Upkeep

Pulled Before the Field Call

The House Alpha came into the field barracks in the dark, hours before the field call, the way he came in most mornings, and two hundred men pretended to sleep.

He stopped at the third bunk from the end. He had never stopped there before.

“Up. Both of you.”

Cody came off the plank with his cock already stiff along his belly. The Nipple-Whore Drops burned steadily, unbroken since the branding. Eleven weeks had taught him to stand and not look at what his body was doing. Jax surfaced slower, the plank sucking free of his hip. He had come in his sleep again. The horse cock stood at the angle it had held for weeks. The corded sack hung low and swollen. He made no attempt to cover any of it.

“Wash rack. Now.”

They walked out past two hundred men who did not touch them. New meat in a field barracks gets used. These two did not, because nobody puts his cock in the Master’s investment. The Master’s pup. The Master’s stud. Every night the shed went at it in the dark. The two of them lay in the middle of it with their cocks up and no hand on either of them. The veterans had a word that came through the boards: House pussy. It did not land in Jax. Cody had built a story on the untouched weeks: a decision, made on purpose, by one man. It had held every night until this one.

Clean for Something

The wash rack was a concrete apron under a tin overhang with a hurricane lamp hung off the corner post. Two house boys waited in silk shorts, looking at Jax’s cock in the lamplight with the frank attention men give a horse at a fair. The House Alpha put the bristle brush in Cody’s hand.

“You’re doing him. Water first. Brush. Neck down. You’ll be told when it’s wrong.”

Jax set his legs and laced his hands behind his head. Cody sluiced him cold and started at the collar. The Beast-Builder shot had thickened the traps and packed the long arms. The rings sat heavy through swollen, shiny meat. When the brush hit them Jax’s whole frame jolted and the horse cock went fully up, a clear thread breaking on the concrete. Cody set the brush down on the wet concrete and took the cock in his hand because he was told to. Hotter than the rest of him. Skin drawn back. Smell thick and salt-sweet. Then the sack, both palms, the weight of it, veins standing like wiring. His cock came up unhurried and complete and leaked into the wet air. Nobody remarked on it.

“Turn him. All fours.”

Jax went down. Palms flat. Knees apart. Back level.

The House Alpha set the flat tin of grease on the concrete beside Cody’s knee.

“Two fingers. Load them properly. You’ll be going back in it more than once. Spread him.”

Cody put a hand on each cheek and opened him.

The crease was shaved bare. Pale skin where the sun had never reached. In the middle of it the hole was small and tight and shut, drawn up into a hard pucker that flinched once at the cold air and shrank tighter.

Cody’s chest went sideways. It was the only thing on this whole body that had not been changed. Eleven weeks of muscle and rings and cord and chemical heat, and this one place had stayed as it arrived: closed, unused, private. He stared at it longer than the order required. The flinch. The attempt to vanish into itself. There was a precision to it that the rest of the body no longer had.

“Sir.” His voice came out wrong. “Sir, is he going to be…”

“You don’t ask. The hole’s not the point on him. Grease it anyway. Properly. Round the outside first.”

The heat climbed out of Cody’s collar into his face. He put his fingers on his friend.

Under his hand Jax had gone rigid. He had heard the same sentence. He had been the bull. The shot, the drops, the rings, the cord, the name, all of it stacked on one clean fact: what they wanted off him hung between his legs. Nobody greases a bull. Both balls climbed hard against him fast enough to hurt. The muscle down the backs of his thighs started a fine steady shake that wouldn’t settle. His cock stayed hard through the collapse, and that put the heat in the corners of his eyes.

The ring flinched at the first pass of Cody’s fingers and shrank to a hard knot. His gut answered it with a cold cramp behind the navel. Second pass and it flinched again. Third and it held still. Fourth and it began to soften and open under the grease. The fight going out of it was worse than the fight had been. Cody watched the change happen under his hand and felt a low, unwanted interest rise with it. Not in Jax. In the hole itself. It had defended, and then, degree by degree, stopped defending. He had never looked at one like this. Never had reason to. Now he could not look away from the slow surrender of the ring.

“Four passes. That’s standard on a shut one,” the House Alpha said. “Now in. First knuckle. Don’t push. Turn. He’s never had anything in him, so go slow, because if you tear him the Master takes it out of your hide and not his.”

Cody set the pad of his finger against the centre and turned his wrist. It did not go in. It held, and held, and then gave all at once, the first knuckle sinking through a ring that had never let anything past it in its life. Jax’s back came up off its line. His breath went out in a sound like a man taking a punch to the chest.

The heat came up Cody’s arm. He had not known a man was that hot on the inside, hotter than skin by a long way, gripping from every direction at once in slow panicked rings that ran up his finger and let go and ran again. He could feel his friend’s pulse through the walls. Tight all the way in. Not one inch of it had been taught anything yet. He was the first. No man alive had been where his finger was.

And underneath the horror of it, in the same second, something low and thick turned over in his groin. His cock jumped once against his belly and stayed standing. He was hard because of the heat and the grip and the knowledge that this closed place had just opened for the first time under his hand. The shame of that landed hotter than the grease.

Under him Jax’s body did the wrong thing and did it immediately. It opened. Eleven weeks of the shot had left him so raw that one knuckle lit him from his balls to the back of his teeth. His hips shifted before he knew they were shifting. The sound coming up his throat had to be killed halfway by teeth in his forearm. His cock kicked and spat a long clear string onto the stone, untouched, from his best friend’s hand. The shame that came up his chest was not the shame of being seen. It was the other kind: that it felt good, that it always felt good, that somewhere at the root of him was a thing they had found and switched on and left running, and it answered to any hand at all. Including this one.

I do want it.

“Second finger. He’ll take it. He has to take a good deal more than that tonight.”

Cody loaded his hand again. His fingers were shaking. He put two in. Resistance for one second, real resistance, the body locking. He stopped.

“Keep going.”

He kept going. It gave all at once, a soft heavy yielding around both knuckles. Jax made a noise into his forearm. The House Alpha crouched beside them to watch what was happening on the end of Cody’s hand.

“Rocking back on two, an hour after his first. That’s the shot. Eleven weeks of it and no hands allowed on him, and now his own body does the asking before anyone tells it to. He’ll beg out loud by the time the Master’s finished with him tonight. They all do.”

Cody heard his friend stop breathing. Then the breath came back wrong. Shoulders dropped. Forehead to the wet concrete. Hips pushed back onto Cody’s fingers.

Cody kept his fingers from going hard and clinical the way the House Alpha’s voice wanted them to. He couldn’t make them do it. They still hesitated, still asked. Jax’s whole body answered the asking every few seconds, like a tongue going back to a broken tooth. His breath caught on it over and over. It was the unsureness doing that to him, not the fingers. Whatever Cody hadn’t let go of yet, Jax was reading it off his own hands. It was the last long thought Cody had room for. What came up behind it, in his own voice, was one word.

More.

“Third finger. Then we’ll flush him.”

Cody put three fingers into his friend. It hurt going in. He felt the whole body seize and heard the noise bitten off in the forearm. Then the hips came back onto it anyway, slow, working, taking more than had been put in him. Cody’s hand was dragged half an inch deeper by a man doing it to himself. He held still and let it happen because stopping had not been an order. It went on about a minute. The longest minute of the eleven weeks. Neither of them ever spoke about it again.

While it happened Cody watched the hole. The ring, stretched around three fingers, stubbornly trying, weakly, to close. The wet shine of the grease. The small involuntary flutters that ran through the muscle when the fingertips pressed deeper. He had never known a hole could do that many different things in the space of a minute.

The House Alpha lifted the lamp off the post, crouched, looked into him, and spoke over both their heads.

“Colt’s clean and he’s greased.”

Then, in exactly the same voice:

“Now do me.”

Cody did not understand it for a second and a half. In that second and a half the House Alpha had turned, put one hand flat on the post, set his feet apart, and pushed his shorts down.

He was not a big man. Smooth, fed, soft through the flank. Two silver rings in the nipples. Not a mark on him. Standing in front of a young slave with his shorts down, waiting to be serviced, because that was the arrangement now.

“Same as you did him. You’ll be doing it often enough.”

Cody loaded two fingers out of the same tin. The grease went over grease that had dried on him, and under that, unmistakably, was Jax. Then he put his hand on the House Alpha and the House Alpha let out a breath. Small. Up out of the chest. The sound of a man arriving at something he had been waiting on all morning.

Cody went in and it was nothing like Jax.

There was no ring to speak of. It took two fingers on the first push with no argument anywhere in it, warm and slack and used. The second the knuckles were through, the entire body settled backward half an inch onto his hand and stayed there. Cody felt the difference land in him like a second education. Jax’s hole had fought and then yielded by degrees, every stage visible, every stage a negotiation. This one had already lost its negotiations years ago. It opened the way a well-used tool opens: immediately, without drama, shaped to the work long since. The walls were softer. The heat was the same but the grip was different, looser, more of an invitation than a seizure. He could feel the history in it. How many hands. How many cocks. How many mornings like this one.

Whatever had started with Jax’s closed pucker and the first flinch now locked on harder. He was mapping it. The tight unused ring that had to be taught. The slack trained one that already knew. How each reacted under his fingers. He did not want to fuck either of them. He wanted to know what the next one would feel like. And the one after that.

“Slower. Round, not in and out. Get it up in the walls, all the way round, that’s what it’s for.” The instructional voice, and underneath it something thickened and slowed. “There. Yes. There.”

Cody worked round. The man on the end of his hand rolled his hips into it, unhurried, chin down against the post, silver rings swinging. His cock had filled and stood and was leaking onto the concrete in strings. Nobody had drugged this one. No drops, no shot into the hip. The House Alpha simply liked it. Liked being opened by whoever he was standing in front of, made no more secret of it than a dog makes of eating, and had asked a field slave for it in front of two house boys in the same voice he used to report stock as clean.

And Cody was the hand.

He had held on all morning to a shape of himself. A soldier doing what a soldier does, holding position, being kept for something. It had survived Jax. It did not survive this. The blood went out of his face cold from the hairline down, and his cock did not go down with it.

Eight feet away Jax remained on the concrete, cheek down, watching. Cody could feel it on the side of his face and did not turn his head. Jax watched his friend’s back working, the house slave’s hips rolling into the hand, and his friend’s cock standing hard through the whole of it with a bead swinging off the end. Jax let go a notch. Not relief. Company.

“Deeper.”

He went deeper. It took about ninety seconds. The House Alpha made a low satisfied sound near the end of it that Cody heard in the roots of his teeth, then pulled his shorts up and turned round with his face perfectly flat, as though none of it had happened on his body at all.

He tipped his chin at the house boys. “Take the colt up. He’s expected.”

One of them got a hand in Jax’s collar, and Jax came up off the concrete and went, wet and greased and still hard, without looking back at his friend.

“Master’s put you on the house rota. From tomorrow that’s yours. Every house slave in this place, and the seven head slaves, and it isn’t a morning job. They go greased and they stay greased, because a hole let go dry is a hole that isn’t ready, and none of us knows the hour we’ll be wanted. Round at three before the day starts. Round again at noon. And you come when you’re called between. The overseer takes you off the gang for it and puts you back on after, and you make the hours up at the far end of the day.”

Cody’s right hand was slick to the second knuckle with two men on it. Two different holes. One that had never been opened before this morning and one that had forgotten how to stay closed. The grease was already going tacky in the cold air. It would stay that way for the walk up the track and through everything the day put on top of it, because nobody told him he could wash and he had not been given permission to ask.

He followed Alpha up toward the main house, wet, empty, scoured, carrying his hand held out from his side the whole way. The heat of both holes had not left his fingers. He could feel the difference between them, clean and separate.

He had washed Jax. Nobody had washed his hands.

Loaded

By eight the trunk of the Master’s SUV smelled of hot vinyl and gun oil and the cold-metal ghost of the winch cable coiled in the wheel well.

The blacksmith lay on his side with his knees drawn up because there was no other way for two hundred and seventy pounds to fit, and the plug they had sealed him with at breakfast sat in him like a fist made of stone.

He had been plugged before. Forty years old, twelve of them here, he had been plugged, weighted, whipped, hung, and once, in the second year, nailed by the loincloth to a post for half a day over a mistake he could no longer remember the shape of.

None of that was this. The breeding studs had run him in pairs last week, four days of it, two at a time in rotation, nine and ten inches apiece with no let-up between them, and there was not a man on the ranch who needed the routine explained to him, because the routine only ever gets done to one kind of slave. What they left behind was not a hole anymore in any sense the word usually carries. It was a slack hot ruined ring that no longer decided anything for itself. It stayed however it was put. It had stopped hurting on the second day and stopped closing on the third.

The plug was not there to stretch him. Nothing was going to stretch him again. It was there so the blood and the slick stayed inside him instead of running out onto the Master’s upholstery, and the weight of it shifted greasily in him every time the car took a bend.

He knew where the car was going. They had told him.

It was the Master’s way and it had never once varied in twelve years. An hour ago on the veranda boards, on his knees with his hands flat on his thighs and his eyes down and the coffee steaming above him, in the level voice a man uses for feed orders: “We’re going to market today to find your successor. After breakfast you get ready. You ride in the back.” No dressing on it, and no piece left lying about for him to work out on his own. He had said “Yes, Sir.” Two words. That was the entire conversation.

Then Viktor had asked to see the damage, and he had gone down on all fours on the boards and put his chest low so the young master could get a proper look at what the studs had left him, and while a field bull licked him soft enough to take the plug he had listened to the word replacement pass back and forth over his back. Nobody lowered his voice for it.

Twelve years ago he had walked onto this ranch with his hands unmarked and soft from his own shop. He had been forty-five thousand drahm. He was twenty-eight thousand now, and he knew that number the way he knew the weight of his hammer, because a head slave who does not know what he costs is a head slave who is already finished.

Today he was going to the market to help pick out the man who would take his forge. The balls went with the forge. It happened in that order here and they had never lied to him about that part either, and he had been carrying it around low in his gut since the day the studs finished with him.

And he was going to do it well. Every good answer he gave today would move him closer to the knife.

The SUV started. Gravel turned under the tires. Somewhere behind them, out of sight, Viktor’s pickup coughed and caught, with a boy asleep in the bed.

The Block

Halloway market ran three days a week off the old rail yard, and it opened at nine, and by twenty past the heat was coming up off the packed dirt in visible sheets.

The blacksmith walked two paces behind the Master’s left shoulder on a short lead. Leather loincloth, no shoes, eyes down at the ground where they belonged.

He was aware, distantly, that men looked. Men always looked. The loincloth hung off a cord at his hips so that the cock swung out in front of it with every step and the sack swung behind, hanging to mid-thigh, the two of them stretched low and heavy in a bag of thin dark skin by twelve years of weights, and above it all, two hundred and seventy pounds of scarred old muscle with an anvil burned fist-sized into the left pec. He drew eyes at a stock market like any good bull.

With every fourth or fifth step the plug rocked in him and a slick warm trickle got past it and started down the inside of his thigh. It went cold at the knee. He let it run and kept his hands where they belonged.

None of them were looking to buy. He knew the difference in a glance by now, and today he was getting the other kind exclusively, the kind men give a thing already spoken for.

A man at the fry stand with grease on his fingers watched him come the whole length of the aisle and did not look at the brand or the collar. He looked at the inside of the right thigh, where the wet was. He was still looking when the blacksmith went past him, and the blacksmith knew it without lifting his eyes, the way you know where a hot bar is lying in a dark shop. He spent the next thirty feet trying to walk in a way that did not advertise his own thigh. There was no such way.

The rows went on. Pens on the left for the field lots, chained in twenties, standing in their own churned mud. The block itself in the center under the old loading canopy. To the right, the specialty rows: breeding stock in one line with their loincloths off, domestics in another, and further down, past the water butts, the smell of hot iron and the low steady sound of the disposal line working.

He could not see much of it and did not need to. Auctioneers on top, flat singsong from both ends of the canopy. Three hundred buyers under that, talking money in the loud good humour of men spending it on a Tuesday. Handlers calling legs, hands, chin down the rows. And below all of it, so constant you only noticed it stopping, eight hundred slaves breathing in the heat.

Then, off the north end, cutting through the diesel and the hot dirt and the cooked sugar of the fry stand, something iron and meat that was none of them, and his sack drew up tight before his mind had put a name to it.

His eyes stayed on the ground, where the ground was feet: bare feet in mud, forty to a pen, a row of ankles chained at eighteen inches so the line learned one stride. The polished boots of buyers moving through all of it.

Viktor came up the aisle from the parking side with his boy on a rope, and he came up loud.

He talked to the men he passed. He knew four of them and greeted six, and did not appear to notice the two who had to work out who he was.

Roman walked the specialty rows with his hands in his pockets and did not greet anybody.

He did not have to. From behind and below, the blacksmith counted it four separate times in ninety feet: a man would see Roman coming, and his shoulders would settle, and he would step out of the aisle before Roman had come close enough to make him. One of them said “Wolfe” as they passed and got a nod that cost nothing.

Twenty feet back, Viktor kept explaining something to a man who had already turned halfway toward the block.

The blacksmith had worked three hundred market days and had stood behind these two at perhaps forty of them, and he knew the shape of the morning before it happened the way a weld tells you it is going to fail, read off the colour of it. The young master would sell badly today. He would sell badly and he would sell badly in front of the Master, and the Master would help.

He kept his eyes on the dirt, carried the knowledge, and held his tongue, because nobody had asked him yet.

Viktor took the boy down the aisle to the stalls under the canopy and found his buyer at the third one along.

The boy went into Inspection every time they stopped, and he went into it fast, and he got it wrong every time. Legs too far apart, so that he had to shuffle them back under himself. Hands laced too high on his skull. Chin lifted past where it should have stopped and held there like a boy holding his breath. It was a copy of a pose, made by somebody who had only ever seen the pose from forty feet away, and when a handler two stalls over called legs at somebody else entirely, his knees moved before he could stop them.

Somebody had let him sleep in the truck bed and put food and water in him and hosed him off, and it had done what Viktor needed it to do. The hollow-eyed thing that had swayed on the veranda at dawn was not gone. It had gone under. A nineteen-year-old body does that, which is why young stock sells: feed it and hose it and it comes back up looking like itself by nine in the morning no matter what was done to it at midnight. What stood in the dirt now had a face that was, objectively, good. Light hair damp at the temples. Freckles across the nose. A tan line where a shirt he did not own anymore had ended. Thighs farm-thick from hauling. And below all of it, a cock that filled a hand and was not going to do anything else today.

The wrists were raw where the ropes had held him to the railing all night, and the hole remained wrecked, and from four feet away in that light neither of those things showed at all.

Viktor was in a fine mood. He walked his boy up and down in front of the buyer’s stall, proud of his work, and talked the whole time, loud, cheerful, one hand always somewhere on the merchandise. He did not seem aware of the hand. It closed on the boy’s ass without warning, mid-sentence, a whole handful, squeezed and let go, and never broke the sentence. Then it came up flat against the belly to slap it twice, brisk and testing, and finished at the jaw, tipping the head up to make a point, thumb hooked lazily at the corner of the neck.

The boy held the stance. The rest of him did not. There was a fine continuous tremor running through both thighs that the work of standing still did not explain, and the sweat was coming off him faster than the morning accounted for, and his eyes climbed to every man who slowed down to look and dropped to the dirt and climbed again. Between his legs the cock Viktor kept advertising hung dead and soft through all of it, and no amount of talking was going to raise it.

“Eighteen and he’s yours. Look at him. Nineteen years old, farm-raised, no soft habits, hauls all day and doesn’t whine about it.” Viktor got a hand in the boy’s hair and turned his head to show the jaw. “Broken in already, that’s the thing, you’re not buying a project. Cock’s a good size, hole works. House or the track either one. Perfect Fun Calf.”

The buyer was a heavy man in a straw hat who had bought a lot of boys, and he did not hurry and he did not ask.

He went to the cock first, because that was the claim a man could check standing still. Took it in his fist with no change of expression and hefted it. Skinned it back the whole way and looked at what was under there. Let it drop. It fell against the thigh and lay soft, and the boy shut his eyes for one second and opened them again, because that was the one part of the inspection nobody had given him a way to pass.

Then the balls. He cupped them, let the weight settle into his palm, and started rolling them against each other, slow, one and then the other, taking each between finger and thumb and pressing in along its whole length for the firmness. The boy’s breath stopped for a beat and restarted wrong. His knees wanted to close and he made them not close. The buyer went on past the point of learning anything, past it by a good while, and the boy stood in the dirt with a stranger’s hand working his sack and kept his hands laced on his skull.

The hand came up the belly, pressed in to feel the wall of it, went on up the chest, and got to the jaw last and almost bored: two fingers hooking the cheek back off the teeth, turning the head to the light and holding it there while he read the gum line. The boy’s eyes widened and fixed on a point above the man’s shoulder. Then the mouth was let go and the head stayed where it had been put, which was the only thing he got right all morning.

The blacksmith took all of it in from under his brows and thought about nothing at all, with great effort.

“Bend.”

He bent. A boot came between his ankles and kicked them wider. Straw Hat took a handful of each cheek, spread him open in the middle of the aisle, and pushed his thumb in dry to the second knuckle.

He left it there. Turned it. The ring gave no fight, the rim swollen from the night on the railing, and the boy’s back locked, and a short spurt of piss got out of him before he could shut it off, four or five drops darkening the dirt between his own feet.

Under the thumb the muscle tried to close and failed, and something old and hungry moved in the blacksmith that had nothing to do with the years he had left. Not the boy. The not-yet. And under that, worse: if he’d come to this ranch a boy instead of a grown man with a shop and his own name over the door, he’d have had Roman twice as long. He’d have traded all of it, the shop, the name, every year of being his own man, for that.

“Used.”

“Sure, used, I said broken in.”

“You said broken in. Used is a different word.” He took his thumb out, wiped it on the boy’s flank. “Virgin nineteen with that face, I’m at thirty. This one’s fifteen.”

The colour came up Viktor’s neck. “That’s insulting, man.”

“That’s Tuesday.”

The blacksmith already knew how it would end: eighteen, then sixteen, because Viktor needed the cash today and not Thursday, and everyone but Viktor knew it.

Roman had stopped walking.

The blacksmith felt it before he saw it, the way you feel a door open behind you.

What a Pup Is Worth

Roman came over with his coffee, and on the way past hooked two fingers under the blacksmith’s collar and turned him a quarter step, incidental as moving a chair out of his path, without once looking at him. The blacksmith held the new angle exactly.

“You’re underselling him, Vic.”

“I’m working.”

“You’re at sixteen and you’re going to take fifteen and a half.” Roman said it without heat, flat as a gauge reading. “He’s worth twenty-two. Young, sound, already broken, not yet spoiled. I’ll take him at twenty-two. Put him with the bed pack or run him through training and resell in the spring.” He drank his coffee. “You need the cash today, brother. Rent’s due Friday. Take mine.”

Four feet of dirt and a pair of boots was all the blacksmith had of him. The boots had been planted. Now one heel came up and set down again, twice, small, the way a man shifts when the thing holding him up has gone out from under it.

“My pup. My sale.” His voice had gone up half a step and he heard it go up, and that made it worse. “I decide what he’s worth. You do this every single time, you get right in the middle of my sales like I can’t count without you holding my hand. This is my stock, my commission, my whole month.”

“I’m helping you.”

“You’re doing something. That’s not the same as helping.”

Roman didn’t answer that. He set the coffee cup down on the rail post instead, and the not-answering was worse than anything he could have said. The blacksmith, standing four feet behind him with his eyes on the dirt, could tell from the length of the silence what was about to happen, and felt his stomach go cold and heavy around the plug.

“Forge Ox.”

“Sir.”

“Tell him honestly. What’s a pup like that worth on this floor this morning?”

There was a moment when he could have shaded it.

He could have said hard to say, Sir. He could have said twenty, twenty-two, Sir and stood there in his loincloth and given the young master a soft place to land and no one would ever have been able to prove a thing. He knew the number and he knew the lie and he knew, with the flat clarity of a man who has spent twelve years reading the weather in one man’s face, that the Master had not asked him for a number at all.

The Master had picked up a tool.

He gave the number.

“Master’s high, Sir.” His voice came out of him as it always did now, down in the chest, gravel, no music left in it, eyes on the ground four feet in front of the young master’s boots. “Nineteen years, not a virgin, already used. Eighteen to twenty is the ceiling on this floor today. Virgin, he’d be twenty-eight to thirty-two, Sir. And the price falls fast on a used pup once he’s been walked past the same buyers twice. If he doesn’t sell today it’s fifteen tomorrow, and by Friday they’ll price him for parts.”

Two buyers at the next stall had stopped talking to listen.

Viktor’s boots came around square to face his friend. When he spoke his voice had lost all of the boy in it and had not found anything to replace it with.

“Even your fucking dog gets to teach me my business now.”

“He answered a question.”

“You asked him. In front of the whole floor. You did that on purpose.”

“I did.”

For a second Viktor had nothing. Then it came all at once. “You always do this. Every time. You wait till there’s people around, and then you fix it so I’m the one who didn’t know.” His hand was moving, jabbing air. “A year of this. A whole year, and you still can’t just say it to me first. And you don’t even enjoy it. That’s the part I can’t get past. You don’t even fucking enjoy it.” He was already turning. “You know what? Forget it. Forget the whole thing. I’m not one of your fucking pups.”

He shouldered past Roman on his way out, hard enough this time that Roman had to plant a foot, and it didn’t move his face at all.

Then he jerked the rope and went off into the crowd with the boy stumbling after him.

The boy got nine steps before he went down in the churned dirt, rope caught in Viktor’s fist, Viktor walking on, so that he was dragged half a yard on his knees before Viktor felt it and spun around, face murderous. The blacksmith had nowhere else to put his eyes.

The boy got his forehead down into the dirt and kissed the toe of Viktor’s boot.

“Thank you, Master, for breaking me.” It came out loud, cracked in the middle, and he pushed it out anyway, to the whole aisle, however he imagined it was supposed to sound. “Thank you for teaching me my place. Thank you for selling me to someone who’ll keep on with your work.”

The market didn’t pause. Two rows over a man laughed at something else entirely.

Viktor stood there holding a rope. Nobody had trained the boy to do that. Three days on the ranch, not ten minutes of instruction, and he had assembled the whole ritual off scraps: how the house slaves moved, how the field crews went down, the words said over him while he was tied to the railing. He had worked out the shape he was supposed to be on his own.

Something crossed Viktor’s face too fast for him to stop it. He hauled the boy up by the collar, walked him straight back to the man in the straw hat. “Sixteen. Cash. Now.”

The buyer counted it out and the rope changed hands. The boy was led away at a fast walk and looked back once, at the young master who had bought him off his own family a week ago, shoved his face into a mattress, tied him to a railing all night, and his eyes were wet, wet because Viktor was leaving.

Viktor put the notes in his back pocket and didn’t watch him go.

The Line

Roman went down past the water butts toward the sound of the disposal line, and the blacksmith followed on the lead, and neither of them said anything about Viktor.

At the butts Roman stopped and drank. The lead went slack, and the blacksmith closed the two paces himself and stood in at the Master’s shoulder, because that is what a stopped Master means.

Roman reached back without turning round, found the sack hanging under the loincloth and hefted the weight of it in his palm, absently, like a man working a coin in his pocket while he thinks. He kept it there through most of the water. Two buyers went past and one of them looked and one of them did not.

The blacksmith did the arithmetic without meaning to: how many more mornings there would be like this one, Roman’s hand finding him without looking, before there was nothing left in it to find. Not many. Maybe none after today. When Roman was done he let go and shook the wet off his fingers and offered no word, and the blacksmith’s cock had begun to fill and he made it stop, and it did not entirely stop.

The disposal line ran under a long open shed at the north end, and the conveyor was a chain-and-roller affair salvaged out of a packing plant, and it did not stop.

Rebellion cases came off the county wagons at one end, went up in the pulleys with their legs racked open at the ankles, moved down the shed at the pace of a slow walk, and came off the other end into a wash trough. Two cutters worked in the middle in rubber aprons. There was a table with instruments in a tray of pink water and a bucket under it, and a man with a clipboard reading numbers off collar tags.

The noise was not screaming, mostly. They were gagged for it.

The cutters worked fast: a grip, a blade in above it, two strokes, the weight into the bucket with a soft knock. Then the iron came down before the blood had found its rhythm. Even gagged, even over the chain and three hundred buyers talking money, that sound got out: not a scream, something shorter and uglier, punched through the nose and the teeth and gone almost as soon as it started, because whatever was left of him by then couldn’t manage more.

Not every slave on the chain took it lying down. Two places up, a big one had worked a hand loose and was fighting the pulley outright, and it took two handlers on his legs and a third pinning his shoulders before anyone could get near him with the grip. That never stopped. Not the cut, over in a breath, but the fighting before it: the whole line naked and strapped into the same wide-open rack, balls swinging bare like fruit left hanging for whoever came down the row next with the knife, sweat running off them in sheets until the concrete looked rained on.

Plenty of the men at the rail had come for the payoff: to watch a man who’d fought his way onto the wagon get walked, right there in front of them, all the way out of the fight. Some brought their own fresh slaves to see it, a rope in one hand and a new neck in the other, and held them there through the full four minutes so the lesson only had to be taught once.

Roman walked slowly, hands in his pockets, and read faces.

The blacksmith walked behind him and looked at the floor of the shed, wet concrete with a channel cut down the middle of it, and did not look up. His sack had drawn up in the aisle when the smell first reached him and had not come down since.

His body had known it before his mind put words to it: this was where they’d do it. Not today. But soon, and here: this shed, this concrete.

Roman stopped.

The buck was maybe thirty, with perhaps four minutes left before the cutters reached him. What the tray was for hung between his racked-open thighs, heavy, swinging with every drive of his hips, bare to the whole shed. Above it, legs thick and strong through the thigh straining against the ankle straps that held them wide, a chest and shoulders carrying the flat functional muscle of somebody who had worked, black hair matted to his forehead with sweat, a bad cut over the eyebrow from being subdued.

He was thrashing. Most of them thrashed. What made Roman stop was that this one was thrashing at the cutters and not away from them, hips driving, trying with everything in him to swing his body up the line and get his heels into somebody, gagged, with no possible outcome.

“That one,” Roman said to the man with the clipboard. “Hold the chain.”

The overseer looked at Roman’s watch and his boots, reached over and threw a lever. One section of pulley disengaged, and the buck in it swung and hung still while the rest of the line kept walking past him. The chain itself never paused. Nothing on this floor was worth that.

The next case came up level with him and went on by, four feet away, and got to the cutters, and the snip happened, and the iron came down, and the sound got out of him and went on and on.

Roman took hold of the sack in the pulleys and weighed it in his palm.

The buck locked rigid. Every muscle in the torso went hard at once. The eyes came around and found Roman for the first time and were entirely animal.

“Shame to lose these,” Roman said, the same idle tone he’d have used pricing produce. “Handsome bull.”

He rolled the testicles under his thumb, unhurried, testing them for firmness, and the buck made a sound through the gag, and Roman waited out the sound and spoke again without altering anything.

“I want you to understand something before we go further, because it’ll save us both time. I’m not the man who’s going to give you your balls back. Nobody does, not once they’re on the list. That’s not what’s happening here.” He let it sit. “I’m the man who cuts them off. The only thing I decide is when. Everyone who touches you between now and that day works for me.” He waited. “You’ll want to have understood that before I ask you anything.”

The eyes had stopped being animal. They had gone somewhere much worse, which was arithmetic.

The buck nodded. Once.

“Good.”

Roman looked over his shoulder.

“Forge Ox. Come here and show him your hole.”

There was no part of the blacksmith that hesitated.

That was the thing he would not have been able to explain to the man he had been twelve years ago, the one with the shop and his name over the door. There was no war in him. There was a command and then there was his body executing it, and the gap between the two had been closed and welded shut so long ago that he could not find the seam anymore.

He went down onto the wet concrete on all fours in front of the pulleys, put his chest low, and got his knees apart.

Roman crouched, took the flared base of the plug in his fingers, and pulled it out in one movement.

The sound it made was loud in the shed. The blacksmith’s breath went out of him in a grunt he did not manage to stop, more from the sudden cold than the pull, the awful open-air rush of it, and the plug came away wet and streaked in Roman’s hand.

Nothing closed.

That was what there was to see, and Roman had brought him here so that it could be seen: the ring stayed exactly where the plug had left it, slack and wet and gaping the width of the base, the rim dragged dark and shining, pink and raw in the middle of an enormous scarred old body, not so much as twitching toward closing, just hanging open and leaking a slow clear thread down onto the concrete under his belly.

“Twelve years,” Roman said, to the buck in the pulleys. “Head slave. Trusted. He brands my stock and forges my collars and he wears a whip on his own belt, and there is not one man on my ranch who outranks him.”

Under him, untouched, the blacksmith’s cock began to thicken and lift on its own, not from anything done to him, just from hearing his worth read out loud over the ruin of himself.

“Look at that. Twelve years and it still gets hopeful. That’s the top of the ladder, bull. That’s what the top looks like from underneath.”

The buck in the pulleys was making a thin sound now. Under him, hauled up and racked open, his hole was clenching and unclenching in fast little pulses, small and pink and tight and entirely intact, and everybody looking at him could see it doing it.

Roman held the plug up level with the racked face for a moment, fresh-wet from where it had just come out of the old man, close enough that the buck could smell what was on it before he ever felt it, sweat and slick and the blacksmith underneath both. He had never had anything that size that close to his eyes. Then he walked around behind the racked body.

“Here’s the whole of it. I’m going to hold this behind you. If you accept that I own you, you put yourself on it. Not me. You. That’s the entire test.” He set the wet base of it against the buck and let him feel it there. “Refuse, and I let the chain go and you’re at the table in three minutes and it costs me nothing. Nod if you want me to keep holding it.”

The buck’s eyes travelled from the blacksmith’s gaping hole to the plug held wet against his body to Roman’s face above it, which had not changed at all, and the moment arrived with nowhere else for them to go.

The buck nodded.

He kept nodding as he started to push back. It was a horrible thing to watch.

The straps had the buck’s legs hauled wide but his hips could move maybe six inches, and he used all six, driving himself backward onto the thing with a desperate scrabbling urgency that nobody was making him produce. The plug was wide as a fist at the base and greased with nothing but what its last holder had left on it. The head of it went in and stopped hard against a ring that had never taken anything in its life, and he kept shoving anyway, working his hips in short brutal jabs to force it, straining at the ankle straps to get another inch of travel that was not there.

The blood came up into his face until it was purple. Tears and snot ran sideways across his temples into his hair, and behind the gag a shriek built with nowhere to go, swallowed down into a strangled hum while the pain flooded through him, from the stretch to the roots of his teeth.

The stretch came all at once, with a wet catch and a tear he felt go, and the widest part of it dropped into him and his hole snapped shut behind the flare and locked around the neck of it. He howled into the gag. He kept pushing anyway.

And his cock, shrivelled up tight against him since the wagon, filled and rose in about four seconds and stood out dark and hard and started leaking down over his belly.

Roman’s free hand went back to the sack and took hold and pulled down, slow and steady, watching the buck’s face the entire time.

“There,” he said. “That wasn’t so frightening after all, was it.”

Then he slapped the hanging sack, not hard, just a bright wet crack that carried under the shed.

“So. I’ll buy you. Your balls stay on.”

He said it with his hand closed around them, rolling the two of them slowly against each other in their bag while the buck’s cock stood up hard between his spread thighs and dripped.

“But it would be wrong for you to walk out of here without a punishment, and you’re a rebellion case, and a rebellion case gets punished. That’s not something I can change and it’s not something I’d want to. So your sentence isn’t cancelled.”

He came back around to the front where the buck could see him, and took the sack again on the way, not to weigh it this time, but to close his fist around it, slowly, so the buck could feel every stage of it arriving. He kept closing it, watching the face, and didn’t ease off when his whole racked body came up off the straps and hung there shaking.

“It’s deferred.” He said it into the noise the buck was making. “Ten years. Maybe more, maybe less, I’ll decide when I decide.”

He let out a little of the pressure. Not all of it. Just enough that the buck could hear him.

“And every day of those ten years you’ll be paying that deferral down. With work, with pain, with obedience, until there’s nothing left in you that argues.” His thumb moved once, almost fondly, over what he was holding. “This is what I’m lending you. Understand that. These are mine and they’re staying on your body because I’ve decided you can carry them for a while, and I can call them in any morning I wake up wanting to.”

He took the buck’s jaw in his hand and turned the face up.

“And I promise you this, because I’ve watched it happen more than once. When the day comes, you’ll ask for it yourself. You’ll come to me and you’ll ask, and you’ll thank me after. Nod that you understand me.”

The buck nodded. He was weeping openly by then, chest heaving against the racked-open frame, cock hard despite it, and he nodded three times more than he needed to.

“Overseer.” Roman was already reaching for his wallet. “This one’s mine. Off the chain. Cut the rest.”

A handler came with the key while the money changed hands, worked the ankle straps loose one at a time, and the racked body came down out of the pulleys in stages, shaking, still hard. Behind him the chain kept walking. A man went past to the cutters, and the sack came away, and the bucket knocked, and only then did the shaking find a reason: not the plug, not the fist, something looser and later, the kind that comes after. His chest let go, and for one confused second it felt like being free. Not because he was. Because the only thing worse had just walked past him with somebody else’s balls in a bucket.

The blacksmith got up off the concrete when he was told to and stood with his legs apart. This time there was no plug. The ring stayed open as it had under the pulleys. It would stay open for the ride home, and for however long past that Roman decided a body like his didn’t need covering anymore. Empty was becoming the only word that still fit everywhere on him.

The buck came out of the shed a pace behind him on a handler’s rope, and they crossed the lot together, two big frames in the same heat with the sweat running off both of them, headed for one SUV.

Out in the lot, three rows over, Viktor was counting notes into a seller’s hand at the tailgate of his pickup. There was a slave beside him on a fresh rope. The blacksmith priced him from where he stood, without meaning to, the way he priced everything now. Twenty-two. Twenty-four to a man in a hurry.

Viktor’s jaw hadn’t unset since the market floor. He snapped the notes off the roll harder than counting required and didn’t look up once, not at the seller, not at the slave on the rope, not across the lot to where Roman was standing.

The counting stopped before the seller’s hand came away. The seller left it out and waited. Then there was paper on the tailgate. Viktor bent over it, and the pen was ready before he asked for one.

He got in the truck without looking around and drove off the lot fast enough to throw dust.

Roman watched all of it from three rows away and said nothing. Then he turned to the pens where the smith lot was standing.

Loaded Twice

Roman came off the argument with Viktor still carrying it, the flat banked anger of a man who hadn’t yet been allowed to spend it, and the blacksmith read it in his walk before they’d covered half the lot.

“Load him, boy.”

Not an order to a handler. The rope on the buck was Roman’s business. The packing was the blacksmith’s, and packing was a job for hands that already knew the trunk’s dimensions from the inside.

“Yes, Sir.”

Twelve years of names meant to cut, and it had never once been that one. Forge Ox. Bull. Old Ox. Mouth. Gape. He’d have taken any of them twice over rather than this, because a name built to cut you still has to look at you first. Boy was the word for anyone. The one you used on a body whose name you hadn’t bothered to learn, and Roman said it without noticing he’d said it, which was worse than if he had. The blacksmith let nothing show, because that too was a job for hands that already knew how.

He folded the buck down into the space himself, knees drawn toward his chest, and climbed in after him the only way two men that size fit into a space built for one: head to groin, his face inches from the buck’s hips and the buck’s face inches from his, each of them breathing in what the other had spent the day becoming. Two hundred and seventy pounds and something close to it besides, and where the blacksmith’s face ended up was thick with a smell he knew without wanting to: fear-sweat gone stale in the same clothes too long, mud from however many days the buck had stood in the county wagon. His own smell, from some year he no longer troubled to remember. Two dogs sniffing before either had worked out which one gave ground.

Roman leaned into the open tailgate to look at what he’d built.

“Boy.”

The blacksmith held still, his mouth already inches from where he’d been ordered to put it.

“Taste him. Mouth on his cock. I want to know what I bought before I drive it home, and you’re still the only judgment on this ranch I trust for anything.” Level. The same voice he’d used on the market floor that morning. “Call it a test of the replacement. See how it grades against what you used to be.”

There was no part of the blacksmith that hesitated. There never was.

He put his mouth on the buck’s cock where it lay soft and exhausted against his thigh and did the job the way he did every job, thoroughly, without performance, while Roman watched from the tailgate with his arms crossed and nothing on his face but the anger sitting behind it, unspent, waiting on something else to land on. The buck made a sound through his teeth that wasn’t refusal, because refusal wasn’t a thing his body remembered how to produce anymore, and under the blacksmith’s tongue he began, despite everything, to fill.

Roman reached past both of them and found the plug seated in the buck, unmoved, and pushed it once, testing.

“Seems the new boy’s excited about being plugged.” He said it as he said everything else, unbothered, filing it away. “Good enough. Have your fun. Smell each other. It’s the last new thing either of you gets today.”

The tailgate came down.

In the dark the buck worked at it slowly. The plug grinding low in him had come out of the old man folded against him, worn out of true by one man and fitting him now. The mouth that had gone over him belonged to the highest-ranked slave on the ranch. Ten years had sounded long out in the shed.

The blacksmith’s ache was older and had no bottom. It had started the day the studs finished and it had not eased once. Nothing in him held anything now, not the hole, not the rest of him. Where the plug had sat since breakfast there was open air and a slow cooling wet running down toward his ribs, and against his groin the breath of a man ten years younger who had just been told he could keep his balls.

The engine started, and Roman took the gravel out faster than he ever drove cargo he meant to keep whole. Every pothole came up through the floor at once, knee into ribs, skull into wheel well. Nobody had told either of them what the morning with Viktor cost him. Nobody needed to. It came up through the floor with everything else.