Bound and Initiated (11 page)

“Oh, no,” she couldn’t help saying. “Please.”

Without turning around, Claudia said in a stern voice, “Silence, columba.”

Through the door and into the lobby. The receptionist still there. “Hello, Sarah,” she said, looking up from her novel and smiling.

“Hello,” Sarah said uncertainly, though she felt sure she must respond, for something convinced her that the receptionist must be one of her superiors.

Claudia stopped, and turned to Sarah and the receptionist. “Columba Sarah, this is Puella Beatrice. You may address her as puella.”

Sarah had almost literally to bite her tongue to keep from asking what it meant. “Hello, puella,” she said.
Puella.
More Latin. Why couldn’t she have taken classics instead of Farsi, dammit?

“
Bona fortuna, columba, et magistro delectes,
” said Beatrice.

“Sarah, Puella Beatrice has just wished you good luck,” Claudia interpreted, “and expressed the hope that you will please your master.”

“Thank you, puella,” Sarah whispered, her pussy contracting helplessly at the words.

“Is the elevator lobby clear?” Claudia asked. Relief flooded Sarah at that, and she couldn’t push down a little sigh expressing it. Claudia turned to her with a mocking smile and narrowed eyes. “Never fear, columba. Before too long you will be naked before the eyes of some of the best dressed, most lustful men on the planet. You must grow accustomed to it.”

“Yes, domina. Clear,” Beatrice said.

Claudia led her out of the Ostia office. Even though no one was there, the experience of being naked in leather in such a public space, with its potted plant and its generic modern paintings, upon a gray industrial carpet, made Sarah feel faint. In the elevator, Claudia inserted a key in the control panel and turned it, and instantly they began to descend.

More useless questions, but now Sarah didn’t even need to repress them. They simply remained, floating on a sea of ignorance, in her head.
Does the key lock out other floors from calling the elevator?
Of course.
Does the key unlock a secret sub-sub-sub-basement?
Of course.

They descended for a very long time, it seemed, but Sarah knew her sense of time to have gone entirely out of whack, and it might only a have been a minute or two. When the elevator doors slid apart, she saw to her amazement a torch-lit passage lined with dark roughhewn stone that she knew must be bedrock because she saw no seams where cut blocks of stone met one another. Claudia didn’t give her time to absorb more than the vaguest impressions: the torches, venting perhaps to holes in the ceiling, for the air didn’t seem smoky; the floor of smooth stone that felt very cold on the soles of her feet.

Perhaps twenty feet in length, the passage led to ancient-looking wooden double doors that Sarah thought would look at home in a Roman imperial palace: a fiery red in color with a golden image of a young man in a strange hat on the left one and of an angry-looking bull on the other. The young man—
Mithras?
Sarah wondered—faced the bull, and the bull faced him, as if the place where the double doors joined one another were the space contested between them. Through that crack, too, Sarah could see a reddish glow on the other side, as if a fire burnt there, and so the dividing line between man and bull looked like a thin, fiery chasm that kept them definitely apart, if dangerously close.

Mithras, yes.
Mithras’ only real mythology: the killing of the bull.

Claudia stopped and turned.

“Now you will learn, Columba Sarah, of what it is you now become a part. You have ceased to ask useless questions, and you have been instructed in the ways of pleasing the men who have brought you here to serve their manly lusts. You have lain open upon the table, and you have been bound and leashed. There is no return now to your old life; the girl you were is dead.”

Oh, God.
Her body had indeed betrayed her mind. Sarah James, CIA analyst, screamed inside her head,
It’s not true!
But Sarah James, romance writer, knew it was true: there was only the new life before her.

“You are a servant of the god-man Mithras now, columba. In making you a woman, the creator chose to fashion you for the use of the men He fashioned in the image of Mithras. You are a holy possession, given by Mithras to his male servants for their refreshment and their enjoyment. By submitting to those men, and giving them the pleasure they deserve, you will become holier and holier. They will train you, and you will pass through the degrees of initiation as you learn to please them more and more. Today you stand before the first degree. At that first degree, above you, stands the man who will consecrate you with his manhood from sunset to sunrise, for the next three nights, and be your pater throughout your service thereafter. When he has finished with you, you will stand before the second degree, and you will be a nupta, the second grade, and a columba no longer. All these things are a mystery, Columba Sarah; you need not understand them, for what will befall you now will befall you whatever you think, or feel, or do. Fear not, then; your pater will be rough with you, as befits the god who slew the bull, but his pleasure will be your best reward. Though he ruins your innocence forever, you will learn to take joy in his triumph over your chastity. When his seed spurts inside you, know that you have received a gift worthy of your utmost gratitude.”

Now Claudia pointed to the figure of Mithras. “That is Mithras, columba. The hat he wears shows that he began his reign in the land of Persia, to which all culture and civilization trace their birth.”

Now you’re speaking my language,
Sarah thought. The fertile crescent: Ur and Babylon. Not Persia, really, because Persia didn’t exist until after culture and civilization had aged a bit, but that made what Claudia said even more interesting.

Claudia pointed to the bull. “Legend tells us that Mithras, god of law and of light, became human to slay the bull of man’s bestial nature.”

So far, so good.
Mithras, the Hellenized, then Romanized, version of the Mazdaic divinity Mithra, whose name came from a word that meant ‘binding.’ Sarah tried to adopt the open-mouthed expression of a girl told something so profound she cannot yet comprehend it.
Binding.
One of those mystical coincidences, surely, that followers of insane doctrine took as confirmation. The interpretation of the bull as
man’s bestial nature
was odd, but that kind of thing was common in cultic practices.

“The bull could only be slain, though, with the help of girls like you, columba,” Claudia intoned slowly, loudly, and very distinctly, and as she spoke the final syllable of
columba,
unseen hands flung wide the doors, which opened into an enormous vaulted chamber that stretched into the distance like the nave of a Gothic cathedral but with purely Roman architecture: vaulting of perfect arches, but wide enough at their bases that both the arches’ feet and their arcs were lost in shadow despite the blaze of torchlight and the enormous blaze of fire in the center of the chamber. A roaring of combusted air came that, while not deafening, at least deadened the ear to other sounds that might reach Sarah from a distance.

Claudia stepped into the hall and led Sarah forward. When they had gone ten feet, Claudia stopped deliberately and dramatically in front of a place where the floor changed from stone to some sort of tile. Both the knowledge of how a columba should react to the sight and the purely physical response of her body came to Sarah at once then, overwhelming her: she sank to her knees. She could not imagine doing anything else, unless it should be to faint.

The bull. The man. Girls like her.
There stretched out in front of Sarah, occupying the whole of the vast space between her and the conflagration that she instinctively felt must mark the center of this enormous underground chamber that existed, impossibly, underneath New York City, a mosaic. The mosaic depicted the bull, the man, and girls like Sarah.

She couldn’t make out everything because the image stretched so far out in front of her, and her perspective was so foreshortened, but she could see enough to know how these modern Mithraists had added to the story of the bull-slaying to produce their erotic variation. As Mithras subjugated the bull in the strange sidelong posture that Sarah remembered from her Western Civilization course, half-seated upon it as he held a short sword at the massive animal’s throat, his enormous erect cock—
not
an element Sarah remembered—rose from his lap. Seven naked girls knelt in a group at his feet, and an eighth girl, perhaps a little older, stood beside them, pointing to their hero’s phallus clearly as if to say,
Please that mighty cock this instant, girls, for that is your purpose.

It was the rich scenes that surrounded this central image, though, that told Sarah of the essence of the cultic practices of which her heart quailed to know she must now take a part. She could see two of these side scenes, which the mosaic artist seemed to have arranged around Mithras and the bull and the girls as if to show all the action as taking place at once, while still leaving the impression that one could read the side scenes as a progression; the two Sarah could see certainly appeared to progress, and she felt sure that the five further scenes she couldn’t see but which certainly—judging from the proportions and layout of the mosaic—lay beyond her sight on the other side of the central image must continue in that manner.

In the image at the base of which she had of course, undoubtedly by design, knelt, three men in red robes that hung open to expose their enormous erections fucked three girls. Sarah supposed that one could also read the image as one man and one girl, depicted three ways. The girls wore leather restraints identical to Sarah’s, and those restraints, in the mosaic image, had been employed to position them securely for fucking. The first girl’s collar was tied between two small columns so that she looked almost like a horse in crossties, so that the man who enjoyed her could use her mouth as he liked. The scale of the mosaic allowed for amazing detail, and Sarah could see that the girl whose mouth he filled struggled greatly to please her master. The man himself, though, was looking as he thrust into his own girl’s mouth at the central scene, and Sarah noticed now that all the men in the three side scenes she could make out did the same, as if they looked to Mithras’ coming enjoyment of his seven girls as the inspiration for their own virility and their own mastery over the girls they fucked in imitation of his great sexual power.

The second girl lay on her back on a bench, her belt and her thigh and ankle cuffs secured to it in such a way as to open her completely to the sight of the second man, who held his hard cock in his hand at the ready, clearly about to deflower her. She looked at him in apprehension, but he, like the first man, looked at Mithras, though the artist had been able to suggest using his mastery of perspective and sightlines that this red-robed master could also see the bare pussy of the girl he would fuck. The girl’s wrists were fastened, it appeared to her collar, and Sarah felt the blood rush to her face at the thought that they had done that so that she might not interfere with her master’s pleasure.

The third girl’s master had bound her to a similar—or again, perhaps the same—bench, on her face with her bottom high. He had attached her wrist cuffs to her thigh cuffs and secured her belt to the columns so that he could fuck her in her bottom at his leisure, while still watching Mithras and his seven girls. The couple were depicted in profile, so that the girl’s face, turned to face the viewer as her master thrust in and out of her anus, clearly showed how ambiguous were the sensations awakened in her by having a bottom full of cock.

“You kneel at the first degree, Columba Sarah,” Claudia said, her voice strong against the roaring of the fire. “Behold your fate. The first degree is the degree of three from one. One cock, but three nights, and three places for your pater’s cock in your young body: three maidenheads for him to take from you.”

Sarah couldn’t quite see the side scene that lay a few feet in front of her and to her left, but she could tell even without being able to make it out entirely that it must represent the second degree, for she could see that in it two men shared a girl between them.
We stand at the second degree
.

Three from one. Then, two? And after that, what? One from three, and what would that mean?
Sarah craned her neck, trying to see the third image but unable to discern anything much beyond the fact that she couldn’t see one of the red-robed men; instead she thought perhaps she saw three girls on a bed, and it made her blush again.

“There are many mysteries here, as I’m sure an intelligent columba like you can see, Sarah. It is not permitted, though, that you know the mysteries beyond your degree, and so now you will wait here for your pater, who will use you as you see in the picture.”

Sarah looked up at Claudia, and saw that the expression on the domina’s face looked kind and even a little anxious, as if in hope that Sarah wouldn’t be too scared. Deliberately and slowly, Claudia laid the leash down along Sarah’s back, until its looped end must lie on the floor behind her, though Sarah couldn’t see it.
In back of me, so that my master sees it, and can pick it up, but I cannot.

“Lie down, columba, on your right side, with your wrists, knees, and ankles together,” Claudia said. “Face the fire, of which I shall tell you in a moment, and then leave you to your master. As you wait for him, you must show your obedience by not moving.”

So big was that fire—which Sarah now saw actually burned on some lower level, shooting its flames upward so that it appeared to hover, as she lay there, over the floor—that the floor felt comfortably warm despite its being made of stone. Did many huge fires burn beneath this room, throughout its vast expanse, warming it and only exposed at the opening in its center?

Above her Claudia stooped, and with clips secured Sarah’s ankles, thighs, and wrists to one another. Then with another clip she secured Sarah’s wrists to her collar, like those of the second girl in the scene that Sarah now knew for certain depicted the first degree: her degree—the columba, deflowered.