We were back on open, level ground now, heading, I guessed, back toward the ring. We turned a corner in the path, and I realized that we were heading straight for a low stone wall. I wasn’t getting any instructions to slow down from Don—had he fallen asleep at the wheel? Hey, I might be perverse but I’m not crazy, I thought, and began to prepare for a halt, when all hell broke loose. The reins jerked my head back, the whip started raining down on my shoulders and ass, and Don started shouting insults, “Bad, bad, no! Bad pony! Stupid girl!”
I stopped running—the reins were certainly telling me to do that now—and he jumped out of the cart and ran up to me in a fury. “Did I tell you to slow down?” he yelled. “Did I tug the reins or yell to slow down? What the fuck made you think you could decide that? What the fuck made you think at all?”
Of course. The wall was supposed to be a test. And I’d flunked immediately. After the fact it seemed so simple. Of course they wouldn’t let me go into the wall, and they did not fall asleep at the wheel around here. Don would have jerked me to a halt in plenty of time, I realized. I was stupid. And bad. I hung my head and wept in front of him.
He watched me for a while and then slapped my cheek lightly. “Head up,” he said, but not unkindly. “We’ll try it again.”
He got back into the cart, reined me around, and we went back a few hundred yards along the path. And this time I just kept running toward the wall, proudly and trustingly, until at the very last minute he jerked my head back and I dug my heels in and stopped—well, I stopped every bit as short as Stephanie had done the day before. And as we trotted back to the ring, which wasn’t far from the stone wall, I was delighted by Don’s murmurs of praise and encouragement and almost ignored the thought that crept unbidden into my head just then: Sir Harold was right; Jonathan won’t know me.
Don reported to Sir Harold that he thought I could pull paying customers now, giving him the specifics of the morning. Sir Harold looked almost convinced and said he’d think about it, and Phil unharnessed me and took me back to the stable for grooming, food, and a nap. And that afternoon, I got my first paying customer.
Given my luck, of course, it turned out to be a Muffy. I mean, not one of Jonathan’s Muffies, just a specimen of the generic type. Which means, even though I think I did reasonably well, I got hit quite a lot. I think that there’s something about me that gets to them, that I’m a symbolic stand-in for themselves, for their fevered imaginings of how they’d do in my place.
But then, as Sir Harold said, I think way too much. I’ll never be able to change that, but I realized that first afternoon that I was learning how to keep it at bay while I was pulling a cart. I mean, there’s just so much physical data to have to deal with—the light, shade, and colors whizzing by, the shape of the path under my feet, the complicated embrace of the bridle, tail, and harness, the pleasure and desire of the driver, translated into tugs at the reins and slaps of the whip. Then there are the ache of my own muscles and bruises, the pounding of my feet and heart, the sharpness of my breath in my chest, and the burn of salty sweat dripping into my eyes. And the challenge, the ceaseless challenge to look good, proud, upright through it all.
Well, wax poetic over it as I might, my new pony persona didn’t stop me from gossiping and giggling with Cathy through the hose after dark. It was a nice break, a way to be myself. But not too much myself, or too deeply. Because I discovered that although Cathy liked nothing better than to talk endlessly about Madame, her elegance and her cruelty, I didn’t want to talk about Jonathan. I was confused about what I felt about leaving him.
And Cathy was cool. She didn’t understand me, but she did understand that each slave was unique in what made him or her tick, and she stopped asking me things I clearly didn’t want to answer. So we just used the evenings to compare notes, on customers, on the stable guys—especially when, as bonuses for extra good work, Sir Harold let them use us—and of course on the other ponies. We pieced together the information that while most of us were temporary boarders, our masters and mistresses doubtless paying obscene sums to Sir Harold for our training, Sir Harold owned four girls himself. Those were the ones who could goose-step, or even, Cathy whispered to me in awe, negotiate the path through the woods in heels. I found this difficult to believe, but I watched them whenever I got a chance, Gillian, Cynthia, Anna, and Jenny, and they were so astonishingly surefooted, so proud and gorgeous, that I thought maybe it could actually be true.
But our favorite topic of bitchy gossip was, naturally, Stephanie, nasty little good girl princess Stephanie. Because even Sir Harold’s ponies didn’t have her haughty manner, her way of doing everything perfectly but of not being here at all. It was as clear to Cathy as it was to me that Mike—Aerosmith, as I still thought of him—was pathetically infatuated with her, and we didn’t approve of that. All the rest of us had figured out a kind of rapport with the guys who worked for Sir Harold, an admiration for how good they were at their jobs, and a sympathetic acceptance of their idiosyncrasies (like Frank’s girl perversion). It was amazing how much you could express with a bit in your mouth, and how much people communicated to you, I thought. And I remembered, with a start of recognition, Kate Clarke’s telling Jonathan that if I were hers, she’d put a bit and bridle on me. She’d been right, I thought, I had needed this training badly.
Stephanie, though, it was as though she didn’t need this training, as though she were above it. Cathy and I were as nasty and bitchy as we could be, egging each other on to imagine humiliations for her, humiliations she never got, of course, because she was so prissy and perfect. If we’d been in summer camp, we would have short-sheeted her bed by now. Or dipped her hand in a bucket of water while she was sleeping to make her pee in her sleeping bag.
“What I would have liked to see,” Cathy whispered one night, “was her pulling a plow.” It was her last night here—Madame was coming for her tomorrow. She was so excited that she couldn’t sleep, and I was so sad about her leaving that I couldn’t, either. So we both were overtired and punchy, repeating all our old Stephanie jokes just for companionship. But this plow stuff was news to me.
“A plow?” I whispered. “They have a farm here?”
“Well,” she answered, “when Madame drove me up here, on the road through the grounds, we passed a girl pulling a plow. They have a vegetable garden, I think, and they grow some flowers. Anyhow, the girl, she’s gone home since then; she was all tired and muddy and everything, and, you know, bent over. She looked terrible. Madame asked Sir Harold about it and he just rumbled, ‘Punishment.’ And then he looked at me and said, ‘For a pony who didn’t behave.’”
“Wow,” I breathed, “it does sound terrible; it would be perfect for her.”
And we were so taken with this image, both of us, that we didn’t even hear when Phil and Mike, both of them that night, came through for a bed check and shined a flashlight right at the rubber hose between my mouth and Cathy’s ear.
“Well,” Phil drawled, “will you look at this? Two little ponies talking on the telephone. Or pretending to talk, anyway, because everybody knows ponies can’t talk. Why, that’s so cute, Mike, I think we’ll just have to show the boss. Get the fuck up, you two.”
And while we scrambled to our feet, he and Mike gathered up all our hardware in our arms—boots, bridles, everything, and not forgetting our telephone. Then they each grabbed a riding crop and began hitting us hard, on the ass, driving us barefoot through the night, running up a path we’d never been on to Sir Harold’s house.
It was an old-fashioned house on a hill, with a porch around it, gables and gingerbread and cupolas. There was a light burning in an upstairs window, so it wasn’t long before Sir Harold came down to open the door, barefoot with bony, hairy ankles and wrapped in a voluminous maroon bathrobe with a big gold crest on the pocket. He nodded as Phil explained the situation and showed him the little bit of hose, which he put in his pocket.
“Talking to each other,” he murmured. “Shocking. Wel
l, boys, we’ve got a busy night ahead of us. Get the two-seater out and harness these bad ponies to it. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
Phil left to get the two-seater, while Mike started getting us into our harnesses, bridles, tails, and boots. I was scared by the idea of a night ride—and of the fact that I doubted that this would be our only punishment—but I was even more afraid to look at Cathy. She was sobbing silently, huge tears coursing down her face, and I knew that she was thinking about Madame coming tomorrow. Sir Harold would doubtless tell her everything.
It couldn’t have been more than five minutes before Mike returned with the two-seater cart and attached us to it snugly. Then Sir Harold floated down his front steps in shoes and socks but still in his bathrobe, carrying a large, menacing black whip. He shot us a fearsome look, climbed into the cart, and cracked the whip over us, pulling the reins to signal that we head out for the path over the ridge and through the woods, and at our fastest gallop.
And that’s all that happened for the next hour. We ran and ran, faster and harder than I could have imagined, the whip cracking over us, both of us groaning, weeping, panting, and feeling as if this would just go on forever. Once in a while one of us would slip—the path seemed different in the dark and sometimes in the thickest parts of the forest you couldn’t even see the moon—and the other would have to drag her along until she got back into the rhythm. Once we both slipped, just about at the same time, and I thought dimly how lucky we were that we were going slightly uphill, so that the cart didn’t just roll over us, because I didn’t trust Sir Harold to use the brake. We staggered to our feet, the whip blows raining down on us, and started up again, and maybe ten minutes later, Sir Harold drove us back to the ring, where Frank, Mike, Don, and Phil were all sitting on the fence, waiting by the light of a Coleman lantern.
“I want them back at my house in an hour,” Sir Harold said, as Don and Phil jumped down to unharness us. “You boys can have ’em till then.” And he hiked up the path to his house on the hill, his robe billowing behind him.
They took everything off of us except our tails and pushed us into the ring. Then, slapping our asses hard, Don said curtly, “Run!”
I couldn’t see which direction Cathy was running in. I just started running, barefoot, in the direction the slap seemed to be telling me to go in. And I got about halfway across when I felt a rope around me, pulling me to the ground. I looked down at myself, puzzled, to see a rough rope looped around my torso, and then I looked up, to see the other end of the rope in Frank’s hand. Lassoed, my god, I didn’t know these guys could do rodeo tricks. Which is what they did for about fifteen minutes, all of them taking cracks at roping us, pulling us down hard, reining us in.
Finally, they seemed to be tired of that one and it was Mike, I guess, who yelled at us, “Get down on your hands and knees and look at us.”
And when we did, in the center of the ring, he added, “You two look disgusting.” It was true, too. We were a mess, filthy, sweaty, wet with tears and drool.
The other guys nodded, and Phil added, “If we wanted to fuck you, we could wash you down. But that sounds a little too much like what we do on the job every day—the boss just throws in the fucking so’s he can get away with the pitiful wages he pays us. And you know how damn hard we work. So, no, working’s not what we have in mind. We were thinking, more like, of watching.”
And then they were all very quiet, waiting to see what we’d do. And I looked at Cathy, and she looked at me, and bruised, miserable, exhausted, and scared as we were, we had to smile a little. I mean, these really weren’t bad guys and it really wasn’t the world’s worst punishment they’d cooked up for us.
“Uh, well, could we wash ourselves a little first?” I asked. “Or, each other?”
“I guess,” Frank said grudgingly, “but hurry up.”
One of them threw us a rag, and we ran to a spigot near the gate of the ring. And we got a little of the worst sweat and crud off each other. And I kissed Cathy softly on the mouth, and she stroked my breast a little, and then we came back, hand in hand, to the middle of the ring.
Where we just stood, looking at each other and considering. I knew that the guys were starting to get restless, but I figured we were entitled to think about this for a minute. Then Cathy took a step forward and pressed her front against mine. We were pretty much the same height and I loved how her breasts felt against me. I started to rub, started to paint designs on her with my own breasts, up and down and around. She was firm and smooth—sandstone, I thought at first, an Eskimo carving, but getting warmer and softer and more yielding every minute.
She pushed me down to my knees and I licked the shape of her concave belly, the ridges of her hipbones. I made huge circles with my tongue, stopping just short of her pubic hair, while my breasts ground into her thighs and my hands grasped her ass.
Until finally she couldn’t stand being teased by my mouth any longer and pushed my head into her crotch. “Fuckin’ A,” I heard one of the guys mutter, and I realized that they’d gotten off the fence where they’d been sitting or lounging and were clustered around us. Good, I thought, maybe I’ll teach them something. I mean, it wouldn’t hurt things around here if they ate a little pussy, now and again. And I dug my tongue in and explored, tracing the shape of her labia, then settling in to suck. I heard her moan and felt her short, sharp orgasm. Fast, I thought. Shit, I paid too much attention to the guys and not enough to her. I looked up at her, expecting some mild disappointment, but was surprised by her intent look, her shining eyes. Like, I thought wildly, a vampire in the moonlight?
But no, this story does not make that wild genre switch, it just modulates, ever so slightly, as Cathy did, pushing me to the ground and lying down next to me. And kissing me deeply, while her fingers opened my vulva and entered, moved, clenched, and moved some more, and… oh my god, I felt knuckles. My eyes flew open and I saw her green-brown eyes and wicked smile, and I remembered that I’d admired the muscles in her arms. Biceps, triceps—the girl was wasted on a pony farm, she should have been pitching the World Series. Or so I thought, when she gave me a chance to think at all, just banging me, wide open and stuffed full, while also never so aware of the horsetail dildo up my ass, crowding things up even more. I came and came and it didn’t seem as though she would ever stop. I realized that I was going to have to beg her to, which I didn’t really want to do, but what a joke, me and I’m sure also the guys thinking that they were in for a show of some girlie lingerie sex, even if we were rolling around in the dirt, and getting this instead, and to hell with it, I’m not proud Stop please! Cathy, beautiful Cathy, I beg you, thank you.
“Ohhhhh,” I groaned. And pulled her down and kissed her. And she whispered, “That was new for you, wasn’t it? I’m glad it was me, then.”
And then the guys were all over her. I was scared for a minute, not knowing whether they were going to gang-bang her or what, but it turned out they were more interested in high-fiving her. And I couldn’t imagine why she’d worry about Madame, who, it seemed to me, would be so horny after a week away from that genius arm that she’d care less about a little length of hose. I mean, she might be cruel and elegant, but she probably wasn’t stupid.
Still, it looked like our hour was up, and Don and Phil walked us up the hill to Sir Harold’s, rang the bell and waited in the hall after he’d pushed us into a little office he had. He told us to get down on our knees in front of his desk, while he sat on the edge of it, swinging one leg. And then he took the little length of hose out of his pocket and just asked quietly, “Which one of you?”
And you know that he thought it was me anyway, and that I figured he might as well keep thinking it, because Cathy was looking scared again of Madame, and, well, I didn’t know what Jonathan would say or think about any of this, so I figured I’d risk it. That was how I finally ended up spending the rest of that strange night wrapped in a ragged blanket in a tumbledown little shack next to the vegetable garden, trying to get some
sleep before I had to wake up the next morning to pull the plow.
It was actually dark when a rooster woke me up. I stretched and groaned. Everything hurt, especially my insides, and I wondered if Cathy had pulverized them beyond recognition. Cheap, I thought, at the price.
Because I was realizing that even as grubby, achy, and unsure of what the day would bring as I was, I was downright cheery. When you’ve been that massively fucked, I thought, life just doesn’t look so bad. I looked at the filthy little hut I was lying in, the hairy, greasy rope looped around my neck and tied to a hook in the wall, the dirt under my fingernails and on just about every other inch of me, too, and I shook my head in disbelief that I could actually be feeling anywhere near good. And then I shrugged, turned over, and got another half hour of deep, dreamless sleep.
When I woke up again, it was to some nasty kicks in the ribs, which I realized had been probably going on for some time. “Up, now, you lazy thing, get up now!” I heard. Right, okay, yeah, lazy thing, that’s me, I thought groggily, okay, how do you want me? I figured I’d try hands and knees, which would take less effort than any other position I could think of. And I guess that was right, or close enough, because the kicks stopped.
I looked up at a heavy, round-faced woman, dressed in overalls, work boots, and a floppy sun hat, holding a pan of what looked like garbage. Table scraps, I realized, as she put it in front of me. And tastier, once you got over the weird feeling, than the Science Diet they’d been giving me in the stables. I nosed out a little slice of salami—pepperoni, actually —and thought, it could be worse, Carrie.
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