by Anne Rice
“She’s not Lady Juliana!”
“Yes, that’s exactly who she is. How did you know?”
“She was my tormentor at the castle, my Mistress as surely as the Crown Prince was my Master,” Beauty said. How well she could see Lady Juliana’s lovely face, and those thick braids. How often had Beauty run from her paddle along the Bridle Path? “0, how dreadful of her!” she said. “But what happened after that? How did you manage to escape her?”
“I told you I broke and ran from her, and the Captain of the Guard had to bring me back. It was clear I was not ready to return to the castle.” He laughed. “She begged and pleaded for me, I’m told. And promised to tame me herself with no help from anyone.”
“Monster!” Beauty said.
The Prince dried her arms and her face. “Step out of the tub,” he said, “and be quiet. I think Mistress Lockley is in the kitchen.” Then he added in a whisper, “Mistress Lockley wouldn’t let me go. But Juliana isn’t the first slave to remain and become a terror. Maybe someday you’ll face the choice and suddenly have the paddle in your hands, and all those naked bottoms at your mercy. Think of it,” he said, his dark face crinkling with a good-natured laugh.
“Never!” Beauty gasped.
“Well, we must hurry. The Captain’s waiting.”
The image of Lady Juliana naked with Roger flared bright in Beauty’s mind. How she would love just once to turn Lady Juliana over her knee! She felt a hard stirring between her legs. But what was she thinking? The mere mention of the Captain caused in her an immediate weakness. She had no paddle in her hands and no one at her mercy. She was a bad, naked slave, about to be sent to a hardened soldier with an obvious taste for rebels. And envisioning that sun-browned handsome face and the deep gleaming eyes, she thought, “If I’m such a bad girl, then I shall act like one.”
THE CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD
MISTRESS LOCKLEY had come out of the door. She untied Beauty’s hands and dried her hair roughly. Then she pinioned Beauty’s wrists behind her back and forced her into the Inn and up a narrow curved wooden stair behind the giant fireplace. Beauty could feel the warmth of the chimney through the wall, but she was marched upstairs so fast she scarcely felt anything.
Mistress Lockley opened a small heavy oak door and forced Beauty down on her knees in the room, pitching her forward so that she had to put out her hands to catch herself.
“There she is, my handsome Captain,” she said. Beauty heard the door close behind her. She knelt, still uncertain of what she meant to do, her heart racing as she saw the familiar calfskin boots and the glow of the little fire on the hearth, and the large wooden paneled bed under the sloped ceiling. The Captain sat in a heavy armchair beside a long dark wood table.
But as she waited, he gave no orders.
Rather, she felt his hand gathering the length of her hair and lifting her by it, so that she had to crawl forward a little and then kneel up in front of him. She stared at him with astonished eyes, seeing again that brazenly handsome face and luxuriant blond hair of which he was surely vain, and the green eyes deep set in the sunbrowned skin meeting her stare with the same intensity.
A terrible weakness came over her. Something within her softened completely and the softness seemed to grow, infecting all of her heart and spirit. Quickly she shut it off. But some understanding was just coming to her....
The Captain lifted her to her feet, her hair wound around his left hand. Towering over her, he kicked her legs wide apart.
“You will show yourself to me,” he said with the barest trace of a smile, and before she could think of what to do, he let her hair go and she was standing free and a wave of humiliation passed over her.
He sank down in the chair again quite confident of her obedience. And her heart thudded so loudly she wondered if he could hear it.
“Put your hands between your legs, and part your private lips. I wish to see your endowments.”
A scarlet blush burned her face. She stared at him and didn’t move. Now her heart was racing.
And in an instant he had risen, imprisoned her wrists, lifting her and seating her hard upon the wooden table. He bent her back, her wrists pushed against her spine, and forced her legs wide apart with his knee as he looked down at her.
She didn’t flinch or look away, but gazed right into his face as she felt his gloved fingers doing what he had commanded her to do, spreading the lips of her vagina wide, and now he looked down at it.
She struggled, twisted, tried desperately to free herself, the fingers prying her wide apart, pinching hard at her clitoris. She felt the color scalding her face, and she rocked her hips in open rebellion. But under the rough leather casing of his gloves, her clitoris hardened, grew large, bursting over his thumb and forefinger.
She was gasping, and she had turned her face away, and when she heard him unfastening his breeches and felt the hard tip of his cock against her thigh, she moaned and lifted her hips in offering.
At once the cock was driving inside of her. It filled her so completely that she felt the hot, wet pubic hair of the Captain sealing her closed and felt his hands under her sore buttocks as he lifted her.
He carried her away from the table as her arms wound around his neck and her legs about his waist, and with his hands he worked her back and forth on his thrusting cock, lifting her as she almost cried out and then forcing her down on the full length of the organ. Harder and harder he worked her, and she did not even realize that he was cradling her head in his right hand or that he had turned her face up or that he had forced his tongue into her mouth. She felt only the jarring explosions of pleasure washing through her loins and then her mouth clamped shut on his and her body was taut and weightless, being lifted and brought down, lifted and brought down, until with a loud cry, an indecent cry, she felt the final shattering orgasm.
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 th
e 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. “0, 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 on 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 t
owards 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.
