by Anne Rice
“There, there,” she said again in that tender voice. She blotted my forehead and my wet cheeks with a smooth handkerchief of white linen. I looked right into her eyes, and she kissed my lips, my cock almost dancing, as the kiss took the breath out of me.
She slipped the phallus out so quickly I was pulled off-balance, glancing back at her in alarm. And then she disappeared into the rich little house, and I stood shaken, gazing up at the high-peaked roof and the fine sprinkling of stars above it, realizing I was alone with the Master, his thick strap in his hand as always.
He turned me around and had me march along the broad paved road back in the direction of the marketplace.
SOLDIERS’ NIGHT AT THE INN
FOR HOURS Beauty slept.
And only vaguely was she aware of the Captain jerking the bell rope. He was up and dressed without an order to her. And when she fully opened her eyes, he stood over her in the dim light of a new hearth fire, his belt still unbuckled. In one swift movement he slipped it from around his waist and snapped it beside him. Beauty couldn’t read his face. It looked hard and removed and yet there was a little smile on his lips, and her loins immediately acknowledged him. She could feel a deep stirring of passion inside, a soft discharge of fluids.
But before she could break through the languor, he had pulled her up and deposited her on the floor on her hands and knees, pressing her neck down and forcing her knees wide apart. Beauty’s face flamed as the strap walloped her between the legs, stinging her bulging pubis. Again came a hard slap to the lips, and Beauty kissed the boards, wagging her buttocks up and down in submission. The licking of the strap came again, but carefully, almost caressingly punishing the protuburant lips, and Beauty, fresh tears spilling to the floor, gave an openmouthed gasp, lifting her hips higher and higher.
The Captain stepped forward, and with his large naked hand covered Beauty’s sore bottom, rotating it slowly.
Beauty’s breath caught in her throat. She felt her hips lifted, swung, pushed down, and a little throbbing noise came out of her. She could still remember Prince Alexi at the castle telling her he had been made to swing his hips in this ghastly, ignominious fashion.
The Captain’s fingers pressed into Beauty’s flesh, squeezing her buttocks together.
“Wag those hips!” came the low command. And the hand thrust Beauty’s bottom up so high that her forehead was sealed to the floor, her breasts pulsing against the boards, a throbbing groan choked out of her.
Whatever she had thought and feared so long ago at the castle didn’t matter now. She churned her bottom in the air. The hand withdrew. The strap licked up at her sex, and in a violent orgy of movement she wagged and wagged her buttocks as she had been told to do.
Her body loosened, lengthened. If she had ever known any other posture but this she couldn’t clearly remember it. “Lord and Master,” she sighed, and the strap smacked her little mound, the leather scraping the clitoris as it thickened. Faster and faster Beauty swung her bottom in the circle, and the harder the strap licked her the more the juices in her surged, until she could not hear the sound of the strap against the slick lips, her cries coming from deep in her throat, almost unrecognizable to her.
At last the licking stopped. She saw the Captain’s shoes before her and his hand pointing to a small-handled broom beside the fireplace.
“After this day,” he said calmly, “I won’t tell you this room is to be swept and scrubbed, the bed changed, the fire built up. You will do it every morning when you rise. And you will do it now, this evening, to learn how to do it. After that you’ll be scrubbed in the Inn yard to properly serve the garrison.”
At once Beauty started to work, on her knees, with swift careful movements. The Captain left the room, and within moments Prince Roger appeared with the dustpan, scrub brush, and bucket. He showed her how she must do these little tasks, how to change the linen, build up the wood on the hearth, clear away the ashes.
And he did not seem surprised that Beauty only nodded and didn’t speak to him. It didn’t occur to her to speak to him.
The Captain had said “every day.” So he meant to keep her! She might be the property of the Sign of the Lion, but she had been chosen by its chief lodger.
She could not do her tasks well enough. She smoothed the bed, polished the table, careful to kneel at all times, and rise only when she must.
And when the door opened again, and Mistress Lockley took her by the hair and she felt the wooden paddle driving her down the steps, she was softened and carried away by thoughts of the Captain.
Within seconds, she’d been stood in the crude wooden hogshead tub. Torches flickered at the Inn door and on the side of the shed. Mistress Lockley scrubbed fast and roughly, flushing out Beauty’s sore vagina with wine mixed in water. She creamed Beauty’s buttocks.
Not a word was spoken as she bent Beauty this way and that, forcing her legs into a squat, lathering her pubic hair, and roughly drying her.
And all around Beauty saw other slaves being coarsely bathed, and she heard the loud bantering voices of the crude woman in the apron and two other strong-limbed village girls who went at the task, now and then stopping to smack the buttocks of this slave or that for no apparent reason. But all Beauty could think of was that she belonged to the Captain; she was to see the garrison. Surely the Captain would be there. And the volleys of shouts and laughter from the Inn tantalized her.
When Beauty was thoroughly dry, and her hair had been brushed, Mistress Lockley put her foot on the edge of the hogshead and threw Beauty over her knee and swatted at her thighs hard with the wooden paddle several times, and then pushed Beauty down on her hands and knees as Beauty gasped for breath and sought to steady herself.
It was positively odd not to be spoken to, not even sharp impatient commands. Beauty glanced up as Mistress Lockley came around beside her, and for one instant she saw Mistress Lockley’s cool smile, before the woman had the chance to remember herself. Quite suddenly Beauty’s head was lifted gently by the full weight of her long hair, and Mistress Lockley’s face was right above hers.
“And you were going to be my little troublemaker. I was going to cook your little buttocks so much longer than the rest for breakfast.”
“Maybe you still should,” Beauty whispered without intention or thought. “If that’s what you like for breakfast.” But she broke into violent trembling as soon as she finished. 0, what had she done!
Mistress Lockley’s face lit up with the most curious expression. A half-repressed laugh escaped her lips. “I’ll see you in the morning, my dear, with all the others. When the Captain’s gone, and the Inn’s nice and quiet, and there’s no one here but the other slaves waiting in line as well for their morning whipping. I’ll teach you to open that mouth without permission.” But this was said with unusual warmth, and the color was high in Mistress Lockley’s cheeks. She was so very pretty. “Now trot,” she said softly.
The big room of the Inn was already packed with soldiers and other drinking men.
A fire roared on the hearth, mutton turned on the spit. And upright slaves, their heads bowed, scurried on tiptoe to pour wine and ale into dozens of pewter flagons. Everywhere Beauty glanced in the crowd of dark-clad drinkers with their heavy riding boots and swords, she saw the flash of naked bottoms and gleaming pubic hair as slaves set down plates of steaming food, bent over to wipe up spills, crawled on hands and knees to mop up the floor, or scampered to retrieve a coin playfully pitched into the sawdust.
From a dim corner came the thick, resonant strumming of a lute and the beat of a tambourine and a horn playing a slow melody. But riots of laughter drowned the sound. Broken fragments of a chorus rose in a full burst only to die away. And from everywhere came shouts for meat and drink and the call for more pretty slaves to entertain the company.
Beauty didn’t know which way to look. Here a robust officer of the guard in his vest of shining mail pulled a very pink and pale-haired Princess off her feet and set her standing on
the table. With her hands behind her head she quickly danced and hopped as she was told, her breasts bouncing, her face flushed, her silvery blond hair flying in long perfect corkscrew curls about her shoulders. Her eyes were bright with a mixture of fear and obvious excitement. There another delicate-limbed female slave was being thrown over a crude lap and spanked as her frantic hands went to cover her face before they were pulled aside and playfully held out before her by an amused onlooker.
Between the casks on the walls, more naked slaves stood, their legs apart, their hips thrust out, waiting to be picked, it seemed. And in a corner of the room, a beautiful Prince with full red curls to the shoulders sat with legs apart on the lap of a hulking soldier, their mouths locked in a kiss as the soldier stroked the Prince’s upright organ. The red-haired Prince licked at the soldier’s coarsely shaven black beard, mouthed his chin, then opened his lips to the kissing again. His eyebrows were knit with the intensity of his passion, though he sat as helplessly and still as if he had been tied there, his bottom riding up with the shift of the soldier’s knee, the soldier pinching the Prince’s thigh to make him jump, the Prince’s left arm hanging loosely over the soldier’s neck, right hand buried in the soldier’s thick hair with slow, flexing fingers.
A black-haired Princess in the far corner struggled to turn round and round, her hands clasped to her ankles, her legs apart, long hair sweeping the floor as a flagon of ale was poured over her tender private parts and the soldiers bent to lap the liquid playfully from the curling hair of her pubis. Suddenly she was thrown standing on her hands, her feet hoisted high above, as a soldier filled her nether mouth with ale to overflowing.
But Mistress Lockley was pulling Beauty so that she might take a flagon of ale and a pewter plate of steaming food in her hands, and Beauty’s face was turned to see the distant figure of the Captain. He sat at a crowded table far across the room, his back to the wall, his leg outstretched on the bench before him, his eyes fixed on Beauty.
Beauty struggled fast on her knees, her torso erect, the food held high until she knelt beside him and reached over the bench to place the food on the table. Leaning on his elbow, he stroked her hair and studied her face as though they were quite alone, the men all around them laughing, talking, singing. The golden dagger gleamed in the candlelight and so did the Captain’s golden hair and the bit of shaven hair on his upper lip, and his eyebrows. The uncommon gentleness of his hand, lifting Beauty’s hair back over her shoulders and smoothing it, brought chills over Beauty’s arms and throat; and between her legs the inescapable spasm.
She made some small undulation with her body, not truly meaning to. And at once his strong right hand clamped on her wrists and he rose from the bench lifting her off the floor and up so she dangled above him.
Caught off-guard, she blanched and then felt the blood flooding to her face, and as she was turned this way and that, she saw the soldiers turning to look at her.
“To my good soldiers, who have served the Queen well,” the Captain said, and at once there was loud stomping and clapping. “Who will be the first?” the Captain demanded.
Beauty felt her pubic lips growing thickly together, a spurt of moisture squeezing through the seam, but a silent burst of terror in her soul paralyzed her. “What will happen to me?” she thought as the dark bodies closed in around her. The hulking figure of a burly man rose in front of her. Softly his thumbs sank into the tender flesh of her underarms, as, clutching her tightly, he took her away from the Captain. Her gasps died in her throat.
Other hands guided her legs around the soldier’s waist. She felt her head touch the wall behind her and she tucked her hands behind her head to cradle it, all the while staring forward into the soldier’s face, as his right hand shot down to open his breeches.
The smell of the stables rose from the man, the smell of ale, and the rich, delicious scent of sun-browned skin and rawhide. His black eyes quivered and closed for an instant as his cock plunged into Beauty, widening the distended lips, as Beauty’s hips thudded against the wall in a frantic rhythm.
Yes. Now. Yes. The fear was dissolved in some greater unnameable emotion. The man’s thumbs bit into Beauty’s underarms as the pounding went on. And all around her in the gloom she saw a score of faces looking on, the noises of the Inn rising and falling in violent splashes.
The cock discharged its hot, swimming fluid inside her and her orgasm radiated through her, blinding her, her mouth open, the cries jerked out of her. Red-faced and naked, she rode out her pleasure right in the midst of this common tavern.
She was lifted again, emptied.
And she felt herself being set down on her knees on the table. Her knees were pulled apart and her hands placed under her breasts.
As the hungry mouth sucked on her nipple, she lifted her breasts, arching her back, her eyes turned shyly away from those who surrounded her. The greedy mouth fed on her right breast now, drawing hard as the tongue stabbed at the tiny stone of the nipple.
Another mouth had taken her other breast. And as she pressed herself against the mouths that suckled her, the pleasure almost too acute, hands spread her legs wider and wider, her sex almost lowered to the table.
For one moment the fear returned, burning white-hot. Hands were all over her; her arms were being held, her hands forced behind her back. She could not free herself from the mouths drawing hard on her breasts. And her face was being tilted up, a dark shadow covering her as she was straddled. The cock pushed into her gaping mouth, her eyes staring up at the hairy belly above her. She sucked the cock with all her power, sucking as hard as the mouths at her breasts, moaning as the fear again evaporated.
Her vagina quivered, fluids coursing down her wide-spread thighs, and violent jolts of pleasure shook her. The cock in her mouth tantalized her but could not satisfy her. She drew the cock deeper and deeper till her throat contracted, the come shooting into her, the mouths pulling gently at her nipples, snapping her nipples, her nether lips closing vainly on the emptiness.
But something touched her pulsing clitoris, scraped it through the thick film of wetness. It plunged through her starved pubic lips. It was the rough, jeweled handle of the dagger again ... surely it was ... and it impaled her.
She came in a riot of soft muffled cries, pumping her hips up and up, all sight and sound and scent of the Inn dissolved in her frenzy. The dagger handle held her, the hilt pounding her pubis, not letting the orgasm stop, forcing cry after cry out of her.
Even as she was laid down on her back on the table, it tormented her, making her squirm and twist her hips. In a blur she saw the Captain’s face above her. And she writhed like a cat as the dagger handle rocked her up and down, her hips spanking the table.
But she was not allowed to come so soon again.
She was being lifted. And she felt herself laid over a broad barrel. Her back arched over the moist wood, she could smell the ale, and her hair fell down to the floor, the Inn upside down in a riot of color before her. Another cock was going into her mouth while firm hands anchored her thighs to the curve and a cock pushed into her dripping vagina. She had no weight, no equilibrium. She could see nothing but the dark scrotum before her eyes, the unfastened cloth. Her breasts were slapped, sucked, and gathered by strong kneading fingers. Her hands groped for the buttocks of the man who filled her mouth and she clung to him, riding him. But the other cock pummeled her against the barrel, plugged her, grinding her clitoris to a different rhythm. Through all her limbs she felt the searing consummation, as if it did not rise from between her legs, her breasts teeming. All her body had become the orifice, the organ.
She was being carried into the yard, her arms around firm, powerful shoulders.
It was a young brown-haired soldier who carried her, kissing her, petting her. And they were all over the green grass, the men, laughing in the torchlight as they surrounded the slaves in the tubs, their manner easy now that the first hot passions had been satisfied.
They circled Beauty as her feet wer
e lowered into the warm water. They knelt with the full wineskin in their hands and squirted the wine up into her, tickling her, cleansing her. They bathed her with the brush and the cloth, half playing at it, vying to fill her mouth slowly, carefully with the tart, cool wine, to kiss her.
She tried to remember this face, that laugh, the very soft skin of the one with the thickest cock, but it was hopeless.
They laid her down in the grass beneath the fig trees and she was mounted again, her young captor, the brown-haired soldier, feeding dreamily on her mouth, and then driving her in a slower, softer rhythm. She reached back and felt the cool, naked skin of his buttocks and the cloth of his breeches pulled halfway down, and touching the loosened belt, the rumpled cloth, and the half-naked backside, she clamped her vagina tight on his cock so that he gasped aloud like a slave on top of her.
It was hours later.
She sat curled in the Captain’s lap, her head against his chest, her arms about his neck, half sleeping. Like a lion he stretched under her, his voice a low rumble from his broad chest, as he spoke to the man opposite. He cradled her head in his left hand, his arm feeling immense, effortlessly powerful.
Only now and then did she open her eyes on the smoky glare of the whole tavern.
Quieter, more orderly than before. The Captain talked on and on. The words “runaway Princess” came clear to her.
“Runaway Princess,” Beauty thought drowsily. She couldn’t worry about such things. She closed her eyes again, burrowing into the Captain, who tightened his left arm about her.
“How splendid he is,” she thought. “How coarsely beautiful.” She loved the deep creases of his tanned face, the luster of his eyes. An odd thought came to her. She had no more care what his conversation was about than he had care to talk to her. She smiled to herself. She was his nude and shuddering slave. And he was her coarse and bestial Captain.