hands? I shuddered at the thought of our awkwardness. The game was precisely the kind of intimacy I had dreaded when we entered the bedchamber. It was bad enough to be scrutinized ; now we must strive to give amusement.
Instantly, Lexius sent the ball rolling across the floor, and, on our knees, Tristan and I struggled after it. Tristan pulled ahead of me and dipped to catch it in his teeth. He managed it without falling. And I realized suddenly that I had failed. Tristan had won. There was nothing to do but struggle back to our Masters, where Lexius was already taking the ball from Tristan’s mouth as he stroked Tristan’s hair approvingly.
He glared at me, and his thong whipped my bare belly as I knelt before him. I could hear the Sultan’s laughter, though I looked down and saw nothing but the floor gleaming before me. Lexius whipped my chest, my legs. I winced, the tears spilling again. He forced us around, in position to compete with each other again, and once more the ball was thrown. And this time I really went after it.
Tristan and I struggled against each other, trying to push each other to the side as the ball came to rest before us. I managed to get hold of it, but he confounded me by snatching it right from my mouth and turning at once to take it back to the Master.
I was in a silent rage. Both of us had been commanded to please the Sultan, and now we had to fight each other to do so, and one would win and one would lose. It seemed beastly unfair.
But all I could do was return to our Lords and be whipped again by that hated little thong, the thing finding the sore flesh in back this time as I knelt still, weeping.
The third time I got the ball and shoved Tristan over when he tried to take it. And the fourth time Tristan got it again, and I was frantic. By the fifth race, we were both out of breath and had forgotten all about grace of any sort, and I could hear the Sultan laughing lightly as he watched Tristan steal the ball from me, and me stumble after him. I dreaded the thong this time as it cut at my welts, and I wept miserably as it came whistling down through the air, the strokes long and hard and fast as Tristan knelt receiving approval.
But the Sultan shocked me suddenly because he drew near and he touched my face again. The thong stopped. And, in a moment of exquisite stillness, his silken fingers wiped my tears once more, as if he liked the feel of them. And there came the lovely warm feeling of my heart opening again, as it had on the garden path, the feeling that I belonged to him. I felt I had tried to please. I was simply slower, less agile, than Tristan. His fingers lingered. And when his voice rose, speaking rapidly to Lexius, I felt that it was touching me too, stroking me, possessing me and tormenting me with perfect authority.
In a blur I saw Lexius’s thong tapping Tristan, directing him to turn and approach the bed on his knees. I was ordered to follow, but the Sultan walked along beside me, and I felt his hand playing with my hair still, lifting it above the collar.
I was in a low ache of desire. My faculties were drowning in it. I saw the bodies tethered to the four posts of the bed—beauties all, women turned in to face the Lord as he slept, men turned out, and all of them moving under their bonds as if to acknowledge the Master’s approach—and my vision seemed to dim even more, so that the bed looked not like a bed but rather like an altar. The tapes-tried covers blazed with tiny configurations.
We knelt at the foot of the dais. And Lexius and the Sultan were behind us. There was the soft sound of cloth falling, of fabric untied, bits of metal unclasped.
Then the naked figure of the Sultan moved into my vision. He stepped up on the dais, his body shimmering in its cleanliness and smoothness, its lack of any mark, and he sat down on the side of the bed, facing us.
I tried not to look into his face. But I could see he was smiling. His organ was erect, and it seemed a momentous thing to