by Ann Rice
But it was the spectacle of it that truly shamed her.
"We are tethered to one another like little animals led to market," she thought. And she was further confused by the chains stroking her thighs and the outside of her pubic lips, by their grazing her taut belly.
"You little fiends!" she thought, glancing at the silk robes of her groom. He was fussing with her hair, forcing her back into a more convex position so that her rear was higher. She felt the teeth of a comb stroking the delicate hair around her anus, and her face flooded with a hot stinging blush.
And Tristan, did he have to move his head, making her nipples throb so?
She heard one of the grooms clap his hands. The leather thong came down to lick at Tristan's calves and the soles of his naked feet. He started forward, and she immediately hurried after him.
When she raised her head just a little to see the walls and ceiling, the thong smacked the back of her neck. Then it whipped the undersides of her feet just as Tristan's were being whipped. The leashes pulled at her nipples as if they had life of their own.
And yet the thongs smacked faster and louder, urging all the slaves to hurry. A slipper pushed at her buttocks. Yes, they must run. And, as Tristan picked up speed, so did she, remembering in a daze how she had once run upon the Queen's Bridle Path.
"Yes, hurry," she thought. "And keep your head properly lowered. And how could you think you would enter the Sultan's Palace in any other manner?"
The crowds outside might gape at the slaves, as they probably did at the most debased of prisoners. But this was the only proper position for sex slaves in such a magnificent palace.
With every inch of floor she covered, she felt more abject, her chest growing warm as she ran out of breath, her heart, as ever, beating too fast, too loudly.
The hall seemed to grow wider, higher. The drove of grooms flanked them. Yet still she could see arched doorways to the left and right and cavernous rooms tiled in the same beautifully colored marbles.
The grandeur and the solidity of the place worked their inevitable influence upon her. Tears stung her eyes. She felt small, utterly insignificant.
And yet there was something absolutely marvelous in the feeling. She was but a little thing in this vast world yet she seemed to have her proper place, more surely than she had had in the castle or even in the village.
Her nipples throbbed steadily in the fur-lined grip of the clamps, and occasional flashes of sunlight distracted her.
She felt a tightness in her throat, an overall weakness. The smell of incense, of cedar wood, of Eastern perfumes, suddenly enveloped her. And she realized that all was quiet in this world of richness and splendor; and the only sound was that of the slaves scurrying along and the thongs that licked them. Even the grooms made no sound, unless the singing of their silk robes was a sound. The silence seemed an extension of the palace, an extension of the dramatic power that was devouring them.
But as they progressed deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, as the escort of grooms dropped back a bit, leaving only the one little tormentor with his busy thong, and the procession went round corners and down even wider halls, Beauty began to see out of the corner of her eye some strange species of sculpture set in niches to adorn the corridor.
And, suddenly, she realized that these were not statues. They were living slaves fitted into the niches.
At last, she had to take a good look, and struggling not to lose her pace, she stared from right to left at these poor creatures.
Yes, men and women in alternation on both sides of the hall, standing mute in the niches. And each figure had been wrapped tightly from neck to toe in gold-tinted linen, except for the head held upright by a high ornamented brace and the naked sex organs left exposed in gilded glory.
Beauty looked down, crying to catch her breach. But she couldn't help looking up again immediately. And the spectacle became even clearer. The men had been bound with legs together, genitals thrust forward, and the women had been bound with legs apart, each leg completely wrapped and the sex left open.
All stood motionless, their long, shapely, gold neck braces fixed to the wall in back by a rod that appeared to hold them securely. And some appeared to sleep with eyes closed, while others peered down at the floor, despite their slightly lifted faces.
Many were dark-skinned, as the grooms were – and showed the luxuriant black eyelashes of the desert peoples. Almost none were fair as Tristan and Beauty were. All had been gilded.
And in a silent panic, Beauty remembered the words of the Queen's emissary, who had spoken to them on the ship before they left their sovereign's land: "Though the Sultan has many slaves from his own land, you captive Princes and Princesses are a special delicacy of sorts, and a great curiosity."
"Then surely we can't be bound and placed in niches such as these," Beauty thought, "lost among dozens and dozens of others, merely to decorate a corridor."
But she could see the real truth. This Sultan possessed such a vast number of slaves that absolutely anything might befall Beauty and her fellow captives.
As she hurried along, her knees and hands getting a little sore from the marble, she continued to study these figures.
She could make out that the arms had been folded behind the back of each one, and that the gilded nipples too were exposed and sometimes clamped, and that each figure had his or her hair combed back to expose the ears which wore jeweled ornaments.
How tender the ears looked, how much like organs!
A wave of terror passed over Beauty. And she shuddered to think of what Tristan was feeling – Tristan, who so needed to love one Master. And what about Laurent? How would this look to him after the singular spectacle of the village Punishment Cross?
There came the sharp pull of the chains again. Her nipples itched. And the thong suddenly dallied between her legs, stroking her anus and the lips of her vagina.
"You little devil," she thought. Yet as the warm tingling sensations passed all through her, she arched her back, forcing her buttocks up, and crawled with even more sprightly movements.
They were coming to a pair of doors. And with a shock, she saw that a male slave was fixed to one door and a female slave to the other. And these two were not wrapped, but rather completely naked. Gold bands around the foreheads, the legs, waist, neck, ankles, and wrists held each flat to the door with knees wide apart, the soles of the feet pressed together. The arms were fixed straight up over the head, palms outward. And the faces were still, eyes cast down, and the mouths held artfully arranged bunches of grapes and leaves that were gilded like the flesh so that the creatures looked very much like sculptures.
But the doors were opened. The slaves passed these two silent sentinels in a flash.
And the pace slowed as Beauty found herself in an immense courtyard, full of potted palm trees and flower beds bordered in variegated marble.
Sunlight dappled the tiles in front of her. The perfume of flowers suddenly refreshed her. She glimpsed blossoms of all hues, and for one paralyzing instant she saw that the vast garden was filled with gilded and caged slaves as well as other beautiful creatures fixed in dramatic positions atop marble pedestals.
Beauty was made to stop. The leashes were taken from her mouth. And she saw her groom gather up her own leashes as he stood beside her. The thong played between her thighs, tickling her, forcing her legs a little apart. Then a hand smoothed her hair tenderly. She saw Tristan to her left and Laurent to her right, and she realized that the slaves had been positioned in a loose circle.
But all at once the great crowd of grooms began to laugh and talk as though released from some enforced silence. They closed in on the slaves, hands pointing, gesturing.
The slipper was on Beauty's neck again, and it forced her head down until her lips touched the marble. She could see out of the corner of her eye that Laurent and the others were bent in the same lowly posture.
In a wash of rainbow colors the silk robes of the grooms surrounded them. The din of
conversation was worse than the noise of the crowd in the streets. Beauty knelt shuddering as she felt hands on her back and on her hair, the thong pushing her legs even wider. Silk-robed grooms stood between her and Tristan, between her and Laurent.
But suddenly a silence fell that utterly shattered the last of Beauty's fragile composure.
The grooms withdrew as if swept aside. And there was no sound except the chattering of birds, and the tinkling of wind chimes.
Then Beauty heard the soft sound of slippered feet approaching.
BEAUTY: EXAMINATION IN THE GARDEN
IT WAS NOT one man who entered the garden, but a group of three. Yet two stood back in deference to one who advanced alone and slowly.
In the tense silence, Beauty saw his feet and the hem of his robe as he moved about the circle. Richer fabric, and velvet slippers with high upturned curling toes, each decorated by a dangling ruby. He moved with slow steps, as if he was surveying everything carefully.
Beauty held her breath as he approached her. She squinted slightly as the toe of the wine-colored slipper touched her cheek, and then rested upon the back of her neck, then followed the line of her spine to its tip.
She shivered, unable to help herself, her moan sounding loud and impertinent to her own ears. But there was no reprimand.
She thought she heard a little laugh. And then a sentence spoken gently made the tears spring to her eyes again. How soothing was the voice, how unusually musical. Maybe the unintelligible language made it seem more lyrical. Yet she longed to understand the words spoken.
Of course, she had not been addressed. The words had been spoken to one of the other two men, yet the voice stirred her, almost seduced her.
Quite suddenly she felt the chains pulled hard. Her nipples stiffened with a tingling that sent its tentacles down into her groin instantly.
She knelt up, unsure, frightened, and then was pulled to her feet, nipples burning, her face flaming.
For one moment the immensity of the garden impressed her. The bound slaves, the lavish blooms, the blue sky above shockingly clear, the large assemblage of the grooms watching her. And then the man standing before her.
What must she do with her hands? She put them behind her neck, and stood staring at the tiled floor, with only the vaguest picture of the Master who faced her.
He was much taller than the little boys – in fact, he was a slender giant of a man, elegantly proportioned, and he seemed older by virtue of his air of command. And it was he who had pulled the chains himself and still held the handles.
Quite suddenly he passed them from his right hand to his left. And with the right hand, he slapped the undersides of Beauty's breasts, startling her. She bit down on her cry. But the warm yielding of her body surprised her. She throbbed with the desire to be touched, slapped again, for an even more annihilating violence.
And in the moment of trying to collect her wits, she had glimpsed the man's dark wavy hair, not quite shoulder length, and his eyes, so black they seemed drawn in ink, with large shining beads of jet for the irises.
"How gorgeous these desert people can be," she thought. And her dreams in the hold of the ship suddenly rose to mock her. Love him? Love this one who is but a servant like the others?
Yet the face burnt through her fear and agitation. It seemed an impossible face suddenly. It was almost innocent.
The ringing slaps came again, and she stepped back before she could stop herself. Her breasts were flooded with warmth. At once, her little groom thrashed her disobedient legs with the thong. She steadied herself, sorry for the failure.
The voice spoke again and it was as light as before, as melodious and almost caressing. But it sent the little grooms into a flurry of activity.
She felt soft, silken fingers on her ankles and on her wrists, and before she realized what was happening, she was lifted, her legs raised at right angles to her body and spread wide by the grooms who held her, her arms forced straight up in the air, her back and head supported firmly.
She shivered spasmodically, her thighs aching, her sex brutally exposed. And then she felt another pair of hands lift her head, and she peered right into the eyes of the mysterious giant of a Master, who smiled at her radiantly.
O, too handsome he was. Instantly, she looked away, her lids fluttering. His eyes were tilted upwards at the outsides, which gave him a slightly devilish look, and his mouth was large and extremely kissable. But, for all the innocence of the expression, a ferocious spirit seemed to emanate from him. She sensed menace in him. She could feel it in his touch. And, with her legs held wide apart as they were, she passed into a silent panic.
As if to confirm his power, the Master quickly slapped her face, causing her to whimper before she could stop herself. The hand rose again, this time slapping her right cheek, and then the left again, until she was suddenly crying audibly.
"But what have I done?" she thought. And through a mist of tears she saw only curiosity in his face. He was studying her. It wasn't innocence. She had judged wrongly. It was merely fascination with what he was doing that flamed in him.
"So it's a test," she tried to tell herself. "But how do I pass or fail?" And shuddering, she saw the hands rising again.
He tilted her head back and opened her mouth, touching her tongue and her teeth. Chills passed over her. She felt her whole body convulse in the hands of the grooms. The probing fingers touched her eyelids, her eyebrows. They wiped at her tears, which were spilling down her face as she stared at the blue sky above her.
And then she felt the hands at her exposed sex. The thumbs went into her vagina, and she was pulled impossibly wide as her hips rocked forward, shaming her.
It seemed she would burst with orgasm, that she couldn't contain it. But was this forbidden? And how would she be punished? She tossed her head from side to side, struggling to command herself. But the fingers were so gentle, so soft, yet firm as they opened her. If they touched her clitoris, she would be lost, incapable of restraint.
But mercifully, they let her go, tugging at her pubic hair, and only pinching her lips together quickly.
In a daze, she bowed her head, the sight of her nakedness thoroughly unnerving her. She saw the new Master turn and snap his fingers. And through the tangle of her hair she saw Elena hoisted instantly by the grooms just as she had been.
Elena struggled for composure, her pink sex wet and gaping through its wreath of brown hair, the long delicate muscles of her thighs twitching. Beauty watched in terror as the Master proceeded with the same examination.
Elena's high, sharply angled breasts heaved as the Master played with her mouth, her teeth. But when the slaps came Elena was utterly silent. And the look on the Master's face further confused Beauty.
How passionately interested he seemed, how intent upon what he was doing. Not even the cruel Master of Postulants at the castle had seemed so dedicated as this one. And his charm was considerable. The rich velvet robe was well tailored to his straight back and shoulders. His hands had a beguiling grace of movement as he spread Elena's red pubic mouth and the poor Princess pumped her hips disgracefully.
At the sight of Elena's sex growing full and wet and obviously hungry, Beauty's long starvation at sea made her feel desperate. And when the Master smiled and smoothed Elena's long hair back from her forehead, examining her eyes, Beauty felt raging jealousy.
"No, it would be ghastly to love any of them," she thought. She couldn't give her heart. She tried not to look anymore. Her own legs throbbed, the grooms holding them back as firmly as ever. And her own sex swelled unbearably.
But there were more spectacles for her. The Master came back to Tristan. And now he was lifted into the air, and his legs spread wide in the same manner. Out of the corner of her eye, Beauty saw that the little grooms struggled under Tristan's weight, and Tristan's beautiful face was crimson with humiliation as his hard and thrusting organ was examined closely by the Master.
The Master's fingers played with the foreskin, played
with the shiny tip, squeezing out of it a single drop of glistening moisture. Beauty could feel the tension in Tristan's limbs. But she dared not look up to see his face again as the Master reached to examine it.
In a blur she saw the Master's face, saw the enormous ink-black eyes, and the hair swept back over the ear to reveal a tiny gold ring stabbing the ear lobe.
She heard him slapping Tristan, and she closed her eyes tight as Tristan finally moaned, the slaps seeming to resound through the garden.
When she opened her eyes again it was because the Master had laughed softly to himself as he passed in front of her. And she saw his hand rise almost absently to squeeze her left breast lightly. The tears sprang to her eyes, her mind struggling to understand the outcome of his examinations, to push away the fact that he drew her more than any being who had hitherto claimed her.
Now, to her right and slightly in front of her, it was Laurent who must be raised up for the Master's scrutiny. And, as the enormous Prince was lifted, she heard the Master make some quick verbal outburst which brought laughter from all the other grooms immediately. No one needed to translate it for her. Laurent was too powerfully built, his organ was too splendid.
And she could see now that it was fully erect, well trained as it was, and the sight of the heavily muscled thighs spread wide apart brought back to her delirious memories of the Punishment Cross. She tried not to look at the enormous scrotum, but she could not help herself.
And it seemed that the Master had been moved by these superior endowments to a new excitement. He smacked Laurent hard with the back of his hand several times in amazingly rapid succession. The enormous torso writhed, the grooms struggling to keep it still.
And then the Master removed the clamps, letting them drop to the ground, and pressed both of Laurent's nipples as Laurent moaned loudly.
But something else was happening. Beauty saw it. Laurent had looked at the Master directly. He had done it more than once. Their eyes had met. And now as his nipples were squeezed again, very hard it seemed, the Prince stared right at the Master.