I had thought he would say more, but Philip seemed a less loquacious man than the prince. Instead of more words, I heard the sound I had dreaded so thoroughly, with such a terribly ambiguous tightening in the pit of my stomach: the cane, whistling through the air.
I couldn’t help picturing it from the camera’s point of view and the audience’s; I had spent too long thinking about the way vital national moments would appear on the screens of the citizens of Artemisia. I knew precisely how the director would present the beginning of the whipping of Sara Granzofar.
For what seemed the eternal instant from the moment I heard the terrifying noise to the moment when I felt the dreadful thing land across my upturned bottom, I could see it much too clearly in my mind’s eye. A medium shot of a handsome officer standing over a nearly naked girl, bound tightly to a bench dedicated to this purpose—the strict education of a young woman in her duties, in proper behavior to the man who owned her, in utter submission to his will.
Her backside presented over her parted knees. Her lacy white panties setting off the pallor and the roundness of her taut bottom-cheeks, the strip of fabric between them preventing the utmost revelation of her intimate charms, but not with actual modesty: no, rather with the promise that her master would soon take down her underwear and use her pussy and her anus properly, once she had learned her terrible lesson.
The whistling ended with a sharp, final sound, not like the crack of the paddle but very sharp in its own way because it ended the dreadful, menacing noise that had preceded it. It seemed somehow, though it wasn’t quite true, that I heard the landing of the bamboo fully across both cheeks of my bottom before I felt it. Really I felt it at the same time, but the initial feeling, the sensation of pressure, didn’t match the awful anticipation my guardian had created inside me with the sound of the cane’s flight through the air in the long, forceful stroke with which he had begun my first whipping.
In that microsecond, the first moment of the terrible lesson Philip had decided I must have, I actually wondered why I had feared the cane so much. Then I knew, because the pressure had become a searing line of fire across my backside. I heard my voice, too: I had uttered an “Oh!” despite having supposed just a second earlier that I would be able to keep myself from crying out, to show my world that I was made of sterner stuff than my deposed president.
Viola cried out, too, when she heard myOh—a mewling little cry that made me turn my head to see that, whether consciously or not, she seemed to have snuggled backward on the prince’s lap, and His Royal Highness now held her close to him, his left hand firmly around her waist and his right on the bare skin of her knee, just below the hem of her schoolgirl skirt.
That sight seemed to combine itself terribly with the building of the agony in my backside, so that I felt my brow furrow deeply as I tried to get command over myself. That kind of self-control had become very difficult in the last few moments, because to my horror I found that as the agony from the first cut of the cane built and then began to fade slightly, it sent an unwelcome warmth forward into my pussy.
The governor tingled, and I bit my lip to keep from letting out a sob of mingled frustration and pain.
“Count, Sara,” Philip said, his voice very severe.
I had forgotten. Realizing I had forgotten made it all much worse: I did sob, then, because my guardian had tapped into the very need for independence and autonomy that he seemed intent on ridding me of. Sara Granzofar did what she intended to do, without needing that kind of reminder. The whole galaxy had just seen, on the contrary, that Sara Granzofardidneed to have her duty recalled to her mind, that her master would have to be strict with her to ensure she obeyed him properly.
I took a deep breath through my nostrils. The action of the muscles in my chest to draw the air in seemed to increase the pain from the first stroke of the cane, and I found myself straining against the belt, lewdly clenching my bottom-cheeks to ease the sting. I kept in the cry of dismay that threatened to come from my mouth, and instead I said, “One,” as scornfully as I possibly could.
“One, what, Sara?” Philip asked, his voice even sterner, the tone menacing.
I wished I didn’t know what he meant. I wished I were the kind of girl who could honestly say she didn’t know she had again forgotten her duty, and failed to address her guardian properly.
I had parted my lips to remedy my fault despite the part of my mind that still wanted me to scream that I wouldn’t let go of my idea of independence, even to avoid more terrible pain, when I heard the whistling of the cane again.
“S—no!” I cried. The stroke came down on my bottom just as my lips had formed into thepof please, so my yelp of agony started with thatp, making me sound that much more ridiculous.
At that moment I understood just how terrible the cane would be, and how desperately I must work, in the future, to serve my master well, so that he would never whip me again. That second cut in itself only added its sting to the first, and the sum really didn’t come to an unbearable agony. The promise of more, though, and of what would happen as Philip continued to cane me, made my stomach flip over.
My body strained against the leather binding me to the punishment horse, every muscle taut as I tried instinctively to pull sensation away from the second burning line.
“No need to count that one, girl,” Philip said. “Because it wasn’t part of the twelve. Count the first one, properly, though, or I’ll have to give you another extra.”
Oh, no.My mind had gotten confused, or at least the upper levels of my reasoning had. I didn’t know how to respond, to keep him from whipping me more than I could bear. My deeper consciousness, the part more intimately connected with my body, saved me, though.
“One, sir,” I sobbed, without even forming the words in my brain before they emerged.
“Good girl,” Philip said. “I’ll turn up your governor now as a reward for obeying me.”
“Oh, no,” I whispered, because I could already feel what would happen, and then I let out a tiny, mortifying sob as I actually felt it. When my guardian had allowed my pussy more pleasure before, the sensation hadn’t transformed everything down there the same way: even after he had paddled me, when he had shown me precisely how the governor would work against my independence and for my dark needs.
Then, it had felt like a warm glow, ending softly with the tingle of the device setting the new, higher limit. Now, it felt like a raging fire, the agony from the cane’s two lines across my bottom-cheeks not really fading but rather gaining something new, something absolutely impossible to resist, to keep from needing more and more and more of.
A fire and an ache, and the consciousness somehow of what would assuage it—the absolute certainty that only my master’s hard cock, thrusting hard, would help me, comfort me, soothe me… and, above all, release me from the tormenting pleasure that accompanied the pain he had so justly chosen to mete out to me.
That thought, as much as the surge of arousal in my pussy, made me sob, for the feeling down there, where he would fuck me, where he had caned me, somehow brought the utterly illogical but still inescapable conclusion that Philip was right, just, and loving. He had done nothing more, and would do nothing more, with his cane than to whip a very naughty girl exactly as he should.
I heard the sound again, and I cried out before the cane came down again, because I hadn’t had any time to get ready—as if I could ever have prepared to receive another stroke.
My whole body bucked as the third thwack came, and then the sting, from a cut that must have lain across the other two so that their agony, too, redoubled.
“Oh… oh…” I started, and a surge of fear made me choke out, in a voice that sounded terribly strangled, “Two, sir.”
The fourth came immediately—only the third of the ones that counted—and I started to scream, as much because IknewI couldn’t bear another stroke from the cane, let alone nine more. Somewhere I knew that all Artemisia was watching this shameful display of the naughty girl properly disciplined—my world, the galaxy… and Viola.