Beauty's Release

BEAUTY: COURTLY LIFE IN ALL ITS GLORY
BEAUTY, PROPERLY gowned and bejeweled, walked back and forth across the room, eating an apple, only now and then tossing her long sleek mane of blond hair over her shoulder and glancing at the robust and splendidly dressed young Prince who had come to her father’s dreary castle to court her.
Such an innocent face.
In a low, fervent voice he spoke the predictable words—that he adored Beauty, would be most happy to make her his Queen, that their families would be overjoyed at the union.
A half hour ago Beauty had interrupted the nauseating diatribe to ask if he had ever heard of the strange pleasure customs of Queen Eleanor’s kingdom.
He had stared at her with wide eyes.
“No, My Lady,” he had said.
“Pity,” she had whispered with an acidic smile.
She wondered now why she hadn’t sent the Prince away. She had been sending men away since she had returned to her father’s house. But her father, though weary and disappointed, only continued to write letters, to receive more guests, to open his doors to more suitors.
At night Beauty lay crying against her pillow, her waking and sleeping dreams the same: of the lost pleasures of the world she had known beyond the border of her parents’ land, a subject which no one broached at court, which she herself never mentioned in public or private.
She stopped and looked at this young Prince now. She threw away the half-eaten apple. Something about the young man fascinated her. Of course he was handsome. She had let it be known she would marry only a handsome man. No one thought it unusual of a Princess with such endowments.
But there were other things about him. He had violet-blue eyes, rather like those of Inanna or more truly like those of Tristan. He was blond like Tristan—dark gold hair, thick and bushy around his face, leaving the lower part of his neck bare. “Rather enticing to see the bare neck,” Beauty thought. And the young man was big and broad-shouldered like the Captain of the Guard, like Laurent.
Ah, Laurent! It was Laurent she most thought of, remembered. The Captain of the Guard was a dark, faceless sentinel in her dreams. The sound of his strap rose and fell. But it was Laurent’s smiling face she saw, Laurent’s enormous cock that she longed for. Laurent!
Something had changed in the room.
The Prince had stopped speaking. He was gazing at her. His courtly ardor had melted away into a rare and honest silence. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his cloak hanging off one shoulder, and a sadness came over him.
“You will refuse me, too, won’t you, my Lady?” he asked quietly. “And you will haunt my nights forever after.”
“Is that so?” she asked. Something in her quickened. It was not a sarcastic reply. The moment was suddenly important.
“I want so to please you, Princess,” he whispered.
Please you, please you, please you. The words made her smile. How often she had heard them spoken in the far off world of the castle and the village, and in the even more distant fantasy world of the Sultan. How often she had spoken them herself.
“Do you, my dear Prince?” she asked gently. She was aware that her demeanor had changed, and that he realized it. He stood motionless, looking at her across the room, the afternoon sun falling in broad shafts on the stone floor between them. It glinted in his hair, on his eyebrows.
She advanced, and she thought she saw him shrink back, saw a flicker of undefined feeling in his face.
“Answer me, Prince,” she said coldly. Yes, she had seen it. The wave of redness rising to his cheeks confirmed it. He was baffled. “Then bolt the doors,” she said in a low voice. “All of them.”
He hesitated but a moment. How virginal he looked. What was under those breeches? Her eyes passed up and down over him, and she saw it again, the inward shrinking, the vulnerability that made his size and fair countenance suddenly quite irresistible.
“Bolt the doors, Prince,” she said threateningly.
And, moving like one in a dream, he went to obey, glancing back at her timidly.
There was a stool in the corner, a broad three-legged thing. Beauty’s maid sat upon it when she wasn’t needed.
“Set the stool in the center of the room,” she said, and she felt a little catch in her chest as she watched him obey her. He glanced up at her before he righted himself, after setting down the stool, and she liked this, his body bent over, his eyes gazing up, the color in his cheeks. Divine color.
She folded her arms and leaned against the carved side of the fireplace. She knew it was not a ladylike position. Her velvet gown annoyed her.
“Take off your clothes,” she whispered. “All of them.”
For a moment he was too astonished to respond. He stared at her as if he had heard wrong.
“Off with them,” she said in a monotone. “I want to see your body, see what you look like.”
Again, he hesitated, and then the blush on his face deepened as he bowed his head and began to unlace the jerkin. Lovely, the sight of his flaming cheeks, and the jerkin opening over the wrinkled shirt. He pulled the ties that laced the shirt, and there was his bare chest. Yes, more, and more. Yes, off the arms. Quite naked.
Fine nipples, maybe just a little too pale, and each surrounded with a little blond hair, and the hair moving down the center of the chest to a curling growth on the belly.
And now the breeches were down, and he was stepping out of the boots. Nice cock. And very hard. Of course. When had it gotten hard? When she had ordered him to bolt the doors? Or to remove his clothes? Actually it didn’t matter. Her own sex was moist and hot between her legs.
When he looked up at her again, he was stark naked—the only naked man she had seen since she had left the ship moored at Queen Eleanor’s dock, and she felt her own face tingling and her lips moving into a smile shamelessly.
But it wasn’t good to smile at him so soon. She stiffened slightly. She felt a great warmth in her breasts. She hated the velvet gown that covered her.
“Up on the stool, Prince, so I can have a good look at you.”
That was too much, or so it seemed for an instant. He opened his mouth, but then he only swallowed. 0, very handsome. He would have been welcomed by Queen Eleanor and her voluptuous Court. And what an ordeal it would have been! And that fair skin, revealing everything, as Tristan’s skin did. And he didn’t have the cunning of Laurent.
He turned and looked at the stool. He was paralyzed.
“Up on the stool, Prince,” she said stepping forward, “and put your hands on the back of your neck. That way I can see you well. Your hands and arms aren’t in the way.”
He stared at her. She stared back. And then he turned and in a slow, almost somnolent, fashion climbed onto the stool and put his hands behind his neck as she had commanded. He appeared astonished, astonished that he had done it.
And when he looked at her again, his face was redder than any face she had ever seen, making his eyes glitter, his hair look rather like gold, the way Tristan’s hair had often looked. He swallowed again, and he looked down, but probably he did not see his erect cock. He looked past it, into his own newly awakened soul, pondering with shame that he was so defenseless.
But that did not really matter to Beauty. She looked at the cock. It would do. It wasn’t Laurent’s organ, but then there weren’t very many that thick, were there? It was a good cock actually, curving upwards a little sharply above the scrotum, and very red now, red as the Prince’s face.
As she drew closer, the cock became even redder. She reached out and touched it with her thumb and forefinger. The Prince shrank back.
“Hold still, Prince,” she said. “I want to inspect you. And that requires your quiet compliance.” How shy he looked as she pinched the flesh, glancing up at him. He couldn’t meet her gaze. His lower lip was trembling exquisitely. If she had seen him at the castle, she would have been drawn to him as she’d been to Tristan. Yes—when you stripped away everything, he was a fine young sapling of a Prince who would come into full leaf under the lash quite predictably.
The lash. She looked about. His belt would have to do. But she was not ready for that, and he would have to get off the stool and hand it to her. For now she walked around behind him and looked at his buttocks. She felt the virginal skin, and she smiled as he shivered noticeably, as his hair shivered on the back of his naked neck rather touchingly.
She took his buttocks firmly in hand and spread them. This was almost going too far. He shuddered, and the muscles tightened.
“Open to me. I want to have a look at you.”
“Princess!” he gasped.
“You heard me, Prince,” she said gently but authoritatively. “Relax these beautiful muscles so that I can examine you.” She thought she heard a little gasp as he obeyed. The well-molded flesh went soft, and she parted the cheeks and looked at the hair-ringed anus. It was so small and pink, wrinkled, secretive. Who would have thought it could take a stout phallus, a cock, a fist clad in golden leather?
But for this tender fledgling something smaller would do. Almost anything really. She looked lazily about the room. A candle was the obvious thing, and there were many of them, some only an inch in width.
And as she went to take one from its holder, she remembered how she had pierced Tristan in this way when they had made love together in Nicolas’s house in the village. The memory galvanized her. She felt a totally unfamiliar sense of power.
When she turned, she glanced up and saw tears wetting the Prince’s face, and this further excited her. In fact, the wetness between her legs surprized her.
“Don’t be frightened, my darling,” she said. “Look at your cock. Your cock knows what you need and what you desire, even better than I do. Your cock is grateful that you’ve found me.”
She moved behind him again and, opening him with one hand, her fingers spreading him wide, she slowly inserted the wick end of the candle. Gently, and kindly, she worked it in, a fraction of an inch at a time, ignoring the Prince’s deep moans until he held a good six inches of it. It jutted out, a splendidly humiliating sight, and it moved as he contracted his buttocks again, his moans soft but resonant and imploring.
She backed away, heady with the sense of possessing him. Why, she could do anything to him, couldn’t she? In time....
“Keep it in,” she said. “If you force it out or let it fall out, I’ll be very disappointed and angry with you. It’s there to remind you that for now you belong to me, you’re mine. You’re speared by it, and it claims you, holds you powerless.”
To her pure and sweet amazement, he nodded slowly. He did not argue with her.
“We’re speaking a universal language of pleasure, aren’t we, Prince?” she said in a low voice.
Again, he nodded. But it was so difficult for him, he was suffering so much. Her heart went out to him, and mingled with her compassion was a terrible loneliness, a terrible envy. It was strong, this feeling of power, but stronger still were her memories of being overpowered. Best not to think of both simultaneously....
“Now, Prince, I want to whip you. Drop down and take your belt from your clothes and give it to me.”
As he moved slowly to obey, his hands shaking uncontrollably, the candle sticking out from his backside, she went on talking in a soothing voice:
“It’s not that you’ve done anything wrong. I will whip you because I wish to,” she said. He turned to her and put the belt in her hand, but he didn’t move away once she had it. He stood right in front of her, trembling. And she touched his curling chest hair with her fingers, tugging on it, running her fingers around his left nipple.
“Yes, what is it?” she asked.
“Princess ...” he said haltingly.
“Speak, my dear,” she said. “No one has said you may not speak, after all.”
“I love you, Princess.” “Of course you do,” she said. “Now back on the stool, and after I’ve whipped you I’ll let you know whether or not I’m pleased. Remember, keep the candle tight in place. Now move, my love. We must not waste these private moments.”
She moved behind him as he obeyed. She swung the strap hard and watched in fascination as it left a broad pink impression on the side of his right buttock. Again she struck him, marveling that the strength of the blow seemed to be echoed by his whole frame, even the shivering of his hair, his hands still trembling though he clasped his neck obediently.
Now she gave him the third blow, harder than the other two sweeping him under the buttocks, beneath the jutting candle, and she liked the sight of this the best, and so she gave him more and more good smacks there, making the candle move as he moved, making him rise on the balls of his feet as he struggled to keep still, his groans strangely eloquent.
“Anyone ever whipped you before, Prince?” she asked.
“No, Princess,” he said in a raw, torn voice. Exquisite.
And in thanks she worked on his thighs and on his calves, on the flesh behind his knees and on his ankles, his legs seeming to move without moving. What control he had. She tried to remember if she had had this control. What did it matter? That was all gone for the present. And she had this instead, and she thought back not to the whippings she had suffered but to the times at sea when she had seen Laurent strapping Lexius and Tristan.
She came round in front of the Prince. His face was more stricken than she had imagined.
“You behave beautifully, my darling,” she said. “I am truly impressed with your demeanor.”
“Princess, I adore you,” he whispered. He was gifted with extraoardinary looks. Why hadn’t she fully appreciated them before now?
She gathered the length of the strap in her hand, leaving only a good tongue of it free, and with this she whipped his cock hard, clearly frightening him and startling him.
“Princess!” he gasped.
She only smiled. Better to whip his firm little belly, and she did, and then his chest, watching the marks shine out like tracks in water. She whipped his nipples.
“0, Princess, I beg you...” he whispered, barely parting his lips.
“Would that I had time to make you sorry that you begged me,” she said. “But there isn’t time. Get down here, Prince, on your hands and knees. You will now pleasure me.”
As he obeyed, she opened the lower hooks of her skirt, her gown falling back below the waist. That was all he needed to see of her, she reasoned. And she felt her own fluids melting down her thighs. She snapped her fingers for him to approach.
“Your tongue, Prince,” she said, and she parted her legs, feeling his face against her, and the tongue lapping at her.
It had been so long, so dreadfully long! And his tongue was strong and quick and ravenous. He nuzzled into her, his hair pushing the velvet skirts farther away, tickling her lower belly. She sighed and slipped a few steps back. He reached up and took hold of her.
“Take me, Prince,” she said. She couldn’t bear the clothes anymore. She tore them open, let them drop off. He pulled her down on the hard stone floor.
“Ah, my darling, my darling,” he gasped. He pushed her legs wide apart as he went into her. She reached for the candle and found it with both hands and worked him with it. He gritted his teeth and rode her hard, as she rode him with the candle.
“Harder, my Prince, harder, or I promise you I will whip every inch of you with the strap!” she whispered, biting his ear, his hair covering her face. Then she came in a white explosion of mindless ecstasy, barely conscious of his juices flooding her.
Only a few moments of slumber. She pulled the candle out of his body and kissed his cheek. Had she done that long ago with Tristan? What did it matter?
She rose and put on her gown again, snapping the hooks impatiently. He too struggled to his feet.
“Get dressed,” she said, “and go, Prince. Leave the Kingdom. I won’t marry you.”
“But Princess,” he cried. He was on his knees still, and he flung himself at her, catching her skirt.
“No, Prince. I told you. I refuse your suit. Leave me.”
“But Princess, I’ll be your slave, your secret slave!” he implored her. “In the privacy of our chambers—”
“I know, my dear. And you are a good slave, without question,” she answered. “But you see, I don’t really want a slave. I want to be one.”
For a long moment, he stared at her. She knew the torture he was enduring. But it didn’t matter, really, what he thought. He could never master her. She knew it, and whether or not he knew it wasn’t important.
“Get dressed!” she said again.
And this time he obeyed. But his face stayed red. He was still trembling even when he was fully garbed again, with his cloak over his shoulders.
For a long moment she studied him. Then she began to speak in a low, rapid voice.
“If you want to be a pleasure slave,” she said, “go directly east of here to the Land of Queen Eleanor. Cross the border. And as soon as you are within sight of a village, take off your clothes and put them in your leather traveling bag and bury them. Bury them deep so that no one can find them. Then approach the village, and, when the villagers see you, run from them. They’ll think you’re a fugitive slave, and they’ll catch you quick enough and take you to the Captain of the Guard for punishment. Then tell him the truth, that you beg to serve Queen Eleanor. Now, go, my love, and take my word for it. It’s worth it.”
He stared at her, more amazed by her words perhaps than by anything else.
“I’d go with you, if I could, but they’d only send me back,” she said. “It’s no use. Now go. You can reach the border before dark.”
He didn’t answer. He made some small adjustment to his sword, his belt. Then he came nearer to her and looked down at her.
She let herself be kissed, and then she clasped his hand tight for a moment.
“Will you go?” she whispered. But she didn’t wait for an answer. “If you do, and you see the slave Prince Laurent, tell him that I remember him and I love him. Tell Tristan too....”
Futile message, futile link with all that had been taken from her.
But he appeared to weigh her words carefully. And then he was gone, out of the room and down the stairs. And in the soft afternoon sunlight, she was alone again.
“What am I to do?” she cried softly to herself. “What am I to do?” And she wept bitterly. She thought of Laurent, how easily he had risen from slave to Master. She could not do it. She was too jealous of the suffering she inflicted, too eager for the subjugation. She couldn’t follow in Laurent’s footsteps. She couldn’t imitate the example of the fierce Lady Juliana, who had gone from naked slave to Mistress, apparently without batting an eye. Maybe she lacked some dimension of spirit that Laurent and Juliana possessed.
But had Laurent been able to pass back again into the slave ranks as simply? Surely he and Tristan had met with dire punishment. How had Laurent fared? If only she knew. If only she knew a particle of the discipline he suffered now.

As late afternoon came on, she went out of the castle. As her courtiers and ladies-in-waiting trailed behind her, she walked through the village streets. People paused to bow from the waist to her. The wives came to the doors of their cottages to pay their silent respect.
She looked at the faces of those she passed. She looked at the stolid farmers and the milkmaids and the rich burghers, wondering what went on in the depths of their souls. Did none of them dream of sensual realms where passions were flamed to white-hot heat, of exotic and demanding rituals that laid bare the very mystery of erotic love? Did none of these simple people long for Masters or slaves in their secret hearts?
Normal life, ordinary life. She wondered if there were not lies worked into the fabric, lies she could discover if only she took the risk. But, when she studied the serving girl at the door of the Inn or the soldier who dismounted to bow to her, she saw only masks of common attitude and disposition, as she saw them on the faces of her courtiers, her maids. All were bound to show respect for the Princess as she, by custom and law, was bound to her proper and lofty place.
And, suffering silently, she made her way back to her lonely chambers.
And she sat by the window, resting her head on her folded arms on the stone sill, dreaming of Laurent and all those she had left behind, of a rich and priceless education of body and soul interrupted and forever lost.
“Dear young Prince,” she sighed, remembering her rejected suitor, “I hope you have made it into the Queen’s country. I did not even think to ask you your name.”