a broad barrel. Her back arched over the moist wood, she could smell the ale, and her hair fell down to the floor, the Inn upside down in a riot of color before her. Another cock was going into her mouth while firm hands anchored her thighs to the curve and a cock pushed into her dripping vagina. She had no weight, no equilibrium. She could see nothing but the dark scrotum before her eyes, the unfastened cloth. Her breasts were slapped, sucked, and gathered by strong kneading fingers. Her hands groped for the buttocks of the man who filled her mouth and she clung to him, riding him. But the other cock pummeled her against the barrel, plugged her, grinding her clitoris to a different rhythm. Through all her limbs she felt the searing consummation, as if it did not rise from between her legs, her breasts teeming. All her body had become the orifice, the organ.
She was being carried into the yard, her arms around firm, powerful shoulders.
It was a young brown-haired soldier who carried her, kissing her, petting her. And they were all over the green grass, the men, laughing in the torchlight as they surrounded the slaves in the tubs, their manner easy now that the first hot passions had been satisfied.
They circled Beauty as her feet were lowered into the warm water. They knelt with the full wineskin in their hands and squirted the wine up into her, tickling her, cleansing her. They bathed her with the brush and the cloth, half playing at it, vying to fill her mouth slowly, carefully with the tart, cool wine, to kiss her.
She tried to remember this face, that laugh, the very soft skin of the one with the thickest cock, but it was hopeless.
They laid her down in the grass beneath the fig trees and she was mounted again, her young captor, the brown-haired soldier, feeding dreamily on her mouth, and then driving her in a slower, softer rhythm. She reached back and felt the cool, naked skin of his buttocks and the cloth of his breeches pulled halfway down, and touching the loosened belt, the rumpled cloth, and the half-naked backside, she clamped her vagina tight on his cock so that he gasped aloud like a slave on top of her.
It was hours later.
She sat curled in the Captain's lap, her head against his chest, her arms about his neck, half sleeping. Like a lion he stretched under her, his voice a low rumble from his broad chest, as he spoke to the man opposite. He cradled her head in his left hand, his arm feeling immense, effortlessly powerful.
Only now and then did she open her eyes on the smoky glare of the whole tavern.
Quieter, more orderly than before. The Captain talked on and on. The words "runaway Princess" came clear to her.
"Runaway Princess," Beauty thought drowsily. She couldn't worry about such things. She closed her eyes again, burrowing into the Captain, who tightened his left arm about her.
"How splendid he is," she thought. "How coarsely beautiful." She loved the deep creases of his tanned face, the luster of his eyes. An odd thought came to her. She had no more care what his conversation was about than he had care to talk to her. She smiled to herself. She was his nude and shuddering slave. And he was her coarse and bestial Captain.
But her thoughts drifted to Tristan. She had declared herself such a rebel to Tristan.
What had happened to him with Nicolas the Chronicler? How would she ever find out? Maybe Prince Roger could tell her some news. Perhaps the dense little world of the village had its secret arteries of information. She had to know if Tristan was all right. She wished she could just see him. And dreaming of Tristan, she drifted into sleep again.
GRAND ENTERTAINMENT
Tristan:
Without the dread pony harnesses, I felt rudely bare and vulnerable as I marched fast towards the end of the road, expecting any second the tug of the reins as if I still wore them. Many coaches roared by us now, decorated with lanterns, the slaves clopping fast, heads high, just as mine had been. Did I like it better that way? Or this way? I didn't know! I only knew fear and desire, and an absolute awareness that my handsome Master Nicolas, my Master who was stricter than so many others, was walking behind me.
A brilliant light poured into the road ahead. We were coming to