Beauty's Release (14 page)

A carpet had been spread out right before them. There was the small wine table with its circle of goblets, the scattered cushions. The barren cross was to Tristan’s right, directly before the fig tree. The blood thundered in my head when I saw it.

The Master at once gave a series of orders. But his voice was soft. There was no anger in it. I was picked up, turned upside down, and taken to the cross. And immediately, I felt my ankles being tethered to the ends of the crossbar, my head dangling just above the ground, my cock bumping the smooth wood.

I saw the upside-down garden spread before me, servants mere blurs of color moving through the greenery.

As soon as I was secure, my arms were lifted up away from the ground and my wrists tied to the brass hooks that held the thighs of the other slaves. And then I felt my cock being bent back and straight up above my inverted body, and it was tied in place between my legs by leather thongs that went round my thighs, holding it firmly. It did not hurt in this unnaturally bent position. But it was on display, and it could touch nothing.

All the bonds were made doubly secure, leather thongs pulled tight, and then one more good loop of leather was bound round my chest and the cross, to steady me and render me completely immobile.

In sum, I was upside down, bound firmly with legs apart and arms apart and my cock pointing upwards. The blood was roaring in my ears, and thudding in my cock.

I felt the blindfold going round my face—it was fur-lined and very cool—and buckled tight on the back of my head. Pure blackness. And all of the noises of the garden suddenly magnified.

Footsteps in the grass. Then the heightened feel of hands rubbing oil into my backside, massaging it well and deep between my legs. The distant sounds of pots and pans, the smell of cooking fires.

I tried to move. I felt an irresistible urge to test the bonds. I struggled. It produced no effect, except that I realized it had been easier because I was blindfolded. Unable to gauge the visual effect, I let myself tremble all over, and feel the cross vibrate slightly under me, as the Punishment Cross had done in the village.

But there was a terrible ignominy to being upside down, a terrible ignominy to the blindfold.

Then I felt the first lash of the strap across my bottom. It came again very quicky, and then again, with a loud cracking noise, more leather than flesh being smacked, and then again, stinging this time remarkably. I felt myself wriggling all over. I felt grateful that it was happening at last, yet afraid of what I would feel moments from now. And it was bitter to me that I didn’t know whether or not Lexius was doing the whipping. Was it he or one of those little grooms?

Whatever the case, it was good, the whipping. It was the thick leather strap that I had craved ever since we left the village, the sound, punishing strap that I needed. It was the beating I had dreamed of every time those delicate thongs teased my cock or the soles of my feet. And the walloping was splendid, coming fast as it did. And with a rush of sublime relief, I lost all resistance.

Even on the village Punishment Cross I had not been so totally given over. That had come only with the increase of pain. Now, as I hung blindfolded and helpless, it happened instantly. My cock was thumping and moving under its tight binding, and the strap was lashing me hard across both buttocks at the same time, and coming so fast that there seemed little or no interval between blows, just unbroken punishment with a sound that seemed nearly deafening to me.

I wondered what the other slaves thought as they heard it—whether they craved it as I might have, or feared it. Whether they knew it was a disgrace to be whipped like this, the sound disrupting the peace and the quiet of the garden.

But the thrashing was going on. The strap was being swung harder and harder. And when a cry broke from me, I realized for the first time that I wasn’t gagged. I was bound and blindfolded but not gagged.

Well, that little oversight was immediately remedied. A roll of soft leather was shoved well between my teeth, as the blows from the strap continued. And the gag was pulled well back into my mouth by ties that were then knotted behind my head, holding the gag firmly.

I don’t know why it so thoroughly undid me. It was perhaps the last restraint needed, and under all these restraints I went wild, bucking and struggling under the pounding strap and crying aloud against the gag as I hung in darkness. The inside of the soft fur-lined blindfold was moist and hot with my tears. And my cries were muffled, but loud. And I began to struggle in rhythmic motions. I could raise my entire body a few inches, then drop down. And I realized I was rising to reach the blazing hot wallops of the strap, and then dropping away from them and coming up again.

“Yes,” I thought, “do it. Do it harder. Whip me soundly for what I’ve done. Let the blaze of pain grow brighter, hotter.” But it was not this coherent, what I thought. It was like a song in my head, made up of the rhythms—the strap, my cries, the creak of the wood.

And at some point as it continued, I realized it was going on longer than any beating I’d ever received before. The blows weren’t all that hard now. But I was so sore it scarcely mattered. Nice, lazy loud smacks from the strap had me writhing and crying.

And the garden was filling with voices. Men’s voices. I could heard them coming in, laughing, talking. I could even hear, if I listened very carefully, the wine being poured into the goblets. I could smell it again. And smell the green grass right under my head, and smell the fruit, and the strong aroma of roasted meat and sweet aromatic spices. Cinnamon and fowl, cardamom, beef.

So the banquet was in progress. And the beating still went on, but the blows were coming more and more slowly.

Music had commenced. I heard the thumping of strings, the beat of small drums, and then the ring of harps and shrill, unfamiliar sounds from horns I couldn’t name. It was dissonant and foreign and delightfully strange, the music.

My rump was burning with pain. And the strap played with it. There would be a long moment in which I would feel every inch on my backside glowing, and then the crack of the strap, the white-hot flair, for an instant. I wept. I realized it might go on like that all the evening long. And there was nothing I could do but cry helplessly.

“But better this,” I thought, “than to be one of the others. Better this, to draw their eyes to it as they dine and drink and laugh together, whoever they are ... than to be a mere decoration. Yes, the disgraced one again, the punished one. The one with the will.”

And I struggled violently on the cross, loving the strength of it, that I couldn’t bring it down, and feeling the strap come down harder and faster again, my cries growing louder and more miserable.

Finally, the blows slacked off again. They became teasing. The strap was playing with various little marks, welts, scrapes that it had made in my flesh. I knew this little piece of music.

And it blended with the other music, the music of those who held power, which flooded my senses. Mentally I reached out from the moment, exquisite as it was, and gathered other moments to me, welding the immediate past to the dizzying present. The feel of Lexius’s lips—why hadn’t I called him Lexius, made him call me Master? I would next time—the feel of his tight little anus when I’d raped him. I savored all this as the strap lazily revived my simmering flesh, and the banquet went on noisily.

 

I didn’t know how much time had passed. I only knew, as I had in the hold of the ship, that something had changed. The men were rising, moving about. The strap was startling me now. I’d be left in peace, then it would lick at me. I was so sore that the scratch of a fingernail would have made me moan. I felt the blood teeming under the welts, and my cock dancing in its leather bindings. The voices in the garden were getting louder, more drunken, more abandoned.

Cloth brushed my back, my head, as men passed me. Then suddenly my head was lifted, and the blindfold was pulled off, and I felt the bonds being loosened from my ankles and wrists and my chest simultaneously. I tensed all over, afraid of falling, of being dropped.

But the grooms quickly had me right side up, and I found myself standing in the grass, a desert Lord before me. Naturally, I hadn’t the common sense or self-discipline not to look at him. He wore a full Arab headdress of white linen, and dark wine-colored robes, and his eyes glittered from a dark sunbaked face as he smiled at me. My stunned look seemed only to amuse him. But other such Lords pressed in. I was suddenly turned roughly. And a powerful hand squeezed my sore buttocks. There was laughter. My cock was slapped, my chin lifted, my face examined.

And all around me I could see slaves were being taken down. Dmitri, still blindfolded, was on all fours on the grass, being well raped by a young Lord. And Tristan knelt before another Master, taking the man’s cock into his mouth with vigorous motions.

But even more interesting was the sight of Lexius, standing back under the fig tree, watching. Our eyes met for one split second before I was roughly turned around again.

I almost smiled, but it would have been foolish to do so. My reddened buttocks were really delighting these new Masters. They had all to squeeze them, feel the heat, see me wince. I wondered why they didn’t whip all the other slaves, too. But no sooner had that little thought come to my head than I heard the straps at work on the others.

The Lord with the sunburnt face pushed me down on my knees and with both his hands kneaded my punished flesh, while another man caught my arms and wound them around his hips. He opened his robe. The cock was ready for my mouth, and I took it, thinking of Lexius when I did so. And in back of me a cock pushed at my buttocks, parted them, and entered.

I felt speared at both ends, and all the more excited by the thought that Lexius witnessed it. And I worked my lips hard on the delicious cock in my mouth, falling into rhythm with the one that was driving into me. The cock pushed deeper into my mouth, deeper into my throat, and the man behind me spanked against my aching backside with each thrust, until finally he spurted into me. I locked my arms tighter around the man I suckled. I nursed him harder and harder, while again my buttocks were pulled apart, kneaded and pinched, and another, bigger cock slipped into me.

At last, I felt the hot salty fluid fill my mouth, and the cock, after a last few licks of my tongue, withdrew through my tight wet lips, as if savoring the motion as much as I did. At once, another took its place as the man in back continued to grind his hips against me.

It seems I took another in front and in back before I was stood upright again and thrown back, my shoulders caught by two men who pushed my head down so that I could see nothing but their robes, my legs spread apart by another man who entered me immediately. My body was rocked by his thrusts, my own cock pumping vainly. A cool mass of cloth suddenly veiled my chest. Another man had straddled me. My head was lifted and cradled to receive his cock. I tried to free my arms to hold to his hips, but those who held me wouldn’t allow it.

I was still sucking the cock, greedily, hungrily, my own hunger critical and painful now, when the man who had been raping me withdrew, quite satisfied I think, and I felt the strap licking at my buttocks as the men held my legs apart and up. I was whipped hard, the old welts blazing again, until I was moaning and twisting as I sucked the cock and I could hear laughter around me. I cried bitterly as the pain grew worse. The hands that held my legs tightened. And I clung to the cock, working it feverishly until it came, and then letting the fluid fill my mouth before I slowly, deliberately swallowed it.

I was turned over again, and I glimpsed the grass beneath me, the sandals of those who held me suspended. My buttocks were steaming from the strap. And, as a new cock entered my mouth and another entered my anus, I was whipped from the side, the strap curling over the same punished flesh, and then licking at my back and underneath, at my cock and my nipples. I went into a frenzy as the leather licked my cock again. I pumped my backside against the man who raped me, and drew the other cock into me deeply.

I had no real thoughts now. I had no dreams of other moments or even of Lexius. I was simmering with just the proper mixture of pain and excitement, hoping desperately that my Lords and Masters might at some point want to see my cock perform.

But what need did they have for that?

When they were at last satisfied, I was allowed down on all fours and sent to remain motionless in the center of the nearby carpet. I might as well have been an animal for which they had no more need. And the Lords settled back into their circle. They sat crossed-legged on their cushions and lifted their goblets again—ate, drank, murmured to one another.

I knelt there with my head low, as I had been taught, trying not to see them surrounding me. I wanted to look for Lexius, see that familiar figure again in the trees, know he was watching. But all I could see were the dark shadows surrounding me. I saw the glint of splendid robes, the sharp gleam of the men’s eyes, heard the rise and fall of voices.

I was panting, and my cock was humiliatingly alive, moving without my will. But what was that in the Sultan’s garden? Now and then one of the men reached out and slapped my cock, or pulled at my nipples. A mercy and a penance. A little laughter from the group, some observation. The situation was unbearably subdued and intimate. I tensed, unable to shield myself. And when my welts were pinched I cried softly, keeping my mouth closed.

The garden was quieter now. But there still came the sound of punishing straps and hoarse, triumphant cries of pleasure.

Finally, two of the grooms appeared with another slave and they took me by the hair, and pulled me out of the circle as they pushed the new slave into it. They snapped their fingers for me to follow them.

LAURENT: THE GREAT ROYAL PRESENCE