Ojastara spent the night in the swamp. The swamp was affectionate but, by four in the morning, a little colder than was strictly comfortable. 

In the morning, when the sun had warmed and woken it, she let the swamp feel her gratitude and affection, but told it she had to go. The swamp was reluctant for a few seconds, and Ojastara worried momentarily that it intended to hold her by force. But it relented and she sensed it returning her affection. A section of the mud beneath her swelled and then carried her, bouyant, back to the point where she’d stepped in.

The foxes – those miscreants who had fought over and shredded her dress – were waiting for her. Ojastara considered picking up a stick to beat them off, but the alpha female whined and then licked her hand, so she knew she had nothing to fear. 

She resumed her walk, naked, the foxes forming a guard of honour behind her. At last she came to a wall. It was brick and stucco, and higher than she could climb. Ojastara pursed her lips (one of the foxes swooned at this sight and had to be re-awakened by its mother), and decided to follow the wall until she found a collapsed section or an entrance.  

The wall seemed to be ancient, but it also turned out to be well maintained. There was no tree that she could climb and drop down to the other side, no ivy to clamber up, and no gaps. At last she came to a gate. A young man stepped out as she approached, with a longbow and arrows. He said, “Welcome, naked lady, to Waldenbereich.” 

Ojastara said, “The name means as little to me as if I were a tree. Or swamp. But thank you for your welcome. May I pass through your gate?” 

The young man smiled contemptuously. “You now have the right to do as you’re told, no more than that. Step forward, please, with your hands together behind your back. I can’t add you to my family, but it will do me no harm to give the Landgraf a gift.”

One of the foxes growled, and the young man nocked an arrow to his bow. “If you don’t want your pet to die, tell it to relax.” 

Ojastara signalled to the fox to stay back. She stepped forward, unafraid, with her hands behind her back as ordered. Swiftly, skilfully, the young man tied her hands, and used a spare bowstring to make a slip-knotted leash on her neck.

He tugged, wordlessly, and she followed. Befhind her, foxes growled.

Some time after two in the morning, when I was blissfully sleeping it off, my cock feeling well-used and slightly sore, in a good way, from all the hard work I’d done, beating, eating and fucking Ojastara, I felt a hand shaking my shoulder.

Usually I wake up quickly, and pretend I was awake all the time. But this time I really needed the sleep, and I was reluctant to re-enter the waking world. But Ojastara pushed my shoulder again, and said, “More? Once more?” 

So I groaned and finally sat up. “Now I can see why that guy broke a riding crop on your arse. You are getting a dozen, hard, before you go to work. That’s a promise.”

“Excellent! I can’t see my marks. But I like to feel they’re there.”

Ojastara didn’t just mean that she couldn’t see her own arse without a mirror. I’d discovered that evening that you could raise welts on her bottom, and admire those, but her skin didn’t change colour under my hand, or my belt or any other implement. She wasn’t black in the American sense, where even a faint coffee tan is called “black”. She was simply black like coal is black.

I smacked her left breast, quite hard. “Glad to be of service. What do you want?” 

“Fuck me again, Master? Please?” 

I thought about it.”I’d like to, little one. But there’s no way I’m going to get a hard-on again until morning. Real morning. This is the middle of the night. And my recovery time.”

“Please, Master?”

A master’s job is to make his slavegirl happy, and keep her in that state. So I smacked her right breast. She was a big-breasted woman, and the sway was a gorgeous sight. I made a note to do that again, and then fuck her between her breasts, when I was horny again. Then I slapped her face. (I have some internal resistance to doing that, but with Ojastara I knew it would be right.) “All right. On your back. Sitting up a bit.”

So she made a pile of pillows and leaned back on them. “Like this, Master? Are you going to lick me?”

“You woke me. You’re doing all the work. You’re to stroke yourself until you’re ready to come. And you’re going to stay there, on the edge. But you’re not allowed to come until I tell you.”

“Yes, Master. Of course. But what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to tell you a story. While you wank. You’ve got fifteen seconds to come, after I’ve said the works, The End. If it takes you longer, then you weren’t edging.”

“Fifteen seconds!” She managed to sound outraged. I was the unfairest, meanest Master of them all.

“Fifteen seconds. I won’t let you after fifteen seconds, and I’ll find a way to really punish you. Understand?”

“Master!”

Ojastara had already begun obeying, thighs wide, fingers buried, working fast. I smiled at her, though she didn’t notice. “That’s a good girl. Now, once upon a time…”

[End of prologue.] 

I was in a relationship with Ojastara, a Tamil woman. We’d met at work, where I was policy consultant for the State Government and she was a lawyer working on a complicated land deal. Part of her job was helping me not screw up the legal niceties, because the issues were more specialised than I was used to.

I told her a story about how a couple of years ago the then Minister had insisted we discriminate against people who’d just been released from prison. It was wrong and outside of that organisation’s establishing Act. There was nothing there about adding to the punishment of people who’d served their sentence. It was socially unhealthy, it was illegal and it would hurt vulnerable people.

I knew the Minister only wanted it because a local shock jock was running a radio campaign to stir up his audience.

She thought I’d fight it on the constitutional issue, that it’s not a possible use of that government agency. But that would only make him mad at me and I couldn’t afford that. So I wrote the Minister a paper showing that  he could do that but if he did he’d have to apply the same policy to other groups, unless he changed the legislation. I knew he wouldn’t want to do either of those things.

So he sent back my advice and and I came up with another solution that would give him what the shock-jock wanted but be unpopular with everybody else. By then three weeks had passed and the shock-jock had got bored and moved on to something else. So my third paper went to the Minister’s office and never emerged again. As I’d planned. 

I meant it as a parable about how government works differently from law. She thought it was funny. So we had a drink in the pub across the road, after work.

Her name, as I mentioned, was Ojastara. She’d been in Australia since she was three, so she wasn’t culturally Tamil, or not much. I asked her if she liked M.I.A. (I do), but she said she liked Celtic music.

The main thing about Ojastara that was different from any other Australian girl was that she had the darkest skin I’d ever seen, at least on someone I’d actually met.

After a while I realised she had the darkest skin of anyone I’d wanted, very particularly and personally, to fuck.

That second category is smaller, but it’s more important to me, of course. She was so black her skin glowed, almost with a trace of blue-black like Superman’s hair. I thought it was beautiful. She was beautiful.

She had an apartment not so far away. She mentioned that after our second glass of wine, when it was clear that we were getting on well. So I put my arm round her while we walked to her place. After a block’s worth of silence she said, “It’s a pity you’re such a rule-breaker. Because I’m a girl who likes strict rules.”

I didn’t immediately realise that was meant as a hint to out herself in case I was sensitive to clues like that. I missed it it the moment, but I  whacked her bum anyway, not very hard, “Well, I’m the rule-breaker. I never said you could break rules. Especially not mine.”

She dodged, but not until after my hand had connected. She laughed at me. “Oh? What sort sort of rules would you want? And do you really think you could hold me to them? I’m a very stroppy lawyer.”

So I stopped, and held her for the first time and kissed her. She had such a sweet face. I said, “Politics beats law, every time.”

She nodded. We’d recognised each other. A policy-maker was going to beat a lawyer, and then fuck her. She said, “But lawyers, we’re famous for not taking any bullshit.”

So I smiled, held her against me, smacked her bottom again, but really quite hard this time, and kissed her.

And that’s this story’s first episode. Tune in again on Wednesday!