The next day, after breakfast, Hannah had Sirius run on the lunge line for a while, in wide circles around and around the empty threshing floor. She would call out to him to lift his hooves, to strike with his hooves flat, to keep his back straight. All these pieces of advice were accompanied by sharp little swats from her lungeing whip, which could reach him from across the room. After he was sweating nicely, Hannah stood him in the door of the feed room and cross-tied his bridle to the door-jambs, which left him quite free to turn about and look around. She toweled him off, scraping the sweat from his groin and armpits with a dull little knife, telling him how good he had been.
Meanwhile, Tomas was running Syzygy on the lunge line. Syzygy wore a more complex bridle - an English bridle, Sirius thought it was called - with leather blinkers. Tomas had set up two dozen "calvaletti" - rough-hewn beams laid out like spokes in a wheel, evenly spaced. Evidently Syzygy's hooves had to strike exactly twice between beams. This seemed easy enough for him to accomplish. Then Tomas yelled "gee, boy!" and struck him smartly with the long whip. Tomas doubled his pace, completing a full circle in twenty-four strides, one hoof landing neatly between each pair of calvaletti.
Sirius could see immediately that Syzygy did not quite have the pace down - he was going too far forward with each step, and a moment later his hoof struck a calvaletti and he stumbled. Tomas started whipping him vigorously, but Emily's voice shouted down from somewhere overhead: "Leave it, Tomas, he can hardly feel that one. Punish him later."
"All right. Gee, boy! Start you back at a trot."
Tomas jerked up on the lunge-line til Syzygy was standing. They started again, two hooves between each pair of calvaletti, and then sped up to one. This time Syzygy had the pattern, and Sirius could see the sweat beading on his forehead as he completed three, four, five laps at this speed.
"Gee!" said Tomas, snapping the floor loudly with his whip. Now Syzygy doubled his pace once more, to a mad dash, skipping every other pair of calvaletti entirely, and circling the threshing floor in only twelve thunderous hoofbeats. He would surely have gone crashing into the walls had Tomas not been hauling back full-force on the lunge line. Any mistake, Sirius knew, would be quite painful enough even before Syzygy was punished. He watched with rapt attention, until Hannah turned his head away and said "Don't worry, your turn is next."
"Easy! Easy! That's good, that's my boy." Tomas was saying. And soon Syzygy was being brought over to their doorway, and cross-tied where Sirius had been. He was panting and covered with sweat, a stream of drool ran down from either corner of his bitted lips, yet he seemed quite happy. His cock was hard and seemed almost to glow with pride. As Sirius was led back out on the floor, he caught a glimpse of Syzygy's flashing, victorious eyes between the blinkers.
"All right." Hannah said. "These are Calvaletti. Have you ever seen them before?" Sirius shook his head no. "I'm going to start you at a trot for awhile. Gee up, on!" She snapped him lightly with the long whip.
The trot was exceptionally easy - so easy, Sirius found, that it was hard not to let his mind wander off and remember to raise his heels smartly. He heard Tomas telling the other ponyboy "I think it's better if I paddle you now, and then I only have to scrub you down, once, eh?" Then, each time he was completing a circuit, he would see Syzygy's hips snapping under the paddle, his head bobbing, chased out into the floor as far as the leads of the crosstie would let him, in a hopeless effort to escape Tomas' muscular arms.
They doubled their speed, and this too Sirius found easy, and fun. He simply could not understand why Syzygy had stumbled at this jogger's pace. Maybe I'm just naturally more coordinated, he thought, and then reflected 'Isn't that a proud pony thing to think?' The idea amused him. With a snap of the whip, they doubled up again, and now Sirius was in heaven. Every step was an all-out lunge - it was the best exercise he had since biking up Reed's Hill two weeks earlier. Held to the center by the lunge line, he felt he could cut loose absolutely; he felt completely free in spite of the shackles and the bridle and the bit. He whinnied with pleasure. My form is not so good, that's true, but Hannah doesn't seem to care. Hannah's smiling!
"Easy, boy, easy." Said Hannah, all too soon. She threw a warm, sudsy towel over his shoulders and led him back to the doorway. Syzygy and Tomas were gone, Sirius had not even noticed them going. He stood in the puddle of soapsuds they had left, while Hannah cross-tied him again. When she began to soap him down, his cock hardened instantly, as if to say 'Aren't I a good pony? Aren't I?'
Hannah read this piece of body language perfectly, and she laughed, stroking him a few times with soapy hands.
"Yes, you're very good. You're very good. Were you worried when Sizzy fell and got punished?" He nodded, only wanting her to go back to lathering his penis, but she had moved around to his rump. "And he's been with us longer, too. You're so proud of yourself, aren't you?" He nodded again, shrugging with delight. It was not a very modest response, he realized, but it was a sincere ponyboy's response, and he marveled at himself a bit. She laughed. "My proud ponyboy."
Then Emily arrived looking fresh as if she, too, had just been lathered and rinsed.
"Yes. But of course Sizzy has something Sirius doesn't have yet. I think we should start him out, don't you?"
"Yes, I think he's ready."
He glanced at them in fear. Hanah went on rinsing off the soapsuds while her boss vanished again. Emily returned from the tack room with another pair of blinkers, and despite his snorts of protest, she quickly fastened these to his bridle. Two squares of leather, smelling of oil and blacking, they rested on his cheekbones and narrowed his world down to a few degrees of vision directly in front of him. Both of the women stood behind him now, and he couldn't see either them.
"These are training blinkers, or blinders." Emily was saying. She had mischievous lecturing voice, didactic and impish all at once. "You think that they are taking away some of your space, some of your world that you can see. But that's not really true. Most of the time you aren't really looking at the world anyway. The blinkers make a pony focus on one thing, they give you more world, really. What they take away is your anxiety, which is time, not space."
Sirius had no sooner begun to ponder this little fortune cookie than he received an immense wallop on the buttocks; he could only presume with the same weapon that Tomas had been using on Syzgy. He bolted against the cross-ties, which gave him considerable freedom, and whinnied with surprise.
"You see?" Hannah said kindly. One of them stepped forward to massage the welt. He winced for a moment, and then the pain subsided. It was Emily, he realized when she spoke.
"The pain fades away in a few seconds, doesn't it? But without your blinkers, you would have spent the last minute watching me, watching my paddle, knowing that I was about to strike."
He murmured through his bit. Fingers were on his cock now, spreading a handful of oil and moving slowly up and down. For some reason, he wanted desperately to believe that they were Hannah's. Emily was whispering into his ear. "I could be standing here with a whip, or a twitch, or a branding iron. The truck could be here to take you away. I could be here to give you a stab at that filly whose cunt you can't get out of your nostrils…."
He moaned. Whoever's hand it was - it did not matter, did it? - they were not stopping. This was not the little thirty-second tease he got with his meals and his rubdowns. They were going to let him come! He arched his back into Emily's bosom, rocking his hips against the gentle, maddening slow strokes. Oh God.
"You don't know," Emily went on. "Because you can't see me. So all that worry, all that anxiety, is stopped out by two little leather squares."
He came like a fountain. The orgasm lifted him up onto the tips of his hooves, and before the last drop of desperation had shot from his cock, one of the women - afterwards, he hoped it had been Emily - landed three incredible swats on his ass, in rapid fire, and all on exactly the same unfortunate line of flesh. Sirius did not know if the tears inside his blinkers were from joy or pain.
"Take him outside," said Emily, "And let him think about it." She tromped off, and while Sirius could not see her - or much of anything - he could easily imagine the way she shook her shoulders as she exclaimed "Oooh! I love virgins."
Sirius was an intriguing young colt. He had rekindled in Turquoise an interest in ponyboys that she didn't remember losing, but there it was. She had. 'Maybe I've been a bit jaded. Maybe I didn't want to pay much attention to any one pony. But...ah, hell with it.' She didn't like to think too hard about anything; she was the queen in the realm of her instincts, her pony-mind, and she didn't like to venture out of that.
But it was not only Turquoise that felt Sirius was something special. Maxon had come to visit him twice since he was branded, and now he was back a third time. And Maxon hardly ever came down to the barn, except now and then on Fridays, when the ponygirls were being covered. Orion liked the smell of musk - God knows who had figured that out - so, like all the fillies, Turq got sprayed with musk every Friday morning. But that was not the smell she most associated with being mounted; with feeling the stud's cock swollen and pulsing inside her; with that triumphant, long-awaited explosion of her nerves and the tremors that followed. No, the smell that she had come to associate with being covered was Maxon's pipe-smoke. He would sit there on a milking stool, sometimes, in the stall right beside her. He never touched her, he just watched her face intently, as if he was trying to find some secret to her pony-nature in the tremors of ecstasy convulsing her neck.
And probably that's exactly what he's doing. 'But it's exactly what I'm doing, to, and I haven't found the secret yet. And I have a much better view, despite my blinkers.'
She felt superior to Maxon, in many ways, but she did not dislike him. He was a decent man, obviously - she knew that he had been personally involved in the consortium's manhunt for Stanley Binner, the sociopathic kidnapper who had abducted two girls and tried to sell them as "ponygirls" at Saint Angelique. Realizing that he was up against something much worse than the police, Binner had fled to Europe, and the consortium caught up with him there. Sometimes, idly, she wondered what they had done with him.
There was another thing about Maxon she admired. For a sadist - and he could be almost as relentlessly cruel as Gigi - Maxon was not manic, he was not a hopped-up, uncontrollable avalanche of unprovoked vengeance, in the way Emily often seemed to be. That was a rare quality, and Turquoise found it very charming. But in the end it made him a bit boring, a bit too much like her Dutchman master whose name she never knew. Sometimes she wished that Maxon would stalk down to the barn at midnight, trying to befuddle his inner demons with a long bout of fucking or torturing some poor ponygirl who only wanted to sleep. That would be nice. But you can't have everything.
Having come, apparently, to visit Sirius, Maxon spent a whole afternoon wandering around the stables in his sleepily unpredictable way. He went in to Minka's stall and read her a passage from some old political treatise - maybe Rousseau - as if he wanted her equine opinion on matters of free will, consent, and contract. Afterwards, he asked Emily to take Minka out and whip her, which she did quite enthusiastically, so Turquoise was understandably worried when Maxon came into her stall.
"Humans and animals." Maxon said, rather pedantically seating himself on the cradle-beams, since Turq was standing. "We have the most complicated set of bonds, don't we? You know, there are wolves here. Real wolves, sometimes you can hear them howling out across the frozen lakes. The farmers hate them. They want them shot, poisoned, trapped - they buy dogs to protect their herd. And the dog comes inside at night and sleeps by the fire, and wears a flea collar. But the dog and the wolf are the same thing. They can interbreed, even. Two aspects of one face.
You look at sheep, or cows. Humans have created those species. Nature gave us deadly water buffalos, mountain goats. It took us thousands of years to shape them into 'Mary had a little lamb.' And for what? A cow is the result of ten thousand years of careful work - why are they so stupid?"
"Maybe we like animals to be stupid." Said Emily.
"Sure, sure, sure. But…have you ever seen a Przewalski's horse?" he leaned back against the wall of the stable, and got out his pipe. His pipe-cleaning and pipe-lighting ritual was so elaborate that it seemed a miracle he ever got to smoke anything. "The original wild horse, the one they say all horses descended from. They look like sheep. We took them and made them into these magnificent, noble, intelligent creatures."
"Yeah, I've seen pictures of them. Furry, right? Not much mane."
"Sure, sure. The mane goes up to their ears, and stops. No forelock. When you think about it, a mane is like human hair. A little fluff on the top of the head, just for looks. We bred them to look more human - the equus are the only mammals other than us with that top-tuft of hair."
"Camels." David shouted from somewhere upstairs, eavesdropping. This stopped Maxon in mid-pipe-lighting, horrified.
"Camels, camels." He muttered. "Do camels have manes?"
"Search me." Said Emily, holding up her hands.
"David, are you sure camels have manes?"
"I think so. I don't know. Never seen a camel."
Maxon chewed his lip, upset by this. He changed the subject. "When you look at a pony," he spread his hands to encompass Turquoise, touching the bit and the tail. "Is it the nobility that you see, or the degradation? Do you say: 'Here is a beast who has surrendered her needs, her desires, her will, to a larger experience. She has the pure commitment and dignity of a nun or a hermit. She has put her hooves on a path, and she is not denying anything on that path. She is beautiful.' Or do you say: 'Here is a pathetic, doomed, creature. She sleeps in the straw. She needs her grooms and handlers to keep her clean. She makes no contribution to the human race. She is just an expensive toy that keeps getting dirty.' Which do you see?"
"Me?" Said Emily, rather lost in watching Maxon's fingers work their way along Turq's back and buttocks.
"Sure, you."
As if to gauge her feelings, Emily came over and cupped Turquoise' breast in one hand, raising her slightly. She slid a finger through the nipple ring, making the ponygirl's lips tremble. Her other hand ran along one globe of Turq's ass, until she and Maxon's fingers were flirting, just below the parabola of her tail.
"Well. I suppose I mostly see obedience, and disobedience. You know? I'm not their owner, I'm not a philosopher, I'm the stablemaster. But there are two kinds of obedience."
"Ah, see, you are a philosopher after all."
Emily laughed. "I have some perspective; that's all. There are the ponies who obey us, who obey me. That's obedience, and it's very important. But there is also the internal obedience. The ponies that obey their pony-mind. That's more important. All we can do is bring them there."
"You are a philosopher. But are they noble?"
Emily sighed. She swatted Turquoise's rump and ordered "Legs apart" gently. Then, with her left hand, she ran a wedge of fingers deep into the ponygirl's pussy, making her tremble and paw at the ground. "Of course we think they're noble. And of course we think they're degraded. Look at her. I'm about to fist her. Aren't I, girl? And she knows it, and she stands here spread wide for me. Trying to remain calm, trying to be composed. And you do a very good job, don't you?" Emily sank her hand in up to the knuckles, and then cradled the ponygirl's head in her other hand. It shook slightly, her eyes very wide and her lips fluttering against the bit as Emily slowly pushed the bulge of her knuckles through the gates of the ponygirl's vulva. "There, there." She said, softly.
Turquoise was shuddering throughout her whole body. One of her rear hooves, quite of its own accord, was slowly raising and lowering an inch or two, as if to gently tap the ground. This had never happened to her, she had never even considered that it would happen to her, and she was indeed trying to be calm. She could feel every wrinkle, every texture of Emily's fingers as they pivoted slowly between her hidden, inner walls. And she knew that if she struggled, she would be punished far worse than Minka had just been - Minka who hadn't done anything, anyway - but she could not bear it. Not any longer. Not being this open, no.
"Now look at her," she said to Maxon, turning Turq's trembling head to face him. "Do you really think she is feeling noble, or degraded? No, those are human ideas. All she knows is that she is a helpless ponygirl being displayed before her master, and her groom has one hand deep in her cunt, and could reach for the crop or for her clit with the other hand, and there is equally nothing she can do about it."
Maxon smiled and finally lit his meerschaum. Emily twisted her hand in the warm, wet vise of Turq's hips, and a happy sob came to the ponygirl's lips.
"I'm sure you're right." Maxon said. "But from the human's point of view, it's like an onion, isn't it? A layer of nobility, and you peel it away to see the degradation. And you peel that away to see more nobility, and so on. I always wonder, which one is at the core."
"Neither." Said Emily. She withdrew her hand as abruptly as possible, making Turquoise wail with shock. Her whole body seemed to contract, trying to assure itself it was all still there, all intact. Emily loosened the ponygirl's bit, and stuck her hand in its place, letting Turq lick her own innermost juices off the fingers. "At the very core, I think, are only the raw, animal emotions. Lust and fear and awe."
"Lust and fear and awe." Maxon repeated, pleased. "And curiosity?"
"Always curiosity, Emily replied, "or else we would still be animals."
"Now then," said Hannah. "You've been here almost a month, haven't you?" He nodded, somewhat shocked to hear it. "And you must be starting to realize what it means that you can't speak anymore. Are you used to it yet?" He considered for a moment if this was some kind of trick question, and then he shook his head no. "It takes a long time. No more gossiping, no more asking questions, no more worrying to people about things you can't help. No more flipping people the bird, hmm? And most ponies try to write things with their hooves, but you're better than that. But you know what? You're still nodding and shaking your head."
He drew back, confused. Now she was giving him the little frown that she always had just before she whipped him. He backed against the wall of the stall. He didn't want to be whipped. Not this morning. No. Let me out in the pasture, let me run around, then you can whip me. Please. She got the crop down from its peg.
"I need you to stop shaking your head yes and no, Sirius. Ponies don't do that. If you have something to tell me, you can tell me with your eyes, or your posture, or your obedience." She swung the crop. It rattled down the wall-boards and hit the top of his rump, hard. He jumped forward with the shock of it, and she quickly spun her fist to ball up the two feet of bridle this reflex had slackened. Now his ass was defenseless. She smacked him again, freely, and as hard as she could. He felt tears well up in his eyes.
"Sometimes we ask ponies question. That's true." Smack! "But you don't need to answer them. We don't expect you to answer them." Smack! "You're just a pony. You don't have to worry about questions and answers." Smack! "And we're humans. We always go around worrying about everything. I even ask my goldfish questions." Smack! "What would I think if I said 'Does Goldy want some fish food' and it said 'Yes, please, Miss Hannah?'"
She lifted the crop but did not swing it. She was staring curiously at Sirius' face, as if she expected him to answer her. The tears ran down to his lips, and he licked one up, pathetically. Hannah smiled a bit and brought the crop down hard on the farther globe of his buttocks, crossing his tail somewhat and making the phallus leap inside him.
"I would think" she whispered, "that he wasn't a real goldfish." Smack! Sirius was dissolving into the agony of it now, his rump swaying back and forth as if he could cool it off in the air. Please stop. You have to stop. Please stop. "And I never want to think, Sirius, that you aren't a real pony." Smack! "Do I make myself clear?"
He began to nod, very eagerly, and then froze, horrified at himself. Hannah grunted. She tied the traces to a ring set in the wall, very close, so his lips were almost touching the old oak boards. She hung the crop back in its place and left the stable. Tied to the wall with the door open, expecting the worst, Sirius felt the whole world could see him. His ass felt like a bonfire, a beacon, and was exposed to all comers. In fact, only Jasper and Turquoise could see in from their stables, and he knew this, but the sense of exposure was dreadful.
Hannah returned with a short switch, not the workaday leather of the riding crop but a barkless hickory cane. It was not much wider than a pencil. 'Oh god, no. I can't bear it, but if I have to bear it, please shut the door. Please god, Hannah, shut the door.' She set herself down on a three-legged milking stool by his hindquarters. 'Don't let Turquoise see me punished and sobbing for my own stupidity. Please don't!'
"I know, I know," said Hannah gently, stroking the welts she had already left. "It's only a reflex. A human reflex. It's hard-wired. But you're going to have pony reflexes, now, and we need to hard-wire them, too." With the tip of the cane, she lifted his tail and flipped it over to one side. Then she placed the cane snugly at the crease where his buttocks met his thighs. He squirmed with the smoothness of it, the dreadful anticipation.
"Sorry," she said simply.
The blows came down in blindingly rapid succession. He buckled his knees, raising his hooves clear off the floor, wedging himself against the edge of his sleeping-ledge. The noises of a horse in unendurable distress were pouring from him, and he was not even trying to moan. His back rocked, his arms pried at the shackles. He bit down into the rubber bit until he thought his jaw would break.
Hannah was repeating something about the importance of not nodding, but he could not pay any attention to her. His fixed point, the leash his mind thrashed against, was the certain knowledge that Turquoise was watching all of this, judging him. He wanted to behave in a way she would respect, but he did not know what that was, and in any event he could barely control himself at all. At one point he thought he would expel his tail, and only avoided doing so with the mantra that his punishment for that would, no doubt, be unimaginably worse.
The blows seemed to go on eternally, with Hannah's friendly lecture showing no signs of ending. He entered a trance of agony. The cane felt like molten raindrops. He lay slumped now, his rump at an angle, and one hoof on the ground, registering the hardest blows only with a shudder in his back and his bound arms.
When it ended, Hannah simply got up and left. She did not even bother to close the stable door. 'Damn her.' He inched his hips back and forth, feeling the embers of pain re-ignite every time he moved. He could hear Hannah and Emily talking, out at the coffee-table, over some sandwiches.
"I started to break the new one from nodding."
"Oh, good. How is he?"
"Ah, he's fine. I'll let him out to pasture after lunch, let him think about it."
"Sometimes it takes a few tries."
"That's true. What's with Comet?"
"She's in heat, I'd say." Emily seemed more interested in this subject. "I think she got wind that the old man is planning to sell her, and she doesn't seem to care about getting caught. Last night she got out of her stall, which I need to talk to Tomas about, and she almost got in with Orion, who would have fucked her senseless. Luckily Ingrid was out here doing the rounds. Well, Ingrid got her back in her stall and woke me up, and we blindfolded her and put earplugs in her and then I whipped her properly. If she wants to get out of her stall, that's her problem, but if I have to get up at four AM, I'm going to make someone's life hell."
Hannah laughed.
"And now?"
"Ah, we tied her up out in the woods for the rest of the night. I would leave here there until we sell her, but we can't, obviously. Anyway I want her to know she's not on vacation just because she's headed to Mexico next month. So I'll send Tomas out to get her around nine."
"Mmm, yeah." Said Hannah agreeably. "By that point she'll be hungry, and her tits will be dragging on the ground."
"Exactly."
They ate in silence for awhile.
"Look at Turq." Said Emily, amused. "You'd think she'd never seen a stallion punished.
"Yeah."
Sirius did not know what to make of this final comment. Hannah offered him some oats, which he refused, and then led him out to the home pasture and left him. It was raining slightly. He trudged slowly around the edge of the fence, mourning himself. At one point he pressed his buttocks against the smooth, wet fence-boards, and rocked back and forth until the feeling dulled.
Scorpio was there too, and came over to prod him and turn him around, so he could see the network of welts painted on Sirius' rump. Then the other stallion wandered off, motioning Sirius toward the far corner of the pasture. He walked there, wondering what was supposed to be so interesting about this abandoned spot below the hill.
Then he heard the moans. On the other side of the fence, a little way into the woods, he could see Comet tethered. She was wearing a curb bit, which looked a bit ridiculous without a full bridle, and one end of it was tethered to a low-hanging hickory branch. She was still blindfolded, and her ears were stuffed with little black things that looked like hearing aids but were, no doubt, the opposite. She could squat but she could not sit down. As Sirius approached the fence, a gust of wind blew up, and Comet turned away, shivering. He saw her backside. She had welts from the top of her boots - from what Emily called her "hocks" - to the top of her shoulders. Emily must have tied her arms away to whip her. Her buttocks were indigo, and a corduroy of welts ran down into the valley between her legs. 'Could Emily have whipped her on her vulva? Would she do that?' He didn't know, and couldn't see, but now he realized how trivial his own punishment had been.
Poor ponygirl, he thought, moving away. She's been out here all day in the rain. And night will come, and she doesn't know Tomas is coming to fetch her back. She must be so afraid to stay out here all through another night. But then he thought of her proud glare, and the fact that she had so obviously brought this torture down on herself, all in a bid to get into Orion's stall. Maybe it was more accurate to call her courageous.
Confused, Sirius returned to the eaves of the barn, free from rain when the wind wasn't gusting. The storm picked up a bit, and the sky darkened well before natural dusk. The wind howled over the hills like Sirius had howled under the cane. He and Scorpio looked respectfully out at the woods on the hill, waiting for Ingrid to let them in and towel them off.