Beauty's Punishment

by Ann Rice

  Yes, the realization was complete. I had wanted the total degradation of the village. I could not bear Stefan's love, his tentativeness, his inability to govern me. And for his weakness in our predestined bond, I despised him.

  Beauty had understood my aims. She had known my soul better than I knew it. This was what I deserved and hungered for because it was as violent as the soldiers' camp, where my dignity, my pride, my self had been so thoroughly plundered.

  Punishment here in this busy, sun-drenched square, even with the little village girls gathering round, and a woman standing in the door of the Inn with her arms folded, and the loud snapping blows of the thrash – punishment was what I deserved, thirsted for, even in terror. And in a moment of utter surrender I spread my legs wide and thrust my head back and rocked my hips in a gesture of total recognition of the whipping.

  The Captain gave great swinging sweeps with the flat lash.

  My body was alive with the stings and hurts he had inflicted. And surely my Master understood the secret. And there would be no mercy for me as, reading this little dialogue, my Master would take me the full journey no matter how I might later plead with whines and whimpers.

  The whipping was over but I did not break my supplicating position. And the Captain gave back the thrash and caressed my face suddenly, impulsively it seemed, kissing my eyelids just as my Master had done. The last knot in me broke. It was agony that I couldn't kiss his feet, his hands, his lips. That I could only incline my tortured body towards him.

  He drew back, his arm out to my Master. I saw them embrace rather naturally it seemed, my Master slighter of build, elegant as a fine carved silver knife beside the solidly made Captain.

  "It's always so," the Captain said with a slow smile, looking into my Master's cold and clever eyes. "Out of a batch of a hundred timid and anxious little slaves sent down for purification, there are those who have invited the punishment, needing the rigors not to purify their faults but to tame their boundless appetites."

  It was so true that I was weeping, struck to the soul by the incentives this would give to all my tormentors.

  "But please," I wanted to plead, "we don't know what we do to ourselves. Please have mercy."

  "My little girl at the Sign of the Lion, Beauty, is the same," the Captain said. "A naked ravenous soul that foments the passion in me dangerously."

  Beauty. And he had been watching her through the Inn door. So he was her Master. I felt a divine ripple of jealousy and solace.

  My Master's eyes pierced me. The sobs shook me, the spasms passing through my cock and my sore calves.

  But the Captain was at my side. "I'll see you again, my young friend," he breathed against my cheek, his lips tasting my face, it seemed, his tongue licking at my cruelly opened lips. "That is, with your gracious Master's permission."

  I was inconsolable as we moved on, my low weeping turning heads as we marched out of the square and through other lanes, and past hundreds of other unfortunates. Had they been revealed as I was revealed, both to themselves and to their Masters and Mistresses?

  So sore from the Captain's lashing that the merest flick of the thrash made me jump, I tried in no way to hold back, wailing as the ponies pulled me after them.

  We passed through a narrow street where slaves for hire were hung by their hands and feet on the wall, pubes oiled and glistening, prices scratched upon the plaster above them. In a little shop, I saw a naked seamstress pinning up a hem, and in a small open place a band of naked Princes driving a treadmill. Princes and Princesses alike knelt here and there with trays of fresh cakes for sale, no doubt from the Master or Mistress's oven, a little basket hanging from the mouth of the slave to humbly receive the coins of the purchaser.

  All the regular life of the village passing as if my misery did not exist, was not so loudly lamented.

  A poor Princess chained to a wall whimpered and struggled as three laughing village girls idly stroked and teased her pubis.

  And though I saw nowhere the theatrical savagery of the Public Punishment Grounds the night before, it was magnificent, and horrifying, this daily life of the village.

  In a doorway, a buxom matron on a stool soundly spanked a naked Prince over her knee with her thick broad hand as she castigated him angrily. And a Princess holding with two hands a water jug on her head waited meekly as her Master implanted between her red pubic lips a good-size phallus with a leash attached, by which he made her smartly follow.

  And we were now in quieter streets, streets where men of property and position lodged, and there were shiny doors with brass knockers. And from the high iron brackets above, slaves hung here and there as ornaments. The hush descended and the horseshoes of the ponies sounded louder and sharper up the walls, and I heard my weeping more clearly.

  I could not think what the days held in store for me. So solid it all seemed, the population so accustomed to our wails, our servitude nourishing the place as surely as meat and drink, and sunshine.

  And through it all, I was to be borne along on a wave of desire and surrender.

  We had come round again to my Master's lodgings.

  My lodgings. We passed the front door, quite as ornate as any we had seen, and the large costly leaded glass windows. And we went round the corner, through the little lane to the back road along the ramparts.

  The straps and phalluses were stripped away in a great rush, the ponies sent off, and I collapsed at my Master's feet, kissing them all over. I kissed the insteps of the smooth morocco boots, the heels, the lacings. My agonized sobs broke louder and louder.

  What was I pleading? Yes, make me your abject slave, be merciless. But I am frightened, frightened.

  And in a moment of pure madness I wished he would take me again to the place of Public Punishment. I would have rushed with all my strength to the Public Turntable.

  But he only turned to go into the house, and I came on hands and knees after him, lapping at his boots, giving darting kisses as he walked, following him down the corridor, until he left me in the small kitchen.

  I was bathed, fed by the young male servants. No slaves worked in this house. I alone was kept, it seemed, for torment.

  And quietly, without the slightest explanation, I was brought into a small supper room. Quickly I was stood up against the wall and chained with legs and arms in the form of an X and left there.

  The room was polished and neat – I could see all of it now – a real rich little village-house room such as I never knew in the castle where I was born and reared, or in the Queen's castle. The low beams of its ceiling were painted and decorated with flowers, and I felt as I had when I first entered this house, huge and shamefully exposed in it, a true slave bound there among the shelves of gleaming pewter and the high-backed oak chairs and clean-swept chimneypiece.

  But my feet were flat on the waxed floor, and I could rest my weight on them and rest back against the plaster.

  And if only my cock would go to sleep, I thought, I could rest also.

  The maids came and went with their brooms and mops, arguing about supper, whether to roast the beef with red wine or white, and whether to put in the onion now or later. They took no note of me except to pat me gently as they passed, dusting about me, fussing, and I smiled, listening to this chatter. But just as I was dozing off, I opened my eyes with a start to see the lovely face and form of my dark-haired Mistress.

  She touched my cock, bending it down, and it came to life violently. She had several small black leather weights in her hands with clamps like those I had worn on my nipples yesterday, and as the maids talked on behind a closed door, she applied these clamps to the loose skin of my scrotum. I winced. I couldn't keep still. The weights were just heavy enough to make me painfully aware of every inch of the sensitive flesh and of the slightest shift of my balls – and a thousand such shifts seemed inevitable. She worked thoughtfully, pinching the skin as the Captain had pinched it with his fingernails. When I flinched she took no note of it.

  Then s
he manacled my penis at the base with a heavy weight dangling beneath it, and as my organ bobbed I felt the coldness of the iron weight against my testicles. The touch of these things, their movements, were unendurable reminders of these bulging organs, this degrading exposure.

  The little room grew dim and close. Her figure loomed large before me. I clenched my teeth hard not to plead with some mortifying little cry, and then that sense of surrender returned, and I pleaded quietly with low sighs and moans. I had been a fool to think I would be let alone.

  "You will wear these," she said, "until your Master sends for you. And if that weight slips from your cock, there will be only one reason for it, that your cock has gone soft and released the manacle. And your cock will be whipped for that, Tristan."

  I nodded as she waited, unable to meet her gaze.

  "Do you need that whipping now?" she asked.

  I knew better than to answer. If I said no, she would laugh and take it as impertinence. If I said yes, I was sure she would be outraged and the whipping must follow.

  But she had already lifted a little delicate white strap from beneath her dark blue apron. I gave a series of short sighs. But she whipped my penis this way and that, sending shocks through all my loins, my hips lifting towards her. All the little weights pulled at me, like fingers stretching my skin and tugging on my cock. And the organ itself was purplish red, jetting straight forward.

  "That is only a little example," she said. "When on display in this household, you must be turned out properly."

  Again I nodded. I bowed my head and felt the hot beads of tears at the corners of my eyes. She lifted a comb to my hair and ran it through carefully and gently, arranging the curls neatly over my ears and drawing them back from my forehead. "I must tell you," she whispered "you are easily the most beautiful Prince in the village. I warn you, young man, you're in good danger of being bought outright. But I don't know what you could do to prevent it. Misbehave and you need the village all the more. Thrash your handsome hips in charming submission and you make yourself just as seductive. Already, there may be no hope for you. Nicolas has wealth enough to purchase you for three years, should he so desire. I'd love to see the muscles in those calves after three years of pulling my coach, or Nicolas's little walks through the village."

  I had lifted my head and I was staring down into her blue eyes. Surely she could see I was puzzled. Could we be made to remain here?

  "O, he can make a good argument for keeping you," she said. "That you need the discipline of the village, or perhaps even only that he has at last found the slave he desires. He is no Lord, but he is the Queen's Chronicler."

  There was a growing warmth in my chest, pulsing like the slow fire in my cock. But Stefan would never...

  But then maybe Nicolas was in higher favor than Stefan!

  "He has at last found the slave he desires." The words were crashing in my head.

  But she left me to my own whirling, challenging thoughts in the little room and went out in the dim little hallway and up the dark steps, her burgundy skirts bright in the shadows for only a moment.

  MISTRESS LOCKLEY'S DISCIPLINE

  Beauty had almost completed her morning chores in the Captain's bedchamber when she remembered with a sudden shock her impertinence to Mistress Lockley.

  The recollection came to her along with the faint sound of steps advancing towards the door of the Captain's room from the stairway. She was suddenly terrified. O, why had she been so insolent! All her resolve to be a bad, bad little girl abandoned her immediately.

  The door opened and the pert figure of Mistress Lockley appeared, all fresh linen and lovely blue ribbons, her blouse brought down so low over her mounded breasts that Beauty could almost see the nipples. The most wicked smile was on Mistress Lockley's exquisite face, and she came right towards Beauty.

  Beauty dropped the broom and shrank into the corner.

  A low laughter erupted from her Mistress, and at once she had Beauty's long hair twined around her left hand and with her right hand she picked up the broom and thrust its prickly straws into Beauty's sex so that Beauty cried and tried to squeeze her legs together.

  "My little slave with a tongue!" she said. And Beauty began to sob. But she couldn't free herself to kiss Mistress Lockley's boots and she didn't dare speak. All she could think of was Tristan telling her it would take a lot of courage to be bad all the time!

  Mistress Lockley forced her forward on her hands and knees, and Beauty felt the broom between her legs driving her out of the little bedchamber.

  "Get down those stairs!" The Mistress said under her breath, her ferocity scorching Beauty's soul so that she broke into sobs and scurried towards the stairway. She had to stand to descend the stairs, but the broom drove her just as maliciously, plunged into her, tickling and scratching at her tender nether lips as Mistress Lockley came right down behind her.

  The Inn was empty, quiet.

  "I've sent my bad children off to the Punishment Shop for their morning licking so I could tend to you!" came the Mistress's voice between her tightly clamped jaws. "We're going to have a little session in how to properly use that tongue when it is called upon to be used! Now into the kitchen!"

  Beauty fell to her hands and knees again, desperate to obey, the angry commands pushing her to panic. No one had ever flashed upon her with such withering heat before, and to make matters worse, her sex was already brimming with sensation.

  Sunlight filled the large immaculate room, pouring in from the two open doors to the rear yard, striking the fine copper pots and pans that hung from the hooks above, and washing over the iron oven doors in the bricks and the giant rectangular cutting block that stood in the middle of the tile floor, as high and large as the drinking counter outside where Beauty had first been punished.

  Mistress Lockley brought her to her feet, and plunging the broom hard between her legs so that its stiff straws lifted her, she forced Beauty back against the cutting block and then lifted her legs so that Beauty quickly scrambled up on the wood that was covered with a light sprinkling of flour.

  It was the paddle Beauty expected, and it would be worse than ever before, she knew, with that angry voice driving it. But Mistress Lockley spread Beauty out on her back, drew her hands over her head, and quickly tied them to the edge of the board, telling Beauty to spread her legs or have them spread for her.

  Beauty struggled to get her legs wide. The flour on the smooth wood felt silky under her bottom. But her body was being stretched to its full length as her ankles were now tied, and Beauty felt panic again, bouncing helplessly on the smooth unyielding wood as she realized she could not free herself.

  In a flurry of soft urgent cries she tried to plead with Mistress Lockley. But the moment she saw Mistress Lockley smiling down at her, Beauty's voice died in her throat and she bit her lip hard, looking up into the clear black eyes that quivered ever so slightly with laughter.

  "The soldiers liked those breasts, didn't they?" Mistress Lockley said. And reaching with both hands, she pinched Beauty's nipples between thumb and forefinger. "Answer me!"

  "Yes, Mistress," Beauty wailed, her soul quaking with the sense of her vulnerability to those fingers, the flesh around her nipples shriveling as the nipples themselves hardened to knots. A deep pang between her legs caused her to try to close her legs, when that was quite impossible. "Mistress, please, I will never –"

  "Shhhh!" Mistress Lockley clamped her hand over Beauty's mouth and Beauty arched her back, sobbing against it. O, it was worse being bound; she could not make herself be still. But she stared at Mistress Lockley with wide eyes and tried to nod, though the hand held her.

  "Slaves have no voice," said the Mistress, "until the Master or Mistress asks to hear that voice, and then you answer with the proper respect." She let go of Beauty's mouth.

  "Yes, Mistress," Beauty answered.

  The firm fingers took hold of her nipples again. "As I was saying," Mistress Lockley went on, "the soldiers liked these brea
sts."

  "Yes, Mistress!" Beauty answered, her voice quavering.

  "And this avaricious little mouth." She reached down and pinched shut the pubic lips so that the moisture overflowed and Beauty felt an itch as it trickled.

  "Yes, Mistress," she answered breathlessly.

  Mistress Lockley lifted a white leather belt and showed it to Beauty, like a tongue extending from her hand. And gathering Beauty's left breast from the top in her left fingers, she bunched the flesh and plumped it as Beauty felt the warmth suffusing her bosom. Beauty couldn't keep quiet. And the moisture between her legs trickled down into the crack of her buttocks. Her spread-eagle body strained in vain to close itself.

  The fingers stretched her left nipple and snapped it. And then the white tongue of the leather belt spanked her breast in a series of hard loud slaps. "O!" Beauty gasped aloud, unable to prevent it. The spanking that the Captain's large warm hands had given her bosom was nothing like this. The desire to break free and cover her breasts, both of them, was irresistible and impossible! Yet the breast seethed with feeling as never before and Beauty's body twisted against the wood. The little strap spanked the nipple and the bulging flesh harder and harder.

  Beauty was in a frenzy as Mistress Lockley turned her attention to the right breast, plumping it in the same manner, snapping the nipple. Beauty's cries grew louder, her struggling more violent. The nipple was rock hard under the torrent of licks.

  Beauty closed her mouth, sealed it shut. She would have screamed at the top of her lungs, "No, I can't bear it." The concentrated blows came faster and faster. Her body became her tortured breasts, her desire fanned by the licks like a torch flame.

  Beauty swung her head so violently that the hair streamed over her face. But Mistress Lockley lifted it back and she bent down and looked at Beauty, but Beauty could not look up at her.

  "So tumultuous, so exposed!" she said to Beauty, and she kneaded the right breast, pumping it up high again, and then continued to spank it. Beauty gave a high keening scream against her clenched teeth. The fingers tweaked the nipples, massaged the flesh, and the heat roared through Beauty, her hips thrust upwards in a sudden violent convulsion.