It was a most ingenious harnessing. I would be tugged forward by their marching, and I could not fall even if I lost my balance. And there were two of them to my weight and I could see by the thick muscles of their calves and thighs that they were accomplished ponies.
They tossed their heads as they waited, as though they liked the feel of the leather, and I felt the tears already flowing. Why couldn’t I be harnessed as they were to a cart? What was being done to me? They looked sleek and privileged suddenly, with their shining horsetails and high-pitched heads, and I felt bound like a lowly prisoner. My naked feet would pound the road behind the loud metallic ring of their shoed feet. I twisted and pulled, but the straps were tight and the boys, busy with oiling my buttocks, ignored me.
But I was suddenly startled by the Master’s voice as he appeared in the corner of my eye with that long leather strap dangling from his waist and asked softly if I was ready. The boys answered yes, one of them giving me a good smack with his open hand, the other pushing the phallus into my wide-open mouth more firmly.
I gave a desperate coughing sob and saw the Master step in front of me.
He wore a beautiful doublet of plum velvet with fancy balloon sleeves and looked every inch as fine as the Princes of the castle. And the warmth of our lovemaking last night swept over me and caused me to swallow my cries silently. But desperate unfamiliar sounds came from me.
I tried to restrain myself, but I was already so severely restrained that I seemed to lose all interior command. And pulling against all my bonds at once I realized I was absolutely helpless. I could not even drop to my feet if I wanted to, and the strong ponies held me effortlessly.
My Master drew close and, turning my head roughly towards him, kissed both my eyelids. The tenderness of his lips, the clean fragrance of his skin and hair, brought back all the closeness of the bedchamber. But he was the Master. He had always been the Master, even when I rode him and made him groan under me. My cock writhed and a fresh volley of groans and cries broke from me.
I saw a long stiff flat thrash in his hand, which he tested now against one of the ponies. Two feet of it was rigid handle tapering out into another two feet of flat slapping leather that stood straight out when it was not being snapped at the pony’s buttocks.
In a clear voice, he said: “The usual morning round of the village.”
The ponies started off at once, and I stumbled into a march behind them.
My Master was walking beside me. It was just as it had been last night when the two of us had walked down this road, only now I was a prisoner of these monstrous straps, these tightly bound phalluses. And terrified of his correction, I tried to march well as he had taught me.
The pace was not too fast. But the flat snapping switch played with my welts. It stroked and petted the underside of my buttocks. My Master moved on in silence, and the pair ahead turned as if they knew the way, into a broad lane that led to the center of the village. It was the first real look I had had at the village on a regular day, and I was astonished.
White aprons, wooden clogs, rawhide breeches. Rolled sleeves and loud convivial voices. And everywhere there were toiling slaves. I saw naked Princesses scrubbing thresholds and balconies above and washing shop windows. I saw Princes bearing baskets on their backs, hopping ahead of their Mistress’s lash as fast as they could, and through an open gateway a gathering of naked, reddened rumps around a great laundry tub.
A harness shop loomed ahead as we turned a bend, with a Princess manacled much as I was manacled and hanging from the shingle over the door, and then came a tavern in which I saw a row of slaves along a ramp waiting to be punished one by one on a little stage for the indifferent amusement of dozens of patrons. There was a phallus shop beside it, and on display in front three Princes squatting with their faces to the wall, their buttocks well outfitted with samples of the merchandise.
And I could be one of these, I thought, squatting in the hot dusty sun as the crowd passed. Was it worse than trotting with anxious breaths, my head and my hips pulled inexoraby forward, my sore flesh reanimated by the long, loud snapping behind me? I couldn’t really see my Master. But with every lick, I saw him as he had been last night, and the ease with which he tormented me again astonished me. I had never dreamed it would stop because of our embraces. But for it to be intensified like this... I felt suddenly some awesome sense of the depth of submission he wanted from me.
The ponies pressed proudly through the thick crowd, making many a head turn, as villagers milled everywhere with market baskets or slaves at tether. And over and over, the observer glanced from the finely turned-out ponies to the slave behind them. But if I expected scornful looks, I was disappointed. What I saw was simply muted amusement. Everywhere these people looked they saw some delectable bit of naked flesh, punished or positioned or harnessed for their pleasure.
And as we turned corner after corner, rushing through this narrow lane and that, I felt more surely lost than I had been on the turntable.
Each day would have its dreadful course, its obliterating surprises. And though I wept more desperately when I thought of it, and my cock swelled in the lacings, and I marched harder, trying to squirm away from the snapping thrash, it gave a strange luster to my surroundings. I felt the undeniable urge to fall at my Master’s feet, to tell him silently that I understood my lot, that I understood it more clearly with every excruciating trial and that I gave thanks from the depths of my being that he had seen fit to break me so thoroughly. Hadn’t he used that word yesterday, “breaking” a new slave, said the thick phallus was good for it, and the phallus was splitting me wide again, and another stretched my mouth making my cries hoarse and wildly unmanageable.
Maybe he understood from my cries. If only he would condescend to comfort me with just a little touch of his lips. . . . And I realized almost with a start that never had I felt this softened and subservient in all the rigors of the castle.
We had come to a large square. All around I saw the signs of the Inns, and the carriageways and the high windows. Rich and fancy Inns they were, windows as ornate as those of a manor house. And as I was whipped and pulled in a broad circle around the well, the crowd agreeably letting the ponies through, I saw with a shock the Captain of the Queen’s Guard lounging at a doorway.
It was unmistakably the Captain.
I remembered his blond hair and coarsley shaven beard and those brooding green eyes. Quite unforgettable. It was he who had taken me from my native land, captured me when I tried to break and run from the camp, and brought me back, my hands and ankles bound to a pole carried between two of his horsemen. I could still remember that thick cock spiking me and that silent smile as he ordered me whipped through the camp evening after evening until we reached the castle. And that strange inexplicable moment when we parted and both of us looked at each other.
“Good-bye, Tristan,” he had said in the most cordial voice, and I had kissed his boot of my own will, my eyes still fixed on his silently.
My cock recognized him, too. And as I was drawn near to him, I was in sudden terror that he would see me.
My disgrace seemed too much to bear. All the strange rules of the Kingdom seemed for the moment immutable and just, and I was bound, penitent, condemned to the village. He would know I had been sent down from the castle to harsher treatment than even he had given me.