Leah's Punishment Read online

  'What is it?' Leah whispered.

  For the first time, a frown clouded Lord Shardlan's brow. A cold shiver rippled over Leah's belly. With one hand he took gentle hold of her tightening nipple. With a single finger of the other hand he continued to tickle-stroke the tiny entrance to her pee-hole and he waited patiently until she whispered: 'I . . . I agree.'

  As the master nodded very slowly, Leah felt the sublime shudder of inner submission being shed between her legs, then the soft after-beats coming through the sensitive, pushed-out inner flesh, now gently stabbing itself upon his fingertip. Behind the firm enquiry of his blue-grey gaze Leah detected the reassurance that she needed, that all would come well, whatever the treatment. Lord Shardlan then sealed the bargain with a slow gentle kiss upon her lips; meanwhile, high up between her legs, that fingertip continued to press pure pleasure up through her.

  He left Leah's side, stepped briefly outside then returned, apologising for the delay. 'My instruments are in the boat. My assistant will bring them.' In the meantime, he asked that water be administered to Leah.

  'It is not from the spring,' the Gangmaster told him.

  'No matter.' Lord Shardlan watched as Denni was put in charge of helping Leah drink. He seemed to be weighing Denni up. Then he looked at Ean. Finally he went over to him, removed his gag and asked him something. When Ean was slow in replying, the Gangmaster threatened him with the belt but Lord Shardlan said: 'No – let him be,' then immediately looked for Leah's reaction. Leah thanked him with her eyes and took more water from Denni, in acquiescence to the new master's wishes.

  The assistant then appeared and handed her master a small casket. She wore the cap and tunic of a guard but appeared fresh-faced and youthful. She treated his lordship with familiarity rather than deference and kept stealing glances at Ean as she stood casually by the door. Lord Shardlan now returned to the matter of Leah's testing. The casket had a lid inlaid with polished flat gemstones, mainly green and red, and was lined with green velvet. The objects inside it were shiny black, perhaps the length of two finger-joints, and shaped like tapered rods in progressively increasing girths. Each one had a neck crowned by a ball-shape at the wide end, with the greatest girth coming at the shoulder just below the neck. 'They're worked from smoothest ironstone – quill-stone, I believe the diggers call it,' said his lordship. 'I had them made up by the jeweller at the Retreat. They're copies of gold originals. I'll need you on the bed.'

  He waited until Leah had complied. 'Turn over. On your knees. Spread them open. Lift your bottom. Belly down, hard down – hanging.' She quickly became keenly aware of the quantity of water she had drunk. Very gently he felt for the opening. 'Ah – don't tighten. Keep pushing open.' The tip of the first instrument touched, chill as ice. She shuddered sexually as it started to invade so private and lewd a place. The minute mouth opened and the fleshy tube began to swallow and distend. 'There – keep pushing. Come here, Denni, and watch. Does she not look beautiful with this going in?'

  'Mmmm.' Denni crouched and kissed Leah's back and touched her labia while his lordship selected quill-stone rods of steadily increasing gauge. Applying each one individually and gently, using spittle as a lubricant, he slipped them up the narrow barrel of Leah's pee-hole until the shoulder was swallowed and the ball was cupped against the minute erect rim. The smoothness of sliding, the coldness, the precise pressure of the smooth ball against that rim – when Leah was already so aroused – induced a sexual feeling both unnatural and exquisite. All the while, Denni was toying with her labia, gently pulling, softly trying to spread them back.

  After each insertion, with the rod in place, his lordship would cradle Leah's taut belly with his hand and ask her to bear down. Her sex would stay open like a swollen-petalled flower. Then his fingertip would press the ball of the instrument against the mouth of her pee-hole, transmitting feelings of acute strangeness and pleasure through the cold, rigid smoothness of the rod into the warm tube within. Before one instrument was fully withdrawn, her flesh already craved the next girth of distension. Finally a tightness came that made her gasp. 'There,' his lordship said with a sigh, withdrawing the quill-stone. 'We have your measure.'

  He got up quickly, taking the instrument over to Ean. Leah heard a groan and glimpsed his lordship shamelessly squeezing the root of Ean's erect penis. When he came back, the quill-stone was soaked in pre-come. 'See – he salutes you. Now relax; let the insertion accomplish to the hilt.' Trembling, Leah felt the delicious sliding penetration start again. She shuddered at the sensation of Ean's pre-come being pushed up her pee-hole. 'Just a little more – take the shoulder – and the quill shall lodge without slippage. Bear down. Kiss her, Denni. There . . . Done!' Leah gasped; she felt her sex contract, drawing the ball securely against her, locking it in place, expelling Ean's excess pre-come in a globule which his lordship gently spread about her clitoris.

  'Close your legs,' his lordship whispered, and he picked her up in a bundle and took her to the big mirror to show her. The only visible sign – the ball – between her legs was tiny, yet the feeling was so strong, like having a second clitoris. 'Touch it,' he told her. Nervously, her fingertips tried and the first tiny self-touch made her gasp, for it felt as if she were touching the head of a sexual bolt screwed all the way inside her to the tip of her spine, so deeply rooted was the pleasurable feeling.

  He took her back to the bed and made her lie on her side with her thighs closed around her sex while he confirmed with the Gangmaster the arrangements of transfer. Every pulse beat Leah could feel vibrating through that little quill of arousal pushed up her pee-hole.

  Her heart leapt when she heard the Gangmaster offering his lordship Ean too, declaring: 'He's been nothing but trouble; he's a thief.'

  His lordship was unwilling. Then Leah spoke out of turn: 'My lord, please take him.' He stared his disapproval at her defiance. 'Master, please?' she begged very softly, one last time, before lowering her gaze.

  Then the girl-guard at the door interjected: 'My lord, perhaps the boatwomen's barracks might use him.'

  He glanced back in mild annoyance then shrugged. 'Very well.'

  Then Denni blurted out: 'I want to go too.'

  'Take no heed of her,' said the Gangmaster.

  'Surely, Gangmaster, as a free girl, she may at least ask, if she pleases?' Lord Shardlan retorted.

  'Let me speak with her,' said the Gangmaster. He took her outside. A few seconds later came the harsh sounds of the crop then sobs of desperation. Then Denni was brought back in tears.

  'Tell him,' said the Gangmaster.

  'I w-w-want to . . . stay here,' Denni sobbed.

  'Very well,' said Lord Shardlan curtly. 'Then all is settled. We take these two.'

  Leah wanted to plead for Denni but his lordship's eyes narrowed upon her to silence her. Denni was bundled out before she could even say goodbye. Lord Shardlan came to Leah. 'Know your place – lie still. Raise your leg. Let me touch in there.' She murmured under the feeling as his fingertip pressed the little ball of the insert up against the mouth of her pee-hole. Then he whispered: 'Denni is not a slave like you; in the end, she does as she chooses. Would you have me do to her what the Gangmaster just did, to attempt to induce her to leave?'

  'Not that, but –'

  'Enough. Had she spoken up or even shown a sign, I might have intervened. Neither you nor I know what drives her. Her resolve will surely find its level in the end.' Then he turned to the girl-guard. 'Get our own shackles for the male.'

  Ean was hobbled and tagged. His wrists were fastened behind him to a chain around his waist. Finally a cruel clamp was applied to his ball sac – two flat pieces of wood fastened round it with wooden screws that could be tightened. 'It secures swift compliance,' Lord Shardlan explained. 'Even the slightest girl can handle several men.'

  'What about her?' the girl-guard asked. 'All runaways need restraining.'

  'Her restraint is well inserted; I shall monitor her,' he replied coolly.

  He carried
Leah to the small boat. The girl led Ean. 'Don't hurt him,' Leah pleaded. 'She will take appropriate care,' the master answered.

  There were three other runaways aboard but the master avoided them. He laid Leah on a little bed, on her side with one leg stretched out and the other tucked high and his fingers in between them, at her core, gently squeezing the flesh around the quill-stone insert, gently pressing the protruding ball, gently loosening it when the pressure became too strict to bear, allowing a little warm fluid to escape, sometimes on to the bed but mainly by dispersal over the skin of her thighs or, if there was a lot, upwards towards the nipples, keeping them in erection, then licking them clean. He asked if her breasts had lately been put in constraints to shape them, then said: 'For now, we shall let nature take its course. What your master does with them when he gets you back will be his affair.' He made no move to penetrate her. Several times Leah touched and squeezed his penis and made him leak but not come completely.

  For her, the keenest pleasure came when the bedded insert was very slowly twirled – it brought a feeling at once intense and uncontrollable, deeply sexual, deeply wrong, deeply sweet. It made her reach up to kiss the master's mouth, suck his tongue, hold it captive, just as her pee-tube held that twirling quill-stone up inside her, clinging to the uniqueness of that pleasure until she groaned into his mouth. Her nipples felt as if needles had been put through them; her belly cramped and yet through her sex the climax was exquisite and would not cease. His hand was becoming saturated, for she could not stop herself, nor did she want to. 'We shall have a wet-slave of you yet,' Lord Shardlan whispered, slowly kissing the dangling musky droplets from his fingers then kissing Leah's lips, imparting her own wetness to them, nuzzling them gently, and all the while keeping the pressure of an obsessive finger up against the tiny ball at the tip of the insert that was bedded so precisely to engender such restive feelings in that special place.

  While his lordship's finger nurtured his budding wet slave, a nurture of a different sort was happening to Ean, who was chained in a separate compartment from the runaways and whose penis was already very erect after the earlier touching. The young girl-guard had now re-entered the compartment and put down her whip. Silently she removed her tunic top, revealing breasts that were beautifully sculpted, markedly swollen, with the burden of plumpness drawn to the tips, which were very dark brown, almost black, as if she might be pregnant. Her small belly bulged in beautifully tight roundness against her low-slung belt. Without a word she approached him and knelt before him as he stood chained naked against the wall, his erection straining helplessly upwards, driven by the vision of her sexuality and by the pervasive sexual pleasure-ache of the clamp about his ball-sac.

  She leant back, unfastened her belt and let her trousers fall to her knees. Then she knelt up and began gently to tighten his clamp with very slow turns. Each time his breathing stalled, she pressed her soft full lips to his penis, in the very sensitive place under the head, sucking moistly until his breathing was forced to resume, when she very slowly tightened the screws again, watching his face, waiting for his chest to heave and his erection to stand like a rooted bone, when she again took up the sucking. While she sucked, she was touching herself between the legs, and the wet glans of Ean's penis could feel her agitation through the tremors in her breathing.

  His sac throbbed as if trapped between a finger and thumb. But transcending this came a strange feeling, as if the clamp were instead around the gland inside him. The girl was murmuring as she masturbated herself and all the while those soft lips sucked until Ean gasped and groaned and the girl withdrew. 'Wait,' she said, and swiftly tightened the screws one full turn, then slid her lips fully over the head of his penis, enveloping it like a sheath and sliding moistly all the way down until he felt the glans mate to the soft yielding funnel of the back of her throat. She hunched forward, wanting to take it deeper, then gulped all the ejaculate that the pleasure-tortured gland inside him yielded. Through all Ean's agonised spurting she remained impaled by mouth upon his penis, her nostrils flared, groaning, swallowing, her whole body shuddering, as if she were trying to swallow the very flesh that she had forced to subservience in her throat.

  When the girl-guard had for the present drunk her fill of her prisoner's semen, she stood up, buckled her belt but left her swollen dark-nippled breasts standing proud. Then she put her arms around his naked waist and her breasts around his standing penis and the pulsing she induced there caused the last dregs of issue to spill upon her velvety nipple-surrounds. As she took suck upon her velvet, the little boat was already pulling through the serpentine portico, and the first rays of sunlight were gleaming on the golden domes and alabaster spires of the Tithe Retreat.

  She looked up at Ean again, her eyes glistening darkly and wantonly. 'I might not put you to the boatwomen. I might keep you to myself.'

  'As my torturer?'

  'As your liberator.'

  Over the next few days Ean got to know his guard a little – her traits, her perverse wishes – but he never got to the bottom of that extraordinary statement. She never alluded to it again. She seemed to want to know all he could tell her about Leah but she would disclose nothing concerning Leah's whereabouts, simply saying reproachfully: 'Be assured, my lord master is protecting her.' Then her attention would drift. But whenever she returned from a meeting with her master, she would be brimming with arousal and would want to take Ean there and then, in the little store-room, and have him penetrate her standing, while he was still shackled. She taught him to postpone his climax by withdrawing and clenching the muscle inside. Repeatedly she would make him do this and would watch his penis jerking, then she would slide on to it again and kiss him in the most delicious manner till his climax neared again, when she would slide off him and proudly watch his struggling. Eventually she would instruct him to come and would slide her mouth all the way down his shaft and swallow every drop while touching herself to bring on her own pleasure. Her eyes would be closed and she would be mumbling incoherently around his slippery shaft. The more he thrust into her mouth the stronger her climax and the louder her muffled gasps and cries. Once, amid her shudders, he made out a phrase that afterwards echoed perplexingly through his mind: 'My precious, my only, my lord . . .'

  13

  The Dresser

  Her name was Ulline, though the wealthy merchants who made the journey up to the Tithe Retreat, high above the heat and bustle of the seaport, generally knew her as the Dresser, a title which Ulline preferred, for its formality and its surgical overtones, which instilled an appropriate measure of fear in the potential recipients of her expertise. Put plainly, she got the girls ready – though Ulline's readying had little to do with frippery or attire. Having once acted as surgeon's assistant on the ships, she preferred to think of her suite as a lazaret. It overlooked the staircase of locks that guided the waterway down to the sea and it bridged the ground between the toll-house proper and the alabaster towers of merchant-pleasure. Every girl had to pass through Ulline's surgical fingers and be assessed for possible improvements to the contour or the response of intimate parts.

  Every morning she put on fresh white linen – a thin bib to contain her breasts, whose perfect shape shouldered against the sheerness of the material, and a sarong sheathed low about her waist, leaving her midriff bare. In a different setting she would have been thought beautiful. She was tall and graceful, high cheekboned and with delicate features – small ear lobes, small nose and mouth and slender, adept fingers. Her hair was silken and long. Like the girls in her charge she went barefoot.

  Today, her round would begin with the gentle lacing-up of a girl whose faultless labia had been punctured like the flaps of a boot, with a precision that would do credit to any artisan. Under gentle fingertip pressure, the twelve gold sleepers slid out one by one, showing her punctures healed and nicely open. The flesh of those beautiful labia swelled under the provocation of touching. They felt deliciously alive and very, very warm, like the loose pelt of a
naked newborn animal.

  Ulline fed the fine, gold-stranded satin cord carefully and delicately through every precisely circular perforation in these soft smooth velvety lips, as the girl moaned faintly, gently drew the cord tight, gently tighter, sealing off the upper part of the vulva, hiding all the pastel pink, then securing the moist warm closure with a perfect bow. The girl's erect clitoris, constrained by the tautness, protruded like a sweetly pushable button from beneath its hood. Though she was sealed by the lacing, still there was space for a finger to get within her sex to test her temperature: in fact there was space for at least three fingers, or perhaps the head of a sufficiently inquisitive penis. Once the girl was laced up, Ulline left her aroused sex to come to terms with its new binding and moved on to check the progress of the others.

  She stopped at the third bed. The girl was sleeping. Her wrists were tied above her head and she lay on her side with her knees tucked up. Ulline drew back the coverlet. Lodged between the girl's thighs was the swollen ball-sac of an alabaster dildo. The rest was inside her sex, keeping it open. The insertion had come sweetly – the gentle ritual of it all – the deep examination, then the false starts as the vagina contracted, then finally the delicious sliding up to the balls. Alabaster was smooth when polished and not too dense and did not in itself cause chafing, though stimulants could be applied if torment was needed. The dildo had a leather loop attached to its ball-sac so that when it was not inside the girl it could be hung at the head of her bed, for the muscle of the vagina benefited from periodic relaxation: then the return of distension would feel more telling.