Beauty s Punishment - By Anne Rice Page 0,26

kneel up. And with her thumb she stroked my wet cheek, causing me to blush all the harder. I looked down, naturally, but I had seen her high jutting breasts and slender throat, and a face like the man's, not physically so, but just as serene and impenetrable.

I slipped my hands behind my neck and hoped desperately that she would not torment my cock, but she bid me stand up and her eyes were fixed on it.

"Spread your legs; you know better than to stand like that," she said sternly but slowly. "No, very wide," she said, "until you feel it in those exquisite thigh muscles. That's better. That's how you'll always stand for me, with your legs widespread, almost at a squat but not quite. And I will not tell you again. Slaves in the village are not coddled with constant orders. You will be strapped on the Public Turntable for any failing."

These words sent a shudder through me, with an odd sense of fatality. Her pale hands seemed almost to glow in the light of the lamps as they moved towards my cock. And then she squeezed the tip, bringing out of it a drop of clear fluid. I gasped, feeling the orgasm ready to explode inside, to

roll up through my organ and out of it. But mercifully she let it go and lifted my balls now as the youths had done.

Her little hands felt of them, massaging them gently, moving them back and forth in their sheathing, and the flicker of the oil lamps seemed to expand and to dim my vision.

"Flawless," she said to my Master. "Beautiful."

"Yes, I rather thought so myself," said the Master. "Easily the pick of the herd. And the cost was not so terribly great, as he was the first one auctioned. I think had he been last it would be have been double. Observe the legs, the strength in them, and these shoulders."

She lifted both her hands and smoothed back my hair. "I could hear the crowd from here," she said. "They were in a fury. Have you thoroughly examined him?"

I tried to still my panic. After all I had been six months in the castle. Why was it so terrifying, this little room, these two cold townspeople?

"No, and that should be done now. His anus should be measured," said the Master.

I wondered if they could perceive the effect the words had on me. I wished I'd taken Beauty a half dozen times in the cart so that at least my cock would be better under my control, but the thought of that only further inflamed me.

Frozen in this shameful stance, legs sprawled, I watched, powerless, the Master going to one of the shelves and reaching up for a morocco-covered case, which he set on the table.

I was turned by the woman so that I faced the table. She brought down my hands and placed them on the edge of it so that I was bending over from the waist, and I struggled to spread my legs as wide as I could so that she wouldn't have to correct me.

"And his buttocks are hardly reddened, that's good," she said. I felt her fingers toying with the welts and sore places. Little riots of pain broke out in the flesh, like lights in my mind, and right before my eyes I saw the leather case opened and two large leather-covered phal-luses taken out of it. One was the size of a man's cock, I would say, and the other somewhat larger. And the large phallus was decorated at the base with a long bushy shock of black hair, a horsetail. Each was fitted with a ring, a sort of handle.

I tried to brace myself. But my mind rebelled as I stared at that thick, glossy hair. I could not be made to wear such a thing, a thing to make me look even more lowly than a slave, a thing to make me look like an animal!

The woman's hand opened a red glass jar on the desk, the light seeming to strike it for the first time as I noticed it. And her long fingers gathered up a large dab of cream and disappeared behind me.

I felt the coldness of it against my anus, and knew the appalling helplessness I always experienced when my anus was touched, opened. Gently but quickly, she spread the moisture, smoothing it well into the crack, and then into my anus itself as I tried to be