Beauty's Punishment
Page 41

"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."
"Hope for what? To be punished all the more?"
"I don't know."
"You do know!"
"My only hope for a deep love, a loss of myself to someone, not merely a loss amid all that strives to break me down and remake me. But a loss to someone who is sublimely cruel, sublimely good at mastering. Someone who might somehow, in the blaze of my suffering, see the depth of submission and love me also." It was too much of an admission. I stopped, crushed, certain I couldn't continue.
But I did go on, slowly.
"I could have loved many Masters or Mistresses perhaps. But you have an eerie beauty that debilitates me and absorbs me. You illuminate the punishments. I don't... I don't understand it."
"What did you feel when you realized you were in line for the Public Turntable," he asked, "when you implored me with all those kisses to my boots and the crowd laughed at you?"
The words stung. Again, it was too real for memory. I swallowed hard.
"I felt panic. I cried, to be punished so soon like that, after trying so hard. Not as a spectacle, I thought, for a crowd of common people, and such a crowd, all there to preside over the chastisement. And when you reprimanded me for begging, I was . . . ashamed that I had ever thought I could escape it. I remembered that it wasn't necessary for me to have earned the punishment. I deserved it by being here, and being what I was. I was filled with remorse that I had pleaded with you. I will never do it again, I swear it."
"And then?" he asked. "When you were taken up and mounted without fetters? Did you learn from it?"
"Yes, enormously." I gave another low, harsh laugh. Hardly more than a single syllable. "It was devastating! First there was that fear of losing control when you told the guard, 'No fetters.' "
"But why? What would have happened if you had struggled?"
"I would have been bound down, I knew it. Tonight I saw a slave bound like that. Last night I simply assumed it would happen. I would have resisted with my whole body, bridling the way the Prince was tonight, bucking, the terror crashing against me and washing away from me."
I stopped. Engulfing yes, it had become engulfing.
"But I held still," I said, "and when I realized I wouldn't slip or slide under the blows, all the tension was released. I knew this remarkable exhilaration. I was being offered up to the crowd and I submitted to it. I collected all the crowd's frenzy to myself, and the crowd enlarged my punishment as they enjoyed it, and I belonged to the crowd, to hundreds and hundreds of Masters and Mistresses. I yielded to their lust. I held back nothing, resisted nothing."