She flexed her cheeks gratefully, and licked her darting red tongue over parched lips, working her jaw, which was sore from the pressure of the wadded panties.
"What do you make of this then?" Henry asked, holding up the new piece of paper.
Clue Nine
'Where maidens nine were wont to sit,
Reclining at their leisure,
You'll find a seat entirely fit,
Though not to give you pleasure.'
"Not a lot," she replied, "though I'd have thought it would take a little while to round up nine maidens round these parts. As far as I can tell, the little bitches drop their pants as soon as they start their periods round here."
'Well,' he thought, 'nothing's depressed her spirits... so far, so good.' Aloud he said, "Don't judge them all by your own randy standards. If you're going to talk dirty I'd better put those knickers back where they came from. Anyway, I'm surprised you didn't think of the Nine Maidens, the stone circle up on the Downs."
"Of course, "she cried. "How stupid of me!"
"You're forgiven. I have the advantage over you in that I've not only been there more than once but not so long ago, was treated to a scene up there that most men wouldn't forget in a hurry."
"What was that then?" she asked, full of curiosity, woman like. "Something sexy I should think, if it stayed in your mind."
"Just for that you can have your rag back in right now," he replied. "It'll give my ears a rest."
He pinched the sides of her jaw between a strong finger and thumb, so that she had to open, and stuffed the sodden plug of panty material back into her mouth. Once again she made no resistance, though she looked both disappointed and still curious, as far as her puffed out cheeks allowed her feelings to appear at all. He took pity on her.
"Sit back and behave, and I'll tell you all about it as we go," he promised. "It's the other side of the county and it will help to pass the time."
***
The men were obviously up to something. They exchanged cryptic remarks, talked about being ready when they met up that evening, and generally showed signs of hatching a plot. The wiser women knew better than to betray their curiosity, but one or two earned themselves a smart spanking for being too inquisitive, or were sentenced to minor humiliations, having to go round with a table tennis ball in their mouths, wear their knickers round their knees, or similar familiar disciplinary measures, for asking too many questions.
At first it seemed it was going to be a pleasant but very tame evening; they went to the pub for a few drinks, moved on to the Box Tree restaurant at Layiton to be wined and dined in some style. Rachel apparently, hadn't learned her lesson, despite having spent the evening with a clothes peg on her clit for undue curiosity. She could not resist pressing her partner once again for a clue as to what was to happen, and was made to kneel on the floor, with her hands behind her back, and bend forward to eat her meal from a bowl set down for her like a dog. Not that the others actually got to feed themselves. The party was well known and tolerated at the Box Tree, and each girl knelt by her 'master' and was fed by his hand, and from his glass. They all found it a source of great intimacy and affection, rather than just humiliating as more 'liberated', that is to say, lost, women might have done.
Only the men had places laid for them and each kneeling girl, her hands held behind her, raised her pretty mouth to delicately take the morsels donated to them by their masters.
Henry gave the lead. He was on one of his periodic visits to his birthplace and, since urgent business had meant that Chris couldn't attend the dinner himself, he had asked Henry if he would be so kind as to take Georgina, so that the girl would not miss out on the event; a duty he was more than happy to accept. He took a little avocado on a spoon, and held it out towards Georgina's mouth. Her lush red lips parted obediently, and she took the morsel onto her tongue tasting it with obvious pleasure. In their turn the other men offered their women titbits from their plates.
Rachel did not share in the 'starter', being in disgrace but Bill asked one of the waitresses to bring him a shallow bowl, into which he placed some of the potato served him, a little minced beef, some peas and a generous helping of thick brown gravy. He took a fork and mashed the mixture into a viscous paste, then set it on the floor by Jenny's knees.
"Eat," he commanded.
She knew better than to protest, or to use her hands. She bent forward, straining to reach down to the bowl, and pushed her face into it until she could lick up the mush little by little with her flickering pink tongue. It was a strain to bend like that, and humiliating to eat like a dog, especially with the waitresses, in their smart black and white uniforms, and black patent leather pumps, passing by every few minutes, and catching a view of her nearly bare bum, her mini skirt drawn onto her back by the head-down pose, and her thong panties disappearing into her crack. Also she couldn't avoid getting her face smeared, especially as she worked her way down the bowl, and her hair kept falling over her face and sticking to the viscous mush. Altogether she was degraded and humiliated enough to suit even her masochistic spirit, by the time her meal was done.
Meanwhile the other girls enjoyed their masters' affectionate attentions. There is something very intimate about the act of feeding a submissive woman, and the feeling is reciprocated since the dependence on another for food is one of the strongest bonds known to man, or woman. What did it matter if an ill-judged movement left a smear of grease on cheek or chin, the sensation of being owned and cared for compensated for everything. Such meals are much more than games. They represent an intimacy only exceeded by that of a shared bed, and not always then. Two people can lie in a bed together, with little warmth in their contact, but the passing and receiving of food, the choosing and acceptance of a choice morsel, the offering of a glass to lips parted to sip from the rim, all these are bonds of affection, based on submission and control, that the mere fact of sleeping together does not always approach.
Rachel's punishment was much more severe than it appeared since, besides humiliating and soiling her, it deprived her of the bonds of intimacy that the others were enjoying.
When the meal was over, the women were permitted to retire to the ladies room and 'freshen up', cleaning their faces and repairing their make-up, not to speak of giving their tongues a chance to wag, that the intimate atmosphere at dinner had tended to inhibit. Rachel though, was not allowed to go with them, even to relieve her bladder, let alone to wash or straighten her sticky hair. It was a cruel sentence and Georgina pleaded on her behalf and gained her a modest concession. She couldn't wash or tend herself, but the other women could, if they wished, lick her clean.
The waitresses had left the room by then, but one returned to collect the coffee things. She had looked on unconcerned when the women had been fed, but now stopped, open-mouthed. Rachel still knelt on the floor, where she had been joined by all the others, who knelt round her, each licking carefully whatever part of her face and hair they could reach, like a group of mother cats all cleaning the one kitten. Their tongues curled under her chin, stroked into the lobes of her ears, her dish had managed to get even there, wriggled into her nostrils, gently laved around her moist eyes, combed through her gravy glued hair. When they had finished she was pink and clean all over, and almost purring at the loving, intimate attentions she had received. The waitress came back to earth with a jolt, and almost fled from the room.
Time passed. The party stayed until late, the men sharing sips of their brandies and liqueurs with their women, who knelt again docilely by their sides. It was the early hours before they finally left, a sleepy but complaisant restaurateur letting them out personally, the over-excited waitresses being dismissed long before to find what release they could in their own or in others' beds.
To the women's surprise, they did not turn for home, but towards the high ridge of the downs, climbing steadily. There were one or t
wo attempts to ask what was happening but, when asked if they had forgotten already just why Jenny had been punished, they held their tongues and waited with what patience they could manage to see what happened. They had little doubt it would concern them personally and would call for some price in suffering, humiliation or embarrassment for them all.
They drew up on the top of a ridge, where a stile led through a fence into a grassy area, where dark shapes could be made out by the light of the nearing dawn that lit the eastern sky.
"The Nine Maidens," Poppy exclaimed, "I should have known from the way we were heading."
"You should have guessed from the date too," George contributed.
"The date? What's that... Oh no!"
"Oh yes. It's Midsummer morning, and the dawn is almost here. Strip off girls; you're about to be sacrificed."
"But it's freezing!" they cried, almost as one woman.
"You'll be warm enough in a minute, I promise you," George assured them. "Everything off, down to your pretty panties. Bare bums and tits are the order of the day for maiden sacrifices."
"We're hardly maidens, after you men have had your wicked way with us so often," Laura reminded him.
He laughed. "But you're still very tasty, and I don't remember you protesting much at the time. We'll just have to use our imaginations. Come on; get 'em off."
With shudders and protests they obeyed as usual, six pinkly naked forms soon standing bare-foot in the dew. The light was strengthening by the minute revealing the ring of great upright stones set in a circle thousands of years ago for some lost ceremony of sex and fertility.
"We have to get the sun to rise for us," Bill cried. "The maidens must circle the stones to bring him up."
"They'll certainly bring something up," Henry remarked to his neighbour, "I can feel it in my trousers right now."
Hesitatingly the girls began to walk round the outside of the circle, the growing light gleaming on their pink and shivering flesh.
"Faster!" George cried. "The maidens ran until they dropped. I told you you'd get warm soon."
Even as he spoke, there was a yelp from the leading girl in the pack. Unnoticed by the girls, while they had been peeling off their clothes to offer their shuddering nakedness to the chilly dawn air and dewy grass, the men had been busy cutting hazel switches from the hedge that ran along one side of the compound around the standing stones. Now they used them to cut shrinking buttocks, extra sensitised by the cold, sending the girls speeding round the ring, stretched out in a scattered line, leaving each vulnerable to the stinging rods. They yelped and squealed as the swishy sticks found thighs and bottoms, running as fast as they could now, hair flying, breasts bouncing. The cold air on their teats had hardened them until they stood out like tiny pink and red thumbs, but the breasts they adorned were still full of bounce, and rode up and down their chests delightfully as they ran, desperately trying to avoid the cuts of the supple rods. It had been a clear night and the temperature had dropped suddenly, the grass glittering with diamond drops of dew that their bare feet would have cringed from if they had not been concentrating so desperately on running fast enough to avoid the slashing hazel twigs.
The men drove them to near exhaustion, and until the sun lifted itself in a red ball over the horizon. As its blood red rays turned to gold George shouted, "The sacrifice! The sacrifice!" and seized the nearest woman in the racing circle, throwing her to the cold wet grass, forcing her thighs apart and plunging into her warm inner depths. One by one the other men caught the nearest exhausted 'maiden' and served her as vigorously. In minutes their rasping breaths from their forced run had changed to panting pleas for more, more, and then to a cacophony of sounds as each gave voice to her orgasm in her own distinctive style, one honking helplessly, another shrieking her passion, a third simply going "Ooooh, oooh, oooh," as if she had never made any other sound in her life, and would make no other in the future. The sacrifice was complete!
***
She had listened in bursting silence. Her eyes had opened wide at some of the revelations, the semi-public nature of the visits to the Box Tree, especially Rachel's degrading meal and her humiliation in front of the waitresses. Was it worse to be fouled and degraded in this way before other women? She thought, deep down, this might be so. To be seen thus by men, women's natural masters, seemed somehow appropriate but in front of strange women? No that would be a hundred times worse.
And the others, kept helpless to feed themselves, dependent on their men to feed them. Ah that was something altogether different and exciting. Rachel's ordeal had set her pulses racing strangely, imagining, even in a way wishing, herself in the same position. She felt herself positively melting, and not just mentally. She had been in a state of arousal for some time now, but this sent her juices down her thighs. If her knickers had not been in her mouth, they would have become just as sopping by now, clinging to her groin. She'd not only seethed with a desperate need to ask questions, but with her sexual needs as well.
Under the combined pressure she felt as if she might explode, and, as they reached the top of the down, which Henry had so graphically described, she grunted through her gag to draw his attention. She knew better than to try and spit it out. In the first place it was not as easy as it seemed, the wet rag clinging round her teeth. In the second her experiences of the afternoon reinforced by all the details she had been learning about the way of life of the group she was now even more keen to be accepted into, made it very clear that an unguarded curiosity was a sure way for a woman to find herself with a sore bottom. So, although her female nature meant she could not resist giving vent to her feelings by urgent little noises through the fold of her panties, she was careful not to be too insistent.
Henry was very well aware of her needs, he'd handled women before at this point in their progress towards self-fulfilment, and decided that it would be excellent discipline for her to have them unsatisfied for a little longer.
As she almost steamed in her excitement and frustration, he left the slimy pad of panties firmly embedded between her teeth and her tongue, and led her by the arm to the stile, supporting her as she lifted each long stockinged leg in turn, giving flashes of pantyless crotch, and flaming bottom in the process. She hardly seemed to notice, despite the feel of cool air on her bare wet vulva, and equally naked, but burning, buttocks, more concerned with the freshly wakened painful sensations in her clamped genitals, and pegged nipples. As they walked to the centre of the enclosure that surrounded the Maidens, she groaned afresh. Six grains of rice trapped in a stocking sounded harmless enough but, by the time she had walked the three or four hundred yards from the car park, they felt like nails driven into her tender feet.
They stood upright, nine dark ancient stones of irregular shape, in a circle like the maidens of the legend, and seeming to look towards one side of the ring. There a set of stones formed a kind of throne, with three or four uprights framing and supporting a flat horizontal stone that formed the 'seat'. Deeming it was time for her to play her part in the hunt again, he made picking movements with finger and thumb, and she gratefully opened her mouth and let him pull out her gag.
"Ooh, thanks," she said, gratefully, once she'd worked her jaws a bit to loosen them, "I could get to dislike being gagged. Oh Henry, I've been bursting to ask. Was it all true, or did you just make it up about Georgina and the others? I can't believe that women like that would allow themselves to be ordered around, made to kneel in front of waitresses, have no food of their own. It's just not like them."
"You think not? Just what are they like, do you think? Or, put another way, what sort of women would submit to that sort of thing, as you put it? Think about it," he suggested, "but not now. You've work to do to find this clue and get on with the hunt. Unless you'd prefer I put your panties back in your mouth to quieten you," he threatened.
Wisely she contained her curiosity and her com
ments, although she did put some thought into what he'd said. Was it possible that, as he'd hinted, it was the intelligent high-achieving women who were most likely to succumb to the temptation to hand themselves over to another's will? She thought about what she'd accepted that afternoon already and began to think she might be close to the answer, but was called away from further consideration by Henry taking her arm and leading her firmly towards the Maidens Seat, ignoring her groans, but giving her the support she needed as she hobbled painfully on the wickedly hard grains in her stockings. Rather than feel resentment at being made to suffer like this she felt instead, gratitude and security in his hold.
The Seat was formed of flat stones arranged to form quite a sophisticated bench, with sides, back, seat and a space beneath. In that space she could see something white, which turned out to be a card.
'Take your pick and take your seat,' it instructed, 'nothing but the bare essentials mind.'
Beneath the card was a stack of woven wicker mats. They were on sale in all the local craft shops, just the thing to put under hot plates to protect the table, except that these particular examples were not fully finished. Where the mats sold to visitors would have the ends of each length of stripped withy tucked neatly into the weave, these had their ends left protruding, stone hard, and needle sharp, forming a set of porcupine spikes on one side of the mat.
"Which would you like?" Henry asked.
She looked at them with distaste. She could hazard a guess at to how these contraptions might be employed and didn't care for the thought.
"Just give me the top one," she said resignedly, "I don't think it will make much difference."
Henry obliged and held it up for her inspection. She looked at the forest of short sharp points that adorned one surface and groaned.
Painful Prize Page 4
