"Who has ever had three such marvelous choices, Laurent?" she asked. "The Sultan's palace, the village, the castle. I tell you, in any one I can find delights to suit me."

"But, darling, you don't know what it will be like in the Sultan's palace," I said. "The Queen had hundreds of naked slaves. In the village there were hundreds at labor. What if the Sultan has even more than that--slaves from all the realms of the East and the West, so many slaves he can use them for footstools?"

"Do you think he does?" she asked excitedly. Her smile became charmingly insolent. Such wet lips and exquisite teeth. "Then we must find some way to distinguish ourselves, Laurent." She leaned her chin on her hand. "I don't want to be just one of a thousand suffering little Princes and Princesses. We must see that the Sultan knows who we are."

"Dangerous thoughts, my love," I said, "when we can neither speak nor be spoken to, when we are pampered and punished as simple little beasts."

"We'll find a way, Laurent," she said, with a mischievous wink. "Nothing ever frightened you before, did it? You ran away just to see what it would be like to be captured, didn't you?"

"You're too quick-witted, Elena," I said. "What makes you think I didn't run in fear?"

"I know you didn't. No one ever ran away from the Queen's castle in fear. It's always done in the spirit of adventure. I did it myself, you see. That is why I was sentenced to the village."

"And was it worthwhile, my dear?" I asked. Oh, if only I could kiss her, make her pour her high spirits into my mouth, pinch her little ni**les. It was a great cruelty that I'd never even been near her during our days in the castle.

"Yes, it was worth it," she said thoughtfully. She had been in the village a year when the raid happened, a female farm slave of the Lord Mayor, working in his country gardens, searching out weeds in the grass with her teeth on her hands and knees, the gardener a stout and severe man, never without a strap in his hand.

"But I was ready for something new," she said, turning over on her back, letting her legs go apart as she always did. I couldn't stop staring at the thick brown hair of her sex under the woven gold shield. "And then the Sultan's soldiers came as if I had summoned them with my imagination. Remember, Laurent, we have to do something to distinguish ourselves."

I laughed to myself. I liked her spirit.

But then I liked all of them: Tristan, a beguiling mixture of strength and need, who bore his suffering in silence; and Dmitri and Rosalynd, both contrite and dedicated to pleasing, as if they had been born slaves instead of royalty.

But Dmitri could not control his agitation or his lust, could not hold still for punishment or use, though his mind was filled with nothing but high thoughts of love and submission. He had spent his short village sentence pilloried in the Place of Public Punishment, awaiting his whippings on the Public Turntable. And Rosalynd too knew no semblance of control unless shackled tightly. Both had hoped the village would purge their fears, allow them to serve with the finesse they admired in others.

As for Beauty, well, next to Elena she was the most enchanting, the most unusual slave. Cold she seemed, yet undeniably sweet, thoughtful and rebellious. Now and then through the dark nights at sea I saw her staring at me through the bars of her cage with a puzzling expression on her strong little face, her lips spreading easily in a smile when I acknowledged her.

When Tristan wept, she would say softly in his defense:

"He loved his Master." And she would shrug as if she found it sad but incomprehensible.

"And you loved no one?" I had asked her one night. "No, not really," she said. "Only other slaves now and then.... And there came that provocative look that made my c**k rise at once. There was something savage in her, something untouched, for all her seeming fragility.

But now and then she seemed to brood on her resistance. "What would it mean to love them?" she asked once, almost as if talking to herself. "What would it mean to yield the heart completely? The punishments, I love. But to love one of the Masters or Mistresses...." She looked afraid suddenly.

"It troubles you," I said sympathetically. The nights at sea worked on all of us. The isolation worked on all of us. "Yes. I long for something I have not had," she whispered. "I deny it, but I long for it. Maybe it is only that I haven't found the proper Master or Mistress....

"The Crown Prince, it was he who brought you to the Kingdom. Surely you found him a truly magnificent Master." "No, not at all," she said dismissively. "I can barely remember him. He did not interest me, you see. What would happen if I were mastered by someone who interested me?" And her eyes took on a strange glitter, as if seeing for the first time a whole new realm of possibility.

"I can't tell you," I had said, feeling suddenly at a loss. Up until that moment I was sure that I had loved my Mistress, Lady Elvera. But now I wasn't entirely certain. Maybe Beauty spoke of a deeper, finer love than I had ever known either.

The fact was, Beauty interested me. She who lay beyond my grasp upon her silken bed, her naked limbs as perfect as a sculpture in the semi-dark, her eyes full of half-revealed secrets.

Yet all of us, despite our differences, our talk of love, were true slaves. That was certain.

We had been opened up and inalterably changed by our servitude. No matter what our fears and conflicts, we were not the blushing, awestruck beings we had once been. We swam, each at his or her own pace, in the dazzling current of erotic torment.

And as I lay thinking, I sought to understand the important differences between the castle life and the village life, and to guess what this new captivity in the Sultanate promised us.

Chapter 2

LAURENT: MEMORIES OF THE CASTLE AND THE VILLAGE

I HAD SERVED well for a year in the castle, property of the strict Lady Elvera, who had had me whipped each morning as a matter of course, while she took her breakfast. She was a proud and quiet raven-haired woman with slate-gray eyes, who spent her hours at delicate embroidery. I had kissed her slippers afterwards in thanks for the whipping, hopeful for the smallest crumb of praise--that I had taken the blows well or that she found me handsome still. Seldom did she speak a word. Seldom did she look up from her needle.

In the afternoons, she took her work to the gardens, and there I coupled with Princesses for her amusement. I had first to catch my pretty prey, which meant a hard chase through the flower beds, and then the blushing little Princess must be carried back and laid at My Lady's feet for inspection, after which my real performance commenced and must be carried through perfectly.