The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

I arrived at the grave still prepared to kill Leila, but even I wasn’t prepared to find the tomb gate opened, the coffin lid thrown back, and Leila leaning over Jak’s body, her lips only inches from his mouth. What sickness was this? I put my hand on the hilt of my sword.

“Step away from him,” I ordered her, “or I’ll kill you where you stand.”

Leila stared at me calmly and spoke only two words.

“He’s breathing.”

Shock kept my sword in its scabbard, as I ran to the coffin to look. Jak’s lips were slightly blue, and his face was pale, but I could see his diaphragm moving. I was paralyzed. Then he snored, and a bubble of near-hysterical laughter broke out of me.

“Help me get him up,” Leila snapped, as if I were still her apprentice. “We have to get him on his feet and moving to clear his lungs and flush the antidote through him.” I obeyed, too numbed by the strangeness of this reversal to question her orders. I hefted the bulk of Jak’s limp weight, while Leila hauled his legs over the edge of the coffin and Jess rolled his torso over the edge to follow, gasping as she strained to support his weight, getting no help from the legs yet. “Hold him!” Leila barked, and I did as I was told. Leila stood before Jak, reached out to raise his chin with her left hand, and delivered two savage slaps to it with her right. Jak gasped and twitched, flailed his arms weakly. She backed away from him, and he staggered after her.

“What kind of weakling are you?” Leila’s voice sneered into his face. He kicked clumsily at her. “You can’t even kick? I’m wide open, slave.”

Jak growled and threw out a loose-jointed, aimless front kick, no balance behind it.

Jess, walk him toward me Leila whispered, and then shouted at Jak, “You’re pathetic! Is that all you’ve got? No wonder you lost the Duel—oops, that was truly fierce—“ as Jack lashed out, a little harder, with the other foot “—only a few of our six-year-olds could kick that well” and she grinned as Jak took a great breath this time, expelled it explosively as he threw the third kick, which was almost worth dodging.

“You’re scaling the heights of mediocrity now—“ Leila said, as she danced in and slapped him again, a short, quick motion like a careful boxer’s tight left hook. This time Jak snarled and tried to throw me off, holding him from behind. A clumsy but determined elbow hit me on the side of the neck.

“Let him go,” Leila called. I stepped back and Jak’s legs buckled, he stumbled, but he found his feet again and managed a fairly quick staggering step toward Leila. She danced back, well out of range, and held out both palms in placation.

“All right, Sergeant,” she said, with no edge this time. “I think you’re almost awake, but keep moving. You’ve got to move that antidote through your system as thoroughly as possible.”

Jak shook his head, less to clear the cobwebs than to shake these strange events into some pattern that made sense.

“We faked your death,” Leila said. “You’re all right now. I have to get out of here, quickly, and you two very shortly after, in the opposite direction. Run to Gull Cove. You’ll find a boat there.” She turned to me. “There are things in the coffin you need to see. Read the note at your leisure, but don’t miss the jewels, and leave here quickly. Goodbye, Daughter. Never come back.”

Leila turned her back on us and walked purposefully back toward the town.

I watched her go for a few seconds, before I turned back to Jak, trying to absorb the fact that the man whose death I had witnessed, in sorrow and shame and rage, was still alive. I called his name, holding out my arms as I stepped toward him, but he just stood still, with his arms at his sides.

“We have to run,” he said.

This didn’t feel like a reunion of lovers. “Yes,” I said, “but Leila mentioned some things in the . . . box.” I led the way back to the coffin, reached in with a surprising, queasy reluctance, and found a small leather bag. I opened it carefully and found a collection of precious stones—mostly rubies, but also a number of small diamonds, all of the stones cut but not mounted, except one, an emerald as big as my thumb, mounted as a pendant on a fine, gold neck chain. I couldn’t help a wry smile, which I wiped off as soon as it appeared. I had last seen that pendant when Leila used it to entrance a male visitor in the precious-gems trade. He had left the house very happy to have given Leila a substantial discount on his sampler of stones. In fact, he had seemed very happy about life in general—Leila’s little consolation prize for his having given up his gems at a ridiculously low price. I felt sure that the pendant’s inclusion was Leila’s parting piece of advice on how I should manage my relationship with Jak. Leila might have recognized him as “the exception to the rule,” but she obviously retained her conviction that the lady should rule the exception. I reached back into the coffin; there was a slight distortion in the corner of the little corpse-pillow where Jak’s head had rested. I picked the pillow up; it was much too heavy. I reached inside the linen case and pulled out a canvas tarpaulin, folded around some other parcels: a light pack with straps, a small hunter’s knife, a little envelope of fish hooks with a coil of fine silk fishing line wrapped around it, a flint and steel, and a series of small, dark glass potion bottles. I could guess what they were; I wondered how long Leila had been planning all this. The last time I reached in I found only an empty bottle that must have contained the antidote, and a scrap of expensive rag paper that was torn in one corner. I almost left it there, but could just make out some writing on it. In case anyone searched the tomb later, it would be a bad idea to leave it behind. I stuffed it into a pocket. “We’d better find that boat,” I said. “And first, we’d better bury that coffin and seal the tomb.”

“I don’t know how to sail,” he said, looking away.

“I do,” I said. “Dig.” And we did.

JAK:

The boat was there. It was a small fishing boat. There were two big fish on the deck, panting shallowly.

At the tiller was a small fisherman, eyes open, staring glassily out over the water. “Is he dead?” I asked her. Would Leila go that far for Jess? Kill a civilian?

“No, he’s entranced,” she said. She reached out and turned the fisherman’s face toward her.

“You’re still asleep,” she murmured to him in that seal-fur voice I still had to fight, “but you can hear me clearly. “You’re going to give us your boat,” she said. “Mistress Leila wants you to give us your boat. And she wants us to give you a magic fish. In a moment, you’ll get up, and take the bigger of these two fish, and carry it to the sand. You’ll reach into its mouth very carefully, and you’ll find a diamond there. The gods gave you the magic fish in return for taking your boat from you. This is fair. The gods are fair. It’s a good deal. Mistress Leila knows about deals, and she says this is a good one for you. You will remember that the fish beached itself on shore and you took the diamond out of its mouth and put the diamond carefully into your purse, but you’re going to forget what Mistress Leila told you, or that Mistress Leila was even here. You’ll just remember that the gods paid you a diamond for your boat. And when we sail out of sight, you’ll forget about our being here, too. You’ll forget my voice speaking to you. You’ll just be happy that you made such a good deal with the gods. Now just relax quietly for a moment more.”

Jess reached into her purse, took out a diamond as big as the nail of my little finger, and put it into the salt-stained purse on the belt around the fisherman’s waist.

“Walk him back to the shore . . . she said, and then appended, “will you? He seems pretty woozy. Leila might have slipped him a potion to loosen him up.”

“All right,” I said. And for some stupid reason I added, “Owner.”

Her mouth hardened. “Please never call me that again,” she said. “If you do, you mean that whatever we have—or had—is over. That’s how I’ll read it.”

I felt a little angry, but also wrong-footed. Finally I just said, “Right.” No apology. I took the fish under one arm and hooked the other one in his.

“Come on, Sleeping Beauty,” I said. “Let’s go celebrate your lucky day on the beach.” He came along, easy as a lamb.

Jess:

While the two of them waded back to the dry sand, I took out the piece of paper. It was Leila’s hand.

Jessica, My Daughter:

First: if you killed me before I had the chance to tell you this, pinch his nostrils shut and blow three quick breaths into his mouth to make his belly swell; then elevate his head and neck. Under his lower back is a bag. In it is a small vial with a rubber dosing bulb. Squeeze one full dropper into the back of his mouth and stroke his throat to make him swallow. It will counteract the poison. Also in the bag is a bottle of smelling salts; use those to bring him to consciousness. While he is recovering, you will find under the coffin pad a purse of precious gems, well-cut, easily portable, and valuable enough to pay passage for the two of you to somewhere far, far from our part of the world and, of course, not a signatory to our Treaty on Fugitive Slaves.

If you killed me later, I presume you did so because I failed to revive him. I’m sorry. My poison was too good; my antidote, not good enough. –There, Daughter; I’ve handed you your slogan for dismissing whatever I was to you. You need not bother with the rest of this letter.

Possibly, I am still alive as you read this; possibly I told you in person about the antidote, and the gems, and the importance of your both getting as far from us as you can, as fast as you can. You can never come back, unless you come at the head of an invading army, which you are unlikely to raise. It’s true that our arts of persuasion ensure us the more favorable end of any bargain, but we are not foolish enough to strip our partners bare; in fact, many of them are wealthier for having worked with us, and all of them have the conviction that one day they will be wealthier still, if they stay on our good side. Attacking us would cost them a chance at that wealth, so they won’t support you; they are more likely to pretend to do so and then sell you to us. Don’t expose yourselves to that risk. In all likelihood, we will never meet again, and this will be my only chance to explain myself—more particularly, why I saved your man’s life, why I seduced him in his death cell, why I got him the death sentence in the first place.

I pushed for his death sentence because, branded, he would be a magnet for fugitive hunters when you and he inevitably tried to run away from Mar. If I could falsify his death, he would bear no such brand, and no one would be looking for him. There was a risk, I knew, that we would fail to break the coma, and I accepted that risk for all of us without consulting either of you. There was a chance, I also knew, that you would choose not to revive him, because of what either he or I would, by that time, have confessed to you.

And that brings us to what you think of as my betrayal of you. “Why?” you asked me, but truly you believed there could be no answer to that question. There is an answer. Men have been faithless liars for as far back as our history, even the misty legends that preceded it, extends. They are born with that streak of mendacity, just as they are born with that organ that so dominates their attention until they are too old for it to work any more. That is why we had to learn to control them, and why we learned to do so by controlling that very organ whose sensations they treated as more important than the women they claimed to love, or the children they sired, or sometimes even their widely trumpeted honor. I can see your heart, my dear; I always could. In that heart you are just like one of those little girls of fourteen who believe that they have found the one boy who is different. However, this one did come back to preserve your life after he wounded you (please don’t insult me by thinking I believed that silly tale about your own sword falling out of its scabbard and stabbing you), so there was a remote chance that he was the legendary exception. I decided to test him—and no, as he would understand the term, I did not “play fair”; I came to him in the dark of what he thought would be his last night on earth, and the breeding instinct in such cases is famously strong. I dressed to arouse him. I spoke to arouse him. I was not, perhaps, entirely truthful when I told him that I had not enchanted him to fuck me. What I did was not enchantment as traditionally defined, but it was in rather a grey area. I tell you this because the real test was not whether he would resist me. After he succumbed, I asked if he was willing to confess his infidelity to you, even if it would kill your love for him—in fact, especially if it would. He protested—the usual male song of denial and self-pity, and I could only see one way for it to turn out. Yet he surprised me, mightily. He was indeed the exception that proves the rule.

And that is why, my dear Jessica, you and he have to leave here and never come back. You told me once that you thought slavery would be finished here in ten years. Were the two of you able to live in Mar as in some old ballad where love overcomes all custom, our institutions would not last half that long. I am not a lover of social innovations rushed into place and laying waste to everything familiar. The two of you together are just too dangerous to us, and the two of you apart will never be happy. So it finally comes down to that: I desire you to be happy, and to leave us, my daughter.

Farewell.

Leila had never said anything about loving me the whole time I studied with her. I think I loved her then. I didn’t know whether I still hated her as well. I crumpled the paper and thought about throwing it into the water; then I thought I wouldn’t. I pushed it back into my pocket as I saw Jak turn his back on the fisherman and wade out toward our boat.