by Anne Rice
But he was watching something through the open door of the Sign of the Lion, and in one glance I saw the little spectacle. A lovely village woman with a pretty red skirt and white ruffled blouse was spanking her slave quite diligently upon a wooden counter, and the lovely face peering out through its tears was that of Beauty. She writhed and struggled under the paddle. But I could see she was unfettered, just as I had been last night on the Public Turntable.
We passed the door. The Captain looked up, and as if in a nightmare I heard my Master halt the ponies. I stood still, my cock straining against the leather. But this was inescapable. My Master and the Captain were greeting each other and exchanging pleasantries. And the Captain was admiring the ponies. Roughly he jerked the horsetail up in the one on the right, lifting and stroking the shining black hair, and then he pinched the red thigh of the slave as the slave tossed his head and sent a shiver through the harnesses. The Captain laughed.
“0, we have a little high spirits here!” he said, and he turned to the pony with both hands, apparently provoked by the gesture. He lifted the slave’s chin and then the phallus and gave it several strong rocking upward jerks until the pony kicked and worked his legs friskily. Then came a soft pat on the rump, and the pony settled quietly.
“You know, Nicolas,” he said in that familiar deep voice, able to strike fear with one syllable, “I’ve told her Majesty several times that she should give up her horses for short journeys and rely on slave ponies. We could outfit a great stable for her quickly enough, and I think she would find it delightful. But she sees it as a village occupation and won’t really consider it.”
“She has very particular taste, Captain,” said my Master. “But tell me, have you ever seen this slave before?”
And to my horror he pulled my head back by the straps of the harness.
I could feel the Captain’s eyes on me, though I didn’t look. I could picture my cruelly stretched mouth, the straps of the harness scoring me.
He drew closer. He stood not three inches from me. And then I heard his low voice deeper still.
“Tristan!” and his large warm hand closed on my penis. He squeezed it hard, pinching the tip shut, and then let it go as sensation knotted at the end of it. He fondled my balls, pinching between his fingernails the covering of skin that was already pulled so tight around them by the lacings.
My face was scarlet. I couldn’t meet his gaze, my teeth clamping down on the huge phallus as if I could devour it. I felt my jaws working, my tongue lapping the leather as if I were somehow forced to do it. He stroked my chest, my shoulders.
A flashing image of the camp returned, of being tethered to that great wooden X in a circle of X’s and the soldiers standing idle about me, teasing my cock, educating it as I waited hour by hour for the evening whipping. And the Captain’s secretive smile as he strode past, his gold cape over one shoulder.
“So that is his name,” said my Master, his voice sounding young and more refined than the deep murmur of the Captain. “Tristan.” And hearing him speak it further tormented me.
“Of course I know him,” said the Captain. His large shadowy figure moved just a little to let a collection of young women pass, who were laughing and talking loudly.
“I brought him to the castle only six months ago. He was one of the wildest, broke and ran through the forest when he was ordered to strip, but I had him beautifully tamed when I put him at her Majesty’s feet. He’d become the darling of the two soldiers whose duty it was to whip him daily through the camp. They missed him more than any slave they ever had to discipline.”
I shivered silently, swallowing the sound, as the gag, strangely enough, made it all the harder.
“A rather volcanic passion,” said that soft rumbling voice. “It wasn’t the severity of the whippings that made him eat from my hand; it was the daily ritual.”
0, how true, I thought. My face smarted. That fearsome, inevitable sense of nakedness again descended on me. I could still see the freshly turned earth before the tents, feel the straps and hear their steps and their conversation as they moved along with me. “Only one more tent, Tristan.” Or that greeting every evening, “Come on, Tristan, time for our little trek through the camp, that’s it, that’s it, look at this, Gareth, how quickly this young man learns. What did I tell you, Geoffrey, that after three days I wouldn’t have to use the manacles?” and their feeding me with their hands after, wiping my mouth almost affectionately and patting me and giving me too much wine to drink, and taking me out after dark into the forest. I remembered their cocks, the argument about who would go first, and whether it was better with the mouth or the anus, and sometimes one of them fore and one of them aft, and the Captain never very far away it seemed, and always smiling. So they had felt affection for me. It had not been my imagination. And neither was the warmth I felt for them. And a slow, undeniable realization was dawning on me.
“But he was one of the finest, most beautifully mannered of all the Princes,” the Captain murmured, that voice seeming to come from his chest, not his mouth. I wanted suddenly to turn my head and look at him, see if he was just as handsome now as he had been then. My glimpse before had been too quick. “Given to Lord Stefan as his personal slave,” he continued, “with the Queen’s blessing. I am suprised to see him here.” Anger crept into his voice. “I told the Queen that I myself had broken him.”
He lifted my head, pushed it this way and that. I realized with mounting tension that I had been almost silent all this while, struggling not to make a sound in his presence, but I was now about to give way, and at last I couldn’t control it. I gave a low moan, but it was better than crying.
“What did you do? Look at me!” he said. “Did you displease the Queen?”
I shook my head no, but I wouldn’t look into his eyes, my whole body seeming to swell under the harnessing.
“Was it Stefan you displeased?”
I nodded. I glanced into his eyes and away, unable to stand it. Some strange bond existed between me and this man. And no bond—that was the horror of it—existed between me and Stefan.
“And he’d been your lover before, hadn’t he?” the Captain pushed, drawing close to my ear, though I knew my Master could hear him. “Years before he came to live in the Kingdom.”
I nodded again.
“And that humiliation was more than you could bear?” he demanded. “You who were taught to part your buttocks for common soldiers?”
“No!” I cried behind the gag, shaking my head violently. My head was pounding. And that slow, inescapable realization that had begun only moments before became clearer and clearer.
Out of sheer frustration, I cried. If only I could explain.
But grasping the little silver buckle of the phallus in my mouth, the Captain pushed my head back.
“Or was it,” he said, “that your former lover didn’t have the strength to master you?”
I turned my eyes, staring directly at him now, and if one can be said to smile with such a gag in one’s mouth, I smiled. I heard my own sigh come slowly. And then despite his hand on the phallus, I nodded.
His face was clear and beautiful as I remembered. I saw his full and robust figure in the sun as he took the snapping thrash from my Master. And as we looked each other in the eye, he commenced to whip me.
Yes, the realization was complete. I had wanted the total degradation of the village. I could not bear Stefan’s love, his tentativeness, his inability to govern me. And for his weakness in our predestined bond, I despised him.
Beauty had understood my aims. She had known my soul better than I knew it. This was what I deserved and hungered for because it was as violent as the soldiers’ camp, where my dignity, my pride, my self had been so thoroughly plundered.
Punishment—here in this busy, sun-drenched square, even with the little village girls gathering round, and a woman standing in the door of the Inn with her arms folded, and the loud snapping blows of the thrash—pun—ishment was what I deserved,
thirsted for, even in terror. And in a moment of utter surrender I spread my legs wide and thrust my head back and rocked my hips in a gesture of total recognition of the whipping.
The Captain gave great swinging sweeps with the flat lash.
My body was alive with the stings and hurts he had inflicted. And surely my Master understood the secret. And there would be no mercy for me as, reading this little dialogue, my Master would take me the full journey no matter how I might later plead with whines and whimpers.
The whipping was over but I did not break my supplicating position. And the Captain gave back the thrash and caressed my face suddenly, impulsively it seemed, kissing my eyelids just as my Master had done. The last knot in me broke. It was agony that I couldn’t kiss his feet, his hands, his lips. That I could only incline my tortured body towards him.
He drew back, his arm out to my Master. I saw them embrace rather naturally it seemed, my Master slighter of build, elegant as a fine carved silver knife beside the solidly made Captain.
“It’s always so,” the Captain said with a slow smile, looking into my Master’s cold and clever eyes. “Out of a batch of a hundred timid and anxious little slaves sent down for purification, there are those who have invited the punishment, needing the rigors not to purify their faults but to tame their boundless appetites.”
It was so true that I was weeping, struck to the soul by the incentives this would give to all my tormentors.
“But please,” I wanted to plead, “we don’t know what we do to ourselves. Please have mercy.”
“My little girl at the Sign of the Lion, Beauty, is the same,” the Captain said. “A naked ravenous soul that foments the passion in me dangerously.”
Beauty. And he had been watching her through the Inn door. So he was her Master. I felt a divine ripple of jealousy and solace.
My Master’s eyes pierced me. The sobs shook me, the spasms passing through my cock and my sore calves.
But the Captain was at my side. “I’ll see you again, my young friend,” he breathed against my cheek, his lips tasting my face, it seemed, his tongue licking at my cruelly opened lips. “That is, with your gracious Master’s permission.”
I was inconsolable as we moved on, my low weeping turning heads as we marched out of the square and through other lanes, and past hundreds of other unfortunates. Had they been revealed as I was revealed, both to themselves and to their Masters and Mistresses?
So sore from the Captain’s lashing that the merest flick of the thrash made me jump, I tried in no way to hold back, wailing as the ponies pulled me after them.
We passed through a narrow street where slaves for hire were hung by their hands and feet on the wall, pubes oiled and glistening, prices scratched upon the plaster above them. In a little shop, I saw a naked seamstress pinning up a hem, and in a small open place a band of naked Princes driving a treadmill. Princes and Princesses alike knelt here and there with trays of fresh cakes for sale, no doubt from the Master or Mistress’s oven, a little basket hanging from the mouth of the slave to humbly receive the coins of the purchaser.
All the regular life of the village passing as if my misery did not exist, was not so loudly lamented.
A poor Princess chained to a wall whimpered and struggled as three laughing village girls idly stroked and teased her pubis.
And though I saw nowhere the theatrical savagery of the Public Punishment Grounds the night before, it was magnificent, and horrifying, this daily life of the village.
In a doorway, a buxom matron on a stool soundly spanked a naked Prince over her knee with her thick broad hand as she castigated him angrily. And a Princess holding with two hands a water jug on her head waited meekly as her Master implanted between her red pubic lips a good-size phallus with a leash attached, by which he made her smartly follow.
And we were now in quieter streets, streets where men of property and position lodged, and there were shiny doors with brass knockers. And from the high iron brackets above, slaves hung here and there as ornaments. The hush descended and the horseshoes of the ponies sounded louder and sharper up the walls, and I heard my weeping more clearly.
I could not think what the days held in store for me. So solid it all seemed, the population so accustomed to our wails, our servitude nourishing the place as surely as meat and drink, and sunshine.
And through it all, I was to be borne along on a wave of desire and surrender.
We had come round again to my Master’s lodgings. My lodgings. We passed the front door, quite as ornate as any we had seen, and the large costly leaded glass windows. And we went round the corner, through the little lane to the back road along the ramparts.
The straps and phalluses were stripped away in a great rush, the ponies sent off, and I collapsed at my Master’s feet, kissing them all over. I kissed the insteps of the smooth morocco boots, the heels, the lacings. My agonized sobs broke louder and louder.
What was I pleading? Yes, make me your abject slave, be merciless. But I am frightened, frightened.
And in a moment of pure madness I wished he would take me again to the place of Public Punishment. I would have rushed with all my strength to the Public Turntable.
But he only turned to go into the house, and I came on hands and knees after him, lapping at his boots, giving darting kisses as he walked, following him down the corridor, until he left me in the small kitchen.
I was bathed, fed by the young male servants. No slaves worked in this house. I alone was kept, it seemed, for torment.
And quietly, without the slightest explanation, I was brought into a small supper room. Quickly I was stood up against the wall and chained with legs and arms in the form of an X and left there.
The room was polished and neat—I could see all of it now—a real rich little village-house room such as I never knew in the castle where I was born and reared, or in the Queen’s castle. The low beams of its ceiling were painted and decorated with flowers, and I felt as I had when I first entered this house, huge and shamefully exposed in it, a true slave bound there among the shelves of gleaming pewter and the high-backed oak chairs and clean-swept chimneypiece.
But my feet were flat on the waxed floor, and I could rest my weight on them and rest back against the plaster. And if only my cock would go to sleep, I thought, I could rest also.
The maids came and went with their brooms and mops, arguing about supper, whether to roast the beef with red wine or white, and whether to put in the onion now or later. They took no note of me except to pat me gently as they passed, dusting about me, fussing, and I smiled, listening to this chatter. But just as I was dozing off, I opened my eyes with a start to see the lovely face and form of my dark-haired Mistress.
She touched my cock, bending it down, and it came to life violently. She had several small black leather weights in her hands with clamps like those I had worn on my nipples yesterday, and as the maids talked on behind a closed door, she applied these clamps to the loose skin of my scrotum. I winced. I couldn’t keep still. The weights were just heavy enough to make me painfully aware of every inch of the sensitive flesh and of the slightest shift of my balls—and a thousand such shifts seemed inevitable. She worked thoughtfully, pinching the skin as the Captain had pinched it with his fingernails. When I flinched she took no note of it.
Then she manacled my penis at the base with a heavy weight dangling beneath it, and as my organ bobbed I felt the coldness of the iron weight against my testicles. The touch of these things, their movements, were unendurable reminders of these bulging organs, this degrading exposure.
The little room grew dim and close. Her figure loomed large before me. I clenched my teeth hard not to plead with some mortifying little cry, and then that sense of surrender returned, and I pleaded quietly with low sighs and moans. I had been a fool to think I would be let alone.
“You will wear these,” she said, “until your Master sends for you. And if that weight slips from your cock, there will be only one reason for it, that
your cock has gone soft and released the manacle. And your cock will be whipped for that, Tristan.”
I nodded as she waited, unable to meet her gaze.
“Do you need that whipping now?” she asked.
I knew better than to answer. If I said no, she would laugh and take it as impertinence. If I said yes, I was sure she would be outraged and the whipping must follow.
But she had already lifted a little delicate white strap from beneath her dark blue apron. I gave a series of short sighs. But she whipped my penis this way and that, sending shocks through all my loins, my hips lifting towards her. All the little weights pulled at me, like fingers stretching my skin and tugging on my cock. And the organ itself was purplish red, jetting straight forward.
“That is only a little example,” she said. “When on display in this household, you must be turned out properly.”
Again I nodded. I bowed my head and felt the hot beads of tears at the corners of my eyes. She lifted a comb to my hair and ran it through carefully and gently, arranging the curls neatly over my ears and drawing them back from my forehead. “I must tell you,” she whispered “you are easily the most beautiful Prince in the village. I warn you, young man, you’re in good danger of being bought outright. But I don’t know what you could do to prevent it. Misbehave and you need the village all the more. Thrash your handsome hips in charming submission and you make yourself just as seductive. Already, there may be no hope for you. Nicolas has wealth enough to purchase you for three years, should he so desire. I’d love to see the muscles in those calves after three years of pulling my coach, or Nicolas’s little walks through the village.”
I had lifted my head and I was staring down into her blue eyes. Surely she could see I was puzzled. Could we be made to remain here?
“0, he can make a good argument for keeping you,” she said. “That you need the discipline of the village, or perhaps even only that he has at last found the slave he desires. He is no Lord, but he is the Queen’s Chronicler.”