The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Jess

The strange thing is that he never suspected during the fight that I could read his thoughts. What he thought was lightning speed on my part was really a critical, quarter-second head start; in fact, he moved just as fast as I did, but not fast enough. Our martial arts hold at their core the skills of attunement, not just with the opponent’s physical energy, but with thoughts and emotions, even under the stress of combat. So I knew his tactical thinking, I felt its suppleness as he changed his plans, I recognized every trap he set for me and turned it against him. I also felt his emotions and the strain of his will to control them, including his uneasiness—something like embarrassment still—at fighting a woman. I would have been angry if this delicacy hadn’t been so laughable in a man who was being beaten by that woman. Yet I remembered the moment of his only real chance to win, when I was on my back, stunned, and his right arm was cocked to smash a lethal blow into my throat. Something in his own mind had made him hesitate, throwing away that chance, and I felt that, too. For women with my gifts and duties, the price of attaining the highest level of fighting skill is the reflection of the pain we inflict, through a brief but intense intimacy with the person whom we are trying to hurt or even kill. It doesn’t last, but for a time, it makes what I have to do feel like fratricide.

Now, with the combat and its fears finished, there was nothing to distract me from his suffering, his effort to ignore the pain and defy the growing fear of defeat and death, his blind determination—anyone but a warrior would have called it merely foolish—to ignore despair as well, spending everything he had left to win or die. I think that was why I used the Soft Strangle instead of breaking his neck. He was a brave man, and I had hurt him enough. Once I had secured the stranglehold, I whispered words of respect and comfort to him, with a little push of enchantment behind them, to bring the sleep on more quickly. I did not forget that he was dangerous; after his arms stopped their struggle, his legs quivering spasmodically, I kept the hold on for a count of ten before I rolled off him. Then I saw his body lying completely still and thought that I had waited too long; he was not breathing, his face in the dust. I looked up at the judges. Our judge pointed at me as the victor. After several long seconds, their judge reluctantly did the same. I dropped hurriedly to my knees, rolled him over, cleared his mouth of sand and the bile that he had vomited, blew breath back into his lungs, hammered my fist on his breastbone and breathed into him again. As I reached to check his neck pulse, he gasped and coughed, and then continued breathing and spitting out sand. After turning his head to the side in case he vomited again, I stood up. Now I had the leisure to look at the insults I had inflicted on his body: the violet swellings shot through with dark red about the broken forearm and all around the eyes, one of which might be blind for life, two broken fingers swollen thick and dark as sausages, the mottled purple over the cracked ribs, the angry red, misshapen ear, the broken nose. I was surprised by shame, as if I were looking at something indecent while the crowd cheered me. I told myself that I had done my duty, he had done his, and I had won. That was all.

It did not feel like all. I stabbed at my split lip with my tongue, producing a surprising little twinge of pain, half intentional, as if it could be some symbolic way of sharing what had been done to him.—No; what I had done to him. I looked down at him again: If you can do it, you can look at it. I saw his injuries, inside and out. I felt I knew him better than any man alive. To this man, I had done sickening things that made me want to run from the sight of his broken body. Instead, I shouted, “I claim him.”

Lara, the senior member of the Council, motioned me over to her. I came over and, at the respectful distance, squatted before her like a little girl, our custom for acknowledging the difference between what the young and the old know. Her negotiation partner from the other side, a man, stood beside her, looking uncomfortable as the Elder spoke.

“Consider these words, child, before you say them again. This is not one of the old stories where passion and love grow easily out of the respect for a brave enemy. You may legally claim him now as your property, but you have not won him. The men of Ter wear a rigid pride before the world. You’ve made him fail before his people, as was your duty. He may never forgive you for doing it.”

“Nevertheless, Mother,” I said. And I raised my voice for witnesses to hear, binding myself, “I claim him as my own.”

The elder turned toward the Teran representative. “You agreed to this condition,” she said, “if the duel did not end in a death. Will you stand by it?”

He said nothing, but nodded stiffly.

“Very well, child, put him in the cart,” she said. “Councilor Leila, will you tell us how best to move him?” Leila came over, with her healer’s pouch slung over one shoulder. I started toward him, but Lara caught my arm and held me back for a moment. I turned back toward her, surprised. She sighed, wearily, and for the first time I saw her age in her face.

“We do”— she gestured with revulsion at the fighting circle, blotched with our blood caking in the sand—“this, because it is better than throwing all our young people into the mouth of war. But it is not a good thing in itself; even without killing. Winning the day for us, as your duty required, you have had to inflict pain on him. That was hard for you, as it should have been. Pain, at its best, is a necessary evil. But beyond the pain, you have broken a part of him. Doing that to someone has injured part of you, whether you know it yet or not. Killing him might have been easier to recover from, because you would not have to look daily at the injuries you have inflicted on his body and his spirit. But he is alive, so if you are to keep him near you, and if you are to heal yourself, you must heal him. That has nothing to do with making him love you. Even if he recovers, he may never love you.”

“With respect, Mother,” I said nervously, “I said nothing about his loving me, or my loving him.”

She went on without acknowledging my words.

“You may use your powers to remove or reduce irrelevant obstacles,” (here she frowned sternly over at Leila) “but you must not try to create in him a passion or regard that is not there. I think it will be easier on you—perhaps even on him—if you sell him overseas at the slave market. That said, the infirmary annex is at your disposal for as long as you need it.”

“I can’t sell him in this condition,” I said. “I probably will later. Eventually. When he’s better.”

She bowed forward and planted a kiss on my forehead. I bowed my head, rose, and limped over to him, favoring the knee that he had punched in his last attempt to break the strangle. He was awake, I knew, but he kept his good eye closed, as if this would remain only a bad dream until he opened it. Two of my sisters helped me lay him in the cart and secure him, more to prevent further injury than to prevent him from escaping. As we picked him up, I heard his breath catch in his throat as he choked off a groan.

Despite our best efforts, the ride back to the infirmary annex was rough, and he was conscious. I could feel the echoes of his pain in my mind, as well as his shame that he had lost, and his overlaid shame that having lost, he was not dead. I tried to think of something to say that would stop him from inflicting that further injury on himself, but nothing sounded right in my head.

Jak

When I was fading out under the choke, I was half hoping that this was the end; I thought I had lost everything, and it felt like an easy enough death. But I woke up with the sand of the fighting circle caked on my face and lips. I woke up gasping and gagging, seeing her face come into focus at the same time it moved away from mine, moved away from very close to mine, until she was standing over me and shouting in their old language—some victory cry I supposed, while her supporters screamed their shared triumph.

I couldn’t see Mort in the crowd—I couldn’t see much of anything with one eye swollen closed and the other halfway there—and when I thought of what had happened, I didn’t want to see him. All the wrecked outposts of my body were clamoring with pain, and I found myself beginning to fall into that death-sleep that takes some painfully wounded soldiers even when they aren’t bleeding out and they have a clear airway. But then I remembered the miserable “Land Exchange” villages I had been shown before the fight—the hollow-eyed children with their swollen, empty bellies, the parents numb with defeat and guilt while they poured their sweat into worthless land. I knew that I deserved no easy death. Those villagers would pay for my failure for years. I pushed back the cold fog and lived; I deserved no better.

In the Mar crowd around us, a lot of talk was buzzing about my being her “prize.” I guessed that I’d be made a field slave. Then again, she might sell me overseas, or keep me as a house slave to show off, a trophy that washed pots. At any rate, something seemed to be settled. The winners and losers were walking their separate ways from the circle.

“Do you need help getting up?” she asked in Trader Speech with the Marian lilt, holding out a hand for me to take but looking away from me, at the ground off to the side—in embarrassment? I ignored the hand. She looked annoyed and turned to meet my eyes.

“You have to get into the cart,” she said. “You’re badly injured. If you need help getting in, here it is.”

She had won. I had lost. The only honor I had left was sticking to the terms my people and I had agreed to. So she would have that, but nothing more. I brushed her hand away. “I’ll climb in. I don’t need help.” I hunched my knees under my chest, which felt full of needles, and put my one good hand on the ground to steady me while I pressed up to my feet. The world reeled and began to darken again, and I felt her arm around my shoulders. I didn’t bother trying to shrug it off. I was staggering in this whirling dimness, and breathing despite the hot spike in my ribs took all my attention.

Jess

At the Annex, getting him from the cart into the infirmary was difficult for me and clearly painful for him; the broken ribs hurt him when he changed positions, and his eyes had swollen all but shut; he was walking blind. I put an arm around his upper back, with my hand anchored under his armpit.

“Lean on my shoulder,” I said to him. “Steady yourself.”

He said nothing, only tried to shake my arm off. When he partially succeeded, his knees buckled and I almost dropped him.

“Right now your duty is to heal,” I said. “You have to do what will make that happen.”

“The fight is over,” he said, his face blank, almost dead, just staring before him. “You won. I know the agreement. But it doesn’t say I have to listen to your notions about my duty.”

“Then you might cooperate to make up for having just about broken my shin,” I hissed back at him. “The one that’s holding up both of us. Or my knee. Or my shoulder.”

I should have left it at that. When you have a stroke of inspiration, don’t tinker with it.

“Besides,” I blurted out, “actually the agreement says you do have to listen to my notions about duty, or anything else. It says that I own you now. So I decide—”

“—Or what?” he laughed. It was not a good-sounding laughter; it reminded me of how a dying man coughs, and it must have hurt his ribs. “You’ll kill me? Go ahead. I’m alive by an unfortunate accident; you’re welcome to correct it.”

“You’re alive because I thought it would be a waste to kill you. Maybe I was wrong; I did not allow for the depth of your self-pity. Your men are always ranting about their “honor” when they really mean that they have been made to look—”

“—Fuck my honor,” he snarled, “and fuck you! We’ve had people starving, in the thousands, after your witches ensorcelled our negotiators. Again. There was enough land there to give each of a thousand families a decent small farm. That’s what I lost for them. Not my honor, which you know nothing about. When you get tired of toying with me, I—”

He cut off the sentence in his throat, as if he were garroting himself. Then he bowed his head and threw up in the dirt. Something that sounded like a sob came out of him, although it might have been the groan of vomiting. I wanted to comfort him but did not know how. I looked away, thinking that witnessing his shame would add to it, and saw a couple of big attendants coming out of the Annex to help me carry him inside.

“Put him in the traction room, “ I told them.

His open eye widened a little as he took in the slings, the restraints, the pulleys in the room. Then he glared at me, his mouth forming a feral grin with blood marking the lines between his teeth, his nostrils flaring like a charging bull’s. I knew by now that this was his face for staring down his fear, and I knew what he was afraid of. It shocked me, what he thought of us.

“No, we’re not going to torture you,” I said wearily, as the attendants laid him carefully on the table. “No act is as disgusting to us as torture. This may hurt, but not because we want it to. I have to set the bone in your arm, or it won’t heal right. As soon as the bone is set, the pain will lessen. Or—”

He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. Good. Some of the same mind-roads that lead to the state the Ter warriors seek in their meditations can also lead to enchantment, with the right guidance. My heart began to speed up as I reached up to a shelf for the dark-blue bottle that Lady Leila had given me to mark the end of my year of apprenticeship with her, the glass colored deeply to keep the light from weakening the costly medicine in it.

“—Or we could use this. It’s made from an herb that grows in the Spice Islands,” I said. “It will help.”

“Help what?”

“It will dull the pain.” It would, but the important thing was that it would relax him, make him a little sleepy, leave him open to me.

“I can talk the rest of the pain out of you,” I said softly, “if you’ll cooperate with me.”

“Talk the—What is this—more witchcraft? Just set the poxy bone.”

He was more afraid of me and my “witch ways” than the pain of a major bone setting; I could hear that as clearly as if he were shouting it in my face. I had already begun to modulate my voice down to that soothing murmur we use to comfort the sick, the injured, and the dying. It was time for some enchantment, without his knowing exactly what was happening. I made my voice even softer, lower, smoother.

“Sometimes we have to cause pain to repair damage, but pain itself doesn’t help healing. In fact, it interferes. It exhausts strength that the body needs to keep a wound from sickening. I know how to wipe the pain away,” I whispered. “Soldier’s honor.” I put a hand over my left breast, cupping it for just an instant as I took the hand away. . . “Look in my face and see that I’m telling the truth . . . all the pain you took has exhausted you, I can see that, how tired you are, look at me and see the truth . . . it’s in my eyes . . . if you look deeply you can see it. . . . . We want the same thing . . . I want you to heal . . . you can see that in my eyes if you look deeply . . . and you know you need to heal so that you can help your people recover. Who will help them if not strong men like you? To heal, you need to rest. Let me help you rest and heal, so that you can help your people. Keep looking into my eyes, and see the truth of my words. I know your eyes are so tired, but keep looking for as long as you can. Keep looking into my eyes, and find rest there.”

When I saw his poor, swollen, slitted eyes begin blinking both more frequently and more slowly, I held a measure poured from the bottle up to his lips. Luckily, unlike a lot of medicines, this one doesn’t smell disgusting. The taste is another matter.

“Tha-a-a-t’s right,” I crooned approval at him, as if he were already in the act of drinking. “It’s bitter, but you swallow it quickly. You swallow the bitterness, like a good soldier. For your people.” It worked. He took a sip; then, squinting into my face the whole time, he swallowed the rest. Leila had said that on an empty stomach the effects could start appearing in as little as five minutes.

“Good,” I praised him again. “You were brave in our fight, Sergeant. I honor that, and I thank you for being brave enough to trust me now, after . . . what we had to do. Now let the medicine work while I prepare everything for a good set.”

We put him on the table, adjusting its wooden sections to fit his lanky frame. I fastened the straps where needed, fussed with them and fastened them again, taking my time while his body warmed the potion up to blood heat and began to absorb it.

“Give me something to bite on,” he said, his voice a little slurred, blinking and shaking his head as if to clear it. “Wood or . . . leather . . . or . . .

I smiled a little. “If you just let the medicine work, relax and listen to me, just relax and listen to my voice, you won’t need anything like that. The pain and you will drift away from each other, as you are beginning to drift now, aren’t you? Yes . . . I can see that the medicine is making you a bit sleepy, you’re blinking more frequently and slowly, that’s good, that’s what you want, and you’re watching my eyes carefully for as long as you can keep yours open . . . watching for the truth . . . but those poor, hurt eyes are sooo tired and heavy that soon they have to close, and that’s fine, you can close the,m soon, even now if you like, in fact now would be good, your eyes are so hurt and tired, I know you’re so hurt and tired, so very weary, but now I’ll look after you, I’m making a place in your mind where you can rest from the pain, we’ve done our duty and we don’t have to hurt each other any more, we’re much alike, you and I, in a way we’re comrades, battle friends, because we know each other in a special way, I’ve known your courage, I’ve felt your strength, I see your honor. I would trust you with my life, Jak, and you can safely trust me, I promise you that, just let me give you this rest, just trust me and SLEEP.” His eye closed and he sighed.

Jak

When I really came to myself, they were putting me on a padded table with ropes and straps and pulleys everywhere. I thought they were going to torture me, and along with the fear that bubbled up in my gut was a kind of relief. They would torture me, and I would be silent and take it, and make up for . . . Yes, it was a stupid idea, but I didn’t know that then. Anyway, what happened was nothing like that, so different that I found it confusing. At first, she starting talking to me like some hard old battlefield surgeon: Soldier; that leg has to come off. This will hurt, so tough it out—but even then the tone was different. There was a kind of sorrow in her voice that did not fit her status as victor, and then the tone shifted again into something like a lullabye, not sung but spoken, and she was saying that she wanted to help me with the pain if I would just listen to her talk to me, because she could talk the pain away—which was ridiculous—but somehow she got me to drink a cup of some bitter herbal tea from a bottle. The odd thing was that I had decided to refuse it when she mentioned the tea. I didn’t want to cooperate with any witchery, but the refusal seemed to slip my mind; I forgot not to drink it. With the first swallow, the gash in my tongue stopped hurting; in fact, I stopped feeling my tongue at all. She was murmuring things at me. Some of them I could barely hear, and some of them made no sense between enemies. I couldn’t sort them all out because I was getting so woozy that I kept losing the thread of what she was saying. I was only dimly aware of someone fastening the padded straps to secure my upper arm. Although I knew what was coming, I could not seem to care. I tried to hang on to the pain of my failure, the pain of my injuries. That, I knew, was real, but it was fading, her voice was so strange, like a mother’s, or a lover’s, and I knew that she was using it on me deliberately, but the suspicion that should have come from knowing that was numb, or asleep, and she was looking down at me with a fond half-smile, as if we had not been trying to kill each other an hour ago . . .”

Jess

As the potion began to relax him, it gave me greater access to his feelings. I felt his pain and his teeth-gritting war against showing it, and I saw that struggle melting off his face, as the brow smoothed, the clenching around the swollen eyes dissolved. I could feel both his need for relief from the pain and the opposing need to hang onto it, as if it could burn away his humiliation and guilt. Perhaps I would have felt the same in his place. Did thinking so make me say things to him that I had not meant to say? Where did that talk about trusting him with my life come from? And when I said that, and he sighed like a lost child who is found and finally laid in his own bed, why was I so moved?

As we reduced the fractures and splinted the arm, I had his mind so deeply wrapped in soothing images that he barely twitched. I had used the technique of transference, moving all his body’s pain to the minor bruise over his cheekbone, and pointing out that the spot could not hold so much pain; it was too small. The rest of the pain would just pass into the air and drift away. I felt much greater triumph in putting his pain to sleep than I had ever felt in causing it. Then I realized that the things I had said to him to calm him, to win him over, to cast the spell, might be true. I could at least imagine trusting him with my life. I did feel closer to him than to any other man, and comforting him was no longer just a requirement of his recovery, something that needed to be done. Now I wanted to be the one to do it.

As I watched his sleeping face, its peaceful look so much at odds with his swollen eyes and ear, the angry scrapes from the sand on his face, the purple bruises, I knew that we were going to have to do more work on him. That ear would need leeches, or it would harden into its current swollen, plug-like shape. The eyes would need very delicate attention from a master leech. The Terians burn their dead; they think that letting a worm feed on them even after death is disgusting, unthinkable when they’re alive, even if it does them good. It would be much better if he drifted off to sleep and woke up when the leeches had been removed. In fact, a lot of necessary procedures would be easier if he drifted off, and I would not always have time to enchant him the slow way.

I moved up close to his left side and whispered in his good ear.

“Jak, you are sleeping peacefully, in deep comfort, but you can hear me. This relief from pain is good for your healing, and it feels good, too. It feels so good. You would like to be able to return to this feeling quickly, and I can do that for you. After you’re awake, whenever you hear me, and only me, say the words “Sleep, my friend Jak,” you will instantly sink into this wonderful, healing sleep where there is no pain. In fact, when you hear me say “Sleep, my friend Jak,” you will sink even deeper into this comfort and relaxation and healing than you are now. Ten times deeper. Feeling ten times more comfortable. You do not need to remember my telling you this, but when you hear me say “Sleep, my friend Jak,” you will sink into this deeply peaceful state unthinkingly, aware of nothing but comfort and the words I speak to you.”

I remember believing, at the time, that I had planted this phrase in his mind purely to make healing his body easier.

Jak

I woke up to the sound of her reciting a string of numbers and then saying, “Awake and alert eyes open” or something like that, which was stupid, because obviously I was awake and alert with my eyes open, so why did she have to announce it? It was not as if I hadn’t gotten the news.

“How do you feel?” she asked me, in a voice somewhere between the “I-won-you- lost” speech she had made right after the fight and that stuff she was crooning at me when I was on the bonesetter’s table.

“Your spells don’t seem to have worked,” I told her.

“No?” She was half-smiling at me. It was annoying.

“No,” I said. “You kept going on about wiping away all my pain, and I’m here to tell you, lady, that it’s still with me.”

“Is it no better?” she asked, as if concerned.

“I didn’t say that,” I muttered, maybe a little peevishly. “But it’s not all gone, either.”

“Pain is a signal the body sends us, to warn us that it’s taking damage so that we make the damage stop. If I took all your pain away, you would probably hurt yourself worse.”

I laughed. “Oh, right, you could remove all the pain, but you decided to leave it with me for my own good. I swear by all the gods, I can’t imagine how you people have been swindling us all these years if that’s the most plausible story you can make up.”

“I guess you see right through all my ruses, don’t you?”

“No,” I said reasonably. “Just the lame ones.”

She laughed, indulgently, and that was even more annoying.

“What would you say was the injury that was hurting you the most at the end of the fight?”

“You really want to revel in that? I thought better of you.”

She just stared at me for a long time. Then she seemed to shake herself slightly. “I have a logical point to make,” she said. “What was hurting the most?”

“Obviously—” I began, and then I ran out of self-assurance, because nothing was obvious. “I can’t remember.”

“Can’t remember . . . hmm, that’s odd. Well then, what hurts the most now?”

“There’s a stupid question. It’s my . . . cheekbone.” My what?

She laughed at me. “Really? That little blue bruise on your cheek is the worst pain you’ve got? Your right eye was swollen shut, weeping blood under the lashes, a little while ago. You’ve been going on and on about your right arm, moaning and groaning, so . . .? So your right arm doesn’t hurt?”

“Of course it . . . No.” It didn’t, and I didn’t know why. “But I thought you said you couldn’t remove some pain because taking it away would lead to re-injury, blah blah, because I was too dumb not to try moving it unless it hurt.”

“So does it hurt?”

I didn’t say anything. I had already admitted that it didn’t, and I was tired of being the butt of this game, whatever it was about. I just scowled at her.

“No need to get angry, Jak,” she said, unimpressed by the scowl. “Why don’t you try to move the arm?”

“Because I don’t want to re-injure it. I want to heal up so I can be sold to some place with a more pleasant atmosphere and company, like maybe a slave galley with plague on board.”

“Just humor me. Go ahead and try to move it. It’s not strapped down; it’s just lying there, so relaxed.”

Just by the way she said ‘try,’ and the sensuous weight her voice laid on the word ‘relaxed,’ I knew that I would not be able to move it, and I was right. The muscles in my shoulder just refused to do their work.

“What have you been doing to me? How did you do this, and why?” I hoped that my voice sounded more angry than scared.

She started using that breathy voice again. “It will be a while before we can talk about why, but as for how, all I did was say, Sleep, my friend Jak.”

And then I was sinking into a velvet fog; my newly opened eyes began to flutter uncontrollably, my muscles went slack, and I tried not to enjoy the feeling as sleep broke over me like a huge, warm wave. I really did try.