“I could never use a regular Beki instrument on you, of course. Even a Beki pleasure-whip would injure you, and just a few strokes with a punishment one would flay the flesh from your bones. I had these made to order.” Another ambiguous smile. “The craftsman enjoyed the challenge, I think. Finding the right material for a disciplinary tool that might leave you screaming and sobbing and very well marked, but without damaging your delicate body. As for the other tool – ” He made a slightly dismissive motion, but even then I could see the wickedness gleaming in his eyes. “Who even knows if you will respond as a Beki woman does?”
I ran my finger over the carving on one of the handles, just for an excuse to avert my eyes. It was in Beki script. I couldn’t read a word of it. Later, I found it was customary to inscribe both the couple’s names and a proverb on each whip. The punishment whip would generally contain some adage about a woman’s need for a firm hand, the pleasure instrument one about the wisdom of keeping a woman well-satisfied. Much later, when I had become fluent in my husband’s tongue, I read our names on those whip handles. And the phrase he had chosen for both.
I will not deny.
I learned the touch of that pleasure whip on my wedding night. I learned . . . so many things. My body was like a neighbouring country, one I had heard so much about, yet never visited.
He reclined me back against the cushions first, his hands firm and gentle as he guided my shoulders down. The discarded wrappings from my gifts crackled as we moved against them and the spicy bite of the scented candles above us tickled my nose. My new collar was heavy against the hollow of my throat.
He murmured, a low purr in my ear, using a Beki word which means, alternately, “toy” or “wife” or “property”. The tone was clear, if not the meaning. My loins felt heavier than the fine chunk of metal about my neck. As he began to unbraid and untwist my hair, my lips parted. I wanted to call him by the title he’d taught me. I couldn’t speak.
Later I would see the irony in my voice failing me.
Unsheathing a claw, he drew a finger down the front of my marriage robes, neatly slitting them open. He parted the clothes from my body, held me down against the cushions, and began to touch me. He was an experienced man, my new husband. He knew a woman’s body, even a Jzhat’lan woman’s body, all the pleasure spots, all my secret places. With ruthless efficiency, he rubbed and kissed and licked them.
I began to moan and squirm. Then struggle outright. The urge to sing the drzaliin was strong, yet instinct bade me hold my tongue. His restraining hand was not cruel. It was firm. Gentle. Unyielding. His tongue and fingers kept up their onslaught. I closed my eyes then and let my body melt into the cushions as I gave myself over to the pleasure.
The stroking turned to pinches, scratches, the kisses to the most mild of bites. I was almost keening then, the slight pain intensifying my arousal. I clutched at his body, twining my fingers in the softness of his pelt, wanting something I had no knowledge of. He lifted his head from the inside of my arm. His hands stopped their motion. “Turn over,” he said then, in the trade language, his voice even thicker. Turn over, a throaty command, and I obeyed, pure instinct once more.
Imagine, I might have told my sisters. Imagine, me, responding to the voice of a man.
I was shaking as he lifted the pleasure whip, tucked it against his body. My keening trailed off into a low steady moan. He slipped an arm under my hips, raising me, and shoved a bolster beneath me to bend my body slightly. Goose bumps formed on my skin, yet I was hot all over.
His hand was in my hair. “Slave . . . wife,” he murmured, again in the trade language. “. . . mine.” The words seemed to come sluggishly, from far away. I know now, of course, that he longed to speak Beki. There are words in his native tongue without precise equivalent in any other language.
He grabbed my head up. “Please,” I whimpered. “Please.”
I didn’t know what I was begging for.
He shoved my head back down into the cushions. The whip smacked across my thigh. I screamed.
I smile now to think of it – screaming at a lash from that soft, velvety leather, screaming at a lash that was more a kiss than a blow. But my nerve-endings were awash in sensation, confused, and I screamed more from shock than pain.
My husband crouched beside me, laid the pleasure whip gently down on the plane of my back, and shushed me. “Don’t be afraid,” he said softly, one hand firmly in my hair again, the other once more tweaking a pleasure spot with casual adeptness. “Punishment should frighten you.” The tweaking fingers grew busier and he leaned to brush his mouth against my hair. “But this isn’t punishment . . . it’s pleasure.”
I was moaning, almost keening, again when he took the pleasuring hand away. Something dropped in my belly and I felt a great emptiness, a yearning. Somewhere in some corner of my mind even then was the knowledge that I could sing the drzaliin, but the wish to do so, to this man, to my master, was obliterated. “Please,” I repeated instead, and this time I had a small inkling of what I was asking for.
He lifted the whip from its resting place on my back then and started peppering my thighs and buttocks with soft, quick, stinging lashes, heating every inch of skin.
Later he told me how wondrous it was, beating a Jzhat’lan woman for the first time, watching the colour come up on my pale, smooth flesh. And the noise I was making, a continuous musical wailing, passion tinged with suffering, was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard. He was, he said, almost overcome with the exquisiteness of his pleasure. It was all he could do not to try to enter me right then.
He didn’t, of course. He was far too large to use my body sexually without weeks and weeks of patient dilation and further weeks of harrowing training for me. Instead he kept whipping until my flanks were a perfectly uniform shade of dusky red and the sounds that were coming from my throat were ones I had never made before. Then he tossed aside the pleasure whip and manipulated my most pleasurable spot of all, until my body convulsed and I let out another scream.
As I trembled in his arms afterwards he whispered a mix of Beki endearments and compliments in the trade language. I was so beautiful, so pliant, so sexual. He was so pleased with me. I would be such a good slave, a wife to be proud of. As my breathing slowed to normal, he brushed his mouth along my hair again, buried his face in it, chuckling quietly. “Now I know,” he murmured, “that you do respond to the whip as a Beki woman does.”
“Yes, my master,” I murmured back. The words rolled smoothly from my mouth.
I was not my father’s eldest daughter, but I was his most responsible, and I came to my new husband’s house with an expectation. If there were obligations to my husband, my master, I would of course fulfil them. If there were commitments, I would honour them. I would be as I had always been. Dutiful. Conscientious.
As the first weeks and months of my marriage unfolded, my husband undertook to shatter that expectation. I would not obey out of mere duty. I would not follow the mere letter of the law. He wanted something different. Something more.
He spent the long evenings and well into the nights of those early months lavishing his attention on me. Slowly and patiently, he taught me his language and his customs. Taught me to serve him, to care for his needs and provide for his pleasures. Talked to me about his days, the business, the news of the city. Asked me endless questions about Jzhat’lan, about my family, myself. Worked on my dilation, and then the arduous process of training me to take something as large as his member into me, giving reassurance but never mercy as I wept and pleaded in my agony. Walked with me in the gardens and, on occasion when I was restless, snapped on my leash and took me out into the streets, the public parks, once even to see the pale orangish ocean. Laughed with me. Brought me to ecstasy in ways I didn’t know existed. Held me in his arms when the homesickness poisoned me. Learned to know me. Began to love me.
He stayed up far too late in those days, got far too little rest – though I couldn’t, at the time, recognize the s
igns of exhaustion in his slightly dulled hair or heavy lids. It was well worth it, he tells me now. By the time of my first storm season on Mrw-Bek, he had begun to see what he wished to see. I was beginning to be bound to him by something stronger than law, obligation, or chains. That he would have my obedience was a given. Slowly he was capturing my devotion.
Devotion is, of course, something that might well be tested.
You might think my “opening” proved to be a test for me, but in truth, somewhere in the final phases of my dilation or the beginnings of my training, the whole process became easier for me. I still cried tears of pain as I was stretched and plugged. There was no denying it hurt. But at some point, my fear of the pain had been superseded by my wish to please him.
I no longer begged mercy when he told me to fetch the instruments. I brought them quickly and without complaint, positioned myself however he ordered, spread my legs wider or bent myself more as was his whim. Sometimes, when I saw he meant to advance to the next longest or thickest instrument, tears would start running down my cheeks before he actually forced it into me, before he began to move it in hard, rhythmic thrusts, but I no longer wanted him to spare me. Every painful session was a step closer to my being able to please him completely.
I sometimes contemplated the final instrument in the set with horror and longing. It was as large as his member and as cruelly barbed. When I was opened enough to take that into my body, when I could bear to have him work me with it for more than a few moments at a time, then I would be ready for him to use as any Beki man might use his wife. That night was fast approaching. My belly tightened as my pleasure spots tingled, thinking about it.
“It will hurt you, my property,” he whispered when he saw the direction of my gaze. “And I’ll enjoy that.”
“I know, my master,” I whispered back, desirous.
No, it was not my opening that tested my devotion. It was something else altogether
My mother died when I was just a small child, and my two elder sisters were only several years my senior, too young to serve as surrogates. It fell mostly to my female tutors to teach me of the drzaliin, of my powers and responsibilities as a Jzhat’lan woman. The Lady Vutlael, she who was later so squeamish about Beki customs and sexuality, was dry and factual about our own. “The drzaliin is the power of your voice to entrance and enrapture a male. The man who hears you sing it will, for a time, wish for nothing more than to do your bidding. The pleasure he feels from it will be so overwhelming, it will be stronger than even his wish to copulate.”
I had a thousand questions the first time she addressed the matter, but she gave me no time to ask them. Instead she went on lecturing about my moral obligations not to misuse the drzaliin – to use it only for the mutual pleasure of my mate and myself – and then started in on evolutionary theory. How our pregnancies are so long and copulation was so dangerous to our unborn in the days before technology, scientists thought the drzaliin had developed as a way to keep our mates bonded to us. I’m sure it was very fascinating, but I was a young girl, interested in more practical, immediate matters.
“Lady,” I said finally, tugging on her sleeve to forestall more lecturing, “how will I know how to do it? How will I know when to do it?”
She allowed herself a small dry smile. “You won’t need to be taught, girl. As you come to womanhood, hundreds of thousands of years of instinct will guide your sweet voice. As to when . . .” She paused. “When you are with your mate and, ah, amorous, you will sometimes feel the urge. Perhaps at other times as well. It is up to both of you how often you yield to it. If you are unmated . . .”Another long pause and a slight frown creasing her face. “A mature woman who goes too long without singing the drzaliin will begin to feel irritable and conflicted. For unmated women, there are other outlets.”
Apparently she felt that she had said too much, been somehow inappropriate, for she sat up straighter then and shook her head, almost. “Enough of this for now, girl. Get your astronomy and botany texts. Your father will be much displeased if you fall behind.”
That particular aspect of the subject had never been touched on again. Not even whilst she and Lady Truio were preparing me for my marriage. Why would it have been? I was going to be mated.
Of course, they failed to take into consideration that my marriage would be rather different from their own. I would be mated. I would be owned. I would be tested. There were things I might have benefited from knowing. Experience is, after all, the hardest teacher.
When the irritability came upon me, the nagging feeling of wrongness and unease, I failed to understand what it was. My husband noticed it, of course, but he too failed to glean the significance. Homesickness, feelings of confinement, even the oppressive humidity of the storm season . . . it could have been any of a thousand things which had put me out of sorts.
Even when I began to baulk at his orders, he wasn’t much concerned. Slaves usually rebelled, fought their own submission, at some point in their training. He would simply repeat the order in a cool, low voice and give me a look suggesting it might be unwise to make him speak a third time. His face would remain impassive as I forced myself to obey.
And eventually the feelings would pass, the crawling sense of confusion and peevishness would leave my belly as quickly as they came on and, lying on the cushions with him, I would want to say I’m sorry, my master, so sorry . . . I don’t know what is happening to me. But his hand would be in my hair, stroking, the slow thud of his heart beneath my face quieting me, and I never spoke.
We went on that way for several weeks, through the worst of the storm season. The winds would suddenly whip through, a few minutes of darkness and blinding rain, then back to the heavy, sullen, sticky air, unmoving and barely breathable. My moods were much the same, quickly upon me and quickly gone, but leaving unpleasantness in their wake.
One night my husband came home to find me, as he always did, kneeling on the tiles, prepared to greet him and to serve. I hadn’t bothered to braid any ornaments into my hair, nor had I perfumed myself. I bowed my forehead to the floor and recited the greeting he’d taught me with what might well have been a touch of sarcasm. As I raised my head, I saw he had noticed all these things, and I saw he was weighing whether they were worth a reprimand. I felt insanely pleased.
“You’ll want tea?” I asked in tones of supreme boredom as I stood to take his cloak. My voice grated in my own ears. He handed me the garment and I placed it – tossed it, almost – on its hook by the outer door, not troubling to shake it out or smooth its creases.
As I turned around, he was there, immediately in front of me. I gasped in surprise, and gasped again as he grabbed a fistful of my hair. “What I want is you back on your knees.”
So. I had done it. I had made him lose his patience finally. I felt even more insanely pleased. I bowed my head as I slipped back down to the floor, letting my hair cover my face and my smirk.
“Crawl to my chamber, slave.” I noted the word he used, not the affectionate one, not the one that connoted “my property” or “toy” but the one that meant, quite simply, “slave”. I deflated a bit. He was angry then, really, seriously angry, not just annoyed. I began to consider that perhaps, just perhaps, my little show of rebellion was childish and ill-advised.
“Crawl.” He nudged my flank with the side of his foot, and I did. Halfway to our bedchamber, my irritation came flooding back. Let him be angry with me. I didn’t care. I was angry, too. The fact that I couldn’t think of a single rational reason why I should be angry only served to make me seethe.
He stopped me just inside the bedchamber. “Stay there,” he said in a low, clipped growl. I understood enough Beki now that he rarely had to resort to the trade language. “I’ll be back.”
I heard him exit the room, leaving the door ajar, brisk footsteps echoing in the hall. It sounded as if he were heading to the kitchens. Good, I thought, another nasty smirk on my face. Let him fix his own tea. Let him serve himself. Let him think m
e miserable, kneeling despondently here, grieving over his reprimand. I pulled myself up from my hands and knees, and plopped onto my bottom, shaking my hands out and stretching, telling myself I didn’t care about his orders.
The wind was picking up outside, seeping through the shutters I’d latched earlier and making them rattle. I lifted my face to it, welcoming the marginally cooler, fresher air, even as it tangled my hair. Perhaps, I thought sourly, perhaps my husband was so irritated he would go out for the evening. Perhaps he would leave me here, alone, thinking to punish me with his absence, and I would go out into the gardens and stand in the rain just to feel it soak my hair and cool my skin. Perhaps . . .
“I thought ‘stay there’ was a phrase you understood.”
I turned quickly to the sound of his voice. He had removed his own boots; his footfalls were silent as he padded towards me. In one fist were a handful of scraggly twigs and his eyes were colourless. “Hands and knees. Now.”
I slid back into position, angry and ashamed and angry with being ashamed. My lips parted. I wanted to make some scathing remark. I wanted to hurt him. He took absolutely no notice, just crossed to the platform where our cushions were and sat, that odd bundle of sticks in his lap.
“You’ve gone too far, you know,” he said. His voice was as colourless as his eyes, as cool and detached as I was angry. Apparently during his little walk to – where? – the little patch of garden beyond the kitchens? – he had composed himself. “Your behaviour has been insolent, provocative. Like an ill-mannered child.” He fingered that bunch of twigs in his lap. “You don’t deserve the dignity and the respect of being disciplined with your own punishment whip, like a woman. I’m going to spank you with this bundle of clatha switches instead.
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