other in the eye, he commenced to whip me.
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—pun—ishment 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,