"This is-though some might punish my candor-so fucking Medieval!" Juliana Bisque-Hardy Mellroot's dulcet voice rang off the tiled cell walls.
Chained wrists jutting backward, she offered a piquant icon of aggrieved British womanhood. Her head thrust forward, chin high above her rumpled blouse. Her skirted seat dug with bulldog defiance into the cushion resting on the floor.
"Ju', honey, your candor nailed our asses to the lamppost once already." Lucretia Sue Merydith shifted her naked bottom on its brocade pillow.
She spoke above the numbing drone as a machine labored to cool and humidify the desert air for their window less cell. "As to being Medieval, the folks back home in Georgia got some downright Gothic ways where womanfolk's concerned."
Six feet tall, the American redhead wore only a man's shirt on her whipcord and whalebone frame. Silken wrist fetters kept her hands demurely at the small of her back.
"I've seen Hee-Haw and your Smoky Mountain bucolic, Miss Parton." Juliana's nyloned, unshod toes rippled. "I have reference to this Inquisitorial backwater on the oozy Persian sewer so politely termed a Gulf."
"95% of humanity is still sniffing around the Declaration of the Rights of Man like a randy hound circling a wolf-bitch, uncertain if it wants to begin its mating nips," Lucretia Sue pointed out.
"When I played exchange student," she continued, "a whole lot of mistresses and their giggly girl praelictor co-conspirators took care to thwack into my hide that cute public school maxim that 'Life is Pain.' " Juliana's flaxen Saxon head inclined pityingly. "There is such a thing as Justice. I had hoped that you learned thai at Miss Maelstrom's with us, Trews. Without Justice there can only be Darkness. This vile farce mimicking jurisprudence, this frowning Arab mumbo-jumbo masquerading as procedure does not-cannot-and could never hope to ape simple Law, much less Justice."
She set her shoulders resolutely. "I am an adult British subject. I do not intend to countenance receiving corporal correction."
At least not from wogs, I won't, she added fiercely. Not for all the oil in Araby.
"Lord . . . I'm the one they confiscated the jeans from." Lucretia Sue informed the universe at large. "All they took were her snippy ol' spike heels."
Juliana looked unhappy. "Item: one pair of virgin yak skin high-heeled shoes, suitable for office or evening wear, Adjudged 'provocatively feminine attire.' To be burned by order of the Magistrate's Court.
"Item: one pair of 14-karat gold earrings, for pierced ears. Adjudged 'seductively feminine attire.' To be returned to the prisoner-thank you, gentlemen, I assure you-upon her deportation, due to the quality of workmanship.
"Item: One Lady Wachovia Executrix gold wrist chronometer, with international date and seven distinct time functions, musical and optical alarms, and limited calculation capacity."
Juliana leaned toward her friend earnestly. "Said wrist chronometer adjudged by the court to be 'severely unfeminine apparatus.' To be retained within the state, by order of the magistrate, after deportation of the prisoner due to 'masculine utility.' "
"I got to admit your watch didn't resemble any feminine apparatus I ever eyeballed, or, in the case of Beastly Bella Ponsonby, laid--"
"Trews," the Englishwoman firmly shook her tired coiffure, "it is not quite the thing to discuss such matters after schooldays. Frank Harris set a regrettable precedent. He was Irish."
"I only intended to say, 'laid other sensory equipment upon.' "
"The point," Juliana pursued primly, "that I broached is that the very time is a specifically masculine province in this blighted heathenscape."
" 'Once the people know how to tell the time, they'll ask how time is used. You will no longer be called the king of time'--or some such eloquence from The Thief of Baghdad."
Lucretia Sue contemplated the ornate bronze door set in the blue and white tile walls. No fear of listeners at keyholes since push buttons worked the electronic lock.
"Arabian fantasies in the movies are a whole hell of a lot healthier than the one we are in the process of living," she concluded.
"These diseased feudal throwbacks--"
"Ju\ out here in the puckerbrush the folks have their li'l ways which it does not behoove us to be inordinately vocal about. That magistrate we saw earlier, for instance.
"A man charged with the authority to order anything from having your eyebrows tweezed to sewing your living carcass into a bloody pig's hide and having you towed from a helicopter as a rifle target-a man like that's not used to being called a 'witless parrot of megalomaniac misogyny,' or even a 'dictatorial cameldriver.' "
"My words needed to be strong to decry grave wrong." Juliana pursed her lips, all dignity.
"Lord ... all they did was catch you doing some two-fisted he-man work, some rugged data input and a little hairy-chested double-ledger bookkeeping. Me they nabbed with a hip flask of ol' Uncle Jack's No. 7 sourmash elixir."
"Trews, you suffered for that vulgar habit at Miss Maelstrom's, I rather do recall."
"Funny how ol' nicknames continue to apply." The American grinned. "Trews I'm wearing none of because they peeled 'em off me for the crime of wearing them in the first place. I got my first sixer at Miss M's female academy for just that."
Her English companion corrected, "Miss Maelstrom told you they were unsuitable, unfeminine attire straight away she saw you in them. Your six came for lip."
"I merely pointed out denim britches seemed a whole lot more modest than those school uniforms, the skirts of which couldn't get shorter without giving us girls a whole new set of lips to paint."
"Unintended vulgarity may be verbally corrected. Deliberate barbaric speech merits more painful and, one hopes, more lasting measures."
Miss Despina Maelstrom stood in the school's Great Hall, a converted stately home refectory. Rank on rank of briefly skirted girl scholars sat agog at the American exchange student's impudence.
The headmistress gestured and two lusty senior girl praelictors advanced on Lucretia Sue. The carrot-curled American debated showing the assembly a judicious dose of rib-cracking Okefenokee free-for-all.
Then she mentally shrugged. She'd applied for the Mothers of the Third Manassas overseas scholarship a taste foreign customs first hand. She dealt herself the cards; she made up her mind to play them out.
"Stand up, Merydith," Messaline Straightways directed her, raven-haired and wolf-jawed. "Palms flat on your head, if you please."
Lucretia Sue obeyed.
"I'll have those hoyden's trews removed, thank you," Miss Maelstrom enunciated crisply.
Messaline personally stripped down the offending denim She unbuckled the two-inch heeled pumps and handed them to the other prae. With officious relish, she plucked the furled jeans off Lucretia Sue's lifted feet.
The second prae, a hip-heavy blonde, guided the American to the rear of the room.
The assembly continued with exhortations to triumph on the games fields during the coming terms. Coveted cups and shared tradition flourished in Miss M's rhetoric as Lucretia Sue's arms grew heavy. A glance at Messaline convinced her not to drop them.
The girls had called the prae Dire Straits. A bony eighteen and hell on the hockey field, the senior girl served as one of four student overseers holding the pupils in check. Eyes and ears everywhere, they had limited authority to punish on their own, and often handled painful correctional chores for the adult school mistresses.
Peculiarly, some staff felt a senior girl could administer physical chastisement more fairly since she held fresher memories of punishment's pangs. "Dis-MISSED!" announced Miss Maelstrom. "With the exception of young Merydith and Bisque-Hardy."
A wheat-haired, stunningly figured girl hung back as the other students trooped out. The severe black-and-white school uniform accented her ripe strawberries-and-cream complexion. Her ears and cheeks glowed brighter as she shuffled toward the rear of the hall.
As with all senior girls, Miss Bisque-Hardy's midnight-hued woolen skirt flared from the lips and ended promptly three inches above her knees. Stark white regulation cotton stockings covered the full calf.
The outfits on the younger girls came snugger and shorter. Lucretia Sue imagined they'd been designed by Humbert Humbert in an inspired fit.
The four praes wore identical tailoring with the colors reversed. Black blouses and stockings with white skirts and jackets reminded the Georgian of the S.S. crossed with the Ku Klux Klan.
"Shall we adjourn to a more convenient place?" Miss Maelstrom's eyes raked them, sharpened icicles. "Be certain to incinerate those vulgar trews once we've done, Straightway s."
Messaline smiled tightly, squeezing the folded jeans. She fell in beside the unhappy Juliana Bisque-Hardy as the party followed the headmistress out into the huge, chill corridor.
"You may put your hands down," the blonde prae whispered, striding beside Lucretia Sue.
She dropped her palms and gave her panties an upward tug. The cold marble corridor made her feel distinctly vulnerable.
Beneath a grand staircase rising to the second and third floor sleeping rooms, a chapel-sized chamber had been consecrated to corporal punishment.
Girls and mistresses going and coming ensured that It would be overheard, with all consequent deterrent effect.
Lucretia Sue and Juliana marched in glumly. They stood against a wall whose faded gilt paper sported 18th Century shepherdesses dallying in fields the French Academy would have found saccharin.
The blonde prae firmly closed the door as wolf-smiled Messaline proudly used her own keys to unlock the punishment case. The double cabinet doors let a heavy, pungent vinegar smell into the room when opened.
"Bisque-Hardy, you recall my promise end of the Spring term." Miss Maelstrom extracted a violet sheet of note-paper from her sleeve. "I have your mother's sad report on your summer scholarship and her most earnest exhortation to deliver a regular straightener -- 'something to pull the girl's socks up' -- until your studious efforts bear tangible fruit. I must concur in her judgement."
Juliana's gaze rooted itself to the veined and aloof stone floor. At one side, Messaline and the other prae shed their pumps. They pulled on rubber-soled gym shoes . . . floor-clinging flogging shoes.
"Mondays, following Great Hall, until marked improvement dictates otherwise, you shall receive ten strokes of a birchrod across your buttocks."
The well-bosomed girl exhaled sharply.
"In four weeks, if the practice should still be required, the number shall advance to twelve. And so on, each four weeks."
A concerned frown creased the headmistress' lips. "If you find Christmas an unduly warm season, imagine the Lententide. I regret other inducements have proved futile, Bisque-Hardy."
Lucretia Sue's bottom had known some enthusiastic switchings in Georgia. She blinked incredulously at the rod Messaline drew from the glass pickling trough in the punishment case.
Five nastily budded birch withes, each rapier-tough, had been bound at their severed ends with red ribbon. The pencil-thick switches splayed from the ribboned handle and would obviously strike separately, each imparting its own stinging welt.
Juliana meekly folded her jacket on a small table. Her fingers clumsily worked at the absurd skirt. It dropped, exposing the brief silk slip required by school decorum.
She set the skirt on her jacket and twisted her plain, unfigured slip into a roll beneath her blouse's hem. Cotton panties clung to full-bodied hinds, roundly summited with cute hollows along the hipbones that made the cheeks stand up and out.
"I imagine you should remove those completely." Messaline skillfully took charge. "I don't propose to secure your legs and the knickers you exploded last term weigh upon my conscience.
Lucretia Sue watched the British girl expose her succulent bottom. With a nervous fold, she placed her panties atop her skirt.
She advanced to a short, padded horizontal beam set on an iron frame. The blonde, meaty-hipped second prae loosened fat-winged nuts. A lever wrenched groaning squeals from the metal till it raised the beam to meet Juliana's thatched pubes.
The upper surface slanted away. The girl bent forward till her loins rested on it. Her torso pointed at an angle toward the floor. She reached down.
The second prae put a mahogany dowel into Juliana's hands. The wooden stick had been secured to the floor by fat nylon stretch bands. They pulled the girl down, drawing her buttocks up smartly.
"Prepare," Miss Maelstrom called.
Messaline stepped into position, the five-fanged rod hissing as she swung upward. She lunged, her full weight behind her stroke.
The birch wands spread and clung to that cream-pale girlhide. Muscles bunched violently. Messaline held the rod in place for long seconds as the cleft squeezed and sensation rioted. She swept the birch away. Icy, bloodless tracks radiated across the soft skin. Then color flooded in, darker on the right, where vinegar-hardened buds had rapped the flesh.
"Prepare."
The buttocks shuddered. The birchrod flashed up-hard across. Messaline's rubber sole gave a final stamp. Juliana contributed an abrupt, woeful noise. Her legs quivered.
The withes had spread over some fresh territory and overlapped some prior marks. Streaks of flame gleamed brightly as they swelled.
By the fourth and fifth cuts, Juliana danced on urgent tiptoe. Her hindcurves glowed from mid-line to thightops.
Messaline surrendered the birch to the blonde prae. That senior girl put hip and shoulder into her strokes. The five claws thwapped solidly along the upper cheeks. Burgundy pips showed where the stone-budded tips scalded gentle skin.
Juliana's sniffly whimpering meshed with the singing switches and the lunging stamp. The prae marched the birch down the bottom's length. Her final cut lashed across Messaline's lowest marks. Two vagrant withes dipped down to lick greedily into straining thightops.
Juliana's legs kicked like a startled filly.
It took two minutes for her to come erect. Face stark, eyes salty, she bent her leg in a pained and shaming curtsey. "Th-thank you for taking the t-trouble to . . . admonish me."
The two senior girls inclined their heads graciously.
"Straightways shall monitor your progress." The headmistress addressed Juliana. "I shall review your situation when she feels your achievements warrant it."
Juliana sniffed another well-tamed "thank you." She took her panties from the small table. Her teeth serrated her lower lip as she raised one leg to slip them on.
They slid slowly up to snugly embrace her weal-blotched rear. The fit seemed tighter, the gluteal cheeks more pronounced. Her fingers chased her slip down.
With equally gingerly motions, she resumed her skirt. Her blurry eyes stayed humbly averted as she tugged on her jacket and stood by Lucretia Sue.
The American felt tension from her calves ripple the full distance to her shoulders. Miss M spoke: "Six of the cane's best, for improper speech."
Messaline replaced the birchrod in its smelly pickle. She chose a vivid yellow punishment stick thin as a little finger. The handle crooked; its striking end thickened to a wincingly bulbous tip.
The blonde prae also selected a cane, as lean and hearty.
Lucretia Sue cleared a suddenly dry throat. "Shall I. . . ? Of course."
She removed her own panties with tightly compact motions. She gave them a double fold and put them where Juliana's clothes had rested. She covered the warm, slightly moist cotton with her uniform jacket.
She advanced to the padded beam. The blonde prae squatted, forcing the iron frame higher. It screeched at the tall Georgian girl's nerves until the beam reached her legtops.
She bent across the padding, feeling Juliana's humid heat against her own naked loins. Her lips canted up, her head rocked down. Her bra straps began to bind in that position. Hair swung around her face as she gripped the extended dowel.
The mahogany had been polished by generations of palms. The strong elastic bands tugged her firmly over. She felt her well-muscled rump grinning broadly back at the prae lectors.
The two British girls stood on opposite sides. With a rising panic that shamed her, Lucretia Sue hoped they wouldn't hit simultaneously.
"Prepare," Miss Maelstrom called. A blush of satisfaction lightly tinged her normally stony voice.
An angry electric tremor livened Lucretia Sue's innards. She relaxed her buttocks by pure will.
The blonde prae stepped back and pranced into a tip heavy cut. The air shredded like ripped silk. Bloody blue blazes seared through and through Lucretia Sue's bottom Hot-hotter yet!-her fingers twisted on the dowel. Her hiking-firm buttocks jumped wildly.
"Prepare," she heard, the agony still mounting.
Messaline's arm drove the lithe stick from the opposite side, hellishly low. Solid undercheeks rose in outrage Fires leaped, bracketing the whipped girl's vulval gash.
Lucretia Sue fought the feverish pain.
"Prepare ..." The broad-fleshed blonde made her weight count. The cane sank deeply across knotted muscles.
Lucretia Sue sucked air, strangling down a yelp. She screwed her eyes against tears as her bottom squirmed childishly.
"Prepare ..." Messaline's humming wand whacked into flesh a hair's width above her first welt.
The Georgian girl's lips stretched over locked teeth as she heard the damning, merciless, "Prepare ..."
She couldn't steel herself. The blonde flogged her writhing buttocks. She gasped and snorted an indelicate blob onto the uncaring stones.
She felt three years old and on fire. "Prepare ..." Messaline's thumping stroke completed a seething band along her lowest curves. Lucretia Sue let herself shudder and kick-she couldn't help it. The weals ate into her, a white-hot grill barbecuing her pride. She couldn't guess how long it took her to rise. Her eyes burned, but she didn't cry. Miss Maelstrom stood, remote as a Victorian bronze casting. "Custom requires an expression of gratitude for the trouble taken to set one's feet upon the proper path."
Improvising, Lucretia Sue agonized her rear by attempting a full genuflection. She begged pardon for any uncivil words. Blood sang in her ears as she stood.
"A curtsy will suffice on future occasions. Kindly write one hundred lines before Room Dark is called. I will avoid the impression of sarcasm in word or deed.' Since this is your first imposition, you will write them before Straightways.
The headmistress exited in grandeur. The canes went back onto their pegs in the punishment cabinet.
"Orphaned in the Blitz," the blonde prae spoke unexpectedly, confidentially. "Pinned in rubble for two days, with her family massacred around her. Not a tear in the tot's eye when they dug her out. Ice water in her veins, that one."
She appraised the American girl and smiled. "Call me Aramilla. You'll do, you know, you really will."
She shook Lucretia Sue's hand and sauntered out. Juliana Bisque-Hardy's fingers teased at her birch-flogged bottom beneath her skirt.
"Beastly Bella, we call her. Short for La Belladonna Senza Pieta. Watch out for her, Merydith." She left with panged steps, blotting her wet cheeks.
Messaline Straightways pointed to the jacket covering Lucretia Sue's panties. "Perhaps you should put your knickers on, though most girls know what a contrite crupper looks like.
"Or is yours contrite?" She drank deeply of the Ameri- can's murderous expression. "I should temper that mutinous eye, Merydith. Remember, I can have those knicks at your knees again for up to three licks on my own authority "Be at my room to do your lines by, say, seven o'clock. You may do them standing."
She watched as Lucretia Sue dressed, hands stiff with icy anger.
The red-haired woman stretched her naked legs. "Now I'm back into short kit and facing a hiding. Somewhere--I'd hope in a Marseille wharfside cathouse screwing for their supper-Dire Straits and Beastly Bella might be enjoying a laugh."
"You obviously failed to profit from the lesson the first time." Juliana retained a prim posture in their cell. Her adolescent gorgeousness had ripened to a mature beauty, shopworn as it seemed at the present moment.
"If Miss Tsk-Tardy had ever learned to hustle her huggable heinie, as they stressed as Miss M's, she'd have been safely locked in the computer room with the other gals when the Girl Patrol made its swoop. Your final 'Late! Eight!' from sweet Aramilla didn't have much lasting effect, either."
Juliana shuddered at the memory. A week before the senior girls graduated, a week before her freedom as a young woman of fashion, she had made her final visit to the punishment chamber.
She'd lagged behind in the controlled scramble to get to Sunday chapel. No fault of her own; it never actually was-things simply delayed her. If the praes would only see that and judge on the facts of the case, instead of being prejudiced by past . . .
Aramilla Ponsonby had applied to Miss Maelstrom for a full dozen cane strokes on grounds of "undue repetition of fault." Permission granted, she had shared the rigorous duty with a horse-strong, inarticulate Yorkshire prae.
Juliana had been sliced, diced, and set out to dry. For "unchristian epithets under correction," Miss Maelstrom had ordered Beastly Bella to deliver three more to Ju's corrugated backside before bed.
That evening, the terrified young woman of fashion had pleaded to thoroughly brown her nose up Aramilla's nightie, in exchange for remission of the extra stick licking.
The Rubenesque praelector had gloatingly collected the treat.
Juliana admitted her thoughts had been far from that degrading episode when the sudden appearance of the Girl Patrol had set the few women working in Dillingham Eastern's offices scuttling for the computer room. The constables made spot checks at intervals to assure the government that no foreign women labored in violation of traditional law.
"God knows what toll these heathen intend to extract." The Englishwoman began to slump, then squared her shoulders valiantly. "And by 'God' I refer to the Universal Deity-and by 'Universal' I most certainly mean the Anglican Catholic faith."
"I always found the Wesleyan Chapel just a might easier on the bee-yew-tee-tee," Lucretia Sue reminisced. "I figured that out first minute I laid eyes on the compulsory religious attendance reg in the school prospectus.
"Since sashaying to the chapel down the road met the standard, I told Miss M my folks were five generations Southern Methodist. Not exactly a lie. You can't tell a moss-backed Southern Baptist from a rock-ribbed Southern Methodist without a strong light and a magnifying glass."
Juliana's eyes widened. "Girls always said you were a rancid little sneak for going off-school for chapel. I imagined they were joking, envious that you didn't have Dire Straits or somebody watching the door with a great thumping cane."
"I may pridefully say you have to rise powerfully early in the a.m. to catch an Okefenokee Merydith napping." The Georgian stretched her tethered arms.
"However, I do admit that these fig-pluckers here in Qu'imram got up at midnight, at least. You may picture my embarrassment when that nice Constable Fa'ud kicked the lock off the door and stomped in on my li'l seminar in Western Culture."
"I was unaware that Gloria Vanderbilt and Jack Daniels occupied such pinnacles."
"Levi Strauss, honey. I only wear the gen-u-ine article. No one in the family ever married Leopold Stokowski, but they make damn good britches. I wear Levis," she chortled, kicking her bare legs, "or I wear nothing at all."
"Thank God-please take the qualification as read-that Fa'ud didn't actually hear you discussing any 'obnoxiously unfeminine ideas' with the local ladies."
"A-men, sister."
"Two days ago I played at battledores and shuttlecocks with the emir's wife," Juliana mused. "Such a charmingly Victorian sport in the age of Virginia Wade and Nastassja Kinski."
"Nastassja isn't the Virginia Slims all-star, sugar."
"Whomever. The bony foreign ballbasher."
"You were always good at outdoor games. Me, I preferred a little draw poker, or cut-throat gin rummy."
"And suffered for those lapses, also."
The birching had been a shock in its severity. Thirty-nine strokes lacerated Lucretia Sue's publically bared posterior. Dotty Nurse Quince rubbed her hated brine "styptic" no less than three times during the application in the Great Hall.
Lukewarm sentiment had fired and consolidated firmly in favor of the American girl. Trews Merydith had "come through" in style. No Maelstrom girl could deny her pluck.
Juliana had been proud to claim the foreign girl as her chum, and the flogging had cemented a very tentative friendship.
"You know, I am rather sorry to have enticed you to visit us in this utter armpit of depraved humanity," the Englishwoman voiced her remorse.
"Ju\ whatever they do'll be no worse than the time papa and the preacher found me with Billy Jim Hotchkins playing strip blackjack."
Lucretia Sue reflected. "We-e-ell, now that I think on it, we weren't exactly still playing cards. Having won my last stitch and then some, he was busy collecting a forfeit.
I'll admit that I acted like a real good sport about it, since although I was fourteen and he was twelve, he'd turned out to be real advanced for his years. "My enthusiasm in helping him collect his winnings set the choir loft to creaking so thunderaciously that the preacher and pa came up for a look-see. "Pa was a parish elder. He'd been consulting with the preacher on church finances, over a glass or two of some venerable corn by-product that pa's tennant, Mr. Diddlebock, made out where tax stamp men seldom came to visit.
"The two hadn't understood how an earthquake had crawled up the ladder into the loft, so they climbed up to investigate.
"They did raise some noticeable ruckus with razor strops and hickory switches." The redhead sighed. "I ate off the mantle for two full weeks. My brothers found the sight almighty entertaining, 'specially since I wasn't wearing anything at the time, as a slight reminder of my sin. "I had to feed Calvin a face full of mud to inhibit him from telling the schoolyard the full details, down to my birthmarks and bruises. It was just his hard luck that some pretty fresh cow plop had gotten trampled into that mud when I gave him a flying tackle.
"Ol' Farmer Hawthorne drove his stock to pasture across the schoolyard, mornings, and some had been indiscreet right where I headlocked my smarty-mouthed brother and taught him some loyalty.
"So then it became the principal's turn to wale me for being rowdy." Lucretia Sue chuckled. "He had to have me peel stark jaybird naked-in front of the nurse, of course; though word had branded Lucille Grimsby trash for spending her evenings at the principal's house -- in order to search my hide for some fresh spots to work on, "The strop marks seemed plum ubiquitous along my hinderscape from heels to the top of my crack-pardon, my cleft. He did take care in avoiding the switch welts as he plied his ruler.
"A hard man, but fair. Just like that full eleven inches of prick I found when I unbuttoned his trousers afterwards. Fair licking, but hard to melt down, even with help from Lucille Grimsby."
Juliana's interest in the recital curdled. "I'll take shuttlecocks, thank you. Richard has attempted to interest me in the noisome sport you allude to, but without offering decent reciprocity."
"Pedophilia, you mean? Or just garden-variety matrimonial cocksucking?"
The Englishwoman elaborated with grace. "I have reference to fellatio. I'll be damned and frying on Satan's griddle if I'll lip-coddle any man's thing without getting a nub-tonguing in fair return.
"And by 'Satan' I most emphatically refer to that diseased Adversary plainly in control of this benighted pagandom."
Lucretia Sue spoke lightly. "Now, to be fair to your husband, I do seem to recollect that you pine for a tongue-diddling at a rather peculiar time of the month.
"I did hear-tell of your more intimate tastes and eccentricities at school-Frank Harris wasn't alone, honey, so you can stop wiggling your face so Old Girlishly about the curtain being lifted on dorm room frolics.
"I can't quite quote Alicia Trent, but she did admit to having a rather bloody mouth after she'd cunt-kissed you, in exchange for not being tied up and wee'd on, or some of the other homey little pranks you hellions used to visit upon the young and unprotected.
"And by 'hellion' you can most certainly insert one of those Gospel-true Ronald Searle images of St. Trinian devilment," the Georgian concluded.
Juliana averted her profile. "I'm more in need at some times than at others. A fingering just isn't adequate relief. Besides, Alicia Trent should have been hazed out along with the other queeqs and squinges."
"Honey bunch, just because I came to the school in my last year doesn't mean I ain't a queeq at heart. My daddy worked for a living, just like two drop-outs you-all chased from Miss Maelstrom's, and whose winter woolies now warm seats in the House of Commons.
"Now, as for squinges, our ol' brick-solid girl-type buddy, Pamela Jellicoe, used to roll on her back and fawn once Beastly Bella became the boarding school bum-brusher par excellence."
"Jellybuns had an overly active nervous system highly susceptible to pain. Besides, Aramilla had been her rave for years." The Englishwoman pointed out.
"A masturbatory relationship not terribly exclusive in nature. Jelly's too-tender tush had a high sensitivity to pleasure and pain, as someone not miles away once remarked to me with a grin like the Cheshire cat who ate Alice.
"A ration of the birch and the martinet had suitably admonished friendly Pamela for her chummy night wanderings after Room Dark. Even a secret and eventful journey to the Ponsonby passion pit hadn't quenched the longings of spring. So, Ju', helpful sugar lamb that you were--" Juliana interrupted firmly. "Pamela Jellicoe treated everyone quite decently, even if she did worship Aramilla as some kind of goddess. Please try not to make some carnal remark, Trews."
Lucretia Sue changed position. The heavily embroidered cushion had etched its pattern into her bottom. She tried to vary the imprint.
"Our rear ends will be longing for the days at Miss M's, once the magistrate finishes cogitating on how much of a sin he convicted us of."
"Trews, listen." Juliana bent earnestly. "It has been simply hours since that vulgar interlude with that medieval maniac. I'll wager you that my loving Richard-good, clever, resourceful Richard; 'the boy ferret' as the Foreign Secretary once personally called him-has been working behind the scenes to get us off.
"Oh, I expect deportation, of course. Perhaps a fine to Dillingham Eastern for employing me sub rosa. I mean, what crime can it be for a consul's wife to amuse herself and keep her mind active with a little office work . . . ?"
"In the Qu'imram Protectorate, chile, it's a full-blown felony."
"But, Trews, you don't know my Richard! I can see him cozening that prince who handles Internal Affairs, the one who got him this post because his palace is here. The man wanted an old friend to be about when he left the capital and came to the sea shore."
"Daoud Abdullah ibn Qu'imram." Lucretia Sue gazed at the tiled walls thoughtfully. "That wily Oriental gentleman's already been cozened, honey pie. He's been cozened by an expert who's been cozening since she was eleven. I have a feeling that this was one hand of strip-poker she overplayed, even though it gave the glands a fun workout while the game lasted."
Juliana stared. She realized why her friend had been so long in joining her in the cell after the hastily convened magistrate's session.
"I may in my quiet, reserved, British Maggie Thatcher way be frightfully ill."
The Englishwoman sat, striken and silent.
The Honorable Richard Deathshead ("Deeth-shed, old darling. You'll be amazed how many chaps figure me for some butcher Army type, a sort of Chinese Gordon, when they read my name.") Mellroot drew languidly on the hookah.
Water-cooled cannabis fumes invigorated his brain while soothing a frame wearied by a day on consular business. "Bangladesh Red, old boy?"
"Saigon Green--or should I call it Ho Chi Minh City Green? A present from their U.N. envoy to my brother."
"Lovely stuff, absolutely suc-u-lent. You don't know how quiet the afternoon's been, Daoud old top." He dragged dreamily on the blackened ivory mouthpiece.
"There is a wise saying circulating among my people." The tawny Arab intoned: " 'A fluent tongue is the only thing a mother don't like her daughter to resemble her in.' "
"Quite, quite. Sufi Wisdom, old thing?" "Richard Brinsley Sheridan." "Ah. Just the man."
Time expanded and contracted rhythmically. At length (unless it proved to be almost at once) the honorable diplomat ventured. "I suppose you chaps really do need to ... I mean, old fellow, I let her while away her time at Dillingham really for my convenience and peace, although what with Foreign Office salaries, the lolly made a pleasant appearance first of each month . . .
"But I imagine simply deporting her isn't sufficient, is it."
"Dickie old chum, the flogging and the various punishments are essential!" The black desert eyes widened. : "Your vastly charming wife, my too-terribly-effulgent hostess on occasions without number, a woman beyond her peers in her beauty and virtues--ah, this paragon of all things feminine uttered such words when she came before the wise and clement magistrate--things so scandalously spoken that only my timely intervention prevents her corrections from being performed in public.
"Should I do more, it would cause unfortunate tales to spread among uninformed parties." He coughed delicately. "The also-fluent tongue of rumor would impeach my dedication to the cause of Islamic Renewal.
"As we know, the Devil Khomeini is today the enemy of our great friend Iraq. By the inversion of Fate, whose hand no mortal may descry-or, so seeing, stay in its course-the blaspheming suckers of Sheytan's tout can be restored to a former intimacy as our great friends--"
"Particularly if they win their war." Mellroot nodded "Too true, old seed. Don't expect you could intercede in the American woman, either. Ju' is quite keen on her,and I find her refreshing."
"A savory and refreshing wench, indeed." The prince sigh of contentment brought a raised, mazed eyebrow from the English consul. "This Merydith person, I mean, Dickie, not your pillar of spousal virtue.
"Yet her crimes-so blatantly flaunting herself before decent women in masculine attire; violation of the most sacred abstinence prescribed by Holy Law; and attempted subversion of the very bulwark of our nation, the enforcement of our statutes!"
"Do say, old egg?" Mellroot had a puzzled look.
"The use of carnal means to interfere with the duly pronounced judgments of Holy Justice." The Arab shuddered. "You plain-dealing, open-hearted Europeans have yet to understand: "Woman is in no way inferior to man in her capacities You Westerners delude yourselves to believe that. She is the full equal of our sex, always recall that.
"Fail to bridle her cunning mind, fail to curtail the application of her lethal charms, fail to subdue her-so-amoral appetites- "Fail and she will prevail over you in all things, great or small. As your own Nietzsche so subtly phrased it. 'You go to woman? Ah, carry the whip!' "
"Surely not our Nietzsche, old stuff. Some other chap Nietzsche, I'm certain. The bally Germans, perhaps."
An eloquent ripple of dismissal transcended a mere shrug. "These tribal differences do not matter to the objective Eastern mind, Dickie old bird."
"Mmmmm ..." The consul sucked and mulled. "The magistrate won't be too hard on Ju', do you imagine, come the sentencing? A near cousin of yours, you sail old lad?"
'Of course. Our Protectorate is a family affair. But-" The dark face showed a self-consciousness bordering on embarrassment. "He is a Harrovian, I regret to say. Not Eton at all."
"Ah." Richard commiserated. "Not a bad tie, of course. But, I say, old tick, didn't I hear he was also a Christ Church man-now that's something in his favor, after all."
"Cambridge."
"Oh!"
CHAPTER TWO
Bed and Board
The cast party threatened to spill out of the theater foyer and run riot on the rest of St. Cloud University's campus. A boom box thundered heavy metal out into the hot night Orinda, California, sweltered in its breezeless valley.
Away from the guitar-heavy concussions, Dorothy Til-den sat on a stone bench overlooking the freeway and Bay Area Rapid Transit line that bisected the little community. The still Art Deco lines of the landmark Orinda Theata lay visible in the business district lights.
She tipped the Calvados bottle heavily over Gerry Vestry's glass. "Bracing up for the Fall Semester onslaught?"
The student wrinkled her nose, silver-rimmed glasses edging higher. "It's rough in the summer. Our alumni adviser for Sigma House, Lucretia Sue Merydith, is resting her duff in the sun somewhere with a girl she knew from her time in England."
"Georgia's belated answer to William Tecumseh Sherman lived in Blightie? I'll have to compare notes. I spent some time over there teaching in my salad years."
"As incoming vice-president in charge of pledge training I'm going to be up to my appendix scar in-" Something shattered not too far behind them. Dionysian giggles rolled out the foyer doors.
"Sorority life is taking off again, I imagine." Dorothy Tilden slugged down more apple brandy. "The Ronnie Reagan syndrome, nostalgia for Leave It to Beaver and Dobie Gillis. Army recruiters blossom once more on campus, and Greek life flourishes."
"The clone sororities are booming. Quirky little Sigma Epsilon Xi-" A couple dashed past them. Hurled plastic cups hit the pavement behind the fleeing pair.
"Wasn't that your Antony? Jesus Christ Super-stud?" Gerry Vestry nodded toward the departing footsteps.
"Ron Ladrone, yes. His prowess as God's gift to the stage may be only exceeded by his devotion to little Miss Mona Forbes. Or not so-little-miss if you contemplate her vital statistics . . . and her vitals."
"Mona ... is she on our house bid sheets? Oops." The sorority girl touched fingertips to her lips. "Confidential house business. No can talk."
"If she should pledge to Sigma, count on having Ron ornamenting your social parlor half the day and night." The Drama Department professor chuckled. "I have him slated to tailgate in Hamlet next season. All the blue-rinsed alumnae who creamed their arthritic support pantihose over his Antony will ape out once I have him strutting his stuff as the Dane."
"You almost lost him for your next summertime spectacular. The Ladrones have some relatives in the Caribbean." Gerry Vestry sipped her Calvados. "He was supposed to be heading there in a couple of days with his sister, Jan."
"So Ron told me. I only got his services for School for Scandal because his lady love is taking some summer intra courses here to ease the transition from high school to big-time learning."
Dorothy Tilden cackled, shaking her head. "My budget depends on the turn out and on the endowments the department gets from those panting ladies who form Ron's main rooting section. God, like the days of Toscanini--only one name sells tickets and skims the cream of those alumnae donations."
"I've been dragooned into chaperoning Jan." The Sign vice-president stared off into the night. "Mom and pop want someone to hold her leash. We're flying down to somewhere Monday, then taking a boat. I hate to leave the house, but it's a free ticket, and it's only for a coupled weeks. Have you ever heard of an island called Man! Blanc?"
" 'White Tuesday'? Is that the day before Ash Wednesday? No, wait a minute, that's Fat Tuesday. No. A new holy day of obligation?"
"That's the island we'll be visiting, mostly."
"Better you than Ron. I started a brush fire by rubbing him up against Shandel'la's Cleopatra. The ladies are hoi to trot for Scandal. Without matinee idol Ron, it'd be tried-and-true laugh-an-hour Noel Coward instead of daring, experimental Sheridan."
Gerry Vestry thought. "I saw The Vortex out in Concord recently. Kinda cute, particularly the guy playing the boy, the coke fiend."
"Damn fine production. Pawnie made the show for me." The drama instructor brooded. "Coward can hit greatness with the right cast. Not my clutch of amiable scene-stealers. It becomes just routine wit-fencing.
"Give me a Private Lives with Richard Burton and Marilyn Monroe, and Robert Preston and Dorothy Tutin for support duty."
"They're all dead."
She blinked, upset. "Even Tutin? I used to dream about becoming her. That sexy voice. If I'd been born English... No, not stardom for me, just my whip and chair trying to put leopard-sexy Ron through his paces to fatten the box office so I can produce . . . Damn it, I've forgotten the dream season I wanted once we'd gotten the budget squared away."
Dorothy Tilden laughed hoarsely into the drowsy university town night. The girl at her side splashed some more Calvados into her own glass and slugged down a soul-soothing jolt.
* * *
Mona Forbes drifted up the stairs sometime after midnight. Amused, boozed, and carnally used . . . she'd had a glorious evening. Sunday would be a bitch, getting the apartment back in shape to face her drill sergeant cousin.
Tonight, however, had been a dream, a Cinderella fantasy where she'd been to the Prince's ball and then balled her Prince and . . .
"Oh!" Her vivid mauve eyes went wide and faintly panicked. She stood in the doorway, key in the lock, door open. "You."
"You expected, maybe, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle?" Rita Henshaw gestured broadly about their shared living room. "She'd feel perfectly at home. This pit is kissing kin to a rain forest."
Mona shot furtive glances around the room. She had really been going to spend all Sunday cleaning it. Honest. The whole apartment.
"Fortunate that stepmama and I found subjects on which to mutually disagree. Otherwise, I would have been down in Carmel until Monday evening."
The buxom young businesswoman strolled among the tangled copies of People ("Fergie v. Liz: Diet Duel of the 80's"), stained candy box liners, and rumpled heaps of sweat-ripe clothing.
"Judging from the time," Rita consulted her watch, "we may both have planned to come back the same day."
"It's only--" Mona blinked at the happy face mantle clock. The yellow disk had a bizarre blood-like splotch across it and a liquid crystal sweep hand. Her stomach fluttered. "It is kind of 1:30, isn't it?"
"In the inky blackness of morning. Where has Miss Night Owl been 'owling?"
"Ron took me to the cast party."
"Oh, did they finally close that stud show down after three weeks of extensions? How will the coeds and female faculty survive without his come-hither glances to prime their dreams?"
"Uh, Miss Tilden's got him in School for Scandal next and then he's Hamlet in the fall, too."
"Giving private tutoring lessons in scandal just now, was he?" Rita arched an eyebrow. "I seem to recall your weekend curfew chimes at 11:30. Or has the world advanced in the few days I've been away?"
"Um, no, I guess it hasn't." Mona suddenly felt badly in need of a hole to hide in.
"I wondered if you'd sublet the joint in my absence, Some wild gypsies ransacked the kitchen. Butter has formed the cutest design on the table. The jam has some interesting fuzzy things growing, sitting out on the counter with the top off. A biology project, perhaps?"
The corners of Mona's mouth twitched downward painfully.
"Two empty See's boxes had broken loose and roamed across the floor to die," Rita continued. "Fortunately,! know that couldn't have been you, since your candy ration stands at only six pieces a week."
"I got hungry."
"Thank heavens you warded off starvation. May I assume that plate of sandwiches I left got mailed to sub-Saharan famine victims? Since you were weak from calorie malnutrition you couldn't have had any hand in polishing them off."
"They tasted great."
"It's rewarding to have one's skills recognized." She crooked a brightly nailed finger. "Perhaps I can show off other of my talents. Come, little one."
Not so little . . . Mona felt all-too conscious of her round California Girl buttocks. Sharing digs with Rita had seriously painful drawbacks.
In their cozy bedroom something shockingly unpleasant lay on Mona's wadded bedspread. A palm-wide blade two feet long extended from a stubby, friction-taped handle.
"That's a-a paddle!" Under shiny clear varnish ten red capitals floridly advertised: MONA FORBES.
"Maple wood, hand-crafted. No pains spared so that no pain would be spared." Rita circled about the girl with feline grace. "Your uncle has such an inspired way with tools. You can count nineteen tiny holes drilled through the flat, right where they'll do the most good. He'll add one next birthday."
Mona's gluteal flesh twitched frantically. Rita didn't even know she'd put in a bid for three sororities for the fall.
"Be sure to write him a nice, gracious note." The young woman's sharp nails trailed along the polished paddlewood. "Show it to me before you mail it." Mona guessed the penalty for not being gushily appreciative enough. "You're not going to cane me anymore?" Twenty-six inches of English punishment rattan had been the major hazard of her life with Rita to this point. "Such a thought! I wouldn't dream of depriving you. No, that nicely shaped rump Mary See has been padding out with milk chocolate still gets the stick for your curfew violation. Two hours overdue."
Nine, Mona realized dismally. Five for the first hour late, two extra for each additional half-hour. Or fraction thereof. Drat Ron and his utterly irresistible backseat foreplay.
"The maple love-patter will help provide the consequences for the candy, the heathen sty we see around us, and the general aura of carelessness run amok. Anything use seem unfamiliar, aside from your bottom's new playmate?"
Mona glanced about warily. Her used underwear still carpeted the floor in front of her dresser. A faint, cloying scent reminded her to cap her bath cologne sometime soon. The mess seemed pretty much as she'd left it when Ron had honked downstairs.
"My sheets!" Her eyes focused on her bed.
The top blanket, red and bristly, lay directly on a dark brown wool second blanket. No hint of white percale top | or bottom sheet showed.
"Brilliant deduction, Ms. Watson. You know my methods."
Rita smiled. "Every time you mess our room, you can picture yourself spending all night between those rather coarse comforters-mother naked, need I add? With your hands tied snugly to the headboard.
"Scratching and self-abuse will definitely be out, though I suspect that itching will definitely but positively be IN.
"Rita-!" Mona's deep golden hair framed an oval, woe-struck face in the room's vanity mirror. She realized how vulnerable she looked and shut her mouth.
"Believe me, after a tight tanning, that woolen blanket won't be at all pleasant. So. Shall we test it out?" The woman retrieved the paddle from the rumpled blanket. "Hassock time, dumpling."
"Can't you punish me in the morning-I mean, after we sleep?" Mona stared starkly at her horrid bed. "It's almost 2:00 a.m."
"Whose fault is that, eh? You won't be lacking come sun-up. The curfew caning tomorrow morn should feel really spectacular across paddle-tender sit-upons. You can anticipate it in your innocent and love-tossed dreams. Nine brisk ones, shortly after rising tomorrow."
Mona followed her cousin haplessly into the living room. The too-familiar clawfoot leather hassock awaited. She spread her bare tummy over it too many times while Rita sliced the living Dickens out of her dimpled fanny.
"Suppose you shed that party dress first, hmmm?" The young woman rummaged for some cord in the too suitable Edwardian lowboy near the bedroom door. "Don't be modest. I've closed the blinds."
Thankful for the small favor, Mona wrestled her dress down past her lips. The tiny, apparently ancient biddy on the top floor across the street had been given some rich eyefuls lately.
Rita'd gotten the cute idea of leaving curtains open and blinds up, to give her whippings greater effect. The old busybody'd even taken to using field glasses the past couple of tannings, for a really good look.
Vividly aware of her recent love-making, Mona stood in her lingerie.
"Bra, too, I think," her cousin directed. "Don't pout so. I haven't asked you to lower your panties, have I?"
"No. You like doing that yourself."
The coed unhooked her brassiere, freeing a jouncy 38-inch bust. The blue-veined globes undulated as she breathed. She thanked God that skin didn't take fingerprints, though Ron had done his best to leave some. The kissable dark nipples didn't show any of his teasing little half-bites, either.
"Shoes, too. You can keep the garter belt and nylons. They frame your tender spots so nicely."
The girl cursed her roommate's splendid muscle-tone as she undid her party shoes. Rita's brisk morning exercises kept her arm hard and her own 40-inch dugs firmly up-thrust, despite her prejudice against a bra.
"Over you go." Rita playfully whacked the low hassock. The paddle hit the leather with a deep, bruising sound. "The piper has his bill stamped OVERDUE in big red letters."
The only scarlet letters Mona saw spelled her own name on that maple blade. The cool steerhide upholstery chilled her nearly naked skin. The tiny, delicate briefs scarcely covered essentials.
Her face hovered over the rug. She held out her wrists. Rita bound them efficiently with the ritual twine, then Mona rested them on the carpet.
Teeth locked, fingers folded, and bowels tensed, she tried not to shiver as busy fingers invaded her panties.
The waistband slipped maddeningly across her tingling buttocks. Skin that Ron had cherished and brought to erotic flame crawled with gooseflesh. The sheer nylon whispered down her bottom, dropping the length of her thighs to rest at her knees.
"Don't forget to count."
"How many, please, Rita?" She liked to know so she could pace her endurance.
"I'm not really sure," her cousin chuckled.
The flat maple surface brushed Mona's cleft mounds. She knew that puckering her cheeks only made the sting worse. Still ... the netherglobes squeezed together with apprehension.
S-m-a-c-k! The strange, harsh sound hit her ears. Muscle masses slammed in against her pelvic bones.
"One," the girl gulped, absorbing the rising hurt. Thank you, ma'am."
A second beastly s-p-l-a-t drove her lips hard against the hassock. The nineteen damned holes-each stretched and pinched her skin. Fiery stars twinkled along the broad paddle-sting.
"Two. Thank you, ma'am."
Bitch . . . Three and four had her shoulders shaking, She hurt all down her bottom. White-hot pips burned maddeningly. Damn her inventive uncle!
"How is our newest family member treating you?"
"I think-I know-Rita, I have to go . . ." Damn, why hadn't she begged to visit the bathroom first?
"If you really, really can't hold it in, and aren't just trying to take a breather, I can put you on all fours in the bathtub. We can start all over from swat one, and your bladder can misbehave without fear."
Mona hated that more than having the blinds up in broad daylight. "N-no, not necessary."
The bonfire in her posterior crackled with two loud paddleslaps. She stuttered out lying thanks. Tears began to drift helplessly down her shiny nose.
"Nine . . . thank you ... ten . . ."
Her rear made theatrical leaps as the wood walloped it She could imagine the cool toilet seat soothing the blazing skin.
"Fourteen . . . fif-fifteen . . . Christ, Rita!"
She bawled unashamedly over the creaking leather hassock as her lips squirmed. Somehow . . . someway ... no more swats fell. She slowly realized that as her head pounded with an ache that failed to mask the agonized throbs in her behind.
"I think dad deserved those woodworking trophies he keeps in his workshop. Though I doubt that the judges quite had this tail-warmer in mind." Rita leaned down to untie Mona's wrists. "Well-scoot! Pick up your mess in the morning. Or should I occupy the bathroom ahead of you?"
Mona strained to push herself upright. Her panties flopped flimsily at her stockinged feet. She stepped free with a mincing skip.
Her hindquarters protested as she hurried to the can. "Don't forget to pop your technicolor rump di-RECTLY after brushing your teeth," Rita called after her. "No nightie. Make it quick. Remember, I have to tie you in for the night."
The bathroom door banged sharply. Mona stared a moment at her tear-wet face in the slightly distorted medicine cabinet mirror.
She had to pledge to some sorority-she just had to! It was the only way her parents would let her live apart from Rita.
Her thighs quivered like rubbery things as she made a pained squat. Her paddle-hot flesh hovered just over the urgently needed comode's seat. She tried to pee without setting her abused bottom down, She failed, and fresh tears dripped from her chin.
Stiff, prickly wool on all sides set Mona's whole body horribly a-squirm immediately. That soon settled down in favor of local outbreaks of maddening irritation, She hadn't expected the heat radiating from her backside to make her sweat. Stretched on her tummy, hands helplessly trussed to her headboard, she slowly roasted, A river of sweat ran down her spine, pooling stickily at the small of her back. Her breasts sopped and itched. The salty, scratchy worse spot of all drove her nearly frantic.
That was the same place Rita had thoughtfully clipped short the previous week.
Mona had been forced to stand on a stool, her eyes watching the shaming process in a cheval mirror. She had been palely, utterly nude. The living room curtains stayed open and the blinds had been pulled high so that the tiny lady across the way could enjoy the spectacle to the hilt.
Rita had trimmed and groomed the shaggy Venus mound down to a fine bristly stubble.
Mona had given Ron some stupid story about staying cool in the summer. He'd complained about her close, prickly growth during their hot-blooded trysts.
She now knew why. The stabbing wool, the salt sweat, the mounting heat all worked at the tender apex of her thighs. Her own little stubby hairs prodded back at her flesh as she writhed.
Her hands tugged at the square-knotted cord lashing her to the headboard. She couldn't do a thing to soothe the rasping itch. Nothing at all.
Her shoulders jerked once, twice. A violent twitching ran up her left leg. She moved her face to try and find a cool spot on the damp pillow as she prayed for dawn.
12,000 miles away, the clear Persian Gulf sun illuminated the afternoon. Prison walls glowed a blinding white. The camel's hide whip showed pure snakish black.
The wielder posed, arm high, lash at the ready, giving onlookers their fill. Low, respectful suspirations voices their appreciation of its length, its stiffness, and its patent educational virtues.
The crowd watched eagerly.
The flogger stood-a dark statue in red-striped breed clout one moment, a striking serpent the next. His arm sent the leather crisply sinking across the creamy buttocks bound before him.
Strapped helplessly to the whipping triangle, the woman screamed. Her raw sound ripped through a mouth-muffling gag. The lash peeled away to show a ruby-bright welt that writhed across her full posterior like a severed reptile as broad cleft opened and closed, As consul, the Honorable Richard Mellroot stood to attention, apart from the main crowd. The local heathen could thus contemplate the Commonwealth's ensign of indefatigable alertness.
The American slouched beside him. He nodded as the second whistling stroke provoked more desperate ophidian motion.
"Not very wholesome," Richard observed languidly. "I mean, that bally Frenchwoman is practically flaunting her cunt at that gaggle of young boys." The native onlookers included women veiled into obscurity, save for eyes and hands. Older, bearded men ruminatively enjoyed the spectacle. Young males from schoolroom to university age all but drooled.
"Indecent coquette," Richard expostulated as the lash scalded spasming undercheeks. The Frenchwoman did, indeed, wiggle her lips in vivid coital motion. The triangle spread her buttocks sufficiently to demonstrate a rich love grove at each backward buck. "It's the boss." As CIA circuit rider along that area of Gulf, the American had been pressed into service to meet protocol's demands for the punishment of a foreigner, He explained, "That frame has a cross beam with a raised ridge on it-catches 'em right across the . . . Well, that boss is padded with unshaved elephant hide. I traveled with a circus as a kid. We used to blow-torch jumbo to get his skin smooth enough to ride on in the parade around the "Those hairs'll peel the shell off a walnut, and I don't think the brass studs nailing the hide to the wood are too pleasant, either. Mam'selle l'Orange should be feeling it pretty nastily right about now. Smarts in two spots, I'd "You're rather up on all this." Richard smiled pleasantly. "Can you give an idea what that sign they've hung her back means?"
"To translate literally . . . um, more figuratively I'd say 'Nazrani Nookie' would be closest. It's a bit more detailed, talking about lizards, but that's just poetic license."
"Ah." Richard nodded at the American, though his main attention stayed on the flogging. The whip confined itself to the woman's buttocks. Her bound, upraised hands clawed frantically at the sun.
The consul pointed to long banners sternly draped from the prison walls. "I imagine those say something more ii that vein."
"No, no." The CIA man shaded his eyes. "More like 'Curb Your Lust.' Damn, I wish I had old John Payne's or Sir Richard Burton's gifts. They could really translate Arabic into something lyrical.
"But the patrol-those guys in uniform there, the same ones who nabbed your wife-keeps its eyes out for any signs of . . ."
His voice foundered at a really spectacular shake-rattle-and-roll bottom toss from the welt-streaked victim.
"My! Oh, Prince Daoud mentioned something about the patrol." The English diplomat searched his memory. " 'Any tumescence secondary to a morbid or unhealthful interest in the corporal aspects of judicial punishment merits an appropriate rebuke in the interests of maintaining community standards.' The offenders receive a sharp dressing-down, I do gather."
"Something like that. A large and not very flexible stick along the keister highlights some of the more salient points."
At the thirteenth rump-scoring whipcrack, the woman hung from her wrists. Her legs twitched in feeble fits.
"Do you know what she did?"
"Huh?" The American craned his head. "Did I miss something?"
"Not did just now-I mean before, her crime."
"Oh. She came as a 'traveling companion' to a minor princeling and can't afford a plane ticket home. The French embassy at Damascus wired her the money. You Limeys are lucky to have a legation here. The other countries have it rough. Everything gets routed through Damascus or Cairo or some damn place."
He waved at the triangle. "This just reminds people of the official Qu'imram policy toward deadbeats."
A pencil-mustached medical doctor inspected the leather-seared derriere. With a hearty slap, he pronounced it sound. The woman wept, her sobs choked by the gag.
The executioner beamed, hoisting the lash in triumph.
The crowd disbursed quickly. Two youths and one oldster in a tattered burnoose fell prey to the iron-handed patrol. They marched the protesting malefactors through the small side gate into the prison for appropriate rebuke.
The hot breeze from the barren, oil-heavy desert fulfilled the promise of another hell-bright day. The Englishman and American continued to chat as they drifted toward the ornate, graceful government building adjoining the stark prison.
By contrast with the exterior landscape, the Magistrates Courtyard exhibited the joys of Eden. A vaulting glass ceiling admitted sun. Icy air whisperingly circulated to dispel heat.
Trees actually bowed with garish fruit. Cool, moist garden smells scented the artificial air. Flowers added fragrance and infinitely diverse shades of color to the broad room.
Qu'imram officials lounged on tubular steel and cream vinyl benches. Some wore fully traditional garb, but most of the men favored European side-vented jackets and pleated slacks. All sported sunglasses against the ceiling's glare, and each had his light, purely symbolic burnoose regardless of other apparel.
Again, Richard held himself gratuitously to attention. He'd learned the trick as a guardsman. It gave a chap an automatically commanding presence in gatherings.
The CIA man contemplated a filter-tip cigarette as he spread his weight on a chrome and vinyl settee under a flowering jasmine tree.
"You know, my wife never allows me to smoke indoors." The American turned the cigarette end over end. "I always get sent outside-snow, sleet, lightning.
"I've been in the field for sixteen months now. I'll seen her exactly two weeks in that time, last April in Rome. I still can't light up inside four walls.
"It's like trying to masturbate. All I hear is my mother kneeling beside the tub, telling me never, never rub my doohickey that way. She'd wash it for me, she told me. Handling that was woman's work."
He sighed. "I asked her what would happen when grew up. She said that I'd have a wife to tackle the job.
The honorable consul studied him quizzically. "An interesting problem. Persisted on into adolescence, did it?"
His inner eye saw Nanny Collins, rose-cheeked and solid as the heavy Shropshire earth. "Ooooh, what a spunky monkey you've become!"
His joyous seminal spurts announced emphatically his initiation into the opportunities of puberty.
"Mother made me start taking showers at fifteen," the CIA man confided. "Probably just as well. She lied about a wife doing that. At least every day."
He crushed the filter-tip into dried bits. He sniffed the ruin, then emptied his hand carefully into his jacket pocket "These people sure do have a different philosophy."
Nanny Collins had introduced Richard to the new upstairs maid on his twelfth birthday. "She's a willing work specially chosen for her skill at doing for a young man all busy growing up."
He'd choked down tears when the familiar playroom connected with his bedchamber had been converted into the new maid's room. The sorrow for lost childhood had passed. The familiar, inviting refuge had stayed a playroom, a loving retreat on his holidays from Eton and Oxford.
"Excuse me, excuse me, good gentlemen." My Lord the Magistrate Ishmael Mohammed ibn Qu'imram waved his hand in delicate supplication as he entered. "A thousand forgivenesses for all our delay."
A circlet of simple obsidian lozenges alternating with thumb-sized brass skulls secured his headcloth about his temples, above his two-toned Foster-Grants and his blue blazer.
Cambridge blue, Richard observed sadly. The Arab's tie also spoke of sandstone halls whose wisdom was still young when the Islamic world's academies had achieved ancient age.
"I have just been informed that Sir Rupert Murdoch has definitely radiogrammed his regrets that he cannot attend our ceremonies." My Lord Ishmael sat upon a Bedwani campstool draped in cloth of gold.
Court now in session, the CIA man stood quickly.
The coffee-skinned magistrate smiled at the Westerners. "We are a tiny emirate, a small protectorate-this week the ward of our powerful friend, who protects us from last week's not-as-powerful friend."
He lifted his shoulders. "We desire no coarse unfortunate publicity, no half-truths coursing like maggots through the pages of the world press-no lamentable snuff films covertly shot in parking lots.
"All is open, free for world scrutiny and, of a certainty, for that world's comment. If the eyes of that greater world do not choose to attend-well, I thank you gentlemen for your presence and your kind attention to our judicial proceedings."
His sun glasses seemed to aim at the British consul, around tie clasp level. "An excellent school, sir, they inform me, though Professor Tolkien had, perhaps, a less contemporary outlook than our own Professor Lewis. Both estimable men, assuredly."
The Arab appeared to survey the American's black bolo tie with its Navaho silver and veined turquoise slide. "Always a pleasure to receive a guest from . . . Mr. L'Amour's neck of the woods, is it not? A wild land so very similar to our own, with desolate sands, wandering peoples, and a sufficiency of oil for rudimentary comforts."
"Uh, New Hampshire." The CIA agent bobbed his head encouragingly.
"Very good. I most enjoyed your primary election on television. So energetic, so decisive. In our poor tradition-bound lands, we inefficient peoples occupy decades in the task of paring down the many contenders for power.
"Unimpaired by antiquated thought, you brisk, young countries topple the challengers for office in mere weeks-in hours-in the course of but a single decisive telecast." j He shook his head admiringly. "Ah, well, on to our slower business today, hampered as we are by habits of deliberation, counsel, and the rigors of learning in our justice.
"I wish to dispose of some purely local cases to display to you, and to any of Sir Rupert's representatives who may inquire later, that no special prejudice adheres to the handling of the most truly honorable Mrs. Mellroot and the esteemed Miss Merydith, merely because their origins lie in the West.
"The even gaze of the Compassionate shines upon Believer and unbeliever-upon the Elect as upon the pale races-upon that hand which raises itself in supplication to Heaven as surely as upon that fist knotted to strike at Divinity's dictates."
He lifted his own hand toward a venerable greybeard seated cross-legged upon a dark maroon rug. That worthy began to read sonorously from a parchment scroll, his Arabic words flowing like prayer chants.
"A moment." My Lord the Magistrate stayed the recitation. "In the interests of full disclosure before our distinguished visitors and representatives of our firm allies-of this season, we are at least sure-greater expedience dictates translating the proceedings directly into English."
He glanced toward the CIA man. "Would you also care for a translation into American?"
"Uh, I can muddle along, thanks."
The ancient functionary upon the rug raised his voice. "Excellency! My Lord the Magistrate, the medium through whom the benedictions and right proper severities of justice flow to our darkened minds as light is arrayed upon the earth through the blessings of the sun! My Lord, I present for your wisest judgment . . .
"Oh hear the shame of a married woman, condemned by the righteousness of your hand Thursday this last, attainted of having in her possession a most obscene, decayed-permit my failing tongue to read that as decadent, oh My Lord-and too-insidious book traded among the unbelieving nations under the unnatural title of The Women's Men's Room- "Or so one must judge from its most salacious and deceiving cover. This filth of the press passed from the hand of that married woman so disgraced by its contact, passed from her hand into the keeping of My Noble Lady-"
"In the interests of brevity, we shall omit that illustrious name and associated details."
The CIA man murmured, "The magistrate's sister."
Richard tilted his chin minusculely in acknowledgement.
"-following her detainment the condemned did in willful malice toward both the state and higher virtue refuse to disclose the circumstances under which she obtained so catastrophic an infamous book."
"Just so." My Lord Ishmael tilted his head back, as if searching the skies for guidance. "I have meditated upon this crime. May I observe to our guests that the circulation of a proscribed manuscript, however corrupt, cannot injure the close-woven fabric of a community of ideas to the degree possible when there is clear importation of unknown numbers of volumes so rightfully stigmatized in their own lands as 'mass paperbacks.' "Where unguessed numbers of mischievious books may be transmitted among corruptable parties, grave risk exists for harm to the treasured and proven ideals which have sustained a people in its pursuit of Heaven's own enlightenment."
He raised a silver-chased camel's hair fly whisk. ' my word that it may find obedience.
"The creature guilty of this offense and twice-more guilty in her contumacy shall this day be flogged by ninety lashes-to be equally distributed along her back, her buttocks, and the reverse of her thighs, all such named parts to be exposed for the purpose of her punishment."
The whisk lowered. "That is, I must assure our guests, she shall receive ten strokes of the nine-tailed whip. Three shall be apportioned to each region mentioned. By esteemed tradition, the tenth is applied at the discretion of the executioner to such part of the body as he deems most worthy."
Richard recalled Daoud's explanation. "And any stray leftovers generally get awarded where the lady needs them most, you might say, old lad. The triangle presents them most adequately for the purpose. No amorous leave-takings for you should the whip catch her where she lives, I fear, Dickie."
The whisk rose again in majesty. "Such execution shall be accomplished in the customary place of public contrition as expiation for possession of so unruly a book as has been described."
The CIA man looked startled.
"Following that punishment," My Lord Ishmael further dictated. Scribes on either side of the garden-like chamber wrote furiously upon parchment in liquid Arabic script "The condemned shall be confined for a period of no less than 90 days, in solitude, in a room to contain appropriate bedding, one full-length mirror, one wardrobe-contents to be specified-and shelves supplied with ample provision of Harlequin romance novels.
"She shall, in the course of each day, be visited no less than three times, but not to exceed six, by members of the Protectorate Unified Armed Force, who shall enjoy her attentions freely- "Saving the stipulation that at the time of the lunar month determined by competent medical authority, she shall have her coynt reserved from use."
"You know, Dickie-bird," Prince Daoud had once drawled as they watched three coin-spangled dancers writhe skillfully through a Lesbian display, ' 7 never realized until I read Chaucer that our ladies had coynts. Our humble, untutored people always say 'the vale of greatest delights' or 'the smiling lily' or 'the welcoming grotto,' unlike your great poet and your celebrated translators. For such blunt speech I needed Oxford."
My Lord the Magistrate continued his sentencing. "At the end of each week, she shall be examined by 2000-word essay upon her reading matter. The grades of A, B, C, and No Credit shall be awarded by a competent professor of the Islamic School faculty.
"The mark of A shall merit three briskly applied taps of the cane upon the revealed buttocks, in the privacy of the prison warder's punishment room.
"The grade of B shall earn three strokes, to be applied as before but with vigor, plus three well-laid on strokes upon the uncovered reverse of the thighs, in the warder's punishment room, with full staff in attendance.
"The discreditable mark of C shall be punished with three strokes to the buttocks, stiffly applied, three strokes to the reverse of the thighs, and three most soundly delivered strokes upon the soles of the feet. The prisoner shall receive these in nakedness, before staff and inmates in the prison courtyard."
Pens decorated the scrolls as he spoke.
"A No Credit grade shall result in a provisional penalty of twelve full strokes, most soundly applied to the visible buttocks in the quadrangle of the Islamic School, staff and students in attendance.
"Such provisional punishment shall be followed by reexamination within three days, to be repeated until a credit grade is earned.
"Each credit grade of B or better shall be rewarded by one Georgette Heyer Regency novel." He nodded in the consul's direction. "Superior scholarship, as judged by three examiners in consultation, shall be repaid by one additional Barbara Cartland novel.
"Sustained superior scholarship of at least three weeks duration shall bring the supplement of one Rosemary Rogers novel to all the aforesaid."
Solemnly approving looks flashed from nut-brown face to nut-brown face.
"Except for the times of examination and those periods of physical conversation with the members of the Protectorate Unified Armed Force, the condemned shall remain in solitude.
"Her wardrobe shall be furnished with one cocktail dress, one European-styled wedding gown, and one Fredericks of Hollywood Ooo-La-La French domestic's attire, with footgear and underclothing appropriate to each.
"No other garment shall be permitted, save that sustained superior carnal performance-as evaluated by officers of the Unified Armed Force above the rank of lieutenant-shall supplement the above provisions by the addition of one Desmond of Bond Street Naughty Darling's Delight sleeping costume.
"Performance shall be evaluated by exit poll. This grant shall not exceed one garment per week. Color may be specified by the prisoner.
"All afore-cited corporal punishment shall be applied with the flexible 30" Indonesian bamboo cane or with the flexible 36" Indonesian bamboo, upon selection by the Islamic School examiner.
"No use shall be made of the regulation public school Malaysian rattan cane, unless so elected by the chosen examiner following three consecutive No Credit grades."
The judicial whisk fell limply. My Lord the Magistrate favored the Westerners with a tired grimace.
"Our aim is not the backward follies of the zealots so distressfully rampant in the land of our never-to-be-sufficiently-execrated enemy of this week.
"Rather, we seek to fully incorporate the very considerable advances, artistic as well as technological, which the 20th Century has bounteously provided. Naturally, in such co-mingling of diverse cultures we must guard against any lasting pollution of those timeless wellsprings of strength, health, and piety bestowed by the All-Highest upon our humble people."
My Lord Ishmael grew confidential in tone. "Do you learned gentlemen realize that the mercies of judicial flagellation were entirely unknown among our unlettered tribesmen until your First World War?
"At that time our noble first protector, the Acting Sergeant Harry Percival Wigcropper, came as emissary of your great Allenby to secure us from interference by the rampaging bandid Saud. As he extended the safeguarding mantle of your allied European nations, the esteemed Act-ling Sergeant in his own right offered the blessings of counsel to our chieftains.
"Rude practices of cicatrization and mutilation by the sword were still routine in the disciplining of errant women until he demonstrated conclusively to the most doubting of our noble forebearers that 'a nice piece of fluff can always benefit from a bit of the stick.' " The magistrate's arms spread wide. "Such truly visionary enlightenment found universal praise among our womenfolk, you may be assured.
"Further, the customary rites of clitorectemy and infibulation at puberty were forever stamped out in our land The Acting Sergeant Wigcropper cogently and vividly displayed for all to appreciate that such practices played sticky with a rather choice morsel.' "Although infibulation still surfaces in debates on suitable treatment for female unpleasantness, the utter revolution in the physical relations between a man and his wives has ended any thought of clitoral interference." "If you stuff 'em to the gills, it'll eventually stop their mouths-is that it?" The British consul's entire frame ached for a brandy and ginger beer. "Quite so, sir, I applaud the acumen you have acquired and the pith with which it finds expression-doubtless a heritage of my respected opposite number college. We must have luncheon at some soon point."
"Perhaps after you've deported my wife," Richard suggested wearily.
"Ah, yes, a sensitive point of protocol, to be sure."
The elder functionary upon the rug once again began his appointed say.
"My Lord the Magistrate, right hand in defense of the Faith and bulwark of the realm, I now present for your final and unreproachable judgement a matter of slander uttered in common hearing by three women, so forgetting, their gender's modesty as to use-" The honorable consul's drifting mind summoned for the ten thousandth time that so-efficient upstairs girl her youth. Anne Gambol. . . Annie, he called her, and Nan when Nanny Collins wasn't about . . . and he called her often.
More frequently he simply surprised her at her maiden's disrobing, or while she sponged her moist body in the bath, or while she tidied his bedchamber in the nude-she deeply abhored spotting her uniform with dust.
How she tended for him from that first day ... He a curious twelve and she a willing eighteen. How they comforted one another after his swishings.
Nanny Collins insisted she share his pains so as to understand and better minister to his sorrows. Each correction he endured far below in the sullen print-lined study would be duplicated in the cheery young maid's room.
The muscular Nanny Collins acted the role of his father. Annie impersonated Richard, the stinging cane striping the round, bare Gambol bottom again and again until he quite forgot his own tears in contemplation of hers.
Then the two contrite figures found their solace together ... first with nanny's supervision and thoughtful advice ... then with her speechless, but bountiful collaboration.
How the days at school and University had tediously lingered. How even the hours of the Long Vacation fled by... Ah, home. Nostalgia puffed in his breast. Ah, England.
The pains that service to the Crown entails that never get properly rewarded, he mused. Though he expected an eventual knighthood, he recognized that its day had been pushed into some unglimpseable future by Juliana's silliness. He never should have permitted her whim of toiling those three hours a day at that commercial enterprise.
Yet. her interest in Dillingham Eastern's affairs had definitely left him ample free time to taste the many rewards of his friend Daoud's generous land.
Yasmina . . . Leylah . . . desert doves shivering so trustingly in his virile grasp. He feared that Juliana's indiscretion might alienate them from him. So sensitive, these Orientals.
He meditated upon those stark privations demanded by Mam. the Queen, and St. George.
CHAPTER THREE
Called Under the Carpet
"P-P-P-P-leeeeze!" Mona hopped and shivered, ha diamond-dotted skin shockingly white and blue. "Ret-Rita! It's COLD!"
The shower blasted her with chill water that had slept the night in pipes far under the hills. The girl boogied, honey hair plastered to a drawn face animated by chattering teeth.
"Okay, kidlet." Her cousin stepped back from the bracing mist thrown by the spray. "Out."
Mona hurled herself at the great, fuzzy terry cloth towel. "Ohgodohgodohgodohgod."
She worked the lovely warm thing across her bloodless body parts. "Why do you do this to me, Rita?"
Her naked limbs winked in and out of the towel's enveloping folds. The skin had tightened, raising her breasts. Nipples probed the air in full erection, acorn-hard.
"It builds character and I have an uncontrollable interest in your welfare." Rita smirked at the unhallowed strip-act contortions. Tit and tush wove in and out of view, Sally Rand's clientele never had it so fine. "I thought you told me you were warm all night."
Mona hunkered and chaffed her calves.
"Enough dance of the seven veils minus six." The young woman slapped her open palms together loudly, "Recitation time. Ready, set . . ."
Mona opened her frowning mouth. Silence. Her pale tongue touched paler lips. Nipples quivered and her burnished bush shone in the overhead fixture light. Rita cupped a hand behind her ear. She nodded promptingly. "I'm wai-ting."
"Um." The big eyes with their bruised lilac irises pleaded. "What was I supposed to memorize?"
"Swinburne, lumpkin, dear old Algie Charlie Swinurne, the sadie-masie poet laureate. I tested you on two stanzas last week and you muffed them. So, three fresh ones now-or would you prefer a whole new poem for next week?"
"No! Um, I got it." The girl stood as in a trance, eyes fastened shut. The fluffy towel hung from her shoulders, a white backdrop highlighting her lush figure. She rested her weight on one leg, hip cocked irresistibly.
"Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?
Men touch them and change in a ... a trice The lillies and langors of virtue For the raptures and roses of vice; Those lie where thy foot on the floor is, These crown and caress thee and chain, 0 splendid and sterile Dolores, Our Lady of Pain.
There are sins it may be to discover, There are deeds it may be to delight," Mona paused, puzzled, then gulped an "oh!"
"What new work wilt thou find for thy lover, What new passions for daytime or night?
What new spells that they know not a word of Whose lives are as leaves overblown?
What tortures undreamt of, unheard of, Unwritten, unknown?
Ah beautiful passionate body That never has ached with a heart! On thy mouth though the kisses are bloody Though they sting till it shudder and smart, More kind than the love we adore is, They hurt not the heart or the brain, O bitter and tender Dolores, Our Lady of Pain."
Mona inhaled and exhaled briskly, shifting her weight from hip to hip. "That's icky stuff, Rita."
Her cousin applauded with three handclaps.
"Very good, very good. I think Swinnie is too easy for you, too much the kindred spirit. Next time maybe something rah-rah and less soulful."
She jabbed a fingernail toward the door. "You're nicely dressed for your morning workout-or had you forgotten? No mistakes on the recitation, but it's still naughty nine for your raptures and roses with Ron."
Slightly damp, slightly chill, the woeful coed followed her out to the hassock. A too-familiar rattan cane lay in state.
"Mmmmm. Some festive, fruity hues down amongst the lovegourds." Rita surveyed as the girl knelt. "I especially like those purplish speckles. Tender, are they, even after an icy splash to quiet the circulation?"
Mauve eyes narrowed, the blonde handed back the cane Her pebbled spine arced as she put her weight on the hassock. Her breasts hung freely over the leather's edge.
The velvety, well-upholstered rumpcheeks thrust up and back. Rita slashed the air. The naked bottom goosebumped in sudden fear.
The cane's straight handle had been cork wrapped for grip. Rita took a fencer's stance. She snapped the lithe rattan through a salute, a lunge, return to guard, and furious parrying of phantom thrusts. With a victorious riposte, she hissed the steely cane through a final salute The stick quivered in her hand, zealously alive.
She felt her blood pump as she studied Mona's brazenly available bottom. The cane's fattened tip brushed each uncertain hillock, creasing the paddle's painful spoor.
"You have a healthy hindend. Think how much more there'd be to take a touching up if you stayed on those candy binges. Your mother put me in loco parentis for a reason, kiddo."
The sallow rattan sliced the air and struck. Mona's wet hair whipped back in spikey tendrils. The curving wood indented her flesh, driving her against the hassock.
Rita rubbed the punishing wand back and forth, then lifted it. She'd hit high, above the paddle marks.
"You have a Pre-Raphaelite nymph's tail, cousin mine. Not Reuben's class-not yet. Nor Beardsley-gaunt by anyone's imagination. Muscles squeezeably padded with subcutaneous fat."
Rita studied the welt. She particularly favored an English cane for its classic double-ridged mark. A narrow-gauge railway to pain, the twin tracks always ended in a darker, hotter terminus if the tip landed well.
The thickened cane end had caught Mona's right chub perfectly. She resisted the temptation to prod the swollen ridge.
"Algie Swinburne's darling Dolores probably ate like a vixen visiting a chicken house. Victorians worshiped at the altars of hefty, Lillian Russell-style women. I could double your punishment dosages without a qualm if you fed your fundament to classic 19th century specifications."
The rattan sank viciously into the plump, peach-cleft mounds. The wood shivered just above the first weal.
"I'm more concerned with your studies than the way you're feeding your sitzfleisch-or even the slop-and-drop nonchalance you bring to housework."
Rita raised the cane and snapped the third lick between the two welts, welding them into a single band. Her arm thrilled from the impact. The stung buttocks leaped in protest. Mona's feet danced a futile tatoo. Her cleft clenched to a shadowy line.
"Your last year in high was light on solid nutrition. A's and B's you got, but 'Introduction to Contemporary Living,"The Literature of Rock,' and 'Advanced Textile Patterns' do not a Rhodes scholar make. College is a whole new ball of wax."
The cane thwacked solidly across the paddle-sore lower cheeks.
"Or an independent business woman."
The fifth cut seared the tender bruising lower yet. Mora squaled in sow-shrill outrage.
"Or a modern helpmeet, if you prefer the kitchen and kinder route to success."
The sixth whipped into bunched, squeezing mounds. Burgundy corrugations rose, fat with pain. The blonde coed's fists hammered the rug as she grunted.
"Little Cleo had better watch her empire while she's taking the Nile water with Marc Antony. If any pattern develops that puts your scholastic standing in jeopardy ..."
Rita prodded a recoiling buttock with the rattan's blunt tip. "I made you enroll in those intro courses this summer: to let you chew on some real meat under fairly relaxed conditions."
Brick-faced, the bent girl puffed and blew. Wet hair slumped across her eyes. Tears joined the shower's dampness.
"Any hint of brain-drain down the party tube ..."
The woman lashed the innocent upper thighs. Her cousin shrieked again.
"I'll raise the penalty for curfew violation to two licks per quarter-hour increment."
The stick scored both working thighs. The legs churned as Mona arched high over the hassock.
"Plus ..." Rita chuckled. She remembered her stepmother laying down the law, in fire-fleshed doses, during her own school years. "Plus . . .
"Each date. Each assignation. Each appointment away from class or library. Each get-together with boy or girl or inquisitive dog will commence with four low, serious strokes just to remind your tubby tookie that it's here in town to warm a classroom seat, not some hunk's lap.
"All that I promise you if those grades start to wander below the salt."
The steel-cruel rattan lashed true and terrible-right into the ink-pipped undercheeks. Mona flew halfway across the hassock. Her legs threshed in the air as her lips rolled. The buttocky paroxysms put exotic dance to shame. "I've heard seals mate with less noise." Rita enjoyed the whole-hearted girl show immensely.
She stroked the vibrant cane. Her blood soared with energy. She looked forward to the morning's iron-pumping down at the Orinda Build-A-Bod Spa.
Rita fingered the English whipping stick lovingly.
In a parked car hidden among the brown, dry hills east of San Francisco Bay, sophomore Beryl Eisley caressed an upright prong with almost identical motions.
"Kinda big." Her face ducked lower. She critically eyed the taut, ready ballsac. "You sure this fits?"
She dubiously held up the cheerily candy-striped condom.
"Not over the whole thing. Just the end." Ron Ladrone looked impatient. "You're supposed to roll it down as far as it'll go. That's enough."
Beryl sniffed the sperm-heavy cods. "Spicy." The tip of her tongue nudged the skin, rolling a testicle around. "I guess if I can eat sushi ..."
Her fingers fumbled with the narrow latex balloon and the uncircumcised cockhead.
"No, you have to start at the top and roll it down, or it'll bust, maybe."
She glanced down again at his gibbous scrotum. "They're that full? Look, why don't you do this, if you're an open?"
"It's more fun if you ... do everything." Ron's sheepish grin carried markedly less voltage than the one he'd used on Mona just a few night hours before.
"I'll bet." She concentrated on trying to clothe his yearning member with the red and white condom. "Hey, is this thing growing bigger?"
"It's because you've got fingers like silk," he whispered "Mmmmph. It still makes the job harder. Oh, God speaking of harder!" She poked at the bone-rigid length with one chewed fingernail. "Aren't you supposed to be doing something to make this as exciting for me?"
"Sure, I'll get to that in a minute, if you'll finish up. This's supposed to protect both of us, you know."
She worked the barber-striped rubber further down, "Protection I could have used when I met you at Pancake Mike's. Strawberry waffles soften my brain."
The jolly condom finally sheathed his phallus. The floppy reservoir tip lay like a tiny French Revolutionary cap atop the egg-sized head.
Beryl gave a tentative lick. "Hey! It's peppermint flavored."
"Sure. Just like Christmas candy, only sweeter." After Shakespeare, Ron hated himself for such happy talk. He grinned inanely as her tongue swept up and down with enthusiasm.
She grabbed the semen-fat ballsac, kneading it simultaneously. Ron rocked back against the carseat. He gasped "Nah-not YET!"
The condom reservoir bounced to attention as sperm jets flooded it. Beryl studied the geysering critically. "I hope you don't think you're done for the morning."
Ron's confused smile met her accusing glance. He felt the hot, trapped load lave his cocktip. That whole-hog hayroll with Mona had left him too keyed up. "Uh, don't worry . . . I'll still help you get off."
"Help? Help?" She rattled the fleshy barber-pole." did the whole works on this. You'd better finish the job on me yourself."
Her ragged nails nipped into the latex like claws. He swallowed hard. She looked determined. "And no fair using hands, either!"
Gently, he pried her talons off his crowed-out cock. With a sincere heart he repented the itch to be unfaithful to loveable, suggestible Mona.
The toad-squat Arab gentleman dressed in purest prison-governor white, from gleaming leather shoes and suede spats to a spotless Panama hat. He addressed Juliana and Lucretia Sue in their cell.
"For the bitter crime of disrespectful speech to a male person over the age of fourteen, My Lord the Magistrate had determined the Olive Race to be a suitable penance."
His incongruous hat tilted Juliana's way as his eyes narrowed in relish. "That punishment is to be succeeded by administration of 120 lashes, in the warder's punishment room, in remonstrance for willfully performing an unfeminine occupation for gainful hire."
The Englishwoman goggled.
"Ca-ca-" Juliana babbled as two burnoosed guards descended upon her. "Ca-ca-"
"You require relief?" The governor seemed to be genuinely solicitous. "Was there not adequate time for that this morning?"
"Ca-can I-the consul-" She shrieked as the men seized her upper arms and bore her along. "My husband! Richard! I must see-"
"He has been fully informed," the governor informed her fading voice as his guards carried her away down the corridor.
Lucretia Sue felt sincerely awestruck as the squat, absurdly dressed man surveyed her in her bare-assed deshabille.
"For the affront to nature itself of wearing men's trousers, My Lord the Magistrate has decreed four chukkers of Carpet Polo."
She only blinked, trying to comprehend. Perhaps either he or she had missed a key word somewhere. "Your violation of purity in the seduction of a male person for attempted gain in governmental dealings shall find its due chastisement, he has determined, in the ordeal of Unendurable Pleasure Indefinitely Prolonged."
Lucretia Sue sucked on her lip. She understood. Guerrilla theater had come to Qu'imram while her naked hot-torn had been cooling in this cell. This had to be Ionesco. Maybe Samuel Beckett feeling in a parodistic mood. The metaphor of Life As A Prison explored through Absurdis devices.
Yeah, that made sense. The whimsical li'l imps intended to diddle her funny bone till she convulsed in laughter. Suitable punishment for what were Absurdist crimes, anyway.
"Your atonement for the willful and knowing possession of forbidden beverage abhorant to the Holy Law and destroyer of men's faculties, he so wisely directs, shall be 180 lashes, administered in the place of public penance." "Jesus!" Lucretia Sue clung to her family's heritage of Okefenokee grit. "That'll slice me into jelly!"
The governor frowned a very evil, toad-like frown. "I do not believe blasphemy to be suitable in your situation. Surely even women realize that the Prophet Jesus is loved by the All-Compassionate only below His final prophet, the reverenced Mohammed?
"I am minded to report your impiety to My Lord the Magistrate for delay of deportation and some suitable education in reverence."
"My humblest apologies, your worship, sir, I know you are quite right." Lucretia Sue bent her torso in an attitude of abasement. "My unlucky and ill-mannered upbringing has been my downfall yet again, distinguished sir."
"Mmmmmm ... I shall take this under advisement." His face softened. "Yet I counsel you not to sully the names of Heaven's holy ones further during your just tribulations."
More guards advanced. Hands drew her up and force marched her down the corridor.
Lucky, lucky, Ju'-baby, she thought. A hiding in private while all the world gets to gawk at my fanny and my ruination.
An almost telepathic shout came to her from the Juliana of her memory. "Never say 'fanny' when you mean 'bum.' Someone might take you at your word."
She recalled one of the many unsavory episodes in the campaign to re-educate her speech. After an epic enough tussle, she'd been planted doe-naked on a dorm table. It had seemed more silly than anything else, so she'd let the other inmates at Miss M's have their way.
She'd been required to finger herself in front of the leering, nightgowned girls while stridently reciting: "This is my fanny, and this is my bum. One is for tickling at night with my thumb. The other's for whacking and kissing by scum. Pray don't confuse them and birch my split plum."
As the guards hauled her along, Lucretia Sue hoped that at least one portion of her anatomy would be safe from flogging-whether called picturesquely a "split plum," in British vulgarity a "fanny," or with clinical objectivity a "pudendum."
The Most Royal Princess Yasmine, eldest daughter to the reigning emir, wore her smartest light peach Jackie Kennedy-clone suit.
For the first time, Lucretia Sue saw that dark beauty unveiled. It confused her, since men plainly stood about the huge, vault-ceilinged room.
The mother of all carpets stretched across the floor. It lay in wrinkled folds, easily 200 feet by 300. Perhaps more. Its delicately figured, brilliantly colored pile rose at the center in a peculiar bulge. Something lay under there.
Arab women stood at either end of the rectangular room. Some wore knee-length tennis dress. All had skirts. The Princess Yasmine stood with ladies of her generation, some scarcely twenty years old.
The Exalted Princess Saphira, wife to the emir--but not Yasmine's mother-dominated a contingent of older women on the other side of the carpet.
Lean, pantherish, and officially forty for the past seven! years, the first lady of Qu'imram seemed a hellcat browsing among heffers.
Her entourage boasted multiple chins and poundage traditional to Arab leisured ladies. By contrast, Yasmine's coterie reflected Western-slender concepts of elegance.
Lucretia Sue wondered why all the women held round-bladed battledore paddles. Saphira flexed the whippy palm stalk handle on hers as she talked. Not a net or a shuttlecock seemed in sight.
"Let me acquaint you with the rules, Miss Merydith." An insidious voice made her flinch. She turned.
A sour-faced young man wore the loose linen trousers and shapeless jacket of a warder. Slight, clean-shaven, he inclined his brow in a minute bow. A sardonic glean infected his eye.
He reminded her of a brown-skinned Cedric Hardwicke, whose sarcastic portrayal of Death she fondly recalled from the Lionel Barrymore chestnut On Borrowed Time.
"You will find the play simple." He hand waved from one group of women to the other. "The court ladies compose two teams with six players each. The teams compete to achieve the placement of that beach ball-" He pointed to the bulge under the carpet.
"--through the appointed goal markers." He indicated stubby posts set six feet apart at the ends of the carpet near the groups of women.
"I don't guess they tap the ball along with those paddles.' "Most acute." His head waggled, amusedly. "Twelve female prisoners, like yourself sentenced by the court, or remanded by the governor for reasons of internal prison discipline, compete beneath the carpet to stir the ball."
"Sounds like a mad scramble down below."
"Most precisely. The one who completely frees the ball and herself through the goal markers may leave the play."
"The royal ladies have some influence in this game, I begin to suspect."
"Soundly reasoned. Each player beneath acts for herself, seeking to liberate the ball and her body from the play. Each player below is guided by a player above, who influences the direction of . . .
"Here we employ polo terminology for its metaphoric simplicity and call the one beneath the carpet a 'mount.' "
"I suppose the gal on top is her rider," Lucretia Sue offered.
"You grasp the essentials with admirable speed." He chuckled. "Actual straddling of the mount by the rider has proved hazardous, in memorable instances. The rider does encourage haste and effort, guides direction, and maps out the greater strategy of the game. The battledore assists her in communicating with her mount.
"Each placement of the ball through the goal advances one team's score. Yet, if the rider permits her mount to achieve freedom by following the ball, her team declines in strength."
Oho. The Georgian got the idea very, very clearly. She and her rider would have very different objectives right at the moment she scooted the beach ball out of play.
"You have a clever mind. Some say this game resembles the simplicity of life." He gazed with a peculiar bitterness at the Princess Saphira and her retinue of older ladies.
"Below, our actions seem random," he continued. "We seem frantic prisoners of unseen forces, always trying to pursue our self-ad vantage, yet often inexplicably thwarted.
"Above, the opposing forces engage in a formal trial of their captains' wisdom. The great picture becomes clear and orderly.
"Below, the fully successful finish their efforts and receive blessed rest in the kingdom above, once their bodies pass through life's goal.
"Above, the judicious player must curtail the zeal of a successful and enthusiastic individual in order to avoid losing her skill. A single victory too early in the contest can spell ruin if a valuable mount escapes to her reward."
"I'll bet that curtailing smarts." Lucretia Sue studied the battledores. Quaint little 19th Century anachronisms. Yeah. Sting like holy hell.
"Sometimes zeal must be tempered with seeming cruelty to serve the far-sighted strategy of the game," the young man agreed. "The great compassion of the captains and the riders must extend to the whole play, not just a moment of victory and the desire to reward a mount who has contested well."
"Downright Manichean in its simplicity-if you sympathize with that religious pursuasion." Lucretia Sue wondered what ingenious brute had developed the rules.
"I've seen Portugese bull fighting," she remarked. "Blindfolded horses get ridden in the ring against some pretty angry bulls."
"An apt comparison. You appreciate the subtleties of the game. Shortly, the women from the prison will arrive, regular prisoners from the common cells. At that time you shall strip yourself naked and enter beneath the carpet."
"Uh-huh. We start off mother-naked, like life."
He nodded. "Nor shall you know which side has chosen you. When I blow my whistle, the action shall commence for fifteen minutes. We employ the double-chukker. When I sound the whistle again, three minutes of rest follow.
"Absolute immobility is required," he stressed. "Violations result in rather strict punishment."
The American figured as much. Something puzzled her even more than before. "We're all going to be naked as unborn chicks. The court women are all unveiled. Yet, here you men are, looking right at them. Nobody with even one of those token hankies you folks put such store by, much less one of those full-scale marketplace veils."
"Yes, I see the noble ladies unveiled. At times, I see them in extreme disarray." He fingered his silver whistle. "To serve a far-seeing strategy, I have myself been-- tempered. I am a eunuch. All you see here as men have that honored limitation."
The edge in his voice made the skin above her coccyx angle.
A far door opened. Blocky, hard men hauled in a bevy of nude women. The men had none of the soft, petulant appearance of a Hollywood stereotype harem attendant.
The females carried solid meat on their bones, in the classic mold favored in Eastern lands. Lucretia Sue could see that squabbling with them over a silly beach ball would be hell.
She felt grateful for her rough-and-tumble years in the Okefenokee. Those looked to be tough broads to handle. The hockey field scraps at Miss Maelstrom's had put an edge on her style, too.
"How do we breathe down there?"
"The floor is ventilated through many holes. The air is forced and quite brisk. Alas, the flooring causes much abrasion-although it must be preferred to smothering."
"I know. Also like life."
"You should remove your garment now."
"One question left." She unbuttoned the shirt. "How hard do they use those battledores?"
Both Saphira's and Yasmine's troops flourished their long-handled paddles as they giggled maliciously at the nude prison women.
"Miss Merydith, as in life, we are in a prison. Need you ask?" His light, biting laugh continued until he raised the whistle.
She set her heaped shirt back from the carpet's edge. Fortunately, she hadn't been wearing a bra when Fa'ud had interrupted her seminar. The other prisoners had begun to ease themselves under the carpet.
"I suggest you enter now." The unsexed warder surveyed the increasingly restive court ladies. "The riders are eager for the play."
She hunkered on all fours. She fingered the vast textile's bound edge. Soft, exquisitely woven, the carpet had a nape like velvet.
She could imagine a conventional length of the same material being drawn through a bride's wedding ring, as authorities claimed one could do with the finest rugs.
Still, the great, inert bulk of it would get mighty heavy mighty fast. She crawled under the edge. The clinging wool passed over her shoulders. It tickled her waist. As her buttocks waggled under, Lucretia Sue felt a claustrophobic oppression.
Her breath caught. The air seemed dead, as stiffling as breathing through a sweater. She moved on resolutely.
Needles of fresh, cool air exploded up against her face She closed her eyes as they drove up at breasts and belly She shook her head and lifted her lids.
Her eyes began to adjust to the light percolating down through the carpet weave. If she blinked enough, the tickling jets didn't bother her that much.
The floor vibrated as women tramped above, checking out the "mounts." The flat blade of someone's battledore whacked her smartly across the right hindcheek.
She arched her back, hissing indignantly. She relaxed as footfalls moved away.
A round paddle tapped her backside lightly, over the gluteal divide. It didn't go away. She guessed she'd been chosen.
She knew her orientation to the big bulge. She could scramble dead toward the ball. Who she'd meet when she got there was another matter.
A hard, piercing whistle stabbled through the carpet.
She tried to gallop full tilt on hands and knees. The battledore barely grazed her retreating rump. As she struggled forward, the carpet caught savagely at her long hair It tried to rip the carroty growth from her scalp.
She slowed and tucked her head way down. Feet caught up with her. A paddle delivered an encouraging splat. She scampered onward, head low. The carpet rasped along be neck and shoulders.
She heard shrill, wailing cries ahead and leaped for the fray. Suddenly she realized the only way to actually move the ball would be to butt it, head-on while she used her arms and legs to force it against the carpet's drag. And any fleshly obstacles.
She felt the material rise ahead of her at the ball's bulge. Contact!
The battledore sang into her behind. She hoped it signaled a right turn. She changed direction and found the ball--alone, thank heaven.
She braced herself against the ball and began to ram it. Grudgingly, it began to roll.
No! A punishing whap to the lip redirected her. Signals, damn it, we need to agree on signals, she thought as she shifted to the left of her original direction.
Also like life, she reflected-devotees of astrology, kismet, determinism, and Friday night sports bar mud wrestling all try to interpret the hard knocks they endure.
The game constituted a complete education in itself. Tiny holes bit at her elbows and knees as she scrabbled over the flooring.
A freight train load of vibrations thundered toward her. Avid, wildly trilling Arab women rushed at her. She'd wondered where the rest of the pack had been keeping itself. Setting her muscles, she continued to drive the ball forward.
The young eunuch watched the female confusion roil beneath the carpet. Battledores flashed. The wooden blades rang like pistol cracks across the recoiling bulges. The court ladies leaped agilely to avoid being tumbled as the carpet stuff shifted and yanked about under them.
He smiled sardonically when they failed. The overfed riders on Her Blessed Solemnity Saphira's team landed the most comically. Just now, all the court women circled, shrilling their discontent and encouragement as mounts tangled.
Princess Yasmine had the advantage. She'd set the ball in motion. The experienced prisoners had been reluctant to race to action. Lucretia Sue Merydith had moved like an arrow.
Her Ladyship Saphira found the battle under the carpet not going in her favor. The tigerish woman abandoned her mount to the cat-fight. She ran to where a fat confederate waited. She'd hung back from the press, keeping clear.
The princess appropriated the idle mount and smack-paddled the prisoner into a rapid scramble. She plainly intended to lie in wait in front of Yasmine's goal. A simple strategy. The eunuch had seen it before.
One of Yasmine's ladies tried to pull her mount out of the fray. She beat a lump of carpet free from the melee and sent it crawling to engage Saphira. Her battledore swung in a bottom-burning fury.
All the while, the ball twitched back and forth. Amid beaten flesh, vile language, and gutteral shrieks it seemed no one's clear possession.
Yet, Saphira had been correct. When the ball at last began to move purposefully, Yasmine had command of that mount. It mattered not if it was the same woman she'd started with. Whoever directed the ball through her own team's goal markers scored.
She drove her ball-butting mount gently. Her ladies fell into formation as outriders, their crawling prisoners warding off marauders as the bulge progressed.
The eunuch checked the time. Ah. Three minutes had passed.
Lucretia Sue's rear felt branded. Her hair choked her. She couldn't stop long enough to pull it from her face and mouth. Her skull bonged like a gong as she battered the ball ahead-ahead-ever ahead.
At least whoever rode her wasn't paddle-happy. Her wind came hard and her limbs ached, yet she kept i constant speed. She knew she had to pace herself to keep energy for a final scurry. She intended to butt the ball out and go for the goal like a greased gator.
She felt competition coming from behind, four o'clock low. The fresh, scampering woman rammed full-tilt into the beach ball, knocking if off course.
Lucretia Sue threw her best elbow, followed by a breast clawing and a hip-bruising body block. A thigh-slamming kick sent the other woman rolling away in pain.
The Georgian regained the ball. A heavy battledore blow tried to catch her shoulder. The carpet, tented around the ball, deflected the whack.
Arabic railed above her, then English.
"Damn you!" Her rider ranted. "Let this one spell you!"
"Oh! . . . Oh!" Lucretia Sue fell back. Another prisoner came in from the side and began to butt the ball forward. Her hot body sweated as it forged on ahead.
Lucretia Sue wondered if she could be stinking as powerfully as that other woman in so short a time. She kept up with the ball's motion. She had an inkling that the bitch riding her might try to pull her back, letting the other woman score.
Right, sister, just try it . . .
Grateful as she was for the respite, she intended to be through the goal herself, leaving only a trail of ozone.
The eunuch enjoyed the girl-fights as Yasmine's outriders repelled raiders trying to redirect the ball. The skirmishes allowed the ball to roll on, battling prisoners in its wake.
Ah-ah-ah! He saw the stir behind the bulge as it neared the goal. Neither woman could directly perceive the fat posts she had to crawl through to gain freedom. Yet, both knew they had to be near. He perceived conflict over who would drive the ball to attempted victory.
Saphira's marauders fell in like hyenas. They formed a blocking line ahead of the sphere as Yasmine disciplined ger ball-movers with furious spankings. Her battledore supplemented her tongue, pouring forth vulgar Arabic and quite common English alike.
The ball surged on suddenly.
The eunuch checked the time. Quite enough left for a brutal encounter. He knew the spoiled, idle court ladies loved every wench-battling instant of it. At least the periodic violence gave the prisoners a release from incarceration's tensions. Some were hardened desert women, some harder city predators.
The young warder stiffled a yawn. He much preferred administering Unendurable Pleasure Indefinitely Prolonged. He hoped the Merydith whore would be in viable shape for that ordeal.
Someone, somewhere among the hot, acrid woman-bodies was peeing. Lucretia Sue knew someone had unloaded Number One. The rushing forced air vaporized it and scattered droplets among them all. The damned girl-wee invaded her panting mouth and flaring nostrils, as it infiltrated her eyes and ears.
She had abandoned the ball to lend a hand at clearing out the female barricade ahead. The hens above the carpel had a jolly time during the free-rolling bitch-brawl below, Now Lucretia Sue sidewindered back, between stray feet when possible. When not . . . she tumbled a regal lady onto her gold-plated ass without any regard for team loyalties.
She reached the driving side of the ball and added her thrust to the other woman still pumping forward steadily.
Commming thrroough, giiiirls!
The ball slammed against the hooting, cursing tangle of femininity ahead. The opposition had been thinned. Yasmine's crew parted it effectively. The sphere rammed on, full-tilt.
Hands caught at her pushing legs. The naked body beside her tried to elbow her away.
Ha! Lucretia Sue indelicately kicked the wind out of her partner-way out. Clawing hands still clung to her other leg. She rolled, lashing a heel kick backwards. The fingers let loose.
She rammed the ball full force. It exploded free of the carpet, rocketing against the wall.
Someone leaped to sit on her before she could exit herself. Arching into a furious knot, she let the court rider straddle her for a full second.
Then she uncoiled like a rattler, shooting under the carpet's edge after the ball.
A heavy thump from behind gave her hope a royal tookie had gotten purpled for the evening. She panted gratefully, blinded in the full light. Cooler, freer air washed over her sweat-drenched body.
She turned to see Princess Yasmine pick herself up, her mouth viciously twisted. Lucretia Sue grinned. "Hurrah for our side, honey. I made it this time. Your turn next."
The young eunuch ambled along in her direction. Others retrieved the ball and began to roll it under the carpet toward the center.
Yasmine engaged the young warder in a passionate, evidently well-spiced tirade which he opposed with only downcast eyes and patient shrugs.
Finally she stormed back toward the huddled carpet lumps of the imprisoned women. Her battledore carved the air before her.
"Her Beneficent Serenity contended that your sentence had included a full four chukkers of play. I but replied that having observed the rules, your further participation is rightfully on the sidelines, and no word of His Lord the Magistrate set aside any customary provision of the game."
He smiled bitterly. "She is not pleased. You handled yourself amazingly for a novice. You must enter the play again some day."
"Thank God for deportation, honey chile, or that brass-souled . . . uh, dear lady would see to it, I'm sure."
"The princess may be able to delay your exit. Her influence with her father is considerable." He appraised her. "You appear rather chipper, I must say, for all of your exertions."
"We Merydiths dote on a good ol' skull-creasin', face- arrangin' free-for-all. Usually the menfolks try to hog it for themselves, but we rarely let 'em." A whistle sounded. With screams and rude paddle smacks, the play resumed.
"You're not officiating?"
"We now proceed to your next punishment. Any time to be served on the sidelines can, by logical extension, be expiated in other rooms." His eyes seemed bright with unkind anticipation.
Her joints and muscles protested as she stood. "Ow. I don't think a li'l of spanking would hurt a bit right now."
"We shall indulge in the other first, anyway."
She followed him to the door she'd entered through. Looking back, she saw the bizarre carpet lumps battling for possession of the greater bulge. Yasmine seemed dedicated to breaking her battledore over someone's crupper.
Lucretia Sue hoped the victim was the broad with the clutching hand at the end. She rather pitied the one she'd had to boot out of action, after all the good ball-driving she'd done.
CHAPTER FOUR
Touch and Go
Juliana Mellroot quivered in soft-boweled dismay at the evil implications offered by two broad cakes of ice standing a good forty feet apart on the mottled marble floor.
Mist rolled from them as steaming Gulf air poured through open windows. She couldn't imagine why vast pools hadn't formed around the two junior ice floes. Perhaps freezing coils kept them solid.
Beside each ice cake stood three villainous, contemptuous Arab gentlemen. None wore trousers or anything other than felt slippers below their lean brown waists.
Brigands, she thought dismally. Desert brigands. Sneering faces and ratty mustaches. That's how sheiks really look. Not like Rudy Valentino or Doug Fairbanks (pere or fils) or Sean Connery or . . .
Well, she conceded, maybe Tony Quinn had caught the knavery of the authentic article.
"You will please to use the cloakroom!" An officious thumb brusquely prodded her toward one wall. At least the short, fussy warder wore clothing.
A local woman, heart-stoppingly nude, rose from a turnip-shaped earthenware vessel. She averted her long-lashed eyes.
"Any accidents will be most regrettably punishable!" The warder had bulging eyes to go with his piercing voice. Juliana approached the foul thing, fairly tiptoeing. Its reek carried in the humid air.
"Your Bedwani, madame, is ever your gentleman, Nature's choicest nobleman, forged in that keen furnace, the desert-cleansed of impure behavior by the tempering sands.
"Only in cities, where Greece and Rome piled their rot, have you the sordid decadence that plagues the man torn from his clean, harsh heritage and set to wallow in the putrescence oozed by the great city cultures.
"Be thankful that your husband goes to a county only recently citified. Alexander's your man! He put the Indian sign to the Arab, madame, and don't you be mistaken about it. The Hellenistic hellsbroth had little effect on the greater Arabian peninsula. I envy you your new home and opportunities."
Professor Bastion Creature-Scott had enthralled her by his rhetoric when she'd visited his Oxford digs.
The Englishwoman studied the over-used earthen vessel. Surely they could have emptied it at least once that week Basty, you shit-simpleton, she thought, why didn't you mention this muck and stuff your Alexander and his Indian sign up your own putrescent ooze?
She hiked her skirt inelegantly. Thumbing her panties down to her knees, she strove to squat without perching or that unsavory rim.
Her skills from adolescent summers in Paris rescued her. She wee'd with shameful largesse into the unfragrant vessel.
Black desert eyes, black city eyes-she didn't care whit provenance they claimed, black heathen eyes watched her in negligent cruelty as she ... as she . . .
No. Oh! NO!
Her fluttery colon seized its opportunity. It took swift advantage of her vulnerable posture. The gut tube swelled in unmistakable yearning.
Unwanted, unsought, unstoppable, the first of an unutterable series plashed loudly into the darkly golden pond held by the vessel.
Unspeakable droplets leaped to lave her below.
She held her head rigid, tears forming as the humiliating display continued without pause. The incredulous, amused gazes pierced her to the quick. At length, the indignity concluded.
The shrill-voiced warder approached. He seemed terribly offended. "You will clean yourself! You will cleanse yourself of your dirty business!"
His eyes gave significant attention to her left hand.
"The unfortunate conjugation of a Bedwani's thumb and his bum, dear madame, has given rise to that ceaseless quest for stimulation so notoriously and explicitly detailed by the late Sir Richard Burton in his 'Sodiatic Zone' essay ..." Creature-Scott had looked very, very Old School solemn as he invited her to contemplate "the carnal misguidance provoked by the drive for sanitation."
Juliana began to laugh at the memory. Her eyes dripped shame's salt and her hindquarters dripped . . . Her mind rebelled. Sufficient for her to know that she dripped.
She laughed as she stripped off her underpants, worth a fashionable fortune at Maison Montrachet in Rue Colombard.
She used the pricey satin to muck herself out 'tween the cheeks and she laughed.
She let the sorely-used nethergarment drop into the acrid vessel as she laughed. She saw the jailer's vivid distaste and laughed still. She let her sad skirt drop over her thighs.
She had reduced herself to idiotic chuckles as she paced her way from the earthenware crock to-? Surely some serial buggery while bent over a baby iceberg.
She grinned a crazy, very Upper Class grin as she eyed the cock-proud villains beside each frosty cake.
"You will now pleasantly distress yourself!"
She nodded merrily at the insane order. Surely the poor lunatic needed humoring.
The warder's hand tugged at her crumpled blouse impatiently. "You will be pleased to distress yourself!"
Ah, yes, let's sit and sing sad songs of kings . . . talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the earth . . . for the first time she felt a real sympathy with Shakespeare's Richard II.
"Disengarb yourself at once! Do you not now comprehend me?"
Abruptly the penny dropped. A gravely voice-the sain Turk Murphy, no doubt, from a jazzman's Paradise-began to intone in her mind: Dis dress don't cover no gamblers, dis dress; dis dress don't cover no gamblers, midnight cowboys, pagan ramblers . . .
Dis-robe, dis-dress . . . she nodded at the foolish pop-eyed man with comprehension as she stripped herself as bare as Mother Eve.
Yet Eve after the fall, she mused, neatly folding her much-abused clothing. Eve under the baneful sentence to toil and to suffer. The bra hooks fought her giddy fingers. Eve expelled from dignity and pride by the angel's lightning-bright sword. She placed the bra tidily on her clothes, breasts free and wobbling.
Eve without a fig's leaf to shield her fig.
Juliana obediently occupied the spot beside that nude Protectorate woman who had employed the pot before her. Quilt lovely, really, with that abundance of curve and cuddle...
A flurry of noise at the door heralded a guard thrusting in a third female, also exposing her brown and fulsomely-proportioned all. She stood on Juliana's left, viewing her with haughty desert scorn.
The fussy little warder began to chatter in machine-gun Arabic. He held a single, plump olive between his thumb and forefinger. It seemed to hold importance; he gestured at it often.
The two Qu'imram women divided, each scurrying to stand by one of the junior icebergs. Fog continued to drift down the unmelting sides.
"This first prisoner will carry from one place to the other." The officious white-clad man all but rammed the dark ovid fruit up her nose in his gesticulations. "The second prisoner will pick it up and carry it to the former place. The third prisoner, who is you, will then pick up and carry..."
Juliana thought it all frightfully obscure. "In the intervals between cartage, you shall occupy the vile mouth which insulted authority by enticing the manhood of that one, there, while you are there." His finger jabbed at the third bandit in line by the farther ice block. "When you are here, you will concentrate the same attention upon this man." He pointed to a dismayingly long-wanged ruffian by the nearer ice cake. "The others each their own man assigned. You will stick to your own man."
Love to, ducks, she giggled inanely to herself, but I know my dear Richards--who is my man, after all, isn't he?--slyboots Richard is plying every wile at his command, weaning himself to the sturdy British bone trying to free me from this horror. He shall probably rescue me before I ever find out what the devil you're trying to tell me. However, the game became clear as she watched. The warder fussily placed the fat olive on the exact mathematical center of the first ice block. The first naked Arab woman swiftly slid her warmly fleshed posterior onto the flat, glacial surface.
The topside proved too broad a plateau for her to simply sit. She had to industriously push her nethercheeks backwards across the misted ice until her feet dangled in the air. Only then could her clenching buttocks grasp the olive.
Juliana began to comprehend.
The brown woman squirmed herself off the cold block. Her goose-pimpled bottom swayed, the dark fruit buried somewhere between the ample twin moons. She made hast toward the far ice cake.
Crouching beside that pearlescent platform, the second Arab woman skillfully sucked and chewed the slowly erecting phallus of the man appointed her. Her glance darted from her task to the prisoner with the olive.
Again the comical wriggling to reach the exact center of the icy seat. This time, the first woman deposited her awkward burden.
Dusky-aureoled breasts rippling, lips and thighs a-ji, she leaped from the block to fall upon her knees before the sullen, circumcised bandit designated for her.
The second woman sprang up the instant the first touched lips to dong. She abandoned fellatio to slide her own wincing rump along the ice to retrieve the olive.
Absolute madness, Juliana concluded from the comforting distance of her own balminess.
"Am I forgetting to tell you?" The agitated little warder stared at her in concern. "The one who first procures summation for each of her men wins the Olive Race. The others receive a sharp fustigation for their tardiness."
"Oh." Oh. Oh!
The protective veil of giddiness fell. Bleak rationality flooded back. Juliana saw her life as a single gleaming bridge, from schoolroom days to this prison room in Qu'imram.
"Ju-Ju Tsk-Tardy!
Ju-Ju Tsk-Tardy!
Late to chapel, Late to class-
Must LOVE to feel a rattan.
Across her laggard arse!"
No, not really, she'd always silently responded to the doggerel taunt. She'd endured the unfeeling jibes of the other girls, her face screwed, eyes red, fingers itching to comfort her hotly wealed sit-upons.
When Aramilla'd been Dorm Monitor she'd forced Juliana to lift her skirt and bare. "Educational for the other girls."
Ju' had hated the probing fingers kneading her sore "tardy stripes."
Even in Qu'imram, far from Miss Maelstrom's trampled green playing fields, the impatient god Haste demanded its sacrifices of bruised girlflesh.
Her sound mind restored, Juliana saw the naked woman slide from the ice platform and rush to crouch before her protuberant lovefeast.
The dark ovid fruit waited in the curling mists. The Englishwoman knew with stabbing mental clarity that this grotesque charade could not be madness. Nothing so comforting-no, this was true reality, this was life. This was school.
Her insides knotted in their well-remembered fear of a licking as she strode naked to the icy pedestal.
She bent her legs, reaching out with her gently bred, strawberries-in-cream bum. For a moment, the chill felt welcome. Then a prickly burning bit at her lower buttocks and thighs. COLD!
She winced, scrunching farther back. Her skin stuck to the ice. She had to put her weight on the block, since the damned olive lay so far in.
She used her knuckles to lift herself. Her undercheeks skimmed along the clutching ice. She felt the fugitive tickle of the ovoid fruit.
Settling down for an instant, she tried to clutch with her cleft. An icicle pang shot through her vitals. She couldn't feel the olive at all-then she realized the icy finger diddling her anus had to be the chilled fruit itself.
She hoped her numbed muscles gripped it as she struggled forward. Oops! She kicked foolishly as she almost rumbled.
Landing in an arse-low crouch, she peered fearfully at the stone floor. No. She glanced back at the ice shelf. The olive wobbled peacefully toward the edge.
She backed herself over it and closed her bottom cheeks around it.
"Very good!" The warder encouraged. "You must use absolutely no hands."
At least he shouted less. She tried to trot-then to walk. Thighs pressed close, she minced in a particularly theatrical parody of feminine carriage toward the second block, forty feet distant.
The cold lump thawed slowly between her pressed nates. She tried to deposit the tiny cargo on the second frozen perch.
"The center, the very center," the warder coaxed.
The ice shocked her rump as she skimmed along. Feeling drained as blood retreated from her skin. She couldn't be sure the blasted little thing had dropped loose until she saw it behind her.
The Arab woman almost bashed her to the floor with her driving, desert lips as she rushed to leap on the block.
Juliana confronted the raw maleness on display. Two upcurving sceptres shone with saliva. The third in line had yet to begin erection. Already stylishly stout, the thing would be fearful in its upright arrogance.
"No, thank you, no sausage tonight, please." How her brittle quip had nettled Richard. His own fault, really, for not agreeing to respond in kind.
"It's not the fish I mind dear, it's the sauce." He had found wit for some repartee. "Can't we compromise? Just tongue my willy now and when it's a drier season of the month, I'll be pleased to offer Mistress Puss a nice mouth-to-mouth."
Charmingly put, but selfish of him to deny her the treat she craved at the time she truly needed it. She archly informed him he could just climb on for a conventional jogging unless he preferred the telly and Starsky and Hutch.
"Damn squishy work," he'd complained, but he'd performed the missionary labor with his customary thoroughness.
She sank to her knees before the Arab prick, dappled in fawn and olive shades. Miss Maelstrom's had included pointed lectures for potential Foreign Officers' wives. The exhortations on Englishwoman's Burden had explicitly discussed Lady Mountbatten's libido and its role in the graceful transfer of power over India.
Yet . . . vast areas had been overlooked in the curriculum. How naked, how strange the circumcised cockhead appeared. She ventured her tongue tip along the old, adolescent scar. How peculiarly newly born the dark engine seemed as it throbbed, butting up at her lips, rather like a calf seeking nurture.
Suckling in reverse. She felt almost maternal as she circled the blind thing with her open mouth. The cosy sensation vanished as it leaped against her soft palate. Her gorge threatened to rise and spill. Fingers knotted, she applied herself to the task. Unless she made the demanding thing spurt its freight first, her lily-soft bum would be on the griddle. So like school . . .
A drum of waddling feet announced salvation. The olive returned to its chill throne, born by unbashful Bedwani buttocks.
In a certain dismay, Juliana realized she'd hardly begun to coax the blunt instrument along toward the spitting point. The desert woman sank to her hams and went gobblingly at it.
The enthusiasm nettled Juliana's soul as she probed backwards on the freezing seat for the olive. So . . . these heathen believe they can out-fellate the Anglo-Saxon race, do they?
Resolve steeled her as she waggled between the ice blocks, olive nuzzling her sphincter. She'd give the next paynim peggo a tussling it'd remember for star-filled desert nights to come!
"Rather a nasty cat, that." Richard Mellroot appraised the nine-tailed whip the executioner swung loosely in the simmering heat.
Her ale-colored nudity fully displayed, the well-bred Arab woman had been stretched and trussed to the triangle. Her wrists hung from its peak; her legs spread at its base, opening the paired Babylonian moons of her posterior.
The soft skin had been oiled, as a courtesy, and she shimmered with enchanting lights before the slowly weaving whip.
"Bengal tiger gut." The CIA man coughed in the silent, muggy air. "Excuse. Tiger gut, pressed and rolled, knotted all down the last two feet of each tail. The do-dads fastened to the tips of the lashes aren't really barbs. They're tiny silver crescents."
"I'd gather they hurt a bit," Richard nodded. While sands, white stone, white prison walls seared under the stabbing sun. The silvery charms sent piercing flashes in: his eyes as they swayed.
The nine-tailed cat reared and clawed, backed by a powerful arm. The woman screamed through her gag. The tiger's gut raked her back. Hot marks reached across her spine as her hindquarters rotated.
Something drooled from her chin.
"The gag is thick felt," the American explained. "Soaked in fresh stallion semen. The harder she bites the more she swallows."
He shook his head. "Must be a hell of a job, masturbating a horse. I understand they've got boys who're pretty good at it."
Raw ruby showed along the woman's ribs where the crescents had clipped in on the right. Her whole body rippled at the next cut. The knotted tails splayed cleanly overlapping prior welts.
Ivory droplets fountained from her lips. Her lustrously bare, oiled buttocks vibrated in torment. The British consul's manly creature bounded in heady empathy against his trouser fly.
Jolly good the patrol wasn't going to be mucking about with him. In Qu'imram's parochial vision, diplomatic immunity covered the males of each legation.
He'd warned Ju', given her the standard Foreign Office bumf outlining the reasons for discouraging female dependents ... at least he imagined he had. Hadn't he? Be found a curious lapse of exact memory of showing her the document. Doubtless an early sign of brain fag.
She had insisted on inviting her friend, the backwoods girl, for a holiday. No one could fault him for graciously acceding to her wishes, as with that whim concerning Dillingham Eastern. The addition to their living stipend had been a grateful bonus to his husbandly indulgence, too.
A third stroke scored the pretty ale-brown back. The woman moved like a pendulum, suspended by her wrists.
The flogger aimed next at her netherglobes. The nine fiery crescents and knotted gut-ends flayed the far right flank. Scarlet ribboned the satiny hinds.
The hummocks spread helplessly for the fifth lick of the nine rough tongues. Her loins agitated themselves in a frenzy against the cross beam boss.
"I dare say she'll feel that when she sits."
The CIA man opined, "She'll feel it when she dreams. Oh-oh."
The prison medical examiner stepped forward. He studied the lacerated skin. His urgent hand summoned a shriveled, ratty-mustached man with an enamel bucket. The functionary dipped a small brush deep within and slathered something smeary over the raw ridges on the right.
"Oooo." The American frowned. "Nasty medicine. In the old days they disinfected wounds with horse's urine and salt. Primitive stuff, but acid and saline do make a pretty good antibacterial. This goo is much more sophisticated."
"I would have to imagine. What's in it?"
"The same rock salt and horse piss with a pepper oil base to make it cling better. It really scours out those germs."
The sixth stroke curled across already-flaming weal traces, the bitter ends driving the searing ointment deeper. The woman's rasping howl evoked a horse's exultant neighing from somewhere near.
"I think they're milking another stallion for Miss Merydith." The American watched the aristocratic woman writhe like a scotched snake as the cat peeled skin from her thighs.
"Mighty decent of you to stand by when they're ready for her," he thanked Richard. "I appreciate having a second witness. Looks better on the record. "I know your schedule must be tight, with your wife flying out and all."
Nonsense, old man." The consul rocked on his heels as the eighth tiger-gut stroke whistled into her legs. "Thank you for doing the same while they hide Ju'."
The Persian Gulf sun burned unflinchingly on the undulating stripes. The flogger let his whip carve the thighs a final time.
The doctor's assistant tottered forward to paint crimson-dewed marks. The woman's sobs seemed less boistrous than Mademoiselle l'Orange's, but no whit less sincere.
The executioner stepped directly behind the wide, inverted V of her legs. The assistant scurried away with his hellbucket.
The nine tails flew and spread in a practice swing as the flogger got his distance.
"I don't ever want to know what that's going to feel like." The CIA man kept his eyes glued to the triangle.
"I don't think chaps can, old seed."
Hardened muscles sent the greedy cat scooping up and in. Bunched gut-cord smacked against flesh.
Silence. The thongs held tight, then fell, one knotted strand at a time.
Silence. Then an expulsive retch shot the sodden gag free into empty air.
They heard a torn, fluttery wail as muezzins make at the last hour from burning minarets overlooking mighty cities' fall.
A tearing inhalation sounded as she forced in breath.
Finally, a full-throated lament echoed from the stolid prison walls, the roar of a desert creature in mortal pain.
Tingling to the marrow, the consul focused on her pain-wracked bottom and remembered England.
CHAPTER FIVE
Unendurable Pleasures
Professor Bastion Creature-Scott, Dithering Manor, Shambling Way, Oxford: Sir, in contemplating the actual strictures and privations encountered in Middle Eastern residence, I must observe that your tutorial instruction sorely neglected several critical hazards.
Item: Sweat. Hurry and bustle in a humid, tropical sea coast area produces copious perspiration along the lower body.
Such moisture adhering to the backside and upper legs has an abnormal propensity for freezing upon contact with large, inconveniently encountered ice masses. This may immobilize an individual attempting to extricate herself pom an awkward seat purchase upon said mass.
Attempts to free one's ice-bound person may result in hysterical weeping, occasioning further perspiration and consequently enhancing immobility.
Item: Olives. I find your eulogistic monograph, Olea Europaea, Saviour of the Once-Fertile Crescent, to be mysteriously incomplete.
This dietary- staple, when lodged in a warm, moist cranny or crevice, displays an alarming propensity to adhere to any frozen surface.
So cleaving to such a surface, it requires abnormal macular effort to dislodge-the more so when the muscle- group so employed has limited prior experience in tje intricacies of grip and cartage.
I find your revealing publication about the distasteful little fruit entirely without reference to this common problem.
Item: Ice. A careful inspection of faithful notes taken at your tutorials reveals one off-handed remark advising persons in the tropics to avoid an ice cube in one's cocktail lest undistilled water "keep you cocking your tail in the loo."
Not a damned word warned of the dangers of frost-biting your bum on desert ice floes . . .
Juliana composed the letter as she slurped and vacuum-mouthed an unsavory male member. Didn't these fellows ever wash their fellows, she wondered, or did the arrogant heathens depend on women to do that chore for them?
She nipped and tongued in her best British public school manner. Mayhap . . she popped down for a comprehensive lingual tour of the hairy-bagged cods. Kissy, kissy. Getting hot enough for you?
Her lips traveled up the potent prong. She heard the usual footfalls. The olive's return, just as she felt close to scoring a climax.
Ah, well, she had hopes for the other ready meatus as well. The randy giant looked so near to proving a gusher.
She stumbled to the ice cake and the much-traveled olive.
"At this sport, I believe, you are no novice." The white-clad eunuch bowed Lucretia Sue through a doorway.
Her naked skin glowed from a brief, but needed soak in hot, perfumed bath water. She no longer smelled like a lady wrestler as she stepped in from the prison corridor.
The room held soft-toned carpets and pillows, Deco-framed mirrors, and a prominent backless divan. Delicate, distant sounds of stream water rambled, with birds calling in the background.
She sniffed. The air smelled vaguely like the closeness under the polo carpet, without the heavy woolen mustiness.
"Odd scent."
"An essential oil rubbed on the light bulbs. It affords fragrance without tiresomely smoky incense sticks."
"Puree of Musk Ox?" she hazarded, tilting her head to view the hook in the ceiling. In one corner a silk cloth inadequately concealed some chromed harness and the edges of certain rubber novelties.
"The oil's trade name, I believe, is Essence of Hot Girl-secretions from the skin and certain specific membranes, extracted during protracted coitus."
"Dandy. Let's be candid, sugar babe. What's this Unendurable Pleasure Indefinitely Prolonged jazz? I thought they'd slapped a copyright on that when My First Two Thousand Years hit print."
"Your breadth of experience is ever pleasing." His smile seemed genuine, if still bittersweet. "Do you recall that line where Salome states 'My body is a dwelling for a multitude of beings'? So do you beguile in your endless diversity.
"Your next punishment was named in homage to George Sylvester Viereck and Paul Eldridge. The prolific Mr. Viereck may forgive the literary liberty in view of his range of knowledge, as displayed in his prison memoir, the ever-enlightening Men Into Beasts."
The eunuch removed his shapeless jacket. He hung it from a curving Art Deco hat tree. "It shall be my most exquisite pleasure to require your complete cooperation in certain uncommonly elongated carnal acts."
He draped his shirt from another peg. "This chastisement, may I remind, is for the seduction-"
"I suspected Prince Daoud was a mite less grateful for my efforts than his enthusiasm implied at the time." She tried to perch on the divan. The twinges in her battledored rump made it adviseable to stand.
"What I understood earlier, of buddy, is that you're . . . uh, hors de concours."
"An admirable euphemism." He removed his Western shoes. "Surely knowledgeable women of the Atlantic shores, in their frenetic sexual liberty, must be aware that a youth taken in adolescence and shriven of his primary sexual glands will lose neither ability nor concupiscence.
"Unlike one delivered of his masculine purse before puberty, I am not your epicene, obese human ox." He loosened and dropped his trousers.
Lawd, honey, I guess not! Lucretia Sue stared at the cobra-sure rise of his chopped and channeled phallus. Clean of foreskin and ballsac, the tawny prod displayed a fearful purity of design.
"Forgive a trite aphorism unworthy of your experience, but the mind remains the primary sexual organ. This truism governs stimulation among my kind," he chuckled acidly, "the steers among the cows.
"I may enjoy full sensation and the thousand satisfactions available during coitus-save one. The limitations prescribed by ejaculation do not concern me. The adrenal and some other glands produce male hormones sufficient to induce physical engagement. I am permitted greatly protracted exercise, as long as my mind and flesh retain their enthusiasm."
Lucretia Sue had the sinking realization that she had fallen to the eyebrows in the nasty and the awful. Might as well take the bull-sorry, the steer-by the tail and face the facts squarely.
She inhaled. "I have only one question. Do forgive my candor, as Ju' once remarked a million years back. You don't have to answer, but out of womanly curiosity, have you ever-I mean, did you ever . . . before the operation, that is-?"
His lips twitched. "You are the first person to inquire, of any so sentenced. I remained virgin of coital contacts with females-or with males, and, as must be specified in lonely lands, with any domestic animals.
"I had a strict religious upbringing. I did not engage in that passion of dreaming youths so erroneously ascribed to the leader Onan. I held myself spotless from self-corruption, As to any nocturnal emissions, I have no memory."
He stepped free of his trousers. A thoughtful and sardonic expression touched his face as he draped them on the Decotree. "My surgery in Damascus was performed by a woman physician.
"Ah, you appear startled. The female role is complex in our lands. Egypt and Syria-once united in republic-have educated, uncommon women in all professions, including medicine and law.
"This female physician found the charity to provide a first and last peak experience of ecstasy. She did so without asking, as I lay bewildered in my hospital bed. She employed only her naked hand, the same hand that, scrubbed and gloved less than an hour later, proceeded to . . ."
He made an eloquent gesture as his risen phallus stiffened.
Talk about your castrating Western bitches . . . Lucretia Sue comiserated. "Good training for your job with the local royalty, honey chile?" "You perceive the perversities of my employers correctly." His smile hinted at depths she knew she'd be plumbing very, very shortly. "We have ample opportunity and means to indulge in amusing invention."
She stood gamely on the balls of her feet. "I guess you intend to make this as unpleasant for me as possible. Do I suckle your honeydipper before you cornhole me-or after?"' She made a face. He appeared puzzled. "I do not speak American ... ah, I grasp the thread of your inquiry. Shall we not consider both?"
He reached and tweaked her right nipple with the nails of thumb and forefinger. Slowly, savoringly he brought her aching body rigid with sharp, fresh pain.
"Laggard! The slovenly one who has lost this race along with you procured climactic enjoyment for her second man a quarter hour hence! You have not even wet your lips with the first!"
Not so, Juliana wanted to remonstrate as the fussy little warder ranted. Her lips trailed slime from the pre-orgasmic syrupy oozings of both brigands. Her lips had lost their feeling from the constant, numbing attentions to both rugged shafts.
The men now stood side by side. The race had long since been lost. The triumphant fellatrix had been led away. The olive had been retired to stud duty-or wherever olives go.
The other loser had oralized her two targets to potent foamings. Not so Juliana. Only the thick, constant effusions from the two towering pricks had kept her lips and tongue from galling.
Her spirit had been chapped raw. Sisyphus had no more nightmarish a task. She shifted from one looming cock to the other to keep each erect and on the bubble. Neither seemed inclined to come.
"Wait, now! Perhaps this may spur the industry of your miserable mouth!"
She knew dully that hands dragged her to her feet. Ungentle men pinioned her arms and forced her, belly down, across the top of a misty ice block.
Christ, she hated that glacial burn! Her lips tried to cant upward, free of the ice.
Her legs were hauled into midair, throwing her weight onto breasts and tummy. A callous hand seized her hair. Her face was twisted around so that she could see as well as feel.
An olive branch lashed at her. She recognized it from all those insipid images of peaceful doves making war no more.
The leafy switch licked viperishly into her bare soles. Her belly froze to the iceberg. She couldn't even writhe as the branch welted her feet.
Again! Again! Again! The red rush of pain throbbed through her whole body. Again! Again! Again!
Once more nightmare receded, reality crowding in to clear her fellatio-blurred brain. Each angry slash etched her soul as well as her skin.
Once again it was School.
Uncompromising fingers peeled her from the clinging ice. Her nipples stang, as if raw. The men marched her on screamingly anguished feet. They threw her on her knees before a darkly rearing male sceptre.
Perhaps the sight of a whipping did it, perhaps the violence of her renewed attack. The sullen prick sputtered and spat into life within moments.
Her choking gullet knew its maiden baptism by the salten stream of a male orgasm. She gargled the porridgy stuff. Her head snapped back, but not far enough. Gouts boiled along her teeth and tongue.
When the mighty engine paused, the men dragged her on skinned knees to the other upstanding member. Her soiled mouth closed on the head, repeating its degrading labor.
Within two minutes, pulsing cream climaxed down her gagging throat. She reared away, only to catch spermy splashes in her eyes and nose.
She lapped the painful cup of abasement as fully and truly as she had at Messaline Straightways' flogging hand ... or in Aramilla Ponsonby's enslaving bed. She faced her humiliation with perfect clarity of mind, agony of body, and defilement of spirit.
She lived as she had not done since Miss Maelstrom's. And she knew it.
Over a dozen mellow golden needles lay on the deep blue velvet liner of a flat silver case. The eunuch chose one carefully.
"The Chinese have remarkably advanced upon the older, Tibetan system of acupuncture, utilizing currents of natural energy within the body." His fingers ran along Lucretia Sue's flank.
She hung in space. Jonathan Edwards' sermon about sinners in the hands of an angry God came to her mind through his image of a spider dangling over a flame candle.
A chain from the ceiling hook supported a too-tight leather cinch about her middle. A lighter set of links ran tautly from the small of her back to her ankles, arched above her buttocks. Her legs remained cramped and doubled, though her arms fell free.
The eunuch deftly inserted a gold needle where her buttock met her thigh. For a wonder, she found it didn't hurt. He slid a second into her flesh on the opposite side.
"Tantric mysticism may be seen as overly relying upon sexual symbolism." He stroked her upper gluteal hummocks. He pierced her so close to the bony tip of her spine that she winced, though she only felt a cool rush, as of water through her loins, as the needles entered her.
"Yet, Tantra deals with archaic forces, ancient to the times when great beasts prowled the earth guided by central nervous systems more sophisticated than the rudimentary brains within their skulls."
He touched her shoulders, probing the tense body armor of her muscles. He found spots and slid sharp golds lengths into her flesh four times. She began to be aware of a curious warmth suffusing her bent body, as if a volcano-warm stream flowed directly through her blood and bones.
"The ear is much misunderstood in Western physiology." He guided two slender shafts into each shell. "Complex lines of energy involving the brain can be tapped, and the whole system affected-so."
His fingers spread her labia. Her clitoris rose as sudden sexual voltage electrified her nerves. Crouching he made a single, transverse insertion.
A pressure built relentlessly within her, seething from the base of her spine.
"Crude clips on the nipples and netherlips can achieve a similar effect. Your Atlantic coast S&M parlors specialize in such. For a passionate woman, though, whose energies merely need direction, not coarse stimulation ..."
"Truly unendurable pleasure?" She felt even her lips warm with peculiar tingling sensations. The soft tissues of her body responded, swelling. "Indefinitely--?"
"A woman can attain numberless orgasms--or, precisely, to the limit of her cardiovascular endurance-if her erotic energies but concentrate themselves. A man--" He snapped the silver case shut. "But I suffer no gross physiological limitations as do the unaltered.
"I have always found Jakes Barnes situation in The Sun Also Rises to be an artificial one, a projection of Western neurosis. In the East even a penis-less man may make full use of so hearty a nymphomaniac as Lady Ashley."
"Oh."
Not by chance, but by the Providence which guides the stars in their courses, Juliana stared at that moment at a stout ceiling hook. Her feet hurt so badly she could scarcely stand. Yet she'd rather march on gravel-bed roads than partake of that hook's hospitality.
The warders' punishment room avoided institutional severity. Mosaiced walls showed a geometric Tree of Life along one surface, a rippling floral design on the others. The floor had been set with tiny tiles to duplicate a carpet's intricate patterns.
And the ceiling had a hook.
Juliana could recognize a classic Chinese basket depending from the hook. Dear Richard had taken her to a celebrated Soho review, Naughty Harem Harlots in Bondage.
She had laughed. The erotic tableaux had been ludicrous, but stimulating. Although she'd politely-at that time-spumed his requests for oral enticements as they retired that evening, she'd emulated the deliberate rhythms of a bangled nautch girl as they'd froliced in their bedroom.
Now she stood in a room whose ceiling had a hook and a Chinese basket.
"I shall explain the mechanism."
"I understand the apparatus," she informed this warder, a fat, contemptuous creature with an absurd broad-brimmed white hat.
"Ah, I forget, an expert in matters unsuitable for a lady's knowledge." He selected a judicial cat of nine tails from a wall rack. Silver crescents gleamed at the tips of knotted gut lashes.
"The sentence is 120 strokes."
Juliana studied the terribly, terribly long whip. She knew the Chinese basket displayed thighs, buttocks, and muff to freest advantage.
She screamed.
Two guards stepped in to quell any struggle. She gave them none. She let herself be led as limply as any blancmange.
Life is pain, the public school axiom pounded in her temples, life is pain.
"Our girls excel -- they can ride the flames as courageously as dear Wagner's Brunnhilde." Miss Maelstrom had conjured that galloping image at the graduation exercises.
"Any silly can buck up in pleasant circumstances. Remember the nobility and grace of our monarch Charles on the scaffold. Remember the calling of Empire and the duties to our Commonwealth."
As they strapped her into the harness, Juliana closed her eyes and thought of England.
Richard Mellroot and the CIA man tiptoed in. They had exchanged their leather shoes for felt slippers, silent as kitten's paws on the tile floor.
Juliana hung in a harnessed ball, her back lowermost, her inverted head away from them. Her buttocks projected temptingly. The velvet grove gaped between flushed thighs.
A winsome moue, Richard realized for the ten-thousandth time. Love stirred at him.
The executioner winked broadly as he exchanged the penal-grade cat for a five-thonged French martinet. Juliana could not see the switch. Soft Russian leather lashes terminated in jaunty crimson tassels sporting tiny knots of spun silk.
Two dozen licks from a five-thonged whip sounded more impressive as 120 strokes, Richard mused.
The martinet blurred in the air as the Arab swung. He had strength as well as lard. Five slender vipers struck her well-projected hillocks.
Juliana rocked in her harness. Guards steadied it, keeping her bottom aligned.
The arm uncoiled again. The fat wrist gave that final flip which spread the singing lashes. Her flesh juddered. The whip rills flushed an impassioned scarlet as they thickened.
After six lively cuts, the Arab took care to let the tips finish hard between the inverted rounds. He flogged the single right cheek thrice. The flaring knotted tassles just missed her pale, open labia. Hard pips rose darkly along the inner buttock slopes.
He treated the left side equally. Her muscles leaped in tightly controlled spasms. Once more, Richard admired that discipline she could display in absolute adversity- though nothing less brought it out.
The martinet lashed her broadly displayed thighs. The silken skin showed signs of rough usage. The consul guessed the Olive Race had somehow peeled a bit of her dainty hide. The knotted silk drummed in, leaving indigo streaks along surfaces his fingers knew so well.
The flogger shifted aim. The thongs clawed along the whole length of one buttock, then the other. Richard held his breath. His ears caught a strained girl-soft weeping, his wife's first whimper since the punishment began.
The executioner swung for the middle with a heavy arm. The hissing leather sailed fully into the parted love grove. Lips yawned; the pip-welted buttocks slopes recoiled. Juliana bleated nasally.
The man took his time. They watched the jellyfish writhings of her stung center. As she seemed to crest the pinnacle of fullest pain, he struck sharply.
The leather scored between her cheeks, blistering the puckered anus. Silk knots kissed those flushed lips brutally.
Juliana wailed, a lost soul impaled by flames.
Richard had lost count. The Arab surprised him by folding the martinet and bowing. Both consul and CIA man applauded his work with silent hand pats.
He bowed his appreciation as they tiptoed out. Wei, mournful cries followed them.
Lucretia Sue dangled in the air, she felt she was some great sky goddess reaching from infinity down to earth. Explosive, coupling energies darted along her arms, arced from her breasts, discharged lightning-like from her cunt.
Earth for her meant a lean muscled brown body, a face of onyx eyes and almost sneering lips that took her kisses as a heathen idol accepted tribute.
She almost slobbered as she shattered through another orgasm . . . her fifteenth, her fiftieth?
He'd moved the divan under her and taken his place. With her heels chained over her buttocks, she had little mobility below the cinch belt holding her to the ceiling.
He had penetrated her and rocked her body in slow rhythm, the genital friction building an impatient need. Her breasts brushed back and forth over his hard, hairless chest. His hands pivoted her steadily. She found herself caressing him, her very fingertips alive with erotic force.
She'd climaxed promptly . . . but ... the rocking had not stopped. The orgasm had been but a first plateau . . .a second came, a third . . .
She'd actually begged when he stopped moving her. "But you have arms, you can continue. You must continue."
His nails had tweaked both breasts viciously. She braced her palms and pushed, pivoting herself above him. The genital forces surged. His hands roamed her freely, stroking, pinching.
The lances of pain as he twisted her skin, or raked her flesh with calculating talons, only spurred the fury. She agitated herself to another explosive love-fit ... and yet another . . . Her mouth covered his cheeks and eyes with kisses. No matter that he tantalized her nipples or panther-muscled belly with his delicate, knowing hands; no matter that he ran swollen claw tracks down her inner thighs, or that his pincer-fingers savaged her buttocks as they wove up and down over his loins.
All sensations fueled pure, erotic fire. She lavished her lips on his throat, his chin. Her tongue met his and she cried in orgasmic bewilderment as his teeth closed on her love-dart, nipping and worrying like a predatory beast.
She rocked herself urgently on his untiring, piercing wand. Her hormones danced through her blood, her flesh seemed to dilate to fill the universe.
Un-en-DUR-able wild fire in-DE-fin-ite-ly pro-loooonn nnggggeeeedddd . . .
"Thirteen," Lucretia Sue's pulse beat in her throat as she spoke. Hard crimson numerals paraded on a midnight background. The clock streamed the seconds before her nose. . . 13:01 . . . 13:02 . . . 13:03 . . .
Her eyes blurred from trying to focus on the liquid-crystal numbers. Her temples throbbed, her anus distented achingly.
She crouched on a bristly rope mat, her lips canted like a bitch. The eunuch's iron gristle rammed her guts in unrelenting sodomy.
"Fourteen." She floated in a jelly of post-orgasmic sensation and throbbing pain ... 14:35 ... 14:36 .. . 14:37 ... the unvarying pace, the long sliding jabs, the raw violation of being buggered-buggered-buggered- His ungentlemanly weight lay on her back. His loins spanked at her bottom with each full, uncompromising piston-drive.
.. . 17:43 . . . 17:44 . . . she'd never realized the horror of being rump-scuttled by someone who couldn't come, who'd never shoot his wad and dismount, who wouldn't unplug himself until he chose . . . 17:58 . . . 17:59 . . .
"Ey-eighteen." Oh, oh. The hormonal broth in her blood after that epic cunt-fucking rose in tidal waves. Her Graffenberg Spot felt tickled by his colonic thrusts ... or those damned needles still did their work ... she felt another orgasm as a thundercloud, blinding her vision, crashing cannonballs in her skull . . .
"Ahhh . . . uhhhh . . . mmmmuuuuhhhh . . . nnngggaaa hhh!" She sweated and grunted down the rocky slide, a shoot-the-chutes over volcanic glass shards and broken basalt . . . 18:56 . . . 18:57 . . . 18:58 . . . 18:59 . ..
"N-n-ng-g-nnt-eeeeen!"
She squirmed her lips in bruised-animal wiggles. She couldn't control herself . . . nothing dented that unwavering plunging of his steel tool . . . nothing banked the damning fire of her body's response . . .
"T-t-w-aaaa-t-t-eeee!" 20:01 . . . 20:02 . . . cruel fingers worked on her right breast, a hot leaden lump. His knowing thumb found her needle-pierced nub, hard and alive.
"Ohno . . . ohno . . . ohno ..." Wet kisses and sharp, skin-breaking bites laved her nape and shoulders . . .
The digital seconds raced beyond her eyes. Her pulse beat them three to one ... He couldn't be human, she decided. Some demoniacal night gaunt had crept from the desert and assaulted her up the shit-chute ... she felt his soulless sand-spectre eyes driving into the back of her skull as his ramrod laced into her rear.
Pll-lleeaassee!! No m-m-MORE!
The lash of another orgasm shredded her nerves.
"T-t-ha-ha-unty-unty-" Her aching lips dribbled nonsense. The hot coal numerals branded her eyes. Upraised shingle-thin slats bit edge-on into her shins. She knelt on the agonizing platform, her wrists chained to her ankles. A ball of servility, her tongue and lips served the eunuch's pleasure.
She kissed the thing that had buggered her. God knew what kept it so fiercely upright. She sucked her own muck grimly, only opening wider as his serpentine prick probed for the back of her throat.
Her tongue felt the heated pulse of the great green vein rising along the sleek length.
That's it, she realized, spite. Pure cussedness could hold a hard-on longer than lust.
And yet . . . his patting hand touched her neck, her distorted cheek . . . something still strove within her, something centered amid those betrayed vitals that hovered over the bitterly painful slats . . .
Incredulous, she gagged and sniveled through her six hundred and sixty-sixth climax, her vagina clutching at the empty air.
Almost gibbering, a spraddle-legged Lucretia Sue stumbled naked behind the eunuch. Her six-foot rawhide body had softened to pulp.
He walked steadily in his white trousers and shirt. Dark glasses masked his eyes. He seemed carven from some deep-colored root.
The sun pounded at her numbed, pinch-blue flesh. They crossed the ground from the prison to the public flogging triangle. He had extracted the golden needles. Nothing remained in her body but a slimed memory of utter violation.
A crowd watched, white robes adding to the glare of bone-white sand, baking stone, and ash-hot prison walls. She ducked her head, carrot-bright hair slapping at her sore breasts.
An urgent hiss from the eunuch drew her face up.
A classic English whipping bench lay before the triangle, all blond oak and sun-scarred velvet. It rose in a hump at the center, the better to present a bottom for the twigs. Miss Maelstrom had used the cousin of that bench for the public, Great Hall birchings.
A tall fellow stood with arms as corded as Arnold the Barbarian's. A slight, stooped figure with rat-tailed facial hair stirred at something in an enameled bucket.
As she approached, Lucretia Sue saw the shallow trough of stinking, pickled rods. She swayed a moment, grabbing at the triangle for support. Its sizzling wood held upright.
Christ, how she'd hated the birch! 180 strokes . . . the most she'd had from Miss M had been a smoking three dozen for introducing seven-card stud to after-hours recreation.
"You will recline." The eunuch's lips curved under his shades. "I believe you know the drill."
"Kick a girl when she's down, will you?" she muttered.
The sun already had the worn velvet padding flinchingly hot. She stretched across it, feeling the life return to her bruises. Her lips curved at her zenith. Leather manacles secured wrists and ankles to the bench's four comers.
Lucretia Sue winced as she lay her cheek on the sun-fevered velvet. She tried resting her head on her stretched arm.
The heavy-muscled flogger drew a rod, forty inches of imported birch wood. The five withes had absorbed liquid, gaining weight and resiliency. Wire bound the handle and wove in a lattice-pattern up each switch. The steel flung the sun's fire at her.
"First dozen," the eunuch announced crisply. "Thirty-second intervals. Both buttocks, from the left. Open wide, Miss Merydith." She bit on the preferred gag. Something thick, a salt-tasting fish glue, filled her mouth. She couldn't spit and had to swallow.
She'd thought no agony, no indignity could reach her soul after that unflagging forced fucking. She'd been wrong. She hated the birch. All right. So? Lay on, ibn Duff, and screwed be he who first cries "Hold, enough!"
She heard the maddening zzzzzziisshh.
A blow rocked her flesh. The wooden frame creaked. Then the shock hit like Mrs. Quince's favorite iced-water enema. Her buttocks leaped.
Muscles she'd believed numbed by abuse tried to flee apart. She squeezed her eyes. Pain dug its cloven hooves into her rump.
"One." The eunuch enunciated distantly. The birch withes savaged the air. Wire-bound wood carved into rising weals. . . . hated, hated, hated the birch! "Two."
"She cuts well, better than Ju'," Richard appraised. The third swipe fell cleanly. "Too many women clench on the stroke. It's like watching someone beat wet laundry. She's tense, but her bottom still has that full bounce of character."
"Yeah." The CIA man studied as the next lick spread the switches along the lower curves. "The tail motion follows through right into the shoulders. You can see the nipples, sort of like dancing."
"Or more private recreation."
"Fine as wine, this girl." Chauvinistic pride made the American hope his countrywoman would bear up as nicely Juliana.
"Nine."
Lucretia Sue simmered, her backside glowing coals. The flaying birch tips had bitten her right flank to the blood, she knew.
More snot-thick ooze bubbled from the felt gag as her jaw spasmed from the tenth stroke. She coughed in wracking rebellion. Goo shot from her nose.
Her sinuses burned. She gulped air from the corners of her mouth.
The eleventh cut welted her thighs. The twelfth thickened the marks.
"A pause while we restore some areas." The eunuch sounded respectful. "We must also change the rod."
Lucretia Sue had no care. Her eyes puffed, her body pulsed in raw, wet agony. She barely felt the slap of the medicinal brush along her right buttock. Then the styptic fires raged along her nerves.
Jee-SUS! Her nails clawed varnish from the bench wood She reared and spat out the tooth-shredded gag.
"Would you say that a birching is more lively thai fucking a eunuch?" He picked up the mined felt. "A pity. A great effort went into flavoring that for you."
She coughed and wheezed as her rump reached new levels of pain.
Fingers rocked her jaw up, holding it open. A steel choke pear jockeyed between her teeth. "Here; no stallion spunk, but it will provide easier breathing."
He released the catch. Squat springs forced the relentless pear open. Her mouth yawned obscenely. At least she could suck in air freely.
"Second dozen, in diagonal sixes, from the right and then the left, over the full bottom."
The bircher stood beyond her waist. He hewed at the lowermost welts crossing her left cheek. Her gluteal muscles jammed furiously. Tears trailed along her distented lips.
She made the bench squeak and shudder at the next few cuts. Her salt-clouded eyes saw the rod being shaken before her. Three switches hung cracked in their wiry lacing. The flogger chattered in Arabic.
"He says you've a crupper of purest Carrara marble. He salutes you. No woman will ever be the same for him."
The exultant executioner took up a third birch. He finished the X he'd begun across her tormented hinds. She whinnied through the pear gag.
More corrosive ointment slathered her raw hide. Her head roared as the stuff burned and blighted her nerve endings.
"Eight to the upper legs. You will, perhaps, feel the weave on any trousers you choose to wear in the next few weeks."
The bircher spoke rapidly to the eunuch, who chittered back at him. "In honor of your fortitude, he'll apply the strokes in volleys to each thigh, rather than alternately."
Honor . . . ? Lucretia Sue felt saliva run from her strained mouth, cooling her hot face where it rested on the hotter bench.
The five thwacking limbs skinned her right below the sulcus. The next scorching swipes marched along her twisting left leg to the knee.
Then a sustained quartet hissed down her other thigh. The unguent daubed her abraded skin like molten lead.
"That leaves four, I imagine." Richard had tried to keep track. The severe wealage showed burgundy shot with purple ridging. Sun glinted off the greasy mass coating the worse grazes.
"One guess where they'll land," the CIA man commented.
"Four strokes, whipped in."
The eunuch touched the scalding hillocks. The marks felt stone-hard. Deftly, his thumbs separated the heavy cheeks. The sun bathed orifices he knew in delicious memory. The sore anus puffed comically.
He nodded to the executioner.
A fresh, fourth birch sang sharply against the inner buttock slopes. Tips nipped the stunned rectal vent. "One."
He could barely hold the raging muscles apart. His blood raced as the next cut whipped that tender, thoroughly reamed valley. He felt her powerful reaction down to his bones. "Two."
The switches licked further, stinging the full-lipped cunt. He lost his grip for a moment. The hindquarters slapped noisily together, seizing the birch and churning it like mill wheels.
He fought to separate the warring cheeks. "Three."
The bircher had the verge free. The eunuch held the buttocks firmly apart. For an instant he glanced at the crowd, catching the faces of the Englishman and the American.
He saw wonder, joy, and horror writ large upon their countenances. The final stroke flashed in.
The young eunuch could hear her grunt and rave. His hands caressed the tossing bottom, their fury filling him. The executioner raised his rod in salute and bowed to the woman.
The rat-mustached medical assistant made his final, deep swab with his burning brush. The eunuch released her with regret.
Lucretia Sue writhed on the bench, still spirited as i gaffed sail fish.
"Grace under pressure," he murmured delightedly. "Perhaps I shall reread this Hemingway with greater attention."
"Your wardrobe, lady consul."
Indeed it was. Juliana's entire array of outfits lay on the floor of the spacious room. Evening gowns, social suits, play pretties;-all carpeted the windowless chamber.
The nude Englishwoman's arms had been secured wrist-to-elbow. Hands propelled her in. Her bare feet wandered over her clothes. Mental torment and physical need wracked her.
"You shall choose your outfit for the plane journey." Dark eyes laughed at her distress. "Do not hurry. You still have two hours. You may choose carefully."
The door shut, leaving her alone.
A heated dose of mineral oil boiled within her. A nasty clyster had pumped it into her intestines. It had been a full day since that ghastly episode at the earthenware crock.
She'd lain in her pain and eaten, eaten. The prison governor had ordered her supplied with sweetmeats for her comfort-amply supplied.
That morning, a solicitous male nurse had compelled her to down three heaping spoons of a treacly emetic.
Her colon felt the invasion from both ends. It began to work as she skipped over the clothing.
Her left leg grew numb as she hopped (something about gut pressure on an artery, she knew vaguely). She yearned to be free . . . but . . .
She almost wept to see her lovely things spread about. She tried to kick a free space. Damn! Some slyboots had tacked all her clothes to the floor.
Juliana's innards turned tyrant. She danced around the room in horror.
"You smell like a crescent house in the hot sun, honey chile." Lucretia Sue had a pale, shadowy look. She walked beside the Englishwoman down the sun-scalded tarmac, toward the passenger jet. The airport lacked the great city amenities. An old-fashioned portable ramp butted against the door of a moderately sized plane.
"I take it earth tones are in style for we penitants." The American had an almost waddling gait. She wore her Levis and loose man's shirt again.
Juliana wanted to peel naked and trample her incredibly soiled suit. She wanted to run to the jet's lavatory and hide forever.
"I heard you got it badly." She tried to speak calmly. They hadn't seen each other until this moment. "Will you be able to sit?"
"Sugar, never again without a tremor of dread." Lucretia Sue gasped and twisted. "Ooooo . . . almost."
Juliana grabbed her arm and helped her along. The spasm looked painfully familiar. "A clystering?"
"My least favorite castrato graced me with a full syringeload of--" She gave a wan grin. The steward on the ramp ahead waved and shouted, trying to hurry them.
"Christ," the redhead whispered. "I should have guessed those li'l devils would make sure we'd have to buckle in just as soon as we hit the plane."
Juliana helped her lurch toward the ramp. Her disgrace ripe upon her, the Englishwoman's morbid interest roused.
"What did he use? Soap suds? Turpentine?" She recalled her own ill treatment and shuddered. "Lava?"
They bounded up the ramp and through the hatchway "Take your seats! No smoking! We must take off!"
The steward's face wrinkled as he pointed them toward the first class section. Other heads showed. Other passengers gabbled impatiently.
"My friend is ill--" Juliana began.
"I need the John."
"No time! We're under orders to clear in three minutes." The steward raced them down to seats.
Lucretia Sue had a weak and tipsy smile as she buckled her seat belt. "Bastards. What'd they use, you ask, sugar plum."
She closed her eyes. "God, that seat hurts my fanny- and shut up, Ju'. I'm skinned like a rabbit down there." The airplane rolled forward.
"Oh." Lucretia Sue sat tensely. "My ol' eunuch buddy shot my full pint of Jack Daniels Number 7 elixir up my unwilling guts. What else?"
Her knuckles whitened on the seatarms. "He mayhavt done me a favor at that. I've got a buzz that I couldn't get otherwise on this Prohibition-Era Islamic airline."
Two minutes into the air, Juliana sniffed. Something penetrated the earthy miasma rising from her clothes. As the plane climbed, her eyes went to her friend, who slumped in her jeans and shirt.
"So that's what a distillery smells like, Trews."
The American gave a sigh of paroxysmal relief.
Far below and behind, Richard Mellroot shook his new friend's hand. "Hope to see more of you, old chap."
The CIA man released his grip and waved as he headed for a light, single-engine Gypsy Moth.
Richard inhaled the hot, barely stirring air so richly scented with sea and desert. He knew the mysterious contentment a white man can find in a home strange to his forefathers.
The fields of bright grass and ancient trees, the while washed villages with their Edwardian brickpiles, the tang of malt vinegar rising from still-sizzling fish and chips . . . all seemed distant to him now, as if a dream.
He stared at the departing speck, the airliner holding his wife on the hop to Damascus, thence to Rome and to London.
He mused on the phantom of England, the England within.
CHAPTER SIX
Old-Time Religion
The Reverend Caledonia M. Roundsong filled her dark green ecclesiastical robes with a matronly heft that matched her earth-mother face. As she glided down the St. Cloud University corridor, her heavy brown braids flopped against her bosom-load of jewelry.
Her chin wobbled over a short strand of ochre glass paste beads seamed with green and black. Below that, opalized blue glass glowed with inner energies. A full string of overlapping silver medalions depicted Kali and other goddesses. At the center, a tin pendant showed a wild-haired, wild-armed female with clutching fingers.
A Hopi squash blossom belt cinched her wide waist. Her outfit would have caused no comment in San Francisco's Haight in the late 60's, or along Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue for a decade after.
A couple of sincere, punk-cropped theater arts majors gave her quick, nervous looks as she stopped at a faculty office door.
She swung it open. "Knock, knock."
Dorothy Tilden slouched at her desk over lined sheets with minutely lettered pencil notations.
"Oh, hi. Come in. Have a slug?"
The drama instructor indicated something cloudy and brown in an oversized wine glass. She pointed at two bottles and a clean tumbler.
Caledonia slipped into a hard wooden chair and sniffed the wine glass. "Whoooh! What's in that?"
"Bourbon and absinthe. I got the idea from Jonathan Latimer in Headed For a Hearse."
"You are if you drink that regularly. Old-formula U.C. Med Center absinthe?"
"Better living through chemistry, yeah." Dorothy Tilden downed a good swig and peered with one eye. "You look bright with the flame of the Goddess. Or is that just the absinthe?"
"Thanks, I hope I am. I'm doing an interfaith dealie down in Grendl this evening with the Campus Crusade for Iacchus." She touched the tin pendant. "That's why I'm wearing Erzulie, the Haitian love loa. Want to come along? Loads of fun."
"Sure. She seems like a demure little miss." Dorothy Tilden poured some Maker's Mark into her wine glass. She diluted the clear brown to a smoggy murk with the absinthe.
"As you know, I'm spiritual adviser to Sigma Epsilon Xi," Caledonia began.
"A crowd that definitely needs soulful counsel."
"More so these days with Lucretia Sue Merydith larking on vacation, Gerry Vestry snoozing in the Carribean, and Maxine du Pre husking corn-or shucking and jiving, or whatever they do for entertainment in Nebraska of a summer's eve."
"Sounds like your cupboard's bare."
"Exactly. I've been asked to help process resumes for the fall rush list."
"I thought Sigma took on all comers."
Caledonia gave an offended snort. "It only seems so because we're an ecclectic house. The Berkeley chapter look me thirty years ago, after the Great Panty Raid Riot, because it wanted to break sorority stereotypes."
"I thought the recruitment was dwindling."
The minister frowned. "It is. Still, we want to judge on merits, not just on our financial needs. Mona Forbes. Gerry says she's being squired by Ron Ladrone."
"Is that the current verb? I haven't caught them gyring backstage." Dorothy Tilden tapped her glass with thoughtful pings.
"I'm not a Greek sympathizer, Cal. I had my pin jerked by dear, owl-eyed Chi Omega in my soph year on a Q.R. rap. My questionable reputation came from half a dozen soul kisses observed while I was mildly under the influence." "That's all?"
"I do admit I was petting with another girl in the fragrant autumn leaves after a marshmallow roast. Brandy went to my head." She tipped the wine glass and drank. "I haven't touched the stuff since."
"I'm curious about the emotional and physical entanglements Miss Forbes has gotten herself into," Caledonia pursued. "We have this Boy Ban for the first two months. It's going to be rough on her if she's serious about him."i The drama professor leaned back. "Mmmmm. I'd call her a good influence on Ron. She's sincere. He's... tomcatting in the innocent expression from our youth. He probably thinks of it as sharing the wealth with faculty, alumnae, and the odd fellow student."
"It'll be worse during the Ban if he's that way."
"Absence may make his heart grow fonder. Remind him of what a good thing he had going." Dorothy Tilda twined a strand of jet black hair around her little finger. "A real relationship such as Mona offers can do a lot fori him.
"Being pitched out of Chi Omega in tandem cemented Carole and I together through graduate school." She gave a fragrant sigh. "Careers parted us. I came to St. Cloud to forget . . . like Rick to Casablanca."
"And she . . . ?"
"Added a D.D. to her M.B.A. and is shoveling up the shekels in Christian broadcasting. She's got a stable of three televangelists and a cassette service."
The matronly minister's brows lifted. "Lady loves duck-we use her videos at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley."
"Looks like a blueberry muffin." The sophomore student's coppery pony tail had been cinched by an absurdly purple bow.
"Rutherford atom." Mona Forbes crinkled her eyes at her notes. She sat in a study module recessed into the St. Cloud library wall.
"What's 'Plancked Bohr' supposed to mean, anyway?" Mona shifted for the fiftieth time on the hard plywood seat. It had been three days since Rita's reminders. "Hi, Wanda."
She studied her friend's pompon costume. The glove-tight blue and white costume had a skirt wholly unable to conceal the glowing scarlet panties. "Looks like Sigma made heap bad medicine for squaw." "Hot-and-Heavy Night." Wanda made no attempt to sit down. "If you think the briefs are bright, you should have seen my fanny after it got fan-tailed. Stupid of me to break the rules, anyhow."
"I know what you mean . . ." Mona grimaced. "At least you guys only use the board."
"Don't you believe it!" The sorority girl snickered. Sweet Sigma has a broad range of methods. Someone we both know had three hours in a Playtex with a mustard plaster on each sitter for company. Following which, she crawled through a gauntlet, blindfolded. Don't think apple switches can't sting something fierce over well-prepared territory."
Mona weighed that against English rattan and found no cheer.
"You'll hear about little Lotta later, no doubt." The sophomore dropped to a giggly whisper. "Stripped to the buff and coated chin to ankles with molasses. After a roll in feathers, she could have passed for Big Bird's fuzzy chick.
"She had to march all the way from the quad right down to the house, at darkest midnight. Susie slipped the jocks the word so that they could cheer her on with a peanut wagon chorus of wolf whistles." "Yuck."
"Rules is rules. She was lucky the Greek Row is almost dead during summer. Otherwise ..."
Mona returned to her notes. "Bye, Wanda." "Okay. I have to see a man about some corks."
"Corks?"
"I'm deputy pledge trainer next term, under Gerry Vestry and Maxine du Pre." She beamed. "If I do well, I can be trainer in my junior year. So I do all the leg work, like getting the corks and the castor oil."
"I don't want to hear about it. Bye, Wanda."
The tender-bottomed coed wondered if the bid she'd she'd submitted with Sigma Epsilon Xi as her first choice might not have been one big mistake. Perhaps she didn't appreciate her cousin Rita enough.
" 'Heath debt of the universe,' " Mona muttered in puzzlement. She just had to start taking better notes.
"I dunno." Her hair a California blonde tumble of chestnut chased with gold, Judy Latimer clung to Wanda Luckett's arm. "I don't think grammy would like this."
"How did she react to your sister shacking up with Gerry's brother?" She patted the girl's cold, tense hand. Loud-voiced students milled around them.
"Nobody's told her." Judy swallowed. "I think she'd rather hear that Helen went Catholic and became a nun." Her fingers tightened. "And she told mom she'd put her head in the oven if that ever happened."
The two stared around the hall. All chairs had been cleared out so people could sit on the floor or any cushion they'd brought. A shallow stage marked one end of the room. Below it, Reverend Roundsong planted her robed backside firmly, legs extended.
A lithe, tanned gentleman with grey-touched temples, sat in a full lotus beside her. His broad mustache turned up slightly at the ends.
Dorothy Tilden sprawled on a blanket, glass full and in fine vocal flow.
"... I couldn't begin to relate to their rituals and such, though I'm sympathetic enough to Goddess worship."
"Neo-Pagans indulge in much confident rodomontade concerning 'the Old Religion.' " The man's accent had the lilting precision of Oxford, with Eton drawling in the undercurrents.
"The sainted W.C. Fields would call the whole Berkeley crowd's best claims tarradiddle," Dorothy Tilden maintained. "Nero Wolfe would label them flummery. I say, bull-puckee!"
Caledonia flicked a thick braid over her shoulder. "I've met certain Wicca practitioners who claim to have family Books of Shadows going back generations, and they assert a documented continuity of non-Christian folk religion going back into--"
"Have you seen the books-or, better, seen any reliable authentication by anyone who seriously knows manuscripts?" the drama instructor demanded.
"With all appropriate respect to the religious convictions of those present, past, and future, I have to say that Britain contains some amazing survivals from its sea-bound past." The man wore an open-collared green shirt with a pale grey silk scarf folded about his throat. The stickpin securing the silk had a long silver Tibetan dragon.
"Hmmm." Dorothy Tilden rocked onto one hip. "Margaret Murray and her woeful armchair anthropology babbling about a Horned God of the Witches and worshipers sticking it to Thomas a Becket as a consenting ritual sacrifice."
She rolled onto her back. "Murder me in the cathedral, I'm pagan!"
The Briton chuckled. "I particularly enjoyed her calling Joan of Arc a priestess representing the God Incarnate. If ber execution was truly the ritual murder of a divine victim, that takes my long-suffering people off the hook for her martyrdom."
Caledonia tucked up her legs and rested her hands where her robes stretched between her knees. "Murray got herself published by Oxford University Press. That lent enough cachet to her writings that Gerald Gardner could whip up that awful claptrap in Witchcraft Today."
"He even paid the deified Aleister Crowley fifty pounds to write the witch cult rituals he foisted onto the public as authentic goods." The man shrugged. "Where the Neo-Pagan Wiccans go wrong is with Gardner."
"And not with your Crowley, whose mind ever dwelt on sex-sex-sex?" Dorothy Tilden cawed.
"Baroness Vittoria Cremers made that charge," he admitted, "as Jean Fuller records in her Victor Neuburg book. Cremers had a heavy tinge of the shady about her, with her claims of having murdered Jack the Ripper herself and having put paid to Crowley with her Asian magicking.
"The extreme characters give the field color," Caledonia observed. "They also confuse multitudes."
She touched the tin pendant on her breast. "I know that the Haitian loa Erzulie connects to straightforward religious sources local to Dahomey."
"Have you read Robert Farris Thompson and his Afro-Atlantic cross-cultural rap?" The man asked. "What you say isn't enough for him. He reads like Zora Neale Hurston on speed-and I do genuflect before Hurston."
"Only proper." Caledonia nodded. "But whatever Thompson suggests-and I'd call him visionary rather than off-the-wall-can be checked by field research. The same type of research on European pre-Christian religions has gotten muddled up with mountebanks and spurious misdirection."
"I don't see it as any accident," Dorothy Tilden spoke clearly with her back arched and her face inverted, "that Freud and Jung's revolutionary delving into sex and the psychology of symbolism came at the same time that Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Annie Besant, MacGregor Mathers, and half a hundred other late Victorians found they could put mysticism back into the Industrial Revolution's clockwork religion.
"These people incarnated the unconscious drives of a continent to restore a whole, integral world view-with all the nightmares and genies and fucking that been creeping around the edges in erotic folklore and written-to-order pornography and whatnot."
She eyed them both upside down, her black hair a waterfall spreading on her blanket. "Just show me any evidence that any pre-Gardnerian Wicca cult existed prior to the 1880's in Britain or any other part of Europe. I don't mean wise women giving herbal douches to pubescent girls. I mean a full-throated non-Christian cult. 'Taint so.
"Does your England have any verifiable survivals from before Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and that archetypal transcendence jazz?"
"Freud had his effect," Caledonia began carefully, "and the cultural suppression of women in conventional Judeo-Christian religion fueled a lot of proto-feminist reaction when it came apart at the-"
"Excuse me--hey, listen up, everybody!" A knife-shrill New York accent sliced through the general chatter.
Enough schmoozing, already! We've got a lot of program this evening.
"First, an announcement. Rebbe Janet Silberlocke has a talk Thursday evening-that's tomorrow, guys. It's sponsored by Jews for Iacchus and she's speaking on the Luddovicher Lesbian Liberation Front. Open to the public, right here in Grendl Hall, 7:30. Free, already!
"Now, Professor Porter and Reverend Roundsong!"
At a dusting of applause, Caledonia and the man stood up. Most everyone else had settled onto the floor attentively, "I'm sorry you all haven't been listening to the conversation we've been having." he began. "For those who haven't met me, I'm Gustavus Fielding Porter. I'm faculty adviser to the Campus Crusade for Iacchus."
"And I'm Caledonia Muse Roundsong, a minister of the Church of Spiritual Liberation-gee, that's a popular word with the over-forty crowd-and the token Goddess-worshiper on the St. Cloud Theology Department faculty." She made a polite leg.
Porter resumed, "Your first question may well be: Why Iacchus, a fairly obscure and somewhat gamey lurker in the sub-basement of the Greek Pantheon?"
Caledonia cocked an eye at him. "Who is Iacchus, for all us California types who think James Dean and Marilyn Monroe are the Elder Gods?"
"Right on about Marilyn," Dorothy Tilden muttered audibly.
"I'm glad you asked that, Madame Interlocutrix. The humble Greek Iacchus was a lusty lad, born to Demeter after intercourse with her brother, Zeus."
The minister put her hands to her face. "Ooooh! Incest!
Kinky!"
"Celestial divinity partnered with earthly dirt-and-potatoes reality to produce an offspring as gargantuan in his appetite for life as Rabelais' creation or Sir John Falstaff or-"
"John Belushi, or any latter-day myth figure," Caledonia concluded for him.
"Just so. Iacchus may be seen as that divine shout yawping upward from the roots of the world. The orgasm symbolizes creation, power, vital involvement with the world. Precursor to orgasm must be the original erotic impulse.
"A playful, joyful interaction with the world-erotic in its fullest sense-leads up to the life-springing climax." He clapped his hands sharply.
"The Genesis story taken in full shows God creating us in his image and likeness as co-creators of the world with him. Note The Song of Songs, which is Solomon's. The wisest of God's chosen expressed the relationship of Adonoi and Israel-later seen as the unity of Christ and the Church-through the erotic interaction of bridegroom and bride.
"The playful exuberance which led to the world's foundation is our birthright. The Iacchus-shout released by God must be resurrected within us and channeled."
Caledonia surveyed the group. "Who else was in San Francisco during the Summer of Love? I'm it? The last survivor to tell about the Diggers giving out free bread and pre-AIDS nymphets giving free head. Okay.
"I missed the Woodstock loving rock sacrament offering communion of spirit to thousands of strangers. I did see the Woodstock Nation crumble-not at the Chicago Seven Trial, but in the chaotic mess at the Altamont Speedway. See the Stones film Gimme Shelter.
"Two images come to me from the hey-day of the Haight. I have a photo of a girl friend of mine, pregnant as a goat, standing in her wedding gown next to a uniformed beat cop holding flowers. One year later that same girl had to take a sharp knife and a heavy stick to walk down to Cala Foods because that's how dangerous it had become by 1969."
Porter took up the solemn moment. " 'Love is the Law,' quoted Aleister Crowley, 'Love under Will.' That erotic playfulness at the heart of the universe must coexist in harmony and synthesis with the rest of Creation in order to do our true will."
Caledonia held up her tin pendant. "A too-terrible homey example. Erzulie, the Haitian love deity, can drive folks mad if her energy isn't focused. The unshackling of the erotic impulse in the Sixties broke down barriers. Some of us forgot that walls protect as well as imprison.
"We opened the door in the 60's to the AIDS of the 8O's. The old flower-tripping psychedelia which hit twenty years ago has left coke-shriveled lives and shrunken veins toxic with a disease that shatters all defenses.
"Erzulie is hot stuff and worth the trip, but you can't handle her with naked, unprepared hands."
Porter concluded. "Iacchus in balance, Iacchus in right relationship-the leap of love under the Tao, whose path is the central current of life. That's what this Campus Crusade represents."
Dorothy Tilden murmured, "I haven't been so enlightened since the Marquis de Sade stopped the fucking and sucking in Philosophic dans le Boudoir to throw in a political pamphlet."
The man turned to the New Yorker who had introduced them. "Enough prologue. Have the celebrants all arrived?"
"Showtime!" The curly-haired Easterner stood up. "Come on, you guys! Places for the ritual."
Back in the hall, Judy nudged Wanda. "I don't know. This all sounds so weird."
"You told me Seth took you to that Hassidic group in Berkeley. You said that got pretty wild."
Judy wilted. "Oh, they were so drunk-I mean, there's this Scripture thing, I think, about on one day you've got to get so bombed you can't tell-well, it's two Hebrew words that sound similar, sort of-and you're supposed to be so wasted you can't tell them apart."
Her left hand waved helplessly. "I just don't know this stuff like Seth does. These guys with dreadlocks or something-one jumped onto the rabbi and rode him likea horse, beating on his head while everybody sang.
"I mean, if we did that with Dr. Scott at church they'd throw our congregation out of the whole Synod. We'd be in the paper, like those TV guys." She looked pinched-faced and worried as people assembled on the hall's stage.
A young woman with huge eyes and a rich bronze skin: wore a long white dress, ruffled low on the skirt with lace trimming the hem. A red kerchief knotted around her waist, another about her head.
A coarse woven strap supported a drum over her shoulder. She held the instrument under her left arm. Tot hourglass-shape allowed thick fiber strings to connect the drumheads of the opposing ends.
She experimentally rapped the taut drumskin with curved sticks held in each hand. A squeeze of her elbow changed the drumhead tension, altering the pitch. She thumped several times, running up and down some kind of scale.
A boy with flowing hair and an earring straddled a second long drum, riding the plain cylinder as if it were a log. He practiced patting the drumskin open handed-now a ringing slap, now a caressing spank.
Five girls from freshman to senior age had drifted onto the stage between the two drummers. They went barefoot, their sky-blue chitons draped about their bodies ala Isadora Duncan. Each held two upright hazel switches.
Professor Porter raised his voice to the audience. "This dramatized rite has been arranged by Reverend Roundsong's Goddess group and the Campus Crusade. A word about the two principals: "Backstage, each is now performing the vibration of the godnames and other invocational ritual to summon the godforms of Bacchus and Artemis. Sorry that we couldn't show you that. Esoteric orders have to keep some secrets, otherwise they wouldn't be esoteric. Right?" He drew home tolerant titters.
"Basically, the person builds in his or her mind a complete image of the chosen god. This takes time to perfect. Ignatius Loyola used similar visualization in his [practical Catholic mysticism to achieve consciousness of God."
Caledonia Roundsong asked, "How many people saw Blen Sebastian's play, The Sanctified Church, based on ZoraNeale Hurston's writings? That few? The poverty of asponse chills me-that was the theatrical experience of the decade, except for Lily Tomlin alone on the stage.
"In the Voodoo ritual at the end, Erzulie and Ghede possessed various of the characters. You saw Luisah Teish doing a good imitation of being ridden by a loa. She should know, she's an Oshun priestess herself.
"Possession in Voodoo, or Voudou, or Voudoun, like God-shouting and speaking in tongues in the Christian Sanctified churches, is rather random. The worshiper opens up and waits for lightning to strike."
Porter resumed, "Here, however, the practitioner invests the image of the chosen god with reality and projects him or herself into it. The individual makes a selective magical unity with divinity.
"We spoke of discipline. The person shapes the god around him or herself, and the deity manifests through the individual's unique personality. This is not like Shirley MacLaine and random channeling."
A broad-faced boy with a curly black beard and a round belly stepped out from the back of the stage. He wore a blue-black toga-like drape.
Judy Latimer instantly thought of John Belushi and felt ashamed. Everyone was taking this so seriously.
A short girl with tiny bones and rounded flesh entered from the opposite side. Her flawless skin clothed her and nothing more. A strung archer's bow lay in her hand.
A sharp pixie chin and close-cropped androgynous platinum hair contributed to an unearthly aura. Light touched her and seemed to wrap her protectively. Her cold, pale blue eyes held a wealth of worldly wisdom beyond her elfin appearance.
The New York voice came from the audience, reading from an open book. The two drums began to talk in rhythm under his words.
" 'Come, Bacchus, come thou hither, come out of the East; come out of the East, astride the Ass of Priapus' Come with thy revel of dancers and singers!' " The bearded fellow hopped across the stage with an exaggerated Agnes de Mille cowboy two-step. The five chitoned girls drifted around him, hazel rods waving.
Each moved as if underwater, lips undulating in slow motion to the drums. The beating instruments caught rhythms and patterns, tossing them back and forth. The girls swung their loins sensually, some to one rapping structure, some to another.
" 'Who followeth thee, forbearing to laugh and to leap' Come, in thy name Dionysios, that maidens be mated to God-head!' " The boy Bacchus crouched, broad shoulders and head swaying. Girls skillfully vaulted over him, their hazel rods thrust on high.
" 'Come, in thy name Iacchus, with thy mystical fan to winnow the air, each gust of thy Spirit inspiring our Soul, that we bear thee Sons in Thine Image!' " The boy stood up. Two girls collapsed at his feet. Hazel wands in their teeth, they pawed him sexually. He reached into his blue-black toga.
What his hand brought out bore no resemblence to a fan, yet he waved it, grinning.
Judy blinked, her face heating. She'd never seen as realistic a dildo, down to the furry scrotum.
The New York voice interpolated. "Let me be clear on the symbolism! As it says, the uninitiated self of the magician 'is a mob of wild women, hysterical from un-comprehended and unsated animal instinct.' " All five girls began to claw the air before the upraised phallus.
" 'They will tear Pentheus, the merely human king who presumes to repress them, into mere shreds of flesh.' " The quintet quivered and howled to the complex inter-weavings of the drumbeats.
"Don't just rely on the human, guys." The New Yorker nasally advised. "Situational ethics, the secular humanist trip, old-fashioned dialectic materialism, Objectivism, new design for living-you name it.
"All the purely worldly systems of belief, even the Playboy philosophy that raised you, fall before the Bacchic energy."
The girls snarled and yelped, like true bitches. They rose and circled around the priapic youth.
" 'None but Bacchus, the Holy Guardian Angel, hath grace to be God to this riot of maniacs; he alone can transform the disorderly rabble into a pageant of harmonious movements, tune their hyaena howls to the symphony of a paean, and their reasonless rage into self-controlled rapture. . .' " Judy tugged urgently on Wanda's arm. Her voice slid under the hot, driving drumming. "Uh, let's go, please."
The New Yorker's voice rose several decibels. " The High Priestess,' it is written by The Master Therion, 'represents the most spiritual form of Isis the Eternal Virgin.'" The cool-eyed pixie stepped forward, regally self-possessed. She circled the dog pack of girls and the dildo-waving Bacchus.
" 'The Artemis of the Greeks ... she is light and the body of light. She is the truth behind the veil of light. Upon her knees is the bow of Artemis, which is also i musical instrument, for she is huntress and hunts by enchantment.' "She links the ideal world in highest heaven with the reality attained on earth," the speaker concluded.
The mob of girls became an orderly chorus on their knees, wands rippling back and forth as they chanted: "Io, Pan, fleet piper, Invigorate the forest with thy musk, Let thy enchanted syrinx lift the veil, Discharge night with desire's sudden light."
The boy skipped goatishly, miming a flute player with the phallus. The wise-eyed nude pixie drifted, repeatedly intercepting him as he careered about the stage.
"Ho, Hecate, sweet intercessor, Send thy menstrual rain to draw That crystal fire from the stars, Bright dew upon the fresh-turned earth."
The naked Artemis stood, legs spread, undulating will an icily controlled eroticism to the hip-rolling drumbeats.
Judy yanked. "Wanda!"
"Io, Bacchus, whose cup inflames, Offering the blood of Iacchus, Dionysios' love-bitten lips and liver Spreading communion with all life."
The platinum-haired pixie danced nimbly, her bow laying to the compelling drum sounds. The boy chased after, phallus probing the air.
"Ho, Artemis, whose swift joy Outraces the hairy-thighed Pan, Thy beauty a promise ever-leading, Thy perfection never degraded by decay."
The chorus suddenly became a forest, their hazel wands branches. In and out weaved the pixie and the satyr. The bearded boy mugged and panted and leered. He leaped before the prancing Artemis, the phallus copiously jetting milky gusts as he squeezed the base. Fluid splashed her nude, glowing skin.
The girls stripped away their blue chitons. In sweating nakedness they assailed him with their switches. He heaved up his toga, mooning them lewdly. The hazel wands lashed at his chubby rear.
"Ooooo!" He squealed in mock pleasure. He dived for them, the dildo thrusting like a lance. It still spurted, weakly.
They began to peel the blue-black toga from him and whip his hairy, stout body as his giggles rose. Judy gripped her friend firmly and fled from the hall.
"I still get a kick out of working with youth."
Reverend Roundsong glanced about the living room. Professor Porter's decor continued to resemble an arcane bookstore that had been invaded by an anthropological museum.
She settled comfortably onto the curving seat of what seemed a small bench well scarred by use. She knew the dark wood had in fact been cut and shaped in Ghana into an Ashanti Tribe stool.
On the wall behind her, a dark Afghani Baluch pillow rug served as a decorate hanging.
"Superb drummers. They had the group ready to plow the furrows even before your nymphs stripped off." Porter selected glassware from a reddish wooden cabinet, its posts and panels elaborately carved with New Zealand Maori designs. Mother of pearl eyes flashed rainbow lights; mouths grinned, four-fingered hands reaching out past the lips. Every inch between figures seemed covered with delicate whorls and swirls.
"Glendullan for you?" He held up a snifter.
"Thanks. Your usual Talisker, I suppose?"
"It goes best with a fine cigar. The peat bites into the cloying tobacco aftertaste. Yet, I'll respect your prejudice against the weed and abstain."
He poured a tot of whisky and offered her the snifter. Uncorking a second bottle, he filled a sherry glass. "Jem de la Frontera, as thick and sweet as a Gypsy's netherlips."
He tapped on the power of his CD player. Strings hovered low in the background. He stepped over and clicked his glass against her upraised snifter.
"Power to the people." She tasted the single malt Scotch, "Mmmm. Muchisimas gracias."
He slid into a full lotus before a bookcase gaudy with academic paperback spines. Not a drop spilled. He sipped the oloroso sherry. "Mona Forbes, you asked. Sweet, innocent wench. Taking three two-unit intro courses, including one of mine."
The stereo whispered as a full chorus barely breathed an invocation: "O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness; Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress-"
"Miss Forbes is fresh from high school," he continued, "but you know that. Not gifted, but capable of intelligent work. Charmingly middle class." "Good. Sigma is overdrawn at the eccentrics' bank. We can use some mainline recruits for pure balast." Caledonia warmed her whisky with cupped hands. "What's this we're bearing?"
"Gustav Hoist's Choral Symphony, to verses by Keats." "It's not The Planets, but it has a civilized intensity." The chorus suddenly erupted: "Hear us, great Pan!
Be still the unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings-"
"Miss Forbes lives with a cousin who keeps her toeing tie line."
"Better and better. It's easier to break in fillies if they come semi-trained." She closed her eyes and reveled in the Highland bouquet as she swirled the Scotch about the snifter.
"No stranger to corporal correction." Porter watched one eye open to peer at him.
"You do know her well." The lid closed. "Don't forget the Boy Ban. No dating, no assignations, no quickies stacked in the library stacks until the Harvest Festival."
Bliss glowed from her plump face as she drank.
He stroked the raised tip of his left mustache. "Such bold conclusions. I'm a father confessor to her."
"Oh. Incest. Kinky," she mocked. Her eyes both opened. "You must call upon heroic reserves to satisfy the spiritual needs of the student bodies."
"Not all relationships demand all-night stands." He let the light play around the edges of the heavy black sherry. "There's the casual tryst before meals, to stimulate the pallate."
"The post-prandial bang-up to settle the digestion." "As Krishna chanced to remark to Arjuna during a lull in the frenzied warfare soaking The Bhagavad Gita with blood, blood, blood." He cleared his throat.
" 'No man shall 'scape from act by shunning action; nay, and none shall come by mere renouncements unto perfectness. Nay, and no jot of time, at any time, rests an; actionless; his nature's law compels him, even unwillingly, into act; for thought is act in fancy. He who sits suppressing all the instruments of the flesh, yet in his idle heart thinking on them, plays the inept and guilty hypocrite-' "
"I like that for Brother Swaggart," she nodded, "but I shouldn't criticize the competition while it's down."
" 'But he who, with strong body serving mind, gives up his mortal powers to worthy work, not seeking gain, Arjuna! such an one is honourable. Do thine alotted task!' "
"To paraphrase: A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." She rumaged in the open mouth of her sacklike purse and extracted toothpaste and toothbrush.
"Woman, too." He finished the sherry.
"You, sir, purpose lechery." The Reverend Roundsong began to slip her beads and medalions over her head. "I am bent on an ecumenical convocation, a hymn in blood and bone, contrapuntals crying praises to heaven and earth."
He helped her waft her heavy robe over her shoulders. While she piled it on the Ashanti stool, he walked to the front of a two-seat rattan couch.
Reaching down, he tugged on the front rail. The frame slid, elongating smoothly. It neatly became a futon-matressed bed. He left the twin bolster cushions in place.
Stepping to the hall closet, he brought back sheets and fluffy foam pillows. Caledonia helped him make the bed, her pantihose and halter discarded. Her full flesh undulated, cushiony softness overlaying rounded muscles.
He undressed in front of a low bookcase. Atop a gaudy yellow-green-burgundy-imperial-blue strip-woven Ghanan cloth rose a deep brown dance wand sacred to the Nigerian Yoruba god Eshu-Elegba. The knowing eyes of the trickster god observed Porter's body, darkly marked by the Corsican sun during the weeks before the summer term.
The professor extracted a chamois pouch from a brass box with a rearing centipede on its lid. "Since Indian hemp is consecrated to Bacchus, I shall donate some Thai."
He sprinkled a liberal heap of pungent leafy shards onto a sooty bronze brazier. A match set it to gentle flame.
Caledonia touched his hard muscles and greying chest hair. "Before she became a shrewish virgin, Artemis knew worship in Ephesus as the nymph aspect of the Goddess."
He lightly fondled her aureoles, dark half-dollars. "Older yet,Hecate Selene, the far-shooting moon."
She kissed his cheek, tasting the faintest trace of English Leather "I invoke her, by Hathor's milky eye, the moon-stone tear of night's splendor."
The name vibrated along her throat, through his skin.
He nuzzled the softness along her arm. "I invoke goat-fleet Pan, by that cherished Eye of Hoor, whose lamp reveals secrets the moon never sees."
The resonate name tingled from his lips, into her flesh. They sank side by side, onto the thin, firm satin-sheeted Japanese matress. Hands roamed in familiar freedom.
The stereo roistered with orchestra and song: "Whence came ye, jolly Satyrs? whence came ye? So many, and so many, and such glee? Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?"
His phallus rose as they lay embraced, face to face. Her Win, silky mound pressed against its notable length, loth continued their caresses, making only tiny movements of legs or torsos.
The hemp-sweet air pressed lovingly down upon their bodies. An energy streamed between them.
He envisioned a silver cord linking the base of his spine and his navel. Visualizing a second body of pure light bide his body of gross matter, he shifted his consciousness into that body of light.
At no time did the astral self-image leave the bounds of his physical skin. Slowly his material perceptions faded and his astral senses opened.
A second body of light meshed with his, the pearlesceant radiance that was Caledonia Roundsong.
With a coy slap to his left cheek, she dissolved into a camphor-sharp mist that swiftly dissipated. He felt his astral form grow heavier as thick, goat-scented hair sprouted along his legs. His feet knobbed into fists, then formed into hooves.
All around him lay black quiet.
Suddenly, a chittering, capering grey-furred orangutan somersaulted over him from behind. It waddled and gibbered, its great bag-like abdomen rocking as its knuckles dragged.
He followed it with easy swimming motions. His arms and legs drove him through the void after the dancing ape It receded from him, though he worked his astral muscles in smooth, vigorous strokes. As it diminished to a dot, the black perceptibly lightened to a murky grey.
He caught the scent of ocean water.
His skin felt the first faint caresses of an enveloping medium. Something surrounded him, bore him up.
That something bit at his nose. He sneezed, raising his face. Cool air touched his mouth and nostrils. Salt splashed at him as his head dipped.
He raised his face for regular breaths as the grey faded to a shimmery silver.
A brine-tangy, moon-clear sea surrounded him. He swam with clean arm strokes, his furred legs and cloven hooves threshing heavily in the water behind.
The sea narrowed, becoming a channel between huge, smooth rocks. A powerful tide poured against him. yet he fought his way up the strait.
The water soon flowed a fierce crimson, mingled with stinging red flux that coursed between the narrow cliffs, A carmine mist rose to stain the overhead moon, barely visible between the rounded rocks.
The sea channel became an estuary. The roiling river current ran pure dark ruby. He struggled to breast it. His tody passed through the narrow strait into a cove, surging with current and eddy.
The shore spread with oaks, heavy in leaf, and black poplars. The river current spewed from a high waterfall, almost completely masked in garnet mists. Dimly seen ferns and wild growths clung to the rocks.
He slipped into a twisting eddy and came to shore. He danced out onto the damp earth, leaving cleft tracks. The red mist rolling from the waterfall's spray colored, but did not obscure, the details of the moon-washed night.
He moved into the forest springing close by the cove's edge. A grating peacock screeched. Quail darted away from his tread. He heard the far rustle of a great animal, also hooved. By scent he knew it for a stag, musky with mating need.
He had left the mist behind. Silver moonlight illuminated the open ground as he stepped from the trees into a clearing. Three paths stretched farther into the wood, on the other side.
A lioness slept peacefully across one. An ivory-hided bitch curled before the second. It moved in fitful dreaming,a low puppy's whimper sounding from its throat.
A graceful centauress drowsed on her four legs at the third path's opening. Sprigs of pennyroyal had been braided into the hair that hung over her breasts. Her head slumped, her arms slack.
The naked human torso flowed into a jennet's body. The tail swished in twitches. The hooves stood steady, their golden-red bronze shoes bright under the moon. He skipped nimbly over the dreaming bitch and followed the central path. The scent of almond trees in flower grew stronger as he pursued the meandering forest track. Finally, he found a grove of black poplar and almond. A young woman curled naked on the clear ground. Her bow and quiver lay against her breasts, brushing her belly.
Cradling arms protected them. She slept with slightly parted lips.
He touched her curving spine swiftly as he settled on his haunches by her. His fingertips swept down her back to her curved buttocks. With spread fingers he massaged those warm, muscled hinds.
He touched her lingeringly between the thighs. She murmured in the night. Her breath quickened. His fingers manipulated. Lips parted. She breathed in shallow, rapid gasps.
Suddenly, she shook in ecstasy, a throaty keening vibrating in the air. She inhaled deeply, then woke.
A hiss broke her lips. The trees rustled. Long, pale serpents crawled from the leaves, wriggling down tree trunks to surround them.
Her hands seized the bow. She slid out an arrow and nocked it, rearing on her heels. The silvery snakes closed in.
He leaped backward. His furred legs drove him over the narrowing circle of serpents. His hooves spun on the ground and he fled.
An outraged cry followed him. Footfalls and the swift rustle of scales pursued him down the path. The wood darkened instant by instant as the moon set behind near mountains.
By pure starlight, he pranced into the clearing. Under the black sky he found thirteen white-haired hags, thirteen breastless girls, and thirteen women round with child. All danced, hands raised and touching, forming a great delta shape.
The bright eye of Sirius glowed overhead in the huge dog following Orion. Directly beneath it, in the center of the women's triangle, something horned and stinking stirred.
A reeking breath, damp and gritty, filled the clearing. The women parted, their lines opening as if jaws.
The whisper of scaled bellies along dirt and the stamp of the angered archeress came from behind him. Before...
By the cold Dog Star he saw the black diamond eyes in the horned head at the clearing's center. The wet-ashes stench increased. The thing reared on ass's haunches. It rotated, offering the inhuman backside. Thirteen shriveled-breasted crones howled in desire. The hairless-pubed girls echoed their lust. The child-heavy, thick-dugged women spread their legs, groaning in parody of coition.
The hot-bodied huntress sprang down the path behind him. One arm caught him around the throat. Something lanced between his goat-hairy buttocks, writhing and probing his anus.
The huntress threw her legs around his waist. Her naked toasts pressed at his nape. Arm crushing his throat, she ached down to seize and jerk his hanging lingram. The serpentine thing up his rectum forced itself higher. The motions stimulated his prostate. His male member rose, knob-heavy and tormented by his rider's grip. He danced into the arena formed by the women's lines. The archeress yanked and cruelly twisted. He skipped a wild sarrabande as the length up his backside rooted higher. Lightning bursts of sensation drove along his nerves, stabbing between rectum and phallus. His pointing gristle stained toward heaven and the winking eye of Sirius. Her hard hand goaded and guided him. She firmly danced him around the circle of women. Pregnant bellies jiggled before him, in time to his pained bucks and leaps. Slender palms clapped as merry-cheeked girls chanted nonsense rhymes. Varicose legs and stretch-blued skin bobbed in time to his enforced gallop.
His loins burned and his flanks ached. He leaped higher as the python-fat thing reared yet farther up him. He hunched and capered with desire as his rider's hand squeezed his male growth, worrying the already raw foreskin.
The homed monster spread its ass's cheeks tauntingly. Its foul breath choked the air. Thirteen wrinkled-bellied beldams laughed at his goat-footed capers. The girls' ivory milk teeth showed in the cold starlight as they tittered and pointed. Each swollen- trunked woman set her heels, chortling in harsh, navel-deep howls.
The sinewy thighs crushed about his middle. Warm breasts straddled his bent neck, tantalizing. Her left arm reached back and low.
She yanked the serpentine length free. A hard, violent release shot through his blood. Her other hand choked and chaffed at his phallus.
Sperm foamed up from his depths-yet the fingers, cruel as bronze, crushed his genital lance. She blocked the orgasm within him.
He begged and hammered his cloven hooves. His spine arched till his straining lingam jutted straight at the sky, directly into the bright eye of Great Canus.
The fingers slackened. The sperm fountained in gouts. He shrieked his joy at her mercy. One-two-seven-nine, -thirteen ... the pearlescent jets pulsed starward.
Thick ropes of semen splashed down on them, wriggling along their naked skin. The orgasmic drops splashed onto the dark, horned beast.
It shriveled. Its midnight head turned in a silent plea. Clinging gism spotted the monstrous face and ass-haunched body. Pained tears welled from the diamond eyes. The black pupils widened.
The horned thing shrank and dissolved into a dark pool of tears that watered the roots of a stunted thistle patch just ahead of the naked crones. The thirsty plant drank the brackish ooze.
The stench vanished with the nightshape. Hot breath, sharp and spicy as crushed aloes, panted along his forehead and cheeks.
The huntress released her thigh-grip and wrestled him to the earth. She sat on him, eyes laughing as she ground his back into the dirt. Her mouth darted. Their tongues meshed. She extracted wild, massaging kisses from him. Her taut, silk-haired body pressed his phallus against his belly.
The thirteen unripened girls froliced widershins around them. The worn, wise ancients shuffled their swollen- jointed feet rhythmically. The thirteen great-teated, full-wombed mothers rocked and clapped their hands.
The archeress engulfed his phallus. Her elbows took her weight and plowed the open earth as she mated lustily with him.
The closed delta rotated about them to the beat of the ancient dance. Beyond the coupling bodies, the pool-watered thistle slowly parted its prickly leaves. A thick-rooted stalk appeared. Under the light of Sirius it rapidly blossomed into a heavily lipped orchid, swaying gorgeously to the foot-stamps and coital lunges.
In the morning, Porter uncorked a cold Hop Kiln Winery late harvest Johannisberg Riesling. "A little Weihnachtwein?"
"No orange juice?" Caledonia Roundsong's fork broke into an omelet of sesame-scented, wok-fried vegetables.
"A mimosa cocktail destroys good sparkling wine and dilutes fresh O.J."
He set a champagne flute of still, amber Riesling in front of her. Thick Canadian bacon accompanied the broccoli, snow peas, and squash omelet on his earthenware plate.
"To the Ephesian Artemis," he tilted his glass toward her, "whose white bitch avatar generously whelped the first vine stalk."
She drank solemnly. "Let me propose the health of Bacchus. His wine cult made best use of the grape."
The heady pungency of the Riesling mingled with crisp, fresh vegetable tastes as they ate.
"We should one day lighten the burden of Dorothy Tilden's curiosity concerning occult survivals." Porter cut and devoured some bacon.
"She has a road to travel before she can accept that kind of initiation." The minister licked her fork of clinging scraps. "She'll take to sex magic like an eel to water, though. There's a lot of energy in that girl."
Porter let the wine cut the salten fattiness lingering on his tongue. "She sublimates royally into her theater work-but is discipline really her strong suit? Such a smirk, Caledonia; you'd thought I meant a vulgar pun."
"Her alcohol intake is no greater than your indulgence of your libido. If Mona Forbes does pledge to Sigma, remember the self-discipline of the Boy Ban."
"I'm a savior to her, not the Big Bad Wolf. To prove it, let me tell you my plan for her roommate ..."
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sweet Sunday
An Interlude by P. N. Dedeaux
Pure calendar art, thought Rita Henshaw, looking down at her cousin still blissfully asleep in bed. Meat magazine stuff.
The girl lay on her left side on the coarse horse-blanket, one leg drawn up; she had tossed off the top cover of the same material as evidently too hot or itchy. Her pale shortie top had ended up mostly around her armpits, and she wore no bottom. Tousled and slightly moist licks of blonde hair decorated her forehead-the room was rather warmer than was comfortable-and she was snoring lightly. All she needed, considered Rita, was to have one thumb in her mouth. But Little Mo' was learning. It was Sunday morning and, despite her cousin's announced weekend absence, she had held to the blanket rule. Pity she'd kept on the top, though.
Rita Henshaw flexed her cane. It was the first thing Mona Forbes saw on opening her pure mauve, rather muzzy eyes. "Morning, Mo'." "Eh, uh, Oh. It's you.
"I... uuh, ah . . ." The girl gave a Penthouse yawn. She plucked a little uselessly, realization flooding through her face. "I didn't exactly expect . . ." "Evidently not, dear. But you're coming along. I did promise you the occasional spot check. To keep our little lady up to snuff. Come on. Quick. Up!" One end of the cane released itself into a furiously quivering antenna.
The girl knuckled sleep out of her eyes and swung her legs over the side of the bed. "Please, Rita, you aren't going to punish me, for having kept my top on, are you? It was so scratchy and itchy and ugh."
"Poor thing. And you still have some lines on your so misused tookie."
"Are you?"
"Come on. Homage!" Rita stood sternly, her legs slightly parted, stretching the short no-nonsense skirt of light chino across her broad thighs, pantyhosed in charcoal nylon. Above, she wore a short brown cashmere cardigan, loosely buttoned over-breasts. "Start the day right, dear."
Mona slipped to her knees in front of her cousin. She put her hands behind her back and bowed solemnly forward to kiss the skirt hem, in between the thighs. Her sleepy forehead bumped.
"Don't be impertinent, dear," said Rita, moving it. "Here."
Her imperious left index finger indicated a spot in front of her left flank where skirt ended and bursting pseudo-silk began. To it Mona fastened a long, sleepy, drizzly kiss that moistened both materials and even made the multi-denier stuff rustle, beside drawing an appreciative "Mmmn" from their occupant.
"Don't overdo it, dear." Rita stretched, then shifted slowly out of her left steeple heel. She kicked the shoe forward.
"As it's Sunday, we'll start with a special, just to remind you of your place in life around these parts. Lave the inside of that exquisitely expensive thing with what I trust is your still innocent tongue.
"Thoroughly, Mona, understand? Imbibe the scent of warmed Gucci calf as you work and mentally compare i with the scent of hickory. After all that dancing last night, my feet are killing me already."
She watched the mildly mute and moving head and, when the second shoe had been done to satisfaction, she seized the napeful of blonde hair and brought Mona to her startled feet with it, half-bent over and head twisted to one side.
"Purlease, Rita, don't be cruel to me. I haven't ..."
"Cruel to be kind. First, we'll have some Recitation."
"But it's Sunday. I don't have to . . ."
"You can say Friday's. First three stanzas of The Charge of the Light Brigade."
Mona paced under twist and turn. "But I've forgotten them!"
"Foolish you. You know I can call on any repeat for a week. Now off with your modesty garment and hands behind your back.
When the bared girl's chaste-looking thumbs had been secured behind her with a leather-lined thumb-cuff, Rita went to the adjoining bathroom, humming, and turned on the shower. After a moment she returned.
"Not as cold as I'd like, but will do. Come on, dear, perhaps it will help stimulate that lagging memory of yours, and I don't only mean Alfred, Lord Tennyson. There are rules around here and some of them have been broken. Two minutes, and head right under."
Mona miserably advanced. Rita took a book from a shelf and riffled pages to the poem. She heard the first gasp, then only plashy water falling. Very Tennysonian.
"Okay," she called. "Out you come."
The girl trod back in, dripping. She stood so, hair plastered to her scalp, her other mane furze-bedewed, arms behind her and eyes tight shut.
"Begin."
She recited the lines, then waited, heaving. Her eyes opened.
"Three errors. Three swats." Rita snapped the book. "But first you do two more minutes, my fickle friend- hot."
She strode by the dismayed teener and turned off the cold tap, turned on the hot, widening the jet at the head a little. When it was a stream too hot to take her arm she held aside the shower curtain with a bow.
"Enter, and be drenched, my dear. Two minutes also."
"Please, Rita. Please turn it back to cold."
"Aren't you the choosy one! Silly, it isn't scalding. It'll just wake you up a bit, that's all." She reached and grabbed.
"Hiieeeh!" Mona swung in. The hot jet struck, stiffly, first on her breasts, then, as she turned, the length of her plushy back.
Rita, grinning, watched the needles hitting into the plump flesh as gurgling, gasping, stamping Mona fought to find a position of least prominence in the small shower stall. She finally sought most comfort in the distance, doubling over so that the jet struck and trickled down her bended be-hinds. It suited Rita's book. The older woman reached in and shut off. Mona panted, mouth wide.
"Warm enough for you? Now kindly fetch the paddle."
"For Pete's sake, give me a minute."
"That'll make it four, dear, two either side."
With a sulky look on her head-down face Mona strode purposefully through towards her bed, her pinkened pears streaming and shaking as if indignantly. Rita watched their wet shapes sidle out and fatten as the girl knelt on the bed.
The paddle was hung over it and she had not a little maneuvering to manage to get the striking end in her teeth and lift it off its hook. Rita watched her targets for that morning with pleasure.
"Can't think why they use the expression 'well-hung' for men. It precisely describes you from behind, dear. Were you having gooey dreams of Ron when I disturbed you, by the way?"
Mona was standing rosily in front of her, frowning as she munched her paddle. Rita accepted it with a sigh.
"It really is a pity to have to belabor such lovely lollies with this nasty, cruel, hard, unfeeling board. You know I'm forced to, don't you."
When Mona mutinously said nothing, Rita turned her and by the level of her connected hands bent her well forward. "Head right down. Study the wrinkles in your kneecaps."
Mona, her almost blowsy bottom still steaming, waited. So did Rita. "Ready?" inquired the latter. "Of course I am," snapped Mona. "Dear oh dear ..."
"I didn't mean ..." The wettened face peeked quickly- "Please!"
"You are glutton for it this morning, aren't you. That puts the score up to six, three on each silly-billy, and it also makes it reluctantly incumbent on me to hit, oh, much, much harder." She added, "I'll alternate but keep on one sitter if you clench or even if you demurely dance. Relax it and, yes, round it."
She pulled gently on the thumb-cuff. "Up a little, down a little. I often wonder at these moments not what you are thinking, before the Big Event, but what they are."
She patted the plump hinds with her plank. "Almost they seem to talk."
Flack! The wood whacked up the right. The half-bent buttock-ball bounced.
"Ow!" said Mona softly. "I . . . thththanks!"
Rita was pleased. The girl was really getting there. She hadn't asked for the ritual gratitude this time. She was also pleased at the strong purple smear the paddle had drawn up an the warm and wettened flesh. Just the right color. She swung and clapped into the left. "Phew! Er . . . thank you."
"You're welcome. You've no idea how nicely this board brings up your cane marks."
Again she sullied the skin of the right side. Mona mewed, but pluckily did not move. Only after the fifth did she definitely flinch and earned a blisterer on the same burster. Then she was skipping, hands behind, if tied.
"Golly, Rita, that damn thing stings . . . phew, you've no idea ... oh gosh it . . ."
"You must admit, my dear, you were a teensy-weensy bit on the rebellious side beforehand."
"Well, I'm not now. Jeepers, that wood really whops in, y'know it. I really think it's the very worst first thing in the morning. Really, Rit', do you have to . . . ?"
She broke off to look down. By now she was no more than treading water and her cousin was absently tracing the taped handle up her trimmed furze in front.
"Like to get 'em over with now, luv? Or leave them till after breakfast? Today I'll be lenient."
"What?"
"Come. You may not be Phi Beta material, Mona, but you're not all that dense. For trying to hide your ripeness from the loving touch of the blanket ..."
"Pur-LEAZE! I only put on my top."
"And that didn't seem to get you very far either, did it. Anyway, the penalty's always bottomless, isn't it. Unless! decide to take a whalebone to those whoppers you carry ahead of you with such insouciance-one of these fine days. What is it?"
"What?"
"What me no whats, child. Steady your jugs and think."
Mona looked down. "Six," she said sullenly.
"Invariably of the lickiest, for breaking a House Rule. However, I said I'd be lenient today and you did have on half only, so I'll let you off with three. Get your own cane."
The girl brooded. "Please. It's such a beast."
"A little thinner, I agree, but then perhaps stingier. So they do say. I wouldn't know."
"Please let me off this once."
"Honey, I do believe you're building up a real respect for Mr. Stick. Just get it, or you're in for a real ride on the roller coaster."
The paddle was hung over the bed, the cane on the wall across from it. Useful reminders both, in Rita Henshaw's modest opinion. She watched as the big-butted co-ed walked over and tip-toed to grip the dangling yellow cane in her teeth. Then she lifted it by the thong threaded through its hob grip, on which the letter M had been burnt in -- another reminder.
The two seats had been stained a very satisfactory scarlet, indeed. She presented the quivery limb to her cousin who accepted it and pointed.
Mona looked down in some dismay as the tough tip prodded and plumbed her erect right nipple. The cane pressed till the lump doubled back on itself, embedded in its roseate coin. Then it was released, standing out stubbily, with indignant quiver.
"Ouhhh," she whimpered softly.
The left was similarly treated. The fat cylinder wiggled.
"Must say you're putting on the poundage up there, Mo'. I don't suppose you get any complaints from the boys sitting either side of you."
"They, they aren't as big as yours."
"How do you know?" grinned Rita.
"I've. . . I've seen."
"But not felt, eh. Well, we'll weigh them up some time today. Meanwhile," and the little beetle of her fingernail scratched one red stub, "I'd say you were ready to give suck to a regiment. Are they always as stiff as this before a beating? If so you must really like it."
"I don't. I hate it."
"Well, to vary the monotony a bit-after all, no true tanning should be exactly like another-I want you standing up against that table, close. Thumbs on your coccyx, please. Now right knee right up and put your foot on the tabletop."
"My right . . . ? Honest, Rita, some of the positions you make me . . ."
"There. See how nicely that rounds out your left chub? Also making it harder to clench. I'm giving you the first on your left only, the second on your right only, with your left foot on the table, please, and the last a cliff-climber clean across the twain."
She steadied, Mona stood. With her right foot up on the table and her left leg duly braced it was true, her big left bun was bunched, its mass awaiting. The cane thrashed at it and clung, full across. Searing pain streaked the whole of the ham.
"Yiiikes!" A-tiptoe she arched. Pliant as a lover the lean wand had embraced the rubbery round so that its fearsome tip dug in on the inside, leaving the darkening fury of its mark on the very tenderest flesh.
"For Pete's sake, Rita. That's murder." Mona ground herself against the table edge.
"Left leg up now, please."
It was done. This cut was almost as bad, but bearable. For the third Rita undid the thumb-cuff and made her winsome charge touch her toes with her back touching the table. A full-blooded cut and Mona, jumping, banged her head under it. Rita seemed to think the subsequent sight of the teener rubbing her ritzy tail with one hand and the back of her head with the other particularly funny.
"Now then I know you'd like some breakfast. Two eggs or three? I'll fix it. I want that hair fluff-dry, dear, and shirt-sleeve order, please. That's nothing under the jeans, remember, and," she flung back a mischievous wink from the doorway, "rump patches are out."
Sunny side up, the eggs were excellent, the coffee even better. Rita took hers to the Women's Pages, Mona morosely.
Frankly, she sensed something afoot; she moved from one side to the other uneasily. The chair felt particularly hard today, or her jeans especially thin. All she had on was a white shirt, buttoned coat-style and cut short; its tail rested on the ledge of her behind, behind, no more.
She felt unpleasantly conscious of her bottom at the moment. The faded cottony jeans were skintight, seemed, indeed, to press into the fatty parts beneath her, sternly. Rita had hit. It wasn't fair to be paddled first, before a caning. That third had drawn hot wire across her hinder halves, Mona wriggled at the memory. She could see that damn hassock across the room. Trying to look innocent.
After breakfast, Rita settled to more of her Sunday supplement in an easy chair beside the dead fire, last light's, it seemed.
"You may want to do your room now, dear. And any other bathroom business as yet unattended to. I think I will profit by the same relaxed moment of the day in a minute, "Okay." Mona mooned off. Her chaperone watched the dry material move over the noble rounds beneath it. She had plans for that pair, all right.
Twenty minutes later the teener returned. Her cousin rein the same seat, but reading, this time, some of her young charge's blue books. What brought Mona up sharp ns the sight of the hassock. It had been brought out dose, for impending occupancy, it seemed plain, and on it lay two objects. One a cane, the other . . .
"What's that?" Mona pointed sickly.
Rita dropped her reading and cocked her head to one "I wonder. What do you think? To me it looks like a tort length of one-inch garden hose, green, hard, and pliable. When applied to the gluteal fat of a growing girl, I have an idea it might hurt. What do you feel?"
"You're not going to use it on me?"
"What's the betting?"
"Please. You're so goshdarned strict with me, Rit'. Honest, I don't mind taking an occasional whipping, maybe I even deserve them at that, but like that cane really stings. I mean it."
"Poor ickle you." Rita had gone grim. "Without meaning to pun, I want to get to the bottom of a few things about here. Come on. Sunday Settlement. Recite your faults. And remember our rule. If I know of something you've done wrong which you don't confess you get double."
Mona sighed. She looked about, but there seemed no entrances she could use as exits and she tugged at her shirt hem.
"Well. I did run out of toilet paper and had to make a raid on your tissues."
"So I saw. We'll let that pass."
"Then, I cut Bio twice. Ugh. Those frogs." "I'm glad you told me about that, Mona, as I'd checked at the college. Two cuts for each cut. Go on." "Well . . ." "What?"
"Maybe I did sneak a smidgen of your new perfume."
"Last night?" "Yes."
"No matter. Anything else?"
"I, I got a D on Midterm at Math. But," her face brightened, "an A in Physics."
"I checked on that, too, dear." Rita frowned. "Odd. I can't entirely understand why you got a D in a subject like Math and then A in its close relative. Unless you were grossly idle in one or hopelessly favored in the other."
The big woman shrugged. The growing flush in her cousin's face had not gone unnoticed by her, nor the fidgety fingers, the rise in breathing rate of the frosh's so senior chest. Why, there even appeared to be a kind of pulsing in the lump lodged at the apex of the thighs, bulging behind the tautened jeans, with their false fly-front .
"Sure that's all?"
"I ther-think so, yes."
Rita stood up. Smoothing her skirt, undoing a button of her cardigan at the top. An impressive specimen of womanhood.
"W-What are you going to do now?" Mona asked. "Attempt to clear your mind" (she tapped) "through your tail" (she tapped). "Four's the slate so far." She put aside the cane and picked up the hose length.
"I don't think you've made the acquaintance of this lovely and variety is the spice of life and all that. They say this one works miracles. Hassock position, please."
"Oh Rit', won't you ... I mean . . . like take it easy on me a bit . . . you absolutely blistered me in there and that cane . . ."
"I shall give it you over your trousers, yes. But first put your hands up like so."
"No!" was the petulant echo. Mona stamped. Rita, her hands at one earlobe, stayed them and stared. Mona was near tears. "Please. They hurt. And, and, one day I'm sure I'll ter-tear some skin."
Rita spoke softly. "So you did want your trousers down fork, after all? Show-off."
Mona wrinkled her rather pixyish features but wisely said nothing.
Her ears were pierced, as were her cousin's. From the latter's rosy lobes were taken twin thin gold rings, almost a jeweler's sleepers. Rita slid them through the soft and pulpy flesh under Mona's ears and there dangled from them two most convenient thumb-cuffs of finest 14-karat. In a moment Mona stood with her thumbs at her nice flat ears, as if listening for something.
What she heard was not reassuring. A smacky slap as Rita tried the hose on her own bigly fleshed calf.
"Jesus Christ," she said, hopping. "All right, kneel down and come over here. Over you go."
Mona bent a torpid torso across the pouffe. Her bottom bloomed, she held her anxious elbows out. Rita, appreciative, flipped up the derisory little shirt tail lying on the upper plane; into view came a circlet of tan waist, meek-looking.
"Can't you do it with the cane? I'll bet that thing hurts like, like sin. Besides, I'm all sore a'ready."
"With a butt as big as yours you can take an honest whaling without permanent pother. Now, let's get at the disaster area." Businesslike she bent. The side zip slipped of itself. Half the arse bulged out. Then she had to tug.
"Hell, you kids wear these things tight. Like peeling a banana, just. Or two. There we go."
The material lay marooned at Mona's knees. The heavy cheeks moved uncomfortably; the paddle blushes had dimmed a little but the cane streaks still spoke volumes. The telephone went. Rita strode and answered it with her implement hanging.
"Who? The porter? Whose porter? Oh, aha. Professor Porter. Of the Physics Department. Yes, I wondered if you'd call ... no, I'm afraid she's engaged just at the minute, professor, a little therapy . . . not entropy, therapy. But I'm sure she'd be happy to speak with you in a little while. Say a half hour? Fine. Thanks. Goodbye." Rita stood over the divided dumplings. "Anyone you know, dear? Now let's get this over with. I fear it's going to hurt you far more than it does me. You may be a dullard in Math but I'm sure you can count to four. Stick it up and, if you wish, say your prayers."
With flexed knees she swept the first almost horizontally into the ripe flesh; the hose met with a wet flaccid sound but its punishing power was attested by the wealth of its weal and the sudden jamming together of the twin peach-halves.
"Ieeeee!" Mona wailed, threshing forward. "ONE!"
For the second Rita cut at an angle but for the third and fourth the girl's toby was canted slackly, breathless, full atop the hassock and she was able to drive down two positive welters as hard as she could.
Mona squealed off, squirming. She rolled on the rug, her great limbs threshing greatly. When the world had subsided somewhat she knelt up panting and saw her tormentor standing in front of the fireplace cane in hand.
"Now, Mona, my dear, perhaps that will freshen up your memory. I told you I meant to get to the bottom of things and unless I'm mistaken you had a visitor here last night. Or have you"-and Rita's canetip speared a circle of ash from an ashtray-"taken up Romeo and Juliets?
"Even that wouldn't account for the level of Chivas Regal, which I know you hate, nor certainly for the condom missing from your secret store.
"Put two and one together and I surmise your mysterious stranger was none other than Professor Porter and he wasn't here to wash your feet in soda water. Let's have it now. How did he take you, where, how often-and when? You're in for it whatever you say so it might just as well be the truth."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Family Bonds
"A lazy cruise in the Caribbean sun does wonders for the complexion of a girl's southernmost exposure." Lucretia Sue Merydith observed her naked and pardonably proud buttocks in the stateroom full-length mirror. "None of those nasty birching tracks are still blemishing my heigh-di-hinds, which can go back into hiding."
"Just because the sun has tanned over the spoor doesn't mean one can't still feel every lingering trace." Juliana reposed on her tummy across her bed. She sipped tentatively at a long glass of Long Island iced tea. Her demurely bikini'd sit-upon showed only a finger's fashionable width of upper cleft.
"A-men, sister." The lanky redhead piroutted, studying her nude body. "Yet if I were to let my little nightmare voices have their field day, I'd be daubing vaseline up my--" Juliana frowned.
"--self in various locations (is that dainty enough for your cuss-maiden ears?) and cringing every time I saw a jock strap bulge. Speaking of which."
She fished money from her purse and tucked it into an envelope. The black-eyed, cocoa-skinned waiter on the bed accepted it and began replacing his uniform.
"Afternoon fun over?" Juliana's voice had a liberal crusting of frost.
"Therapy, sugar, just therapy. Otherwise I'd freeze up in memory of that sturdy li'l steer, with more lead in his pencil than anyone still packing balls."
The waiter executed a solemn bow, did a sudden genuflection, and kissed something not Lucretia Sue's hand.
'Oh! Well, thankee kindly, sweet stuff."
He wheeled the luncheon cart out into the ship's corridor. The door clicked smartly.
Juliana held her glass to the light and tasted it cautiously. "Your codless wunderkind seems to have left a trail of vigorous successors."
"We both have our little after-effects from the Qu'imram calaboose, I'd say. I seem to notice someone skipping to the loo three or four times a day for more than watering the daisies."
"A simple post-traumatic psycho-physiological gastrointestinal reaction," Juliana announced primly. She took a farther swig of her Long Island iced tea. "You know, Trews, I believe there's alcohol in this."
"The bartender would hope so. I was a tad curious why you squeezed lemon and poured cream into it, but I gave up offering you English advice on serious drinking when I saw your pop swizzling Martell cognac into his ginger beer. Speaking of whom, how is the ol' pater familias?"
"Still potty." The woman put her glass on the floor in disgust. "He closed up the country place along with the London house. Pensioned off his entire staff, even Borogove, who'd been his man for ages. Repaired to the ancestral lands on this Mardi Blanc island. Grandsire left there in 1505 and none of us have even seen it since."
Lucretia Sue studied her watch as she slid feet into sandals. "We'll be taking in the sight soon enough. Docking's in a couple of hours. I want to get another touch of sun in my bones before I have to masquerade as a decent woman again." Still wedding-night naked, she opened the stateroom door.
"I'll do the packing," Juliana offered. "I fear that alcohol is going to go through me like the Bastard plow through Hastings."
Her mildly sun-brushed English curves shuddered graphically.
"Seven o'clock beddie-bye, mind." Rita stood in the kitchen doorway, coffee in hand. "Don't dawdle at the library."
The luscious twin mounds of cotton-trousered girlmeat continued their wobbling course. The snowy britches had that extra-tight look born of sore and sorry hide beneath. For a fleeting instant, Rita had an illusion of seeing the streaks and blotches wink through the well-scrubbed pants seat.
". . .not fair ..." came a delicate murmur.
" 'Hem. A moment, Mona dearest. Dissatisfaction in the ranks of tender . . . ah . . . minds?"
The girl shifted a pale blue folder crammed with note One eye peeked around a vagrant golden lock. "You don know what it's like-in public-sitting on a bottom li mine."
"You'd rather have to kneel on a chair?" The soft pun brought an eloquent flinch. "See? It always can get worse Trust me. Now, toddle. Think of all the bedrest you'll g before tomorrow's classes."
Rita sipped the slow-drip Kona coffee, well-laced with Tia Maria. She savored Mona's cringe at the thought of twelve solid hours in the blanket-lined sack.
"Be sure to give my love to Professor Peters, the man who ignited a passion for physics in the soul that couldn't tell a quark from a Smurf two months ago."
She'd have to check his biography in the school catalogue. Her cousin's rather blubbery confessions had been explicitly detailed and far too imaginative for hastily contrived fiction. Amazing what liberal education and excess leisure time could produce . . .
Mona's sweetly-filled cotton dingers waggled out the door.
That Professor Packer could do the girl's GPA some real food. Rita decided, if he didn't get boorishly possessive tot her. Perhaps he could spread the good word and Mona could ease her way up the academic ladder. Certainly she could do more good with faculty than with that hunk Ron, srutting and fretting his assets upon the stage . . .
The doorbell chimed. Rita gulped another spiked dram in irritation. "Clang-clang yourself."
As she strolled to answer it, she considered installing the faithful cane in an umbrella stand by the entry. That way Mona could have a reminder going and coming that her roomie meant capital-B Business.
"Yes?" she inquired through the wrought-iron grate across the peeping hole.
A lean, tanned face had an authoritative fringe of grey above the ears, with salt-and-pepper giving character to the mustache. For a moment she recalled a hyperthyroid tennis pro who'd impressed her with his vicious backhand and follow-through foreplay. "Special delivery for Miss Henshaw."
She gave a curt shake of her head. "You are not the mailman. You look too well paid."
"True." His teeth flickered charmingly under that mustache with the raised ends. Spitfire pilot style, was that? "However, Antonia Henshaw thought you'd appreciate it, since I was passing through."
"Oh. How nice of muh-ma." Bloody, bloody, bloody. She been looking forward to firing up the pleasingly plump dildo she'd bought in Amsterdam and reliving those scrumptious lickings she'd just handed mournful Mo'.
"Thank you, ever so." She unlatched the door. "You'll have to excuse me for not inviting you in. I'm just about to step out to church-" The caller pushed the door open. He carried a plaid carpetbag in his left hand. Rita made a gracious grab for the grip, but found herself back-pedaling as he strode right on ahead.
"And what church might that be?" He abruptly lost a nasal Midwestern accent and sounded unsettingly British as he closed and locked the door. "We could be the same denomination."
He stepped forward, swinging the bag jauntily. She had visions of Whitechapel and Springheel Jack, ripping the bodices and thoraces of sporting women.
"Uh, Non-Conforming Resurrectionist Brethren of the Latter-Day Evangelist." She thought of the bone-shattering iron skillet hanging by the stove. "Look, I really must insist-"
"A fellow Resurrectionist, and here in such a small town. Tell me, do you use the Zoroastrian Rite Temple or the old Monophysite Hall?"
Her questing hand found a wiry modernistic lamp on the bric-a-brac table. A determined swing got effortlessly blocked in mid-air. He popped the lamp from her fingers.
"Look, I really don't know your name." Her bottom butted the couch. Her toes shifted for a power sprint the minute those hawklike eyes wavered. The ox-stunning skillet and the fourteen-inch razor-honed carving knife . ..
"Of course. Forgive me. Gustavus Fielding Porter." He managed a bow without averting his gaze. "Doctor of philosophy, master of pedagogy, liter arum baccalaureus, associate professor of physics, lecturer in comparative lit, and-on my mother's side, I admit-hereditary commander of the Lithuanian Light Horse, as recognized by the exiled court in Washington."
She rocked and sat on the couch back. "Not, by any chance, private marital arts tutor to one Mona Forbes in your inevitably copious spare time?"
"My disguise is penetrated."
"About as thoroughly as my cousin." Rita stepped forward. "Really, that trick with the Ivory Soap and the j goose feather went out with Mata Hari's farewell as a j courtesan. You're in the neighborhood mighty quickly! after calling. Planning a study date with Miss Forbes, perhaps?"
"She's off to the library. We met in the foyer. Such a vivid color scheme below decks. I peeked."
His smile had the style of Ronald Colman mixed with something uneasy from Peter Cushing.
"Isn't there a phrase in your alleged profession's code of ethics about sleeping with the student bodies?" She tried to recapture the initiative.
"We never slept together."
Her brows arched scornfully. "You just smoked cigars while she tried to guess the secret word?"
"Only beforehand. Mona kept far too busy to get a wink's rest between the sheet-and we did use sheets. She much prefers her bed that way, and her bottom unbruised."
"Look, Professor Portsmouth, doctor of philandery, master of pederasty, bachelor ad libitum, I happen to be standing in loco parentis for Miss Forbes-"
"Speaking of parents, how is dear Antonia? Still as radiant in person as she sounds over the phone?"
He settled the carpetbag on a couch arm. The image clashed with her memories of Mona's pink tail, barred with reddish violet, bent for a deterring flogging ... the recollection brought back times when her stepmother had forced Rita to bare her behind . . .
"Ah, yes, mama's fine and feisty as ever." The skin over her buttocks tightened warily.
"I knew her first as Toni Belefont. Such a fun name, we all thought. She hated it dearly-the only point of vulnerability with her. Even in those madcap days when she captained her way to fame on the women's sabre team, she had this conviction that hers was to order, ours to obey."
Something nibbled at the back corners of her mind. "Talked to mama recently, have you?"
"Last night. She instructed me to look you up, quite as she had in the old days." The trophy and photo flashed crystal clear into her mind's vision. "Your name is . . . ?"
He inhaled. "Gustavus-"
" 'Toni, ever la belle dame sans merci, my love through the ages, Tavi.' "
"She still has that?" A mild, distant look touched his keenly whetted eyes. "I wonder if she ever--?"
Rita felt light-headed as she cleared her dry throat. That Tia Maria must be hitting with an extra mule kick.
"You mean: " 'Tavi lowered Toni's slacks, And gave her beauties forty whacks; And when she felt him have his fun, She begged the beast for forty-one.' " His tugged his mustache reflectively. "She actually told you that?"
"Uh, no. Daddy."
"Of course, that shy lad without any absurdly Latinate given name. Phil-not a Philo, or Philemon, or Philander, but an honest Philip, with the wind at his back, the world in his palm, and the girl at his side. Two, in fact.
"Thoroughly British Toni and All-American Polly, the sirens of our bright set." He marveled, "Married them both, that cad. Your comely cousin startled the deuce out of me when I saw her in the lecture hall."
" 'Startled' apparently isn't the verb." She tried for accusation again. "According to Mona, she's been trod and scrod--"
"In ways quite odd." He beamed. "A bountiful armful, indeed, but Forbes women always have been."
She thought for a moment of Uncle Jack's wife, then her imagination mated two plus two. "You mean mother!"
"Your generation did not invent the follies and pleasures of good-natured libertinage. It pleased me to find Polly's niece so apt to tutelage."
She watched blankly as he opened the carpetbag. A chill tumbled down her spine as he extracted a complicated arrangement of thin leather harness and chromed metal.
"Do you recall the last time we met?" The contraption jingled as he shook it straight. "Toni's wedding to my twice-rival." "Oh, my god."
"I doubtless didn't stand out, though I did kiss the bride rather deeply. On the other hand, the willowy little shepherdess with the bouquet seemed so central to everyone's memory, her pink satin panties so evident as she did that cute sommersault in the aisle during the ceremony." "Look . . ." Her coffee-and-cordial basted tongue clung to the roof of her mouth.
"Toni certainly didn't spare the shoe leather, to judge from your howls in the vestry. I gather the spanking stung, Certainly, you looked rosier below during those three summersaults Toni made you turn without your satin step-ins. Then, the passionate ex-Miss Belefont always favored the dramatic in her corrections."
"And stand in that corner for a full hour, missy, or you'll do another gymnastic exhibition, with a much less pleasantt set of links between your legs." The hot summer sun beat through her brief white tennis outfit. Its skirt had been pinned to her back to demonstrate the effects of a summary switching. Her stepmother had personally belted the saddle-strap about her waist, and drawn the rawhide thong tight between her legs, Rita'd had to walk on her hands and do jumping jacks for the vodka-faced guests, the willow's welts scalding her sixteen year-old cheeks. The humiliation had been a hundred times worse than at that wedding so long ago. And pain...
The calistenic display had left a shocked, flaring cunt almost as sore as her switch-scored buttocks. "Weepy at one end and welty at the other, eh?" Aunt Salty had chuckled in her vague way, and that wide-eyed piglet Mona had drunk in every detail. "Chin up, precious, and get the most good out of it." Rita'd stepped into the small, square planter box in the patio corner where dry fenceboards met stucco wall. The sun-baked gravel flooring the box bit harshly at her feet.
She shifted from heels to toes, conscious of the barbecue guests glancing and sniggering at her punished bottom. The rawhide split her in two. Better that than the chain her stepmother sometimes used.
"When you've had your hour, you can take milk and cookies with the grown-ups." Antonia Belefont Henshaw had chucked her salt-tracked chin.
"Thank you, ma'am," she'd whispered.
She'd stood in shame and loathing.
". . . as round in the can as Polly ..."
". . . a lot hairier-doesn't she trim it for the pool. .."
"... has to take a skinny-dip in the garden pond first thing each morning, November through March, to 'toughen the blood,' Toni tells her ..."
"... Sally spoils Mona rotten by comparison, only spanking her with a ping-pong paddle once or twice a month ..."
Rita blinked, caught in reverie. "What? I'm sorry."
Professor . . . Pater, was it? . . . studied her intently. "Do fun-loving Jack and his bemused frau approve of all your Draconian methods with their daughter?"
Her stomach tightened. They certainly hadn't objected to Toni Henshaw's wicked stepmother regime. "I have carte blanche in Aunt Sally's own handwriting. Besides, you have to know that Mo' actually adores it."
Which Rita most emphatically did not. She had been slack-jawed in astonishment when she'd stepped into the bathroom and found her shame-faced cousin fingering herself off minutes after a tidy shelacking. Puzzled and uncomprehending, the woman had made Mona stretch out her lustful palms for three cane slashes each.
Thereafter, she'd simply born down all the harder to compensate for the undoubted masturbation later. That had led to the first night with the girl's wrists trussed to the headboard. The wet-eyed blonde had actually begged for a longer walloping at times-red bottom and bountiful breastworks wiggling as she pleaded-in exchange for free hands at night.
It often amused Rita to listen to the hard breathing and rustling sheets and grunting as her well-whipped charge found relief. That had actually inspired the further refinement of the rough blankets. Pussy-rub on those, Missy Mo'. . .
"Eh?" She was totally unaware of what he'd been saying.
"There seems to be this attention span problem." He eyed her critically. "Educators used to prescribe speed for dysfunctions like that in the States. We always used the stick or the tawse in England. Do, pray, attend as I speak: "My judicious word, supported by some physical evidence, such as today writ large across Mona's expressive tambo, could inspire Jack and Sally to put their suffering fjirlchild into one of St. Cloud's dorms or even foot the fees for a sorority." His mouth had a wicked twist. "Consider the testimony for the prosecution."
He pointed at the blinds, now open. Rita wondered just how co-operative the biddy across the way would be.
"Further, there's the trust which Toni and Phil administer for you."
She stiffened. "I'm self-employed and wholly self-supporting. Art imports do a roaring business."
"Yes." He observed the yellow happy-face clock with the smear of blood. "A Watchmen accessory from Hong Kong. A high profit margin, no doubt. Surely the five hundred a month from Polly's fund helps with the knick-knacks."
His finger indicated a nude in a silver frame. "Is that sketch a good Elmeer van Hory, or a bad Modigliani?"
"The papers claim Modigliani. Why?"
"Pity, as a forgery it has some merit. Not cheap with papers, surely." His mustache twitched up at the ends. "I have some influence with Toni and Phil, I dare imagine."
Rita wondered if the skillet and knife were still possible solutions. Messy, but a good house cleaning service could get blood out of the parquet floor after she'd finished explaining the attempted rape to the police.
"What do you have in mind? I can't let Mo' run wild. Besides, would the family care for your own fondlings of her fair white bod?"
"She did mumble those dreadful innuendos about how she gets her grades from me. All healthy-spirited exercise between us comes as recompense for the tutorial hours I've spent with her." His brow furrowed. "She could spend less time cramming-and being crammed-if she'd concentrate more during class.
"I do concede some choice lines across her fundament may be needed to bob up her math scores. I've made inroads there, I trust, in the past week."
"You're sure she hasn't been skating through your course on her well-greased twat?" Rita gave him the hard, narrowed eyes she used on dealers.
"Ask her to expound on Millikan's Experiment sometime. Her dissertation was lucidity itself."
Rita remained unconverted. "So what's this hyperthyroid truss you've been playing with?"
His eyes gleamed while the harness swayed hypnotically. A finger jabbed at the clock. "The old chestnut of Who Watches the Watchmen. We agree the slothfully inclined Miss Forbes must not get slack-but there's a broad frontier between taking up that slack and stretching the rope till it snaps. I propose to keep watch on her fundament and other equally fun parts. Excessive severity, such as you've exhibited recently, will result in . . ."
" 'Blackmail' is such a pretty word." The young businesswoman remembered her stepmother when the lady got bent out of shape. "Not a word to your old tongue-fencing partner, then?"
"Not a whisper." His smile had Old World elegance. "I'm afraid I'll need to administer a . . . call it a warning demonstration. Strip down to your skin, if you please."
"Not while I'm telephoning! No, not even there ... Trews? I hate these cordless phones, could you hold yours steady? The crackle when it moves . . . N-not your thumb, either! . . . Not you, Trews, just some distraction ... If you could just stay on deck, the room's a bit disorganized j... Do you mind? . . . Well, there'll be plenty of time to pit up again once I've finished talking, won't there? . . . Mo, Trews, it's impossible at the moment. I'll lay out jour shore clothes and meet you on deck for a drink. Stay f there. That'll give me time to finish-sh p-pa . . . PACKING!"
CHAPTER NINE
Bas-Relief Camoes
"Certificate from police . . . certificate from police. . certificate from police ..."
Miriam Marteau stamped the exit visas, the certificates, the passports. Three relieved travelers joined their luggage on the dock. The Customs Shed's great metal door had been raised. Light sea winds offered slight alleviation of the temperature in the galvanized steel hut.
"Ah, now, what's this? Expired certificate?" The tall blue-black woman held the paper high. "Does it not clearly state NOT VALID AFTER THREE DAYS in a bright red at the bottom?"
A pink-nailed finger touched the Ultrabold Demigothk Oblique lettering.
"But-I mean-the boat left-we couldn't-" Bright Caribbean sunlight shafted through a fly-screened window to glint off silver-rimmed glasses. The Greek letters sigma epsilon xi had been etched in the far lower corner of the left lens.
Gerry Vestry patted Jan Ladrone protectively. The younger girl resembled a frightened mole, blinking against the barely diffused light.
"Four hours ahead of schedule, last Tuesday's packet boat left. We've been used to delays, missed connections, having our seats booked concurrently with two other sets of people for Miami to Barbados. Oh, everything but something leaving ahead of schedule," the blonde senior explained patiently. "This cruise ship is the first vessel to dock since Tuesday."
"Your certificate expire, too, miss?" Miriam Marteau picked up a second sheet of official paper. "Of course."
The black woman smiled down at them. At six foot four, she found virtually all Caucasians cute. The only one she'd ever met on equal footing had been John Wayne. He'd addressed her class at University of Southern California.
She had startled him with a bear hug at the cocktail reception afterward. He'd reciprocated mightily, though. In spite of five margaritas, he'd waltzed genteelly with her a Dixieland combo rendering of The Green Leaves of Summer.
She liked Americans. "Well, in circumstances such as these, you may get them validated over there." She pointed to a doorway in the far wall. "Hurry, though. The cruise steamer will be docking in fifteen minutes. Sometimes the captain only puts out the gangway long enough to pick up the passengers on the dock and throw us a mail sack." "Why linger?" Gerry Vestry patted the shorter, wide-bottomed brunette. "I don't know about you, but I'm going to give The New York Times a columnload describing this when we get back." "The Enquirer may pay you for it, miss, and has a much larger circulation. They write terribly amusing head-lines about our country. I particularly enjoyed MOB FLOGS NAKED MADONNA." The tall woman checked the clock, "Fourteen minutes."
"You're sure . . . ?" The sorority officer waved the expired police certificate, "A protest may be lodged with the American Embassy. The ambassador's personal computer has a very firm form letter to lodge with our Foreign Office, and a copy goes to London, since we're Commonwealth."
"Oh wow."
Gerry Vestry led a terrified Jan toward the tiny doorway in the corrugated steel wall.
"I'm missing the pre-Pre-Reg for the fall term," the blonde muttered. "Your mother will have what's left of our hides, so Sigma can take it out of my bones, and nothing will be left to plead for my registration at St. Cloud but a ghostly voice."
Jan's fugitive hand strayed to her own lushly designed backside, exquisitely outlined in pink and green Parisian jeans. "All for . . . nothing."
"Builds character."
The older girl navigated her charge through the narrow doorway, spotted with rust. Shade and breeze dropped the temperature to a comfortable 80� in a pleasant arbor. Bicycles headed lazily down the road paralleling the shore. Two black nuns in stark white habits meandered slowly towards them.
"Oh, God!"
"George Burns has nothing to do with this." Gerry Vestry took a solid grip on Jan's biceps. "I know this isn't a hell of a lot of comfort, but I've lived through worse than they can provide-and you've got more upholstery down below than I do."
A slender, sharp-faced youth of sixteen sat beside an efficient-looking trestle. Several very uncompromising canes projected from an umbrella stand.
"May I be of assistance?" He stood up. In flannel trousers, white shirt with tie, and horn rims, he reminded the sorority girl of a teen-aged Max Roach.
"Validation." She thrust forward the certificates. "Two."
"Ah." He looked from one to the other. "I presume on both of your . . . though since you are listed as guardian for her, I can-"
"The police offered that when we did this eight days ago." Gerry Vestry shook her blonde hair. "No."
"A bit of unpleasantry. As a minor it is only twelve for you," he reassured Jan, "but you know that."
The girl remembered the lingering dozen, when they'd purchased their exit visas. The commissioner of police had made it a point to watch, though a matron had done the logging.
"Which shall be first?" He pointed to the trestle with an excruciatingly long whipping cane, glossy from fresh suing.
"They used a lighter one at the jailhouse." Gerry Vester unbuckled her belt.
"Regulations for the validation of an expired certificate, under the Alien Travel Restraint Act." He shrugged apologetically. "It discourages Castro's people and any I.M.F. agents provocateurs."
Even-handed of you." The blonde struggled with her button-fly Levis. A blush touched her face. Those nuns seemed to be staring right at her as they walked. She jerked her pants and panties to her knees and bent over the wooden trestle. Her mortification spread to her ears. Jan stared unblinkingly at the creamy hindcheeks, speckled brown, green, and yellow in regular lines from last week's constabulary whipping. It anguished her to see an upwardly mobile young woman headed toward her masters in management and a Fortune 500 future laying there, bottom bent, jeans at half-mast--Thwack!
Jan flinched at the whistling stroke and thumping cut. The cane lingered, quiveringly imparting that last joule of corrective force.
The young American kept her legs ramrod-straight, though her hinds shivered and rebounded as the stick lifted. Her spine stayed rigid. Thwack!
The twin-tracked weal shimmied crazily across the pair as the cane swept away. Gerry Vestry's buttocks jiggled jello-ishly from the impact, but gave not a flex of other reaction. A third sailed in, and a fourth. The crevice betrayed a moment's agitated shiver, as if the slack mounds had some independent life after all.
The youth swung his punishing stick with a steady, implacable tempo.
The eighth brought distinctly spasmy knotting. The hotly lined rounds recoiled as the ninth lick bit solidly into the upper curves. The youth paused.
"Please-" The blonde hissed between set teeth. "The boat."
"Oh. Sorry, demoiselle." He immediately lashed her bare buttocks.
An abrupt, clumsy kick lifted Gerry Vestry's Levis at the thirteenth. Jan stared dry-mouthed. Every muscle in the sorority girl's body seemed taut, her hindquarters shifting in a finely controlled rumba of pain.
The stick had worked the whole bottom, its stinging tramlines rippling between cleft top and sulcus. The young islander let his final five cuts snap randomly across the bright weals.
The blonde's head twisted back, the corners of her mouth bone-white. She gasped and shuddered down to her toes.
"Steamer's docking." The dull whoot of an air horn beckoned.
Gerry Vestry jacked erect, arms clutched under her breasts. Her glasses shivered at the end of her nose. She puffed, eyes swimming. "Sorry. Jan-jeans."
The younger girl jumped and pulled up the sexy sorority vice-prexy's panties. She tugged the shrunk-to-fit denim over the martyred behind. Gerry Vestry made a sound in her throat. Tears leaked down her chin as the fly buttons closed.
The blonde nodded insistently toward the trestle. "Now.!"
Jan gulped. Twelve . . . only twelve . . . she'd done it before. That was why her bowels felt like hot mush.
She unzipped and showed the lazily advancing nuns her plump gluteals in profile. A bicycle bell rang. She heard giggling from the road.
An abrupt shock laced into her outthrust flesh. She winced. The feeling of violating impact melted into burning hurt.
Again the cane clipped her. She clung to the example she'd been shown, the throbbing twice-nine. A third whistler made her hindcheeks bunch. That weakness shamed her... by seven she danced, her feet churning her rumpled pants.
She cried freely, whimpering at the eighth ... the ninth ... she couldn't get her breath. Her ribs seemed frozen by her straining muscles. She fought the scalding sensation of the last licks.
"RUN FOR IT!" A hand yanked her upright. She stumbled over her pink and green jeans. Ducking and clutching, she hoisted them and ran.
Juliana Mellroot followed the battered grey canvas mail sacks down the gangplank. Men wearing the Mardi Blanc clenched fist and winding river flag on their shoulder patches hauled the bags onto their backs. They threw them onto a rusting jeep standing at the end of the long dock.
"Can we get a-" Juliana gestured futilely toward her impressive mound of luggage as the aged vehicle coughed to life. It roared down the wooden pier toward the iron shed.
"Guess not." Lucretia Sue Merydith stood behind her, both grips in her hands.
Three outbound travelers moved up the gangplank. The last, a bony Swede with sunblanched hair and skin like a wallet, chuckled nastily and knowingly at the two women.
An air horn blasted twice as the trio got on board. Black hands reached for the hauser mooring the steamer to the piling by the bow. The gangplank receded onto the ship.
"WAIT!"
Working men froze. The high-pitched voice rang with the brazen tones of command. Two figures flew down the wooden planking toward the cruise ship.
The shorter one had a suitcase in one hand and held her clown-colored jeans up with the other.
The gangway thrust back onto the dock. The two hit it it a dead run, collapsing onto the deck with frantic gasps of joy. The blonde rose. She tucked her silver glasses higher onto her nose, fixing her gaze on Juliana and Lucretia Sue. "Suckers!"
The men cast off. The gangplank vanished. The engines hummed as the cruise ship wheeled in its graceful arc away from the landing.
"What was that all about?" Juliana wondered.
"The pest house done bust loose?" the Okefenokee redhead speculated.
"Trews, I understand that in the States you have some new definition of obscenity, based on the violation of privacy-or civil rights-or something sacred about women."
"That's based on Andrea Dworkin's Minnesota thing, sugar, making it illegal to degrade and debase female folks." Lucretia Sue lifted a shoulder. "Me, I find it pretty uppity to have laws telling me how to think, but that's-" Juliana turned a stern eye on the Mardi Blanc flag. The Union Jack and Tricolor occupied opposite quarters. A black clenched fist on red and a blue twisting river on green lay in the other quarters.
"They can use this as my contribution. This," she held a mimeographed section of the Universal Civil Code aloft, "is obscene. And by 'obscene' I mean vile, filthy, loathsome, debased, unclean, unnatural, un-British-"
"You might had ought to consider cooling it, honey pie. I think they get the idea."
Miriam Marteau had a genial smile. "It keeps the revolutionary and reactionary elements out."
"Eighteen cane strokes across the bare bottom to enter your country-and eighteen more to leave?" Juliana seemed aghast. "How do you expect to nab tourist quid?"
"We do pretty good exporting nutmeg."
The complete contents of Lucretia Sue's two bags spread to the right along the varnished counter. Juliana's cases had all been emptied to the left. Passports and entry visas sat beside two vulnerable-looking toothbrushes. "Suppose we choose not to go along to your gaol and prefer to go back to civilization?" Juliana gave a frosty look to two deputy constables standing by another sturdy, antique jeep.
The black woman appeared composed. "You may always take the next boat. The packet steamer should be by in, oh, two days, unless there's engine trouble. You may stay on the dock, for a nominal fee for using the space, Don't try to pee into the bay, though. The Environmental Control Act requires a penalty." "Dare I guess?"
"Flogging." The two constables nodded in unison, "Suppose we sicken and die?"
"Unlawful dumping of carrion or refuse on public owned property. The penalty's heavier." She grinned. "Imprisonment with flogging." "Let's suppose I just want to chat up the British Embassy? My husband is in the Foreign Service, you know. A consul."
"The Alien Intercourse Act forbids contact with local or foreign-national residents without a valid police certification "Which costs-?" "Eighteen stripes."
Juliana turned to her friend. "Trews, is this some endless curse? Could you escape it if you separated from me? I can't even ring up father-"
"Father?" Miriam Marteau picked up one of the passports. "Juliana Christina Gloriana Bisque-Hardy Mellroot. "Why didn't you say so, little silly, instead of rattling on? The baronet posted your bond yesterday. That's valid in place of a whipping." "Oh." Juliana glanced further along the mimeographed section of Civil Code. "If you hadn't buried your patronym under all those useless names we could have straightened all this out immediately." She waved away the two deputy constables. "Sorry, another day. Cyril, Algy, put all this stuff back into their kits."
Two gangly lads began repacking the baggage.
"You mean, we don't get caned."
"Of course not, of course not." The black official chuckled. "Unless you violate a law or something. Then both the sponsor and the alien party catch a double dose at the station house and an administrative law judge reviews the case for possible deportation."
The customs woman chuckled. "Yes. Some fool of a Swedish girl on holiday dirtied the public road with a Wrigley wrapper. Violation of the Debris Management Act. She caught eighteen the first day, nine the second, and nine the third, along with the goose of a resident who sponsored her. The judge permitted her to stay, after a sound lecture on cleanliness, but she elected to take the ship you just arrived on. It was the first to dock after she felt up to the hiding for an exit visa."
"Jee-sus." Lucretia Sue looked respectful.
Miriam Marteau's eyes widened. "Blasphemy Abatement and Religious Observance Act."
The Georgian cleared her throat. "Je suis craintif, I meant."
Juliana had a rigid, anxious look. "I need ... I mean, is there a ladies ... do you have a loo?"
The black woman directed her. She ran.
"Thank . . . heaven she didn't violate the Evacuation Placement Act." Lucretia Sue accepted her two repacked bags. "The penalty's probably flogging."
"The Roadside Sanitation and Beautification Act, you mean," Miriam Marteau told her soberly. "Public flogging, following a strict purge."
"Too late, honey, we already been there."
"Mona has impressed me with your love of verse."
Professor Porter studied Rita Henshaw as she stood in her living room, bare to her waist. "I dabble in lit from time to time--Hobbitry 1A is my forte. Dear old Tolkien Studies packs the hall in droves. Like you, I incline more to Swinburne for recreation."
She didn't care for the emphasis he gave the word. The attention he devoted to her hefty, thrusting pecs went beyond flattery.
"Another modern maiden who eschews the benefits of artificial uplift. You have no idea how such progressive fashions enliven the lecture hall."
He still held that absurd harness as a wave of his hand commanded her to continue. She shed her shoes before unsnapping her skirt's waistband. The heavy khaki cloth felt reassuring, a final barrier against surrender.
The professor plainly enjoyed her lingering as she loosened and lowered her skirt.
"I'm surprised you didn't give our Mona those soul-stirring and revelatory lines: "I have passed from the outermost portal To the shrine where a sin is a prayer; What care though the service be mortal?
0 our Lady of Torture, what care? All thine the last wine that I pour is, The last in the chalice we drain, 0 fierce and luxurious Dolores, Our Lady of Pain.
"All thine the new wine of desire, The fruit of four lips as they clung Till the hair and the eyelids took fire, The foam of a serpentine tongue, The froth of the serpents of pleasure, More salt than the foam of the sea, Now felt as a flame, now at leisure As wine shed for me.
"Ah thy people, thy children, thy chosen, Marked cross from the womb and perverse! They have found out the secret to cozen The gods that constrain us and curse; They alone, they are wise, and none other; Give me place, even me, in thy train, Oh my sister, my spouse, and my mother, Our Lady of Pain."
Rita had her pantihose peeled to the knees. She bent and in a trice wiggled naked toes upon the carpet. The leg-warmed nylon joined her discarded skirt.
"Tan all over, with almost as much callipygian blessing as our arrogantly nether-globed Mo'." He circled her attentively. "Rounder, definitely curvier. Not quite as-ummm, fully packed, shall we say. Very sweetly turned up, by the bye. I've seen those tantalizing tambos merrily tilting their way down the lane more than once. You can't imagine how I pined for a closer look."
Maybe he's myopic, she thrilled with hope for a brief moment.
"Now, by the dancing ghost ships at Riga!" His voice came from low behind her. "What have we here? Varicose veins of the gluteal musculature? Stretch marks? No! Surely the work of a birch-those broadly splayed blue and green markings."
If he touches my bottom, she resolved, I'll belt him. No hormone-crazed stanza-wielding hospodar is going to feel my fanny!
"I thought you acceded to my demands rather quickly." His voice had the mildness of spring milk. "Is Toni's arm as savage as ever? Wicked violence on the tennis court, and relentless fury on the sabre mat."
"She hits."
"You used to take it better, darling." Her stepmother mocked the tears and quivering. ' 7 do suppose I'll have to repeat that last half-dozen just before you get into your car-unless you'd care for a second go-around now."
Rita had sniffed and accepted the second option. The imperious Antonia went for another birch. The young woman lay over the hated flogging block. A worn oak front kept her knees on the floor and her thighs perpendicular, Stepmama had commanded nylons and garter belt. These framed the scarlet crisscross seething across bare buttocks and upper legs.
Rita's torso bent downward along the inclined top, cursorily padded and leather sheathed. The pungent saddle-soap smell surrounded her. Her dress had been hiked to her tits, which objected to her body's weight crushing them against the block. Tough. The rest of her had problems, too.
Her fingers had scarred the old oak so often that Antonia'd trussed her stepdaughter's arms behind her back, wrist to elbows. The rolled dress lay above; naked, perspiring Rita extended below, to the garter belt. She hoped the dear lady wouldn't find it cute to add some licks from a martinet across her ribs. It had happened. "Now, no naughty words and rebellious jerkings around, Take your flogging like a lady."
The second Mrs. Henshaw laughed and lashed the slackly waiting rump. Curved and parted cheeks flared at the slow, hard strokes parading across the lower slopes. Eight blistering licks at half-minute intervals. Rita had expected only six. The final two set her twisting and gnashing. "Compensation for not having your freshly-limed bottom on the car seat tomorrow-or will you go home Sunday morning? We could brunch in Carmel." Dinner had been an exquisite salmon shio-yaki, with cold nutmegged spinach and inch-long fingers of asparagus steamed for 90 seconds. Rita's cold and angry fingers plied their Japanese chop sticks on the mantleplace. Her left hand kept her furled dress above her buttocks while she ate the salt-grilled fish.
Her father had complimented his wife on her thoroughness. The $1500 check covering the next three months had burned no less than the birching when Antonia pressed it into her hand. Rita drove away Saturday and found a San Mateo motel, an incredible pseudo-Tudor erection by the Bayshore Freeway. She took the last leg to Orinda Sunday morning, arriving to detect Mona at her mischievous slumber.
"I trust you know how to put one of these on." Professor Porter handed her the chrome and buckskin harness. It looked childishly simple, compared with some of Antonia's more advanced models. This appeared to be simple collar-and-belt, without even one rigid busk.
She buckled the broad waist-cinch in place. Two lean rein-like straps crossed between her breasts and ran through a collar. She snapped that shut around her throat. A suspicious ring protruded below her chin, ideal for a leash.
"May I?" He led the two long straps over her shoulders. They hung back from the collar. "Legs akimbo, please."
His fingers grazed shrinking flesh as he ran the straps under her buttocks, up the fluffily-haired crotch, and through two rings on opposite sides of the belt buckle. He stepped to his carpet bag.
"Now try these for size." Rummaging in his kit he brought forth wrist and ankle cuffs. She buckled them into place, noting bronze D-rings sewn strategically into the leather.
"Cross your wrists over the small of your back."
One loose strap stretched across her front and under her right floating ribs. He secured that to her left wrist. The other rein-thin line went around her left side and immobilized her right wrist.
Or-not quite immobilized. She could still move either arm, and bring increasingly intolerable pressure up on her cunt.
"I thought one of us was a gentleman," she complained as he snapped shut a six-inch chain between her ankle cuffs. He returned to his sinister bag of tricks.
"An officer and a pedant, Miss Henshaw." He saluted, then withdrew a longer, thicker strap.
"Wait a minute!"
"Just a tawse, the old Scots persuader of youth in my country-one of my countries, that is."
"You called this a-a demonstration. A warning."
She tried to retreat, but the ankle chain left her freedom to scuttle with awkward hip-switches.
"I only intend a kind of spiritual cleansing, a behavioral prophylaxis. Think of this as the dentist's."
"I'd rather consider it my home and my castle."
He caught her easily and held her elbow with steel-cored ringers. "Perhaps a more meditative posture."
Pressure of his hand brought her involuntarily to her knees with a thump. "Stop manhandling me-please."
"My apologies." He released her arm. "If you settle your bottom toward your heels, you can bow your torso and present your palms without falling on your nose."
"My . . . palms." Lips compressed bitterly, she hunkered back and leaned forward. She extended her fingers, feeling tension between her legs as she moved her wrists. Her toes started to ache.
The lean tawse end split into two rounded tails, reinforced with stitched leather and fire-toasted to harden the twin tongues. She knew Antonia's version entirely too well.
Her face glanced up and she saw him swing low toward her hands. She shut her eyes. Her right palm flared, jerking away. The buckskin line creasing her cunt tautened mercilessly.
She heard a second swish and had the presence of mind to raise both palms toward the striking tawse. The tails smacked meatily across her left hand.
Twin hot flashes scored each palm again. Her fingers spasmed.
"I believe we have a mutual understanding now." He stepped away, touring the room while she bent and swallowed her ire. It tasted of gall and lumped in her throat.
"You know, when last here with Mona I wondered why these sturdy ring bolts had been installed in the arch to the oversized closet you've outfitted as your home office."
Dear God, don't let him use them. She'd merely implanted them as a back-up, in case Mona should rebel and require some restraint. She hadn't used them on the girl.
"Yet, you have such a peaceful look, perhaps I'll simply leave you while I grade the papers I brought." He chuckled. "I'll use Mona's desk in the bedroom, if you don't mind. The place has such cozy memories. I won't be much more than an hour."
He lightly draped the tawse across her stung palms. "Oh, I've penciled you into my appointment book for 7:30 tomorrow evening. I expect you at my humble mud hut promptly, no earlier, no later. I recommend synchronizing to Naval Observatory time. You needn't wear anything under your street clothes besides that harness. My card."
He extended it under her nose. She had no choice but to take it in her teeth.
He carted his bag into the bedroom, whistling something coy from Noel Coward. The taste of pasteboard invaded her mouth. She didn't spit out the card, though.
Mona, my sweet, she thought, heaven help your lily hide if you try to get biology tutoring the same way. God grant me some justification-one crumbly flake of an infraction-so that I can turn your elegantly blisterable pretties up tonight. That paddle is growing dusty and I have a grave need to re-introduce it to your pouting crupper.
She quailed at the image of having to wear the damned, bisecting harness to his home. Change sweaters and wear the flaired slacks that sweep the ground even when I'm in heels . . . that pull-over with the endless floppy collar would hide the throat band.
This tears it, Mona Forbes. She set her teeth. No more Ms. Nice Guy.
Rita crouched and waited.
"Clare Boothe Luce once called your stepmother the finest American woman fencer she'd seen since the Thirties.
That was before Toni pioneered mixed sabre bouts, by the way." The professor freed the young woman's wrists. He gave the lines a firm tug that made her eyes widen, then clipped them together behind her slender waist. "Let's be sure to keep the harness on until tomorrow, shall we? You can cart me the tawse in your purse." He removed the chain from her ankles. She considered a heel-kick to the bridge of his nose. After all, it might drive the bone slivers into his brain; it always did in books, didn't it?
The opportunity passed.
She removed the saliva-soaked card from her lips. The sodden pasteboard showed an address quite close to St. Clouds campus.
"7:30 in the peaceful p.m. As Auntie Mame said, I'll open doors for you-doors you never even dreamed existed." He gave her a satisfied, insultingly proprietarian look. He finished loading his carpetbag and ambled to the door. "My love to Mona, if you mention my visit. Don't worry, I won't."
A wave and he was out. She leaped to bolt the lock after him. The tawse remained on her carpet, jeering. He had her, she knew-trussed and plucked and seasoned like a guinea hen waiting for the roaster. He had never even touched her sexually. He might do so later-or he might not. His ballgame, all the way. She could deal with her stepmother and her father. Awful as Antonia could be, the woman had predictable behavior patterns. Cooperation paid off in bankable checks, with an ample Christmas bonus from her mother's trust- painful to earn, delicious to spend.
This man . . . she had to glance at the card to remember his name . . . she felt starkly open before him, with no place to hide, no game to plan.
She reached back for the ends of the leather strips sawing at her tender crotch. Damn! The bastard had padlocked them together.
She touched herself below. The two straps didn't impede any vital functions. She could even still fit in the vibrator, though she wouldn't be able to wriggle very much once the pleasure-jolts started sparking through her.
Somehow the Dutch dong seemed far less inviting than it had right after Mona's departure.
"All I have to say, Mo'," she addressed the air grimly, "is that you better know a quantum leap from a quagmire by the end of summer, or you'll be taking your classes standing for the whole fucking fall term!"
Speaking of which . . . that Ron idiot ... if Mona had free time to polka between the sheets with this Porter fellow, perhaps her Incredible Hunk had some spare minutes for glandular recreation on the side.
Maybe she could talk to him about her cousin's studies-a nice, heart-to-heart physical conversation. It would serve her bed-bounding roomie right.
Her tawse-stung palms flexed. She'd get around to that project once she healed from whatever this Gustavus Fielding Porter, Q.E.D., R.F.D., L.S.M.F.T., had up his far too comodious British sleeve.
Limeys, she reflected as she paced barefoot to the bedroom for some clothes, pain-hungry bastards all.
Her glance caught the whipping cane she'd so often bent over Mona's cushiony chubs. Although the fog-bound beasts did have a few good ideas in some departments.
CHAPTER TEN
An English Tutorial
The Dramatic Climax by P.N. Dedeaux
"Miss Priss in person!"
The doorbell had barely completed its dulcet yodel-and Campus Tower its due hour-when he was looking once more, with unashamed delight, at the generously bodied girl-woman, the lyrically quivering (an almost invisible tremoring) summer song, the orthodox majesty of the well-slung, strong, young, and encunted woman-carcass who had come for her rendezvous royally clad in nothing but creaseless fawn slacks and black turtleneck sweater (covered things, he realized, like throat-throttle and wrist straps, just as the wide-bottomed bells, hung over high mules, concealed the ankle straps also).
He understood the potency of his fascination. And were her eyes, their whites almost milky blue beneath the slightly slitted, calculating lids, moistening already?
He himself, the prim prof, wore only a blue velours kimono or kung-fu robe, lightly belted, over a teak-tanned and remarkably well-preserved body, one intending to enjoy itself independent of him.
Rita tried her most insouciant stroll into the center of the big book-lined room, but her upper body was stiff and her cunt-walls squirmed within. Full flesh shivered. Even though he did have eighteen degrees, the man made her feel afraid. Her eyes traveled but, apart from paneled opulences, they met little.
"My, but you Henshaw girls come tittsy," he chuckled. He passed behind her. "Buttsy, too. That gear gives you really astonishing rear cleavage. Holds them out and up, too."
"Please. Let me get it off."
He frowned, tutting. "No poor puns in my class, Miss Prissy. I don't believe you've been to my ... ah . . . chambers before. They have some interesting aspects. As do you. Did Mona twig?"
"I don't think so. I've had to wear this sweater all the time, it's fisherman-knit and so darn itchy, and hot, and what's more the straps show, I mean, when . . ."
"Well?"
"When I bend."
"Do so. Touch your toes."
Rita only hesitated briefly.
"No, breech on," he corrected. She shuffled.
His eyes sharpened as the thin stuff moved over her broadened halves. There was a sultry weight about that butt that was total grist to his senses. He saw her shift uneasily from foot to foot, as if about to be punished at once, forming balance. Yes, the straps showed.
"To swap puns, m'dear, I like to watch your beam with delight. There have been times, watching you going from me, I mean, when I have longed to be no more than your chair for a week. And I assure you I shall take my revenge on it.
"By the time I have finished with you this evening you won't want to sit in a hurry. There is the kind of ass that is and the kind that isn't-made for sheer sodomy. Yours needs the hard male meat anchored up it instantly. Why, I declare I can almost see your tailhole through ..."
Rita got erect as if he had goosed her-tugging at once with a wince at her slacks. She was flushing hard.
"Let's get this over with. Please. I came on time. I'll take it best I can and I swear not to lay into Mona too hard . . ."
"Tush, tons of time. But, how charming. Look. Those pants are so tight tailored they even show your squish." "My what?"
A cane had grown in his hand. Its shivery tip indicated the tautened center of her person and she looked down. Close set, her thighs were strongly bowed, curving to her tody's lumpy hump where, yes, the material had formed a replical incision of herself-her striding, perhaps.
"Don't you remember when you were a little girl you used to call this your squish? And this," he tapped her nearest hind, "you called your squash. Used to be a dab at the game myself, say it who shouldn't."
The cane-tip's mocking rap had hurt more than expected, a reminder of its lacing venom, and she jerked. She hadn't counted on humiliation as well; this man could make her feel like two.
"Shade less squashier now. But all the lovelier to whip into for that. And these?" Into joggling distension he prodded one bursting bub.
Sickly she said, "My tibs."
He tweaked a stubby nipple through the wool. "And I'll bet that little mite in the middle of your muddle gave a gulp as I did that."
It had, but she tried to shake her head. "I only like to dish it out, not get it."
"Which makes the giving so much more rewarding. And, anyway, I think we can fix that little aberration up also. My dear, you should wear this gear always. Gives you the cardboard carriage of a guardsman, or woman. I've never seen you thrust them out so well. Let me feel the overhang. Excellent. Did you bring the instrument of remediation?"
Unseeing, she searched in her purse, aware of being beam on to him again. The strap was cold, heavy, hard of tail. She handed it to him with averted eyes. "Here. It'll hurt more than what I gave Mona. Anyhow, she can take it better."
"How d'you know?"
"Well, thicker."
"Moot point," said the professor, slapping the loaded tails of his calf. "Ouch. I'd forgotten this one had those little bits of lead sewn into each tail."
He cocked his head. "No, I'd say yours are just as thick through, if a trifle more solid, springy. Five with a garden hose equals five with the tawse by my math, provided you take 'em with a well spread seat, full on, and lots and lots of teary contrition. What was it? Over a hassock, eh?"
He kicked out a leather pouffe. "Go on, get over."
Rita looked round at him. Things were proceeding too fast.
"Can't I take this damn harness off first?" "No. Enjoy."
"Well, kneeling over it, as a matter of fact."
With a stunning whack he whunked the tawse into the pouffe. Rita stared at the furrows in its leather top.
"Get your bottom up on that, young lady. First pull up your pants, though I don't see how they could be much tauter. If I split a seam you can go right home. Legs back straight, arms out in front. So. And don't look so cheerful about it, this is only the first part of your trip."
Shoulders knotted, back arched, Rita stretched on fingertips and toes on the fulcrum of her pursy lips. She turned her face.
"Look, please. I didn't . . ." She felt the tails lagging in measured motion across her bunched cheeks. She felt their weight, tried to look at them, wretchedly. "Please. If I take it well . . ."
He answered harshly: "You're going to find yourself skewered in the guts in any case. You'll make it easier for yourself by relaxing that part of you which is uppermost and, yes, acting like a perfect lady. Come, let's get on with it. Or, get it on. Rump-a-dump, full across. Shift it up a bit, arch your back, and don't cry out. Moans I don't mind."
He stood back, legs apart, then swung the weighted tails into the richly proffered hinds, hard. They hit in with a socking sound. Rita, staring intensely ahead, heard their coming, muscled herself a little, then the jolt drove the breath from her body. Pain poured through her. She grunted. Did not cry.
He was pleased. He liked the way she kept her legs straight out stiff behind her like that, with no knee-flexion, massing up her lovely loaves, and he liked the way she stared so intently at a ceramic wall ornament across the room, concentration personified. He knew it had hurt far more than expected and, game girl that she was, she was mustering herself to weather the five.
He waited, thunking in again on the same band of tensed buttock meat, right where she sat. This time she panted and he was rewarded by an involuntary clutch, the lower quarters kneading briefly but eloquently together.
Excellent. This heavy hard leather would lay the groundwork for very passionate pain, later, indeed. No one could be bom with an ass like this and not expect to have it whipped-once in a while. After the fourth, she slowly dropped her head, her arms in almost a push-up position, to whisper, "Tcheeesus Priest!"
"Hurt?"
"What do you think?" "Sass earns you extra." "No! Please."
"Two extra, actually. With the cane." "I didn't mean ..."
The haunches were still bunched but flinching and he whacked the last across their halves, watching them bounce to the flacking blow.
"NNNNrgggh!"
He saw the rumps squirm together most satisfactorily, heard her hot panting, looked at her face-it was frowning and flushed, a little moistened with the mouth open. He picked up the cane, his favorite.
"I have often wondered whether leather hurts more on tautened or relaxed flesh. There are theories. Perhaps you could enlighten me, later. Can you relax those sides of meat, do you think?"
"I . . . aaaah . . . try . . . Christ, that thing stings!"
"Now stop the romantic moaning, Rita, it won't get you anywhere-except into more trouble, if I suspect it's put on. Let me introduce you to a weapon worthy of the gluteal endowment that is yours.
"Just about the thinnest, lickiest, and yet toughest Malay I've found. Got it from an auction in a British reformatory. Er, for boys. I'm sure you'll appreciate it across the cellulite excess. Hard to take. So they tell me."
Hard as I am, he thought, looking modestly down at the best belly-high erection he had mounted in months as it probed inquisitively through the folds of his robe, demanding a grandstand view of the action to come.
From high he thrashed down the limber limb, slicing vertically into muscled buttock. Rita hissed before it hit and his cockhead gave a trout-like leap at what it saw, the fatty screwing of the arse in absolute agony. The hiss turned into "Hhhieeeee!"
"A good ass, luv. Pity to have to mark it."
One more last one he laced in, possibly less hard yet a sheer all the same. He was satisfied, a mottled hue flooding face and fully turgid member alike.
He returned the cane to a corner and when he came back, Rita was huddled, kneeling over the hassock, not holding her bottom but gripping the pouffe's soft leather and panting for breath.
She looked up at him sickly, then her eyes fluttered and a schoolgirl's O of disbelief widened her cunt-pink lips yet further. It wasn't merely the muscular rigidity of his manhood that caused her the panicky convulsion in her belly's depths, nor the truly heroic angle from which it menaced her. It was the plump girth of the duckhead that undid her, turning her knees to jelly.
The stretched silk of the ski-slope head was furiously engorged, the Cyclops-eye a-dribble with the thinner fluid already, the whole rimmed with the thickest corona she had ever seen, even in her wildest, wettest dreams. It was almost a deformity, a ring of ruddy gristle that made her purely quake. "Uh."
"Get up," he said huskily.
"Do you always ... get one like that . . . after giving a beating?"
"Almost invariably. As you're going to feel every inch up you shortly you may be able to judge more about it. What's good for Mona must be good for her mentor. Get up and drop your britches."
"Some circumcision job." But she couldn't make it sound flip.
"Your backside's what I'm interested in. Bare it."
The material flopped about her ankles. "Be darned. Not bad at all. Alfy got to you, eh? Alfy's my favorite cane. Take a dekko for yourself."
He gently turned her. She peeked over a shoulder. There was a mirror set in the wall behind her. Across the room she saw her heavy heinie still juddering a little; across each cheek the strap had painted a puce patch, lumpily dark on the right where those frightful tails had flailed home.
Across the center of this duskening ran two twinned lines, ruby to purple to solid ink at the ends. She felt him ran a finger over their hot hard corrugations.
"What I call jumbo welting."
"Alfy . . . was . . . hell." She bridled as he caressed die glowing halves. His huge manhood clubbed one cheek as he drew up her sweater to examine her belt. She felt its olid weight. The sweater came up further.
"Such saucy sacks." The belt and backstraps had cut into her as he had intended them to-without pity. "Did you potty, Priss? Today, I mean."
At last she muttered, with lowered head and flaming face, "Number one."
"I see. You reserved the other until I had released you. But I thought I told you of the need to keep the passages open when wearing these dainties. Anyhow, I have just the thing for loosening and clearing them for you."
The professor strode to a walnut sideboard, his monster swinging before him like a branch in a gale. He ferreted, found, and came back to her holding the yellow lozenge coated with grease, on high, triumphant.
"What's that? Sir."
"What d'you think? Horse suppository, glycerine. Lean forward a little." He pried open, out-pooched her pucker and she felt the cold live suctioning slide of the thing up her sleeve. Automatically she grimaced. "Right up? I have an idea it will be right down again rather shortly, causing you to be all squeaky clean within and perfect for my purposes. In the meantime, let me fix you a lemonade."
He was at the sideboard, nearly through, when he heard her eek.
"What is it now?"
She bit her lip. "Please!"
"Now who's a spayed cat?"
She had plucked her slacks half up and looked at him now, writhing. Pleading.
"It's coming down!" There was panic in her face and voice. "For God's sake where's your JOHN?"
"Straight down the hall and to your left."
On a sob she fled, or hobbled, off, a perfect picture of indignity, slacks around her ankles, her hands pressing empurpled peach-halves together, protestingly, desperately.
"And leave the door wide open, would you."
He chuckled as she vanished, slugging the lemon drinks cordially with vodka. He wanted her pain threshold high for what had to come. In the distance he dimly heard squirtings and splashings. The toilet flushed and flushed.
Better just check, he told himself, and went out into the passage. She had indeed obediently left the door wide open and he could see her on the pot, her upper body perforce erect, her flushed face strained upwards and, evidently to facilitate maneuvers since she could not bow her torso, her legs doubled up, heels on the seat itself, her hands behind her thighs. Sudden convulsions jolted her.
From the doorway he bantered, "I never thought you could curl yourself into such a little nothing, dear."
She shot him a look of terror and disgrace nicely mixed with loathing.
When eventually Rita returned she strolled in coolly, bandbox-neat, not a hair out of skilliker. A trifle pale perhaps. She said nothing when he handed her the beaded glass, but drained it at once, then looked at it.
"Thanks for the vodka lacing, I needed that." Her lids fluttered downwards. He was, if possible, harder than ever.
"Take your clothes off and, before I let you out of your strappings, I'm going to bugger the bejesus out of you, miss."
"With that?" She pointed, faintly. "Have you never been cornholed, then?" "I beg your pardon. Sir." "Ass-fucked, idiot." "No."
"Remarkable. Can hardly believe it with a pair like yours. Y'r mother knew no better, while as for Toni, why I've slid this shank up her there many a time, while she wanked off in front almost continuously. Did you know Toni actually jets when she comes? Like a man. In fact, like several. That woman can orgasm simply brushing her teeth in the morning."
She was scared. Had heard of it but not done it. Nor had, she wagered, half those hellions who bragged in dorms and dens of the U. But with this bludgeon . . . she began to undress slowly.
"As a matter of fact, I don't mind if you diddle yourself in front, either, but the co-operation you show verso is what counts and will be counted in for the rest of your evening."
He placed her as he wanted, in the center of the carpet, shod feet apart and legs braced to quivering, hands on knees. Clearing his thighs of the kimono folds he gripped his colossal cob by the root and presented it at the horizontal, nosing between encarmined ass-halves. The glutted pine pulsed in his grip, longing to guzzle and root up the puckered crater.
She looked back in despair. "Cer-couldn't you put something on it first?"
"You're lubed a'ready, baby. The first two inches may be a trifle uncomfortable. For you. But I can't see that matters."
"Please ... I can't ... not up the butthole, please put it in my cunt ..."
"Greedy, greedy. One day I will and you'll feel it in your throat and be able to stir the resultant libation around with your tongue. But for the moment I want you to feel what those new dildoes they're using on the pledges in some of the sororities can do for you. Hold hard."
"Uingh!"
He was so hard he did not have to hold her, nor mar the vision of his strap's dark spoor. Already the head had slipped half in, tasting heaven.
"This is going to hurt you, lady, rather more than it does me."
"Naaaah ... I cahhhn't . . . !"
"If you back off like that again, I'll truss you like a turkey and give you a dozen. With Alfy."
"It's so huuuu . . ."
Grunting to himself "Something's got to give and it won't be me," the professor slid the entire egghead of his knobkerrie in. The sphincter ring enfolded it utterly, to a suctioning clamp he was certain he could hear. The buttocks gave a wriggle of impalement that spoke volumes to their observer.
"Sooo BIG ..."
She was panting frantically now.
"Steady the Buffs!" He slid an inch or more in and felt the glorious slippery clasp of her body-hot tallow. He set himself, held her lips, and heaved. His thighs met her buttocks with a thud. "GAWWWWHHHHH!"
He was lammed, crammed, jammed inside her now and she, twisting in his grip, was standing up against him on tiptoes, carrying his monstrous mast high up her entrails.
"Get it out of me." There was terror in her eyes.
"Still an inch to go, m'dear. Relax and it'll be the easier."
"It's too big I tell you."
"I agree it's stretching you a bit but I don't see you have piles."
Suddenly she twisted and clawed, missing his face by inches and joggling herself with a stifled cry even deeper on his member. He laughed and cuffed her in the side of her solar plexus and she collapsed doll-like forward in his arms, mewing.
"I thought as much. Fortunately I came prepared." He took the padlock from his robe-pocket and snapped her wrists together behind her back.
Then, parading her forward on the end of his prick, he advanced to the fireplace and slapped her down over the back of a leather chair there. Stiffly she fell, grunting. She lay with her strapped upper body limp as he began to slice in and out of her.
"Now then, Miss Priss, let me introduce you to Dirk the Dork. Or vice versa."
Only her panting, his breathing, and pronounced slucking sounds could now be heard in the professional "chambers." He used her: as an oil-slick sleeve, a muscly noose, a turgid tunnel of his lust. He slammed into her till she gurgled, drooling.
"Jesus God, woman, you're practically pulling me inside out."
"Please. Get it off. Shoot into me." "All in good time." He continued for perhaps two minutes. "I. . . beg you," he heard her say.
"Is it hurting less now?" he asked. "No."
Later, he swore he had felt it in his prick before he'd seen it. She was sobbing. He looked down at her face, twisted to its left on the leather cushion. She was definitely crying. And this was bliss.
A few more strokes would suffice, for he had to be in rut for what he wanted to do, in a total contained fury of desire to rib those hefty hams the color of burgundy-blue or beef's blood. Then let her feel it when she sat.
But it was beginning to happen.
"Ger-getting bigger," she moaned.
Indeed, the celestial music had begun its elements, inner percussion, thump of the drums, string semi-quavers, blasts of sheer brass, a universe of elemental sound scored by the sawing into slippery streaked ass-cheeks.
Panting hard himself, he pucked out of her bunghole, watching the angry humid tube of himself, scarce besmeared, jerk up from the quickly shrinking muscle. And "Down boy!" he chortled then and speared, was sheathed, in suddenly quaking cuntal silk.
"Just rinse off in here a second."
"Shit!" she hissed, rising tremendously to her toes, her sweaty, strained and fully fettered upper body coming up in knotted tension of shoulder and neck muscle, buttocks bunched, face a-gape as the first spasms started to jolt her. He could not withdraw; she was sucking him off in her crisis of coming.
"This has to beeeee," she began when, realizing what was happening, he bored, rooting hard into her, turning her words to a lost-soul wail, on which stricken cry she teetered, tensed, upright a second longer or more in the pain-pleasure, the ecstagony of her biting straps, then collapsed sack-like over the chair-back while he continued to gush gallons of gism into her boiling, squirming, queenly, animal quim.
Twitches shook the upthrust fat where he had beaten it. He was glad to see the tip marks were still retaining bruise. She would need something later for acting like a cat.
Withdrawing with gravamen he said, "You may need a Kleenex after that."
"Or a couple of Turkish towels," came from the seat-cushion. "Please let me out of this rig. It's hurting like hell and I do have to use the bathroom again."
This time he obliged, unclicking expertly.
"My oh my, more like your slush than your squish, I'd say." Again he watched her wade unsteadily off, this time one hand under her cunt. She was good to look at. The straps had really bitten in. As all straps should.
Rita regarded him. It was effectively all she could do, and she had got beyond pleasing, it would only excite him the more. So she watched, a mouse its teasing tabby. But her mounded breasts tingled, her bulging buttocks still felt ... it.
She looked with dread at the bow of whip-cane in his hands. She was sitting on one side in the chair she had been fucked over, wearing only what he had invited her to wear, namely (to save her own clothing soiling) one of his shirts, cream silk or shantung, collarless and with cuffs a little frayed from overwashing that she had rolled up to her elbows-but the label was Sulka.
With a thong belt she looked ultra-chic. The coat-style front scarcely covered her gism-gristled furrow, bearded in a sole plump line, but the tail nearly hid opulent hers. Her long tan legs entwined and shifted--watching.
The third drink was good. She did not intend to excite this pedant any further; already his monstrous cock was considering coming up again. Her bowel sleeve felt as if a locomotive had slammed up it.
In fine form the professor was perorating away: "... sort of another first for me, too, actually . . . never done a snatch and shit-chute job like that before . . . hear 'bout it, of course ... oh you're beautiful, all right, ought to stay naked all your life . . . bent over for ass-fucking and shellacking . . . Toni has all the luck ..."
She wet her lips. Composure, come.
And touch your toes and brace your knees back tight, if you drop the coin between your knees . . .
"Tell you what I'll do. I won't report you to her if. . ."
She said in a considered way, "I don't think I need punishing any more."
He grinned, brows leaping. "Not for hellcat scratching? Not for trying to pick me eyes out?"
Hers she dropped. "I'm sorry. It was ... an involuntary action."
"Like pulling me off at the end just now. No, you know you're going to get it, don't you? Urn?"
After a long silence she said, "How many of these visits are there likely to be?"
He chuckled. "Listen. I don't often bargain but with you, darling, I'll make a deal. I don't know if you're aware I do a little private tutoring here-mostly girls sent to me by their mothers for sharpening-up.
"Mona has not told you? Well, in my bedroom at this moment, as a matter of fact, is one undergoing contemplation. Preliminary to a little skipping. Nothing much. Six of the best on the bare. Momma's orders.
"Rowthena is sixteen years old-of Finnish descent, I believe, and very stoical about her corrections. Since you claim to be such an impresario with the rod I shall let you take my place and cane her lovely butt; if it doesn't turn you on, nothing will.
"Rowthena's bottom is poetry, if on the fat side. If you make her cry, come up, in general reduce her to disorder I shall let you off with . . . four."
Rita stiffened. "She's only sixteen, you say? And with that cane? What happens if I fail?"
"I won't fool around with you. It won't be six, it won't be eight--ten across the plumpest part of your gorgeous globes."
He grinned as she chewed her lips. "A dubbio, you might say. And don't decide yet. Rowthena isn't ready, anyway. I'll give you a ten-minute cooling-off period in my special den. Come."
He turned. "And I don't mean come. At least not yet."
Bar and game-room in the basement, she supposed sickly, a-flutter following him down the passage. No steps were involved, however. The heavy door he opened gave onto some paneled gym, surely, tile-floored, the ceiling crossed by big beams. Not the kind Professor P. favored, either.
"Looks like some set for a Round Table loop," she tried, unconvincingly.
He was fiddling with switches. She saw horses and trestles and trampolines and . . . things. Lights there were everywhere, some helmet-shielded, and the whole damn place was far too hot, and all sorts and kind of equipment, lots of hungry lengths hanging from walls.
He dimmed down by rheostat and she felt the color pour over her like sweat ... it was sweat . . . then adjusted so that the room was purplish-red (to match her ass?), eerie light that made her all too sullied flesh surfaces gleam. The heat heaved on her.
"Use this spot for workouts myself ... as well as for those of others . . . here, try a ride on this."
Surely it was some exercise saddle, adjusted by him now to a little lower than crotch-height and stanchioned by a chrome shaft to the flooring, got from some dumb Y. She bestrode it with a shrug, noticing short stirrups, set back a bit. Deftly he caught her arms together behind her back.
"Ow!"
Hard he buckled the strap above her elbow joints, bracing her shoulders to bursting point. Her hands fluttered at her sides.
"I'm going to gag you for your ride, m'dear."
What went into her wondering mouth first was, as he widened her jaws like some mare's for its master's bit, a stubby wet black mackintosh dong, of bulk yet pulpy to ber tongue and teeth. It went deep in and fully filled her mouth but she sensed that the inch or so protruding from her distended lips had some orifice or buckle on it.
The broad yellow studded strap he next brought forward looked far more cruel. It was. It covered the front of her face from the bridge of her brows to jawline, being designed to follow the ridge of her nose with a cutout for nostrils. She could breathe, at least.
Or could she?
At the mouth itself an O was cut in the gag, fitting over the plug he had pushed in and which she was now so uncomfortably mouthing. Where was she? In darkness that's where. A strap was being buckled from temple to temple over her head and her brain began to beat. She could not see. But she could hear.
"In that shirt your dugs look just like sacks of cement. Ever had them whippy-whipped? Of course, I forgot you can't answer. This one's inflatable, by the way."
She felt him attaching something to the forepart of her mouth plug, heard the thin hiss of something plumping precious air, and in pure panic realized the soft lump in her mouth was enlarging. Idiot! He would suffocate her if he wasn't careful. Her face darkened, her nostrils flared out wide. Soft folds lapped the insides of her cheeks. Wo-wo-wo . . .
"Just relax."
No. Fight. Struggle. Sheer terror. No air! Black clingingness inside her mouth. It was engorging more yet still not inflated at all tight, just gollops of moistened rubber.
"Mouthful for you?"
Suddenly the buckles of the gag-strap tightened at the back of her neck and her head yanked hideously backwards as a broad strap was now attached from behind her head to fasten to the one connecting her breaking elbows. God in heaven, what was she? Quivering a-tiptoe, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, a breathless puppet of a will not her own.
Behind her he tucked shirt into belt, palped rolls of massive ass. "You certainly are spankable, I can hardly blame Toni. Now sit down and enjoy your ride, said the spider to the fly." "Nnnnniiiiiiigh!"
Snot snorted from her nostrils, as the weeping keen fought through them. Standing behind her he had unceremoniously pulled up her ankles and she had sat flat as some split split-skater on the saddle-and soundlessly howled. A thousand hornets stung and sang beneath her. Fastening her ankles up under her seat in the stirrups, splaying her wide and sitting her well down, he chuckled again, "Boar's hide, with the bristles cut close, to make 'em stand up straight. The bigger the butt, the steadier, I've found, they sit. Contemplation should take place in complete silence and, of course, calm. You really do have a superior posterior, Rita."
She keened hysterically again, her forehead squeezing like a nut, tears wettening the inside of her face-strap. He was leaving! What if she cramped? Couldn't beathe? Odor of rubber, odor of leather. Her breath sucking. Nightmare of suffocation. The bristles achieving their purchase in the fattier parts of her so halved halves.
"The expression is 'on pins and needles,' eh? Let's say twenty minutes for your decision. That's best Corsican boar you're sitting on." The door closed after him.
Her head thrown back she tried to sob, her fingers clawing into air. Air! Pure threads of oxygen through hot nostrils. Her breasts felt scalding, twice their weight, the tibs toughening. The bristles worried her buttocks. They were indeed needle-sharp yet dug into her feelingly, livingly, since her arched body found it hard to still, the thing being she had to rock quickly off her slit for whenever the bristles touched her vulva it was pure agony.
She tried to gain purchase with the insides of her thighs but doubled-up legs only rocked her into rawer prickier prickings. The saddle-shape meant the bristles could make themselves felt right inside her divide. You chump! To let yourself in for this . . .
Eternities went past. She wept openly, once shouted, her voice lost, smothered, unheard. Sweat soaked her shirt and sides. Some ten minutes had to have gone by now. Then fingers teased her tibs and she jolted . . . agonizingly. She had not heard him come back in. Her hair switched.
Ecstasy of rescue, ecstasy of the end, for the measure of nightmare is the bliss of awakening. Thank God, oh thank God. The airless blinding of the inside of her mouth would be over, she was experiencing utter subservience to another's will in a way she never had before. She quivered like a brood mare. Her own will was gone, relinquished, its burden no more hers. A very saint, she would do anything he said. Anything.
"A little scratching for scratching, eh. This thing can be put into motion, actually. But let's put you into movement instead!"
"Eeeee-ighhh!"
Again he had scarcely touched her slickened clit, fully erect, when the first smoking started inside her. Slowly she soared, building into body-knotting convulsion. This too was unlike anything she had ever known.
Shocks volted her pinioned body, bobbing her well-strapped head, turning her hams agonizingly on the boarish bristles, the warnings before each spasm thundering into mind-rocking explosions, double in power for her flesh's fetterings. Her eyes dimmed. What was happening? She couldn't see any more . . .
Then air was in her lungs, sweet as kisses after death. She was free and unencumbered, hunched before him on the tiled floor once more, pulling down her shirt-tails like a child of old pleating her pinny.
"What did I tell you? I knew we'd reform you."
The door was open. He let her pass first, watching how the sweat-patched shirt tail stuck in her peach-cleft, observing how her rolling motions speckled its cream with pin-dots of strawberry. Back in the living room he began clinking blessed ice.
"Make mine a triple," she said. One hand soothed at a buttock-chub; it felt moist, or at least oozy. "Thanks." "Know how long I left you in there, luv?" "No."
"Two whole minutes."
She shook her head and drained the beaded tumbler.
"What's your mind?"
"I can't take more than four. Please."
"Makes sense. Let's go and see Rowthena."
"Give me a second to get my breath back."
She had begun to do so when it went again-she looked down. He was in total monstrosity again, thrusting through folds. And again her belly squirreled within.
"All right to do it like this, I mean?"
"Perfect. Freedom of movement. I shall enjoy the view."
There was another drink and another long and softly carpeted corridor, leading in the opposite direction. All the worst things happen in the west wing, she told herself as she stalked lusciously before him, sultry of hip and swishing the cane. He opened the door for her, modestly drawing his robe to.
If the "play"-room had been mid-Arthurian, the professor's bedroom was manorial. The maid Rowthena was kneeling at the foot of the four-poster and she was really kneeling. She made no movements as they came in, nor might she have. A corn-blonde in shirt and low-slung belted jeans, she was tethered spinnaker-taut with her arms behind her with her legs doubled up, her heels behind her butt.
In fact, the scuffed sneaks were sole up. She wore the same face gag Rita had just enjoyed; from the bolt at its back a thin chain led down through straps wrenching her elbows together, through more cuffing her wrists, down to a bar holding her ankles tight up behind her. She balanced on her knees against the bed-board.
The professor proceeded to unfasten her facial attire. Rita saw a snug, if smeary little bunny who must have used a bucket of blue eye-shadow. Fully released and stood up-after some understandable knee-nibbing-she turned out to be an insouciant little sixteener, smaller than Rita had expected but less stocky.
A sexpot, in short, shrugging her cute hind-ends deeper into her jeans by tugging on her wide leather belt. She vouchsafed an expressionless glance at Rita, a longer and more calculating one at the bow of cane.
"You are ready to be punished now?" said the professor.
"Yes, sir." With quick nod.
"Very well. Six of the best, as your mother ordered. Since I have a touch of arthritis in my wrist today, Rowthena, Miss Henshaw here will perform the, ah, necessary. Take them down and assume the position."
The teener needed no second bidding. Skintight jeans and puerile panties were tucked in scrupulous folds around ankles. She faced the bed and bent over and grasped its board. She even solicitiously tucked her shirt up to her armpits.
Rita was faced with a pair of beauties that weren't, as the professor had promised, fat at all. They were perfect, a Brigitte-Bardot can, liquid and lithe, very vulnerable in the underbum, set on silken legs that had seen the sun.
Rita began to thump inside. She stood well back, swishing her wand. She gave an interrogative look at their host who nodded, with a softly growled-"Just above the tanline, please."
Rita measured off. It was important to make this first one really hurt. Get her going early, if she was to win her dubbio, as win she had to.
She paced, heard the hushed rushing of its coming, then felt the stick's tip chew into muscleless girl-flesh. Damn, a trifle high.
Rowthena gasped, yet the buttocks, though brilliantly branded, gave no sign but for a clam-like quiver at their base. A blue eye peeked back, under the mane of com.
A second whistled in. A third. She was stoical, all right. But with a butt like that it had to be hurting like hell . . . then Rita saw the hands wrestling with the bedboard.
Suddenly that stretched, striped and now slightly shifting seat was Mona's and she ached behind her eyeballs to see it squirm in pain.
It made the difference. The fourth, a scorcher in the fold, brought Rowthena's head up to a startled "Ow!" The fifth stiffened her stricken sit-upon to tensed humps and the sixth, lashed in without respite, sent her spinning like a top, a-burst with girlish tears. Rita knew she had won.
"Let that be a lesson to you, my dear. Do up your things. You may go."
At the door a minute later a tear-bleared face was turned upon them. "Thank you, sir."
"Did you good, d'ye think?"
"Oh yes, sir." Emphatically. With a rub at rear. Then she turned her glorious orbs on Rita's. "Thank you, Miss. That was a real licking."
Any time, Rita wanted to say, but the imp had gone.
And she wanted to swallow.
The professor's condition had been improved, not only by watching a wobbly bottom whipped but by the rotund revelations of the winsome whipper--and was now again apparent and rampant.
"Four," said Rita levelly. "You promised."
He took the cane from her. "I could go on thrashing your soft squash all night, and you know it. But I did promise, it's true enough. Get in there and get everything off." He swung her to the door by an earlobe. "Before I do."
Back in the living room there were categoric preparatives. From the table against one wall the professor extracted a lean leaf. Rita, now greatly bare, had to bend over the table end, hands behind, and drop her heavy fleshed jugs into the empty slot left by the extracted leaf.
When she was well down on the shining surface, he firmly closed the table to, until its top squeezed home on the base of those udders, imprisoning them within its bite.
Again Rita felt her wrists fettered behind. She turned her face to the left.
"Now these go on your tibs, childie," he was saying. "First, we must firm them up. Pull them hard."
He disappeared from view with agile bend and she began hissing. He didn't have to milk her, for God's sake! "Rub 'em briskly between finger and thumb, so. Can't you get them any tougher than that? Well, it's okay, I guess. Will do. We now clasp these rings deep on each one."
"OW!"
The "rings," which he first held up for her inspection, were pretty enough, but very torment on. Each was sized smaller than a little finger-tib-sized, in short. Made of a sort of latticed and elasticized steel, rugous within, a'purpose. From each depended an adjustable stretch of piano wire, concluding in two further rings, or, rather, larger thongs, made of thick black rubber.
The two plump oranges of flesh that now confronted the so active professor under the table were tugged, inflated, blood-engorged, the rubbery stubs in their midst tethered tight to her big toes, where the stirrups were adjusted drum-taut. Crawling out he cawed, "Should stop all that silly trampling and stamping. If you pull one off it's a couple extra. With the switch."
He stood back, and admired.
The meaty masses, meekly bent looked slow-witted things, voluptuously indulgent, stained by the strapping, dotted with the boar-hide, broad-on and both pear-halves tracked crimson. Already the rumps quivered in apprehension. a fine tail to scorch.
"Won't stop any clutchings though. Only my Centipede will do that. Here." He hurried to a drawer in the cabinet behind him, adding, "Hardly necessary to grease it first, now."
What he extracted was a strip of metal thinner than a pencil, if a little longer. It was gently curved in a scimitar shape. Along its length on either side bristled out the teeth or entipede's "legs," as he jocularly explained to her. From the forward edge, midway down, stuck out the mushroom or toadstool of the device; this was of dark grey rubber attached by a stem to the steel centipede shaft, a solid round inch or so, from which flowered the head of the hideous thing, a domed two inches or more in width, and round at its edges.
"I plug this in and drive it fully home. Then you won't want to clench, Ma'am."
Riven with the ripping weals, Rita's hams quivered and twitched as the professor held them open with his left fingers, presenting the bung to the most private orifice of her person, her pure base. The muscled ring dilated and dimpled. Rita groaned. "Please . . . it's too big ..." "Nonsense. You've passed bigger than that by far." He pressed again and to another, deeper groan the anal ring gave. She tried to tense. Octopus-like the sphinctral ring swallowed the domed head, slid together, embedding the neck. Panting anguish accompanied the slight suctioning-in as the stem rooted home. "No, God!"
He pressed the barbed bar well into the divide, at which both side-cheeks winced in quickly.
"To this day," he opined, "I do not know what they made the legs of my little Centipede of, but to me the teeth look much like the old HMV gramophone needles of my youth, soldered in. Indeed, they may be such.
"I'm told that standing up with the Centipede well in, or, should I say, up, is like having a cat slowly unleash its claws into your tenderest person. Four, I think I said."
The effect on Rita was electric, or excruciating. Heavy-hammed as she was, several needles soon pierced her flesh down the divide to the velvet-lozenged vulva, quivering like jelly. With a hiss she tried to part her legs but could only do so a trifle. The Centipede's bite could only be mitigated by a bucking or arching-up of her hip basin.
This vigorous thrust-up of the buttocks put them wholly on display, in a lewd trounce, as if they asked to be beaten and the professor needed no second invitation. The cane was measured off across the emblazoned nudity of these so magnificent posterior portions.
"Four," he said again.
With a sickening wheep! the stick numbly whickered and fled into the flesh, the fat part low down, plummily wealing the violated bases. Pain writhed like lightning through her loins. Again the cane flickered on the air, unbraided and licked in, to a transport of agony.
"GAWWWHHH!"
The inner sides cringed in. With a buccal jerk, as if to throw off a branding iron, Rita rose a-tiptoe, no agony worse. Her parted halves were now perfectly thrust out and quivering their lengths to the knees, beneath which calf muscles bunched. On offer was the tenderest skin, where she folded.
"As good a spread as I have seen you give," said the professor. "Keep your crupper up like that for just two more."
She heard her teary whine-"Mer-mer-ceee! Please Take it out of meee . . . it's agony."
"Tsck!" The professor briskly crossed the room, came back with an embroidered tea-cozy and capped it on her head. "Your face distracts me, dear. Especially when you're crying. All I want to concentrate on is your arse. Besides, it'll give you something to bite on."
He stood back. "Mother o' mine, Toni should be here to see this. Two to come."
Once more the cane flayed the air and seared the cringing skin. This time he felt its bite like the flicker of a tongue on soft air. Her full thighs squeezed, her head came up as the vicious weal awoke, laddered her so sensual hide lower; the hams juddered and jammed together in their twin pain.
Her muffled weeping turned to a quick cry then as the cat pulsed its claws into the insides of the churning hinds. They bucked up and she stamped, tugging the tether off her right nipple to a squeal. Her head shook like a cock in a cage.
"I told you that would teach you to clench," he chuckled. "Heeeiihhhh!"
A final clean cut and another piteous and convulsive cringe and once more the Centipede BIT!
He took off the tib-tethers and stood her up, hopping, her hands still manacled behind, her neck hooded (was it tears or sweat that streaked that noble neck? he would stream his spunk down it later . . .). The heaving rounds were still helplessly writhing in, corrugated raw ruby across, and deep in their depths the Centipede BIT! She tried to stick out backwards, feet astride. The switch he fetched was pick-thin bone. His eyes were live coals now.
"You didn't think I'd forget the two extra, for pulling clear."
"Mmmmmngggh!" Rump-presented, heaving, she mewled her keening protest.
"Stand up straight and THINK! Now, Rita, when I say Down! I want you to go into a full squat bend before me, haunches wide. This way we shall seat or bed the Centipede fully into your person.
"Down!'" She sank into the position, balancing well, her thigh muscles taut. "When I say Up! I want you to jump up straight, legs together from feet to cheeks. If you don't do it sharp we shall go on until you do. Up!"
Her straining legs straightened like springs, and a hissing cry started from her stifled lips. No pain could be worse. Then the switch licked in the arched and pouting croup. Which squirmed in undignified haste, her hands trying to reach down and open and spread the stricken cheeks.
"DOWN!"
She came up with a dreadful jump again, and was a ballerina of pain, striving to grasp her hinder halves. She was in hell.
He, the professor, however, was in heaven.
Kneeling before him, her body shone with sweat. The sheened skin purely served him, the whip-ribbed buttock cheeks moved in the mirror behind her, over her shoulder She still wore her face mask but it was tilted back so that her softly rounded mouth could lavishly accept and tongue the pulsing bludgeon of his body. The fervent oval slurped his shaft. Splutters and gaggings and waggings. The high boned cheeks hollowed, anticipating their bloating inundation. And then it came. He gushed like a flood, and the lovely column of her throat worked in spasmodic gulps which with wet sucking sounds told him of her dazed and stricken (so invisible) eyes. Rita was conquered, her lips come-strung.
Later she walked to the car park, her buttocks hot and hard. Even the motion of her slacks over them irritated. "My God, Mona," she said to herself, "here I come!"
