Beauty's Release - By A. N. Roquelaure & Anne Rice Page 0,78

And it wasn’t the maddening little sting of the Sultan’s thongs. It was a good smack each time the leather whipped us. And down the road we went in a loud clatter of horseshoes, the sky shining overhead as it had done on a thousand warm summer days, other carriages passing us.

I can’t say the country road was easier than the village road. If anything, there was more traffic. Slaves at work in the fields, small carts rattling by, a string of slaves bound to a fence, their bottoms being soundly whipped by an angry Master.

And when we pulled into the farm road, our brief rest in harness was hardly an escape from our new station. The naked and dusty farm slaves pushed indifferently past us, unloading the cart, then piling it high with fruit and vegetables for market. At the kitchen door, a scullery maid watched us idly.

The experienced ponies pawed the ground with their horseshoe boots; they shook their heads now and then when the flies came near; they stretched their muscles as though loving their own nakedness.

But Tristan and I were rather still, and it seemed each tiny variation of the country scene took more of the mental skin off me, deepening the sense of my lowliness. Even the geese pecking near our feet seemed part of a world that had condemned us to be rude beasts and would keep us there.

If anyone enjoyed the sight of our hard cocks, our tortured nipples, this wasn’t revealed to us. The driver of the cart, pacing up and down, whacked us with his doubled strap more out of boredom than inclination.

And when two of the other ponies rubbed against each other, the driver punished them with hard and cold annoyance.

“No touching there,” he declared. And the scullery maid slowly roused herself to fetch a wooden paddle for him. Stepping in front of us, he found plenty of room to punish the offenders, switching back and forth between the two rumps, jerking up the phallus by its hook with his left hand as he soundly whacked at the bottom and thighs with the paddle.

Tristan and I watched, petrified, the ponies groaning under the hard smacks, the muscles of their reddened buttocks contracting and releasing helplessly. I knew I must never make this mistake of rubbing against another harnessed body. Yet I felt certain that someday I would make it.

Finally, we were again driven out. We trotted fast, muscles tingling, backsides smarting under the strap, the bits pulled harshly back, the pace just a little too quick for us so that it soon had us crying.

Driven into the marketplace, we were again allowed to rest, the noonday crowd taking only a little more notice of us than the farm servants had, someone stopping to pat a rump here or slap a cock there, the ponies who were touched tossing their heads and stamping their feet as if they liked it! I knew when some passerby finally touched me I would do the same. And then suddenly I was doing it, tossing my hair and chewing hard on the bit, as a young boy with a sack slung over his shoulder stopped to call us fine steeds and play with the weights that hung from my nipples.

“It will take us over,” I thought. “It will become second nature.”

And as the afternoon passed in a succession of such trips, I grew not accustomed to it so much as profoundly resigned to it. Yet I knew that true understanding, true appreciation of the pony life, would only come with the passing of days and then weeks. I could not conceive of my frame of mind six months along. It would be an interesting revelation to me.

At nightfall, we made our last trip, no longer tethered to the Mayor’s cart but to the refuse wagon that traveled about the deserted market to receive the sweepings. Sluggishly we moved, as the cart was filled, naked slaves driven to the work by their crude and impatient overseers.

The villagers, dressed for the evening now, moved past the deserted shops and stands towards the nearby Place of Public Punishment. And we could hear the paddles and straps at work there, the cheers and screams of the crowd, the general noise of festivity. From that too we were, for better or worse, excluded.

It was the stable world for us, the hearty young grooms unharnessing us with simple words:

“Easy now,” and “Steady,” and “Head up, that’s a good boy,” as they