Shared by the Barbarians (13 page)

Jalinda felt her backside clench and unclench in agony, in a vain attempt to assuage the fiery admonition of the strap, the warning that she must be a good and obedient wife, always ready to provide her husbands’ cocks with the pleasure they rightly required of her. Hed held her wrist in his left hand, behind her back, at the same time securing her tightly over his thighs, and kept whipping her steadily and slowly.

Jalinda twisted her head to find Kar, and saw that he wore on his face a different expression from Pag’s, almost as if he would spare her at least some of this cruel discipline that came to his bride simply because every bride must learn her place this way, among the Trestrimar. Yora had said that some husbands went easy—even just laid the whip across their brides’ bottoms once, to symbolize the bridal whipping—but that she must expect Hed to honor the true intent of the custom, and expect to have trouble sitting down for several days.

Also, though, Yora had concluded, to feel a kind of sexual pleasure she had not known before, when Hed and Kar had their fucks in her no longer virginal cunt and rump. In Kar’s eyes now she saw that he knew of that pleasure, and though he might have spared her some of the extremity of this lesson, he would never tell Hed, the bridegroom appointed by the Trestrimar to discipline Jalinda severely when he felt she needed it, to stop.

Still, it hurt
so
much. Hed had given her ten lashes now, at least, and she couldn’t help it, but screamed, “Kar, please… please…”

But Kar looked at Pag, and Pag spoke, holding up his hand to Hed to stop the whipping. “Sweetling, you know you need this. Never try to play your husbands off against one another. Hed, add ten more lashes for addressing Kar.” A hard look had come into his eyes.

“No! Please, no! Pag, sir… please!”

“You heard your eldest,” Hed said, breaking his silence at last, and began to whip her again.

By the time the whipping ended, with Jalinda’s bottom a mess of welts nearly as painful as the general had made of it, she hung her head over Hed’s thigh and sobbed like a little girl.

“There,” Hed said simply, and now he rubbed her bottom again, and the heat moved to her quim in a rush that took her breath away.

“Powers…” she whispered, as Hed picked her up, and laid her face down over the spanking bench, while Pag and Kar sat down on the couch to watch.

“There,” said her second again, and began to fuck her.

Hed fucked without any regard for her pleasure: first her mouth, then her quim, then her bottom. He drove hard, and pumped his cock in and out of all three places quickly, pounding his strong hips, when the time came to have her quim and her rump, very hard against her well-punished buttocks. The pain was still too great for Jalinda to come anywhere near her release, but as she cried out under Hed, while he used her private places to seek his own climax, she felt the thrill of a submissive ecstasy starting to build, from the sensations between her legs and in her disciplined backside to the mental stimulation of knowing that the strong man who enjoyed her would keep her in line, would not hesitate to whip her again, even harder, if he decided it would make her a better wife.

With a shout, Hed finished inside her bottom. He held himself there for a moment, while Jalinda whimpered softly at how sore her secret blossom was, even as well as her husbands had prepared it with the training belt.

“There,” he finally repeated, and withdrew.

Then, immediately—or so it felt to Jalinda, who seemed to herself now to inhabit some other plane of existence—Kar had turned her onto her back and gently pushed her knees up. “Hold yourself open, sweetling,” he said softly. “I’m going to make it all better now.” She received her knees from him, and held herself as the brothers had held her at the betrothal on Zulin, watched Kar first tenderly wash her between her legs with a warm, soapy towel.

She cried out loud with the pleasure Yora had spoken of under that towel, and long before she watched Kar, with disbelief and even terror that ecstasy might rend her body limb from limb, lower his face to her poor burning quim.

She screamed, and came. She came, and screamed. Three climaxes did Kar give her before he entered her quim, riding gently and telling her to rub at the aching bud atop the place in and out of which he commanded her to watch his cock moving, fucking, owning.

When he presented his cock to her lips, at the other end of the bench, still rubbing her quim where he had her keep it wide open for him, Jalinda sucked the taste of cunt off it eagerly, submitting to her third in a way utterly different from the way she had submitted to his brothers. In that moment somehow she resolved all the doubts about whether she could love Pag as he deserved, for she realized that love is not a single thing: she loved them all. Perhaps she loved Pag most, but
most
had no meaning when Kar’s cock had its way in her mouth and she felt so desperate to please him, to draw his essence from him.

Which she did, for with a little groan he shot his seed down her throat, and Jalinda eagerly swallowed it. He stroked her cheek. “I’ll have your bottom sometime soon, sweetling, I promise. I think you’ve had enough cock there for today.”

“She certainly has,” Pag confirmed. “Jalinda, sweetling, you may take a shower now. Then we’ll shower, too, and we’ll all go to the feast.”

“There will be a pillow there for you,” Kar said, with a smile, “though you’ll have to show the elders your backside before you may sit on it.”

* * *

The first week of her married life gave Jalinda a strange sort of bliss she could never have dreamt she might enjoy, growing up on a civilized planet. By the law of the Trestrimar, the day after a girl’s wedding she might stay in bed for the whole twenty-one hours of the Maran planetary rotation—in order, of course, that she be ready for fucking again after her day of rest. Jalinda enjoyed her time in bed, which included Kar, and Pag, and even Hed coming in to cuddle her at regular intervals and to bring her food and drink: the naturally grown food from the hydroponics that lay screened by trees outside the village and the cool clear water that all the barbarians of Mara drank to the exclusion of every other beverage.

“Are you comfortable?” Pag would ask, and Jalinda would laugh.

“No, sir,” she said each time, “but I don’t mind.”

By the end of the day of rest, though, she felt comfortable enough between her thighs, on her still well-bruised bottom-cheeks, and even in the cruelly used blossom between those cheeks that the need for cock to which her husbands had indeed now fully awakened her began again to take hold. The next few days, during which, when she hadn’t been ordered over the fucking bench, she began to put the hut in an order at least a little reminiscent of her home on Sherdon, with the kitchen well-structured to make the sorts of meals she thought Pag and his brothers might at least find interesting, though food seemed not to interest barbarians as much as it did the civilized, went by in a lovely blur.

Having three lusty husbands to please, though, meant that she spent a good deal of time over the bench and, when night fell and she went into the room of one husband only, awake in his bed with his cock deep inside her. All three brothers kept her in her training belt all day, when their day came around, except when one of them had her bottom over the bench. At night her belt came off, for even gentle Kar liked bottom-sex best of all.

She did go over her whipping stool once.

She had forgotten that Kar had requested she not use so much hot pepper in the next soup she made. When she realized, she had served it anyway, thinking that Kar shouldn’t be such a baby.

Kar didn’t want her whipped, though he was sneezing violently and his eyes watered uncontrollably, but Pag disagreed. Looking gravely at Jalinda, he asked if she had realized before she served the soup that she had forgotten Kar’s request. Jalinda felt her face crumple as she nodded.

“Go get your whipping stool, sweetling,” Pag said gently. “I don’t want to have to do this, but we have a responsibility especially at the beginning of our marriage, to make sure you understand your duties. Put the stool next to the fucking bench in the great room. Then take off your belt and get over the stool with your bottom up and ready. Hed will come and whip you in a few minutes. You need to learn to remember these things, and we must help you.”

Waiting for her punishment over the little stool that presented her rump so prominently for discipline seemed like the worst part, until Hed actually whipped her, which instantly became the worst part.

“Next time,” Pag said, his voice still grave, “it will be your cunt that gets punished, sweetling.”

It was his night, and before he fucked her bottom he told her that he would thrust in at full length for the first time. “You need it that way,” he said simply, “after a whipping. I want you to know what it’s like to have to serve me so fully.”

Lying over the pillows the way Pag always positioned her for bottom-sex, Jalinda felt her heart jump. When Pag did thrust in all the way, crouching over her and driving hard and deep, she cried out loud with every thrust at his utter mastery, but he spared her nothing, and fucked harder and harder until Jalinda thought her bottom would never be the same. When at last he came deep inside her secret blossom, she sobbed at the intensity of the feeling, and when Pag turned her over and gently brought her to her own climax with his fingers, looking down smilingly at her bare quim and kissing her there from time to time, she moaned, “Thank you, sir. Thank you,” over and over.

Chapter Sixteen

The bad news came ten days after the wedding. Coming in from a successful hunt of the genetically engineered elk with which the founders had seeded Mara to provide food and training in manly discipline to their barbarian descendants, Pag and Kar heard the whine of a departing jump-jet. Hed had stayed home with Jalinda, since the roof of the hut needed some minor repairs.

He came to meet them as they approached the village, a grim look on his face. “News from Marafall. Kroban is coming.”

Pag stood still for a moment, forgetting the full, heavy bag of meat he carried and forgetting the stickiness from the skinning that only a few seconds before he had been longing to wash off before he went to embrace Jalinda, hold her close and look into her eyes, and tell her about the hunt.

“Zulin?” Kar asked.

Hed nodded. “Gep is dead, though his rebellion continues. They captured and tortured him, but he did not betray us, of course.”

“But they figured it out,” Pag said. “Genetics, probably.”

“Genetics?” Kar asked. The technology was one of the things the founders of Mara had specifically forbidden to their barbarians, but Pag had picked up enough knowledge to know what a two-edged sword such things could be.

“They found some of our blood, or some of our skin, in the barracks on Zulin,” he guessed. “They have a tech that lets them figure out that the men who killed the Vionian soldiers came from Mara.” He turned to Hed. “How soon did the messenger know?”

“The emergency burst came from Zulin, from the resistance there. Kroban wants to roll the revolt up quickly, they say. He only brought his assault ship.”

Pag reasoned it out. “So he will not want to gather the whole fleet, after he just brought it home from Sherdon. He will come straight here, to make an example of us. Has a council been called on Marafall?”

Hed nodded. “Tomorrow. The elders are meeting now.”

Pag glanced at Kar, who wore a lopsided grin. He always got elated at the thought of battle. “Think of Jalinda, Kar,” he said. “We could die in this fight.”

Kar’s smile faded. “Should we ask them not to send all of us out to the field? Pag, you could stay here to defend the village.”

Hed’s face darkened at that, but he let Pag express his mind. “Our honor is concerned. We must go. And there will not be a field. With no EMP to knock out their blasters, the Vionians will slaughter us unless we find a way to trap them.” He turned back to Hed. “Jalinda does not know?”

“No,” Hed said, though Pag knew him well enough to see in his face that what he meant was,
Of course not: do you think me an idiot?

“She’ll take the news very hard,” Kar said. “But can we keep it from her?”

“For as long as possible,” Pag replied, “we will. She will go to the secret shelter with the other women if the battle comes here, as it may. We will tell her then that her husbands go to war, but we will not tell her that it is Kroban. We will not frighten her that way.”

* * *

Because they had served under General Kroban, Pag and his brothers received a summons to the council, and left with the first elder of the Trestrimar on the jump-jet the next morning. They sent Jalinda to stay with Yora. Pag could see in her troubled green eyes that she knew something very grave had happened, but he also saw her resolve to wait until her husbands decided to tell her what it was.

In only a few weeks, Pag had found such happiness in his bride as he had never thought he might experience. Something about caring for her—far beyond the whipping and the fucking, which gave him more pleasure than he had known with any woman—and helping her settle into a life here on Mara that she seemed to find unexpectedly to her liking filled his heart with a joy that far surpassed the red joy of battle he had felt in his adventures across the galaxy with his brothers.

After the council of the three elders of the village, Pag had gone to the first elder and told him the whole story of their departure from Vion 4 and the fight on Zulin.

“On a civilized world,” the elder mused. “I suppose you would have felt the need to tell me this earlier.”

Pag had felt rebuked for a moment, so close to civilized had he become in his five years serving the empire, but then he understood what the elder had meant. “Yes, elder. But among the Trestrimar, such things are far away.”

“Who would have thought a general of the Vionian Empire would decide to take anything a barbarian of Mara did so amiss?”