THE SPOILS OF WAR by Pete Brown. petebrownuk @ yahoo.com
Read all of Pete's stories in groups.yahoo.com/group/petebrownseroticstories
Part 26
I sat there, dazed and confused. All around me were these youngish tough-looking guys dressed in a variety of soiled and torn robes, as I was. They were jabbering away in what I assumed was Arabic, and they seemed hostile to me - I could see they looking at me, and wondering how many of them it would take to overpower me and kill me.
It was the guards who saved me. Just as four of them had plucked up enough courage to come over to me and start shouting and threatening me, the guards unlocked our cage and herded us out. The guards looked serious - as well as the usual whips and slave prods, they all carried guns: and these were not the normal pistols carried in holsters, but automatic rifles, carried cradled in the arms, ready for use. I guessed that all the men I was with were considered to be dangerous, very dangerous indeed.
The guards ordered us to strip, and also said it in Arabic, reading the words from a piece of paper. All the men started to shout, and no one did anything. The guards ordered a second time, there was a lot more shouting, threatening gestures, and nearly a riot - until the guards took a guy near them, prodded him so that he screamed and writhed on the floor, then bent down and simply pulled and cut away his clothes. They had to do two more until the lesson seemed to have been learned, and we all then stood there naked together. I couldn't help noticing that most of the guys covered their dicks and their balls with their hands - not something a group of Americans would do: I've seen single men stripped in front of others who've tried to cover themselves, but when you've got a whole group of guys, they don't bother.
They herded us into a line, pushing us so close together that I could feel the guy's body behind me pressed against mine, and I was pushed into the guy in front of me. The guards patrolled up and down the line with their prods, threatening anyone who made even the slightest attempt to move, and a whole lot of the guys were almost weeping. It seemed so odd - I mean, if you're not used to it, being sandwiched between other naked men isn't exactly pleasant, but it's not the end of the world, is it? And I knew it couldn't be all that bad, as after about half an hour I could feel the dick of the guy behind me nudging at my ass as he had an erection, just as mine was doing to the butt of the guy in front: I mean, if you were really terrified, you wouldn't have an erection, would you?
After what seemed like an age, the line shuffled forward a couple of paces then stopped, then forward again.... Eventually I got to the front, and was pushed through a door into what was clearly a "processing facility".
Two burly slaves grabbed hold of me and pushed me down onto a kind of rack. Straps were quickly fastened around my torso so that I was held immobile, then, as I stood there, bent at the waist, there was a hiss.... and a stabbing pain from my left butt. I learned later that this was the new, "humane" way of branding slaves - the branding iron, dipped in liquid nitrogen, sears the flesh and leaves the visible brand just as the traditional white-hot one does, but there's almost no pain - and, perhaps more importantly, the slave can work immediately as there's no lengthy recovery period.
As I lay there they pushed a small dolly under my neck, and then I was collared - not the thin, steel collars that slaves at the Colonel's who didn't have snout rings wore, but a more traditional, heavy iron collar. They held my head steady and a pneumatic jack hammer banged a rivet through the fastening on the collar, and then that was it - without another word, they released me and pushed me out through a second door, into a big holding cage.
The slaves who had already been processed were all standing there, and seemed to have got over their shame, or whatever it was, as they were no longer attempting to cover their genitals. Just as I knew I must have, they all had big angry-looking "S"s burned into their butts - S for slave, I supposed, and like me their heads were almost bowed by the unexpected weight of the heavy iron collars around their necks.
We stood around as more and more slaves were processed, then, without warning, the cage door was opened and eight of us were pulled out - I'd got a healthy regard for staying away from cage doors, having seen how they took my fellows for gelding before, but I'd slipped up this time and happened to be closest. As we stood there, the guards surrounding us menacingly, two more slaves dragged over a big length of heavy chain, then using a portable riveting device, all eight of us were attached at intervals to it.
Once this was done, the guards seemed to relax, as they evidently thought we were no longer a risk, and they simply led us out, onto the former exercise area, where we squatted down under the hot sun to wait.
I was soon to learn that a coffled slave is in one of two modes: waiting, as we then were, or working! You don't have any choice. You have no freedom to act, or move, or not move, other than that dictated by the coffle itself. And had I know then that I'd spend the next three years of my life coffled together with the other seven guys on my "string", I think I'd have gone mad. But as it was, I had no time to think as my coffle was pushed out onto the former exercise field, where we just stood, chained together, waiting to see what was going to happen. Some other coffles were already there, and we all simply stood around for the remaining guys to be chained and brought out - they hardly needed to guard us at all, as when you're chained by the neck to seven other guys, it's hard to make a break for it!
As we waited my coffle mates seemed to be getting over their embarrassment at their nudity - well, I guess it is hard to stand for long periods with your hands clasped over your dick. They were jabbering away at each other, and making threatening gestures towards me. Then, suddenly, they turned on me - all moving in as best they could, to start pummelling and scratching at me. I of course defended myself, and I'm an expert in close, hand to hand fighting, and was making a pretty good job of it until we were all struck down - all our eight bodies were writhing on the ground, and I had those excruciating pains in all my limbs that you only get when you've been severely prodded by one of the slave prods.
A guard stood over us as we lay there groaning and twitching, and he snapped "Lesson one of the coffle, guys - one for all, and all for one, as the musketeers used to say! If we goad any of you, you all get it as that chain's a pretty good conductor. Now you boys need to learn to behave - you're going to get to be very good friends from now on, as that chain will never be removed - and I do mean very good, close friends, as 'never' means 'never' - you're going to live out your slavery coupled to each other like that, until you die!"
One of the Arabs muttered something at the others, and they all seemed to be listening. He bent his head close to me and said "Listen, infidel pig, I have some English, unlike my men and I have told them what the guard said. You are safe for now, but we will find a way to kill you..."
"Hey, what have I done...?"
"You are an American. You have invaded our country. You have enslaved me and my men...."
"Who's this 'we'? Can't you see I'm a slave as well? They captured me and made me a slave, and now I'm stuck on this fucking coffle with you...."
"You are a spy, put here to trap us, to make it worse for us...."
"Bullshit! Do you think that if I was a spy they'd strip me as naked as you are? Would they prod me with that dammed slave prod and leave me twitching on the ground? Would they brand me with a slave brand?" and here I turned around and showed him the livid red scar on my butt. "...and, anyway, how could it possibly be worse for you? You and your men, and me, are all going to be taken somewhere and made to work. We'll have to work buck naked like this, chained together for the rest of our lives, whipped and prodded if we fail to work hard enough...."
"No! They cannot do this! They cannot make us work naked!"
"Hey, calm down! Yes, slaves in coffles do usually work naked, and they certainly can make us do it. If they don't give us even a scrap of clothing to cover ourselves ,where do you think we're going to get it from? They don't want to waste money on providing us with clothing, and with having to wash it and change it - it's cheaper for them to keep us naked. And it makes it even more impossible for us to escape. And the whip cuts into the flesh directly, if we're not working hard enough...."
I stopped then, and looked at him, and went on "So you'd better get used to it. But you've got nothing to worry about - you and all your men are pretty defined, you've got good bodies..."
"No! It is a sin!"
"Oh come on! Look, they've made me do worse than just work naked.... After a time, it gets to be no big deal..."
"It is a sin! Our religion teaches us that a man may only expose himself to his wives in the privacy of the marriage bed. Men do not appear naked in front of each other."
"Not just in front of men, actually.... If we're working on the highway or somewhere, women will see us, too..."
"No!"
I put my hand on his arm to calm him down, and went on "Look, there's nothing you can do about it, sin or no sin. So you'd better learn to accept what you can't change. Is all this sin stuff why you were all so upset earlier?"
"Yes."
"Well, as I said, that's tough. You'll soon get used to it, just as I had to."
He took a long, cold look at my body, and saw that there were no tan lines on me (in preparation for fighting to the fuck, I'd been given intensive courses of sun bed treatment, as it was considered to detract from the audience's enjoyment of the slave's body to see white patches around the butt and pubes). I took advantage of the silence to add "Look, I'm a slave just like you. Have been, for some time, so I guess I'm getting used to it. But this is serious now - there's no escape from the coffle, as chained together like this there's just no way we could do anything..... But why do only you speak English? And why do you call them your men?"
"My father is a rich and powerful man. When the Yankees came to take our oil, I fought them, and naturally I was a leader. I had the finest schooling, with an English governess when I was a child..., one of my wives speaks excellent English..."
"Hey, don't call them 'Yankees'! It's filthy Southerners who invaded you and took the oil. And I reckon you got what you deserved - if your scum of a country hadn't cut off the supply to the North, we wouldn't have lost the Civil War...."
He launched himself at me, and even with the constraints of the chain tried to punch me. The guard at once came over, and all eight of us were then writhing on the ground as he prodded us harshly. As we lay there, still twitching as our limbs spasmed, he almost snarled "Don't insult my country and my people, saying we deserve the foreign invaders...."
I was going t argue with him, but it didn't seem worthwhile. Neither of us was going to give way, so instead I muttered "Look, you see what happens if we fight or anything... For the sake of all of us, let's just behave..."
He glared at me, but nodded, and, still shaking, we all got to our feet again.
They just packed the coffles all into a truck - we were extremely crowded, and there was no room to sit down or anything. Once the rear door had been shut and the truck set off, every time we went around a bend we were all thrown together, our bodies pressed helplessly into each other. I suppose it helped those Arabs to start to overcome their shyness, as there was nothing the could do to prevent their dicks pressing into the other guys, and, of course, it wasn't long before a whole lot of us had erections as we were all young and virile. But after several hours we were all exhausted, and I for one needed to piss - when the pain got unbearable, I just had to let go and piss as I stood there pressed together in between all the hot sweaty bodies of my companions. And as they felt my piss spatter on their legs and feet, there was a lot of unpleasant shouting (which I didn't understand, but the tone was pretty bad!). There was nothing they could do about it, though, as in the dark they had no real way of knowing it was me - and before long the floor streamed with piss as some of them had to relieve themselves, too.
It must have been hours before the truck stopped and the door was opened, and a coffle was pulled out, then the door was slammed shut and we drove on. This happened two or three more times, so I guessed they were making "deliveries", and I think it was indicative of the way that we were being treated just as mere commodities in our coffles that it didn't seem to matter which coffle was taken out at which stop - they just hauled the one out nearest the door. Still, it did make it easier as after a time we could at least all sit, slumped together, although it wasn't pleasant doing so in the piss that was now all over the floor.
We were pretty desperate for something to eat and drink as we must have been travelling all night because at the last "drop" it had been morning again, and somehow we were the last. I'd have thought it might have been a good idea to have been offloaded earlier as we might tat least then have been fed, but the Arab guy kept pushing his men towards the back, and urging them to keep clear of the door, and as I was chained to them, I had to do the same thing. Still, our turn did come eventually as we were the only ones left, and as we jumped down off the back of the truck, we saw what was to be our home for the next three years.
There wasn't much, actually - we were in a clearing in the middle of what seemed to be like acres of farm land, with different kinds of crops and some stretches of fruit trees, too. There were two men standing there looking at us, equipped with the usual whips and prods. They eyed us up and down ,and then one spoke to the other "Pretty good crop, this lot - I told you it was OK to buy them from the government by mail order.... Everyone knows that these Arabs they've been shipping in are pretty fit."
"Yes, but I'm still worried - they're all trained fighters, after all..."
"...and I've told you to stop worrying: there's nothing they can do! We'll keep them buck naked so they can't hide any weapons or anything, and chained together like that they can't escape. They'll soon learn that they need to work, and work, and work, or else they'll feel the kiss of the whip, and that will make them so tired that they won't have any spirit left to even consider rebelling."
Turning to us, the first man rapped "Do any of you monkeys speak English?"
I was going to say that of course I did, but then held back - perhaps I might still be at risk, and it might be better to play the part of a dumb Arab. The leader though said in a clear voice "I do."
"Right! Tell your companions that they're here for one reason only, to work. If they fail to work, you'll all be punished. We don't tolerate any slacking. And as you're the only one who speaks English, we'll look to you to make sure the others get the message - otherwise it will be doubly bad for you."
And that was the real start of the hell that was to be my life for those years. I never wore a stitch of clothing, and in the summer we toiled away under the blazing sun, the insects biting us unmercifully. In the winter we shivered with the cold in the early mornings until the pace at which we were forced to work got us warmed up. Rain never stopped us - a man in clothes sooner or later stops working when he's wet through as the stuff is so clammy it chafes the skin, but a totally nude guy can be made to work even in the worst storm. They treated us just like animals - no, worse than animals, as there are laws governing cruelty to animals. Our only food was the handsful of slave chow we were given first thing in the morning and last thing at night. We had no proper place to sleep - our coffle was just driven into a totally bare barn at night and we lay on the bare dirt floor, our only comfort the bodies of the slaves around us. We were only allowed to crap in the mornings, squatting there in the bare soil in a line on our chain, and then covering up our droppings just as if we were cats; if we wanted to piss, we were not allowed to stop working, but just had to do it as we toiled away.
And what was this work? Well, anything to do with the fucking crops: tilling the fields before planting, endless hoeing, weeding on our hands and knees, harvesting.... And on some days staggering along with the boxes of produce to the waiting trucks. And in spite of our hunger, if we so much as dared take even one of the fruits or vegetables, the whole coffle was whipped or prodded.
We worked seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year, from sunrise to sunset. The guards just gave us terse orders at the start of the day, set us a quota of so many rows to hoe or whatever, and we knew that if we didn't make it, we'd be punished. It was totally mind numbing - there was no news, no conversation (Slaves had to remain silent in the fields), no entertainment of any kind: my days were just passed in an endless round of totally bored drudgery. We didn't even speak to each other much in the evening - after the first few weeks when we had told each other our life stories, there was nothing to say: nothing ever happened, and so there was nothing to discuss.
There were some consolations though, I suppose: it was a healthy life, as there was no stress, provided you worked hard and fulfilled your quota. My body was properly fed and strenuously exercised continuously, so I remained in perfect physical condition. And, of course, gradually I got to know the other slaves well - very well! When we were first coffled I've told you how I thought they were all ashamed of their bodies, and then I found out that it was something to do with their religion that it was a sin to appear naked. Well, they soon got over that - well, I mean, they didn't have any choice, did they? (Or perhaps they thought that their god had abandoned them anyway). We were chained together and naked all the time, and they soon got used to the feel of another mans body against theirs. And we were all young guys, and fit, so inevitably we all had erections - there was no hiding them when we were working, or at night when we were huddled together in a heap in the barn. It was only a matter of time before, like me, they were all jerking off, and we were used to seeing each other do it; and, as you'd expect, we quickly moved on to jerking each other off, and then to the more interesting parts of sex.
As a gladiator I'd kind of become used to public sex, but in the coffle I found new heights of enjoyment, having the same seven companions every night, and knowing that we were going to be together the next night, too. All of us found real release from the torments of our everyday life in the joy we found in each others bodies, and it was the only entertainment and pleasure we got.
Ali, the "leader", soon got tired of translating everything for me, and with his help and the willing encouragement of the other guys, I was soon speaking a kind of "pidgin" Arabic - although the vocabulary I was learning, focussing as it did on the dick, ass, and the things you could do with them, would probably have shocked polite society. Mind you, there was a constant tension between Ali and me: he thought of himself as a natural leader, and the other guys all deferred to him; but I was a tough, independent kind of guy, as you know, and I didn't see any reason for taking orders from him - after all, I was an American, even though I was now an American slave, and I'd been brought up to know we were better than the Arabs and other assorted people on the planet!
So Ali and I had many run-ins with each other. He'd give an order, that the others would kind of obey, but I wouldn't. He didn't have many things to give orders about, as our working lives were so totally controlled by the guards, but he did things like say how we were going to sleep in the barn, and who could fuck who! And once we'd all got used to fucking, he always wanted to pick the men he was going to fuck. The first time he chose me I refused of course, as I'm a natural top, and there was a lot of shouting and bad feeling. He ordered two of the other guys to hold me down whilst he fucked me, and I just had to kneel there and take his dick up my ass - although I didn't cry out, even though he fucked me hard and vigorously, as I didn't want the others to see that he was hurting me. But later that night, in the early hours of the morning when the others were sleeping, I got my revenge - I held him around the throat, choking him into submission, as I took my pleasure from what I suspected was his virgin ass!
After that, we were fine together, though. He got to understand that I was in control, even though he gave orders to his men. And we fell into pretty good sex - one night we'd each fuck one of the other guys in the coffle, and the next I'd fuck him. We were good together - of all the men I'd had, he was the one most like me: we were the same age, both had a fiery temper which we had to control almost all the time, and we both really enjoyed sex with other guys. I got pretty good at Arabic, too, as when we lay there in each others arms those nights, Ali enjoyed teaching me new words and expressions, nipping my tits with his sharp teeth, or giving my balls a little squeeze, if he thought I wasn't paying proper attention: it's a pretty exciting way to learn a language, I'll tell you!
There was only one other time when Ali used his power on me - we'd been harvesting sugar cane, which you do after they've burned off the leaves, and we were all filthy dirty with the soot. And the stuff is really vicious - kind of barbed, so much so that they even gave us gloves to stop our hands being torn to pieces.
That night Ali told four of them to hold me down on the ground, and I started to curse him saying that he wasn't a real man if he couldn't fuck me without having me restrained like this. He just laughed, and said "Steve, this is for your own good... I know you're brave and everything, but even a guy like you couldn't take this if you weren't restrained, my friend.... Now, bite down on this..."
He shoved a piece of cane into my mouth, and I wondered what the hell was going to happen - until it was as if my back caught fire. There were endless pricks and stabs at it, none of them in themselves too bad, but the pain built until it was unbearable - sweat was pouring off me, and if the stick hadn't been there to bite on, I'd have screamed the place down. It went on and on for almost two hours, and then I was allowed to go free.
"What the fuck..?", I managed to stammer as I fought to control my body.
"We all talked about it, Steve.", Ali told me. "And when there were all the sharp bits of cane around, and the soot, this seemed like a good time to do it. Look, we thought of killing you when you were put in this coffle, as we thought you were one of the Yankees who'd enslaved us. But then we saw you were what you said - a guy who'd been enslaved, just like us. And we heard you tell us about how you'd be gelded if they ever found out you were not really 'one of us'. So we decided we had to do this - there was always a risk that the 'Spike' on your back would give you away, so we have changed and altered the letters into Arabic characters."
Several of the other guys started to snigger and laugh amongst themselves then, and I began to realise that there was something else going on. "Letters? What do they say?"
"Oh, don't worry, the guards here don't even understand what we're saying, let alone be capable of reading what we write..." Ali's eyes were twinkling with amusement now, too.
"Come on, tell me..."
"Well, Steve, we had to choose characters that we could make from 'Spike' - and it just so happens that, loosely translated, for those that know, you are now telling the world that you're a good fuck!"
Everyone laughed then, and they kind of hugged me so that I knew I was properly accepted. Still, if I ever did meet other Arab guys, it might be interesting to prove to them that you shouldn't believe everything you see written!
I think we'd all given up on even believing that any other kind of life was possible than the one we were enduring - treated just like animals, worked to the limits of our strength, and then the nights of sex when we almost managed to forget it all. Until one day - it was our regular weekly "bath" (I'd forgotten to tell you that they didn't allow us time to wash or anything every day, as they saw no need) and we'd been lined up as usual to have our hair clipped and our stubble shaved, and we knew that there would soon be the icy cold water from the hose as one of the other slaves on the place used a brush to scrub the dirt of our bodies. It all went off as usual, but at the end, instead of being herded back to the fields, we were loaded into a truck and driven off! And that seemed to be the end of our life on the farm - no goodbyes, no explanations, just loaded up and shipped out.
We didn't go far, though - just to what as presumably the local big town, and soon all eight of us, still in our coffle, were standing there, up for sale. Our farmer owner must have taken the opportunity to sell us that day as there was some sort of county fair on - lots of booths and stalls, the smell of popcorn in the air, the sounds of cattle being groomed and shown in the ring, and, to one side, this big area of grass where we were which was the slave display area.
All they had to do of course was tether the ankles of the guys at each end of our coffle to pegs in the ground, and there we were, all lined up and ready for inspection. We could see a few other coffles, and, in the distance, the area where the individual male and female slaves were on display. As coffle slaves we were displayed naked, but we noticed that the individual slaves were given small scraps of cloth to cover their loins - although as the potential buyers moved amongst them, they were frequently moved aside so that the buyers could see the entire body.
We had quite a bit of interest from farmer types - they'd come and appraise the whole string of us, then do a detailed inspection of one or more of us, running their hands all over our bodies, paying particular attention to our backs, butts and flanks as that's where a work slave gets most of his strength from. The didn't really care about our dicks, as farmers don't usually have sex with coffle slaves as it's just too dangerous - they either have to take there guy out of the coffle, and risk escape and stuff, or fuck him when he's still coffled, when there' s the risk of his coffle mates turning on him when they're intimately engaged. So it wasn't so bad, I suppose - it was a real change just to be able to stand there in the sunshine and not work, and at lunchtime, they even gave us a bar of compressed slave chow to eat! Still, it was good to see "real people" again - on our farm we'd just seen the small number of guards, and now there were ordinary Americans enjoying their day out - moms, dads, kids all flowed past in their casual clothes, and it was now obvious that slavery was so much an accepted part of their society that the thought of seeing all these naked guys standing there wasn't a concern. Although when one of my coffle mates pissed (which is what we were used to doing, after all, whenever we needed to), an irate middle aged woman complained to a guard who came over and gave him a couple of lashes with a tawse, so we got the idea that if we needed to do this, we should at least turn our backs away from the crowds.
It was getting to be late afternoon when finally we were unchained from the pegs holding us in place and led off to the auction area. We waited at the edge of the small stage they'd erected whilst the slave there was being sold - the auctioneer used his cane to turn the guy around, poke at his balls, and hold his dick up for the crowd to see. Then, as the auctioneer said he was a newly-enslaved prisoner who they'd taken special care with to make sure that the other cons did not get to him, he was made to bend over and pull his ass cheeks apart so that the potential buyers could see his "ass, believed to be virgin". I really did feel sorry for the slave - he only looked to be about nineteen, and in response to questions from the crowd the auctioneer said that he'd been enslaved for driving without insurance! That brought home to me how bad things must be getting - if they were that desperate for slaves, to take guys for minor offences like that!
There wasn't all that much room on the stage for all eight of us, but the auctioneer just intoned "You've all had an opportunity to inspect this coffle, ladies and gentlemen... Fairly standard, eight good, strong males, former Arab so-called 'freedom fighters', all believed to be between twenty five and thirty five, so a lot of good working life left in them. Been coffled for three years, so used to the life: they're all fuck buddies, I'm told, so they don't cause trouble at night". There was a ripple of amusement from the watching crowd as he said this, and he continued "They're in perfect condition, ladies and gentlemen - look at the muscles. The only reason for sale is that their current owner is selling off most of his land for housing development. Now, what am I bid...."?
Somehow, being auctioned off like that, just as if you're an object and not a person, really brings it home to you what your real status in life is. As we were led off the stage I knew I was doomed to spend the rest of my life like this.
End Of Part 26