Bound and Initiated (18 page)

“Thank you, columba,” he said.

After that, he raised Sarah up to her feet and took her onto his lap in the man’s throne. For a while, he simply kissed her and caressed her, loving the way she shied away at first from his kisses, as if anxious that he not taste his own seed in her mouth. He ran his hands around her collar, her belt, her cuffs; he found it delightful to verify with his fingers that his new girl still wore the signs of her bondage to him, which she would wear until he decreed that the time had come for them to be removed.

“This chair is called the
man’s throne,
columba,” he murmured into Sarah’s ear. “When a man first arrives at the first degree, he is enthroned upon it, and a blindfolded girl of the third degree kneels before him and sucks his cock, while her domina whips her and directs her in pleasing him.”

Sarah shivered, and snuggled herself in tighter to Robert’s chest. He thought he could feel her ambivalence just in the tension of her limbs, and with it her unspoken question.

“You will have to do that, Sarah, when you reach the third degree. Claudia will whip you with her strap, and you will suck a cock you cannot see, and receive in your mouth the seed of a man you have never met. Thus he will know that he has begun to be a true man. That, in a nutshell, is the purpose of Ostia girls like you, according to our scriptures. The writings, which only men may read, say that when a true man fucks you, he does his duty to his nature and his virility, and he gains in stature and progresses toward our Mithraic ideals. Your mouth, your cunt, and your bottom have no nobler purpose than to receive the cock of a true man, and thus your body as a whole has no better use than to give pleasure to that hard cock.”

Sarah made a little sound in her throat, as if quelling some sort of protest. Robert even thought he felt her forcing herself not to struggle.

“But,” Robert said, putting into the monosyllable as much significance as he could. He felt Sarah relax a little in his arms. “But from the foundation of the guard, we have recognized that the girls of the Order of Ostia would not furnish their private places to the cocks of true men willingly unless they were girls of superior understanding. We have understood from the start—even those among us whom you might call the harshest disciplinarians—that the young women we train have intellects that generally rise to heights of reason beyond the capability of most girls whom society would call
normal.
You, Sarah, prove that by your writing, and by your curiosity today.”

“Oh,” she said. “Those books… they’re just… fluff.”

“Yes,” Robert admitted. “But to write any book that uses proper grammar and sustains a narrative…”

Then to his surprise, Sarah interrupted him. “No, really…”

“Don’t interrupt me, columba,” Robert said sternly, “unless you’d rather your bottom were considerably warmer than it is right now.”

She clutched at him instinctively, and he regretted her alarm and felt the early, marveling love well up in his heart. Robert knew, though, that he must make sure Sarah understood the need for complete respect to her superiors.

“Yes, pater,” Sarah whispered.

“As I was saying, while those books are, as you clearly see, in a certain sense very silly, they nevertheless demonstrate your intellectual energy.”

She seemed to squirm in his arms as he spoke, as if she still wanted to deny any accomplishment in the
Forever Girl
books. That seemed a little odd, but Robert supposed it spoke well of her.

“Anyway,” he continued, “you are extremely intelligent, and although according to the simplest interpretation of our doctrine, it will appear to you that your cunt and anus are more important to me, and to the other true men to whom I will make you furnish them, than your mind, that isn’t so.”

“It isn’t?” Sarah tilted her chin up, and she craned her neck a little so that her eyes met Robert’s for the first time in several minutes.

“No,” Robert said, and kissed her again, very deeply. “You’ll understand that much better by the time I come to you tomorrow night. You will sleep now, in that bed, and when Claudia wakes you she will bring you first to the exercise room, where the athletic trainer will give you your fitness regimen, and then to the study room, where you will spend the day learning about the tasks that you will undertake as a nupta.”

“What tasks, pater?” Sarah asked eagerly.

“Nuptae monitor communications around the world for certain important subjects and terms. You won’t know why you’re looking for those words, but as you find them and report them, patterns will emerge that your mind will work on both consciously and unconsciously. You will begin to progress in your reasonable faculties.”

Sarah still looked up at him, the adorable crease appearing in her brow.

“You’re probably wondering what that has to do with your sexual purpose,” Robert said dryly.

Sarah nodded.

“As you learn to do your more mundane jobs for the order, columba, you will dedicate your mind to the purposes set for you by your superiors, and in particular by me, your pater. By doing my will you submit to me, and with each report you make you will grasp the idea of your belonging to me and to my brothers in the guard more firmly in your intellect and in your imagination.”

As he spoke, he worked his right hand between Sarah’s thighs and began to stroke her cunt-lips possessively. She gave a startled cry that quickly faded to a moan.

Robert continued, “A nupta has other duties, as well. Nuptae go to private functions, just as I think Claudia told you Ostia girls do, to serve the lusts of men. Most of those men aren’t true men—that is, members of the guard who follow the way of Mithras. When you are sent to these lewd events, columba, you will gather information just as you gather it from the texts and images you monitor during the rest of your time.”

He kept stroking, now working two fingers gently inside her as Sarah shuddered with forced pleasure in his arms. “Pater, please,” she whispered.

“Please what?” he asked.

“I want to come.” The words emerged in a little sob.

“If I told you that I would only let you come after a long, hard spanking, Sarah, what would you say? The choice is yours.” His fingers slipped and slid with her wonderful private wetness. Her body felt so very right in his arms: pink and little and all his own, bared for him and bound for him.

“Oh, God,” she sobbed. “Oh, please, spank me, pater.”

“That’s a good girl,” Robert said, and turned her swiftly over his lap, a father giving his little girl the discipline she needs.

Sarah gasped at the suddenness of it, but Robert had no ability to stop himself from beginning her punishment immediately, so pertly and invitingly did her bottom-cheeks rise before his eyes, presented for his firm hand’s proper role. He brought that hand down hard, where only a few lingering traces of her earlier whippings lay. Claudia knew how to bring girls along, and so did Robert: it would be quite a while before Sarah’s bottom received marks that would last more than a day.

She began to cry, and although Robert was spanking her hard, he knew that her tears came much more from the feeling of shame that the over-the-lap position must always bring. With his left hand he gripped her belt to keep her wayward backside steady, while with his right he spanked her steadily, a few spanks in each place before he moved onto the next, reddening her bottom as thoroughly as he knew how. If he managed this lesson correctly, Sarah would understand, when he had finished, just how much she craved discipline.

“I’m punishing you, Sarah,” he said softly, in between spanks.

“Oh, God. Pater… for… for what? Oh, pater, it
hurts
.” Sarah struggled against his grasp, kicked out, but Robert kept spanking her.

“For presuming to express an opinion about whether you should come,” he said, and abruptly stopped the spanking.

“But… but…” Sarah moaned.

Robert thrust his hand between her legs, and she spread them instantly, giving a cry that rent his heart despite its being an unambiguous cry of pleasure. With his middle two fingers he rubbed her clitoris very firmly until she gave another cry, and then he said, “Consider, columba, whether perhaps you are not happy to be punished. Come for me now, Sarah.”

Another cry, this one much more ambiguous, and Sarah writhed in his grip, held fast, and came. But Robert kept rubbing. “Come again, Sarah,” he said.

“I… I c-can’t…” she sobbed to the floor.

“You can,” he said, and he proved it, twice, with Sarah screaming louder and louder at the forced pleasure.

Afterward, Robert carried her to the bed and fetched a comforter from the cupboard, which he laid over her. He lowered the lamps and sat there on the bed, stroking her golden hair, until she fell asleep. He spoke not another word in that time, but she looked up at him with shining eyes before she closed her lids.

When Sarah had fallen asleep, Robert folded the table quietly and left the room, swinging the great stone door silently closed behind him. Claudia and her staff of bellatrices (the third degree of the Order of Ostia) would monitor her on the surveillance cameras. One of them would wake Sarah in two hours to show her the bathroom that lay through a hidden door in her chamber. Robert would watch that himself, he decided, on his own monitor in his apartment in the penthouse. It was always charming to see the look on a girl’s face when she realized that from now on others would always accompany her to the bathroom and watch her upon the toilet. Nor did he want to miss the little pout on Sarah’s lips and the furrow on her brow as she peed. He would have her pee in front of him before too long, he decided.

As he rode the elevator up to his apartment, he contemplated the business of the following day, wondering if he could concentrate on it at all, with the vision of what would happen at sunset, upon the bed of the pleasure chamber, before his eyes.

He fell asleep in his enormous bed, between sheets of Egyptian cotton, wondering how quickly Sarah would take to her duties as a nupta. Something about her seemed so very analytical that he thought he wouldn’t be surprised if she turned out to be a natural at it. Nor was he sure he had spoken the truth when he told her that she wouldn’t understand why she monitored the subjects they gave her to monitor.

Robert’s own job, he felt, held a great deal less intellectual stimulation than Sarah’s would. He spent his days, when not in marathon meetings here in New York, or in Rome, or in another city where the guard maintained a center, writing reports about those meetings. Theoretically those reports distilled the essence of the resolutions arrived at through painstaking consultation among the most brilliant minds in the world, putting forth various abstract bases and justifications for the frequently purely ad hoc decisions they made because someone must, and presenting the possible ramifications of the guard’s actions. In practice, Robert’s job amounted to glorified secretary duty:
The cardinal said X, and the director said Y, and then the president said, “No, Z,” and the meeting was adjourned.

Sometimes Robert was of the cynical opinion that for all the grandiose metaphysical scaffolding put in place by Cardinal Otranto, the banqueting and the fucking were only there as the most massive carrot the cardinal could find.
Otherwise,
Robert put it to himself as he fell asleep,
nothing could get intelligent men and women to do a duty as depressing and boring as saving some shred of civilization from its doom.
Without the prospect of spanking, whipping, and fucking one another’s brains out to await them at the end of the day, they would merely pray that the charts were wrong, and retreat into their enclaves and wait for the end.

O true man,
the lost books of Mithras ended,
I give you much, when I give you this duty, to master beautiful young women, to bind them, to whip them, and to fuck them as you please. But I demand much in return.

Throughout the day Robert checked in with Claudia to see how Sarah fared on her first day as a full columba—really, a nupta-in-training.

“She’s doing fine, pater,” Claudia told him at ten, after Sarah’s workout in the gym that lay two subterranean floors up from the Hall of Mithras. “I’m going to take her to the study room on five and fasten her there now. Grace will start training her in her daytime duties.”

Three of the elevators in 650 Fifth Avenue went all the way down to the hall; two further elevators connected the six subterranean floors mined into the bedrock at mind-boggling expense in the 1950s, beginning with a tunnel from Queens through which all the spoil would eventually be carried, under the East River, to become a significant portion of the gravel used to pave the highways that transformed the landscape in that era. Rome remained the home of the Pretorian Guard and the Order of Ostia, but the New York Mithraeum that lay more than a hundred feet below the deepest subway line was the secret beating heart of the effort to save the world.

At eleven, Robert, in his above-ground office, opened a window on his computer’s desktop with the video feed from the fifth level of the Mithraeum. He saw that Sarah was indeed bound to a bench, looking at a computer monitor, with Grace, a nupta who wore the same collar, belt, and cuffs, leaning over her shoulder. Nuptae must remain naked and in leather, but unlike columbae they need not be fastened at all times.

Sarah, however, did have to be fastened, and the padded, leather-upholstered benches in the study had straps for the purpose: her belt and ankle cuffs were attached, so that she could not move her body freely. She must also of course, when she needed to relieve herself, ask Grace to release her for the purpose; Grace would then accompany her to the bathroom and watch while Sarah answered the call of nature.

Robert always felt obscurely guilty when he grew hard, thinking of the little humiliations of which Ostia girls’ lives were full. He knew from long experience now, though, that just as they aroused him, they also aroused the true Ostia girl even as her blushes deepened to crimson. He had loved watching Sarah pee the night before, her eyes turned down to the white-tiled floor and her cheeks pink as if the delicious rushing sound of the golden stream that came from her privates were the most shameful thing imaginable.