Beauty's Release - By A. N. Roquelaure & Anne Rice Page 0,43

in my head, made up of the rhythms—the strap, my cries, the creak of the wood.

And at some point as it continued, I realized it was going on longer than any beating I’d ever received before. The blows weren’t all that hard now. But I was so sore it scarcely mattered. Nice, lazy loud smacks from the strap had me writhing and crying.

And the garden was filling with voices. Men’s voices. I could heard them coming in, laughing, talking. I could even hear, if I listened very carefully, the wine being poured into the goblets. I could smell it again. And smell the green grass right under my head, and smell the fruit, and the strong aroma of roasted meat and sweet aromatic spices. Cinnamon and fowl, cardamom, beef.

So the banquet was in progress. And the beating still went on, but the blows were coming more and more slowly.

Music had commenced. I heard the thumping of strings, the beat of small drums, and then the ring of harps and shrill, unfamiliar sounds from horns I couldn’t name. It was dissonant and foreign and delightfully strange, the music.

My rump was burning with pain. And the strap played with it. There would be a long moment in which I would feel every inch on my backside glowing, and then the crack of the strap, the white-hot flair, for an instant. I wept. I realized it might go on like that all the evening long. And there was nothing I could do but cry helplessly.

“But better this,” I thought, “than to be one of the others. Better this, to draw their eyes to it as they dine and drink and laugh together, whoever they are ... than to be a mere decoration. Yes, the disgraced one again, the punished one. The one with the will.”

And I struggled violently on the cross, loving the strength of it, that I couldn’t bring it down, and feeling the strap come down harder and faster again, my cries growing louder and more miserable.

Finally, the blows slacked off again. They became teasing. The strap was playing with various little marks, welts, scrapes that it had made in my flesh. I knew this little piece of music.

And it blended with the other music, the music of those who held power, which flooded my senses. Mentally I reached out from the moment, exquisite as it was, and gathered other moments to me, welding the immediate past to the dizzying present. The feel of Lexius’s lips—why hadn’t I called him Lexius, made him call me Master? I would next time—the feel of his tight little anus when I’d raped him. I savored all this as the strap lazily revived my simmering flesh, and the banquet went on noisily.

I didn’t know how much time had passed. I only knew, as I had in the hold of the ship, that something had changed. The men were rising, moving about. The strap was startling me now. I’d be left in peace, then it would lick at me. I was so sore that the scratch of a fingernail would have made me moan. I felt the blood teeming under the welts, and my cock dancing in its leather bindings. The voices in the garden were getting louder, more drunken, more abandoned.

Cloth brushed my back, my head, as men passed me. Then suddenly my head was lifted, and the blindfold was pulled off, and I felt the bonds being loosened from my ankles and wrists and my chest simultaneously. I tensed all over, afraid of falling, of being dropped.

But the grooms quickly had me right side up, and I found myself standing in the grass, a desert Lord before me. Naturally, I hadn’t the common sense or self-discipline not to look at him. He wore a full Arab headdress of white linen, and dark wine-colored robes, and his eyes glittered from a dark sunbaked face as he smiled at me. My stunned look seemed only to amuse him. But other such Lords pressed in. I was suddenly turned roughly. And a powerful hand squeezed my sore buttocks. There was laughter. My cock was slapped, my chin lifted, my face examined.

And all around me I could see slaves were being taken down. Dmitri, still blindfolded, was on all fours on the grass, being well raped by a young Lord. And Tristan knelt before another Master, taking the man’s cock into his mouth with vigorous motions.

But even more interesting was the sight of Lexius, standing back under the