Béla Book 2: Phoenix

Bibi entered the luxurious red and white striped tent of her mistress, bending low to get through the opening. Once inside, she stood straighter, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the comfortable darkness. The sand was much cooler to her feet than the hot, sun-baked sand surrounding the huge camp, both of which extended out to the horizon.

Nearby, there was an oasis – a few scrubby trees and bushes and a pitifully small pond – not nearly enough to water the troops camped for the night in the vast Wadi Desert, but her mistress, Daryna, held some influence over the captain of an entire regiment, so both camp followers, Bibi and Mistress Daryna, had been permitted this site to set up for the night. There were at least a hundred other tents set up by women who made their livelihood off the soldiers of Cambius by selling their bodies and, often, other wares, sometimes even food, if they could manage to transport it from campsite to campsite without spoilage. 'But then, ' Bibi thought, 'that's what spices are for, right?'

A soldier, Rustam, followed Bibi into the cool darkness of Daryna's tent, almost bumping into the diminutive girl when she stopped inside the entrance.

"So where is this little bit of Egyptian magic you would show me?" Rustam asked, draping his arms over the girl's shoulders and pulling her backward against his metal breastplates.

Bibi leaned back and pressed her lips against his neck just behind his beard, which was still wet from his having just washed the day's march from his face.

"It's over here," Bibi murmured quietly. "In my Mistress' satchel."

After searching through several bags of clothing and cooking utensils, Bibi found the small, hardened satchel she'd been looking for. "Here it is!"

She carefully placed the bag on the smooth surface of her own trunk of clothing, then reached in, being careful not to break anything, and pulled out a small urn. It glowed in the darkness, a deep, bronze reflection of the single candle burning inside the tent.

"This is indeed a rare piece," Rustam observed, admiring it as Bibi carefully shook its contents out onto her trunk – two coils of copper wire, some pieces of bone from, perhaps, a small bird, and a curly wire, also made of copper.

"There was another piece," Bibi explained as she cut a small piece of citrus in half and squeezed its juices into the little urn, "made of sand, melted and reformed into a tiny bowl that fit over the top of this."

Two more pieces of fruit, juiced, filled the urn, then Bibi picked up two bird bones and inserted the end of each one into tiny holes Rustam hadn't noticed before on top of the little bronze urn. "You could see right through the bowl, even though it was solid – hard. It had its own quality of ancient magic, and it would make whatever you put beneath it grow in size."

Rustam snorted, clearly not believing the little whore. He knew that if a camp girl could create a mystery around herself, she could earn more coin for a night of pleasure in her tent. He wondered how many others she might have shown this trifling bit of pottery to and was beginning to feel restless. Bibi was almost magical, herself, as he discovered the first time he'd touched her naked skin. There was an allure, a depth to her that he was anxious to explore and, he suspected, she was as anxious as he.

Still, he watched, patient, not willing to force the girl into what she would eventually offer willingly, while Bibi unwound the wires and threaded them through the bones to touch the flexible thin wire she'd earlier stretched across the top of the urn and attached to the base of each bone sticking out of its respective hole.

She took the loose end of one wire and pressed it under the metal latch on her trunk. "Now watch," she said, taking the end of the other wire and wrapping it up in a woolen cloth.

"Oh," she said, suddenly remembering, "you need to blow out the candle."

Rustam laughed aloud at this. So she wanted to do it in the dark, did she? Well, he was willing. It would be part of her mystery. He pinched the candle flame and it vanished between two large fingers, plunging the tent into near total darkness.

"Can you find your way back over here?" Bibi asked, pleasant laughter in her voice, as well.

"It depends on what I find when I get there," Rustam replied, willing to play her erotic game of 'find the naked girl in the dark'.

"Just follow my voice," Bibi whispered, barely audible over the sounds of the camp outside. When Rustam bumped into her, he voiced his disappointment that she was still dressed.

"You can have me in a moment," Bibi promised, "But first, just watch." She took the woolen cloth with the copper wrapped inside and began brushing and rolling it with her hands.

"Watch the urn," she chided him when his hands found their way into the armholes of her garment and slipped around to squeeze her breasts. She didn't smack his hands away, so he continued gently squeezing and caressing the skinny, dark-haired beauty while watching the urn over her shoulder.

As Bibi increased the movements of her hands across the wool cloth, the urn, or rather, the thin... 'filament', a voice inside her head announced, giving the thin wire a name ... began to glow. She felt Rustam gasp in surprise as he watched.

"It's magic!" he exclaimed.

"No, it's just electricity," Béla replied, then realized, 'Oh, fuck! I'm dreaming again! That damned Praetor!'

---

Bibi awoke to the sensation of a terrible weight pressing down on her. Pressing up against it, she realized that the tent must have collapsed during the night.

'Huh! Must've been a windstorm and I slept right through it. Stupid tent.'

Her movements caused something to move beside her, and she remembered that Rustam had stayed with her through the night.

"Wake up! The tent fell on us last night!" she exclaimed, shoving enough of the tent off the top of her so she could nudge Rustam awake.

A muffled yelp and cry for 'Help!' Bibi couldn't tell the direction of the sound, but she knew how the tent was oriented – had been oriented – so she shoved up at the canvas and tried to tunnel toward where she believed her mistress, Daryna, had been sleeping. She immediately began having serious problems. First off, there was a LOT of sand on what had been the 'roof' of her tent, and it pressed down on her with a relentless weight, dropping the canvas down in front where she was trying to dig, and pressing down on her back and legs where she'd just been.

'I could die in here, ' Bibi suddenly realized, then hoped there were others, somewhere above, that might be digging toward them, intent on rescue, because she was beginning to think she wasn't going to get out of this by herself.

The thought of being permanently buried under a pile of sand infuriated her. She'd been alive for over a thousand years and THIS is how it was going to end? Savagely she began digging harder, hoping to find her mistress before she was crushed under this grueling weight. Using her knees and elbows, she pressed up against the tent top, then shoveled sand from in front of her down the passageway created beneath her torso. It was a very short time before she noticed her breasts were beginning to burn from the friction of moving over the cool, damp sand while the weight of what she decided was an entire sand dune bore down on her backside.

Suddenly she broke through into a tiny pocket of air created by her trunk and those of her mistress. For the time being, the trunks held the sand covered tent up off the soft, sandy floor of the tent.

"Dari ... Daryna! Mistress, are you there? Can you hear me?"

A gasp, then a weak cry: "Bibi ... help me ... Can't ... move..."

It was much easier crawling around between the trunks and the bed frames, and it only took another moment to locate her mistress in the blackness of their sand-covered tomb and pull her off the bed, down to the floor where she could breathe more easily.

Both girls lay on the floor of the tent, gasping for air for several moments. After a time, they managed to catch their breaths and Bibi suddenly realized that somewhere, there was the faint sound of someone digging.

"Are they coming to rescue us?" Daryna wanted to know, a pleading desperation in her voice.

"I think it might be Rustam," Bibi breathed noisily. "He was in my bed."

It wasn't long before the sand-covered tent became silent again, the sound of digging having ceased. The two girls stared into the darkness, each fairly certain of what had happened, but neither wanting to admit the possibility. The same thing might likely happen to them.

"It's getting hot," Daryna mumbled after a time. "Getting hard to breathe."

"It's the air, Mistress," Bibi panted in reply. "We are using it all up. There is only a little left in this dark domain."

"How can one 'use up' air?" Daryna asked, her temper beginning to spike at the thought of dying down here, unable to breathe. "You breathe it in, you breathe it out – it's still there!"

"This is Enchi's Domain," Bibi explained, her voice almost reverent. "The Great Dragon of the Night does not need air to breathe. We need to pray for guidance if we are to escape."

"Wow! What a load of crap! I can't believe I said that!" Béla exclaimed. "We're dying down here! We gotta dig our way out!"

"If we are to escape," Daryna, spurred to a decision by her slave's heathen beliefs, imperiously informed her, "we are going to have to dig our way out, lest we starve down here!"

Startled into action, Bibi/Béla immediately got her legs beneath her and strained against the tent top, pressing against the heavy sand as hard as she could.

"Help me, dammit!" she exclaimed to her mistress, gasping from her efforts.

"What?" Daryna asked, so frightened by the sounds Bibi was exerting in the darkness that she forgot to demand to be called 'mistress'. "What are you doing?"

"Pushing on the roof of this friggin' tent!" Bibi gasped, then suddenly collapsed as the tent tore where her hands were pressing upward and a ton of sand collapsed down on top of her. She pushed against the cascading sand with every ounce of strength she had, refusing to perish beneath the crushing, choking wave of pressure.

When the sand stopped moving, Bibi's hands were still above her head, her shoulders and arms providing a small pocket of air that gave her some room to move her head and hands. The instant she did, however, the sand collapsed down against her face, filling her eyes and mouth with grit. But the single instant before she was blinded, she was sure she saw...

'I can see light!' Bibi thought excitedly. 'We can get out!' She began frantically pressing down with her arms, forcing her body to move some slight distance upward. The sand was dry enough, or just moist enough, so that it stayed where she pushed it.

After a few minutes of desperate digging, Bibi found part of the tent that had collapsed. She had dug her way upward until she was about halfway through the roof before she suddenly remembered Daryna, who still had to be on the other side of that canvas.

"Dari ... Mistress!" Bibi croaked, sand having gotten in her mouth and throat.

"Here..." came a weak cry from almost right in front of her, just under this cursed, sand-covered canvas. She began digging sideways, anxious to clear the sand off the top of the tent, then something struck the underside of the canvas she was clearing.

"I can see light!" Daryna exclaimed, her voice louder, now that only cloth separated them.

Bibi struck at the damp, sandy canvas with both hands, again and again, until it separated, showering sand down on Daryna's joyful face as she gazed upward at her savior. Reaching down a hand, Bibi pulled her out of what had nearly become their sandy tomb. They happily embraced, Mistress and Slave, for almost a full second before the entire tent collapsed, burying everything they owned, forever. Once again, they had to dig themselves out.

Bibi never realized it was so hard to crawl upward, out of a hole. The sand kept collapsing and burying one girl or the other right up to the tops of their heads, but FINALLY, they were at least halfway out, each of them free from the waist up, when a pair of strong arms reached down and pulled them the rest of the way out.

'Way to go, girls, ' Béla thought as she remembered that awful time in her life. Thousands of soldiers and hundreds of camp girls had been lost in the most terrible sandstorm she'd ever experienced. Four soldiers, along with Daryna and Bibi had survived, though Rustam was not among them. Unfortunately, two of the men would later die on the long trek north to the Oasis of Tu-at, where they rested, bathed, then raped the camp girls before abandoning them and continuing on to the sea, another day's journey away.

The two men who survived had secured a few flasks of water, which they refused to share with the camp girls, denouncing them as worthless chattel, deserving nothing. Bibi and her mistress managed to survive by feeding off each other, sharing their blood between them. Although that had been Bibi's idea, she'd had no inkling of what that would do to Daryna.