The Emperor's New Pony (12 page)

“Of course, of course. But I think you are perhaps too anxious. I watched you in the ring just now, and I cannot express how impressed I was.”

“Your imperial majesty does me too much honor.”

“Perhaps I do, but that will not stop me from requesting a little demonstration here in my imperial ring.”

“We are at your service, of course, your imperial majesty. Shall I walk her on the line?”

“No, no,” the emperor replied. “I saw enough of that when you were longing her just now. I should like to see you ride her.”

Versal set his jaw in what could have been a tiny display of annoyance. “Your imperial majesty…”

“I know it is not something you have practiced with her yet. That is why I requested it. I want to see how your own studies are coming along. I want to see what your filly Edera does the first time she has a man in the saddle.”

“Very well, your imperial majesty,” Versal said. “Please excuse us while I take my filly back to the tack room for the saddle and reins.”

“Oh, no,” the emperor said. “You may leave Edera here and go bring the tack. I do like to see my fillies being saddled.”

Versal made his bow, and unhooked the longe line from Edera’s collar, giving her a pat on the rump and saying something into her ear. He ran his hand up and down her back, and then with practiced fingers he loosed the harness on her bosom and hips, and removed it. With one final pat on Edera’s backside, he walked away toward the tack room to get the riding saddle.

Edera stood, clad only in her bridle, her eyes turned down to the dirt of the ring. Her hands still hung obediently at her sides even now that her wristlets had been removed. Comnar let his eyes take their fill of the lascivious sight of the girl’s little breasts with their perfectly sized pink nipples, and of the view of the little slit that peeped out between her thighs.

“Filly Edera,” Comnar said, “look at me, please.”

Edera raised her head to look him in the eyes. Her face looked inexpressibly beautiful with the leather enclosing it like a tracery of henna that marked her out as a prized possession of the emperor. Through the thin leather straps, he could see worry on her face.

“You will do fine, filly. I know that you have not had a rider before. Get down filly-fashion now. Your backside to me, if you please, and present that tail nicely.”

Edera turned to show him her snow-white tail. Then she knelt in the dirt and went down on all fours. The site of a well-groomed tail in a shapely bottom never failed to please Comnar. Edera’s rump, too, had some claim he thought to the title of the shapeliest in the imperial stables. Something about the way the pure white horsehair covered the charms between her thighs seemed very moving, as well—pure and virginal. Who would mount her? Comnar still had not decided.

“Very nice, filly Edera,” he said. “Just remember that the most important thing when you have a rider is to keep your tail nice and high.”

Chapter Thirteen

Ranin wished he knew what the emperor intended by requesting to see him ride Edera. Beyond the basic humiliation of it, there wasn’t anything about saddle riding that related to the disciplines that Comnar seemed to have Morqan emphasize in the training of imperial fillies. Some of the lords and knights seemed to enjoy saddle riding greatly, and some of their fillies did as well, as far as Ranin could tell. But Morqan had not spoken of it in Ranin’s hearing, let alone included it in the brief, pointed lessons he had been giving him over the course of the first week of Ranin’s residence in the stables. In fact, the only reference he had heard to the discipline—if it could even be called that—of saddle riding had been when Gad said to Hednar, “Lord Jost does get a lot of use out of that saddle, doesn’t he?” and Hednar had only snorted derisively in reply.

That must be it,
Ranin thought.
He must want to see me trying to come to grips with something he knows I wasn’t expecting to have to do.

Or perhaps he just wanted to humiliate both Edera and Ranin. Saddle riding was one of the few elements of filly training in which the trainer—or the filly’s owner—might look just as degraded as the filly. And then there was the truth that Ranin, as he walked back to the imperial ring carrying the saddle and reins, could no longer avoid confronting: for the man who had been the chief marshal of the knights of Amidia to ride upon the back of his princess would convey another of those exquisite moment of victory of which Comnar seemed unable to get enough.

He saw with dismay that the emperor had made Edera get down filly-fashion and present her tail. He cursed himself inwardly for that dismay. To start feeling jealous of the emperor would not help his cause or Edera’s. But the way she had looked with his cock in her mouth rose to his mind unbidden once every minute of the day, it seemed to him. Now that they had crossed that fateful line, Ranin soothing her between her legs and Edera swallowing his seed so happily, it seemed like the barrier that Ranin had raised ever since his princess turned eighteen had crumbled away to dust. He could not stop thinking about how he longed to hold her in his arms. Exercising her in the regular ring this morning had been a terrible trial even before Morqan had come to say that the emperor wanted them in the imperial ring. The sight of her beauty bound in the leather of her harness, of the tail swishing between her sweet bottom cheeks—where he had spanked her the night before—made him once again as hard as iron, and made it a constant effort to remember to keep the longe line at the proper tension and to touch her with the whip to help her keep her gait perfect.

He reached Edera’s side where she knelt in the dirt and, holding the saddle and reins out in front of him, he made another low bow to the emperor.

“You may proceed, Goodman Versal,” the emperor said.

The riding saddle was not a complicated piece of tack. There was a cinch for the filly’s waist, and the barest of a curve in the piece of hard leather from which the cinch emerged. There was at least also ample padding under that hard leather, to protect the back and flanks of the filly from injury. The rider took almost the entirety of his weight upon his own spread feet, of course. But to make the practice pleasurable, for rider and filly and audience, as far as Ranin could tell, the rider must give the appearance of having the same sort of firm and responsive seat as a skilled rider of real horses. The trick, Ranin had decided, while idly watching one of the knights ride his filly, was to use the ground as if it were the stirrups of a real saddle. Ranin had been able to tell, though, that that was no easy feat, even—or perhaps especially—for a skilled rider of real horses.

As he tightened the cinch around his sweet girl’s waist, the urge to kiss her came upon him urgently, but he pushed it back and whispered, “Don’t worry, sweetheart. Don’t worry. Let me do the work.” Edera nodded. Ranin could not help thinking how submissive she looked with the bit in her mouth. It made his cock long to be there in place of the bit, and that made him angry with his cock for wishing to profane his beautiful princess that way again.

He hooked the reins to the rings on either side of the bit. Then, holding them in his left hand, he turned to the emperor.

“Your imperial majesty, may I mount?”

“You may, Goodman Versal,” the emperor said, smiling wickedly.

Ranin turned back around and, suddenly realizing what pleasure lay in saddle riding a lovely naked girl, he threw his right leg around Edera’s bottom and took his seat lightly in the saddle she wore. To his shame, the hardness of his cock only grew as his body itself seemed to become aware of the way to ride the girl he loved—like this, with reins and saddle—gave him utter control over her.

If Ranin had had any anger left for her at what she had done in throwing her nation’s sovereignty away, he might have taken satisfaction in the way he now pulled back on the reins, making Edera’s head come up and her back arch like a proud mare’s might under his careful guidance. He might feel vengeful pleasure, rather than just the strange, loving dominance he did feel, as he pulled her head around so that he could turn her gracefully to face the emperor.

Gods help him, he had never felt more a man and a marshal than he did as he found that in fact his skill on real horseback did transfer seamlessly to his skill atop Edera. No, it was no easy feat, but never had a challenge seemed more welcome. Forgetting for a moment that it was his princess whom he rode, he made his salute to the emperor, which the emperor acknowledged with a wave. Without even thinking about it, as he would have with Audrian, his favorite palfrey, he stroked Edera’s cheek and patted her shoulder. “Good girl,” he said, and Edera gave a little grateful whimper that sounded to his ears almost like a whinny.

Then he knew with absolute certainty why the emperor had demanded this particular display of them. For the chief marshal of the horse of Amidia realized that deep in his nature lay the will to dominate this girl as if she were any other girl. Despite his love—his adoration—for her, the desires his loins stirred in him made a mockery of that adoration. Or perhaps that was too severe—but only just. Perhaps those desires didn’t make a mockery of his heart’s true love for Edera, but nevertheless, as if they were a jeering crowd of imperial subjects, they laughed at the idea that if the emperor told him to fuck her, he would be proof against it, knowing that if Ranin didn’t fuck the princess, someone else would surely do it, and soon.

And surely, because he adored her and had cherished her for so long, he should be the one to take her maidenhead, should he not? Just as he rode her now, walking her prettily around the imperial ring—slowly to be sure but very gracefully.

The emperor had made Ranin ride Edera to show him how very much his nature yearned to have his princess as his own filly. To send him mad, if Ranin were not already proof against madness—and to corrupt him, if he did not go mad.

Beneath him, Edera seemed content to dirty her hands and knees in the soft dirt of the imperial ring. Really, Ranin had grasped instantly the trick of putting almost no weight on her back at all—just enough to let her know where he was and what he wanted. As an experienced rider herself, the princess seemed to know instinctively exactly what Ranin asked, moving her limbs in slow walk, slow trot, and even a very slow version of a canter.

Through it all, Ranin, the reins in his left hand, kept murmuring encouragement to her and patting her shoulder. It was the same sort of murmur he had always used with Audrian: “There we go, there we go. Who’s the sweetest mare in the yard? Edera is. Up now, up now.”

Then, finally, after they had made a complete circuit of the ring and had come back to the center, “Whoa, sweetheart.”

Ranin had not looked up at the balcony in minutes, and now, when he did, he saw that the emperor had departed. What that boded, he could hardly tell.

* * *

Qartin came to see him in his little room in the stable block that night.

“My lord,” Ranin said, rising from where he sat on a stool at his tiny work table, poring over
A Treatise on the Origins of the Imperial Standard Chivalry
and beginning a bow.

Qartin sighed. “Sit, my lord,” he said quietly.

Ranin started and obeyed, astonished to be called by his old title. Qartin sat on Ranin’s little pallet and leant in close. “I am sent here,” he said, “to tell you to bring Edera, in full harness, to the arena door at dusk on fifth day—tomorrow.”

Ranin nodded, still very puzzled.

“That is not, however, all I am going to tell you, my lord.” The tall, gray-haired steward, so gaunt as to be almost skeletal, looked searchingly into Ranin’s eyes. To his surprise, where he had expected to see the same guarded look he had always seen, even though he had become almost certain that Qartin would not oppose a well-organized transition of imperial power, he saw sympathetic pain.

Ranin had come into the knowledge that a revolution might be possible five days before. The day Ranin returned from yielding Amidia to the imperial legions, Ranin had been standing next to Morqan in the main ring, watching him longe two of the Hadian fillies, trying to discern the differences between human and equine horsemanship. Morqan sent his assistant running to get a different whip from the tack room, and said softly, “There’s a league against him.”

Ranin had taken a long time even to discern that Morqan was talking to him, since the stable master kept his attention fixed on the fillies cantering in a circle around the two men. Morqan’s tone, though, made it clear that if Ranin was in fact being addressed, the matter was urgent. “Who?” he said. The boy was already running back with the whip.

“Emperor,” Morqan said. “You in?”

“Yes,” Ranin said, his heart beating fast.

The next day at the afternoon session, Morqan handed his whip to his assistant, and walked over to where Ranin was trying to correct Edera’s trot. “You willing to give it all?” the stable master asked, his eyes apparently fixed on the Amidian filly’s feet. “There’s a plan, but you and your girl would be the ones in the most danger.”

“Yes,” Ranin had said.

And here was the lord high imperial steward of the palace, calling him ‘my lord.’

“You must,” Qartin said, “put on a show of your own, as you watch what happens in the arena. It will be the first, and perhaps the only, time when those who are with us will see you before we act.”

Ranin nodded. “And they want to be sure that I am prepared to risk everything, I imagine.”

“Yes. And so you have two duties, fifth-day night, in the emperor’s little theater of erotic shame. First, when I announce the program of the show, you will tug at your left earlobe.”

“To prove that we are in communication. Yes.”

“Second, when the emperor has you come onto the floor of the arena, where the show takes place, to illustrate his victory over Amidia, you will act defiantly.”

“What?” Ranin whispered urgently. “He will take it out on my princess!”

“Yes,” the steward said, with regret in his voice. “He undoubtedly will. And he will probably do it in a fashion so terrible that you may well wish you had not entered into this conspiracy.”