“You may drink the wine as I do,” he said, as if he’d read my thoughts. And, quite astonished, I drank as a man for the first time in half a year, feeling a little awkward about it. I gulped too much and had to stop. But it was well-aged burgundy and without equal in my memory.
“Tristan,” he said softly.
I looked him straight in the eye and slowly lowered the cup.
“You’re to speak to me now,” he said, “to answer me.”
More amazement. “Yes, Master,” I said softly.
“Did you hate me last night when I had you whipped on the turntable?” he asked.
I was shocked.
He took another drink of the wine but without taking his eyes off me. He looked ominous suddenly, though I didn’t know why.
“No, Master,” I whispered.
“Louder,” he said. “I can’t hear you.”
“No, Master,” I answered. I flushed as deeply as I ever had. It wasn’t really necessary to recall the turntable. I’d never truly stopped thinking about it.
“ ‘Sir’ will do now and then as well as ‘Master,’ ” he said. “I like both. Did you hate Julia when she stretched your anus with the horsetail phallus?”
“No, Sir,” I said, the blush getting hotter.
“Did you hate me when I tethered you with the ponies and made you pull the coach to the manor house? I don’t mean today after you had been so well worked and tempered. I mean yesterday when you were staring with such horror at the harnesses.”
“No, Sir,” I protested.
“Then what did you feel when all those things happened?”
I was too stupefied to answer.
“What did I want from you today when I tethered you behind that pair of ponies, when I plugged your mouth and your anus and made you march in your bare feet?”
“Submission,” I said, my mouth dry. My voice sounded unfamiliar to me.
“And ... in more precise detail?”
“That I ... I march briskly. And that I be taken through the village in ... in that fashion....” I was trembling. I tried to steady the goblet with the other hand as if it were a thoughtless gesture.
“In what fashion?” he pressed.
“Harnessed, gagged.”
“Yes ... ?”
“And impaled on a phallus and barefoot.” I swallowed, but I didn’t look away from him.
“And what do I want from you now?” he said.
I thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I ... That I answer your questions.”
“Exactly. So you will answer them, fully,” he said politely with a slight lift of his eyebrows, “and with deep descriptive passages, concealing nothing and without so much coaxing. You will give long answers. In fact you will continue your answer until I put another question.” He reached for the bottle and filled my goblet.
“And drink your wine whenever you like,” he said, “there is plenty of it.”
“Thank you, Sir,” I murmured, staring at the cup.
“That’s a little better!” he said, marking my response. “Now, we’ll start again. When you first saw the team of ponies and you realized you were being made to join them, what went through your mind? Let me remind you, you had a stout phallus in your backside with a good horsetail attached to it. But then came the boots and the harness. You are blushing. What did you think?”
“That I couldn’t bear it,” I said, not daring to pause, my voice quavering. “That I couldn’t be made to do it. That I, I would fail somehow. That I couldn’t be lashed to a coach and made to pull it like an animal, and the tail, it seemed a dreadful decoration, a stigma.” My face was in a fever. I sipped at the wine, but he had not spoken and this meant I had to go on answering him! “I think it was better as the harnesses were tightened and I couldn’t get away.”
“But you made no move to get away before that. When I strapped you home through the street, I was alone with you. You didn’t try to run then, not even when the village toughs whipped you.”
“Well, what good would it have done to run?” I asked in consternation. “I’d been taught not to run! I would only have been trussed up somewhere, beaten, maybe my cock whipped—” I stopped, shocked at my own words. “Or maybe I would only have been caught and harnessed anyway, and pulled along truckling by the other ponies. And the mortification would have been greater because all would have known that I was so afraid, out of control, and being so violently forced to it.”
I drank from the goblet and shoved my hair out of my eyes. “No, if it was to be done, then it was better to submit; it was inescapable, so it had to be accepted.”
I shut my eyes tight for a second. The heat and torrent of my words amazed me.
“But you’d been taught to submit to Lord Stefan, and you did not,” he said.
“I tried!” I burst out. “But Lord Stefan ...”
“Yes...”
“It was what the Captain said,” I faltered. My voice sounded frail to me now. The words were too rapid. “He had been my lover before, and instead of using that intimacy to his advantage as Master, he allowed it to weaken him.”
“What an interesting statement. Did he talk to you as I’m talking to you now?”
“No! No one has ever done that!” I laughed shortly, dryly. “That is, not with me talking back. He ordered me about like any castle Lord. He ordered me stiffly, but he was in a terrible state of agitation. It excited him beyond words to see me erect and bowing to his wishes and yet he couldn’t endure it. I think, well, I think sometimes that if our positions had been reversed by fate, I might have showed him how to do it.”
My Master laughed, and his laugh was free and slow. He drank from his cup. His face was animated and a little warmer now. I felt some terrible sense of danger to my soul, looking at him.
“0, that is probably too true,” he said. “The best slaves sometimes make the best Masters. But you may never have the opportunity to prove it. I spoke to the Captain about you this afternoon. I made thorough inquiries. When you were free years ago, you bested Lord Stefan in all ways, didn’t you? Better rider, swordsman, archer. And he loved you and admired you.”
“I tried to shine as his slave,” I said. “I journeyed through excruciating humiliations. The Bridle Path, the other games of Festival Night in her Majesty’s gardens; I was the Queen’s toy now and then; Lord Gregory, the Master of the slaves, incited the most exquisite fear in me. But I never pleased Lord Stefan because he himself did not know how to be pleased! He did not know how to command! I was always distracted by other Lords.”
My voice stopped in my throat. Why must I tell these secrets? Why must I lay it all out and amplify my revelation to the Captain? But my Master didn’t speak. It was the silence again and I was falling into it.
“I kept thinking of the soldiers’ camp,” I went on, the silence pulsing in my ears. “And I felt no love for Lord Stefan.” I looked into my Master’s eyes. The blue was only a glimmer of blue, the dark centers large and almost glittering.
“One has to love the Master or Mistress,” I said. “Even the slaves in the village cottages, they can love their gruff and busy Masters or Mistresses, can’t they, as I loved ... the soldiers in the camp who whipped me daily. As I loved for one moment—”
“Yes?” he demanded.
“As I even loved the Whipping Master on the turntable last night. For one moment.” That hand lifting my chin, squeezing my cheeks, that smile looming over me. The power in that thick arm ...
I was trembling as badly as I had then. But still the silence ...
“Even those toughs, as you called them, who whipped me in the street while you watched,” I said, veering away from the image of the turntable. “They had their shabby power.”
I had only thought I was blushing before. I tried to cool myself with the wine, strengthen my voice, the silence stretching again as I drank.
I put up my left hand to shield my eyes.
“Take down your hand,” he said, “and tell me what you f
elt when you were made to march, after you were properly harnessed.”
The word “properly,” pierced me.
“It was what I needed,” I said. I tried not to look at him, but I failed. His eyes were wide, and in the candlelight his face was almost too perfect for a man’s face, too fine. I felt a knot in my chest loosening, breaking. “I ... mean, if I’m to be a slave, it was what I needed. And tonight—when I did it again—I had pride in it.”
My shame was too much. My face throbbed.
“I liked it!” I whispered. “That is, this evening when we went out to the manor house, I liked it. I had already been shown by the early barefoot run through the village that one could take pride in being harnessed like that, instead of the other way. And I wanted to please you. I took pleasure in pleasing you.”
I drained the cup and I lowered it. There was the wine pouring into it again, and his eyes never letting me go as he put the bottle back on the table.
I felt as if I were falling; I was being opened by my own confessions as surely as the phalluses had opened me.
“But maybe that’s not the whole truth,” I said, looking at him intently. “Even if I had not been run barefoot through the village, I might have liked the pony harnesses anyway. And maybe, despite all the pain and the misery of it, I liked the barefoot run through the village because you were driving me and you were watching me. I felt sorry for the slaves I saw whom no one seemed to watch.”
“In the village someone is always watching,” he said. “If I strap you to a wall outside, and I will, there will be those who will notice you. The village toughs will come round to torment you again, grateful for an unattended slave they can torture for nothing. They’d whip you raw in less than half an hour. Someone always sees, comes to punish. And as you said, they have their shabby charm. For a well-tuned slave, the crudest cleaning woman or chimney sweep can have an overwhelming charm if the discipline is engulfing.”
“Engulfing.” I repeated the word. It was perfect.
My vision blurred. I started to raise my hand again but put it down.
“So you needed it,” he said. “You needed to be well harnessed and bitted and shod and driven hard.”
I nodded. My throat was so thick I couldn’t speak.
“And you wanted to please me,” he said. “But why?”
“I don’t know!”
“You do know!”
“Because ... you’re my Master. You own me. You are my only hope.”
“Hope for what? To be punished all the more?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know!”
“My only hope for a deep love, a loss of myself to someone, not merely a loss amid all that strives to break me down and remake me. But a loss to someone who is sublimely cruel, sublimely good at mastering. Someone who might somehow, in the blaze of my suffering, see the depth of submission and love me also.” It was too much of an admission. I stopped, crushed, certain I couldn’t continue.
But I did go on, slowly.
“I could have loved many Masters or Mistresses perhaps. But you have an eerie beauty that debilitates me and absorbs me. You illuminate the punishments. I don’t ... I don’t understand it.”
“What did you feel when you realized you were in line for the Public Turntable,” he asked, “when you implored me with all those kisses to my boots and the crowd laughed at you?”
The words stung. Again, it was too real for memory. I swallowed hard.
“I felt panic. I cried, to be punished so soon like that, after trying so hard. Not as a spectacle, I thought, for a crowd of common people, and such a crowd, all there to preside over the chastisement. And when you reprimanded me for begging, I was ... ashamed that I had ever thought I could escape it. I remembered that it wasn’t necessary for me to have earned the punishment. I deserved it by being here, and being what I was. I was filled with remorse that I had pleaded with you. I will never do it again, I swear it.”
“And then?” he asked. “When you were taken up and mounted without fetters? Did you learn from it?”
“Yes, enormously.” I gave another low, harsh laugh. Hardly more than a single syllable. “It was devastating! First there was that fear of losing control when you told the guard, ‘No fetters.’ ”
“But why? What would have happened if you had struggled?”
“I would have been bound down, I knew it. Tonight I saw a slave bound like that. Last night I simply assumed it would happen. I would have resisted with my whole body, bridling the way the Prince was tonight, bucking, the terror crashing against me and washing away from me.”
I stopped. Engulfing yes, it had become engulfing.
“But I held still,” I said, “and when I realized I wouldn’t slip or slide under the blows, all the tension was released. I knew this remarkable exhilaration. I was being offered up to the crowd and I submitted to it. I collected all the crowd’s frenzy to myself, and the crowd enlarged my punishment as they enjoyed it, and I belonged to the crowd, to hundreds and hundreds of Masters and Mistresses. I yielded to their lust. I held back nothing, resisted nothing.”
I stopped. He nodded slowly, but he didn’t speak. The heat pounded silently in my temples. I sipped the wine, thinking of my own words.
“It was the same in a smaller way,” I said, “when the Captain thrashed me. He was punishing me for having failed after his training. But he was also testing me to see if I was telling the truth about Stefan, if it was mastering I needed. He was calling my bluff, saying, in effect, ‘I’ll give it to you and we’ll see if yo can endure it.’ And I offered myself to his lash, or at least it seemed so. I never thought, not even in the camp when the soldiers punished me, or at the castle when the Lords and Ladies looked on, that I could, in a hot noonday village square, full of passersby, dance for a soldier’s thrash like that. The soldiers trained my cock. They trained me. But they never got that from me. And though I’m terrified of what lies ahead, terrified even of the pony harnesses, I feel myself opening to all punishments instead of triumphing over them with sublime form as I did at the castle. I am being turned inside out. I belong to the Captain, and to you, to all who look. I am becoming my punishments.”
Silently he moved towards me, taking the goblet and setting it aside and then taking me in his arms and kissing me.
My mouth opened wide, eagerly, and then he pulled me onto my knees and went down to put his mouth on my cock and fold his arms around my buttocks. Almost savagely he sucked at the full length of my organ, enveloping me in tight wet hotness as his fingers, spreading my buttocks, pried open my anus. And his head went back and forth, pulling on the full length of my cock, lips tightening and then releasing as his tongue circled the tip; then the rapid, almost mad sucking continued. His fingers stretched my anus wide. My mind went clean. I whispered, “I can’t hold back.” And when he sucked even harder, with rougher strokes, I steadied his head with both hands and jetted hard into him.
My cries came in short bursting rhythm with the suction that seemed to want to empty me. And when I could stand it no more, and tried gently to release his head, he rose up and pushed me down on the bed on my face, shoving my thighs up and wide and flattening my buttocks to the sheets with the heels of his palms before he lay down and forced his cock into me. I was spread like a frog under him. The muscles in my thighs positively sang with delicious pain. His weight pressed me down all the harder. His teeth opened lightly on the back of my neck. His hands hooked under my crooked knees and forced them up closer to the pillow. And my exhausted cock throbbed and doubled beneath me.
My buttocks bobbed. I groaned from the strain. And his cock, stabbing into my wide-spread buttocks, seemed some inhuman instrument reaming me, coring me, and emptying me.
In a wild series of spurts I came again, unable to remain flat, bucking under him, and he bore down all the more, grinding out his low moan of climax.
I lay panting, not daring to uncramp my bent and flattened legs. Then I felt him pushing my kne
es down. He was lying beside me. He turned me over to face him, and in that keen high-pitched moment of exhaustion, he started kissing me.
I tried to fight the languor of sleep, my cock begging me for a moment’s respite. But he had sent his hook down into my loins again. He was bringing me up, forcing me to my knees, directing my hands to a wooden handle over our heads in the paneled canopy of the bed, and whipping my cock with his hands as he sat with his legs crossed before me.
I watched it engorge with blood under the slaps, the pleasure slower, fuller, excruciating. I moaned aloud and twisted away almost before I could stop myself. But he tugged me forward, wrapping my balls up against my cock with his left hand, and he continued the merciless slapping with the other.
My body was on the rack. My mind was on the rack, and now I realized, as he pinched the tip of my cock, that he meant to tease it out of me. Pinching, stroking with his curled fingers, now licking with his tongue, he had me in a frenzy. He took the cream from the jar he had used last night and greased his right hand and pulled at my cock, squeezing it as if he would destroy it. I was grunting behind my clenched teeth, my hips rocking, and then it shot forth again, the hard spurting and spurting. And I hung from the wooden handle dazed and truly empty.
A light still burned.
I didn’t know how much time had passed as I opened my eyes. But it must have been early. Coaches still rolled on the road outside the window.
And I realized my Master was dressed and walking back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back, his hair tousled. He wore the blue velvet doublet unlaced, his linen shirt with its long balloon sleeves open down the front also. Now and then he would pivot sharply, stop, run his fingers through his hair, and then continue pacing.
When I rose on my elbow, afraid of being ordered out, he gestured to the wine goblet and said, “Drink if you wish.”