by Anne Rice
The young silk-robed boys had even brushed her sleek brown hair and massaged her buttocks and back with their strong fingers, as if such irascible little beasts as we must be soothed in this manner. Of course, they had stopped soon enough when they realized the soft shadow of brown curly hair between Elena’s legs was moist, and that she could not help but move her hips against the silk of the grooming mattress, so excited was she by their touch.
With little scolding gestures and shakes of the head, they had made her kneel up, holding her wrists again as they fitted her little vagina with its inflexible metal covering, the chains coming round her thighs and quickly clasped tight. Then she had been put in her cage, arms and legs tied to the bars with thick satin ribbons.
Yet this display of passion had not angered them. On the contrary, they had stroked her wet sex before covering it, smiling at her as if to approve her heat, her need. Yet all the moaning in the world had not brought mercy from them.
And the rest of us had only watched in lustful silence, our own starved organs pulsing vainly. I wanted to climb into her cage and tear off the little shield of gold mesh and stab my cock in the wet little nest made for it. I wanted to open her mouth with my tongue. I wanted to squeeze her heavy breasts in my hands, suckle the small coral-colored nipples, and see her flushed red with throbbing pleasure as I rode her to the finish. But these were but painful dreams. Elena and I could only look at each other, as I hoped in silence that sooner or later we might be allowed the ecstasy of each other’s arms.
The dainty little Beauty was also most intriguing, and the buxom Rosalynd with her big mournful eyes absolutely luscious, but it was Elena who was full of cleverness and dark disdain for what had befallen us. During our whispered talks, she laughed at our fate, tossing her heavy brown hair over her shoulder as she spoke.
“Who has ever had three such marvelous choices, Laurent?” she asked. “The Sultan’s palace, the village, the castle. I tell you, in any one I can find delights to suit me.”
“But, darling, you don’t know what it will be like in the Sultan’s palace,” I said. “The Queen had hundreds of naked slaves. In the village there were hundreds at labor. What if the Sultan has even more than that—slaves from all the realms of the East and the West, so many slaves he can use them for footstools?”
“Do you think he does?” she asked excitedly. Her smile became charmingly insolent. Such wet lips and exquisite teeth. “Then we must find some way to distinguish ourselves, Laurent.” She leaned her chin on her hand. “I don’t want to be just one of a thousand suffering little Princes and Princesses. We must see that the Sultan knows who we are.”
“Dangerous thoughts, my love,” I said, “when we can neither speak nor be spoken to, when we are pampered and punished as simple little beasts.”
“We’ll find a way, Laurent,” she said, with a mischievous wink. “Nothing ever frightened you before, did it? You ran away just to see what it would be like to be captured, didn’t you?”
“You’re too quick-witted, Elena,” I said. “What makes you think I didn’t run in fear?”
“I know you didn’t. No one ever ran away from the Queen’s castle in fear. It’s always done in the spirit of adventure. I did it myself, you see. That is why I was sentenced to the village.”
“And was it worthwhile, my dear?” I asked. Oh, if only I could kiss her, make her pour her high spirits into my mouth, pinch her little nipples. It was a great cruelty that I’d never even been near her during our days in the castle.
“Yes, it was worth it,” she said thoughtfully. She had been in the village a year when the raid happened, a female farm slave of the Lord Mayor, working in his country gardens, searching out weeds in the grass with her teeth on her hands and knees, the gardener a stout and severe man, never without a strap in his hand.
“But I was ready for something new,” she said, turning over on her back, letting her legs go apart as she always did. I couldn’t stop staring at the thick brown hair of her sex under the woven gold shield. “And then the Sultan’s soldiers came as if I had summoned them with my imagination. Remember, Laurent, we have to do something to distinguish ourselves.”
I laughed to myself. I liked her spirit.
But then I liked all of them: Tristan, a beguiling mixture of strength and need, who bore his suffering in silence ; and Dmitri and Rosalynd, both contrite and dedicated to pleasing, as if they had been born slaves instead of royalty.
But Dmitri could not control his agitation or his lust, could not hold still for punishment or use, though his mind was filled with nothing but high thoughts of love and submission. He had spent his short village sentence pilloried in the Place of Public Punishment, awaiting his whippings on the Public Turntable. And Rosalynd too knew no semblance of control unless shackled tightly. Both had hoped the village would purge their fears, allow them to serve with the finesse they admired in others.
As for Beauty, well, next to Elena she was the most enchanting, the most unusual slave. Cold she seemed, yet undeniably sweet, thoughtful and rebellious. Now and then through the dark nights at sea I saw her staring at me through the bars of her cage with a puzzling expression on her strong little face, her lips spreading easily in a smile when I acknowledged her.
When Tristan wept, she would say softly in his defense:
“He loved his Master.” And she would shrug as if she found it sad but incomprehensible.
“And you loved no one?” I had asked her one night.
“No, not really,” she said. “Only other slaves now and then....” And there came that provocative look that made my cock rise at once. There was something savage in her, something untouched, for all her seeming fragility.
But now and then she seemed to brood on her resistance. “What would it mean to love them?” she asked once, almost as if talking to herself. “What would it mean to yield the heart completely? The punishments, I love. But to love one of the Masters or Mistresses....” She looked afraid suddenly.
“It troubles you,” I said sympathetically. The nights at sea worked on all of us. The isolation worked on all of us.
“Yes. I long for something I have not had,” she whispered. “I deny it, but I long for it. Maybe it is only that I haven’t found the proper Master or Mistress....”
“The Crown Prince, it was he who brought you to the Kingdom. Surely you found him a truly magnificent Master.”
“No, not at all,” she said dismissively. “I can barely remember him. He did not interest me, you see. What would happen if I were mastered by someone who interested me?” And her eyes took on a strange glitter, as if seeing for the first time a whole new realm of possibility.
“I can’t tell you,” I had said, feeling suddenly at a loss. Up until that moment I was sure that I had loved my Mistress, Lady Elvera. But now I wasn’t entirely certain. Maybe Beauty spoke of a deeper, finer love than I had ever known either.
The fact was, Beauty interested me. She who lay beyond my grasp upon her silken bed, her naked limbs as perfect as a sculpture in the semi-dark, her eyes full of half-revealed secrets.
Yet all of us, despite our differences, our talk of love, were true slaves. That was certain.
We had been opened up and inalterably changed by our servitude. No matter what our fears and conflicts, we were not the blushing, awestruck beings we had once been. We swam, each at his or her own pace, in the dazzling current of erotic torment.
And as I lay thinking, I sought to understand the important differences between the castle life and the village life, and to guess what this new captivity in the Sultanate promised us.
LAURENT: MEMORIES OF THE CASTLE AND THE VILLAGE
I HAD SERVED well for a year in the castle, property of the strict Lady Elvera, who had had me whipped each morning as a matter of course, while she took her breakfast. She was a proud and quiet raven-haired woman with slate-gray eyes, who spent her hours at delicate embroidery. I had kissed her slippers afterwards in thanks for the whipping, hopefu
l for the smallest crumb of praise—that I had taken the blows well or that she found me handsome still. Seldom did she speak a word. Seldom did she look up from her needle.
In the afternoons, she took her work to the gardens, and there I coupled with Princesses for her amusement. I had first to catch my pretty prey, which meant a hard chase through the flower beds, and then the blushing little Princess must be carried back and laid at My Lady’s feet for inspection, after which my real performance commenced and must be carried through perfectly.
Of course, I had loved these moments—pumping my heat into the shy and quivering body beneath me, even the most frivolous Princess shaken by the chase and the capture, and both of us burning under My Lady’s steady gaze as she nevertheless went on with her sewing.
Pity I had never covered Beauty during this time. Beauty had remained the Crown Prince’s favorite until she fell from grace and was sent down to the village. Only the Lady Juliana was allowed to share her. But I had glimpsed her on the Bridle Path and longed to have her gasping under me. How finely tuned a slave she had been even in the first few days, her form as she marched beside Lady Juliana’s horse quite impeccable. Her hair was golden as wheat as it hung down beside her heart-shaped face; her blue eyes flashed with burnt pride and undisguised passion. Even the great Queen was jealous of her.
But, looking back on all of it now, I did not for a moment doubt Beauty when she said she had not loved those who claimed her affections. I could have seen, had I looked, that her heart wore no chains then.
But what had been the particular quality of my life in the halls of the castle? My heart did wear chains. But what had been the essence of my bondage?
I was a Prince, though bound to serve—a high-born being temporarily deprived of his privileges and made to undergo unique and difficult trials of the body and the soul. Yes, that was the nature of the humiliation: that I should be privileged again after it was over, that I was the equal of those who enjoyed my nakedness and reprimanded me severely for the slightest show of will or pride.
It was never so clear to me as when Princes from other lands came to visit and to marvel at this custom of keeping royal pleasure slaves. How it had flayed me to be presented to these guests.
“But how do you make them serve?” they would ask, half astonished, half enchanted. You never knew whether they yearned to serve or command. Do all beings have both inclinations at war within them?
The inevitable answer to their timid questions was a mere demonstration of our fine training; that we must kneel before them, offering our naked organs for their examination, our upturned backsides to be whipped.
“It is a game of pleasure,” My Lady would say matter-of-factly. “And this one, Laurent, a beautifully mannered Prince, amuses me in particular. He will one day rule a rich realm.” She would pinch my nipples slowly, then lift my cock and balls in her open hand to display them to the amazed guest.
“But still, why does he not struggle, resist?” the visitor might ask, possibly masking his deeper feelings.
“Think on it,” My Lady would say. “He is quite well stripped of the accoutrements that would make him a man in the outside world, only the better to expose the fleshly accoutrements that make him a man for my service. Imagine yourself as naked, as defenseless, as thoroughly subjugated. You might serve, too, rather than risk agamut of even more ignominious corrections.”
What newcomer had not asked for his own slave before nightfall?
Red-faced and trembling, I had crawled to obey many an order given in an unfamiliar and unpracticed voice. And these were Lords I should some day receive in my own Court. Would we remember these moments? Would anyone dare to mention them?
And so it was with all the naked slave Princes and Princesses of the castle. Nothing but the highest quality for this utter debasement.
“I think Laurent will serve another three years at least,” Lady Elvera would say airily. How remote she was, how eternally distracted. “But then the Queen makes these decisions. I shall weep when he goes. I think perhaps it is his size that most entices me. He is taller than the others, bigger-boned, yet his face is noble, don’t you think?”
She would snap her fingers for me to come near, and then run her thumb down my cheek. “And the organ,” she might say, “it is extremely thick but not overly long. That is important. How the little Princesses squirm under him. I simply must have a strong Prince. Tell me, Laurent, how might I punish you in some new fashion, something perhaps that I have not thought of?”
Yes, a strong Prince in temporary subjugation, a monarch’s son, with all his faculties engaged, sent here to be a pupil of pleasure and pain.
But to incur the wrath of the Court and to be sent to the village? That was an altogether different ordeal. And one that I had barely tasted, though what I did come to know was the very quintessence of it.
Only two days before my capture by the Sultan’s thieves, I had run away from Lady Elvera and the castle. And I do not know why I did it.
Certainly, I adored the Lady. I did. No doubts really. I admired her imperiousness, her endless silences. She could only have pleased me more had she whipped me herself more often, rather than ordering it done by other Princes.
Even when she gave me to the guests or the other Lords and Ladies, there was the special joy of returning to her, of being taken again into her bed, being allowed to lap at the narrow triangle of black hair between her white thighs as she sat there against the pillow, her hair down, her eyes narrow and indifferent. It had been a challenge to melt her glacial heart, to make her throw back her head and cry out in pleasure finally like the most lascivious little Princess in the garden.
Yet I had run away. And it had come over me suddenly, the impulse—that I should dare to do it, just get up and go off into the forest and let them search for me. Of course they’d find me. I never doubted they would. They always found the runaways.
Maybe I had lived too long in fear of doing it, of being captured by the soldiers and sent to labor in the village. It was tempting me suddenly, like the plunge from a great cliff.
And I had mastered all my other faults by this time; I had attained a rather boring perfection. I never shied from the strap. I had grown so to need it that my flesh quivered warmly at the mere sight of it. And I always caught the little Princesses quickly in the garden chase, lifting them high by their wrists and carrying them back over my shoulder, their hot breasts thudding against my back. It had been an interesting challenge to master two and three in a single afternoon with the same stamina.
But this matter of running away.... Maybe I wanted to know my Masters and Mistresses better! Because, when I became their captured fugitive, I would feel their power to the marrow of my bones. I would feel all that they could make me feel, completely.
Whatever the reason, I waited until the Lady had fallen asleep in her garden chair, and then I stood up and rushed to the garden wall and climbed over it. This was no little bid for attention on my part. I would make it an indisputable attempt at escape. And, without glancing back, I fled over the mown fields towards the forest.
Yet never had I felt so naked, so utterly the slave as in those moments when I appeared to be in rebellion.
Every leaf, every tall blade of grass stroked my exposed flesh. A new shame astonished me as I roamed beneath the dark trees, creeping past the watchtowers of the village.
When night came on, I felt that my nude skin was glowing like a light, that the forest would not conceal me. I belonged to the intricate world of power and submission and had tried wrongly to steal away from its obligations. And the forest knew it. Brambles scratched my calves. My cock hardened at the slightest sound in the brush.
And o, the final horror and thrill of capture, as the soldiers spotted me in the dark and drove me onward with shouts until they had me surrounded.
Rude hands grabbed at my arms and legs. I was carried low to the ground by four of the men, my head hanging and my limbs outstretched, merely an animal
who had given good sport, brought into the torchlit camp amid cheers and hoots and laughter.
And in the blazing moment of inescapable justice, everything was further clarified. I was no high-born Prince anymore. I was a stubborn and lowly thing to be whipped and raped repeatedly by the spirited soldiers until the Captain of the Guard appeared and ordered me bound to the thick wooden Punishment Cross.
And it was during that ordeal that I had again seen Princess Beauty. She had already been sent down to the village and chosen by the Captain of the Guard as his little plaything. Kneeling in the dirt of the camp, she was the only woman there, her fresh pink and milk-white skin all the more delectable for the dust clinging to it. She had magnified all that happened to me with her intense gaze.
And no wonder I still fascinated her: I was a true fugitive, and the only one of us in the Sultan’s ship who had earned the Punishment Cross.
In earlier castle days, I had glimpsed such mounted runaways myself. I had seen them put in the cart to be taken to the village, their legs spread wide on the crossbar, their heads bent back over the top of the cross so that they looked straight up into the sky, mouths stretched by the black leather band that held their heads in this position. I had been terrified for them, marveling that even in this disgrace their cocks were hard as the wood to which their bodies were tethered.
And then I was the condemned one. I had passed into the tableau to be bound in the same excruciating fashion, eyes heavenward, my arms doubled behind the rough stake, my open thighs stretched wide and aching, my cock as hard as any I’d ever beheld.
And Beauty was but one of a thousand witnesses.
Through the village streets I was paraded to the slow beat of the drum for common crowds that I could hear and not see, each turn of the cart’s wheels jarring the wooden phallus implanted in my backside.
