Slaves Of Xi Ling

With those slim Manchu blades that so many Chinese carry, they stripped the two gwailo of all their clothes. The razor sharp edges cutting cotton, leather belt and silk with ease. More than one blade drew against skin, slicing a bloody line on the soft white flesh.

Naked, and because they were exposed, vulnerable, the final act of the Manchu knives was to cut their wrists free of their bonds. But the respite was short lived as modern European hand cuffs were clicked onto wrists and shackles added to ankles almost like a cruel afterthought.

With a small motion of the hand Xi Ling waved over one of her entourage. When she spoke he translated almost as fast as she mouthed the words.

“You are truly the devil who thought that he could fuck the daughter of Sha Loung and live to tell the tale. I remember this,” she said as she pointed the handle of the whip at Garry’s flaccid cock. “You will not be needing it any longer, later it will be my pleasure to relieve you of its urgings.”

Now she moved to stand over Adam. “You were with him when he chose. You could have spared me by choosing more wisely and quickly, but you did not. For that you too will suffer, but I have not decided if your life is forfeit, like his, or if you would make a nice gift for a woman that I know.”

Adam just swallowed in abject fear. This was the worst nightmare that he had ever been caught up in. He turned his head to see where they were. If there was any sign of hope on the horizon. But the group stood alone on a track and no habitation or other persons were in view.

Xi Lin spoke to her hirelings and mounted one of the two rickshaws that were by the side of the road.

Adam and Garry were dumped again into the yellow funeral cart, the lid was slid into position and the ride recommenced with both men knowing that their lives were now in the hands of an Oriental woman who was seeking revenge for her rape.

 

*** Part The Eighth

Journey.

They did not see Xi Ling again for weeks. Their captors took them from the coast, that haven for foreigners, deep into the dark underbelly of what used to be the Heavenly Empire. Now it was in the grip of the chaos of the Warlords who racked the country from one end to the other with their not so petty wars and strife as the Manchu overlords tumbled to the Triads, Tongs, White Lotus, Ming recidivists and the republicans.

Not a word of English was spoken by their captors, who also forbade the two captives to talk to one another. But they were fed some morsels and they were not unduly mistreated. It was rather that there was a monumental indifference to their fate.

All the while they were kept naked and chained, whether they were on the deck of a barge on the Yangtze Kiang or whether they were tossed over a horse. They were both on full display to the excited crowd that always gathered wherever they stopped.

Both were prodded and poked and many a woman weighed the gwailo’s sexual parts in her hands to measure up how they compared to the local men in terms of form and size.

The sun beat down and both men became tanned as they never had the use of the sunshades that their captors reserved for their own comfort.

Only abject slaves had tanned skin in China.

Finally they left the river and started to go upcountry. The foothills of that plateau called the Himalayas start in rural China and quickly become a confusing mass of hills, cliffs, mountains and savage towering peaks.

Now the horses had been left behind! Both Adam and Garry struggled, naked and on foot, up the ill made roads that twisted around this forgotten part of Asia.

Continually exhausted, the party made its way up the hills that made up the realm of the Warlord known as Lo Liluoang, the angry dragon of the west, and his favourite concubine Xi Ling.

 

*** Part The Ninth.

The eight cuts.

The fortress loomed over the huddle of the small town like a brooding presence. It was no more than a medieval fort but the modern, breech loading artillery on the walls said much about its owner and his local power.

Cavalry paraded with red banners, the leftover elite dregs of the Manchu horsemen who had ruled China for hundreds of years. Now they were mercenaries who sought only to survive the revolutionary convulsions in China. Over their shoulders were the carbines of the former Emperor’s select few and in their holsters were the latest Browning repeaters.

Not a single European face did the two prisoners see as they were walked up to the great ebony doors that guarded the citadel of Xi Ling’s world. This was a part of the Orient that few Europeans had ever seen, or indeed ever wanted to see.
Weary and exhausted they were finally at the end of the week’s long trek into the Chinese hinterland. There arrayed before them as if in some ironic diplomatic gesture was Xi Ling, her father and most of the inhabitants of the castle.

As Garry and Adam stood, silent, awaiting judgement, they once again went under that impersonal scrutiny that had become the hallmark of the whole trip.

Some discussion followed that both Garry and Adam could not follow but it finished with Xi Ling stamping her foot in anger as she pulled her chi pao robe to show the healed scars of the caning that she had received at Garry’s behest.

In the end she stormed off in frustration as the warlord, Lo Liluoang, surveyed the two men who had been kidnapped at the behest of his concubine. He seemed fascinated by Garry and ran his soft hand over the slave’s back with an almost sensual movement.

Suddenly he barked an order and Garry was knocked to his knees. Whilst four men stood on his wrists and ankles, the fetters were removed and his arms and legs were staked to the ground so that he was spread face down, naked, in the soft sand of the courtyard.

Another sharp order and a soldier arrived with a tin bath that was full of water and bamboo rods that had been soaking for weeks.

Adam looked away from the inevitable punishment and his eyes caught a small movement behind the blinds in a window.
Xi Ling was settling down to enjoy the beating whatever the argument had been previous to her storming off.

Sure enough the blinds were opened to reveal what could almost be described as a theatre box. Xi Ling and two other women sat in comfort and chatted whilst Garry was prepared.

On the courtyard sand a masseur came to administer a massage to loosen the muscles on the big American’s back. All the while Garry cursed loudly, but it seemed as if that was all part of the show.

Finally the massage was over and a slender young woman, naked from the waist up, arrived to bow deeply before Lo Liluoang. They exchanged a few words and then at last the slim girl picked one of the canes from the water.

In Adam’s head there was a moment, when the drops of water flashed in the bright sun. That remembrance would remain as a fixed memory for the rest of his life. The glitter of the water and the dark marks that it made on the sand when it splashed down. The slim girl, her breasts well formed and pert that moved in gentle sympathy with her graceful movement. The sound of the cane hissing through the warm air and the expectant look on Xi Ling’s pretty face as the cane met the flesh of its victim.

Eight strokes.

Eight strokes of the cane does not sound like much at all. Every public schoolboy has to suffer as much. But there is a difference between the casual punishment of schoolboys and the administering of torture by an expert.

Each blow was placed by the hand of an artist. The cane rose, it circled and gathered speed. Then its orbit changed and it drew across the flesh as it contacted to rip the delicate and massage softened skin with the ridges of the bamboo rod.

The young woman was Lo Liluoang’s torturer. She administered the most wicked punishments with a small childlike smile and a touch of the fingers to her full lips.

She filled the canes with lead shot and ensured that enough tamarind had been added to the soak water. She was so much more than a technician of terror, she was an artisan of agony.

At each blow Garry cried in agony. From the very first he suffered a world of pain that made him animal. Lifted the veil of thousands of years of civilisation and revealed the howling creature beneath.

But the slim girl ignored his struggles. She checked her cane before every blow and tossed it to the sand if any sign of splitting showed. So savage were the blows that four canes lay discarded after only eight blows.

She circled her victim with the intent of a wolf that has disabled a large prey. When she saw that, in his fright, Garry had an erection she kicked off her sandal and massaged the turgid member for a moment against the sand before placing the next blow.

After every blow she waited until her victim was still and calm so that he fully appreciated the next cut of the cane. Now barefooted she checked between his legs and occasionally massaged Garry’s prick with her toes. The sensual becoming an creative composition mixed with the blood of the brutal.

His hips moved in a semblance of fucking as she brought him to two climaxes. One of pain and one of rape with the soles of her blood-soaked feet.

The audience of women on the balcony clapped politely and commented, appreciating the subtle contrast of pain that was so intense that the only outcome could be pleasure.

Adam could not decide if he was witnessing a barbaric ritual or a work of art. Every move seemed to be calculated to heighten the senses of victim and audience.

The terrible cuts on his back started to take the form of a Chinese character. A capital ‘T’ with cross strokes on the vertical. This too was part of the art of punishment.

Even the eight lucky strokes and the character written in pain had significance.

Blood splashed on the breasts of the artist who was performing to the edification of all but her victim, Garry. It trickled from the points of her nipples and onto the sand.

Then there was more liquid on the sand as sweat, blood and finally sperm flowed on to the sand between Garry’s thighs.

This final convulsion as the eighth stroke tore at his back was greeted by appreciative noises from all but Adam and of course Garry who was in so much pain that he was almost unaware of the pleasure that had been forced from him.

This was the first taste of Xi Ling’s revenge. That Lo Liluoang had refused his lover permission to carry out the revenge was after all so fitting.

There was so much more to appreciate as a spectator and Lo Liluoang’s torturer had so much grace and flair for her horrific job that she made a mere caning into a lotus bloom of so much beauty that the victim was pleasured by the pain.

Garry had passed out but his body shivered as the masseur applied a vinegar sponge and cleaned the blood from his back to reveal the single symbol that had been cut in eight strokes of the cane instead of the seven strokes of a calligraphic brush.

The character for revenge. Seven strokes of the pen and eight of the cane. Two strokes so artfully placed that they seemed one.

Now that he had been marked for punishment the real revenge would begin. Supervised by Xi Ling, administered by a young girl and sanctioned by a Chinese Warlord