In the eastern deserts of Fyrnath, when the north wind blows across the vastness of the sands made hard and sharp by the minerals scoured from the bleak surfaces of the Great Barrier Mountains to the north, a man's flesh can be torn from his bones overnight.

To Caris, a dark haired beauty just past her eighteenth birthday, standing in the Hall of Justice in the underground city of Delyz, this was no idle myth or fairy story told to fractious children to make them behave. Before the assembled crowd a man stood accused of sleeping with another man's wife. The penalty was exposure during a sandstorm.

The accused was dressed in the simple shirt and loose britches that all men of the nation wore when they were safely underground. The trial had been going on for some time now and the verdict was near. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that he was guilty, and so was the woman. She was a tall, mature woman with the dark hair common to most people of the nation, good-looking and proud, as was her lover. Her husband was older than either of them and looked on with a vindictive gleam in his eye.

The judge - Caris' father - sat on the traditional judgement chair and in due course would announce the verdict that everyone gathered there knew was inevitable. In the silence which followed his announcement that he was ready to pass sentence, they could all hear the wind begin to moan and roar outside. Even scores of yards into the huge caverns carved out by generations of the nation, it was audible.

"Adapha," he intoned solemnly. "It is the view of the court that you are guilty of adultery."

Adapha stayed silent and looked straight ahead.

"What say you?" Caris' father turned to the crowd.

"Guilty!" came the answering roar that rolled around the high, stone ceiling of the hall.

"You are sentenced to be taken from here forthwith to be exposed for a period of no less than twenty-four hours."

Adapha was led away. The trial had been held back until the forecasters had been fairly certain that a storm was moving south, and now sentence was to be carried out immediately. Twenty-four hours was a death sentence.

The men assigned to take Adapha out put on the heavy suits with the filter masks that covered every inch of flesh and which had thick goggles to protect their eyes, then they took him by the arms and led him away.

Caris knew what happened next. Some of the younger children would find windows from which to watch - she had done so as well on several occasions when she was younger, a frisson of delighted horror running through her young body as she had seen the condemned men stripped naked and tied out to receive the death of the desert wind. The guards would withdraw back into shelter and the man, staked out on the sand would mutter his prayers and then the clouds would blow in and they would hear him scream for a few minutes before the storm roared so loud his voice was lost. Then, in the morning, if the storm had passed there would be a pathetic corpse with strips of skin still attached here and there, the flesh lacerated and with viscera desiccated and exposed bones scoured pure white. By evening the vultures would have picked it clean and within hours of that the sands would have consumed the bones.

But she was eighteen now and beyond such childish things. She didn't creep away as she had used to, instead she stayed to see Samelle, the accused woman, sentenced. There was only one penalty when the crowd had confirmed her guilt.

She wore only a simple gown, like most of the women when they were underground. Sometimes in the great weaving, embroidering and sewing halls they went bare-breasted because of the stifling heat. But she was now stripped naked and Caris was surprised to find how excited she was by the woman's nudity. She was well-formed, her light brown skin gleaming under the lights as she turned to face her punishment. Her breasts were big and they stood proud and high on her chest with their dark red nipples plainly puckering as she was exposed to the cool draughts of the hall. Her hips were good and wide with a dark nest of pubic hair at her delta and her legs were long and graceful. Swallowing nervously in the face of her coming ordeal, she sat down on the rug-strewn platform before the judge and women came forward to bind her. They tied ropes which hung down from the shadows above, to her ankles and looked over to where men stood at either side.

The men hauled on the ropes and Samelle's body was dragged up until it hung free with her legs wrenched wide apart. Caris bit her lip. Because she had only just become eighteen, this was the first full court session she had been allowed to attend. The children had all been shooed out before the female punishment was administered. Now she found herself nervously pressing her own thighs together to protect her secret place as she witnessed Samelle's, so shamelessly displayed for all to see.

Two of the women came to kneel at either side of the victim and hold her arms down as Caris' father stood forwards with a simple strap made from the hide of a Hemla, the great beast of burden that still served the nation out in the desert wastes better than any modern vehicle could. Once sand blasted and cured and soaked in brine down at Syrac, the trading port at the south of the nation's migration route, it became wickedly supple and soft and could tear into the skin to terrible effect. Samelle was to receive fifty lashes to the insides of her thighs and on her sex too; Caris had heard her mother exhorting her father not to show any mercy to an adulteress.

"It is where the crime was committed! Scour it with the strap!"

Now Caris' father raised his arm and slashed the heavy strap down. It was met with an ear piercing shriek from Samelle but with silence from the watching crowd. Caris had winced as the smack had echoed around the hall and seen how hard the women had had to hold onto the victim's arms to stop her from protecting herself. But even so Caris had seen the woman's stomach try to convulse and curl up around her pain. But now her father was dealing out the second lash and again the smack echoed and again the echoes were chased around by the scream. The third lash smacked in, her father letting this one land a little way down one thigh, the fourth one similarly on the other thigh but then the fifth hit square on the labia again and Samelle's shriek broke into sobs as a sixth lash landed.

Caris was aware of strange things going on in her own body. She clenched her thighs together in sympathy with Samelle and yet she felt hot and unsettled in her stomach and her heart was pounding. The body looked so beautiful as it hung there naked and vulnerable, the legs drawn apart and the mound of the sex so lewdly exposed. To her own astonishment she found herself wishing she could go behind the woman and see the heavy tail of the strap bite all the way along her buttock crease. Furtively, one hand began to make its way down towards her stomach. Caris was standing with her friends at the back of the hall, as eighteen-year-olds they were allowed to wear the light gowns of the women and Caris was finding them much more to her liking than the heavy smocks that young girls had to wear. She glanced around her nervously but all her friends, their eyes bright with excitement, were watching the naked flogging of one of their own sex, with complete absorption. Very gently and carefully, Caris began to rub her finger against the nubbin of her clitoris, that spot which she had discovered could deliver the most exquisite pleasure. She had become adept at stimulating it secretly and silently in bed, surrounded by her younger siblings and with her parents doing whatever it was they did in bed. Of course, she and the other young women whispered about 'it' whenever they could and trailed around after this or that well-set up young man. But the noises her mother made worried her. It sounded almost as though her father was hurting her.

By the twenty-fifth lash, Samelle's crotch area was displaying a network of sombre, purple and red stripes. Caris' father was sharing out the lashes between each thigh and the sex itself. Samelle's body was now just jerking spasmodically as the lashes landed and the two women holding her arms down were able to leave her.

Caris felt the way Samelle's body now swung freely as it jerked and her hands feebly pawed the air as her crotch was whipped raw was going to make her faint, she felt sweat trickling down her cleavage and her forehead and she licked her lips wondering what the poor woman's labia would look like after such an awful thrashing and her finger began to work faster.

By the time the beating was into the forties, Caris' father had stopped twice to allow Samelle's face to be bathed to stop her passing out but she had long ago stopped her shrieks and for the last few lashes, just made a strange growling noise which had Caris pressing her hand against her crotch to stop herself from being overwhelmed by her excitement, it sounded eerily like the noise her mother sometimes made with her father when they were in bed.

When at last the torment of the whip was over, they left Samelle to hang and Caris watched with real trepidation; she had heard the girls talk about this next part in horrified and giggling conferences held furtively in odd corners. A brazier was brought onto the platform, with an iron already plunged into it. Caris' father came forward and took the iron up. Caris held her breath, her father was actually going to do what the girls had all whispered about. He was going to brand her husband's name onto Samelle's inner thigh. He turned and blocked Caris' view but everyone could see the smoke come up and hear the hiss as the flesh was burned into. Then there was the smell of roasting flesh - almost like the smell of her mother's cooking. Samelle's body convulsed and one last hoarse scream escaped her before she fainted. Then it was over.

 

The next day the nation moved on northwards towards the capital city of Fyr-Lanth. The Hemlas were laden with fabrics, rugs, prints, pottery, everything they could buy in Syrac that they could sell in Fyr-Lanth, plus the wondrous rugs and carpets that were famous across the whole world.

As they left, the vultures were still feasting on the remains left by the storm. The nation, or as it was known to others, the Berr-len people travelled south to north and back again across the Great Desert, from Syrac on the south coast to Fyr-Lanth on the shores of the vast lake Erewyn in the north. And for the privilege of trading in Fyr-Lanth a tribute was levied by the Elders of the city.

Every second year a tithe - one tenth - of the population aged eighteen in that year was chosen to be sold in the slave markets of the great capital. For generations bloody wars had been fought between the Berr-len and the Fyrnath Empire as it grew and gobbled up all the minor states and kingdoms that stretched the thousands of miles from the Panagyr Isthmus in the east to the Scorat border in the west. But try as they might, the Fyrnath rulers could not quell or absorb the Berr-len, nor could any modern communication route be established across the vastness of the desert, and eventually an agreement was hammered out that was no more harsh than the lives the nomads were used to and which left them free to continue in their traditional way of life.

Since then the underground city of Delyz had been hugely extended, mid-way between Syrac and Fyr-Lanth, and life had improved to the extent that some of the wealthier Berr-len actually owned houses in Fyr-Lanth and would stay there for one migration in every two.

Caris knew all this and her father had told her that she would be presented when they reached the city. She had no objection as she knew it was vital to their lives and if she was chosen her parents would be handsomely paid. And as they moved off the day after Samelle's punishment, Caris sitting on one of the bench seats that ran along the creature's flank at right angles to her father's seat above the head of the huge Hemla, he talked to her.

"What did you think to the trial yesterday?"

"I think Samelle should not have been married to that horrible old man!" Caris had said. "Adapha was much more handsome!"

"True, but we have laws and they must be obeyed. What did you think to her punishment?"

Caris blushed behind the heavy robe everyone wore when they ventured into the desert, even on a day with no wind. Her eyes were shielded by dark glasses, and she was grateful for them on this occasion, she still hadn't come to terms with the storm of sensations that witnessing the beating had provoked. "It was just, Father."

Her father turned to look at her with an odd smile on his face. "If you're picked out for the markets in Fyr-Lanth, Caris, you may well experience similar things in your future life, but remember, after you've been treated it won't matter."

He looked at her for a moment or two more and then turned back to guiding the great beast through the salt pans. After two days' travel north they would come to the oasis where their vehicles were stored and as the desert loosened its grip on the land, they would take those on up to Fyr-Lanth. And for the first time, Caris felt her stomach lurch in that disconcerting way it had the day previously, when she thought about the slave markets.