The Emperor's New Pony (4 page)

“But,” the emperor continued. “I shall have the pleasure of putting your belts and your wristlets on you now. And then I will give you your tails.”

He sat on his curule chair. Next to him stood an old wooden chest. As he opened it, he said, “The chest belonged to my ancestor Comnar the Fool—he was the first emperor to keep fillies. The custom fell out of use, but, I fear—at least where your modesty is concerned, my fine lades of Amidia—I have revived it in greater splendor than it ever knew under my forebears.”

From the chest he removed four broad leather cinctures and laid them in his lap. “Come here, Edera, formerly princess of Amidia,” he said with authority in his voice.

“Your imperial majesty…” Edera started to say, meaning to beg for mercy, but the emperor cut her off.

“Do you wish me to bring the captain of my guard into the pavilion to force you over here so that I can bind you in your filly’s belt? You have just earned yourself six strokes of my quirt.” Comnar reached into the chest again, and brought out a strangely short horsewhip that made all the girls gasp. Edera’s heart beat wildly in her chest. He couldn’t, could he? “You may come and get over my lap so that I can give them to you, or I can have my captain come and bring you to me, and give you twelve strokes instead.”

“Oh, your… your imperial… oh, gods… y-you can’t…”

“I give you one final chance, Edera, my newest and loveliest filly, because until an hour ago you were a princess. But if you do not take that chance, you will have eighteen, and I will invite both the captain and his centurions to assist and observe.”

On trembling legs, still holding her hands to cover her maiden charms, Edera began to move toward where the emperor sat. He patted his lap, covered in a purple silk robe, impatiently. “You are proving a good girl, Edera, but you must move faster than that if you are to escape the terrible punishments that await my fillies when they are slow to obey me.”

Edera’s mind could think of nothing but the shame that lay before her along every path. She must choose the one that had the least shame. She tried not to care about the threat of the whip—but to be seen by imperial legionaries as the emperor chastised her… at all costs, she must not let that happen. She tried to move faster, and then she had crossed the ten feet that had separated the line of naked highborn girls from the emperor’s chair.

Edera had a moment of doubt as to what the emperor desired her to do, but he solved that for her at least: he took her firmly around her waist as she gave a little cry of fear. The emperor pulled her down across his thighs and then, swiftly and with evident skill, he took hold of her bottom and moved her firmly so that her head and arms hung down over his thighs in a terribly ungainly way, her hair cascading around her face, her feet in the air; worst of all, the emperor raised her bottom so that it lay just over his right thigh. His touch made her shudder, and it made her ashamed of the way her body always seemed to betray her and to grow warm when a man touched her even upon the hand. To have him take her little bare bottom in his hand and move her thus made that feeling come upon her ten times more strongly than it ever had before.

But if she had thought that worst of all, what the emperor did next surpassed every shame Edera had ever felt, or had imagined she ever would feel. He put his right hand, which with a shiver Edera realized now held the strange, short quirt, between her knees, and pushed them apart.

“N-no!” she cried, but the emperor’s response was merely to spread her knees wider.

“You other fillies,” he said in a good-humored tone. “Come stand in a line to my right and have a look at the filly who used to be your princess. Her maiden cunt will not long have these lovely curls—nor will those pretty little cunts you fillies are trying so hard to hide. As soon as you reach the stables, the stable master will shave you there.”

“Wh-what…” said the voice of Melisan. “Oh, no…”

“Girls,” the emperor said. “I hope that after you have seen me punish the little filly on my lap, you will not be so slow to obey. I assure you, though, that I can use the lap quirt gladly on every one of your pretty bottoms before we put you in the filly wagon for the journey to Maq.”

Now Edera heard whimpers and sobs, as her ladies-in-waiting surely obeyed and came to stand behind her to see the way Comnar had opened her secret cleft, covered in the soft fur that Edera sometimes naughtily stroked in front of the mirror, admiring how charming she looked.

Then without warning the emperor began to whip her right on her bare bottom. It was the most painful thing Edera had ever felt, and she screamed in shame and agony from the first blow. Comnar struck her three times with the little horsewhip on her right bottom cheek, and then he said conversationally, “Look at her little rump squirm. I have something for that, too.”

Edera sobbed, feeling punished for her foolishness so thoroughly that she hoped even Lord Ranin might forgive her. Then she felt something in a place she did not even have a name for, the little place between the globes of her bottom, the little ring there.

“Wh-what are you… oh, gods…”

The emperor pushed his finger in there. “Hush, my filly,” he said. “Do you see, ladies of Amidia, the price of disobedience for a filly of my stable?” The feeling was terrible most of all, because the burning and itching of it also had a measure of a sort of shameful pleasure from which Edera’s heart instinctively shrank away.

Just as suddenly, the finger left her, and the whip returned, and Edera screamed again as the emperor covered the other bottom cheek with three more blows.

“There we go, little filly Edera.” To Edera’s surprise, the emperor’s voice sounded almost tender. Thinking that perhaps since she had received her punishment he would be a little gentler with her, she began to try to climb off his lap, but he held her firm. Edera feared he would be angry, but he addressed her almost kindly, like a parent might to a disobedient child. “Oh, no, Edera. Stay there. I’m going to put your tail in, since I’m lucky enough to have you here over my lap.”

Nothing happened for a moment except that she felt Comnar move in such a way that he must be reaching into the chest for whatever he meant by her ‘tail.’ Then, to her horror, he put his left hand down, holding the thing right in front of her face, and she knew exactly what he meant by Edera’s tail.

“It’s a special moment for a filly,” the emperor said, “when she gets her first tail.”

“Oh, gods,” she heard Alira whisper. “Oh, gods.”

“Yes,” said Comnar, “you will have them too, my pretty fillies. But yours will not be as special as little Edera’s.”

A thick length of hardened leather hovered before Edera’s eyes, with a splendid plume of white horsehair attached. The leather thing was of a strange shape: about as long as a man’s hand, and as thick as a carrot, tapered to a smaller, rounded end and flaring out at the other, where the tail itself joined the thing. At that same end, a curious indentation curved the leather.

“You will find,” came the emperor’s voice, “when I set the tail inside your lovely bottom, that the curve of this bung secures it inside you, where it belongs.”

“N-no… no… oh, gods, please…” Edera said. She refused to picture it: she closed her eyes and pretended she had never seen the thing, and never grasped how he meant to impose it upon her.

“Take it in your mouth, now, my filly,” Comnar said, even more gently than he had spoken after he finished whipping her. “Show me how you can suck something so big. All you fillies will need to begin practicing your skills, because the stable master’s demands are harsh and frequent upon a filly’s tender mouth.”

Again Alira betrayed her greater knowledge, because she gave a moan of despair at these words that Edera did not even understand. The emperor must mean something terrible, but surely he could not mean… but he must mean that, and now she sobbed at that thought too: of being made to take into her mouth the part that she knew by the name of ‘manhood’ when she did not hear it called a ‘sword’ or a ‘lance.’ To be made to suck the manhood of a man she had never seen—she fled from that vision and found that her flight ended in opening her eyes to see that Comnar had brought the narrow end of the tail’s leather bung close to her lips.

“Come now,” he said, “surely you do not want the lap quirt again so soon, Edera? Take the bung in your mouth to get it ready for your rump.”

Part of Edera knew that to obey the command made much the least shameful path, but something inside simply refused—and a tiny voice inside her head whispered that the reason for the refusal lay in the way a part of her felt that same dreadful, pleasant warmth at the thought of what the emperor would do. She hushed that voice and closed her mouth tightly, shaking her head.

“Poor Edera,” he said, and spanked her hard with his open hand, where the welts of the quirt on her right bottom cheek made the slap burn like fire. “Poor little filly.” He spanked her again, and when she opened her mouth to cry out, Comnar thrust the bung inside.

Edera sobbed and retched, and felt herself drooling around the hard leather that held her lips, her teeth wide open.

“Get it nice and wet now, girl. You don’t want me to have any trouble getting it inside you.”

Oh, gods. She did. She got the bung nice and wet, so that when the emperor pulled it out he said approvingly, “That should go in nicely.”

Then the leather was there, pushing, and Edera sobbed and moaned at the feeling.

“Open up, little filly,” said Comnar. Then, “Girls, watch what happens when your princess’ little cunt gets a wank.”

“Oh… oh… n-no… oh… gods…” Comnar had begun to rub where a man must never touch her before her wedding night. And the terrible warmth grew and grew, and when he told her again to open, she could not help but obey him, so that he could push the horrible thing all the way into her poor bottom, until to her shame she felt her little ring closing around the indentation, and she knew that she would never be able to take it out without pulling hard at it, and pushing hard with those muscles that it felt so immodest to use, even when nature demanded it.

Then Comnar stood her up. None of the Amidian ladies could muster any resistance at all after what Edera had just gone through. One by one Comnar buckled their belts around their waists, and their wristlets upon the wrists, and hooked the wristlets to the belts so that the girls’ hands could not leave their sides. One by one, the three ladies-in-waiting went over his lap, as Edera had done, and received their black tails while their fellow fillies watched, forbidden by the emperor to look away from the shameful spectacle.

At last, the fillies’ wagon, covered completely in canvas and strewn with straw, backed up to the flap of the pavilion, and the girls, still naked but for their leather and their tails, had to climb into it.

“I shall see you in Maq, my lovely fillies,” the emperor said as he closed the flap at the back of the covered wagon. “I cannot wait until your lord chancellor sees what a sweet mare you make, Edera.”

Comnar watched out the window above the palace gate as the man who still thought of himself as Lord Ranin Versal made his sorry way toward the team of young fillies who had waited all morning to greet him. Comnar took the greatest pleasure in knowing that the privilege fell to him of not only disabusing Versal of his ideas about what highborn ladies of Amidia might suffer at the hands of a conquering emperor, but also of his notions of his own identity.

To the victor go the spoils: the emperor had had a very difficult time convincing his council that the empire should carry out the conquest of Amidia. One councilor had needed murdering, and even so two more had resigned and fled the capital. Now Comnar’s new council applauded a victory so easy and so assured that nothing in the chronicles even resembled it. It did not bother Comnar at all that the strange conquest had come about through his new filly Edera’s monumental foolishness: heaven had bestowed warrior’s strength on the emperor in exchange for the strength it had taken away from him in that other regard. Ever since he had understood, at eighteen, that he would never be able to lie with a wife or a wench, as his brothers did, his deeds of prowess—as he thought of them whether he did them in battle or with poison in the dark—had never failed. His brothers and his father had paid with their lives for the jeers and for the looks of pity worse than jeers they had directed his way when the imperial physician had brought the news to the family that Comnar “would never make an heir.”

She too was dead now, though; the girl who had slashed him with the dagger and taken away the strength of his loins. She had in her own way been the first to find out how unwise it was to resist Comnar.

Down below, outside the closed gate, Versal shook his head sorrowfully. To see his princess and her ladies-in-waiting in harness, their sweet maidenly cunts shaved and on view set off by the leather of their tack, must be a terrible ordeal for such a virtuous man. The scene gave Comnar the greatest pleasure—indeed, he could not remember having arranged a better one, though in the past nine years he had had the chance to humiliate many defeated enemies, several of them in similar fashion.

It did not even matter that the fillies’ cunts had proven not entirely virginal: one of them had been married, though she would soon be made to forget her husband, and another of them proved on examination by Morqan the stable master to have given into temptation with a man and had a fuck or two. A stern whipping from Morqan in the emperor’s presence had revealed that her lover was the captain of the honor guard, a man who proved on closer, even more delightful, questioning of the girls also to be the lover of the married filly.

Comnar himself had gotten that out of the married one, but not before her still shapely backside was crisscrossed with lashes from his quirt. Even better, the lover himself, who thought of himself as Sir Lennar though his knighthood would soon be stripped from him like Versal’s lordship, sat in the dungeon, ready to be given the sort of deliciously terrible choices Comnar adored forcing upon such virtuous young men in the emperor’s little arena.