement, held it above his head to block the swift downswing of a spear.
Fen flinched, blinked. At first, he thought the impact had broken his elbows. But his arms were still intact; the cracking sound must have come from the spade handle. There was no time to think: the pirate had taken another step closer, and the spear was swinging again. Fen stood with one foot behind his wife's back and the other in front of her stomach - even with his heart hammering in his ears, some small part of his mind was able to ensure that he did not tread on his daughter - and he twisted his body to block the next swing. The spade broke, the handle splitting and splintering in his hands; caught off-ballance, Fen tripped and fell.
Deprived of a weapon, Fen's next thought was to recover the helpless baby still crying on the ground beside him. He twisted, rolled over onto his hands and knees. In one swift movement, he scooped the little girl into his arms and began to run. Just ten yards away, he spotted the open front door of Lusi Stollop's house; he saw the woman's face emerge from the opening door, saw the expression of horror that overcame the face when she saw the scene that had befallen the peaceful square. Even as he ran, he shouted to her: "Get out of there! Get in the trees!" He took another running step toward the house. Another. Then, he felt the impact on his back as the pursuing pirate swung the spear into his ribcage. He coughed and fell forward. In a last desperate struggle for consciousness, he tossed the baby toward the open door. "Take her!" he managed as he hit the ground. Then blackness fell.
All around, there was a surge of motion. The pirates raced forward, swarming into the village in all directions. The men who followed from the fields had taken up the cry: "Pirates!" Several of them ran back to the fields to call the men who had been too far away to hear the commotion. Others rushed to their homes, trying to retrieve their wives or daughters. Still others hurried to find weapons; the small village's economy did not rely heavily on hunting or gaming, and as such, only a small supply of spears could be found tucked away in the houses. Some of the children who had been playing outside made the mistake of running through the village to find their parents: the boys were clubbed down with spears and the girls were captured.
It became apparent quickly that only the girls and young women were targets. Many of them, some hysterical, dashed out of their homes toward the protection of the trees. Those that managed to avoid the ensnaring vice of the whirling pirate bolas climbed lightly into the upper branches, almost leaping between limbs in a motion that would have seemed playful if not for the look of terror in their eyes. Clinging to the branches, they looked round at one another in relief, then back down at the scene below, only to realize that their position of safety was not to last.
As the mass of pirates darted between buildings searching for more girls, swinging the occasional spear when one of the village men darted out of a doorway that was too near, about fifteen of them began the process of gathering the bound girls off the ground and carrying them off in the direction of the road. And while the newly escaped girls watched from the trees, fifteen more pirates came in their direction carrying what looked like long whips.
The construction of these whips was similar to the bolas, with weights attached to the long cord. Their were two weights, one fixed at about two thirds of the whip's length, and a smaller one near the tip; the whips were easily twenty yards long. When the first pirate, a short, ugly man with heavily pock-marked skin, reached the nearest tree, he cast his whip upward with a sharp, flicking motion. The purpose of the whips was immediately obvious when the tip flew into the upper branches: the larger weight began to fall before the tip had reached its zenith and the long cord began to bend in the middle; the pirate jerked downward on the handle, and the weight in the middle of the whip suddenly became an airborne anchor point, while the weighted tip spun in a quick, tight circle back around on itself. The spinning cord wrapped itself around a branch, hitting a young woman as it did - exactly the woman for whom the pirate had been aiming - and with a surprised shriek, she fell.
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