THE SPOILS OF WAR by Pete Brown. petebrownuk @ yahoo.com
Read all of Pete's stories in groups.yahoo.com/group/petebrownseroticstories
Part 33
There was a stunned silence in the Council Chamber and then Ali's father burst into a furious tirade, saying that the Leader could not enslave his son. The Leader banged his gavel several times to restore order, and then addressed him. "I am not enslaving your son. He is already a slave - you bought him, along with a coffle of others, in the South, and then exported him back to this country. The laws of this country give me, as Leader of the Council, the right to expropriate any assets that I deem necessary to keep our state secure, and I have decided that your slave is a threat to the order and stability that we enjoy. Consequently I am making such a sequestration order against your property, your slave. Had he been a man, a trial would have been necessary with possible unpleasant consequences, but a mere owned property, a simple order from me is all that is necessary. And I would remind you that as the owner of potentially dangerous property, charges could still be levelled against you yourself; but now this mere slave, is removed from you without further discussion and debate. Now, remain silent and let us move on to the rest of today's business in Council, or else we will need to consider those potential charges against you for owning dangerous materials."
Fuming, but controlling his anger and rage, Ali's father strode out of the Chamber, and I followed him.
After he had calmed down, Ali's father addressed me sorrowfully. "Steve, what can we do? I thought I had lost my son in our quarrels before, but you helped me regain him by your wise counsel. Now he is a slave to the Leader, I fear I have lost him permanently, just as we might have been able to start rebuilding a proper relationship: I am so proud of my four grandsons that he has sired, and I hoped that we might use them as common ground from which we could build...."
"We must get him out of there. I will summon the troops, address them and tell them what has gone on, and we will start the revolution... We will march on the Palace, and free Ali - we are the power in this country, after all - Ali commands the loyalty of thousands of hardened fighters."
"No, Steve, I do not think that will work. Remember, the Leader of the Council is also the Chief Priest in our religion. Many, if not all, of your men are firm believers in the god about whom he preaches, and I do not believe that you will be able to convince them to attack the palace, which is also the chief holy shrine! Even if some of your men follow you, the rest might be whipped up into a fervour, a jihad, as we say, and you would have fighting between your men. My son would not want that, even if it means his permanent enslavement."
"Return to your home, and I will consult with our closest and loyalist men", I told him, understanding that in this superstitiously religious country what he said was probably true. "We will come to you this evening, hopefully with a plan."
Ali's father embraced me. "Steve, you helped me before. You are my son's closest ally and friend, and yes, his lover. I trust you to find a way to restore him to both of us, and to his sons...."
The old man was almost weeping as we left, and I felt pretty dreadful, too. But my emotions were a mixture of anger and rage, deep concern for what even now they might be doing to Ali, and a terrible fear that we could not make a plan to rescue him. I did not know how I would be able to live for the rest of my life without Ali.
We were still using the old mine as a base, although now it was almost deserted as the slaves had all been shipped back to the USA and many of our army had dispersed back to their homes. Our trusted "brotherhood of the coffle" was still there, though, and the seven of us sat down to discuss Ali's rescue.
After hours of debate I had to agree with them and bow to their superior knowledge of the ridiculous religious superstitions in the country - I'd had experience of some of that kind of thing in the USA, after all, even in the relative sophistication of my home in Maine - and knew that we would not be able to mount a direct attack on the palace. So "stealth" seemed to be the only way, but again this seemed to be impossible: the whole palace compound was guarded by a special corps of fanatical religious fundamentalists, who had all vowed to die rather than allow any danger to come to the Leader, their high priest, and to the so-called "hold places". There had been many examples of these men doing suicidal things, such a throwing their bodies under the wheels of trucks trying to force a way through the gates - they had been conned into believing that a "future in heaven" awaited those who died in this way.
We considered many strategies, all of which were flawed in one or other respect. And finally it was me who came up with a plan, albeit one with many uncertainties and risks. I explained to them that as Ali was being kept in the Leader's slave quarters, that was where we needed to be. And who had ready access to the slave quarters? Why, slaves, of course.
My plan was therefore for us to become coffle slaves again, and for Ali's father to take us an present us to the Leader. There's a certain offhanded carelessness about dealing with coffled slaves, as it is believed that with the chains binding them together by their necks any concerted action is impossible, and so guards cease to focus on them. But we would have a coffle chain that appeared to be welded as usual, but which was in fact detachable by the use of very strong force. Once in the slave quarters, therefore, we would break free of the chain, overpower the guards, and free Ali.
"But, Steve, we would have no weapons", Faisel, always one to raise objections, countered.
"True indeed. We would have to be naked. But even naked, trained fighters like us, fighting for a cause in which we believe, can overcome tremendous odds."
"Naked?"
"Yes. Ali's father will have to take us in to the Palace compound as a gift for the Leader. We will have to look like a coffle of slaves - we will need to fit our collars again, and be entirely naked, as such a coffle would be when presented as a gift."
There was some muttering from the guys, and Faisel spoke up again. "But Steve, we are leaders of our men... We cannot appear naked in front of the Leader and his Council, and all the pleasure slaves he keeps in his Court.... It is undignified...."
I turned the whole thing into a bit of a joke. "Oh come on now, Faisel! Are you ashamed of your body now after a few weeks of relatively soft living? Do you fear the laughter when they look at your belly, as it is losing its flatness from all those sweet dates you eat and sherbets you drink as you loll on the silken cushions in your home with your wives? Or do you fear comparison of your dick against those of the pleasure slaves - most of us have never found it wanting, after all, but perhaps it has shrunk now that it no longer services strong male asses and only has to impregnate your wives?"
When the laughter and catcalls had subsided, I continued "But, seriously, I think this is the only plan that has even a vague chance of success. If any man here is scared to join with his coffle brothers in rescuing our leader, let him leave now: there is no shame, as you have all worked hard and tirelessly to free your country. What is proposed is dangerous, and many of you have sons who you will wish to school to manhood, and we will all understand your desire to retire to private life and do this. There is a strong possibility we might be killed, or if the attempt goes wrong before we can attack the guards, we might end up as slaves to the Leader for the rest of our lives, chained in that coffle we all hated in the South. But sometimes men have to pursue a goal, a higher purpose.
I will go, even if it is only me who is taken, a collar around my neck and a leash dragging me along, as Ali's father presents a single naked slave to the Leader."
Faisel at once stood up, and put his arm around my shoulders. "You will not be alone, Steve. I will be alongside you, even though my belly might cause you offence!"
He laughed as he said this, and all the others at once jumped to their feet, shouting their determination to join in our cause once more. My eyes filled with tears as we all threw our clothes off to stand there, naked and unashamed, embracing each other as once more our coffle re-formed.
Of course it was hateful to have a heavy iron collar once more around my neck - there were plentiful supplies in the mine, as we had used them on the captured Americans. And as I walked around, once more feeling my dick bobbing up and down as it was no longer confined by clothes, I experienced once more that change of gait, and restriction of my natural movements, that a heavy iron collar necessarily imposes: truly a man is almost a slave already once he is collared. The collar chafed and bit into my flesh once more as we spent the rest of the day experimenting with the attachment of the coffle chain to us: it had to be sufficiently secure to pass scrutiny by suspicious guards, but then capable of being torn off by a concerted effort from us, to allow us freedom of movement.
Ali's father came to the mine on my summons, and was at first astonished to see all seven of us standing there coffled together. Then he begged me to call off the plan, saying that dearly as he loved his son, he could not allow seven brave men like us to needlessly sacrifice our lives, or our liberties, for Ali. Well this was not the kind of talk I wanted to hear - before going into a fight men need to believe they can win, and reminding them of death or permanent enslavement was not the right thing at all! "Master", I told him, "You forget that, in law, we are still your slaves. It is an honour to serve you, to free your other slave who has been stolen from you!"
"Don't be ridiculous, Steve...."
"No, it is you who are being ridiculous. We are all determined to free Ali. We have all voluntarily stripped ourselves of all the trappings of free men, and have collared ourselves and chained ourselves into the coffle. That is how much we respect Ali, and should show you our determination to succeed. You must now assist us, by playing your part: load us into your vehicle, and take us to the Palace as a 'peace offering' to the Leader."
Ali's father went down the line, embracing all of us warmly in turn. Then he turned and said "Truly I have never had such devotion before. You are effectively free men but you are enslaving yourselves for a cause in which you believe. Even when I have had slaves whipped almost to the point of death, I have never succeeded in getting such loyalty from them as you are showing today. You make me very proud of my son and the loyalty and love that he has managed to build in you all. It would be wrong of me to prevent you fulfilling your destiny in this enterprise on which you are all determined, and I will render such assistance as I can."
Our ride from the mine to the Palace was uncomfortable, to say the least. Ali's father had driven himself out to the mine in a 4x4, to preserve a measure of secrecy, and now he drove us back with all seven of us squashed into the rear compartment - a slave could hardly travel in the front with his owner, if any degree of reality was to be maintained, after all. Still, it was good to have the warmth of the other six guys all around me, and it was surprising how quickly we re-learned our old habits, forced into us during those three long years, that enabled us to move and explore each others bodies without choking on the chain!
At the Palace we stood in an anteroom whilst Ali's father went further in, and it was surprising how in those surroundings we automatically dropped into "slave" mode - we lined up, shoulders touching so as to consume as little space as possible, clasped our hands behind our backs, and kept our heads lowered, staring at a spot three feet in front of us. There was an almost constant flow of people through the anteroom on their way to and from various errands around the huge Palace complex, and although our eyes were lowered we just knew that many of these people stared at us in our naked magnificence - even though the Leader was reputed to have many slaves in the Palace, I suppose that they would not be in such splendid physical condition as we were. And, as you would expect when seven healthy men are standing for any length of time, most of us had erections as we stood there, our thoughts focussed on our future fight.
After what seemed like hours, a soldier in the black uniform of the Leader's special guard came up and ordered us to follow him. We went into a huge audience chamber, filled with the Leader's advisers, courtiers and assorted other sycophants, and then were literally "herded" across the huge marble floor towards his throne at the end. I remember feeling the cold against the soles of my bare feet, and feeling the sting of the tawse on my shoulders and butt as the guards "hurried" us along, quite unnecessarily, but to make more of a spectacle, I suppose.
Ali's father was standing there on the steps of the throne, and said to the Leader "Please accept this gift - you have taken my son, a slave, and I have decided to retire from the Council into private life. I will be moving to Switzerland to live out my old age in sorrow at the loss of my son, and slaves are not permitted there. As a parting gift, therefore, I present you with these other seven slaves, the coffle mates of the one you have already taken from me. They are as you will see all in superb condition, and you will be able to whip them to work extremely hard for many years."
"I thank you for your magnificent gift, but I am suspicious", the Leader said quietly. "Guards - test the chains on these slaves!"
Black uniformed figures advanced on us and tugged at our coffle chains, so hard that a rough edge of my collar even caused my skin to break, and a trickle of blood to started to flow down my chest.
"I see they are properly coffled, and perhaps I will add the other slave, your former son, back to it", the Leader said. "But let us have some amusement from these slaves now - it is true that they are indeed superb specimens, and I like to see a coffle acting in unison."
He raised his voice and commanded "Slaves! On your knees, heels together, knees apart. Then I wish to see sexual activity - masturbate, keeping your hands in time with each other!"
Well, I suppose we should have know something like this might happen, and after all we'd been through in the past, it was no big deal after all. Still, it was a bit of a shock, and we all hesitated just for an instant - but long enough for the guards to lay into our butts with the tawses again.
I knelt there, my knees touching those of the guys to my left and right, and kept my head bowed and eyes cast down as a slave would. Then, being careful to remain in step with my comrades to avoid a further beating from the guards, I began to jerk myself off. Of course it's relatively easy to jerk off like that, but not as exciting as being able to vary the pace to suit the feelings in your dick, but there's no way that a group of seven guys are all going to cum at the same time, is there? I wasn't the first, and I wasn't the last, but finally we were all kneeling there, the slimes of our cum streaking out across the polished marble in front of us, and with the remaining dribbles of the "aftershocks" falling from the ends of our dicks. I knew that my comrades would all be breathing deeply, as I was: even though it's not particularly hard work to jerk off, there's always that excitement that causes your heart to race and your breathing to quicken, isn't there?
"Excellent!", I heard the Leader say to Ali's father, although I remained "in character" and kept my eyes down. "I thought that this might be some sort of plot, but the slaves are harmless as they are securely coffled, and are indeed proper slaves - no free man would perform such an act as that in unison with his fellows."
"I have not decided how I will use these excellent examples of male flesh", he continued, "But it will keep me from sleep tonight as I consider the erotic possibilities of using eight masculine males like these here at the Palace. In the meantime.... Take them to the slave quarters and cage them. But before you go - the floor is now soiled. Clean up that mess - use your tongues, slaves!"
Look, don't get me wrong - there's nothing wrong with eating cum, especially when it's your own. But having to crawl in a line across the floor, watched by a great crowd of spectators, as you lick your cum from the floor is a wholly different experience. I was aware of the clanking of our coffle chain against the floor as we shuffled along, of the faint taste of the polish from the floor overlaying that of my cum, and, of course, of the eyes boring into me. The Leader hadn't just wanted us to lick up our cum, but knew that as we moved along on hands and knees our balls and dicks would be exposed between our thighs, and as we pushed our heads right down to the floor to garner the last faint traces of our seminal fluids, the audience would also be rewarded with tantalising glimpses of our ass holes. In spite of everything that had happened to me before, I still found myself blushing slightly at this new way in which a master had managed to humiliate his slaves.
The guards were gratuitously cruel to us as we were herded through the seemingly interminable corridors of the Palace towards the slave quarters - they seemed to delight in using short but very flexible canes to stripe our butts as we hurried along as best we could.
And when we were finally pushed into the main room of the slave accommodation, we all gasped in horror: there was a big "holding cage" against one wall, whose sole occupant was Ali. But an Ali very different from when we had last seen him: he had been shaved totally bare, and, like us, was again collared. But his total nudity served only to emphasise the bruises that covered him totally - bruises that I recognised from my fighting days as indicating that he had been severely and expertly worked over by hard fists. Standing out above the yellow and black of all this were the bright red stripes where he had also been whipped heavily and repeatedly - they covered his back, butt and thighs, and, more horrifically, curled around the sides of his body to show deep weals on his chest and around his nips where an expert whipmaster had allowed the whip to wrap and cause him further pain.
He had been so badly beaten that he was just like a piece of inert meat, sprawled across the floor of the cage. He didn't even raise his head as we were herded in, and we could hear the laboured breathing from his battered body.
"Throw these in with that one", the guards told the slave jailers. "The Leader is deciding what to do with them."
"Can we fuck them?"
"I don't know."
"Well, after this one had been fucked by the Leader, and then beaten, caned and whipped, we were told that he was to be used, and used hard, by all of us. It was amazing to hear how he screamed when we had him on a horse and six of us went up him, one after the other.... Do you think the Leader would mind if we used some of these slaves tonight, as we've been really turned on by this one and now all feel the need for another fuck...."
"Well I would advise you against it! The Leader might be planning to use them himself, and won't want their holes all stretched by you men in here! If I were you, I'd just take the first one out again and use him a second time."
The guards then turned and left, and the "jailers" opened the cage and went to push us in. This was our one chance, we all knew. As they watched, hardly believing their eyes, we reached for each others throats and tore at the coffle chains in a frenzy. Our muscled strength and our desperation had the required effect, and the chains fell from us. We at once turned and attacked the jailers, stripping away from them, before they could use them, their guns and slave prods.
We were now in control inside the slave quarters, and using the jailers' keys, we went along and released the other slaves in what were clearly semi-permanent quarters for them. To our great delight we found that there were several of our own men, standing fiercely defiant at the bars of their cages, in contrast to the sorry set of pleasure slaves, waiters, valets and cleaners who tended to cower in the corner, afraid of what might happen to them if they dared to join in a revolt. We now had about twenty men, but were in real need of additional weapons as we had garnered only five pistols from the jailers. I led a small party out of the slave quarters therefore and we slunk along the corridors, looking for guards.
We were of course well used to ambushing individuals, as that is what we had been doing with the occupying forces and we had all been very "hands on" in the first year, so it wasn't all that difficult for us to take out the isolated guards and pairs of patrolling men that we found. But what to do then? Soon all twenty of us had as many weapons as we could manage, and one course of action would be to carry Ali and try to make a break for it. But carrying an exhausted, collapsed comrade, especially a heavy guy like Ali, would be a huge drain on our meagre resources. I know they teach you in the marines that you have to leave the injured behind in those circumstances, sacrificing one man for the greater good of the others, but I don't think I know of any instances when any group of marines has ever carried out such a manoeuvre! And I wasn't about to recommend it here - especially as Ali was our leader, and the object of our exercise in the first instance.
There was no alternative to fighting our way out of the Palace, therefore. Look, I know we have been criticised for the carnage that resulted, especially when we found the majority of the palace guard lined up in the internal courtyard waiting to receive their orders for a thorough search of the palace once the alarm had been raised: five grenades hurled in simultaneously from all directions scythed down most of them, and left many of the others severely wounded.
Yes, I understand that these were our countrymen, but they supported the evil regime of the Leader, and they supported it enthusiastically: look at the way that Ali had been cruelly whipped and beaten up just on the Leader's say-so. But our critics should tell us what else we could have done - we couldn't carry Ali, and had we done nothing, we would all have been captured and enslaved, if not executed.
After that things were relatively easy - the few remaining guards were either attempting to comfort their injured and dying comrades, or simply fled at the thought of the retribution we might mete out to them. We were able to take our pick of the vehicles from the Palace motor pool to take Ali to the hospital, and there we told the Administration that we were now assuming control, and that he was to receive the best and finest medical treatment available.
The rest is history, as they say: the next time Ali appeared before the Ruling Council it was to receive the Council's supplications for him to become the Leader - the former Leader having fled after the destruction of his inner Palace Guard.
You can read about what happened next in any of the standard works of history: now in full control of the country, we were able to surround the remaining bases of the South - without ready access to the facilities of our country, the South found it even more difficult to retain control of the oil supply as our men were easily able to ambush how ever many patrols they sent out. After many weeks of struggle, with the South's bases running out of fuel and supplies generally, Ali finally agreed to allow the South to repatriate the remainder of its occupying forces in exchange for the return of the few remaining men of our country - we all watched the soldiers of the South arriving home so joyfully, on TV. It was a crashing defeat for the South, of course, but for the individual soldier, the joy of being back on his home ground without being enslaved was palpably evident. The subsequent consequences for the South were of course dire - we simply cut off their oil, and allied ourselves with the North. As its economy started to grow once more, the North was able to demand the return of its men enslaved in the South, and when Prexmire, in his arrogance, refused, what we now call "the third civil war" started. It was over very quickly of course as the South's economy simply fell apart, the Northern slaves revolted, and Prexmire's army found fighting with limited amounts of oil to fuel its tanks and planes to be a very difficult task.
We seemed to be at the end of a long, long journey, a journey that had started with us chained naked in our coffle, and which now appeared to be ending in victory, with my lover as the effective ruler of our country. But, as you will know, the story does not end there.
End of Part 33