Meanwhile, several hours to the north, Turquoise and Minka were hauling the dray, bringing in bales of hay. They were oiled with sweat and the sun cream Emily used on the ponies - though Minka, by her nature, was fairly well protected under her second skin. Tomas walked along beside them, piling bales on the dray, twelve to a load, until the cart was unbearably heavy on the bumpy ground. Turquoise could see sweat running down the ringlets of Minka's tail - she presumed hers looked the same.
After each load, it was back to the upper deck of the barn, across the little bridge and through the mowing gate, and Tomas would unload the bales and stack them. In the cavernous interior of the barn, the pile seemed to grow very slowly. But it was nice to stand there in the shade, drinking water from the little pail, or munching the occasional sugar cube that Tomas kept in his pocket. Even the humans seemed drowsy in the heat.
'Isn't this stallion's work? Sirius is off playing at the gymkhana, but where the hell is Syzygy? Where's Scorpio? They have full schedules today, or what?' She remembered stories of ranches like Ghent, where the ponies did all the work - plowing, planting, mowing, and hauling. 'At least Maxon is not so old fashioned that he doesn't have a tractor.' For a moment she felt like Broken Oak was pampering them, a bunch of pretty ponies at the spa, not workhorses. 'Probably so. I'll take it.'
By the fifth load, Minka was already starting to burn a little on her shoulders and buttocks. Emily was very concerned about this. Every time she whipped her, she would stop the cart and re-apply sun cream to the welts, where the tongue of her whip had wiped it off.
"Ok, I guess that's it." She said when they returned to the barn. "I'm just going to take them up to the house, Maxon wants to see me. He's got a new camera and he doesn't know how to use it."
"Oh, you're in trouble, then." Tomas smiled and gave Emily a kiss on the cheek, which made Turquoise jump a bit. Those two? Really? But he's so...nice. "Who should I harness up next?"
"Chessy and Scorpio, maybe. And then Dolly and Ayesha."
"Orion's stronger."
"Yeah, but he needs his strength."
"Right. See you." And Tomas waved and headed down the steps. Minka looked at him mournfully - no sugar cube.
When they reached the house, Emily unhitched the dray beside the patio, and led the ponygirls in to the shade of the portico, where she cross-tied them both in the same archway, almost on top of each other.
"Maxon!" She shouted. He came out of the house, so flustered by modern technology that he was not even smoking. "What's up, boss?"
"Look at all these settings!" He sounded agitated. "See? It has a picture of a horse's head. Is that for taking pictures of ponies?"
Emily laughed for as long as one can laugh at one's employer. "My god, man, have you read the directions?"
"Yes, but I think they've been translated a great many times. See, it says: 'Holding the camera with its shutter, depress the other button now.' What does that mean? That doesn't mean anything."
"Easy, boy. Can I see it?" She looked at it for a second. "Maxon, look. This here is auto-focus. You just set it there, and don't touch any of these buttons, nothing. Point the camera, push the big button on top. Everything else…you won't need."
The old man held up the camera gingerly, and Emily raised one hand to interrupt.
"Sorry. This, boss, is a lens cap."
"Sure, sure." He took a picture of the hills, and then looked at it in the little display window. "It works!"
"I'm happy for you, boss."
"How's the hay coming in?"
"Pretty well. These two work as hard as the stallions, if you want my opinion."
"They can't be as strong."
"No, but they doesn't have the whole cocky 'I ain't in no hurry' thing, either."
Maxon nodded, and walked over to them. Minka shuddered; Turquoise tried to steal a peek at the picture he had just taken. She somehow imagined that Maxon could get it out of focus even with auto-focus. But the window had gone dark again already.
"Minka interests me. Our only Greyson. I really think she's a submissive masochist, not the other way around."
Emily nodded very slowly. "I think I know what you mean, but you're going to have to help me out."
"Well, most of our ponies - Sirius, Chessy, Magda - their attunement is masochistic. They like pain, they like punishment, but they can't give themselves what they want. So they become submissives - they becomes ponies - in order to get it."
"And Minka?"
"I think Minka doesn't like pain. I think she hates it. But she wants to submit, and if that means pain, it's a price she accepts." Minka stomped back and forth a bit, either disagreeing or simply not wanting to hear Maxon philosophizing after a hard day's work.
'No, Maxon.' Turquoise thought. 'You've got it wrong. Ponies aren't in the game for this thing or that thing. It's a whole life unto itself. A whole way of being. We knew that, we chose that, we just wanted to be ponies.'
"What do you think? You know them much better than I do."
"Maybe you're right. Partly." Emily was saying. "But you know what Turquoise is, I think? I think she is a really evil-minded sadistic dominant, who gets detached from herself. Sometimes I'm whipping her, and I feel like she's right there beside me, saying 'Oh, yeah, good shot!'"
Maxon laughed.
Touche. Thought Turquoise, almost blushing. Good shot.
The next event was called the bush chase, and the barker explained the rules again, in his booming bass: "We have one hundred and three ponies entered. The quadrupeds get a ten-minute head start, the bipeds get five. Each of our riders tags seventeen ponies, and the one remaining gets the gold."
With a gunshot, the quadrupeds' paddock was opened, and Sirius watched them stream out from the gate. The little one from earlier did not seem to be there - he's probably hanging from his hind-hooves being whipped. He scanned the field in front of them. For perhaps a quarter of a mile, the ground was flat and there was no cover whatsoever. Then there were two rocky hills, forming a low point in the middle, with some kind of small building, like a pump-house, on one side of the gap. There were trees and underbrush there. Things to hide behind, maybe, but probably not for long.
There was a second gunshot and the striders took off running full-tilt. Many of them, though, seemed to have no hope and thus no interest in winning the race. Instead, they looked on it as a chance for a different kind of action - and for most of the ponyboys, no doubt, this was the first time they'd ever been in the ring with fillies and no grooms around. A melee quickly ensued near the gates. Several of the usual suspects had waylaid two ponygirls - a latex-covered strider whose eyes were masked anyway, and a Dancer covered in little bells. They were mounting both of them with happy abandon, quite aware that they would be the first to be tagged when the riders set off in five minutes. The crowd was laughing hysterically, especially at the plight of the little Dancer, whose bells rang as her captors ravished her, adding a pleasant jingle to her sobs.
Sirius rushed past them, making for the hill as hard as he could. Distance, he figured, was not the most important thing. Each rider got to tag seventeen ponies. So all he had to do was get beyond a good dense cluster of them, and then he would have a chance.
As he reached the woods, he saw two ponygirls tumbled in the dry oak leaves. They formed a luscious pair of parentheses, each of them happily licking the other.
"Hey stud!" One of them called. She had long brown braids with emerald barrettes in them, and wore a matching emerald harness of thick latex straps. "Want some action?"
Sirius stopped.
"The odds are against us, eh? Might as well sit back and relax."
He squatted and nuzzled at her cunt. It was so red, so moist, so warm. He knelt to take her, his cock arching desperately up from his balls.
"Uh-uh. Sixty-nine. I suck you, you suck me."
"And me!"
"And Veva."
Sirius grunted his assent, and began to position himself. Then the third gunshot went off, and six men mounted on horses - on real horses - began galloping across the field. They had long whips - bullwhips? - and with six neat, stinging strokes, one of them "tagged" the ponies who were amorously entangled back at the gates. All the way across the field, over the galloping of the hoof beats, Sirius could hear them screaming. He cut and ran through woods. It seemed like only a few seconds later that he heard the two ponygirls shrieking desperately. Looking back, he saw that they both bore a single green slash across their exposed flanks. The bullwhips, it appeared, were dipped in paint or dye.
But the rider that had tagged those two did not really want to enter the forest, open though it was. There was better picking outside. Sirius ran up towards the top of the hill, and came out, breathless, into a little clearing. Two other ponyboys stood there, big Striders with fancy harnesses.
One of them, who was shaven bald, grunted and approached him. He gave a half-turn and then kicked Sirius in the stomach. It wasn't an overwhelming blow, but he hadn't been expecting it. He fell to his knees, and the ponyboy quickly dropped down beside him and trapped Sirius' legs in his own.
No, no, fuck, no! But the other ponyboy had already seized Sirius' tail in his teeth and yanked it free. He felt a moment of wrenching pain throughout his body - Hannah was always slow and gentle with that delicate operation. A moment later, Sirius felt the tail replaced by a cock, and whimpered as the colt opened him endlessly, capitalizing on this opportunity which he might not have had in months, and might never have again.
Sirius tried to relax his hips, offer the ponyboy his pelvis, ride it all out in numb compliance. He couldn't. His mouth opened wide with every thrust into him from behind, tiny moans creeping out of it, which only encouraged his tormentor. He could feel the bald ponyboy's cock hard against his calf, waiting its turn. In fact, his own organ was still swollen from the smell of that emerald-harnessed cunt at the base of the hill. He tried to imagine that it was not him being taken on his knees, but the ponygirl with brown braids, being taken by him, as he very well could have if he had a little more sense.
Then both of his tormentors exploded away from him. The cock that opened him popped out with an explosive sound, and they were running. Sirius rolled clumsily aside and then got to his feet, but realized that it was not one of the riders. It was a ponygirl, a Dancer, hiding in the bushes nearby. His tormentors apparently preferred to mount a filly than a colt.
I have to get my tail back. He doubled back on the little clearing, and saw the ponygirl drop-kick the bald ponyboy with a sharp blow from her hind leg. Yes! You're my filly! Effectively alone now, the ponyboy who had been ravishing Sirius circled his prey, worried. She charged him, and planted a hoof hard into his balls. Hearing the cry as he fell, for a moment Sirius was almost sorry for him.
But now a rider was coming, and he ran down the back side of the hill. It was already hopeless. He heard two snaps of the whip as his fallen tormentors were tagged where they lay. They moaned in redoubled agony. Now he and the ponygirl were racing neck and neck through the trees. The horseman was right behind them. He could hear the horse snorting, even as branches tore at his chest, slashed across his cock, his nipples.
There was another horrendous snap, and the ponygirl beside him went down in a long, sobbing, crash. Now its my turn…but the rider simply wheeled away. Excellent! He must have used up his seventeen hits.
Sirius stopped, and walked back to the ponygirl, breathing hard. She lay in the leaves weeping. A long line of gold dye highlighted a wheal from the whip that was already growing ugly. Sirius nuzzled her face, friendly, and she turned away to comprehend the pain on her own. He shrugged. I need my tail, dammit. He made his way back past the two ponyboys, who hadn't moved. His tail was lying in the grass. He grabbed it in his teeth. No, I have to get it back in, or I'll surely be punished. Dropping it again, he managed to pick it up in his fingers, but his arm-binder did not let him reach low enough it to replace it. Goddamn it.
He trotted back over to the ponygirl, who seemed to have recovered slightly. The welt from the bullwhip was now bluish under the gold, and seemed almost as thick as Sirius' cock. He dropped the tail beside her, pleading with his eyes. She gestured at her rump. Quid pro quo.
Circling, he leaned down to lick her there. Her vulva was a perfect little morsel served up in the scalloped edges of her labia. A scallop in its shell. He flicked his tongue through her happily, hungrily, loving the seashore taste. She sprawled on her side, one of her hind-legs forward, pawing at the air. In a brief moment, she was shuddering, neighing with gratitude, the welt across her back entirely forgotten.
Sirius circled her again, and with a few deft moves, she picked up his tail in her teeth and rammed it home. A moment later, Sirius heard the hoofbeats and dissolved into pain, hearing his own screams as if from far away.
May had come with an early thaw, and while traces of the giant snowdrifts lingered outside, the days were warm. Hannah and Tomas opened the big mowing doors during the daytime, and resumed their warm-weather practice of washing down the ponies every day, on the threshing floor, rather than in their stalls. This made Turquoise happy, as she loved to watch the ponies brought out and displayed, washed and groomed so lovingly, and struggle with their beauty.
She had three favorites. Chessy was the most impressive. His face was not dull, but always calm, like a monk drifting in meditation. He seemed entirely self-assured, in a rooted way, a way that Orion could never be. The iron rings which bored through his cock and encaged it were not going to come out. He was not going to have that release. And having surrendered to that fact, neither Hannah's teasing nor Ingrid's whip could really touch him.
Hannah would lead him out onto the floor, and lower the two big steel hooks, which passed through his armpits. Turq imagined that they were cold and smooth - she had never felt them, since she was a Dancer. Chessy would be lifted up so his hooves barely touched the floor, and Hannah would scrub him down lovingly. She meted out special attention to his nipples, his neck, and his forlorn cock. Perhaps Chessy would breath a little faster, perhaps he would drool behind his gag. Certainly his member tried hopelessly to expand against its implacable bonds. But his expression would not change.
Turquoise was always impressed by that. Such detachment was not inevitable. She remembered - 'what was her name?' - a ponygirl in Mexico, a Greyson. 'Palomita.' She was almost fully encased in leather. Only her buttocks, her nipples, and her dark, mournful latin face were free to the elements. As a pony, she had never and could never be mounted - yet she was in no way detached about the matter. She rubbed herself against everything, begged sluttishly, and wept with fury when the studs were making their rounds of the other ponygirls. 'Dear Palomita. I wonder if she's retired yet?'
After Chessy, Turquoise liked to watch Dolly most of all. She was tall and slender, with long black hair that glistened red-brown when Tomas turned the hose on her. She had beautiful, tapering legs; all in all, she was perfectly formed to be displayed in that way, hung by the armpits, wet, and wriggling. Moreover, at some point in her youth, Dolly must have resisted the grooms' efforts, because Tomas always attached a wide bar between her ankles, spreading her wide, so that she could not object to the tickle of his scrub brush, or the boldness of his soaker hose.
Sometimes Tomas would winch her high up into the air to dry, and Turquoise reveled in the sight. If it was in the afternoon, the sun would come down through the slatted barn-boards of the west wall, falling in lascivious lines across her slowly turning body. It emphasized her very subtle curves; the small breasts, the slender hips. She would hang quietly, without stirring, her tail dripping slowly, her thighs and vulva still forced to gape for some ancient indiscretion. Turquoise could look up into her, and she enjoyed the view.
But for sheer beauty, she had come to enjoy Sirius most of all. She loved to watch Hannah tease him through the soapsuds, until his eyes would plead with her, and his lips would chatter at the bit. It was bad form, perhaps, but it was lovely. Once or twice, she got to see Hannah bring him off. She would swaddle his cock in her wash-rag, and stroke him slowly, murmuring "today, you have my permission to come." And the ponyboy's whole glistening body would go tense, and his eyes would close. The moment of relief was lovely to watch: he would sag all over, in his tautly spread shoulders.
Once, just afterwards, Sirius caught Turquoise's gaze as he was drying. And his longing was so specific, so clearly directed at her, that it almost frightened her. She ducked back into her stall, and was in turmoil about it. He was cute, no doubt. He had great potential. But he was still so human, and she was afraid that her crush on him was making her more human, as well. She did not want to think about such things. She kicked over her water bucket and waited for the inevitable distraction of punishment.
The wind that night had blown chaff and cobwebs down from the rafters, and Tomas had filled his trough with oats without bothering to sweep out the debris. Sirius had gotten surly and cow-kicked Tomas when he came to clean the stalls. Tomas had whipped him soundly and then led him out into the lower doorway of the barn, which was wide up. A movable beam - the "standard" - stood in the center of the doorway, and had two holes bored through it at shoulder-height, which the doors bolted into when they were shut. Tomas tied his bridle through one of these holes, and then tied his hooves to the door-hinges with long traces, spreading his legs as far apart as they would go. Sirius stood there immobilized, with his blinkers on, the sun on his chest, the barn to his back.
When Emily got up, an hour later, Tomas let her know Sirius was sullen, and she decided to whip him again. She had barely begun, though, when her cell phone rang, and she had to put down the crop to answer it.
"Good morning, this is Emily at Broken Oak," she said cheerily. There was a pause, and then she must have covered the receiver, because she hissed gleefully to Tomas "It's Melissa! Yes, thanks for calling back so promptly…. So, you're still interested?…All right…. No, don't - I don't want your phone number, your contact info, none of that. Don't tell me." There was a very long pause. Sirius tried to hear the girl's voice on the other end of the phone, but he could only hear his own ragged breathing. Then Emily was saying. "No, I'm afraid we can't do that. Anyway, you've already seen our stables once. That's more than most ponies have when we break them…. Right?… OK, Melissa, here's what I'll do. You're at the university, right? I'm going to send a limo around to, let's say, the student center. On the 17th, which is two weeks from Tuesday, at eight o'clock in the morning…. Yes… Now, if you still want to come in, you should pack a suitcase, make sure to bring your ID, and get rid of the rest of your stuff… Yes, that would be fine. And then I want you to get a good night's sleep, all right? That's very important. Get a good night's sleep… Yes… If you change your mind, just sleep in. Got it?… Nope, you can't. No, I can't answer that. If you call me again, you'll just get the machine, and I don't check the machine." Another long pause. "All right. I hope so, too. Goodbye, Melissa."
There was a click, and then Emily started doing war-whoops and ran off in the direction of the house.
For a long time, Sirius just stood there, splay-legged, his blinkers facing the pasture. At some point he realized that Tomas was gone, and Hannah and Ingrid were conferring by the stove.
"Why is Sirius tied to the wall?" Hannah was asking.
"Dunno. Looks like he was being punished for something."
"Yeah. I should probably leave him there until we find out from Emily."
'Ah, no,' Sirius thought bitterly. 'Hannah won't protect me.'
"Emily's gone berserk. She might be hard to get ahold of. I think she drove over to Kevin's."
"Melissa must have called back."
"Yeah."
"Damn, you know? I've never seen her so excited over a new pony."
"Well come on, Hannah, she's pretty hot. And she's only just popped the cherry on being legal." They had come out onto the threshing floor now, and Hannah stroked Sirius' faintly smarting rump.
"The age of consent." She said thoughtfully. "One day you're a kid who can't even sign their own medical waiver. The next day, you blow out some candles, and you decide you want to give up your species and live in a stable. And the law says, 'hey, sure, that's your business.'"
"Well, it is."
"Sure. But its kind of abrupt, don't you think?" Hannah started untying Sirius' hooves, and he stretched his legs wearily.
"Well, Emily is doing her usual routine with a zillion phone calls and pointless delays. It kills her, you know. If she weren't so sensitive, she would have snapped a bridle on that girl the moment she walked in the door with her dork boyfriend."
Sirius almost choked to hear Emily being called 'sensitive.' Hannah seemed a bit dubious, too. She had left Sirius' bridle tied to the standard, and the two grooms were wandering off up the barn.
"It's a good method, I understand. But if it were me, I would want to say: 'look, girl, we'll send the Rolls around in two weeks. So in the meantime, go get laid. Have a drink. Go see Broadway, go see Vegas. Talk to strangers. You know? Fly to Paris. Because the only way she'll see Paris now is through the holes in the wall of Croix San Genevieve." She swatted Sirius back into his stall.
"I've never seen Paris," said Ingrid with a shrug, as they walked off.
"Yeah, you work too much."
"Have you been to Paris?"
"Oh, yeah, in school I spent a semester there, and then we went to 'Veve once to buy a couple ponies."
"What's it like?"
"Paris?" Said Hannah, her voice fading into echoes down the barn. "Paris is full of dogshit; Paris sucks…"
Around noon David arrived with the pickup, intending to back in to the threshing floor. This meant removing the standard, and that meant removing Sirius. He untied him, and then to Sirius' disappointment simply re-attached him to a ring on one side of the door.
"Company coming, boyo." He back the truck in and unloaded it. The back of the truck was taken up by a steel cage, about the size of a refrigerator on its side. It was ornate, but not in a decorative way. Sirius noted that, unlike the kitten's cage at the vet's, this had bars on the bottom. You could not lift up one corner and creep out. Whoever or whatever went into that cage, someone intended that they stay there.
David offloaded this device, then drove back out. From his perch by the door, Sirius could watch him hooking up the tractor. He was starting to mow up in the high fields, and the tractor made a dull, distant, roar in the sunshine. Sirius watched him, hypnotically, rubbing his welted backside on the barn-boards, which let him re-kindle the sensation to exactly the simmering warmth he wanted. The sun heated him on one side, the echoes of his earlier punishment heated him on the other. He lost all sense of time, a happy ponyboy watching the farmer at work.
Towards nightfall, Emily returned him to his cell and whipped him again, front and back, with a piece of boot-leather she kept on hand for this purpose. He gave in to her completely, crying and clenching his tail uncontrollably. When she was gone, Hannah came to soothe him. She slid his tail out and oiled his little anus with some chilly, tingling cream. She spread it along his sides, too - it felt wonderful, but his ribs were so sore he hated even to be touched.
"I know, I know." She said gently, as she massaged the cross-hatching of welts on his buttocks. He wept again, quietly. For the first time, he didn't care that he had been punished in full view of Turquoise. Not only that, he knew she would understand. 'Of course she understood. Emily made me surrender, Emily can make us all surrender our bodies, if she wants to. But not our hearts. And Turquoise knows it.'
Hannah left his tail out for the night, but she did not let him come. It was just as well - he was not sure he could bear any more stimulation. He lay on the cradle-boards in the dark, making tiny rocking motions. His ribs hurt almost too much to sleep. Hours went by. Half-dreaming, half-fantasizing, he imagined that it was Turquoise, not Hannah, that had washed him and oiled him and nickered in his ear (in the shadow world of dreams, he did not wonder how Turquoise could hold a sponge). Then, more feverishly, he imagined that it was Turquoise, not Emily, who had whipped him - not with a leather strap but with her long tail. And then he broke free of his restraints and he was covering her, and it was wonderful…
At one stage of his life, Sirius had often dreamt of the women television and Hollywood raise on high as goddesses. Usually the dark-haired ones: Winona Ryder, Jennifer Beals, Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in the Aliens movies. He dreamt of them as his lovers, of course, cruel and dominant, and sometimes he came, in those dreams, leaving his sheets sticky and his clean conscience stained. But at that age, he could help himself to orgasms, courtesy of his right hand, any time he wanted. Now that his satisfaction was at the mercy of the grooms, he had lost that ability to come in his sleep. At the critical moment, he simply woke up.
He was not the only one awake. He heard the clattering, voices talking in some tonal language like Chinese. In the slit of vision left him by his blinkers, and the second-hand moonlight, Sirius could see three figures. Two men were hauling on a beast, which seemed to have a dozen claws and spikes, and a long, barbed tail. It was growling; and sounded both very feminine and very dangerous. The keepers did not have it on a leash, exactly. Rather, each of them held a pole some two yards long which was hooked into the creature's collar. One of them held a cane in his free hand, and delivered a series of vicious strikes to the monster's rump when she refused to enter the cage. Finally they got her in, and slammed shut the door and Sirius heard several bolts slide shut. Only then did they unhook the poles from her collar.
The two keepers left, and silence fell on the barn once again. Because the cage lay flat, and Sirius was in the second row of stalls, he could not see it. But he stared in that direction for a long time, the bruises on his sides forgotten. For there was no doubt in Sirius' mind that what he had just seen was a dragon-girl.