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THE BRONZE HORSE
By JAR
CHAPTER 2
When I came too I could see by the sun it was late in the day so I must have been unconscious for quite some time. I had a blinding head ace and a lump on my forehead. When I reached the hut it was very quite and other than six very dead member of the gang that had kidnapped me the place was empty. At this point I felt sick and my head started to swim, which I assumed was from the blow I had taken on the head. I must have passed out again as it was dark when I came too. I soon went back to slept.
The flapping of wings woke me and I realised that the vultures had come for breakfast. I just hoped it was not me on the menu some time soon. I decided that my best plan was to go back to the stream and get the water bottles, then try and follow the stream until I came to a village that would help me. When I arrived back at the stream I could not find the water bottles. I was sure I had the right spot. All I could think of was that the old guy had come back for them. Still if I followed the stream I would not need the bottles as I could drink when I wanted to.
The problem of following the stream soon became apparent to me as the water encouraged the growth of plants, especially a very thorny variety. Several time I had to divert around very dense clumps and then try and pick up the stream on the other side. Twice it took my over half an hour to find the steam. So the next time I tried to crawl along the stream bed but soon the sheet covering me was stuck up on a bush. Try as I might I could not free it so I gave it a harder and harder tug till it tore. To my horror nearly half the sheet was gone. As I tried to back out of the bush it got caught again and before I realised what had happen it was over my head and on the ground. I had no use of my finger because of the tape still raped around them so I gripped it in my teeth but the material was so thin and worn that it just tore again. Tears welled up as I sat there naked in the middle of no were.
I cried for about 10 minute before I was able to pull myself together again. I had one last try to get the sheet free of the thorn bush but with just my teeth I had no chance. I started to walk and it was not long before I could feel the sun burn into my shoulders and the rest of my body. I was not sure how but at some point I lost the trickle of water that was the stream. It must have gone underground was all I could think of.
By mid afternoon I knew I was going to die and the vision of the vultures feeding on the dead gang members came back to me. I would find my self to weak to walk, and then while I was still alive they would start too ripe off my skin and eat me alive. I wondered how long it would take till I died.
I kept walking till I found some shade behind a rock and stopped. I though it would be best to travel at night when the sun was not out. I rested for the rest of the day. The night seemed cold but I think that was only because it was so hot during the day and I was hot from sun burn. With the moon out I was able to see quite well so I kept going as fast as possible but I was very thirsty by now. As morning arrived I managed to find a bank with an over hang to keep off most of the sun for next day and waited for the evening to come.
I was now very dehydrated and my face and tongue felt parched and swollen. My body was covered in a layer of dust from lying down all day. I somehow got to my feet and staggered off. Several times I stumbled and fell. It was very painful on my breasts and or shoulders, as I could not put out my hands to save myself. I was glad that they had left my boots on or my feet would have been ripped to pieces and I would have been unable to walk at all. As the sun started to come up I could see a clump of bushes in the distance but the rest of the landscape was flat.
I made my way to the bushes only to find that in fact they were the tops of several trees in a small depression. In the bottom was an oasis. In my haste to get to the water I stumbled and fell and ended up rolling down the slope scraping my body arms and legs as I roiled to the bottom. I expected it to be a mirage but it was still there as I crawled on my knees into the water and lay down. It felt so good, I could feel my skin absorbing the life giving water. I drank as much as I could. Then I went and lied down under a tree and fell asleep.
When I woke up I was very hungry and I managed to pick berries off a bush with just my mouth. It wasn’t until I had eaten a load that I wondered if they might be poisonous, but it was too late now. For the rest of the day I drank and ate berries or dozed under the tree.
The water had cleaned my body and removed the dirt and dried seam I had been covered with. I was so good to feel clean again and my mood was very happy. My sunburn was quite bad, so I would often lie in the water to try and help reduce the effects. It was still very sore but the soaking had helped. Now that I was clean I could see the extent of the bruises to my breast and legs. I had quite a few cuts and scrapes but none of them looked to be infected at the moment. My face was sore and swollen but I felt that would go down in time with no permanent damage.
By the end of the next day I had recovered quite a lot and climbed up the slope to see if I could work out what to do next. Every direction I looked in, it was just flat grassland. I was not even sure which direction I had come from or which way to go. In despair I went back down to the trees. I tried to think of a plan but I had lost the water bottle so I knew I could not survive for long without water so the only thing I could do was to stay here until someone came along. I knew this could have its down side in that they may be bandits like the lot that had kidnapped me in the first place.
For three days I had rested, eat fruit and let my sunburn start to recover. About halfway through the morning of the fourth day I suddenly had a feeling that I was being watched. I looked around but could see no one, but the feeling continued for the next hour or so. Then I looked up and a man was standing on the top of the slope, on the other side of the water. He had a shield and spear, his face was painted and only wore a loin cloth.
I was suddenly very conscious of being naked, with my arms being tied behind my back and a rope hanging around my neck. I was unsure what to do but I felt freighted by him and I did not know why. Maybe I should run for it. In the end I did nothing and he walked up to me and stopped about 6 foot away.
He was only about 3 foot tall and reminded me of the aborigines I had seen on the TV. He looked over me very carefully and his scrutiny made me blush. I said to him in English and I don’t know why I expected him to understand “please undo my arms. I half turned to him so he could see them and hoped he understood what I had said. He moved forward but instead of releasing me took the end of the rope around my neck and tried to lead me towards a tree.
It was clear that he had no intention of releasing me so I tried to jerk the rope from his hands but he must have anticipated I would do that and moved with the pull. I started to walk up the slope and he was pulled along. He was no match for my strength. We were about half way up the slope when he started to make aggressive gestures for me to stop. These I ignored. When we arrived at the top of the slope I started to walk fairly fast towing him along. I felt a tug on the rope then it felt free. When I looked over my shoulder he had stumbled and let go of the rope so I started to run and was now some 30 yards away from him.
I ran at a speed to keep the distance to about 50 meters or so. It was quite embarrassing with my breasts swaying and bouncing about with the action of my running. This was something I was not use to as I had all ways worn a sports bra when running. After about a mile he stopped and turned about and headed back to the oasis. I too stopped and it suddenly dawned on me that the oasis was the only place with water for miles and without it I would die.
I circled around the oasis and slowly came up to the edge of the depreciation and could see he was down by the water lighting a fire. He soon had an animal that he had caught roasting and the smell made me realise how hungry I was. I tried to creep forward to get a drink but when I got to about 15 meters from the water he stood up and walked towards me. So I ran back up to the top of the bank and when I looked back he was sitting down by the fire again. We played out this pantomime many times before evening set in. It was obvious that I would not be allowed to drink unless I allowed him to capture me. I was sure I could have overcome him if my hands were free.
When night had set in I hoped he would go to sleep so I could sneak down to the lake to get a drink, as by now I was very thirsty. In the end it was me who fell asleep. I awoke with a start as the sun was well up above the horizon and was horrified to see him standing about 10 feet from me. It was oblivious that he could have captured me at any time but instead he smiled and walked back to his camp.
The implications to me were clear, if I wanted food and water, I had to surrender to him. I became angry and stood on the rise and shouted that he could go to hell before I would grovel to him. I kept this up for about 5 minutes before I ran out of steam and the hopelessness of my position sunk into my brain. I sank to my knees and cried, die or surrender was the only two alternatives I had. Neither of which I wished to do.
It was midday before I gave in, twice during the morning I had tried to get a drink. As soon as I approached the water, he would come up to me and whip me around the legs with a thin stick to drive me off. He had made it clear that he would have to give me the water and that I could not just take it.
I walked up to his camp and stood in front of him and nodded my head at the water bottle. He shook his head and pointed at the ground just in front of him, indicating that I should kneel down. This made me so angry I stamped my foot and then felt embarrassed at my childish actions but I was determined not to grovel. For over and hour I stood in the full sun watching him as he sat in the shade of a shelter he had built. I was getting badly burnt so I gave in and knelt in front of him.
Tears of rage ran down my face. But still he would not give me a drink. He indicated that I should bow my head to the ground. Seething, this I did. He leant forward and picked up the end of the rope that was around my neck and tied it to a tree. I would not be running off unless he let me, now I was his prisoner. He then tapped me on the head with his stick and held up his cupped hands with water in them. I was so thirsty that I drank from his hands. He then placed fruit and berries on a flat stone and allowed me to eat.
I was still on my knees which helped to reinforce that he was in command and I had to do as he told me. Where as the Bandits had used me as a sexually play thing, I was still a woman. With this guy I felt like an animal.
I watched as he stood up and walked over to a thorn bush and cut a long thorn from the bush. He returned to were I knelt in the dirt and dipped the end of the thorn in to a small file of liquid he had removed from his pouch. He then went behind me and I felt a sting as he pushed the end of the thorn into a vain at my neck. Within a few minutes I started to feel cold and a bit dizzy. I was losing control of my body and legs felt stiff and unresponsive. Then I lost control of my body and started to fall over. He caught me and laid me face down in the sand. Next he worked at the straps holding my arms behind my back and untied them.
This was what I had wanted for days, weeks even, and now I could not take advantage of it. Both arms were stiff and sore from being tied the way they had been for so long. He placed each of the fingers of my hands around the wrist of the opposite arm and bound them with one of leather strips that my arms had been tied up with.
He then got two pieces of flat wood I had seen him working on and placed them along both of my forearms. Using a long, 3 inch wide, strip of leather he bound the wood to my arms. The end result was to push my elbows wide and straighten out my wrists. After wrapping them in several layers he left me lying on the ground. About an hour or so later I regained the use of my arms and legs and was able to sit-up.
It was sometime after I was able to sit-up he seemed to have finished what he was doing and came over to me. First he put a stick, with the bark striped off, into my mouth and used a leather strap to tie it around the back of my head to hold it in position. I was still tied to the tree and he had the stick that he used as a whip, so had to go along with what every he decided to do to me.
For the rest of the day made me adopt one of two positions. The first position was knelling down with my face about a foot off the ground, which I was to adopt when he said what sounded like “TOLAY”. The other called “PAMPON” was to stand up.
He would call TOLAY and I would knee so he could straddled my back, putting this leg either side of my ribs but inside of my arms. This took quite a bit of pushing and shoving on his part to get me to understand what he wanted. In the end several hard strokes with the crop convinced me to cooperate.
Once in position he grabbed the stick in my mouth and jerked it in an upward direction and said PAMPON. After the third go it came to me that I was to stand up, this I did. I now had him sitting on my arms, which were behind my back with his bottom resting on my forearms. Digging his heals into my stomach like you would on the flanks of a horse I realised that I was to walk forward. At first I refused to do this but several digs in the stomach with his heals and a hard swat across my bottom made me start to walk.
After two steps he would say WOO and pull on the stick in my mouth, I would stop. Next it would be TOLAY and I would kneel so he could get off. He made me repeat this over and over again till I was fluent with it. If I were slow he would hit me with his whippy stick. The pain was enough to make, me concentrate on getting it right. The stick in my mouth was removed and he then refilled the water bowel and gave me more fruit and dried meat to eat, then I was allowed to rest.
I was now more than every determined to make him suffer when we reached civilisation. I would get the police to arrest him and sue him for every penny he had. No one was going to treat me like of horse and get away with it. I had decided that I would call him Fred so I had a name for him. It helped to focus my anger
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