Bound and Initiated (23 page)

Grace laughed. “Oh, it’s fun. Your pater watches you with two hunky guys.”

“Oh…” Sarah said, “um. Fun?”

Grace nodded. “I’ve done it a few times myself even though I haven’t progressed. Claudia gives it as a reward sometimes, if I’ve written a good report.”

“Reward?” Sarah said weakly.

Grace smiled. “You’ll understand when the time comes. So bellatrices are like more important nuptae. Agnae are traveling secretaries, pretty much, but the parties are much cooler.”

“Parties?” Sarah suddenly remembered something Claudia had told her about the duties of an Ostia girl.

“Uh-huh,” Grace said, speeding her treadmill up a little. Her body was covered in a fine film of sweat now that made it hard for Sarah to keep her eyes forward. She bumped her own speed up a bit. “You’ll probably go on your first one in a few days. They’re a little boring for nuptae because we’re just tied to a wall, but it’s fun to see all the rich people, and you get to try the food and even have nice drinks afterward. After you’re a bellatrix, things get more interesting.”

“How?” Now both Sarah’s intelligence-analyst side and her submissive side cried out for more information.

“Party guests take bellatrices to private rooms and make them do stuff,” Grace said simply. “Anyway, the girls—whether you’re a nupta or a bellatrix—write reports about anything the guests say. You don’t have to try to get them to say anything, and you don’t even know what’s important except that if you think they said anything that has to do with energy, you’re supposed to highlight it.”

Whoa,
Sarah thought.

“So,” Grace continued. “Bellatrix to agna is the anal and kissing your domina between her legs. Agna to perses—persai manage teams of nuptae and bellatrices—is anal from five guardsmen.”

“Five?” Sarah swallowed, trying to picture it. Suddenly the plug in her bottom seemed much heavier.

But Grace went blithely on. “Capta comes after perses. Captae manage persai. That’s the hardest progression, everyone says.”

“Why?” Sarah didn’t want to hear the answer, she thought, but couldn’t help asking.

“Your pater whips you. I mean, he really, really whips you. So that it’s painful to walk afterward, and your marks last for a week.” Grace grimaced. “I’m glad to be lifetime nupta, thank you very much.”

Sarah gripped the handles in front of her, pretending to want to see her heart rate, which turned out to be much higher than it should be.

“After that,” Grace said, “there’s only domina, which they also call puella patris—girl of the father.”

“Claudia,” Sarah said, a little surprised.

“Uh-huh,” replied Grace, stopping her treadmill. “That’s when they chain you in a dungeon in the dark and guardsmen come and fuck you whenever they feel like it.”

Sarah stopped her own treadmill, breathing very heavily. “How long?” she said, trying to picture elegant Claudia bound and waiting in the dark for the civilizing act to be bestowed upon her, over and over.

“Three days,” Grace said.

Secured to the bench again, with the civilizer making it terribly difficult to concentrate, Sarah saw what she knew must be the first real work they had given her. The test, the day before, had consisted of a series of articles clipped from tabloids. It had been immediately obvious to Sarah that they were chosen because they contained references to the energy markets, some of them overt and some of them highly cryptic, like the prince of a small European principality who had decided to build a bigger swimming pool.

Today she spent her morning with full issues of tabloids and magazines. She spent her afternoon that way, too, after Grace released her to pee (while Grace watched, of course, which felt even more embarrassing with the stone plug firmly in place) and to have a sandwich and a salad for lunch. At least in the refectory they bound her to the bench and her hands were free to manipulate silverware, though even as she felt grateful for that she couldn’t help longing for the way her pater had fed her the snack the night before.

The exercise of finding the relevance to the energy markets of the various items in the full magazines fascinated her and confused her. As she undertook the task, she began to realize much more of what must lie behind the guard’s civilization-saving effort. She supposed it could still be a brilliant disguise for a megalomaniacal power grab, but she found herself more and more to give Robert the benefit of the doubt when he had said that he and his brothers—the true men—were working on saving the world.

The energy markets were messed up: no doubt could exist about that. When you correlated their being messed up with the cultural material through which they had set Sarah to work, you began to understand that the world might well face a horrific collapse at some point in the not-too-distant future. Princes and swimming pools were barely the tip of the iceberg: the sports, the technology, the simple role of air-conditioning—all of them pointed toward disaster, and perhaps the founders of this strange guard had found themselves unable to do anything but band together in this strange sexual pact with the girls of the Order of Ostia, and save what they could.

Could she betray the Pretorian Guard? Could she betray Pater Robert, now that she thought he actually did intend to save civilization, even if his methods were not to the liking of Sarah’s superiors in the CIA? Didn’t the CIA itself manipulate the world, to save it? Which superiors must Sarah obey, now that it appeared she would have the chance to go out into the strange world of these parties as a nupta? She began to dread the moment that must come, when one of the guests at a party would reveal him or herself as Sarah’s CIA contact, and tell her how to deliver her report.

Civilization. The civilizing act.
As the clock ticked toward 5 p.m., when she knew she would be brought back to the refectory for her final meal before Grace led her back to the pleasure chamber, Sarah found it harder and harder to concentrate on articles about celebrity shenanigans. Her mind seemed capable only of imagining what it would be like when Robert civilized her fully with his cock. She knew she had done good work, and felt sure that her little reports would please Claudia or whoever would read them, but eventually she simply couldn’t concentrate, and merely stared at the screen, reading the same paragraph over and over.

Grace seemed to notice Sarah’s distraction. She had been filing on the other side of the study room, but at around four o’clock she came and stood next to Sarah’s workplace. She put her hand on Sarah’s shoulder and said, “I know, Sarah. It’s okay.”

“How much does it hurt?” Sarah asked very softly, without taking her eyes from the monitor in front of her.

She couldn’t see Grace’s face, but in her new friend’s voice she could hear a sympathetic frown. “It hurts a lot, but… well, Pater Gregory—he’s the one who, you know, made me a nupta, and he isn’t kind the way Pater Robert is—after he did it, and I was crying because my bottom was so sore, he said,
That wasn’t too bad, now, was it, girl?
And I couldn’t believe it, but when I said,
No, pater,
I meant it.”

Sarah felt her own bottom tighten around the stone plug in her anus, and she swallowed hard. How could she be so scared of something and so aroused by it at the same time?

At five, Grace loosed her from the bench, clipped her arms to her sides, and led her to the elevator. The civilizer still felt cool, as if the chill of thousands of years of geology remained locked within it. Down the elevator to the Hall of Initiation they went again.

This evening, however, instead of leading Sarah straight into the pleasure chamber, Grace led her silently around the whole of the enormous mosaic, lit by the torches and by the enormous central fire. She saw again the three postures in the first episode, which she now knew represented only one maiden, becoming a nupta through her pater’s mastery of mouth, cunt, and anus.

She saw, in the second episode, a girl made a bellatrix with her cunt full of one man and her bottom another: nor had the artist failed to show the pater in the background, watching with his arms folded. After that came the scene from the video—the seated priestess with her legs spread, receiving the oral attentions of a girl whose backside gave pleasure to a red-robed man while a nupta in leather clung to him, and rubbed herself against his leg to increase his joy in the fucking.

Then Sarah saw the five big men standing behind a girl who, in the artist’s rendering, appeared as nothing but an upturned bottom bound over the bench. Her hands were clipped to her sides like Sarah’s, but she had been made to spread her backside’s halves just the same—just as Claudia had made Sarah do that morning. Each man held his cock in his left hand and a twelve-tailed mastix in his left.

Grace brought Sarah to the episode where a raven-haired girl was bound to a column then. Her pater held the mastix, and he had already covered her back with fiery red welts. Tears ran down her face, and a bit-gag distorted her mouth. Sarah felt herself go cold with shock, and then terribly hot with arousal at the sight.

The final episode shocked her even more, because all that lay in the sixth position were black tiles. “The dungeon,” Sarah whispered, imagining that in the darkness a girl, bound to a metal staple in the stone floor, received her rough suitors, many at once: cocks whose owners she might never have seen before pushing into her and making her the receptacle first of their pleasure and then of their pulsing seed.

“That will be your path, columba,” Grace said solemnly, as they looked at the black space that made the circle of six episodes full, “if you show yourself worthy. You will thank me for showing it to you.”

“Thank you, nupta,” Sarah whispered, not sure whether Grace had meant that Sarah must thank her now or that she would someday be grateful for the tour around the mosaic—or perhaps both.

Grace didn’t resolve the matter, but instead led Sarah silently in through the swinging stone door of the pleasure chamber and straight to the bathroom.

“Into the tub, columba,” she said. “I must cleanse your anus.”

Blushing, Sarah stepped into the enormous sunken bathtub, its sides fashioned of carved marble, at the end of the tiled room. Grace got a towel and laid it, folded, in front of her.

“Kneel, Sarah,” she said. Trembling, Sarah obeyed.

Grace fetched a broad low stool, whose purpose Sarah had wondered about, from the corner. Its top was upholstered in leather and well padded, so that it was almost a hassock. She placed it in front of the kneeling Sarah.

“Rest your head and torso here,” Grace said, “and present your anus to me.”

“Oh, please…” Sarah whispered, but it appeared that Grace wasn’t allowed to show her any compassion here in the pleasure chamber. The nupta did not chide Sarah, or threaten her, but as Sarah looked into her friend’s anxious face, she could tell that Grace would have to whip her if Sarah refused.

She bent down awkwardly, and half fell onto the top of the stool. It wasn’t terribly uncomfortable, but it felt so degrading, as she obeyed and once again opened her bottom cheeks for the attention of a superior in the Order of Ostia, that her face seemed to burn against the leather upholstery as it had against the couch in Claudia’s office.
Only two days ago?
The stone plug felt even stranger this way, shown to another person.

“Thank you, columba,” Grace said. Sarah felt her fingers tugging gently at the civilizer. “You know what to do, Sarah,” she said.

With a little sob, Sarah did what she must, and pushed out the unyielding thing that made her rectum burn as much on its departure as it had on its entrance. Her anus and her whole bottom felt strange now, as if the plug had taught Sarah that her backside should have something in it, to teach her to be a good girl—as if the unnatural had become natural, and the wicked notion that girls’ bottoms should receive what their superiors inserted had become virtuous and civilized.

Grace departed again. Sarah heard running water and then the unmistakable sound of suction. She didn’t want to picture the enema bulb, but she couldn’t help it: of white—or red?—rubber, sized to fit Grace’s palm, filled now with soapy water that Sarah would have to expel as her friend watched.

Grace’s footsteps, coming near. No further words then, just Sarah’s gasp at the touch of the nozzle, and her startled cry as Grace pushed it in. Her moan at the squeezing and the filling with the thankfully very warm water. Then the realization that Grace must have a basin of water, for she had filled the bulb again and put it back inside Sarah’s rectum, and Sarah had to bear even more soapy water.

Over and over, until Sarah moaned with the fullness of her bottom and the shame of having her rear end prepared for her pater’s pleasure. Five times? Six times?

Finally Grace said, “It is enough. You may rise, go to the toilet, and void your burden, columba.” Grace helped her up. Sarah couldn’t stop whimpering as she made her way, knees bent and bottom terribly full of liquid that seemed to slosh and threaten to humiliate her by defying her bottom’s clenching attempts to keep it all inside.

At last the toilet and the instant, degrading sounds that came with a feeling of such relief as Sarah thought she had never known. Grace stood in front of her, but Sarah could not look into the face of her friend: she could only hope that it wore a sympathetic expression.

“Now we will wash you, bathe you, and perfume you,” Grace said, when the sounds had ceased.

Into the shower then, where Grace washed her gently with a washcloth between her bottom-cheeks, while Sarah couldn’t suppress little sobs of shame and helpless arousal. Into the tub, the towel and the stool removed and wonderfully warm water filling it with perfumed bubbles.

“See?” Grace whispered as she soaped Sarah’s back. “Not that bad?”

Sarah looked at her, fearful that she might get in trouble for talking, or that Grace might have risked something terrible to reassure her, but Grace smiled back. “This is the one time it’s okay to talk. I know you won’t really want to talk, but you can relax while you’re in the tub, and let me wash you.”