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THE LOST PRINCE—CHAPTER 21
Daka rubbed his eyes and tried to stay alert as the last piece of luggage was loaded onto the carriage. He’d been half asleep helping the StableMistress hook the ponies up to the new coach, but he’d performed the task so many times his brain didn’t need to be fully in gear.
Lady Koho’s two splendid mounts were in the lead, followed by Sempai Nodo’s four mismatched ponies, donated to her by the royal stable. They were all late-generation stock, but did not fit together in size or looks. One tall skinny blonde, one thick brunette with large, tattooed breasts (obviously a gift from some minor padisha living near the edges of the kingdom), one high-gen dark-skinned beauty with huge thighs and a brilliant smile, who’d tried to rub her mound against Daka even at this early hour, and finally, the first asian-stock mount he’d seen in close to a decade. The Asians were too short to be good ponies, and most were found in household staffs or in the ranks of assaya. This one was short too, but not so much that she wouldn’t be able to keep in stride with the other ponies. She was skinny, with thick thighs and the upper body of a man. Daka had never seen a pony so totally breastless.
The driver was a young soldier who also served as Sempai Nodo’s bodyguard. As an old historian with little money and less property she thought the idea of a bodyguard ludicrous, but it was a royal decree that all court personnel have a guard west of the river. And the Sempai wasn’t so old she couldn’t find some use for a handsome young man required to obey all her commands. He finished tying down the bags and then sat on the bench, ready to be off. From the way he held the reins Daka could tell he knew less about ponies than he did soldiering.
Uma was sorry to see Daka go, but did her best to hide it. He was the property of another mistress, and she showed no signs of wanting to let him stay on as a stablehand. She desperately needed one, now that Ranyo was to be shipped off to a seed farm, as soon as he finished laying with the clan women, each in her time. None were supposed to be fertile, but then, neither was he. Including ponies and assayan novices old enough to bleed, Ranyo had over three hundred women to service, and a schedule of their fertile times was being drawn up. Even laying with a woman thrice a day Ranyo would be kept busy for nearly half a year, and would be exempt from his stable duties.
“Cool water, downhill road, and frisky mounts at the end of the day,” Uma said to him, a traditional stable cheer to those about to embark on a journey. Daka, surprised, bowed, then opened his mouth and tried to think of something to say in turn. Uma grabbed his shoulder and pushed him toward the carriage. “Go,” she said with an exasperated smile. She regretted not having a go at his big tool, but she always had the ridged pole in the rear stall. Maybe some day they would meet again.
The Lady Lena had come to see Lady Koho off, as had the Lady Roba. Both had been shown the cut up futons tossed about Lady Koho’s room when she returned in the morning. The window was open, and the furniture had been strewn about as if by a storm. A storm with knives in it. No one in the house had heard a thing.
“Speed and Luck,” was all Lady Roba would say. She blinked slowly in the early morning light and tugged her robe closer around her. She was not normally an early riser.
“Speed and Luck and all else I could give you,” Lady Lena said, bowing to Daka’s mistress and the Sempai, who seemed bright and cheerful in the misty cool air. “You have not told me all that transpired,” she went on, holding up a hand, “and that has been for a reason, I am sure. Go now, and be safe. Remember the circle, and you will be well.”
“You honor me, as you have always done,” Lady Koho said in return, with her own bow.
“And you have honored us with your presence,” Lady Lena said to Sempai Nodo. “Your knowledge and guidance will be missed. May your trip be swift and easy.”
Sempai Nodo bowed again, as did her student, and they climbed into the carriage.
“Lady Hirondelle is traveling your road,” Lady Lena told Daka’s mistress, “but will not be leaving until mid-day at the earliest.”
“The others are leaving then also?”
“Today and tomorrow. Lady Main seems in no hurry, and Lady Rosetta has but a short trip.”
Lady Koho nodded, then hugged and kissed both Lady Lena and Lady Roba. “Forever the circle,” she said. She pushed Daka toward the carriage, and he clumsily climbed inside and sat facing the historian and her student. His Mistress exchanged a few quiet words with the two Ladies, then climbed into the coach and shut the door. Lady Lena waved, then nodded at the driver. The coach lurched forward and Daka watched out the window as the buildings grew smaller. In a minute they passed through the gate, and then he could see naught of the compound but the high wall, and its wide gates swinging shut.
The Sempai’s assistant was a mousy young woman, pale and skinny, with short hair that looked like it had been cut by a dull hatchet. She wore plain grey robes, and spent most of the time staring at her hands.
The coach featured two opposing benches, each wide enough for three adults to sit, with enough room between them so that everyone could stretch their legs without kicking each other. Daka gave it a brief onceover out of curiosity, but was too tired to concentrate. While his Mistress had had no problem falling right to sleep the night before, he’d been unable to tear his eyes from Lady Roba and the novice cavorting with her pets. The dogs were nearly as intelligent as men, or so well trained in the acts of pleasure as to seem so, and performed as well together as they did apart. They’d stayed busy until near dawn, and he doubted his eyes had been closed more than thirty minutes before the handmaiden had entered the room to help bathe and dress his Mistress.
“Daka.”
He jerked up, not knowing when his eyes had closed.
“Yes M’Lady?”
“Did you get any sleep last night?”
“Some.”
Lady Koho shook her head. “Lay down and get some sleep,” she told him. “You are asleep on your feet. I had forgotten how entertaining well-trained pets can be. I’ll awaken you if I need you.”
“Yes M’Lady,” he mumbled. He lay down and curled up on the padded seat. He was asleep in seconds.
“We have three days to Perle, with only water stations and small hamlets in between,” the Sempai observed, eyeing Daka’s sleeping form. “Then another three, with good weather, to Gardene and, beyond that, Clan Bukkake’s house.” She caught Lady Koho’s eye, then gave a barely perceptible nod toward her assistant. “We need to know, and soon.”
Lady Koho eyed the mousy woman, and tried to hide a smile. “Pipa, was it? Have you ever been to the seed farms before?”
The wan girl looked up briefly, very self-conscious, and shook her head. “No M’Lady,” she said quietly.
“Pipa’s never been more than a few miles from the palace,” the Sempai told her, suppressing a grin. “Our trip west was quite an eye-opening experience for her.”
Lady Koho bit her lip to keep from laughing. “And more still to come, I’m sure.”
S’Leah returned with two rabbits she’d killed with thrown rocks, but they’d yet to locate any water. The women rested in the small dell through the hottest part of the day, then moved out again when the sun began to sink in the sky.
S’Leah’s plan was to head northwest for several days, paralleling the northbound road out of sight to the west of them. At Big Fork she assumed Izumi would take the north road and head back to her countrymen. S’Leah would be taking the other road, heading straight northeast.
She estimated it was a hundred miles from Clan Infibula’s compound to Big Fork. There there was a large water station and eatery, if by then they could risk being seen. But they would need water before then.
It was near
“We’ll rest here,” S’Leah said. “Drink all you can, as often as you can, for we have nothing with which to carry water other than our bodies.”
They sat on the bank, staring upward at the stars or across the rolling, dark plains, every few minutes moving to the stream to drink. After half an hour S’Leah felt like a balloon, she’d drunk so much water, and moved off to urinate, for the first time in thirty-six hours. When she pulled up her trousers and moved back to the stream she saw Izumi staring at her.
“You piss as a woman,” Izumi said with some confusion. “Can you not pass water through your tool?”
S’Leah sat down and leaned back on her elbows. “Only with great difficulty,” she admitted.
Izumi crossed her legs and leaned forward. “How did you come by your stick and stones?”
“The royal chemists weren’t as all-knowing as they thought they were,” S’Leah said with a trace of bitterness.
“You were a pony!” Izumi said, the pieces finally falling into place. S’Leah didn’t respond. After a while Izumi looked down and began pulling at the grass blades.
“I was traveling west from the river when my troupe was attacked,” Izumi said. “They came in after dark and overran our tents. There were maybe thirty of us, and only a dozen or so of them, but they had weapons, which we did not, and the element of surprise.”
“Who were they?” S’Leah asked. Izumi shrugged.
“Some wandering pack, I don’t know. Barbarians,” she spat. “They killed most of the men, and a few women who fought too much. They pulled the tent down around me, and tied me before I could run or fight. They had been heading south, and continued that way with us. Every few days we’d meet up with another band traveling the same road, and they’d sell one or two of us. By the time we entered the Queen’s realm there was just me and three others left. I was sold to Princess Cutlips, and Anja was sold to a local. The band kept Richard—they’d grown quite fond of him by that time. And Isma.” Izumi shook her head.
“Were you part of a caravan?” S’Leah asked her. Izumi moved off and drank at length from the stream. When she returned she lay on her back and laced her fingers behind her head. The sky was cloudless and filled with stars.
“Cirque Bizar,” she said finally. “Not that big or successful, but we were finally drawing some notice east of the River, north of the Realm. We were told the high road to the west was safe.”
“Nothing is ever safe,” S’Leah said. Izumi barked out a harsh laugh. “You were a performer?” S’Leah asked her.
Izumi in response sat up and unbuttoned the jacket. As quick as a snap of the fingers she folded one leg behind her back, then the other. She lay back on them, her ankles crossed below her shoulder blades. She placed the flat of one hand at the small of her back and curled forward, and laid one light kiss on the lips of her own sex.
“Twister,” she said, pulling her head back. She took the hand from the small of her back and pulled upward on the taut skin of her mound. Her sex was a bulging purse of flesh, and when she tugged her hooded slit rose upward. A stream of urine shot from her, arcing ten feet into the air and coming down in a stream nearly as narrow as when it had left her body. Izumi caught the stream in her mouth, but only for a second, then rolled to the side and emptied the rest of her bladder out across the grass. “And Pisseuse,” she added after swallowing, and still the stream continued, a curving, glittering arc splashing down a dozen feet from where Izumi lay. In distance alone she was impressive, but the sheer quantity of the stream was amazing. It shut off as if from a tap, and Izumi unwrapped her legs. She wiped her chin with her palm.
“I’m still dry,” Izumi said. “For a proper display I’d need to stay here all night drinking. I can stretch my bladder until it looks as if I am with child.”
“That was impressive enough,” S’Leah told her, thinking that to get that much height with her stream, Izumi’s bladder had to be the strongest muscle in her body.
“I’d do all sorts of tricks, twist myself into all sorts of shapes and hit a spittoon across the stage, mouths in the audience,” Izumi said. “We all had our specialties. Anja was hairy as a bear, Rika was a dwarf that appeared to be just a young girl. She dearly loved shocking people, and did quite well after the shows with men who still hadn’t figured out she wasn’t a child.”
“I would imagine so.”
“Mickelou and his wife Inka were jugglers and fire eaters,” she went on. Izumi paused, and looked down. “Micky tried to defend her when we were attacked, and they killed him. Inka fought so hard after that they beat her unconscious and left her for dead in the middle of our campsite. Wallo was an acrobat, and I think they killed him too. I never saw him after the attack.”
“Had you no weapons at all? No sentries posted?”
“Sentries?” Izumi tried to smile wryly, but it came out a grimace. “The thought never crossed our minds. We were thirty strong, what could we possibly have to worry about?”
“The West is not the East. And the Wasteland is something else entirely.”
“So I’ve seen.” Izumi shook her head. “We should never have come west of the river. Cirque Bizar,” she said with a snort. “Except for Isma, we’d all just blend right in.”
“You’ve said that name before.’
Izumi nodded. “She and Richard were still captive when I was sold off. He’s a true freak of nature, with an organ as large as a man’s fist and forearm. It was so large it took him half an hour to get hard, but in fair trade he could last for hours. His size was such that it frightened most women, instead of exciting them. The band that captured us, three quarters of them were women, the roughest kind you can picture. I can’t imagine what they must have lived through to turn them into such callous beasts. They couldn’t keep their hands off Richard, even though only a few of them could fit him inside themselves, and none to the base.”
“And Isma?”
“I think when she was just an infant her parents were killed in a raid, somewhere near the mountains, by a clan that had reverted back into mysticism and savagery. They kidnapped her, and then treated her as a sort of good luck charm, a symbol of their success in war. They never thought of her as a person, only an object. Never taught her how to speak, or write, and covered her from head to toe in tattoos and scar patterns that are the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen. Her entire body, including her face. Tattooed, and pierced dozens of times.
“Before any significant event, the clansmen would fuck her for good luck, dip their knives and clubheads in her sex before a battle for the same reason. She was captured by another group during a raid, was used as a seed receptacle by their men for two years, traded, sold, until somehow she found her way to us. After all that, life in our circus seemed pleasant to her. If just her mere appearance wasn’t enough to entertain the crowd she would eat for them.”
“Eat? Eat what?”
“Whatever they wanted. Garbage, worms, dirt, shit, anything and everything. The band that attacked us liked her because no matter what they made her do, or did to her, she didn’t seem to care.” Izumi’s expression in the dark was hard to read. “She cared.”
S’Leah looked up at the stars, and found her bearings. She stood up. “Time to go.”
Compared to the Waste, the north country was as green and fertile as a garden, with gentle rolling hills and occasional clumps of short, slender trees. The first two days passed uneventfully. The road was wide and in good repair, with pumps or water stations at regular intervals. Several times a day they passed coaches heading south. Daka caught a glimpse of young feminine faces in the carriage windows as they went by, but they did not stop.
The first night they’d stopped to sleep at a tiny water station, attended by a gruff grey-haired man missing his right leg below the knee. After a lean meal the others had gone to sleep inside on beds while Daka attended to the ponies in the rickety stable. The driver tried to help, but he was close to useless, and Daka soon bid him leave.
Daka’s awakening to ponies as something more distracted him as he washed and fed the mounts, especially with the dark-skinned beauty constantly trying to rub herself against him. In the end he strung her up and worked on her sweet spot as Uma had taught him, until with flashing teeth and scissoring thighs she climaxed.
When he lowered the black-skinned pony Daka discovered the other ponies had all become somewhat frisky watching him work on their teammate. It had aroused him too, and his cock fought against the rings with every beat of his heart. However, he had neither the energy nor the inclination to stroke the sweet spots of five more mounts, so he led them into the one big stall that was there, unhooked their leads, and closed the door.
The ponies still wore their armbinders and gags, but were otherwise nude. Their corsets, harnesses, and boots were all draped over a metal bar, drip-drying after being washed. Once inside the stall and free to move about, four of the ponies paired off, nuzzling ears and straddling thighs. The odd one out, the brunette with the big tattooed breasts, came to Daka and began nuzzling his chest, looking up into his eyes. She knelt down and turned her back to him, then tipped forward until her chest was on the floor. She spread her knees as wide as they would go and waited expectantly.
Her brown folds were loose and wrinkled, and he played with them for a few minutes, kneeling down behind her. He listened closely, in case one of the others came to check on him, but he believed they’d already all retired. Inside, the pony was hot and wet, and she pushed her rump back against his hand, encouraging him to penetrate her.
Daka went to work on her sweet spot with the flats of two fingers, and her hole opened up to him. He inserted a third finger, then a fourth, pressing down and rubbing her as he’d been taught. The mount grunted and hunched against his hand, which began to slosh loudly around in her as her excitement grew. Her juices were dripping off his palm, and suddenly he found his entire hand was inside her. He stared at the odd sight of his forearm ending at her slick folds. Her flesh was snug and wet, gripping his loose fist like a heated glove. The sensation of having his entire hand in her was very strange to him, and he twisted it slowly left and right. Her flesh rippled around his knuckles, and her sex pulsed, as if it were a mouth trying to swallow him. The pony began to buck wildly back onto his arm, groaning happily around her gag.
Daka paused, and a grin crept across his face. Past his pony the other four were writhing on the floor, awkwardly grinding their mounds against each others’ thighs, panting and sighing around their gags. The air was close with their scent, and he took a deep breath, then bent back over the pony wrapped around his hand.
The second night of the journey their group camped around a lone pump adjacent to the road. Lady Koho slept alone in the carriage, while Sempai Nodo retired to her tent with the driver. Daka sat beside the fire with the Sempai’s timid assistant, Pipa, and listened to the sounds of enthusiastic lovemaking inside the tent. Pipa was beside herself with embarrassment, but all Daka could do was try to imagine what the body of a woman as old as the Sempai looked like. Wrinkled and saggy, of that much he was sure. The boisterous and occasionally wet sounds from the tent didn’t disturb the ponies sleeping in a circle around the fire, tired after an especially long day over hilly ground.
Daka looked up as he heard the tent flap open, and the Sempai stuck her upper body out. Her hair was mussed, her face flushed, her small breasts even more wrinkled and saggy than Daka had imagined. Her eyes sought out her aide.
“Pipa,” she commanded. “Come over here.”
Pipa, mortified at the sight of her mentor’s bare breasts, stared at her hands, but shuffled over to the tent. There was a brief, fervent discussion, during which Pipa seemed to shrink in stature, then the Sempai scooted to the side. Slowly, reluctantly, the assistant bent down and stepped into the tent.
Sempai Nodo gave Daka a brief look, then disappeared back into the tent. Whispers, fierce murmuring, the rustling of clothes, then finally the rhythmic sound Daka recognized. Eyes heavy, he lay on the ground and went to sleep, the sounds from inside the tent fading into the darkness.
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