Энн Райс - Beauty's Punishment

“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.

“O, 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 felt 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.”