The one thing a Hyperborean slave might make a real fuss about, is when you breed her.
It takes only a few days to teach a free, Hyperborean girl that she has become a slave. Her culture prepares her for it, and the slaves in her bloodline were not defiant women. A few days more, and she’s ready to serve on her back, as well. This is enough for most masters. They may invest further in a favored girl or two to bring them to Collar Joy, but beyond those, their slaves receive no further breaking. Why bother? That is what chains are for.
However, this is why few slaves rush to spread their legs for breeding. Instead, they are just as likely to kick off. Some will claw, kick, and bite like the day they were captured. To their masters, this is an amusing speed bump before the inevitable. I find this a lazy view. If you own a slave girl, you cannot be too busy to dominate her. A dominated slave submits to all things, and she can no longer envision otherwise.
I am never too busy for this.
***
Wherever you dig around Dura, you find the past. Arrowheads and middens, potsherds, and cracked skulls. More than traces of the forgotten, you will also find their ruins. Fishermens nets snag on old tombs. Men digging wells break into cold, half-collapsed cellars. Children left unattended go missing; fallen into catacombs.
One such set of buried vaults was found under my very own grounds. The mummified warrior we found inside is now in my personal collection of Hyperborean artifacts, and his old digs I turned into my breedery.
“Greetings, Lightning Shield!” a woman’s voice called out.
Appearing ahead of me in the morning gloom were a pair of heavy, iron-banded doors leading into the ground. They were set inside a doorway of large, half-excavated granite blocks. In front of it was a large brazier set on the ground, pumping out orange-yellow light. Seated around it were two female guards. They wore leather cuirass armor and leg greaves and had helmets of bronze. They carried large, Roman-style, tower shields and wide-bladed short swords. One had a scar where her eye used to be. The other had kill count marking tattooed on her cheek. They smiled and stood, saluting with gloved fists.
“Come for your special whores?” asked One Eye.
“They’re not whores,” I walked up with a pair of wooden mugs. They steamed with hot fish broth mixed with rice.
“Yes, they are,” she said, taking her mug. “All slaves are whores.”
“Whores bring in the silver. These ones cost me gold.”
“He means our gold,” said Tattooed Kills. She downed her soup in one and produced a large, iron key. She knelt by the black doors and unlocked them. The tumblers made loud clacks as they turned.
“I do. But that’s gold well spent, Warrior.”
“And drunk,” One Eye winked (it is not every day you see a one-eyed person wink).
I descended the stairs, and the guards locked the doors. The air was musty, dank, still. At the bottom was another pair of large doors, these with the symbol of Shub-Niggurath, the fertility god, carved across them. I unlocked them and stepped inside my breedery.
***
It was Fogrim, my friend and sword brother back in Darfur, who had convinced me to set one up.
The problem is one of politics. There are no kingdoms out here in the great, empty Borderlands. No strong city-states or confederations of towns. Just a few handfuls of poor, scattered, forgotten villages connecting by rumors and chance rediscovery and few promising towns like Dura and Starka. This political vacuum had hardly mattered in the still-emptier continent. Now, however, it was as if the whole world was trying to squeeze its way into the Borderlands. City-states were founding colonies that sent back rice to them in warships. People speaking strange tongues slashed and burned revered forests to make new farmland. Local and immigrant alike looked for security from each other.
Enter: Gerard of Stone. The strange man who arrived by Landing Beast, a hero of the Battle of Aymund, Gerard the Lightning Shield. He killed ten men with one mighty slap, they say. He fought Father Dagon himself at Red Water, you know. I saw him spit fire, like a dragon!
“They will ask you for your children,” Fogrim had said, “that they may raise them as their own.” It was in this way that Hyperboreans living outside the safety of city walls sought political alliance - and protection. When one proved more successful by sword or cunning than his neighbors, they looked to him for support - pledging their own in turn, just like the feudal exchange between a Medieval lord and a vassal. The Hyperborean however, had an asset his monogamous Medieval counterpart didn’t; cages of fertile slave girls. Slave breeding allowed even peasants to participate in dynastic exchanges.
They rarely did it by marrying off daughters, though - Hyperborean men prefer owning girls to wedding them. Instead, the ascendant man gifts the applicant family a child to adopt as their family’s heir. Whether he can afford to breed slaves for this was part of his valuation. When a man gifted enough times in a region, a single generation was enough to weld a group of families into a united clan of powerful half-siblings.
As Fogrim had predicted, the requests began as soon as I returned. Nine months later, the lovely slave girl Amber, once of German Ohio, allowed me to fulfill the first. Since that day, 14 families had accepted my blood with theirs, making me their de facto clan chieftain. Many other families were patiently waiting.
I passed the doors of the breeders’ cells - all were empty: they had gone for bathing. I would have to come back: there was one slave mother I wanted to see. One door was open: inside, a translucent, white skylight let in what would have been bright sunlight once. A brazier made up for it and gave the room a pleasant, dry warmth. A large cot with a straw mattress had been set against the wall. These were, I was quite sure, the most luxurious slave quarters on the planet. I left and went downstairs to the worst.
It was dark on that level - the only light came from a few half-covered oil lamps set into the granite walls. A female guard at the foot of the stairs handed me a lamp to see by. Trapped here behind another pair of doors, the air was stale, hot, and smelled of sweat. It was so humid my fingers came away damp from the walls.
“Master?”
Before me were three stacks of iron cages, spaced wide enough for me to walk between them, like the stacks of a server room. Each stack was comprised of nine cages: three lower, three middle, and three high. The cages were small, barely three feet square.
“Master!”
A pale, dark-haired girl turned her head, staring with large, ice-blue eyes. She winced as I held the lamp to her face. Her naked body gleamed with sweat. Locked around her throat was a heavy, iron collar.
She tried to turn in the cage and pressed her buttocks against the bars at me.
“I am ready!” she rubbed herself against the bars. “Breed me!”
“No!” a voice in the dark called out. “Breed me!”
“No, me!” said a third.
“Silence, Slaves!” I drew my whip and cracked it. The slaves become quiet.
I had 12 girls caged in this battery farm, squeezed into in as much space as three of the breeders’ cells. Most of the cages were still empty: Filled, I would have 27 girls. In here, they couldn’t tell the passage of time; it was always dark. They were fed a cold sludge. There was silence - any noise or talking would get a girl punished. The only times they were let out were for exercise and examination. Exercise was in an adjoining chamber - a giant, stone, grinding wheel with a wooden beam through it. Slaves were chained to it, had their ears plugged, were gagged, and blindfolded, and set to pushing the wheel for hours.
A brunette stared up at me from a floor-level cage, her wrists hanging from cuffs at either end of the cage - to stop her from pleasuring herself. She studied me with dark, shining eyes and began running her tongue up and down the bars. The number ‘6’ had been tattooed on her right breast, just above the aureole.
“Please,” a tall blonde in a waist-height cage pressed her cheek against the bars, her eyes closed. Her breast read ‘3.’ “Please, Master, do not go. I will die if I see you leave here again.”
I reached between the bars and stroked 3’s cheek. Her skin flushed, and she looked up at me like I was an angel come down to see her. I bent down and kissed her - she moaned and probed with her tongue, shoving her arms through the cage. I pulled away, and she whined.
Tied to the door of every cage was a papyrus scroll. I checked 3’s; her period was six days ago.
“It’s alright,” I released the scroll. “Your time will come. You are doing very well.”
“When, Master?”
I had stepped away. All around me, slaves were pressing against their cages and baring themselves, thighs spread.
This was the reason I kept these girls sense-deprived. Imagine what it is like for young, healthy, energetic slave girls to be kept so, for weeks on end, and then find themselves presented with the sight of a man. His smell. His hand stroking their backs. Some he speaks to - human contact! They know why he has come and that submitting to him is their only way out of the cages.
They submit.
I went through a door adjoining the battery and entered the exam room. It was a cell with five stone blocks spaced in a row. On each block were two, iron ‘╠╣’ shaped frames. The middle ‘═’ bar of each frame could be raised or lowered. Along the frames were rings to attach shackles. The forward-facing frame, on each block, had an adjustable collar fitted to the center of their middle ‘═’ bars.
On three of the blocks were slave girls. One was a tall, slim, blonde with shapely feet. The second was a toned, athletic beauty with black hair and East Asian features. The third was a petite girl with hair like falling silk. She had mixed, Eurasian features.
Their throats were locked in the frame collars. The Eurasian’s frame collar had been tilted down, forcing the girl to hang her head, her long hair cascading over the stone block. The blonde’s collar had been angled up, forcing her to tilt her head back. I liked how it drew attention to her neck and heavy breasts.
They were on their hands and knees. Their wrists were cuffed to the ‘feet’ of the forward frames. Their knees were strapped to the ‘feet’ of the rear frames. The restraints were tight - they could not wriggle an inch.
I went to the blonde first.
“Master?” her accent was Armanean. She looked up at me with green eyes. I reached under her and checked her breast - she was ‘8’. A gang in Slumland had kidnapped her from her tent. The burghers let the gangs operate - we didn’t have the resources to stop them, and channeling them to slaving worked for us.
I had just liked the look of this one, watching her bend over in the brothel to scrub its floor one morning, and carried her off. It was a small indulgence and added a level of danger to my presence that the slaves did not feel around other men - the danger that they, too, might be brought here.
Beside the blonde were a rolled papyrus and small pot of ink, with a stylus laid across it. I checked the papyrus - it had been 14 days: she was at her peak.
“Let us see if you are ready, Slave.”
“Yes, Master!”
I parted her buttocks - her labia were dripping wet. This wasn’t unusual - all the slaves in the battery were wet when I visited. It is the effect of the deprivation.
“Oh!” I felt her vaginal muscles clenching as I slipped two fingers into her, probing deep. I swirled my fingers around a few times, then pulled them out, holding up the lamp to study them.
The mucus was cloudy; I smeared it on my thumb and spread my fingers apart. The mucus divided, clinging to my fingertips.
“Am I ready, Master?” she asked.
You can check a slave girls’ fertility by her cervical mucus. If it is yellow or cloudy (or absent altogether), she is not ovulating. If it is clear and stretchy, then she is ready for breeding.
“Master? Please, Master, am I ready?”
Next, I went to the girl with East Asian ancestry. ‘5’ was Shang, a language group from the 70th Century AD. The Shang tribes dominated the underground mega warrens beneath Central Asia and the Tibetan plateau, all the way to the east to the Marianas Trench. They were at their peak then, halfway through the climate crisis that had turned all the lands between the tropics into scorching, uninhabitable dustpans. The Shang were advanced transhumans - they didn’t sicken, they regenerated from injury, and their females could deliver a child in 3 months. The Landing Beasts hunted them heavily. They were one of three Transhuman groups they brought to Hyperborea en masse.
I ran my fingers up and down 5’s labia, enjoying how it felt.
“Ah!” she jerked as I pinched the fleshy hood that covered her clitoris.
My fingers slipped in deep and came back with mucus. It was cloudy. I pulled my thumb and index finger apart, and the mucus formed a short string, but then it broke.
I wiped my fingers on her buttocks and went to the final girl.
The petite Eurasian beauty had a mix of features - Caucasian, East Asian, and a good deal of perhaps everything else. She was of a second the group of hunted transhumans - an Ansaru. The Ansaru were not a language group or ethnicity but an empire ruled by posthuman intelligences. Its seat was the jungle continent Australia would become. At their height, their war galleys would exact tribute from as far as the Sudanese cataracts of the Nile river to the islands of Hawaii. Their success was in their endless mineral wealth, technology salvage, and booming slave farms.
The third group was the Bharaji. I still didn’t have any in the breedery. The slave girl Layla, who I had arranged to purchase a year ago at Aymund but for all I knew had died, was a Bharaji.
I set thoughts of Layla aside and adjusted the Ansaru beauty’s frame collar, forcing her to tilt her head up and back. Her long, silk-black hair fell across her face and down her shoulders. I brushed it aside; she looked up at me with large, brown eyes. She smiled; it was angelic.
“Are you ready, Slave?” I ran my fingers through her hair. Her throat read ‘10’.
“I don’t know, Master. I-I am afraid.”
“Afraid? Don’t be. You are perfectly safe.”
“I’m afraid I will disappoint you.”
“I don’t think you will,” I cupped her lovely jaw in one hand, and probed her with the other. She looked up at me, eyes shining, as I pushed in deep.
I then studied my fingers. Her mucus had the appearance and feel of raw egg white. I smeared the clear gel it on my thumb and spread my fingers. The mucus stretched easily between them, elastic.
“Is it alright, Master?” her eyes were anxious.
I wiped my fingers on her back, running them up and down her spine. She trembled at the sensation. I reached the back of her neck and stroked the skin - it was warm, soft, flushed.
I pulled down my pants, and she sighed in relief, smiling and laughing. It was a beautiful sound.
She closed her eyes and bit her lip as I slipped my penis into her. She was warm, enveloping, completely wet. I took hold of her by her hips and pushed in, deep. She moaned.
“Oh!” she cried. I thrusted, buffeting her. Her large breasts jerked forward. “Oh! Oh!”
I rammed her again and again, my fingers digging into her, her behind cushioning me. Smack I went against her skin. Smack. Smack. Smack. She groaned, jaw dropping, her expression stricken. The H-frames held firm. She clenched her toes, and her cries rose in pitch till they were squeals.
Her whole body shook as she orgasmed. I came right after, pulling her hard against me as I spurted. When I was done, I let go - my fingers leaving bruises. She would also bruise where she had been shoved against the H-frames.
I stepped in front of her. She smiled up at me, face glowing. I bent and kissed her - her lips were soft and hot, trembling with emotion. Her tongue was curious. I held her by her hair, bunching and pulling at the roots. My tongue pushed in deep; her jaw went slack and she opened wide for me. Even in a kiss, a slave knows her place.
“You are bred,” I stood, still gripping her by her hair. She beamed up at me.
“Thank you, Master!”
I pushed my penis into her mouth for her to clean. She sucked and licked it. I saw her throat bob as she swallowed. I pulled out when I’d had enough and wiped myself on her face.
“Good Slave,” I stroked her belly. “This is the greatest task you can be put to.”
“I have waited for this, Master! I will pup for you. Then I will do it again, and again, and again!”
“You will,” I stroked her head. “You will not disappoint.”
I left the exam room and returned to the cells. There was a slave mother I needed to see.
***
“It is time, Zana.”
Sitting cross-legged on a bed of straw with her back to me, was a petite, slender, Shang girl. She had long, black, still-wet hair. Water dripped from it, gleaming on her back. She wore nothing but a slave collar and the brand on her hip.
Swaddled in her arms, suckling, was our child. I did not look - I didn’t want to see him. Every time he made a sound, it struck like a dagger.
He’ll be fine. In a family. MY family. That’s what this is all about.
“Yes, Master. May I - may I finish feeding him?”
“Of course.”
She looked over her shoulder and flashed me a smile.
“Thank you, Master!”
How that smile had melted me, once.
Zana had been a brothel girl named I’d been infatuated with when I first arrived in Dura. Zana was one of the first slaves I’d ever had and the only one I wanted to own. Her owner, a Settite named Uru, had always declined me. Then, I had returned from Darfur, rich and with three wagon-loads of slave girls. I’d forgotten Zana - fine as she was, I had many fine beauties. I found I’d acquired her when I brought Uru’s brothel. I worked her till she’d paid off her cost. Then, I tattooed a ‘1’ on her and brought her here.
“He is fed, Master,” she burped the child.
A female guard had arrived beside me. I turned to her and nodded. The guard entered and stood before Zana.
“Child,” she said.
Zana looked up at her, baby in her arms.
“Give me the child, 1,” said the guard.
Blinking back tears, Zana held up the child. The guard took it from her, supporting the child’s head with the practiced ease of a mother. I turned away as she walked past me. The child starting crying moments later. I waited till it was gone before turning back.
"Master, why did you not look at him?"
"Come," I held up a leash chain. "It is time to go back to your cage."
Zana knelt like a dog, back at a 45-degree angle. Her palms were on the floor. She looked up at me with large, questioning eyes as I leashed her.
"Master?"
“I am pleased you didn’t make a fuss, Slave. Well done. You will be given a treat tonight. Some honey to lick from your feeding bowl.”
She brightened at that. She tried to stand: I held her shoulder and pushed her back down.
"No. A breeding slave walks from her cage, Zana," I said. "But, when she goes back, she crawls."
"Yes, Master."
She crawled as I led her back to the breeding battery. I opened the door of one of the bottom cages and swung it open. Zana crawled in. With the ease that comes from practice, she crouched and turned to face me. She did not have to turn her head as the taller girls did.
"Master?"
I removed her leash and shut the cage. I locked the door and updated the papyrus scroll attached to it.
"Master, please!"
"What is it, Slave?"
"Our son is beautiful."
"He is not your son, Breeding Slave. He was never your son. He is my son."
"Why did you not look at him, then?"
All my breeding slaves were listening.
"I can't. If I look, I won't give him up."
"Then, Master could keep him?" says Anna, clutching the bars. "You could give him to your wives."
"I have no wives. Stop this. You will not see him again. Do not hold out hope otherwise."
"I do not ask for myself, Master. I ask for you. Does Master not want to have a family?”
“Do you remember Garaman, the Trader?”
“Master?”
“Answer, Slave.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Do you remember when he tried to kill me in the tavern?”
“Yes, Master!”
“What happened?”
“You killed his guard.”
“I killed his guard. He owned three barges, and all I owned was a sword. Do you know what he is doing now?”
“No, Master.”
“He’s still trading, but now he only has one boat. Garaman thought gold made him rich. He didn’t understand his own world.” I crouched and reached between the bars to gripped her by the collar. “On Hyperborea, power makes you rich.”
“She swallowed, her eyes nervous.
“I bred you to win me allies. Every child born here adds another family to my warband. I don’t need to pay them, like guards. If I call them, they will come. And I, for them. That’s power.” I let go of her collar. “Understand, Slave?”
She said nothing.
“Understand?”
“Yes, Master!”
I turned to leave.
“Master - is that all it is to you?”
“Are you not happy to be a breeding slave?”
“I am happy to be a breeding slave,” her reply was mechanical and practiced.
“What about the rest of you?”
“I am happy to be a breeding slave,” they chorused.
I made them say it five times.
“It’s just - is that all it is for you, Master?”
I wondered what to do. Ignore Zana and leave? Take her out and whip her? Answer her?
“No, that’s not all it is. All this," I gestured about the room, "I enjoy it. I enjoy keeping you in cages. Breeding you. Seeing the swell of your bellies. Hearing the groaning from the birthing room. What I enjoy most of all is how normal you find it. That’s power, too."
"Yes, Master," said Zana. "I love you, Master. Thank you for breeding me."
"Thank you for breeding me," said 10, the Ansaru.
"Thank you for breeding me."
I left, their words following me up the tunnel. Such simple, innocent girls. So beautiful. So helpless.
I was proud I’d given their lives meaning.
***
On returning to the Master’s Inn, I had not expected to run into drama. It was late. Didn't people sleep?
Outside the entrance, a pair of my guards were shoving an old man. He stumbled back, unsteady on his feet, and collapsed in the snow. One guard brandished his club and warned him not to get back up. The old man, perhaps energized by anger, got to his feet and took a step forward.
The guard drew his club back.
"What the hell? Leave him alone!"
All three stopped and looked at me.
"What is wrong with you? Beating up an old man?"
"He was trying to steal," said Club Guard. The other guard, perhaps finding his shame, came forward to dust snow off the old man's clothes. He pushed away the guard's hands.
"That's hardly a reason for something like this."
"He was trying to steal a girl."
"That's my daughter you have in there! Milena!" His voice wavered.
"Which one is he talking about?"
"A new one. She wears a bell."
Belled Pet!
"My daughter and her brother are all I have left," the man turned to me. His face was as cracked and dry as a dead summer stream.
"You don't have a daughter anymore, Grandfather," I crossed my arms. "But while you did, she felt the same about you. She gave herself to the slavers. That's why you and your son are even alive today. If you can afford her, you can have her back. If not, be thankful that she is kept warm, safe, and fed. How many can be sure of such things today?"
"I cannot afford her, Burgher," his words cracked like old bones. "But I must free my daughter."
The two guards looked at each other. One raised an eyebrow, and the other shrugged.
It was uncommon for a family to want a daughter back after she’d been enslaved. Part of this is stigma; when a girl submits to slavery, she becomes no better in a Hyperborean's eyes than an animal. There is no coming back from that. Further, as a slave girl’s training progresses, her nature changes. She goes from a proud woman to a servile, shameless wretch who is eager to be treated like one. By such a point, there is very little a Hyperborean family would want to take back.
Only love did this: given without condition at whatever the asking price.
I regarded my guards. The one with the club had a fat lip. The other limped and kept touching his side like it was tender.
"You've got a lot of fighting you, Grandfather."
The old man said nothing.
"What did you do before all this? Were you a farmer?"
"I was a scribe."
"A scribe! Can your daughter read and write?"
"No. She did not want to learn."
"That's a shame. That would have got her out of the brothel. Maybe you can get her out, instead. We can always do with more scribes. Work hard for me for a year, and I will free your daughter."
His eyes widened.
"You speak true words?"
"You will get meals and lodging too if you need it. Be here tomorrow morning. You will help with the accounts. Perform well, and in a year, you will have a daughter again. Until then, she is mine - and she will work as hard on her back as any collared meat. Is that understood?"
"Azathoth be praised! The Idiot God has sent you, Burgher!”
He embraced me, babbling prayers over and over. When he was done, he wandered off through the snow. He kept muttering to himself in some Armanean dialect.
"Why Burgher?” asked Club Guard. “It will be cruel to give her back to him."
"Why indeed? It would be cruel to give her back, even now. And yet, he wants his daughter."
"He has no daughter," said the second guard.
"It is a beautiful thing he does not see that. If he still does not see it a year from now, who I am no one to keep that family apart? This world is full of beauty. You must learn to see it in all its forms."