by Anne Rice
“Now we will talk,” I said. “And you will tell me first, where is Tristan?”
This startled him, naturally.
“Sleeping,” he answered. “The Sultan released him an hour or so ago.”
“I want you to send for him. I want to talk to him, and I want to see him take you.”
“O, please, no ...” he said. He went down to kiss my feet.
I doubled up the strap and smacked his face with it. “Do you want marks on your face, Lexius?” I asked. “Put your hands behind your neck, and keep your form when I’m talking to you.”
“Why do you do this to me?” he whispered. “Why must the revenge be taken out on me?” His eyes were so large, so beautiful. I couldn’t keep myself from leaning over and kissing him, feeling his hot mouth suck at my mouth.
It was unlike kissing any other man, kissing him. He pumped a molten spirit into his kisses. He said things with them—more than he knew, I suspected. I could have kissed him for a long time, that alone giving him surges of pleasure.
“I don’t do it for revenge,” I said. “I do it because I like to do these things to you, and you need it. You positively require it. You wish you were on your hands and knees with us. You know you do.”
He burst into tears, silently, biting his lip. “If I could serve you always....”
“Yes, I know. But you can’t pick whom you serve. That’s the trick. You must give yourself over to the idea of service. You must surrender to that.... And each true Master or Mistress becomes all Masters and Mistresses.”
“No, I cannot believe that.”
I laughed softly. “I should run away and take you with me. I should put on your handsome robes, darken my face and hair, and take you with me, naked over my saddle, as I said before.”
He was shuddering, eating the language, and being intoxicated by it. He knew everything about training and punishing and disciplining, and absolutely nothing about being on the other end of it.
I lifted his chin. He wanted me to kiss him again, and I did, taking my time with it, wishing it didn’t make me feel so much his slave suddenly. I ran my tongue down along the inside of his lower lip.
“Get Tristan,” I said. “Bring him here. And, if you speak another word in protest, I’ll let Tristan whip you also.”
If he didn’t see through that little ploy, he was not only beautiful but brainless.
After he rang the bell, he went to the door and waited. Without opening it, he gave the order. And he stood with his arms folded and head bowed, looking lost, as if he needed some fine, strong Prince to fight the dragons of his passion and rescue him from destruction. How touching. I sat on the bed, devouring him with my eyes. I loved the curve of his cheekbones, the fine line of his jaw, the way that he passed through the attitudes of man, boy, woman, and angel with varying gestures and little changes in his expression.
A knock on the door startled him. Again he spoke. He listened. Then he unbolted the door and beckoned, and Tristan came in on his knees, eyes down demurely. Lexius bolted the door behind him.
“Now I have two slaves,” I said, sitting up. “Or you have two Masters, Lexius. It’s difficult to judge the situation one way or the other.”
Tristan looked up at me, saw me naked on the bed, and then glanced in perfect bewilderment at Lexius.
“Come here, come sit with me. I want to talk to you,” I said to Tristan. “And you, Lexius, kneel here as you were before and be quiet.”
That summed it up, I thought. Tristan took a moment to absorb it, however. He took in the naked body of our Master, and then he looked at me. He rose and came over to the bed, and sat down beside me.
“Kiss me,” I said. I put my hand up to guide his face. Nice kiss, more robust but less intense than the kisses of Lexius, who was kneeling right behind Tristan. “Now turn and kiss our forlorn Master there,” I said.
Tristan obeyed, slipping his arm around Lexius, and Lexius gave himself to the kiss a little too completely to suit me. And maybe to spite me.
When Tristan turned back, his eyes questioned me directly.
I ignored the question.
“Tell me what happened after I was dismissed. Did you continue to please the Sultan?”
“Yes,” Tristan answered. “It was rather like a dream—being chosen, lying with him finally. There was something so tender in him. He isn’t our Master really. He’s our Sovereign. There’s quite a difference.”
“True,” I said, smiling.
He wanted to say more, but again he glanced at Lexius.
“Let him alone,” I said. “He’s my slave, and he awaits my will, and I’ll let you have him in a moment. But talk to me first. Are you content, or are you still grieving for your old Master in the village?”
“Not grieving anymore,” he said, then he broke off. “Laurent, I was sorry that I had to win over you—”
“Don’t be foolish, Tristan. It was what we were made to do, and I lost because I couldn’t win. It’s as simple as that.”
He looked again at Lexius.
“Why are you tormenting him, Laurent?” he asked, his tone slightly accusatory.
“I’m glad you’re content,” I said. “I couldn’t tell. But what if the Sultan never asks for you again?”
“That doesn’t matter, really,” he answered. “Unless, of course, it matters to Lexius. But Lexius won’t ask the impossible of us. We’ve been noticed, that’s what Lexius wanted.”
“And you’ll be just as happy?” I asked.
Tristan thought for a moment before he answered.
“There’s something very different here,” he said, finally. “The atmosphere is charged with a different sense of things. I’m not lost as I was so long ago at the castle when I served a timid Master who didn’t know how to discipline me. And I am not condemned in shame to the village where I need my Master, Nicolas to retrieve me from chaos and shape my suffering for me. I am a part of a finer, more sacrosanct order.” He studied me. “Do you see my meaning?”
I nodded and gestured for him to continue. It was clear he had more to say, and his expression let me know that he was telling the truth. The misery I’d seen in his face all the time we were at sea was truly gone now.
“The palace is engulfing,” he said, “as the village was. In fact, it is infinitely more so. But we are not bad slaves here. We are merely part of an immense world in which our suffering is offered up to our Lord and his Court whether or not he ever deigns to acknowledge it. I find something sublime in this. It is as if I have advanced to another stage of understanding.”
Again, I nodded. I remembered my feelings in the garden when the Sultan had picked me from the ranks. But this was only part of the many things I could and did feel about this place and what had happened to us. In this room, with Lexius, something different was occurring.
“I began to understand it,” Tristan said, “when we were first taken from the ship and carried through the streets to be viewed by the common people. And it came fully clear to me when I was blindfolded and bound in the garden. In this place we are nothing but our bodies, nothing but the pleasure we give, nothing but our capacity for evincing feeling. All else is gone, and it is quite impossible to think of something as personal as whippings on the Public Turntable of the village or the constant education in passivity and submissiveness we knew at the castle.”
“True,” I said. “But without your old Master, Nicolas, without his love as you described, isn’t there a terrible loneliness—”
“No,” he said candidly. “Since we are nothing here, we are all connected to each other. In the village and the castle, we were divided by shame, by individual humiliations and punishments. Here we are joined in the indifference of the Master. And we are all cared for in that indifference and used rather well, I think. It is like the designs on the walls here. There are no pictures of men and women, as you find in Europe. There are only flowers, spirals, repetitive designs that suggest a continuum. And we are part of that continuum. To be n
oticed by the Sultan for a night, to be valued now and then—that is all we can and should hope for. It is as if he paused in the corridor and he touched the mosaic on the wall. He touched the design as the sun hits it. But it is a design like all the other designs, and, when he moves on, it lapses back into the overall pattern.”
“You’re such a philosopher, Tristan,” I whispered. “You overawe me.”
“Don’t you feel the same? That there is a great order of things here that is in itself rather exciting?”
“Yes, I can feel this,” I said.
His face clouded. “Then why do you upset the order, Laurent?” He asked. He looked at Lexius. “Why have you done this to Lexius?”
I smiled. “I don’t upset the order,” I said. “I merely give it a secret dimension that makes it more interesting to me. Do you think our Lord Lexius couldn’t defend himself if he chose to? He could summon his army of grooms, but he doesn’t.”
I climbed off the bed. I took Lexius’s hands from behind his neck and twisted his arms back so his wrists were firmly held right at his backside. In sum, I trussed him much as we had been trussed with the bracelets and the phallus. I stood him up and forced him to bend over. He was absolutely pliant in all this, though he was crying. I kissed his cheek, and he softened gratefully, but his cock didn’t soften.
“Now, our Lord needs to be punished,” I said to Tristan. “Have you never felt that need? Have a little compassion. He is a mere beginner in this realm. It’s hard for him.”
The tears streamed down Lexius’s face beautifully. The light caught the tears. But another light suffused Tristan’s face as he looked up at Lexius. He rose on his knees on the bed and put his hands on the sides of Lexius’s face. There was love and understanding in Tristan’s expression.
“Look at his body,” I said softly. “You’ve seen stronger slaves, slaves more well muscled, but look at the quality of his skin.”
Tristan’s eyes moved over him slowly, and Lexius cried softly.
“The nipples,” I said. “They’re virginal. Never been whipped, clamped.”
Tristan examined them. “Very lovely,” he said. He watched Lexius carefully. He played with Lexius’s nipples just a little roughly.
I could feel the tension shoot through Lexius, his arms stiffening in my grasp. I pulled them back harder, forcing his chest out.
“And the cock. It’s a good size, a good length, wouldn’t you say?”
Tristan inspected it with his fingers as he had the nipples. He pinched the tip, scratched at it a little with his nails, ran his hand down the length of it.
“I would say he’s as fine a quality as we are,” I murmured, drawing near to Lexius’s ear.
“True,” Tristan said very earnestly. “But he’s too virginal. When a slave’s been used, really well worked, the body is enhanced in some way.”
“I know. If we work on him every time there is the opportunity, we can make him perfect. By the time we are sent home, he will be as good a slave as we are.”
Tristan smiled. “What a lovely thought. What a lovely secret aspect to things.” He kissed Lexius on the cheek. I could see the gratitude in Lexius’s manner, and see Tristan drawn to him, see and feel the current that passed between them.
“Yes,” I answered. “A lovely secret aspect to things. I have found my lover here, as you did in the village. And my lover is Lexius. And I think I will love him all the more in a little while when he punishes me or trains me as he must, when another day dawns here in which he is again the Master.”
Tristan’s cock was hard, his eyes a bit feverish as they moved over Lexius.
“I would like to whip him,” he said quietly.
“Of course,” I said. “Turn around, Lexius.” I let his arms go.
“Bend over and put your hands down between your legs,” Tristan said. He got off the bed so that he could stand behind Lexius, turning him to just the right position. “Gather your balls and keep them covered with your hands and brought forward.”
Lexius obeyed, bending from the waist. I stood beside him. Tristan adjusted the position of his backside, then spread his legs a little wider. He took the strap from me, and then he swung it hard, whipping Lexius right in the crack of his backside.
Lexius winced. I was a little surprised myself at the deliberation of it. But Tristan was clearly not going to waste this opportunity. He seemed the very opposite of the weak Master he had once had who couldn’t work him.
He whipped Lexius again in the same manner, and, moving even farther back, he swung the strap up, smacking the anus and the crack and even the fingers with which Lexius protected his scrotum. Lexius couldn’t keep still. But the whipping went on, moving into a nice cadence. And Lexius wept, his rear rising and falling with his struggles, the strap cracking again and again on the tender flesh between his anus and his lifted scrotum.
I went round to the front and lifted Lexius’s chin. “Look into my eyes,” I said. The whipping continued in very thorough style. This was better than I had hoped it might be. Lexius was biting his lip, gasping. I felt that stirring of feeling again, that fount of affection and love. I was frightened suddenly.
I went down on my knees and kissed him again, and it was just as powerful as before, the strap sending the shudders through him, his tears spilling onto my face.
“Tristan,” I said. Kisses, wet sucking kisses. “Don’t you want him? Don’t you want to show him how it is done properly, give him a good coring?”
Tristan was more than ready.
“Straighten up. I want you standing to take it,” I said.
Lexius obeyed, still holding his scrotum. I was still on my knees looking up at him.
Tristan put his arms around Lexius’s chest, and his fingers found the little virginal nipples.
“Spread your legs,” I said to Lexius. I held his hips as Tristan entered him. And I let my lips touch the hungry, obedient cock, the poor, mastered cock right in front of me.
Then I went down on it to the hairy root, and, just before Tristan came, Lexius came, utterly dissolved in cries and release, so that we both supported him.
When it was finished and every last vibration of it was gone, he moved sluggishly to the bed, not waiting for any command or permission, and he lay there weeping uncontrollably.
I lay down beside him, and Tristan lay on the other side. I was still hard, but I could save it for the morning, save it for the next round of torment. It was nice just to be next to him and to kiss his neck.
“Don’t weep so, Lexius,” I said. “You know you needed it, you wanted it.”
Tristan reached down between his legs and felt the reddened flesh below the anus.
“It’s true, Master,” he said softly. “How long have you wanted it?”
Lexius quieted a little. He moved his arm around my chest, drawing me even closer to him. He reached out for Tristan in the same way.
“I’m frightened,” he whispered. “Desperately frightened.”
“Don’t be,” I said. “You have us to master you, train you. And we will do it lovingly, at every opportunity.”
We both kissed him and caressed him until he was still. He turned over. I wiped his tears.
“There are so many things I am going to do to you,” I said. “So many things I mean to teach you.”
He nodded, lowering his eyes.
“Do you ... do you feel love for me?” he asked softly, but his eyes were brilliant and clear as they looked up at me.
I was about to answer, of course, that I did, when my voice caught in my throat. I was looking down at him, and I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came. Then I heard myself answer:
“Yes, I do feel love for you.”
And something passed between us, something silent, something locking us together. And this time when I kissed him I claimed him utterly. I shut out Tristan. I shut out the palace. I shut out our distant Lord the Sultan.
And when I drew back I was puzzled. I was the one who was frightened.
Tristan’s face was calm and wistful.
A long moment passed.
“It’s such an irony,” Lexius said under his breath.
“No, it isn’t really. There are Lords in the Queen’s Court who give themselves over to slavery. It happens....”
“No, I didn’t mean that, that I should be so easily mastered,” he answered. “The irony is that it should be you and that the Sultan should find both of you so pleasing. He’s ordered you for the games in his garden tomorrow. You’ll fetch the ball and bring it back to his feet. He’ll pit you against each other in many games for his amusement and the amusement of his men. He’s never chosen my slaves for that before. And he chooses you, and you choose me for this. That is the irony.”
I shook my head. “Again, not really.” I laughed softly. Tristan and I exchanged glances.
“We should rest now for the games, shouldn’t we, Master?” Tristan asked.
“Yes,” Lexius said. He sat up. He kissed us both again. “Please the Sultan and try not to be too cruel to me.” He stood up and he put on his robe, and wound the girdle around it. I got his slippers for him and put them on his feet. He stood waiting for me to finish and then he gave his comb to me. I combed his hair, moving around him as I did it, and the feeling of possessing him, of owning him, transmuted itself into an awesome pride.
“You’re mine,” I whispered.
“Yes, that’s true,” he said. “And now you and Tristan will be bound to the crosses in the garden to sleep.”
I winced. My face must have colored. But Tristan only smiled, glancing down bashfully.
“But don’t worry about the sunlight,” Lexius said. “The blindfold will keep it out. And you can listen to the song of the birds in peace.”
