Father Malachi approached, flicking the whip he held in his hand.
"Daughter of the devil," he snarled, "you will pay for your ignorance."
Frightened, I quailed before his angry gaze. He grasped me by a thick hank of my hair and brought me to my knees. I had been trained to expect this position because I deserved it.
I had not been trained for what happened next. Very slowly, leering at me with a strange expression I could not fathom, Father Malachi undid the cord which held his trousers in place.
His trousers dropped to his ankles.
I gasped at my first sight of a male member, and then I trembled more violently as I felt the whip on my bared buttocks.
"Take it in your mouth," he said, "daughter of Sodom. Take it in your mouth."
I looked at him, horrified at what he was suggesting, and bewildered by my own maidenly ignorance of sexual matters.
Again the whip bit into my buttocks, and I felt the burning sting suffuse my body.
Desperate to avoid further pain, I opened my mouth, and felt the flesh of his manhood throbbing against my tongue.
He thrust inward roughly, and I thought I would die as the whip came down again on my naked ass.
----------------------------------
CHAPTER ONE
I am a dog, the daughter of a heathen slave. So I have been taught.
I have been given this manuscript and a quill, to practice my script. It is slow and difficult for me.
My mind, according to my captors, is naturally dark because I have no Christian virtues, and because I have not been baptized.
I dread it-that thing they call baptism, and yet they say I must be baptized if I am to be saved.
I do not like these people. I do not like their ways. I do not like how I am treated.
But so it has been decreed.
I sit in my chamber in the Priory of Saint Armand. It is late. The fire in the grate is low and casts but a faint warmth in the cold room. The dank coolness of the stones beneath my feet seems to permeate my whole body and fill me with a wretched shivering.
The candle flickers and turns my meager frame into a dark giant which floats on the ceiling of my cell. The crucifix over my bed wavers, the corpus on the dark polished wood seems to writhe in a hideous agony.
And so my soul!
I feel as if there were a tribe of frogs in my body, and they jump and set up a racket that unnerves me.
Tomorrow I am to be washed in the water of the Christians, those murderers, those rapists, those creatures who murdered my family, raped my mother, those dastards who have consigned me to the most miserable niche of mankind, the place of a slave among them.
My soul writhes, but it also rebels. I have determined to keep watch tonight, to write my story, to wait for dawn, and perhaps an answer.
I do need an answer!
I have prayed desperately in the form they have taught me. I have beseeched that strange creature they call a god, who lies pinned to the crucifix above my bed. But he has not answered me. Perhaps my mentors are correct. Perhaps I am damned, a slave through all eternity.
I did not always think so.
My name is Alethea. They say I cannot keep my name. I must be named Catherine or Maria. I do not like these names. They are not mine. My name is Alethea.
I do not know the country from which I came. I am ignorant of what they call geography, but I remember the taste of the grapes at harvest, the glowing dark eyes of my father, the warm breast of my mother, her sweet fragrance as she sang me to sleep.
These are the images I keep in my mind. They console me.
I was very young when it all happened.
My mother claimed that I had completed nine harvests. I was tall for my age, almost as tall as my mother.
My skin was browned with the sun, my strangely-colored hair bleached almost white by the sun. From sunrise to sunset, I worked in the fields with my father, my skirts hiked up above my strong ankles, as I gathered the sheathes of wheat and corn, and picked the grapes.
And there was the work my mother and I did around the house when the field work had been done, grinding the corn and wheat into meal, cooking, cleaning out our small, hospitable home. My original home was much smaller than anything I have seen in this strange city to which I have been transported.
We were in the fields, my little brother, my parents, and I. Around us were others, neighbors, kinsmen, and my special friend Damian, harvesting.
In the distance we heard a great roar. My father straightened up, and shielded his dark eyes from the glare of the sun to look. I turned in the direction from which the strange, earth-shaking noise came.
The horizon swirled with clouds, and then forms took shape-frightening forms, men on horseback. They scintillated as their drawn swords caught the light of the gentle sun.
They came closer and closer, the dust swirling around them in frightening clouds.
"Crusaders!" one of the women screamed. "Run!"
We dropped our tools and ran, ran like demons, toward our village and relative safety. The Crusaders were the most frightening demons any of us knew. And we had heard the stories of their pillaging, their rapes, their murders-whole families wiped out in the name of some bestial god who would not countenance those who did not worship him.
An ugly-Faith, a vicious creed, Christianity, that will not allow the sun to shine on those different from its adherents!
And now this affliction, a screaming horde, was descending on us, poor, simple farmers who had never hurt anyone, nor raised our hands in anger against neighboring tribes and families!
The noise got louder as the mob approached. Their horses were strangely caparisoned, the clothing of these creatures motley and bizarre to look upon. Their strangeness heightened the terror in us, as we ran.
The few of us from our plot of land were soon joined by others from other plots of land, until we were a seething river of humanity, heading toward our village.
My father, one of the village elders, screamed, "To the hills! To the hills!"
There were caves in the hills, which were kept carefully against the time when marauders would descend upon us. There we were safe until the ravagers had scoured our village.
It happened frequently.
And of all the marauders with which we could be afflicted, the Crusaders were known as the most vicious, the most merciless.
The seething tide, which kept being swelled by streams of harvesters from outlying plots of land, changed direction and headed toward the hills. The men lagged back, pushing the women and children before them, seeking to save them. I found myself running beside my mother. My brother had hung back with my father.
The horde came closer and closer, and my lungs were burning, as I raced for the precious cover.
Many of us made it. None of the men did.
They stood their ground as. the Crusaders came up to them. I saw but little as I ran to safety. But what I saw and experienced later more than made up for what I had missed during the panic of our initial flight.
Panting, my lungs burning with dust, I finally achieved one of the caves with my mother, and the daughter of our neighbor, Rena. She was four or five years older than I, almost grown to womanhood.
She was betrothed to Damian's brother, Rodrigo. We retreated into the mouth of the cave, along with several other women and children. In the other small caves in the hills, we saw other women and children reaching safety.
From our height, we then watched, helpless and anguished, as our unarmed brothers and fathers and friends were cut to pieces.
The Crusaders were ever' bit as bad as the travelers coming through our village had said. I have never seen such carnage since, nor have I ever read of such.
In less time than it takes the sun to travel a hand-span down the horizon, our village was decimated of its men and young boys. They lay in pathetic heaps on the dusty earth on the outskirts of the village, and the Crusaders began to pillage our homes.
As dusk approached, we saw the first lurid glow of the fires, as they burned our homes.
The grief of the women was muted. They had the children to protect, and hopefully, the Crusaders would ignore us and leave us in the relative peace of our haven.
But we were sadly mistaken.
We filled the mouths of the caves, watchful, as the darkness, like a black cloak, fell over the earth. The stars shone forth.
I have always loved the night, that gentle mender of the day's wounds, that sweet harbinger of rest from weariness. This night was different, and all my nights since then have never been the same.
The fires shot higher, and soon we watched our whole village go up in flames. But the
Crusaders did not go away. They rode toward the foothills, came toward the caves where we had secured ourselves, and there was nothing to stem the tide that washed over us.
"Death to the heathen!"
We heard the cry over and over again, like the scream of a pig being killed for food, or the cry of a horse who has broken its leg.
They descended on us, laughing, bellowing their rage and their cruelty, and we were all undone.
My mother grabbed me, and ran toward the back of the cave with Rena. We sought vainly to hide ourselves from the predators who had descended upon us.
And there we were found by a band of them. They were hideous to behold. They were covered with the blood of our men, their faces smudged from the fires they had set. Their strange armor was dirty and redolent of sweat and death.
One great, red-haired man approached my mother. His teeth gleamed white in his dirty, sweating face, and his eyes glowed luridly.
He grabbed her. I screamed and reached to help her, to pull her away from the beast who had captured her, and I found myself imprisoned brutally by two hammy fists which grasped my slender arms, and restrained me.
The man who had captured me sat down on a rock, and pulled me onto his knee, holding me so hard that I winced with pain.
My heart was beating so hard that I thought I would faint, as I watched my mother's robe being torn from her body. I blushed with shame when I saw her naked before the beast who had humiliated her.
"Please, kill me," my mother sobbed, as the man stood over her, his blood-stained sword pointing at her breast. Her lovely breasts heaved with her sobbing breath.
I heard a shrill scream, and I turned, to see Rena stretched on the floor of the cave.
She, too, was naked.
And as I watched, I screamed with fear and horror, as I saw the man standing over her, reveal his fat, thick rod.
Rena struggled vainly. Her arms were stretched out from her shoulders, and they were held by two Crusaders. Two Crusaders held her ankles, her legs spread wide.
Again I blushed to see her secret sexual parts revealed to the man who was now crouched between her legs.
Another scream rent the air of the cave, as the man's thick rod pierced Rena's womanhood.
The man holding me so brutally laughed. I felt a hardness on my buttocks where his manhood swelled, as he watched.
I was torn. To my left, my mother was being ravaged by one beast, and to my right, Rena had had her maidenhood slain by the fleshy sword of another bestial Crusader.
I heard the man who was rending Rena's womanhood apart grunt. His long thick rod disappeared into Rena's little dark hole.
And a strange thing happened as I watched. I felt a strange stirring in my own secret sexual parts.
Having been born and raised on a farm, I was not ignorant of sexual matters, which had unfolded themselves to my knowledge gently in the course of births and deaths, and matings, in the course of seasons, and planting, and harvests.
But there was nothing gentle, nothing natural about what I was witnessing now. It was hideous, and my mind was blasted by what I was watching.
The man who was raping my mother had bent her legs up over her shoulders. That dark channel from which I had emerged was now stuffed with the Crusader's cock, which lunged inward, until it had disappeared, and then pulled outward, gleaming with my mother's inner juices.
The cock of the man raping Rena, was covered with the blood of her rent maidenhead. His cock, too, sawed in and out of her pussy.
I was faint with fear and pain and anguish. I wished at that moment I was dead.
The man who was holding me appeared to be totally oblivious of my presence on his lap. He watched, and I could feel his labored breathing blowing moistly on my neck, as he kept me bound to him with his burly hands.
But in my own secret recesses, I felt the stirrings of my own juices. I had been feeling such sensations since the onset of my monthly flux, and Damian never failed to arouse me when I was in his. presence.
I was appalled that I could be aroused by the brutal rape of one of my best friends, and my mother, and yet my eyes were riveted to the obscenity occurring before me, fascinated against my will by those secret rites I had been so long desirous of being initiated into.
Damian had wanted to become betrothed to me, but my father had said I was too young. There were girls my age who had become betrothed, and some who had been married, but my father was gentle and possessive, and had chosen to keep me by his side for a year or two more.
Now, as I watched the hideous fate of my mother and Rena, I was sorry I had allowed my father to preserve my girlhood. I shuddered to think of my fate at the hands of these men.
In the caves around me, I heard similar shrieks of pain, heard the guttural cries of Crusaders, as they raped the women.
The grip of the man holding me tightened. The Crusader who had stolen Rena's maidenhood had expended himself in her little hole, and he had been replaced by another man.
Rena was no longer screaming. Her body was writhing as the man's thick rod slid into her little channel.
Rena's mound of love was thickly-furred. She was almost full-grown, and her breasts, round and ripe and pear-shaped, jiggled with the labored rise and fall of her chest.
The sight of her was unaccountably erotic to me. Even the sight of the violence aroused me.
I have thought long and hard about it. It wasn't that I consented to, or took pleasure in watching the rape of my mother" or Rena. I think it was the fact of that violence, that sudden brutalization, which overpowered me, and caused the incredible erotic excitement which I felt.
My thighs were stained with the honey which issued from my womanhood, as I watched Rena and my mother being repeatedly raped by the men in the cave.
There were other women in the cave being similarly treated, but they were more toward the front. In my direct line of vision were my mother and my best friend, the woman who was going to marry Damian's brother.
My beloved! He was dead.
The thought suddenly hit me, as if I had been inundated by a rock fall, and I let out a loud wail.
The grip on my arms tightened. The man holding me shook me violently.
"Shut up, you heathen wench. If they were Christian women this would be a crime, but they are daughters of the devil, as you are. Shut up!"
He shook me until my teeth rattled, and I stifled the anguish to which I had given vent.
I heard the clank of metal and the rustle of leather, and a tall, powerful-looking man strode toward the back of the cave.
He looked at the hideous spectacle in front of him, and he grinned. Behind him, a younger boy strode, and stood now at his arm. The man clapped his hand on the boy's shoulder.
He was comely, if one could call a Crusader comely.
My eyes veered from the man and the boy to Rena, whose body suddenly arched upward. She let out a high-pitched, mewling shriek, and then her body collapsed.
I watched the hairy buttocks of her rapist rising and falling furiously, as he drove his rod deeper and deeper into poor Rena's wounded womanhood, and then the man let out a loud grunt, and his body collapsed on top of Rena's naked one.
Rena was very still. As I watched, the man who had raided her fleshy temple of delight looked at her.
"Aggh!" he growled, pulling out of her, his rod gleaming with sex juices, "She is dead."
At that point, the man holding me pushed me off his lap. He pushed me forward, and I staggered in the direction where the Crusaders were gathered around Rena's now lifeless corpse.
I looked down at her, too grief-stricken for Rena's fate to be worried at that moment about my own.
The Crusaders had released their grip on her limbs, and she lay, blessedly blind in death to her shameful fate. Her thighs were stained with blood. Again I felt that strange constriction in my own secret parts, as I saw the juices which the men had spewed into her hole, dribbling out of her wounded womanhood.
They trickled slowly, like syrup, down the crack of her buttocks, and pooled on the dirt floor beneath her.
"There's one for you, still alive and kicking," my captor bellowed behind me. I turned, and saw him bare his own thick rod, and my hands and feet went cold.
But my secret cave of lust got hotter and hotter.
My whole being seemed to freeze however, as I saw the glint of a blade. The last Crusader to pillage my mother's pussy had raised his sword, and I heard the horrible chunk of metal cutting through flesh and bone.
The Crusader had cut off my mother's head.
The terror was perhaps too great for me to faint, and yet my body was totally without any semblance of rational control. I stood frozen, watching the blood spurt upward from the gaping hole where my mother's head had been.
And then I was grabbed from behind, and thrown to the floor. My garment was wrenched from my body, and rough hands seized my wrists and ankles. I felt my limbs being violently wrenched apart, my legs spread-eagled to their limit painfully, my arms almost pulled from my shoulders by the Crusaders who were holding down my wrists.
The man on whose lap I had been forced to sit crouched between my spread-apart legs, and aimed his deadly spear at my quivering little hole.
The juices which flowed in spite of my fear and revulsions seemed to increase in quantity, to swell the tide which had already stained the soft inner flesh of my thighs.
He leaned forward, leering, and caressed my legs.
"Lovely little wench-for a heathen," he muttered.
"Hurry up, Claude!" I heard one of the soldiers exclaim. "I have yet to douse my fire, and this heathen's little hole would suit fine."
The man prepared to thrust his weapon into the mouth of my womanhood. My body stiffened, and I prayed for death.
"Hold!"
I gasped at the sound of the voice. Could there be mercy among these beasts after all?
I looked in the direction of the voice. It was the newcomer, who had come in with the boy about my age.
He strode forward, and gazed down at me. He did not look at me as a man looks at a woman, as another human being gazes on one of his kind. He looked at me as if I were a horse to be appraised, or a painting to be judged for its merit. The gaze was cold, and my heart, so newly-risen to hope after such a devastating blow as the Crusaders had delivered, sank again to the icy pits in which it had been trembling.
"Save her. She will do quite nicely for my lord, the Duke," the man said.
The soldiers released their grip on me reluctantly.
"But, my lord!" one of the men exclaimed. "What shall we do for relief?"
The man looked around at my mother, and then down at the dead Rena lying beside me. He looked at me again and smiled. His smile was evil.
"Use her mouth," the man said. "But I warn you, make no mark on her body, nor do not use her cunt. My lord the Duke will be pleased with her. She is comely."
There was some grumbling from the men.
I did not understand what he meant by his command, until I felt myself being raised to a kneeling position by one of the Crusaders who yanked me by my hair.
I winced, and then knelt before four men, with raging cocks, who stood before me, while the man who had raised me still held me by a thick hank of my straw-colored thick hair.
The man who had captured me on his lap, and who had thrust me among the beasts now stood before me, his throbbing cock inches from my mouth.
"Eat, wench, eat!" he snarled, as he moved forward slightly. I felt his disgusting member, that rapacious appendage of his questionable manhood, pressing against my lips.
"She doesn't understand," someone said.
"Then show her," another replied.
I felt a hand wrenching my jaw apart, opening my mouth. And then I gagged, as the crusader's prick slammed into my mouth, ramming against the back of it, at the entrance to my throat.
"Warning. I will have the right hand of any man who does not leave her intact," said the man who had come in with the child. "The duke does not pay for spoiled merchandise."
"Have no fear!" shouted the man whose cock was now lodged in my mouth, suffocating me, "we will care for her as if she were the most priceless cow on the duke's lands."
And with that, he started to buck his hips forward, driving his cock deeper and deeper into my mouth, until I felt his bulbous, mushroom-shaped cock head stretching my throat, as he sought to embed it even deeper.
Again I prayed for death, as the man rammed his cruel prod into my mouth over and over again.
But the mercy of death was not to be mine-only a long, hard limbo of travail and loneliness.
Around me, the men laughed, the din of their cruel hilarity battering me with the same urgency, the same cruel insistence, as the man's cock battered my aching throat.
My jaws hurt me badly, and my mouth felt stretched out of all shape, as the man's huge rod slammed into me over and over again.
I felt as if my flesh were crackling and sizzling with the flush of shame which suffused my body.
And yet, my perverse womanhood still sent its heated streams of thick juice down the tunnel of my lust.
My head throbbed with the pressure of the man who still held me by my hair. He was pulling on it, and every now and then I'd feel the sting as some of my hairs were pulled from my scalp.
"Suck, damn you, suck!" the man bellowed, who was pillaging my mouth with his cock.
I had never heard of such a way to make love before, and the idea of it was just as repugnant to me as the fact.
But I was even more afraid of displeasing them, more afraid of the torture to which they could put me.
The travelers who came through our village who had experiences with the Crusaders talked of horrible mutilations, and the agonies to which they could put anyone who thwarted their wills.
I infinitely preferred death to what was happening to me, but doing what they wanted to the best of my meager ability was far better than being tortured.
I started to suck on the man's cock, as he slammed it into my mouth over and over again. I felt my cheeks sucking inward, as I applied pressure to the man's throbbing rod.
After a while, the sensation became far less unpleasant. I was learning, as he thrust his massive prod into my throat, to swallow against it. I discovered that it stopped the gag reflex which tortured me and made me feel as if I were dying of asphyxiation.
I could feel the flush in my face recede somewhat as I acquired the knack of inhaling when the man's cock pulled out, leaving only the mushroom-shaped tip of it lodged in my mouth.
As I became more comfortable, if I can use that word, my own perverse passions seemed to mount.
I felt as if the flower-like petals of my sex flesh were swelling with the heated sensations which coursed through me. My inner thighs were sticky with the resin of my desire, as it oozed out of my hot little tunnel of lust.
The man who was holding me by my hair reached around with his other hand and began to caress my burgeoning tits.
I started when I first felt his crude palm rubbing my breasts, but the sensation was far from unpleasant. No one had ever touched my breasts, and the sensation only udded to the hot welter of passion which was building in my body.
I felt my nipples stiffening under his sweating palm, as he rubbed his hand over first one breast and then the other. The sensation I experienced was that my tits were swelling with the heated sensations which permeated them.
I shivered with a growing, bizarre pleasure.
The cock in my mouth seemed to swell. The throbbing seemed to become more intense.
And then I choked on the first flush of his man juices, as his come slit erupted with its steaming load of lusty lava. His juices poured down' my throat, and I swallowed harder and harder, trying to please him, trying to forestall any injury which might accrue to me for displeasing him, or any of the others.
"She has nice tits," the man behind me grunted, his hands getting more and more urgent on my breasts. I felt the resilient tissue denting as his fingers dug into the fleshy wealth of my womanly orbs.
My pussy felt like a seething cauldron of desire. The conflicting sensations coursing through me made me light-headed. The first was, of course, the profound grief under which I was laboring.
That grief had yet to flood me. Instinctively, I knew this, as I continued to swallow the man's gism.
Each inward lunge caused more and more of his musky spunk to pour into my throat, and there was so much-of it that it welled up in my mouth and trickled out of the corners of my distorted, stuffed mouth.
I could feel the slimy tendrils of the man's liquid lust trickling down my chin and dropping on my breasts, which the man was still massaging. He massaged the gism into them, which created still another sensation.
"Keep greasing her, Martin," the man massaging my breasts said. "It will wash her filthy soul as clean as a new-born Christian babe's."
The laughter of the men assaulted my ears, as the man fucking my mouth emptied his balls into me. I swallowed the last of his slimy liquid lust, and then he pulled out of me, his powerful rod softening as he did so.
I thought that would be the end of my troubles, but I was mistaken. He was replaced by the man who had held my hair and mauled my tits.
His cock was as big and demanding as the man who had just finished marauding my mouth, and his humping motions as he drove his prick into my hot oral cavity were stronger, more insistent.
He grunted as he thrust his prick into my pillaged orifice. No one replaced him in holding my head, but he grabbed a thick hank of my hair on either side of my head, and drew my mouth downward on his massive phallus.
Again I felt the gag reflex, but this time, I had learned a few defensive tactics, which I hastened to employ. As soon as I felt his bulging prick head slamming against the entrance to my aching throat, I started to swallow fiercely.
This prevented me from gagging, as I had so painfully done before. I could feel the man's hot fleshy rod prying more and more deeply into my already stretched and aching throat, as , I continued to swallow against his intruding manhood.
My cheeks caved in as I started to suck on his prick, capturing it between my tongue and the roof of my mouth, and pulling on it really hard as he withdrew until only the tip was lodged in my mouth.
Then he thrust inward again. I felt my throat stretching as he pried deeply into my throat with his massive sword, piercing deeply, as if he would try to lodge his manhood in my stomach.
As he slammed inward, his hairy fleshy globes slammed against my chin, and the hairs which covered his loins, from which his prick sprung like a lurid stalk abraded, my nose and mouth.
The odor of his aroused manhood was strong, and he smelled also of sweat, as he undulated his hips back and forth, pumping his cock into my mouth and withdrawing it, only to lunge inward again.
By now my cheeks and chin were glistening with a combination of my saliva, which I could not swallow, and the gism of the man who had ejaculated into my throat the first time.
My neck was aching due to the posture I was constrained to assume as I serviced the brutal conqueror with my mouth.
Again I found myself praying for death, as the men around me brutalized me with their laughter, taking an obscene joy in my degradation and my misery.
And yet my body was a seething maelstrom of passion mixed with anguish and anger, and each powerful emotion which flooded me, seeming to carry my body away from my rational control, only heightened the erotic sensations which I felt.
I sucked harder and harder on the man's prick, as he drove it brutally into my mouth, over and over again. I was becoming more and more adept at sucking on man meat, and I learned with the second man that it was possible to hasten that explosion which filled my mouth with their seed.
The harder I sucked, the more excited the man became, and the more I lashed my tongue around and around on his throbbing shaft, the more swiftly he would pump his prick into me, dipping deeply into the well of my throat.
I felt his juices starting to pour out of his throbbing rod, felt them oozing in a slimy stream down my gulping, rippling throat.
Again the flood was too heavy, and I was unable to swallow all of the man's seed. It surged up from my gulping throat and pooled in my mouth, and trickled out of the corners of my lips again, adding to the slimy, sticky patina of sex cream which already stained my chin and my breasts.
The other men were hastening my assailant on, hungry to have their turn. I moaned as I felt his spill the last of his seed into my mouth, knowing full well that my agony was far from over.
At that moment, the man shot the last of his load into my mouth, and I opened my pain-blurred eyes.
I spotted the hilt of his dagger which was still slung around the man's waist. I was tempted to reach up and pull the dagger from its sheath, and plunge it into my wounded, violated breast.
I remembered at that moment, something my father had once said to me. He had said, one fall when the rains had wiped out our crop of corn that life forgives everything. In its teeming demand to live and be fruitful and multiply it covers over all the old errors, the gullies made by heavy rains, ruined crops replaced by new growth, soft vegetation which crept around burned-out homes, or hovels that were abandoned. He had smiled at me as we mourned our lost labor, and placed his hand lovingly on my shoulder.
"Remember Alethea," he had said. "There is always a prize for living through a disaster.
"There is always a reason for living, and wealth to be extracted from the bountiful earth, no matter what mishaps occur, and we all make mistakes."
I wondered now, as my tits heaved with my labored breathing, as I wallowed in my shame and my growing despair, what there was to look forward to, what there was to live for.
My father excoriated vengeance, and my anger was far from being potent. I was merely a nine year old girl, helpless in the face of the cruel, arrant power which had ridden rough-shod over me.
My parents were dead. My brother was dead. My village was wiped out. And these men, into whose hands I was now consigned, thought of me as being no better than a dog.
Very well, then, I thought, in memory of my father, I will be the best dog I know how.
I will live until I find a reason for living. I swore a solemn oath in the memory of my mother and father at that moment, that I would hot do away with my miserable life, until I had given myself every opportunity to find forgiveness' for this hideous mishap, this cruel affliction which had been visited upon me.
A strange sort of peace, and with it some semblance of courage seemed to fill me when I made that vow, as if the dearly beloved spirits of my mother and father were hovering over me, as if the whole village floated above my debased head to give me comfort.
I gave myself a time limit. I would try to survive, if indeed I survived at all at the hands of these beasts, until I was sixteen. At the time I made that vow, I thought I was placing an inhuman burden on my young shoulders.
I am sixteen now, and I must consider my decision carefully, weigh it with my thought, and either send it on its way, or sacrifice my life to it.
The sounds of pain and agony had long since faded from my ears. The only sounds I heard were the obscene remarks of the men, and their laughter at my plight.
The second man was replaced with a third, and the third with a fourth, and the fourth with a fifth. After that, I believe I was semi-conscious. I do know that my jaw was almost frozen from being held open so long, and I had difficulty articulating my lips.
My mouth tasted as if a tribe of dogs had nested in it, and I doubt that I was far from the truth. Never in my life have I met dogs like these. Beasts of the field were kinder and more loving, more considerate of their masters, than these so-called rational men bent on a mission of salvation.
I laugh, and there is no humor in the laughter, when I think of their sanctimonious words, their preachings, their total, absolute hypocrisy.
I do not believe that any class or race of people have ever behaved so abominably nor treated people with such devilish lack of regard for decency and humanity.
I was failing fast, and I knew it, as I labored under the wretched, lascivious labor to which these men had put me. I thought I would die of my exhaustion alone. I had given up hope that I would die of grief or shame.
The man who had come in before, entered the cave again.
"Come. We have a long way to go before dawn. We launch our attack on the next village early tomorrow afternoon."
"What do we do with the heathen dog, sire?" asked one of the men, as I lay, finally abandoned, at least momentarily, by the sated men.
He walked over to me, and with the toe of his mailed boot, he turned me over onto my back. I was a filthy, reeking mass of flesh, barely able to focus my eyes on his tall bulk.
Again I saw that smile.
"Comely, still. You have kept her intact?"
"Yes, sire," one of the men said.
"Get her a cloak and put her in the supply wagon. Give her to the care of Master Eberhard. Tell him to wash her well. She stinks!"
The men laughed at this man, who was obviously a commander of sorts, and I was hauled rudely to my feet. Naked I was paraded through a mass of dead bodies to the entrance of the cave.
There were loud hoots and guffaws when I made my shameful appearance, my body almost dangling between two men.
"Hah! One is saved. Let us have at her!" shouted a voice from the milling crowd.
"Hold! She is for my lord the duke," shouted one of the men who was half-carrying, me toward some destination of which I was ignorant.
"On whose orders!" someone yelled angrily. "Speak to Lord Landau," shouted the man in response. "It was his bidding."
There were some disgruntled murmurs in the crowd, but it subsided, which caused me immense relief. Helpless as I was, depleted with exhaustion and anguish, I did not relish being rent from limb to limb, and I had not one single doubt that, had that unruly mass of cruel men got their hands on me, I would not have been left intact at all!
I was dragged toward the rear of the milling Crusaders, to a large, covered wagon.
A strange, wizened old man with frightening eyes, the color of slate, appeared at a flap in the wagon.
"Who comes?" he cried, in a high-pitched, piercing voice.
"It's Master William and Master Francis. We bear a prize of war from the Duke of Landau. He wishes you to wash the little heathen and protect her from the men. She is for the duke, my lord's master."
The man descended from the wagon, and peered at me, his eyes seeming to bore through to my very soul.
"Hah! She looks as if she will not survive the night."
"She had better survive, Master Eberhard," said the man who called himself Master Francis. "The Lord Landau is most particular that she reach her destination."
"Well, we shall see, we shall see. Come along, daughter of sin and damnation. I cannot repair your damned soul, but I shall wash your body."
I was grabbed by Master Eberhard. His grip was far from being as brutal as the other two and I had hopes of being better treated.
On trembling legs, I was propelled to a large wooden bucket at the side of the covered wagon, and I was compelled to stand while Master Eberhard soaked my body and scrubbed it down.
It was merely an added humiliation to what I had already suffered, and I stood in peace, needing to feel washed, needing to feel some semblance of cleanliness after the filthy uses to which I had just been put.
Master Eberhard scrubbed me with strong soap and washed my come-stained hair as well. Then he wrapped me in a cloak, and sat me before a small fire over which a kettle was strung from three sticks which met at the top.
"Barton!" he bellowed.
A small boy appeared at the flap of the covered wagon, and I shivered when I saw him. It was the boy who had accompanied the leader, the first time that I saw him.
"Yes, Master Eberhard?"
"Watch the little heathen, and do not lay hands on her. Your father has special uses to which he intends to put her. I shall return when I find a garment for her to wear."
The boy came down the contrived steps of the wagon, and walked over until he stood beside me. He was wearing a dagger at his waist, and this he unsheathed.
"You will remain where you are and not move, dog," the boy snarled, his fingers working on the intricately tooled handle of the weapon.
Again I suffered that bothersome impersonal gaze, as if I were an inanimate object, as Barton guarded me.
I had time, my head lowered so that my guard could not fathom my expression, to consider what had happened.
It was then that the pain of my loss, the agony of my present situation flowed over me in wave after wave of grievous sorrow. I thought I would break under the weight.
When one has been cut or wounded, one does not feel the hurt immediately. I do not know why, nor has any physician ever been able to give me an answer. But the grief must have been like that, too.
I did not receive its full impact until this one quiet moment, alone, guarded by a mere boy not much older than myself. I shook violently with the anguish which seemed to sear my innards, to dry me up and leave me an empty shell.
I thought I should never smile again, thought that I couldn't bear another moment of life.
And yet I had sworn, and I was condemned to the honor of my oath, condemned to live until I was at least sixteen. That was seven long seasons away.
Master Eberhard returned bearing a coarse white garment.
"Put this on, slave," he said, motioning Barton back to the darkness of the wagon.
I did as he requested.
Then he tied ropes around my wrists, and bound me to one of the large, metal wheels of the wagon, and threw down a blanket for me to lie upon.
"Sleep, slave. We have a long trip ahead of us when the men have gathered their forces."
I lay down on the hard ground, covered only by the blanket, and thought I should never sleep again.
But the human body is merciful and the mind protects it. I fell asleep instantly, and felt surcease from the agony of soul which wrenched me. I don't know how long I slept, not long, I think.
I was shaken awake by Master Eberhard, who untied the rope from the wheel and motioned me inside the wagon.
The inside was surprisingly comfortable.
There were rich pillows, and a thin light from shielded candles.
The boy called Barton was curled up among the cushions, asleep. I was instructed to lie on other cushions, and again my wrists were fastened, this time to one of the slats which comprised the sides of the strange vehicle.
Master Eberhard sat at the head of the wagon, and I heard it being jostled. I realized later that huge work horses were being harnessed to its traces.
It was still dark, and I had not had time to determine from the position of the stars, exactly what the time was.
The wagon seemed to tilt to one side, as a wagoner mounted into the front box, and cracked his whip over the heads of the horses. I heard various calls from outside the wagon, and then the vehicle lurched forward.
I was traveling now, and I was in the thick of that rumbling mass of horsemen who pillaged and raped.
There were no more roots for me in my native land, only a host of hideous memories to cap my final hours among those whom I had known and loved.
We traveled all night long. I slept no more, as I lived with my own thoughts, something I was to become adept at-as skillful as I became at servicing the Crusaders, and later my subsequent captors.
Barton awoke frequently, and whined orders at Master Eberhard, who obeyed them with a servile promptness that shocked me at first.
No adult in my village would ever dance attendance on a child as Master Eberhard did on Barton.
But then, I had never been among the wealthy and the gifted, and I had yet to learn the perverse uses to which they put their monied leisure.
I had just learned one way they spent their money-making war on the innocent, manufacturing causes under whose banners they decimated foreign lands.
I had much more to learn, and I learned as I could, fascinated at the contrast between the simple goodness in which I had been reared, and the complicated mechanisms in which evil dresses itself.
Eventually, I saw light stealing through the crevices of the wagon. The rumbling stopped, to be replaced by raucous noises of thousands of voices, as the men camped to eat and refresh themselves before their next campaign.
The flap of the cover was abruptly shoved aside, and the leader who had saved my maidenhead the night before, entered.
"Good morning, my son. How have you fared?" he asked, sitting beside the sleepy boy who had just been awakened by Master Eberhard.
"Terrible!" Barton complained. "You love me not, I think."
The man looked stricken.
"Not love thee! I love thee as I love my own flesh, my son! Why do you say this to me, your father?"
"You let that heathen dog sleep with me."
"Ann, that heathen dog will make your fortune, Barton, when I sell her to the duke. He pays well for such merchandise, as well you know."
Having mollified his son, the leader gazed at me long and keenly. Then he rose to leave, crouching beneath the low roof of the wagon.
"Feed her well, Master Eberhard, and if you can, see if you can teach her some of her letters. Put some meat on her bones, and some food in her uncivilized brain. She appears to be a good plaything for the duke. I shall fetch a pretty price for her."
My. despair darkened when I heard his words. I knew what I was intended for now, to be the slave, the sexual pet of some lord. I had heard of this traffic before in which the Crusaders indulged to the hilt, and all young girls in my village and the surrounding villages had been warned. Never go to a stranger, who will kidnap you and take you to a fate worse than death.
I had been captured, and now I was bound to that fate.
I regretted that I had ever made the promise to remain alive until I found the forgiveness, the richness that my father promised this earth contained.
But I had promised, and with an ache in my heart I remembered that my father had never lied to me nor to any man.
He had been known in my village as the man of truth, and that was why he was one of the elders.
For all my loss, his spirit and his memory were a mountain I must climb and climb alone, in order to be worthy of him.
I bowed my head to my fate.
CHAPTER TWO
I ate fully of the viands that were offered to me, knowing I would need every ounce of strength I had for the ordeal ahead.
The Crusaders camped where we had stopped for the day. I did not leave the wagon, except for two trips outside in the company of Master Eberhard, to relieve myself and bathe. This time, I was allowed to perform that service for myself.
Master Eberhard produced the first books I had ever seen, with writing on them. The writing fascinated me, and I wondered if I would ever be able to master the scrawls and curls and lines which I saw on the parchment.
He was trying to teach Barton something he called history. He bade me be attentive. I did listen, and at first I could not understand what was meant by history.
He was talking about Caesar and some wars. Well did I know war! It wasn't until the end of the lesson, when Barton in impatience threw down his lessons and moved away from Master Eberhard, that I learned that history was not war nor the science of war, but merely the story of what men have done.
It wasn't a pretty story I heard-not like the stories I heard at my mother's knee about the sun and the moon and the stars, and it was not the kind of history I heard over communal fires at harvest when people gossiped and we learned who had married whom, who had died, how many new children had been born.
I decided I didn't like it, but there was a necessity which I felt keenly for learning all I could, in order to survive among these strange people, these beasts of war.
Barton went off to find his father, and Master Eberhard then set me to learning my letters, as he called them.
It was then that I learned how to form several of the scrawls on the manuscript It was hard but fascinating work.
As the sun started to dip toward the horizon, the leader came back with his protesting son, Barton, in tow.
"Keep him here, Master Eberhard," Lord Landau said, pushing the boy gently toward the old man.
"Surely, my lord," he replied.
"I don't want to stay!" Barton screamed. He lashed out and to my horror, kicked his father in his shins.
His father did nothing to chastise the boy, did not even appear to think that what his son did was disrespectful or unusual. I had much to learn and I observed.
Lord Landau looked kindly at his son, and shook his head.
"The town we are going against is walled. It will be dangerous because there are armed soldiers. You cannot go. Stay here with Master Eberhard."
"I want to go! I want to shoot a soldier."
I felt enormous contempt for both Lord Landau and his unruly son. So the lord would let his son ride with him against an unarmed village, to rape and pillage, but he would save his son from the consequences of attack when the opposing party was armed!
Master Eberhard held the boy as his father turned, mounted his horse, and rode to the head of his army, and for his pains he had his beard pulled right royally by the little brat.
The darkness descended, and I slept. The town was a sufficient distance away so that no sounds of battle reached us. When I awoke, dawn was coming up.
Barton was asleep on the cushions opposite to me. Master Eberhard, with a worried frown on his face, was peering through the flap of the wagon.
I was thirsty, and would have liked some water.
When I stirred, Master Eberhard looked at me and handed me a goatskin filled with water, from which I drank thirstily. I wondered if he could read my mind.
I had heard of witches. There was one in the foothills to whom my father had gone once when our crops failed. Witches know what you are thinking and what will happen to you. They can read the future and the past.
It puzzled me that he knew I was thirsty. I did not learn until much later that Master Eberhard had had the charge of the children of the rich and royal for many many years, and knew them well.
Barton stirred on his cushions, and sat up, blinking his eyes. He pulled the goatskin from my hands, spilling the water, and drank noisily.
"Where is my father?" he asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
"I know not. I have seen nothing of the soldiers," Master Eberhard declared.
Barton crawled to the opening through which Master Eberhard was gazing.
"But they should have been back before now. Should they not?"
"I warrant you, young master, they should have," Master Eberhard declared.
Barton slipped out of the wagon.
"Do not go too far," Master Eberhard warned the rebellious little boy.
We were fed, and then we waited. The sun slid upward, until it stood at its peak, and then we heard the distant rumbling of horses. I saw them coming, and something in me shivered. I sensed that something was wrong, although at the time I could not have said exactly what it was.
Master Eberhard stepped down from the wagon. He had loosened my bonds when I awakened, and I was now physically free. Barton and he, and some of the other people left behind in the camp stood in a group, watching the approaching horsemen.
The man at the head of the Crusaders I did not recognize, but he was wounded and dirty.
"Where is my father?" Barton cried to the man as he dismounted.
"Your father is dead, my lord. Be brave."
"You lie!" Barton screamed, attacking the man who staggered toward Master Eberhard, beating on his cuirass vainly.
The man grasped Barton's wrists, and flung the boy from him.
"Be off with you, you surly wretch!" he snarled, approaching the wagon. "Water!" he commanded Master Eberhard, as he came into the wagon. It creaked with the decisive weight and movement of him.
He was bigger than Lord Landau, and his size and command awed me.
"What has happened?" Master Eberhard asked, as he offered the man the goatskin.
"We have leveled the town, but it cost us over half our men. Lord Landau was killed-by a woman!"
The man laughed sardonically and took a deep drink from the neck of the goatskin bag.
"How is this?" Master Eberhard asked.
The huge man was staring at me.
"Is this the little heathen Lord Landua intended for the duke?" he asked.
"Yes, Master Lindsay," the old man said.
He looked at me for a moment, and then turned away.
"We hare heading home. We have not sufficient forces to proceed further in this heathen country."
"What about the little Lord Landau?" asked Master Eberhard.
'i will take charge of these two," the man called Master Lindsay said. "Barton I shall return to his home, and this one I shall give to the duke as Lord Landau intended."
Master Eberhard nodded. Master Lindsay took command of the troops, and that very day we pulled up and began to travel.
When I was not being tutored, I stared at country which got stranger and stranger as we progressed.
Master Eberhard was assiduous but not harsh with me, and some of my anxiety was allayed by the manner of my treatment. But I still chafed under the fate that was in store for me.
After many weeks of traveling, I heard the columns up ahead give a big cheer.
I crawled to the opening in the flaps which covered the wagon, and stared out at what must have been Paradise, or so I thought. To my left, I could see a glistening mass of blue and I frowned and looked at Master Eberhard. He had tears in his eyes.
"This is France, our native land," he explained to me and then he pointed toward that marvelous expanse of glistening strangeness.
"And that is the sea."
I looked again. I had heard of the sea, but I had never seen it. I was awed. We traveled along the rim of it for some way, and then we camped in a huge green meadow.
Here, people were friendly. They were not preyed upon. I watched soldiers bartering for goods among the farmers who came up to the camp. The profusion of sights and sounds thoroughly bewildered me.
Since his father's death, Barton had alternated between a sullen withdrawn silence, and wild fits of rage. He had become totally unruly, apparently giving up all pretense of civility.
And he became more and more brutal to me. He would slap at me, pull my hair, leer at me. My body was not safe from his hands which pried into my most secret flesh.
Once Master Eberhard had caught him trying to rape me, and this time, Barton was beaten with a strap.
"Take it as a piece of good fortune that I have only tanned your hide with my belt, little lord," Master Eberhard said gravely to the weeping, sniveling boy. "If my lord, the duke discovered who had despoiled his prey, you would have lost your right hand. And well you know this!"
After that, Barton's lewd attentions were slightly mitigated, but still I shuddered to think what he might do.
That first night in France, he made his move.
Master Eberhard had gone with most of the other soldiers to the outskirts of the field to gather news from the populace who had come to greet them.
Barton sat in the corner, rubbing his crotch, his eyes hot upon me. I shivered, knowing his evil predilections, and knowing that I was helpless and alone before his predatory instincts.
He growled finally, and rose, to tower over me. I tried to escape him, to crawl out of the wagon. I wanted to find Master Eberhard.
"Stop, beast," he snarled, grabbing me by the hair.
He clapped a hand over my mouth, stifling the scream that I felt burbling up from my throat. Then he pulled my gown up over my waist.
Once again, I knew the shame and humiliation of being naked before the gaze of a lewd man. Barton was breathing heavily, and my heart was pounding in my breast, as I felt him fondling my rounded buttocks.
I clenched them together as his hands roved down the crack of my ass.
"You will lose your hand, Master Barton," I gasped, when he released my mouth.
"No," he said, leering at me cruelly. "I will not."
He threw himself on my back, and spread my legs. I tried to fight him off, and surprisingly, did knock him off my back. Then I started to head toward the wagon entrance, but Barton grabbed my ankles.
As I struggled and kicked, he tied my hands to one of the posts which held the covering over the wagon. I was now helpless.
He revealed his manhood, and gripped it. As I watched, wide-eyed with fear, looking over one shoulder, he pumped on his prick a few times, and then crouched down between my legs, which he had roughly spread-eagled.
"I can still have my cake and eat it, too," he sneered.
I gasped with horror, when his hands roughly spread my ass cheeks, and I felt his massive prick pressing against the puckered brown ring of my rectum. .
"No!" I gasped.
"Yes!" he said, laughing brutally. He lunged inward, and I screamed with the horrible pain of having my after passage pierced by his raging rod.
I moaned as he started to thrust inward, his fleshy spear cleaving apart the walls of my asshole.
He grunted like a rutting pig, as he buried more and more of his prick in my wounded, burning after passage.
I clenched my fists, and then realized that my tension was only aggravating the pain that I felt, and I tried to relax. My stomach turned upside-down in my belly, and I almost vomited, as I felt his massive cock spreading my asshole walls apart.
With a grunt, he thrust inward again, and buried himself to the hilt in my anal passage. I closed my eyes, trying to blot out the horrible humiliation which I felt, the horrible perversion to which I was being subjected.
He started to move in me, pulling his prick out to the tip, and then lunging inward again. He pillaged my asshole roughly, brutally, and I moaned as I felt his throbbing shaft abrading the lining of my bung hole.
With each inward lunge, his hairy balls slapped against my pussy, tickling it, causing it to twitch and jerk.
He sawed in and out of my shit hole mercilessly. I felt the burning sensation intensify, and once again I wished I were dead, rather than have to suffer this misery.
Barton was moving faster and faster in my after passage, his cock throbbing powerfully against my stretched walls, the head of his prick rummaging around in the depths of my bowels. I felt as if my insides were turning to jelly as he continued to pierce me with his manly spear.
And then a strange thing happened. I started to become aroused. I don't know what caused it. Perhaps it was the sense of helplessness, such as I had felt on the first day I encountered the Crusaders.
Or perhaps it was the way his hair-covered balls tickled my pussy flesh. At any rate, I felt the juices of my desire starting to flow, and as they flowed, the pain of his prick pounding into my asshole lessened.
I shivered with the hot, lawless sensations which surged through me. I felt stranger than I had ever felt in my life. My body felt as if it were melting with the heat which rose in me until I felt feverish.
Barton continued to pump his prick in and out of my asshole, his motions becoming harder and faster as his passions mounted.
He paused for a moment, and stretched himself out on my back, I felt his hands working beneath my chest, until he was cupping my tits. My nipples puckered with the hot sensations which his hands created, as he massaged my growing boobs.
I moaned, and a great gush of pussy fluid poured out of my pussy. My pink sex flesh swelled with the lust which seemed to permeate my body, and I felt a strange tingling where the little button of my pleasure nestled.
It seemed to pop out of its fleshy sheath, and sent wild lightning-like shards of pleasure coursing through my body.
"Ahh!" Barton growled, as he slammed into me. The more violent his thrusting motions became, the more aroused I became. I could feel my juices trickling out of my quivering little hole, felt them coating the now-swollen pussy lips which pouted from between my plump white outer lips.
My body stiffened, and I felt little spasms rippling through my inner organs.
Barton's hands moved harder and more ardently over my tits, and then I felt him squeezing my nipples between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. The little cherry-red buds which crowned my tit-mounds seemed to elongate, almost the same way my little love button was becoming elongated.
My whole body was possessed of the wild passion which coursed through me. His cock continued to pump in and out of my after passage. My rectal walls seemed to stretch, to accommodate his cock more comfortably, and again the hot pleasure mounted, until I was sweating.
I could feel the sex sweat staining my coarse, simple garment, could feel the heated passion burning away in my gut.
My body was no longer in control of my mind. My pussy acted as if it had a life of its own. It tingled and the inner flesh rippled, spewing more of the dew of my desire out of me.
And then the pleasure in my asshole increased, as my rectal walls stretched to allow easier access to Barton's cruel prick.
I felt delicious spasms of ecstasy rippling in my sex flesh. The blood which had surged to my inflamed rectal membranes throbbed, heightening the pleasurable effect of Barton's throbbing shaft as he sunk it deeply into me time and again.
I felt as if my whole body were being turned inside out as a strange, sweet, demanding chaos ripped through my body.
My hips humped against the cushioned floor of the wagon which had been my home for so long as we traveled.
Barton was now grunting rhythmically, as he pumped his powerful prick into my asshole over and over again. It seemed to me that his cock swelled, got hotter, that the throbbing of it became stronger and harder.
And then a wild convulsion rippled through me and my body seemed to have a seizure. But it was brilliantly blissful.
Behind my tightly-closed eyes, hot flashes of light went off, and seemed to permeate my entire flesh.
The dew of my desire cascaded out of my quivering hole like a flood of slimy, thick, warm honey.
Barton thrust inward, his strokes stronger, and sharper now, and I felt my ass muscles contract around his prick. It felt as if my asshole had become a sucking mouth, drawing on his prick, sucking it deeper and deeper into my bowels.
Then he groaned, and I felt the gism pouring from the head of his prick. It washed against the burning abraded walls of my rectum, and soothed the harshly rubbed flesh, like balm.
He lunged inward more and more powerfully, each inward thrust causing more of his thick man cream to spew into me. I could feel it pouring downward, the way my pussy cream was pouring downward.
Barton's cock was lubricated with the melted butter of his manhood, as it spewed into me, and coated my asshole walls.
"Ohh!" I moaned, as the orgasm-my first with a man-peaked in my body, causing it to stiffen momentarily as if I had been struck by lightning.
At that moment, Barton slammed into me one last time and then his body collapsed on top of mine.
I could feel his lawless, passionate heat suffusing my back, causing me to quiver with a wild excitement I had never felt before. His cock still throbbed in my after passage.
At that moment, the tent flap was pulled back.
"Ann! You little beast!"
Master Lindsay strode into the wagon, followed by Master Eberhard.
I felt Barton's prick pulling out of my rectum, as Master Lindsay pulled the evil young boy off me.
I whimpered.
Master Eberhard untied my hands, and then pulled me to a sitting position.
"It was only her bung hole!" Barton bellowed.
Master Lindsay was not as patient with Barton as his deceased father had been. He was treated to a royal hiding that left him kicking, squalling like an infant, and sobbing for some hours afterward.
"You have no right to touch me!" Barton screamed. Master Eberhard had washed my slightly bloodied asshole, and applied a soothing salve to it, and then sat me in a corner. I was sobbing silently, my face flaming with grief and humiliation.
"I have all the right of a guardian! You had no right to touch that girl!"
"She's a beast, a heathen slave. I can do anything I want to her!"
Again Barton was treated to a slap in the face for his insolence.
"How is she?" Master Lindsay asked Master Eberhard.
"All right, I think. My lord the duke would be displeased to find that she had been so used, however."
'True enough! And I am honor-bound to deliver her as Lord Landau wanted. It's the least I can do for a friend and commander."
"I will stay with her and guard her closely, Master Lindsay, but I suggest that you remove Barton. He is quite out of hand, anyway. Perhaps the death of his father.. . "
"His father's death! God's blood, he has always been a lawless little imp of the devil! I will take him under my wing, and see if he mends his ways in the next week, before we reach Paris."
Barton was hauled away, and I was left to think about what had happened. What bothered me more than anything was that lawless impulse of my body to pleasure in the midst of degradation.
I wondered if I had already been corrupted by these beasts who seemed to think that they were the kings of the earth. I had never known anyone to behave in such fashion, but as I said, I was learning daily.
There was no honor nor kindness in Master Lindsay's wanting to protect me from Master Barton. He had a job to fulfill. I was to be sold as a slave.
I wondered at the so-called ethics of which I heard these people speak endlessly on our long, arduous trip to this strange country. They seemed to think that they alone possessed virtue, and that everyone who had not their code of ethics was less than the beasts of the fields.
It was a strange dichotomy, to say the least, and it kept me puzzled for many years thereafter.
That night was spent peacefully for a change, and the next day, as our bedraggled band made our slow way toward the city they called Paris, Master Eberhard finished teaching me my letters, and began to teach me how to put them together in words.
The work went much more easily this day, since Barton was not near to disrupt my concentration.
"For a heathen, you are quick and docile," Master Eberhard said, regarding me keenly.
His eyes, which had once struck such fear in me, now seemed to be the keen, studious eyes of a scholar who is familiar with human nature.
I lowered my head, not wanting to respond to the compliment. It was mixed with the sentiments which would account for my lowly position in ;life, and I swallowed my bile to think that he wouldn't believe that I, too, was of the same human condition as he.
That night we camped by a stream in land that was richer than any I had ever seen.
I was told that it was the beginning of the duke's estate, that duke to whom I was to be given.
"I shall be glad to be rid of this charge," Master Lindsay said, as he came into the wagon.
I had been taken to the river to bathe, and now I was dressed in a strange costume that was rich and soft on my skin. My hair had been brushed by one of the women who had followed the men, an old crone who was none too gentle.
Master Lindsay had sent a courier ahead to announce to the duke that his Crusader army, what was left of it, had returned, and they bore gifts of great wealth and beauty for his lordship.
I was led oui of the wagon, and suffered the lurid gaze of many men, as I walked between Master Lindsay and Master Eberhard to the edge of the camp.
My heart plummeted to my feet as I saw several horsemen approaching. They were all richly-dressed, and I had no doubt that the duke was among the party.
I was standing beside chests filled with treasures, and piles of rugs and rich cloths and tapestries, all the spoils of war.
And I, too, was as one of those things, merely another treasure to be used and cast aside.
My vain tears trickled down my cheeks, and stained the richly embroidered yoke of my garment, as I waited.
CHAPTER THREE
"Greetings, Master Lindsay! Welcome home. How fared you?"
The man speaking was tall and stern and gray-haired. He was richly dressed, and a huge gold medallion glistened at the breast of his velvet tunic.
"Well and ill, my lord Rathler. How does my lord the duke?"
The man's face became sterner.
"My lord the duke has gone to his reward. He was carried off by the Black Plague, along with half his family only a fortnight ago."
There were startled murmurs among those men assembled around us. Morions and caps were doffed, and heads were lowered.
"My Lord Rathler, I do not know how to speak of my grief at this tragedy," declared Master Lindsay.
"There is naught to say, Master Lindsay. The will of God has been done. What have you here?"
"Spoils of war for his lordship, my lord."
"These spoils go to the Church, Master Lindsay. The duke's son and daughter have died of the same affliction, and within hours of their father. There is no direct heir to the land nor his property. It has been remanded to the Church of Notre Dame, until some title is determined by the king. Your spoils will have to be taken there."
"I see. There is no heir at all?"
"That is for the king and his council to decide. We merely act as stewards in the meantime. Where is Lord Landau."
"Killed in battle, my Lord Rathler."
"His son?"
"I have charge of him. I will return him to his home and his mother."
"Well, and good."
The man called Lord Rathler looked at me keenly..
"This is a pretty prize."
"Lord Landau preserved her for the duke."
"Pity he is not among us to enjoy her."
"What do you suggest I do with her, Lord Rathler?"
By now I was beginning to get the gist of the conversation. The duke to whom I was supposed to be sold, was now dead, and his lands given over to this institution they called the church for safe-keeping.
But my fate hung in the balance. I had visions of being turned over to the motley rabble which had gathered around us, to be used until I died of shame and abuse.
The man gazed at me long and keenly.
"Take her to the Priory of St. Armand," Lord Rathler instructed. "There they have several other heathen girls whom they are training for service. There she will be safe until some determination can be made about her disposition."
"As you will, my lord."
Master Lindsay made a deep bow, and I was brought back to the wagon. The treasures which had been piled up so hopefully for the delectation of the deceased duke were piled into other wagons, and we proceeded at dawn, toward Paris.
I passed strange towns, the-likes of which I had never seen before, with buildings which looked like monstrous piles of stone. The very roads were stones, which caused the wagon wheels to rumble loudly and with frightening reverberations off the hard walls of the buildings. As we passed through these towns, people appeared at windows to cheer and throw down flowers.
I had never been more frightened in my life since the night the Crusaders killed my village, and my old, happy life. This was a new way of living, and I wasn't sure I liked it.
We spent the next night camped outside a town, and then the next day, we reached Paris.
I must say, the city took my breath away. It was beautiful on the main avenues, although the brief glimpse I got of dark alleyways between the buildings was not promising.
It appeared to me that the city was like a stone one turns over, and there is rich, ripe soil beneath and hundreds of creeping, crawling things who scatter as soon as they see the light of day.
If the facade of the city were clean and bright and rich-looking, the under side of the city seemed to be inhabited by ragged, creeping crawling things whom I recognized as impoverished human beings.
I wondered what my captors thought of this segment of their population. I learned later that their attitude was one of indifference if not downright scorn.
Near the great outer wall, on the opposite side of Paris, was a large, walled building.
We pulled up in front of this building, and Master Lindsay came to take me from the wagon. I was put astride his horse.
"Master William," the man commanded to his assistant. "Disband the men until further notice, with their booty. They will want to see their families. Take the treasures allotted to the duke to the king for his guardianship, and then wait for me there. I shall come and pay my respects as soon as I have disposed of this treasure."
Master William hastened to do as he was bidden, and then he wheeled his horse in the direction of the massive stone cairn which was to be my prison for the next seven years.
The wall contained a great iron grill, and beside it was a brass bell, which he rang. There was a long wait, and then an old hunchback came to the gate.
"Who calls?"
"Master Lindsay of the king's Crusade, under the leadership of the deceased Lord Lindsay."
The hunchback grumbled and then unlocked the gate, which opened on its hinges with a great creaking and groaning. I shivered as Master Lindsay wheeled his horse into the cobbled courtyard and up to the massive, carved doors of the entrance.
He dismounted, and then pulled me off the horse. With his hand on my shoulder he walked up to the portals, which were opened.
The inside of the building was lofty, and dim. I smelled sweet, strange smells. The pervasive scent which pleased my nostrils I was later to learn was beeswax candles mixed with incense.
Lighted tapers lined the walls, causing my shadow to loom large, and then recede, as we walked down the long corridor.
Before us, traveling like a black ghost, was a silent woman garbed in black with a white wimple which framed a plump, rosy face. She walked so silently that I had the impression she was floating about an inch off the cold stone floor.
We stopped at another large door, and the black-garbed woman knocked gently.
"Come."
She opened the door, and stood against it, bowing. Master Lindsay walked past it, pushing me through it with his hand still on my shoulder.
I quailed at the presence in that room.
She was singularly tall for a woman, I thought, with piercing black eyes, thickly-fringed with black lashes.
Her eyebrows were also black and thick, and they arched diabolically above those burning orbs. I felt a shiver of fear course through me.
She was sitting in a large, ornately-carved chair.
"What have we here?" she asked, leaning forward slightly.
"She is part of the spoils meant for the duke, who, God rest his soul, was taken with the Black Plague". Lord Rathler has instructed me to bring her here, to await her fate."
"Indeed," the woman said, fixing her piercing gaze on me. Again I shuddered. There was something ineffably evil about this woman. The aura seemed to fill the room.
"Another heathen, ehh? We already have five of the slaves here. I have managed to sell two. One to the Cardinal of Lorraine, and the other to my lord, the Marquis of Revelle."
"I believe this one will have to be held, pending a decision from the king with regard to the estates of the duke, whose heirs died with him."
"That is true. That is true. Very well, sit!" She pointed to a chair which was in front of hers, indicating that I should seat myself there. I did as she commanded. "She appears to be somewhat docile," the woman said, finally.
"Master Eberhard claims she is quick with her letters, also. She has given us no trouble on our way back from the Crusade."
"That augurs well for her, however we dispose of her. Sit, Master Lindsay, and tell me the news. Sister Corita, bring Wine and cheese."
The little black-garbed woman who had opened the door and led us to this room, bowed again and disappeared silently, to reappear just as silently some short time later with a large tray.
They talked and drank wine and ate the cheese, while I sat, patiently. I had early learned that these people value silence from their underlings, and patience, and I had cultivated it, although my high spirits chafed against the restraints which my captivity imposed upon me.
As I observed them in their conversation, I noticed that Master Lindsay appeared to be as uncomfortable as I in the presence of this woman, who I learned was the Abbess Frederika.
He finished his wine and cheese, and rose to leave.
"I am at your service, Abbess. If I can be of assistance, please let me know."
"The little Lord Landau is well provided for, I take it?" the Abbess asked, not rising from her chair.
"Very well indeed," Master Lindsay replied.
"I fear, however, that there will be battles over the duke's estates. They were most extensive."
"True enough. I must depart, to pay my respects to the king. Good day to you."
Again Master Lindsay bowed, and turned quickly to leave the room. I heard his footsteps fading away, and sat still under the scrutiny of the Abbess. She regarded me for a long time with that malign gaze of hers, and then she spoke.
Her words did little to reassure me that my fate was a happy one, although I had indulged in some feelings of relief to discover that the duke was dead.
"Little Heathen, you are at the Priory of St. Armand. You will be trained in Christian principles, and you will do penance for your sins. When you are baptized, you will then be disposed of in some way that your life will be of service to the elect of God."
With that she rose.
"Come with me."
I rose immediately, and followed her. I glanced briefly at the face of Sister Corita and felt a chill in the very marrow of my bones, when I saw the expression on her face.
It was one of fear mixed with what I discerned was pity, and I wondered just what ordeal this woman would impose on me.
She led me down the long, dim corridor, to a flight of stairs. She stood aside when she opened the door leading to the subterranean levels of the priory, and pointed downward.
She picked up a wax taper from its sconce on the stone wall, and followed after me as I made my way gingerly down the stairs into the cold dark reaches of the cellar.
'Turn to your right," she said, when I had reached the foot of the stairs. I did as I was instructed, my heart beating like a trip-hammer.
There were strange implements on the walls, leather and metal things whose uses I did not know, but which presented a frightening aspect to me. And there were whips.
At the end of the corridor into which I had turned was a large, brass-studded door.
I heard the rattle of keys, and the Prioress inserted one of them in the keyhole and turned it. Then she swung the door open, and I entered.
It was a large, vaulted room, with a huge fireplace at one end. There was a fire blazing in the hearth, which took away some of the dank chill of the cellar. We moved closer to it, and the Abbess placed the lighted taper in a sconce over the fireplace.
She turned to me, her eyes glowing with a frightening expression.
"Remove your clothes," she said.
I blushed and hesitated but a fraction of a moment. I dared not refuse. But I did think it strange that a woman would ask me to do that which the Crusaders would have liked me to do.-
I hastily removed the rich, lovely garment in which I had been brought to the priory, and stood naked before the fixed gaze of the woman.
She approached until she was inches from my trembling body.
"Daughter of a dog, child of sin, you will be used as you deserve, and you will resign yourself to your fate," she said.
She grasped a thick hank of my hair and brought me to my knees on the cold stone floor. My trembling increased.
Slowly, before my horror-stricken eyes, the prioress started to raise her voluminous black skirts, until I saw her hairy womanhood. My hands and feet felt like blocks of ice, as I caught a whiff of her pungent womanhood.
"Kiss it," she kissed. "Kiss it, slave of sin. This is your purpose in life, and so you will be taught."
I gasped at the unthinkable thing she was asking me to do. I remembered the sight of my mother and Rena, being used by the men. This I had been taught, and this I knew.
But what this woman was asking me seemed to be impossible, some perversion of nature. I had never had a sense of sin, never felt that I was anything but good, part of the goodness and the wealth of life, as my father had taught me.
But after weeks of hearing how evil I was, I questioned the very facts about the earth which I thought I had known, and that included the assumption of my own natural virtue.
But I knew that in order to survive I had to obey and without question. Perhaps that was to become the new virtue for me to concentrate on: simply surviving, acquiring that habit of survival which would maintain my personal and spiritual integrity.
I had made the promise, vowed to live at least until I was sixteen, in honor of my father, and I was pledged to whatever devices that promise entailed.
I trembled as I moved my face close to the woman's odorous mound of love, and I kissed her, my lips being tickled by her wiry hairs.
"Ann, good! Now lave it with your tongue. Wash me clean of my sins, you sinner."
I looked up at her, puzzled. But her grip on my hair tightened, and she pressed my mouth hard against her pussy.
Again I kissed her, and as she pressed my mouth against the thick pelt which covered her mound of love, my lips separated.
"Tongue it!" she gasped.
Then I understood what she wanted. Repelled though I was by the idea, I flicked my tongue out, and it made wet hot contact with the flower-like petals of her inner pink flesh.
She trembled when she felt my tongue on her pussy, and her grip loosened somewhat on my hair, so I knew that I was pleasing her. I sought to please her even more.
I pressed my tongue between the curved cleft of her cunt, and started to run it into the crevices of her honeyed folds of flesh.
"Aieeee!" she gasped. I took my mouth off her hairy mound and looked up at her for a moment. The look on her face was one of tortured ecstasy.
Again I lowered my face to service her womanhood. I pressed my tongue into the swollen crevices of her pussy meat, starting near the little dark hole which was oozing with cream.
It tasted musky, salty. It wasn't entirely unpleasant, and I relaxed somewhat, thinking that what she was asking wasn't that bad. At least she wasn't hurting me.
I covered every inch of her pink, passion-bloated flesh. I became curious. I had done some meager exploring of my own private flesh, discovered certain areas, such as that hard little button at the apex of my cunt cleft, which provided enormous pleasure.
Bringing to bear all the knowledge I already possessed, and curious to discover more, I used my tongue to feel out the womanhood of the prioress.
Her hips were now rocking back and forth as I strove to drive my tongue into her hot hole, wondering how far I could get it in.
Her hole of course couldn't accommodate my tongue, nor did I have the strength to thrust it all the way in, much as I would have loved to do so, but I did give her pleasure.
This much I knew, as I felt a hot gush of the dew of her desire rushing from the dank inner recesses of her hot tunnel, and coating my tongue. Her pussy walls seemed to spasm around the tip of my tongue, as I laved the entrance to her womanhood.
Then I brought my tongue up, exploring all the little flaps of flesh, feeling the pulsation of her lusty blood, as it engorged her inner sex flesh until the pink inner meat sprouted out from between her plump white outer lips.
She was crooning to herself, babbling with ecstasy, as my tongue found the little love button which I knew brought so much joy to me."
I flicked my tongue back and forth over it, absorbed in my exploration.
"Arrghh!" she growled, her voice guttural with a growing passion. I .could almost feel the heat of her body intensify, as I continued to flick her little love button back and forth with the tip of my tongue.
The little love button popped out of its fleshy envelope like a tiny snake peers out of its hole in the ground.
On a sudden impulse, I bit gently at the base of the button, again lashing the tip of it with my tongue.
"Ohh! Ahhh!" the woman gasped. Her hips swiveled against my mouth which was now gleaming and sticky with the juices which flowed from her pussy. I could feel some of the hot effluence of her womb pouring down my chin, to splash in thick streams on my breasts.
And as I explored her pussy, I felt my own juices flowing suddenly, as I remembered the kind of hot pleasure I could give to myself secretly by pressing my little finger against those delicate little petals of flesh which provided me with such joy.
My knees were pressed together on the floor, and I could feel the "throbbing of my own little love mound between my pressed together thighs. The soft inner flesh of my thighs became coated with the thick resin which flowed from my own womanhood, as I laved the pussy meat of the prioress.
She seemed to be going mad as I ran my tongue up and down her swollen cunt meat, licking up the juices which cascaded out of her hot little hole.
I felt the tremor in her thighs.
Instinctively, to balance myself, I reached up and grasped the back of her thighs as she humped against my mouth, mashing her muff against my hard-working mouth.-
My own hips started to rock back and forth, and I felt the slight pressure of my thighs squeezed against my own wanting and passion-swollen woman meat.
My little love button tingled hotly as I continued to rock my hips back and forth, stimulating myself to a secret pleasure as I serviced the prioress.
She was groaning steadily now and the tremor in her body had the appearance of a seizure, as I tongued her twat, driving the tip of it between the crevices of her pink sex flesh, spreading the outer lips wide.
I flattened my tongue out and started to slurp upward, as if I were a thirsty animal lapping at a brook. I started where her hole quivered and oozed its slimy juices, and worked my tongue upward, until once again I had made contact with her hard little love button.
I flicked my tongue back and forth over it, and then pulled some of her pussy hairs with my teeth. I had been fond, when I explored the reaches of my own womanhood, of pulling on some of the downy hairs which covered my little love mound, enjoying the slight sting which it occasioned.
It had the same effect on the prioress. I hadn't yet done anything wrong, or anything that I thought displeased her.
My tongue worked ardently, with increasing strength up and down the soggy pink swamp of her delight.
And all the while, my own arrant blood boiled hotter in my veins and pulsated powerfully in my temples.
I became light-headed. The muscles in the back of the prioress's thighs tightened, and then her humping motions became frenzied.
Her grip on my hair tightened, and suddenly she started to grunt rhythmically, driving her muff with bruising force against my nose and mouth.
For one moment there, as her juices gushed hotly out of her, I thought I would faint from lack of air. Her muff seemed to swell even more, and I slurped up as much of her juice as I could capture. But it still fell downward, some of it landing on the cold stone floor at my knees.
I bit on the edges of the folds of flesh, pulled at her pussy hair with my teeth, and continued to glide my tongue up and down the honeyed folds of flesh.
By now, I had become used to the taste and the pungent aroma of her womanhood, and the task she had set me was far from unpleasant, particularly since I was achieving a bizarre kind of pleasure for myself.
I felt my womb contract as if a hand had gripped it softly and then felt it relax.
My juices poured out of me in the same wild quantities as the prioress's juices were flowing out of her pussy.
She emitted high-pitched squealing sounds as she approached her sexual crisis. The very excitement which set her body to shivering, aroused me. I had a small sexual crisis of my own. In a way it surprised me, since I didn't have my hands on my flesh at all.
My hands were caressing the prioress's thighs, as I laved her pussy meat with my wet, soft tongue.
She humped spastically against my mouth and nose for a long time, and then her body subsided somewhat, seemed to sag a little against me.
She loosened her grip on my hair, and then sighed.
I looked at her, licking the last foaming flecks of her liquid lust from my lips. My face gleamed with her juices. It wasn't too far removed from the quality of the situation in the cave when I was forced to service so many men with my young, virginal mouth.
The prioress smiled at me, and then pulled down a thick leather whip from the wall.
"You have done well. And now you will do penance for having indulged in a sin of the flesh.
"Aieee!" I screamed, as I felt the bite of the lash against my shoulder. My body jerked, and I raised my arms to ward off the next blow, but it was a vain gesture.
She whipped me until I was exhausted.
The whip was of such a nature that it didn't cut the skin, but the pain was excruciating, and it left livid welts on my smooth skin.
She finally exhausted herself whipping me. My back and my ass cheeks tingled with the brutality I had just suffered.
"You will rise, heathen, and come with me. I will show you to your cell."
Trembling, I did as the abbess demanded. I put on my clothing again, and followed her to a small, square room with a minimum of furniture. It was cold and bleak, but it was the only home I was to know until this night.
And the room, the very stones in the room, speak of the arduous trials I have undergone.
It oppresses me!
CHAPTER FOUR
Such was my initiation into the life of the Priory of St. Armand.
I was led to the little stone cell, which had a hard bed in it, and a desk and a chair.
There was a wash stand and a screen, and high up in the wall, a window, narrow and not admitting of much light. Exhausted, I crawled between the sheets, and fell sound asleep, only to be roughly shaken awake in what felt like a brief span of time.
"Get up slug-a-bed! There is too much of the Lord's work to do for you to he sleeping!"
I reared up and blinked my eyes, and then looked at the voice which had spoken.
She was a big woman, with a handsome face, and twinkling brown eyes.
"Good morning. What's your name?"
"Alethea."
"Ann, such a pagan appellation!" she remarked.
I was slightly relieved of my anxiety by her aspect. Her face was pleasant and there were two dimples right in the middle of each cheek. She did not give off the unpleasant, rather evil emanations of the Abbess Fredericka. Instead, there was a bustling warmth about her.
"Go wash," she said. "I have brought you water and soap. Wash well behind your ears."
"Who are you?" I asked, performing my ablutions.
"Sister Margaret. I will be your companion and familiar. I am to teach you the ways of God and Christians."
I couldn't resist a slight snicker.
"You mock our religion?" she asked. "Are you so given to the devil?"
"From what I know of your Christian ways, I think I prefer the devil."
The good woman's face went white. She would be my first contact with another sort of Christian, the one who truly believes, and labors mightily, and in whose veins the milk of human kindness runs in plenty and spills for all.
"Child, do not voice such sentiments, ever again! You will be whipped and have the devil tortured out of you. Now, hurry and dress. Put on this robe and veil, and come with me. We will go right to chapel and say a prayer that God will guide you and save you."
I felt a little chastened by having shocked her. She led me down the long corridors to an open doorway through which spilled a lovely golden light.
All the inhabitants of the convent were assembled in this large, lovely room. I was to spend many hours in the peace of this sanctuary, and whatever horrendous things happened in this priory, this place alone seemed sacred and immune.
No one ever bothered me when I sneaked in here. And somehow, whenever I walked into the chapel, with its altar and stained glass windows, its fragrant candles perpetually burning, I seemed to leave the travails of my life outside the door.
But I did not like the priest who finally came out on that altar to perform rites I had never witnessed before. He was announced by tinkling bells, but I think the roar of a bull would have been more appropriate.
At one point in the service, the heathen girls in the convent were forced to go up and prostrate themselves before the altar, while the priest said special prayers over us, and then sprinkled us with water.
Sister Margaret explained later that it was holy water, designed to drive out the devil, and that we were heathen and therefore had more prayers said over us.
I would have liked to associate with my companions in exile and misery, but our very sameness precluded intercourse. We were forbidden to speak to each other for fear that we would infect each other with our devilish thoughts and conversation.
We could speak only to our familiars, those nuns assigned to us to instruct us and bring us along on the path to perfection, as it was called.
It was a concept which I had never heard of, perfection. And I spent long weary hours trying to understand it. .
My days and nights seemed to be filled with bleak, unremitting toil, my way honeycombed with long stone corridors that at first echoed my step, and then, as I learned to walk on the balls of my feet as the other nuns did, to reflect my silent passage in the glare of wax tapers.
I could speak, on occasion, to some of the other nuns who were Christian-born, and it was through them that I learned some of the history of the priory.
The evil nun who had initiated me so brutally and with such carnality was believed to be possessed. She ruled with an iron hand-
Many of the girls were daughters of noblemen, and I was appalled at the treatment they received and accepted from the hands of their tyrannical fathers. They were put away because there was not enough money for the sons, or because there were too many girls to be married off, or bought off I soon learned, and they were imprisoned behind these cold walls to pine away their lives.
I soon learned that even in the most stringent of confinements, there are pleasures to be had for the body as well as for the soul.
I enjoyed my contacts with some of these girls, and with some of the help who came to assist us in the fields, since the priory was self-sustaining both for the nuns, and for the priests in the adjoining priory.
I learned how to weave, how to cook, and I learned more of my letters. I also started to learn about their strange religion. I heard my people who were unbaptized referred to as the spawn of hell, and I grew accustomed to accepting the dictums of my captors.
For all. the harshness of the life, it was disciplined and regular. The food was good. We were well-clothed. I grew and prospered in my training.
I had given myself the task of surviving, and I had sounded out my captors, so I knew those traits they valued the most.
I was therefore, assiduous at my labors, docile in the extreme, and I learned to keep my own council.
It was a long, long way, eons away, when I was a happy, chattering little child. My father had always called me a magpie for my prattling and my mother frequently had put her hand to her forehead to beg me to desist.
I learned now, and in that silence stored up strength and wisdom. But my wisdom did not encompass their faith. Much as I loved some of the ideas they preached, I hated them.
They were murderers in the name of that Christ who was so foolish as to have died for humanity, and I wondered how they could so contradict his teachings. Not all of them did. Sister Margaret turned out to be a gentle if very firm teacher, and I had learned that first morning when she awakened me, not to offend her good soul, nor trouble her conscience by inveighing against my fate which had been occasioned in the name of that Christ she so obviously adored, loved, and strove to emulate.
I would frequently hear strange things in the night, as I lay awake, which often happened, and I wondered what kind of subterranean life went on in the convent.
I would eventually learn.
The more contact I had with the prioress, the more convinced I became that she was possessed.
Whippings were not uncommon for the least little infractions, and one day, I tasted that whip for the second time, and this time it was more vicious than the first time.
I had been assigned to pick the pears which were ripe in the orchards. I was working with Sister Corita, the portress, Sister Margaret, and a little girl named Sister Eulalia.
As I picked the pears, and put them into the baskets, I saw Sister Eulalia, up on her wooden ladder steal one of them, and put it in her apron pocket.
I did not even think to blame her for it. It is such a little thing. One piece of fruit amidst so much. Who would object to it?
When I had picked all the ripened fruit on the tree to which I had been assigned, I descended the ladder, at about the same time as Sister Eulalia. She was giggling. She took the pear out of her pocket, and bit into the luscious fruit.
Much of it was consigned to market to be exchanged for cloth and other necessaries. We had some fruit but not an abundance of it for our table.
Then, with her mouth full of the fruit, she offered it, very generously, to me, looking to her left and right to see if anyone were watching.
I got into the spirit of the thing, feeling my young juices rising to the fun of having stolen.
I was still young, although constrained to the tempered life that should have belonged only to the very old.
I took the pear from her hand, and bit into it. I was about to hand it back to her, when I saw her face pale. She looked at me as if to warn me.
I swung, to see the prioress behind me, glaring at me.
"Little heathen!" she snarled, slapping me brutally across the face. "Thou shalt not steal! You have sinned."
I had staggered against the tree. The fruit was still in my hand. Sister Eulalia stepped forward. I think she was going to confess her error, but I held up my hand.
"Yes, I stole it!" I cried. "What is one pear among so many!"
Sister Eulalia's jaw dropped, and her eyes filled with tears.
I knew I was stronger than the little girl so recently admitted to the priory. I knew also what was in store for me, and I pitied Sister Eulalia her innocence. I thought I could forestall that inevitable moment which must eventually happen.
"Go to your cell!" the prioress commanded. "You will be sent for!"
Still holding the pear, I walked through the fragrant orchard to my cell, and waited on my bed, my heart pounding.
At that time, I think I experienced the first impulses of rebellion, and I strove to keep them under command. As I sat there, I finished eating the pear, deciding that I might as well enjoy the fruits for which I was about to be punished. I knew I would pay ten times what that fruit was worth in pain and humiliation.
Sister Margaret appeared, her eyes bright with tears, her face the picture of a concerned distress.
"Child, what ever possessed you to do such a thing?" she asked, coming up to me.
"I'm sorry I have distressed you, Sister Margaret. I just thought it was fun."
Sister Margaret sat down on the edge of my bed.
"I am commanded to summon you to the lower room. The prioress says you have been there before?"
I rose and walked stiffly to the door. As my hand reached for the latch, Sister Margaret spoke again.
"Sister Eulalia told me what you did, dear. I have asked her to say an extra rosary for the good of your soul. You were very generous."
"I believe that Christ was, too, when he died for our sins," I said, not without a tinge of sarcasm, which thankfully, went over Sister Margaret's head.
"Praise God, you are progressing!" she exclaimed. "I'm afraid I dare not tell the prioress of your sacrifice, or Sister Eulalia will be doubly punished. I shall wait for you. Offer up your pain for your sins."
I failed to see the good of that, although she always counseled me to offer up something for my sins. But I failed to see how I had sinned. I had been captured, brutally used, sexually violated, taught to tread the path and assume the position that even a pet dog didn't have.
But I was reluctant to point this out to the good, if naive, Sister Margaret, afraid of destroying her belief in the basic goodness of everyone. Sister Margaret could even find excuses for the Prioress.
"Abbess Fredericka errs in zeal for our immortal souls. She is not evil, merely stern, as our Heavenly Father is stern when we have erred. She is not to be blamed for punishing us when we do wrong. Our way is much to simple to allow of transgressions against the rules," she would say.
Sister Margaret was the only nun in the priory with whom I spoke who did not believe that Abbess Fredericka was possessed of the devil.
As I descended to the dark chamber where I had first been initiated into the rites of the convent, my mind conned some of the stories I had heard, the hinted intimations that the prioress was far from good.
They talked of rites of the devil, of an ungodly liaison with a priest, of insatiable carnal appetites that would eventually ruin her and the priory itself.
I had listened attentively to these stories, as I had listened attentively to everything else my captors said, trying to understand them and their strange ways.
I turned to the right at the foot of the stairs, and headed toward the large, brass-studded door. My heart beat mightily against my ribs, seeking an exit. I forced it into some semblance of quiescence, knowing that I would need every inch of my strength to survive whatever ideal the irate prioress had for me.
I opened the door and walked into the room. The prioress stood near the fireplace, a whip in her hand.
"Come here!" she barked. I walked toward her, my skin crawling as I thought of the bite of that lash. I knew it couldn't kill me. She had used the same lash on me before. But I wondered at the same time, how easily pain can kill.
I had yet to learn, although I would, how much pain a human being can endure.
"Remove your clothes!" the prioress barked. I hastened to obey her, knowing that any hesitation on my part would only exacerbate that rage which glowered in her eyes, and caused her normally pale face to flush.
When I stood, trembling slightly, naked before her, she raised the whip.
"On your knees, dog, slavish daughter of a heathen slave!"
I winced and held my tongue, my loyalty to my beloved parents flayed mortally by her wicked statement.
"Aiee!" I screamed, feeling the lash bite into my soft white shoulders. My body had developed apace during the first year I had spent in the priory.
My breasts were full and round and ripe, my waist long and tapering, my body comely, strong with hard work, glowing with decent nutrition.
The prioress rained blows upon me, not sparing the rod or her arm. And with each blow she uttered a damning imprecation on my head and the heads of my deceased forebears.
I winced with each blow. The fire of the welts suffused my body. I closed my eyes, abandoning myself to the evil and the attendant pain of it, as the prioress lashed at me with all the fury of a devil.
My back crawled with the stinging pain of the lash. When she had covered my shoulders and my back, she moved down to my buttocks. I contracted my ass muscles when I felt the bite of the whip digging into my sensitive ass flesh.
As the whipping continued, I felt as if I were whirled out of time and into a wracking eternity of pain. My emotions became muddled, my brain seemed to shut down, the way one snuffs a candle.
I was an animal, a pain-wracked animal seeking to survive. Strangely enough, I felt my juices flowing.
As she continued to beat me, the juices flowed more and more hotly. I pressed my thighs together, my body swaying like a willow in the wind, as the whip kissed my flesh harshly over and over again.
With each blow, the heat of the burning welts seemed to form a warm puddle in the pit of my perverse womanhood. I was deriving sexual pleasure from the pain!
It bewildered me, frightened me! And at the same time, the impulses were so intense that I could not deny them.
I suffered a small spasm of ecstasy as the whip bit into the lower part of my fleshy globes.
I clenched my hands at my sides, mortally tempted to bring them to my passion-swollen breasts, to massage them, caress the puckered, tingling little nubbons of flesh which crowned my melon-shaped globes.
The prioress appeared to be having some kind of fit. I could hear her breathing behind me, labored, and harsh.
I refrained from turning around to stare at her, afraid of arousing her to further mayhem. Instead I submitted to the blows which seemed to get stronger and more intense.
"Dog of a heathen, are you sorry for your sins?"
"Yes," I said, not meaning a word of it.
The whipping ceased abruptly.
She walked around in front of me, and then I knew the reason for her labored breathing. I could tell that she was enormously physically aroused. Her hands came down, and she dropped her whip. Then I gasped as I felt her hands on my breasts. Her fingernails dug into the resilient flesh of my tits, and I shivered with a macabre pleasure.
Sharp bolts of pleasure seemed to fill my body, and the impact was almost like that of a fist pounding into my gut.
My flat belly turned almost concave, as the woman massaged my tits. And then her hands reached for her skirts.
I knew what to expect and I was waiting for it. I would service her. I would drive her to oblivion with my tongue, and there was not a little rancor in my determination.
She was a woman of flesh who propounded the things of the spirit. She was diabolically carnal. I knew that many of the nuns had been forced to do her bidding. I could tell by the expressions on their faces when they encountered her.
I refused to become craven. I would show her that I was a woman in my own right, a human being. I would surmount her evil by accepting it, and giving her better than she gave.
Her skirts rose higher and higher, until the black pelt which covered her love mound became visible.
The pungent perfume of her sexual arousal filled my nostrils. I could feel them flaring as I inhaled the strong, musky aroma.
"Eat," she gasped, her voice guttural with her lust.
I opened my mouth and leaned forward. I opened my mouth wide, and buried her pussy in my hot oral cavity.
"Ann!" she gasped. I raised my eyes and saw her face flushed with passion, snapping backward. Her mouth was wide open, and a thin trickle of spittle gleamed at the corner of her lust-sodden mouth.
I smiled, feeling for the first time in my life, a sense of power among my captors. I sucked on her already passion-bloated muff, feeling the incredibly soft texture of her inner flaps of flesh against my tongue, as I drove it into her cunt cleft, and strove to drive her insane.
I lapped upward, and twirled my tongue around her hard little love button, and then my tongue glided downward over her slime-coated lips, until the tip of my tongue discovered the quivering little hole which was the entrance to her womanly cave of lust.
I drove my tongue into the hot little hole, and felt my tongue become coated with the honey which was oozing out of her womb.
Her cuntal walls closed in around the tip of my tongue as I thrust it inward, in a rhythmic pulsation that caused her hips to hump forward. At first her rocking motions were gentle, sensual. Her thighs trembled as I placed my hands on them to steady myself and her.
My tongue moved faster and harder up and down her pussy lips. I lashed at her soft flesh with my tongue the way she had lashed at my body with her whip.
As my sense of power over her grew, I felt the tremor of sexual excitement building in my own body.
I felt as if I were possessed by some phallic demon, and wondered if there were any such creatures in the Christian lexicon of saints and sinners.
My fingernails dug into the, soft, trembling, heated flesh of the prioress's thighs as I lashed my tongue over her pussy meat, pulling on her thick wiry pubic hairs, until she was breathing like one suffering some sort of violent seizure.
And in effect she was.
I had discovered how powerful sexuality was, even among those devoted to the spirit. I had investigated some of the strange noises I heard at night in the convent, had found nuns locked in erotic embrace.
Deprived of men, and the normal sexual outlet, I had found their erotic struggles exciting in the extreme, and I had spent much time in my cell lost in the pleasures of self-stimulation.
Now, as my tongue probed among the soft bloated folds of the prioress's sex flesh, I strove to get her lost permanently in the labyrinthine ways of carnal wildness.
And mad I did drive her. Her body quivered and shook as if in upheaval. She slobbered incontinently, and wild high-pitched shrieking sounds came from her passion-constricted throat.
And the more excited she became, the more aroused I became, until I felt another subtle orgasm race through my flesh, causing my skin to crawl with the hot ecstasy which took possession of me.
"Arrggh!" she gasped, as she became lost in her sexual crisis. Her body snapped forward, her veil falling down over my wounded, stinging back. Her hands gripped my shoulders, her fingers like talons as they dug into my soft flesh.
Her chest heaved with her labored breathing, and her body quivered like one possessed with a dancing demon.
My tongue laved at her honeyed folds of flesh. I lapped up almost all of her juices, which flowed in such abundance that my cheeks and chin were covered with the hot effluence which cascaded from her hot little hole.
Her knees were bent slightly, and the tremor in her muscles was violent, as her orgasm peaked.
For one brief moment as I labored with my mouth on her pussy, I would have sworn that I had killed her with pleasure.
Her face went from red to stark white, and then flushed red again, as she struggled in the delicious throes of her orgasm.
My own juices flowed hotly out of my hole, and stained the soft inner flesh of my thighs.
I could feel the slime trickling warmly down my legs, could feel the hot throbbing of my own pussy, and I knew I needed relief immediately. Even the burning pain of the whip lashes which striated my smooth white skin added to the erotic welter of carnal joy which seethed in my young body.
I bit into the prioress's clitoris, and then flicked my tongue, lizard-like, back and forth over her hot, creaming pussy.
She collapsed in a heap. For a moment the contact of my mouth with her love mound was broken, but I hastened to correct the situation. As she writhed spastically on the floor, her ass slapping up and down on the cold stone, her black robes bunched up around her waist, I quickly spread her legs, and dove into her hot, heavily-furred delta of delight again.
Again I covered her thickly-furred muff with my mouth and drove her orgasm higher. The more excited I made her, the wilder my own blood boiled in my veins.
It was truly a berserk, twisted coupling, and it left us both weak and shaken when it was over.
She sent me summarily to my cell for the evening, without supper. I didn't care. I had my own need to fulfill, and the sooner the better!
CHAPTER FIVE
I did not dare rend the delicate fabric of my maidenhead; I knew that this was prized above all things among these strange people.
But I did everything short of deflowering myself.
Having reached the; haven of my room, I closed the door and went to the bed. There was no such thing as real privacy in the priory. Anyone could walk into one's room at any time. Therefore, F left my gown on.
I lay down on the bed, and lifted my gown above my slender waist. Then my fingers sought and found what I wanted so ardently-my own secret sexual flesh.
I ran my fingers through the swollen swamp of my lust, feeling the juices flow lavishly from my hot little hole.
I inserted one and then two fingers into that hole, and slid them in until I could feel that little barrier which signaled my virginity, still miraculously intact.
I pumped my fingers in and out of the hole, and enjoyed the feeling of my cuntal flesh rippling around the prying digits of my hand.
My fingers were soon coated with the thick honey which flowed copiously from my little well of lust.
I moaned, and closed my eyes. I brought my knees up to my full, ripe breasts, to expose more of my nether flesh to the stimulation of nty hand.
As I pumped my two fingers in and out of my wet and wanting womanhood, I used the tip of my index finger of the other hand to stimulate my clitoris. The little love button became inflamed, engorged with lusty blood. It felt as if ice-cold waves, alternating with fiery hot waves of pleasure were being flashed by the hardened little button throughout my whole body.
Every fiber of my flesh seemed to partake of the carnal bliss which seethed in me.
I continued to pump in and out of my pussy, stopping just short of my maidenhead, wanting desperately to rupture it, to rend it from me forever.
In my country, hymens were not so valued. A good strong woman who could bear children, and help in the fields was much more valuable, and could be forgiven almost anything.
But not in this strange culture which bought and sold women as if they were cattle.
I pitied these women who submitted so unthinkingly to their fate. I moaned as I felt the heated release building to an explosive intensity.
My hips writhed on the bed, and I could feel the sweat pearling on my overheated skin, as I continued to stimulate myself.
As I frigged myself, I thought of the abbess, struggling on the floor in her sexual insanity. I had caused that. I had made the woman a seething mass of writhing flesh, her mind driven clear out of her body, as she suffered the sweet throes of her sexual climax.
Now I sought the same escape for myself. My fingers pumped more and more frenziedly in and out of my pussy, and the finger with which I was stimulating my hard, tingling little love button increased its pressure as I twitched it back and forth and then circled it around and around the hard little nubbin of delight.
I felt my pussy meat swelling outward, pouting from between my plump, golden-fringed white outer lips.
I removed my finger momentarily from my clitoris and pulled on the blond maidenhairs which covered the delta of my delight, enjoying the slight stinging sensation.
My buttocks were burning from the lashing I had received, and even that stinging heat seemed to permeate my body, heightening the erotic effect of my self stimulation.
I thought I was going slightly insane myself as I lost myself in the pleasure I was creating in my body.
My flesh was like a musical instrument, which tingled at my command making hot wild music which carried me away to a plain beyond fear and humiliation and degradation.
My skin crawled and rippled, as if it were possessed by tiny little demons who massaged my flesh, and aroused me still further. I may indeed have been indulging in a rite of their own, but I didn't care. The pleasure was so wonderful, and it gave me rest from the travail, the bleakness of my life.
I felt myself being transported to a fleshy plain of a myriad of delights, where my body, outside my rational control, taught me more than any of the manuscripts I pored over.
I cried out as the ecstasy built. I felt as if I were melting, my fleshly limits expanding until I virtually oozed off the bed in heated delight.
Again the tip of my finger sought my clitoris, as I felt the sweet explosion rumbling in the depths of my wet and willing womanhood. I longed for a man at that point, and the vision of Damian, my beloved Damian, filled my head.
I had not thought of him for a long time, but the' impact of seeing his much-loved features, triggered the incipient orgasm which was rumbling ponderously in the depths of my belly.
My mouth opened in a silent scream, and I felt my body stiffen, my .toes curling inward, as the hot ecstasy took possession of me and caused my muscles to grow taut.
And then with a loud whoosh of breath, I writhed passionately in the . pleasurable paroxysms, which wracked my body.
My fingers moved faster and harder in and out of my hot little hole, the pumping motion necessarily shallow in order to prevent the tearing of my hymen.
The finger which pressed into my clitoris moved spastically back and forth over the little button which vibrated with the intensity of the sensations which surged through it.
I came down from that little death slowly. That was what orgasms appeared to me to be-little deaths, little escapes into a seething limbo where there were no troubles, no cares, no such thing as being heathen or Christian.
I was still quivering with the lusty pleasure I had given myself when I stood up.
My thick, warm honey oozed out of my tingling little well of lust. I re-arranged my habit so that it bore some semblance of rightness, and then went to my desk to study my lessons.
When I had finished, I got undressed, and went to bed. Again I sought that delicious nothingness of sexual surrender, and I frigged myself to exhaustion, thinking all the while of the prioress, lost and helpless as my mouth drove her into the chaos of sexual insanity.
Then I fell asleep.
I was awakened by a sudden soft noise, and I reared up from my pillows, startled. I looked out the window.
It was not yet time to awaken, so it couldn't have been Sister Margaret coming to rouse me.
"Who?" I gasped.
"Shh! 'Tis I, Sister Eulalia."
I heard the rustle of her garments as she walked swiftly toward the bed. Then I saw her shadow, dark against the glowing embers of the fire in my grate. She dipped a candle into the embers, and lit it, and then, shielding the light, she set it on the desk.
She turned and walked toward the bed.
"Poor Alethea," she murmured, her eyes bright with tears.
She produced a lovely alabaster jar, and took the cover off it. The room was filled with a sweet scent.
"Let me attend to your wounds," she whispered.
I pulled the covers off me, and got out of my gown. I felt her hands, soft and gentle on my striated back. The salve was warm and wonderful on my burning skin. I felt my flesh, which was contracted with the pain, relax, and a warm glow filled my body.
She anointed all the wounds, and then helped me into my nightgown again.
Then she reached into her pocket, after depositing the alabaster jar on the desk.
"It is for you, a gift. My mother makes it and sends it to me. I have more," she said.
She pulled out a thick bundle of linen, and opened it up on my lap. I gasped.
Hidden in the folds of the linen napkin were thick slices of mutton, and freshly-baked bread, thickly covered with golden butter.
My stomach contracted. I had been sent to my cell without supper, and my sexual labors had made me very hungry indeed.
"You must be hungry, so I have stolen this for you."
"It is a sin to steal, Sister, Eulalia, but I am most grateful for the food. I am very hungry."
"I will think twice before I commit that particular sin again, but after what you did for me, I could not let you remain hungry. Here, eat."
I ate the good food" she had prepared for me, and then with a sly grin, she reached into the folds of her gown again, and produced another napkin.
Still grinning, she opened the napkin on my lap.
I gasped. Nestled in the linen, were three ripe, fine pears.
"You have paid for the fruit. I think it only just that you should enjoy it," she said, smiling shyly.
I smiled, and offered her one of the pears.
"Oh, no," she said. "I couldn't."
"You must," I said, smiling at her, and persisting. "How shall I enjoy the sweetness of this fruit if you do not share it with me. You have risked a lot to procure it."
Reluctantly, she accepted the pear, and silently we enjoyed our ill-gotten gains, reveling in the warmth and the companionship.
When we had both eaten our fill, Sister Eulalia bent over and kissed my flushed cheek, and then tucked me in for the night.
I slept sweetly, happy in the knowledge that I had gained my first real friend. And such we would always be.
I was awakened early, but very refreshed, by the mysterious tolling of a bell.
I had never heard that particular sound before, and it distressed me. The bell tolled monotonously, and it sounded like the voice of doom, like a thousand tears, and the great wailing of a multitude of bereaved people.
I know my imagination is vivid. It has always been that way. But I shuddered at the fateful sound of that tolling bell-a single brass voice that rasped through the night, cutting through sleep, destroying rest, and auguring I knew not what.
I could not sleep, and. so I arose, and bathed. I applied some more of the sweet and soothing ointment to my wounded back, and then I sat at my desk, conning a manuscript, and waited. .
I had become exceptionally talented in the art of patience.
I soon heard scurrying footsteps up and down the hall, soft padded presences that warned me the rest of the priory was also astir, no doubt disturbed by that bell of doom.
And still I waited. A glance at the sky told me that it lacked still some three hours to dawn, when we normally rose for matins.
I. saw a golden chink of light beneath my door, and then it opened quietly. Sister Margaret was standing in the doorway. She looked grave, even frightened.
I rose and faced her. , "Good you are awake. Blessed be the maiden who keeps the lamps trimmed," she said, loosely paraphrasing one of Christ's parables. I smiled at her.
"What is that bell, Sister Margaret?" I asked.
"That is the death bell. The Black Plague has struck again. We must go to the chapel and hear "Mass for those who have already been carried away by it."
By this time, my knowledge was sufficiently sophisticated so that I knew what the hideous Black Death or Black Plague was. It was the same monster of death which had mercifully for me, carried away the duke to whose sexual servitude I had been initially consigned.
I knew that it plundered nations, and was disrespectful of rank or station. It swept all before it, the rich and educated, the poor and helpless, the thief along with the priest, the maiden and the fallen woman.
I went with Sister Margaret to the chapel, where that priest was. He said a solemn mass and told us that the Plague was a visitation from God for our wickedness.
He paid special attention to the heathen women in the congregation as he spoke, cautioning us to give up the ways of the devil and make our peace with God.
Again I pondered my own puzzlement. A God who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, and that, too, was beyond 'me, who, like a ravening wolf, having delivered himself up to murder to make amends for our sins, then, struck us down like the meanest feudal lord his serf!
These Christians were exceedingly contradictory!
That bell became part of my flesh, and my senses. It tolled throughout the day, and all that night. There was precious little sleep to be had. At dawn, Sister Eulalia knocked on my door.
"Come, I will show you something you shall never, with the grace of God, see again," she said, beckoning to me.
I rose, put on my cloak and followed her. We went to the parapet of the priory, and I got my first glimpse of Paris at dawn, and from a height.
What I saw turned my blood to ice in my veins.
Throughout the city, I saw fires raging, aggravating a nightmarish aspect.
"What are those fires?" I asked. There were several other nuns on the roof, watching the spectacle.
"Those are the homes of the diseased. When the last dead are taken out the homes are burned, especially the homes of the poor, on the streets behind the avenues," Sister Eulalia said.
The River Seine flowed, turd id, and lit luridly with bonfires which lined its banks.
"And those fires by the Seine?" I asked.
"The clothing and personal effects of the dead and diseased," Sister Margaret said, coming up behind us.
The picture struck me to my heart. Then another spectacle caught my gaze. A turgidly flowing, milling mass of people heading toward the gates of the city, which were locked.
"What are those people?"
"Poor souls!" Sister Margaret gasped. "They are people seeking refuge, seeking to escape from the Plague. They will not escape. They will be turned back by the guards at the gate."
A loud outcry of many voices was heard, and I looked toward the north gate. There I saw a small riot taking place. I saw reflected in the light from the many bonfires, the flash' of steel, the cry of mortally wounded people, as they tried desperately to escape the disease-ridden city.
In the distance, on the banks of the Seine, stood a great hulk of a building. On its roof, I saw bonfires burning, with ant-like figures of men attending them.
"What is that building there?" I asked.
"That is the great Notre Dame. Right now it is filled with the dying. Its great spaces echo with their cries. It is a din to affright the soul and freeze it," Sister Margaret explained to me.
I turned to her.
"You have seen it?" I asked.
"I delivered food at the door today. We may not go in. And if we do we may not come out until the Black Plague has run its course."
As my eyes surveyed the scene, I saw something else in a field behind a batch of houses. It was a great pit, and it was lined with torches burning brightly.
"And that?" I asked, pointing.
"Listen!" Sister Eulalia gasped, "and you will learn."
I heard a horrible cry.
"Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!"
I saw doors open, I saw men and women carrying out bodies. Some of them were wrapped in sacks. Others were naked. Others were dressed but uncovered. All of them were twisted, their limbs wracked out of shape and comeliness by the horror which had visited their bodies.
"Has this happened so suddenly?" I asked, watching as tumbrils stopped before the doors, each tumbril already filled with the twisted remains of what had once been men, women and children.
"No, my child. It is just reaching its peak. When the people discover someone with the signs of the Plague upon them, they are afraid to report it to the authorities. They will be locked in their houses for at least forty days, or until the authorities are sure they have not been tainted.
"This of course, for many of the poor folk, is a sentence of death since they have to be close to those things handled by the Plague victim, and they almost always succumb, poor lambs."
Sister Margaret's voice was vibrant with compassion.
The tumbrils rapidly filled with the dead bodies, and then I saw them heading toward the field. I realized with horror exactly what that yawning, fire-limned pit was, and it appeared to me that I was seeing the incarnation of the hell which I had been taught by the Christians.
It was a common burial pit. The tumbrils were dragged by men right up to the lips of the yawning pit, and there, their piteous loads were dumped, like loam upon a newly-planted field, into the depths of the pit.
Again and again, I watched the tumbrils come to the pit, and dump their hideous load.
"Why are they not buried the way we buried old Sister Constancia?" I asked.
"There are, alas, too many dead, my daughter, and the fear of infection is great. They are brought out at night, and put into that common burial ground, and their bodies will be covered lightly with dirt, until the next night when the next load comes."
More than the tolling of the death bell, the constantly repeated command, "Bring out your dead!" weighed on my soul, oppressed me.
I heard the soft tinkle of the bell, calling us to matins, and mass, ringing up, counterpointing the heavy, steady, ominous tolling of the death bell.
We descended to the chapel and prayed long and hard. Again I heard the priest, Father Malachi, inveighing against our pagan ways. The Crusades had swelled the number of heathen girls in the convent.
Some of them were not so fortunate as I. They had been brutally deflowered by the vicious harbingers of Christianity, and they would spend their lives probably as I would spend mine, in unremitting toil, treated worse than the worst whore-and against our wills, against our very natures, which were as delicate and even more humane than the natures of our captors.
Breakfast was, as all the meals were, silent, but added to the silence was the constant din of the bell of death, and the weight of our own fears, the horror of what we had witnessed on the parapet.
I was drawn to that parapet again that afternoon, when I had finished my chores. I watched in the ugly light of day, the horrors that occurred in the Paris streets, the sight of people dropping in the streets, men shrieking and running from houses, half-clothed, tearing their hair and running like maniacs through the streets, avoided by people who scattered before their paths, like flies.
These I learned, were those who had reached the crisis of the illness. The pain of the boils was apparently insuperable, and combined with the fever, it drove many men and women, mad.
I truly pitied these people and I reluctantly pulled myself away from the nightmarish scene, the grisly incidents, which passed before me
The streets were filled with armed guards. The tumbrils and those who pushed and dragged them, wove through the streets, performing their grisly task.
The yawning pit so luridly lit the night before, was now limned with the greasy smoke of the same torches, which were kept alight in order to contain the miasmic atmosphere of the Plague-stricken dead.
Some of the smoke reached my nostrils as the wind changed. The acrid stench of smoke was mixed with the sweeter, more nauseating odor of decay and disease, the smell of death.
I retched, and left the parapet, to continue my mundane existence in the convent.
It did not remain mundane for long.
Soon the bell was ringing constantly from the gate, as beggars piteously pleaded for food and shelter.
The prioress forbade any of us to go near them, for fear of contagion, and most of us obeyed but reluctantly. After all, our duties in life were stated quite clearly. We were supposed to be of service to suffering, sinful mankind.
The prioress seemed to have different ideas
No one chafed more under the stricture than Sister Margaret, who wailed and moaned, and wanted to help.
Then, just after our evening repast, she begged admission to the prioress's cell.
I suspected what she was requesting, and when she emerged from her interview with the prioress, radiant with happiness, I walked up to her.
"You are going out to help them, aren't you?"
"Yes, my daughter. I will not be back, if I come back at all, until the Plague has spent its course. I will go to Notre Dame and nurse these poor lambs of God."
"Let me go with you," I gasped impulsively.
Sister Margaret looked grave.
"My daughter, you do not know what you ask. The sights will be hideous, appalling. You stand in great danger of death."
"I want to go. I wish to help, too."
Sister Margaret paused and then turned toward the door from which she had just emerged.
"I shall ask the prioress." She approached the door again, and knocked. I was right behind her when she was bid to enter.
"Sister Margaret, have you changed your mind? Have you considered what I have told you?"
I looked at the prioress, sitting in that ornate chair, idle, evil, and still somewhat frightening to me.
I stepped forward.
"I wish to accompany Sister Margaret to
Notre Dame, there to nurse the sick and the dying."
There was a harsh bark of laughter from the prioress.
"Better you than she," she said, indicating Sister Margaret. "Very well, little heathen, I give you permission right willingly. Go and take care! Come back alive if you can."
I turned and left and prepared quickly to leave, perhaps forever, with Sister Margaret.
I bid goodbye to Sister Eulalia, who wept on my shoulder, and kissed me.
"Till we meet again," she said, biting her lip, her tears flowing fast from her eyes.
"God willing," I replied, using a phrase which Sister Margaret had taught me.
"I shall pray for you," Sister Eulalia said, hugging me again.
For the second time, lost in her sweet embrace, I experienced the rare sweetness of Christianity, and found it good.
I was to learn something of its hard-core strength, the mightiness of the love of those who followed it at Notre Dame, and I would learn to loathe with a great passion those who perverted it.
I learned that Christ did live in some of his followers, and his life was mighty and awesome to behold-and adorable!
CHAPTER SIX
In the four years I had been in the priory, I . had never been beyond its walls.
When Sister Margaret and I left and heard the creaking iron gate close behind us with a portentous clanging, we were as women condemned. We carried with us, medicines, such as could be spared from the convent, I secretly considered that the prioress was rather close-fisted in the matter, some food, and our meager belongings.
Behind the grilled fretwork of the iron gate, we saw many of the nuns, watching us gravely as we wended our way out into the world.
"I am frightened, Sister Margaret," I said. "I have never seen this city."
"I, too, am afraid," Sister Margaret said, laughing heartily. "I have not seen the outside world for lo these twelve years now."
"Did your father put you here?" I asked, feeling exceptionally close.
"Lord no, child! My father switched me royally when I told him I wished to become a nun. He wanted me to marry and raise children, to be happy in the world. I finally won out, though."
"Is he still angry with you?"
"No. My father rests in the bosom of Abraham, daughter. He died full of grace, and I was at his bedside when he closed his eyes in his last sleep."
She turned and looked at me. Her face, far from being filled with doom, was alight with joy and excitement.
"And you, why did you wish to accompany me on this trip which may have no return?"
I looked at her and wondered myself. Perhaps the tenets of Christianity, being taught to me by Sister Margaret, were taking root in my soul, because I truly wanted to help these poor people.
"I want to help. I want to find forgiveness for these people who have murdered my mother, my father, my whole village, who have despoiled me, who treat me as lower than the most miserable beast of the field.
"And I want to be with you," I said, looking up into her kindly brown eyes. "I love you, and you have been a sweet salve in my miserable exile."
Sister Margaret's eyes filled with tears. She dropped her bundle on the road, and turned to embrace me.
"Dear child. You are like the daughter of my own body to me. You are a sweet and kindly little heathen, and God will reward you for your generosity."
We pursued our deadly way into the seething cauldron which the city of Paris had become, singing psalms as we went.
As we got closer to Notre Dame, the sights became increasingly horrendous. The dead lay like discarded rags in the streets which were littered with them. Many of them were being rifled by theives.
Shots rang" out, and there were constant outcries, as those who tried to escape the city were thrust back through the gates by the armed guards.
The tumbrils rumbled over the cobblestones, and the air reeked of death and decay, of unwashed bodies, and the stale, insidious miasma of fear.
Occasionally, one maddened with his disease would brush by us in his mad flight to nowhere. At first this alarmed me, until I realized that we would be living with them, working among them, and that it no longer mattered.
We were risking the disease to help those who could not help themselves.
We finally reached the portals of the great Notre Dame. The cathedral towered over me to an inconceivable height, as we strode up the stairs.
"Stop!" A guard said, stepping forward.
"We are from the Priory of St. Armand. We have come to help," Sister Margaret said. The guard looked from Sister Margaret to me, and something akin to an expression of awe spread over his surly features.
"This child, too?"
'This child, too," Sister Margaret averred.
Reluctantly, the guard let us pass, and we went into the cavernous reaches of the great cathedral, which had been given over to the care of the sick. They formed a carpet on the great hewn stones of the floor, and the sounds which reached our ears were deafening and frightening.
It would soon come to pass that we barely heard the great din, hearing instead those who needed help the most, directing our attention to their meager pallets, if indeed they had anything on which to lie.
A tall, very slender priest, with a mane of thick white hair approached.
"What do you here?" he asked, frowning.
Again Sister Margaret repeated her message.
Again the same questioning look toward me, and this time I affirmed my intention to help.
The priest's name was Father Robert, and he was the first priest I had met since Father Malachi. He was kind to the point of almost total self-abnegation, and I soon grew to love him.
I met many people in the massive cathedral, who had no motive for condemning themselves to the company of the diseased and dying, other than the motive of simple human kindness.
I felt my ideas beginning to alter slightly as I went about my business. There were days when we labored without respite, and even without food. At the height of the Black Plague there was precious little food to be had, with the exception of some of the farmers, who brought produce in fairly regularly.
There was one. They called him the Bastard Leon. He came regularly once a week, with a heaping truck load of supplies, anything, he said, that he could beg, borrow, or steal, in addition to what he culled from his own garden.
For some strange reason, he looked familiar to me, and I searched his face, from the distance we were required to keep, to see where I might know him.
He was exceptionally tall, well over six feet, and magnificently built. His eyes were black, and he had thick black hair that curled. His hair was very glossy, and the curls assumed the aspect of clusters of grapes, fresh from the vine.
His teeth were straight and white and even, and his smile was a glory which touched me as I hadn't been touched since Damian.
"Why do they call you a bastard?" I called one day, as I hauled the baskets of garden truck up the stairs, to be received by the workers at the top.
"Because I am one. It's a grave curse."
"How so?"
"I cannot get married to a decent girl. I cannot ever hold office."
I straightened up and looked at him.
"I am sorry for the ways of your people that so condemn you. You are a good man."
"Aye, so he is, my child," Father Robert said, smiling with a kindly warmth at us both.
"And you are a courageous woman," the Bastard Leon said, "to nurse these poor people like this. And so young and beautiful!"
I blushed at the compliment.
"I, too. labor under a curse," I said.
Leon laughed.
"What is that?" he asked.
"I am a heathen. I have been transported from my homeland. My family are dead. I am the lowliest of the low."
"As are we all, my child," Father Robert said, patting me on the shoulder, and taking a basket from my hands to pass up the cathedral stairs. "And of course you have come into your spiritual inheritance."
"What is that?" I asked.
Father Robert straightened out, his gray eyes regarding me gravely.
"Why, surely you have been baptized?"
"No, Father. I am not yet considered worthy."
Father Robert said nothing else, but when we had stored our wealth from Leon, who was impoverishing himself for our benefit, according to the good priest, he took me to Sister Margaret. .
"I understand this poor child has not yet been baptized!" he exclaimed.
"Oh, Father, it is a great grief under which I labor," the good woman said. "She has mastered her catechism, and she lives our life well, but the prioress, ever anxious, I believe, to keep our faith pure, has not given in to my pleas to have her baptized."
"This may not be!" the man cried, as close to anger as I had ever seen him. "Baptized she will be, right now. She has long since proven herself more than worthy of thee name of Christian. If anything she is already baptized by her acts of charity above and beyond the call of devotion. Come!" he said.
I was taken into one of the great apses of the church, in which were stored medical supplies. There was a baptismal font there.
"What is your name?" the priest asked me.
"Alethea."
"How very beautiful," the priest said, as he put on his stole.
I was baptized right then and there. One of the men who did the heavy work was my godfather, and Sister Margaret was my very joyful godmother.
"It will be nice, if God wills it," Father Robert said, after the simple ceremony, "if you become a saint and have your name added to our lexicon. It is a lovely name. Do you know what it means?"
"No, father," I said, having long since lost most of my innate knowledge of my people and their customs.
"Pity. It would be interesting to find out."
There was no time for celebration, no time to express the joy we felt. I would not, I think, have felt such joy in the priory, where the life was cramped and stiff, and hypocritical.
Out here in the streets, for all the decay and misery, for all the acts of human rapacity, life was far kinder, sweeter to me.
I mentioned this one day to Sister Margaret.
"Aye. I feel as if my soul has stretched, and I question my conscience, why I joined the priory. Was it to hide from this good, sweet world, however troubled it is. I have seen more goodness in the space of ten days here than I did in all the years at St. Armand."
I was frequently sent out to bring food and medicine to those poor who were afflicted with the Plague. After I became familiar with the streets, and did not need a companion, I would go alone. .
I wore a special cloak which marked me as a tender of the sick. People made way for me as much out of respect for my calling as for fear of being possibly contaminated.
I carried a little bell, which I rang, calling out, "Make way, make way for a tender of the sick."
The rich, I had noticed, had long since abandoned the city, and there was no help from them, but frequently as I made my way to an afflicted house, some poor crone, or shabbily-dressed old man would throw a coin in my path.
. "For the sick, sister, for the sick."
I truly grew to love these people, and found my forgiveness in the knowledge that they knew not what their wealthy masters did! And thafin itself was a blessing.
And so I labored. One night, after working for two days straight and two nights, I sank down on my pallet, exhausted, to sleep. I was shakea awake by Goody Renette, one of the good women who were nursing.
"Child, it grieves me to awaken you, but we have just received a new batch of the sick, and we may not be spared. One of the men in the corner tells us that his little son lies stricken at his home. It is in the alley behind the Church of St. Madeleine, two Rue de Criffe. Would you go and fetch the child here? He is all alone. His father was stricken on the way home from the market to fetch food for him."
"How did he get out of his house?" I asked. When a known victim of the plague was reported, everyone was closed into the houses, and a guard posted.
"He slipped past the guard who had fallen asleep," Goody Renette said.
I rose quickly, and took a shabby blanket from one of the shelves where supplies were kept, and trudged out of the cathedral. It was dark, and the tumbrils were rumbling.
"Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!" they called.
I ran to my destination. The guard still lay against the fence, sound asleep and snoring.
I went up to the shabby door, and opened it, creeping inside. There were two shabby, but clean rooms, and in the second one, wrapped up on a cot, lay the child.
He was well past the crisis, and although he still had fever, he was sleeping restlessly, the sweat pouring from, his frail body. With some devoted care, he would be one of the lucky ones. He would survive.
I picked up his frail body, and wrapped him in the blanket. He stirred weakly, opened his eyes, and then closed them again, sinking against my breast.
I held him tightly against my now fully-grown breasts, my belly aching for the children I would never have, for the man I would never love, the land I would never till again, but in the service of the priory-if indeed I lasted out my life there. I remembered again, wearily, the promise I had made to my dead father.
I left the house and made my way over the dead bodies, past the piles of refuse, toward the cathedral, ringing my bell as best I could to warn the people of my passage.
As I passed through one particularly dark alley with my precious burden, I heard footsteps behind me. I turned, and saw a shadow lurking in a doorway.
I rang my bell, and called out to warn him, "Make way! Make way for a tender of the sick."
It did not occur to me, until I heard a vicious, low-sounding laugh, that the shadow was stalking me.
Frightened, suddenly, I quickened my footsteps, clutching the little boy more tightly to me.
The shadow behind me came closer.
Now I had two fears, and the first was for the boy. I turned a corner, into another alley, which curved behind the great cathedral. To be so close and yet so far!
I secreted the boy, still wrapped snugly in the blanket, in a doorway with a great red mark on it, indicating that the Plague had visited the house. Then I straightened up to confront my stalker.
I had a few pennies on me, and not much more.
The man approached. His face was evil-looking, twisted.
"What do you want? You can have my money," I gasped, throwing the few coins into the street in front .of me.
"Phagh!" he snarled, "it is not coins I need."
With that, he lunged at me. I uttered a shriek of fear as I felt my body landing heavily on the cobblestones.
I saw a big explosion of light behind my closed eyelids, as my head hit the pavement, and then there was a moment of unconsciousness.
But I was awakened almost immediately by my ravager's rough hands pawing at my naked breasts. He had ripped open the bodice of my gown.
I opened my mouth to scream, and realized that he had put a gag in my mouth. I raised my arms to struggle with him, but they, too were bound!
The man was panting, as he raised my gown above my waist, and then I heard his disgusting, guttural grunts, as my naked pussy was revealed. I felt the flush of shame suffusing my face as his hands began to paw the golden-furred triangle of my womanhood.
I felt his dirty fingers prying between my cunt cleft. Again I tried to struggle, but the man was more powerful than I. My heart beat powerfully against my rib cage, as he spread my legs wide, and then crouched between them. With one hand still pawing my belly and my pussy, his other hand loosened the cord which held his shabby trousers in place.
They dropped, and his raging manhood was revealed. It bobbed with the throbbing lusty blood which surged into his thick, hard member. My body stiffened.
I was about to be raped. The very thought of it frightened me so that I lost my power to struggle momentarily, and that moment was enough for him to press his prick head, gleaming with the juices already seeping from his come slit, against my virginal cunt.
Holding my thighs with brutal, and powerful hands, he lunged inward. I felt my pussy walls being stretched for the first time in my life by a man's long, hard rod, and I screamed, the sound muffled behind the gag he had stuffed in my mouth.
His cock head butted against my maidenhead.
When he felt the thin membrane, he uttered a loud, lewd laugh, and thrust inward again, wincing with the effort. I felt a fierce pain as the delicate flesh was rent from my pussy walls.
A great surge of blood welled up around the wounded flesh, as he lunged inward again, until his cock was buried to the hilt in my ravaged pussy.
I started to weep, as he started to move in me. He pulled his prick out to the tip, and then thrust it inward again.
He had braced his hands now on either side of my body, as he lunged into me over and over again. He was sure of his prey. I was thoroughly impaled on his brutal rod of flesh.
I felt his cock head butting against the fleshy roof of my cave of lust. I wept for the loss of my maidenhood, wept at the brutal uses to which I had been put, and which I was being put now by my ravisher.
His hard throbbing cock abraded the walls of my pussy, creating a heat which surged upward in me.
Again my perverse passions got the better of me. As he kept lunging in and out of my cunt, I felt my pussy lips starting to swell, felt them pouting from between my golden-fringed outer lips.
His hairy loins jarred my body as he lunged inward. I felt his balls slapping against my quivering ass cheeks, felt the blood of my slain virginity seeping out around his raging prick, as he continued to pump into me, each thrust inward harder and more brutal than the one before.
But the heat rose, and like the time when I was ass-fucked, I felt my pussy walls stretching to accommodate his massive manhood, and I felt the perverse juices starting to flow.
As my honey oozed downward, it lubricated his plowing prick, easing his passage in and out of my hot little hole.
I felt my cuntal walls closing in spastically around his hard-driving prick, felt my passions rise.
That which I had always lusted after was mine now, however violently it had come to me. I was being raped, and I was deriving pleasure from it.
No matter how hard I struggled with the passional impulses of my body, no matter how hard I tried to stem the tide of my dew of desire, it flowed in ever-increasing quantities, mixed with my blood.
It oozed out of my tightly-stuffed little hole, as the man's prick pillaged my hot wanting tunnel of lust, and trickled down my ass crack:
I moaned behind the gag, as I felt my body melting with the heat which suffused me. A hot welter of passion built up in my belly, seeming to turn my flesh inside out.
My hips started to hump upward, as he continued to lunge into my teeming well of lust over and over again. I thought briefly for one moment how weak my flesh was in the face of sexual pleasure, and then I surrendered to his wildly thrusting prick, as he scored the depths of my womanhood.
He ravished my pussy, and sent wild tremors of delight coursing through me. My hips started to hump upward, my upward-bucking hips meshing with his downward thrusting lunges. His cock seemed to drive deeper and deeper into my hot tunnel of love, and I felt the quivering of an orgasm deep in my belly.
I thought my insides had turned to jelly as the wild, lawless passion mounted higher and higher.
I closed my eyes, and saw wild fires behind my tightly-closed lids. The fires descended, turning my body into a seething cauldron of lust and pleasure.
My nipples, long since puckered by the man's rude hands as he massaged my magnificent tit mounds, started to tingle, adding to the insane melange of pleasure which coursed through me.
My whole body quivered with the impending sexual crisis which gripped it. I whimpered behind the gag, feeling my muscles go taut.
Then the hot climax exploded in the depths of my womanhood. I felt my muscles quivering, and tingling with erotic excitement. My pussy walls closed around the man's prick, and sucked on it, almost drawing his juices out of his balls.
. His hairy loins were now thoroughly coated with the honey which flowed from my pussy.
My whimpering got desperate as the orgasm mounted, until it had taken possession of me as a demon might. My body bounced and twitched under the hard-humping body of my rapist.
I heard him gnashing his teeth at the height of my orgasm, and then I felt for the first time, the warm rush of his manly fluids into my body. My pussy seemed to close in around the hot slimy liquid, which swelled the slimy tide which was coursing from my body. I felt the hot river trickling down my ass crack, coating my humping quivering ass cheeks as they bounced up and down on the cobblestones. There was a slimy pool forming beneath my ass flesh. '
My orgasm was sustained and powerful. The man emptied his balls into me, as I started to float downward from the seething heights I had reached. My whole body seemed to be bloated with . the heat which had surged through me.
His prick was still lodged in my pussy, as I finally gained enough rational control of my body to arch upward, trying to dislodge the beast from me. I felt enormous guilt at having experienced pleasure from my own rape.
Another strangled cry issued from my gagged mouth, and then I heard footsteps running toward me.
I was appalled. The last thing I wanted was to be discovered in my shame. I arched upward again, my bound arms aching at the strain.
"In here!" I heard a voice shout.
Suddenly, I was surrounded by men and two women. Someone hauled my depleted rapist, too far gone to even be aware of the commotion, off my body. I whimpered behind the gag, as one of the women reached down. She saw my garment and reared backward.
"Oh, the shame! Oh, pity! Mark, help her! I dare not touch her. She's one of the nurses from the cathedral."
"Here, I will risk contamination!"
The other woman rushed forward, and unbound me and pulled the gag out of my mouth. The woman looked down at my blood-stained thighs, as she lifted me up. I tried to cover my nakedness, ashamed, and weeping.
"To tend the sick and be subjected to this!" the woman who had helped me exclaimed.
I heard a strangled cry, and looking in the direction of the cry, I saw one of my saviors plunge his knife deeply into the throat of my attacker.
"Death to the rapist! Death twice over!" he cried, lunging inward with his knife again. Another man came toward me, as the woman was helping me to close my rent garment.
"Here," he said, "take this."
He pulled off his great coat, and handed it to me to cover my nakedness.
More foot steps were heard running, and then Father Robert came into view.
"We caught this man trying to rape her!" one of the men said. "He lies there, dead for his evil."
"Oh, my poor daughter," the priest exclaimed, helping me to my feet. I was shaking like a leaf.
"The child," I gasped, pointing to the doorway. "Is he all right?"
The confusion was the work of a moment. The man was left in a pool of his own blood, while Father Robert took the child, and the kindly woman helped me toward the cathedral.
I looked down once at the face of the man who had raped me, and who now lay dead at my feet.
I gasped with horror and surprise.
It was Barton, the son of Lord Landau.
It took all my strength to get to the cathedral where I was bathed, and put to bed, to sleep away the impact of the horror.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The sky is paling in the window high up in my cell and my candle begins to gutter, as I write this meager history of my life.
I survived my rape, and lived to nurse the sick until the Black Plague passed over Paris, taking with it three fourths of the population, as near as we can guess.
At first, I was withdrawn, and avoided Sister Margaret, being ashamed of what had happened to me, ashamed more than anything of the pleasure I had received.
Father Robert came to me one day as I was putting supplies away.
"My child, you must not labor under the sin of another. Sufficient unto the day be the evil thereof, and what happened to you was not of your own choosing."
I broke down and cried. Father Robert patted my shoulder, and I forgave myself my own erring passions.
Within a week of my rape, Sister Margaret was stricken with the plague. I nursed her devotedly for four days, but she expired, still joyful that she had been of service.
There was no time to weep, as I withdrew while Father Robert heard her last confession. They talked for a long time, and I wondered what in that good, innocent woman's life, there was to tell!
Finally, she called me to her side, and took my hand in hers.
"I have loved you like my own daughter, and I shall pray for your happiness," she whispered.
"But you won't die," I protested.
She smiled radiantly.
"Oh, I feel such happiness. I am about to approach my Maker!"
She half rose from her pallet, and then her body sunk down, divested of that good sweet soul which had been one of my only consolations at the priory.
She was taken away with the rest of the dead, to be buried in a common grave. One by one, as the Plague intensified, the other nurses, men and women, were stricken.
At one time, during the height of the disease, there were only six of us, nursing hundreds! Father Robert was there, morning, noon, and night, devoted to the sick, along with one other abbot who had come from a distant priory, having heard of our plight.
And then, I too, was stricken.
I survived the nightmare week of my illness, and staggered from my pallet as soon as the course of the disease was run, to continue my nursing chores. This I did over the protests of the doctors and nurses present.
Of course, I could have been sent back to the priory. Those who survive the disease, do not get it again, nor can they give it to others, according to the physicians.
Knowing this, I became braver, going into districts where every house bore the red mark of the plague, bringing food, water, medicines, cleaning the homes, smoking them to purge them of the Plague.
Then back to the cathedral to continue my rounds.
Finally, the load of the sick dumped on our steps became lighter and lighter, until finally, the cathedral was emptied out, the last ill person staggering out on the arms of his happy wife.
I was present when the cathedral was re-sanctified.
My gorge rose at the idea of going back to the priory. There was only one person there I would have cared to see again, and that was Sister Eulalia, if she were still there.
After the magnificent consecration ceremonies, Father Robert took me to one side.
"It is time to consider your future life, my daughter. What is it you wish to do?" I smiled at him.
"I do not wish to return to the priory," I said.
"Would you do an old, foolish man a favor?" he asked.
"I would do anything for you!" I exclaimed.
"Go back. Go back and do your duty until you are sixteen. I understand from Sister Margaret, that you will be sixteen in two summers."
"That is true," I replied.
There wasn't much else I could think of to do.
I looked at the kindly man who had meant so much to me.
"Very well. I will return as you have suggested. But what is to happen to me when I am sixteen?"
Father Robert looked at me and smiled.
"Wait and pray until then. It is not for us to know the workings of God's will, nor for you to know what your womanhood will bring you. Wait and pray and be patient."
"I shall do as you have asked, Father," I replied, kissing his hand. He caressed my silken hair. Sister Margaret and I had long since dispensed with the elaborate wimple and veil, and wore only white linen cloths on our heads, soaked in vinegar to protect us from the evil vapors of the plague.
Now my hair was free, and flowed down my back. I was wearing a simple gray dress provided by one of the grateful parishioners of the parish with a white bodice and white cuffs.
The following morning, I gathered my few belongings, and made my way to the great walled priory again. I started down the steps with a heavy heart, and suddenly was aware of a crowd gathered.
I looked up. They were all pressing flowers and gifts of food into my arms. Some of them kissed the hem of my robe.
I blushed as I made my way through the silently adoring crowd, feeling their love wash over me in waves.
From feeling terribly lonely, I felt suddenly a kinship with them. I smiled and they returned the smile. They wished me well in half a dozen different tongues.
Father Robert accompanied me to the gates of the priory.
"Remember, watch and pray. You shall see . me again," Father Robert said, as he rang the bell.
The old hunchback answered it. He looked at me with rheumy eyes and blinked with disbelief.
"Sister Margaret?" he asked, as he swung the door open.
"She has gone to her Eternal Reward," I said. I turned and took Father Robert's proffered hand and brought it to my lips again.
"God go with thee," he said, smiling.
"And with thee," I replied.
I heard the gate clank behind me, and again my heart felt like lead. But the coldness must perforce diminish. I had six months of living memories, six months of devotion, and the resultant love of the people to warm me, and I had also Father Robert's promise that he would see me again.
I suspected that perhaps he had some plan for my life that I could not formulate for myself, nor fathom from his intimations. But I had made a promise to him.
I resolutely entered the priory, determined once again to survive to the best of my ability.
I made my way to the prioress's study, having divested myself of the gifts with which I was laden.
She partially rose from her chair, her eyes widening.
"So! You have survived."
I was appalled. If anything, she looked more insane, more possessed, more evil than ever.
Her eyes burned with a feral glint that struck the fear of the devil into my newly-baptized soul, finally. The devil I had had trouble believing in, since men themselves were so condignly evil in themselves. I couldn't picture how God would need a devil with men to do the devil's work.
"Yes, Abbess Fredericka. I have survived," I said.
My travails had done nothing to alter my comeliness. I had always suspected that I was handsome, although the nuns and the prioress insisted on calling me "ugly" and "misshapen."
Once on the outside, I had found a mirror, and discovered that I was every bit as beautiful as the most beautiful women I had encountered. My hair was gold, the color of straw. My eyes were green, and large, filling my face. They were thickly fringed with dark brown lashes.
My complexion, from being deprived of the sun, had turned pale instead of its remembered tan, and it was like alabaster. My nose was straight and fine, my lips full and pink and ripe.
My tall body was thin and strong, and my breasts were ripe, my hips full and firm. The prioress sat down in the chair again. "Sit!" she said.
The chair which she indicated was the same one in which I had sat when I first came to the priory. As was my wont, I held my peace, and kept my own council.
I did not tell her I had been baptized. I told her as little as possible, answering her questions directly and readily.
"I suppose you have been corrupted by the world, or else disgusted by it, and are happy to return."
"I love the world, Abbess Fredericka," I said. "I met more goodness in the Paris streets than I had ever expected."
"All the more reason to do penance here, then," she replied.
Her new program for me was incredibly stringent, and it included flogging once a week, said flogging to be applied by her.
As usual, I was required to service her with my mouth. I did it readily enough, knowing that two years was not really that much time, considering the length of time I had already survived.
Sister Eulalia managed to reach my cell one evening, and she came bearing a gift-a pear!
We embraced. She wept at my safe return, and she wept at the loss of Sister Margaret, whom she had loved as I loved her.
"But she died happily," I said, caressing her hair, as I held her. "She died loving God, and her fellow creatures. She died for them."
"Greater love hath no man.. . " Sister Eulalia said through her tears.
"Yes. She is with God, there is no doubt in my mind."
"What is it with you?" she asked, when she had recovered somewhat from her grief, "that Abbess Fredericka assigns you to solitude and prayer, and penance? How have you offended her?"
"She says she wants to bring me closer to God, to purge me of the evil of the world which might have tainted me."
There was a note of sarcasm in my voice. like Sister Margaret, however, Sister Eulalia's basic goodness did not perceive it.
"Oh, never! You, too, risked your life for love of your fellow man," she cried, protesting.
"Nevertheless, I must resign myself to what has been laid out for me," I said, smiling at her. "Now, go to bed. The fires die, and the night is fast approaching morning. I do not wish you to be caught."
Sister Eulalia left. We had several other clandestine interviews, but not many. The prioress, who appeared to be getting more and more demented as time passed, kept me pretty much in seclusion, until yesterday:
At that time, she sent for me, and told me that I was to be baptized. My instinct about people, honed by the months I spent among them, especially when they were in extremis, at which time people reveal much more of themselves, told me that there was something wrong in the manner in which she couched her announcement.
"You should keep vigil tonight, and tomorrow you will receive your last test," she said to me, her voice quavering with an excitement that I recognized immediately was sexual in nature.
"You will give me my last test?" I asked, not without sneering mentally at the bestial nature of that test.
"No, that will be Father Malachi's chore."
I froze, and I have remained frozen ever since. The dawn creeps upward. The hand that will open the latch on my door will not be the dimpled, strong, competent hand of a loving Sister Margaret. It will be some minion of the demented prioress.
No, I doubt very much if she is possessed of the devil. I think she is genuinely insane, and I think there is good reason to believe that one day she will lose her mind altogether. Her sexual excesses have told on her brain, and she no longer has the control of her body she should.
But I dread this interview with Father Malachi. A thousand biting pangs of fear war with each other in the pit of my belly.
For I have not told them that I am already baptized, and that I was allowed to keep my own name, any more than they have been informed that I have lost my maidenhead.
And I fear the outcome of this "last test."
There it is. The click of my latch. It is one of the new postulants. I shall put my pen down. I may never lift it to paper again.
My hand wavers, but true to my promise, I have survived. Survived, but to face what further horror!
I am locked in my cell, to await the decrees of the mad prioress and the demented Father Malachi.
The postulant who entered my cell took me to the room with which I was now familiar. She left me at the door, looking at me with some fear in her eyes.
"I am to leave you here, and return," she said, handing me a lighted taper which stood in a scone beside the door.
"Go quickly," I said, my voice hoarse with my own anxiety. I waited until I heard her footsteps on the stairs leading up to the warmer reaches of the priory, and then resolutely, I opened the door, and stepped inside the tall, vaulted room.
Father Malachi and Abess Fredericka were standing on either side of the fireplace.
"Come forward," the priest commanded.
I stepped forward. Before the fireplace, they had erected what looked suspiciously like an altar.
"Strip!" the prioress commanded, as she took the candle from my hands.
I obeyed, by now denuded of my last maidenly refuge, shame. I was resigned to the fact that no one would respect my body.
I saw the evil gleam in the priest's eyes, and my worst suspicions about him were confirmed. Here was a man as depraved as the prioress.
"Lie down here, on your stomach," the prioress said.
I lay on my stomach on the altar, as I had been commanded. The preist stepped forward, and clamped my wrists into leather bonds which were attached to the wooden top of the altar, and then he spread-eagled my legs and did the same.
Again I felt the juices in my body rise up and flow, and this time, I surrendered to the sensation. Those passional urges had been my salvation after all these years of abuse.
I looked up and saw the prioress holding aloft, a goatskin bag which was filled. I didn't know with what. From the end of it dangled a tube which was the cured intestine of some animal, and the tubing was surmounted by a glass bulb, which was hollow and elongated.
I gasped. A clyster bag! But I did not need an enema!
My mind boggled at the depths of this insane woman's sexual perversion! I knew in a blinding flash what she intended to do.
"Today you will be baptized," she said, "if you pass this test. This is boiling holy water. We will purge you of the last devils that remain in you," she explained.
I struggled with my bonds, too late to be effective, since I was securely tied to the alter.
I felt my ass muscles contract, protesting against the anticipated pain of the hot water.
The priest and the prioress stood at the foot of the altar, and the priest leaned forward and roughly spread my ass cheeks, revealing the puckered brown flower of my asshole.
I winced, and then bit my tongue. I must survive, and it was vain to waste my strength crying out. These merciless fiends would never listen to me.
I felt the glass bulb pressing against my rectal opening, and then the prioress thrust it inward brutally.
I felt my asshole walls spreading, as she inserted the bulb fully into my anus.
.I clenched my fists, and pressed my burning forehead against the rough wooden floor of the altar, waiting.
"Ann!" I gasped when I felt the first surge of the hot water boiling into my bowels.
I clenched my asshole against the glass bulb, trying to prevent the water from seeping into me, but I couldn't, stop it. I felt the hot, searing flow of the liquid pouring into me, bloating me, surging upward through my bowels in a burning wave.
My body stiffened with the excruciating pain, and trembled. I felt the sweat pearling on my smooth white skin, felt my belly bloating, swelling with the unnaturally heavy load.
The prioress emptied the hot contents of the goatskin bag into my bowels. I thought I was going to explode with the heavy load which filled me. In addition, the fact that I was lying on my belly increased the pressure.
The water swirled around in my intestines, and I tensed my ass muscles, to restrain the load which sought its way out.
My belly began to cramp as she removed the glass bulb. I grunted, and listened to the heavy breathing of the perverted pair.
"Now you will answer my questions," Father Malachi intoned.
He began to quiz me on my grasp of religion, going deeper and deeper into the fine points, as I struggled with the swirling, burning weight of the hot holy water, which surged through my belly.
I could feel my face blushing. My ass muscles cramped with my efforts to restrain the flood. I was desperate not to humiliate myself by allowing the heavy load to explode from my bung hole, and soil me, embarrass me more than I had been embarrassed.
My hands and feet were cramped with the tension as I clenched them, throwing every ounce of strength into the effort to withhold the load which wanted to burst out of me.
And still I answered his tedious, tendentious questions.
Finally, he stopped. He had apparently had enough. I had had more than enough and I was in agony!
"I am satisfied. She is ready. Just one final trial, and then she is worthy to be one of us."
