Beauty couldn’t help but think of her long march to the Prince’s Kingdom, how he had led her through the villages where she had been honored and admired as his chosen slave. Nothing like that was happening now.
The crowd had broken loose and was spreading out on either side of them as they neared the gates. Beauty could see the women in their fancy white aprons and wooden shoes, and the men in their rawhide boots and leather jerkins, robust faces everywhere alight with obvious pleasure, which made Beauty gasp and drop her eyes to the path before her.
They were passing through the gates. A trumpet was being sounded. And hands reached out from everywhere to touch them, pushing them, pulling at their hair. Beauty felt fingers brush roughly across her face; her thighs were slapped. She let out a desperate scream, struggling to escape the hands that shoved her violently forward, while all around came the loud, deep, mocking laughter, shouts and exclamations, random cries.
Tears were flowing down Beauty’s face and she hadn’t even realized it. Her breasts throbbed with the same violent pulse she felt in her temples. Around her she saw the tall, narrow half-timbered houses of the village opening broadly to surround a huge marketplace. A high wooden platform with a gibbet upon it loomed over all. And hundreds crowded the overhanging windows and balconies, waving white handkerchiefs, cheering, while countless others choked the narrow lanes that led into the square, struggling to get close to the miserable slaves.
They were being forced into a pen behind the platform. Beauty saw a flight of rickety wooden steps leading to the boards above and a length of leather chain dangling above the distant gibbet. A man stood to one side of the gibbet with arms folded, waiting, while another sounded the trumpet again as the gates of the pen were shut. The crowd surrounded them, and there was no more than a thin strip of fencing to protect them. Hands reached for them again as they huddled together. Beauty’s buttocks were pinched, her long hair lifted.
She struggled towards the center, desperately looking for Tristan. She glimpsed him only for a moment as he was pulled roughly to the bottom of the steps.
“No, I must be sold with him,” she thought and pushed violently forward, but one of the guards shoved her back into the little cluster while the crowd hooted and howled and laughed.
The red-haired Princess who had cried on the road was now inconsolable, and Beauty pressed close to her, trying to comfort her as much as to hide. The Princess had lovely high breasts with very large pink nipples, and her red hair spilled down in rivulets over her tear-stained face. The crowd was cheering and shouting again now that the herald had finished. “Don’t be afraid,” Beauty whispered. “Remember, it will be very much like the castle finally. We will be punished, made to obey.”
“No, it won’t be!” the Princess whispered, trying not to move her lips visibly as she spoke. “And I thought I was such a rebel. I thought I was so stubborn.”
The trumpet gave a third full-throated blast, a high echoing series of notes. And in the immediate silence that fell over the marketplace, a voice rang out:
“The Spring Auction will now commence!”
A roar rose from all around them, a near-deafening chorus, its loudness shocking Beauty so that she couldn’t feel herself breathe. The sight of her own quivering breasts stunned her, and in one sweeping glance she saw hundreds of eyes passing over her, examining her, measuring her naked endowments, a hundred whispering lips and smiles.
Meantime the Princes were being tormented by the guards, their cocks lightly whipped with the leather belts, hands plumping their pendulous balls as they were made to “Come to attention!” and punished with severe cracks of the paddle to the buttocks if they did not. Tristan’s back was to Beauty. She could see the hard perfect muscles of his legs and buttocks quivering as the guard teased him, stroking him roughly between the legs. She was miserably sorry now for their stolen lovemaking. If he could not come to attention, she would be to blame.
But the booming voice had sounded again:
“All those of the village know the rules of the auction. These disobedient slaves offered by our gracious Majesty for hard labor are to be sold to the highest bidder for the period of no less than three months’ service as their new Lords and Masters shall see fit. Mute menials these incorrigibles are to remain, and they are to be brought to the Place of Public Punishment as often as their Masters and Mistresses will allow, there to suffer for the amusement of the crowd as much as for their own improvement.”
The guard had moved away from Tristan, giving him an almost-playful blow with the paddle and smiling as he whispered something in Tristan’s ear.
“You are solemnly charged to work these slaves,” the voice of the herald on the platform continued, “to discipline them, to tolerate no disobedience from them, and never an impudent word. And any Master or Mistress might sell his slave within this village at any time for any sum as he should choose.”
The red-haired Princess pressed her naked breasts against Beauty and Beauty leaned forward to kiss her neck. Beauty felt the tight wiry hair of the girl’s pubis against her leg, its moisture and its heat. “Don’t cry,” she whispered.
“When we go back, I will be perfect, perfect!” the Princess confided, and broke into fresh sobs again.
“But what made you disobey?” Beauty quickly whispered in her ear.
“I don’t know,” the girl wailed, opening her blue eyes wide. “I wanted to see what would happen!” and she started to cry piteously again.
“Be it understood that each time you punish one of these unworthy slaves,” the herald continued, “you do the bidding of her Royal Majesty. It is with her hand that you strike the blow, with her lips you scold. All slaves once a week are to be sent to the central grooming hall. Slaves are to be properly fed. Slaves are to be given time to sleep. Slaves should at all times exhibit evidence of sound whipping. Insolence or rebellion should be thoroughly put down.”
The trumpet blasted again. White handkerchiefs waved, and all around hundreds upon hundreds clapped their hands. The red-haired Princess screamed as a young man, leaning over the fence of the pen, caught her by the thigh and pulled her towards him.
The guard stopped him with a good-natured reprimand but not before he had slipped his hand under the Princess’s wet sex.
But Tristan was being driven up to the wooden platform. He held his head high, hands clasped to the neck as before, his whole attitude one of dignity despite the paddle soundly playing on his narrow tight buttocks as he climbed the wooden steps.
For the first time Beauty saw beneath the high gibbet and its dangling leather links a low round turntable onto which a tall gaunt man in a bright jerkin of green velvet forced Tristan. He kicked Tristan’s legs wide apart as if the Prince could not be addressed even with the simplest command.
“He’s being handled like an animal,” Beauty thought, watching.
Standing back the tall auctioneer worked the turntable with a foot pedal so that Tristan was turned quickly round and round.
Beauty got no more than a glimpse of his scarlet face and golden hair, blue eyes almost closed. Sweat gleamed on his hard chest and belly, his cock enormous and thick as the guards had wanted it, his legs trembling slightly with the strain of being so widely spread apart.
Desire curled inside of Beauty, and even as she pitied him, she felt her organs swelling and pulsing again, and at the same time the terrible fear, “I can’t be made to stand up there alone before everyone. I can’t be sold off like this! I can’t!”