Chapter 5
"Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?" - Morpheus in "The Matrix" (1999).
The beating of the carriage rumbling over the bumpy road woke Ashley up. As the darkness around her faded, she slowly became aware of her sorroundings. She was on an open carriage, drawn by two horses along a forest road. Two soldiers in heavy armor, armed with swords and pikes, followed them on horses. She spotted several thatched roofs in the distance, just before they disappeared behind the dense forest.
"Oh, you are finally awake", a man who sat on the bench across her spoke in a hoarse voice. His hands were shackled. A chain was running from the man's shackles down to the bottom of the carriage where it ended in a metal ring that was attached there. Another chain ran up from that ring towards Ashley and ended around the manacles that held her own wrists in a firm grip. Ashley was startled. Why were her hands tied? Where was she? Why was everyone around, including herself, dressed like they were headed straight to a medieval LARP meeting?
"Where are we going?", she asked after she finally had decided which of the questions in her head had the most relevance.
"Castle Despair. Although that is not the real name, but the name the people made up for it. It is the largest prison within fifty leagues", the man replied. "My name is Rulf by the way. I should not even be here! I am innocent! They say I ravaged a girl. Truth is, she offered her body to me by herself. I lost my wife to the plague two years ago, but I still have needs, right? That little whore took my money and tried to run off. But I caught her the next day. And when she did not want to give the money back, I only took what I had already paid for!"
"Shut up back there or we will take a break and teach you some manners!", the fat coachman growled from the front. Rulf fell silent immediately. Ashley kept examining the carriage, instinctively looking for a chance to escape. She did not know what this infamous Castle Despair was going be like, but she certainly had no desire to see it from the inside. And she still had no idea why she was being taken there, but her shackled hands were an unmistakable proof that this was not a field trip.
Only now Ashley saw the person on the floor of the carriage, quite small and skinny. A boy maybe? Unlike Rulf and herself, the boy was not shackled, but secured with ropes, tied in a tight hogtie. Ashley's and Rulf's clothes were ragged and dirty, but the robe the boy wore was beyond any repair. A bag had been pulled over his head, rendering him practically blind. Laying face down on his front, tied and blindfolded, he had no chance to brace himself for the potholes and roots the wagon ran over. There was a shriek or a moan everytime he got another hit from the uneven road, muffled, since some kind of gag had been apparently placed in his mouth.
"Poor boy", Rulf said, quietly now so the coachman couldn't hear it. "It may look bad for us, but at least we might still get out of this alive. This lad won't, I am afraid. He was already on the waggon when I got in. I heard the guards say that the escort came in from the barracks. I guess, he is a deserter who got caught and is now being executed."
Ashley was shocked. "They are going to kill him?", she whispered back, so that neither the coachman nor the boy could hear it.
"Yes", Rulf nodded sadly. "Usually they would do this directly at the barracks. A rope around the neck or a sword between the shoulder blades. But at Castle Despair, they have a lot more possibilities to take a life. Slow and painful ones. Whatever he has done, he must have really pissed off someone."
The road, which had made a steep climb for the last league or so, took a sharp turn along the mountainside and left the forest behind. The path offered now an unobstructed view over a small fortress. There was a stone wall with battlements on top. It enclosed the bailey on three sides. The fourth side was the mountain itself. There was a keep, that was build against the cliff, almost seeming to be merged with it. The thatched roofs of two smaller buildings protruded over the wall, stables probably. And there was a crooked and rotten wooden watchtower where Ashley suspected the gate to be.
"Does not look like much, right?", Rulf mumbled from the side. "At least not like a prison that holds more than 1,000 doomed souls. This used to be a mine. I was told, my great-grandfather worked there when they were still extracting ores. And now that they have drained the montain, they have turned the tunnels into cells."
Ashley did not know what to say. The sight of the fortress alone frightened her, let alone the unspeakable things that were likely happening behind its walls at this very moment. Images of diabolical torture devices from one of her old history text books flashed through her thoughts. Racks, spiked chairs, iron maidens. She felt like in a horror flick.
As the escort apporached the gate and they got close enough that Ashley could almost make out the faces of the sentinels on the wall and the watch tower, a true scene of terror unfolded in front of their eyes. On the roadside, there were two long stakes standing out from the ground. Each was occupied by a person, a man and a woman, who had been impaled on them. Although both of them were stark naked (and terribly battered), Ashley could not clearly see how had they been mounted so precisely on the pole. But she guessed that the pointy end on top had been pushed into their buttholes until it had exited their mouth, leaving their faces as atrociously distorted grimaces with their mouths and murky eyes wide open. The hefty winds that blew through the glade had already dried out the blood that coated their tighs and mouths. Only the woman's long hair and the man's flaccid penis were still fluttering in the wind.
"So that is what happened to them", Rulf coughed, resisting the urge to throw up at sight if the grotesque scene. "I recognize them. They were travelling entertainers. I saw them at the marketplace when I visited the town the other day. Some days later, I heard rumors that they were arrested for stealing a bag of potatoes. Looks like the rumors were true."
They finally arrived at the gate. While the coachman and the guards on top of the gatehouse made jokes about the latest delivery of 'freash meat', Ashley was frightened again by another terrible view. On each side of the gate, a gibbet cage hung from the wall. One contained a body that had already decayed so much that the identy of its former owner could not possibly be determined anymore. But in the other one, there was a young women, maybe a little older than Ashley. She looked at the people waiting in front of the gate with blood-shot eyes and her dried-out ruptured lips formed silent words that Ashley could not make out before the gate was opened and the wagon moved inside.
The last part of the rise was short and the carriage made its final stop in the center of the courtyard. The chains that had kept Ashley and Rulf fixed to the wagon where loosened and the two were rushed to climb off and take position between the guards who had dismounted their horses. They also took the boy down, but they let him brutally slump onto the dusty cobblestone floor before cutting the ropes that secured his feet and pulled im into a standing position, his hands still tied behind his back and the hood still over his head.
A man exited the keep and came towards the new arrivals. He appeared to be someone high ranking around here, the commander of the fortress maybe? His appearance certainly differed from everyone else in visibility, as he wore clean and flawless clothes.
"What have you brought me today, Peyton?", he asked, giving the coachman a matey handshake. The fatso replied by handing him over three rolled up letters he had taken out of his satchel.
"Ah, Rulf the rapist", the commander said after unrolling the first letter and reading it.
"No, that's a lie!", Rulf protested. "I did not rape the girl! She sold herself to me."
"Silence!", the commander interrupted the desparate man. "In the letter it says, that you raped the tailor's daughter after he had sent her to collect a due payment for a coat. He also filed the contract papers to prove the order."
"I never got that coat. Everyone knows that the tailor is broke and has no money to buy new materials. So he sells his daughter! I have seen her visiting every second house in the village, including the house of the provost."
"Shut up, or I will have your tongue for this defamation! As far as I know, the tailor is an honorable citizen. He would never expose his daughter to this fornication you claim. My job is to make you confess, because the judge cannot pass a sentence on you without a confession. When this is done, you may probably choose between loosing your cock or being send to the coal mines on the other side of the mountain, where you will have about a year to live before the dust kills you. Either way, you will never fuck a woman again."
Rulf fell silent and started sobbing. His cries were drowned out by a bloodcurdling scream coming out of the keep's open gate. Ashley and Rulf, roused by the inhuman noise, stared into the direction it had came from.
"Oh, don't mind that", the commander said casually as he took the next letter and started to read it. "That was just the herbalist. She has been on the rack since dawn. I guess, one of her shoulders finally popped. Now to you! You are Ashley, I presume?"
Ashley just nodded, still unable to fully grasp the whole situation. Being in this place, standing shackled between a rapist and a (suspected) deserter, could only mean that she was in big trouble.
"Strange. The letter says that you are scheduled for interrogation, but not what you are charged with. What have you done, wench?"
A good question. What could she have possibly done to be deported to a place like this? The events of the past hour had occupied Ashley's mind so much that she had completely forgotten to contemplate her own fate. Actually, she could not remember anything that had happened before awakening in chains on her way here.
"I... I don't know", she replied.
"Are you a dimwit or something?", the commander challenged. "I am quite sure you know why you are here. And you will tell me, sooner or later. Everyone who comes here talks eventually. At the very latest when they have enjoyed some of our devices."
At the same moment, another scream was heard form the keep, a little hoarser but definately not quieter or less terrifying than the first one.
"The other shoulder", the commander nodded and moved on to the boy. "Take the hood off."
One of the soldiers from the escort pulled the bag off the small creature's head. Now that the face was visible, Ashley started to doubt that the third prisoner was a boy. The soft lineaments suggested a female face. The tousled hair, botchetly cut short like a boy from a lower social level would wear it, could not hide this.
"Oh, this is something new!", the commander bawled after having read the third letter. "Here we have Farfelee, daughter of Merek the weaver. You all do remember the king's draft call to all working class families to send their family head or their eldest son to the barracks, because he needed men to fortify the borders? Our little warrior princess here went in her father's stead, because her poor old daddy was sick and had no son. The thing is, women are prohibited from joining the military. Of course, the general in charge found out what was going on when she refused to strip during the initial inspection."
The girl, Farfelee, offered a miserable sight. Judging from her bowed posture and her black eye, it was obvious that she had been beaten not so long ago. She was shaking. The tears rolling over her bruised face were soaked up by the rag that she had been gagged with. But the commander showed no sign of pity.
"Farfelee, you are 18, which is old enough to become a soldier. But as a woman, you know that you are not allowed to. By trying to deceive the general, you have mocked the military and the king. And that is why you are scheduled for immediate execution!"
Farfelee sunk to her knees. Her cries were muted by the gag. Three soldiers, who had sat around a small table nearby, heard their cue and came forth to sorround her. One of them pulled a knife from his belt and cut open her tattered robe and threw it away, leaving her completely naked. No wonder that it was so easy to mistake this girl for a boy, Ashley thought. Farfelee was not only spindly, but had also almost no noteworthy female curves. Regarding the bruises, the rest of her body did not look any better than her face.
"What shall we do with her, Sir?", the one with the knife said.
"It is a slow day", the commander replied. "Take your time. Before we start with the execution, she should be taught a lesson to understand once and for all that she is not a man. Show her something that a man cannot do... like taking three cocks in three differnt holes at the same time?"
The three soldiers uttered dirty laughs while they quickly removed the parts of their armor that blocked their crotches. The first, who had pulled out his already stiff dick, positioned himself on the ground. The other two lifted up the defenseless Farfelee, one having pushed his hands under her arms, the other holding her knees apart. Ashley could see that Farfelee's labia were reddened and glistening. There was no doubt that other men had forced themselves onto her right before she had been put onto the carriage to damnation.
"Stop!", Ashley heard herself scream. She knew that it would have been the wisest to stay silent and endure the peverted display. But her moral senses urged her to scotch the unbelievable procedure. No one listened to her. Farfelee had no chance to fight back as she was mounted on the shaft of the soldier waiting on the ground. The second soldier knelt down behind her and pulled her tied wrists upwards, forcing Farfelee to bend forward in an effort to take the pressure off her shoulders. Then he shoved his stick into the overwhelmed girl's butt.
The third moved to her front and freed her from the gag. "No... hmpf!", was all Farfelee could say before his manhood filled her mouth.
To be continued.