Bound and Initiated (16 page)

Sarah’s breath began to quicken, her nostrils flaring. Still looking into his eyes, she nodded again.

“That’s what I mean by progression, Sarah. You need to learn that you will progress as a member of this order according to your superiors’ scheme for you. Do you understand?”

“Yes, pater,” she whispered.

Under the table was a cooler, and from the cooler Robert now extracted a dish of vanilla ice cream. He cleared their plates to the far edge of the table and put the ice cream in front of Sarah. “Your treat,” he said with a smile.

“Thank you, pater,” she said, giving him the ambiguous look of someone who wants to tell you their real favorite ice cream flavor.

“Next time I give you a treat, columba, what flavor would you like?” he said with a chuckle.

“Oh, I love vanilla…” she exclaimed, as if afraid she might be spanked if she didn’t show herself grateful.

“But?” he asked.

“Well, black raspberry is my absolute favorite. Strawberry, if there’s none of that. Then vanilla!” Again she affirmed her faith in vanilla as though she were saving his feelings or avoiding a punishment.

“I think we can arrange black raspberry,” he said.

She smiled and took a spoonful of the ice cream. “What’s your favorite flavor, pater?” she asked, her mind clearly going on conversational autopilot.

Robert felt an odd sensation in his breast. Had any other columba ever asked him such a small-talkish question? He couldn’t remember it, if so. In any case, too, he didn’t think his heart would have been struck the way Sarah’s innocent question now struck it.

“Coffee,” he said, and he couldn’t help saying the simple word in a tone that indicated that she had touched him, asking the question.

Sarah blushed. Why? Because of Robert’s tone?

“I’m sorry, pater,” she said. “Should I not ask that kind of thing?”

“Yes, you should, if you want to know the answer.” He smiled, but he felt that he hadn’t smiled the way he wanted to smile: he had hoped to smile dismissively, to show her that he didn’t care whether Sarah wanted to know his favorite kind of ice cream or not. Instead, he knew from her expression that he had smiled warmly, and Sarah didn’t know what to make of it.

“Of course, to earn your treat tomorrow, you’ll have to be a very good girl for me.” Sarah’s eyes widened again, and Robert saw in them that he had succeeded in dispelling the effect of his warm smile. It had cost him more than he really wanted to admit to himself to speak in his well-practiced tone of degradation, but at least he had avoided showing Sarah the truth he was too honest and perceptive to deny: that he was falling in love with her.

“Yes, pater,” Sarah said softly. “I’ll try.”

“That’s all I can ask, columba.”

A quizzical look appeared on her face as she took the last spoonful of her ice cream.

“Pater, may I ask another question?”

“You may, columba.”

“Why does it matter if I’m a good girl, when you’ll bind me and… initiate me, whether I like it or not?” Her eyes seemed to tell the story that she meant the query to be directed inward to herself, as much as it was directed outward to him. Robert knew how to use that introspection.

“It matters,” he said slowly and seriously, “because you matter, Sarah.” Robert watched his words sink into the roiling mass of her ideas about submission, about the guard—whose true name she did not yet even know—and about him.

Sarah frowned. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t mean to frustrate you, but I think you know the answer.” He gazed into her eyes as serenely as he could manage, given the way his heart had begun to ache. He wanted to give this girl every shred of wisdom he had, to make her journey easier. Did he want to steal her away and spare her the path that lay ahead of her?

No.
That path was what she needed, just as Robert’s own path of dominance, the way he had trod to reach the highest echelon of the New Pretorian Guard,
pater et praetor,
father and leader, had been necessary to him. For a girl like Sarah James, her progression would come with a great deal of ambivalence and self-interrogation, just as Robert’s progression had made him less and less certain of the rightness of his actions and of his cause. But no other path existed for such as them, once the way of Mithras had opened before their feet.

“Will you give me a hint?” An adorably coy expression appeared on her face, and Robert had to resist the urge to kiss her.

“Yes,” he said gravely. “Your hint is that a girl’s desire to submit is the most precious thing in the cosmos to a true man like me.”

Sarah gave a little gasp then, as if she had never imagined that mere words could affect her that way—existentially and erotically at once. Robert couldn’t resist, now: he stood, leant down, took her face in his hands, and he kissed Sarah very hard—so hard that for a moment she struggled against the suddenness of it, and that made him instantly hard again. Then she melted, and he knew that the dangerous feelings that had begun to fill his chest had perhaps started to fill hers, too.

When he finally broke the kiss, Sarah said, so quietly that she perhaps didn’t even realize that she spoke aloud, “It’s not real. It can’t be real.”

Robert kissed her again, nearly as hard and for nearly as long, still holding her face in a firm but gentle grip. Then he said, “It’s real, Sarah. Do you have your answer?”

“Yes, pater,” she breathed.

Reluctantly, Robert let Sarah’s face go and stood up again, crossing his arms. “Any more questions?”

As Sarah looked up at him, he could practically see her mind working to try to encapsulate hundreds of questions into one larger one. She said, “What can you tell me about the civilization-saving thing?”

Robert smiled, realizing that he had probably smiled more that night already than he had in the previous month. “We’ll play a little game now, Sarah,” he said. He moved to the middle of the room and picked up the kneeling bolster from between the binding columns. He brought it to the man’s throne that stood against the left wall and laid it in front of the massive seat, carved of oak that had seen service in Nelson’s flagship, the
Victory
. He turned and sat upon the red cushion that adorned the throne’s seat, embroidered, like the napkins, with Mithras’ M. He fixed his eyes again upon Sarah’s; the girl had begun to bite her lip again, adorably, clearly understanding exactly what the most important rule of the game would be:
Sarah sucks her pater’s cock.

“Rise, columba, come over here, and kneel before me.” As he watched her obey, he spread the fabric of his robe around his lap so that she would see how hard the thought of enjoying her for the third time had gotten him. With his right hand he stroked his cock, and with his left he held his scrotum gently.

You, o true man, shall show your girls with what ease you may pleasure yourself. Thus their bondage, that their hands be kept from wanton self-touches upon their naughty cunts, will appear to them the more striking and will be the more instructive. You may enjoy the pleasure the gods gave unto you in your phallus’ majesty, o true man, just as you like best. Your girls’ cunts too were given unto you, however, and you must ensure that the pleasure therein be well-ordered. Make them watch you ease the ache they create with their beauty and their wantonness, with both hands upon your majesty, and do not neglect to pleasure their cunts when they have given good service and you have ridden them hard.

The ‘lost books’ of Mithras were full of such things that members of the guard must memorize as they progressed through the degrees of masculine initiation. Robert couldn’t deny that they came from the pen of some genius in dominant eroticism. The founders of the guard acknowledged of course that these scriptures didn’t come from ancient Rome, let alone even more ancient Persia. The man who had most likely written them, however—Riccardo, Cardinal Otranto, a papal camerlengo of the 1930s—maintained to his dying day that he had found them in the Mithraeum at Ostia.

Robert watched Sarah approach, once again marveling at her radiant beauty, though her loose blond ponytail had now come entirely undone and her eyes were red-rimmed from the fuckings he had given her face. Her hands drifted down with her bound wrists so that her fingers obscured his view of the little cleft between her legs that he very much wanted to see just then.

“Lift your hands to your midriff, please,” he said gently.

Sarah complied with a startled look, stopping her movement as she did so, halfway between the table, which stood just inside the doorway, and the man’s throne where Robert was masturbating as he gazed upon his columba.

Your girls’ beauty belongs to you, o true man. Gaze upon it, and be not ashamed that you wish to look long at her breasts, her rear, her cunt. Bind her, as Mithras once must have bound the bull, and spread her wide so that you may feast your eyes before you fuck.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the lost books of Mithras was the frankness of their eroticism. Several of the founders had maintained even after Cardinal Otranto’s death that he could not have been their author for that reason. His life as a prince of the church had been outwardly impeccable, and though many cardinals over the years had been known as extremely coarse, even lewd, men in their private lives, with the exception of the rites of Mithras in whose founding he took the leading role, Cardinal Otranto had never, it seemed, uttered a coarse word in his life, or taken a lascivious action.

The lost books were of course written in Latin, so that the dirty words seemed perhaps a little elevated:
cunnus—
cunt;
futuo—
fuck;
phallus
. But the intent of using such language had seemed to Robert, from the first time he had read the document, clearly to arouse the libidinal energy of the Pretorian Guard. It fulfilled the function admirably.

“Lovely,” he said. “How do you feel about your cunt, Sarah?”

Speak to a girl of shameful things, o true man, to increase your enjoyment of her body’s charms. Ensure that she contemplates your mastery of her cunt and rear and mouth, and appreciates its extent.

Sarah swayed back, as if he had landed a blow—though a light one—upon her cheek. Her mouth opened in a gasp.

“I…” she said, but apparently could say no more.

“Answer my question, please, columba. It’s very pretty with no hair on it, and I’m enjoying looking at it right now and thinking about how nice it will feel to have my cock inside it tomorrow night.”

Her face had gone charmingly pink again. “It… I like it?” she said.

Robert did not cease pleasuring himself in her sight, and now he watched Sarah’s eyes go from his lap to his face, clearly at a loss to decide where they should rest. “Did you touch it often, before you joined us and had the privilege taken away?”

“Yes,” Sarah whispered. “Every morning.”

“Did you ever use a mirror to see how pretty a cunt you have?”

“Yes.”

Robert’s hand flashed up and down on his cock faster. He stood in serious danger of coming, he realized, just at this marvelous little interchange. He slowed his hands, and watched Sarah’s eyes go wide as if at the sight of untold masculine rituals of pleasure.

“Come kneel,” he said gently, “and tell me how you like what you saw, when you used the mirror.”

A crease appeared on her brow. Still holding her hands up so that he could see the little slit of her outer lips until she had knelt on the bolster with her eyes upon his cock, she obeyed him. “Um,” she said. “It was a little… strange? But I like the way it looks kind of like a flower, I guess?”

Robert gave a soft chuckle. “That’s good,” he said. “Your mouth is a little like a flower, too, Sarah.” Her eyes flicked up to his, and Robert nodded. “Suck now, Sarah, with that little flower. See if you can make the seed come. And now we’ll play our game. As long as your mouth feels pleasing, I will tell you about the civilization-saving thing, as you called it.”

She looked up at him hesitantly, as if having to
choose
to put her mouth on his cock presented a problem that
allowing
him to fuck her there had not.

When a girl has done passive service, o true man, make her complement it with active service. Do not neglect to command her as you like, to please you in whatever fashion your phallus craves. Your hard phallus, o true man, must rule her cosmos. If it craves her lips and tongue, order her to kneel and suckle at her lord’s manhood. If it craves her cunt, command her to ride upon your lap as if you were a noble steed. If it craves her rear, declare unto her that she must spread her hindquarters to show her lord the path into her narrowest passage, where he must have his pleasurable way, long and hard.

It was true that Cardinal Otranto, once he had caused the pleasure chambers to be built deep beneath the Vatican catacombs, visited them very often. The girls he fucked there, like the ones he fucked in the course of the greater rituals, never had a bad word to say about him, however. The author of the lost books of Mithras, were he to have put into effect all his dominant teachings, would have behaved in the pleasure chamber like a monster, and Otranto had given no sign that he was that monster.

Whip your girls, o true man. Bind them and whip them. Neglect not to leave the marks of your discipline upon them. She who is slow to kneel, let her have fifty strokes of the birch. She who does not swallow all your seed, let her have fifty lashes of the mastix or the flagellum. She who touches her own cunt lewdly, let her have fifty cuts of the cane.

That passage was generally taken as hyperbolic, of course, but as far as Robert had ever been able to tell, Cardinal Otranto had preferred to take girls over his knee and spank them as if he were their grandfather. The girls had no clothes on at the time, of course, but Robert had always thought it spoke of a tenderness that didn’t seem consistent with the frequent harshness of the lost books.

“Go ahead, Sarah,” Robert said. “Don’t make me whip you.”