The Emperor's New Pony (3 page)

I am, in sorrow,

Your Princess Edera

Ranin looked out the mullioned window of his chamber in the palace. He wondered if sometimes a disaster were so great that the people on whom it would fall could feel, somehow, that something was wrong. Slavery hung over the rooftops of Amidia and the people inside their houses, and Ranin knew that he must be the man to tell them, and the man to take the blame. He could negotiate terms of surrender: if the emperor wanted the Amidian stallions to go on producing colts, he would not wreak vengeance upon the people or upon their possessions. Many of the folk of Amidia might prosper.

But they would prosper as slaves. Comnar, like his predecessors, made it very clear to his people that they existed to serve him. Auner the First had founded Amidia as a place where men might be free. If an Amidian man prospered, he could hope to send his sons to their own farms in the vale, to prosper even more greatly. If he failed, he could find help from his neighbors, and rise again.

In the empire, the prospering man paid greater taxes, and the failing man’s family departed in chains for the galleys and the houses of the aristocrats, as bondsmen.

Could he not, then, just let them slay her? He wished he felt rage: the kind of rage that would allow him to say in a terrible moment he would regret forever, “Tell the emperor that a princess is not truly worth her kingdom. You will die, your highness.”

Or she would do worse than die. That thought tormented him above all: the image of the girl he had helped raise to be princess, in the indecent, shameful service to which her beauty would surely bring her.

If death were all she might suffer, truly, he thought… but then he realized that he could not contemplate Edera dying at all, let alone being the agent of her death. He had sworn to Auner that he would defend her, his young princess, and he would keep that oath.

Ten imperial knights did indeed wait for him to bring him to the emperor, after he had descended the road alone. He had told only his lieutenant Sir Geron what had happened, and where he went, instructing him to wait for a message that he would send from Maq to the scout camp at the top of the ascent, addressed to Sir Geron. He told the captain of the scout camp to stand ready to receive that message under flag of truce, and send it on to Sir Geron with his fastest rider.

At least there was no value in taking Ranin prisoner as well; the emperor had wit enough to know that the lord chancellor and chief marshal would best serve the Maqian plan as the man forced to tell Amidia that the day of slavery had come. Ranin’s escort, thankfully, treated him with dignity. He even saw regret in the eyes of their captain when he offered his sword, but was told to keep it. They gave him one of their horses, and he sent his palfrey back up the ascent.

The journey to the capital was wearying: three days on the road, sleeping on the ground, and thinking how much worse of the journey must have been for Edera, a day ahead and probably confined in an enclosed wagon that would have bumped and jarred her and her ladies terribly. They reached Maq at midday on the fourth day. Ranin had journeyed there only once before, when Auner had renewed the ties of amicable commerce with Comnar’s father.

The city, ringed about with the curtain wall two centuries old and forty feet high, sat on the best natural harbor men had ever yet discovered: broad and deep, and thoroughly sheltered by Cape Maq-Li, projecting out to the north and east and itself now thoroughly fortified against invasion from the sea.

The empire had its birth here, when Qol the conqueror had formed his band of pirates, fed so well upon the haul of the fishermen’s teeming nets, into a warrior caste that could begin the long series of victories that eventually brought dozens of the surrounding tribes under Maq’s sway.

As they neared the gates of the capital, Ranin found it easy to make himself more philosophical than he had managed when Edera’s message had reached him in the palace of Amidia. The empire could not be stopped. Someday, it would fall of its own accord, the way all empires did. Perhaps Comnar was the first harbinger of the decay that had gripped the other empires of which the chroniclers told.

As they passed through the suburbs of the city, Ranin studied the faces of the imperials, and looked closely at what he could see of the way they lived. They did not look unhappy, and that helped him in what he knew as his cowardly effort to make himself feel better about what he must now do, but they did not look happy either. Ranin sighed. They looked like people.

Once Ranin and his escort had ridden through the gate, the people’s faces took on a different air: these men had business. Now, the little party rode along the grand processional avenue of the empire. Ranin had seen it before, but he had not thought then about how it had come into being. The long, broad, straight boulevard ran from the gate all the way to the imperial palace. And Ranin realized that the street looked nothing like any of the other streets that surrounded it, weaving in and out of the old buildings. He said to the captain of his escort, riding beside him, “How did the emperors create a street so grand?”

The captain laughed. “Com the Greedy, Comnar’s grandfather, decided he wanted a place he could show off his cavalry. He liked parades. So he took all of the houses between the gates and the palace and knocked them down.”

“And what happened to the people who lived in the houses?”

“Damned if I know,” said the captain. “What happens to people who get thrown out because they can’t pay their taxes? They go to the country and work on farms, I suppose, or more likely they end up down by the harbor.”

Ranin resolved that when the time came for him to tell the people of Amidia that they were now imperial subjects, he would also tell them that they must under no circumstances think of moving to the capital.

It took an hour to ride from the gates up the grand processional way, which they had almost completely to themselves.

“Only military and nobles are allowed to use the avenue,” the captain explained.

Riding up the right side of that long, broad way lined with palm trees, they must also have been conspicuous from the palace. By the time they reached the grand gates of the yard, gleaming with polished bronze in front of the splendid stone sprawl of the imperial residence, a greeting party stood there. Ranin saw that the gates of the palace did not stand open, as they would have on the occasion of a negotiation with another sovereign nation—as they had stood open when Ranin had come ten years before with Auner.

The captain of the escort stopped them a hundred yards away, and said to Ranin, “You must dismount, my lord. Horses are not permitted in or near the palace grounds.”

As Ranin looked in puzzlement at the captain, for such had not been the rule in Comnar’s father’s time, one of the knights of the escort said, “Horses with hooves, anyway.” The rest of the escort laughed at this, but Ranin could see no reason why. What sort of horse could there be without hooves?

“Captain?” Ranin asked.

The captain seemed to sigh regretfully. “My lord, I think to your sorrow you will understand soon enough.”

Then suddenly Ranin remembered one of the depraved stories about Comnar’s court. Surely that story could not be true? He looked at the greeting party, and he realized that there was something very strange about four of its members. At first he could not even tell whether they were human, or some strange sort of beast brought from the ends of the earth to live in the emperor’s menagerie, so famous for its exotic animals.

Then suddenly his mind re-interpreted what his eyes saw, and he noticed that one of the four had long blond hair. Then he realized that what he had taken for a very strange close-fitting garment was in fact naked female flesh, bound up in straps that must be leather and resembled the harness of a horse.

“Gods preserve us,” he whispered. “Captain, what has your emperor done?”

“I am sorry for you, my lord,” the captain said. “I would not wish this fate even on my worst enemy, and truth to tell I do not truly consider you an enemy at all. But you must go forward now and meet the shame your princess has brought upon herself and you, and your kingdom.”

Hardly even knowing how he did so, Ranin dismounted, and began to walk toward the six figures at the palace gate. It was only too true. The young women—Edera, Melisan, Adilan, and Alira, the highest born and most beautiful ladies of Amidia—stood naked but for the strange harnesses they wore. Thin straps of dark brown leather enclosed their heads in a sort of bridle and thicker straps bound their torsos and their hips.

The cruel harness maker had shamefully arranged the straps so as not to cover a girl’s breasts or her loins, and configured them so as to bind her arms to her sides, forbidding her thus to hide her secret places from the sight of all. Worse, to his helpless, aroused excitement, Ranin could see that someone had shaved all four of the noble girls between their lovely thighs, giving a view of their tender little cunts. To his dismay, Ranin found he had terrible difficulty averting his eyes from that view, and above all from the loins of Princess Edera.

Next to them stood two men, one on either side of the girls. The man on the left must be a counselor of the emperor, from his grand ceremonial robes of silk and cloth-of-gold, but the man on the right wore the sort of simple clothing of homespun fabric and leather that a stable master might wear, and in his hand he held four long leads that ran to the girls’ harnesses. Then, with a shame and a hardness that shamed him even more, Ranin saw that the girls had bits in their mouths, to complete their tack: the leads in the stable master’s hand were hooked to the thick straps fastened around the back of the head, which held the bits in the girls’ mouths. Gleaming bronze rings attached the bits to the girls’ bridles; those rings could only be meant for hooking on reins, and the images that rose in Ranin’s mind seemed for long moments to threaten to drive him mad.

Ranin kept walking, helplessly shaking his head as he did so, trying to drive the fancies out of his mind. Now he could see the eyes of his princess and her ladies-in-waiting, and to his grief he saw that Edera wore a look of shame so great that even the loss of a kingdom, he thought, could not fully justify it.

Suddenly the stable master said, in an authoritative tone, “Fillies, present your tails.”

Edera gave Ranin a look at that seemed to say that she could hardly bear to meet his eyes, and then, along with her ladies-in-waiting, she turned to show that the emperor had imposed upon them a humiliation so great Ranin could scarcely comprehend it: from each girl’s bottom emerged a fine horsehair tail, which must be affixed to a wicked device that impaled her there, where a highborn girl must feel the greatest shame for a man to see her, let alone to see her wear such a degrading adornment. Edera’s tail was of snow-white hair, like the tails of the most prized Amidian mares, while her ladies wore tails of coal black.

Clearly the girls had already been trained in certain aspects of this shameful service. After they had turned to show Ranin their shapely backsides with the tail, they bent over and placed their hands on their knees. They arched their backs to present their rumps much more fully, at the same time turning their heads to look over their left shoulders at him. Now Ranin saw upon the girls’ bottoms red marks that could only have come from the quirt with which the stable master must have trained them, and which explained their obedience. That quirt, Ranin now saw, hung at the man’s belt, a double length of leather attached to a braided handle.

Ranin had never imagined that in his life he might undergo such a trial. To his distress, pity, love, and shame at the fate of these noblewomen mingled with an arousal so great that he thought his cock might burst through his clothes. The thoughts about Edera that he had pushed back so many times since she had turned eighteen came rushing in upon him, and he could not stop looking at her as lascivious temptation seemed to make his hardness grow, dominantly and even angrily. The thought of taking her reins and fucking her as hard as he could to pay her out for losing her kingdom, fought with the most tender affection and his urge to rush to her and shield her from the eyes of the world somehow, if he had to rip his own robe off his back and throw it over her.

But, perhaps most terrible of all at that moment, he knew that he had no power at all to do anything but look away, and even that took an effort that felt superhuman.

They had taken the girls’ clothes away first. That had been awful, but at least Edera, Melisan, Adilan, and Alira had been allowed to strip in the pavilion, hidden from leering eyes other than the emperor’s.

“Only the emperor and the favored see the imperial fillies naked,” Comnar said, without explaining. Something about the way he used the word ‘filly’ made it clear that he referred, in some unknown and shameful fashion, to Edera and her ladies-in-waiting.

The emperor’s order to remove their gowns and shifts had come after the knights had been led, with their hands bound, out to an uncertain fate. Edera had not seen Sir Lennar and the other men of her honor guard since then. So when, now naked and blushing uncontrollably to be bare in front of the emperor, she had been told she must write the message to her lord chancellor, she had quailed, but she had also been a little reassured at being told that she must write that they were all alive.

Who knew, though, whether that were the truth?

“You will be put into full harness when you reach my palace stables in Maq,” Comnar said after Edera had written the letter he had commanded her to write, sitting naked at a little camp table that was nevertheless made of old, dark wood, and ornately carved with the symbols of the moon and harbor. He had commanded them to stand before him then, and there they had stood, helplessly trying to cover their breasts and loins with their hands. Edera had not envied Adilan her rounded breasts then. Still less did she envy Melisan’s very full ones that went so well with her curvaceous hips. Really, she found herself jealous instead of Alira’s tiny breasts with the tiny pink nipples that she could hide without difficulty; Edera’s own pink buds were bigger, the size of coins, and she felt that the emperor must be able to see them very easily, as Edera could see Melisan’s big brown nipples.