An evil, awesomely ugly king rules by fear and punishes with a sex-driven passion. Neither regal ladies nor the lowliest sluts of the street escape. His cruel and unusual punishments are followed by degrading sexual demands. His 'disciplines' are designed to create exquisite pain and arouse animal lusts. He is never satisfied; always perusing the next orgiastic sado-erotic triumph.
CHAPTER ONE
It was the Year of our Lord 1475. The grim Hundred Years' War had ended twenty-two years earlier, begun in 1337 when those English kings who were Dukes of Guienne were by treaty and law vassals of the French kings, opposed the centralizing policies of the French crown and showed increasing reluctance to do homage to France for their continental terrain. By the year 1429 the English and the Burgundians were masters of nearly all France north of the Loire, but in that immortal year Joan of Arc appeared, relieved the besieged city of Orleans, defeated the English at Patay and saw Charles VII crowned King of France at Rheims.
But now France was ruled by Louis XI, son of Charles VII, who had been married as the young Dauphine to lovely young Margaret, daughter of King James of Scotland.
Louis XI, who had nearly cost his mother his life because of his enormous head and hunched back and thin bowed legs, had been stricken with apoplexy on his wedding night, and gentle Margaret had turned in horror from her grotesque husband. The festering malice born in his soul from that night forth was to extend throughout all France, for it had been destined that he would not ascend the throne of a united France until the year 1461. Yet even as Dauphine, he had joined several conspiracies against his father, and had fought in battle in a manner that belied his deformities and his infirmity which was to plague him all his life. History shows that he achieved the goal of creating a new, national state based on the central power of the crown of France, in spite of the military superiority of his many enemies (for all the great nobles of that era were arrayed against him) by dint of stubbornness, skillful and unscrupulous diplomacy, and bribery.
Four years after his accession to the throne of France, the League of the Public Weal headed by Charles the Bold of Burgundy and Francis II of Brittany forced him to grant concessions of territory which he soon violated. Though he forced the Peace of Ancenis on Francis of Brittany in 1468, he was mortally humiliated by Charles the Bold who lured him to Peronne for an interview, and then refused to let him go until Louis had helped him suppress the revolt of Liege, which the "Spider King" himself had stirred up. He had never forgotten the humiliation of Peronne, when he had been forced to walk before the mounted Duke of Burgundy, the eyes of all the Burgundian soldiers mockingly upon him, lectured to as a naughty child by the great Burgundian soldier-noble. He swore then unremitting vengeance, but the mercenaries and Charles' own loyal troops seemed to outnumber him always at every turn and to dash his hopes. Now on this July night in the Year of our Lord 1475, the Burgundian armies besieged Paris itself, and the realm of the "Spider King" seemed doomed....
This night, the royal flag of Louis XI, the gold fleur-de-lis on a sky-blue field, flapped idly from atop the gloomy tower of the fortress of Montservat, in the southwest quarter of Paris. Here the "Spider King" met often with his ministers and with his two most trusted servants, the royal executioner-torturer Tristan L'Hermite and the dwarfed little Olivier le Malvays, who had begun his station in life as barber to Louis XI and was now doctor, advisor, and but recently ennobled with the name of Oliver le Daim. There were those in France who whispered that Olivier might well have become the favorite of the "Spider King" because he too had bandy legs, a hump on his back and long ape-like arms. And in his own grim and macabre humor, Louis XI often let his barber wear his royal robes and his cap with its row of leaden saints circling the rim to visit taverns and houses of ill repute, there in his own royal name to spy upon the temper of the people and to learn whether they were loyal in this life-and-death struggle against Burgundy....
The "Spider King" had wed again, in 1459, the lovely sixteen-year-old Charlotte, the daughter of Duke Lodovico of Savoy, and she had given him three daughters and a son Charles, who would become Charles VIII and reign from 1483 to 1498, marrying Anne of conquered Brittany.
But the "Spider King" thought nothing of his Dauphin son now as with Tristan and Olivier he moved towards a dungeon where the palace guards had incarcerated a young tavern wench who answered to the name of Isabeau La Jolie-Isabel the Lovely-who had been seen by one of the king's spies shooting an arrow over the city wall towards the camp of the besieging Burgundians....
The castle of Montservat was a grim structure of gray damp stone and rusting iron, squat, without windows, a monument of the remote age from which it dated, a relic of the Dark Ages of the Twelfth Century. It had once been the castle of a Duke and Grand Marshal of France, but now it served as prison. The damp odor of fungi from the cellars and a profusion of bats that swarmed at sunset from a crack in the masonry of one of the ruined watchtowers, made the superstitious people of Paris cross themselves when they neared this grim edifice. Louis XI put his tongue to his thin dry lips, glanced cunningly at his royal executioner. "Well, Tristan, there'll be good sport, I'll warrant, this night. Mayhap we shall learn what treason my own citizens of Paris plan against me in aiding my hated enemy of Burgundy."
"Sire," the massive giant rumbled, pulling at his gray beard, his dark blue eyes singularly glowing with a rapacious lust, "I much doubt that this tavern wench knows aught what it was she did in shooting that arrow. It is my belief, Majesty, that some traitorous noble in your own palace bribed the poor slut to do the deed. True, it will not spare her torture, but she shall not at least die of treason if we learn that such is the case."
"My Charlotte is at Montplessis enjoying the spring baths," the "Spider King" cackled, "so perchance a bit of diversion will not be amiss with this lusty wench. You say she is lusty, good Tristan, broad in the bosom and the hips?"
"Aye, Majesty," the royal executioner chuckled thickly, "but danger there is of the pox from lying with such a bawd."
"That is why I have bought my good Olivier. With his drugs, he has saved me from many a fainting spell and stroke of my sickness, and he knows a wench's private parts better than any doctor should-aye, Olivier, you rogue?" He turned to his right, where the newly ennobled dwarf-hunchback hobbled along, and Olivier le Daim winked salaciously. "I can tell in a trice," he boasted in a reedy voice, "whether this harlot is fit for Your Majesty's royal scepter. But if she is not, Ventre Saint Gris, I shall have a comely wench to warm your bed, Sire."
"See that you do, you ugly rogue," Louis XI cackled as he clapped his barber-surgeon-advisor upon his hump, "or I will have good Tristan stretch you straight again, I swear it upon the saints!" With this, the King of France touched with his bony fingers the leaden images sewn to his purple hat, and Tristan opened the door of the torture chamber, its hinges squealing as in a kind of anticipatory agony which the poor, luckless victim within would soon echo!
Indeed, as the sinister trio entered the torture chamber, the attractive culprit uttered a cry of abject terror, cringing back against the damp stone wall to which she had been shackled with her wrists drawn high above her head and fixed by two heavy iron gyves set into the stone itself.
To her right, and in the broader portion of the dungeon, the terrible apparatuses of torture were visible. Two men, naked to the waist and their faces masked in black as befitted their terrible station, blew on the bellows to fan the flames of a huge brazier in which branding irons were heating. The vaulted ceiling in this broader portion of the dungeon was higher, and from the ceiling dangled chains and ropes, while in a corner to the victim's left stood the rack, and in the opposite corner a round heavy wooden post in which a single circular iron gyve was fixed at the very top-a whipping post. Against the central wall to the girl's left, there were other dread objects of torture for which this savage age was famed: the iron boot, tongs and pincers of varying sizes, and a set of shining knives with murderously sharp edges, used to flay a convicted criminal.
The two assistants were burly rogues, famed in their skill of inflicting exquisite agony while prolonging a victim's life to the utmost; but Tristan l'Hermite was their acknowledged superior and master at the hideous trade of torture and death. For Louis XI, beset by the most powerful nobles of the land, ruled, not only by intrigue but by terror as well, and he made use of this weapon, which had the added virtue of whetting his inordinate sadistic appetites.
The girl at the wall stared incredulously as he, centered between the hunchback barber and the massive executioner, approached. His cloak and doublet, as his royal hat with its rows of saints, was a dusty and faded purple, and his hose emphasized the spindly and bowed shape of his malformed legs. Even if she had not known by the hat and the medals and by the royal purple, however faded, which adorned him, Isabeau would have divined from his sly face and enormous head and his crooked body that this was the terrible "Spider King."
She had been seized at the tavern after the king's spy had pointed her out to the men-at-arms, and so she wore a low-cut blouse which excitingly set forth the upper curves of a magnificent pair of round, closely spaced breasts, and a dirtied skirt whose fullness did not hide the tempting promise of her ripe hips and thighs. Her face was round, her lips overripe, her nose dainty and with broadly flaring wings, but the terror in her supremely widened dark brown eyes added an indefinable nuance of helpless femininity to her features which Louis XI found particularly stimulating. Apprehension and suspense were an integral part of the torture chamber, and so sensitive and deliciously attractive a victim would, he knew, provide hours of titillating pleasure.
"Bow your head, slut," the giant Tristan boomed, "your sovereign stands before you and has come to judge you!"
"Oh, pitie, ayez pitie de moi, Votre Majeste" Isabeau La Jolie heartrendingly sobbed.
But Louis XI did not listen to her plea; his crafty, watery little eyes were squinting at the generous thrust of her round bosom against the brazen immodesty of her blouse, as if they sought liberation to his eyes and hands and lips.
"A toothsome wench, indeed, Tristan," he cackled as he winked at his executioner. "Nay, how fair this flower of the gutter might be were she washed and then gowned! But what would you, the treasury of my poor kingdom is still too paltry to bedeck every pretty wench in Paris with a fine gown. Besides, she will have no need of clothing at all very soon, eh, my Tristan?"
"None whatsoever, Sire," the giant smirked, he too intent with glittering eyes upon the shuddering body of the helpless girl. Isabeau's dark-brown hair had been loosened in the struggle during which she had tried to escape her captors at the tavern, and it tumbled down nearly to her hips.
"My poor child," Louis XI declaimed in a wheedling voice, "it grieves me to see one so fair in such pitiful straits and in so gloomy a dungeon. Happily, it is unlikely that you will catch a quinsy from the cold, since I see that Tristan's good cronies are making the flames leap in that brazier. In your own welfare, girl, I counsel you to speak the truth to your King and overlord. I am told on good authority that you were seen shooting an arrow into the Burgundian camp. To whom were you signaling and who bade you do this treasonable act? Know you not that Burgundy is my mortal enemy and that his vassals besiege the walls of Paris to the peril of every honest and upright citizen of my city? You must speak, girl, or your tongue will be loosened, for I must know all of plots and schemes to topple my throne."
"Oh, Majesty," Isabeau quavered, "I-I have a lover who has taken service with the Duke, and it was to him that I sent the message tied to the shaft of that arrow. I swear it upon my hope for salvation."
The superstitious King of France hastily crossed himself. "Take care not to blaspheme, wench," he whined, "lest your immortal soul perish here and now! The Omnipotent One who knows all truth and all error, all falsehood and all deception, hears you now beyond these walls. Nay, do not take me for a child, you pretty creature, and do not think to cozen me with your fair charms. Were you my sister herself, you should be stripped and put to the question if you dared betray your King to whom you must owe allegiance to the very death!"
"But it is the truth, as heaven is my judge, Majesty," Isabeau pleaded, tears welling into her lovely large eyes, breaking and dribbling down her contorted, flushed cheeks. Her tears added to the sensual delight of the "Spider King," for he could not purge his soul of the rancor he had felt when his beautiful young Scottish bride Mary had recoiled from him on his wedding night. And he could see in the eyes of the terrified and tethered Isabeau La Jolie that faint shadow of repugnance which insulted and infuriated him and which made him, conversely, all the more savagely eager to punish any such bold jade who would flout him because he was not handsome as a courtier.
He put out his bony hand and brushed her bare shoulder, and Isabeau shrank back against the unyielding stone wall of her dungeon with a stifled cry of horror. The cold, bony touch of his fingers on her naked skin made her nearly swoon with terror, as did the relentless and deliberate preparations of the assistant executioners beyond her.
"Such fine white skin, my pretty little dove," he crooned, his forefinger tracing its way down the narrow valley between her heaving titties. "What a pity it would be to mark it with the purple and dark red and black of the hot irons. Or to trace upon it the kisses of the lash." His eyes narrowed, his voice grew cold and ruthless: "But mark it I will assuredly do, you obstinate slut, unless you now speak and reveal the truth! Quickly, the irons are almost white-hot and they yearn for your naked flesh, you young, misguided trollop! You have enough lovers, I vow, in the tavern where my men made you prisoner, without offering yourself to those dogs of Burgundy."
"She is a common bawd, Sire," Tristan impatiently interposed, "and any rogue with a few exus in his purse and the wherewithal to pay for a flagon of wine and a bed in some grimy hostel can enjoy her favors."
"That's not true, I swear it's not ture, I'm no bawd!" poor Isabeau hysterically cried out.
"Do you deny then, slut," the giant Tristan growled as he cupped her chin with his thick, mercilessly strong and cruel fingers, and stared gloatingly into her tear drenched eyes, "that you do not sell your body at that tavern? Mark you, girl, you will not lie to me long, for I have ways of extracting the truth even from a deaf-mute! I will bring into this dungeon a dozen cutthroats who will equally swear upon their hope of salvation that they have lain with you. Even that rogue of a poet Francois Villon, who fancies himself to be of nobility and calls himself Francois de Montcorbier-he, I know for certain, is one of your legion of lovers. But I have had enough of this idle banter! Jules, Pierrot, put this girl to the post and strip her naked for the lash. We shall begin with the whip, and perhaps you will tell us how virtuous you are or are not. If not, then the irons will be more than ready!"
"Oh no-in the name of mercy, oh no, Majeste, do not let him torture me, I know nothing, I have told the truth!" Isabeau shrieked as the two masked, half-naked torturers eagerly approached her.
CHAPTER TWO
At this very moment, though the army of the Burgundians was camped around the walls of Paris, Charles the Bold himself was dining in state at the castle of Drienne, a powerful fief which was still held in thralldom by him and not by the crafty Louis XI. The Compte Henri de Drienne, feudal lord of this magnificent estate and the fortress-like castle which commanded it, had ceded it to his Burgundian master for a great feast. It was a stratagem of war more than a festival, although it entailed a marital alliance, the purpose of which was to weaken the power of the "Spider King."
The great hall of this castle, a magnificent new structure with ten glass windows, was brilliantly lighted with scores of torches that burned with a steady clear yellow flame. A pleasant scent was wafted into the air, for these torches had been impregnated with beeswax, a substance reserved in France for the finest quality of candles.
The hall was crowded with magnificent tables, spread with superbly figured Flemish linen, and had robbers entered and seized the decor of these tables, they would have netted a fortune, for there was a veritable treasure in silver plate: silver forks, silver candlesticks, pastry castles three feet high, churches of cake with genuine golden bells ringing from their edible steeples; a silver unicorn with a candy-stick horn. For viands, there were cranes stuffed with pheasants which in turn were stuffed with quails, and these in their turn were stuffed with hummingbirds. There were swans covered with white sugar feathers swimming in a lake of their own delicious juices, in which bobbed oranges, the eggs of plovers, and ripe plums. In one corner of the largest table, a Dutch windmill with sails of cake frosting pumping a miniature river of wine into a silver ewer from which the noblemen dipped their goblets into it to toast the health of the Duke of Burgundy, the Comte of Orienne, and of Philippe, the Compte of Valois.
Philippe of Valois was a profligate weakling, a man of thirty and a fop. He used snuff from a silver box, and his doublet and hose were the most elegant and expensive in all France. He carried a perfumed pomander which he put to his delicate nostrils now and again, affecting a look of supercilious scorn at those who sat at the table with him. He was unmarried, and his passion was for young pageboys, whom he would occasionally dress as girls and, blindfolding them, take them to one of the torture chambers in his sumptuous castle to the south, and there under the penalty of a flogging or worse, force them to divest themselves of their raiment, to kneel on all fours for buggering.
The burly and stalwart noblemen who crowded this central table at which the Duke of Burgundy himself was seated beside his ally of Valois were distasteful to the effete pederast. Philippe had his own army of German and Swiss mercenaries, and it was precisely this army which Charles the Bold, ruler of Burgundy and of much of the Loire, desperately craved.
So Charles the Bold had ordered this great feast with a display of all his wealth as well as that of his ally and vassal, the Compte of Drienne, to impress the foppish ruler of Valois. And the plum which he meant to dangle in front of this popinjay was his own voluptuous and sadistic sister, Katherine.
Philippe de Valois, pederast though he was, lusted also for women, but he wished to be dominated by them. His own mother had been a cruel and vindictive woman, beautiful and desired by many, and history records that many a troubadour or knight who pined for a night in her bed was often summoned to her bedchamber, only to discover that, after permitting him some daring caresses which only excited him to frenzy, she would call in her maids, have the varlet stripped and flogged with birch switches as he knelt, his hands tied behind his back, while she mockingly sat on a footstool and put her milky hand to his prick and masturbated him constantly until he fainted from the pain and the frustration.
Thus these two diversely contrasting sides of Philippe's sensuality had led him both to the amusement of boy pages dressed as girls and to an ungovernable and almost hopeless yearning for a mate who, while he practiced on her the normal and natural male right of possession, would nonetheless dominate him. Charles the Bold had planted several spies in the household of Philippe de Valois and had learned of his potential ally's astonishing two-phased lusts. That was why on this eve when he felt secure in the siege of Paris and believed that only the addition of mercenary troops would topple the walls of Paris and bring Louis XI to his knees begging for clemency, he had absented himself from his own armies to lure Philippe de Valois into union with beautiful Katherine....
In the fair city of Beaune, in the heart of Burgundy, that thriving province of Eastern France and famous for its magnificent wines, Katherine of Burgundy was amusing herself this summer evening, little knowing what her soldier-brother planned. She knew that she might rule as regent should her brother perish in battle and that the troops of Charles the Bold would swear allegiance to her under the Burgundian manner, so that her own future was assured. And in these times, Burgundy included not only this province of France but also the Low Countries and Franche-Comite. While the "Spider King" had to levy taxes against his own nobles and suffer their rage at such extortion, Burgundy, a center of art and culture, was also the wealthiest state of Western Europe. And of the women of this thriving land, Katherine of Burgundy was one of the most beautiful-and also the most ruthless and heartless....
She was tall, perhaps five feet eight inches, with jet black hair wound in a coronet braid atop her stately head. Her eyes were a piercing blue, but they were cold and unlike the warm sun-bathed sky of Burgundy itself in this soft summer season. Her nose was aquiline, perhaps even a trifle sharp, with sensuous nostrils that flared mercurially and denoted her ardent temperament. Her mouth was thin and small and her chin firm as a man's, her face an insolent oval and her cheekbones high-set, while her skin had the warmth and whiteness of pure ivory.
Her figure was that of a young Diana-goddess of the hunt, and she rode as well as her stalwart brother. But now, at eventide, in her bedchamber, she was naked but for a perfumed silken robe with a silver-cloth belt that accentuated the suppleness of her slim waist and called attention to the alluring flare of svelte hips and high-set oval-cheeked buttocks, long shapely nervously muscled thighs and elegantly sinuous calves.
She had supped on roast pheasant and downed several goblets of red Beaune wine, and her small but magnificently firm orange-like breasts rose and fell quickly as her passion mounted. She stood facing her favorite maid, a Norman girl of eighteen, named Marie Castelatte, whom she had bidden attend her in her bedchamber, giving leave to all her other maids to do what they would until their bedtime.
Marie had been in her court six months, and Katherine of Burgundy had made tacit inquiries regarding this enchanting virginal morsel. It was reported that Marie Castelatte wrote despairing letters to a young squire in Normandy and that she often wept alone in her room, pining for her native province and her elderly father. Her mother had died a year after her birth, and she had been brought up by a gentle old nurse. She was unaffected, with the simplicity of a country girl who had had little schooling as she stood out like a pure white rose amid the lush orchid-like sophisticated women of the Burgundian court.
Katherine of Burgundy had long lusted for the conquest of Marie Castelatte, but with the true air of a voluptuary had put off this conquest until a propitious hour-which had now come. Distraught and nervous, having had no word of her brother in a month, Katherine's sadistic passions had reached their zenith and sought a victim for their consummation: the victim tonight would be virginal golden-haired Marie Castelatte.
"I am angry with you, Marie," she said in a vibrant, husky contralto voice as her dark blue eyes narrowed in contemplation of the lovely young girl who knelt humbly at her feet. Marie Castelatte wore a simple white silk gown, chastely out, without jewels, and her golden hair was coiffed in the simplest of styles, drawn aware from the pure high arching forehead and gathered at the back of her neck in a white net. Her face was round and heart-shaped, her eyes also blue but warm and gentle. Her mouth was ripe and sweet, her nose Grecian, but her body was what Katherine of Burgundy most coveted; round full exuberant young titties, sumptuous young haunches to match, round succulent thighs, and a soft baby-pink skin.
On the great four-postered canopied bed of the Duchess of Burgundy, there lay a silver-handled riding crop of black leather, flexible and venomous. And beside it there lay a coffer lined in purple velvet in which reposed a curious ivory appendage, the replica of a male penis in full erection, with jeweled ribbons to affix it to the hips and loins of an ardent female who sought to emulate the male. It was the dildo of Katherine of Burgundy, which had taken full many a maidenhead and which would take another, the most prized of all, this summer night!
Katherine's fierce, domineering gaze devoured the kneeling golden-haired penitent before her. Marie Castelatte little knew that she was being stripped naked and evaluated, even to her plaints, as the sadistic sister of Charles the Bold envisioned a night of salacious and orgiastic pleasure. Her other maids, including those who were of noble birth and whose places in her household were guaranteed by this rank of their fathers, vassals of her mighty brother, were by now known only too well to her and often failed to give her fulfillment unless she resorted to the silver-handled riding crop and other devious torments. They fawned upon her, seeking her favor, and willingly came to her bedchamber, which did not thrill her half so much as the prospect of overcoming the virtuous and virginal scruples of this charming, naive girl before her.
"Yes, I am displeased, Marie Castelatte."
"Wh-what have I done, Duchesse? I swear I did not mean to give offense," the charming golden-haired girl replied in a clear sweet voice which trembled with anxiety as she now clasped her soft fingers and held them up as if in prayer to the towering brunette imperatrix.
"For one thing, you mope like a swallow with its feathers plucked away," Katherine fiercely retorted. "You insult my court and therefore me, your duchess, by finding no affection here where you are honored, you who are not even of noble birth, by being my attendant. Instead of seeking some courtier whom I should pick for you, you spend your time in your room composing mournful epistles to some Norman varlet-"
"Oh! He-he is not a varlet, my lady!" Marie Castelatte gasped, her soft pink cheeks flaming in her virtuous young indignation. "He will be knighted before long, I know he will, and then he will join the service of my Lord Duke."
"Be not so sure," Katherine of Burgundy sneered. "Not all Normans are so loyal. Besides, he is leagues away and should be forgotten now that you are my servant, you wretched girl. I will find you a lover, little Marie."
"Oh no, please, I-I don't want that-truly, I-I'm grateful that my lady lets me serve her, but in all honor, my lady, let me be as I am! I want no man save Etienne!"
"You dare to flout me, you impudent young baggage?" Katherine hissed vituperatively. "Do you not know that even when my noblewomen displease me, I have the power to thrash them with my own hand? And you, lowly born as you are, do you dare expect as much? You shall be punished for your insolence, Marie Castelatte! Take off your clothes, I wish you naked!"
The golden-haired young girl on her knees uttered a stifled cry of stupefaction, her eyes widening as she stared up at the passion-contorted face of the svelte brunette Duchess of Burgundy. "Oh no-I implore mercy, my lady!"
"Take care, wench, my power is absolute within this fief while my brother besieges Paris. It will not be long before he instead of that crippled hunchback Louis is on the throne of all France. My power here in his absence is as his own, girl. Obey me, or I will call Master Robert to have you trussed up and flogged before my entire court!"
At this dire threat, Marie Castelatte began to sob and despondently stumbled to her feet. With burning eyes, Katherine of Burgundy watched the unfortunate young beauty remove her simple gown and then the long white camisole and the clinging linen drawers which hugged the ripe rondures of her pink-sheened bottom-cheeks. With an imperious gesture, Katherine stopped the sobbing victim as Marie was about to unhook her garters: "No! Leave on your hose and garters and your shoes! It will make your nakedness more shameful. And now, go place yourself in penitence at the foot of my bed, pillowing your head on the covers, and on your arms, and present me that impertinent backside of yours that I may warm it for you with a few good stripes!"
"Have pity, Your Grace! Do not w-w-whip me, I have never been whipped, never!" Marie sobbed heartrendingly.
A cruel smile curved the thin lips of the dominatress: "Then it is high time you were, little Marie," she crooned, her nostrils flaring with the lubricity which possessed her. "A good whipping will teach you manners and submission to your duchess. Quickly, now, before I call in Master Robert after all. He will take you out to my court naked as you are now and tie you to the post in the courtyard. There will be torches to light up your nakedness, as you wriggle and squirm under the lash-would you prefer that, my stubborn little baggage?"
"Oh no, have mercy, hot that, not Master Robert!" Marie Castelatte groaned as, with a terrified look at her tormentress, she fairly ran to the foot of the great bed and bowed her head in her trembling bare arms over the rail, proffering her round pink-satiny bottom to the kisses of the silver-handled riding crop.
Katherine of Burgundy shuddered with the furious passion consuming her as she moved deliberately towards the bed and picked up the flexible black leather thong, grasping its cool precious metalled handle as she would a scepter. "Keep your eyes on that coffer, you obdurate little slut!" she hissed. "Before I've finished with your punishment, you will beg me to open that coffer and to requite your loneliness-you'll see!"
With this, her left hand bore down on the small of Marie Castelatte's bare quivering back as, her eyes blazingly fixed upon the cringing, twitching naked half-moons of that voluptuous and virginal posterior, she raised the silver-handled riding crop, hovered it in the air an atrociously long moment to increase her victim's suspense, and then brought it down with a wicked, hissing crack over the tops of Marie's luscious young hips.
"Aahhh! Oh spare me, Your Grace, it burns, it cuts! Have mercy, I will serve you better, I swear I will!"
"I know you will, my little dove," Katherine purred as she let the crop dangle in her hand and graze the shuddering, tightening hillocks of Marie's voluptuous naked bottom. The bright red weal which the first stroke had left inflamed her lust, and she was impatient to see a multitude of such stripes decorating the velvety, smooth perfection of that ripe young naked flesh.
Sucking in her breath, Katherine applied a second stroke of the flexible leather crop over the most enticing and plumpest arc of the twitching nether hemispheres; Marie Castelatte uttered a scream, piteous and agonized: "Eeeeoohhharrr!! Ohh, my lady, pour le bon Dieu, do not beat me so horribly-I shall die, I shall assuredly die! Oh, I beseech you to have mercy on me and I will serve you faithfully henceforth, I swear it!"
"You will serve me better after you have had your whipping, my little dove," Katherine hissed, her left palm bearing down with all her strength on the supple, now perspiring naked back of her voluptuous young prey. For the third time the silver-handled riding crop sounded its sibilant music in the air as it flashed down, with a sonorous crack as it bit home across the base of Marie Castelatte's jutting naked bottom globes, and another frenzied, even more prolonged cry announced the torment. The naked girl, wriggling and kicking her stockinged legs, turned her contorted and tearstained face back towards her tormentress, whom she dared not rebuke or revolt against lest the torture chamber of the castle welcome her as inmate. Shorn of noble birth as she was, she could only pray for an ultimate mercy ... but the mercy which Katherine of Burgundy would finally vouchsafe her would be far beyond her most innocent maiden dreams!
"Your skin is most tender, little dove," the Duchess sadistically announced as she capriciously flicked the stiff flap at the end of the riding crop over the shuddering naked globes. "How you do flinch when you hear the whistle of the crop through the air and how your big bottom jumps when you feel the leather caress it! Does your manly Etienne rouse such feverish mobility in your lovely body, I wonder? No, he cannot, unless you have lied to me and are truly instead of virgin!"
"Oh no, Your Grace, I am a maid, I have lain with no man," the tearful golden-haired victim piteously sobbed.
"Then you have much to be grateful for," Katherine of Burgundy cynically replied. "I shall initiate you myself, so that no rude lout will tumble you and make you lose the heavenly joys which only a woman can teach another. But first you must have your whipping, for it will warm you and draw forth from that innocent little hairy spot of yours the most frantic surging of desire. This I promise you, my sweet little Marie of Normandy!"
So saying, the sadistic brunette dominatress, bidding the unfortunate, weeping girl to clasp her hands together before her and not dare try to protect her bottom unless she wished to deal with Master Robert (the executioner who served both brother and sister in this imposing castle), the svelte brunette resumed the flogging. With a diabolical cunning that demonstrated untold practice, she made the black leather band sting and crack wickedly over poor Marie's plunging, squirming, wriggling naked buttocks, attacking virtually every untouched pink-sheened inch of tender bottom flesh. Try as she would, entreating mercy in hysterical and almost incoherent terms, the unfortunate golden-haired virgin could not escape a single caress of the wicked crop.
The pattern of weals and splotches grew apace as Katherine, her small firm orange-like titties swelling exuberantly as her passion welled within her, seemed implacably content to flog without respite. But she took care not to break the skin, yet to assail it with repeated stripes and stigmata which drew the blood to the perspiring, streaked naked young flesh and multiplied the unspeakable torment which now consumed that voluptuous young posterior. As if a thousand angry wasps had bitten her naked seat, Marie jerked and twisted her hips this way and that, innocently and unknowingly revealing at times the gaping pink cleft between the dark-gold curls which framed her virgin cunt. In these moments, the eyes of Katherine of Burgundy flamed with a sinister and unholy glow, and her nostrils dilated convulsively as she stepped even closer to the unfortunate naked captive and, continuing to pin the girl across the rail of the bed, with her left palm, continued the fustigation.
"When you have had enough," she panted as she lowered the crop after some thirty-five strokes, "you have only to beg me to open the coffer, pretty little bitch!"
"Oh do so, Your Grace! Eeyarrhhh!! Aiii! Oh have mercy, I cannot bear it any longer, open the coffer and do with me as you will!" Marie Castelatte shrieked as a pair of fiendishly applied lashes, directed from downwards up, leaped into the gape between her straining thighs and found the tenderest nook of all: her twitching quim.
"Reach for it, then, my pretty one," Katherine of Burgundy hissed. "Open it and beg me to use this upon you instead of the whip! Hurry, or I shall flay the skin from this big bottom of yours which waggles so impudently in my face!"
To punctuate her argument, she directed a vicious slash of the silver-handled riding crop across the ripest curves of both naked globes, and Marie Castelatte, lifting her head, her face twisted with the rictus of unspeakable torment, uttered a shriek and grabbed at the coffer, fumbled with the catch and opened it. Her tear-blinded eyes blinked as Katherine, pausing in her sadistic gloating joy, watched the naked sufferer try to clear her vision and to see the hideously obscene object which the coffer contained.
"Ohhh-aahh-ohh, what-what is it, m-my-lady?" at last Marie Castelatte tearfully quavered.
"You will not be long in learning its usage, little dove! Quickly now, beseech me to use it, or I shall continue with the riding crop, thus!" Suiting action to word, Katherine of Burgundy lowered the crop again and perfidiously leaped it up right into the mossy gape of Marie Castelatte's exquisitely sensitive young virgin cunthole.
"Aaarrreeeeowwww!! Oh not there, Your Grace, for the love of heaven, use this instead, use it quickly before I die of the pain! I cannot bear it any longer! Have mercy, I have been punished enough, I will do your bidding, my lady!"
Katherine of Burgundy exhaled a sigh of gratification. She flung the crop to the other corner of the ornate bedroom, and hastily doffed her wrapper and was ivory-naked, save for the thick black triangular thatch which marked her own virgin cunt. Virgin to male, but not at all to her own sex, as poor weeping Marie, bent over the bed, her body abandoned, her welted buttocks twisting and squirming uncontrollably, was soon to learn.
"Go kneel upon the bed then, since it will doubtless pain you to lie upon your back, little dove," the Duchess of Burgundy commanded in a husky, passion-thickened voice that would brook no refusal now.
Marie Castelatte weepingly dragged herself onto the bed, slithering on her belly like an eel, and finally, panting and sobbing, head bowed, her beautiful round titties dangling like ripe fruits from the vine, got onto hands and knees, crouching like a beast at bay as the hunters approached for the kill.
So blinded with tears were her eyes, so blazingly agonizing were the flames that permeated her streaked and swollen buttocks, that she did not see her royal mistress swiftly, expertly, attach the dildo with the jeweled ribbons to her loins and hips, gusseting herself, so that the ivory phallus loomed like a male organ in savagely full erection, bent upon the destruction of Marie Castelatte's virgin seal.
Crouching behind the weeping, half-fainting naked blonde, the Duchess of Burgundy reached out her slim strong fingers and cupped Marie's pendant titties, tweaking and pinching them as a man might well do in his lubricious joy of possessing such tasty, opulent flesh. "Do not dare to move, you little bitch, or Master Robert will be kept busy this night," she warned her victim. Marie Castelatte babbled a promise to submit, though she did not, could not know to what she now agreed. The ivory phallus moved insidiously and silently between her parted thighs, till it brushed the curls which framed her slit. Then, in reaction, she jerked nervously with a whimpering little cry: "Mon Dieu, what are you doing to me, Y-Your Grace?"
"That which will make you a woman and my more dutiful servant, little dove," was the caustic answer. And then, in a sibilant, cruelly menacing tone, "Do not dare to move now, as you value your life! It is your Duchess who commands!"
Hardly had she uttered these words than Katherine of Burgundy, seizing the squirming, perspiring, welted naked hips of her young maid, rammed the ivory phallus between the pouting pink lips of Marie Castelatte's virgin cunt and on up to the hymeneal barrier which proved her purity. Marie uttered a strangled scream of mingled terror and pain, twisted her contorted tear-stained face back towards her regal mistress, and her eyes widened in terror as she saw the flushed, vengefully cruel and sadistically beautiful features of her mistress warped in that mask of unbridled rut. She closed her eyes to blot out that image, and at that moment Katherine of Burgundy thrust home her simulacrum of male potency, rending the virgin barrier, plunging to the hilt inside the tender narrow vaginal sheath of her Norman maid.
Marie could no longer control her cries, but these, rather than infuriating Katherine, seemed now to excite her. like a man bent upon furious coitus, Katherine of Burgundy jerked her hips back and forth, digging the phallus to the very hilt again and again inside that martyred love sheath. Heedless of the young girl's cries and incoherent, babbling pleas for mercy, the Duchess possessed Marie Castelatte even more brutally than might a male. And at last, drawing the bloodied weapon out of its human, palpitating sheath, she fumbled with the jeweled ribbons that bound the artifice to her naked loins and flung it to one side of the huge bed as, kneeling upright with her legs astraddled, Katherine of Burgundy commanded: "Now to your mistress, girl! Now you may have your chance to serve her well! Your lips and tongue to me, at once, or I shall pull the bellr ope and summon my executioner!"
Swooning with her agony and shame, Marie Castelatte was coerced into obedience by that dire threat. She turned feebly, moved on all fours towards the imperious dominatress who had ravaged and flogged her, not quite comprehending what her task was to be. But Katherine of Burgundy swiftly stretched out both hands, her supple slim fingers twisting in the girl's golden curls, and dragged Marie's tear-stained face up against her cunt and repeated, "Your lips and tongue, as you value your position here, little dove! Or I shall cast you down into the dungeon to be the plaything of the scullery lads and the lowliest varlets of this duchy!"
Awkwardly, ingenuously, Marie Castelatte began her first lesson in gamahuching her royal mistress, and now it was Katherine of Burgundy's turn to moan and to squirm as, her eyes closed, her nostrils dilating and shrinking with convulsive tremors, she let herself be roused to the very pinnacle of passion. "Ma mie, more quickly now-that's it! Your tongue, deep as you can-Pasque-Dieu, how good it is! My little sweet, I shall make it up to you for the cruel way I've treated your lovely bottom-aahhh, more, more, deeper, deeper with your tongue, you little bitch-oh yes, there now-there, there, quickly, quickly, did I not tell you that a good whipping would make you burn with ardor in my service, Marie?"
And with a cry, Katherine of Burgundy stiffened, her eyes rolling, her head falling back, her nipples hardened to dark coral tips as her tumescence came upon her, while, degraded and shamed, sobbing and trembling and whimpering, the naked golden-haired young maid brought her to the moment of shattering appeasement.
CHAPTER THREE
Isabeau, at a sign from the formidable giant executioner Tristan, had been unshackled from her place at the wall and dragged over to the rack, still weepingly protesting her innocence and supplicating for mercy. The two stocky half-naked masked torturer's assistants had swiftly stripped her of her garments, even to her drab hose and shoes, and flung her down on her belly on the rack. It was near the wall beside the door of the dungeon, and above, fixed into the stone with a metal bracket, a heavy torch was thrust, flickering its eerie light down upon the glossy white naked body consigned to the hellish embraces of this medieval apparatus. It was a rack which Tristan himself had designed, with fiendish ingenuity, and of which he boasted that no similar device throughout all Europe was so versatile, so ingenious in devising multitudinous pains for the victims delivered over to its infamous manifestations.
In its center was a rectangular stone block on which the victim's belly lay. Directly in front and behind of it stood a pair of round wooden posts, whose top reached only so far as the level of the stone block itself. At the peak of each post there was affixed an iron ring through which the rack-cords passed down to the middle of each post, where an ingenious little wooden windlass-crank was set. Thus, rather than with the ordinary rack whose central windlass drew on the arms of the victim while the bonds at her ankles remained immutable, the torturer could at his own improvisation or caprice, tighten each of four bonds and stretch this or that arm, this or that leg as desired. When the victim was a woman, as now was the case, her naked breasts dangled free in the air just beyond the rectangular stone block, and these tender globes might be subjected to the lash or the heated iron, the pincers and tongs, or to prodding with bone needles or sharp long jewel-headed pins. Moreover, along the surface of the stone block, again at the executioner's caprice, thorns and pebbles might be scattered, or a viciously sharp metal triangle inserted under the girl's belly so that she would strain to arch herself up from the excruciating pangs of its triangulated point. In the past, Tristan had even let his sadistic imagination run far afield by having a bouquet of freshly plucked nettles thrust under the bare belly of a female prisoner being put to this merciless question in the dungeon of the "Spider King."
One of the masked assistants now seized the tumbled, thick dark-brown tresses of the sobbing naked girl and dragged them forward so that they dangled towards the floor. Her naked body was thus presented at the height of about a man's waist, and the hunchbacked monarch moved closer, his eyes glittering with avaricious lust as he detailed the fine white skin, the delicate blue veins which formed their elegant tracery at the soft knee hollows. "This trollop has the skin of an aristocrat," he commented dryly, pursing his thin lips in the manner of one who is accustomed to making important pronunciamentos. "I would therefore exhort you, my dear Tristan, to take note of this sensitivity and not to treat her as you would a mere peasant girl. Who knows? By skilful and subtle means, we shall learn more from her prattling tongue than if the lash or the irons were administered too heavily. Do you follow me, cousin?"
The wry custom of the "Spider King" to take his cronies into his confidence as if they were equals involved a deadly trap for all who served Louis XI; his moods were as changeable as the color of the chameleon's skin, and those who had found him in an engaging mood and dared make the error of being familiar with him rued it to their sorrow. The great Cardinal Balue, who had dared to be flippant with him after his disgrace at Peronne had spent long months in an iron cage almost too small to lie down in, and was still incarcerated in a castle dungeon far from Paris at this very time.
It was this same Cardinal Balue who had once confided in tortured anguish to a dignitary of the Church that he would give his miter for a roll in the hedge when, one evening at the banquet table, Louis XI had instructed his cook to dose the rich food with cathartics and had ordered his servants to put fancily dressed mannequins on the stools of the water-closets, so that when his guests furtively and shamefacedly excused themselves to relieve a pressing urgency, they found the privies occupied, as they believed. It was this same mordant and perverse humor which made him even more feared especially in the setting of a torture chamber than any other monarch in Europe!
Now, doffing his black satin coat trimmed at cuffs and collar with lynx fur, a present from Louis XI himself, the towering royal executioner approached the sobbing naked captive, and drawing off his gloves, passed his thick, long fingers lingeringly over Isabeau's thighs and calves, while the naked victim cringed and flinched, glancing backward over her left shoulder with huge, tear-brimming eyes as she weepingly supplicated: "Oh, do not hurt me, I pray you! I have told you all I know, I swear it on the bones of the savior of France, Joan of Arc!"
The hunchbacked king put his left hand to the leaden images of the saints which rimmed his purple hat, muttering Latin to exorcise this singular oath, which implied that he himself could not save the nation against the Burgundian hordes. And rebukingly he admonished the unfortunate naked girl, "Gently, my poor daughter, lest my good cousin punish you for lese-majeste and treason! That was over a generation ago, and besides it was the cursed Burgundians who sold her to the English to be burned at Rouen. I, who battled with my father all his life, must save France again-but how can I do it when a pretty wench like you conspires with my arch enemies? Ah, Tristan, what splendid buttocks this young bitch has, to be sure! It is here the last must be directed most of all!" This last, as with his bony, long tapering fingers, the crafty Louis XI palpated the contracting and spasming naked bottom globes of the sobbing captive. Isabeau's behind comprised two upstandingly rounded hemispheres, set tightly together at the base, but with the sinuous groove broadening thereafter so that even now on the rack as she lay pinioned, the secretive ambery-rosy orifice of her ass-hole and, below, the plump ripe coral-tinted fig of her cunt could be seen. A thick dark-brown cluster of love curls nearly hid that latter oasis of pleasure, but the "Spider King" skillfully inserted his bony forefinger through the thicket and touched the dainty pink rims of Isabeau's cunthole. The naked girl, overwhelmed her shame and terror that a monarch himself would so finger her, was left gasping and wordless as she struggled at her bonds.
Almost reluctant to end this deliciously libidinous byplay, the stooped crafty-visaged King of France stepped aside, thus wordlessly consigning Isabeau to the mercies of his torturers. The two assistants approached their master, but Tristan made a gesture to them to withdraw to the other section of the dungeon, since this was serious business and before the eyes of his royal master; he wished no interference with his own expert prescriptions of torment which would yield to Louis XI such secrets of treason as must be known to turn the tide against the mighty forces of Charles the Bold.
Eager to determine the pain-thresholds of the sobbing young tavern wench, Tristan l'Hermite passed both hands gently and slowly over the tautened naked body, from ankles to knee hollows, thence along the gently rounded columns of the quaking thighs, on over the tensing cheeks of Isabeau's voluptuous milky behind, along the deeply hollowed back, without forgetting to caress the sides of her panting, pendant bosom-cantaloupes and at last the neck and the shoulders and the armpits. All this while, the unfortunate naked captive pleaded for pardon, avowing once again that she had simply taken this means of conveying a message to her lover who had become one of the Burgundian mercenaries.
"She is obstinate, alas, cousin," Louis XI regretfully murmured. "You must quicken her memory, I fear. But gently cousin, gently."
"That is understood, Sire." Tristan now moved to the posts behind the stretched naked Isabeau, and moved the lever handle of the small windlass which at once drew tighter still the cord binding her slim left ankle. Next, moving around her, he went to the head post at her right, tightening that windlass too, so that her right wrist was tractioned even more cruelly. This diametrically opposed tauting produced, as he well knew, exquisite and excruciating pangs, far more subtle and effective than the general rough stretching of both arms and legs at the same time. He was particularly proud of this his own devised method, which had proved so effective on so many other occasions.
"Come now, girl," he said in a rough, raspy voice, "we are not at war with trulls and drabs and the-likes of you, but with men who are our enemies. Speak the truth, thrown yourself upon the King's clemency, and you may escape with only a good thrashing and a little uncomfortable stretching of your fine animal's muscles, which I doubt but have often flexed the frequent concourse of your little lusts!"
Once again his rough, calloused hands moved lingeringly over the milky naked, deeply hollowed back, and Isabeau caught her breath and groaned aloud at this maddeningly prolonged preface to her ordeal.
Then, straightening, the royal executioner crisply demanded, "Jules, fetch me a pannikin of water, hold it in the brazier till it grows uncomfortably warm, then hand it to me!"
One of the masked assistants hastened to do his master's bidding, and in a few minutes Tristan l'Hermite took the pannikin with a muttered implication and tilted it over Isabeau's shuddering, touted naked body, pouring the warm water onto her bottom-cheeks and upper thighs. Startled at this imaginative and unexpected prelude to her torture the naked brown-haired tavern wench uttered a piercing cry, to which the executioner replied with a grim, dry chuckle, "Save your voice, my pretty! There will be time enough to let us know when you are truly in pain. Now then, Pierrot, toss me that leather whip. I am going to warm your plump backside, my stubborn drab, and I counsel you to speak as quickly as you can reconcile yourself to do so, or I shall be regretfully compelled to try your patience and your fair white skin even more sorely!"
With this sententious and hypocritical speech, he seized the whip which the other masked assistant had just brought him. Fitted to a solid round wooden stock handle, a solid piece of horsehide dangled, about fifteen inches long, and cut down the middle for about five of those inches to form two vicious lashes. The width of this curious whip was some four inches, so that with dexterity the executioner might apply the biting kiss of each of those two thongs at the end to a victim's bottom globes. Or if he chose, the lashing could be visited on first one hemisphere and then the other. Weighing the handle of the whip in his hand and taking his stance at the girl's left, the royal executioner slowly raised the fustigatory instrument and brought it down with a quick turn of his wrist. With expert cunning, only the semi-circular tips of the two thongs cracked against the tightly drawn milky white skin of Isabeau's right bottom-cheek, but the stinging fury of that lash was such as to make the unfortunate captive jerk convulsively at her bonds and turn her face back over her shoulder to emit a piercing scream: "Ohhh! Oh pity, pity! It hurts me, Mon Dieu, how it hurts me! I know nothing more, I swear it on my mother's grave!"
"Take care, you brash, blowsy trull," Tristan hissed, "that you do not swear it on your own! And did I not warn you a moment ago to conserve the strength of your lungs? I have hardly begun, and that was only a playful caress." With this, he again brought down the whip, this time the two end pieces of the lash crisply stinging Isabeau's left bottom globe and causing the same convulsive jerking as her head lifted and her eyes widened with inexpressible anguish.
Now, in a confidential tone, the royal executioner glanced over at the "Spider King" and murmured, "You see, Sire, that by applying a douse of uncomfortably warm water to the wench's bare skin, the kiss of the whip is made doubly painful."
There is no better executioner in all France, not even Charles the Bold with his Machaut can boast of such skill," Louis XI chuckled. His eyes had not once left the now brightly splotched milky bottom of the sufferer.
Thus encouraged, Tristan slowly applied a dozen more lashes, alternating on Isabeau's bounding, jerking, writhing bottom-cheeks, applying both thongs to first one globe and then the other in a progressive descent which marked her from hip slopes to the top of her straining milky thighs. Her tears and shrieks and incoherent supplications excited the grim trio, and the hunchbacked barber and the King of France had eyes only for her beautiful, stretched and quivering bottom under the lash.
"Still silent, girl? What a pity! I fear that when next you take a lover for a few ecus, you will have to devise another posture in which to jig," Tristan salaciously remarked. Now moving a little towards the right, he raised the whip and descended it with a turn of his wrist so that the left thong bit into the groove of Isabeau's ass-hole while the right stung the swelling curve of the right buttock about two inches away. "Awwrrrooohhheeowwwouuu!! ! Pitie, pitie, ayez pitie de moil" Isabeau shrieked, wrenching at her bound wrists with all of her might, twisting back her tearstained and contorted face to implore pardon from the executioner.
The hunchback barber Olivier had hobbled over to squat down under Isabeau's fine round titties, and now reached up his thumb and forefingers to tweak the girl's soft nipple buds. Her face lifted, her eyes mad with suffering, as he craftily tensed his grip on those sensitive love darts, and even as she cried out, the executioner brought the whip down so that, this time, the right tip of the thong darted into the ambery-shadowy groove between her buttocks while the other end of the lash cracked wickedly against the satiny lower summit of her left buttock.
"No more! In the name of the Holy Mother, spare me! I swear it was to my lover that I sent that arrow flying!" Isabeau wailed hysterically.
Tristan lowered the whip and then, out of a sadistic refinement, laid it down on Isabeau's naked, shuddering, sweating back. He donned a heavy leather glove on his right hand, and made a sign to one of the masked torturers, who promptly handed him a branding iron which was now white-hot from its long sojourn in the brazier.
"I fear I must warm your skin elsewhere, girl," Tristan said in a mellow voice which trembled with lubricity, "for you still persist in your prevarications. But, realizing that you gain your livelihood by lying on your back with your legs open to welcome varlets with stout cocks and copper coins the pave the way to your favors, I shall begin by touching the soles and the heels of your dainty feet. If that fails, I should deeply regret to mar your body, such as those fine round teats which hang so enticingly to the fingers of our master barber-surgeon!"
That indeed would be a pity," Olivier at once responded with a lecherous chuckle, "for they are firm and without the least sag, though I doubt not they have been cradling countless scores of nameless lovers since the wench first realized what a fortune she had between those round white thighs of hers!"
"Oh, no, it's not true. I'm a good girl-but I'm poor and at times I must sell myself. Oh, Your
Majesty, will you not pardon me, I swear it was only to my lover that I sent the arrow speeding over the wall!"
"I would fain believe you, my poor child," Louis XI sorrowfully replied, in a compassionate voice that belied the ferocity of his narrow gaze and the rigid thrusting of his royal prick, "but treason is serious business and I will spare no effort and no pain to ferret it out even from the highest and noblest of my subjects. Begin, Tristan!"
"As Your Majesty commands," Tristan joyously murmured, a feral light in his pale blue eyes. Holding his breath, he approached the white-hot branding iron towards the heel of Isabeau's right foot and touched it but for an instant. The girl's naked body contracted in a violent spasm, and then a hideous shriek tore from her panting throat as her head flung back, her eyes exorbitantly dilated, fixing on the ceiling as if calling upon Providence to save her. Even the torturer's assistants shuddered with the harrowing agony of that wordless cry.
"Will you speak now?" Tristan persisted as he lifted the smoking iron in the air and then lowered it towards Isabeau's other naked foot. "Quickly, my little one, or I fear you will need a new pair of shoes for the hard cobblestones of Paris!"
"Dieu me prot'g'! Oh, have pity, don't burn me, I am dying of the pain, oh, Your Majesty, have pity on me!" Isabeau shrieked as she twisted her face this way and that, seeking to soften with her agonized gaze the cruel heart of Louis XI. All this while, the hunchbacked ennobled barber continued to play with her nipples, pinching and plucking them forth from their soft coral aureoles, muttering obscene praises of her physical beauty which, alas, in no way comforted the naked young sufferer.
"Perhaps a bit more stretching on your excellent rack, my good cousin, would help matters along," Louis XI slyly proposed, approaching the sobbing, shuddering naked girl and putting out his left hand to caress one quivering rounded satiny hip.
"Oh no! Have pity on me, Sire! I have done no wrong, I swear it!"
"You are too prone and quick to swearing, my little one," the "Spider King" sententiously replied. "And because of that, I do not know, verily, what to believe of what you tell me. The rack, Master Tristan."
"At once, Sire." The royal executioner sent the branding iron back on the brazier, and then busied himself turning the small windlasses at each of poor Isabeau's feet, so she shrieked with pain, her body tightly stretched, drops of glistening sweat standing out on her naked sides and in the thick dark-brown fleece of her soft armpits. But when he had approached the head of the rack and tightened the cords binding her wrists, she began to complain hysterically that her sinews were cracking and implored clemency.
Without a word, he went back to the brazier to retrieve the reheated iron, and now moved round to face her, showing her the horrid instrument and squatting down while Olivier playfully dragged on the nipples of her titties as if to offer them up to the white-hot torture implement.
Her eyes bulging from their sockets, glassy and glazed with terror and pain, Isabeau shrieked: "Oh no! Not that! I will tell, only spare me any more, I will tell!"
"Quickly then, you slattern," Tristan hissed, "you have kept His Majesty unnecessarily long in your babbling. The truth, then, and let it be the truth or I swear by the bones of Charlemagne-and this is not an oath I take lightly my pullet-that I shall scorch your fine teats till customers will turn aside in disgust from your offers!"
With this, he lowered the iron towards one of Isabeau's milky-satiny bubbies, and the young tavern wench jerked and twisted frenziedly as much as the pitiless cords at her ankles and wrists would allow, as she cried out: "No, don't do that! I'll tell, I'll tell! It was a man I hadn't ever seen before at the tavern, and that's the truth! He gave me a gold piece, a gold sol, to shoot the arrow, and he said that no one would take notice because it was a girl who drew the bow."
"Could you describe this fellow?" Louis XI demanded.
"I-I will try my best, Sire," Isabeau whimpered. "He was tall and lean, and he wore a threadbare doublet and a sword without a scabbard. He had a scar on his cheek and a long hawk-like beak of a nose and a wide grinning mouth. He had asked the landlord to point out to him a girl with whom he might have his pleasure, and I was called to his table. He plied me with wine and then he told me I might earn this coin if I would but do what he bade me. And that is all I know, I swear on my hope of pardon, oh don't hurt me any more, please don't!"
"This time," Louis XI remarked with a sigh, "I think the bitch speaks with a truthful tongue, good cousin."
"I share Your Majesty's opinion," Tristan concurred.
"All the same," the "Spider King" mused, "she must be punished for her part in the affair, even if it was innocent. In times of war with a foe like Charles the Bold, one does not send even an arrow into his camp unless it be to slay."
"What punishment, then, do you command for this slut, Sire?" Tristan eagerly demanded while
Isabeau burst into helpless, hysterical sobs.
"Why, as to that, cousin, shall we not take our pleasure with her first and show her that there is the king's justice of the high and the low degree as well. First, the high degree, whereby she shall be honored beyond her trull's station in servicing our desires, and then the low degree, in which she shall be properly basted and sent to the Hopital des Aumoniers to do her penance, to weave baskets and to be drubbed by the holy sisters for her sins."
Tristan turned on his heel and made an impatient gesture. The two masked, half-naked torturers bowed low and left the dungeon.
Louis XI stooped and whispered something to Olivier, who cackled his amused laughter. Then, rising and hobbling over to the other end of the rectangular stone base of the rack, he crouched between Isabeau's shuddering milky thighs, delving with his bony fingers into her cunt, parting the labia so that he might peer into the love tract. "It seems healthy enough, Sire," he cheerfully pronounced. "There are no signs anywhere of the pox, even the mildest of attacks."
"However, to make certain," Louis XI laughed evilly, "I shall use an entrance which I trow has not been often sullied by ignoble commoners. Good cousin, bring me a stool, a wide low one, that I may stand upon it and honor this young, misguided slut beyond her dreams!"
It was Olivier who hastened to bring the footstool, while Louis XI liberated his bony, bulging, purplish-veined cock with an enormous plum head seeming to separate itself from the taut-skinned shaft like an obscene growth. Mounting the stool between Isabeau's shuddering thighs, the King of France sank his bony fingers into her welted and trembling buttocks, yawned them widely apart to disclose the shrinking fissure of her ass-hole. Then, with a growl that was more animal than human, the "Spider King" thrust his meatus against that tender and hitherto unprofaned spot, and forced himself just within the lobby way, while Isabeau shrieked in pain at the distention of her sphincter muscles which resisted this perverse penetration.
The barber returned to squat beneath Isabeau's heaving naked titties, to pinch and slap them and to amuse himself with telling her how he would use her when it was his turn after his royal master. And Louis XI greedily thrust himself to the hilt inside the tight rectal cavern of the martyred young tavern wench, until at last with a cry his body jerked and his royal seed spattered her entrails.
And after he had emerged from her and pantingly got down from the footstool, Tristan, who had no need of such support, took his place and this time Isabeau shrieked in agony as his mightier, broader weapon delved to the depth of her bowels. And after Tristan, Olivier resumed the footstool and for the third time visited the chafed and twitching and clenching ass-hole of poor Isabeau until she lay fainting on the rack.
"She must first do homage to my royal weapon," Louis XI cackled as, hobbling round to stand before the agonized naked girl, his fingers twisting in her hair to drag up her face, while Olivier hastily proffered the footstool for him to stand upon, he commanded: "Now use your lips and tongue to make your obeisance before your sovereign!"
Isabeau grimaced with nausea at the slimed organ tendered to her. But instantly Tristan, who had retrieved the two-tipped horsehide whip, swept it down horizontally over the lower summits of both shuddering naked bottom-cheeks. With a shriek, the girl at once accepted her lot and, closing her eyes, her body violently shaken with tremors, sucked and tongued clean the organ of the King of France.
And after she had done the same to Tristan and to Olivier, the king, restoring order to his royal garments, diffidently commanded, "Let her spend the night so stretched, but first baste her big naked bottom well almost to the blood. Then send a soldier with her back to the tavern and tell the scurrilous dog of a landlord that she is banished henceforth from his inn and that he is to call the king's guard if ever he sees her set forth again."
"Oh ... Dieu ... what shall I do? Oh how shall I earn my bread, Sire?" poor Isabeau whimpered.
"By selling yourself, you infamous bitch, but let it be to no Burgundian or I swear that you shall hang from the highest gallows at Montfaucon! See to it then, my good cousin," Louis XI looked back as he put his hand to the door of the dungeon.
CHAPTER FOUR
The popinjay Philippe of Savoy preened himself in the mirror which his faithful valet Ferdinand Triuce held up for him. His velvet doublet was of the latest vogue, and his hose the most elegant, one being of purple and the other of pink, an outlandish style newly come to the court from Italy.
"What think you, Ferdinand?" the Count demanded as he nodded and strutted over towards a huge battlement window which, as he pulled aside the thick drape, looked out upon the courtyard. "Will I make a splendid bridegroom, do you think?"
"You will make the handsomest in all France, my master," the valet diplomatically murmured, struggling to hide a smile from his lean features. For it was well known throughout the province of Savoy that Philippe fancied boys and indeed the news of the sudden wedding between himself and Katherine of Burgundy had already caused something of a sensation. " But I would warn my master, " the faithful valet continued, "to beware of this raven-haired sister of Charles the Bold. He wants your mercenaries and nothing more, my lord. That is why he has foisted off his sister on you."
"Silence, lackey, you go too far when you abuse your betters!" the strutting young nobleman petulantly retorted. "She is assuredly the richest duchess in all France, and her lands and her arms and her serfs will belong to me once we are wed this afternoon in the great Cathedral."
But the valet dolefully shook his head: "You will have me flayed or stretched a foot longer on the rack, my lord, if I told you what I really thought," was all he would say as now, picking up a vial of exquisite scent distilled from attar of roses, the work of Philippe's favorite alchemist, he dipped his fingers into the rare essence and delicately dabbed at his master's neck and ears and temples.
"I give you leave to speak, Ferdinand, but this time and only this time. Henceforth, the Duchess Katherine will be my wife, and if you address so much as a villainous look at my lady and my bride, you will repent the day of your birth, I promise you this!"
"Then I have your word, my master, that you will not punish me for what I wish to say now?"
"A thousand devils, haven't I already said so? Out with it, fellow!"
The valet drew closer to Philippe Of Savoy, glancing about as if fearful that someone might be listening even though they were in his master's private chamber and guards stood outside the heavy doors on this second floor of the castle. "Yes, we are alone. I have served you for ten years and faithfully-"
"By the bowels of St. Michael!" the Count of Savoy angrily exclaimed. "There is no need to remind me of your fidelity, Ferdinand! For this moment only you may speak to me as an equal. But after that, guard your tongue if you wish to keep it. Unless, to be sure, now that I am marrying, you wish to leave my service?"
"Oh no, my lord, you will need a friend and that friend will serve you better if he is a lowly lackey by far! So, now that you give me permission to speak as from the heart, I would warn you, my lord, to beware of Katherine and still more of her brother! He wars against the Spider King, and it is to that end only that he wishes this alliance between you and his sister. With the force of your mercenaries, he can attempt an attack into the city, where as now only he lays siege to it. But once he has your troops, he will cast you from him as he has done with many a nobleman, like the Comte de Louranne and the Due d'Orleans. Nor will he let you take the field with your own troops, lest you should by fortune's favor gain the victory and so dwindle his grandeur. And moreover-"
"Lackey, I swear by all the Holy Rook that you do not credit me with much intelligence, for I have already divined the purpose of Katherine's brother! But there are things a man does in this world, Ferdinand," here the Count of Savoy put his arm affectionately around the shoulders of the slim, lean-featured valet and gave him a most engaging smile, "because what appears to be an advantage for another can actually be an advantage for one's own self. I am well aware that Katherine is fickle and heartless, and I have heard how she torments her maids. But no matter. Do you not think that I have heard the ugly things they say of me in my own city of Savoy, that I am not capable of mounting and servicing a wench? That I am a pederast and a lover of young nubile boys? Well, that penchant I'll allow, since you know my weakness already. But the guise of husband will serve me in good stead and make my people more loyal. As to my own troops, I pay them well and they have sworn the oath of fealty to me and hence they are my vassals. Oh, to be sure, they will follow Charles the Bold into battle against Louis XI, but they will not betray their rightful master. So be of good cheer, my faithful lackey, and resolve to show unto my Countess Katherine the same diligence and respect and loyal service you have accorded me so long."
* * *
But in another bedchamber in the same castle, black-haired, svelte Katherine of Burgundy had already contemplated the prospect of the wedding night and determined how it would be with her new husband Philippe. She had summoned Marie Castelitte, that golden-haired young virgin whom she had despoiled with the formidable ivory dildo in her jeweled offer, having ordered all her other maids to leave her alone with the young beauty.
" You are still under my displeasure, wench," the Duchess of Burgundy hissed as she glared at the kneeling, tearful penitent, who with clasped hands, raised in prayer, with trembling red lips and tear-lustered blue eyes, regarded her with an indelible anguish. "I have written your Norman father and the message has gone to him by special courier this very morning. I have told him that henceforth you are to be my personal maid, elevated above all others, and that I wish to keep you with me for the next six months, so that he will not expect you to return to him before then."
A joyous if tremulous smile was seen on those lovely quivering red lips, and a heartfelt sigh was heard, which made Katherine smile crookedly. "Oh, Your Grace, I will do anything to serve you, to please you! Only do not be angry with me, do not punish me any more!"
"You recall how will I served your tender bottom, eh?" the svelte noblewoman taunted. She had the pleasure of seeing Mare's cheeks flame and the girl's eyes lower in shamed embarrassment. "I'm glad to see that you still remember that lesson. Well, you shall have much worse unless you do precisely what I tell you tonight. As you know, I am to be wed two hours hence in the cathedral to that ridiculous monteback which passes for a man, Philippe of Savoy. And though you are a virgin, my little dove, I am certain that you must understand what occurs after marriage-in bed. Do you follow me?"
Too confused and dazed by this imperiously commanded audience with her tyrannical mistress to speak, poor-Marie could only shake her head.
"You are a greater fool than I thought! It means, in a word, you stupid girl, that Philippe and I shall be bedded at the end of the great feast tonight. And he will have conjugal rights over my body. Now do you understand?"
Marie's blushes deepened, and this time she nodded, averting her eyes from the mocking face of her despotic dominatress.
"And high time," Katherine of Burgundy laughed mirthlessly. "Now attend to me, little fool, for you will do exactly what I say or what your tender bottom felt the other day will be as nothing. I have no stomach for a popinjay like the Count of Savoy. Yet, for reasons of state which do not concern you, the marriage must be consummated. You will wear a wig to resemble me to the bridal bed tonight, my dove."
"What? Oh, Your Grace, you are surely jesting!" Marie gasped in horror.
"If you think that I am jesting, Marie, only let me learn that Philippe had discovered the dupe, and you will be sent to the lowliest dungeon of this castle and there put of the lash and fire. And I will have your tongue torn out by the roots that you may never speak of this masquerade to my dishonor. Indeed, I have a mind to do it anyhow-"
"Oh no!" Marie Castelatte moved forward on her knees, sobbing hysterically. "Have pity on me, Your Grace! I will obey you, I will be silent-but how can I possibly trick the Count into believing that I am you, Your Grace?"
"Because you will insist that you are shy and that it is your first man. You will have the torches put out, and the bedchamber will be in total darkness. Then your wig and with your lovely body, he who pays such devotion to his young pageboys, will pay little attention to you save that you have the body of a woman and that it is his to use. Methinks he knows full well how the people jeer behind his back at his filthy little Greek games, and he will wish to prove himself all the more a man tonight. Well, it will not be upon my body, for never shall a man have me and possess me. Now do you understand me?"
Crushed with terror and shame, but fear governing her most of all, the golden-haired young Norman maid nodded and then hid her face in her hands as he shoulders shook with her choking sobs. On the face of Katherine of Burgundy, there was a cruelly triumphant smile...
* * *
The marriage had been performed and there was a great feast. There were forty-eight kinds of meat, fish, pasties, game and stews, with such delicacies as pink dormouse pie, and salad of snails spiced by the addition of pickled snake fillets. Charles the Bold himself rose at the end of the feast, holding up the naked shining blade of his sword in whose pummel had been inscribed his motto, "Dieu et mon droit." In his other hand he lifted up a golden cup in which the red wine of Burgundy glearned in the light cast by the myriad torches on the walls. "I drink to the happiness of my sister and to her husband and my ally, Philippe of Savoy," he proclaimed. The nobles at the tables rose, honoring the toast, lifting their cups and drinking in token of their loyalty. Thunderous applause saluted the bride and bride groom. Katherine of Burgundy was magnificent in the tall peak white hat rising like an inverted cone from her black tresses, and from the narrowed point high above her head fell a shimmering veil of Flemish lace, the most exquisite ever seen at court. The beribboned and jeweled Count of Savoy sat beside her, smiling at her and whispering from time to time, to which she mechanically nodded, for her thoughts were elsewhere.
In her own bedchamber at this moment, Marie Castelattle, trying not to weep, was donning the magnificent linen and lace nightgown which had been laid out upon the huge canopied bed. She stared at herself in the mirror, and marveled. The wig had been cut with such skill that for moment she believed that she almost resembled Katherine, yet as she touched her rounded cheeks, she knew that she did not have the arrogant and sensual features of her Duchess. Terror clutched her heart as with a human hand as she thought of this, for perhaps the Count of Savoy would realize it and have her put to the torture to confess why it was that she, a lowly Norman maid, would enter his noble bed to pose as the Duchess of Burgundy, now the Countess of Savoy. But at the same moment came the even more atrocious dread of Katherine's reprisal. Bowing her head, Marie Castelatte said a prayer to her maker that at least she might carry off this terrible conspiratorial role and survive...
"My dear sir," Katherine of Burgundy murmured, giving her handsome young husband a coy smile and fluttering her eyelashes as might a timid virgin,"! am shy, and I beg of you a boon."
The count of Savoy had eaten well and drunk several goblets of the strong red wine of Burgundy. His senses had begun to reel, but he felt envigored as he had never felt before. His eyes devoured the svelte body of his haughty and aristocratic bride, and he swore to himself that this night he would silence once and forever all the malicious tongues that wagged in the province of Savoy over his fondness for the pretty young pink-cheeked boys in his court. From the swelling of his organ, he knew that he would be empowered to consummate this union. Before retiring from the festal hall, he had signed the pact which put his soldiers at the command of Charles the Bold.
He had seen the exchange of triumphant glances which had passed between Charles and Kamerine, and he had realized that his valet had spoken from the heart and with wisdom as well. Well, three could play in that game as well as two, by the Mass, the Duke of Burgundy was in such haste to assume command of his own troops that he had taken leave before the end of the feast and ordered his charger saddled and ready for the return to Paris and the continuance of the siege. It was an insult Philippe of Savoy understood. But now that the Duke's sister was his legal wife, he the dandy whose hose she had smiled at as she came down the aisle of the Cathedral to meet him at the altar, would know how to exact his own peculiar revenge. Nor could she cry nay to what he intended, for was she not his consort in the eyes of heaven? And if she dared whisper a word of what he planned to do to her to take his vengeance, she would be jeered throughout even Burgundy as well as Savoy!
So, even through the clouds of wine which befuddled his brain, the handsome nobleman could play the gallant a little longer . "You are the most beautiful maiden in all Burgundy, " he said fervently, squeezing her elbow. "I hunger for you. I could not wait to leave the feast and those roisterers below. Send away your maids and let us be man and woman together in a bed where there is only truth and no deception."
"Oh, my dear, you speak like a troubadour," she murmured, touching his lips with her scented fingers. "But I ask my boon, as a timid bride who has the right to beg her husband's indulgence on the wedding night."
"Ask and it shall be yours, my Katherine. I can deny you nothing now," he said ardently as he took her hand and kissed it, staring greedily at the thrust of her bosom against the silver-cloth gown which graced her supple form.
"Then, if we are to be man and woman together for the first time, my adored Philippe, let the torches be put out, let the bed be in darkness, that I may come to you in my maidenhood, trembling and yet afraid and yet restored by the knowledge of your love. Let no one spy upon us this night of nights, my handsome husband. Let me prove my devotion to you. Be gentle with your shy maiden of a bride."
"But this boon is no boon, my fair wife," he chuckled, "you have my leave, I will await you in bed, as a lusty young husband, nay, as a peasant, a serf who cannot believe that his noble lord had not interrupted the ceremonials by demanding his droit de seigneur. Come to me when you are ready, Katherine."
She curtsied before him, and then she murmured, "You are generous and good, my lord husband, I will be a better bride to you than you know. And now I go to my chamber to prepare myself for your embrace."
Back in her own bedchamber, this svelte dominatress inspected her double for this night of nights, her eyes narrow and critical. "You must wear slippers with higher heels, my dove, "she decided. "Even in darkness he will see the outline of your body and remember that I was taller. It is a little thing, but everything must be perfect for tonight. And if you value the safety of your father back in Normandy, little one, do not dare to speak no matter what he does to you. Do you understand me?"
"Y-yes, Y-your Grace," Marie Castelatte faltered.
"Good! He has drunk too much wine, he will not be too observant. The room will be dark, you will go to him in bed, in this fine nightgown, and you will be shy as befits a virgin. For you are thus, are you not? My little jeweled toy in the coffer did not take away your innocence as regards man, my sweeting," Katherine of Burgundy tauntingly murmured. She herself crouched down to draw the slippers on Marie's dainty feet. Then, touching the girl's neck and the valley of Marie's lush titties with a little glass rod which had been dipped into the vial of sweet essence, she nodded: "Go now, it is the room at the very end of the hall to your right. Knock timidly, and enter. Go quickly to him, and let him draw you down to the bed. Then, be silent and remember that you serve all Burgundy in acting thus. If you succeed, my pet, I shall find you a fine strapping husband and you shall have land and gold to comfort your old father in his last years. Fail me, and the torturer will embrace you with his instruments. Now go quickly!"
She watched Marie Castelatte bow before her, and then move as in a trance out of the room, close the door and begin her fateful journey down the hall Katherine of Burgundy was naked under a silver cloth cape, whose belt she had tied loosely about her supple waist, and in her daintiest damask pumps, with blue amethysts sewn upon the white cloth of the arch. She waited a long moment, and then she moved toward a bell rope and pulled it twice. A moment later, there was a soft knock at her door and one of her maids entered, the bold-eyed Guillemette Danvers, a brazen auburn-haired girl of twenty, the niece of a miner seneschal of Burgundy. Guillemette had come to the court of Charles the Bold a year ago, and was now Katherine's favorite lover. As capricious and cruel as her mistress, she often regaled Katherine by acting in the role of executioner and torturess when the Duchess of Burgundy was sated with pleasure and wished to fan the flames of her lubricious and sadistic passions by acting as voyeur.
"Well, Guillemette, is everything ready, did you lure the pretty kitchen wench into the dungeon as I bade you?"
"Oh yes, Your Grace. I told her that my noble mistress wished to speak with her about elevating her from the scullery to the bedchamber. I thought her eyes would pop out of their sockets, truly I did. I told her that this meeting must be arranged in secret, so that Madame Laure, who is the mistress of the household, would not know that she had been picked to high favor rather than a dozen worthier girls."
"You did well, my lovely Guillemette! You shall have a little part of the fun tonight."
"But, Your Grace, is it net your wedding night?"
"Of course," Katherine of Burgundy laughed. "But I have found a proxy who willingly goes to the catamite of Savoy and who will be served as I have no doubt he wished he had the stomach to service me! Ah, Pasques Dieu, the very thought of coupling with that gaudy, beribboned little fop! And had he so much as even dared to try his nasty Greek tricks on me, I would have stabbed him in his guts! But come now, we mustn't keep little Roxane waiting, must we?"
CHAPTER FIVE
Marie was damp with sweat, and she could feel the costly nightgown stick to her armpits and to her crotch and along the groove of her buttocks. She reached her hand out towards the door, on which in gold leaf, was inscribed the royal insignia of the Count of Savoy. She bit her lips and a fit of trembling seized her. And then she recalled the insidious words of her mistress and the threat of the torture chamber and forced herself to knock, then took hold of the handle of the door and pushed, finding it unbolted, and entered.
The room was in Stygian darkness, and she waited a moment until she could make out the vague outline of a huge four-poster canopied bed. Philippe of Savoy lay naked upon it, his head pillowed in his arms, luxuriating at the double coverlet of eiderdown against his naked flesh. Already his prick was swollen beyond endurance, as he plotted his vengeance against Katherine of Burgundy, who had thought to make him her fop, her puppet, while her brother marched off with his own army to defeat the "Spider King."
Under the thick brocaded pillow, he had a short leather strap, a weapon to be used as part of Katherine's humiliation. He had sent away his servants, for he was certain that his royal consort would scream and cry when she felt the strap on her aristocratic bottom, and he did not wish the scandal to be bruited about the court. Only Ferdinand, hiding in a narrow closet near the bed, would be witness to what would happen, so that if Charles the Bold and his ambitious sister dared voice their objections to him, he could counter with the threat of summoning a witness to a secret hearing of magistrates who would decide whether or not he had consummated the union.
He was smiling to himself as he heard the faint knock at the door, and he did not deem it necessary to give Katherine the slightest comfort. He lifted his head slowly and stared through the darkness, making out the figure in white that moved slowly towards the bed. He bared his teeth in a grin of anticipation, put his hand to his prick to assure himself that he had never been more virile.
Marie, her teeth chattering, her limbs giving way beneath her, had compelled out of her terror of Katherine to approach the bed where for the first time she was to lie with a man. But she did not think so much of shame and her own virtue as she did of the terrible penalties for failure. Her father would die in disgrace if she was sent back to Normandy. And she could not bear the idea of being stripped naked and handled by one of those brutal executioners. The lash and fire-oh, mon Dieu, let it not be so!
She had reached the edge of the bed now, and, remembering what her mistress had taught her, quavered, "I am here, my lord husband, to do you homage as befits my vow in the Cathedral."
"Yes, little Katherine," he exultantly retorted, his voice thickened with wine, "to love and to cherish, to do honor to my house, to be my countess though be a Duchess! Come to bed, my wife!"
He reached out for her hand, found it and suddenly dragged her across the bed. Marie Castelatte was stupefied by the maneuver so that she did not have time to cry out. Besides, it was already too late. In a trice, he had her flat on her belly, and with both hands was ripping the costly nightgown off her shuddering body. Then she did try to struggle, but he was kneeling upon her back, burdening her down, crushing and suffocating her, and then she felt him fumble for something. And next, a white-hot fire blazed in her plump bottom as the heavy leather strap came down with a savage crack.
"Oh please, stop-what are you doing-oh mon Dieu!" she cried hysterically.
"Teaching you to keep your vow, Katherine of Burgundy," he snarled as he brought the strap down again and again over her bounding, squirming buttocks. Still tender from the previous thrashing which her royal mistress had inflicted, Marie's young flesh smarted atrociously. She shrieked aloud, trying to twist herself out from under his knees, but with a remarkable agility born out of his drunken fury, Philippe of Savoy maintained her helpless, pinned down like a worm, as he thrashed away at her buttocks and thighs with that thick leather strap.
The unfortunate Norman maid yearned to implore pardon and to earn it by revealing her true identity, but that greater terror paralyzed her tongue. She could only shriek, could only twist her naked hips in a frantic and futile effort to escape that blistering leather thong which feel repeatedly and mercilessly across the plump hillocks of her naked behind.
Half-fainting, she felt him move off her body, leaving her back aching from his weight and the dig of his bony knees. Then she felt him seize her wrists, and take the rent nightgown to bind them as a fetter. Again she tried to resist, but she did not have the strength.
Brutally, he knelt between her thighs, and his sinuous fingers dug into her swollen buttocks, yawning them apart. "Now, you Burgundian bitch, you scheming jade," he snarled, "I'll take you as a man takes a woman who has learned that her husband is the stronger! Cry all you want, I have sent the servants away and we are quite alone. Your brother has my soldiers, but I have you, Katherine. And I do not think you will boast of your wedding night, for if you do, I shall have it spread through my provinces what a perverse whore the sister of Charles the Bold has become!"
"Oh no, my lord-aahhrrrb, you're hurting me so-stop-in the name of heaven-Dieu me prot'g'! Aiiiii!! ! "
She jerked at her bound wrists, she lifted her congested face from the eiderdown coverlets, as she felt Philippe of Savoy thrust his prickhead against the dainty shrinking cleft of her virgin ass-hole.
Frantically, she tried to avert this hideous and degrading penetration, but he was the stronger, for the thrashing had weakened her. The dig of his fingers into her swollen, welted buttocks made her wail with pain, and then she felt the atrocious distension of her dainty orifice as his turgid ramrod pried apart the puckering lips and pressed forward past the ring of sphincter muscles.
Now Philippe of Savoy clutched the back of her neck with his right hand to press her face down against the coverlets, to stifle her outcries, while, the fingers of his other hands still digging into one of her burning buttocks, he crammed himself forward till he was hilted inside her rectal sheath.
A frenzied, inhuman and prolonged shriek tore from Marie Castelatte's panting throat. Then he began to bottom fuck her brutally, using her as he might the lowliest whore in all France ... or as accredited had it, one of his young pageboys.
It was an eternity of abominable torment and despair and pain for the unfortunate young golden-haired Norman maid. After what seemed a century, she at last felt the spurt of his seed deep into her bowels, and she lay swooning as he dragged himself out of her, and stumbled out of bed. He groped towards a nearby shower on which a flagon of Burgundy had been placed by his faithful valet. But the wine he had already imbibed and the fierce assault upon the supposed Katherine had now their aftermath; he lost his footing, stumbled and fell onto the stone floor, sprawled and unconscious.
Marie Castelatte, whimpering with terror, managed to clamber out of that regal bed, uttering a sobbing cry at the pain it cost her welted bottom as well as the aggravated torment of her brutally chafed rectum. By dint of twisting and wriggling, she finally managed to loosen the improvised bond around her wrists, and, wrapping the tattered nightgown around her loins to hide her most intimate parts, stumbled out of the room and back toward the bedchamber of the wife of Philippe of Savoy. But Katherine of Burgundy had already gone with Guillemette to a dungeon where the kitchen wench Roxane was waiting in the illusory hope that she was to be honored beyond her lowly state by being made a maid to the Duchess herself ... .
The brazen auburn-haired maid carried a bright torch into the gloomy dungeon where pretty seventeen-year-old Roxane, a delightfully naive and temptingly attractive blonde girl awaited this clandestine interview with her new royal mistress, the Duchess of Burgundy.
Once having thrust the torch into the metal bracket on the stone wall near the door, Guillemette approached the startled Roxane, who had risen and then curtsied low at the sight of the svelte black-haired dominatress.
But as she straightened, her gaze happened to turn to her left, and she recoiled against the stone wall of the dungeon with a cry of horror. The terrible apparatuses of torture were there before her, the rack, the pulleys and hoist, and in one corner stood the grim Iron Maiden, a metal statue in the figure of a woman, which, when opened, revealed sharp metal spikes set all over its inner surfaces. A victim incarcerated there and locked onto the embrace of the Iron Maiden died slowly and horribly.
"This is the wench, milady," Guillemette shot a scheming glance at her beautiful black-haired mistress.
"Your name is Roxane, eh, little pigeon?" Katherine asked with a guileful tenderness in her haughty voice.
"Y-yes, Your Grace."
"You are at present in the service of Philippe, my husband. I have a desire, however, to put you in my own personal household, Roxane."
"It is a great honor, milady!"
"More than you deserve, you little baggage! But before I deem you worthy of such an honor, I would have you tell me what you know of your noble master, the Count of Savoy. Have you heard from any of the servants what he may have said about my brother the Duke of Burgundy? Does he take the alliance well, does he trust my brother's military judgment with his own troops?"
"Oh, milady, how could a poor scullery wench like me know such mighty things?" the terrified teenaged blonde kitchen girl stammered.
"Why, girl, with a little wit and intelligence, you should know a great deal. In a household however noble, even the lackeys know what their masters and mistresses are planning. Has the chamberlain of the Count of Savoy ever tumbled you? You are comely enough, I trow."
"Oh no! He would never look at a poor girl like me, Your Grace! Please, I will serve you gladly if the mistress of the household will permit."
"Girl, you forget yourself," Katherine's eyes flashed fire. "I am the Duchess of Burgundy, and my rank surpasses that of my husband who is your master. I therefore may do with you as I choose. Come, have you no tidbit of information to give me? I fear I must use direct means if you remain silent so obstinately."
"But, Your Grace, I swear-"
"Oh, enough of this, Guillemette! Help me with her. Let us put her in the chains of the hoist and lower her down upon the spikes. Mayhap it will loosen her tongue."
The auburn-haired maid at once seized poor Roxane by the wrists, and dragged her towards the center of the dungeon while the Duchess of Burgundy followed. Threatening her with dire punishment at the hands of the burly executioner, Guillemette managed to terrorize Roxane enough to submit herself, weeping and imploring for pardon.
In the center of the dungeon, four chains dangled from the ceiling, conveying their leather cuffs at their ends. Katherine and her maid Guillemette lifted up the weeping Roxane, engaged her ankles and wrists in the cuffs, and fastened them tightly around the girl's limbs. Then Guillemette it was who ripped off Roxane's garments, leaving her naked. The young scullery maid had fair carnation-tinted skin, an adorable figure already promising the ripeness of Marie Castelatte. Roxane's titties were uptilted, widely spaced soft young pears, and a light-brown soft fleece barely hid the lips of her virgin quim. Her buttocks were spacious ovals, tightly set together over a sinuous shadowy cleft. Stretched now to extreme and hanging in the air at about the level of the two women's waists, she began to sob and beg for mercy, swearing she had done nothing wrong, supplicating pardon, in the name of all the saints.
Heedless of those heartrending prayers, Katherine and her auburn-haired Lesbian partner pushed forward a square wooden block set on wheels. The surface of the block was lined with tiny metal spikes, sharp as needles, and hardly thicker. They were not long enough to inflict fatal wounds like the Iron Maiden, but they could cause implacable suffering to the tender flesh of so delicious and delicate a victim.
Roxane had been so numbed by terror at the unexpected attack upon her that she had hardly struggled when the two women had lifted her up and engaged her wrists and ankles in the heavy leather cuffs. But now that she found herself naked and extended horizontally in the air with arms and legs widely spread, she began insistently and hysterically to appeal for mercy: "Oh no, milady! But I've done nothing to be punished for, truly I haven't! Forgive me if I looked above my station, I wished only to serve Your Grace!"
"And so you shall, little bitch," Katherine of Burgundy sadistically crooned. "Guillemette, my dear, go over to the wall and turn the windlass so we may let this little dove down towards the kisses of the spikes. Perhaps it will make her sing the song I wish to hear!"
The auburn-haired maid-in-waiting to Charles the Bold's cruel sister nodded and smiled sensually, hurried over to the wall and began to turn the heavy wooden handle whose action controlled the four chains which held poor Roxane swaying and tethered in the air. As the chains creaked to lower the naked ash-blonde-haired scullery maid down closer to the waiting spikes, the naked captive tried to shrink herself back, sucking in her stomach, as the muscles of her thighs stood out in frenzied relief. Her large dark-brown eyes were hugely widened as they stared at the svelte dominatress: "Oh no, in the name of pity! Don't hurt me, Your Grace, I've done nothing wrong, I swear I haven't! Oh please, if I've offended by wanting to be your maid, have me whipped by Madame but not tortured like this, not like this!"
At a sign from Katherine, her auburn-haired accomplice halted the progress of the windlass, and the unfortunate naked girl found herself only a few inches away from the greedy spikes. Katherine of Burgundy sucked in her breath at the exciting picture before her, her eyes feasting on the contracting muscles which rippled in Roxane's pink-sheened buttocks, the lovely dimples along the back and shoulders, the exaggeration of the girl's rib cage as with all her despairing strength, Roxane tried to lift herself away from the fierce menace just beneath her.
Now the Duchess of Burgundy unbelted her luxurious fur-trimmed cape, and let it fall to the floor of the dungeon and was naked in slippers. Guilemette's gray-green eyes flamed with a responsive lubricity at the sight of her beautiful mistress's nudity, and as the latter made a sign to her, swiftly disrobed herself and was naked too.
At another sign, the auburn-haired maid took down from a panoply on the wall a short-handled whip of braided black leather, only about fifteen inches in length, slim and supple. Armed with this weapon, she approached the sobbing young girl, standing between Roxane's calves, thus having the girl's voluptuous young bottom immediately before her and at about the level of her waist. Katherine of Burgundy now approached, her eyes glittering with malevolent lust, the nipples of her titties dark and hardened with her insatiable passion. Below the suave basin of her creamy belly, the thick jet-black curls of her mount stood out in lascivious contrast to the soft ivory of her naked skin. With a feigned tenderness, she cupped the tear-wet cheeks of the sobbing blonde girl and, forcing up Roxane's face, kissed her passionately on the mouth, her nimble pink tongue delving between the trembling lips of her captive. "There, little dove," she purred, "that is to show you that I can be gentle, too. Now if you will tell me all you have heard of your master's doings-for surely you've had words with the seneschal and even Madame who have undoubtedly talked about Philippe's concern about this marriage-I give you my word that you shall be one of my maids like Guillemette."
"Oh, Your Grace, I can tell you nothing, I am only a lowly kitchen maid and my betters do not talk in front of me of matters that could not concern such a poor creature as myself," Roxane whimpered.
Katherine, her fingers rising now to the tumbled ash-blonde curls of the unfortunate young victim, combed them out down nearly to the girl's waist, and then her hands slid under Roxane to cup the panting young firm satiny titties and to luxuriate in palpating and tweaking and pinching them while poor Roxane writhed and squirmed, sobbing and groaning as each movement-announced by the creaking of the chains which held her aloft-seemed to draw her naked body down even closer to the spikes.
Raising her narrowed, glowing eyes to the flushed, wanton face of Guillemette who faced her, Katherine nodded. Then her hands again cupped the victim's quivering, flushed and tearstained cheeks just as the auburn-haired maid lifted her right arm and brought down the braided leather lash diagonally over the jouncy naked globes of Roxane's quivering posterior.
"Aaaahrrr! Ohh, have mercy on a poor innocent girl. Your Grace!" Roxane screamed as her body jerked fitfully, while an angry darkening streak attested to the pitiless kiss of the whip on her tender young flesh.
"You will tell me all you know, obstinate little bitch," Katherine hissed as her fingertips dug cruelly into Roxane's cheekbones. "Otherwise Guillemette will lower you down upon the spikes and then let you taste the whip. What a pity it would be to rip and tear such tender young flesh, my little dove! Tell me, are you a virgin?"
Shuddering violently, her enormously dilated eyes blinded by the tears of terror and pain, Roxane nodded and then hysterically burst forth: "Mercy, Your Grace, I am a good girl, I've never lain with a man, not even with the steward Maitre Rene, though he has often scolded me for not granting his desires."
"This Maitre Rene, has he been long with your master Philippe of Savoy?"
"Ten years, Your Grace! Oh, that is all I know, I swear it is!"
"I begin to have an idea, Guillemette," Katherine purred as she lifted her face to stare meaningfully at her auburn-haired accomplice. "A steward and a lackey in long service to a great lord like the Count of Savoy must surely be within his confidence. Well, then, Roxane, this is my command to you: you will lie with Maitre Rene and in return for your favors, you will beg him to tell you what his master has said to him concerning this marriage. Then you will report to Guillemette, and woe betide you if you have not gleaned the information I desire."
"Oh, pardon, Your Grace, do not make me be a spy on my own master, I implore you! All in the castle here respect and will obey Your Grace, there is none here who wishes you harm!"
"Ah!" the svelte naked sister of Charles the Bold sibilantly hissed. "What you have just said confirms my suspicions that your master is not entirely happy with this union with Burgundy. All the more reason why, this very night, you shall go to the chamber of Maitre Rene and make him the gift of your maidenhead, girl!"
"Oh no, please, I don't want to, have pity, I cannot betray my master, I will be put to death by torture!"
"Do you not think, you stupid little bitch, that I, who am now the Countess of Savoy, do not have the same power over you? Guillemette, this stupid girl needs her wits sharpened. Let her taste the lash!"
The voluptuous auburn-haired maid of the Duchess of Burgundy needed no second invitation. Lifting up her right arm, her lips moist and quivering with the same sadistic joy which permeated her noble mistress, she brought the braided leather thong down over Roxane's right bottom globe with all her might. A shriek of pain instantly acclaimed that cruel stroke, and Roxane's naked body jerked and writhed, while the chains creaked their warning protest. With horror, Roxane felt herself sink down almost imperceptibly, perhaps half an inch, nearer to those horribly immutable spikes.
A third lash visited the other buttock this time, and again Roxane screamed in agony, lifting up her contorted face, twisting her soft little fingers, jerking at her leather cuffs, her eyes blinded by tears.
Katherine of Burgundy, shuddering with a violent excess of sadistic rut, once again cupped the girl's tear-wet cheeks and crushed her panting mouth on Roxane's trembling lips, savoring that agonized kiss while at the same time her eyes fixed on her auburn-haired handmaiden. And once again the pitiless lash descended, this time diagonally from left to right, tracing a blazing weal on the soft young pink-satiny flesh of both contracting, spasming bottom-cheeks. Roxane's wild cry of torment was muffled in Katherine's own avid mouth.
Now the Duchess cupped those panting young titties, squeezing them mercilessly, pinching the soft nipples, while the unfortunate, hysterical girl incoherently implored mercy: "Aahhh! Oh have pity-I cannot bear it-Eeeeowwwwouuu!! ! Oh, that horrible whip cuts and tears me, Your Grace! Mercy, I shall die of the pain, oh spare me! spare me!"
"Faster, Guillemette, and send the whip darting in between those impudent buttocks," the Duchess of Burgundy commanded. With thumbs and forefingers, she tugged out poor Roxane's tender nipple-buds, and even as the ash-blonde young scullery maid arched herself forward to ease the atrocious traction, Guillemette brought down the lash again, again, and unrelentingly again, striping the shuddering bare buttocks with three savage horizontal welts which made poor Roxane's naked body leap and jerk and bound, and once again the creaking chains slightly lowered that piteously assaulted naked young body towards the needle-like spikes.
"Well, girl?" the svelte dominatress hisses, "are you ready to obey me now? Will you lie with Maitre Rene?"
"Mercy-I suffer so-aaahhooohhh-lift me up from those awful spikes, Your Grace, I-I remember something Maitre Rene said only last night-but spare me any more, in the name of mercy!"
"Speak quickly, then!" The sadistic imperatrix nodded her head, and once again her auburn-haired handmaiden sent the ship whistling down to dart along the sinuous crevice between Roxane's naked, welted bottom-cheeks, attacking the girl's anus with a rasping surface of the braided leather thong.
"Aiiii ooooooeeeoww!! ! ! Not there, oh for the love of le bon Dieu! I will tell, I will tell you all I know, only spare me any more, spare me!" Roxane shrieked as her body jerked and twisted this way and that, her face contorted in a rictus of indescribable suffering.
"Be quick about it, then, or Guillemette will continue, and this time she will lash you from downwards up so that the whip will kiss that tender little nook of your virginity," the dominatress threatened.
Bowing her head, her body shaken by convulsions of tremors which she could not control, her buttocks furiously wealed with crisscrossing stripes which threatened here and there, to break the tender soft satiny skin, Roxane babbled; "Oh, I do not wish to betray my master ... but I can't bear such pain any longer ... Maitre Rene said that the C-Count of S-Savoy agreed to the-to the marriage because-because-"
"You waste my time, girl! Again, Guillemette, and this time into her tenderest spot!"
Before Roxane could entreat mercy, the auburn-haired handmaiden, lowering the braided thong, had swept it upwards to leap into the mossy grotto of the young scullery maid's virgin cunthole. A frenzied, prolonged and wordless scream was torn from the suffering naked girl, and her body seemed to jerk upwards in the air, then fall back amid the jangling of the chains, which lowered her another half-inch closer to those cruel spikes. Now they were but a scant inch away from her tender belly and titties. Mad with suffering, fighting back the sobs that crowded into her panting throat, the young victim wailed, "I will speak, only tell her to stop, milady! Maitre R-Rene said that our master knows that his soldiers will always be loyal to him ... and that ... if they help your b-brother defeat the King, he will demand one of the Communes of Paris as his booty."
"Yes, yes, go on, girl! And what more did your prattling steward tell you? Quickly, or Guillemette will begin again and in the same place as the last time," Katherine hissed. Twisting her finger in the girl's long ash-blonde tresses, she dragged them forward, jerking at them sadistically, sending agonizing twinges of pain through poor Roxanne's scalp, and the victim screamed as she arched and squirmed and tried to move forward through that terrible traction, "Oh, please, Your Grace, don't hurt me anymore, I'll tell, I'll tell! He said that-that if your brother was defeated, he would have you here as hostage since you are his wife, and could deal separately with the King!"
"Ah, Guillemette, I certainly expected this! ,So the dandy and catamite has a shrewd wit and can plot treason against his liege lord, can he? You have served me well, Roxane. And now, I will give you your reward. You shall not lie with the steward."
"Ohh-OhhM-merci, Votre Grace!" Roxane whimpered.
"The coffer, Guillemette!" the Duchess of Burgundy commanded, her voice husky with over weaning passion.
The naked auburn-haired maid smiled knowingly and nodded. She stooped and picked up the famous coffer which contained the ivory dildo. Binding the ribbons about her loins and hips, she equipped herself with this simulacrum of the male weapon, and pushing up the low footstool, stepped upon it. Then, digging her fingers into the welted cheeks of Roxane's shuddering naked bottom, she yawned them apart and thrust the phallic tip of the implement against the weeping girl's shrinking ass-hole.
Katherine of Burgundy had pushed up a similar footstool and, mounting it, once again entwined her fingers in the ash-blonde tresses of her victim. "Kiss your mistress," she hissed as she yanked at poor Roxane's hair, forcing up the tortured, tear-wet face against her cunt. "Serve me now as I wish, or by the Crown of Charlemagne you shall be given to my brother's foot soldiers to be their trull!"
Roxane shrieked as the dildo probed and distended the tender walls of her narrow virgin bottom hole. But a new threat from the Duchess, followed by a savage tugging of her hair, made her capitulate. And thus, while the noble Philippe of Savoy had taken, as he thought, his own sadistic and warped vengeance on Katherine of Burgundy, that imperious beauty was devising the means to destroy him and rid herself of an unwanted alliance but in a way that would still give her ambitious brother the Count of Savoy's vitally needed troops.
CHAPTER SIX
It was August now, and the verdant beauty of the countryside, the forests and the plains, contrasted with the besieged city of Paris. The walls to the great city were locked against the Burgundian hordes whose tents might be seen in the distance from the top of the battlements. Their number had increased, thanks to the alliance of Philippe of Savoy with Charles the Bold.
There was grumbling inside Paris, and the rumours of mutiny could be heard in the dirtiest hovel, in the bawdiest tavern. And in the Fircone Tavern, where rogues and thieves and murderers were wont to drink their wine with their doxies hanging attendance on them and listen to the rhymes of the merry scoundrel Francois Villon, rebellion against the "Spider King" was perhaps at its zenith.
The day had been scorching, and now at night when one could see the fires of the Burgundian camp lighting up the sky in every direction from the beleaguered city, the Fircone Tavern was bustling with its motley guests. Here were men on whose heads a price had been set, daring seizure by the king's watch, sneaking out of their holes at night to drink to the damnation of Louis . . .some even to the health and success of Charles the Bold. Here was a place where conspirators and patriots alike would mingle, each in search of his own destiny, whether it be in the arms of one of the painted young harlots who frequented the Fircone Tavern and paid off fat Robin Turgis, the landlord, with a part of their earnings for a sweaty and hasty joust in the tourney of fucking.
For here at the famous Fircone Tavern, history records that many of the greatest ballades of Francois Villon were first declaimed to a rough but admiring audience. The men who heard his rhymes belonged to a fellowship which called itself the Company of the Cockleshells, with their special own can't and jargon. For in this dark age of man, the vagabonds who met in comradeship at the Fircone had one common denominator: a fear and hatred for the king's guard and the watch which interfered with their pilfering and waylaying drunken middleclass burgers in dark alleys for their purses. Thieving was a hanging matter in the Paris of those years, and so these men who had death constantly at their heels invented their own language so that they might warn one another lest the jig might be up for any one of them and in turn all of them might dance the last and most hideous jig of all at the gallows of Montfaucon.
At a table near the door, a scar-faced, shabby rogue named Colin de Cayeulx pounded with his fist to attract the landlord's attention. "Ho, Robin," he bellowed, "a mug of your best Beaujolais!"
"I hear you," the fat landlord stolidly replied, "But I do not see the color of your money. Show me a coin with the face of Louis upon it and I will show you my Beaujolais."
"Curse you for an unfeeling dog, a robber of pennies off the eyes of a dead man," Colin snarled. But, seeing that he made no inroads upon the sensibilities of fat Robin Turgis, he shrugged and turned his attention elsewhere. It was a singular thing. Two men, dressed in black, wearing cloth caps with long folds which hid their faces, had sought out the farthest and lowliest angle of the room and ordered a flagon of white Beaune at two sols. One of the men was tall and brawny, and spoke with a resonant accent; the other was stooped, with shifty, narrow little eyes, and had said very little. Colin believed that perhaps they were burgers bent on a night of pleasure with one of the trulls who might be found at the Fircone; and since his trade was partly that of pimp (and partly also that of cutpurse and hired assassin), he rose from his table and moved warily over to the strangers, affecting a fawning, obsequious look. "Good evening, my fine gentlemen," he greeted them. "What do sober-sides like you seek out at the Fircone? Now if it is a matter of a wench, you have but to tell your wants to me, Colin de Caleuylx. I will find you a jade who will be meek abed or will bite and scratch, according to your preference."
The shorter, stooped man, holding a fold of his cap over the lower part of his face so that only his eyes showed, replied in a muffled voice. "Be off with you, vagabond, we want none of these filthy, unwashed sluts you have to offer. We are here after one Master Francois Villon."
"Oh, are you now!" the scar-faced thief and murderer chuckled slyly. "Well, he may come and again he may not, that's as may be. Yet for a coin, I would bring him to you posthaste. A coin, my good gentlemen, sufficient to quiet the avarice of our fat host so that I may wet my parched throat with the wine which graces your table."
The brawnier man glared at Colin, then exchanged a long glance with his comrade, who imperceptibly nodded. Delving under his robe, he took out a purse, carefully opened it, and extracted a silver sol. "Here, fellow," he said coldly, "Before you buy your wine, find us this Villon."
Colin put the silver piece to his jagged, blackened teeth, and bit it to make certain it was good coinage. The stooped figure glared at him and muttered something to his companion, who shook his head. "Yes, it's a Louis," Colin admitted, deftly pocketing the silver piece. "I am at your service, I, Colin de Cayeulx. I will fetch your Villon for you, though I confess what two old sober-sides like you want with such a hearty life-loving rogue is beyond me."
With this, he swaggered off, engaging the fat landlord in whispered conversation, while the stooped figure leaned forward across the table and whispered, "My good cousin Tristan, you would be a week at your job of hanging if the watch or the king's guard could imprison all the rogues and trollops meeting here in this fine company."
"Yes, Sire," Tristan l'Hermite growled. "Already I can see a dozen villains who have been marked out to me as deserving of a quick dance upon the nearest gibbet."
"Silence, you fool. You are not to call me Sire here," the stooped figure muttered, and he gave Tristan a kick under the table which made the brawny giant wince.
The door of the tavern was flung open and the narrow beady little eyes of Louis XI (for it was he) fixed on the strange figure in the entry. The man who stood there was of medium height, lean and muscular, with a thin eager face that was bronzed with the sun and lined with his constant struggle against poverty, imprisonment and death. His dark straight hair was long and unkempt; his cheeks and chin were matted with the uncropped growth of a week-old beard; his brown eyes were bright and quick. Yet for all this, Louis XI perceived the high-arching forehead, the firm lips which bespoke a kind of tenderness at times, and the intelligence of an alert look. He was dressed in faded finery of many colors, ragged and patched, to make him a kind of gaudy scarecrow. His tattered cloak was tilted at the back by a long sword, and he wore a battered cap jauntily adorned with a rooster's feather. In his leather belt, there was stuck a small vellum-bound book of verses, as well as a sharp dagger.
A roar of welcome greeted his appearance, and half a dozen attractive if dirty and poorly clad wenches flung themselves at him, hugging him and kissing him, squealing with joy at his appearance. One of them was dressed in man's attire, in doublet and hose and a brown cap pulled rakishly to the left and down over her forehead. She was magnificently slim and supple, but the fit of her hose did not disguise the elegant contours of fine long calves and shapely, gradually rounding thighs that merged into a plump yet beautifully proportioned posterior.
"Come, my lovely Maid Marion!" the newcomer cried, as, disengaging himself from the other girls, he seized the mannishly dressed, brown-haired girl by her wrist and led her off to a table near that occupied by the King of France and his royal executioner. "Now then, Huguette, what have you been doing in my absence?"
"Pining for you, you wretch, and small thanks I get for it," the comely girl saucily retorted. "You might at least buy me some wine!"
"Regrettably, sweeting," the man replied, "my purse is as empty as my belly at this moment. But I have a rhyme for you."
"Oh that! "Huguette scornfully retorted. "And I suppose it's some sonnet to a pretty jade whose titties you squeezed in a dark alley. I ought to claw your eyes out, Francois!"
The two men at the adjacent table in the dark corner pricked up their ears at Huguette's words, and Louis XI exchanged a meaningful glance with his executioner, then put a bony finger to his lips.
"No, my pet, it is not of a wench but of our illustrious king that my verses treat," the man replied as he drew out the vellum-bound book, flipped open the pages and then, pounding the table for silence, declaimed in a loud and mocking voice:
"Here in hot summer we starve and thirst And fight like curs over a meager bone. We've come to expect the very worst With do-nothing Louis on the throne."
After this quatrain, the royal executioner started from his seat, but Louis XI put a restraining hand on the giant's wrist and shook his head with a wry chuckle as he whispered, "Sit still, Tristan, there's time enough to hang the rouge after I've heard the entire poem. Let's see what sort of wit he has. Unless I mistake, this is the famous Francois Villon."
Tristan gave his royal master a glowering look, and then sat back in his chair, fuming with anger as the man at the next table, after pausing to make certain that he had the attention of all in the tavern, went on:
"Outside our walls, Burgundians conspire To conquer every man jack and make us slaves.
But our do-nothing king hides in his castle before his fire, And cares not a fig that loyal Frenchmen fall into their graves.
While you and I sit here and swill, The King of France prays to all his saints, And having done that thinks he's had his fill
Of war, the thought of which makes him fall into a dozen faints.
If Villon were but the King of France, We'd make the damned Burgundians dance To our own free men's bolder tune, And not, like Louis, bay at the moon.
Yes, varlets and drabs who hear my voice, Would that your Villon might have his chance, I'd give you quickly cause to rejoice If Villon were King of France!"
This time Tristan, unable to contain himself, rose with a muttered oath, but the stooped figure across the table from him also rose and interposed in a silky voice: "Master Villon, is it?"
"Who wants to know, old bag of bones?" Francois Villon laughed as he set down his book of verses and put his arm around the lovely brown-haired Huguette.
"Why, you'll pardon me for eaves dropping, good Master Villon," Louis XI cackled, "but I thought I heard you say your purse was empty. Let me stand treat for you and your wench. And if you'll join us, perhaps there will be a way for you to fill that empty purse of yours. Shall we say it is payment for your verses."
"Why, you're a good old buzzard for all your gloomy feathers," the poet cried. "Come along, Huguette, do you not hear the fine gentleman? Ho there, landlord, two flagons of your very best Beaune, this gentleman's paying!"
Robin Turgis grumblingly brought the flagons of wine and stood suspiciously awaiting payment, while Louis XI gestured to Tristan to pay the score, which the royal executioner did with a long face and still another muttered oath.
"Now then, you old gravedigger," Villon chuckled, "I'll wager all that's in your purse that this is the first time you've gone larking in haunts like these. Can it be you seek a wench?"
"No, Master Villon, I seek you. I have had it told me on good authority that you have escaped the gallows a dozen times, that you have a ready wit, a swift sword, and are ready to pick a quarrel with the devil himself."
"Why, as to that, you've heard rightly, you old scarecrow. But how can I serve a dusty old burger like yourself?"
"By helping the King of France whose place just now you so whimsically sought to take."
"Why should I help that sniveling, do-nothing, sad-minded dawdler who sits on the throne?" Francois Villon insolently asked, and again the royal executioner made a furious grimace and gesture.
"Because, Master Villon," Louis XI mockingly retorted, "you are that rarity, a loyal Frenchman who believes in the unity of all France and damnation to the Burgundians."
"Those are brave words for a tottering old weasel like yourself," Villon jested.
"I do not have your youth or bravado, Master Villon, but I have as much loyalty as you, perhaps more. If you could drive away the Burgundian hordes from the walls of Paris, your purse would be full of gold for as long as you would dip your hand into it, I promise you this."
"And who the devil might you be?"
"I am the do-nothing, sniveling creature who faints at the thought of war, Master Villon," said Louis XI as he drew off his cap and revealed the face known and feared by all of Paris. Francois Villon uttered a gasp, and glanced quickly around to make sure that no one was eavesdropping. "Well," he said bravely, "I always knew I would come to a bad end and you mustn't think me a coward, for at least I've said it to your face, Your Majesty."
"I can forgive insolence and rudeness so long as a man has a belly and a heart for fighting and defeating my enemies," was the crafty answer. "Do you know of a comely wench named Isabeau La Jolie?"
"I know such a one, Sire."
"My soldiers arrested her some weeks past for having shot an arrow over the walls of Paris into the Burgundian camp. She swore in the dungeon that it was but a letter to her lover, which I believe to be a lie. My friend Tristan-who, by the way, is most anxious to make your acquaintance-persuaded her to amend her fabrication. It appears that someone in this tavern paid her to shoot that arrow, a tall man with a scar."
"That wouldn't be my friend Colin, if that's what you're thinking," Villon at once replied. "Yes, I believe I recollect the night when Isabeau told me she had come by some silver coins without having to play the role of the two-backed beast. And I remember the man, too, who had words with her, because he was a surly lout who would not even listen to my verses."
"Isabeau is yet alive and none the worse for her experience, save that her bottom is a bit tender from Master Tristan's whip. I shall spare her, Master Villon, on condition that you learn for me the name of this stranger who bribed her to shoot that arrow. Nay, more, I propose to you to elevate you to this pinnacle of power of which your rhyme spoke. You'll not be King of France, I can't do that for you. But I will make you my Grand Constable, and I will let you direct my armies against the Burgundians. You shall have a fortnight, Master Villon. If you send them scurrying away, I shall pardon you your past sins and reward you handsomely. If you fail, either you will die in battle, or you will die on the highest gibbet that my good Tristan can build. And now, tell your pretty companion goodbye and prepare to come with me to see this misguided girl. You alone can save her, Master Villon."
CHAPTER SEVEN
Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, had rejoined his army camped around the walls of Paris to lead the siege which was already beginning to bring famine and unrest to the citizens within those walls. But he wore a black cloth bound around the left wrist of his coat of mail, in mourning for his brother-in-law Philippe of Savoy. Only a week ago a courier had ridden into his camp on a foundered horse to bring the news that Katherine's popinjay husband had fallen ill of a mysterious fever and had gone to his grave.
A cunningly administered poison, subtly dosed in a dish of tripe of which the handsome Count was inordinately fond had ended an unwanted marriage and left sly Katherine with her virginity intact and with her brother retaining full command of Philippe's mercenaries.
At Katherine's orders, lovely Marie Castellate as well as the scullery maid Roxane had been equally poisoned, then weighted down with heavy chains at the bottom of the moat of the castle where that tragicomic wedding night had taken place. Knowing her brother's habits, the svelte brunette imperatrix, who showed little signs of mourning her short-lived husband, sent to him in this month of August one of the most beautiful of her handmaidens, a tall, full-bosomed and ripe-haunched coppery-haired girl known as Solange Mercier.
Solange Mercier was the only daughter of a wealthy burger, himself an ardent patriot of Burgundy who had contributed many golden sols to the cause of Charles the Bold. Solange, twenty years of age, shared her father's hatred for the "Spider King," and at his dying wish she had gone to the court of Katherine and Charles to offer her services. Haughty Katherine had taken her at once as a handmaiden, and initiated her in the sweet joys of Sappho. But in Solange Mercier there burned a desire to strike a blow against the hated King of France. A decade earlier, Solange's mother had been coveted by Louis XI but had had the audacity to refuse her sovereign the gift of her voluptuous body. Enraged, the "Spider King" had banished Solange's mother and her husband to an obscure little village near Burgundian territory. Solange's father, infuriated by this banishment, had at once recouped his fortune and devoted his life to the furtherance of Burgundian victory which would bring Louis XI to grovel in the dust before Charles the Bold.
And so along with the courier who brought news of the death of Katherine's husband, Solange Mercier rode on horseback as might a man, in a coat of chain mail, with a dagger at her waist and her eyes shining with adoration for the handsome bluff Duke.
Charles the Bold was a direct man in bed, with none of the frills and furbelows of his so recently deceased brother-in-law. The night of Solange's arrival, he summoned her to his tent to thank her for having made so perilous a journey. A few minutes later, her coat of chain mail removed and naked but for her riding boots, the coppery-haired young beauty lay panting on the couch with the Duke's prick buried to the hilt inside her eager cunt. His beard scratched her, drawing her to repeated orgasms as he bowed his head to nuzzle at her titties, which were magnificently sumptuous pears set well apart and high-perched on her pale creamy chest. Having been continent for several weeks during the siege of Paris, Charles the Bold did not let Solange go back to her own tent until he had enjoyed the tight ardent cleft between her quivering and firm muscled thighs three glorious times.
But the next day, at the evening meal, she moved beside him and murmured, "Oh, my great lord, I am so devoted to the cause of Burgundy that I would fain perform some service to aid you in razing these walls so that you can parade the wicked Louis XI before his subjects before you hang him on the gibbet and proclaim yourself the rightful King of France!"
Amused by her burning patriotism, Charles the Bold consented as a kind of token of his admiration for this courageous beauty: "Very well, Solange, I will entrust you with a mission. Dress yourself as a peasant girl and go to the west gate of the city. My spies have told me that here at times the soldiers are mutinous and may not exercise such vigilance as is demanded during a siege. Flirt with them, my lovely red-headed follower, get yourself into Paris and go to the Fircone Tavern to seek out a wench named Isabeau la Jolie. A man high in the court of France is my secret ally, and it was he who had this girl send a message to me to continue the siege and to send more spies into the city to sow dissension and mutiny among the people."
Thus it came about that, exactly a week before Louis XI made the acquaintance of the blustering young romantic poet-swordsman Francois Villon, lovely red-haired Solange Mercier approached the west gate of the great city of Paris and hammered upon it with a cudgel which she had picked up in the forest near the Burgundian lines.
"Who knocks upon the gate of the City?" a pikeman cried out from within.
"I am a poor peasant girl who seeks refuge in Paris against the filthy animals who camp outside your walls! Oh, I beseech you, hurry and let me in, for the soldiers of Charles the Bold have had then-way with me, and I escaped when they had fallen into a drunken stupor!" Solange exclaimed.
To give credence to her story, the resourceful red-haired beauty had disheveled her coppery tresses, ripped a corner of her low-cut coarse muslin dress and torn a fold of her dusty skirt to suggest that she had been mauled and ravaged by the Burgundians.
The gate slowly creaked open, after another pikeman on the battlement, a crossbow at the ready, had ascertained that it was in reality a girl and not a ruse of the Duke's men to gain entrance into Paris. "Let the wench in, the poor creature's had a time of it, I can see," he called down to his comrade.
Solange heard the great bolt creakingly rolled back, and the squealing hinges as three brawny men tugged it open, and she hastily entered, the gate being at once closed and bolted behind her. The three guards halted her, circling her like wolves quarreling over a fresh prey. "Hola, my pretty, not so quick!" the soldier who had first called to her declared. "Who are you and whom do you seek in Paris? How came you through the Burgundian lines? Do you not know that the accursed Duke has laid siege to our fair city for these many long weeks?"
"Have pity on me, Master Captain," Solange flatteringly appealed to the beetle-browed, squat soldier who held only the rank of corporal. "I came to visit my sister Isabeau La Jolie, at the Fircone Tavern. I am from Domremy, a little village where sheep are raised and where the kindly people know nothing of the war. On my way through the forest, I was accosted by half a dozen of those horrible Burgundian brutes and they had me against my will." At this, she put her face to her hands, bowed her head and pretended to sob.
"There, there, there's a good lass," her interlocutor gruffly responded, "you're safe enough now."
"Safe until the Duke decides to break the siege and batter down these walls," one of his companions gloomily replied. "While Louis the Hunchback hobbles about in his strong fine castle, we poor devils guard out here with hardly a sop of bread or flask of wine to cheer us. I for one, if the Burgundians enter Paris, will be willing to swear allegiance to the good Duke. At least, he's a man of action and not like our Do-Nothing Louis!"
"Softly, Jehan, or he will have your neck stretched before the siege is ever broken!" the squat pikeman warned. Then, one dirty, pudgy hand slyly fondling Solange's voluptuous bottom, he muttered to the redhead, "I'll take you to the Fircone myself. It's quiet out there, they're not-likely to try an attack."
"You're very kind, good sir," Solange pretended to be overcome with gratitude. "Oh, Master Captain, how can I ever thank you? Why, I do not even know your name."
"My name is Guy Tabury, at your service, you winsome red-haired doxy. As to thanking me, why before I take you into the tavern, you and I will hide ourselves in a dark alley and I'll show you a weapon that I warrant not even our good King Louis can muster to attack so lusty a slut as you." With this, he touched his crotch, while Solange managed a blush and pretended to be overcome with shocked modesty: "Oh, sir, whatever can you mean? But do take me here, I long so to see my poor sister Isabeau!"
The other two men grumbled, but Guy Tabury growled, "I was the one who let her in, you rogues!
Besides, I'll give you each a few ecus so you can buy your own drabs when you're off duty. Come along, my pretty one. And what's your name?"
"I am Solange Mercier, Master Captain. You are really such a fine gentleman, I only wish you could have been there to save me from what those horrid beasts did to me. Why, do you know, they put my skirts up above my waist and had my drawers down, and they were-oh, I'm so ashamed, I can't tell you!"
This recital only excited the lust of the guard the more, and he walked side by side with the lovely red-haired Burgundian girl, his arm hugging her waist, staring greedily at her face and vowing to himself that this was going to be the best fuck of his entire lifetime.
At last he reached the dirty dark street on which the tavern owned by fat Robin Turgis stood. One could see the lights within and hear the roistering. At that moment, indeed, no one in good Robin's place of business was thinking of the siege, for two trollops, one a blonde, the other black-haired, both stripped naked to the waist, were rolling over and over on the tavern floor, fighting and kicking and biting each other over a quarrel which had ensued when the brunette had accused her blonde rival over having tried to lure away a fat old merchant who wanted a bitch for the night.
"Are you sure that's where you want to go, my pretty one?" Guy Tabury inquired. "I know a better place where we can have a quiet table and a bite of something and cool drink, and then the landlord who's a friend of mine will rent us a room where we can get to know each other better. You owe me that, sweeting, for opening the gate to you. Why, I could be hanged for treason for what I did for you!"
"I'm terribly grateful, Master Captain, but truly, after all those horrid brutes did to me in the forest, I-well, I just couldn't lie with a man now. But I like you very much; I tell you what, you come to the tavern tomorrow evening and ask for Solange. I'll be there, and I promise you shall have me for nothing. Will that content you?"
With this the pikeman had to be content, and reluctantly bade the red-haired Burgundian girl a doleful au revoir.
Meanwhile, Solange entered the tavern just in time to see the blonde take the upper hand in the battle, and, kneeling astride her fallen brunette foe, her left hand clutching one of the brunette's titties, slap her rival's face again and again with her right palm until the shrieking brunette implored mercy.
Fat Robin Turgis ran up now with a bucket of slops and doused it into the brunette's face, bawling, "All right, you young doxies, take yourselves out of a respectable place of business, you're ruining my trade! I want order here, so that my customers may drink in peace and not have their eardrums burst by your squalling!"
A dozen willing hands helped the crestfallen brunette to her feet, seizing the opportunity to squeeze her bottom and naked titties, while they muttered salacious propositions into her ear. Meanwhile, the victorious blonde, who could not have been more than nineteen, strutted boldly, her big cantaloupe-like titties jiggling as she walked, over to the fat bald merchant, bending to him and whispering to him, as with a cackle he lifted a hand and began to squeeze one of those juicy love globes.
Solange Mercier managed to tap Robin on the shoulder and enquire for Isabeau La Jolie. Impatiently, he pointed her out, seated at a table at the back of the tavern with her arm around a tall gray-bearded man in his fifties, whom she was trying to lure to her bedchamber for a joust of love. Solange made her way towards the table, not without some difficulty; the rogues noticed her and began to call at her and some even to try to pull her down upon their laps to fondle her. She managed to break free of their importunities, and was just about to approach the table where Isabeau sat when suddenly the tavern door was flung open and a lieutenant of the King's Guard, together with six pikemen, entered.
A sudden hush fell over the motley crowd, and there were sullen mutterings: "What the devil! It's old hunchbacked Louis again, worrying that perhaps his citizens are having too good a time for themselves, sending his watch to spoil our little pleasure!"
"Which one of you drabs in this filthy hovel is named Isabeau La Jolie?" the lieutenant demanded.
Her face ashen-pale, the dark-brown-haired Isabeau slowly rose from the table at which she had been cajoling her potential customer. "That--that is my name," she quavered.
"I have a warrant from the King himself for your arrest. Quickly, girl, follow me."
"But what have I done?" Isabeau wailed, "I have already been questioned by the King's executioner, and I was freed-"
"Nay, not so, you dirty slut," the young lieutenant jeered, curling the ends of his moustache. "Were you not forbidden to set foot again in the Fircone Tavern? The King's mercy is great, but he does not condone disobedience. I am here to bring you to him, that he may question you once again."
The muttering grew, and the young lieutenant's eyes narrowed. "Silence, you rabble, or I'll have my men thrust their pikes into your bellies," he warned. "Do any of you defy the King's order?"
And then, seeing Solange Mercier standing nonplussed near the table where Isabeau had been seated, the supercilious officer slowly approached her: "And you, girl, who are you?"
"I-I am Solange Mercier, Your Grace," the red-haired Burgundian beauty humbly replied.
"And where do you come from? What business have you in such a disreputable pigsty as this?"
"I-I come from Domremy, sir, to see my s-sister."
The young lieutenant's eyes narrowed. "From Domremy, you say? You must have ridden a broomstick like a witch to have come through the Burgundian lines. You had best come along with my men as well. Have you found your sister yet?"
Solange Mercier bit her lips and glanced covertly at the trembling Isabeau. "Not yet, sir."
"Well, perhaps we shall help you find her. Come along, both of you now, and as for the rest of you here, take care there are no knifings or brawls for the rest of the night, or all of you will be the guests of His Majesty!"
The two young women walked out of the tavern, surrounded by the pikemen, the young lieutenant turning a last time to glare back at the grumbling vagabonds and rogues and doxies who watched the scene. Then, with a sniff of disdain, he went out into the street ... .
CHAPTER EIGHT
It had been Tristan l'Hermite who had reminded the "Spider King" that it would be as well to have the watch arrest the lovely young whore Isabeau La Jolie to learn whether, after all these weeks since her harrowing ordeal in the King's torture chamber, she had thought of any new facts she might give concerning the identity of the scar-faced tall gaunt man who had paid her to shoot an arrow with a message into the camp of Charles the Bold. The malicious hunchbacked King of France had readily agreed, recalling with sadistic pleasure the exquisite gratification which naked young Isabeau had provided him and his two cronies Tristan and Olivier.
And so when Hubert Compigny, the young lieutenant of the watch, appeared in the antechamber of the King to inform Olivier le Doim that his royal master's orders had been carried out, the ennobled barber, a hunchback like the king himself, at once entered the bedchamber of his sovereign to inform him that the prisoner had been brought to the castle and was ready for questioning.
Louis XI cackled with glee as he donned a coarse black hooded robe and thrust his bony feet into leather slippers. With a wink at his barber-surgeon-advisor, he intimated, "It will provide a welcome diversion this sultry August night, Olivier. With my lovely Charlotte safely away from Paris during this miserable siege, I confess that my bed is lonely. And as I recall, this charming dory gave us both much joy, did she not, my good cousin?"
"That she did, Sire." Olivier le Daim chuckled briefly as he hobbled along after his royal master.
Hubert Compigny bowed low as Louis XI emerged from his bedchamber and came towards him.
"You have put the slut into the torture chamber, Lieutenant?"
"Yes, Your Majesty. And with her, another girl whom I took the liberty of arresting, since her story was indeed strange."
"How so?"
"I found her in the Fircone Tavern when I took my soldiers to arrest this Isabeau at your royal order, Your Majesty. Standing close by her was this lovely red-haired girl who professed to have come from Domremy, past the Burgundian lines, and somehow managed to be admitted through one of the city gates."
"A thousand devils take those lazy dogs if they think thus to guard my palace from the damned Burgundians!" Louis XI snarled. "Lieutenant, you shall make inquiry this very night and learn through which gate your prisoner came. Find the man who admitted her, and let him be flogged and stripped of his rank and set to digging ditches in the defense of Paris."
"It shall be done at once, Sire."
"And now this girl, Lieutenant. She is young and attractive, you said?"
"In my opinion yes. Your Majesty. With hair that is the color of copper, and a saucy face and manner. She is dressed as a peasant girl, but her accent does not smack of Domremy. I thought it best to bring her here that your torturers might question her to learn the truth, Sire."
Louis XI clapped the young Lieutenant on the shoulder with a cackle of glee, "Well done, Lieutenant! Olivier, give this worthy officer of mine a gold sol so he may drink my health and damnation to the Burgundians! A good night's work, Lieutenant. Now go find me the stupid fool who let the wench in through the gate, and perhaps I shall make you a captain."
Lieutenant Hubert Compigny bowed low, his face flushed with pleasure and withdrew. The "Spider King" turned to his crony, who shared the same deformity ... and the same base devious lusts. "Two fine strapping wenches for a night's pleasure, eh, Olivier? Let's not keep them waiting, then!"
* * *
Since both girls had been taken at once to the torture chamber, lovely red-haired Solange found herself shackled to the wall, her arms gyved above her head, beside the sobbing brown-haired Isabeau La Jolie. For the latter, this return to the place where she had been whipped and ravished by the King of France and his two closest cronies occasioned her a terrible presentiment of pain and shame; and as soon as the two masked half-naked torturers Jules and Pierrot had fixed the two young women to the stone wall of the dungeon and left them there to their anxiety and misery, she at once burst into tears.
"Oh, I'm so afraid, so afraid!" she moaned.
Solange, looking around nervously and seeing the terrible apparatuses of torture, was hardly calmed of her own secret fears by this outburst. "Don't cry, little one," she tried to console her companion in wretchedness, "they'll see how frightened you are and they'll only try to hurt you worse. You must try to be brave. Who are you, and what have you done?"
"I am Isabeau La Joliie-" the brown-haired young beauty began, sniffling as she tried to check her tears.
Lolange cast a glance at the two masked assistants to the formidable Tristan, and saw that they were occupied in placing branding irons in the smoking brazier and were paying no attention to their future victims. Quickly she whispered, "I have been sent to find you by the Duke of Burgundy himself. I hate King Louis, and if I were a man, I would kill him with a sword! He offended my mother, and because she would not yield her body to him, the horrible little hunchback banished her and my father. The Duke knows how to repay loyalty, and so I work for him."
"You came from the camp of the Burgundians?" the dark-brown-haired girl gasped.
Solange nodded. "You are to tell me who it was that paid you to shoot that arrow over the wall, Isabeau. I must find him somehow, for the Duke wishes me to bid those who are loyal to him rise in rebellion against the wicked Louis."
"He did not tell me his name, truly he didn't!" Isabeau confessed in a low shaky whisper. "All I know is that he warned me not to say a word to any of the King'shid his face hurried into the tavern, and whispered something to him. All I could hear was that he called the tall man Messire."
"That is a title for the nobility," Solange whispered back. "Now listen, I have told the lieutenant of the watch that you are my sister and I came from Domremy to find you. My name is Solange Mercier. We must both tell the same story, or they will put us to the torture. Ohh, mon Dieu, they are coming!"
For now the door of the dungeon had swung open and the King of France, accompanied by his two most faithful and trusted servants, hobbled into the grim chamber of the question, his eyes bright with the anticipation of lustful pleasure. At the sight of him, Solange shrank back against the wall, her eyes wide with loathing and hatred, recognizing that thin-lipped crooked smile, that large head, the stooped body and the spindly legs.
"I hope you have not been kept waiting long, my pretties?" Louis XI chuckled humorously. "Ah, it is the charming Isabeau-we meet again, ma belle. My good lieutenant tells me that you were found in the Fircone Tavern, against my express orders. How do you explain that, you disobedient doxy?"
"I-I had come there, Your-Your Majesty, to see my sister from Domremy. I haven't seen her in two years, truly, Sire, and so I forgot Your order. Have pity on me and forgive me my sin!"
King louis shot a crafty look at Olivier le Daim, pursed his thin lips, and then cackled, "Such family devotion is greatly to be commended in these days of treason and betrayal, my lovely one. If that be so, you need not fear that worthy Tristan here will harm you overmuch. And so this is your sister, I take it?"
"Yes, Your Majesty," Solange spoke up, glancing quickly at the dark-brown-haired girl beside her, a glance in which she sought to express swiftly her thanks for Isabeau's helpful lie.
"How lovely you are, though quite unlike your sister! Such fine coppery-red hair, in which shines the flame perhaps of a Burgundian fire?" the cunning monarch slyly hazarded.
"I came through the forest, Sire, and there I was set upon by Burgundian soldiers who-who-oh, it is still too horrible and fresh in my mind, and it shames me to confess it!" Solange exclaimed in a shaking voice.
"I see. You tell me then, my beauty, that the soldiers of that bastard Duke waylaid you, and brutally stripping you, they made love to you. They forced you against your will before they permitted you to continue your journey to the gates of my city?"
Solange nodded, her eyes lowered, her cheeks flushed, her heart wildly pounding.
Louis XI stroked his chin with his bony fingers. "By which gate did you come, my lovely one?"
"Through the west gate, Sire. I told my story to the pikeman there, and in his compassion he let me seek refuge in your strong city of Paris."
"Tristan, did you hear that? Let it be known to Lieutenant Compgny that this varlet of a guard is to be relieved of his duties, soundly flogged through the ranks, and set to digging ditches for the defense of the palace he very nearly delivered unto my vilest enemy!" the King of France angrily exclaimed. Then, hobbling closer and making a gesture to one of the masked torturers to bring a torch and set it in the bracket near the two shackled young women, he stared intently at the trembling Solange. "You come from Domremy, do you? That is the blessed village of Joan of Arc, unless my memory plays me false. But you play me false, you wily jade! You could not possibly have journeyed from that sleepy village through the Burgundian lines without having been halted many miles before you reached the camp of the siege. No, you were let through those lines because you are on the side of the Duke, and you have come here to spy. She was found at the Fircone Tavern, was she not, good Tristan?"
"That is what your lieutenant told me, Sire," the brawny giant grumbled.
"So," Louis XI resumed, his crooked smile deepening, "You came to find your sister, you tell me. It so occurs that this sister, this paragon of maidenly virtue, aided yet another Burgundian spy to send a message by arrow winging into the Duke's camp. It is much more than coincidence, my red-haired liar!"
"Oh no, Sire, I do not lie, I am from Domremy-" Solange began.
But the beady eyes of the "Spider King" fixed her with so malevolent an expression that she was suddenly silent, her magnificent bubbies rising and falling erratically. He studied her now, observing the rumpled and disheveled state of her clothes and of her hair. He felt his cock harden at the thought of exposing that pale creamy skin, of seeing those proud titties flinching from the approach of the white-hot branding iron or the lash.
"Tristan," he abruptly decided, "you will strip this Burgundian spy naked as the day she was born. You will attach her to the whipping cross and flog her with the cat dipped in brine to the very blood. Then she will spend the night in the witches' cradle. When next we meet, Solange Mercier," he turned back to the shuddering and terrified redhead, "you will have another story for me, I'm certain. As for you, Isabeau, I will not punish you this time, but you shall watch what may well befall you if you continue the dangerous game of meeting in secret with my known foes as well as those who perhaps within my own court are traitors to me!"
He made a gesture, and the burly royal executioner at once unshackled Solange Mercier and, laughing at her frantic efforts to kick and twist herself free of his mighty grip, dragged her over towards a whipping post at the back of the dungeon. It was made in the form of a huge cross, standing upon a small platform some two feet off the stone floor of the dungeon. Heavy metal rings fixed into the ends of the cross arm served to hold the victim's wrists. Within a few moments, Solange Mercier found herself pressed against the cross, her arms dragged out to maximum, her slender wrists shackled in the immutable vises of the iron rings. And then she shrieked aloud as Tristan, with a mocking laugh, ripped off her blouse and then her skirt, and finally the camisole and drawers, and left her naked but for her footgear.
The King of France sucked in his breath as with gleaming eyes he studied this voluptuous marvel of feminine beauty naked at the whipping cross. For Solange was as tall as Katherine of Burgundy, but possessed of wonderful opulent hips and upstanding, rounded, ripe, closely spaced bottom globes; and her titties were like young melons set closely together and with dark Brownish-coral aurolae that centers about crinkly rosy nipple buds. There were two enchanting dimples, one at the upper summit of each bottom-cheek, and as she stood now almost on tiptoe, her naked body pressed against the upright post of the cross, trying to hide the thick dark-red triangle of pussy-hair, those dimples came and went with spasmodic regularity.
Closing her eyes and grinding her teeth, Solange Mercier prepared to endure her flogging. Well did she realize that if she wavered in the slightest from the story she had told the King of France, she might well be liable to the death penalty as a Burgundian spy. Only by stoicism and by refusing to change her story in the slightest was there hope of escaping the snares of the "Spider King." Yet she damned her wretchedly unlucky fate which had made the King's guard enter the Fircone Tavern just when she was about to make contact with Isabeau as the Duke desired.
Tristan l'Hermite had taken the cat-of-nine-tails, dipped it into a bucket of brine, and then slashed it half a dozen times through the air to shake out the excessive drops. Now planting himself at Solange's left, he looked to the monarch for a sign; Louis XI could not take his eyes off Solange's pale creamy naked behind. He could see the muscles of her calves and thighs tense and quivering as the victim steeled herself to endure the thrashing.
He lifted his bony hand at last, and Tristan, with a cruel chuckle, swung down the cat. The nine tapering brown leather thongs, each about an eighth of an inch wide, and as thick, clung en masse across the ripest curves of Solange's naked posterior. The force of the blow drove the naked redhead against the whipping cross, and her head fell back as her dilated eyes fixed on the ceiling. By sheer stoicism she managed to suppress all but a choking gasp. But the fierce bright red lines that striped the very middle of both bottom globes announced the savage fury of the very first stroke of the cat.
Isabeau La Joke closed her eyes so as not to see this terrible flogging which reminded her only too painfully of her own experience in this very dungeon. Yet the hideous hissing music of the nine tapering leather bands as they slashed through the air and then the sickening crack which resounded when they bit home against Solange's shuddering, squirming naked bottom, made Isabeau gasp in a kind of sympathetic sharing of the torture.
Digging her nails into her palms, turning her face restlessly this way and that, the young Burgundian spy called upon all her powers of endurance to withstand the burning agony of the cat that, launched by Tristan's burly arm, martyrized her tender creamy bottom. By the seventh lash, she could no longer restrain her groans and sobs and cries; after the twelfth, tiny drops of blood appeared at the upper summits, where three or four of the preceding strokes had sent the rasping, tapering leather thongs insistently against the same particularly sensitive areas of creamy naked skin.
Sweat globules ran down her naked heaving sides, and after the thirteenth cut, which regaled her bottom diagonally from the right hip down to the base of the left cheek of her bottom, she shook herself so violently in her shackles that her tumbled coppery-red hair fell back down over her shuddering, writhing back almost to her waist. With an imprecation, the executioner stepped forward, seized the cascade of silky hair in his left hand and bawled for one of his aides: "Here, Pierrot, you sluggard, drive me a nail into this cross that I may fix the slut's hair round it so she shall have no protection from the cat!"
One of the torturers hurried forward, with a heavy spike and a hammer, and in a moment had pounded it into the wood to the side of Solange's left cheek, Tristan at once skillfully wound the shimmering coppery coil round and round the nail, and then expertly made a loop at the end and formed a kind of holding knot. Now poor Solange needs must endure her flogging without moving her head, lest she jerk her tender scalp and add to the pangs of her ordeal.
Louis XI licked his lips, moving forward to watch the spasmodic rippling flexions that visited the victim's creamy thighs and calves. He nodded to the executioner, who drew back the cat and applied a ferocious horizontal cut across the lower summits of both globes, near the base of that magnificent, opulent posterior. Solange uttered a shriek of agony, involuntarily jerking her head, only to dry out shrilly as her bound hair punished that movement of her head. Blood began to pearl down her thighs and appeared in her sweating palms as her fingernails scored them in her unspeakable anguish.
A dozen more lashes fell over her jerking, weaving bleeding posterior before the King of France at last made a sign to halt the flogging. Solange, her face turned to the left to ease the dragging on her scalp, her face flooded with tears, her body jerking fitfully as with ague, was almost fainting with the torment in her swollen, lacerated bottom-cheeks.
The other torturer, Jules, came forward with a ladle filled with brine, and at Tristan's gesture, flung it out over the bleeding posterior. A wild, prolonged and penetrating scream tore from the maddened young redhead, as she sobbed in her bonds.
The bitch has fainted!" the "Spider King" disappointedly grumbled. "Let her be taken to the cradle. When we free her of it in the morning, or perhaps just before suppertime, I will wager you two gold sols, Tristan, that she will be gentle as a lamb and ready to believe that she could dupe the King of France. Why, one has only to listen to the voice of Isabeau to see what a naive child she is. She could not possibly be of the same blood as this spirited red-haired jade!"
Jules and Pierrot, at Tristan's order, carried the unconscious naked body of Solange Mercier into another dungeon in that subterranean vault where the "Spider King" incarcerated his victims. The royal executioner followed, as did the monarch and Olivier, both eager to watch the spectacle.
It was a narrow dungeon with a low ceiling. From the middle of the ceiling, held up by a giant metal hook set in the ceiling itself, was an iron frame shaped like a long cradle. On a low table, there lay a curious mummy-like sheath of rough cloth, very much like a ship's canvas. It had arms, and a hood of double thickness sewn to it to make it a single-piece garment.
Swiftly working to the orders of Tristan, the two assistants dressed the unconscious naked redhead in that one-piece sheath, binding her arms in front of her in straight-jacket fashion. The hood was pulled down over her face, made fast to the neck of the heavy garment. A single small hole had been pricked into the hood by an awl to permit breathing, and that was all. Once Solange had been dressed in this sheath, the assistants carefully set her upright on her feet and in the iron frame of the cradle. Then they buckled straps around the front, circling her neck, her bosom, her waist, her loins, her knees, and finally her ankles. Finally, they adjusted an iron band with a circular rim which fitted down over the top of the hood and pressed against the victim's head to prevent her from moving in any way.
The King of France was breathless throughout this entire procedure, and when it was over, turned to Olivier and muttered, "In a way, it's a pity we didn't enjoy ourselves with this slut. But tomorrow night well make up for it, eh, Olivier?"
Tristan had finished. Now, with a chuckle, he put his hand to the base of the cradle and pushed it. It began to swing slowly back and forth on the huge hook set in the ceiling, and then, with a glance at his royal master to make certain that the latter had approved of his methods, he autocratically dismissed Jules and Pierrot. And the "Spider King" stood for a long moment watching the slowly swinging cradle, before at last, with a reluctant sigh, he hobbled out of the narrow gloomy dungeon from which the torches had been taken by Tristan's aides. Solange Mercier was left to return to consciousness and then to terror in this world of darkness and silence.
CHAPTER NINE
Solange Mercier had indeed recovered consciousness a few hours after her merciless whipping, to discover herself in the terrible "Witch's Cracle." She had shrieked aloud in her despair, but only silence had answered. Through the long night, and the terrible morning and noon, though she could not calculate the hours-the overpowering horror of her situation dimmed her valiant resolve to aid the Duke of Burgundy in conquering the man who had slighted her mother and whom she regarded as her own deadliest enemy out of a sense of honor.
Thus it was that the next evening, when Tristan unlocked the door of the narrow dungeon, and ordered Jules and Pierrot to unfasten the cradle and remove the prisoner from the canvas-like garment of penitence, Solange, her body bathed in sweat, befouled by her own excreta, totteringly sank down on her knees and babbled, "Oh, spare me, in the name of decency! Either put me to death quickly, or let me prove my innocence!"
"I have no order concerning you as yet, my beauty," Tristan chuckled as he stroked his beard and licked his lips at the sight of Solange's magnificent panting titties and the dark thick patch of pussy-fur at the peak of her shuddering thighs. "But you shall be bathed and given some food. His Majesty will then decide what is to be done to you."
The two assistants dragged out the sobbing red-haired Burgundian girl and took her to still another dungeon. But here there was a pallet of straw and a pan of fresh water and towels, and they washed her, greedily grasping her naked charms while she dared do nothing to deny their obscene caresses; nor could she shut her ears to their lewd approbation of her naked loveliness.
Then they brought her black bread and strong red wine and a little meat, and laughingly bade her dine well so that she might be of sufficient strength when the King of France at last deigned to visit her.
They left her thus in the dungeon for another two hours, during which the terrified young redhead was left prey to the most morbid fancies of her impending doom. And so when they returned, impassively and without a word to lessen her almost hysterical anxiety, she wept and pleaded with them to tell what was to be done to her.
They said nothing as they led her up the stairs to a room in the castle. There they tied her by the wrists and ankles on a low huge bed with brocaded covers, and then retired as silently as they had come to her.
When at last the door opened, Solange was weeping hysterically, and through her tears she could hardly see the hobbling figure of Louis XI, followed by his two cronies. But soon when she felt the bony fingers of the "Spider King" on her thighs, mounting salaciously to the tender nook of her cunt, she shrieked aloud and tried to break free of her bonds.
Divesting himself of his robe, the hunchbacked naked monarch swung himself upon the bed and, greedily cackling his joy at her revulsion, brutally fucked her. Then it was the turn of his royal executioner, and then of the barber-surgeon whom Louis XI had made a noble for services to France.
And during the nights that followed until the cunning "Spider King" enlisted the services of Francois Villon to aid him in his war against
Burgundy, Solange Mercier was kept a prisoner in this spacious and beautifully furnished chamber, tied and spread-eagled on this royal bed, ravaged by the three sinister men who guarded the destinies of France in this brooding hour of battle with rebellious Burgundy.
Francois Villon, clad in white satin hose and doublet with the gold fleur de lis marking his noble estate, sat with the King of France. Clean-shaven now, well fed, with a purse filled with gold dangling from his belt, a brightly jeweled scabbard to contain his sword, the poet of the Fircone Tavern asked himself if this were not some mad dream.
"You shall be the Count of Montcorbier, Master Villon," Louis XI cackled as he leaned forward and tapped the poet on the knee. "Pay close attention, Master Villon, you are to be my Grand Constable. And your first task will be to ingratiate yourself into the favors and the confidence of this Solange Mercier. I am certain that she is a Burgundian spy."
"I begin to follow Your Majesty."
"You had better do so and with all the swiftness of your fine intelligence, Master Villon, or Tristan will fit a noose about your scrawny neck come a fortnight!" replied the monarch. "Now, this is my plan. It is well known that the Duke of Burgundy has many spies in my city and I believe that some of them are in my very court. He believes also that my people are ready to mutiny against me and to welcome him with open arms. I am not quite so certain. Burgundy would annex Paris, and the taxes would be intolerable. They would give up their hated Louis for an even more savage Charles. No, I still have faith in the people of Paris. And you, Master Villon, leader of all those evil rogues who know how to kill and to rob and to escape my very guard, you shall lead your rabble against
Burgundy."
"It is a scheme that might work, Majesty."
"For the sake of your neck, Master Villon, it had best work' I leave to you the devising. My generals will have audience with you within the hour. Lay forth your stratagems, and they will be your staunch allies, for I have told them what I plan. Now hear me further! Let this Solange believe that you are a traitor to France and that you would gladly give up the baton of the Grand Constable in return for a rich fief granted to you by the Duke. Find some way to convince this bitch, go back with her to the Duke's camp, and tell her what you will-for example, at a certain time, one of the gates of the city will be open to him and his men."
"And then, when he is led into the trap, we may strike at night with our rabble-I perceive the depth of Your Majesty's scheming!"
"Good, you may yet save your neck! And if you do so, during your two weeks as Grand Constable, let me commend to your lecherous attention the person of Louise of Vauxelle. She is a minor princess, and in need of a husband. Our war with Burgundy has delayed my finding a mate for this luscious highborn trollop, but I think that a man of your mettle will amply satisfy her cravings, Master Villon. Distract yourself with her but do not forget your mission. Now go and comfort Solange. She has been abused, I confess it to you. She has known the lash and the cradle, and she has suffered our own regal embraces, as well as those of Tristan and Olivier. You will come to her and console her, Master Villon. Make love to her, as I have no doubt you would anyway without my bidding," he cackled with glee and tapped Villon on the knee. "But you must act quickly with her. Word has come to me that with the death of the Count of
Savoy, the Duke now commands the mercenaries of that province. So he will be much stronger than ever before. He must be lulled into believing that we starve here, that my people hate me for prolonging a useless war."
"I have the plan in my brain, Majesty. Give me leave now to go and develop it with this choice Burgundian morsel."
"I haven't used her too much, Villon," Louis XI cackled as he rose from his chair and gave the poet a lewd wink. "As for your fair Isabeau, she is still my guest, but I have not harmed her. See her also, and discover what you can of the identity of the traitor in my court. A man with a scar, gaunt and lean. I do not recognize him as a courtier or one of my nobles, Villon, and my belief is that he is but a tool in the hands of the true traitor here in my very midst. Be gone now, and waste no time in making rhymes, or you shall frame a ballade on your own hanging!"
The elegantly garbed poet-swordsman, who had in the twinkling of an eye become Grand Constable of France, went at once to the bedchamber in which Solange Mercier was held captive. His pulses quickened at the thought of such a diverting escapade which would have patriotism to motivate it and at the same time offer the most delicious portents of lovemaking. Huegette had been his favorite mistress of late months, but there were times when her importunities at wanting to be equal with the male (this was one reason for her wearing male habit) as well as her jealousy over his casual interest in another wench had begun to tire him. Perhaps it was, he philosophized to himself as he strode down the hall, because when a man faces death at every turn and each new day may be the last in such a precarious existence, he seizes what pleasures he can when they are offered.
Before the bedchamber door, there stood a pikeman, a member of the King's own castle guard, with metal cap and coat of chain mail. He bowed respectfully to the resplendent Villon, and the poet smiled to himself, thinking how fleeting fame must be. Even though his verses might be immortal, the only recognition in this age was power and a title and wealth before which all men bent the knee.
"I am the Grand Constable, fellow," he said briskly, "and I count upon you to see that I'm not disturbed. I am to question this traitress."
With this, he entered the bedchamber and bolted the door behind him.
Solange Mercier, still spread-eagled and bound by wrists and ankles to the four posts of the huge bed, uttered a faint cry of terror as she turned her head to stare at the intruder. But her eyes widened with surprise, for in his new raiment and clean-shaven, Francois Villon was indeed an admirable figure of a man. And after their constant nightly ordeals in which the "Spider King" and his two cronies had alone participated, the presence of this elegant and obviously virile male was a pleasing contrast indeed to the red-haired Burgundian beauty.
"You are Solange Mercier, I am told." he said coldly.
"Oui, monseigneur," Solange stammered, and then blushed. For his keen eyes were slowly sweeping her naked body, lingering on the panting swell of her titties, the suave widely indented kiss-nook that was her navel, and on the thick dark red bush between her straddled thighs. "Have you come to t-torture me again?"
"No, Solange. I am Francois Montcarbier, Grand Constable of France. And what I am to say to you is a private matter which has nothing to do with the King and the rest of his court." With this, the poet crossed towards the bed and stood at the edge, staring intently down at Solange's lovely blushing face.
Startled at this unexpected sally, the naked captive faltered, "But I am accused of being a spy, monseigneur."
"I know that full well. But there are those in this very castle who do not share the passion of doddering old Louis for a victory against the Duke. I, myself an drawn to Charles the Bold, for his courage and his vigor. I have no truck with mummery and the leaden saints which our frightened little King wears to protect himself against the ghosts of danger. Give me always a man of enterprise and daring!"
Solange's lovely eyes widened at this. "Do you mean monseigneur," she quavered, "that you would surrender Paris to the Duke?"
"I would if I could be certain of protection from your master," Francois Villon boldly carried off his ruse. "Look you, girl, as Grand Constable, I have command of the armies of this do-nothing ruler who does not even dare to face Charles the Bold in hand-to-hand combat. If you can arrange a meeting with the Duke and myself, it is quite possible that I may be able to end this wretched and unnecessary siege before the leaves turn brown in autumn."
"Oh, my lord, you do not know how greatly I desire that with all my heart!" Solange passionately exclaimed. "Yes, I will take you to the Duke. But is there not danger for you, you so high in the court of France?"
"I need only tell this idiot who would be king commander that I go to demand surrender from the hordes of Burgundy. But once in the camp of the Duke, I shall offer your master the chance to attack in stealth, and I shall see to it that one of the gates of the city is open to him."
"He will reward you beyond your dreams, monseigneur!" Solange exclaimed.
"But first, my lovely red-haired spy, you must prove your own fealty to Charles the Bold," Villon pursued.
"How shall I convince you, my lord?"
"By telling me, if you can, who it is in this very court who is also on the side of your master. The girl Isabeau who was taken with you in the Fircone Tavern last week-you came to find her, did you not?"
"I did, my lord."
"And she was, from what I have been told, accused of sending a message to the Duke. But this message was given to her by some powerful lord who has not yet revealed himself to me. If I am to aid the Duke, I must have at my side valiant men who hate the accursed "Spider King" as much as I do."
"I can tell you that, then, my lord. He is Thibaut d'Ausigny, and he is the Lord Seneschal. He has offered to place the treasury of the crown at the disposal of Charles the Bold."
"Excellent! I with the army and Thibaut d'Ausigny with the gold, we have here all that is needed to topple Louis from his already foundering throne!"
With this, Francois Villon began to remove his doublet, while the naked red-haired Burgundian beauty stared at him incredulously. "What-what are you doing, my lord?"
"Why, my pretty one, since I am bent on alliance with your master, should I not first essay alliance with his chosen instrument?" Villon quipped. "Moreover, you cannot know how insipid
I find the ladies of this gloomy court, especially now that I see the magnificence of your body."
By now he was naked, and his prick was long and lean and swollen with passion, and Solange's eyes fixed upon it with almost incredulity.
"Oh please, my lord, if you knew what they have done to me-I do not want-Oh no, my lord, have pity on me-ohhh!
For Francois Villon had mounted the bed and now laid himself gently down between Solange's distended naked creamy thighs, his slim fingers gently fondling the swelling torrents of her naked breasts, while his mouth moved gently over the satiny valley between those luscious fruits of love. Solange Mercier twisted her face to one side and closed her eyes, shuddering violently, and the waves of revulsion began to grow in her, for the constant ravaging by these three odious assailants, royal though they might be, had agonized her. Francois Villion felt himself also shuddering but with mounting passion; the supple luscious body tethered helplessly to his will excited him. And her frigidity presented a challenge which, as poet and romancer, he could not ignore.
His lips pastured lingeringly between Solange's titties, as his fingers gently stroke the outer curves of those magnificent love-globes. He made no attempt to penetrate her as yet, wanting to quiet and gentle her into surrender, for this was the way to gaining her confidence so that she would lead him to the Duke.
Now taking one of her nipples between his lips, he sucked daintily at it, flicking it with his tongue, while his fingers crept down her sides to her hips, stroking the satiny, moistly perspiring flesh, lulling her terror of a brutal rape.
Without a word, the lean, imaginative naked poet-swordsman continued his diligent wooing of
Solange's spread-eagled nakedness. His fingers continued to caress her hips and sides, while his mouth sucked and kissed each nipple in turn till he could feel it swell and harden with the throbbing urgency of wakening desire. The red-haired Burgundian captive, whimpering and gasping, turned her face restlessly from side to side, for this manner of lovemaking was strangely new to her. His dalliance began to rouse her deepest femininity, and suddenly she uttered a groan: "Oh, mon Dieu! mon Dieu, do not torture me so, do it and finish with me!"
"Who has thus destroyed your pride and joy in womanhood, ma belle?" he asked wonderingly as he lifted his eyes to stare into her humid ones. "Only a fool or coarse ruffian devoid of the least sensitivity would hasten such an exquisite mating. I wish to show you only that I do not take you by force, my lovely Solange." And with this, Villon went back to sucking the girl's nipples while his fingers crept under her bottom to caress the contracting globes.
He could feel the marks of her lashing, which had faded but were still inscribed in her pale creamy flesh. Instinctively she arched herself up, awaiting pain, but his fingers remained strangely gentle. And then his mouth came down on hers, and with a moaning sob, Solange Mercier accorded him what she had not even given Charles the BoldH;he frenzied access of her pent-up passions aggrandized by fear and shame and all the anguish of her long degradation.
It was at this moment that, with her tongue delving in his mouth, the poet thrust his aching prick into the gaping crevice of Solange's cunt, burying himself to the hilt in a single lunge. He could feel her womb walls contracting convulsing against his ramrod, and he waited thus, immobilizing himself while he savored the marvelous agility and fervor of her young creamy body.
Then he began to fuck her with a deliberate mastery, drawing back slowly and returning in the same lingering way, till Solange was beside herself. Panting, moaning, sobbing, babbling delirious words, she yearned to put her arms and legs around him, her head rose and her eyes implored him to bring her to the pitch of climax.
And when at last he did, her body quaked tumultuously and she felt the hot lash of his gism. And it was this which convinced her that she must aid this handsome stranger who held such power in the court of the "Spider King" and yet avowed himself as being an ally to her beloved master Charles the Bold.
CHAPTER TEN
By the next evening, Francois Villon had arranged for Solange Mercier and himself to leave through the west gate of Paris and go directly to the emblazoned tent of Charles the Bold. An hour before that journey was to begin, the disguised Francois Villon had a soldier of the watch go to the Fircone Tavern to bring back Colin de Cayeulx, second in command in the Company of the Cockleshells.
The frightened cutpurse and hired assassin cringed, fumbling with his tattered hat, when he was led into the austere presence of the new Grand Constable of France. The soldier was sent away, and then Francois Villon uttered a hearty laugh: "Colin, you drowsy rogue, don't you recognize your poet-friend? I am Villon."
"My lord jests, but I cannot share the joke, for I am too afraid," Colin's voice trembled with his anxiety. He feared at best a whipping and at worst a hanging.
"You varlet, do I not know that it was you whose dagger let wind into the fat belly of Casin Cholet when the two of you quarreled over the fat Margot? Did you not once tell me that you had hidden in the hovel which you call home a purse with a dozen silver sols to tide you over till fortune would again smile upon you?"
Colin's mouth gaped as he stared incredulously at the satin-clad, swaggering Grand Constable. "Ventre Saint Gris!" he finally swore, "only Villon himself could know all that! But what in heaven's name do I see? You, the Grand Constable of France? Has the 'Spider King' taken leave of his senses?"
"Say rather that he has regained them at long last, Colin," Villon chuckled. "Now to business. I go in an hour to talk alliance with the Duke of Burgundy. I am to pretend that the citizens of Paris are starving and weary of this siege. As Grand Constable, I have control of the armies which do battle against the Duke's forces, and I shall propose to Charles the Bold to open the west gate of the city at midnight. Meanwhile, Colin, you will go at once to the Fircone and call to yourself all the brothers of the Cockleshells, bidding them arm themselves with axes, scythes, daggers, and cudgels, and not to change one whit their beggars' appearance. If the Duke takes my bait, you and your men are to leave by the southern gate and station yourselves in that little forest near the walls. When the Burgundians come to the west gate, you will fall upon them from the rear, while I open to them the gate and have my forces hidden about the courtyard to ambush them. Thus we shall have them at front and back, and if all goes well, Duke Charles the Bold will go back to his Burgundy with his tail between his legs like a whipped cur. Now go quickly on your errand. I shall have a cannon fired at midnight to give your men the signal the gate is to be opened!"
It was dusk when Francois Villon, in his fine raiment and a jeweled scabbard to house his sword, entered the Burgundian camp under a white flag of truce, with red-haired Solange Mercier clinging to his arm.
But fortune favored Francois Villon's daring game, for the Duke of Burgundy had that very morning ridden back to Liege to quell another threatened revolt, leaving his beautiful perverse, Lesbian sister Katherine in his stead and with the direction of his army in the charge of his first captain, Claude Huon, master swordsman and conquering hero of a dozen forays against towns which his royal master had successfully besieged in uniting the Burgundian provinces. Huon, in his early fifties, was greedily ambitious for power, and so when Francois Villon and the red-haired Solange were brought to his tent by two of the Duke's guards, the gray-haired, gray-bearded sturdy warrior listened with growing excitement to Villon's skillfully concocted scheme.
"My Lord Grand Constable," he exclaimed when Villon had finished, "if you mean what you say and you are loyal to my master, this night shall see the end of Paris and of that infamous hunchbacked king who is no fit ruler for the worthy people of Paris!"
"My sentiments exactly, noble captain!" Villon suavely replied. "Moreover, this charming and loyal girl whom your royal master knows full well has acquainted me with the Burgundian loyalty of our Lord Seneschal, Thibaut d'Ausigny. Thus when your troops enter Paris, Captain Huon, they will have not only the support of my armies but they will have gold also to bring back to Duke Charles to repay your soldiers for their long weeks of siege."
"I would only that my master were here to reward you, my lord! But be assured when Paris is breached, he will reward you fittingly!"
"My reward," smoothly lied Villon, "will be in having rid France of a tyrant. And now it is agreed, Captain Huon? At midnight, you will hear the firing of a cannon from the tower above the west gate. It will be the signal that the gate will be open to you and your men. Come swiftly and without noise, and I shall divert my troops to the opposite end of the city. Those who resist you will be only a token force of the King's soldiers and perhaps some of the rabble who are not armed. Louis Do-Nothing has taken to his bed, some say with a flux from having indulged himself too well at the table. There is no one in Paris, therefore, who can stay my hand."
"You have plotted like a master general, my lord Grand Constable," the Burgundian captain smilingly exclaimed, as he extended his hand in friendship, which Villon shook. "Then I will give orders at once to my men to await your signal. But go you now to the tent of the Duke's noble sister, the Duchess of Burgundy, to tell her what you have told me. She will be overjoyed and may herself wish to pledge you some reward for your valiant services to her brother."
"I think you, Captain Huon," Villon inclined his head respectfully, "This girl and I will go back under the flag of truce, for those at the west gate who have not yet had my order to withdraw may think it odd that I have come here with her and left her in the Burgundian camp. She is, as you know, prisoner of Louis XI."
"That is agreed, my lord. We shall meet, then, on the morrow and I will drink a toast to your health."
"May the gods of chance bring that about!" Villon glibly retorted.
Then, taking his leave of the Burgundian war leader, he led Solange to the even more colorfully decorated tent of Katherine of Burgundy.
The svelte dominatress, wearing a metal helmet and a coat of chain mail and a man's boots, a costume which magnificently accentuated the svelte suppleness of her sensual body, was being attended by her auburn-haired maid, Guillemette. The two women were at the point of exchanging a passionate Lesbian kiss when a fanfare of trumpets announced the presence of Villon dressed as the Grand Constable outside her tent.
"A moment, my sweet, and we shall be to ourselves again," Katherine tenderly whispered as she rose from the couch and went to the door of the tent.
As Francois Villon and Solange entered, the Duchess exclaimed, "My darling Solange! How happy I am to see you again! But how comes it that you return with a nobleman of the French court?"
"Your Grace," Solange curtsied deeply, "this man is Francois Montcarbier, Grand Constable of France. It was he who saved me from that hideous hunchbacked fiend Louis and his executioner and his filthy dwarf of a barber, and it is he who will lead your glorious brother's soldiers into Paris this very night!"
"Can this be so?" Katherine stared at the handsome poet-swordsman. "Then there are still those in the court of that monster who are loyal to the Duke!"
"That is true, Your Grace," Villon smilingly replied as he bowed his head, "like my lord d'Ausigny. I have told your Captain Huon to be ready for my signal at midnight, for I shall open to him the west gate of Paris and divert the King's troops elsewhere in the city."
"This is glorious news indeed, my lord Grand Constable!" Katherine's voice was warm and her eyes shining. "I would only that my brother were now to learn this news from your own lips. But be assured that you will not find him ungrateful for this night's business. And will you take a cup of wine with me, my lord Grand Constable?"
"Willingly, Your Grace,"
As Katherine turned to her auburn-haired maid to bid the latter serve wine to her guests, Francois
Villon stealthily took from the pocket of his doublet three grayish pills, compounded by Olivier le Daim. As the lovely auburn-haired Guillemette came towards him to proffer the jeweled goblets of her royal mistress, he adroitly dropped one of the pills into the goblet intended for Solange. Then, as Katherine and her maid were about to lift their goblets and the Duchess of Burgundy was about to propose a toast, he silkily interposed: "Your Grace, grant me the boon of drinking from the goblet that your lovely hand has touched!"
"What a flatterer and courtier you are, my lord!" Katherine's thin lips curved with pleasure. "You shall have your boon. Take my goblet and give me yours in turn!"
"A fair bargain too indeed, Your Grace," Francois Villon exclaimed, as skillfully he dropped the second pill into the goblet still in his hand, and then moved forward to offer it to brunette Katherine of Burgundy.
As he sipped his wine thoughtfully, he watched with keen eyes for the drug to take effect. It was a powerful soporific which, Olivier had assured him, would retain its effect for at least the better part of a day. Soon Katherine began to yawn, and, before she had finished the goblet of red Burgundy wine, sank down on her couch and in a languid voice remarked, "I cannot tell why I am so drowsy, my sweet Guillemette. And before my guest-how ashamed I am of myself-but my lids seem weighted down with lead."
Solange Mercier's head had begun to droop as she sat on an ornate footstool near the door of the tent.
Francois Villon took a sip of his wine, and then he saw the eyes of the Duchess of Burgundy close. Glancing to one side, he saw that Solange was fast asleep. The moment had come!
He rose swiftly, and before the astonished auburn-haired maid of the Duchess of Burgundy could divine his intent, his hard fist had caught her at the point of the jaw and made her slump unconscious beside her drowsing royal mistress.
Swiftly the poet-swordsman worked, undressing the supple body of Katherine of Burgundy, till she was naked. Then, undressing Guillemette, he forced on her lissome naked body the raiment which her mistress had worn, and finally, undressing Solange, he dressed the Duchess in the peasant's garments which the red-haired Burgundian spy had worn.
To make matters sure, he bound and gagged Guillemette, and then, lifting the unconscious form of Katherine of Burgundy in his arms, he strode to the door of the tent. "By all the Gods," he swore to himself," I must be woolgathering! This black hair must be cropped off, or all will know who it is I carry. Devil take it, I should have thought of that and perchance brought a wig to disguise that raven-black hair by which all men know the Duchess."
Laying Katherine's inert body down on the couch, he seized his dagger and slashed away the coronet braid which she had loosened for the evening, in anticipation of the sweet illicit hours to be enjoyed in the company of her Sapphic maid. Then, taking a silk scarf, he wound it around the head of the Duchess. And then at last he was ready to brave a cursory inspection of the guard at Katherine's tent. He strode outside, and arrogantly declared, "You will tell Captain Huon I've had my audience with the Duchess, and that I now return with Solange to Paris. Bid him heed my signal at midnight, and do not forget this message if you value your own life!"
The Burgundian guard, accustomed to authority, did not question this regally dressed and insolently self-assured dignitary, so he bowed low and hurried off to the tent of Captain Huon. Francois Villon made his way quickly back to the west gate, and was admitted with his prize, the Duchess of Burgundy. He had taken from the palace a cohort of ten pikemen who waited for him now. "Let this girl be locked in one of the King's dungeons. Guard her with your lives, for she is the greatest prize of all Burgundy," he told them.
And then, mounting a horse, he called to the corporal in charge of the detail. "I go to the Fircone Tavern. When you have taken that girl to the castle, you will meet me there to hear my orders!"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The daring ruse of the new Grand Constable of France had been even more successful than its perpetrator had dreamed. At midnight, the sound of cannon signalled the advance of most of the Burgundian forces under Captain Huon towards the west gate of the city. At the order of the Grand Constable, the gate had been opened, but the King's soldiers had stationed themselves in hiding around the huge courtyard upon which this gate opened. Meanwhile, from the thick woods to the south, over three hundred brawlers and rogues, armed with a motley assortment of weapons, moved in the darkness to take their position well behind the Burgundian force.
In the excitement of preparing for this attack, Captain Huon, not wishing to disturb the Duchess, had not thought of sending a messenger to her tent to tell her that the final advance upon Paris was to begin. And in that tent, three women slept dreamlessly, two under the influence of the ingenious drug compounded by the "Spider King's" barber-surgeon, and the Lesbian maid of the Duchess of Burgundy from the effective blow which Francois Villon had inflicted.
As the Burgundian soldiers cautiously advanced into the empty courtyards, Captain Huon barked his orders. Suddenly a hail of arrows whistled through the night from the crossbows of the King's soldiers, felling at once over a score of Burgundian soldiers. "It's a trap!" Captain Huon cried, wheeling his charger back towards the gate. At that moment a skillfully aimed arrow took him in the neck and toppled him from his horse.
There was confusion in the Burgundian ranks, for now the shouts of the rabble outside the gate of Paris added to the clamor of the battle. Colin and his minions had fallen upon the Burgundian rear, and were taking fearful toll with their daggers and axes and clubs and scythes.
Once again the crossbows whistled their song of death, and men fell shrieking with arrows in their throats or eyes. The disorganized Burgundians tried to retreat, only to be met by the aroused vagabonds who fought for France as well as for their leader Francois Villon. When at last the carnage ended, over four hundred Burgundians had perished and the rest of the army of Charles the Bold, leaderless, was retreating back to Burgundy.
And now it was morning and the tocsin bells were ringing from all the cathedrals in Paris to celebrate the great victory. On his throne, the hunchbacked King of France stared down at Francois Villon, who knelt, still in the costume of the Grand Constable, his head bowed in humility before his King.
Louis XI smiled maliciously at the handsome poet-swordsman who thus proclaimed his fealty directly before his sovereign, which Villion had never before done in his life as a poet and vagabond. "You pose me a doughty problem," he at last declaimed, rubbing his bony chin. "You have saved Paris and lifted the siege. Charles the Bold has retreated and the offensive had passed from his hands, thanks to you."
"It was not only myself, Sire, but the people of Paris, in whom you had so little confidence," Villon modestly replied.
"Then in their name, I pardon you of your past crimes and spare you the gibbet. However, I cannot retain you as my Lord Grand Constable-though I will privately admit you are a better man than any who have held that illustrious post since I was crowned. Nor, knowing your cunning as a thief, would I entrust you with the post of Lord Seneschal which Thibaut d'Wusigny only this morning permanently quitted at the hands of my good Tristan. It appears Tristan vowed to use the noose he had had specially woven for your neck, Master Villon, so I bade him apply it instead to the thicker neck of the traitorous d'Ausigny."
"I am relieved to hear that news, Sire."
"So you may yet chant your ballades at the Fircone Tavern, and, now that you are a hero, I doubt not that the doxies who throng there nightly in search of forgetful lovers will make much of you, you clever rogue."
Francois Villon shrugged. "Why, as to that, Majesty, I may console myself with my own lines, Where are the snows of yesterday?"
"With something more, Master Villon, lest you think your king is a niggardly miser and ungrateful for what you have saved my treasury alone. Dieu, when I think that this villainous d'Ausigny might have turned over the royal coffers to Charles the Bold, I grow faint. So, then, there is the problem of your reward."
"I shall be satisfied with Your Majesty's thanks."
"Oh no, you sly rogue," Louis XI cackled, "for then you would go back to the Fircone and pen another set of rhymes narrating for all my hopefully loyal subjects to hear on the theme of my being a miserly ingrate. Let me think-I cannot really make you a nobleman, Villon, though I will readily grant you have the heart and spirit for that exalted state. But I fear you might sink back into the morass of evil deeds and worse companions, so disgracing the title that it could only reflect discredit on your sovereign. A purse of gold you shall have, to be sure-small enough payment for your valorous deeds and for what golden treasure you saved me. But something more, I think. Now, the Princess Louise only last night in my chambers blushingly informed me that she found you devilishly attractive-though why a sensible nobly born girl should make such an error in judgment is beyond my powers to conjure. Yet she is not so impractical as I had supposed, since she will not forfeit her rank to marry a commoner. I fear we are at somewhat of an impasse there, Master Villon."
"Yes, Your Majesty?"
Again the "Spider King" stroked his bony chin as he pondered. Then a mocking light came into his beady eyes. "But by the miter of the cardinal whom I housed in a cage to sanctify him, I will grant you this boon. You and this lusty minx of a princess shall be my royal guests at the castle for a fortnight-yes, Master Villon, the same grace of time I granted you to save your neck! If it happens that you visit her bedchamber during that time, I shall not know of it, for Olivier, my trusted physician, has prescribed for me a journey to my lovely Queen Charlotte. Thanks to you, you rogue, I may quit Paris knowing it to be in safe hands Charles the Bold for some little while yet-if at all-and so I shall not be informed of your licentious rascality with the princess, rascality which, Master Francois, would assuredly cost you your life if it were officially reported to me. Go now, and revel in your fortnight. I take my leave of you. Let me not hear of any duels or murders at the Fircone attributed to you, or Tristan may yet have his morbid wish concerning your neck fulfilled."
"As to that, Sire, I swear on my life you shall hear nothing ill of me," Francois Villon rose as the "Spider King" with a dismissing gesture left his throne.
Louise, Princess of Vauxelle, was nineteen, of medium height, and her beauty was coveted by many a royal courtier. With heart-shaped face, large widely spaced gray-green eyes and full red lips, possessed of a soft satiny carnation-tinted skin, she had tempted even the "Spider King" himself. Her grandfather had been a prince, the result of a victorious war against two minor provinces whose rebellion had threatened the power of the throne of France, and in grateful recognition, the then reigning monarch had bestowed this rank upon him. Louise herself, however, was by legal decree the ward of Louis XI, a fact which had prevented the hunchbacked monarch from playing the role of lover to her.
Nonetheless, he knew well that she was ripe for marriage and mating, since she had often importuned him to find her a husband. And during Francois Villon's brief reign as Grand Constable of France, the poet-swordsman had dined in her company and Louise had found him eminently desirable. Upon his return from the brief but brilliantly successful battle against the forces of Burgundy, she had greeted him in the great hall of the castle, her eyes shining, her lips moist and ardent with the promise of fulfillment, and had whispered, "Oh, my lord of Montcorbier, your heroism merits the thanks of every woman of France-I pray you, let me speak for them and express their thanks." And then, her superb, widely spaced pear-shaped breasts swelling sensually, she had added in a soft husky whisper, "Oh, my lord, come to my bedchamber this night when all are asleep, that I may fittingly express those thanks!"
It was no wonder, then, that Francois Villon, as he quitted the presence of Louis XI, smiled as he thought of the night to come. For now even the "Spider King" had granted him tacit permission to make love to this passionate young princess-which, as a commoner and vagabond, would have otherwise been death for him to attempt; nor, by the fitness of his own ethics as a man, would he have essayed as the spurious Grand Constable of France.
And so that night, when the castle slumbered, Francois Villon, clad only in a rich silken nightshirt and soft fur-trimmed slippers-which a valet had brought him as part of the wardrobe of the Grand Constable-tiptoed down the hall to the bedchamber of Louise of Vauxelle and knocked thrice, his heart leaping as he heard her soft husky voice call. "Entrez,m ttmourl"
Quickly he slipped inside, bolting the door behind him, and uttered a gasp of ecstatic surprise. For the Princess of Vauxelle stood beside her canopied bed, the thin gold circlet of her coronet atop her honey-haired head, her voluptuous young body outlined and limned by the cling of a silken nightshift that hid little of the thrust of her pear firm breasts, the supple waist, and the expensive yet marvelously proportioned hips and buttocks and succulently rounded thighs which made her body such a coveted oasis of lustful pleasure.
"Blow out the candle, m amour," she breathed, "and hurry! It will take all night, I fear, to relate to you the gratitude of the women of France!"
Francois Villon, always the opportunist, could act with more certainty than ever-for was it not the unspoken but implied order of Louis XI himself that he gratify this insatiable young princess for a fortnight? So, blowing out the candle, he took Louise of Vauxelle in his arms and was at once besieged by a far more dangerous enemy to his manly powers than ever the forces of Burgundy could have devised! Her bare arms clutched him feverishly, her ripe red moist warm lips voraciously sucked at his in the most devouring of kisses, and her loins restlessly rubbed to and fro against his swiftly responding manhood.
She was not a virgin, nor was the erstwhile Grand Constable of Trance chagrined to find this somewhat startling lack in a princess of the blood. What she was, entranced and encompassed him far more: a tireless minion, a concupiscent young wanton who joyed in the health and verve of her naked ardent body and in its powers to draw from an admiring partner the most draining tribute. It was dawn before the poet-swordsman could requite the flame in her loins and dim its hot, bright luster, and then the two, dreamlessly, happily, fell into that exhausted and carefree sleep which is granted only to zestful lovers....
A week of Francois Villon's fortnight had gone by on magical wings. Those servants in the castle of the "Spider King" had unmistakably been ordered to ignore the two blissful lovers-or, rather, to serve them diligently but without conversation or bold scrutiny that might embarrass either of them. Thus Francois Villon and Louise of Vauxelle dwelt for a memorable, eternal time in a world apart. And it was on the night of the eighth day that the honey-haired young princess demurely asked her poet-swordsman lover, "Sweet Francois, you have forgotten all save me, and I adore you for it. But now that we have no secrets left from each other, will you not tell me what you plan to do with your prisoner in the dungeon?"
Francois Villon's eyes widened. Of a truth, he had forgotten Katherine of Burgundy, after having told his monarch of the identity of his prisoner. But Louis XI had said nothing concerning her. "Why, sweeting," he responded with a shrug of his handsome shoulders, " to tell you the truth, I had not thought of aught concerning haughty Katherine. When his Majesty returns from his reunion with his fair queen, who is another kind of woman indeed, he will doubtless decide her fate."
Louise saucily shook her head and moved closer to her lover, one slim hand stealthily caressing his dwindled organ. "But is she not a Burgundian and have we not the right to punish rebellious subjects who rise against the rightful King of France?" she queried artfully.
"That's true enough, my enchanting love," he murmured tenderly as he stroked her honey-hair and kissed her red lips. "But what punishment would you decree for a duchess?"
"Pooh," Louise of Vauxelle giggled, moving closer to her lover, while her fingers began to caress his now throbbing cock, "I have a score of my own to settle with her. Some few years ago, before came to the court of my royal guardian, she condescended to visit the estate of my good father. How insolent she was! And she said of me that, I was a young strumpet who should be locked in a nunnery!"
"A great inaccuracy, that," Francois Villon murmured, his hands moving to Louise's plump, spaciously rounded bottom and squeezing it through her satin skirt. "How wasted you would be in a nunnery!"
"But she wouldn't, Francois m amour," Louise teasingly whispered back. "Don't you know she hates men and is forever fondling her maids? Oh, she was shameless even then, I recall. But I was only fifteen then and when she insulted me, I thought only of running to my chamber and bursting into tears! I am wiser now amour"
"Let us pay the Duchess of Burgundy a visit, then," Francois Villon proposed, "so I may learn what wisdom you have acquired!"
The arrogant svelte brunette Katherine of Burgundy, incarcerated in a dungeon all this while, had stormed at her jailers when they brought her food, insisting on an audience with the King. When they curtly informed her that His Majesty was no longer in Paris, her fury knew no bounds. But then, as the agonizingly desolate nights passed, she began to be afraid. She tried to bribe one of the jailers to send a courier to her brother, but failed in the attempt. Pacing the floor restlessly, longing for the comforting presence of auburn-haired Guillemette, Katherine's anger and fear grew equally apace. But, in her vanity as a woman, what most distressed her was the ridiculous cropping of her lustrous raven black hair, which, in the costume of peasant blouse and skirt and rude camisole and a single petticoat, made her look the more ludicrous.
As she stood brooding over her misfortune, the dungeon door opened and Jules and Pierrot, the assistant torturers of the palace, entered. The Duchess of Burgundy whirled to confront them. "Do you come to take me to the King, at last?" she cried.
They did not answer, but, seizing her wrists, dragged her from the dungeon, while the indignant dominatress cursed and threatened them with terrible reprisals if they dared harm the person of the Duchess of Burgundy.
They brought her into a dungeon at the end of the gloomy, dark corridor, and with a cry of mingled rage and terror, Katherine beheld the sinister devices of torture which furnished this high-vaulted cell. Towards a metal triangle set into a rectangular platform of stone about a foot off the dungeon floor, they forced her and, despite her shrill cries and raging demands to be taken to the King of France, they bound her with wrists high above her head to the peak of the apparatus; then, ripping off her skirt-the same skirt that Solange Mercier had worn into the camp of her brother's army-they made her slim ankles fast to the widely spread legs at the base of the triangle. This done, they left her, shrieking against the indignity done a person of her exalted rank, to wait in growing suspense and anguish.
And when at last, a full hour later, Francois Villon and Louise of Vauxelle entered the dungeon, Katherine of Burgundy was perspiring with the sweat of fear and nearly hysterical in her unreasoning dread of what awaited her. For the two masked half-naked assistants to Tristan l'Hermite had set a brine-filled bucket beside the triangle, in which two birch rods soaked in pickle.
"Ah, our Burgundian spy!" Louise cried, clapping her hands gleefully as she approached the struggling, fuming brunette dominatress.
"I am no spy, you witless girl! I am Katherine, Duchess of Burgundy! I demand to be taken before that doddering idiot who calls himself King of France!"
"And now, Francois, m amour," Louise maliciously cooed, "this hussy dares commit lese-majeste! She a duchess? In that attire? And with her hair sheared like a boy's?"
"It is true she does not resemble royalty at this moment," the poet-swordsman laughingly agreed.
"Of a certainty she does not, mi' amour! And since the King of France is my guardian and I his dutiful and obedient ward, will you not permit me, Francois, to inflict the chastisement which I am certain he would order for this impudent Burgundian baggage?"
"I am not one to gainsay a princess, my lovely Louise of Vauxelle," he gallantly replied with a courtly bow.
"Louise of Vauxelle?" Katherine of Burgundy cried, beside herself, as she tugged uselessly at her bound wrists dragged high above her head. "You spiteful chit, you know who I am! Beware of my brother's wrath if you dare offend me!"
"How she does prattle of power, this lowly peasant trollop," Louise merrily remarked. "A good birching will purge her of the choler and impertinence which inflate her nature. Give me leave, m amour?"
Francois Villon chuckled, spread out his hands in a gesture of good-natured resignation. "You are a princess, I but a poor poet," he replied. "Act as the ward of the King of France, without need to consult a commoner!"
"So I shall!" Louise hissed greedily.
Then, striding to the appraised stone dais, she tore away the petticoat and the camisole, and Katherine of Burgundy was naked as the day of her birth. A frenzied and prolonged scream rose from the dominatress' throat to find herself thus degraded before a man. But before she could find words to express the overwhelming rage and shame that made her naked body shake convulsively, Louise of Vauxelle had seized one of the birch rods in the bucket of brine, and, brandishing it in the air, directed it with a wicked, hissing Swishhhh across the upper summits of Katherine's bottom.
"AHRR! OH NOO! HOW DARE YOU TREAT ME SO! OH, DIEU M AV ENGERA! I am a noblewoman, you dare not-AIII! OHHAHRRRR! NOO, PAS CAASSES! PITIE! EEYAHRRROWWWW!"
For even as the svelte Duchess twisted and writhed under the first pitiless lash, exclaiming that such a degrading punishment was never ordained for any member of the nobility, Louise vengefully applied a second, then a third cut of the flexible bundle of switches across the plumpest curves of Katherine's naked posterior. "So I am witless chit, eh, Your Grace." Swishhhl "A wanton who ought to be locked up in a nunnery, am I?" Swish-swishhhhl "Was it thus you repaid my father's princely hospitality by insulting a princess?" Swishhswishh-swishhh Your Grace"-Louise's lips twisted with sarcasm as she pronounced that title of nobility-" that a princess is of far nobler birth than a duchess!" Swish. Swishh. Swishhhh!
Punctuating her mocking discourse with adroitly sweeping blows of the birch, which had begun to shred its twigs and leaves on the dais of the flogging triangle, Louise of Vauxelle flogged the squirming, jerking, twisting bare bottom-cheeks and long shapely thighs with exemplary vigor, till drops of blood pearled on the fine smooth skin and Katherine's cries became deafening.
Casting aside the frayed rod, Louise seized the other and returned to her vindictive attack to repay haughty Katherine of Burgundy for the affront done her, till at last the naked victim, her bubbies jiggling wildly as she flung herself this way and that to escape the scalding cuts of the switches, hysterically implored mercy as might a child: "EEEYAHRROWWW! OUUUUEEE! PARDON! STOP! STOP! I REPENT WHAT I SAID, MY PRINCESS! AHHROWWWOUU! I'LL DO WHATEVER YOU WISH, ONLY HAVE PITY ON ME! I AM DYING! MERCY! All! EEEAHHRR! OH, FORGIVE ME, YOUR HIGHNESS, ENOUGH, ENOUGH!"
Louise, panting, her eyes gleaming, her magnificent pear-bubbies rising and falling with exultant turbulence, turned to Francois Villon. "Take her, ma'amour," she hissed. "She who hates men so, it will be fitting punishment!"
"OHHH NOOO! PRINCESS LOUISE, NOT THAT! NOT A MAN! OH! HAVE PITY ON ME! I WILL PAY YOU RANSOM, I WILL DO ANYTHING-BUT NOT THAT!" Katherine of Burgundy screamed, turning her agonized face back over her shoulder to entreat mercy.
Louise of Vauxelle lowered the birch to the surface of the stone dias, then snapped it up between the svelte brunette's naked straddled thighs. Katherine's body frenziedly stiffened, jerked and lunged, a wordless and inhuman shriek reverberating in the torture chamber.
A second cut, in the same perfidious place, followed at once; then a third.
"Now will you accept him?" Louise purred, as she extended the supple birch and raised it till its slender tips rubbed against Katherine's distended, chafed and burning quim.
Choking with sobs, shuddering uncontrollably, the naked captive found herself unable to speak; Louise, with a sensual laugh, lowered the rod and slashed it up between Katherine's thighs for the fourth time.
"EEEAHROWWUUEEE! YES, YES, YES, ANYTHING, ONLY SPARE ME, OH YOU ARE
KILLING ME, SPARE ME, I'LL DO WHAT YOU WISH!" Katherine hysterically capitulated.
Louise of Vauxelle flung away the rod. But then she turned to the excited poet-swordsman. "You see, m amour? I'm giving you an unexpected reward. But before you accept it, you've a duty to your princess...."
"Always," he gallantly breathed.
"Thrashing that big jiggling backside has excited me so much that I fear you will have to soothe my nerves before you ravish Katherine," Louise giggled as she wound her arms around Francois Villon's neck, her slender white fingers working their way delicately over his skin, sensuously rousing his basest desires, and making him forget any manners he had ever possessed.
Sagging painfully in her bonds, Katherine of Burgundy, her shapely derriere and thighs glistening crimsonly over the white with the blood drawn by the biting rods, her eyes glued to the slowly unveiling scene before her, felt naught but shame and agonized hatred for the clever vixen who had brought her so shamefully low. Wishing she could turn herself away and never be unmanned by such a rank display of sensual desires so openly displayed between a man and a woman, nonetheless, Katherine kept her eyes glued to the unraveling scene before her fascinated eyes.
like the lioness and the bitch-dog, Louise made her attack, taking as always the surreptitious lead and Francois, loyal and loving man that he was, could not resist the slight-for him-temptation of having an early slug at a kill. Her fingers around the back of his neck and inching up into his hair, her lips moving closer to his and moving as they soundlessly whispered words of love and endearment, her hips sliding sensuously back and forth across his heated weapon, egged him ever onward until he could no more have pulled back and stopped than the cat could have foregone his slain dinner, the just reward of his fruitful and long chase.
His strong and bony hands, so deceptive in their hidden strength and subtle agility, gripped at the shoulders of her dress as though to rip it bodily from her creamy flesh, but instead he refrained as his long fingers slipped the filmy material of her expensive gown slowly down over her upper arms, revealing the smooth creamy whiteness of her flawless skin. So enthralled was he with the delightful beauty of her mere shoulders that he bent his leonine head with its "helmet-shaped haircut" and laid his lips reverently and gently on that pearly milk flesh she so ardently loved to have caressed. As his mouth crept across her skin, his tongue was busy flitting back and forth from one corner of his mouth to the other and quickly flicking tiny drops of masculine saliva across the small expanse his red tongue managed to cover on each whipping stroke.
Beneath his expert and adoring hands, Louise felt herself becoming more and more excited as she let her body's small restraint loose and felt the pounding of blood through her delicate structure, laving her face and neck with heightening shades of pink, flooding her exposed flesh with the internal heat only a man could ever give to her. For often she lay alone, she recalled, cold with the chill of separation from all living beings, encased and entombed in a wall of living gray stone, silent with the specter voices of the calm and indifferent night air as it poured unheedingly through the open casement of her jeweled and diamond-paneled window to slither damply across the uncaring floor.
Now, though she rang with the pulsating vigor of the living woman who had found a man worthy of capturing her, a brute male strong enough to weary her insatiable body, a gentleman revering enough to separate the carnal desires he felt for her from the cirtuous pedestal she clawed to remain erect upon. With his face buried deep in the enchanting and enticing hollow of her shoulder where his tongue had crept and even now was nestled in deep contemplation, he couldn't see the triumphant smile she tossed in the way of Katherine. And even if he had, he would have discount d it as being a figment of his virile imagination, his mind being as arrestingly strong and versatile as his body was demanding of womanly appreciation.
Now she in her growing need for his hands and his mouth began to concentrate on her lover, feeling rather than seeing the almost unblinking eyes of Katherine as they followed the enrapt couple through every move with fearful hate and horrid premonition of what was to be in store for her once the little orgy was over.
Her hands went from his neck and hair down to the top of his ruffled doublet and gained the neck of his lace shirt, working swiftly and lightly, moving with infinite grace and sureness, edging unexpectedly into his clothing and working further under his damp clothing to feel the now exposed flesh of the base of his heavy neck. With her fingers she could feel the pulses, knew of their surging beneath his skin, felt their throbbing all the faster because her hands lay there, beat with a heavy and steady rhythm that said how full of the eternal life he truly was.
And then she was at the fine drawstrings that held his lawn shirt close around his fine neck, working her slender hands through the loosely tied knot, pulling gently on it to loosen it so that she could get her long-nailed fingers further into his growing mass of curls that covered his handsome and muscular chest.
He felt the massing fires of his manhood gathering steam as her fingers crept further beneath his garments, exciting him in a way he had never been aroused by any of his many past loves, sending him into ecstasy even before he could get below the tight waist of her dress, quite before he could pillow his massive head between those luscious tits of hers that he so fondly desired and had so lovingly caressed but few times.
"Mon coeur," she whispered against his flat ears, fluttering her sweet-scented breath to tease him more than to tell him of her passionate longing for the tightness of his masculinity pressing between her thighs, of slowly climbing up under her voluminous skirts and ascending her sensitive legs, creeping up to and beyond her shivering thighs, going up until it found what it sought. She wanted him to come into her and she also wanted only him with Katherine watching helplessly tied against the wall and slavering desperately eager for herself to be in the reverse position.
His panting breath, now on her shoulder and moving down toward her rounded and dimpled elbow taking her dress with it, incensed her beyond the measure of her wildest dreams and she felt her body responding in like tempo. Her bosom heaved under its delicate and easily distorted covering, shaping with her every inhalation the thrusting shape of not only her breasts but also her hardening nipples as they strained to be free from the material. But it was simply too strong and he found it all the more enticing to see her voluptuous and rounded twin mounds rising and falling so quickly before his slyly diverted eyes. He could see none but her and it would have been so if the "Spider King" himself had hobbled through the dank quarters of the dungeon at that instant.
His head came back up over her shoulder and across the line of her rounded neck swan-like in its slender length and grace of movement, came over the sharp edge of her jaw and sought the downy softness of her blooming cheek before seeking the lush garden of her full red mouth and sparkling white ivory teeth and the abrasiveness of her quick and teasing tongue. So he did, and heard her moan low in her throat as he ventured to caress her mouth with his own, sliding his lips slowly across her own at an angle that bent her head slightly as it did his, making their mutual reaching that much easier, and giving him the little leverage to convey his eager tongue deeply into her receptive mouth, bypassing almost her teeth.
She felt his hot lips as they came closer to her waiting mouth, and she felt disappointment when for the moment they bypassed her rosebud and crept silently across her young cheek only to return and cover her mouth with his in an embrace that foretold of his desire for her, being more than anything he had ever felt for a woman before in his checkered career of flesh and war.
Thus their mouths met as if it were the beginning for all the world and this was the first passionate kiss, an entreaty to all the generations to come that one must feel the being of the partner as much as he felt, that only this way could two people meet and feel the fullness of roused passions that knew no bounds nor any restraints, that would overflow at the least compulsion and flame in the low heat even of a dank sordid cellar where only before had felons and murderers lain. Pressed together, nipples to nipples with her breasts being crushed against his strong and broad chest, and thigh to thigh, their love met when his weapon using its inborn instincts sought her love nest even through the layers of skirts.
Being coy more than quickly desirous, Louise made him perform for his reward, so that it was with agonizing slowness that Francois was able to unveil that most secret and sacred of her luscious secrets, having become determined to sample for himself the innermost delights she could ever offer her lover, and thereby receive from him the ultimate in honors-his sperm. And he realized that it couldn't be delayed for too much longer as his body would not keep itself in readiness forever, but would soon be demanding release and relief from the building torments of delight that he knew were mustering in his loins.
Perceptibly, then the long skirts came creeping up around her undulating thighs, revealing her slender ankles so neatly encased in high-ankled leather booties (for she had extraordinarily small feet and wore not boots but booties), then the topping of her sheer stockings that disappeared beneath the strangling rounds of petticoats, to be followed by her rounded knees and the garters that lay just above them holding the stockings high on her legs.
His hands reached her thighs and found their nakedness a soothing soft delight to behold in the palm of his calloused palms, so soft and gently rounded the delicately downed flesh was, and he waited there for his mind to catch up with his body, his hand caressing over and over the length of naked flesh between the top of her stockings to the edge of her furry vulva.
When he felt her thighs part slightly and her knees bend just a little, he knew he would be more than welcome, especially when he felt the drop of liquid honey, heated from the glowing heat of her virginal body drop down onto his hand and spread across his flesh, softening it caressingly like the pure grease the shepherds boiled from their woolly companions ... but it had the scent of the gardens at the king's royal residence just outside of Paris.
Suddenly, Louise felt the last lingering shreds of her self-restraint snap, like the shredding of the high-flying clouds after the storm before a strong cleansing breeze. Her fingers dug into his flesh where she had a grip on it at the base of the front of his neck as she let him know quite certainly that she wanted him to enter her now.
Shifting his light holds on her body, he prepared to mount under her and pull her down over his rampant penis that cried for quick relief while threatening to relieve itself soon.
He drove down onto her, having no mercy for any pain she might possibly feel, keeping with his role of gentle conqueror, though, he didn't hurt her really, having excellent control and great desire to make this a loving time for her.
He gasped as she grabbed onto him, pulling herself onto his massive penis. Slamming herself into his groinal area, making their two fleshes ache with the smacking together of their bodies, crunching their bones grindingly into each other, adhering sweating flesh to sweating flesh, Louise gained her objective through him.
And in the height of her delirious pleasures, her eyes fell onto Katherine, drooping in her chains, her eyes glued to their sapient and passient loving. Louise then ignored further the duchess, deliberately looking through her bloody flesh, pretending that Francois and herself were the only two people in that place.
When the scene was completely enacted and the lovers feeling themselves momentarily replete, parted their untied bodies, Louise remembered the duchess. She deliberately excited Francois into another state of high erection, so that when he looked at his lady-love, she was subtly able to redirect his attentions toward the virgin Katherine. His hand wandered forth to caress her body.
However, she shrank away from him as far as possible that she could feel herself pressing against the less nauseating slime of the stones beside her, dripping as they were with cold water and sulphurous excrements from ages past. Resolving not to scream as she had before, disgracing herself, contaminating her good name and her valorous conduct, she clamped her lips tightly together, making a thin line-of the two rosebuds, compressing the flower that Francois desired in his mounting heat to feel softening against her own.
His hand came out touching against her naked arm, causing her to shrink back, horror spreading across her face, contorting her beautiful face, so repulsed by this being she was. His fingers, nonetheless, closed relentlessly around her arm, capturing it easily, pulling her towards him roughly, into his arms. She shrank back, coming against the hard circle of his closed arms, struggling in the unbreakable grip of his steely muscles, being pulled closer and closer to his working mouth and glazed eyes.
She screamed, despite her solemn pledge, overridden by her encompassing horror and fear, succumbing to her bodily shaking, staggering in his grasp, trembling violently against his flesh, and screaming her mouth gaping open, her head thrown back, her throat working heavily while he laid his lips on the bobbing of her heaving adam's apple, seeking to engulf it with his soft kissing.
Even as he bent over, rolling her toward the solid floor and better leverage with which to penetrate her virginal passage, she began to fight him and her fears. But lest she escape, he held her in a heavy grip, hanging her within a circle of his closing arms, crushing her to his breast while his mouth clung to her mouth, effectively stopping her screaming cries for mercy.
Never having known the penetration of a penis before she did not know what to expect, thinking that she would feel great anguish, hoping she would die as he tried to take her long preserved maidenhead. But no such thing was bound to happen, as she would soon find out.
But for the moment, hanging suspended between heaven and hell, dangling like a puppet in the arms of this master of strings, she felt strange things happening to her body. Heaving in her breasts, betraying her mounting excitement, showing that while she was frightened, she was also excited, wanting to be desired and taken as much as she tried to struggle against possession. The blood pounding in her temples, resounding through her head, singing along her arteries, leaping for her vagina and piling heavily into her flesh between her thighs, all gave her away. In her stomach she could feel the first, the beginnings of strange tinglings, at first just an almost nonexistent beat that grew, flailing her intestines into a furor of action, driving her adrenals to work harder than usual, sending sweat to the pores of her flesh, lubricating her body and the internal passages where any penis could safely enter and be assured of a slippery welcome.
The tingling, building and changing into a beat, whose heaviness spread from her stomach down to her vagina and her pubic hairs, further along her thighs so that they throbbed excruciatingly, and up from her stomach, into her diaphragm, stopping her jagged breath, making her gasp for each single whiff of air she was able to glean from the scant supply that got in. With this spreading she felt a growing heat and flush as it spread up her neck to her shoulders and up into her face so that eventually the roots of her hair were hardly distinguishable from the ending of her sweat covered forehead except for the watery shine the flesh had her hair didn't exude.
The icy coldness of the floor came up and entered her back, running cold fingers along her spine and shoulders, causing her buttocks to pull up onto themselves, making Francois' penetration of her tightness even the more difficult. But he was persistent seeking her taut opening, feeling for it with his sensitive fingers, knowing when he found it, the difference in the moisture and the warmth, knowing it at once, even though he had never felt that particular hole before. She arched her back instinctively moving away from the bitter coldness, placing herself unknowingly into an easier position.
In his arousal, he sensed only that she was rotating her thighs and lifting her cunt closer to his rampant pecker, this being the time-honored silent affirmative of the woman's readiness to be completely possessed by the waiting man. He took his cue from her body, it knowing more than her mind what was needed and desired, and began to come against her spreading thighs, helping her with his hands, shoving her resisting legs further apart, giving him the necessary room to enter her completely.
Her control, limited at best, gave in again and she began screaming incoherently, begging for mercy and receiving none of what she branded as mercy, a commodity that had been sadly lacking in herself for many times past, for which some would say, she was now paying in full measure. Her voice rose in a wailing scream, which Francois misinterpreted, willingly perhaps, for he pressed his attack, coming closer against her quivering flesh, getting closer to his ultimate goal, her vulva.
As suddenly as she had felt her body building into his forced embraces, she felt herself growing weaker, leaving herself wide open for an all-out frontal attack, which he immediately obliged on her by pressing himself home, coming to the dark entrance, dripping with her delectable juices even she did not know existed.
Realizing that she wanted to give in, she felt the shame and self-contempt rising inside of her against this weakening of standards. Wanting to surrender and actually surrendering were two foreign substances to wreak havoc with her determination, laying her open to his surging attack which did not lessen as he realized that her morale was falling steadily.
He pressed his point, coming closer to her gaping love hole, as it gaped wider in acknowledgment of his penis' presence, a fact she still solidly attempted to keep from her body, but to little avail, for all she did was make the final capitulation all the slower and more humiliating in the end.
Her trembling flesh, weak as all flesh and long denied, cried out to be held, fondled, touched, loved and her body was quite determined to have its way as it always had before. Her mind still fought, shrieking in silent agony as her heritage and honor paraded before her staring eyes, in stern demeanor. Desiring to bow to the ultimate demands of each, she succeeded in angering both, for her body was lashed by the heavy grip of the man while her mind degraded itself in abasing abjection.
In the end Francois won.
Poised on the edge of her hole, holding himself steady for that instant before penetrating, he felt her loose to herself. Advantageously in that split second he thrust himself forward, his prick seeking the dim recesses of her fluttering cavity.
Her body leaped as a spark of shock reeled from his glans penis to her flesh, throwing both of them just off balance momentarily, so that his swollen weapon brushed against her clitoris. like a sergeant-major, it snapped to attention, sending coarse thrills humming back through her lacerated flesh. She jerked, remembering numerous past experiences then when she had done similar deeds to arouse her women, making their bodies spasm with the touch of her hand. She had not connected the same reaction with men.
Francois followed his glans immediately with his left hand, searching slowly, feeling his way between his thighs and across her pubic bush to her labia, hence to her standing clitoris. Under his forefinger he rubbed the hard callus of sensitive flesh until it responded, sending waves of delight surging along her vulva.
He was not too deeply enmeshed into her that he could not feel the suddenness of her arousal, glorying in it. Responding, he moaned deep in his throat as he launched himself partially into her body, his prick thrusting inquisitively up beyond her fluttering passage that was being stretched by his widening stem.
She was so tight that he had to force himself into her with gradual pressure, often withdrawing to the corona to give her a chance to recoup, which she did by breathing. Then he would come into her again, edging himself even further inside her on the next stroke, taking more of her with each successive jab, coming closer to her maidenhead, which he did not know she still possessed.
Even if he had known, he probably would have gone only the faster, being of the firm belief that a fast penetration was better for any beginner than a slowly agonizing scraping. He realized when he was almost halfway into her that the block in her passage was indeed her hymen, to which he gasped in surprise and withdrew to review the situation. A few seconds feeling her tension in his arms, and smelling the fear sweating from her body, he decided to make this as quick as possible, he did not wish to cause her more pain than was necessary.
Louise, contrariwise, wanted the duchess to suffer all the more, to be affected and abject as though this were a new method of torturing, which she avidly prayed in this case it was. She watched, her smiling face registering more glee each time the duchess registered pain or bewilderment.
Fire raged up her hole when his overtaxed penis blew its top, shooting sperm into the lining of her hole just before her hymen was snapped. She could feel the hot liquid spurting into every crevice of her tight channel, running down the straight walls and back onto his pubic hairs and his testicles. From behind her belly she felt another knot growing, sizing itself for a spectacular knot of feminine explosions.
Rising with her as his penis shot, he retained his hold on her and his foothold inside her, boring himself deeper as he overestimated her reaction, hence driving himself beyond her maidenhead, and splitting it, gaining for himself another feather in his cap of conquests.
While she was momentarily stunned by his jetting into her, he grabbed the instant, grinding his weapon all the way to his groin against her bush, penetrating her for as far as her cavity extended, bumping his glans penis against the back of her cunt hole.
This being the last thing she had expected in her mind, her body reacted accordingly and she felt a knot in her stomach growing until it dropped with a sickening thud into her love passage only to explode wetly over his hot penis, wetting as well as easing his after-come strain.
Sighing, he began to withdraw from her and stopped, smelling the acrid odor of blood from her smashed maidenhead. He paused, gathering himself to inspect his weapon the instant it appeared from her body, which he proceeded to do, finding it smeared a little with red.
Louise stepped lightly up to the duchess, also wanting to see that the virginity had been taken, for this was her personal vengeance against Katherine, for whom she had a great hatred. Seeing the slimy condition of his member, she smiled, thinking of yet another humiliation for the weary and shamed Katherine to be shoved into.
"Wouldn't you want your joystick cleaned, m hmour de ma coeur," she asked of Francois.
He nodded, being too weary and breathless to reply otherwise.
"Then Mademoiselle la duchesse will, I am sure, be more than willing to oblige you, mon coeur." And turning to face the defeated woman, she said, "Get down on your noble knees, mademoiselle, and lay your mouth on his precious weapon. Now!" she commanded stridently.
"And, and if ... I refuse....? " The woman was not totally defeated, yet, in her still was the lingering spirit of her ancestors and her family, which had always sustained her before through all issues and wars.
"You will, and willingly, or you will feel this again," Louise cried, furiously wielding the whip, slapping down across the duchess' naked flank, tender from her recent beating, bruised from her sexual fall on the hard flooring.
When Katherine hesitated, fearing this horrid thing, seeing his messy penis, still erect and dripping with pink cream, she cringed only to feel the haft of the whip ram into her still dripping hole. The force of the blow, lifting her from her feet, smashed into her intestines, sending anguished waves of pain screaming across her body.
"NO! NO! PLEASE. I'LL DO THIS THING.
BUT DON'T--" And to avoid a second encounter with such raucous pain, she fell back to her knees, reaching for the pecker, gingerly taking it in her right hand. She stared at it for a moment, contemplating getting this smelly mixture in her mouth, dreading the much nastier task of swallowing it, for she knew that was what she was ordered to do. Swallowing several times quickly, tightening her grip on the slippery shaft, she moved her mouth to the purplish swelling above the corona, where her fingers finally caught and held on the shaft, after sliding from the base.
Practically sobbing in her ultimate shame, she placed her lips over the head, spreading her mouth to accommodate the extra width, unaccustomed as her mouth was to such a large load at one mouthful.
She began her final humiliation ... and so it ends.
Histroy records that Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, suffering a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of the Swiss, had seen them penetrate to the heart of Lorraine, the narrow, critical province that linked the north and south of his vast Burgundian territories. They had seized the city of Nancy, capital of Lorraine, and in a blinding snowstorm with inadequate force, Charles the Bold rashly set out to retake it. On Sunday, January 5, 1477, his army was routed and he himself slain by an unknown assailant, his mangled body left stripped of its magnificent black armor; and his wife Mary of Burgundy, who detested wars, was left to parley with the "Spider King."
The Duchess, Mary of Burgundy, in her hate and abhorrence of war and warfare, was left almost helpless against the wrath of the King of France, who meant quite well to take his vengeance out on the Duke's widow, for she was part of his family, his name, his honor, his life. She would pay for the crime he had circumnavigated, through death.
Her Grace, Lady Mary, fully aware of the "Spider King's" cruel hate for her, sight unseen, word unspoken, obeyed the man's summons to confront him. Their first encounter was also to be their last for the king, although quite hateful of her, sight unseen, had not prepared for the woman the duchess did turn out to be.
At the royal castle quite far from Burgundy, where Lady Mary was commanded to present herself to her king, she rode through cruel weather and over excruciating roads, that were product of the poverty and the knowledge of the times. She refused to take a litter, knowing that while they were stylish, they were not only uncomfortable but dangerous, for with the miserable roads, accidents were common-fatal ones, she reminded herself. And even though she believed that Louis wanted to see her alive, to humiliate her in her dead husband's stead, it was not inconceivable that her death might be more feasible to his mind, for no one every knew what the "Spider King" would do next, what would be his next move.
So having prayed and confessed for strength, endurance, and guidance, she began her long journey, taking only the barest essentials necessary for the support of her station, in meager style at that, on the way. The Lady Mary was far from being paupered, but she did not believe in undue waste for any unworthy cause, as she fully believed this meeting at the king's command would be. Feeling that he'd already decided her fate, fripperies would not make any difference, except to add to his merriment and to her discomfort in the last issue.
After almost a month of difficult and ghastly traveling, the Duchess of Burgundy, complete with her small train, arrived at the appointed meeting place. Faced with the possibility that she wouldn't be allowed to freshen herself, Her Grace had wisely worn travelable clothing. Her feeling was more than correct, for she was summoned immediately to the royal presence the instant she set foot inside the turret gates.
With the hand from her servant, Guiles, she dismounted, landing with her usual light grace and sureness of foot. She had quietly noted the lack of greetings due to her rank and the guard stationed around. When the page clearly and contemptuously announced her orders, she followed wordlessly.
"Duchess of Burgundy," he sneered at her, standing as though she were some odor he had to contend with for a short spell.
"I am she," Lady Mary replied civilly.
"Come with me, then, Your Grace," he added after a significant pause and with an accompanying sneer.
He did not offer her his arm, nor did he make way for her to proceed him, instead he turned on his heel and strode quickly away, leaving her to run to catch up to him, which she did not do. Instead she dismounted, thanking her man, Guiles, and walked quietly after the quickly disappearing back of the surly page. She was late and had been announced long before she arrived at the entrance to the stately hall.
Sitting crookedly in his royal chair, Louis watched as the youth, the page in question, blurted his announcement, slurring the words so that her title almost did not come out, "Ma dame Marie, La
Duchesse de Bourgandie, elle entrent ici." Whirling around, the page faced an empty hall, as though the duchess had deliberately not appeared. In fact it was almost two minutes before the tall slender figure, dressed in Lincoln Green, her hair bound in a matching wimple that came down around under her chin and with a cloak of dagged scarlet wool falling from her shoulders to the floor came walking regally down the long wide corridor toward Louis.
Even though she was covered from head to toe with only her face and hands showing (she had removed her gloves and given them to her servant along with her crop) the King sat up, as much as he was able, and took notice. The straight lines of her simple dress could never disguise the fullness of her tall form, emphasizing the absurdly tiny waist because of the overly robust fullness of her breasts, so full that they threatened to burst through her bodice, so it seemed. Even her hips, well-developed as they were, they were not nearly as large as her chest measurements. She carried herself erect, but showed no signs of arrogance. She walked quickly, but there was not the least sign of haste in her step, neither was she loitering. She entered the room alone, in disgrace for her late husband, and lowly, but she did not notice this scorn from the attending members of his court. Unhesitantly, she walked toward the "Spider King," her firm long steps carrying her swiftly to the dais on which his throne sat. She did not hesitate nor fumble as she knelt to him and greeted him. She did not entreat him. She did not ask what he wanted. She did not ask what he would do to her, now that he had her.
She knelt before him, greeted him as sovereign and waited for his word.
"You are either courageous," Louis opened, "or you want something from me. Which?"
"I did as I was ordered as a subject of Your Majesty. I have nothing from which I would beg, unless Your Majesty has a suggestion." She waited for his next word, nothing passing across her face, no flickering of her eyes.
"Aren't you afraid of me?" He was puzzled by her attitude, this never having happened to him before, because most came groveling after favors, the rest flaunting services or trembling in terror. She asked "Should I be?"
"I am the King," he snarled loudly. Titters rang around the room. "People, my subjects fear me, most of my nobles hate and fear me. Some dare to laugh at me-behind my back, of course."
"The king is always the king, Sire." She paused. When he did not show anything, she interpreted that as his signal to continue, answering the rest of his query. "All Frenchmen should fear their creator, their king and themselves, Sire. And there is no one who doesn't make enemies at some time in his life-regardless of the justice of their making. One must do his duty, and duty can make enemies as can wealth, power, beauty, or any excellence in any field, ecumenical not excluded, Sire. And lastly, Sire, a real man doesn't care what people say or think of him, so long as he knows he is doing the best he can under the circumstances. Even the creator asked no more of his disciples."
Finished, she stopped, closing her ruby red lips, waiting for his next move. There was a long silence, in which the small shuffling of the standing nobles changing feet and the rustle of silken gowns sounded loudly in the audience chamber. Still the King sat, staring at the beautiful widow, thinking on her words.
Finally, he spoke again, "It is our understanding that your Grace is against war."
"Yes, Sire, I oppose fighting."
"And if we declare it legal and right to look upon it as good?"
"I would still believe what the founder of our faith said, that we should conduct ourselves toward all people the way we would like them to treat us. I am against war. I would not make war on another, I believe others would not want to make war on me."
"And supposing one was to fight with you, for whatever reason?"
"If I needed to defend myself, I believe I would ... or my children, or my servants. But I should not make war on another."
"The late Duke did not so believe," the king got to the crux of this meeting, "unfortunately he is dead, having escaped vengeance. Whom shall I punish?" '
"Our creator has succinctly stated that vengeance is his, and that those who make war their habit, shall be consumed by it."
"Whom shall I punish?" His voice was petulant.
"That is for Your Majesty's conscious to answer. I am but a woman, I hope I do not judge, for it isn't my duty, but the creator's right."
He could pursue his point and her simple answers would make him the looser, for he could not get around the fact that she would not fall in with his scheme, making a scapegoat for his frustrated vengeance. And no matter what he might do to her, now, he would only lose by it, for his people would know and he could not keep all voices silent.
So, with a stiff fine that almost beggared her, he released her, forbidding her to ever come to court. She was satisfied with the outcome of this meeting.
Of Katherine, we know much less, save that she was sent back to Burgundy, gall in her heart, morose and taciturn concerning what had befallen her in the dungeon of Louis XI. For reasons of state, she wed-but by then, she was no longer virgin-Louise of Vauxelle had made certain of that.
A year later, Louise herself was wed to the powerful Baron Letours of the province of Guilly, an alliance which aided Louis XI to present a mighty front against any further threat of rebellious Burgundy. And Francois Villon, master swordsman and poet and for a brief time Grand Constable of France, went on to make more immortal ballades and, some say, to settle down on a small, quiet estate in Poitou, wed at last but doubtless not forgetting to dream, now and again, of his nights of glory and passion when he had been the willing slave of the "Spider King."
