"Now, we will have the little demonstration as I requested it," he said kissing her upturned mouth again, opening it and running his tongue inside her lip. She looked into his eyes. There was nothing but these eyes looking at her. "Captain," she thought the word. Then she saw the tangle of blond hair over the sunbrowned forehead with its deep lines. But he had drawn back, leaving her standing there.

"You will put your hands between your legs," he said softly, settling again in his oaken armchair, his breeches neatly fastened, "and will show me your private parts immediately."

She shuddered. She looked down. Her body felt hot, drained, and that weakness had now infected her every muscle. To her own amazement, she dropped her hands between her legs and she felt the wet slippery lips, still burning, pulsing from his thrusts. With her fingertip she touched the vagina.

"Open it and reveal it to me," he said, resting back in the chair, with his elbow on the arm, his hand curled under his chin. "That's it, wider. Wider!"

She stretched her little nether mouth, not believing that she, the bad girl, was doing it. A soft, lazy sensation of pleasure, an echo of the ecstasy of the embrace, further softened her and quieted her. But the lips were so wide apart they were almost aching.

"And the clitoris," he said, "lift it."

It burned against her finger as she obeyed.

"Move your finger to the side so that I can see," he said.

And quickly, as gracefully as she could, she did.

"Now stretch the little mouth wide again and thrust your hips forward."

She obeyed, but with the movement of her hips there came another wave of pleasure. She could feel the blush in her face and in her throat and her br**sts. She heard herself moaning. Her hips rose higher, moved ever more forward. She could see the ni**les of her br**sts contracted to tiny bits of hard pink stone. She heard her own moan become louder and supplicating.

It would begin any moment, the desire that was so sweetly waning. Even now she could feel the lips thickening against her fingers and the clitoris beating hard like a little heart and the pink flesh around her ni**les tingling.

She could hardly stand the desire, and then she felt the Captain's hand on her neck. He had swung her forward and around and into his lap, with her head back over the crook of his right arm, his left hand forcing her right leg widely apart from the left, and she felt the smooth calfskin jerkin against her naked side, the leather of the high boots under her thighs, and she saw his face above her. His eyes were boring into her. He kissed her slowly, and she felt her hips lift. She shuddered.

He held something dazzling and beautiful in the light before her, and she blinked to see it. It was the handle of his dagger, thick, encrusted with gold and emeralds and rubies.

It disappeared and quite suddenly she felt the cold metal against her wet vagina. "Ooooooh, yes . . ." she moaned and felt the handle slide in, a thousand times harder and crueler than the largest organ, it seemed, as it lifted her, crushing against her smoldering clitoris.

She almost screamed with desire, her head falling back, her eyes blind except for the Captain's eyes looking down at her. Her hips undulated wildly against his lap, the dagger handle going back and forth, back and forth,

until she could not endure it and the ecstasy came again paralyzing her and silencing her open mouth, the vision of the Captain vanishing in a moment of total deliverance.

When she came back to herself, there was still the wild tremor in her hips, the vagina giving quiet gasps, but Beauty was sitting up, and the Captain was holding her face in his hand, and he was kissing her eyelids.

"You're my slave," he said.

She nodded.

"When I come to the Inn, you belong to me. From wherever you are, you come to me and you kiss my boots," he said.

She nodded.

He lifted her to her feet, and before she quite understood what was happening, she had been forced out of the little room again, her wrists behind her back, and she was being marched down the little winding stairs as she had come up.

Her head was spinning. He would leave her now, and she couldn't bear the thought of it. "O, no, no, please don't leave," she thought desperately. He gave her bu**ocks warm spanks with his large, soft leather-gloved hand and forced her into the cool darkness of the Inn again where six or seven men were already drinking.

Beauty caught the laughter, the talk, the sound somewhere of the paddle coming down and some poor slave groaning and sobbing.

But she was being forced into the open square before the Inn.

"Fold your arms behind your back," said the Captain. "You're to march before me with your knees high and you are to look straight ahead."

THE PLACE OF PUBLIC PUNISHMENT

The sunlight was too bright for a moment. But Beauty was busy folding her arms and marching, lifting her legs as high as she could, and finally the square became visible as they entered it. She saw its shifting crowds of idlers and gossips, several youths sitting on the broad stone rim of the well, horses tethered at the gates of the Inns, and then other naked slaves here and there, some on their knees, some marching as she was.

The Captain turned her with another one of those large soft spanks, squeezing her right buttock a little as he did it.

Half in a dream it seemed, Beauty found herself in a broad street, full of shops much like the lane down which she had come, but this street was crowded and everyone was busy, purchasing, bargaining, arguing.

That terrible feeling of regularity came back to her, that all of this had happened before, or at least that it was so familiar that it might have. A naked slave on her hands and knees cleaning a shop window looked ordinary enough, and to see another with a basket strapped to his back, marching as Beauty was being marched, before a woman who drove him with a stick - yes, that too looked regular. Even the slaves, bound naked on the walls, their legs apart, their faces in half-sleep, seemed just the ordinary thing, and why shouldn't the young village men taunt them as they passed, slapping an erect c**k here, pinching a poor shy nether mouth there? Yes, ordinary.

Even the awkward thrust of her br**sts, her arms folded behind her to force her br**sts out, all of that seemed quite sensible and a proper way to march, Beauty thought. And when she felt another warm spank she marched more briskly and tried to lift her knees more gracefully.

They were coming to the other end of the village now, the open marketplace, and all around the empty auction platform she saw hundreds milling. Delicious aromas rose from the little cookshops, and she could even smell the wine that the young men bought by the cup at the open stands, and she saw the fabrics blowing in long streams from the fabric shop, and heaps of baskets and rope for sale, and everywhere naked slaves at a thousand tasks.