Beauty's Punishment

by Ann Rice

  His warm hand lay on her drenched sex, his fingers parting the lips ever so gently. She drew close to his naked limbs, his powerful arms and legs covered with soft curly golden down, his smooth clean chest pressed against her arm and her hip. His roughly shaven chin grazed her cheek. Then his lips kissed her.

  She closed her eyes against the deepening afternoon light from the little window. The dim noises of the village, thin voices from the street, the dull bursts of laughter from the Inn below, all merged into a low hum that lulled her. The light grew bright before it began to fade. The little fire leapt on the hearth, and the Captain covered Beauty with his limbs and breathed in deep sleep against her.

  TRISTAN IN THE HOUSE OF NICOLAS, THE QUEEN'S CHRONICLER

  Tristan: In a near daze, I thought of Beauty's words, even as the auctioneer called for the bids, my eyes half closed, the screaming crowd a swirling current around me. Why should we obey? If we were bad, if we had been sentenced to this penitential place, why must we comply with anything?

  Her questions echoed through the cries and jeers, the great inarticulate din that was the crowd's true voice, purely brutal, endlessly renewing its own vigor. I clung to the silver memory of her exquisite little oval face, eyes flashing with irrepressible independence, as all the while I was poked, slapped, turned round, examined.

  Maybe I took refuge in the strange inner dialogue, because it was too excruciating to bear the blazing actuality of the auction. I was on the block, just as they had threatened I would be. And the bids were rising from everywhere.

  It seemed I saw everything and nothing, and in a dim moment of excruciating remorse, I pitied the foolish slave whom I had been, dreaming in the castle gardens of disobedience and the village.

  "Sold to Nicolas, the Queen's Chronicler."

  Then I was being roughly shuffled down the steps, and the man who had bought me stood before me. He seemed a silent flame in the midst of the press, the rough hands slapping at my erect cock, pinching me, tugging at locks of my hair. Wrapped in a perfect stillness all his own, he lifted my chin, and our eyes met, and with an exquisite shock, I thought, yes, this is my Master!

  Exquisite.

  If not the man himself, robust enough for all his slender height, then the manner of it.

  Beauty's question thudded in my ears. I think I closed my eyes for a moment.

  I was being pushed and shoved through the crowd, told by a hundred taskmasters to march, to lift my knees, lift my chin, to keep that cock erect, while the auctioneer's loud bark called the next slave behind me to the platform. The roaring din enveloped me.

  I had only glimpsed my Master, but in the glimpse all the details of his being were fixed perfectly. Taller than I by only an inch, he had a square but lean face and a wealth of white hair curling thickly well above his shoulders. He was much too young for the white hair, almost boyish despite his great height and the pure ice of his gaze, his blue eyes full of darkness at the very centers. He seemed much too finely dressed for the village, but there were others like him on the balconies over the square, watching from high-backed chairs set in the open windows. Well-to-do shopkeepers and their wives, surely, but they had called him Nicolas, the Queen's Chronicler.

  He had long hands, beautiful hands that had almost languidly gestured for me to precede him.

  At last I reached the end of the square, felt the last rough slaps and pinches. I found myself marching with low panting breaths in an empty street walled on either side with little taverns and stalls and bolted doorways. Everyone was at the auction, I saw with relief. And it was quiet here.

  Nothing but the sound of my feet on the stones and the crisp click of my Master's boots behind me. He was very close. So close I almost felt him brush against my buttocks. And then with a shock I felt the wallop of a stout strap and his voice very low near my ear: "Pick up those knees, and hold your head high and back." At once I straightened, alarmed that I had let myself lose any measure of dignity. My cock stiffened, despite the fatigue in my calves. I pictured him again, so puzzling, that smooth young face, and the shining white hair, and the finely stitched velvet tunic.

  The street twisted, narrowed, grew a little darker as the high-peaked roofs jutted overhead, and I flushed to see a young man and woman coming towards us, all crisp in clean starched clothes, their eyes dusting me carefully. I could hear my labored breath echoing up the walls. An old man on a stool at a doorway glanced up.

  The belt walloped me again just as the couple drew alongside and I heard the man laugh to himself and murmur, "Beautiful, strong slave, Sir."

  But why did I try to march fast, to keep my head up? Why was I caught again in the same anxiety? Beauty had looked so rebellious when she asked her questions. I thought of her hot sex clamping so boldly to my cock. That, and the sound of my Master's voice again urging me on, maddened me.

  "Stop," he said suddenly and jerked my arm around so I faced him. Again I saw those large shadowy blue eyes with the black centers, and the fine long mouth without a single line of mockery or hardness. Several shadowy shapes appeared ahead of us, and I felt a dreadful sinking feeling as I saw them pause to watch us.

  "You have never been taught to march, have you?" he said, and he forced my chin so high I groaned and had to exert all my will not to struggle just a little. I didn't dare to answer. "Well, you will learn to march for me," he said and forced me down on my knees in the street before him. He took my face in both hands, though he still held the belt in his right, and tilted it up.

  I felt powerless and full of shame gazing up at him. I could hear the sound of young men nearby murmuring and laughing to themselves. He forced me forward until I felt the bulge of his cock in his breeches, and my mouth opened and I pressed my kisses to it fervently. It came alive under my lips. And I felt my own hips move, though I tried to still them. I was trembling all over. His cock pulsed like a beating heart against the silk. The three observers were drawing closer.

  Why do we obey? Is it not easier to obey? The questions tormented me.

  "Now, up, and move fast when I tell you. And lift those knees," he said, and I turned and rose, the belt cracking against my thighs. The three young men moved aside as I started off, but I could feel their attention; common youths they were, in coarse clothing. The belt caught me with fast thudding wallops. A disobedient Prince cast down lower than the village louts, one to be enjoyed as well as punished.

  I was drenched in heat and confusion, yet I put all my strength into doing as I was told, the strap licking my calves and the backs of my knees, before it lashed hard against the undercurve of my buttocks.

  What had I said to Beauty, that I had not come to the village to resist? But what was my meaning? It was easier to obey. I knew already the anguish that I had displeased and might be corrected again in front of these common boys; I might hear that iron voice again and this time in anger.

  What would have soothed me, a kind word of approval? I had had so many from Lord Stefan, my Master at the castle, and yet I had deliberately provoked him, disobeyed him. In the early hours of the morning, I had risen and boldly walked out of Lord Stefan's chamber, breaking and running to the far reaches of the garden where the pages saw me. I'd led them a merry chase through the thick trees and shrubbery. And when I was caught, I fought and kicked, until, gagged and bound, I was put before the Queen and a grieving and disappointed Stefan.

  I had deliberately cast myself down. Yet in the midst of this terrifying place with its brutal, jeering throngs, I was struggling to stay ahead of the strap for another Master. My hair was in my eyes. My eyes swam with tears that had not yet started to flow. The twisting lane with its endless shingles and glistening windows dimmed in front of me.

  "Stop," my Master said, and gratefully I obeyed, feeling his fingers curled around my arm with a strange tenderness. There was the sound behind me of several pairs of feet and a little eruption of masculine laughter. So the miserable youths had followed!

  I heard my Master say, "Why do you wa
tch with such interest?" He was talking to them. "Don't you want to see the auction?"

  "O, there's plenty more to see, Sir," said one of the young men. "We were just admiring that one, Sir, the legs and the cock on that one."

  "Are you buying today?" asked the Master.

  "We haven't the money to buy, Sir."

  "We'll have to wait for the tents," said a second voice.

  "Well, come here," my Master said. To my horror, he went on, "You may have a look at him before I take him inside; he is a beauty." I was petrified as he turned me around and made me face the trio. I was glad to keep my eyes down, to see nothing but their dull yellow rawhide boots and worn gray breeches. They gathered close.

  "You may touch him if you like," said the Master, and lifting my face again, he said to me, "Reach up and hold tight to the iron bracket on the wall above you."

  I felt the bracket jutting out from the wall before I actually saw it, and it was just high enough that I had to stand on tiptoe to grasp it, with some four feet of space behind me.

  The Master stood back and folded his arms, the belt gleaming as it hung at his side, and I saw the hands of the young men closing in, feeling the inevitable squeeze to my flaming buttocks before the hands lifted my balls and pressed them lightly. The loose flesh came alive with sensation, tingling, quivering. I squirmed, almost unable to stand still, and smarted at the immediate laughter. One of the young men spanked my cock so that it bobbed sharply. "Look at that thing, hard as a stone!" he said and spanked it again this way and that as another man weighed the balls, juggling them slightly.

  I struggled to swallow the huge lump in my throat and stop shaking. I felt drained of all reason. In the castle there had been those lavish rooms devoted exclusively to pleasure, slaves decorated as exquisitely as sculptures. Of course I'd been handled. I'd been handled in the camp months before by the soldiers who brought me to the castle. But this was a common cobblestoned street like the streets of a hundred towns I had known, and I was not the Prince riding through on my handsome mount, but a helpless naked slave examined by three youths right before shops and lodging places.

  The little group shifted back and forth, one of the men pushing at my buttocks and asking if he might see my anus.

  "Of course," said the Master.

  I felt all the strength go out of me. At once my buttocks were pried apart as they had been on the auction block and I felt a hard thumb pushed in me. I tried to stifle a grunting cry and almost let go of the bracket.

  "Give him the belt if you like," said the Master, and I saw it held out in his hand just before I was twisted to the side, and then it struck at my buttocks viciously. Two of the youths still toyed with my cock and balls, tugging at the hair and skin of my scrotum and cradling it roughly. But I was shaken by each stripe of pain across my backside. I couldn't help but moan aloud again, as the stinging strap came harder from the youth than it had from my Master, and when the prying fingers touched the tip of my cock, I strained back desperately trying to control it. What would it mean if I were to come in the hands of these loutish youths? I couldn't bear the thought of it. And yet my cock was deep red and iron hard from its torment.

  "How's that for a whipping?" said the one behind me, reaching around and jerking my chin towards him. "As good as your Master?"

  "That's enough sport," said the Master. He stepped forward, taking the leather strap, and received their grateful thanks with a polite nod as I stood trembling.

  It had only begun. What was to follow? And what had happened to Beauty?

  Others were passing in the street. It seemed I heard a faint distant roar as from a crowd. There was a thin unmistakable blast of a trumpet. My Master was studying me, but I looked down feeling the passion in spasms in my cock, my buttocks tightening and relaxing involuntarily.

  My Master's hand rose to my face. He ran his fingers down my cheek and lifted several locks of my hair. I could see the dusty sunlight striking the big brass buckle of his belt and the ring on his left hand with which he held the stout strap beside him. The touch of his fingers was silky and I felt my cock rising with a shameful, uncontrollable jerking motion.

  "Into the house, on your hands and knees," he said softly. And he pushed open the door to my left. "You will always enter that way without being told." And I found myself moving silently across a finely polished floor through small crowded rooms, a diminutive mansion it seemed, a rich town house to be exact, with an immaculate little stairs and crossed swords above the little fireplace.

  It was dim, but very quickly I saw rich paintings on the walls of Lords and Ladies at their courtly amusements, with their hundreds of naked slaves forced to a thousand tasks and positions. We passed a small, heavily carved armoire. And high-backed chairs. And the hallway became narrow and close around me.

  I felt enormous and vulgar here, more animal than human, crawling painfully through this little world of townsman's wealth, not a Prince surely, but a rude domesticated beast. With a silent burst of alarm, I glimpsed my reflection in a fine mirror.

  "To the back, through that door," my Master commanded, and I entered a rear alcove where a well-done-up little village woman, a maid obviously, moved aside with her broom in hand as I passed her.

  I knew my face was disfigured with my struggle. And it struck me suddenly what the terror of the village really was.

  It was that we were true slaves here. Not playthings in a palace of pleasure, such as the slaves in the paintings on the walls, but real naked slaves in a real town, and we would suffer at every turn from common men at their leisure or tasks, and I felt my agitation increase along with the sound of my labored breathing.

  But we had entered another chamber.

  I moved across the soft carpet of this new room in the burnished light of oil lamps, and was told to remain still, which I did, without even trying to compose my limbs for fear of disapproval.

  At first all I saw were books, shining in the glow of the lamps. Walls of books, it seemed, all bound in fine morocco and decorated in gold, a King's ransom in books surely. And the oil lamps stood on stands here and there and on a great oaken writing table that was covered with loose sheets of parchment. Feather quills stood together in a brass stand. There were pots of ink. And then high above the shelves the glimmer of more paintings.

  Then out of the corner of my eye I saw a bed in the corner.

  But the most surprising thing in this room, other than the incalculable wealth in books, was the vague figure of a woman materializing slowly in my vision. She was writing at the table.

  I have not known many women to read and write, only a few great Ladies. Many Princes and Princesses at the castle could not even read the punishment placards fixed to their necks when they were disobedient. But this Lady was writing quite fast, and when she looked up she caught my glance before I looked down subserviently. Then she rose from the table, and I saw her skirts come round before me. She seemed small all over with tiny wrists and long graceful hands like the Master. I didn't dare to look up, but I had seen that her hair was dark brown and that it was parted in the middle and fell down her back in ripples. She wore a dress of deep burgundy, rich, like that of the man, but she also wore an apron of dark blue, and there were ink stains on her fingers that made her look interesting.

  I was afraid of her. Afraid of her and the man standing silently behind me, and of the small silent room and my own nakedness.

  "Let me look at him," she said, and her voice, like that of my Master, was finely turned and faintly resonant.

  She put her hands under my chin and urged me to kneel up. And with her thumb she stroked my wet cheek, causing me to blush all the harder. I looked down, naturally, but I had seen her high jutting breasts and slender throat, and a face like the man's, not physically so, but just as serene and impenetrable.

  I slipped my hands behind my neck and hoped desperately that she would not torment my cock, but she bid me stand up and her eyes were fixed on it.

  "Spread your legs
; you know better than to stand like that," she said sternly but slowly. "No, very wide," she said, "until you feel it in those exquisite thigh muscles. That's better. That's how you'll always stand for me, with your legs widespread, almost at a squat but not quite. And I will not tell you again. Slaves in the village are not coddled with constant orders. You will be strapped on the Public Turntable for any failing."

  These words sent a shudder through me, with an odd sense of fatality. Her pale hands seemed almost to glow in the light of the lamps as they moved towards my cock. And then she squeezed the tip, bringing out of it a drop of clear fluid. I gasped, feeling the orgasm ready to explode inside, to roll up through my organ and out of it. But mercifully she let it go and lifted my balls now as the youths had done.

  Her little hands felt of them, massaging them gently, moving them back and forth in their sheathing, and the flicker of the oil lamps seemed to expand and to dim my vision.

  "Flawless," she said to my Master. "Beautiful."

  "Yes, I rather thought so myself," said the Master. "Easily the pick of the herd. And the cost was not so terribly great, as he was the first one auctioned. I think had he been last it would be have been double. Observe the legs, the strength in them, and these shoulders."

  She lifted both her hands and smoothed back my hair. "I could hear the crowd from here," she said. "They were in a fury. Have you thoroughly examined him?"

  I tried to still my panic. After all I had been six months in the castle. Why was it so terrifying, this little room, these two cold townspeople?

  "No, and that should be done now. His anus should be measured," said the Master.

  I wondered if they could perceive the effect the words had on me. I wished I'd taken Beauty a half dozen times in the cart so that at least my cock would be better under my control, but the thought of that only further inflamed me.

  Frozen in this shameful stance, legs sprawled, I watched, powerless, the Master going to one of the shelves and reaching up for a morocco-covered case, which he set on the table.