Beauty's Punishment

by Ann Rice

  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 widespread 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 were 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.

  But her thoughts drifted to Tristan. She had declared herself such a rebel to Tristan.

  What had happened to him with Nicolas the Chronicler? How would she ever find out? Maybe Prince Roger could tell her some news. Perhaps the dense little world of the village had its secret arteries of information. She had to know if Tristan was all right. She wished she could just see him. And dreaming of Tristan, she drifted into sleep again.

  GRAND ENTERTAINMENT

  Tristan: Without the dread pony harnesses, I felt rudely bare and vulnerable as I marched fast towards the end of the road, expecting any second the tug of the reins as if I still wore them. Many coaches roared by us now, decorated with lanterns, the slaves clopping fast, heads high, just as mine had been. Did I like it better that way? Or this way? I didn't know! I only knew fear and desire, and an absolute awareness that my handsome Master Nicolas, my Master who was stricter than so many others, was walking behind me.

  A brilliant light poured into the road ahead. We were coming to the end of the village. But as I marched around the last of the high buildings to my left, I saw, not the marketplace, but some other open place, immensely crowded and full of torchlight and lantern light. I could smell the wine in the air and hear the loud, drunken laughter. Couples danced arm in arm, and winesellers with full wineskins over their shoulders pushed through the crowd offering cups to all comers.

  My Master stopped suddenly and gave a coin to one of these and held the cup before me to lap the wine from it. I flushed to the roots of my hair at the kindness of it, drinking the wine greedily but as neatly as I could. My throat had been burning.

  And when I looked up I saw clearly that this was some sort of fairgrounds of punishments. Surely it was what the auctioneer had called the Place of Public Punishment.

  Slaves were pilloried in a long row to one side, others were tethered in dimly lit tents with the entrances open for villagers to go and come, paying a coin to an attendant. Other tethered slaves ran in a circle around a high Maypole, punished by four paddlers. Here and there a pair of slaves scampered in the dust to retrieve some object tossed before them, while young men and women urged them on, obviously having placed some bet on the hoped-for winner. Against the ramparts far to the right, giant wheels turned slowly, spread-eagle slaves going round and round, their enflamed thighs and buttocks targets for apple cores, peach stones, and even raw eggs from the crowd, while several other slaves hobbled along at a squat behind their Masters, necks tethered by two short leather chains to their widespread knees, their arms stretched out to support long poles with baskets of apples for sale dangling from the ends of them. Two pink, plump-breasted little Princesses, glistening with sweat, rode wooden horses with wild rocking gestures, their vaginas obviously impaled by wooden cocks. And as I watched astonished, my Master walking me slowly now, his own eyes sweeping the fair, one Princess reached her flushing, red-faced climax for the crowd and was obviously applauded the winner of the contest. The other was paddled, castigated, and scolded by those who had laid down bets on her.

  But the grand entertainment was the high turntable where a slave was being thrashed by a long rectangular leather paddle. My heart sank when I saw it. I remembered the Mistress's words, threatening me with the Public Turntable.

  And I was being forced steadily towards it. We were pushing right through the sea of howling, whooping spectators that radiated out some fifty feet from the high platform and right towards the slaves who knelt up with their hands behind their necks, much berated by the onlookers, as they waited obviously at the wooden steps to be taken up and paddled.

  As I stared in disbelief my Master forced me directly into place at the end of this line. Coins were passed to an attendant. I was pushed to my knees, unable to conceal my fear, the tears stinging my eyes at once, my whole frame shuddering. What had I done? Dozens of round faces turned towards me. I could hear their taunts:

  "Oh, is the castle slave too good for the Public Turntable? Look at that cock." "Has that cock been a bad boy?" "What's he being whipped for, Master Nicolas?"

  "His good looks," said my Master with a soft touch of dark humor. I looked towards the steps and the high platform in horror. But I could see almost nothing but the lower steps now, as I knelt, the crowd some twenty or thirty deep in all directions. But laughter exploded at my Master's answer, the light of torches glinting on moist cheeks and eyes. The slave in front of me struggled forward as another was rushed up the steps. From somewhere came the loud roll of a drum and renewed screams from the crowd. I twisted around to face my Master frantically. I went down kissing his boots. The crowd pointed and laughed. "Poor desperate Prince," a man taunted. "Do you miss your nice perfumed bath at the castle?" "Did the Queen paddle you over her knee?" "Look at that cock, that cock needs a good Master or Mistress."

  I felt a firm hand grasp my hair and raise my head, and I saw through my tears that handsome face above me, smooth and a little hard. The blue eyes narrowed very slowly, their dark centers seeming to expand, as the right hand was raised, the first finger wagging back and forth stiffly, the lips forming the word "no" sil
ently. The breath went out of me. The eyes grew still and stone-cold and the left hand let me go. I turned back in line of my own accord, clamping my hands to the back of my neck, again shuddering and swallowing as the crowd gave exaggerated "ooooh's" and "awwww's" of mock sympathy.

  "That's a good boy," shouted a man in my ear, "you don't want to disappoint this crowd, now, do you?" I felt his boot touch my buttocks. "I'm betting ten pence he puts on the best show tonight."

  "And who's to judge that?" said another.

  "Ten pence he really moves that bottom!"

  It seemed an eternity before I saw the next slave go up, and then the next and the next, and finally I was the last one struggling forward in the dust, the sweat pouring down me in rivulets, my knees burning and my head swimming. Even in this moment I believed somehow I had to be rescued. My Master had to be merciful, change his mind, realize I'd done nothing to deserve it. It had to happen because I could not endure it.

  The crowd shifted and pressed in. Loud cries rose as the Princess being paddled above squealed and I heard the thunder of her feet on the turntable. I felt the sudden impulse to rise and run, but I did not move, and the noise in the square seemed pumped to greater and greater volume by a roll of drums again. The paddling was over and I was next. Two attendants were rushing me up the steps while with my whole soul I rebelled, and I heard my Master's firm command, "No fetters."

  No fetters. So there had been that choice. I almost broke into a wild struggle. O, please for the mercy of fetters. But to my horror I was of my own accord stretching out to place my chin on the high wooden post and spreading my knees, and clasping my hands on my back with the rough hands of the attendants merely guiding me.