The Emperor's New Pony (11 page)

“P-please…” she whispered, and he relented, easing his thighs apart and letting Edera spread her knees to reveal to him the delightful secrets of her shaved cunt. It was the lads who shaved the girls, once a week—as with everything else, they took liberties with those fillies not reserved, but Edera got only a shaving. Though Ranin could not bear to be present when the Amidians were shaved, he knew that Alira had already earned renown in the stable for the enthusiastic way she suckled one lad’s cock as another one shaved her.

Now Ranin must stroke her there at the top, where she had that bud Morqan employed so skillfully to train the fillies. Edera cried out, and Ranin let her teach him with the sinuous writhing of her body over his lap, and with her rising moans, what she liked the most. Experimentally, he moved his left hand to her bottom, and her gasp of pleasure told him to put the middle finger inside the valley between her reddened bottom cheeks and push gently into the ring there. He rubbed the sensate bud firmly and pushed his thumb gently into her cunt, until her intact maidenhead stopped him despite the soaking wetness of her loins.

And then, suddenly, Edera shouted loud, and seemed to convulse across his thigh, making his cock grow hard as stone. “Oh, Ranin…” she murmured at last. “Goodman Versal… I mean. Thank you.” She turned her head to look at him, and said shyly, “That was… that was the first time, for me.”

“Really?” Ranin asked in surprise.

“Yes. I’ve been so envious… and I know some of the girls do it to themselves—Alira can do it silently, I think—but it didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel like I… deserved it.”

“You deserved it tonight, sweetheart,” Ranin said. “You took your spanking very well.”

Edera giggled. It was the first time Ranin had heard that lovely sound since before she had rode off to the parley with Comnar, in her pride and her anger at him.

“Do you think you can be a better filly for me tomorrow?” he asked. “It’s very important.”

“May I show you now, goodman?” she said, with the giggle still in her voice.

Ranin did not understand—there was no way they could practice gaits in the stall—but then Edera slid off his lap and onto her knees, between his legs, where his tunic had pulled up to reveal the leather flap that distinguished the special breeches the stable men of the imperial stables wore. “Teach me,” she whispered. “Teach me how to please you.” Then she planted a little kiss right on the flap, where his cock threatened to burst through. She had put her hands behind her back, the way Ranin was sure she had seen other fillies do when the lads trained them—either they kept their hands there, or their wristlets were hooked together, to teach them.

What could Ranin do? Edera would have to learn sooner or later, would she not? Here, after her spanking, perhaps he could bring her along gently. Hardly believing he could bear to show his stiff manhood to the princess he had sworn to protect, he unbuttoned the cock flap, as the boys called it, and watched his stiff cock spring free, as Edera’s eyes widened to see it.

“Oh!” she said. “I’ve never seen… I mean, up close.” Her face blushed as red as her naked bottom still looked, even in the semi-darkness of the stall, lit only by one of the lamps that hung from the high ceiling all along the length of the stalls.

“You know what to do, filly Edera,” Ranin said gently but firmly. “Open up your mouth and take me inside.”

Edera’s response charmed him beyond anything he could ever have imagined: she smiled shyly and nodded, and then she opened her mouth wide and leaned her head forward. Tentatively, she took him inside, and Lord Ranin Versal felt the heavenly pleasure of his princess’ submissive service.

“Oh, my sweet girl,” he murmured, stroking her hair. She gave a little whimper, tried to bob her head, and took him deeper than she yet knew how. She gagged a little, and Ranin lifted her up and looked into her eyes. Her expression was full of concern, but he smiled and said, “You are doing wonderfully, sweetheart.”

“I want to make the seed come,” Edera whispered. “May I, please?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” Ranin said. “Oh, yes.”

And she did, with Ranin helping a bit with his hand, and to his surprise she eagerly swallowed the seed, licked his cock up and down, and kissed his balls. Released from his arousal for the moment, Ranin felt his brow furrow in dismay, but Edera’s sweet eagerness showed him that everything that had happened was for the best.

He pulled her to her feet and held her close for a long moment. Then he said softly, “Time to get your tail back in, sweetheart.”

She nodded. “Over your lap? Please?”

He released her from his arms so that she could get back over his knee. He took from his pocket the vial of saddle oil that all the stable men carried, and began to anoint the bung of her tail.

“Soothe me again?” Edera asked, almost mischievously.

Ranin laughed. “Just a little,” he said. “I’ll soothe you much more tomorrow, if you show your gaits well.”

Something must have happened the previous night between Ranin and Edera, Comnar thought as he watched her on the longe line from the balcony of his apartments. She showed her gaits to absolute perfection, and she went from station to station with more precision than several much more experienced girls. In the space of a day Edera had gone from a filly who looked like she had just received her tail and could concentrate on nothing but her nakedness and her harness to one who seemed ready for imperial standard, the highest attainment of an imperial filly.

Not to mention pulling a chariot with her fellow Amidians! Comnar could hardly contain his excitement finally to race the Hadian fillies against Edera’s new team.

With a sigh of contentment, he straightened from the leaning position he had adopted as he tried to get the closest possible look at Ranin and Edera where they trained in the ring in the extreme right paddock of the enormous yard where Comnar’s father and brothers had raced their Amidian stallions. On their race course, Comnar would race four-filly chariots.

Three paddocks inside the race course, and in each paddock a ring with the stations for imperial standard. That was also how it had been in his father’s and his grandfather’s day, but in the center of each ring stood Comnar’s own contribution: the mounting saddles. Only the saddle in the center ring saw regular use, but there were days, when foreign dignitaries were present, when Comnar had Morqan schedule mountings in all three rings. The visitors whose countries pretended to some degree of civilization generally would write home to their monarchs that Comnar was possessed of a barbarity not to be trifled with. Those whose countries had no such ideas of culture went away from Maq thinking that they must not give the kind of offense given by the realms whose daughters were mounted by the lords of Maq in the emperor’s yard.

And every daughter a willing mount, thanks to the skill of Master Morqan and his lads. Comnar sometimes mused, as he stood on his balcony and watched the training of his fillies, on how his stables, in humiliating the girls who became imperial fillies, raised them up so much higher than they would ever have risen even as queens and princesses of the realms where they were born.

Part of that, he knew, came from his own vanity—from the prideful wish that Maq, and above all that Comnar the Cruel’s Maq, be known throughout all time and space as the greatest flowering of civilization, at least where the satisfaction of human cravings was concerned—and Comnar was certain that no other measure mattered. The fillies were the most important element of that flowering, the element seen only by the privileged few. But the menagerie, the pleasure gardens, and the imperial library—all those, too, would ensure his Maq’s fame.

And along with that vanity, Comnar also knew that something about the curse that the girl’s dagger had visited upon his loins had, even as it had taken so much away, given him a gift of the mind. Or perhaps, ironically enough, it was a gift of the cock. He knew with complete certainty what men and women needed to do, and to have done to them, to feel an extremity of pleasure they would never achieve without the help of a cruel emperor of the flesh, in whose stables girls might be harnessed and mounted.

“Master Morqan,” he called down to his stable master.

Morqan handed the lines he was holding to his assistant, who always stood by him taking notes on the exercise session, and walked closer to the balcony. The morning sun beat down, not quite hot yet, through the crystalline air of the capital. The fillies’ feet raised only a little dust from the dirt of the yard, which was watered twice a day.

A long, loud moan came from the girl on the mounting saddle in the center of the middle ring: it appeared that Lord Maner, to whom she belonged, had offered one of his retainers the pleasure of her rump, and that the young man had been quick to take the lordly gift. Comnar smiled to see it, thinking about how much pleasure he had brought to so many fillies and men who covered them, with the invention of the mounting saddle, with the clips fitted to the rings on a filly’s harness and the padded leather so that she did not feel that she need fear injury. The saddle even had a little rack where a man might put the filly’s tail, should he decide to take it out of her bottom—some men liked to do that, especially those who enjoyed a good bottom fuck; others liked to leave the tail in while they covered their fillies.

“Your imperial majesty,” said Morqan, standing right in front of the balcony, in the special little show ring called the imperial ring, which generally went unused during regular training sessions.

“Have Ranin and Edera come over here, please,” Comnar said. “I’d like to get a closer look at her paces. Oh, and for the arena tomorrow night… the other three Amidians, with the Amidian knight who’s currently enjoying Qartin’s hospitality? Side-by-side mounting saddles, I think. And a special seat for Goodman Versal, with his filly at his feet?”

“Yes, your imperial majesty,” Morqan said, bowing.

Comnar watched Morqan walk to the ring where Versal worked Edera, and speak to the former lord. Versal gave a sharp, quick nod. Edera was in the middle of a little canter from station three to station seven—one of the hardest lines to get exactly right. Comnar heard Versal cluck to her, very clearly and with great authority, and watched him just touch her flank with the long training whip. Edera stopped immediately. Despite the difficulties the Amidians had been having for the past several days, Comnar could see that the culture of the tiny horse kingdom made both Edera and her trainer perfectly suited to life in the imperial stables. Just watching her pull up her steps and stop, breathing hard, was a joy.

Taking the longe line close to its end, where it hooked to Edera’s collar, in his left hand, Versal gave Edera a pat on her rump and, smiling, spoke in her ear. Edera seemed to smile around the leather bit that filled her mouth so charmingly, and nodded. Then Versal led her toward the imperial ring.

Comnar could not take credit for the design of the harness, although Morqan had configured it according to the vague specifications the emperor had given him. Still, to have said to Morqan that the harness should accentuate the filly’s nakedness at her bosom and her loins, and that her face should be gently restrained by a delicate tracery of leather, seemed to Comnar to be a significant contribution to the overall effect of what Edera was wearing, as she stepped charmingly across the yard and into the imperial ring. And Versal led her with such great assurance that Comnar knew he must find a way to employ the man who had been chief marshal of Amidia for the rest of his life in the imperial stables. Slavery, as practiced in the barbarian lands, did not interest Comnar in the slightest. To take possession of hearts and minds and loins, though, with the fine things and the extreme pleasures of the empire—that seemed to Comnar the ultimate power.

“Goodman Versal,” the emperor called down, when they stood just under the balcony, Edera looking lovely in her harness with her eyes downcast and her mouth held open by the bit.

Versal made his low bow and said, “Your imperial majesty.”

“Would you care to earn the title master?”

“Yes, your imperial majesty,” Versal said graciously. He kept his expression carefully neutral. Comnar knew that Versal meant not a single word of anything he said to the emperor, but changing that served the emperor as a worthy goal for the present. Corrupting Versal seemed a challenge worthy of Comnar the Cruel.

“Teach this filly the third stage of imperial standard horsemanship and you shall be master, and you shall organize a great chariot race for the Moon Festival at the solstice—and have the profit of it for yourself.”

Versal bowed low again. “Your imperial majesty is too good.”

Comnar laughed. “Too good is one thing I shall never be,” he said. “As you yourself, along with your filly, will witness tomorrow night in the arena.”

Did a flicker of fear run across Versal’s face at this news? Surely it was not wishful thinking on Comnar’s part that he saw the imperturbable face of Ranin Versal darkened by alarm for a single instant.

“Do not worry, Goodman Versal,” the emperor said. “It will not be your filly who is mounted tomorrow in the arena. But you and she will have a seat of honor in the audience, for she knows and loves the fillies and the one who will mount them.”

Another flicker of emotion crossed Versal’s face. Again it passed too quickly for Comnar to be sure that he read it correctly. Nevertheless it seemed for a moment that concern for the other Amidians did battle with relief at the news that Edera would remain untouched.

“It sounds very diverting,” Versal said, “your imperial majesty.”

“I believe you will find it so,” Comnar replied, honeying his words thoroughly. “Now, however, I would like to see a little of what your sweet filly can do after her first two weeks of training.”

“Your imperial majesty,” Versal said, emerging from another bow and looking up to meet Comnar’s eyes, “you must understand that I have only trained her for one of those two weeks. Any faults in her gait should be attributed to my inexperience and not to hers.”