Beauty's Release - By A. N. Roquelaure & Anne Rice Page 0,47
I promise you.”
“You won’t do that to me,” I said confidently. But his threat struck my heart.
He stepped back before I could say anything else, and the line moved forward and I followed. When any slave forgot to bend his legs in the squat, he was rapped with the thong. It was the most degrading way to walk, and each step required conscious compliance.
We moved to a central garden path, and down it single file, and all those in the garden were rising and coming towards the same walkway. Many were looking at us, pointing, gesturing. I found it as bad as being carried into the city from the boat earlier, this being on display, being paraded.
Many other slaves were mounted again on the crosses. Some had been polished with gold, others with silver. I wondered if we had been chosen for our size or for the degree of punishment we’d received.
But what did it matter?
In this humiliating position, we moved on up the path as the crowd gathered on the edges of it. We came to a stop and were then divided to line both sides of the path facing each other. I took my position, with Tristan across from me. I could see and hear the crowd all around, but no one touched us or tormented us. Then the grooms came down the path, tapping our thighs and making us squat much lower. The crowd seemed to enjoy the change.
The grooms made us squat as low as we could without losing our balance. My thighs were smacked over and over with the thong as I struggled to obey. I found it worse even than the little parade. And I felt the nipple clamps pinch me with each shudder that ran through me.
But the air of anticipation suddenly sharpened. The crowd, towering over us and pressing in close so that their robes brushed us, looked towards the doors of the palace to my left. We stared at the path before us.
Suddenly, a gong was sounded. All the Lords bowed from the waist. I knew someone was approaching on the path. I heard moans, soft muted sounds obviously coming from the slaves. I heard such sounds coming from the deepest parts of the garden. And those on my left began to moan, to twist their bodies supplicatingly.
I felt I could not do this. But I remembered Lexius’s commands to us, how we must demonstrate our passion. And I had only to think of the words to be suddenly at the mercy of what I truly felt—the desire throbbing in my cock, throbbing in my whole soul, and a sense of my hopelessness and abject position. It was the Sultan who was coming, surely, the Lord who had ordained all this, taught our Queen to keep pleasure slaves, created this great scheme in which we were firmly held as powerless victims of our own desires as well as the pleasure of others. And the scheme was so much more fully realized here, so much more dramatically and efficiently executed.
An eerie pride overcame me, a pride in my own beauty and strength and obvious subjugation. The moaning rose from me with genuine passion, and the tears flooded my eyes. I felt the bracelets holding my arms as I let the feeling move my limbs, let my chest expand, felt the heavy bronze phallus inside me. I wanted my humiliation and obedience to be recognized, if even for an instant. And I had been obedient, despite my little conquest of Lexius. I had been obedient in all other things. And I was overcome with delicious shame and desperation to please, moaning and undulating without resistance.
He was coming nearer. There materialized in the corner of my swimming vision two figures carrying the poles of a high, fringed canopy. Then I saw the figure walking slowly under the canopy.
A young man, perhaps a few years younger than Lexius, and of the same delicate-boned and narrow-limbed race, his body very straight under his heavy robes, his long scarlet cloak, his short dark hair free of any headdress.
He was looking from right to left as he passed. The slaves were crying softly but loudly without moving their lips. I saw him pause, reach out, and examine a slave, but I could not see the slave himself. This was all in luridly colored outline. He moved on now to the next slave, and this one I could see a little better—a black-haired slave with an immense cock who