The Woman Who Became a Beast of Burden

- by Julien Sorel


A wizard sat resting at a well in the desert. Across the rocks and sand a woman approached with several bags, as if she were travelling.

As she drew nearer the wizard could see that the woman was very tall and very beautiful, with dark black hair that fell below her waist. The woman smiled in greeting at the wizard as she approached the well to draw water. She was broad-shouldered, and vigorous enough that many men might think twice about attacking her. But there was nothing masculine about the undulation of her hips and the shifting of her large breasts beneath her loose robe.

"Do you belong to a man?" the wizard asked her.

"No," she replied pleasantly.

"Do you want to?" said the wizard.

The woman smiled at the wizard. She did not seem afraid, though she had a right to be afraid in such an isolated place. "No," she said.

"Why not?" he asked.

She replied sweetly, "I will be no man's beast of burden."

These words conjured up a pleasant image in the wizard's mind. "But it is a man's world," he said. "Perhaps you will be taken by force."

The woman simply smiled at him and continued her work. Even this thinly-veiled threat did not inspire fear in her.

The wizard made up his mind and stood. Suddenly the young woman dropped her pitcher of water, which broke noisily. She could no longer hold it: her fingers had become as short and unsupple as toes.

The wizard looked on with pleasure as the long-tressed beauty stood horrified before him, her arms turned into bare, curvaceous legs, kicking helplessly in front of her. She staggered, trying not to fall forward.

"What have you done?" she cried.

"I have made you into a beast of burden," he said. "Get down on your four lovely legs."

"Never!" she said.

"Think of what awaits you if you disobey and I leave you like this," said the wizard.

"I am a woman, not an animal!" she cried.

"Now you are both a woman and an animal," he said. "Come here and be leashed."

"I will not!" she said.

The wizard shrugged. "Let us see if your fellow mortals treat you as kindly as I would have," said the wizard. Then he was gone. The woman looked around her, frightened. She had to find a way to have the curse removed. But how? She was far from home and had no one to help her.

Her arms were now legs, and their curves had to be covered. But she could not drape her shawl over them, because her hands were now feet and could not grasp. Nearly in tears, she gave up and started across the desert, deformed and exposed, leaving her bags behind. She realized immediately that her new body wanted to topple forward, and that walking upright would be very difficult. But she refused to go on all fours.

As she approached the first town on the path, she encountered a group of young men loitering by the roadside. Her worst fears were realized when they started jeering at her from a distance. They knew that she had made an enemy of a wizard; only a brave man would help her under such circumstances. The young men approached her, still mocking her; one of them had turned his belt into a leash and ran toward her. Frightened, she took flight across the desert, trying not to fall forward onto her front feet. The men stopped chasing her, and in the distance she heard them laughing and making sounds to urge a horse on.

The unlucky young woman decided to avoid towns, and walked wearily through the fields, looking for help. Eventually she came to a lonely farm far from town. At the back of a simple house, she encountered an old farmer. The man stared at her but said nothing.

"I've been enchanted," the woman said. "I must find a wizard who will remove this spell."

"Why would a wizard help you?" the farmer said. It was a good question: whoever helped her risked making a powerful enemy.

"I don't know. But I must try," said the young woman.

The farmer said nothing for a long time, staring at the woman. Her front thighs and calves were bare, but he did not look at her with lust. The woman thought, "It does not matter if I am covered. No man will want me like this."

Finally he said, "If I help you, you must help me."

"How?" she said.

"I have a brother who has been in service to a wizard for many years. They live many miles from here. He might present you to his master if I ask him."

"And what can I do?" said the woman.

She did not expect the answer. "My crops are rotting in my barn because I have no money to buy a horse to take them to market. I need you to pull my cart."

The young woman's mouth fell open. "No!" she said.

"Why not? You can do it. You're not fit for anything else."

"I will not be your animal," she said, fear gripping her.

"If you will not, I must try to find a horse before my crops rot," said the farmer.

The young woman said nothing, and the farmer walked away from her. She stopped him, with a trembling voice: "If I help you, when will you take me to your brother?"

The farmer turned around. "We can continue on the market road to find my brother after I've sold my crops."

"Very well," said the young woman quietly. The farmer left and returned with a harness of leather.

"What are you doing?" cried the woman.

"We must leave immediately," he said. "Get down on all fours."

The young woman hesitated. The world would not be satisfied until she was on all fours. Tears were running down her beautiful cheeks.

"Hurry up!" said the farmer. Slowly, in great misery, the tall young woman bent forward, a little at a time, until the toes of her front feet touched the ground. She relaxed, and felt her bare soles in the dirt of the farmer's yard. "I would not obey the wizard, and now I am a beast anyway," she thought despairingly. "I have been conquered."

The farmer wasted no time pulling the straps of the harness around her lavish body, to which he seemed indifferent. "I must remove your robe," he said. "I cannot harness you like this." And she felt his rough hands pulling her clothes away.

"No! Wait!" she cried.

"What does it matter?" he said. "No man will look at you in this state. I'll keep the robe for when you become a woman again." But he was pulling the robe to pieces. In seconds the young woman was as naked as the other animals in the farmyard, her magnificent torso supported by four long, lovely legs. The farmer was a short man, and even on all fours the statuesque young woman came up to his chest.

"I must be brave," said the bared young woman as she felt the farmer picking up her rear feet and pulling off her sandals. In minutes, the farmer's expert hands had harnessed her and led her to the cart, to which she was attached by two long poles, fastened to straps on each side of her wide hips.

The naked woman stared at her front feet in the dirt as the cart was loaded.

Finally the farmer sat on the front of the cart, looking squarely into the woman's upturned bottom and her thickly furred sex. No man had ever seen these parts of her, she thought, and now the farmer would be only the first of many. "Now pull," said the farmer. The woman dug her bare feet into the dirt and pulled; the cart followed, more easily than she expected.

"Good," said the farmer. "Take the road away from town."

"The rocks hurt my feet," said the unhappy young woman.

"I have no shoes for you," the farmer said. "You'll toughen up pretty soon."

After a few miles, the young woman's soft, olive-colored skin was covered with sweat and glistening in the sun. She was breathing hard but not exhausted; her biggest worry was her majestic breasts, which bounced painfully around her chest no matter how steady her gait. "I can't see!" she panted. "My hair is in my eyes."

"You don't have to see," said the farmer. "Just go where I tell you to."

Several times they encountered other travelers on the road, and the farmer stopped to chat with some of them. The naked woman stared into the dirt, breathing hard, while the strangers laughed at her and discussed the details of her deformed body. "Men used to desire me," she thought. "Now I'm naked on a public road, my sex waving in the air with every step, and men only laugh at me."

At one bend in the road, the farmer yelled at the woman to turn, but she was scared to change direction so early and wound up pulling the cart into a ditch. Disgusted, the farmer dismounted. "This is no way to drive a horse," he said. The young woman heard him walk back to the cart, then felt a metal bit pressed between her full lips, and a harness tightened over her head. As the wide-eyed, terrified woman tried in vain to speak, the farmer took his seat in the cart, holding her leads.

"Now, when I do this, you go left." The young woman felt a sharp pain on the side of her mouth, and jerked her head to the left as far as it would go to stop the pain. "When I do this, you go to the right." He pulled, and the woman's head whipped back to the right. The farmer showed her how he would stop and start her, and played with the reins until she responded instantly to his commands. "You're too smart. From now on, no more thinking - I'll do the thinking. If I tell you to walk off a cliff, you walk off a cliff. Understand? Good. Now go." The helpless young woman felt the tug on her reins, silently pulled the cart out of the ditch, and trotted down the road.

Later in the day, the farmer spotted a group of suspicious characters behind him and yelled at the young woman to go faster. But she was too tired to accelerate, and the thieves overtook the farmer and rode off with as much of his crop as they could eat. Furious, the farmer descended with his whip and lashed the woman across her lovely, glistening buttocks. She screamed behind her bit and started sobbing and shaking. The farmer composed himself as he watched the young woman cry.

"It's not your fault," he said. "You need the whip." Mounting the cart, he yelled to the young woman, "Start running!" Then he whipped her reddened buttocks again. Crying out from the searing pain, the woman began to move. "Faster! Faster!" the farmer said, using the whip again and again.

In unbearable agony, the woman ran faster than she thought possible, forgetting about her tender bare feet, about her heavy swinging breasts. When the farmer stopped her, the woman stood gulping for air.

"Good girl," he said. "You'll do just fine."

To himself, he thought, "She's strong, and she's easy to tame. She's not as good as a horse, but a horse will cost money, and she's already under my bit."

When they arrived at the market, the farmer left the naked, dirty young woman hitched to the cart while he sold his crop. He also sold the young woman's tattered but valuable robe, and her sandals. At the other end of the cart, the woman stared at the ground, not responding to the men and children who gathered to laugh at her, not even moving when one of them groped her.

After the market had closed, the farmer tugged at the young woman's reins and guided her back to the road. But he turned her head in the direction of the farm, rather than on to his brother's home. In a panic, the young woman fought painfully to take the cart in the direction she had been expecting. Swiftly, the farmer jerked hard on her reins and struck her soft, upturned bottom four or five times with all his might. Screaming in agony, the woman turned back toward the farm and ran as fast as her four legs would take her. Watching her frantically churning buttocks from the cart, the farmer said to her, "There's lots more work to be done."

That was the last time the young woman resisted the bit or the whip. The farmer used her throughout the harvest season, both on his travels and to haul goods on the farm. He was a slight man, and the woman could probably have bested him in a fair fight; but he knew how to master an animal. After a few weeks, the young woman was utterly obedient. Her greater intelligence only made her more trainable, and she could be made to do things that a horse would flinch at. The farmer left her feet bare, and after a while she no longer minded the stones.

At the last market of the season, the farmer sold the young woman to a hard-looking man who raised crops the year round. The transaction occurred before the young woman's eyes; she understood what was happening to her, but she did nothing but look back and forth between her old owner and her new one. Her will had been broken.

The hard-looking man put the young woman to work drawing a plow, where she remained for several years. He was much crueler than the farmer, and lashed her often, without reason. Over time her olive skin turned dark brown from days in the sun, and her already strong body became muscled and powerful from her strenuous labor. A bell was hung from her beautiful neck, and her long black hair, which had never been cut, was chopped off. Wasting nothing, the man sold her hair, for almost as much money as he had paid for the woman.

At night, the man and his farmhands often went to the stable where the young woman was chained, and used her as she stood in her stall. She had never been taken before she came to this farm, but she did not resist. The farmhands used their spit to ease the way into her sex, but they were pleased to discover that the young woman soon became moist and receptive, though she made no sound while they used her.

The youngest of the farmhands was kinder to the young woman than were the others. At first he only felt sorry for this sad creature, who now barely seemed human at all. But one day, while driving the young woman in the fields, he casually used the whip on her, and suddenly found himself aroused at the sight of her helpless buttocks swiveling in a vain attempt to avoid the blows. That night he visited the tethered young woman in her stall and took her gently and lovingly, reaching around her back and cupping her great soft breasts. When he had spent himself, he lingered inside her, and felt her ease her bottom back into him to engulf him further. The farmhand thought about this gentle motion all night, wondering if the young woman was trying to express her affection for him in the only way she could. The truth was that the young woman had come to respond to what little pleasure she received as simply and directly as she responded to pain. For many years she had had everything to lose and nothing to gain from any exercise of her higher faculties.

One day when the young farmhand was leaving to strike out on his own, he asked his employer if he could buy the young woman. The older man negotiated a hard bargain, but by midday the young woman was tethered to the back of his cart, following him obediently to the house and land that he had bought. But, before going to his home, the young farmhand headed off in search of a wizard who was said to live in a distant town.

And so the young woman found herself led, naked and harnessed, before the same wizard who had admired her many years before at a desert well. Upon seeing her, the wizard, quite delighted, said, "But this is the tall beauty I met in the desert years ago! The one who said that she would be no man's beast of burden."

Undeterred, the farmhand said, "I have come to ask you to give her human form."

"Lead her to me," said the wizard. When the young woman approached, the wizard knelt to stroke her cheek, then to caress one of her soft, massive breasts and to finger her hard nipple. "Do you remember me?" he said. She remembered the wizard fully well, but she did not feel anger or humiliation or despair at appearing before him so degraded. She gently pushed her hard-nippled breast into the hand of the man who had taken away her life and made her into an animal. Her human pride had vanished years ago.

"I find you much improved," said the wizard. Then he stood and said to the farmhand, "I can restore her body, but not her mind. She has been broken, and cannot be unbroken."

"I don't care," said the farmhand. "I love her."

"Very well," the wizard sighed. And the young woman fell to the ground, her front feet having suddenly become hands, and her front legs arms. The farmhand helped her to an upright position, and she stood naked and unsteady. She was changed in a hundred ways from the woman she had been, but she was still very beautiful.

"Come, follow me," said the farmhand. The young woman heard, but she had not been trained to respond to verbal commands. "You had best use the headstall with which you brought her here," said the wizard. And so the woman left bridled, without a backward look.

Living in the farmhand's new house, the young woman recovered enough to perform simple tasks and to help with the housework. She had not spoken, but perhaps will someday. The farmhand loves her, dearly and counts himself lucky to have her. But, in bed, he often takes her from behind, and imagines her again as a lovely four-legged beast....