Christmas came and went. Turquoise got a poster of herself which she had not known existed - it was the centerfold from some ancient copy of H.E.Q., showing her as a yearling filly at Lazy K. Amos - dear old Amos - was giving her dressage training, with that terrible whip he called "the mamba." She could still feel it. She looked absolutely gorgeous, and so she naturally wondered how much she had aged. But then, she could see that the younger woman in the picture - the woman who had so recently been "Karen Bennett, Audio Library, can I help you?" - was not really a ponygirl yet. In her eyes, the photographer captured fear, and the desperate desire to please, to obey. But no resignation, no surrender, no deep acceptance.
The other gifts varied. Poor Ayesha got a tail with a longer, thicker, plug, courtesy of Emily more than Santa Claus. Orion got his choice of the mares - he wanted Dolly, of course - for a noisy, sweaty, afternoon. Minka got earrings - little flamed steel disks that matched the dark blue of her body suit. Sirius, who had nearly knocked the sleigh over on Christmas Eve, by skidding on ice, simply got a reprieve from being punished.
That night, Hannah must not have shackled Sirius in well, because he had gotten himself up onto the upper half of his door, and then swung himself across it, as bipeds can. Oh my God. He's coming for me. She was wet with glee. But as he clonked across the corridor, she knew at once that this mad effort was doomed. His hooves were too loud in the still air. She implored him with her eyes to go back, but it was too late. A light flipped on upstairs, and Ingrid started coming down the steps.
Sirius dashed forward, and planted a hopeless kiss on Turquoise's forehead. When Ingrid appeared at the bottom of the stairwell, she screamed as if she stepped on a tack. Sirius jumped, startled by the noise, if not the interruption. And then, with all the ponies now awake and watching, she proceeded to chase him down the length of the corridor. His cock was still hard with anticipation of a different sort of encounter, and made a strange sight, banging his stomach as he ran. To her great pleasure, Turquoise saw that Sirius was running properly, lifting his hooves high, even in this hopeless escapade.
Ingrid must have caught up with him somewhere out on the threshing floor, and dragged him back to the intersection of the corridors, cursing and panting. She buckled his hooves to the floor-rings, and then went into the office, flipping that light on too. The leads Sirius was fastened by were long; he could turn around and face Turquoise, anguish in his eyes.
'I love you.' She wanted to tell him. 'It was a nice try.'
"Em?" Ingrid was saying, on the telephone. "Sorry to get you up…. Yeah, Sirius. No, I'll get started, of course."
She came back out with a very wide leather belt, the sort the stallions sometimes wore for pulling the dray. She buckled it onto him, saying, "Emily will be very disappointed, you know. Me, I like a chance to punish a stupid ponyboy. But Emily will have expected better from you."
Turquoise watched as Ingrid meticulously looped a rope over one of the ceiling joists, and tied it to the back of Sirius' belt. Walking to Jasper's stall, she hauled on the rope hard, lifting Sirius off the ground by his hips, until the ropes that held his hooves apart formed a taut triangle with the floor. Thus cruciated, Sirius moaned, swaying gently side to side. Ingrid got a short leather strop and positioned herself between Sirius' legs. Turquoise could not see the target of her initial bombardment, but from the way the stallion bellowed, she guessed Ingrid must have started with his testicles.
After two dozen loud swats, Sirius was sobbing, and the merciless Viking backed off for a moment. She got a wide bit from the tack room and gagged him with it. She stood beside Sirius' racked, suspended figure, in the half-dark, stroking the length of his cock for awhile, as if to apologize. Hah! And then, with renewed vigor, she began slamming the strap down into his buttocks, but only at the very bottom, the tender crease with the legs. These blows, off-center as they were, came so hard that he swung back and forth like a tethered pendulum. He wailed for clemency, and Turquoise loved him as though her heart would burst. She saw his knees straining, as if he hoped he could pull the rings out of the floorboards, or dissipate an ounce of his agony in trying to.
"Goddamn," said Emily, walking in with a jacket thrown over her nightgown. "What the hell time is it?"
"One o'clock." Said Ingrid. She stood beside her victim, who swung gently from the beam, recovering the pace of his breathing, and sniffling a little. "I've been saving his rump for you."
"Aaah." Emily rubbed her eyes, not wanting to commit to being awake. "He escaped to get in with Turq?"
"Yes."
"You ought to be beating Hannah." Emily groused. "But no, look. You've got it backwards, Ingrid. He has a hard-on for Turq, he gets out to hop in the straw with Turq. Put him back in his stall, and punish her. That's how you teach him a lesson."
Turquoise went instantly from a deep, romantic admiration to horror. 'No! She didn't want this. She didn't want this now. No, Emily.'
"You're a pro, Em." She went to Jasper's stall and let Sirius down to the ground, where he promptly fell over, moaning.
"Thanks." Said Emily, yawning. "Anyway, he's going to the gymkhana in a week, I want him to be in one piece. You have this under control? When I actually wake up, I want to see Turq swinging here, striped like a zebra. Ok?"
"You got it."
As Ingrid dragged Sirius back into his stall, he tried to throw her a glance - presumably some kind of apology - but Turquoise didn't catch it. Her upper lip was trembling. Why? Surely not because of a little punishment, that's nothing. It would be hell, of course, but she could already feel herself swinging from the joist afterwards, her skin luxuriating as the unbearable prints of the strap melted away in the cool dawn air. In a way she was looking forward to that moment, and it was entirely easy, even routine, for her to accept the road there.
Emily wiped a tear from the base of Turquoise' nose. "You know, Ingrid," she said admiringly. "You're brilliant. I mean, anyone can make a pony cry with pain, but to make them cry from fear…that takes some talent."
"Thanks, boss."
'Stupid. I'm not afraid of them. So why am I crying?' She thought, as Ingrid led her out to the site of her imminent torture, and began to hobble her legs together. 'Is it because I'm disappointed that the colt didn't make it into my stall?' Ingrid fastened the wide belt around the belt she already wore, and hauled her up into the night. 'Or is it because I wish I had made that crazy, doomed gesture before he did?'
A moment later, she stopped thinking. She could only feel and breathe and endure, and even that took all her attention.
Turquoise ached for days after that, and the aches inside her were much worse than anything Ingrid could manage with her strap. Her body wanted Sirius' body; that was clear enough. And her body hated him, too, with a ponygirl's blind vengeance. How could she not hate him? She had hung in the breeze in agony, until mid-morning, all because of the stupid colt's desperado routine. Goddamn him, he wouldn't even look at me. That he probably could not bear to did not seem a sufficient excuse.
And yet some part of her wanted to forgive him, wanted to let him know that she still longed for him. She was not sure if this was unpony-like or not. It was interesting, anyway - it was a new torture, an inner torture, long after she thought she had experienced the entire gauntlet. She couldn't stop thinking about him, and the more she thought about him, the more her hatred for him faded, just as the welts from Ingrid's strap faded. 'It was an accident, after all. He was trying to make love to me. He loves me. And for a moment, I loved him.'
It did not help that Sirius, along with Ayesha, he was now the constant focus of the groom's discussion. Even on Friday, when Turq got to sweat and snort and explode with joy under Orion's virile weight, all the grooms could talk about was the gymkhana. She could not even enjoy the distraction of being covered, the weekly opportunity for utter release. No, it was Sirius and Yeesh, Yeesh and Sirius, and the gymkhana.
Only yearlings went. Turquoise remembered her own gymkhana, in the discrete beauty of the Greenhorn Mountains. Until then, she had never realized how many kinds of ponies there were. She watched Ayesha and Sirius with a kind of respectful jealously, as one watches initiates or virgins who are about to bite into knowledge.
The ride had taken a day and a half. They had stopped for the night somewhere - Sirius idly wondered how they had crossed the border to the United States - and Sirius and Ayesha slept on the straw inside the cold truck, while the humans did whatever they did. The next day they set out before dawn, and Hannah rode with them in the back of the truck, lecturing them a bit and getting them into their 'formal attire'.
Their arms were pulled back in leather binders, which held the elbows together uncomfortably. This had the added effect of thrusting Ayesha's breasts out magnificently, and Sirius made no effort to conceal his appetite for her. Her hair hung down over her shoulders in dark ringlets, and Hannah pinned some of these up with subtle leather straps. She shaved each of them again - neither of them needed it - and oiled them carefully.
When Sirius got out of the truck, blinking with the sudden rush of light, he could see why Hannah had given them a lecture about 'getting overloaded'. There were ponies everywhere, more than he would have believed existed in the whole world, though he knew they were all yearlings. And there were more types of ponies than he could have believed, all dressed up to the nines. There were striders like him, mostly in three-banded leather harnesses - the Dakotas were exceptionally minimalist breed. Many of them were tricked out with little bells, on their nipples or on the straps that held them, so there was a constant tintinnabulation beneath the shouts and gossip of the groom, the neighing of ponies in excitement or their squeals when one was punished. The air was full of a thousand sounds.
There were other ponies, too. Some had feather plumes on their heads. Some had on full blindfolds, or hoods that seemed to permanently cover their eyes. There were quadrupeds like Turquoise, and other ponies that appeared to be bipeds but were driven on hands and knees. They all had hooves, they all had tails, most of them were harnessed and bitted - but there the similarities ended. A group of shaven-headed ponies clad in black vinyl (or latex?) passed Sirius; their faces and breasts exposed, as were their well-whipped buttocks and the nervous vulvas peeking out coyly from under their tails. He thought their breasts looked absurd, wreathed in rubber. And their tails - he realized only as they receded into the crowd that their tails were made of their own hair, shorn off their heads. That seemed an exceptional violation, an outrageous kind of kink, and he shuddered.
Other ponies went by wearing long muzzles and ear-pieces, which made their faces more truly equine, and Sirius watched them admiringly. Still others were festooned with padlocks, and he saw many ponygirls that could not have been mounted and covered without a full set of keys. One splendid, noble-eyed ponygirl seemed to be poured into a corset formed from a single piece of steel. It pinched her waist and covered her vulva entirely, the chrome only broken by her long blonde tail. Sirius could not see no hinges, locks, or seams on it, and it made him wonder. He was glad to have his blinkers on, because clearly there was far too much to look at. And Hannah was hurrying both of them through the crowd to wherever it was they were going.
They passed a tent where there was a workshop on branding, a big man with a circus-barker's voice shouting instructions. They passed by a group of four-hooved ponies that were clad, it appeared, entirely in latex and leather. Even their faces were covered, except for the eyes and nostrils. Sirius shuddered to think of them, in their little moving prisons. 'Surely the masks come off sometimes? Surely?' They passed an auction tent where a dozen ponies stomped nervously in the paddock, waiting for new owners. On the stage, though, were not ponies but a line of three young men and two women - human, at least for a few more hours. They seemed to pay little attention to the auctioneer who was selling them - rather, they kept stealing glances at the ponies in the paddock, and outside the tent. Sirius felt almost condescending to them. Yes, you'll be one of us soon, and you'll understand.
Then they came to a large paddock full of ponyboys, and Hannah was shooing him in with a kiss on his earlobe. "Now, you do us proud, Sirius." She said. "Don't be afraid. We'll be cheering for you." And she was gone, with Ayesha.
The paddock was crowded, and he was soon pushed up alongside two other Striders, who wore intricate harnesses and had rings through the septum of their noses. They seemed incredibly self-assured, and were talking. As he had with the kitten, Sirius found this perversely bizarre. They had English accents, he thought.
"Did you see the dragon, then? They've got a dragongirl in a cage there! I barely sawrer."
"No, really? What's she like?"
"Shit, she'd rip your bloody 'ead off as soon as look at yer. And the cage ain't much, I tell you. If she 'ad a mind to, she'd slash right through it. I kept my distance."
"I'd like to see that. Ey, mate, what's your name then?"
Sirius looked away, but not in an angry way.
"'E can't talk, stupid. 'E's a Dakota."
"Ohhh, roight. Show us your tongue, then, mate."
Bored with this, Sirius pushed his way through the sea of ponyboys to the middle of the paddock. There was a small clearing there. A tiny quadruped - the same type of pony that Turquoise was, or very similar - was crying piteously in the middle. Some of his compatriots had managed to yank out his tail with their teeth, and were now taking turns mounting him. They had been making the most of this unsupervised moment - thick bands of semen already ran down the inside of his legs. As Sirius arrived, a strider was lunging into the boy's defenseless anus, his eyes rolled back, almost barking with pleasure behind his gag. The whole crowd were yearlings, of course. Most of them, Sirius imagined, had not felt their manhood moving inside warm flesh since they became ponies.
The strider finished his work and dismounted very quickly, and a large stallion, clad all in latex up to his chin, leapt forward to take his place. Sirius watched him sigh with pleasure as his cock eased into the now-slippery cavity. He watched the recipient shake his head back and forth, as if he was living through his agony in slow-motion. And it will be so much worse for you, thought Sirius, when your groom discovers that you've lost your tail. How will they make you pay for that?
"You want the next ride?" Said the ponyboy standing beside Sirius.
He did. He definitely did. But at the same time, he felt sorry for this ponyboy who was obviously one of nature's victims, who would lose whatever game they were about to compete in, and then have to explain wordlessly to his groom why he had lost his tail in the process. Pity. That's a human feeling. His cock was hard, and desperately hungry. Even as he inched forward to cut off the other stallions, he was not sure if he would mount the ponyboy or not.
A moment later, the decision was made for him. The front gates of the paddock opened, and four men in some type of uniform began bustling through them, whacking the ponyboys indiscriminately with their crops. They were all being driven out towards what seemed like a giant mud puddle. Still indecisive about whether or not to cover the little Dancer, Sirius was one of the last ponyboys to leave the paddock. For this he got several harsh stripes from the handlers, but he also got to see not just one, but three of the ponyboys tails trampled in the straw of the paddock, along with a number of bells and other oddments. He made a mental note to watch his back.
Out in the ring, the ponyboys were made to form a circle around what was indeed a giant mud puddle. A circular hole had been cut in the ground, about three feet deep and thirty feet across. The red clay at the bottom it had been soaked down to the consistency of oatmeal, and into this mess two of the referees had waded, in hip-high rubber boots. The other two were going around the ponies, clipping a carabiner onto their backs, wherever their harnesses allowed it. A long rope was being looped through these carabiners, one after another, so that all the ponies would stand facing out from the mud pool, in a circle.
"Welcome to the colt's tug-of-war!" Shouted the same barker who had been at the branding workshop. He went on at an incredibly rapid pace - perhaps he was an auctioneer, too. "You know the rules, no pulling until the gunshot, no pulling after the second gunshot, last ponyboy standing wins the gold, everybody else wins mud. Grooms if your pony gets their tack dirty I'm sure you'll be very understanding about it" (Huge gales of laughter went up from the crowd at this.)
Sirius was impressed at how large the crowd was - they could not all have been grooms. Looking around, he also noticed a second paddock of ponygirls, probably waiting their turn. He was no longer listening to the barker, rather he was scanning the ponygirls to see if Ayesha was among them. He could not see her. But he did see a scene mirroring the tableau from his own paddock. A latex-covered quadruped was being held down by two ponygirls as a third used her feathered plume to tickle and probe her vulva. The object of this torment was a blonde ponygirl, her hair drawn up through the latex hood into a single fountain at the top of her head. Like the others Sirius had seen, she had her breasts bared through a latex bodysuit. Yet this time he did not think it looked absurd - the panic and pleasure on her face was too beautiful.
Thus distracted, Sirius almost missed the gunshot, and was instantly drawn back to the edge of the pool, and almost off his feet, by a sharp tug on the rope he was now connected to. He hauled back hard, grunting. This seemed to make no difference, but a moment later he and the ponyboy next to him were gaining ground.
"That's it, Dakota." Said one of the English ponies, who was beside him on the right. "We 'ave 'em."
But the ponyboys to their left did not "'ave 'em," and a run of about ten of them were pulled deep into the mud, where the referees hustled to unclip them from the rope. What was a circle of ponyboys had now become a sort of square, or diamond, with only four clusters of ponyboys remaining at the corners. Pulling so hard he was thought he would bite through his bit, Sirius still dared a glance backwards. The poor ponyboys that had been dragged deep into the mud lay there forlorn. Their tack was ruined, no doubt, and God only knew what their grooms would do to them for that. Sirius' corner was the largest, but it was composed entirely of striders. Two of the other corners were primarily Dancers. They have a huge advantage, Sirius thought. They have twice as much traction as us. The fourth corner, amazingly, was a single ponyboy, a strider, whose muscles made him resemble a tree. He was holding his own against the combined pull of all the others. Finally, Sirius noticed the little ponyboy who had been suffering the attentions of his paddock-mates. He had fallen, of course - I don't know what your contest is, but not this one - but he hadn't quite finished falling. He dangled from his carabiner over the mud, like a bead on a string, feet flailing hopeless. Sirius thought he could still see a string of semen dripping from his tail-less ass.
I should have hurried up and mounted him. It would have been so sweet. And what does it matter to him if fourteen stallions fuck him or fifteen? He's already sore, he's already doomed. For him, it can't get any worse. For me, it could have gotten a little better.
But things were not getting better in Sirius' corner. One at a time, the striders were getting pulled back into the mud. The barker was going on at a rapid-fire pace - Sirius gathered that from him the lone, musclebound strider to their right was called 'Casbah Jones.' Suddenly the rope went slightly slack, and without bothering to care why, Sirius rushed forward a few feet. With a sudden jerk, he and the three ponies left with him were knocked to the ground.
Sweating with exertion, Sirius dug his feet into the clay, and pulled himself up at an impossible angle - his head was only a foot or two off the ground. One of the group of dancers was now lying the mud - the contest was now three-cornered. Thankfully, he saw that Casbah Jones had been dragged back almost to the edge of the pit. He couldn't last. He couldn't. One pony against, what, like seven? I don't care how strong he is. But Casbah Jones was now inching along the line of rope towards the dancers, trying to borrow their strength for the time being.
As if with one mind, both the striders in Sirius' corner and the ponyboys opposite them united in hauling Casbah Jones into the mud. Working in unison, they dragged him through the mud, and then began dragging him back through it in the other direction, so that before the referee could unhitch him, he was covered in red clay from nose to tail.
Then began a long, grueling, détente. Sirius was the last ponyboy on his side of their end, which meant he was probably the next to go. He knew that, but he put every muscle into hauling on the rope anyway. The straps seemed to be cutting into him. Someone on the other side of his end fell, and then another, and then the another, and then him. Moving backwards in slow motion, he marched into the mud and was unhitched by a referee. As the long loop of rope fell slack, Sirius heard the dangling ponyboy finally fall into the mud, headlong, shrieking.
He climbed up to bank, thankful that only his hooves were muddy. In the opposite corner, there were two Dancers flanking a large Strider, and they were now running away from each other at full tilt. All semblance of cooperation was gone. The rope went taut again, and the Strider was not pulled into the mud: he was flung, like a pebble out of a slingshot. A roar went up from the crowd.
"It's down to Travertine and Hafiz!" Shouted the Barker, although Sirius had no way of knowing which was which. A moment later, someone grabbed him and hauled him back to the paddock, and he did not get to see the end of the race, although he heard the gunshot and the news that Hafiz won. Hannah came to collect him shortly thereafter, and fed him sugar-cubes and carrots. He cooled off in one corner of the paddock as the fillies took their turn at tug-of-war. The little ponyboy was spared a repeat performance, being completely covered in mud, and so the largest stallions found someone else to de-tail and fuck senseless.