The Forests Of Gleor

Chapter 24

Queen Sanaya ran through the forest. She didn't know where she was running, and didn't care. She knew that she ran from King Embor and also from Neena and from Blade. She ran from death because those three people knew everything she had tried to do. They would kill her if she didn't run. She didn't care how little she knew about the forests or the Mountains of Hoga and how to live in them. She didn't know or care how long her strength would last. She only knew that it would last somehow until she was far, away from the arena, even if she dropped down dead the moment after that.

She almost hoped she would. It would be a quicker death than dying of hunger or snake bite. That death in turn would be quicker than what Embor and Blade would give her if they caught her. And as for Princess Neena-Sanaya sobbed aloud in fear at the thought of the princess going to work on her. A lingering remnant of sanity told her she should not waste her breath weeping. She ran on in silence.

She ran on until she had to slow down. Now she moved at a painful trot, then a walk, then a lurching stagger. She gasped for breath at each step. At each gasp it felt as if molten metal was rising up in her throat. Her head throbbed until it seemed that it would split open and let her brains ooze out. Her eyes watered, then streamed; she felt the salt of tears on her lips, mixing with blood. Somewhere at some moment she had bitten deep into her lower lip.

She felt cold, damp earth and slickly wet leaves against her feet and looked down. Her boots were soft leather, designed for show, not for hard walking and still less for running in the forest. Both boots were ripped and worn through. The skin of her feet already showed darkening bruises made by stones and roots and thin red lines left by thorns.

She was afraid that if she stopped she would never start up again. She did not know how far she had come from the arena and her enemies. She only knew in her pounding heart and fear-ridden mind that she hadn't come far enough. The knowledge gave her the strength to stumble onward.

Some impossibly long time later, a jutting branch caught one boot and jerked it right off. Sanaya staggered and fell painfully forward on her hands and knees. She slumped down on her face and lay gasping for breath, as mindless as a wounded animal.

After a while strength returned to the muscles she needed for sitting up and stripping off the other boot. She noticed also that her fur cloak was gone, fallen from her shoulders somewhere now miles behind her. Below her knees her skirt was shredded by thorns and branches and dark with grass stains, mud, and dampness.

If she was strong enough to see clearly, she must be strong enough to move on again. She reached for a bush and held onto its branches, using them to pull herself to her feet. She swayed and staggered, but did not fall again. Her hands were dotted with oozing red punctures, from thorns she hadn't even felt.

The sunlight no longer sparkled down golden from high above. It was turning red and slanting in from the west. The day was dying; in another couple of hours it would be dead. But the day would live again, the next time the sun rose. If Blade or Neena caught her, she would die, and for her death would be final. She would go on.

She did, although a child just learning to walk could have gone as fast. Before long the skirt of her gown grew so heavy and wet that she stopped again to rip it off up to the knees.

The breeze now blew chill against her bare legs and bruised and swollen feet.

Before long the insects came to her. They whined in her ears, they made a cloud in front of her eves, they bit furiously at every bit of exposed skin. Some of the bites left red and yellow blotches, others drew blood which drew more insects. She began to wonder if the dizziness and the blurred vision were still just fatigue. Or were poison and the loss of blood from insect bites beginning to take their toll? She did not know, she would never find out, and she could not afford to care.

How much longer Sanaya stumbled on through the gathering twilight, she never knew. When she finally felt her strength beginning to leave her for good, it was nearly dark. When she looked down at her feet, she now saw blood oozing up between the toes, and bloody footprints on the ground behind her. The insects swarmed more thickly. She groaned, and kept moving.

Suddenly the ground was dropping away in front of her. She staggered, and tried to throw herself backward. Legs where every joint and muscle flamed with a separate agony would not respond. She felt herself lurching forward, flailed wildly at the air, screamed, and, fell.

She did not plunge down into a bottomless depth and smash herself to pieces. Instead she fell only a few feet, hit a steep slope overgrown with thorn bushes, and rolled. The thorns clawed and stabbed at her as she rolled.

Then she reached the bottom of the slope. Her head grazed a massive tree root, and pain even fiercer and sharper than before exploded behind her eyes. For a moment she saw nothing but darkness. For another moment she had the horrible feeling that she'd gone blind.

Through that darkness stabbed a man's loud, harsh voice. Then came the sound of footsteps, and a chittering sound Sanaya had never heard herself but heard described far too often. Blindly she tried to roll away from the approaching stolof. She did not worry about how it had come here. She only knew that she had to get away from it and from the man who must be its master.

A new pain burned as a whip slashed down across her bare legs, wrapping itself around them. She was dragged to a stop, and somehow the pain seemed to clear her vision. She twisted her head to look at the man standing over her.

He was tall and burly, with the unmistakable mark of a warrior noble of Trawn in the way he carried himself. He wore a tunic reinforced with copper bands, and across his broad back was slung a long curved two-handed sword. A long, ugly red scar ran down the right side of his face, from forehead to chin and just missing the eve. The eyes that glared down out of that face glittered with both an animal's mindless cruelty and a wise man's ability to think and scheme.

Panic roared and howled in Sanaya's mind again, drowning out everything else she could feel. She clawed at the ground, drooled, tried to jerk herself to her feet. The man let her rise to her knees. Then his fist smashed down like a thunderbolt, taking her on the side of the jaw. Sanaya sprawled backward on the ground, and this time the darkness did not go away for a long time.

When Sanaya did awake, she found herself lying on a dirt floor, looking up at a dirt ceiling and dirt walls. She was bound hand and foot with the skin-tearing cords of Trawn, and she was completely naked.

Pains itched, burned, and throbbed in every part of her body. She felt as though she had been torn into little pieces and then crudely and hastily put back together.

Gradually the pains stopped overpowering her awareness of everything else. She realized that she was in a tunnel or cave running deep into the side of a hill. By moving her head only a little she could see the mouth of the cave, a rough circle faintly defined by the distant glow of a campfire off in the forest. She could see the silhouettes of men moving back and forth across the mouth of the cave. Outbursts of chittering and a faintly sour, acrid odor told her of stolofs nearby.

She was in the hands of scouts or raiders from Trawn, who had crossed the Mountains of Hoga. They had stolofs, they had the strength and self-confidence to make camp in the forests and light fires. It would not be easy to escape from them, even if she regained her strength quickly.

Panic nearly swamped her again. She was in the hands of warriors of Trawn, with all their viciousness and cruelty. She was in the hands of perhaps the only people in all of Gleor who would kill her more painfully than Neena might. There was nothing she could do about it. THERE WAS NOTHING SHE COULD DO ABOUT IT!

«Yes, there is something you can do about it,» said a voice from behind her. She gasped, realizing that she must have spoken her thoughts aloud.

The scar-faced nobleman sat cross-legged on the floor of the cave, staring at her. He wore only a short kilt and boots, and carried only a short sword. He held one of the long five-stranded whips of Trawn across his tanned knees. Involuntarily Sanaya's eyes focused on those knees and the man's muscular legs. Then she caught herself and quickly shifted her gaze. The man smiled, and Sanaya shivered as she realized that her little slip had not escaped his notice.

«Would you like to know what can be done about it?» he asked, his smile broadening. It was by no means a friendly or reassuring smile. It was more of an unpleasantly triumphant gloating over a prize.

Sanaya hadn't expected anything else from a warrior of Trawn. Her lips were trembling so badly that she could not speak in reply, but only nodded.

«You can start by telling me who you are,» the warrior said. «You are clearly a woman of high rank in Draad. Yet you are in a most strange place and in an even stranger condition for one such. Who are you, and how did you come to be here?»

Now Sanaya could not even move a muscle, let alone speak coherent words. Behind the panic flickered one faint trace of rational thought. Nothing this man could do to her for keeping silent would be as horrible as he would do if she lied, or admitted who she was.

The warrior grunted and approached her until he could reach down and put a hand under her chin. He lifted it gently until her eyes met his. Then suddenly he tightened his grip so hard that his long dirty nails stabbed through Sanaya's skin into her flesh. She gasped at the sudden pain. Then the warrior drew back his other hand and brought it across Sanaya's face as hard as he could. She gasped again. If her head hadn't been held still, she would have sprawled backward.

The warrior spent a good deal of time working Sanaya over with slaps, punches, kicks, and pinches on any and every part of her body he could reach. She quickly lost track of the individual blows. They all blended together into one long torment that seemed as though it would go on forever.

Much to Sanaya's surprise, it did not. Eventually the warrior stopped and stepped back, leaving her lying on the round. Gradually her mind cleared until she could recognize all her different sensations.

She could not have spoken now if she'd wanted to-her lips were a swollen, ragged, bloody mess. More blood trickled from her aching nose and from where several teeth had been knocked out. Her eyes were swollen and watering so that everything around her seemed to be swimming through a thick bloodshot fog. Her nipples and thighs throbbed and burned where they'd been pinched, her fingers and toes ached where they'd been twisted, and large patches of skin felt as though they'd been burned. She wouldn't have dared to touch most of her own body, even if her hands had been free.

Yet somehow she did not feel as totally wretched as she'd expected. Other sensations were lurking behind the pain and exhaustion, like the hunters of the mountain clans lurking in the forest. She could not easily put a name to these other feelings. She could make a comparison that somehow made them comprehensible. She felt as she did with a lover, as his hands moved over her skin and cupped her breasts, and his lips pressed warmly against hers. She could almost imagine that Blade was here now, arousing her, and she closed her eyes to see if that would make the image more vivid.

Before she could find out, the warrior cursed. Then he grabbed her by the hair and jerked her to her feet. She opened her eyes to see that he was dragging her toward a tall, heavy wooden stake driven into the floor of the cave.

The warrior tied her ankles tightly to the stake. Then he pulled both her arms high up over her head, and tied her wrists to the stake. From chin to knees she was pressed hard against the rough wood, unable to writhe or twist, barely able to breathe. She had to stand nearly on tiptoe to keep her arms and wrists from being pulled out of joint, and wondered how long she would be able to hold that position. Her weary legs and ankles already throbbed and ached enough.

The warrior picked up the whip and stepped to one side, where she could easily see him. Then he swung the whip several times at the empty air, flicking his wrist each time so that the tips of all five strands cracked like snapping branches. Sanaya could not take her eyes off the whip and the arm that was wielding it, which was no doubt exactly what the warrior intended. It was the vicious torture whip of Trawn, and the arm wielding it was thick and knotted with muscle. Once the warrior started in on her, he could doubtless go on for hours. If Sanaya's stomach hadn't been totally empty, she would have vomited at the prospect. At the same time she felt a faint curiosity to feel the whip on her flesh. The strange feeling that a lover was at work arousing her was still there, and the combination would be-well, oddly interesting, as well as horribly painful.

«Now are you interested in telling me who you are?» said the warrior. He seemed indifferent to whether she answered or not. She suspected he would be quite happy to have an excuse to go to work with his whip.

A moment later she knew she was right. A broad grin spread across the warrior's face, and his arm stretched out. The grin broadened as the whip lashed back, then forward. The whip came down across the small of Sanaya's back, and she never saw what happened to the grin after that. The world around her vanished as pain exploded up from where the whip fell, into her brain and out to every part of her body. She screamed. Before she finished screaming the whip came down again, this time across the backs of her thighs.

Five, ten, fifteen times the whip struck, each time a little bit harder, each time in a more sensitive spot. The pain was passing onward into something which Sanaya's reeling mind could find-no words to describe. Each time she told herself that she could stand no more, that the next stroke would kill her. Yet the next stroke always came, and she always found herself alive.

She might have died or fainted eventually, except that before long she was feeling more than pain. The feeling that a lover was at work on her came again, more vividly. Now it was no longer just tongue and lips and hands that she could imagine. Now it was a swollen, rigid, thrusting maleness driving deep into her, forcing her desire to a higher and higher pitch, making her more and more of an animal. The pain of the whip remained. But now each time it fell there was more than pain. There seemed to be a long thrust by her phantom lover, driving deep into her, withdrawing slowly, tantalizing her, torturing her in a way that was almost more agonizing than the whip.

Her lips began to move, and incoherent sounds that were not at all human came from her throat. She drove her groin and breasts against the stake, feeling more pain as tender flesh met bard rough wood. Yet she also felt as if her lover's own passion and his own vigor were steadily increasing.

All her pain and all her pleasure combined to fog both her eyes and her mind until she could no longer see anything or make any sense of what she felt. She was hardly aware of coming to her climax, writhing and shrieking and howling so loudly that all the men on guard outside leaped up and grabbed weapons, thinking that the camp was being attacked. She was even less aware of the warrior cutting her down, stripping off his kilt, and taking her furiously as she writhed on the floor. She fainted completely before she could see the warrior's face above her. That face was twisted by the release of a terrible passion, but also by a cold and calculating satisfaction.

Lord Desgo had reason to be satisfied. He was still not sure entirely who or what he had in his hands. But certainly she had a high place in Draad, high enough to know much of what he needed to know before his army struck. Just as certainly, she would not hold back any of it. Not now, for he had found the love of pain that lurked in her soul. As long as he could satisfy that love she would be his slave in all but name.

Lord Desgo was not a fool, and he admitted that luck had been with him in bringing to him a woman with that kind of soul. Not all women had it. Princess Neena, for example, had no great love of pain-only a great hatred for him. Dealing with her as she deserved would be no pleasure for her-only for him. He would have that pleasure, though. He promised himself that. King Furzun himself would not stand between him and Neena's death now.

Although he had released his passion only a few minutes before, Lord Desgo found it rising again at the thought of Neena's long lingering death at his hands. So he put Neena out of his mind and returned to the woman beside him, who now received him with furious pleasure.