Caliphate

Castle Noisvastei, Province of Baya, 21 Sha'ban, 1536 AH (17 June, 2112)

Her head moved rhythmically, the object of her attentions pulsing in her mouth. A crucifix swung back and forth in time with her bobbing head, hanging from a chain about her neck. "The men like the idea of fucking Christian women," Ling had explained once, when she'd given Petra the cross. "It asserts their superiority. It's also good for tips."

Petra was a full-fledged houri now; Ling had taught her well and patiently. She no longer knew how many men she had serviced since coming to the castle. It was over a thousand, certainly, even subtracting for repeat customers. She actually tried not to remember the numbers, or the acts. Though, of course, if she wanted to keep repeat customers, she did have to remember preferences. It was a difficult game of mental gymnastics.

For the first few months, Ling had been content merely to have Petra sit or kneel nearby and watch her perform. Well, not quite content; the almond-eyed girl had also taken Petra to her own bed and shown her how to enjoy a woman and how to please one.

"It's how we keep our sanity," Ling had explained.

After that first few months of observation, Ling had had Petra begin to take part, whenever she had a cooperative and suitable man in her quarters. Under Ling's patient coaching, Petra had learned the use of her lips and tongue, Ling's words explaining and encouraging,

Ling's hand firmly but gently guiding Petra's head, Ling scolding at first until Petra learned to accept whatever gift the customer might deposit in her mouth or on her face or lips. Only once had Ling beaten her, and that was because Petra had rudely thrown up after such a "gift."

Before her thirteenth birthday, Petra was a past master in the use of her mouth.

From there, Ling had moved on to more advanced courses. Always she was careful though, selecting, for example, very small men to open and stretch Petra's anus until she could handle larger. One day, Petra had balked, complaining, "It hurts and I hate the pain."

Thereupon Ling had taken Petra down to a lower level of quarters. There, blank faced women sat staring at walls. Others sucked frantically on men. Still others rode customers with seeming wanton abandon. Those last two categories were as blank-faced as the first.

"These are women who complained," Ling explained. "Women who complained once too often."

"What happened to them?" a horrified Petra had asked.

Ling had unconsciously rubbed the crown of her own head, above the hairline. "Oh . . . they were sent to doctors and little things were implanted in their brains. Some other things, parts of their brains, were removed. All their fucking and sucking is controlled by a computer brought from China that sits in the lowest levels of the castle. So far as I know, they feel nothing. So far as I know, they aren't even there. Maybe if the computer didn't make them eat they'd starve to death. But what if they are still there?

"Yes," Ling had answered the unspoken question, "it is a shitty world."

Petra never complained about the pain of anal sex after that. Nor did she complain this time when the customer pushed her head away and placed her on all fours, not even when lined his penis up on her anus, nor even when he thrust forward roughly. All she did was bite the inside of her cheeks and force out a false grunt of pleasure.

In her own room—she was entitled to her own room now that she was a full houri—Petra kept the letters she received from Besma. All of them spoke of how much the Moslem girl missed her sister and friend. None of them asked about Petra's life. Petra had been very clear in the first letter she'd been able to send, "Please, please, please never ask me what I do here." The letters had to go through Ishmael because Besma's father would have gone ballistic if she'd been caught receiving mail from or sending it to a famous brothel.

She reread the letters, sometimes. One in particular, she reread often.

"Fudail is dead. I could not take his manhood, but I did scratch out his eyes when he tried to do to me what he did to you. And, perhaps because I am small, he thought he didn't need his friends to help. I scratched out his eyes and then stabbed the pig through the heart.

"His mother, the lying bitch, said that her son did no such thing. My father, shortly before divorcing her, swore that it could only have been self defense. It was my word against al Khalifa's, with my father's testimony weighing heavily in the balance. The judges let me go.

"Al Khalifa, so I understand, has taken residence in the brothel here in Kitznen. Father won't discuss it, but Ishmael says it is so.

"Of course, you know I would never plan on doing such a thing to my poor, demented stepbrother."

It was that last line, coupled with the letter Besma had left in her great-grandmother's journal, that convinced Petra that Fudail had never tried to commit any crime against Besma, but that she had ruthlessly blinded and murdered him.

"Good for you, Besma," Petra said every time she reread the letter.

Petra thought upon that very letter, even as the grotesquely fat customer behind her ground his passion into her anus and squeezed the flesh over her hips hard enough to bruise. It helped . . . a little.

The fat man straining her anus was a frequent customer. She knew his name and preferences and shouted out in feigned passion, and in English, "Fuck me, Claude, fuck me!" while slamming herself backwards against him. He stank, but then they all stank. What matter; slaves had no right to object to stench. They could, however, at least think, Fuck you, you clod, fuck you.

When the customer was finished, while the filthy drool from his slack mouth dripped onto her back, Petra stayed still, remaining on all fours, his penis inside her upraised rear end. Eventually the customer pulled out, wiping his penis off on the cheeks of her ass. He stood, adjusted his robe and began to walk to the shower. Apparently rethinking it, he turned back and patted her posterior gently. "Good girl," he said, before leaving the bedroom. "Nice fuck." On his waddling way, he dropped two silver dirhem in a plate on a small table by the bathroom door.

Sex was cheap in the Caliphate, as cheap as female Nazrani slaves.