Beauty s Punishment - By Anne Rice Page 0,47

center of the village. It was the first real look I had had at the village on a regular day, and I was astonished.

White aprons, wooden clogs, rawhide breeches. Rolled sleeves and loud convivial voices. And everywhere there were toiling slaves. I saw naked Princesses scrubbing thresholds and balconies above and washing shop windows. I saw Princes bearing baskets on their backs, hopping ahead of their Mistress's lash as fast as they could, and through an open gateway a gathering of naked, reddened rumps around a great laundry tub.

A harness shop loomed ahead as we turned a bend, with a Princess manacled much as I was manacled and hanging from the shingle over the door, and then came a tavern in which I saw a row of slaves along a ramp waiting to be punished one by one on a little stage for the indifferent amusement of dozens of patrons. There was a phallus shop beside it, and on display in front three Princes squatting with their faces to the wall, their buttocks well outfitted with samples of the merchandise.

And I could be one of these, I thought, squatting in the hot dusty sun as the crowd passed. Was it worse than trotting with anxious breaths, my head and my hips pulled inexoraby forward, my sore flesh reanimated by the long, loud snapping behind me? I couldn't really see my Master. But with every lick, I saw him as he had been last night, and the ease with which he tormented me again astonished me. I had never dreamed it would stop because of our embraces. But for it to be intensified like this... I felt suddenly some awesome sense of the depth of submission he wanted from me.

The ponies pressed proudly through the thick crowd, making many a head turn, as villagers milled everywhere with market baskets or slaves at tether. And over and over, the observer glanced from the finely turned-out ponies to the slave behind them. But if I expected scornful looks, I was disappointed. What I saw was simply muted amusement. Everywhere these people looked they saw some delectable bit of naked flesh, punished or positioned or harnessed for their pleasure.

And as we turned corner after corner, rushing through this narrow lane and that, I felt more surely lost than I had been on the turntable.

Each day would have its dreadful course, its obliterating surprises. And though I wept more desperately when I thought of it, and my cock swelled in the lacings, and I marched harder, trying to squirm away from the snapping thrash, it gave a strange luster to my surroundings. I felt the undeniable urge to fall at my Master's feet, to tell him silently that I understood my lot, that I understood it more clearly with every excruciating trial and that I gave thanks from the depths of my being that he had seen fit to break me so thoroughly. Hadn't he used that word yesterday, "breaking" a new slave, said the thick phallus was good for it, and the phallus was splitting me wide again, and another stretched my mouth making my cries hoarse and wildly unmanageable.

Maybe he understood from my cries. If only he would condescend to comfort me with just a little touch of his lips. . . . And I realized almost with a start that never had I felt this softened and subservient in all the rigors of the castle.

We had come to a large square. All around I saw the signs of the Inns, and the carriageways and the high windows. Rich and fancy Inns they were, windows as ornate as those of a manor house. And as I was whipped and pulled in a broad circle around the well, the crowd agreeably letting the ponies through, I saw with a shock the Captain of the Queen's Guard lounging at a doorway.

It was unmistakably the Captain.

I remembered his blond hair and coarsley shaven beard and those brooding green eyes. Quite unforgettable. It was he who had taken me from my native land, captured me when I tried to break and run from the camp, and brought me back, my hands and ankles bound to a pole carried between two of his horsemen. I could still remember that thick cock spiking me and that silent smile as he ordered me whipped through the camp evening after evening until we reached the castle. And that strange inexplicable moment when we parted and both of us looked at each