So sore from the Captain's lashing that the merest flick of the thrash made me jump, I tried in no way to hold back, wailing as the ponies pulled me after them.
We passed through a narrow street where slaves for hire were hung by their hands and feet on the wall, pubes oiled and glistening, prices scratched upon the plaster above them. In a little shop, I saw a naked seamstress pinning up a hem, and in a small open place a band of naked Princes driving a treadmill. Princes and Princesses alike knelt here and there with trays of fresh cakes for sale, no doubt from the Master or Mistress's oven, a little basket hanging from the mouth of the slave to humbly receive the coins of the purchaser.
All the regular life of the village passing as if my misery did not exist, was not so loudly lamented. A poor Princess chained to a wall whimpered and struggled as three laughing village girls idly stroked and teased her pubis.
And though I saw nowhere the theatrical savagery of the Public Punishment Grounds the night before, it was magnificent, and horrifying, this daily life of the village.
In a doorway, a buxom matron on a stool soundly spanked a naked Prince over her knee with her thick broad hand as she castigated him angrily. And a Princess holding with two hands a water jug on her head waited meekly as her Master implanted between her red pubic lips a good-size phallus with a leash attached, by which he made her smartly follow.
And we were now in quieter streets, streets where men of property and position lodged, and there were shiny doors with brass knockers. And from the high iron brackets above, slaves hung here and there as ornaments. The hush descended and the horseshoes of the ponies sounded louder and sharper up the walls, and I heard my weeping more clearly.
I could not think what the days held in store for me. So solid it all seemed, the population so accustomed to our wails, our servitude nourishing the place as surely as meat and drink, and sunshine.
And through it all, I was to be borne along on a wave of desire and surrender.
We had come round again to my Master's lodgings.
My lodgings. We passed the front door, quite as ornate as any we had seen, and the large costly leaded glass windows. And we went round the corner, through the little lane to the back road along the ramparts.
The straps and phalluses were stripped away in a great rush, the ponies sent off, and I collapsed at my Master's feet, kissing them all over. I kissed the insteps of the smooth morocco boots, the heels, the lacings. My agonized sobs broke louder and louder.
What was I pleading? Yes, make me your abject slave, be merciless. But I am frightened, frightened.
And in a moment of pure madness I wished he would take me again to the place of Public Punishment. I would have rushed with all my strength to the Public Turntable.
But he only turned to go into the house, and I came on hands and knees after him, lapping at his boots, giving darting kisses as he walked, following him down the corridor, until he left me in the small kitchen.
I was bathed, fed by the young male servants. No slaves worked in this house. I alone was kept, it seemed, for torment.
And quietly, without the slightest explanation, I was brought into a small supper room. Quickly I was stood up against the wall and chained with legs and arms in the form of an X and left there.
The room was polished and neat - I could see all of it now - a real rich little village-house room such as I never knew in the castle where I was born and reared, or in the Queen's castle. The low beams of its ceiling were painted and decorated with flowers, and I felt as I had when I first entered this house, huge and shamefully exposed in it, a true slave bound there among the shelves of gleaming pewter and the high-backed oak chairs and clean-swept chimneypiece.
But my feet were flat on the waxed floor, and I could rest my weight on them and rest back against the plaster.
And if only my c**k would go to sleep, I thought, I could rest also.
The maids came and went with their brooms and mops, arguing about supper, whether to roast the beef with red wine or white, and whether to put in the onion now or later. They took no note of me except to pat me gently as they passed, dusting about me, fussing, and I smiled, listening to this chatter. But just as I was dozing off, I opened my eyes with a start to see the lovely face and form of my dark-haired Mistress.
She touched my cock, bending it down, and it came to life violently. She had several small black leather weights in her hands with clamps like those I had worn on my ni**les yesterday, and as the maids talked on behind a closed door, she applied these clamps to the loose skin of my scrotum. I winced. I couldn't keep still. The weights were just heavy enough to make me painfully aware of every inch of the sensitive flesh and of the slightest shift of my balls - and a thousand such shifts seemed inevitable. She worked thoughtfully, pinching the skin as the Captain had pinched it with his fingernails. When I flinched she took no note of it.
Then she manacled my penis at the base with a heavy weight dangling beneath it, and as my organ bobbed I felt the coldness of the iron weight against my testicles. The touch of these things, their movements, were unendurable reminders of these bulging organs, this degrading exposure.
The little room grew dim and close. Her figure loomed large before me. I clenched my teeth hard not to plead with some mortifying little cry, and then that sense of surrender returned, and I pleaded quietly with low sighs and moans. I had been a fool to think I would be let alone.
"You will wear these," she said, "until your Master sends for you. And if that weight slips from your cock, there will be only one reason for it, that your c**k has gone soft and released the manacle. And your c**k will be whipped for that, Tristan."
I nodded as she waited, unable to meet her gaze.
"Do you need that whipping now?" she asked.
I knew better than to answer. If I said no, she would laugh and take it as impertinence. If I said yes, I was sure she would be outraged and the whipping must follow.
But she had already lifted a little delicate white strap from beneath her dark blue apron. I gave a series of short sighs. But she whipped my penis this way and that, sending shocks through all my loins, my hips lifting towards her. All the little weights pulled at me, like fingers stretching my skin and tugging on my cock. And the organ itself was purplish red, jetting straight forward.
"That is only a little example," she said. "When on display in this household, you must be turned out properly."
Again I nodded. I bowed my head and felt the hot beads of tears at the corners of my eyes. She lifted a comb to my hair and ran it through carefully and gently, arranging the curls neatly over my ears and drawing them back from my forehead. "I must tell you," she whispered "you are easily the most beautiful Prince in the village. I warn you, young man, you're in good danger of being bought outright. But I don't know what you could do to prevent it. Misbehave and you need the village all the more. Thrash your handsome hips in charming submission and you make yourself just as seductive. Already, there may be no hope for you. Nicolas has wealth enough to purchase you for three years, should he so desire. I'd love to see the muscles in those calves after three years of pulling my coach, or Nicolas's little walks through the village."