Chapter 12

(In which Clementine passes a fourth year of misery)

"How was your annual chat to Rashumba? I saw you had a nice long talk before she started slicing up your poor old back! It must be great to meet up with her and talk over old times! She gave you her best effort yet, I would say. But you seem OK. They'll never break you, Clemmy!"

Alexia and her lover were lying together at midnight on the day of the anniversary. It was bad enough to know that another year had passed and her imprisonment was going interminably on and on, but each anniversary had to be marked by the agony of flagellation skilfully inflicted by a past mistress in that black art accompanied by sneering gloating from the venomous Rashumba. The whipping, though, was followed by the most delicious comfort! Clemmy had felt her darling's tongue licking her sore back for the past two hours. Poor Alexia must be getting pretty dry after all the saliva she had left on Clemmy!

"It was like the others, Alexia - only worse. I think she gets better and better, but I don't care any more. I really truly don't give a shit about it all. It still hurts but I'm not afraid any longer when I'm tied up against that fucking wall waiting for those bitches to start flogging me. And I don't jerk under the lash these days. You must have seen that? Pain is my destiny, Alexia and I accept it. It hurts just as badly as ever, but I live with it now. I can hardly remember what being without pain was like and I'll never know such a time again. So this is my life. A life of unending agony made bearable only because I am with you! You, my darling and these other women. Getting a team of great fighters together and keeping them up to scratch. I'm happy enough with my lot. I mean! What choice is there? As long as I am happy, they lose and I win."

The two lay together for a while. The night was frosty and they both wondered what the coming winter would be like. Now that the regime had been relaxed for ultra cold weather the other women would be indoors all day and all night. Only Clementine, who would work outdoors no matter how cold it became, had any reason to fear it. And she no longer felt fear or any other emotion save love for Viola and Alexia. Her hatred of Rashumba was a thing she had forced herself these last few months to exclude utterly from her mind. She accepted all the torments that the black woman inflicted on her in a totally impersonal way. In view of the utter powerlessness of her situation vis a vis her enemy, she could now only keep her sanity by forgetting her. The woman who had just whipped her was nobody, just a hand wielding a whip, no different to any of the guards - or so she tried to tell herself.

Clemmy kissed Alexia goodnight and felt the body next to her relaxing into a deep sleep. She lay awake a little longer, though. She had not been entirely truthful to Alexia, whom she did feel very fond of. She was not going to be here for the next nine years. She had wasted too much of her life as it was. And it was Viola who filled her dreams, not faithful dear Alexia. It would hurt to leave her behind, but, as she had said, if Clemmy made it home the Government would be forced to improve conditions here. The world community had ways of bringing small countries into line. Alexia would benefit from her escape, as would the rest of them.

She slipped into slumber and, as she did so, realised not for the first time that the fight tournaments were her best hope of getting out. There must be a way of talking to some of the spectators, one of whom might be able to help. She was sure some of them were not locals, but Westerners like herself.

Rashumba had pulled a shoulder while thrashing Clementine. It hadn't brought Clemmy any benefit, though. The injury did not show up until later and she delivered all her lashes with her customary thoroughness and terrifying power and her subsequent punches had hurt her victim as badly as ever they had in the clearing over three years ago. But the next day Rashumba had the most intense pain whenever she tried to raise her arm. The weather here was getting uncomfortably cooler already and there were no local doctors she trusted, so she went to Paris for treatment.

In between her sessions at the clinic, she revisited some of her old haunts. It was with some happiness that she found that the club where she and Viola had done their painful act still functioned. The manager remembered her and enquired after Viola, whom he had not seen since Clementine took her back to England with her. She growlingly replied that she had no idea. Then she took a seat and prepared to enjoy the show. She was disappointed to see that it was tamer than in her day,. There was a whipping act, but it involved a woman flogging a man and not terribly hard at that. If she were in charge of this place, there would be more action that this.

She closed her eyes and saw again Viola's bleeding back. She still missed that girl sometimes, but the memory of staggering dazedly out of the wood after her fearsome beating by Clementine hands and seeing the look of joy on her face as the winner carried her off had destroyed much of the love she had once felt.

One day she drove out to Viola's house in the country. It was not so much that she hoped to see Viola again, and she very much doubted that her former lover/sex slave had been near France since Clementine took her away. Something told her that she had lost Viola for ever. She wanted to see the place where she had seen off a dozen challengers before finally being beaten in a very close contest by the loathsome Clementine, who was now paying dearly for her insolence! She went into the grounds, after seeing that the house was shuttered and apparently unoccupied. She looked at the deserted scene and was more sure than ever that Viola had not been near her country retreat in years - possibly since Clementine had taken her back to England. Well - she wasn't interested in her any more, not after she had seen Clementine beat her.

She spent little time looking at the house, with its peeling paint and general air of desolation, but made for the wood along the path where she had last walked side by side with an opponent who had not deigned to look at her once on that fateful procession. In a few minutes she was in the clearing. It seemed smaller than she remembered. She stood in the centre, where she had fought thirteen other women and relived her triumphs when she had despatched all those dykes to bloody unconsciousness and chuckled at the memory. Then the last fight kept coming into her mind. She undressed in the autumn chill and assumed a fighting posture. It felt like the first time she had raised her fists since that awful day, although she had been training hard during the summer. She did a bit of punching at the frosty autumn air and squatted down on the grass.

She recalled how the blows she had rained on Clementine that day had not stopped the blonde girl coming back at her time and time again, her face a soggy, bloody mess and her body one giant bruise, until she, Rashumba, had been left senseless on the ground. She remembered coming to and staggering to the edge of the wood and seeing Clementine carrying her Viola away not seeing fit to give one backward glance. Well, she had recently battered that arrogant bitch again and this time there had been no chance for her to fight back. It had felt good to feel her fists make contact with that hated face and pound on those ribs and that defenceless stomach, but she knew that a fight with her on equal terms, one in which she was victorious, was what she desired most of all. She might be risking a repeat of the defeat she had suffered here but she felt compelled to take the risk. Unhappily, though, she would be no good with her shoulder in the state it was right now.

Rashumba had no idea how long she sat there, but it couldn't have been long before the cold made her come to her senses. She couldn't take the cold like the tough Clementine who had no choice in the winter but to live and work outdoors. She couldn't fight like quick, hard-hitting agile, brave Clementine and she couldn't take a whipping like the stoic Clementine, who never uttered a murmur as her back was shredded time and time again. If she had been sent to that prison of horrors she knew she would never have lasted a week and Clementine appeared to be thriving there! She hated her rival more than ever in that moment and vowed to think of new ways to torment her when she returned to Abhlovia.

Later that week she developed another bad cold and flew off the Bahamas, where James was to join her for a ten day break. She thought of England and Viola, but knew she couldn't go there, not if she knew what was good for her.

As the pair sat by the pool on the day before their return to Europe watching the sun set in a glory of red, Rashumba mentioned Clementine, at that moment recovering from a more than usually ferocious punishment.

"I want you to think of new things for that cow this summer. It gets hot then, James. Really hot. I think a few days in the sun stretched out on the ground with nothing to drink all day would be a nice addition to her regime."

"We don't want to spoil her for the fights, Rashumba. As you know, they're beginning to bring in serious money. And then there's the quarrying - she works amazingly hard and more than pays for her keep. Her productivity is astounding - really incredible. And please don't forget I have to satisfy my boss as well as you. We can't overdo it with the punishments, but I will see what we can arrange. I'll get them to cut her water ration during the day. And she can spend the nights staked out if you like, but we can't push her too far. Remember she can only take so much! She may be tough, but she's still human and has her breaking point. And there is the complication that the other women have come to like her and they trust her to settle their quarrels and get them organised. The guards rely on her to run the cage and she does it brilliantly. We can't upset them all and provoke a mutiny."

Clementine's next bout was six weeks into her fourth year and a week before her next escape attempt. She won against Ira, but was hurt, suffering a cracked cheekbone and much bruising to her ribs. A lucky kick had her limping through much of the second half of the match and the lack of her usual mobility meant that she had to go on soaking up punishment all through the fight until she took advantage of a lucky opening and put Ira down for a count of ten. When Ira got shakily to her feet and Clemmy was declared the winner, there was nothing triumphant in Clementine's demeanour. She had been lucky to win that one and everyone watching knew it. She lost no teeth but did have her mouth hit so hard at one point that her teeth penetrated her lower lip. The crowd had its fill of blood that night. It was not like that time in the clearing with Rashumba, but bad enough.

She had fought Ira and Alexandra four times apiece in the last series of fights. Now she was into her fourth year and the threat posed by these two was as potent as ever. Each time she fought one or other, she knew she must use every skill and all her strength to survive. The other women sensed the constant danger to the leader's position They would desert her willingly if she lost. Life was certainly very tough indeed at the top. And if she were no longer at the top, her misery would be quite insupportable. It was only her hard won leadership that gave her that last remaining shred of self-respect that made life endurable.

The thought of a life up against these two tough opponents every few weeks and being whipped with increasing severity almost as often temporarily unhinged her. She was so desperate to get away from this interminable reduction of her once beautiful face into a battered nose-flattened mess, to say nothing of what her back must be like by this time, that she tried to get away. She was twenty-one now and knew her looks would go for ever if she got knocked around too much more. So she made another run for it.

Ira and Alexandra were both working in the quarry that day. Both had adapted well to the conditions in the ten months they had been here. They were strong young women and, like Clemmy, saw that their only hope lay in strength and hardihood. They had the advantage over her of being Abhlovians. The rest of the women, however much they admired Clementine, never lost sight of her foreignness.

This pair had not forgotten how Clemmy had beaten them and more than once in the last year. Also they hoped for their sentence to be reduced if they caught Clementine out in some infringement of the rules. Thanks to this pair, Clemmy had been savagely whipped several times, most recently on the soles of her feet, a punishment that had given her terrible pain - particularly as she had still been forced to keep up with the others on the way to and from the quarry despite the state if her soles which bled for days as a result.

They saw Clemmy make her move and let her get some way before alerting the dozy guards, whose inattentiveness had given Clemmy her chance. The two laughed as they saw Clemmy being dragged back, her mouth bleeding where the guards had struck her and her stomach an angry red where the rifle butts had thudded wickedly into it.

"What possessed you, Clementine? Do you want to get yourself killed?" the guard had asked when she had finally been run down by the motor cycling guards and cornered, her eyes full of frustrated tears and her heart sick with apprehension. She knew she was in for it, now!

"Yes. What do I have to live for? If I can't go home I don't want to live any more - not like this. I've done nothing wrong, for Heaven's sake. Certainly nothing to justify twelve years round the clock torture!"

They put her back to work. When she got back to the cage they tied her up in the cold all night. Next day they gave her a hundred lashes, which was light for her these days, but they told her she would receive one hundred every week from now onwards on each Friday, in addition to any other penalties she might incur. Well - that was not too bad, she told herself. She was as hard and brutalised as any of her companions by this time. Only the memory of Viola and the love Alexia had for her, saved her from totally losing her humanity.

Ira and Alexandra had not been too subtle this time and their treachery had been noticed by one of the other quarry workers. By evening all the cage women knew how they had broken the prisoner's code by betraying Clementine. Under cover of darkness, Ira and Alexandra were surrounded and mercilessly beaten for their treachery. Clementine, tied to the ground, heard the blows thudding into those two stooges and made no attempt to intervene, not that her pleas for the two would have been heeded if she had called out to them to stop. When the guards saw them in the morning, neither was remotely fit for work, indeed they were scarcely alive. They were taken into the hospital. Clemmy never saw either again. Rashumba and James had both of them handsomely paid off and they returned to their former life knowing better than to breathe a word about what had happened.

The word got around that Clemmy was to be whipped every Friday and the women were pleased to think they had something to watch once a week. The guards were getting slacker these days and more humane. Sometimes weeks could pass and no one was punished. The hardened and brutal cage women, inured to pain themselves, enjoyed Clemmy's punishments because they were far more terrible than any one else ever received. They might like and respect her, but they liked a good whipping too, especially when the victim was brave and Clemmy was always that. The other women guessed that Clementine's floggings were a never ending battle between her and her tormentors and as long as she kept silent she retained some shreds of dignity in her squalid and brutal life.

She got a hold of herself after that fiasco of an attempt and was never to lose control for the rest of her time in the prison. She would have some hard fights and take some stupendous floggings, especially when Rashumba was in town, but she got through the rest of her fourth year and had the satisfaction of building a fine team. The tournaments had been broadened and outside fighters were brought in to take on Clemmy's team. Only two of her fighters were beaten and Clemmy was not one of them. She was kept very strictly away from the audience, though, and they were not allowed anywhere near the fighters.