Chapter 13
Ilsa
Giovanna applied more wax. I felt the little spatula trace a path so close to the tiny ring of my anus that my breath came shorter.
“The Roman legions brought order to the world,” she told me, her voice instructional.
“Roads, aqueducts, law. They imposed structure on chaos. They took what was wild and gave it form.” The cloth strip went down.
I gripped the alcove’s sides with both hands and tried to prepare.
“When a master takes a columba’s bottom, opening her there on his thrusting manhood, he performs the same act.
He imposes civilization on the most private wilderness of her body.
He makes her his, in the way that Rome made the provinces hers. ”
She pulled the strip away.
I cried out, and the cry bounced off the volcanic stone and came back to me. Somewhere underneath the sharp bloom of pain I felt the unmistakable, mortifying throb of arousal that I had no more capacity to deny than I had capacity to free my wrists from their rings.
“Hold still,” she said, the sharpness returning to her tone.
I held still. I breathed. The pain faded as it had before, into a heat that spread inward and downward. I lay there with my face in the old tears of the women who had come before me and I thought, they felt this too. All of them. They lay here and they were afraid and ashamed.
Their bodies must have betrayed them exactly as mine was betraying me, and eventually their masters came for them and civilized them in the way Giovanna is describing.
They became whatever a columba becomes, and I am going to become it too, and there is nothing in me that can stop that from happening now.
I wasn’t sure when I had known that. Perhaps since the café. Perhaps since the cavern.
Perhaps since the bride saddle, when the voice had said be still, and I had felt my body trying to obey it.
Giovanna worked, taking the hair from the most private part of my body.
She was thorough. I wept quietly and held still and let her bare me in that final, most intimate place.
When she was finished, she smoothed something cool over the skin there, as she had over my pussy, and I shivered at the contrast of temperature.
Then I heard her set down the spatula and pick something else up.
The oil with which my mistress proceeded to anoint me had a scent I couldn’t fully identify at first: olive oil at the base, of course, but infused with something warm and resinous and a floral undertone that the air of the chamber complicated into something even richer.
She spread it across my shoulders first, working down my spine with long strokes that had the quality of a ritual preparation rather than a massage, though the distinction blurred quickly as the warmth of the oil and of her hands moved through my muscles and found the tension that had been living in me since the café and began, methodically, to address it.
I made a sound that had nothing in it of distress. I clenched my jaw to keep it in but it escaped anyway, low and involuntary, absorbed by the leather cushion in the stone alcove.
She oiled my sides, my waist, the curve of my hips, as if she were caring for a recently domesticated animal.
She worked down the backs of my thighs. Over the welts there her hands were careful and deliberate, the oil cooling the lingering sting in a way that made the sting feel, paradoxically, more present rather than less.
I became much too aware of every place the horrid mastix had found me.
Then her hands moved inward and upward. She touched the newly bare cleft of my pussy. My cunt.
“Oh,” I said, into the leather. Involuntary. Useless.
Giovanna anointed me as thoroughly between my thighs as she had everywhere else.
The oil and her fingers worked together with the knowledge she had so clearly demonstrated.
The terrible sensitivity of my freshly bared skin seemed to magnify every pass of her palm, as if the waxing had removed not only hair but also whatever insulation had existed between my nerve endings and the world.
I was very close to a climax, immediately and entirely, and I knew she knew it though I tried to hide it in the desperate, idiotic hope I might be able to come without her sensing it.
She didn’t stop, but she didn’t give me what I needed, either. She maintained the same precise, patient pressure that brought me to the edge and kept me there, hovering over the precipice with my fingers gripping the stone of the alcove and my breath coming in ragged pulls through my nose.
Then her oiled fingers moved to the place she had just bared for me, the place she had told me my master would claim in the act of civilization. Her touch there felt so new, so specific, and so utterly without precedent in my body’s experience that I let out a sob.
“This is where he will have you,” Giovanna said, her voice very quiet now. Her finger moved in a slow, exploratory circle that my body received with a clenching shudder. “Where he will take you… and own you. When the time has come for you to belong to him there.”
She paused in her speech, but her touch continued.
My hips tried to move, of their own accord, and the restraints held me.
I knew, my cheeks burning at the realization, that I wanted them to hold me.
Part of me it seemed had stopped pretending, somewhere between the mastix and the oil, that I wanted anything different.
“You will learn to welcome the phallus and its dominion over your bottom, columba. You will learn to welcome him inside you just as he desires, and not as you wish.”
“Yes, Mistress,” I whispered, because I had no choice.
I had no choice but to say that, as I would have no choice but to belong to my master—whoever he might be—in that terrible, shameful way.
I had seen it in the Viking carvings, felt it on the bride saddle, and I had heard it from a bellatrix of the Order of Ostia.
I still had no idea what the connection between the two might be, but how could I possibly resist their dismaying, mortifying, shared idea of how a strong man claims a girl who has come into his power?
Giovanna’s finger stilled. I felt her hands move to the clips at my ankles.
The sounds of my release came in the same sequence as my binding: ankles, thighs, the ring at my belt’s back. The spell she had apparently put me under continued; when my mistress’s hands came under my arms and drew me upward, I let her do it without protest.
Standing felt strange. The blood moved back through my legs in a way that made me swallow hard, and then bite my lip.
I had to grip Giovanna’s forearm for a moment while the chamber steadied around me.
She permitted my grasp with the patience she seemed to bring to everything, waiting until I had my feet properly under me before she stepped back and reached for the leash on its hook.
I blinked as I watched the leash’s clip come toward me, then disappear under my chin, finding the ring at my collar’s front. I heard it close.
Giovanna didn’t speak. She simply turned and walked toward the door, and the leash drew taut against the ring at my throat.
With a helpless little whimper, I followed her.
There was nothing else to do. I was oiled and bared and still aching with the need she had cultivated so carefully and given me no satisfaction for.
The leash seemed like a simple fact, and Giovanna’s back was a simple fact.
The volcanic stone corridor beyond the preparation chamber received us in its cool, old silence.
My mistress led me deeper, further into the rock, through a passage that narrowed and then opened again into a corridor.
The mosaic here was different from the preparation chamber’s: simpler, more geometric, the tesserae worn very smooth.
Torches in iron brackets gave out light, real fire though it seemed like the flames didn’t smoke.
The shadows they threw moved against the stone in a way that made the corridor feel as though it existed outside of time.
Four doors opened from the corridor. Stone, each with an iron handle and a small barred window set into it at eye height.
Giovanna stopped at the second one. She produced a heavy iron key from the pocket of her robe. She unlocked the door and swung it outward.
The cell beyond the door was small and round.
The stone walls curved up to meet a low dome.
The floor was smooth, worn in a circle at the room’s center where I understood, in an instant of cold clarity, that many feet had stood.
And from the floor itself, in that circle, rose two posts of dark iron, set perhaps a meter and a half apart, each with a ring at its top, its middle, and its base.
To the side I saw a bench similar to the one in the preparation chamber, but larger and furnished with what looked like furs in addition to the same kind of leather cushions I had already seen and lain upon.
My mistress unclipped the leash from my collar and hung it on a hook just inside the door. Then she took my wrists in turn and clipped the rings of my cuffs to the upper rings of the posts, left to right, so that I stood between them with my arms extended, facing the curved stone wall of the cell.
My back was to the door, I realized, my eyes widening at the knowledge of the sheer helplessness of my position.
I was oiled from shoulders to ankles. I was freshly bared in my most private places.
The welts from the mastix mapped themselves across my bottom and the backs of my thighs in a language I couldn’t read but someone else apparently could.
Giovanna clipped my ankle cuffs to the lower rings, so that my feet were spread at slightly more than shoulder width. Then she straightened, and I heard her step back, and for a moment there was only the torchlight from the corridor and the sound of my own breathing.
“You await your master, columba,” she said.
The door swung shut. The key turned in the lock. I could just make out her footsteps receding down the mosaic corridor until the stone swallowed them entirely, and I was alone in the round cell with the torchlight filtering through the barred window and my own heartbeat very loud in my ears.
I waited.
I didn’t know for how long. Long enough that an ache settled into my shoulders so deeply that I ceased to notice it.
Long enough that the oil on my skin cooled to room temperature and I became aware of the cell’s air against every bare surface.
Long enough that I had exhausted several unproductive lines of thought—about the Order of Ostia, about the Guard, about the Norse inscription in a Sicilian mosaic, about the bride saddle and the tree and the young woman’s eyes—and arrived at something that wasn’t quite calm but was at least a quieter version of fear.
Then the lock turned again.
The door opened behind me. I heard it but did not turn, because I could not turn, because my wrists were clipped to iron posts. I felt the change in the air, the slight shift in temperature, and I heard him step inside.
Not Giovanna. The footfall sounded too heavy, too slow, too certain of itself. A man’s tread, moving with unhurried confidence.
He didn’t speak for a long while. I heard the door close behind him. I heard him stop, and I understood somehow from the quality of the silence that he was looking at me.
The back of my neck felt very warm.
“There.” His voice was deep and low and carried an accent I couldn’t place immediately, especially from a monosyllable.
I could tell my new master wasn’t Italian, but my mistress had told me that the Pretorian Guard had global reach, so I supposed he might have come from anywhere. “There you are, columba.”
The way he said columba… it made me wonder, suddenly, if this man wasn’t as conversant with the apparently ancient ways of the Order of Ostia and the Pretorian Guard as Giovanna and her nymphobus were.
And that made me wonder in turn whether the accent I heard in his words might have something Northern about it.
His hand touched my shoulder blade. It felt deliberate, as though he meant to test the temperature of an object he intended to handle.
“Good,” he said softly. “Very good.”