Bound for Glory (15 page)

Clive pondered for a moment. “We’ll have to put out a press release saying that it was a misunderstanding that I had any party backing for the Games. And it’ll lose some perceived value by being just a normal games, rather than a direct head-to-head between a team supported by Andrews and a team supported by me. And we’ve still got the problem of how we engineer a public defeat of Andrews prior to the parliamentary party elections. That was going to be the big play!” His dreams of accepting the rapturous applause of an arena crowd had evaporated under the merciless studio lights a week ago.

“I’ve been giving that some thought. Andrews’ Games are a fortnight before ours and we’re smack in the middle of his home territory so he won’t like having your grinning face on a million posters across Manchester, he’ll have to try and nullify any effect they may have. I think we bring it down to one climactic event at the end of our Games. He’ll have plenty of time, starting now, to put a team together so if we challenge him pretty soon and he ducks out he’ll lose too much face. We’ve got to tempt him out. We just need some sort of all-out, one-off contest at the end of the show between the best girls we can lay our hands on and the best he can get – and we’ll have to make sure ours are better! Then at the critical time, just before the MPs vote, you’ll emerge as the people’s champion; just as we originally planned.”

Clive thought hard, his hand squeezing and stroking the smooth buttocks and thighs of the maid who stood patiently beside him. He was pretty sure the Proteus stable versus the Stars would be good value, even if they weren’t sponsored politically. But by the time a show ended the audience would have witnessed chariot racing, hard and bloody battles with whips, staves and nets on the arena floor, group against group and individual duels. They would have seen the entire stables sweating under their master’s lashes at the mass log pulls. They would have been able to get close to the combatants at the wrestling and boxing battles in the pens. They would have been able to follow their fancies in the pony racing and the dressage. And then there would be the finale, the whole of both stables thrown into the arena to fight themselves to a standstill before the guards from both teams and some spectators who had got lucky with their ticket numbers, would be let loose to finish them off in a fuckfest of epic proportions.

What more could they offer?

His brow cleared as an idea struck him. It was new – and therefore news-worthy! – it was different and could be tacked on to the end of a Games, making the third day go on into the evening. Well there was no harm in that – it would increase the crowd’s appreciation of what they were getting for free!

“Demolition Derby!” he said and sat back and waited for Dandy to weigh it up. The Prime Minister stopped and for a long moment stood still, then slowly spun on his heel.

“Perfect! It can be an entirely self-contained event! Right! We need to call a meeting of all our backers and tell them they’re going to have dig into their pockets a bit but we can still deliver! And what’s more I’ll make the final day of the Games an official bank holiday. That’s a trick that Andrews can’t pull until he can win the MPs over to his side and get elected. And we’ve got to see he never does!”

Conor Brien pulled his sun hat a little lower as he leaned on his stick and watched the punishments continue. The T shaped whipping posts stood in a long line across the centre of the training ground. Beyond them the shadowed bulk of his arena loomed. The sun was setting and another day was drawing to a close, the long shadows cast by the flagellators and their writhing victims wriggled across the hard earth and flickered across the faces of the watching slaves, lined up in ranks, legs apart and hands behind backs in the ‘stand-easy’ position. The girls at the posts had earned their stripes by various misdeeds and slacking across the day. But today was the last day before the pre-games regime set in and a uniform thirty lashes for each girl had been decreed for quickness and ease of administering. Once sentence was complete he would address them.

“Twenty-nine!” came the cry from Jan, the head trainer as the naked bodies jerked once again under the heavy tails of the punishment whips smacking across their backs.

“Thirty!” The girls’ bodies hung inert once the final lashes were administered and the training ground was silent apart from the gasps and moans from the whipping posts and the occasional shuffle of a foot from the watching slaves. Men began to go from post to post releasing the girls and sending them back to the ranks. They were well-trained to the lash but walked stiffly and in obvious discomfort. They were well-used to the sexual pleasure they could glean from the lashes of their masters when they were wielded for pleasure, but were also well aware of failing to please. It was a rash slavegirl who dared to allow herself to enjoy her masters’ displeasure.

Conor moved with painful slowness to stand in front of the ranks.

“In two weeks we’re going into battle!” he told them. Immediately there was a stir. All the slaves knew that this was where they belonged. There would be intensity of experience and sensuality beyond anything else. They would be the objects of veneration by their fans, they would see themselves suffering and triumphing on the giant screens. They would give their all to try and win for their owner and please him. There would be people wanting to hire them out in dungeons and playrooms for pure sex and delicious pain. For three glorious days they would compete until they could hardly stand and then, when they knew they could take no more, their masters would ensure there would be yet more sex and submission and they would have to take it all. It was what they lived for.

“I want the very best from every single one of you! I always do, but the next three months and the next two fixtures are the most important this stable has lived through since I founded it! Win or lose I expect the very best from you…and by God I’ll make any girl who doesn’t give me her best, wish she had never been born!”

Then he turned and hobbled away, his leg hurting worse than ever and a tightness in his chest that was beginning to bother him.

Behind him, the squad was being dismissed and herded back to their various barracks. They would be chained down at lights out from now on until the Games. They had to be sharp and hungry for sex in all its possible forms.

Conor took his seat in the golf buggy he used to get around the estate these days and waited for Jan to drive him back up to his villa.

The big man climbed in and started the vehicle up.

“I don’t like this, Boss. Throwing a show goes against the grain,” he said quietly as they bumped off back across the training ground. In two weeks they were going up against the Bakhtar stable and that was a normal fixture, but Conor had just come back from a meeting with Phil Andrews, the Foreign Secretary of His Majesty’s Government at which plans had been drawn up for them to compete against the Dragons – on UK soil for the first time ever.

“Sometimes you just have to take one step back to take three forwards. Andrews needs a big spectacle and he needs the home team to win.” Conor gave a mirthless laugh. “I understand he thinks he can pay me off just with money if he wins the leadership elections. But we’ll want a whole lot more than that Jan. But by the time he finds out what we do want, it’ll be too late!”

The recording, made when he thought he was off the record, of Andrews asking for the Blues to lose to the Dragons was lodged safely with Conor’s lawyers. Andrews had yet to learn how fast and furiously a crowd could turn on someone who cheated them. But it was a lesson he would learn if he drove Conor to it.

“And what if we do throw this show so that the home team wins but he still loses the election?”

“We’ll have got our foot back in the door of the dear old UK! If Andrews loses then Mostyn wins and he’s no fool. If he gets there it’ll be because of the help he’s had from the other arenas and the Blues are still one of the top stables so he can’t leave us out of his reckoning, even if we didn’t back him. He’ll need to keep the crowds fed with Games from now on, so he’ll need us. Andrews is best for us because we can control him, but Mostyn’s not bad either.”

Jan sighed. “Okay, but I won’t like having to dope our own girls.”

“No, I understand that. But trust me, it’ll be worth it.”

And then there was plan B, Conor thought. First get a foothold in the country with some past financial irregularities swept under ministerial carpets and then get some big players under his thumb as the arenas became an ever-more important part of UK life and then he would be able to get hold of
her
and control her.

And this time no one would steal her away from him!

Back in his office, Conor stretched out in his chair behind his desk and closed his eyes as he reviewed his plans. He had sent the household girl who served as his body slave these days, away. Even blow jobs had been losing their appeal just recently. It was as if all his life was focussing down on this one project. Nothing else seemed to matter. Even his beloved Blues losing a show. He had been slowly working towards this for years and everything was finally falling into place. He was manoeuvring into a win-win position. A stab of pain made him wince. He would call the quack up from the village the next morning, he decided and reached down to pull a bottle of whiskey out of a drawer and pour a large measure. Then he reached across his desk and pulled a photograph towards him. It was of a blonde woman on the floor of an arena. She was naked but carried a small shield in one hand and in her other hand a whip. The photograph had caught her in the act of having delivered a backhand lash to her invisible opponent. The effect was to have given her the chest-out pose of a matador as her whip arm was down and slightly behind her, making her magnificent breasts jut forwards. Her long thighs were smoothly powerful and her thick blonde hair swirled about her face and shoulders. Her body was liberally striped with welts, some of which dived along her inner thighs, just below her vulva. But her blazing blue eyes were fixed only on one thing; the defeat of her opponent. Conor was pretty sure he could remember the show the photograph had been taken at and that the lash she had just delivered had been the
coup de grace
cracking home straight across her opponent’s breasts and bringing her down – for the first time.

Conor grinned at the image as he took a sip of whiskey. Blondie had known how to play them! he reflected. She wouldn’t let a girl get away with just going down the once. She drew it out, never going in for the kill until the crowd was ecstatic as her victim staggered and flinched under the lash time and again but was never given enough excuse to go down. She would let them stage little rallies and let them think they could make a comeback, and then she would really get serious and take them down again. And again.

Blondie had been the Queen of the Arenas.

But she had been stolen from him. He had made her and then Carlo had stolen her. His own bloody trainer had betrayed him!

The power of the bitterness and fury he felt, even all these years later took his breath away and he had to sit back for a moment and recover. Then he sat forwards again and looked at the framed photos that were hung on the room’s walls. Many were of the same blonde – Blondie herself, the undefeated, the legendary gladiator, now living in retirement – Conor’s lips curled into a nasty smile. Well he was about to blow her cosy little world apart! If revenge was a dish best served cold, then this morsel was coming straight out of the deep freeze!

He took another swig of whiskey and debated whether or not he needed a session with a compliant slavegirl and some of the long needles he favoured inserting these days as late night relaxation. But something drew him back to the pictures on the walls and he picked up a remote and flicked it at one. It was a small hologram and the figure within the frame began to whirl and flick with her whip in 3D as the sound of the arena crowd filled the room. It wasn’t Blondie, it was Snake, the slave who had borne the most outrageous of tattoos, consisting of snakes boiling up out of her vulva and across her stomach with a snake’s head taking up the whole of her left breast. Blondie had been stolen from him before hologram technology was available, but as he watched the pre-recorded sequence, Snake went down to a scything lash that caught her behind her knees. She reached up an arm in supplication to her Owner, begging him to end the contest. Conor remembered the day well, he put down the glass of whiskey and reached out his arm with the thumb pointing down, just as a small image of himself did the same in the hologram. The camera swung back to the arena floor as Snake had to stagger back to her feet and go back into battle. She was hopelessly outclassed and she had known it, she was well past her best but Conor had wanted her to go out in a blaze of glory. It was a studded whip duel and Snake was shipping serious punishment from her younger and fitter opponent. He watched as the blood began to run and she went down again and he refused her permission to submit, making her climb groggily to her feet again. He felt his cock unfurl as he watched how impassively she took her condemnation to more pain and struggled on. He recalled the frenzied orgies that had taken place on the terraces as the contest that wasn’t one any more, went on and on as he refused to allow her to submit and Snake had tottered to her feet again and again and the crowds had cheered him on for his cruelty. He also remembered how, when she had finally been dragged off the arena floor behind a cart, he had found her in the medical room. The look of pure gratitude that she had given him came from the depths of her masochistic soul. He had sold her the next day. Her value had gone way up because of the brave way she had faced her final defeat in the arenas. She was now famous as durable whipping stock in a French castle that charged the very rich handsomely for the use of its dungeons. He had stopped off and flogged her for old times’ sake only a few months back when he was passing through.

And that’s how Blondie should have ended too! She should have gone on serving in his stable until he was good and ready to let her go!