Beauty's Punishment

by Ann Rice

  On and on it went, his mouth sucking the cry out of her, not letting her go, and just when she thought with agony it will come to an end, he drove his own climax into her. She heard him groan deep in his throat. His hips froze and then rode her in a frenzy of quick, jerking movements.

  The room was suddenly quiet. He stood cradling her, the organ in her giving occasional little spasms that made her whimper softly.

  Then she felt herself emptied. She tried to protest in some silent way, but he was still kissing her.

  She had been stood on the floor again, and her hands laid on the back of her neck, and legs forced apart by the gentle nudge of his boots, and for all her sweet exhaustion, she remained standing. She stared forward seeing nothing but a blur of light.

  "Now, we will have the little demonstration as I requested it," he said kissing her upturned mouth again, opening it and running his tongue inside her lip. She looked into his eyes. There was nothing but these eyes looking at her. "Captain," she thought the word. Then she saw the tangle of blond hair over the sunbrowned forehead with its deep lines. But he had drawn back, leaving her standing there.

  "You will put your hands between your legs," he said softly, settling again in his oaken armchair, his breeches neatly fastened, "and will show me your private parts immediately."

  She shuddered. She looked down. Her body felt hot, drained, and that weakness had now infected her every muscle. To her own amazement, she dropped her hands between her legs and she felt the wet slippery lips, still burning, pulsing from his thrusts. With her fingertip she touched the vagina.

  "Open it and reveal it to me," he said, resting back in the chair, with his elbow on the arm, his hand curled under his chin. "That's it, wider. Wider!"

  She stretched her little nether mouth, not believing that she, the bad girl, was doing it. A soft, lazy sensation of pleasure, an echo of the ecstasy of the embrace, further softened her and quieted her. But the lips were so wide apart they were almost aching.

  "And the clitoris," he said, "lift it."

  It burned against her finger as she obeyed.

  "Move your finger to the side so that I can see," he said.

  And quickly, as gracefully as she could, she did.

  "Now stretch the little mouth wide again and thrust your hips forward."

  She obeyed, but with the movement of her hips there came another wave of pleasure. She could feel the blush in her face and in her throat and her breasts. She heard herself moaning. Her hips rose higher, moved ever more forward. She could see the nipples of her breasts contracted to tiny bits of hard pink stone. She heard her own moan become louder and supplicating.

  It would begin any moment, the desire that was so sweetly waning. Even now she could feel the lips thickening against her fingers and the clitoris beating hard like a little heart and the pink flesh around her nipples tingling.

  She could hardly stand the desire, and then she felt the Captain's hand on her neck. He had swung her forward and around and into his lap, with her head back over the crook of his right arm, his left hand forcing her right leg widely apart from the left, and she felt the smooth calfskin jerkin against her naked side, the leather of the high boots under her thighs, and she saw his face above her. His eyes were boring into her. He kissed her slowly, and she felt her hips lift. She shuddered.

  He held something dazzling and beautiful in the light before her, and she blinked to see it. It was the handle of his dagger, thick, encrusted with gold and emeralds and rubies.

  It disappeared and quite suddenly she felt the cold metal against her wet vagina. "Ooooooh, yes..." she moaned and felt the handle slide in, a thousand times harder and crueler than the largest organ, it seemed, as it lifted her, crushing against her smoldering clitoris.

  She almost screamed with desire, her head falling back, her eyes blind except for the Captain's eyes looking down at her. Her hips undulated wildly against his lap, the dagger handle going back and forth, back and forth, until she could not endure it and the ecstasy came again paralyzing her and silencing her open mouth, the vision of the Captain vanishing in a moment of total deliverance.

  When she came back to herself, there was still the wild tremor in her hips, the vagina giving quiet gasps, but Beauty was sitting up, and the Captain was holding her face in his hand, and he was kissing her eyelids.

  "You're my slave," he said.

  She nodded.

  "When I come to the Inn, you belong to me. From wherever you are, you come to me and you kiss my boots," he said.

  She nodded.

  He lifted her to her feet, and before she quite understood what was happening, she had been forced out of the little room again, her wrists behind her back, and she was being marched down the little winding stairs as she had come up.

  Her head was spinning. He would leave her now, and she couldn't bear the thought of it. "O, no, no, please don't leave," she thought desperately. He gave her buttocks warm spanks with his large, soft leather-gloved hand and forced her into the cool darkness of the Inn again where six or seven men were already drinking.

  Beauty caught the laughter, the talk, the sound somewhere of the paddle coming down and some poor slave groaning and sobbing.

  But she was being forced into the open square before the Inn.

  "Fold your arms behind your back," said the Captain. "You're to march before me with your knees high and you are to look straight ahead."

  THE PLACE OF PUBLIC PUNISHMENT

  The sunlight was too bright for a moment. But Beauty was busy folding her arms and marching, lifting her legs as high as she could, and finally the square became visible as they entered it. She saw its shifting crowds of idlers and gossips, several youths sitting on the broad stone rim of the well, horses tethered at the gates of the Inns, and then other naked slaves here and there, some on their knees, some marching as she was.

  The Captain turned her with another one of those large soft spanks, squeezing her right buttock a little as he did it.

  Half in a dream it seemed, Beauty found herself in a broad street, full of shops much like the lane down which she had come, but this street was crowded and everyone was busy, purchasing, bargaining, arguing.

  That terrible feeling of regularity came back to her, that all of this had happened before, or at least that it was so familiar that it might have. A naked slave on her hands and knees cleaning a shop window looked ordinary enough, and to see another with a basket strapped to his back, marching as Beauty was being marched, before a woman who drove him with a stick – yes, that too looked regular. Even the slaves, bound naked on the walls, their legs apart, their faces in half-sleep, seemed just the ordinary thing, and why shouldn't the young village men taunt them as they passed, slapping an erect cock here, pinching a poor shy nether mouth there? Yes, ordinary.

  Even the awkward thrust of her breasts, her arms folded behind her to force her breasts out, all of that seemed quite sensible and a proper way to march, Beauty thought. And when she felt another warm spank she marched more briskly and tried to lift her knees more gracefully.

  They were coming to the other end of the village now, the open marketplace, and all around the empty auction platform she saw hundreds milling. Delicious aromas rose from the little cookshops, and she could even smell the wine that the young men bought by the cup at the open stands, and she saw the fabrics blowing in long streams from the fabric shop, and heaps of baskets and rope for sale, and everywhere naked slaves at a thousand tasks.

  In an alleyway, a slave on his knees swept vigorously with a small broom. Two others on all fours bore baskets full of fruit on their backs as they hurried at a fast trot through a doorway. Against a wall, a slender Princess hung upside down, her pubic hair gleaming in the sun, her face red and flushed with tears, her feet neatly tethered to the wall above with wide tightly laced anklets.

  But they had come into another square opening off the first, and this was a strange unpaved place where the earth was soft and freshly turned as it had been o
n the Bridle Path at the castle. Beauty had been allowed to stop, and the Captain stood beside her with his thumbs hooked in his belt, watching everything.

  Beauty saw another high turntable, like that at the auction, and on it, a bound slave was being fiercely paddled by a man who worked the turntable round and round with a pedal as the auctioneer had done, whipping hard at the naked buttocks each time it spun to the proper position. The poor victim was a gorgeously muscled Prince, with his hands bound tight on his back and his chin mounted up on a short rough column of wood so that all could see his face as he was punished. "How can he keep his eyes open?" Beauty thought. "How can he bear to look at them?" The crowd around the platform squawked and screamed as stridently as they had done at the earlier bidding.

  And when the paddler raised his leather weapon now to signal the punishment was at an end, the poor Prince, his body convulsing, his face twisted and wet, was pelted with soft bits of fruit and refuse.

  Like the other square it had the atmosphere of a fair, with the same cookshops and wine vendors. From high windows hundreds watched, their arms folded on sills and balcony edges.

  But the turntable paddling was not the only form of punishment. A high wooden pole stood far to the right, with many long leather ribbons streaming down from an iron ring at the top of it. At the end of each black ribbon was a slave tethered by a leather collar that forced the head high, and all marched slowly but with prancing steps in a circle around the pole, to the constant blows of four paddle-wielding attendants stationed at four points of the circle like the four points of a compass. A round track was worn in the dust from the naked feet. Some hands were bound behind the back; others were clasped there freely.

  A straggle of village men and women watched the circular march, commenting here and there, and Beauty looked on in dazed silence as one of the slaves, a young Princess with large floppy brown curls, was untethered and given back to a waiting Master, who whipped at the slave's ankles with a straw broom as he drove her forward.

  "There," said the Captain, and Beauty marched obediently beside him towards the high Maypole with its turning bands of leather.

  "Tether her," he said to the guard, who quickly pulled Beauty over and buckled the leather collar around her neck so her chin was forced up over the edge of it.

  In a blur, Beauty saw the Captain watching. Two village women were near him and talking to him, and she saw him say something rather matter-of-factly.

  The long band of leather running down from the top of the pole was heavy and carried along in a circle on the iron ring by the momentum of the others, and it almost pulled Beauty forward by the collar. She marched a little faster so that it would not, but it tugged her back, until she finally fell into the right step, and felt the first loud spanking blow from one of the four guards who rather casually waited to punish her. There were so many slaves trotting in the circle now that the guards were always swinging their bright ovals of black leather, Beauty realized, though she was blessed with a few slow seconds between blows, the dust and the sunlight stinging her eyes as she watched the tousled hair of the slave ahead of her.

  "Public Punishment." She remembered the words of the auctioneer telling all Masters and Mistresses to prescribe it whenever they felt it necessary. And she knew that the Captain would never think, like her well-mannered, silver-tongued Masters and Mistresses at the castle, to give her a reason for it. But what did it matter? That he wanted her punished because he was bored or curious, that was reason enough, and each time she made the full circle she saw him clearly for a few moments, his arms at his sides, his legs firmly apart, his green eyes fixed on her. What were all the reasons but foolishness, she mused. And as she braced herself for another smart blow – losing her footing and her grace for an instant in the powdery dust as the paddle swept her hips forward – she felt an odd contentment, unlike anything she'd known at the castle.

  There was no tension in her. The familiar ache in her vagina, the lust for the Captain's cock, the paddle's crack, these things were there as she marched, the leather collar bouncing cruelly against her uplifted chin, the balls of her feet smacking the packed earth, but still it was not that terrible quavering dread she had known before.

  But her reverie was broken by a loud cry from the crowd near her. Over the heads of those who leered at her and the other marching slaves, she saw that the poor punished Prince was being taken down from the turntable where he had remained for so long an object of public derision. And now another slave, a Princess with yellow hair like her own, was forced into place, back arching down, buttocks high, chin mounted.

  Coming round the dusty little circle again, Beauty saw that the Princess was squirming as her hands were tied behind her back, and the chin rest was being cranked up by an iron bolt so that she couldn't turn her head. Her knees were bound to the turntable and she kicked her feet furiously. The crowd was as thrilled as it had been by Beauty's display on the auction block. And it showed its pleasure with much cheering.

  But Beauty's eye caught the Prince who had been taken down and she saw him rushed to a nearby pillory. There were several pillories, in fact, in a row in their own little clearing. And there the Prince was bent over from the waist, his legs as always kicked apart, his face and hands clamped in place, the board coming down with a loud splat to hold him looking forward and quite unable to hide his face, or for that matter to do anything.

  The crowd closed in around the helpless figure. As Beauty came round again, groaning suddenly at an unusually hard crack of the paddle, she saw the other slaves, Princesses all, pilloried in the same way, tormented by the crowds, who felt of them, stroked them, pinched them as they chose, though one villager was giving one of the Princesses a drink of water.

  The Princess had to lap it, of course, and Beauty saw the pink dart of her tongue into the shallow cup, but still it seemed a mercy.

  The Princess on the turntable meantime was kicking and bouncing and giving the most marvelous show, her eyes shut, her mouth a grimace, and the crowd was chanting the number of each blow aloud in a rhythm that sounded oddly frightening.

  But Beauty's time of trial at the Maypole was coming to an end. Very quickly and deftly, she was released from the collar and taken panting from the circle. Her buttocks smarted and seemed to swell as if waiting for the next spank, which never came. Her arms ached as they lay doubled behind her back, but she stood waiting.

  The Captain's large hand turned her around and he seemed to tower over her, gilded with sunlight, his hair sparkling around the dark shadow of his face as he bent to kiss her. He cradled her head in his hands and drew on her lips, opening them, stabbing his tongue into her, and then letting her go.

  Beauty sighed to fell his lips withdrawn, the kiss rooting deep into her loins. Her nipples rubbed against the thick lacing on his jerkin, and the cold buckle of his belt burned her. She saw his dark face crease with a slow smile and his knee pressed against her hurting sex, teasing its hunger. Her weakness seemed complete suddenly and to have nothing to do with the tremors in her legs or her exhaustion.

  "March," he said. And turning her around he sent her with a soft squeeze of her sore buttock towards the far side of the square.

  They drew near to the pilloried slaves, who writhed and twisted under the taunts and slaps of the idle crowd milling about them. And behind, Beauty saw closely for the first time a long row of brilliantly colored tents set back beneath a line of trees, each tent with its canopied entrance open. A young man handsomely dressed stood at each tent and though Beauty could glimpse nothing in the shadowy interiors, she heard the voices of the men one by one tempting the crowd:

  "Beautiful Prince inside, Sir, only ten pence." Or "Lovely little Princess, Sir, your pleasure for fifteen pence." And more invitations like these. "Can't afford your own slave; enjoy the best for only ten pence." "Pretty Prince needing punishment, Madam. Do the Queen's bidding for fifteen pence." And Beauty realized that men and women were going and coming from the tents, one by one, a
nd sometimes together.

  "And so even the commonest of the villagers," Beauty thought, "can enjoy the same pleasure." And ahead at the end of the row of tents, she saw a whole gathering of dusty and naked slaves, their heads down, their hands tethered to the tree branch above behind a man who called out to one and all: "Hire by the hour or the day these lovelies for the lowliest service." On a trestle table at his side was an assortment of straps and paddles.

  She marched on, absorbing these little spectacles almost as if the sights and the sounds were stroking her, the Captain's large firm hand now and again punishing her softly.

  When at last they reached the Inn, and Beauty stood in the little bedchamber again, her legs wide, her hands behind her neck, she thought drowsily, "You are my Lord and Master."

  It seemed in some other incarnation she had lived all her life in the village, had served a soldier, and the mingling of noises coming from the square outside was a comforting music.

  She was the Captain's slave, yes, utterly his, to run through the public streets, to punish, to subjugate totally.

  And when he tumbled her on the bed, spanked her breasts, and took her hard again, she turned her head this way and that, whispering, "Master, and then Master."

  Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew it was forbidden to speak, but this seemed no more than a moan or a scream. Her mouth was open and she was sobbing as she came, her arms rising and encircling the Captain's neck. His eyes flickered, then blazed through the gloom. And there came his final thrusts, driving her over the brink into delirium.

  For a long time she lay still, her head cradled in the pillow. She felt the long leather ribbon of the Maypole prodding her to trot as if she were still lost in the Place of Public Punishment.

  It seemed her breasts would burst as they throbbed from the recent slaps. But she realized the Captain had taken off all his clothes and was slipping into the bed naked beside her.