Beauty's Punishment - By A. N. Roquelaure & Anne Rice Page 0,68

an unattended slave they can torture for nothing. They’d whip you raw in less than half an hour. Someone always sees, comes to punish. And as you said, they have their shabby charm. For a well-tuned slave, the crudest cleaning woman or chimney sweep can have an overwhelming charm if the discipline is engulfing.”

“Engulfing.” I repeated the word. It was perfect.

My vision blurred. I started to raise my hand again but put it down.

“So you needed it,” he said. “You needed to be well harnessed and bitted and shod and driven hard.”

I nodded. My throat was so thick I couldn’t speak.

“And you wanted to please me,” he said. “But why?”

“I don’t know!”

“You do know!”

“Because ... you’re my Master. You own me. You are my only hope.”

“Hope for what? To be punished all the more?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know!”

“My only hope for a deep love, a loss of myself to someone, not merely a loss amid all that strives to break me down and remake me. But a loss to someone who is sublimely cruel, sublimely good at mastering. Someone who might somehow, in the blaze of my suffering, see the depth of submission and love me also.” It was too much of an admission. I stopped, crushed, certain I couldn’t continue.

But I did go on, slowly.

“I could have loved many Masters or Mistresses perhaps. But you have an eerie beauty that debilitates me and absorbs me. You illuminate the punishments. I don’t ... I don’t understand it.”

“What did you feel when you realized you were in line for the Public Turntable,” he asked, “when you implored me with all those kisses to my boots and the crowd laughed at you?”

The words stung. Again, it was too real for memory. I swallowed hard.

“I felt panic. I cried, to be punished so soon like that, after trying so hard. Not as a spectacle, I thought, for a crowd of common people, and such a crowd, all there to preside over the chastisement. And when you reprimanded me for begging, I was ... ashamed that I had ever thought I could escape it. I remembered that it wasn’t necessary for me to have earned the punishment. I deserved it by being here, and being what I was. I was filled with remorse that I had pleaded with you. I will never do it again, I swear it.”

“And then?” he asked. “When you were taken up and mounted without fetters? Did you learn from it?”

“Yes, enormously.” I gave another low, harsh laugh. Hardly more than a single syllable. “It was devastating! First there was that fear of losing control when you told the guard, ‘No fetters.’ ”

“But why? What would have happened if you had struggled?”

“I would have been bound down, I knew it. Tonight I saw a slave bound like that. Last night I simply assumed it would happen. I would have resisted with my whole body, bridling the way the Prince was tonight, bucking, the terror crashing against me and washing away from me.”

I stopped. Engulfing yes, it had become engulfing.

“But I held still,” I said, “and when I realized I wouldn’t slip or slide under the blows, all the tension was released. I knew this remarkable exhilaration. I was being offered up to the crowd and I submitted to it. I collected all the crowd’s frenzy to myself, and the crowd enlarged my punishment as they enjoyed it, and I belonged to the crowd, to hundreds and hundreds of Masters and Mistresses. I yielded to their lust. I held back nothing, resisted nothing.”

I stopped. He nodded slowly, but he didn’t speak. The heat pounded silently in my temples. I sipped the wine, thinking of my own words.

“It was the same in a smaller way,” I said, “when the Captain thrashed me. He was punishing me for having failed after his training. But he was also testing me to see if I was telling the truth about Stefan, if it was mastering I needed. He was calling my bluff, saying, in effect, ‘I’ll give it to you and we’ll see if yo can endure it.’ And I offered myself to his lash, or at least it seemed so. I never thought, not even in the camp when the soldiers punished me, or at the castle when the Lords and Ladies looked on, that I could, in a hot noonday village square, full of passersby, dance for a soldier’s thrash like that. The soldiers trained my cock. They trained me. But they never