Read The Emperor's New Pony Online

Authors: Emily Tilton

Tags: #Erotica, #Bdsm, #Historical, #Literature & Fiction, #Romantic Erotica

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BOOK: The Emperor's New Pony
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Horses and Amidians: that must be why this scene made the fire run through Comnar’s veins watching poor Versal as he now received the news from Comnar’s imperial steward Qartin that he would not even be admitted to the palace proper, which was reserved for nobility, but must follow the stable master to the stables, where he would receive the emperor’s instructions.

Horses and Amidians: from his childhood, Amidian
meant
horse—the best horses of all, beside which no other equine could lay claim to the title. Comnar’s brothers had each received his Amidian stallion when he produced an heir. There had been no Amidian stallion for Comnar. Yes, he must confess it to himself at least: the scene had the power it did because now Comnar had four Amidian fillies—and he had the nation of Amidia too.

Out the window, Ranin Versal followed Comnar’s Amidians to the stables. Smiling, Comnar went to join them there. He could have his dinner after he delivered the devastating news of the doom of Amidia in the stables, and showed his Amidians what their fate had in store for them. Perhaps they would never call him Comnar the Great, or even Comnar the Conqueror, but Comnar the Cruel seemed to the emperor scarcely less of a compliment, and he had already earned that title five or six times over, he thought with satisfaction.

When he reached the stables, he entered as quietly as he could, through the door that led directly from the stable block to his residence. He watched, himself unobserved, as the stable master led the fillies in, followed by Versal and finally Qartin. Comnar stood perhaps a hundred feet away: the imperial stables, which before Comnar’s accession had held ten score of real horses and now held seventy-eight fillies of the human variety that pleased Comnar much more, were as cavernous as a great temple of the gods.

Comnar walked slowly toward the group who had just entered at the gate door, down the center double row of stalls, where the fillies lived. He glanced approvingly at the team of dark-skinned Hadians, the queen and noblest ladies of the Southern desert nation of Hada, and at the pair of olive-skinned Muadis whom he had acquired two years before when he sacked Muad. He read one of the beautifully handwritten cards that adorned their stall doors, not because he didn’t know what it said, or which filly he looked at when he peered through the bars of the stall door at the sweet twenty-year-old who was down on hands and knees, completely naked but for her chestnut tail, eating from the feedbag that hung there.
Salana, once the young queen of Muad, now a fine chestnut filly. Bred by Lord Haq, by permission of the emperor. Mounting days: one and four.

Comnar glanced toward the end of the row. The stable master was still watering the Amidians, while Versal looked on, with an expression of horror that Comnar could just make out at this distance. Filly Salana looked too delightful to pass up the chance at a little fun.

“Salana,” he called softly. The girl raised her face from the feedbag (the fillies ate like the nobility they no longer were, at least); she was just as beautiful as a dark orchid. Her eyes looked at him with the inextinguishable hatred of which Comnar could never seem to get enough. “You may speak.”

Salana had had enough of the quirt to know that failing to answer simply was not worth the price. “Yes, your imperial majesty,” she said, forcing her face into a smile, though the hatred did not leave her eyes.

“Were you mounted in the ring yesterday?”

“Yes, your imperial majesty.”

“Did Lord Haq ride you hard?”

“Yes, your imperial majesty.” Salana’s face betrayed the shameful pleasure in the memory that Comnar knew would be there.

“Were many there to watch?”

“Yes, your imperial majesty. Five or six of your courtiers, I think, and two of your knights.”

“Servants as well?”

“Yes, your imperial majesty, as always. The valets and equerries, with some maids that they brought for fucking.”

Comnar smiled at the way the shameful word tripped off Salana’s tongue. Two years before, when she had first arrived in Maq, Lord Sheomar, Salana’s first rider, had beaten the former queen of Muad until the dusky ovals of her backside had glowed like the sun, before she had obeyed him and said that she liked the fucking he gave her, though it had been clear from her first mounting how she adored Lord Sheomar’s cock. Now it seemed that Haq, Comnar’s own distant cousin, had become very jealous of her—even wanted to sire an heir upon the little former queen. Sad that Haq must not be allowed the privilege of offspring, to ensure the safety of Comnar’s house. Master Morqan personally made sure that Salana drank her bitter tea every day.

“Thank you, Salana,” he said, turning away toward the Amidians with a twinge of regret that he could not do two things at once, and hear about how the courtiers and knights had fucked the maids while they watched Lord Haq at work covering Salana.

“Thank you, your imperial majesty,” she said.

The fundamental system of Comnar’s stables revolved around the mounting schedule. His ancestor’s stables had failed, and got their author reviled as Comnar the Fool, because he had kept the fillies of his stables to himself. Comnar, the first emperor to bear that name since then, had found in his own inability to mount a filly the secret to a security on his imperial throne that he believed could have no rival in history. Every courtier of any consequence had at least one filly to mount and, if he chose and the emperor allowed it, to breed, in Comnar’s stables. The days and times of their mounting were prescribed, and the knights and nobles knew that if they gave out good reports of Comnar and did great deeds for him, the next fillies to come to Maq could fall to them, rather than to their rivals. Above all, they knew that none of them would fall to Comnar, because—the official story went, which no one ever dared question—Comnar had the wisdom to see that a generous emperor made the best sort of emperor.

And when the courtiers bred the fillies, the true genius of the system appeared: for those children were legitimized, by order of the emperor, and raised in Comnar’s court as nobles, or in the court of his cousin, statutory wife, and purported mother of his sons, Empress Qolana, who lived happily in faraway Shaqor, taking as many lovers as she pleased in order to produce ‘heirs’ for Comnar.

Comnar leaned against a stall door twenty paces away from the Amidians. The stall held one of the friskier fillies from Muad: she stood in harness, tied in place with her hands behind her to a rope that descended from the ceiling. Her bit had been left in her mouth—she had either spoken when she should not have, or perhaps shown a lack of respect for a stable boy’s cock when he visited her stall to enjoy between her lips and over her tongue, as was the stable boys’ privilege with many of the lower-born fillies. The girl, olive-skinned like Salana but with striking green eyes that must have been the reason why a knight had decided to take the trouble to bring her to Maq, stared desperately back at the emperor. Comnar winked at her, and turned to look at the Amidians.

Morqan was just walking to the bell that would summon the stable boys to wash the fillies down. Lord High Steward Qartin stood patiently watching: his enthusiasm for the stables was limited, Comnar knew, but unfettered government of the palace, with the bribes that entailed, kept him happy enough.

Morqan rang the signal for wash-down: two chimes, then two chimes, then three chimes. The two nineteen-year-old stable boys assigned the duty for the day emerged from the door that led to the apartments where they and Morqan lived, and had one of the finest educations in the empire, from Master Ropiq the stable tutor—who also would teach any of the fillies who wished to further whatever studies they had come to Maq already having. Many fillies had no education whatever when they arrived, and left the stables at the end of their service at age thirty with the skills necessary to serve the imperial bureaucracy as the all-important secretaries who actually ran the empire.

The stable boys brought with them the buckets of hot water that always sat ready on the hearth in their apartments, and in the buckets their big sponges. As they approached the girls, Master Morqan unhooked the fillies’ wristlets from their belts so that they could move their hands freely.

It would be the first time the Amidians were washed down, and Comnar rather hoped Morqan’s quirt would be required, but the stable master’s command, “Filly-fashion, girls,” was instantly obeyed: Edera, Melisan, Adilan, and Alira all dropped immediately to the well-spaced flagstones that covered this open part of the stable and provided drainage for wash-downs.

“Get them out of harness,” Morqan said to the stable boys.

“Master, may we…” asked Gad, the more experienced of the two.

“Use their mouths? Aye, but not the white-tail—she’s for the nobles.”

Chapter Six

 

 

Ranin thought that he had perhaps already gone mad. The one person who addressed him, the lord high steward of the imperial palace, did not even call him “my lord,” but simply “Goodman Versal.” What was he supposed to think, or to do, about that? Surely the emperor could not countenance such strange, crass degradation as that? He was lord chancellor of Amidia, of an ancient Aurian family. How could he even address a high steward who did not acknowledge his status? To do so would be to make himself complicit with these bizarre proceedings.

But then, as he watched and listened to the actions of the master and his lads in the stable, he understood that his mind had decided to dwell on the way the steward had addressed him because it could not even begin to come to grips with what the emperor had done to Princess Edera. He saw that if he allowed his mind to follow the path down which lay the terrible sights and sounds of the naked Amidian princess and her naked ladies-in-waiting, bound in their leather harnesses and exposed the way he had seen the whores of Maq exposed, openly, to show what a man would get for his silver—if he let himself think about that, he would see a terrible truth that might destroy his reason forever.

One of the stable boys was saying to Princess Edera, “Let’s get this harness off you, sweetheart.” The boy, a handsome lad with brown hair and blue eyes, of the dark coloring of the Maqian warriors, began unbuckling the strap that went around the princess’ forehead. Suddenly Ranin feared that the thing the boy had said, and the thing the stable master had said, a moment before, might be about to happen, and he took a step forward.

“Easy there,” said the stable master. “Remember that I said the white-tail is special.”

Qartin the steward said, quietly and urgently, taking Ranin by the elbow, “Goodman Versal, you’re going to have to watch the others service the lads, but think of what you lose if we have to kill you here and summon someone else from Amidia to negotiate. And I tell you that your special filly will be kept special unless you do anything foolish.”

Then Ranin could not refuse to address him any longer, ‘Goodman’ or no. “He said she would be reserved for the nobles.” How had his ears managed to preserve that, he wondered, when the rest of his wits seemed unable to comprehend anything at all?

“That only means that your special girl—forgive me, for I am not permitted to call her ‘princess’—will not receive any attentions until the emperor decides whose attentions she shall have. And if you cooperate—terribly hard though the emperor will make it—she will not receive the attentions you wish to spare her.”

Ranin realized that his reason must be much stronger than he had ever thought it, for he became conscious that he had
not
gone mad, and that he could see precisely what Comnar meant to do to him.

“Goodman Versal,” said a voice from a short distance away, up the stable block. There was a man there, leaning against a stall door. He wore a sumptuous robe, and in the dappled light that filtered into the stable from a clerestory high above he appeared to be lean as a blade, with a face just as sharp, though it was youthful.

“Your imperial majesty,” said the steward, bowing low.

Could it truly be the Emperor Comnar, third of his name, who stood there, leaned there? Perhaps that moment transformed Ranin’s understanding of the range of woes that would befall him in Maq more than any other. The imperial court of this emperor’s father, Qol the Just, had been a place that despite the maddening bureaucracy and the stifling formality had nevertheless presented the sort of challenge that Ranin remembered Auner of Amidia knowing how to meet—mostly by telling Comnar’s father that Amidian horses would keep coming to Maq as long as Amidia remained a favored trading partner. The imperial court of Qol the Just had been a place where if the emperor visited his stables, three secretaries, two valets, and five lords of the imperial court of justice would accompany him.

The notion that Comnar had converted this enormous stable into a place where he kept
girls,
harnessed and naked: that idea had failed really to penetrate Ranin’s wits when he first realized that Edera and her ladies-in-waiting had been stripped, shaved between their thighs, bound in leather tack, and made to wear horsetails in their bottoms. It had failed to stand clear before him even when Qartin had said, “You must follow me, Goodman Versal,” and led him, behind the shamefully arrayed highborn girls of Amidia, into the stable.

But to see Comnar the Third standing there by himself, watching the proceedings of the stable boys as they unbuckled the tack from Melisan and Alira of Amidia, and to hear him call Ranin ‘Goodman Versal’—then Ranin understood, and the understanding struck him dumb.

“Look, my lord,” Comnar said with a cruel, almost playful note in his voice. “I believe Goodman Versal has just grasped what has happened. His face seems to have lost the ruddy, healthy glow of the Amidian complexion.”

“Yes, your imperial majesty,” Qartin replied.

“Goodman Versal, you must bow,” Comnar said conversationally. “Look at Master Morqan, and at my lads Gad and Hednar.”

Ranin turned and saw that all three of the stable men were bowing much lower than Qartin had: the stable master’s hands were upon his knees, and his boys’ hands were upon their shins. Ranin remembered Auner telling him about this part of imperial protocol, which apparently had survived Comnar’s accession. As a lord, Qartin’s bow to the emperor brought his fingertips to the middle of his thighs; knights bowed with their fingertips touching their knees, masters with their hands upon their knees, and commoners the way the stable boys were bowing. Auner and the rest of the Amidians had not bowed before Qol the Just, because they were members of another sovereign nation’s nobility.

BOOK: The Emperor's New Pony
12.48Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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