Beauty's Release - By A. N. Roquelaure & Anne Rice Page 0,56

over to the bed, and sat down beside me.

“Kiss me,” I said. I put my hand up to guide his face. Nice kiss, more robust but less intense than the kisses of Lexius, who was kneeling right behind Tristan. “Now turn and kiss our forlorn Master there,” I said.

Tristan obeyed, slipping his arm around Lexius, and Lexius gave himself to the kiss a little too completely to suit me. And maybe to spite me.

When Tristan turned back, his eyes questioned me directly.

I ignored the question.

“Tell me what happened after I was dismissed. Did you continue to please the Sultan?”

“Yes,” Tristan answered. “It was rather like a dream—being chosen, lying with him finally. There was something so tender in him. He isn’t our Master really. He’s our Sovereign. There’s quite a difference.”

“True,” I said, smiling.

He wanted to say more, but again he glanced at Lexius.

“Let him alone,” I said. “He’s my slave, and he awaits my will, and I’ll let you have him in a moment. But talk to me first. Are you content, or are you still grieving for your old Master in the village?”

“Not grieving anymore,” he said, then he broke off. “Laurent, I was sorry that I had to win over you—”

“Don’t be foolish, Tristan. It was what we were made to do, and I lost because I couldn’t win. It’s as simple as that.”

He looked again at Lexius.

“Why are you tormenting him, Laurent?” he asked, his tone slightly accusatory.

“I’m glad you’re content,” I said. “I couldn’t tell. But what if the Sultan never asks for you again?”

“That doesn’t matter, really,” he answered. “Unless, of course, it matters to Lexius. But Lexius won’t ask the impossible of us. We’ve been noticed, that’s what Lexius wanted.”

“And you’ll be just as happy?” I asked.

Tristan thought for a moment before he answered.

“There’s something very different here,” he said, finally. “The atmosphere is charged with a different sense of things. I’m not lost as I was so long ago at the castle when I served a timid Master who didn’t know how to discipline me. And I am not condemned in shame to the village where I need my Master, Nicolas to retrieve me from chaos and shape my suffering for me. I am a part of a finer, more sacrosanct order.” He studied me. “Do you see my meaning?”

I nodded and gestured for him to continue. It was clear he had more to say, and his expression let me know that he was telling the truth. The misery I’d seen in his face all the time we were at sea was truly gone now.

“The palace is engulfing,” he said, “as the village was. In fact, it is infinitely more so. But we are not bad slaves here. We are merely part of an immense world in which our suffering is offered up to our Lord and his Court whether or not he ever deigns to acknowledge it. I find something sublime in this. It is as if I have advanced to another stage of understanding.”

Again, I nodded. I remembered my feelings in the garden when the Sultan had picked me from the ranks. But this was only part of the many things I could and did feel about this place and what had happened to us. In this room, with Lexius, something different was occurring.

“I began to understand it,” Tristan said, “when we were first taken from the ship and carried through the streets to be viewed by the common people. And it came fully clear to me when I was blindfolded and bound in the garden. In this place we are nothing but our bodies, nothing but the pleasure we give, nothing but our capacity for evincing feeling. All else is gone, and it is quite impossible to think of something as personal as whippings on the Public Turntable of the village or the constant education in passivity and submissiveness we knew at the castle.”

“True,” I said. “But without your old Master, Nicolas, without his love as you described, isn’t there a terrible loneliness—”

“No,” he said candidly. “Since we are nothing here, we are all connected to each other. In the village and the castle, we were divided by shame, by individual humiliations and punishments. Here we are joined in the indifference of the Master. And we are all cared for in that indifference and used rather well, I think. It is like the designs on the walls here. There are no pictures of men and women, as you find