Enslaved: The Five Tribes of Xanith (closed)

[MarieDavisRPs]

Enslaved: The Five Tribes of Xanith

(closed to me and ProfLittleGiant)​

Tyraa took a step back from the warrior with whom she was battling and took a defensive stance. The man was a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than her, as strong as an ox, and as fierce as a mother Grizzly protecting her cubs. And yet, he was very much at a disadvantage in his fight with who he likely thought was a mere woman who'd found a real man's sword and thought maybe she could use it with effect.

And use it with effect she did. Seeing her pause in their fight, he lifted his ax over his right shoulder and swung it in a big arc toward her neck, trying to severe her pretty head from her sexy body. Most men would call that a shame, but then most men hadn't had that pretty head and sexy body come after them with a sword.

His attack was slow and lumbering, though, and Tyraa easily stepped to her left while ducking low, avoiding the strike. The man had put his all into the action, causing him to turn his back partially to his target. Tyraa pushed off her back foot with her sword before her, causing the man to scream out in pain as the sharp blade sunk into his rib cage, piercing his lung, heart, and lung before sinking its tip into a far side rib. He dropped to his knees, then a moment later to his belly and face ... dead before he hit the dirt of the battlefield.

This was the fourth man Tyraa had killed thus far today, not that she was counting; she'd dropped another five before this with disabling injuries to their torsos, legs, or skulls. Over the course of this cleansing of the Urthat from the valley, Tyraa had killed, maimed, or seriously injured perhaps two dozen more. She was unlike most tribal leaders, men -- and in the rare case like her own -- women who sat back at a safe distance and watched others doing the killing ... and be killed themselves.

Seeing that this enemy was no longer of consequence, Tyraa struggled to free her weapon from his torso, then scanned the village for others yet to be dispatched. She found, though, that the fight was pretty much over. The vast majority of the warriors still on their feet seemed to be her own, and those who weren't were dropping their weapons and then dropping to their knees, seeking mercy. Many people might have thought this a sign of cowardice. But Tyraa would learn over the days to come that most of these men -- including one particular Blacksmith's Apprentice -- hadn't been trained warriors in the first place but had instead been simple villagers who'd taken up arms out of loyalty to their tribe.

A pair of her older, more senior, more experienced warriors approached Tyraa, asking her for her directions. They knew what she would tell them: gather and bind the ankles of the surviving men, women, and older children, then put them to task gathering anything and everything of value that would be taken away as the spoils of war.

Booty was, of course, the reason Tyraa had led her forces from the safety of their homeland in the Eastern Mountains down into the valley of Xanith. Booty was the only thing to be gained here; there would be no taking and holding of land here. The word Xanith came from the Old Word, the ancient language from which all languages derived, and it quite literally meant No Man's Land.

Xanith was a roughly oval shaped valley surrounded by foothills which themselves were surrounded by ever steepening mountains which, at their extremes, remained covered in snow year round. The valley offered everything a people could want for themselves: clean water, fertile lands, a bounty of prey animals, and a much more pleasant climate than that presented by the mountains.

The only problem was that there wasn't only one people who wanted this lush land for themselves, there were five. Throughout the history of Xanith, the people of these five tribes had repeatedly ventured farther and farther down into the valley to farm new lands or run their goat herds over new pastures. They'd profited from this risk for a few years, sometimes for a full generation, only to suddenly find themselves being attacked and robbed of much if not all they'd gained.

That, of course, was what had happened here in this village today, just as it had in other Urthat villages repeatedly over the past 20 days. Tyraa's people, the Parra, had been watching and waiting for years as the Urthat expanded into the valley from their homeland in the Western Mountains. Tyraa's mother, Morranna, had been Queen of the Parra during this Urthat expansion, and for all that time Morranna had restrained her warriors, telling them repeatedly The time is coming ... the time in not now ... but soon.

As Tyraa herself trained to both lead her tribe's forces and, ultimately, follow her mother as Queen of the Parra, she'd begun to get antsy about attacking. The Urthat had long ago reached the western shore of the Great River which cut north to south through the middle of the Xanith valley, ultimately passing through the Great Cleft to run off to a distant sea. Urthat scouts had been seen using boats to reach the eastern side of the river; Urthat hunters had been killing deer, boar, and even feral goats that had descended from Parra stock.

Tyraa had been pressing her mother to go to war for four years, since her Coming Of Age ceremony at age 18. And Tyraa would finally get her wish, though, not in the way she'd hoped. Morranna had died near the end of the summer of complications related to a fall, making Tyraa Queen of the Parra.

Even as her mother's funeral pyre was still sending smoke and ash into the sky, Tyraa called her warriors together and announced that it was time to push the Urthat out of Xanith, once and for all. Fall was coming; the Urthat harvests were nearly done, meaning the pillaged food would feed the Parra through the winter to come, and the hostages they would take would be welcomed and well paid for at the slave markets to the north and south of the Parra homeland.

Tyraa's forces had little trouble accomplishing what she'd asked of them. It was the nature of settling in the Xanith Valley. The Urthat homeland in the Western Mountains retained most of the tribe's warriors, to defend themselves against the persistent attacks from the tribes to their north and south. This left the valley villages lightly defended and vulnerable to attack, the exact reason why growth into Xanith had failed for generations upon generations.

The Parra had attacked, destroyed, and raided eight Urthat villages, thus far, looting them for food, crafted goods, stock animals, and hostages. Tyraa's scouts had reported that another 12 Urthat villages to the west had already been abandoned. Their residents were hurrying to the safety of the mountains as their minimal number of warriors guarded their rear. If the Parra continued their attack westward, the remaining Urthat warriors would burn the villages, to deprive Tyraa's people of their use.

"Let's go home," she told two of her Chiefs as they approached. "The winter is coming. We've gained a lot, and the Urthat are withdrawing. This is our last conquest."

One of the men looked relieved, as he had lost two sons in the fighting. His share of the loot would be greater, to compensate him for his sacrifice. The other appeared disappointed, though, feeling the Parra still had more to gain. But both gestured their respect for her order and turned to supervise their warriors in stripping the village of all it had to offer.

"Burn it," she ordered after the bound hostages and herds of goats and sheep were on their way eastward. Her horse jerked its head in excitement as the village slowly became a conflagration. She gestured the disappointed Chief to her, telling him, "Take your men west. Threaten the Urthat into burning their villages."

"And pillage, my Queen?" he asked hopefully.

She smiled to him. "Anything you take is yours and yours alone. But do not sacrifice more than you will gain."

He again gestured his respect, before gathering a dozen men, some food and supplies, and heading west. Tyraa looked to the Eastern Mountains with a longing and told her remaining Chiefs, "Let's go home."

 

[MarieDavisRPs]

With the roaring conflagration behind her, Tyraa urged her horse eastward. It had been a good day. It had been a good fight. In a cart before her, pulled by one of the burning village's only two oxen, were her own 4 dead and 8 injured. Tyraa would have preferred that those two numbers be zero and zero, but these were the costs of battle.

This attack and those on the previous 8 villages had seen the Parra suffer a total of 38 dead and twice that seriously injured. Tyraa would honor these warriors with a great ceremony once the force reached their mountain homeland. And, of course, there would be compensation to the families for their lost loved ones.

As Tyraa's horse reached the top of the hillock, she looked at the line of people and animals heading eastward and smiled with delight. In this village alone, they had taken more than 200 head of goats and sheep, a couple of dozen hogs, and two oxen.

There had been fowl in the village, too: chicken, ducks, geese. Hundreds of them had had been gathered from coops or chased down across the village. They were stuffed one by one through a hole in a canvas tarp that had been tied down to enclose the back of a cart. The mass of them writhed and squawked and clucked beneath the tarp, creating a cacophony of sound and movement that made Tyraa laugh.

Another cart held almost 20 children who were too small to endure the hike east. Some of these children would be sold at the slave market, but most of them would be raised as Parra, never knowing their true origins or identity as Urthat.

Out before this cart of youth were the rest of the hostages: 20 or so men, 40-plus women, and perhaps 60 children on foot. It was the greatest number of hostages Tyraa's warriors had taken in one raid. In all, the 8 attacks over 20 days had netted them more than 600 hostages in all. Some would remain in the Parra villages as adopted children or slaves, but most would be taken to the slave markets as keeping large numbers of slaves from one tribe was often a recipe for future uprising.



The sun was touching the mountains behind them as the train of people reached the western bank of the Great River. Here was a Parra encampment, with comfort and care for the exhausted warriors, as well as containment for the Urthat people and animals. The cart full of fowl was taken to the river's edge, where the female hostages were put to work snapping the necks of the fowl, cleaning them, and skewering their bodies for roasting over a linear fire pit set up on the pebble rock beach. Crops taken from the village's root cellars would be tossed upon the coals or crushed to create a thick, heated drink called Temtem that had a healing and calming effect that Tyraa knew her warriors needed right now.

"Bathe them," she ordered the Chief who was in charge of the male hostages. Still on her horse above the mass of dirty and sometimes bloody male Urthat, she glared down at them, complaining, "I'm not going to ride behind this stench for the next four days."

The Chief gestured to warriors from his Clan, and together they unshackled and herded the males to the rivers edge. To ensure no escape attempts, a half dozen each from the women and children's groups were brought over, forced to their knees, and threatened with swords.

The men complied, stripping out of their clothes and wading into the water. Tyraa noted the looks of surprise on their faces as they found the water warm. Hot springs boiled up from ground just upstream of this location, leaving the water a comfortable temperature for bathing.

Tyraa urged her horse nearer to the group of now naked men as they splashed water upon themselves. Some looked up to her while others diverted their eyes. She, however, maintained her gaze upon their bodies.

While most of the Urthat's fine examples of masculinity had been warriors in the defeat and, therefore, were no laying dead in the burning village, Tyraa still found a few men amongst these with well developed, muscular bodies. They would sell well as laborers or, in some cases, Pit Fighters. None of them would remain with Tyraa's people, of course. Again, too much risk.

One of the men who had had his back to the bank thus far finished his bathing and turned toward the shore. He was a well defined male with a muscular torso and legs. Tyraa would have wondered about his profession -- warrior or laborer? -- if her mind hadn't suddenly found itself engrossed in thoughts about another part of his anatomy. The man's cock, suffering not from cold river water but freed to lengthen in the warm water and air above it, dangled impressively before his groin. Tyraa gave it a long, solid stare before finally looking up to the man's face and the eyes that were on her as well.

"What is you name, slave?" she asked with a dominating tone.

 

[ProfLittleGiant]

Donnic struck down with his hammer, sending white-hot embers dancing through the air as they cooled to autumnal reds and oranges. The strong tendons in his large hands clamped a pair of tongs around the arm-sized chunk of iron he was working. Another flick and the heat-softened metal was plunged into a trough of water, sending up a bellowing cloud of steam and a hissing sizzle of evaporating water. “Hmph.” The man sighed, drawing hot, damp air into his lungs. As the air returned to full transparency, the spear-shaft shown from its aquatic bed. Donnic chanted an ancient battle tune as he waited for his work to cool so that he could retrieve it for closer inspection.

As a warrior of the Urthat tribe, Donnic had spent many a season fighting over this valley, despite his youth. The Urthat had been in tenuous control of the fecund land of the Xanith for several generations now. During the last planting season, the periodic raids on the nearby villages had dried up, allowing Donnic’s thoughts to stray toward settling down and laying aside his sword. Olgu, the old blacksmith’s widow, had grown too old to work her husband’s forge even in a diminished capacity and she looked kindly on a young fighter willing to learn a proper trade. Since the day he clasped arms with the old crone, her gnarled claw-like nails digging into his flesh just deep enough to elicit a drop of blood, Donnic had split his days between patrolling the wilds that surrounded the village and learning to apply fire to bend metal to his will.

As the apprentice pulled the iron spear shaft from the water, prodding the metal with his cunning fingers to test for weaknesses in the piece, a contemptuous clucking broke the stillness. “Boy, you will never smith shit until you learn patience.” Olgu’s thin, hunched form stood in the workshop’s doorway.

“Old mother,” laughed Donnic, “I have been nothing BUT patient. I have not killed a man in three moons, if I don’t find some new use for my hands my mind will desert me entirely."

“Ah,” said the crone, “in a few years you will be worth one of my husband’s balls. For now, you forge less than shit.” Pausing to cackle, Olgu continued. “But I have found your hands a use you may be keener on.” Seeing her apprentice’s eyebrow flutter upward, the old woman cackled again, sounding more and more like a thoroughly vicious raven. “I have spoken with the rest of the elders. You are to have a wife come the freezing time. I hope you can work a woman’s cunt better than you can work a bellows!”

“You tease too much.” Muttered Donnic with dry appreciation. But a reply was not forthcoming. As the young man turned, he noticed the blood spurting from Olgu’s neck. “Damn the Fates!” he thought as a Parra raider pulled his blade from Olgu’s stiffening corpse. His hammer flew and found purchase in the Parra’s forehead, sending the foreign man crashing to the ground. Donnic cursed having left his sword in his hovel and ran out into the village proper.

It was not long before the young man found the bulk of the fighting. Several muscle-bound raiders were slicing through his fellow townsfolk’s bodies as slighter, faster men looted all the provisions in sight. Scanning the scene, Donnic noticed a woman silently herding a few small children out the back of a large hut. Weaving from cover to cover to intercept them and gaurd their retreat, Donnic’s blood froze as a raider’s eyes met his. With no weapon, the lone Urthat was no match for the Parra raider. With a side-long look at the woman, Donnic silently begged, “Run fast, run now, don’t look back.” Approaching the Parra with arms crossed in surrender, Donnic hoped he had bought these few villagers enough time to escape.
***
Donnic’s mind did not allow itself to register what happened next, save to comprehend that he had been taken prisoner. Later, in a camp teeming with Parra spoils, Donnic was roughly stripped and led into an unusually warm river. Donnic, knowing that cooperation was his only chance at survival, dutifully washed the dust, sweat, and odd fleck of blood he had accumulated on the journey away. The water felt like Grotto of the Ancestors, the eternal reward for his people’s honored dead to Donnic and he hardened between his thighs as the rest of his muscles relaxed. Even in front of his fellow captives and the thrice-damned Para, he was not ashamed. Then he saw her. Black hair, pale skin, cruel eyes. She wore her regal bearing like a king’s mantle, though this woman was obviously a warrior of few peers.

"What is your name, slave?" she asked with a dominating tone.

Donnic meant to surrender, to play the supplicating prisoner. Instead, he met the woman’s eyes and whispered. “I am Donnic, mistress.”

 

[MarieDavisRPs]

“I am Donnic, mistress.”

"Queen!" Tyraa corrected the man standing naked in the warm mix of hot springs and mountain melt. "Queen Tyraa."

He couldn't have known her title of course, and honestly Tyraa would have been surprised if he'd addressed her as such. Tyraa's people were the only tribe that had a Matriarchal Monarch; this man surely understood that. But would he have ever imagined that the Queen of the Parra would have led the attack on his village, spilling blood side by side with her warriors?

She looked to the other men bathing in the river. Some faced her as was this Donnic, their manhood's dangling before them visibly or hidden behind cupped hands. Other men kept their back to her, maintaining a level of modesty or, perhaps, simply trying to be less obvious than the others.

"Get them out of here," Tyraa called to the Chief supervising the Urthat males. "They're clean enough."

The Chief called out orders to the men in the river to come ashore and to his own men to herd them with leveled spears. As the bare men were splashing back to the pebble beach, Tyraa looked to the man to whom she'd spoken and, speaking to the Chief, ordered, "This one stays here."

As the herd of naked men snatched up their clothes and were pushed back toward the pen in which they'd spend the night, Tyraa added to the Chief's orders, "Put him to work building a fire here, by the water. Gather the women. Clean them up as well."

The Chief ordered two of his warriors to guard Donnick, then gestured him to redress. But Tyraa contradicted that last, commanding, "Leave him as he is. I like looking upon him in this manner. In fact ... burn his clothes."

The Chief gestured to one of his men, and a moment later a torch was atop Donnick's piled clothing, slowly setting them ablaze. Tyraa looked down at the man with a pleased smirk, taking in his reaction to what she'd ordered before taking in another ogle of his manhood.

"Build me a warm fire, Slave Donnick," she ordered. "I'll need it ... for after I bathe this Urthat blood off my body."

Then she turned her horse and walked it away as the two Parra guards with weapons before them urged the man to do as he'd been ordered by their -- and now his -- Queen.

As Tyraa was leaving the river's edge, the women were being hurried out of their pen and toward the water. They were young and old, beautiful and ugly, healthy and frail; they varied from one another just as did the men.

One who was young, beautiful, and healthy was Lorna, who was as unique amongst her people as Tyraa was amongst hers. Against her parents' wishes, Lorna had shunned the life other girls had chased: domestic training, marriage, child bearing. She'd learned to ride a horse, to wield a sword, and to draw a bow, all with the goal of becoming an Urthat warrior.

That wasn't to happen, of course. Despite being better than many men at many of the manly things they did, she was still a mere woman. The Chief of her Clan forbade her from getting any closer to a potentially dangerous, combative situation that being a simple scout. It had been a disappointment to say the least, yet deep down, Lorna had known all along that she would never be permitted to partake in the defense of her people, as did the Parra Queen for her own.

And if all of this hadn't been enough of a disappointment, the morning of the attack on her village, Lorna had been informed that after two years as a Scout, she was being forced to give up even that. She'd been preparing her horse for a ride out toward the Great River when she was called back to her hut. Entering, her stomach turned with a threat to empty itself on the packed dirt floor at the sight of the some of the Elders and, most worrisome of all, the woman many called Olgu the Old Hag.

Lorna knew immediately why that woman and the others were here, and without a word from them she bellowed, "I won't do it!"

But, betrothal was out of her hands. She was sat down and told with stress that it was her duty as a woman on the Urthat Frontier to marry and birth children. She argued, begged, and cried to no end, before and after the non-family members had departed.

But it was all to no avail; Lorna's time had come, and the delays she'd managed by working toward becoming something more than just a baby maker had been just that and no more: delays. She'd begun her Moon Period four years ago, the age at which both of her older sisters had been married off. It was only her insistence that she was needed as a Scout that had gotten her to age 18 without being sold off and bred like a common Sow.

To be honest, Lorna had known this was coming. She'd reached her 18th birthday six days ago, and the Marrying Moon would be here in four more. She'd asked her parents with a vulgarity that they'd never heard come from her mouth, "Which warrior cock is going to be finding its way into me next full moon?"

After her father slapped her and her mother chastised her for being so crude, they answered her question. "Donnick. The Blacky's Apprentice."

Now, Lorna had had no desire to marry anyone, let alone find herself naked on her hands and knees while some fat, ugly, sweaty, smelly warrior held her hips in bruise-causing hands while he rammed her womanhood from behind. But at the mention of Donnick's name, she simply stared at her parents in silence for a long moment.

Donnick was neither fat not ugly, though his work often left him sweaty and smelly. And while she still had no desire to marry and, thus, give up her importance as a Scout for her village, there could have been worse men to have dipping their cock inside her as-of-yet defiled slit.

To be honest, there had been many times in the past when she'd been off alone in the woods at one of the many bathing holes near their village, toying her finger tips against that so-sensitive button of joy between her legs while imagining Donnick was touching it instead. As her parents waited for some sort of response to hearing the blacksmith's name, Lorna was considering whether or not this was an entirely unacceptable situation in which she found herself.

"I don't accept this," she'd told her parents finally, to which they'd told her she had no choice. To that, she said with feigned reluctance, "I won't ever be happy with this. I agree, but I won't ever be happy with this."

And yet, after walking off into the forest to curse the world for an hour or more, Lorna had then walked back into the village, straight for the Smithy. She stood out of sight and watched the beautiful man work. He was perfect, as a man.

And Lorna knew she was lucky to have him. Females in the village had been yearning for him for years, waiting eagerly for the day when the Elders would decide it was his time to take a wife. Lorna often wondered if perhaps some of those women had already had him. She wouldn't know such things; in the past, if it hadn't been about scouting and war, she had had no interest in it.

From the shadows, Lorna had watched with great interest as he labored on another metal tool or weapon or whatever, before heading back toward the woods with the intention of reaching her hands down her man-pants again. But that wasn't to be; she'd barely entered the woods when she was struck in the head and knocked unconscious.

Her next thought came when she was laying in the back of the wagon with the children, and -- realizing that they'd been attacked and defeated -- that thought had been Did they defile me? The Parra warriors hadn't, and they wouldn't have. Lorna didn't know it, but their conqueror's Queen had a strict rule against the rape of the conquered's women. It was less about morality than it was about finances: a raped virgin was a virgin no more, and virgins sold for ten times as much as a woman whose hole had been rampaged.

Lorna first thought after her own purity and her parents' current health had been Is my betrothed still alive? She hadn't even spoken to Donnick about their impending union, and yet she was still concerned about whether or not he'd survived the attack. When the Parra guards saw her conscious, one on horseback pulled her across his horse's back and rode her unsteadily to the line of bound women, adding her to their numbers.

She tried to search for Donnick but to no avail as her feet were nearer the line of men than her head. She asked about him once on her feet again, but no one could positively say they'd seen him amongst the captives.

It wasn't until just now, as she was being herded toward the river that she finally caught sight of him ... hauling wood for a fire that was slowly becoming larger ... hauling fuel for the fire ... while naked as the day he'd been born. She knew she shouldn't, but Lorna stared at him through the deepening darkness of coming night. She'd never seen a man fully unclothed before believe it or not. Well, she'd seen her dad, but he was her dad, not a man.

Suddenly, she felt warmer, seeing his cock flop back and forth as he walked across the pebble beach, dropping wood, turning his firm, muscular buttocks to her. Lit up by the red-orange flames, they were as impressively muscular as the rest of his body.

"Strip!" one of the male guards demanded of the women. "Strip and get in the water and wash your filthy bodies, you Urthat whores."

Lorna looked to the man with a fired up expression, wanting nothing more than to rip his cock off and shove it down his throat. But he was armed and not alone, and some of the other women were already beginning to reluctantly do as they were told. She still didn't immediately begin to shed her clothes, though; just as Lorna had never seen a man naked, no man had ever seen her without clothes either.

She looked for Donnick again but could not find him amongst the milling Urthat and Parra. The shaft of a spear slammed against her arm, accompanied by a repeat of the demand. Again, Lorna looked for her betrothed, and she realized suddenly that she was more concerned about him seeing her naked than she was of being seen by the Parra warriors. She pulled the thongs holding her tall boots tight around her calves, shed them, then one by one shed the rest of her garments until she was in only in a shift that passed just beyond the lower curves of her firm buttocks.

"That, too," the guard demanded, again striking her.

She spit at the man, resulting in a strike to her head and, a moment later, the shedding of her last bit of clothing. She hid her crotch behind one hand and tried her best to hide as much of her firm, pert bosom behind one arm and hand. Then, turning a bit to head for the water, Lorna stopped cold at the sight of Donnick staring at her from near the pile of wood at the fire. She stared at him for a few seconds with wide eyes, unsure of how to feel about this situation.

Then, without really thinking about what she was doing, Lorna slowly pulled her hands away from her body, revealing it fully to her betrothed for a long moment, before finally she turned and headed into the water.