Beauty's Release (25 page)

He marched us past the doors to the wagon yard, and I saw another pair of open doors in the side of the stable. A beam like a bolt lay across the span of the opening at midpoint. A man would have to duck under it or climb over it to get through, the former being much easier.

“That’s the recreation yard, and you’ll be there for an hour,” Gareth said. “Now, down on your hands and knees, and see you stay down in the yard. No pony walks upright save to march to his Master’s commands or to trot in harness. Disobey and I’ll chain your elbows to your knees so that you can’t stand up. Don’t make me do it.”

We went down on all fours, and he swatted our rumps with his open hands to drive us through the doorway.

Immediately, we entered a clean-swept dirt yard lighted by torches and lanterns, with several large old trees against the far wall and naked ponies sitting or prowling about on all fours everywhere. There was a peaceful atmosphere until we were seen, and at once the other steeds moved towards us.

I understood what would take place. And I didn’t try to fight or run. Everywhere I looked, I saw naked flanks, long unruly locks, smiling faces. Directly in front of me a beautiful young pony, blond-haired and gray-eyed, smiled as he reached up and stroked my face and opened my mouth with his thumb.

I waited, unsure as to how far I would let this go, when I felt another behind me, the cock already pushing into my anus, and yet another had thrown his arm over my shoulder and was pulling at my nipples roughly. I backed up, bucked, only driving the cock in deeper, and I was caught in front by the beautiful one, who laughed as he sat back on his heels and pushed my head down towards his cock forcefully. My arms were pulled out from under me by another pony, and I opened my mouth on the cock even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I was groaning from the hard grinding I was getting in back. And I was also boiling over with excitement. I liked these steeds if only....

And then I felt a wet, firm mouth on my own organ, sucking at it hard, as another pony’s tongue lapped fiercely at my balls, and I didn’t care anymore about who made the decisions. I was sucking the pretty boy, and being sucked, and my backside was being ground out hard, and I was happier than I had ever been in the Sultan’s garden.

As soon as I came, it seemed, I was thrown over on my back. The pretty one had had enough sucking and wanted to take me. He smiled down at me as he drove in harder even than the first pony had, and my legs went up and over his shoulders as his hands cupped me and lifted me.

“You’re a pretty one, Laurent,” he whispered between his panting breaths.

“You’re not bad yourself,” I whispered back. My head was being held by another pony, whose cock danced just above me.

“Not so loud when you talk,” whispered the pretty one, and then he came, his face blood-red, his eyes squeezed shut. He was pulled off me by one of the others before he was finished. Again a mouth was on me, arms locked around my hips. And my head was straddled, a cock dancing just above me. I lapped at it with my tongue, made it dance more, then it came down, and I opened my lips to receive it, biting it a little, stabbing the tiny hole with my tongue, then sucking it.

I lost track of how many used me. But I kept an eye out for the pretty blond one. He was on his knees at a trough, washing his cock in the fresh, flowing water. That was the way after it had been in another’s backside. You had to clean it before you could put it in another mouth, I could see that. And I decided I’d get into his backside now before he got away.

He laughed loudly when I slipped my arms under his arms and pulled him back away from the trough. I stabbed him hard and lifted him on my pelvis. “Like it, you little devil?” I whispered in his ear.

He was gasping. “Go easy!”

“The hell I will,” I said. I ground his nipples between my forefingers and thumbs as I rammed him, bouncing him up and down.

After I came, I threw him forward on all fours and smacked him hard over and over with my open hand until he scrambled away under the trees. I went after him.

“Please, Laurent! Have a little respect for an older steed!” he said. He lay on the soft earth looking up at the night sky, his chest heaving. I lay down on my elbow beside him.

“What’s your name, pretty boy?” I asked.

“Jerard,” he said. He looked at me, and the smile broke out on his face again. He was quite lovely. “I saw you harnessed up this morning. Saw you several times on the road. You’re the finest stock in the place, you and Tristan.”

“Don’t you forget it.” I smiled down at him. “And, next time we meet in this yard, you’ll introduce yourself properly to me. You won’t take what you want without asking.”

I slid my hand under his shoulder and hurled him over on his face. I could still see the mark of my hand on his bottom. And I rested my chest on his back and spanked him as hard as I could over and over again.

He laughed and moaned at the same time, but the laughter died out as his cries got louder and louder. He struggled and twisted in the dirt. His backside was so narrow and lean I could cup the whole span of it in my hand when I wanted to rest. But I didn’t want very much to rest. I spanked him harder probably than all the straps of the drivers who had used him.

“Laurent, please, please...” he gasped.

“You’ll ask for what you want—”

“I’ll beg! I swear it. I’ll beg!” he cried.

I sat up and rested back against the trunk of the tree. Others were resting in that manner. I could see that only standing upright was forbidden.

Jerard lifted his head, hair all tangled in his eyes, and he smiled, rather bravely, I thought, but good-naturedly. I liked him. His left hand went back timidly to his bottom and massaged the redness. That was something I had never seen before. “Nice to have a period of rest when you can do that sort of thing,” I thought. I couldn’t recall any opportunity in my castle or village or palace life when I’d been able to rub my bottom after a whipping.

“Does that feel good?” I asked.

He nodded. “You’re a devil, Laurent!” he whispered. And he bent forward and kissed my hand as it rested in the grass. “Do you have to be as rough as our Masters?”

“I see a bucket over there by the trough,” I said. “Get it in your teeth, and come back here and wash my cock, and then wash it again with your mouth. And hurry.”

As I waited for him to carry out the commands, I looked around. Several other ponies were smiling at me as they rested on their haunches. Tristan was wrapped up in the arms of an enormous black-haired steed who was covering his chest with rather tender kisses. Another pony came near them as I watched, and the black-haired steed made the smallest threatening gesture and the intruder was sent running.

I smiled. Jerard was back. He bathed my cock slowly and thoroughly. It was coming up again under the warm water.

I said to myself, as I played with his hair, “This is paradise.”

BEAUTY: COURTLY LIFE IN ALL ITS GLORY

B
EAUTY, PROPERLY gowned and bejeweled, walked back and forth across the room, eating an apple, only now and then tossing her long sleek mane of blond hair over her shoulder and glancing at the robust and splendidly dressed young Prince who had come to her father’s dreary castle to court her.

Such an innocent face.

In a low, fervent voice he spoke the predictable words—that he adored Beauty, would be most happy to make her his Queen, that their families would be overjoyed at the union.

A half hour ago Beauty had interrupted the nauseating diatribe to ask if he had ever heard of the strange pleasure customs of Queen Eleanor’s kingdom.

He had stared at her with wide eyes.

“No, My Lady,” he had said.

“Pity,” she had whispered with an acidic smile.

She wondered now why she hadn’t sent the Prince away. She had been sending men away since she had returned to her father’s house. But her father, though weary and disappointed, only continued to write letters, to receive more guests, to open his doors to more suitors.

At night Beauty lay crying against her pillow, her waking and sleeping dreams the same: of the lost pleasures of the world she had known beyond the border of her parents’ land, a subject which no one broached at court, which she herself never mentioned in public or private.

She stopped and looked at this young Prince now. She threw away the half-eaten apple. Something about the young man fascinated her. Of course he was handsome. She had let it be known she would marry only a handsome man. No one thought it unusual of a Princess with such endowments.

But there were other things about him. He had violet-blue eyes, rather like those of Inanna or more truly like those of Tristan. He was blond like Tristan—dark gold hair, thick and bushy around his face, leaving the lower part of his neck bare. “Rather enticing to see the bare neck,” Beauty thought. And the young man was big and broad-shouldered like the Captain of the Guard, like Laurent.

Ah, Laurent! It was Laurent she most thought of, remembered. The Captain of the Guard was a dark, faceless sentinel in her dreams. The sound of his strap rose and fell. But it was Laurent’s smiling face she saw, Laurent’s enormous cock that she longed for. Laurent!

Something had changed in the room.

The Prince had stopped speaking. He was gazing at her. His courtly ardor had melted away into a rare and honest silence. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his cloak hanging off one shoulder, and a sadness came over him.

“You will refuse me, too, won’t you, my Lady?” he asked quietly. “And you will haunt my nights forever after.”

“Is that so?” she asked. Something in her quickened. It was not a sarcastic reply. The moment was suddenly important.

“I want so to please you, Princess,” he whispered.

Please you, please you, please you. The words made her smile. How often she had heard them spoken in the far off world of the castle and the village, and in the even more distant fantasy world of the Sultan. How often she had spoken them herself.

“Do you, my dear Prince?” she asked gently. She was aware that her demeanor had changed, and that he realized it. He stood motionless, looking at her across the room, the afternoon sun falling in broad shafts on the stone floor between them. It glinted in his hair, on his eyebrows.

She advanced, and she thought she saw him shrink back, saw a flicker of undefined feeling in his face.

“Answer me, Prince,” she said coldly. Yes, she had seen it. The wave of redness rising to his cheeks confirmed it. He was baffled. “Then bolt the doors,” she said in a low voice. “All of them.”

He hesitated but a moment. How virginal he looked. What was under those breeches? Her eyes passed up and down over him, and she saw it again, the inward shrinking, the vulnerability that made his size and fair countenance suddenly quite irresistible.

“Bolt the doors, Prince,” she said threateningly.

And, moving like one in a dream, he went to obey, glancing back at her timidly.

There was a stool in the corner, a broad three-legged thing. Beauty’s maid sat upon it when she wasn’t needed.

“Set the stool in the center of the room,” she said, and she felt a little catch in her chest as she watched him obey her. He glanced up at her before he righted himself, after setting down the stool, and she liked this, his body bent over, his eyes gazing up, the color in his cheeks. Divine color.

She folded her arms and leaned against the carved side of the fireplace. She knew it was not a ladylike position. Her velvet gown annoyed her.

“Take off your clothes,” she whispered. “All of them.”

For a moment he was too astonished to respond. He stared at her as if he had heard wrong.

“Off with them,” she said in a monotone. “I want to see your body, see what you look like.”

Again, he hesitated, and then the blush on his face deepened as he bowed his head and began to unlace the jerkin. Lovely, the sight of his flaming cheeks, and the jerkin opening over the wrinkled shirt. He pulled the ties that laced the shirt, and there was his bare chest. Yes, more, and more. Yes, off the arms. Quite naked.

Fine nipples, maybe just a little too pale, and each surrounded with a little blond hair, and the hair moving down the center of the chest to a curling growth on the belly.

And now the breeches were down, and he was stepping out of the boots. Nice cock. And very hard. Of course. When had it gotten hard? When she had ordered him to bolt the doors? Or to remove his clothes? Actually it didn’t matter. Her own sex was moist and hot between her legs.

When he looked up at her again, he was stark naked—the only naked man she had seen since she had left the ship moored at Queen Eleanor’s dock, and she felt her own face tingling and her lips moving into a smile shamelessly.

But it wasn’t good to smile at him so soon. She stiffened slightly. She felt a great warmth in her breasts. She hated the velvet gown that covered her.

“Up on the stool, Prince, so I can have a good look at you.”

That was too much, or so it seemed for an instant. He opened his mouth, but then he only swallowed. 0, very handsome. He would have been welcomed by Queen Eleanor and her voluptuous Court. And what an ordeal it would have been! And that fair skin, revealing everything, as Tristan’s skin did. And he didn’t have the cunning of Laurent.

He turned and looked at the stool. He was paralyzed.

“Up on the stool, Prince,” she said stepping forward, “and put your hands on the back of your neck. That way I can see you well. Your hands and arms aren’t in the way.”

He stared at her. She stared back. And then he turned and in a slow, almost somnolent, fashion climbed onto the stool and put his hands behind his neck as she had commanded. He appeared astonished, astonished that he had done it.

And when he looked at her again, his face was redder than any face she had ever seen, making his eyes glitter, his hair look rather like gold, the way Tristan’s hair had often looked. He swallowed again, and he looked down, but probably he did not see his erect cock. He looked past it, into his own newly awakened soul, pondering with shame that he was so defenseless.