by Jeremy Reed
It was the young men in whom Donatien expressed spectatorial interest. There was a transvestite in glitter make-up, who possessed the curves usually associated with a girl's bottom, but Donatien disapproved of his pedestrian genitalia. He decided to make no purchase on the boy, but for good measure stood up and executed a stinging lash to the boy's buttocks. It was an arbitrary and random cut, and Donatien looked unsatisfied by his capricious outburst. He withdrew to his chair, determined to preserve his whip arm for the right subject.
The guests were busy making selections from the voluptuous harem. The girls had been taught to wiggle with a circular rhythm that distributed body weight in constant oscillation from left cheek to right. They walked from their hips, and the boys had learnt a similar method of attracting backside attention.
XZ had removed himself to a corner of the room and was sipping a bone-dry champagne. Donatien felt himself being observed and prickled at the suspected intrusion.
Unable to restrain his insurgent need, the young androgynous man had mounted his redhead, and was vigorously fucking her on a mauve velvet sofa. One of the oriental girls from the harem had presented her backside to the young man, and periodically he would look up from his smouldering redhead, and lick the other girl's pussy. To augment the undulating geometry established by this triumvirate, one of the rent boys began sucking the androgynous young man's balls, while a fifth entered the rent boy, and became the pivotal support for this multiple chain.
Seeing an immediate opportunity to indulge in a little Sadean perversity, Donatien rose, took his marksman's aim at the fifth man's oiled bottom, and struck a blow so severe that the ricochet was felt by everyone all the way down to the impaled redhead. Donatien cut a second and a third stroke, before retiring to his chair. The spectacle didn't merit a staccato thrashing, and Donatien was still intent on reserving his energies for the right erotic construct. It would take a particularly complex assemblage of bodies, or just the right harmony to the proportions of an individual bottom before he would be tempted to lacerate his victims with renowned fury.
Donatien resumed his scat directly opposite, but a long way removed from XZ. The latter's silver lenses were fixed on him with all the inscrutable alienation of an android. Donatien wondered if XZ inhabited the same time-zone as the other guests, of if he lived permanently in what ufologists called missing time. He seemed absent or too present, and Donatien couldn't decide into which category XZ fell. He had the feeling XZ was psyching his impulses, and hoping perhaps to place a glitch in his electrics. He suspected their mental combat would be mutually devastating, and potentially annihilative. But for the time he reviewed XZ from a suitable distance, and admitted no concessions to his intense scrutiny of both himself and his sister.
Marciana had decided that she would definitely go for a threesome with Leanda and Nicole. The two women corresponded to her feline characteristics, and were inveterately fetishistic to the point of having rhinestones hand-sewn on their panties by one of their Japanese maids. They had been informing Marciana of these details, and of how the two of them owned over five thousand pairs of panties, each garment having been made to meticulous specifications. Silks and transparent chiffons were matched with contrasting lace in the design of the items, the fabric being later finished with pearl or rhinestone decorations, or trimmed with fur or braided sequins. The two women promised Marciana a gift box of Pleasure Château lingerie, describing how each item was monogrammed with the intertwined letters L. and N.
In return, Marciana promised to show the two women her lingerie collection, famous for its backless Sadean panties, and a collection of hand-embroidered silk and satin suspender belts. Marciana was busy imagining the luxurious hours ahead with the three women all modelling items of her lingerie, a thrill that would heighten her own future contact with the garments.
The quintuple of orgiasts assembled on and around the sofa, had been joined by another three participants, two men and one of the harem girls, and they soon contrived to fit themselves into the chain of interactive fucking. The ramified extensions corresponded perfectly to Donatien's idea of sex. It was only in his relations with Marciana that he asserted the prerogative of monogamy. In all other respects he believed in numbers at the expense of couples, and in exhibitionism at the expense of privacy. lie sat watching the assortment of harem bottoms like an eagle on its spacey crag. He signalled to three of the boys to present asses, and insisted on inspecting their buttocks from a point of close-up scrutiny. His eyes sat on their flesh like molten drops. He appraised every centimetre with a knowing that had explored and entered tells of thousands of bottoms over the centuries.
After minute inspection of each of the boy's bottoms, he dismissed them with a hard, disdainful slap. Two red spots glowered like rouge on the bottoms at hand, and Donatien signalled for two Persian girls to come and sit on his lap, something they did by placing their backs to him. He attended to nothing but their blue-black hair, delighting in its texture, the rhinestones sprinkled in the curls, and the perfume with which it had been scented. Stroking a woman's hair encouraged aspects of tenderness in Donatien, and for a moment his psyched up person entered an emotive space, and he was temporarily lost in his absorption of beauty. He liked Marciana's hair to be cut into the sharp definition of a fringe, so that it could be left down, pinned back or swept up in a punky quiff.
Donatien dismissed the Persian girls, and found his eyes jumping to XZ's indomitable lenses. He resented feeling under scrutiny in his own house, and sensed that wherever he sat in the theatre, the visual attack would follow. Instead, he let the wine he was drinking evoke autumn, and imagined boars crashing through moulting forests, and heard again the interminable rains flashing through umbrageous oaks. Part of him would like to have been out riding through the woods, his mind full of nothing but the scent of rotting leaves, and the sound of chestnuts crashing out of high crowns.
Almost the entire harem was now participating in the sexual rites that had begun with the redhead and the androgynous young man, and spiralled into a high-rise of undulating bodies, polymorphic pacts and lesbian trysts on human furniture. The redhead had graduated to being used three ways, and her insatiable need pleaded for progressively severer treatment. The orgiasts were creating a synthesis of rhythmically discriminate fucking, and Donatien was quick to note the select number of guests who had refrained from becoming participants in this tentacular syntax of bodies. He observed how Raoul and the midget chose to keep apart, as did Leanda and Nicole, and the increasingly withdrawn XZ. The midget maintained a constant discourse with his monkey, and the two incongruous beings seemed to Donatien's eye to exist on a level of amused harmony. The monkey perfectly understood the midget's raucous banter, and the two of them were busy sharing a joint.
Donatien had decided that his only means of presentation to XZ was to establish a meeting for the following day. He took himself across the theatre, and formally arranged with XZ that they should meet in the library at noon the next day. Donatien's offer was greeted with acquiescence by the expressionless android who sat with a glass of mineral water at hand. And for the first time in centuries Donatien experienced a feeling of disquiet at the possibility of someone possessing a superior psychic power to his own, and with it the potential to raid his memory bank.
He returned to his conversation with Marciana, and explained to her that he hoped once again to meet Laura at her interior, and to engage in a dialectic with her soul. He told Marciana that his penis was the instrument through which the eye of Shiva opened and disclosed a mystic all-seeing in the act of sex. He intended to extend his colloquies with the numinous Laura, and at the point of orgasm to see the heavens open. Donatien claimed that the visionary ladder could be ascended through tantric sensitisation, and that brother and sister would be married in heaven at a certain orgasmic pitch. Their art was to achieve a sustained resonance through which this ecstatic objective could be attained.
The condominium of bodies was beginning to form splin
ter-groups and some of the split-offs were being led by guides with torches through the labyrinthine corridors that connected with the bedrooms. But a central column of fuckers remained, and the redhead was the pivot on which they depended. She was attempting to engorge a triumvirate of cocks, as well as contriving to form an elastic entry-point for various anatomical fetishists who favoured the helix of the ear, and the warm repository of the armpits. The androgynous young man was sitting out from exhaustion and enjoying having his toes painted by one of the harem beauties. His fingers were being done in scarlet, and his toenails lacquered black.
Donatien surveyed the satelliting orgy-groups with an increased sense of boredom. What he saw was the limitations imposed by physical apertures. There weren't sufficient entry-points in the body to satisfy the complex metaphysics of his anal fantasies. It was the opacity of bodies that had him want to whip them into the representation of distorted forms, or substances re-shaped by the whip. He felt outraged by the prospect that anybody should elude his whip hand. True illumination, he reflected, could only come about through the relation of whipper to whipped. If the initiate was receptive to realising vision through pain, he found himself advocating, then the person could be thrashed to their senses. He felt like flogging the entire company, and awakening them to the ecstatic pain attendant on algolagnia. He saw his whip as representing a short fuse to the collective mains.
Donatien relocated Laura in his life. He owned the copy of Francesco Petrarch's edition of Virgil, in which the poet had written: 'She was taken from the light of day while I, alas, was in Verona, ignorant of this stroke of fate... Her most chaste and very beautiful body was laid to rest on the day of her death, April 6, 1348, at vespers.'
To Donatien Laura represented a vision of the most immaterial, idealized, and diaphanous kind; a passion that found its one consummation in vision. For Donatien, as for Petrarch, Laura was a symbol for amorous meditation. The daughter of Audibert de Noves, she had married Hugues de Sade at the age of seventeen, and Donatien's research had led him to believe that Laura belonged to the circle of educated ladies who made up the 'Love Court' of Avignon.
As a prelude to his lovemaking with his sister, Donatien recalled again how Laura had come to him wrapped in black crepe, and with her blonde hair floating stormily free. She was the white lady of his dreams, and if at times he contemplated defacing her image by ripping off her black negligee, and imagining in the process her compact buttocks, then he suffered for the temptation. It was the tension contained by the erotic within the spiritual that heightened Donatien's pleasure in his incestuous relations with Marciana. It was Laura who he expected to find at Marciana interior.
Donatien sat in abstract contemplation of these things, his mind hooking at sacralized and desacralized images of Laura. He had come to think of her as the celebrated saint of the Sade legend, and of Marciana as the living manifestation of the ancestral cult. He had for a long time formulated the idea of marrying his sister, and he intended on the last and third night of his guests' sojourn at La Coste to announce news of the marriage. Donatien conceived of the union as bringing still another scandal to the Sade lineage; a prospect in which he delighted. He would have his bride dress in a sheath of dark ivy leaves, and her hair and veil would be decorated with black roses. He could see her in his mind, standing in the chapel, shivering in a transparent black gown, while castrati celebrated the profane union of brother and sister.
When he shifted from his reverie, Donatien noticed that Wanda and Nicole had gone over to sit with XZ, and that the three of them could be observed in philosophic discourse. The midget was lying face down at the foot of a quadruple sex act, licking a girl's leather thigh boot. Three or four members of the harem were attempting to attract Donatien's interest by presenting their bottoms, and he motioned to them that they were to bend over, two on each side of a sumptuous armchair. Donatien received his whip from Nina, and cut into the bottoms of the two on his near side, surveyed his work by how the lacerations coloured, and then went round to the other side of the chair and administered the same brutal punishment to the other exposed flagellants. Again, he watched the blue and red horizontal cuts bump up to rich berry colours, went back to the other couple and delivered a repeat performance. He kept this up for another five minutes, and then returned to his chair. Donatien's obsessive concern with numbers reproduced itself in the literal cuts he inflicted on bottoms. He had counted every lash he had delivered over the centuries, and the total amounted to more than twelve million. An increasing discrimination over the quality of bottoms to be whipped had considerably curtailed his quota in recent years, and Donatien was now selective to a refined degree over the numbers he selected for disciplinary purposes. He had hopes of achieving a round thirty million successes before desisting from his mania, and was determined over the next days to indulge in some indiscriminate whipping, so as to increase his figures by another ten thousand.
Donatien regarded Marciana's bottom as too precious to whip in any serious manner, and several strokes were regarded as sufficient to stimulate his passion. This minor defacement of her buttocks assuaged his instinct to desacralize beauty. Donatien thought of this act as similar to holding a thorny rose-stem, while inhaling the flower's scent. For him, it was the intoxicating marriage of pleasure and pain that fired his nerves to excess.
With the idea of increasing his total, Donatien took aim at the central body of orgiasts, running in towards it and wielding a rapid succession of whistling blows. The attack was sudden and without warning, and the Marquis resembled a dervish as he lived in the ecstatic dementia of the act. He seemed to have overtaken himself and to be the composite projection of his shadow as he slashed left and right and at the back and the front of the collapsing construct. Most positions were crumbling like meringue as Donatien ran in a circle round the still interlocked bodies professing his legendary status as a whipper. He was for a moment like a tiger spreading panic through a herd of feeding zebra. And as abruptly as he had begun, so he stopped.
Donatien walked back to his chair like a somnambulist. His body was stiff, and he appeared to be in the process of returning to himself from a long way away. He threw his bullwhip on the floor for Nina to lovingly retrieve. She took care of the whip, and began to slowly massage Donatien's neck and shoulders as he regained his composure. He stared ahead of himself as though he had just navigated a re-entry corridor, and called for Marciana to come and sit on his lap.
Marciana wiggled across the theatre in her see-through second-skin dress, and playfully teased Donatien with the circular motion of positioning herself on his lap. He immediately came alive, and ran his hand the length of her thigh, while her black lipsticked mouth responded by kissing him deeply.
'We'll go out to the woods tomorrow,' Marciana said. Just you and I. And we'll pick up acorns again, and you by looking at them will transform them to gold. You've always done that for me.
'Will you take me to the woodsman's hut in the oak grove? The place where you sat as a child and listened to the autumn rains. We played there together. You and I heard the acorns and the chestnuts falling with the rain. I can still hear that sound every time it rains. I want you to re-live childhood with me. It all started then for us. We'd take those silk sheets into the hut and huddle under red cloak. Let's remember those things.'
Donatien looked away into the distance, and smiled. 'I can see it all,' he said. 'Nothing is forgotten. The smell of leaves and horses and leather. Your nipples were the size of hawthorn berries, and your skin tasted of blackcurrants. Do you remember how we wanted to run away and get married? And now we can realise that fantasy. We will be married in the chapel where Hugues de Sade is laid to rest. At the sight of our betrothal he will rise. We will take him back into our lives in the château.'
Marciana looked like she was dreaming with her eyes open. It was her way to enter into whatever world Donatien imagined. His Imagination was the bridge she used to span the rainbow. She would sit on his thoughts, as thou
gh she was riding a horse across country.
'Yes, we'll be married,' she said, as though it was something she always knew would happen. She expressed no surprise at her brother's decision to marry, but acquiesced fully in his plans to unite their lives in the medieval chapel to the sound of an Aquitainian mass.
'I want you to place a ring on my finger in our old hut,' said Marciana, 'in memory of a childhood that has never died. I hope there will be jays and crows as witnesses of our undying love.'
'Our pact will be an eternal one,' said Donatien. 'Begun in your bottom, our marriage will end in the stars.'
'I can hear the rains now,' said Marciana, 'and they will continue through to our meeting in the woods tomorrow. I want to walk with my face up to the sky, and have my body flashed by the rain.'
The romantic in Donatien could only be touched by his sister. He broke the head off a vermilion rose at hand and offered it to Marciana's lips. He broke off a second one and placed it in her lap, and then a third and fourth were inserted one into each shoe. Marciana luxuriated in the gifts of lipstick-red roses, and expressed her felinity by purring as Donatien stroked her thighs.
'I want you to wear ivy leaves in your hair, tomorrow,' said Donatien. 'And for our marriage, you will have a G-string made from the darkest ivy leaf cut from the château's walls. Nina will have it sewn on to a purple string, and in addition I wish you to have a purple ivy leaf tattooed on your crotch.'
