Sablesword
TMF Master
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OK, this is an excerpt from a longer work, and will require a bit of explaining:
A few years back I wrote a fantasy novel (unpublished) that was partly a homage and partly an answer-back to the "Gor" novels of John Norman. And then I started a sequel, which I'm about half-way through writing. This excerpt is from the sequel, and has the only real tickling scene (so far) in the work.
The novel & sequel are the first-person adventures of John Smith, a new-minted chemistry PhD from our world who finds himself transported to the fantasy kingdom of Cern. This is a place where magic takes the form of alchemy, and where almost all the women are barefoot slavegirls. And they *like* it that way. (Because the alternative is "diminishment" - a sort of mental dwindling that free women suffer.)
The slavegirls are generally much smarter than their masters, but only as long as they are kept *as* slaves. There's lots of bondage, but the "DSM" portions of "BDSM" are cut waaay back, and are mostly limited to use by the bad guys.
Anyway, here's the excerpt:
From An Antidote to Fire
It normally takes eight days to travel across the coastal plain from Brost to the edge of the hills. We made it in five days, by virtue of starting early, traveling late, and pressing the vosk to move just a little faster than they prefered.
The plain was well-settled with plantations, especially near Brost. A Cernian plantation is a large farm or small rural settlement, organized under a Crown charter. Most plantations are partnerships, with a senior partner (the ‘planter’) and a number of minor partners and tenants. A few, however, are sole proprietorships. Often a man would be a tenant at one plantation, and a partner in another, or a minor partner in several plantations, and would travel between them, spending a triweek or a season at one before moving on to another. Some alternated between spending time in the plantations and in Brost, or in one of the other Cernian towns.
The roads were good, kept in repair by gangs of arbi dedicated specificly to the task. A standard clause in the Crown charters establishing the plantations required that each male inhabitant dedicate one arbi to full-time road work. We encountered two such gangs of construction-arbi, along with fields of cotton and corn, pastures of woolyback and vosk, and orchards of various kinds of citrus.
We also encountered stocks. Each plantation has a set of stocks promenently displayed and kept in regular use. Slaves in town can make do with foot-wrappings, on the relatively infrequent occasions when they venture outside, but rustic masters find it a practical necessity to shod their slavegirls with sandals. This doesn’t cause diminishment the way regular shoes would, but it does build up ‘malpod’ - a sort of jinx effect. Malpod has to be discharged by foot-punishments once or twice a week, and the traditional foot-punishment in the Island Kingdoms is to be tickled in the stocks.
We didn’t see the stocks used much in the heat of noon, when we stopped for an hour each day to rest and water our vosk, and to rest and refresh ourselves. But we did see and hear slavegirls giggling and squirming in the stocks in the cooler hours of the morning and evening. Raishi looked on these girls with naked envy in her face, but Luce and Ife would glance at them and then grin at each other. Both of them knew that their turns would come soon enough: They wore sandals all day, walking wrist-leashed behind the second cart, and Edmond checked his malpod glass each morning before we set off.
“You should make a malpod glass of your own, master,” Luce said to me once as Edmond put his little glass foot back into its case.
“Maybe I will, when we reach Falling Waters,” I answered. That was the name of our destination, the plantation owned by Willard del Icelin. He was Yusef’s ‘adept who is now a planter back near the hills,’ the reformed brewer of branding poison who might be able to provide the reagents I needed. “But I though you didn’t like being tickled.” I told her as we started moving again.
“Only in town, master. I hate it when a sandal fad sweeps through, like the one that was just starting up when we left Renes. It’s so unnecessary. Footwrappings are good enough for going outside in town, and wearing sandals while working should be rare enough that malpod doesn’t develop. But it’s different in the countyside: It’s not a fad, but a part of rural life. On the plantations, a girl is outdoors enough that she has to wear sandals, and it’s fitting that she sit in the stocks once or twice a week.”
“Is it?” I said. We were leaving the stocks behind, but not fast enough: Listening to the slavegirls being tickled there was rousing me. I shook my head, trying to shake that mood off as well. “I don’t know if Ife agrees.” She was looking rather daunted, I noticed.
“At least I understand, now,” Ife said, managing a smile. “In the Ysbene empire, being made to wear sandals is a terrible punishment for a girl, since at the end of the week her master inevitably beats the soles of her feet. That hurts, but what’s even worse is when a master smears this brown tar – I don’t know what it’s called – on his girl’s feet. It made my feet itch and bleed, and that was considered cruel even by Ysbene standards.
“And we slavegirls didn’t know why. We didn’t know about malpod; the masters preferred to keep us in ignorance. That made the terror even worse, for a branded girl.”
I nodded understanding. Ysbene masters enjoy terrifying their slaves, and brands make the slavegirls easy to terrify. Which is why branding is so popular, among the Ysbene.
“This,” she waved her hand to indicate the whole situation, “feels very strange. I’m nervous about being put in the stocks, but it’s my own nervousness, not something coming from my brand.” She looked at me. “I know I’ve told you this before, my lord, but I hope you find the antidote soon, so that other girls can heal from their brands the way I have. Even if it means being put in the stocks every day for a year, they’ll still thank you for it.”
#
The fifth day of our journey was hot and steamy. It had been warm enough the other four days, of course, given Cern’s tropical climate. On the fifth day, however, we mostly traveled through forest, and while the trees shaded us from the sun, they also blocked the breeze.
Plantations were rarer near the hills, and might not have existed at all if it weren’t for the presence of communes. The communes – the only places on the world of Trion where humans conceive and bear children – were located on the nexis points where the ley lines crossed. These often weren’t good places for settlements in terms of their mundane characteristics, and many communes survived as much on charity as on the sale of their excess young women as slaves. I thought of them as a weird form of ‘family-friendly monastary.’
Half-way throught the Eighth hour, the third hour after noon, we saw the sign marking the entrance to ‘Falling Waters.’ We had arrived at last. Turning up the drive, we came to the plantation’s stocks, where a plainly-dressed man waited for us, holding a malpod glass. Beside him stood a pair of arbi, and a dark-skinned slavegirl with her hands bound behind her.
“Hallo, strangers,” the man called. “You can leave your girls here in these stocks before you go any further.” He gestured with his glass. “I saw their malpod a league off.”
“Fair enough,” Pierce answered. “That was our plan, anyway.”
“My name’s Willard. Willard del Icelin. I’m the Planter of this place. Kind of ramshackle, but it suits me.”
“I thought you might be him,” I said.
“And I think you must be John-Smith. Am I right?”
I made the gesture indicating a touch, and he grinned. “Thought so,” he said. The rest of us introduced ourselves, and he indicated his dark-skinned beauty: “This is my Etara. She goes into the stocks too, but there’s room for four.”
Edmond and I untethered Ife and Luce from the cart and set them in the stocks, stripping off their sandals. Willard put his Etara in place beside them, so that the three girls sat in a row with their ankles extended and waiting to be locked in place. “There’s room for a fourth,” Willard said, looking at Raishi.
“She doesn’t go in the stocks,” Pierce told him. “Not today.”
“No?” Willard locked eyes with Pierce. The silence stretched and grew brittle.
“My lord,” Raishi called softly. She pulled up her long tunic to reveal her stumps for a moment, then quickly covered them again.
Willard swore. “Forker’s rats! You’re right about that, and I’m sorry. Go ahead and take your animals on to the barn. My arbi will show you the way.”
Pierce and Raishi drove off, led by one of Willard’s arbi as a guide. Willard closed the stocks on the slavegirl’s ankles and locked it in place. Luce, at one end, was the palest of the three slaves, despite her dark-brown hair and quarter-Sinonese ancestory. Ife, in the middle, had duskier skin and black hair. Like Luce, the soles of her feet were flushed red from walking all day.
Etara, sitting at the other end next to the empty spot, had brown-black skin, broad features and wooly hair. The soles of her feet, naked and vulnerable in the stocks, were creamy in contrast. I would have called her an ‘African-Cernian’ except that Africa didn’t exist in this world. Bite your tongue. I told myself. I was neurotic about race, but the ‘natives’ here weren’t. Here, a preference for dark skin, or light skin, was just that - a preference, an individual idiosyncrasy as harmless as a preference for black hair or blue eyes.
“Bind their toes,” Willard told us, handing us leather thongs, and we did so. The wood of the stocks was sanded and polished smooth, with the ankle holes elixired to prevent the prisoners from hurting themselves when they struggled. At a suitable height above each ankle hole was set a wooden peg, with a leather thong that had been elixired like slavers’ rope. These we used to tie the large toes of our slavegirls, leaving their feet even more helpless for the tickling to come.
Edmond looked around at the lack of arbi. “Will we switch off?” he asked Willard. Discharging malpod was a ‘chastisement’ rather than a ‘punishment’ in slavekeeping jargon. A master could not tickle their own slavegirl’s feet to discharge malpod, but instead had to leave the job to another.
“No,” Willard said. “I have honey-brine in one of the buckets here, and my arbi will be back with a pair of vosklings.” He grinned in anticipation, and Edmond grinned in answer.
Etara and Luce squealed. “Not vosklings!” Luce said, but she was grinning too. Ife looked from side to side, nervously, and pulled and her wrist bonds. She and Luce still had their wrists tied in front of them, tethered to the stocks through a hole drilled in the upper board for that purpose. Etara had her wrists bound behind her. All three slaves squirmed, but they could not possibly get loose. The stocks were well and heavily built, with thick posts anchoring it to the ground. The bench on which the prisoners sat were sturdily constructed as well, with a high back that they could lean against, or throw themselves against, without effect.
“Master,” Etara asked. “Could we please have a cordial, first?”
“Yes, please,” Luce said. “A cordial first?”
“What’s a cordial?” Ife asked.
“It’s a distilled potion, a liquor,” Luce explained. “It makes the tickling less unbearable, but drinking it means that the tickling has to last longer.”
“And I just happen to have some right here,” Willard said, pulling a fancy glass bottle and a silver cup from one of his buckets. He poured out generous cupfuls for each girl.
“This is good!” Ife said when she had drunk hers. “Thank you, my lord.”
“You’re welcome,” Willard told her, and ran his fingers lightly over one of her soles, making her squeal and giggle. “We can start with the honey-brine,” he said, and so the tickling began. He smeared the liquid from the bucket onto Ife’s soles, while Edmond did the same with Luce and I with Etara. All three slavegirls squirmed and laughed, held helpless in the stocks. We men glanced at each other, grinning broadly, and went back to work.
Etara had pretty feet, I thought as I rubbed honey-brine between her toes. She was pretty all over, in fact. Willard had not been cheated, even if he had paid a high price for her. But for the moment, I owned her soles, and I toyed with them, sometimes stroking lightly with my fingertips to make her giggle, and other times pouncing for a fierce, brief, tickle that made her squeal. Next to me, Willard was making Ife squirm, and on his other side Edmond was putting Luce’s feet through a pleasant torment. Each girl seemed to be sensitized by the other two’s laughter, leaving them unable to resist even our lightest touch.
“Time, John-Smith,” Willard told me. “The vosklings are here.” I stepped back reluctantly, suddenly aware of how aroused I was. Willard’s arbi had returned, and the two young animals pulled at their halters, eager to lick the brine-soaked feet of the helpless slavegirls. We gave the prisoners in the stocks a minute to rest, while we washed our hands with fresh water.
Then the vosklings were allowed to step forward.
The slavegirls struggled wildly as their feet were licked and nibbled. Their struggles, of course, were useless, since the stocks were designed and built to hold four slavegirls helplessly in place, no matter how much they struggled. Three girls had no chance whatever of escaping, no matter how hard they struggled. By the time the vosklings had tired of the game, the slaves were tickle-drunk, but Willard and Edmond’s malpod glasses both showed that the malpod wasn’t yet completely discharged. We three stepped forward to wash our slavegirls feet and finish the job. This time I teased Ife’s feet, while Edmond tickled Etara and Willard tickled Luce. It took the better part of a Cernian hour, from the time we first applied the honey-brine, to completely discharge the malpod.
Luce told me later that it was a most delightful torment, unbearably sharp but not at all bitter. This was the next morning, after we had both worked off our arousal. I don’t know what Ife told Edmond, but he did purchase two bottles of the plantation’s cordial. “I keep saying that you should make more, master,” Etara told Willard as he handed the bottles to Edmond.
“Maybe you’re right,” Willard said as he hugged her. He had put her in an elbow-hobble that morning, and his eyes took on the abstracted look of a man listening with his Master’s ear. “Maybe you are right,” he repeated.
“Yes master,” she said, twisting around to give him a kiss.
A few years back I wrote a fantasy novel (unpublished) that was partly a homage and partly an answer-back to the "Gor" novels of John Norman. And then I started a sequel, which I'm about half-way through writing. This excerpt is from the sequel, and has the only real tickling scene (so far) in the work.
The novel & sequel are the first-person adventures of John Smith, a new-minted chemistry PhD from our world who finds himself transported to the fantasy kingdom of Cern. This is a place where magic takes the form of alchemy, and where almost all the women are barefoot slavegirls. And they *like* it that way. (Because the alternative is "diminishment" - a sort of mental dwindling that free women suffer.)
The slavegirls are generally much smarter than their masters, but only as long as they are kept *as* slaves. There's lots of bondage, but the "DSM" portions of "BDSM" are cut waaay back, and are mostly limited to use by the bad guys.
Anyway, here's the excerpt:
From An Antidote to Fire
It normally takes eight days to travel across the coastal plain from Brost to the edge of the hills. We made it in five days, by virtue of starting early, traveling late, and pressing the vosk to move just a little faster than they prefered.
The plain was well-settled with plantations, especially near Brost. A Cernian plantation is a large farm or small rural settlement, organized under a Crown charter. Most plantations are partnerships, with a senior partner (the ‘planter’) and a number of minor partners and tenants. A few, however, are sole proprietorships. Often a man would be a tenant at one plantation, and a partner in another, or a minor partner in several plantations, and would travel between them, spending a triweek or a season at one before moving on to another. Some alternated between spending time in the plantations and in Brost, or in one of the other Cernian towns.
The roads were good, kept in repair by gangs of arbi dedicated specificly to the task. A standard clause in the Crown charters establishing the plantations required that each male inhabitant dedicate one arbi to full-time road work. We encountered two such gangs of construction-arbi, along with fields of cotton and corn, pastures of woolyback and vosk, and orchards of various kinds of citrus.
We also encountered stocks. Each plantation has a set of stocks promenently displayed and kept in regular use. Slaves in town can make do with foot-wrappings, on the relatively infrequent occasions when they venture outside, but rustic masters find it a practical necessity to shod their slavegirls with sandals. This doesn’t cause diminishment the way regular shoes would, but it does build up ‘malpod’ - a sort of jinx effect. Malpod has to be discharged by foot-punishments once or twice a week, and the traditional foot-punishment in the Island Kingdoms is to be tickled in the stocks.
We didn’t see the stocks used much in the heat of noon, when we stopped for an hour each day to rest and water our vosk, and to rest and refresh ourselves. But we did see and hear slavegirls giggling and squirming in the stocks in the cooler hours of the morning and evening. Raishi looked on these girls with naked envy in her face, but Luce and Ife would glance at them and then grin at each other. Both of them knew that their turns would come soon enough: They wore sandals all day, walking wrist-leashed behind the second cart, and Edmond checked his malpod glass each morning before we set off.
“You should make a malpod glass of your own, master,” Luce said to me once as Edmond put his little glass foot back into its case.
“Maybe I will, when we reach Falling Waters,” I answered. That was the name of our destination, the plantation owned by Willard del Icelin. He was Yusef’s ‘adept who is now a planter back near the hills,’ the reformed brewer of branding poison who might be able to provide the reagents I needed. “But I though you didn’t like being tickled.” I told her as we started moving again.
“Only in town, master. I hate it when a sandal fad sweeps through, like the one that was just starting up when we left Renes. It’s so unnecessary. Footwrappings are good enough for going outside in town, and wearing sandals while working should be rare enough that malpod doesn’t develop. But it’s different in the countyside: It’s not a fad, but a part of rural life. On the plantations, a girl is outdoors enough that she has to wear sandals, and it’s fitting that she sit in the stocks once or twice a week.”
“Is it?” I said. We were leaving the stocks behind, but not fast enough: Listening to the slavegirls being tickled there was rousing me. I shook my head, trying to shake that mood off as well. “I don’t know if Ife agrees.” She was looking rather daunted, I noticed.
“At least I understand, now,” Ife said, managing a smile. “In the Ysbene empire, being made to wear sandals is a terrible punishment for a girl, since at the end of the week her master inevitably beats the soles of her feet. That hurts, but what’s even worse is when a master smears this brown tar – I don’t know what it’s called – on his girl’s feet. It made my feet itch and bleed, and that was considered cruel even by Ysbene standards.
“And we slavegirls didn’t know why. We didn’t know about malpod; the masters preferred to keep us in ignorance. That made the terror even worse, for a branded girl.”
I nodded understanding. Ysbene masters enjoy terrifying their slaves, and brands make the slavegirls easy to terrify. Which is why branding is so popular, among the Ysbene.
“This,” she waved her hand to indicate the whole situation, “feels very strange. I’m nervous about being put in the stocks, but it’s my own nervousness, not something coming from my brand.” She looked at me. “I know I’ve told you this before, my lord, but I hope you find the antidote soon, so that other girls can heal from their brands the way I have. Even if it means being put in the stocks every day for a year, they’ll still thank you for it.”
#
The fifth day of our journey was hot and steamy. It had been warm enough the other four days, of course, given Cern’s tropical climate. On the fifth day, however, we mostly traveled through forest, and while the trees shaded us from the sun, they also blocked the breeze.
Plantations were rarer near the hills, and might not have existed at all if it weren’t for the presence of communes. The communes – the only places on the world of Trion where humans conceive and bear children – were located on the nexis points where the ley lines crossed. These often weren’t good places for settlements in terms of their mundane characteristics, and many communes survived as much on charity as on the sale of their excess young women as slaves. I thought of them as a weird form of ‘family-friendly monastary.’
Half-way throught the Eighth hour, the third hour after noon, we saw the sign marking the entrance to ‘Falling Waters.’ We had arrived at last. Turning up the drive, we came to the plantation’s stocks, where a plainly-dressed man waited for us, holding a malpod glass. Beside him stood a pair of arbi, and a dark-skinned slavegirl with her hands bound behind her.
“Hallo, strangers,” the man called. “You can leave your girls here in these stocks before you go any further.” He gestured with his glass. “I saw their malpod a league off.”
“Fair enough,” Pierce answered. “That was our plan, anyway.”
“My name’s Willard. Willard del Icelin. I’m the Planter of this place. Kind of ramshackle, but it suits me.”
“I thought you might be him,” I said.
“And I think you must be John-Smith. Am I right?”
I made the gesture indicating a touch, and he grinned. “Thought so,” he said. The rest of us introduced ourselves, and he indicated his dark-skinned beauty: “This is my Etara. She goes into the stocks too, but there’s room for four.”
Edmond and I untethered Ife and Luce from the cart and set them in the stocks, stripping off their sandals. Willard put his Etara in place beside them, so that the three girls sat in a row with their ankles extended and waiting to be locked in place. “There’s room for a fourth,” Willard said, looking at Raishi.
“She doesn’t go in the stocks,” Pierce told him. “Not today.”
“No?” Willard locked eyes with Pierce. The silence stretched and grew brittle.
“My lord,” Raishi called softly. She pulled up her long tunic to reveal her stumps for a moment, then quickly covered them again.
Willard swore. “Forker’s rats! You’re right about that, and I’m sorry. Go ahead and take your animals on to the barn. My arbi will show you the way.”
Pierce and Raishi drove off, led by one of Willard’s arbi as a guide. Willard closed the stocks on the slavegirl’s ankles and locked it in place. Luce, at one end, was the palest of the three slaves, despite her dark-brown hair and quarter-Sinonese ancestory. Ife, in the middle, had duskier skin and black hair. Like Luce, the soles of her feet were flushed red from walking all day.
Etara, sitting at the other end next to the empty spot, had brown-black skin, broad features and wooly hair. The soles of her feet, naked and vulnerable in the stocks, were creamy in contrast. I would have called her an ‘African-Cernian’ except that Africa didn’t exist in this world. Bite your tongue. I told myself. I was neurotic about race, but the ‘natives’ here weren’t. Here, a preference for dark skin, or light skin, was just that - a preference, an individual idiosyncrasy as harmless as a preference for black hair or blue eyes.
“Bind their toes,” Willard told us, handing us leather thongs, and we did so. The wood of the stocks was sanded and polished smooth, with the ankle holes elixired to prevent the prisoners from hurting themselves when they struggled. At a suitable height above each ankle hole was set a wooden peg, with a leather thong that had been elixired like slavers’ rope. These we used to tie the large toes of our slavegirls, leaving their feet even more helpless for the tickling to come.
Edmond looked around at the lack of arbi. “Will we switch off?” he asked Willard. Discharging malpod was a ‘chastisement’ rather than a ‘punishment’ in slavekeeping jargon. A master could not tickle their own slavegirl’s feet to discharge malpod, but instead had to leave the job to another.
“No,” Willard said. “I have honey-brine in one of the buckets here, and my arbi will be back with a pair of vosklings.” He grinned in anticipation, and Edmond grinned in answer.
Etara and Luce squealed. “Not vosklings!” Luce said, but she was grinning too. Ife looked from side to side, nervously, and pulled and her wrist bonds. She and Luce still had their wrists tied in front of them, tethered to the stocks through a hole drilled in the upper board for that purpose. Etara had her wrists bound behind her. All three slaves squirmed, but they could not possibly get loose. The stocks were well and heavily built, with thick posts anchoring it to the ground. The bench on which the prisoners sat were sturdily constructed as well, with a high back that they could lean against, or throw themselves against, without effect.
“Master,” Etara asked. “Could we please have a cordial, first?”
“Yes, please,” Luce said. “A cordial first?”
“What’s a cordial?” Ife asked.
“It’s a distilled potion, a liquor,” Luce explained. “It makes the tickling less unbearable, but drinking it means that the tickling has to last longer.”
“And I just happen to have some right here,” Willard said, pulling a fancy glass bottle and a silver cup from one of his buckets. He poured out generous cupfuls for each girl.
“This is good!” Ife said when she had drunk hers. “Thank you, my lord.”
“You’re welcome,” Willard told her, and ran his fingers lightly over one of her soles, making her squeal and giggle. “We can start with the honey-brine,” he said, and so the tickling began. He smeared the liquid from the bucket onto Ife’s soles, while Edmond did the same with Luce and I with Etara. All three slavegirls squirmed and laughed, held helpless in the stocks. We men glanced at each other, grinning broadly, and went back to work.
Etara had pretty feet, I thought as I rubbed honey-brine between her toes. She was pretty all over, in fact. Willard had not been cheated, even if he had paid a high price for her. But for the moment, I owned her soles, and I toyed with them, sometimes stroking lightly with my fingertips to make her giggle, and other times pouncing for a fierce, brief, tickle that made her squeal. Next to me, Willard was making Ife squirm, and on his other side Edmond was putting Luce’s feet through a pleasant torment. Each girl seemed to be sensitized by the other two’s laughter, leaving them unable to resist even our lightest touch.
“Time, John-Smith,” Willard told me. “The vosklings are here.” I stepped back reluctantly, suddenly aware of how aroused I was. Willard’s arbi had returned, and the two young animals pulled at their halters, eager to lick the brine-soaked feet of the helpless slavegirls. We gave the prisoners in the stocks a minute to rest, while we washed our hands with fresh water.
Then the vosklings were allowed to step forward.
The slavegirls struggled wildly as their feet were licked and nibbled. Their struggles, of course, were useless, since the stocks were designed and built to hold four slavegirls helplessly in place, no matter how much they struggled. Three girls had no chance whatever of escaping, no matter how hard they struggled. By the time the vosklings had tired of the game, the slaves were tickle-drunk, but Willard and Edmond’s malpod glasses both showed that the malpod wasn’t yet completely discharged. We three stepped forward to wash our slavegirls feet and finish the job. This time I teased Ife’s feet, while Edmond tickled Etara and Willard tickled Luce. It took the better part of a Cernian hour, from the time we first applied the honey-brine, to completely discharge the malpod.
Luce told me later that it was a most delightful torment, unbearably sharp but not at all bitter. This was the next morning, after we had both worked off our arousal. I don’t know what Ife told Edmond, but he did purchase two bottles of the plantation’s cordial. “I keep saying that you should make more, master,” Etara told Willard as he handed the bottles to Edmond.
“Maybe you’re right,” Willard said as he hugged her. He had put her in an elbow-hobble that morning, and his eyes took on the abstracted look of a man listening with his Master’s ear. “Maybe you are right,” he repeated.
“Yes master,” she said, twisting around to give him a kiss.
