MSL-15 The Prioress Captive Maiden


FOREWORD

Father Malachi approached, flicking the whip he held in his hand.

"Daughter of the devil," he snarled, "you will pay for your ignorance."

Frightened, I quailed before his angry gaze. He grasped me by a thick hank of my hair and 
brought me to my knees. I had been trained to expect this position because I deserved it.

I had not been trained for what happened next. Very slowly, leering at me with a strange 
expression I could not fathom, Father Malachi undid the cord which held his trousers in place.

His trousers dropped to his ankles.

I gasped at my first sight of a male member, and then I trembled more violently as I felt 
the whip on my bared buttocks.

"Take it in your mouth," he said, "daughter of Sodom. Take it in your mouth."

I looked at him, horrified at what he was suggesting, and bewildered by my own maidenly 
ignorance of sexual matters.

Again the whip bit into my buttocks, and I felt the burning sting suffuse my body.

Desperate to avoid further pain, I opened my mouth, and felt the flesh of his manhood 
throbbing against my tongue.

He thrust inward roughly, and I thought I would die as the whip came down again on my 
naked ass.


CHAPTER ONE

I am a dog, the daughter of a heathen slave.

So I have been taught.

I have been given this manuscript and a quill, to practice my script. It is slow and difficult 
for me.

My mind, according to my captors, is naturally dark because I have no Christian virtues, 
and because I have not been baptized.

I dread it--that thing they call baptism, and yet they say I must be baptized if I am to be 
saved.

I do not like these people. I do not like their ways. I do not like how I am treated.

But so it has been decreed.

I sit in my chamber in the Priory of Saint Armand. It is late. The fire in the grate is low and 
casts but a faint warmth in the cold room. The dank coolness of the stones beneath my feet 
seems to permeate my whole body and fill me with a wretched shivering.

The candle flickers and turns my meager frame into a dark giant which floats on the ceiling
of my cell. The crucifix over my bed wavers, the corpus on the dark polished wood seems to 
writhe in a hideous agony.

And so my soul!

I feel as if there were a tribe of frogs in my body, and they jump and set up a racket that 
unnerves me.

Tomorrow I am to be washed in the water of the Christians, those murderers, those rapists,
those creatures who murdered my family, raped my mother, those dastards who have 
consigned me to the most miserable niche of mankind, the place of a slave among them.

My soul writhes, but it also rebels. I have determined to keep watch tonight, to write my 
story, to wait for dawn, and perhaps an answer.

I do need an answer!

I have prayed desperately in the form they have taught me. I have beseeched that strange 
creature they call a god, who lies pinned to the crucifix above my bed. But he has not 
answered me. Perhaps my mentors are correct. Perhaps I am damned, a slave through all 
eternity.

I did not always think so.

My name is Alethea. They say I cannot keep my name. I must be named Catherine or 
Maria. I do not like these names. They are not mine. My name is Alethea.

I do not know the country from which I came. I am ignorant of what they call geography, 
but I remember the taste of the grapes at harvest, the glowing dark eyes of my father, the 
warm breast of my mother, her sweet fragrance as she sang me to sleep.

These are the images I keep in my mind. They console me.

I was very young when it all happened.

My mother claimed that I had completed nine harvests. I was tall for my age, almost as tall 
as my mother.

My skin was browned with the sun, my strangely-colored hair bleached almost white by 
the sun. From sunrise to sunset, I worked in the fields with my father, my skirts hiked up above
my strong ankles, as I gathered the sheathes of wheat and corn, and picked the grapes.

And there was the work my mother and I did around the house when the field work had 
been done, grinding the corn and wheat into meal, cooking, cleaning out our small, 
hospitable home. My original home was much smaller than anything I have seen in this 
strange city to which I have been transported.

We were in the fields, my little brother, my parents, and I. Around us were others, 
neighbors, kinsmen, and my special friend Damian, harvesting.

In the distance we heard a great roar. My father straightened up, and shielded his dark 
eyes from the glare of the sun to look. I turned in the direction from which the strange, 
earth-shaking noise came.

The horizon swirled with clouds, and then forms took shape--frightening forms, men on 
horseback. They scintillated as their drawn swords caught the light of the gentle sun.

They came closer and closer, the dust swirling around them in frightening clouds.

"Crusaders!" one of the women screamed. "Run!"

We dropped our tools and ran, ran like demons, toward our village and relative safety. The
Crusaders were the most frightening demons any of us knew. And we had heard the stories of
their pillaging, their rapes, their murders--whole families wiped out in the name of some 
bestial god who would not countenance those who did not worship him.

An ugly Faith, a vicious creed, Christianity, that will not allow the sun to shine on those 
different from its adherents!

And now this affliction, a screaming horde, was descending on us, poor, simple farmers 
who had never hurt anyone, nor raised our hands in anger against neighboring tribes and 
families!

The noise got louder as the mob approached. Their horses were strangely caparisoned, the
clothing of these creatures motley and bizarre to look upon. Their strangeness heightened the
terror in us, as we ran.

The few of us from our plot of land were soon joined by others from other plots of land, 
until we were a seething river of humanity, heading toward our village.

My father, one of the village elders, screamed, "To the hills! To the hills!"

There were caves in the hills, which were kept carefully against the time when marauders 
would descend upon us. There we were safe until the ravagers had scoured our village.

It happened frequently.

And of all the marauders with which we could be afflicted, the Crusaders were known as 
the most vicious, the most merciless.

The seething tide, which kept being swelled by streams of harvesters from outlying plots 
of land, changed direction and headed toward the hills. The men lagged back, pushing the 
women and children before them, seeking to save them. I found myself running beside my 
mother. My brother had hung back with my father.

The horde came closer and closer, and my lungs were burning, as I raced for the precious 
cover.

Many of us made it. None of the men did.

They stood their ground as the Crusaders came up to them. I saw but little as I ran to 
safety. But what I saw and experienced later more than made up for what I had missed during 
the panic of our initial flight.

Panting, my lungs burning with dust, I finally achieved one of the caves with my mother, 
and the daughter of our neighbor, Rena. She was four or five years older than I, almost grown 
to womanhood.

She was betrothed to Damian's brother, Rodrigo. We retreated into the mouth of the cave,
along with several other women and children. In the other small caves in the hills, we saw 
other women and children reaching safety.

From our height, we then watched, helpless and anguished, as our unarmed brothers and 
fathers and friends were cut to pieces.

The Crusaders were every bit as bad as the travelers coming through our village had said. I
have never seen such carnage since, nor have I ever read of such.

In less time than it takes the sun to travel a hand-span down the horizon, our village was 
decimated of its men and young boys. They lay in pathetic heaps on the dusty earth on the 
outskirts of the village, and the Crusaders began to pillage our homes.

As dusk approached, we saw the first lurid glow of the fires, as they burned our homes.

The grief of the women was muted. They had the children to protect, and hopefully, the 
Crusaders would ignore us and leave us in the relative peace of our haven.

But we were sadly mistaken.

We filled the mouths of the caves, watchful, as the darkness, like a black cloak, fell over the
earth. The stars shone forth.

I have always loved the night, that gentle mender of the day's wounds, that sweet 
harbinger of rest from weariness. This night was different, and all my nights since then have 
never been the same.

The fires shot higher, and soon we watched our whole village go up in flames. But the 
Crusaders did not go away. They rode toward the foothills, came toward the caves where we 
had secured ourselves, and there was nothing to stem the tide that washed over us.

"Death to the heathen!"

We heard the cry over and over again, like the scream of a pig being killed for food, or the 
cry of a horse who has broken its leg.

They descended on us, laughing, bellowing their rage and their cruelty, and we were all 
undone.

My mother grabbed me, and ran toward the back of the cave with Rena. We sought vainly 
to hide ourselves from the predators who had descended upon us.

And there we were found by a band of them. They were hideous to behold. They were 
covered with the blood of our men, their faces smudged from the fires they had set. Their 
strange armor was dirty and redolent of sweat and death.

One great, red-haired man approached my mother. His teeth gleamed white in his dirty, 
sweating face, and his eyes glowed luridly.

He grabbed her. I screamed and reached to help her, to pull her away from the beast who 
had captured her, and I found myself imprisoned brutally by two hammy fists which grasped 
my slender arms, and restrained me.

The man who had captured me sat down on a rock, and pulled me onto his knee, holding 
me so hard that I winced with pain.

My heart was beating so hard that I thought I would faint, as I watched my mother's robe 
being torn from her body. I blushed with shame when I saw her naked before the beast who 
had humiliated her.

"Please, kill me," my mother sobbed, as the man stood over her, his blood-stained sword 
pointing at her breast. Her lovely breasts heaved with her sobbing breath.

I heard a shrill scream, and I turned, to see Rena stretched on the floor of the cave.

She, too, was naked.

And as I watched, I screamed with fear and horror, as I saw the man standing over her, 
reveal his fat, thick rod.

Rena struggled vainly. Her arms were stretched out from her shoulders, and they were 
held by two Crusaders. Two Crusaders held her ankles, her legs spread wide.

Again I blushed to see her secret sexual parts revealed to the man who was now crouched 
between her legs.

Another scream rent the air of the cave, as the man's thick rod pierced Rena's 
womanhood.

The man holding me so brutally laughed. I felt a hardness on my buttocks where his 
manhood swelled, as he watched.

I was tom. To my left, my mother was being ravaged by one beast, and to my right, Rena 
had had her maidenhood slain by the fleshy sword of another bestial Crusader.

I heard the man who was rending Rena's womanhood apart grunt. His long thick rod 
disappeared into Rena's little dark hole.

And a strange thing happened as I watched. I felt a strange stirring in my own secret 
sexual parts.

Having been born and raised on a farm, I was not ignorant of sexual matters, which had 
unfolded themselves to my knowledge gently in the course of births and deaths, and matings,
in the course of seasons, and planting, and harvests.

But there was nothing gentle, nothing natural about what I was witnessing now. It was 
hideous, and my mind was blasted by what I was watching.

The man who was raping my mother had bent her legs up over her shoulders. That dark 
channel from which I had emerged was now stuffed with the Crusader's cock, which lunged 
inward, until it had disappeared, and then pulled outward, gleaming with my mother's inner 
juices.

The cock of the man raping Rena, was covered with the blood of her rent maidenhead. His
cock, too, sawed in and out of her pussy.

I was faint with fear and pain and anguish. I wished at that moment I was dead.

The man who was holding me appeared to be totally oblivious of my presence on his lap. 
He watched, and I could feel his labored breathing blowing moistly on my neck, as he kept me
bound to him with his burly hands.

But in my own secret recesses, I felt the stirrings of my own juices. I had been feeling such 
sensations since the onset of my monthly flux, and Damian never failed to arouse me when I 
was in his presence.

I was appalled that I could be aroused by the brutal rape of one of my best friends, and 
my mother, and yet my eyes were riveted to the obscenity occurring before me, fascinated 
against my will by those secret rites I had been so long desirous of being initiated into.

Damian had wanted to become betrothed to me, but my father had said I was too young. 
There were girls my age who had become betrothed, and some who had been married, but 
my father was gentle and possessive, and had chosen to keep me by his side for a year or two 
more.

Now, as I watched the hideous fate of my mother and Rena, I was sorry I had allowed my 
father to preserve my girlhood. I shuddered to think of my fate at the hands of these men.

In the caves around me, I heard similar shrieks of pain, heard the guttural cries of 
Crusaders, as they raped the women.

The grip of the man holding me tightened. The Crusader who had stolen Rena's 
maidenhood had expended himself in her little hole, and he had been replaced by another 
man.

Rena was no longer screaming. Her body was writhing as the man's thick rod slid into her 
little channel.

Rena's mound of love was thickly-furred. She was almost full-grown, and her breasts, 
round and ripe and pear-shaped, jiggled with the labored rise and fall of her chest.

The sight of her was unaccountably erotic to me. Even the sight of the violence aroused 
me.

I have thought long and hard about it. It wasn't that I consented to, or took pleasure in 
watching the rape of my mother or Rena. I think it was the fact of that violence, that sudden 
brutalization, which overpowered me, and caused the incredible erotic excitement which I felt.

My thighs were stained with the honey which issued from my womanhood, as I watched 
Rena and my mother being repeatedly raped by the men in the cave.

There were other women in the cave being similarly treated, but they were more toward 
the front. In my direct line of vision were my mother and my best friend, the woman who was 
going to marry Damian's brother.

My beloved! He was dead.

The thought suddenly hit me, as if I had been inundated by a rock fall, and I let out a loud 
wail.

The grip on my arms tightened. The man holding me shook me violently.

"Shut up, you heathen wench. If they were Christian women this would be a crime, but 
they are daughters of the devil, as you are. Shut up!"

He shook me until my teeth rattled, and I stifled the anguish to which I had given vent.

I heard the clank of metal and the rustle of leather, and a tall, powerful-looking man 
strode toward the back of the cave.

He looked at the hideous spectacle in front of him, and he grinned. Behind him, a younger
boy strode, and stood now at his arm. The man clapped his hand on the boy's shoulder.

He was comely, if one could call a Crusader comely.

My eyes veered from the man and the boy to Rena, whose body suddenly arched upward. 
She let out a high-pitched, mewling shriek, and then her body collapsed.

I watched the hairy buttocks of her rapist rising and falling furiously, as he drove his rod 
deeper and deeper into poor Rena's wounded womanhood, and then the man let out a loud 
grunt, and his body collapsed on top of Rena's naked one.

Rena was very still. As I watched, the man who had raided her fleshy temple of delight 
looked at her.

"Aggh!" he growled, pulling out of her, his rod gleaming with sex juices, "She is dead."

At that point, the man holding me pushed me off his lap. He pushed me forward, and I 
staggered in the direction where the Crusaders were gathered around Rena's now lifeless 
corpse.

I looked down at her, too grief-stricken for Rena's fate to be worried at that moment 
about my own.

The Crusaders had released their grip on her limbs, and she lay, blessedly blind in death to
her shameful fate. Her thighs were stained with blood. Again I felt that strange constriction in 
my own secret parts, as I saw the juices which the men had spewed into her hole, dribbling 
out of her wounded womanhood.

They trickled slowly, like syrup, down the crack of her buttocks, and pooled on the dirt 
floor beneath her.

"There's one for you, still alive and kicking," my captor bellowed behind me. I turned, and 
saw him bare his own thick rod, and my hands and feet went cold.

But my secret cave of lust got hotter and hotter.

My whole being seemed to freeze however, as I saw the glint of a blade. The last Crusader 
to pillage my mother's pussy had raised his sword, and I heard the horrible chunk of metal 
cutting through flesh and bone.

The Crusader had cut off my mother's head.

The terror was perhaps too great for me to faint, and yet my body was totally without any 
semblance of rational control. I stood frozen, watching the blood spurt upward from the 
gaping hole where my mother's head had been.

And then I was grabbed from behind, and thrown to the floor. My garment was wrenched 
from my body, and rough hands seized my wrists and ankles. I felt my limbs being violently 
wrenched apart, my legs spread-eagled to their limit painfully, my arms almost pulled from my
shoulders by the Crusaders who were holding down my wrists.

The man on whose lap I had been forced to sit crouched between my spread-apart legs, 
and aimed his deadly spear at my quivering little hole.

The juices which flowed in spite of my fear and revulsions seemed to increase in quantity, 
to swell the tide which had already stained the soft inner flesh of my thighs.

He leaned forward, leering, and caressed my legs.

"Lovely little wench-for a heathen," he muttered.

"Hurry up, Claude!" I heard one of the soldiers exclaim. "I have yet to douse my fire, and 
this heathen's little hole would suit fine."

The man prepared to thrust his weapon into the mouth of my womanhood. My body 
stiffened, and I prayed for death.

"Hold!"

I gasped at the sound of the voice. Could there be mercy among these beasts after all?

I looked in the direction of the voice. It was the newcomer, who had come in with the boy 
about my age.

He strode forward, and gazed down at me. He did not look at me as a man looks at a 
woman, as another human being gazes on one of his kind. He looked at me as if I were a 
horse to be appraised, or a painting to be judged for its merit. The gaze was cold, and my 
heart, so newly-risen to hope after such a devastating blow as the Crusaders had delivered, 
sank again to the icy pits in which it had been trembling.

"Save her. She will do quite nicely for my lord, the Duke," the man said.

The soldiers released their grip on me reluctantly.

"But, my lord!" one of the men exclaimed. "What shall we do for relief?"

The man looked around at my mother, and then down at the dead Rena lying beside me. 
He looked at me again and smiled. His smile was evil.

"Use her mouth," the man said. "But I warn you, make no mark on her body, nor do not 
use her cunt. My lord the Duke will be pleased with her. She is comely."

There was some grumbling from the men.

I did not understand what he meant by his command, until I felt myself being raised to a 
kneeling position by one of the Crusaders who yanked me by my hair.

I winced, and then knelt before four men, with raging cocks, who stood before me, while 
the man who had raised me still held me by a thick hank of my straw-colored thick hair.

The man who had captured me on his lap, and who had thrust me among the beasts now 
stood before me, his throbbing cock inches from my mouth.

"Eat, wench, eat!" he snarled, as he moved forward slightly. I felt his disgusting member, 
that rapacious appendage of his questionable manhood, pressing against my lips.

"She doesn't understand," someone said.

"Then show her," another replied.

I felt a hand wrenching my jaw apart, opening my mouth. And then I gagged, as the 
crusader's prick slammed into my mouth, ramming against the back of it, at the entrance to 
my throat.

"Warning. I will have the right hand of any man who does not leave her intact," said the 
man who had come in with the child. "The duke does not pay for spoiled merchandise."

"Have no fear!" shouted the man whose cock was now lodged in my mouth, suffocating 
me, "we will care for her as if she were the most priceless cow on the duke's lands."

And with that, he started to buck his hips forward, driving his cock deeper and deeper into
my mouth, until I felt his bulbous, mushroom-shaped cock head stretching my throat, as he 
sought to embed it even deeper.

Again I prayed for death, as the man rammed his cruel prod into my mouth over and over 
again.

But the mercy of death was not to be mine--only a long, hard limbo of travail and 
loneliness.

Around me, the men laughed, the din of their cruel hilarity battering me with the same 
urgency, the same cruel insistence, as the man's cock battered my aching throat.

My jaws hurt me badly, and my mouth felt stretched out of all shape, as the man's huge 
rod slammed into me over and over again.

I felt as if my flesh were crackling and sizzling with the flush of shame which suffused my 
body.

And yet, my perverse womanhood still sent its heated streams of thick juice down the 
tunnel of my lust.

My head throbbed with the pressure of the man who still held me by my hair. He was 
pulling on it, and every now and then I'd feel the sting as some of my hairs were pulled from 
my scalp.

"Suck, damn you, suck!" the man bellowed, who was pillaging my mouth with his cock.

I had never heard of such a way to make love before, and the idea of it was just as 
repugnant to me as the fact.

But I was even more afraid of displeasing them, more afraid of the torture to which they 
could put me.

The travelers who came through our village who had experiences with the Crusaders 
talked of horrible mutilations, and the agonies to which they could put anyone who thwarted 
their wills.

I infinitely preferred death to what was happening to me, but doing what they wanted to 
the best of my meager ability was far better than being tortured.

I started to suck on the man's cock, as he slammed it into my mouth over and over again. I
felt my cheeks sucking inward, as I applied pressure to the man's throbbing rod.

After a while, the sensation became far less unpleasant. I was learning, as he thrust his 
massive prod into my throat, to swallow against it. I discovered that it stopped the gag reflex 
which tortured me and made me feel as if I were dying of asphyxiation.

I could feel the flush in my face recede somewhat as I acquired the knack of inhaling when 
the man's cock pulled out, leaving only the mushroom-shaped tip of it lodged in my mouth.

As I became more comfortable, if I can use that word, my own perverse passions seemed 
to mount.

I felt as if the flower-like petals of my sex flesh were swelling with the heated sensations 
which coursed through me. My inner thighs were sticky with the resin of my desire, as it oozed
out of my hot little tunnel of lust.

The man who was holding me by my hair reached around with his other hand and began 
to caress my burgeoning tits.

I started when I first felt his crude palm rubbing my breasts, but the sensation was far from
unpleasant. No one had ever touched my breasts, and the sensation only added to the hot 
welter of passion which was building in my body.

I felt my nipples stiffening under his sweating palm, as he rubbed his hand over first one 
breast and then the other. The sensation I experienced was that my tits were swelling with the 
heated sensations which permeated them.

I shivered with a growing, bizarre pleasure.

The cock in my mouth seemed to swell. The throbbing seemed to become more intense.

And then I choked on the first flush of his man juices, as his come slit erupted with its 
steaming load of lusty lava. His juices poured down my throat, and I swallowed harder and 
harder, trying to please him, trying to forestall any injury which might accrue to me for 
displeasing him, or any of the others.

"She has nice tits," the man behind me grunted, his hands getting more and more urgent 
on my breasts. I felt the resilient tissue denting as his fingers dug into the fleshy wealth of my 
womanly orbs.

My pussy felt like a seething cauldron of desire. The conflicting sensations coursing 
through me made me light-headed. The first was, of course, the profound grief under which I 
was laboring.

That grief had yet to flood me. Instinctively, I knew this, as I continued to swallow the 
man's gism.

Each inward lunge caused more and more of his musky spunk to pour into my throat, and 
there was so much of it that it welled up in my mouth and trickled out of the corners of my 
distorted, stuffed mouth.

I could feel the slimy tendrils of the man's liquid lust trickling down my chin and dropping 
on my breasts, which the man was still massaging. He massaged the gism into them, which 
created still another sensation.

"Keep greasing her, Martin," the man massaging my breasts said. "It will wash her filthy 
soul as clean as a new-born Christian babe's."

The laughter of the men assaulted my ears, as the man fucking my mouth emptied his 
balls into me. I swallowed the last of his slimy liquid lust, and then he pulled out of me, his 
powerful rod softening as he did so.

I thought that would be the end of my troubles, but I was mistaken. He was replaced by 
the man who had held my hair and mauled my tits.

His cock was as big and demanding as the man who had just finished marauding my 
mouth, and his humping motions as he drove his prick into my hot oral cavity were stronger, 
more insistent.

He grunted as he thrust his prick into my pillaged orifice. No one replaced him in holding 
my head, but he grabbed a thick hank of my hair on either side of my head, and drew my 
mouth downward on his massive phallus.

Again I felt the gag reflex, but this time, I had learned a few defensive tactics, which I 
hastened to employ. As soon as I felt his bulging prick head slamming against the entrance to 
my aching throat, I started to swallow fiercely.

This prevented me from gagging, as I had so painfully done before. I could feel the man's 
hot fleshy rod prying more and more deeply into my already stretched and aching throat, as I 
continued to swallow against his intruding manhood.

My cheeks caved in as I started to suck on his prick, capturing it between my tongue and 
the roof of my mouth, and pulling on it really hard as he withdrew until only the tip was 
lodged in my mouth.

Then he thrust inward again. I felt my throat stretching as he pried deeply into my throat 
with his massive sword, piercing deeply, as if he would try to lodge his manhood in my 
stomach.

As he slammed inward, his hairy fleshy globes slammed against my chin, and the hairs 
which covered his loins, from which his prick sprung like a lurid stalk abraded, my nose and 
mouth.

The odor of his aroused manhood was strong, and he smelled also of sweat, as he 
undulated his hips back and forth, pumping his cock into my mouth and withdrawing it, only 
to lunge inward again.

By now my cheeks and chin were glistening with a combination of my saliva, which I could 
not swallow, and the gism of the man who had ejaculated into my throat the first time.

My neck was aching due to the posture I was constrained to assume as I serviced the 
brutal conqueror with my mouth.

Again I found myself praying for death, as the men around me brutalized me with their 
laughter, taking an obscene joy in my degradation and my misery.

And yet my body was a seething maelstrom of passion mixed with anguish and anger, and
each powerful emotion which flooded me, seeming to carry my body away from my rational 
control, only heightened the erotic sensations which I felt.

I sucked harder and harder on the man's prick, as he drove it brutally into my mouth, over 
and over again. I was becoming more and more adept at sucking on man meat, and I learned 
with the second man that it was possible to hasten that explosion which filled my mouth with 
their seed.

The harder I sucked, the more excited the man became, and the more I lashed my tongue 
around and around on his throbbing shaft, the more swiftly he would pump his prick into me, 
dipping deeply into the well of my throat.

I felt his juices starting to pour out of his throbbing rod, felt them oozing in a slimy stream
down my gulping, rippling throat.

Again the flood was too heavy, and I was unable to swallow all of the man's seed. It surged
up from my gulping throat and pooled in my mouth, and trickled out of the corners of my lips
again, adding to the slimy, sticky patina of sex cream which already stained my chin and my 
breasts.

The other men were hastening my assailant on, hungry to have their turn. I moaned as I 
felt his spill the last of his seed into my mouth, knowing full well that my agony was far from 
over.

At that moment, the man shot the last of his load into my mouth, and I opened my 
pain-blurred eyes.

I spotted the hilt of his dagger which was still slung around the man's waist. I was tempted
to reach up and pull the dagger from its sheath, and plunge it into my wounded, violated 
breast.

I remembered at that moment, something my father had once said to me. He had said, 
one fall when the rains had wiped out our crop of corn that life forgives everything. In its 
teeming demand to live and be fruitful and multiply it covers over all the old errors, the gullies
made by heavy rains, ruined crops replaced by new growth, soft vegetation which crept 
around burned-out homes, or hovels that were abandoned. He had smiled at me as we 
mourned our lost labor, and placed his hand lovingly on my shoulder.

"Remember Alethea," he had said. "There is always a prize for living through a disaster.

"There is always a reason for living, and wealth to be extracted from the bountiful earth, no
matter what mishaps occur, and we all make mistakes."

I wondered now, as my tits heaved with my labored breathing, as I wallowed in my shame 
and my growing despair, what there was to look forward to, what there was to live for.

My father excoriated vengeance, and my anger was far from being potent. I was merely a 
nine year old girl, helpless in the face of the cruel, arrant power which had ridden rough-shod 
over me.

My parents were dead. My brother was dead. My village was wiped out. And these men, 
into whose hands I was now consigned, thought of me as being no better than a dog.

Very well, then, I thought, in memory of my father, I will be the best dog I know how.

I will live until I find a reason for living. I swore a solemn oath in the memory of my mother
and father at that moment, that I would not do away with my miserable life, until I had given 
myself every opportunity to find forgiveness for this hideous mishap, this cruel affliction which
had been visited upon me.

A strange sort of peace, and with it some semblance of courage seemed to fill me when I 
made that vow, as if the dearly beloved spirits of my mother and father were hovering over 
me, as if the whole village floated above my debased head to give me comfort.

I gave myself a time limit. I would try to survive, if indeed I survived at all at the hands of 
these beasts, until I was sixteen. At the time I made that vow, I thought I was placing an 
inhuman burden on my young shoulders.

I am sixteen now, and I must consider my decision carefully, weigh it with my thought, and
either send it on its way, or sacrifice my life to it.

The sounds of pain and agony had long since faded from my ears. The only sounds I heard
were the obscene remarks of the men, and their laughter at my plight.

The second man was replaced with a third, and the third with a fourth, and the fourth with 
a fifth. After that, I believe I was semi-conscious. I do know that my jaw was almost frozen 
from being held open so long, and I had difficulty articulating my lips.

My mouth tasted as if a tribe of dogs had nested in it, and I doubt that I was far from the 
truth. Never in my life have I met dogs like these. Beasts of the field were kinder and more 
loving, more considerate of their masters, than these so-called rational men bent on a mission
of salvation.

I laugh, and there is no humor in the laughter, when I think of their sanctimonious words, 
their preachings, their total, absolute hypocrisy.

I do not believe that any class or race of people have ever behaved so abominably nor 
treated people with such devilish lack of regard for decency and humanity.

I was failing fast, and I knew it, as I labored under the wretched, lascivious labor to which 
these men had put me. I thought I would die of my exhaustion alone. I had given up hope 
that I would die of grief or shame.

The man who had come in before, entered the cave again.

"Come. We have a long way to go before dawn. We launch our attack on the next village 
early tomorrow afternoon."

"What do we do with the heathen dog, sire?" asked one of the men, as I lay, finally 
abandoned, at least momentarily, by the sated men.

He walked over to me, and with the toe of his mailed boot, he turned me over onto my 
back. I was a filthy, reeking mass of flesh, barely able to focus my eyes on his tall bulk.

Again I saw that smile.

"Comely, still. You have kept her intact?"

"Yes, sire," one of the men said.

"Get her a cloak and put her in the supply wagon. Give her to the care of Master Eberhard.
Tell him to wash her well. She stinks!"

The men laughed at this man, who was obviously a commander of sorts, and I was hauled 
rudely to my feet. Naked I was paraded through a mass of dead bodies to the entrance of the 
cave.

There were loud hoots and guffaws when I made my shameful appearance, my body 
almost dangling between two men.

"Hah! One is saved. Let us have at her!" shouted a voice from the milling crowd.

"Hold! She is for my lord the duke," shouted one of the men who was half-carrying me 
toward some destination of which I was ignorant.

"On whose orders!" someone yelled angrily.

"Speak to Lord Landau," shouted the man in response. "It was his bidding."

There were some disgruntled murmurs in the crowd, but it subsided, which caused me 
immense relief. Helpless as I was, depleted with exhaustion and anguish, I did not relish being 
rent from limb to limb, and I had not one single doubt that, had that unruly mass of cruel men
got their hands on me, I would not have been left intact at all!

I was dragged toward the rear of the milling Crusaders, to a large, covered wagon.

A strange, wizened old man with frightening eyes, the color of slate, appeared at a flap in 
the wagon.

"Who comes?" he cried, in a high-pitched, piercing voice.

"It's Master, William and Master Francis. We bear a prize of war from the Duke of Landau. 
He wishes you to wash the little heathen and protect her from the men. She is for the duke, 
my lord's master."

The man descended from the wagon, and peered at me, his eyes seeming to bore through
to my very soul.

"Hah! She looks as if she will not survive the night."

"She had better survive, Master Eberhard," said the man who called himself Master Francis.
"The Lord Landau is most particular that she reach her destination."

"Well, we shall see, we shall see. Come along, daughter of sin and damnation. I cannot 
repair your damned soul, but I shall wash your body."

I was grabbed by Master Eberhard. His grip was far from being as brutal as the other two 
and I had hopes of being better treated.

On trembling legs, I was propelled to a large wooden bucket at the side of the covered 
wagon, and I was compelled to stand while Master Eberhard soaked my body and scrubbed it 
down.

It was merely an added humiliation to what I had already suffered, and I stood in peace, 
needing to feel washed, needing to feel some semblance of cleanliness after the filthy uses to 
which I had just been put.

Master Eberhard scrubbed me with strong soap and washed my come-stained hair as well.
Then he wrapped me in a cloak, and sat me before a small fire over which a kettle was strung 
from three sticks which met at the top.

"Barton!" he bellowed.

A small boy appeared at the flap of the covered wagon, and I shivered when I saw him. It 
was the boy who had accompanied the leader, the first time that I saw him.

"Yes, Master Eberhard?"

"Watch the little heathen, and do not lay hands on her. Your father has special uses to 
which he intends to put her. I shall return when I find a garment for her to wear."

The boy came down the contrived steps of the wagon, and walked over until he stood 
beside me. He was wearing a dagger at his waist, and this he unsheathed.

"You will remain where you are and not move, dog," the boy snarled, his fingers working 
on the intricately tooled handle of the weapon. x Again I suffered that bothersome impersonal
gaze, as if I were an inanimate object, as Barton guarded me.

I had time, my head lowered so that my guard could not fathom my expression, to 
consider what had happened.

It was then that the pain of my loss, the agony of my present situation flowed over me in 
wave after wave of grievous sorrow. I thought I would break under the weight.

When one has been cut or wounded, one does not feel the hurt immediately. I do not 
know why, nor has any physician ever been able to give me an answer. But the grief must have
been like that, too.

I did not receive its full impact until this one quiet moment, alone, guarded by a mere boy 
not much older than myself. I shook violently with the anguish which seemed to sear my 
innards, to dry me up and leave me an empty shell.

I thought I should never smile again, thought that I couldn't bear another moment of life.

And yet I had sworn, and I was condemned to the honor of my oath, condemned to live 
until I was at least sixteen. That was seven long seasons away.

Master Eberhard returned bearing a coarse white garment.

"Put this on, slave," he said, motioning Barton back to the darkness of the wagon.

I did as he requested.

Then he tied ropes around my wrists, and bound me to one of the large, metal wheels of 
the wagon, and threw down a blanket for me to lie upon.

"Sleep, slave. We have a long trip ahead of us when the men have gathered their forces."

I lay down on the hard ground, covered only by the blanket, and thought I should never 
sleep again.

But the human body is merciful and the mind protects it. I fell asleep instantly, and felt 
surcease from the agony of soul which wrenched me. I don't know how long I slept, not long, I
think.

I was shaken awake by Master Eberhard, who untied the rope from the wheel and 
motioned me inside the wagon.

The inside was surprisingly comfortable.

There were rich pillows, and a thin light from shielded candles.

The boy called Barton was curled up among the cushions, asleep. I was instructed to lie on 
other cushions, and again my wrists were fastened, this time to one of the slats which 
comprised the sides of the strange vehicle.

Master Eberhard sat at the head of the wagon, and I heard it being jostled. I realized later 
that huge work horses were being harnessed to its traces.

It was still dark, and I had not had time to determine from the position of the stars, exactly 
what the time was.

The wagon seemed to tilt to one side, as a wagoneer mounted into the front box, and 
cracked his whip over the heads of the horses. I heard various calls from outside the wagon, 
and then the vehicle lurched forward.

I was traveling now, and I was in the thick of that rumbling mass of horsemen who 
pillaged and raped.

There were no more roots for me in my native land, only a host of hideous memories to 
cap my final hours among those whom I had known and loved.

We traveled all night long. I slept no more, as I lived with my own thoughts, something I 
was to become adept at--as skillful as I became at servicing the Crusaders, and later my 
subsequent captors.

Barton awoke frequently, and whined orders at Master Eberhard, who obeyed them with a 
servile promptness that shocked me at first.

No adult in my village would ever dance attendance on a child as Master Eberhard did on 
Barton.

But then, I had never been among the wealthy and the gifted, and I had yet to learn the 
perverse uses to which they put their monied leisure.

I had just learned one way they spent their money-making war on the innocent, 
manufacturing causes under whose banners they decimated foreign lands.

I had much more to learn, and I learned as I could, fascinated at the contrast between the 
simple goodness in which I had been reared, and the complicated mechanisms in which evil 
dresses itself.

Eventually, I saw light stealing through the crevices of the wagon. The rumbling stopped, 
to be replaced by raucous noises of thousands of voices, as the men camped to eat and 
refresh themselves before their next campaign.

The flap of the cover was abruptly shoved aside, and the leader who had saved my 
maidenhead the night before, entered.

"Good morning, my son. How have you fared?" he asked, sitting beside the sleepy boy 
who had just been awakened by Master Eberhard.

"Terrible!" Barton complained. "You love me not, I think."

The man looked stricken.

"Not love thee! I love thee as I love my own flesh, my son! Why do you say this to me, your
father?"

"You let that heathen dog sleep with me."

"Ahh, that heathen dog will make your fortune, Barton, when I sell her to the duke. He 
pays well for such merchandise, as well you know."

Having mollified his son, the leader gazed at me long and keenly. Then he rose to leave, 
crouching beneath the low roof of the wagon.

"Feed her well, Master Eberhard, and if you can, see if you can teach her some of her 
letters. Put some meat on her bones, and some food in her uncivilized brain. She appears to 
be a good plaything for the duke. I shall fetch a pretty price for her."

My despair darkened when I heard his words. I knew what I was intended for now, to be 
the slave, the sexual pet of some lord. I had heard of this traffic before in which the Crusaders 
indulged to the hilt, and all young girls in my village and the surrounding villages had been 
warned. Never go to a stranger, who will kidnap you and take you to a fate worse than death.

I had been captured, and now I was bound to that fate.

I regretted that I had ever made the promise to remain alive until I found the forgiveness, 
the richness that my father promised this earth contained.

But I had promised, and with an ache in my heart I remembered that my father had never 
lied to me nor to any man.

He had been known in my village as the man of truth, and that was why he was one of the 
elders.

For all my loss, his spirit and his memory were a mountain I must climb and climb alone, in
order to be worthy of him.

I bowed my head to my fate.

CHAPTER TWO

I ate fully of the viands that were offered to me, knowing I would need every ounce of 
strength I had for the ordeal ahead.

The Crusaders camped where we had stopped for the day. I did not leave the wagon, 
except for two trips outside in the company of Master Eberhard, to relieve myself and bathe. 
This time, I was allowed to perform that service for myself.

Master Eberhard produced the first books I had ever seen, with writing on them. The 
writing fascinated me, and I wondered if I would ever be able to master the scrawls and curls 
and lines which I saw on the parchment.

He was trying to teach Barton something he called history. He bade me be attentive. I did 
listen, and at first I could not understand what was meant by history.

He was talking about Caesar and some wars. Well did I know war! It wasn't until the end of
the lesson, when Barton in impatience threw down his lessons and moved away from Master 
Eberhard, that I learned that history was not war nor the science of war, but merely the story 
of what men have done.

It wasn't a pretty story I heard--not like the stories I heard at my mother's knee about the 
sun and the moon and the stars, and it was not the kind of history I heard over communal 
fires at harvest when people gossiped and we learned who had married whom, who had died, 
how many new children had been born.

I decided I didn't like it, but there was a necessity which I felt keenly for learning all I could,
in order to survive among these strange people, these beasts of war.

Barton went off to find his father, and Master Eberhard then set me to learning my letters, 
as he called them.

It was then that I learned how to form several of the scrawls on the manuscript. It was hard
but fascinating work.

As the sun started to dip toward the horizon, the leader came back with his protesting son,
Barton, in tow.

"Keep him here, Master Eberhard," Lord Landau said, pushing the boy gently toward the 
old man.

"Surely, my lord," he replied.

"I don't want to stay!" Barton screamed. He lashed out and to my horror, kicked his father 
in his shins.

His father did nothing to chastise the boy, did not even appear to think that what his son 
did was disrespectful or unusual. I had much to learn and I observed.

Lord Landau looked kindly at his son, and shook his head.

"The town we are going against is walled. It will be dangerous because there are armed 
soldiers. You cannot go. Stay here with Master Eberhard."

"I want to go! I want to shoot a soldier."

I felt enormous contempt for both Lord Landau and his unruly son. So the lord would let 
his son ride with him against an unarmed village, to rape and pillage, but he would save his 
son from the consequences of attack when the opposing party was armed!

Master Eberhard held the boy as his father turned, mounted his horse, and rode to the 
head of his army, and for his pains he had his beard pulled right royally by the little brat.

The darkness descended, and I slept. The town was a sufficient distance away so that no 
sounds of battle reached us. When I awoke, dawn was coming up.

Barton was asleep on the cushions opposite to me. Master Eberhard, with a worried frown 
on his face, was peering through the flap of the wagon.

I was thirsty, and would have liked some water.

When I stirred, Master Eberhard looked at me and handed me a goatskin filled with water, 
from which I drank thirstily. I wondered if he could read my mind.

I had heard of witches. There was one in the foothills to whom my father had gone once 
when our crops failed. Witches know what you are thinking and what will happen to you. They
can read the future and the past.

It puzzled me that he knew I was thirsty. I did not learn until much later that Master 
Eberhard had had the charge of the children of the rich and royal for many many years, and 
knew them well.

Barton stirred on his cushions, and sat up, blinking his eyes. He pulled the goatskin from 
my hands, spilling the water, and drank noisily.

"Where is my father?" he asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"I know not. I have seen nothing of the soldiers," Master Eberhard declared.

Barton crawled to the opening through which Master Eberhard was gazing.

"But they should have been back before now. Should they not?"

"I warrant you, young master, they should have," Master Eberhard declared.

Barton slipped out of the wagon.

"Do not go too far," Master Eberhard warned the rebellious little boy.

We were fed, and then we waited. The sun slid upward, until it stood at its peak, and then 
we heard the distant rumbling of horses. I saw them coming, and something in me shivered. I 
sensed that something was wrong, although at the time I could not have said exactly what it 
was.

Master Eberhard stepped down from the wagon. He had loosened my bonds when I 
awakened, and I was now physically free. Barton and he, and some of the other people left 
behind in the camp stood in a group, watching the approaching horsemen.

The man at the head of the Crusaders I did not recognize, but he was wounded and dirty.

"Where is my father?" Barton cried to the man as he dismounted.

"Your father is dead, my lord. Be brave."

"You lie!" Barton screamed, attacking the man who staggered toward Master Eberhard, 
beating on his cuirass vainly.

The man grasped Barton's wrists, and flung the boy from him.

"Be off with you, you surly wretch!" he snarled, approaching the wagon. "Water!" he 
commanded Master Eberhard, as he came into the wagon. It creaked with the decisive weight 
and movement of him.

He was bigger than Lord Landau, and his size and command awed me.

"What has happened?" Master Eberhard asked, as he offered the man the goatskin.

"We have leveled the town, but it cost us over half our men. Lord Landau was killed--by a 
woman!"

The man laughed sardonically and took a deep drink from the neck of the goatskin bag.

"How is this?" Master Eberhard asked.

The huge man was staring at me.

"Is this the little heathen Lord Landua intended for the duke?" he asked.

"Yes, Master Lindsay," the old man said.

He looked at me for a moment, and then turned away.

"We hare heading home. We have not sufficient forces to proceed further in this heathen 
country."

"What about the little Lord Landau?" asked Master Eberhard.

"I will take charge of these two," the man called Master Lindsay said. "Barton I shall return 
to his home, and this one I shall give to the duke as Lord Landau intended."

Master Eberhard nodded. Master Lindsay took command of the troops, and that very day 
we pulled up and began to travel.

When I was not being tutored, I stared at country which got stranger and stranger as we 
progressed.

Master Eberhard was assiduous but not harsh with me, and some of my anxiety was 
allayed by the manner of my treatment. But I still chafed under the fate that was in store for 
me.

After many weeks of traveling, I heard the columns up ahead give a big cheer.

I crawled to the opening in the flaps which covered the wagon, and stared out at what 
must have been Paradise, or so I thought. To my left, I could see a glistening mass of blue and 
I frowned and looked at Master Eberhard. He had tears in his eyes.

"This is France, our native land," he explained to me and then he pointed toward that 
marvelous expanse of glistening strangeness.

. "And that is the sea."

I looked again. I had heard of the sea, but I had never seen it. I was awed. We traveled 
along the rim of it for some way, and then we camped in a huge green meadow.

Here, people were friendly. They were not preyed upon. I watched soldiers bartering for 
goods among the farmers who came up to the camp. The profusion of sights and sounds 
thoroughly bewildered me.

Since his father's death, Barton had alternated between a sullen withdrawn silence, and 
wild fits of rage. He had become totally unruly, apparently giving up all pretense of civility.

And he became more and more brutal to me. He would slap at me, pull my hair, leer at 
me. My body was not safe from his hands which pried into my most secret flesh.

Once Master Eberhard had caught him trying to rape me, and this time, Barton was beaten
with a strap.

"Take it as a piece of good fortune that I have only tanned your hide with my belt, little 
lord," Master Eberhard said gravely to the weeping, sniveling boy. "If my lord, the duke 
discovered who had despoiled his prey, you would have lost your right hand. And well you 
know this!"

After that, Barton's lewd attentions were slightly mitigated, but still I shuddered to think 
what he might do.

That first night in France, he made his move.

Master Eberhard had gone with most of the other soldiers to the outskirts of the field to 
gather news from the populace who had come to greet them.

Barton sat in the corner, rubbing his crotch, his eyes hot upon me. I shivered, knowing his 
evil predilections, and knowing that I was helpless and alone before his predatory instincts.

He growled finally, and rose, to tower over me. I tried to escape him, to crawl out of the 
wagon. I wanted to find Master Eberhard.

"Stop, beast," he snarled, grabbing me by the hair.

He clapped a hand over my mouth, stifling the scream that I felt burbling up from my 
throat. Then he pulled my gown up over my waist.

Once again, I knew the shame and humiliation of being naked before the gaze of a lewd 
man. Barton was breathing heavily, and my heart was pounding in my breast, as I felt him 
fondling my rounded buttocks.

I clenched them together as his hands roved down the crack of my ass.

"You will lose your hand, Master Barton," I gasped, when he released my mouth.

"No," he said, leering at me cruelly. "I will not."

He threw himself on my back, and spread my legs. I tried to fight him off, and surprisingly, 
did knock him off my back. Then I started to head toward the wagon entrance, but Barton 
grabbed my ankles.

As I struggled and kicked, he tied my hands to one of the posts which held the covering 
over the wagon. I was now helpless.

He revealed his manhood, and gripped it. As I watched, wide-eyed with fear, looking over 
one shoulder, he pumped on his prick a few times, and then crouched down between my legs,
which he had roughly spread-eagled.

"I can still have my cake and eat it, too," he sneered.

I gasped with horror, when his hands roughly spread my ass cheeks, and I felt his massive 
prick pressing against the puckered brown ring of my rectum.

"No!" I gasped.

"Yes!" he said, laughing brutally. He lunged inward, and I screamed with the horrible pain 
of having my after passage pierced by his raging rod.

I moaned as he started to thrust inward, his fleshy spear cleaving apart the walls of my 
asshole.

He grunted like a rutting pig, as he buried more and more of his prick in my wounded, 
burning after passage.

I clenched my fists, and then realized that my tension was only aggravating the pain that I 
felt, and I tried to relax. My stomach turned upside-down in my belly, and I almost vomited, as
I felt his massive cock spreading my asshole walls apart.

With a grunt, he thrust inward again, and buried himself to the hilt in my anal passage. I 
closed my eyes, trying to blot out the horrible humiliation which I felt, the horrible perversion 
to which I was being subjected.

He started to move in me, pulling his prick out to the tip, and then lunging inward again. 
He pillaged my asshole roughly, brutally, and I moaned as I felt his throbbing shaft abrading 
the lining of my bung hole.

With each inward lunge, his hairy balls slapped against my pussy, tickling it, causing it to 
twitch and jerk.

He sawed in and out of my shit hole mercilessly. I felt the burning sensation intensify, and 
once again I wished I were dead, rather than have to suffer this misery.

Barton was moving faster and faster in my after passage, his cock throbbing powerfully 
against my stretched walls, the head of his prick rummaging around in the depths of my 
bowels. I felt as if my insides were turning to jelly as he continued to pierce me with his manly 
spear.

And then a strange thing happened. I started to become aroused. I don't know what 
caused it. Perhaps it was the sense of helplessness, such as I had felt on the first day I 
encountered the Crusaders.

Or perhaps it was the way his hair-covered balls tickled my pussy flesh. At any rate, I felt 
the juices of my desire starting to flow, and as they flowed, the pain of his prick pounding into
my asshole lessened.

I shivered with the hot, lawless sensations which surged through me. I felt stranger than I 
had ever felt in my life. My body felt as if it were melting with the heat which rose in me until I 
felt feverish.

Barton continued to pump his prick in and out of my asshole, his motions becoming 
harder and faster as his passions mounted.

He paused for a moment, and stretched himself out on my back. I felt his hands working 
beneath my chest, until he was cupping my tits. My nipples puckered with the hot sensations 
which his hands created, as he massaged my growing boobs.

I moaned, and a great gush of pussy fluid poured out of my pussy. My pink sex flesh 
swelled with the lust which seemed to permeate my body, and I felt a strange tingling where 
the little button of my pleasure nestled.

It seemed to pop out of its fleshy sheath, and sent wild lightning-like shards of pleasure 
coursing through my body.

"Ahh!" Barton growled, as he slammed into me. The more violent his thrusting motions 
became, the more aroused I became. I could feel my juices trickling out of my quivering little 
hole, felt them coating the now-swollen pussy lips which pouted from between my plump 
white outer lips.

My body stiffened, and I felt little spasms rippling through my inner organs.

Barton's hands moved harder and more ardently over my tits, and then I felt him 
squeezing my nipples between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. The little cherry-red 
buds which crowned my tit-mounds seemed to elongate, almost the same way my little love 
button was becoming elongated.

My whole body was possessed of the wild passion which coursed through me. His cock 
continued to pump in and out of my after passage. My rectal walls seemed to stretch, to 
accommodate his cock more comfortably, and again the hot pleasure mounted, until I was 
sweating.

I could feel the sex sweat staining my coarse, simple garment, could feel the heated 
passion burning away in my gut.

My body was no longer in control of my mind. My pussy acted as if it had a life of its own. 
It tingled and the inner flesh rippled, spewing more of the dew of my desire out of me.

And then the pleasure in my asshole increased, as my rectal walls stretched to allow easier 
access to Barton's cruel prick.

I felt delicious spasms of ecstasy rippling in my sex flesh. The blood which had surged to 
my inflamed rectal membranes throbbed, heightening the pleasurable effect of Barton's 
throbbing shaft as he sunk it deeply into me time and again.

I felt as if my whole body were being turned inside out as a strange, sweet, demanding 
chaos ripped through my body.

My hips humped against the cushioned floor of the wagon which had been my home for 
so long as we traveled.

Barton was now grunting rhythmically, as he pumped his powerful prick into my asshole 
over and over again. It seemed to me that his cock swelled, got hotter, that the throbbing of it
became stronger and harder.

And then a wild convulsion rippled through me and my body seemed to have a seizure. 
But it was brilliantly blissful.

Behind my tightly-closed eyes, hot flashes of light went off, and seemed to permeate my 
entire flesh.

The dew of my desire cascaded out of my quivering hole like a flood of slimy, thick, warm 
honey.

Barton thrust inward, his strokes stronger, and sharper now, and I felt my ass muscles 
contract around his prick. It felt as if my asshole had become a sucking mouth, drawing on his 
prick, sucking it deeper and deeper into my bowels.

Then he groaned, and I felt the gism pouring from the head of his prick. It washed against 
the burning abraded walls of my rectum, and soothed the harshly rubbed flesh, like balm.

He lunged inward more and more powerfully, each inward thrust causing more of his thick
man cream to spew into me. I could feel it pouring downward, the way my pussy cream was 
pouring downward.

Barton's cock was lubricated with the melted butter of his manhood, as it spewed into me, 
and coated my asshole walls.

"Ohh!" I moaned, as the orgasm--my first with a man--peaked in my body, causing it to 
stiffen momentarily as if I had been struck by lightning.

At that moment, Barton slammed into me one last time and then his body collapsed on 
top of mine.

I could feel his lawless, passionate heat suffusing my back, causing me to quiver with a 
wild excitement I had never felt before. His cock still throbbed in my after passage.

At that moment, the tent flap was pulled back.

"Ahh! You little beast!"

Master Lindsay strode into the wagon, followed by Master Eberhard.

I felt Barton's prick pulling out of my rectum, as Master Lindsay pulled the evil young boy 
off me.

I whimpered.

Master Eberhard untied my hands, and then pulled me to a sitting position.

"It was only her bung hole!" Barton bellowed.

Master Lindsay was not as patient with Barton as his deceased father had been. He was 
treated to a royal hiding that left him kicking, squawling like an infant, and sobbing for some 
hours afterward.

"You have no right to touch me!" Barton screamed. Master Eberhard had washed my 
slightly bloodied asshole, and applied a soothing salve to it, and then sat me in a corner. I was
sobbing silently, my face flaming with grief and humiliation.

"I have all the right of a guardian! You had no right to touch that girl!"

"She's a beast, a heathen slave. I can do anything I want to her!"

Again Barton was treated to a slap in the face for his insolence.

"How is she?" Master Lindsay asked Master Eberhard.

"All right, I think. My lord the duke would be displeased to find that she had been so used,
however."

"True enough! And I am honor-bound to deliver her as Lord Landau wanted. It's the least I 
can do for a friend and commander."

"I will stay with her and guard her closely, Master Lindsay, but I suggest that you remove 
Barton. He is quite out of hand, anyway. Perhaps the death of his father... "

"His father's death! God's blood, he has always been a lawless little imp of the devil! I will 
take him under my wing, and see if he mends his ways in the next week, before we reach 
Paris."

Barton was hauled away, and I was left to think about what had happened. What bothered
me more than anything was that lawless impulse of my body to pleasure in the midst of 
degradation.

I wondered if I had already been corrupted by these beasts who seemed to think that they 
were the kings of the earth. I had never known anyone to behave in such fashion, but as I said,
I was learning daily.

There was no honor nor kindness in Master Lindsay's wanting to protect me from Master 
Barton. He had a job to fulfill. I was to be sold as a slave.

I wondered at the so-called ethics of which I heard these people speak endlessly on our 
long, arduous trip to this strange country. They seemed to think that they alone possessed 
virtue, and that everyone who had not their code of ethics was less than the beasts of the 
fields.

It was a strange dichotomy, to say the least, and it kept me puzzled for many years 
thereafter.

That night was spent peacefully for a change, and the next day, as our bedraggled band 
made our slow way toward the city they called Paris, Master Eberhard finished teaching me my
letters, and began to teach me how to put them together in words.

The work went much more easily this day, since Barton was not near to disrupt my 
concentration.

"For a heathen, you are quick and docile," Master Eberhard said, regarding me keenly.

His eyes, which had once struck such fear in me, now seemed to be the keen, studious 
eyes of a scholar who is familiar with human nature.

I lowered my head, not wanting to respond to the compliment. It was mixed with the 
sentiments which would account for my lowly position in life, and I swallowed my bile to think 
that he wouldn't believe that I, too, was of the same human condition as he.

That night we camped by a stream in land that was richer than any I had ever seen.

I was told that it was the beginning of the duke's estate, that duke to whom I was to be 
given.

"I shall be glad to be rid of this charge," Master Lindsay said, as he came into the wagon.

I had been taken to the river to bathe, and now I was dressed in a strange costume that 
was rich and soft on my skin. My hair had been brushed by one of the women who had 
followed the men, an old crone who was none too gentle.

Master Lindsay had sent a courier ahead to announce to the duke that his Crusader army, 
what was left of it, had returned, and they bore gifts of great wealth and beauty for his 
lordship.

I was led out of the wagon, and suffered the lurid gaze of many men, as I walked between 
Master Lindsay and Master Eberhard to the edge of the camp.

My heart plummeted to my feet as I saw several horsemen approaching. They were all 
richly-dressed, and I had no doubt that the duke was among the party.

I was standing beside chests filled with treasures, and piles of rugs and rich cloths and 
tapestries, all the spoils of war.

And I, too, was as one of those things, merely another treasure to be used and cast aside.

My vain tears trickled down my cheeks, and stained the richly embroidered yoke of my 
garment, as I waited.

CHAPTER THREE

"Greetings, Master Lindsay! Welcome home. How fared you?"

The man speaking was tall and stem and gray-haired. He was richly dressed, and a huge 
gold medallion glistened at the breast of his velvet tunic.

"Well and ill, my lord Rathler. How does my lord the duke?"

The man's face became sterner.

"My lord the duke has gone to his reward. He was carried off by the Black Plague, along 
with half his family only a fortnight ago." There were startled murmurs among those men 
assembled around us. Morions and caps were doffed, and heads were lowered.

"My Lord Rathler, I do not know how to speak of my grief at this tragedy," declared Master
Lindsay.

"There is nought to say, Master Lindsay. The will of God has been done. What have you 
here?"

"Spoils of war for his lordship, my lord."

"These spoils go to the Church, Master Lindsay. The duke's son and daughter have died of 
the same affliction, and within hours of their father. There is no direct heir to the land nor his 
property. It has been remanded to the Church of Notre Dame, until some title is determined 
by the king. Your spoils will have to be taken there."

"I see. There is no heir at all?"

"That is for the king and his council to decide. We merely act as stewards in the meantime. 
Where is Lord Landau."

"Killed in battle, my Lord Rathler."

"His son?"

"I have charge of him. I will return him to his home and his mother."

"Well, and good."

The man called Lord Rathler looked at me keenly.

"This is a pretty prize."

"Lord Landau preserved her for the duke."

"Pity he is not among us to enjoy her."

"What do you suggest I do with her, Lord Rathler?"

By now I was beginning to get the gist of the conversation. The duke to whom I was 
supposed to be sold, was now dead, and his lands given over to this institution they called the
church for safe-keeping.

But my fate hung in the balance. I had visions of being turned over to the motley rabble 
which had gathered around us, to be used until I died of shame and abuse.

The man gazed at me long and keenly.

"Take her to the Priory of St. Armand," Lord Rathler instructed. "There they have several 
other heathen girls whom they are training for service. There she will be safe until some 
determination can be made about her disposition."

"As you will, my lord."

Master Lindsay made a deep bow, and I was brought back to the wagon. The treasures 
which had been piled up so hopefully for the delectation of the deceased duke were piled into
other wagons, and we proceeded at dawn, toward Paris.

I passed strange towns, the likes of which I had never seen before, with buildings which 
looked like monstrous piles of stone. The very roads were stones, which caused the wagon 
wheels to rumble loudly and with frightening reverberations off the hard walls of the 
buildings. As we passed through these towns, people appeared at windows to cheer and 
throw down flowers.

I had never been more frightened in my life since the night the Crusaders killed my village,
and my old, happy life. This was a new way of living, and I wasn't sure I liked it.

We spent the next night camped outside a town, and then the next day, we reached Paris.

I must say, the city took my breath away. It was beautiful on the main avenues, although 
the brief glimpse I got of dark alleyways between the buildings was not promising.

It appeared to me that the city was like a stone one turns over, and there is rich, ripe soil 
beneath and hundreds of creeping, crawling things who scatter as soon as they see the light 
of day.

If the facade of the city were clean and bright and rich-looking, the under side of the city 
seemed to be inhabited by ragged, creeping crawling things whom I recognized as 
impoverished human beings.

I wondered what my captors thought of this segment of their population. I learned later 
that their attitude was one of indifference if not downright scorn.

Near the great outer wall, on the opposite side of Paris, was a large, walled building.

We pulled up in front of this building, and Master Lindsay came to take me from the 
wagon. I was put astride his horse.

"Master William," the man commanded to his assistant. "Disband the men until further 
notice, with their booty. They will want to see their families. Take the treasures allotted to the 
duke to the king for his guardianship, and then wait for me there. I shall come and pay my 
respects as soon as I have disposed of this treasure."

Master William hastened to do as he was bidden, and then he wheeled his horse in the 
direction of the massive stone cairn which was to be my prison for the next seven years.

The wall contained a great iron grill, and beside it was a brass bell, which he rang. There 
was a long wait, and then an old hunchback came to the gate.

"Who calls?"

"Master Lindsay of the king's Crusade, under the leadership of the deceased Lord Lindsay."

The hunchback grumbled and then unlocked the gate, which opened on its hinges with a 
great creaking and groaning. I shivered as Master Lindsay wheeled his horse into the cobbled 
courtyard and up to the massive, carved doors of the entrance.

He dismounted, and then pulled me off the horse. With his hand on my shoulder he 
walked up to the portals, which were opened.

The inside of the building was lofty, and dim. I smelled sweet, strange smells. The pervasive
scent which pleased my nostrils I was later to learn was beeswax candles mixed with incense.

Lighted tapers lined the walls, causing my shadow to loom large, and then recede, as we 
walked down the long corridor.

Before us, traveling like a black ghost, was a silent woman garbed in black with a white 
wimple which framed a plump, rosy face. She walked so silently that I had the impression she 
was floating about an inch off the cold stone floor.

We stopped at another large door, and the black-garbed woman knocked gently.

"Come."

She opened the door, and stood against it, bowing. Master Lindsay walked past it, pushing
me through it with his hand still on my shoulder.

I quailed at the presence in that room.

She was singularly tall for a woman, I thought, with piercing black eyes, thickly-fringed 
with black lashes.

Her eyebrows were also black and thick, and they arched diabolically above those burning 
orbs. I felt a shiver of fear course through me.

She was sitting in a large, ornately-carved chair.

"What have we here?" she asked, leaning forward slightly.

"She is part of the spoils meant for the duke, who, God rest his soul, was taken with the 
Black Plague. Lord Rathler has instructed me to bring her here, to await her fate."

"Indeed," the woman said, fixing her piercing gaze on me. Again I shuddered. There was 
something ineffably evil about this woman. The aura seemed to fill the room.

"Another heathen, ehh? We already have five of the slaves here. I have managed to sell 
two. One to the Cardinal of Lorraine, and the other to my lord, the Marquis of Revelle."

"I believe this one will have to be held, pending a decision from the king with regard to 
the estates of the duke, whose heirs died with him."

"That is true. That is true. Very well, sit!"

She pointed to a chair which was in front of hers, indicating that I should seat myself there.

I did as she commanded.

"She appears to be somewhat docile," the woman said, finally.

"Master Eberhard claims she is quick with her letters, also. She has given us no trouble on 
our way back from the Crusade."

"That augurs well for her, however we dispose of her. Sit, Master Lindsay, and tell me the 
news. Sister Corita, bring wine and cheese."

The little black-garbed woman who had opened the door and led us to this room, bowed 
again and disappeared silently, to reappear just as silently some short time later with a large 
tray.

They talked and drank wine and ate the cheese, while I sat, patiently. I had early learned 
that these people value silence from their underlings, and patience, and I had cultivated it, 
although my high spirits chafed against the restraints which my captivity imposed upon me.

As I observed them in their conversation, I noticed that Master Lindsay appeared to be as 
uncomfortable as I in the presence of this woman, who I learned was the Abbess Frederika.

He finished his wine and cheese, and rose to leave.

"I am at your service, Abbess. If I can be of assistance, please let me know."

"The little Lord Landau is well provided for, I take it?" the Abbess asked, not rising from her
chair.

"Very well indeed," Master Lindsay replied.

"I fear, however, that there will be battles over the duke's estates. They were most 
extensive."

"True enough. I must depart, to pay my respects to the king. Good day to you."

Again Master Lindsay bowed, and turned quickly to leave the room. I heard his footsteps 
fading away, and sat still under the scrutiny of the Abbess. She regarded me for a long time 
with that malign gaze of hers, and then she spoke.

Her words did little to reassure me that my fate was a happy one, although I had indulged 
in some feelings of relief to discover that the duke was dead.

"Little Heathen, you are at the Priory of St. Armand. You will be trained in Christian 
principles, and you will do penance for your sins. When you are baptized, you will then be 
disposed of in some way that your life will be of service to the elect of God."

With that she rose.

"Come with me."

I rose immediately, and followed her. I glanced briefly at the face of Sister Corita and felt a 
chill in the very marrow of my bones, when I saw the expression on her face.

It was one of fear mixed with what I discerned was pity, and I wondered just what ordeal 
this woman would impose on me.

She led me down the long, dim corridor, to a flight of stairs. She stood aside when she 
opened the door leading to the subterranean levels of the priory, and pointed downward.

She picked up a wax taper from its sconce on the stone wall, and followed after me as I 
made my way gingerly down the stairs into the cold dark reaches of the cellar.

"Turn to your right," she said, when I had reached the foot of the stairs. I did as I was 
instructed, my heart beating like a trip-hammer.

There were , strange implements on the walls, leather and metal things whose uses I did 
not know, but which presented a frightening aspect to me. And there were whips.

At the end of the corridor into which I had turned was a large, brass-studded door.

I heard the rattle of keys, and the Prioress inserted one of them in the keyhole and turned 
it. Then she swung the door open, and I entered.

It was a large, vaulted room, with a huge fireplace at one end. There was a fire blazing in 
the hearth, which took away some of the dank chill of the cellar. We moved closer to it, and 
the Abbess placed the lighted taper in a sconce over the fireplace.

She turned to me, her eyes glowing with a frightening expression.

"Remove your clothes," she said.

I blushed and hesitated but a fraction of a moment. I dared not refuse. But I did think it 
strange that a woman would ask me to do that which the Crusaders would have liked me to 
do.

I hastily removed the rich, lovely garment in which I had been brought to the priory, and 
stood naked before the fixed gaze of the woman.

She approached until she was inches from my trembling body.

"Daughter of a dog, child of sin, you will be used as you deserve, and you will resign 
yourself to your fate," she said.

She grasped a thick hank of my hair and brought me to my knees on the cold stone floor. 
My trembling increased.

Slowly, before my horror-stricken eyes, the prioress started to raise her voluminous black 
skirts, until I saw her hairy womanhood. My hands and feet felt like blocks of ice, as I caught a 
whiff of her pungent womanhood.

"Kiss it," she kissed. "Kiss it, slave of sin. This is your purpose in life, and so you will be 
taught."

I gasped at the unthinkable thing she was asking me to do. I remembered the sight of my 
mother and Rena, being used by the men. This I had been taught, and this I knew.

But what this woman was asking me seemed to be impossible, some perversion of nature. 
I had never had a sense of sin, never felt that I was anything but good, part of the goodness 
and the wealth of life, as my father had taught me.

But after weeks of hearing how evil I was, I questioned the very facts about the earth which
I thought I had known, and that included the assumption of my own natural virtue.

But I knew that in order to survive I had to obey and without question. Perhaps that was to
become the new virtue for me to concentrate on: simply surviving, acquiring that habit of 
survival which would maintain my personal and spiritual integrity.

I had made the promise, vowed to live at least until I was sixteen, in honor of my father, 
and I was pledged to whatever devices that promise entailed.

I trembled as I moved my face close to the woman's odorous mound of love, and I kissed 
her, my lips being tickled by her wiry hairs.

"Ahh, good! Now lave it with your tongue. Wash me clean of my sins, you sinner."

I looked up at her, puzzled. But her grip on my hair tightened, and she pressed my mouth 
hard against her pussy.

Again I kissed her, and as she pressed my mouth against the thick pelt which covered her 
mound of love, my lips separated.

"Tongue it!" she gasped.

Then I understood what she wanted. Repelled though I was by the idea, I flicked my 
tongue out, and it made wet hot contact with the flower-like petals of her inner pink flesh.

She trembled when she felt my tongue on her pussy, and her grip loosened somewhat on 
my hair, so I knew that I was pleasing her. I sought to please her even more.

I pressed my tongue between the curved cleft of her cunt, and started to run it into the 
crevices of her honeyed folds of flesh.

"Aieeee!" she gasped. I took my mouth off her hairy mound and looked up at her for a 
moment. The look on her face was one of tortured ecstasy.

Again I lowered my face to service her womanhood. I pressed my tongue into the swollen 
crevices of her pussy meat, starting near the little dark hole which was oozing with cream.

It tasted musky, salty. It wasn't entirely unpleasant, and I relaxed somewhat, thinking that 
what she was asking wasn't that bad. At least she wasn't hurting me.

I covered every inch of her pink, passion-bloated flesh. I became curious. I had done some 
meager exploring of my own private flesh, discovered certain areas, such as that hard little 
button at the apex of my cunt cleft, which provided enormous pleasure.

Bringing to bear all the knowledge I already possessed, and curious to discover more, I 
used my tongue to feel out the womanhood of the prioress.

Her hips were now rocking back and forth as I strove to drive my tongue into her hot hole,
wondering how far I could get it in.

Her hole of course couldn't accommodate my tongue, nor did I have the strength to thrust
it all the way in, much as I would have loved to do so, but I did give her pleasure.

This much I knew, as I felt a hot gush of the dew of her desire rushing from the dank inner 
recesses of her hot tunnel, and coating my tongue. Her pussy walls seemed to spasm around 
the tip of my tongue, as I laved the entrance to her womanhood.

Then I brought my tongue up, exploring all the little flaps of flesh, feeling the pulsation of 
her lusty blood, as it engorged her inner sex flesh until the pink inner meat sprouted out from 
between her plump white outer lips.

She was crooning to herself, babbling with ecstasy, as my tongue found the little love 
button which I knew brought so much joy to me.

I flicked my tongue back and forth over it, absorbed in my exploration.

"Arrghh!" she growled, her voice guttural with a growing passion. I could almost feel the 
heat of her body intensify, as I continued to flick her little love button back and forth with the 
tip of my tongue.

The little love button popped out of its fleshy envelope like a tiny snake peers out of its 
hole in the ground.

On a sudden impulse, I bit gently at the base of the button, again lashing the tip of it with 
my tongue.

"Ohh! Ahhh!" the woman gasped. Her hips swiveled against my mouth which was now 
gleaming and sticky with the juices which flowed from her pussy. I could feel some of the hot 
effluence of her womb pouring down my chin, to splash in thick streams on my breasts.

And as I explored her pussy, I felt my own juices flowing suddenly, as I remembered the 
kind of hot pleasure I could give to myself secretly by pressing my little finger against those 
delicate little petals of flesh which provided me with such joy.

My knees were pressed together on the floor, and I could feel the throbbing of my own 
little love mound between my pressed together thighs. The soft inner flesh of my thighs 
became coated with the thick resin which flowed from my own womanhood, as I laved the 
pussy meat of the prioress.

She seemed to be going mad as I ran my tongue up and down her swollen cunt meat, 
licking up the juices which cascaded out of her hot little hole.

I felt the tremor in her thighs.

Instinctively, to balance myself, I reached up and grasped the back of her thighs as she 
humped against my mouth, mashing her muff against my hard-working mouth.

My own hips started to rock back and forth, and I felt the slight pressure of my thighs 
squeezed against my own wanting and passion-swollen woman meat.

My little love button tingled hotly as I continued to rock my hips back and forth, 
stimulating myself to a secret pleasure as I serviced the prioress.

She was groaning steadily now and the tremor in her body had the appearance of a 
seizure, as I tongued her twat, driving the tip of it between the crevices of her pink sex flesh, 
spreading the outer lips wide.

I flattened my tongue out and started to slurp upward, as if I were a thirsty animal lapping 
at a brook. I started where her hole quivered and oozed its slimy juices, and worked my 
tongue upward, until once again I had made contact with her hard little love button.

I flicked my tongue back and forth over it, and then pulled some of her pussy hairs with 
my teeth. I had been fond, when I explored the reaches of my own womanhood, of pulling on 
some of the downy hairs which covered my little love mound, enjoying the slight sting which 
it occasioned.

It had the same effect on the prioress. I hadn't yet done anything wrong, or anything that I
thought displeased her.

My tongue worked ardently, with increasing strength up and down the soggy pink swamp 
of her delight.

And all the while, my own arrant blood boiled hotter in my veins and pulsated powerfully 
in my temples.

I became light-headed. The muscles in the hack of the prioress's thighs tightened, and 
then her humping motions became frenzied.

Her grip on my hair tightened, and suddenly she started to grunt rhythmically, driving her 
muff with bruising force against my nose and mouth.

For one moment there, as her juices gushed hotly out of her, I thought I would faint from 
lack of air. Her muff seemed to swell even more, and I slurped up as much of her juice as I 
could capture. But it still fell downward, some of it landing on the cold stone floor at my 
knees.

I bit on the edges of the folds of flesh, pulled at her pussy hair with my teeth, and 
continued to glide my tongue up and down the honeyed folds of flesh.

By now, I had become used to the taste and the pungent aroma of her womanhood, and 
the task she had set me was far from unpleasant, particularly since I was achieving a bizarre 
kind of pleasure for myself.

I felt my womb contract as if a hand had gripped it softly and then felt it relax.

My juices poured out of me in the same wild quantities as the prioress's juices were 
flowing out of her pussy.

She emitted high-pitched squealing sounds as she approached her sexual crisis. The very 
excitement which set her body to shivering, aroused me. I had a small sexual crisis of my own. 
In a way it surprised me, since I didn't have my hands on my flesh at all.

My hands were caressing the prioress's thighs, as I laved her pussy meat with my wet, soft 
tongue.

She humped spastically against my mouth and nose for a long time, and then her body 
subsided somewhat, seemed to sag a little against me.

She loosened her grip on my hair, and then sighed.

I looked at her, licking the last foaming flecks of her liquid lust from my lips. My face 
gleamed with her juices. It wasn't too far removed from the quality of the situation in the cave 
when I was forced to service so many men with my young, virginal mouth.

The prioress smiled at me, and then pulled down a thick leather whip from the wall.

"You have done well. And now you will do penance for having indulged in a sin of the 
flesh.

"Aieee!" I screamed, as I felt the bite of the lash against my shoulder. My body jerked, and 
I raised my arms to ward off the next blow, but it was a vain gesture.

She whipped me until I was exhausted.

The whip was of such a nature that it didn't cut the skin, but the pain was excruciating, and
it left livid welts on my smooth skin.

She finally exhausted herself whipping me. My back and my ass cheeks tingled with the 
brutality I had just suffered.

"You will rise, heathen, and come with me. I will show you to your cell."

Trembling, I did as the abbess demanded. I put on my clothing again, and followed her to 
a small, square room with a minimum of furniture. It was cold and bleak, but it was the only 
home I was to know until this night.

And the room, the very stones in the room, speak of the arduous trials I have undergone.

It oppresses me!

CHAPTER FOUR

Such was my initiation into the life of the Priory of St. Armand.

I was led to the little stone cell, which had a hard bed in it, and a desk and a chair.

There was a wash stand and a screen, and high up in the wall, a window, narrow and not 
admitting of much light.

Exhausted, I crawled between the sheets, and fell sound asleep, only to be roughly shaken 
awake in what felt like a brief span of time.

"Get up slug-a-bed! There is too much of the Lord's work to do for you to lie sleeping!"

I reared up and blinked my eyes, and then looked at the voice which had spoken.

She was a big woman, with a handsome face, and twinkling brown eyes.

"Good morning. What's your name?"

"Alethea."

"Ahh, such a pagan appellation!" she remarked.

I was slightly relieved of my anxiety by her aspect. Her face was pleasant and there were 
two dimples right in the middle of each cheek. She did not give off the unpleasant, rather evil 
emanations of the Abbess Fredericka. Instead, there was a bustling warmth about her.

"Go wash," she said. "I have brought you water and soap. Wash well behind your ears."

"Who are you?" I asked, performing my ablutions.

"Sister Margaret. I will be your companion and familiar. I am to teach you the ways of God 
and Christians."

I couldn't resist a slight snicker.

"You mock our religion?" she asked. "Are you so given to the devil?"

"From what I know of your Christian ways, I think I prefer the devil."

The good woman's face went white. She would be my first contact with another sort of 
Christian, the one who truly believes, and labors mightily, and in whose veins the milk of 
human kindness runs in plenty and spills for all.

"Child, do not voice such sentiments, ever again! You will be whipped and have the devil 
tortured out of you. Now, hurry and dress. Put on this robe and veil, and come with me. We 
will go right to chapel and say a prayer that God will guide you and save you."

I felt a little chastened by having shocked her. She led me down the long corridors to an 
open doorway through which spilled a lovely golden light.

All the inhabitants of the convent were assembled in this large, lovely room. I was to spend
many hours in the peace of this sanctuary, and whatever horrendous things happened in this 
priory, this place alone seemed sacred and immune.

No one ever bothered me when I sneaked in here. And somehow, whenever I walked into 
the chapel, with its altar and stained glass windows, its fragrant candles perpetually burning, I 
seemed to leave the travails of my life outside the door.

But I did not like the priest who finally came out on that altar to perform rites I had never 
witnessed before. He was announced by tinkling bells, but I think the roar of a bull would have
been more appropriate.

At one point in the service, the heathen girls in the convent were forced to go up and 
prostrate themselves before the altar, while the priest said special prayers over us, and then 
sprinkled us with water.

Sister Margaret explained later that it was holy water, designed to drive out the devil, and 
that we were heathen and therefore had more prayers said over us.

I would have liked to associate with my companions in exile and misery, but our very 
sameness precluded intercourse. We were forbidden to speak to each other for fear that we 
would infect each other with our devilish thoughts and conversation.

We could speak only to our familiars, those nuns assigned to us to instruct us and bring us
along on the path to perfection, as it was called.

It was a concept which I had never heard of, perfection. And I spent long weary hours 
trying to understand it.

My days and nights seemed to be filled with bleak, unremitting toil, my way honeycombed
with long stone corridors that at first echoed my step, and then, as I learned to walk on the 
balls of my feet as the other nuns did, to reflect my silent passage in the glare of wax tapers.

I could speak, on occasion, to some of the other nuns who were Christian-born, and it was 
through them that I learned some of the history of the priory.

The evil nun who had initiated me so brutally and with such carnality was believed to be 
possessed. She ruled with an iron hand Many of the girls were daughters of noblemen, and I 
was appalled at the treatment they received and accepted from the hands of their tyrannical 
fathers. They were put away because there was not enough money for the sons, or because 
there were too many girls to be married off, or bought off I soon learned, and they were 
imprisoned behind these cold walls to pine away their lives.

I soon learned that even in the most stringent of confinements, there are pleasures to be 
had for the body as well as for the soul.

I enjoyed my contacts with some of these girls, and with some of the help who came to 
assist us in the fields, since the priory was self-sustaining both for the nuns, and for the priests
in the adjoining priory.

I learned how to weave, how to cook, and I learned more of my letters. I also started to 
learn about their strange religion. I heard my people who were unbaptized referred to as the 
spawn of hell, and I grew accustomed to accepting the dictums of my captors.

For all the harshness of the life, it was disciplined and regular. The food was good. We 
were well-clothed. I grew and prospered in my training.

I had given myself the task of surviving, and I had sounded out my captors, so I knew 
those traits they valued the most.

I was therefore, assiduous at my labors, docile in the extreme, and I learned to keep my 
own council.

It was a long, long way, aeons away, when I was a happy, chattering little child. My father 
had always called me a magpie for my prattling and my mother frequently had put her hand 
to her forehead to beg me to desist.

I learned now, and in that silence stored up strength and wisdom. But my wisdom did not 
encompass their faith. Much as I loved some of the ideas they preached, I hated them.

They were murderers in the name of that Christ who was so foolish as to have died for 
humanity, and I wondered how they could so contradict his teachings. Not all of them did. 
Sister Margaret turned out to be a gentle if very firm teacher, and I had learned that First 
morning when she awakened me, not to offend her good soul, nor trouble her conscience by 
inveighing against my fate which had been occasioned in the name of that Christ she so 
obviously adored, loved, and strove to emulate.

I would frequently hear strange things in the night, as I lay awake, which often happened, 
and I wondered what kind of subterranean life went on in the convent.

I would eventually learn.

The more contact I had with the prioress, the more convinced I became that she was 
possessed.

Whippings were not uncommon for the least little infractions, and one day, I tasted that 
whip for the second time, and this time it was more vicious than the first time.

I had been assigned to pick the pears which were ripe in the orchards. I was working with 
Sister Corita, the portress, Sister Margaret, and a little girl named Sister Eulalia.

As I picked the pears, and put them into the baskets, I saw Sister Eulalia, up on her 
wooden ladder steal one of them, and put it in her apron pocket.

I did not even think to blame her for it. It is such a little thing. One piece of fruit amidst so 
much. Who would object to it?

When I had picked all the ripened fruit on the tree to which I had been assigned, I 
descended the ladder, at about the same time as Sister Eulalia. She was giggling. She took the 
pear out of her pocket, and bit into the luscious fruit.

Much of it was consigned to market to be exchanged for cloth and other necessaries. We 
had some fruit but not an abundance of it for our table.

Then, with her mouth full of the fruit, she offered it, very generously, to me, looking to her 
left and right to see if anyone were watching.

I got into the spirit of the thing, feeling my young juices rising to the fun of having stolen.

I was still young, although constrained to the tempered life that should have belonged 
only to the very old.

I took the pear from her hand, and bit into it. I was about to hand it back to her, when I 
saw her face pale. She looked at me as if to warn me.

I swung, to see the prioress behind me, glaring at me.

"Little heathen!" she snarled, slapping me brutally across the face. "Thou shalt not steal! 
You have sinned."

I had staggered against the tree. The fruit was still in my hand. Sister Eulalia stepped 
forward. I think she was going to confess her error, but I held up my hand.

"Yes, I stole it!" I cried. "What is one pear among so many!"

Sister Eulalia's jaw dropped, and her eyes filled with tears.

I knew I was stronger than the little girl so recently admitted to the priory. I knew also 
what was in store for me, and I pitied Sister Eulalia her innocence. I thought I could forestall 
that inevitable moment which must eventually happen.

"Go to your cell!" the prioress commanded. "You will be sent for!"

Still holding the pear, I walked through the fragrant orchard to my cell, and waited on my 
bed, my heart pounding.

At that time, I think I experienced the first impulses of rebellion, and I strove to keep them 
under command. As I sat there, I finished eating the pear, deciding that I might as well enjoy 
the fruits for which I was about to be punished. I knew I would pay ten times what that fruit 
was worth in pain and humiliation.

Sister Margaret appeared, her eyes bright with tears, her face the picture of a concerned 
distress.

"Child, what ever possessed you to do such a thing?" she asked, coming up to me.

"I'm sorry I have distressed you, Sister Margaret. I just thought it was fun."

Sister Margaret sat down on the edge of my bed.

"I am commanded to summon you to the lower room. The prioress says you have been 
there before?"

I rose and walked stiffly to the door. As my hand reached for the latch, Sister Margaret 
spoke again.

"Sister Eulalia told me what you did, dear. I have asked her to say an extra rosary for the 
good of your soul. You were very generous."

"I believe that Christ was, too, when he died for our sins," I said, not without a tinge of 
sarcasm, which thankfully, went over Sister Margaret's head.

"Praise God, you are progressing!" she exclaimed. "I'm afraid I dare not tell the prioress of 
your sacrifice, or Sister Eulalia will be doubly punished. I shall wait for you. Offer up your pain 
for your sins."

I failed to see the good of that, although she always counseled me to offer up something 
for my sins. But I failed to see how I had sinned. I had been captured, brutally used, sexually 
violated, taught to tread the path and assume the position that even a pet dog didn't have.

But I was reluctant to point this out to the good, if naive, Sister Margaret, afraid of 
destroying her belief in the basic goodness of everyone. Sister Margaret could even find 
excuses for the Prioress.

"Abbess Fredericka errs in zeal for our immortal souls. She is not evil, merely stern, as our 
Heavenly Father is stern when we have erred. She is not to be blamed for punishing us when 
we do wrong. Our way is much to simple to allow of transgressions against the rules," she 
would say.

Sister Margaret was the only nun in the priory with whom I spoke who did not believe that
Abbess Fredericka was possessed of the devil.

As I descended to the dark chamber where I had first been initiated into the rites of the 
convent, my mind conned some of the stories I had heard, the hinted intimations that the 
prioress was far from good.

They talked of rites of the devil, of an ungodly liaison with a priest, of insatiable carnal 
appetites that would eventually ruin her and the priory itself.

I had listened attentively to these stories, as I had listened attentively to everything else my
captors said, trying to understand them and their strange ways.

I turned to the right at the foot of the stairs, and headed toward the large, brass-studded 
door. My heart beat mightily against my ribs, seeking an exit. I forced it into some semblance 
of quiescence, knowing that I would need every inch of my strength to survive whatever ideal 
the irate prioress had for me.

I opened the door and walked into the room. The prioress stood near the fireplace, a whip 
in her hand.

"Come here!" she barked.

I walked toward her, my skin crawling as I thought of the bite of that lash. I knew it 
couldn't kill me. She had used the same lash on me before. But I wondered at the same time, 
how easily pain can kill.

I had yet to learn, although I would, how much pain a human being can endure.

"Remove your clothes!" the prioress barked.

I hastened to obey her, knowing that any hesitation on my part would only exacerbate 
that rage which glowered in her eyes, and caused her normally pale face to flush.

When I stood, trembling slightly, naked before her, she raised the whip.

"On your knees, dog, slavish daughter of a heathen slave!"

I winced and held my tongue, my loyalty to my beloved parents flayed mortally by her 
wicked statement.

"Aiee!" I screamed, feeling the lash bite into my soft white shoulders. My body had 
developed apace during the first year I had spent in the priory.

My breasts were full and round and ripe, my waist long and tapering, my body comely, 
strong with hard work, glowing with decent nutrition.

The prioress rained blows upon me, not sparing the rod or her arm. And with each blow 
she uttered a damning imprecation on my head and the heads of my deceased forebears.

I winced with each blow. The fire of the welts suffused my body. I closed my eyes, 
abandoning myself to the evil and the attendant pain of it, as the prioress lashed at me with 
all the fury of a devil.

My back crawled with the stinging pain of the lash. When she had covered my shoulders 
and my back, she moved down to my buttocks. I contracted my ass muscles when I felt the 
bite of the whip digging into my sensitive ass flesh.

As the whipping continued, I felt as if I were whirled out of time and into a wracking 
eternity of pain. My emotions became muddled, my brain seemed to shut down, the way one 
snuffs a candle.

I was an animal, a pain-wracked animal seeking to survive. Strangely enough, I felt my 
juices flowing.

As she continued to beat me, the juices flowed more and more hotly. I pressed my thighs 
together, my body swaying like a willow in the wind, as the whip kissed my flesh harshly over 
and over again.

With each blow, the heat of the burning welts seemed to form a warm puddle in the pit of 
my perverse womanhood. I was deriving sexual pleasure from the pain!

It bewildered me, frightened me! And at the same time, the impulses were so intense that I
could not deny them.

I suffered a small spasm of ecstasy as the whip bit into the lower part of my fleshy globes.

I clenched my hands at my sides, mortally tempted to bring them to my passion-swollen 
breasts, to massage them, caress the puckered, tingling little nubbons of flesh which crowned 
my melon-shaped globes.

The prioress appeared to be having some kind of fit. I could hear her breathing behind me,
labored, and harsh.

I refrained from turning around to stare at her, afraid of arousing her to further mayhem. 
Instead I submitted to the blows which seemed to get stronger and more intense.

"Dog of a heathen, are you sorry for your sins?"

"Yes," I said, not meaning a word of it.

The whipping ceased abruptly.

She walked around in front of me, and then I knew the reason for her labored breathing. I 
could tell that she was enormously physically aroused. Her hands came down, and she 
dropped her whip. Then I gasped as I felt her hands on my breasts. Her fingernails dug into 
the resilient flesh of my tits, and I shivered with a macabre pleasure.

Sharp bolts of pleasure seemed to fill my body, and the impact was almost like that of a 
fist pounding into my gut.

My flat belly turned almost concave, as the woman massaged my tits. And then her hands 
reached for her skirts.

I knew what to expect and I was waiting for it. I would service her. I would drive her to 
oblivion with my tongue, and there was not a little rancor in my determination.

She was a woman of flesh who propounded the things of the spirit. She was diabolically 
carnal. I knew that many of the nuns had been forced to do her bidding. I could tell by the 
expressions on their faces when they encountered her.

I refused to become craven. I would show her that I was a woman in my own right, a 
human being. I would surmount her evil by accepting it, and giving her better than she gave.

Her skirts rose higher and higher, until the black pelt which covered her love mound 
became visible.

The pungent perfume of her sexual arousal filled my nostrils. I could feel them flaring as I 
inhaled the strong, musky aroma.

"Eat," she gasped, her voice guttural with her lust.

I opened my mouth and leaned forward. I opened my mouth wide, and buried her pussy 
in my hot oral cavity.

"Ahh!" she gasped. I raised my eyes and saw her face flushed with passion, snapping 
backward. Her mouth was wide open, and a thin trickle of spittle gleamed at the corner of her 
lust-sodden mouth.

I smiled, feeling for the first time in my life, a sense of power among my captors. I sucked 
on her already passion-bloated muff, feeling the incredibly soft texture of her inner flaps of 
flesh against my tongue, as I drove it into her cunt cleft, and strove to drive her insane.

I lapped upward, and twirled my tongue around her hard little love button, and then my 
tongue glided downward over her slime-coated lips, until the tip of my tongue discovered the
quivering little hole which was the entrance to her womanly cave of lust.

I drove my tongue into the hot little hole, and felt my tongue become coated with the 
honey which was oozing out of her womb.

Her cuntal walls closed in around the tip of my tongue as I thrust it inward, in a rhythmic 
pulsation that caused her hips to hump forward. At first her rocking motions were gentle, 
sensual. Her thighs trembled as I placed my hands on them to steady myself and her.

My tongue moved faster and harder up and down her pussy lips. I lashed at her soft flesh 
with my tongue the way she had lashed at my body with her whip.

As my sense of power over her grew, I felt the tremor of sexual excitement building in my 
own body.

I felt as if I were possessed by some phallic demon, and wondered if there were any such 
creatures in the Christian lexicon of saints and sinners.

My fingernails dug into the soft, trembling, heated flesh of the prioress's thighs as I lashed 
my tongue over her pussy meat, pulling on her thick wiry pubic hairs, until she was breathing 
like one suffering some sort of violent seizure.

And in effect she was.

I had discovered how powerful sexuality was, even among those devoted to the spirit. I 
had investigated some of the strange noises I heard at night in the convent, had found nuns 
locked in erotic embrace.

Deprived of men, and the normal sexual outlet, I had found their erotic struggles exciting 
in the extreme, and I had spent much time in my cell lost in the pleasures of self-stimulation.

Now, as my tongue probed among the soft bloated folds of the prioress's sex flesh, I 
strove to get her lost permanently in the labyrinthine ways of carnal wildness.

And mad I did drive her. Her body quivered and shook as if in upheaval. She slobbered 
incontinently, and wild high-pitched shrieking sounds came from her passion-constricted 
throat.

And the more excited she became, the more aroused I became, until I felt another subtle 
orgasm race through my flesh, causing my skin to crawl with the hot ecstasy which took 
possession of me.

"Arrggh!" she gasped, as she became lost in her sexual crisis. Her body snapped forward, 
her veil falling down over my wounded, stinging back. Her hands gripped my shoulders, her 
fingers like talons as they dug into my soft flesh.

Her chest heaved with her labored breathing, and her body quivered like one possessed 
with a dancing demon.

My tongue laved at her honeyed folds of flesh. I lapped up almost all of her juices, which 
flowed in such abundance that my cheeks and chin were covered with the hot effluence which
cascaded from her hot little hole.

Her knees were bent slightly, and the tremor in her muscles was violent, as her orgasm 
peaked.

For one brief moment as I labored with my mouth on her pussy, I would have sworn that I 
had killed her with pleasure.

Her face went from red to stark white, and then flushed red again, as she struggled in the 
delicious throes of her orgasm.

My own juices flowed hotly out of my hole, and stained the soft inner flesh of my thighs.

I could feel the slime trickling warmly down my legs, could feel the hot throbbing of my 
own pussy, and I knew I needed relief immediately. Even the burning pain of the whip lashes 
which striated my smooth white skin added to the erotic welter of carnal joy which seethed in 
my young body.

I bit into the prioress's clitoris, and then flicked my tongue, lizard-like, back and forth over 
her hot, creaming pussy.

She collapsed in a heap. For a moment the contact of my mouth with her love mound was 
broken, but I hastened to correct the situation. As she writhed spastically on the floor, her ass 
slapping up and down on the cold stone, her black robes bunched up around her waist, I 
quickly spread her legs, and dove into her hot, heavily-furred delta of delight again.

Again I covered her thickly-furred muff with my mouth and drove her orgasm higher. The 
more excited I made her, the wilder my own blood boiled in my veins.

It was truly a berserk, twisted coupling, and it left us both weak and shaken when it was 
over.

She sent me summarily to my cell for the evening, without supper. I didn't care. I had my 
own need to fulfill, and the sooner the better!

CHAPTER FIVE

I did not dare rend the delicate fabric of my maidenhead; I knew that this was prized 
above all things among these strange people.

But I did everything short of deflowering myself.

Having reached the haven of my room, I closed the door and went to the bed. There was 
no such thing as real privacy in the priory. Anyone could walk into one's room at any time. 
Therefore, I left my gown on.

I lay down on the bed, and lifted my gown above my slender waist. Then my fingers 
sought and found what I wanted so ardently--my own secret sexual flesh.

I ran my fingers through the swollen swamp of my lust, feeling the juices flow lavishly from
my hot little hole.

I inserted one and then two fingers into that hole, and slid them in until I could feel that 
little barrier which signaled my virginity, still miraculously intact.

I pumped my fingers in and out of the hole, and enjoyed the feeling of my cuntal flesh 
rippling around the prying digits of my hand.

My fingers were soon coated with the thick honey which flowed copiously from my little 
well of lust.

I moaned, and closed my eyes. I brought my knees up to my full, ripe breasts, to expose 
more of my nether flesh to the stimulation of my hand.

As I pumped my two fingers in and out of my wet and wanting womanhood, I used the tip
of my index finger of the other hand to stimulate my clitoris. The little love button became 
inflamed, engorged with lusty blood. It felt as if ice-cold waves, alternating with fiery hot 
waves of pleasure were being flashed by the hardened little button throughout my whole 
body.

Every fiber of my flesh seemed to partake of the carnal bliss which seethed in me.

I continued to pump in and out of my pussy, stopping just short of my maidenhead, 
wanting desperately to rupture it, to rend it from me forever.

In my country, hymens were not so valued. A good strong woman who could bear 
children, and help in the fields was much more valuable, and could be forgiven almost 
anything.

But not in this strange culture which bought and sold women as if they were cattle.

I pitied these women who submitted so unthinkingly to their fate. I moaned as I felt the 
heated release building to an explosive intensity.

My hips writhed on the bed, and I could feel the sweat pearling on my overheated skin, as 
I continued to stimulate myself.

As I frigged myself, I thought of the abbess, struggling on the floor in her sexual insanity. I 
had caused that. I had made the woman a seething mass of writhing flesh, her mind driven 
clear out of her body, as she suffered the sweet throes of her sexual climax.

Now I sought the same escape for myself. My fingers pumped more and more frenziedly 
in and out of my pussy, and the finger with which I was stimulating my hard, tingling little love
button increased its pressure as I twitched it back and forth and then circled it around and 
around the hard little nubbin of delight.

I felt my pussy meat swelling outward, pouting from between my plump, golden-fringed 
white outer lips.

I removed my finger momentarily from my clitoris and pulled on the blond maidenhairs 
which covered the delta of my delight, enjoying the slight stinging sensation.

My buttocks were burning from the lashing I had received, and even that stinging heat 
seemed to permeate my body, heightening the erotic effect of my self stimulation.

I thought I was going slightly insane myself as I lost myself in the pleasure I was creating in
my body.

My flesh was like a musical instrument, which tingled at my command making hot wild 
music which carried me away to a plain beyond fear and humiliation and degradation.

My skin crawled and rippled, as if it were possessed by tiny little demons who massaged 
my flesh, and aroused me still further. I may indeed have been indulging in a rite of their own, 
but I didn't care. The pleasure was so wonderful, and it gave me rest from the travail, the 
bleakness of my life.

I felt myself being transported to a fleshy plain of a myriad of delights, where my body, 
outside my rational control, taught me more than any of the manuscripts I pored over.

I cried out as the ecstasy built. I felt as if I were melting, my fleshly limits expanding until I 
virtually oozed off the bed in heated delight.

Again the tip of my finger sought my clitoris, as I felt the sweet explosion rumbling in the 
depths of my wet and willing womanhood. I longed for a man at that point, and the vision of 
Damian, my beloved Damian, filled my head.

I had not thought of him for a long time, but the impact of seeing his much-loved 
features, triggered the incipient orgasm which was rumbling ponderously in the depths of my 
belly.

My mouth opened in a silent scream, and I felt my body stiffen, my toes curling inward, as 
the hot ecstasy took possession of me and caused my muscles to grow taut.

And then with a loud whoosh of breath, I writhed passionately in the pleasurable 
paroxysms, which wracked my body.

My fingers moved faster and harder in and out of my hot little hole, the pumping motion 
necessarily shallow in order to prevent the tearing of my hymen.

The finger which pressed into my clitoris moved spastically back and forth over the little 
button which vibrated with the intensity of the sensations which surged through it.

I came down from that little death slowly. That was what orgasms appeared to me to 
be--little deaths, little escapes into a seething limbo where there were no troubles, no cares, 
no such thing as being heathen or Christian.

I was still quivering with the lusty pleasure I had given myself when I stood up.

My thick, warm honey oozed out of my tingling little well of lust. I re-arranged my habit so
that it bore some semblance of rightness, and then went to my desk to study my lessons.

When I had finished, I got undressed, and went to bed. Again I sought that delicious 
nothingness of sexual surrender, and I frigged myself to exhaustion, thinking all the while of 
the prioress, lost and helpless as my mouth drove her into the chaos of sexual insanity.

Then I fell asleep.

I was awakened by a sudden soft noise, and I reared up from my pillows, startled. I looked 
out the window.

It was not yet time to awaken, so it couldn't have been Sister Margaret coming to rouse 
me.

"Who?" I gasped.

"Shh! 'Tis I, Sister Eulalia."

I heard the rustle of her garments as she walked swiftly toward the bed. Then I saw her 
shadow, dark against the glowing embers of the fire in my grate. She dipped a candle into the
embers, and lit it, and then, shielding the light, she set it on the desk.

She turned and walked toward the bed.

"Poor Alethea," she murmured, her eyes bright with tears.

She produced a lovely alabaster jar, and took the cover off it. The room was filled with a 
sweet scent.

"Let me attend to your wounds," she whispered.

I pulled the covers off me, and got out of my gown. I felt her hands, soft and gentle on my
striated back. The salve was warm and wonderful on my burning skin. I felt my flesh, which 
was contracted with the pain, relax, and a warm glow filled my body.

She anointed all the wounds, and then helped me into my nightgown again.

Then she reached into her pocket, after depositing the alabaster jar on the desk.

"It is for you, a gift. My mother makes it and sends it to me. I have more," she said.

She pulled out a thick bundle of linen, and opened it up on my lap. I gasped.

Hidden in the folds of the linen napkin were thick slices of mutton, and freshly-baked 
bread, thickly covered with golden butter.

My stomach contracted. I had been sent to my cell without supper, and my sexual labors 
had made me very hungry indeed.

"You must be hungry, so I have stolen this for you."

"It is a sin to steal, Sister, Eulalia, but I am most grateful for the food. I am very hungry."

"I will think twice before I commit that particular sin again, but after what you did for me, I 
could not let you remain hungry. Here, eat."

I ate the good food she had prepared for me, and then with a sly grin, she reached into 
the folds of her gown again, and produced another napkin.

Still grinning, she opened the napkin on my lap.

I gasped. Nestled in the linen, were three ripe, fine pears.

"You have paid for the fruit. I think it only just that you should enjoy it," she said, smiling 
shyly.

I smiled, and offered her one of the pears.

"Oh, no," she said. "I couldn't."

"You must," I said, smiling at her, and persisting. "How shall I enjoy the sweetness of this 
fruit if you do not share it with me. You have risked a lot to procure it."

Reluctantly, she accepted the pear, and silently we enjoyed our ill-gotten gains, reveling in 
the warmth and the companionship.

When we had both eaten our fill, Sister Eulalia bent over and kissed my flushed cheek, and 
then tucked me in for the night.

I slept sweetly, happy in the knowledge that I had gained my first real friend. And such we 
would always be.

I was awakened early, but very refreshed, by the mysterious tolling of a bell. I had never 
heard that particular sound before, and it distressed me. The bell tolled monotonously, and it 
sounded like the voice of doom, like a thousand tears, and the great wailing of a multitude of 
bereaved people.

I know my imagination is vivid. It has always been that way. But I shuddered at the fateful 
sound of that tolling bell-a single brass voice that rasped through the night, cutting through 
sleep, destroying rest, and auguring I knew not what.

I could not sleep, and so I arose, and bathed. I applied some more of the sweet and 
soothing ointment to my wounded back, and then I sat at my desk, conning a manuscript, and
waited.

I had become exceptionally talented in the art of patience.

I soon heard scurrying footsteps up and down the hall, soft padded presences that warned
me the rest of the priory was also astir, no doubt disturbed by that bell of doom.

And still I waited. A glance at the sky told me that it lacked still some three hours to dawn, 
when we normally rose for matins.

I saw a golden chink of light beneath my door, and then it opened quietly. Sister Margaret 
was standing in the doorway. She .looked grave, even frightened.

I rose and faced her.

"Good you are awake. Blessed be the maiden who keeps the lamps trimmed," she said, 
loosely paraphrasing one of Christ's parables. I smiled at her.

"What is that bell, Sister Margaret?" I asked.

"That is the death bell. The Black Plague has struck again. We must go to the chapel and 
hear Mass for those who have already been carried away by it."

By this time, my knowledge was sufficiently sophisticated so that I knew what the hideous 
Black Death or Black Plague was. It was the same monster of death which had mercifully for 
me, carried away the duke to whose sexual servitude I had been initially consigned.

I knew that it plundered nations, and was disrespectful of rank or station. It swept all 
before it, the rich and educated, the poor and helpless, the thief along with the priest, the 
maiden and the fallen woman.

I went with Sister Margaret to the chapel, where that priest was. He said a solemn mass 
and told us that the Plague was a visitation from God for our wickedness.

He paid special attention to the heathen women in the congregation as he spoke, 
cautioning us to give up the ways of the devil and make our peace with God.

Again I pondered my own puzzlement. A God who so loved the world that he gave his 
only begotten son, and that, too, was beyond me, who, like a ravening wolf, having delivered 
himself up to murder to make amends for our sins, then struck us down like the meanest 
feudal lord his serf!

These Christians were exceedingly contradictory!

That bell became part of my flesh, and my senses. It tolled throughout, the day, and all 
that night. There was precious little sleep to be had. At dawn, Sister Eulalia knocked on my 
door.

"Come, I will show you something you shall never, with the grace of God, see again," she 
said, beckoning to me.

I rose, put on my cloak and followed her. We went to the parapet of the priory, and I got 
my first glimpse of Paris at dawn, and from a height.

What I saw turned my blood to ice in my veins.

Throughout the city, I saw fires raging, aggravating a nightmarish aspect.

"What are those fires?" I asked. There were several other nuns on the roof, watching the 
spectacle.

"Those are the homes of the diseased. When the last dead are taken out the homes are 
burned, especially the homes of the poor, on the streets behind the avenues," Sister Eulalia 
said.

The River Seine flowed, turdid, and lit luridly with bonfires which lined its banks.

"And those fires by the Seine?" I asked.

"The clothing and personal effects of the dead and diseased," Sister Margaret said, coming
up behind us.

The picture struck me to my heart. Then another spectacle caught my gaze. A turgidly 
flowing, milling mass of people heading toward the gates of the city, which were locked.

"What are those people?"

"Poor souls!" Sister Margaret gasped. "They are people seeking refuge, seeking to escape 
from the Plague. They will not escape. They will be turned back by the guards at the gate."

A loud outcry of many voices was heard, and I looked toward the north gate. There I saw a
small riot taking place. I saw reflected in the light from the many bonfires, the flash of steel, 
the cry of mortally wounded people, as they tried desperately to escape the disease-ridden 
city.

In the distance, on the banks of the Seine, stood a great hulk of a building. On its roof, I 
saw bonfires burning, with ant-like figures of men attending them.

"What is that building there?" I asked.

"That is the great Notre Dame. Right now it is filled with the dying. Its great spaces echo 
with their cries. It is a din to affright the soul and freeze it," Sister Margaret explained to me.

I turned to her.

"You have seen it?" I asked.

"I delivered food at the door today. We may not go in. And if we do we may not come out 
until the Black Plague has run its course."

As my eyes surveyed the scene, I saw something else in a field behind a batch of houses. It
was a great pit, and it was lined with torches burning brightly.

"And that?" I asked, pointing.

"Listen!" Sister Eulalia gasped, "and you will learn."

I heard a horrible cry.

"Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!"

I saw doors open, I saw men and women carrying out bodies. Some of them were wrapped
in sacks. Others were naked. Others were dressed but uncovered. All of them were twisted, 
their limbs wracked out of shape and comeliness by the horror which had visited their bodies.

"Has this happened so suddenly?" I asked, watching as tumbrils stopped before the doors, 
each tumbril already filled with the twisted remains of what had once been men, women and 
children.

"No, my child. It is just reaching its peak. When the people discover someone with the 
signs of the Plague upon them, they are afraid to report it to the authorities. They will be 
locked in their houses for at least forty days, or until the authorities are sure they have not 
been tainted.

"This of course, for many of the poor folk, is a sentence of death since they have to be 
close to those things handled by the Plague victim, and they almost always succumb, poor 
lambs."

Sister Margaret's voice was vibrant with compassion.

The tumbrils rapidly filled with the dead bodies, and then I saw them heading toward the 
field. I realized with horror exactly what that yawning, fire-limned pit was, and it appeared to 
me that I was seeing the incarnation of the hell which I had been taught by the Christians.

It was a common burial pit. The tumbrils were dragged by men right up to the lips of the 
yawning pit, and there, their piteous loads were dumped, like loam upon a newly-planted 
field, into the depths of the pit.

Again and again, I watched the tumbrils come to the pit, and dump their hideous load.

. "Why are they not buried the way we buried old Sister Constancia?" I asked.

"There are, alas, too many dead, my daughter, and the fear of infection is great. They are 
brought out at night, and put into that common burial ground, and their bodies will be 
covered lightly with dirt, until the next night when the next load comes."

More than the tolling of the death bell, the . constantly repeated command, "Bring out 
your dead!" weighed on my soul, oppressed me.

I heard the soft tinkle of the bell, calling us to matins, and mass, ringing up, 
counterpointing the heavy, steady, ominous tolling of the death bell.

We descended to the chapel and prayed long and hard. Again I heard the priest, Father 
Malachi, inveighing against our pagan ways. The Crusades had swelled the number of heathen
girls in the convent.

Some of them were not so fortunate as I. They had been brutally deflowered by the vicious
harbingers of Christianity, and they would spend their lives probably as I would spend mine, in
unremitting toil, treated worse than the worst whore-and against our wills, against our very 
natures, which were as delicate and even more humane than the natures of our captors.

Breakfast was, as all the meals were, silent, but added to the silence was the constant din 
of the bell of death, and the weight of our own fears, the horror of what we had witnessed on 
the parapet.

I was drawn to that parapet again that afternoon, when I had finished my chores. I 
watched in the ugly light of day, the horrors that occurred in the Paris streets, the sight of 
people dropping in the streets, men shrieking and running from houses, half-clothed, tearing 
their hair and running like maniacs through the streets, avoided by people who scattered 
before their paths, like flies.

These I learned, were those who had reached the crisis of the illness. The pain of the boils 
was apparently insuperable, and combined with the fever, it drove many men and women, 
mad.

I truly pitied these people and I reluctantly pulled myself away from the nightmarish scene,
the grisly incidents, which passed before me The streets were filled with armed guards. The 
tumbrils and those who pushed and dragged them, wove through the streets, performing 
their grisly task.

The yawning pit so luridly lit the night before, was now limned with the greasy smoke of 
the same torches, which were kept alight in order to contain the miasmic atmosphere of the 
Plague-stricken dead.

Some of the smoke reached my nostrils as the wind changed. The acrid stench of smoke 
was mixed with the sweeter, more nauseating odor of decay and disease, the smell of death.

I retched, and left the parapet, to continue my mundane existence in the convent.

It did not remain mundane for long.

Soon the bell was ringing constantly from the gate, as beggars piteously pleaded for food 
and shelter.

The prioress forbade any of us to go near them, for fear of contagion, and most of us 
obeyed but reluctantly. After all, our duties in life were stated quite clearly. We were supposed 
to be of service to suffering, sinful mankind.

The prioress seemed to have different ideas.

No one chafed more under the stricture than Sister Margaret, who wailed and moaned, 
and wanted to help.

Then, just after our evening repast, she begged admission to the prioress's cell.

I suspected what she was requesting, and when she emerged from her interview with the 
prioress, radiant with happiness, I walked up to her.

"You are going out to help them, aren't you?"

"Yes, my daughter. I will not be back, if I come back at all, until the Plague has spent its 
course. I will go to Notre Dame and nurse these poor lambs of God."

"Let me go with you," I gasped impulsively.

Sister Margaret looked grave.

"My daughter, you do not know what you ask. The sights will be hideous, appalling. You 
stand in great danger of death."

"I want to go. I wish to help, too."

Sister Margaret paused and then turned toward the door from which she had just 
emerged.

"I shall ask the prioress."

She approached the door again, and knocked. I was right behind her when she was bid to 
enter.

"Sister Margaret, have you changed your mind? Have you considered what I have told 
you?"

I looked at the prioress, sitting in that ornate chair, idle, evil, and still somewhat frightening
to me.

I stepped forward.

"I wish to accompany Sister Margaret to Notre Dame, there to nurse the sick and the 
dying."

There was a harsh bark of laughter from the prioress.

"Better you than she," she said, indicating Sister Margaret. "Very well, little heathen, I give 
you permission right willingly. Go and take care! Come back alive if you can."

I turned and left and prepared quickly to leave, perhaps forever, with Sister Margaret.

I bid goodbye to Sister Eulalia, who wept on my shoulder, and kissed me.

"Till we meet again," she said, biting her lip, her tears flowing fast from her eyes.

"God willing," I replied, using a phrase which Sister Margaret had taught me.

"I shall pray for you," Sister Eulalia said, hugging me again.

For the second time, lost in her sweet embrace, I experienced the rare sweetness of 
Christianity, and found it good.

I was to learn something of its hard-core strength, the mightiness of the love of those who
followed it at Notre Dame, and I would learn to loathe with a great passion those who 
perverted it.

I learned that Christ did live in some of his followers, and his life was mighty and awesome 
to behold--and adorable!

CHAPTER SIX

In the four years I had been in the priory, I had never been beyond its walls.

When Sister Margaret and I left and heard the creaking iron gate close behind us with a 
portentous clanging, we were as women condemned. We carried with us, medicines, such as 
could be spared from the convent, I secretly considered that the prioress was rather 
close-fisted in the matter, some food, and our meager belongings.

Behind the grilled fretwork of the iron gate, we saw many of the nuns, watching us gravely 
as we wended our way out into the world.

"I am frightened, Sister Margaret," I said. "I have never seen this city."

"I, too, am afraid," Sister Margaret said, laughing heartily. "I have not seen the outside 
world for lo these twelve years now."

"Did your father put you here?" I asked, feeling exceptionally close.

"Lord no, child! My father switched me royally when I told him I wished to become a nun. 
He wanted me to marry and raise children, to be happy in the world. I finally won out, 
though."

"Is he still angry with you?"

"No. My father rests in the bosom of Abraham, daughter. He died full of grace, and I was 
at his bedside when he closed his eyes in his last sleep."

She turned and looked at me. Her face, far from being filled with doom, was alight with joy
and excitement.

"And you, why did you wish to accompany me on this trip which may have no return?"

I looked at her and wondered myself. Perhaps the tenets of Christianity, being taught to 
me by Sister Margaret, were taking root in my soul, because I truly wanted to help these poor 
people.

"I want to help. I want to find forgiveness for these people who have murdered my 
mother, my father, my whole' village, who have despoiled me, who treat me as lower than the 
most miserable beast of the field.

"And I want to be with you," I said, looking up into her kindly brown eyes. "I love you, and 
you have been a sweet salve in my miserable exile."

Sister Margaret's eyes filled with tears. She dropped her bundle on the road, and turned to
embrace me.

"Dear child. You are like the daughter of my own body to me. You are a sweet and kindly 
little heathen, and God will reward you for your generosity."

We pursued our deadly way into the seething cauldron which the city of Paris had become,
singing psalms as we went.

As we got closer to Notre Dame, the sights became increasingly horrendous. The dead lay 
like discarded rags in the streets which were littered with them. Many of them were being 
rifled by thieves.

Shots rang out, and there were constant outcries, as those who tried to escape the city 
were thrust back through the gates by the armed guards.

The tumbrils rumbled over the cobblestones, and the air reeked of death and decay, of 
unwashed bodies, and the stale, insidious miasma of fear.

Occasionally, one maddened with his disease would brush by us in his mad flight to 
nowhere. At first this alarmed me, until I realized that we would be living with them, working 
among them, and that it no longer mattered.

We were risking the disease to help those who could not help themselves.

We finally reached the portals of the great Notre Dame. The cathedral towered over me to 
an inconceivable height, as we strode up the stairs.

"Stop!" A guard said, stepping forward.

"We are from the Priory of St. Armand. We have come to help," Sister Margaret said. The 
guard looked from Sister Margaret to me, and something akin to an expression of awe spread
over his surly features.

"This child, too?"

"This child, too," Sister Margaret averred.

Reluctantly, the guard let us pass, and we went into the cavernous reaches of the great 
cathedral, which had been given over to the care of the sick. They formed a carpet on the 
great hewn stones of the floor, and the sounds which reached our ears were deafening and 
frightening.

It would soon come to pass that we barely heard the great din, hearing instead those who 
needed help the most, directing our attention to their meager pallets, if indeed they had 
anything on which to lie.

A tall, very slender priest, with a mane of thick white hair approached.

"What do you here?" he asked, frowning.

Again Sister Margaret repeated her message.

Again the same questioning look toward me, and this time I affirmed my intention to help.

The priest's name was Father Robert, and he was the first priest I had met since Father 
Malachi. He was kind to the point of almost total self-abnegation, and I soon grew to love 
him.

I met many people in the massive cathedral, who had no motive for condemning 
themselves to the company of the diseased and dying, other than the motive of simple human
kindness.

I felt my ideas beginning to alter slightly as I went about my business. There were days 
when we labored without respite, and even without food. At the height of the Black Plague 
there was precious little food to be had, with the exception of some of the farmers, who 
brought produce in fairly regularly.

There was one. They called him the Bastard Leon. He came regularly once a week, with a 
heaping truck load of supplies, anything, he said, that he could beg, borrow, or steal, in 
addition to what he culled from his own garden.

For some strange reason, he looked familiar to me, and I searched his face, from the 
distance we were required to keep, to see where I might know him.

He was exceptionally tall, well over six feet, and magnificently built. His eyes were black, 
and he had thick black hair that curled. His hair was very glossy, and the curls assumed the 
aspect of clusters of grapes, fresh from the vine.

His teeth were straight and white and even, and his smile was a glory which touched me as
I hadn't been touched since Damian.

"Why do they call you a bastard?" I called one day, as I hauled the baskets of garden truck 
up the stairs, to be received by the workers at the top.

"Because I am one. It's a grave curse."

"How so?"

"I cannot get married to a decent girl. I cannot ever hold office."

I straightened up and looked at him.

"I am sorry for the ways of your people that so condemn you. You are a good man."

"Aye, so he is, my child," Father Robert said, smiling with a kindly warmth at us both.

"And you are a courageous woman," the Bastard Leon said, "to nurse these poor people 
like this. And so young and beautiful!"

I blushed at the compliment.

"I, too. labor under a curse," I said.

Leon laughed.

"What is that?" he asked.

"I am a heathen. I have been transported from my homeland. My family are dead. I am the 
lowliest of the low."

"As are we all, my child," Father Robert said, patting me on the shoulder, and taking a 
basket from my hands to pass up the cathedral stairs. "And of course you have come into your
spiritual inheritance."

"What is that?" I asked.

Father Robert straightened out, his gray eyes regarding me gravely.

"Why, surely you have been baptized?"

"No, Father. I am not yet considered worthy."

Father Robert said nothing else, but when we had stored our wealth from Leon, who was 
impoverishing himself for our benefit, according to the good priest, he took me to Sister 
Margaret.

"I understand this poor child has not yet been baptized!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, Father, it is a great grief under which I labor," the good woman said. "She has 
mastered her catechism, and she lives our life well, but the prioress, ever anxious, I believe, to 
keep our faith pure, has not given in to my pleas to have her baptized."

"This may not be!" the man cried, as close to anger as I had ever seen him. "Baptized she 
will be, right now. She has long since proven herself more than worthy of thee name of 
Christian. If anything she is already baptized by her acts of charity above and beyond the call 
of devotion. Come!" he said.

I was taken into one of the great apses of the church, in which were stored medical 
supplies. There was a baptismal font there.

"What is your name?" the priest asked me.

"Alethea."

"How very beautiful," the priest said, as he put on his stole.

I was baptized right then and there. One of the men who did the heavy work was my 
godfather, and Sister Margaret was my very joyful godmother.

"It will be nice, if God wills it," Father Robert said, after the simple ceremony, "if you 
become a saint and have your name added to our lexicon. It is a lovely name. Do you know 
what it means?"

"No, father," I said, having long since lost most of my innate knowledge of my people and 
their customs.

"Pity. It would be interesting to find out."

There was no time for celebration, no time to express the joy we felt. I would not, I think, 
have felt such joy in the priory, where the life was cramped and stiff, and hypocritical.

Out here in the streets, for all the decay and misery, for all the acts of human rapacity, life 
was far kinder, sweeter to me.

I mentioned this one day to Sister Margaret.

"Aye. I feel as if my soul has stretched, and I question my conscience, why I joined the 
priory. Was it to hide from this good, sweet world, however troubled it is. I have seen more 
goodness in the space of ten days here than I did in all the years at St. Armand."

I was frequently sent out to bring food and medicine to those poor who were afflicted 
with the Plague. After I became familiar with the streets, and did not need a companion, I 
would go alone.

I wore a special cloak which marked me as a tender of the sick. People made way for me as
much out of respect for my calling as for fear of being possibly contaminated.

I carried a little bell, which I rang, calling out, "Make way, make way for a tender of the 
sick."

The rich, I had noticed, had long since abandoned the city, and there was no help from 
them, but frequently as I made my way to an afflicted house, some poor crone, or 
shabbily-dressed old man would throw a coin in my path.

"For the sick, sister, for the sick."

I truly grew to love these people, and found my forgiveness in the knowledge that they 
knew not what their wealthy masters did! And that in itself was a blessing.

And so I labored. One night, after working for two days straight and two nights, I sank 
down on my pallet, exhausted, to sleep. I was shaken awake by Goody Renette, one of the 
good women who were nursing.

"Child, it grieves me to awaken you, but we have just received a new batch of the sick, and 
we may not be spared. One of the men in the corner tells us that his little son lies stricken at 
his home. It is in the alley behind the Church of St. Madeleine, two Rue de Criffe. Would you 
go and fetch the child here? He is all alone. His father was stricken on the way home from the 
market to fetch food for him."

"How did he get out of his house?" I asked. When a known victim of the plague was 
reported, everyone was closed into the houses, and a guard posted.

"He slipped past the guard who had fallen asleep," Goody Renette said.

I rose quickly, and took a shabby blanket from one of the shelves where supplies were 
kept, and trudged out of the cathedral. It was dark, and the tumbrils were rumbling.

"Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!" they called.

I ran to my destination. The guard still lay against the fence, sound asleep and snoring.

I went up to the shabby door, and opened it, creeping inside. There were two shabby, but 
clean rooms, and in the second one, wrapped up on a cot, lay the child.

He was well past the crisis, and although he still had fever, he was sleeping restlessly, the 
sweat pouring from his frail body. With some devoted care, he would be one of the lucky 
ones. He would survive.

I picked up his frail body, and wrapped him in the blanket. He stirred weakly, opened his 
eyes, and then closed them again, sinking against my breast.

I held him tightly against my now fully-grown breasts, my belly aching for the children I 
would never have, for the man I would never love, the land I would never till again, but in the 
service of the priory-if indeed I lasted out my life there. I remembered again, wearily, the 
promise I had made to my dead father.

I left the house and made my way over the dead bodies, past the piles of refuse, toward 
the cathedral, ringing my bell as best I could to warn the people of my passage.

As I passed through one particularly dark alley with my precious burden, I heard footsteps 
behind me. I turned, and saw a shadow lurking in a doorway.

I rang my bell, and called out to warn him, "Make way! Make way for a tender of the sick."

It did not occur to me, until I heard a vicious, low-sounding laugh, that the shadow was 
stalking me.

Frightened, suddenly, I quickened my footsteps, clutching the little boy more tightly to me.

The shadow behind me came closer.

Now I had two fears, and the first was for the boy. I turned a corner, into another alley, 
which curved behind the great cathedral. To be so close and yet so far!

I secreted the boy, still wrapped snugly in the blanket, in a doorway with a great red mark 
on it, indicating that the Plague had visited the house. Then I straightened up to confront my 
stalker.

I had a few pennies on me, and not much more.

The man approached. His face was evil-looking, twisted.

"What do you want? You can have my money," I gasped, throwing the few coins into the 
street in front of me.

"Phagh!" he snarled, "it is not coins I need."

With that, he lunged at me. I uttered a shriek of fear as I felt my body landing heavily on 
the cobblestones.

I saw a big explosion of light behind my closed eyelids, as my head hit the pavement, and 
then there was a moment of unconsciousness.

But I was awakened almost immediately by my ravager's rough hands pawing at my naked
breasts. He had ripped open the bodice of my gown.

I opened my mouth to scream, and realized that he had put a gag in my mouth. I raised 
my arms to struggle with him, but they, too were bound!

The man was panting, as he raised my gown above my waist, and then I heard his 
disgusting, guttural grunts, as my. naked pussy was revealed. I felt the flush of shame 
suffusing my face as his hands began to paw the golden-furred triangle of my womanhood.

I felt his dirty fingers prying between my cunt cleft. Again I tried to struggle, but the man 
was more powerful than I. My heart beat powerfully against my rib cage, as he spread my legs 
wide, and then crouched between them. With one hand still pawing my belly and my pussy, 
his other hand loosened the cord which held his shabby trousers in place.

They dropped, and his raging manhood was revealed. It bobbed with the throbbing lusty 
blood which surged into his thick, hard member. My body stiffened.

I was about to be raped. The very thought of it frightened me so that I lost my power to 
struggle momentarily, and that moment was enough for him to press his prick head, gleaming
with the juices already seeping from his come slit, against my virginal cunt.

Holding my thighs with brutal, and powerful hands, he lunged inward. I felt my pussy walls
being stretched for the first time in my life by a map's long, hard rod, and I screamed, the 
sound muffled behind the gag he had stuffed in my mouth.

His cock head butted against my maidenhead.

When he felt the thin membrane, he uttered a loud, lewd laugh, and thrust inward again, 
wincing with the effort. I felt a fierce pain as the delicate flesh was rent from my pussy walls.

A great surge of blood welled up around the wounded flesh, as he lunged inward again, 
until his cock was buried to the hilt in my ravaged pussy.

I started to weep, as he started to move in me. He pulled his prick out to the tip, and then 
thrust it inward again.

He had braced his hands now on either side of my body, as he lunged into me over and 
over again. He was sure of his prey. I was thoroughly impaled on his brutal rod of flesh.

I felt his cock head butting against the fleshy roof of my cave of lust. I wept for the loss of 
my maidenhood, wept at the brutal uses to which I had been put, and which I was being put 
now by my ravisher.

His hard throbbing cock abraded the walls of my pussy, creating a heat which surged 
upward in me.

Again my perverse passions got the better of me. As he kept lunging in and out of my 
cunt, I felt my pussy lips starting to swell, felt them pouting from between my golden-fringed 
outer lips.

His hairy loins jarred my body as he lunged inward. I felt his balls slapping against my 
quivering ass cheeks, felt the blood of my slain virginity seeping out around his raging prick, 
as he continued to pump into me, each thrust inward harder and more brutal than the one 
before.

But the heat rose, and like the time when I was ass-fucked, I felt my pussy walls stretching 
to accommodate his massive manhood, and I felt the perverse juices starting to flow.

As my honey oozed downward, it lubricated his plowing prick, easing his passage in and 
out of my hot little hole.

I felt my cuntal walls closing in spastically around his hard-driving prick, felt my passions 
rise.

That which I had always lusted after was mine now, however violently it had come to me. I 
was being raped, and I was deriving pleasure from it.

No matter how hard I struggled with the passional impulses of my body, no matter how 
hard I tried to stem the tide of my dew of desire, it flowed in ever-increasing quantities, mixed 
with my blood.

It oozed out of my tightly-stuffed little hole, as the man's prick pillaged my hot wanting 
tunnel of lust, and trickled down my ass crack.

I moaned behind the gag, as I felt my body melting with the heat which suffused me. A 
hot welter of passion built up in my belly, seeming to turn my flesh inside out.

My hips started to hump upward, as he continued to lunge into my teeming well of lust 
over and over again. I thought briefly for one moment how weak my flesh was in the face of 
sexual pleasure, and then I surrendered to his wildly thrusting prick, as he scored the depths 
of my womanhood.

He ravished my pussy, and sent wild tremors of delight coursing through me. My hips 
started to hump upward, my upward-bucking hips meshing with his downward thrusting 
lunges. His cock seemed to drive deeper and deeper into my hot tunnel of love, and I felt the 
quivering of an orgasm deep in my belly.

I thought my insides had turned to jelly as the wild, lawless passion mounted higher and 
higher.

I closed my eyes, and saw wild fires behind my tightly-closed lids. The fires descended, 
turning my body into a seething cauldron of lust and pleasure.

My nipples, long since puckered by the man's rude hands as he massaged my magnificent 
tit mounds, started to tingle, adding to the insane melange of pleasure which coursed 
through me.

My whole body quivered with the impending sexual crisis which gripped it. I whimpered 
behind the gag, feeling my muscles go taut.

Then the hot climax exploded in the depths of my womanhood. I felt my muscles 
quivering, and tingling with erotic excitement. My pussy walls closed around the man's prick, 
and sucked on it, almost drawing his juices out of his balls.

His hairy loins were now thoroughly coated with the honey which flowed from my pussy.

My whimpering got desperate as the orgasm mounted, until it had taken possession of me
as a demon might. My body bounced and twitched under the hard-humping body of my 
rapist.

I heard him gnashing his teeth at the height of my orgasm, and then I felt for the first time,
the warm rush of his manly fluids into my body. My pussy seemed to close in around the hot 
slimy liquid, which swelled the slimy tide which was coursing from my body. I felt the hot river 
trickling down my ass crack, coating my humping quivering ass cheeks as they bounced up 
and down on the cobblestones. There was a slimy pool forming beneath my ass flesh.

My orgasm was sustained and powerful. The man emptied his balls into me, as I started to 
float downward from the seething heights I had reached. My whole body seemed to be 
bloated with the heat which had surged through me.

His prick was still lodged in my pussy, as I finally gained enough rational control of my 
body to arch upward, trying to dislodge the beast from me. I felt enormous guilt at having 
experienced pleasure from my own rape.

Another strangled cry issued from my gagged mouth, and then I heard footsteps running 
toward me.

I was appalled. The last thing I wanted was to be discovered in my shame. I arched upward
again, my bound arms aching at the strain.

"In here!" I heard a voice shout.

Suddenly, I was surrounded by men and two women. Someone hauled my depleted rapist,
too far gone to even be aware of the commotion, off my body. I whimpered behind the gag, 
as one of the women reached down. She saw my garment and reared backward.

"Oh, the shame! Oh, pity! Mark, help her! I dare not touch her. She's one of the nurses 
from the cathedral."

"Here, I will risk contamination!"

The other woman rushed forward, and unbound me and pulled the gag out of my mouth. 
The woman looked down at my blood-stained thighs, as she lifted me up. I tried to cover my 
nakedness, ashamed, and weeping.

"To tend the sick and be subjected to this!" the woman who had helped me exclaimed.

I heard a strangled cry, and looking in the direction of the cry, I saw one of my saviors 
plunge his knife deeply into the throat of my attacker.

"Death to the rapist! Death twice over!" he cried, lunging inward with his knife again.

Another man came toward me, as the woman was helping me to close my rent garment.

"Here," he said, "take this."

He pulled off his great coat, and handed it to me to cover my nakedness.

More foot steps were heard running, and then Father Robert came into view.

"We caught this man trying to rape her!" one of the men said. "He lies there, dead for his 
evil."

"Oh, my poor daughter," the priest exclaimed, helping me to my feet. I was shaking like a 
leaf.

"The child," I gasped, pointing to the doorway. "Is he all right?"

The confusion was the work of a moment. The man was left in a pool of his own blood, 
while Father Robert took the child, and the kindly woman helped me toward the cathedral.

I looked down once at the face of the man who had raped me, and who now lay dead at 
my feet.

I gasped with horror and surprise.

It was Barton, the son of Lord Landau.

It took all my strength to get to the cathedral where I was bathed, and put to bed, to sleep
away the impact of the horror.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The sky is paling in the window high up in my cell and my candle begins to gutter, as I 
write this meager history of my life.

I survived my rape, and lived to nurse the sick until the Black Plague passed over Paris, 
taking with it three fourths of the population, as near as we can guess.

At first, I was withdrawn, and avoided Sister Margaret, being ashamed of what had 
happened to me, ashamed more than anything of the pleasure I had received.

Father Robert came to me one day as I was putting supplies away.

"My child, you must not labor under the sin of another. Sufficient unto the day be the evil 
thereof, and what happened to you was not of your own choosing."

I broke down and cried. Father Robert patted my shoulder, and I forgave myself my own 
erring passions.

Within a week of my rape, Sister Margaret was stricken with the plague. I nursed her 
devotedly for four days, but she expired, still joyful that she had been of service.

There was no time to weep, as I withdrew while Father Robert heard her last confession. 
They talked for a long time, and I wondered what in that good, innocent woman's life, there 
was to tell!

Finally, she called me to her side, and took my hand in hers.

"I have loved you like my own daughter, and I shall pray for your happiness," she 
whispered.

"But you won't die," I protested.

She smiled radiantly.

"Oh, I feel such happiness. I am about to approach my Maker!"

She half rose from her pallet, and then her body sunk down, divested of that good sweet 
soul which had been one of my only consolations at the priory.

She was taken away with the rest of the dead, to be buried in a common grave. One by 
one, as the Plague intensified, the other nurses, men and women, were stricken.

At one time, during the height of the disease, there were only six of us, nursing hundreds! 
Father Robert was there, morning, noon, and night, devoted to the sick, along with one other 
abbot who had come from a distant priory, having heard of our plight.

And then, I too, was stricken.

I survived the nightmare week of my illness, and staggered from my pallet as soon as the 
course of the disease was run, to continue my nursing chores. This I did over the protests of 
the doctors and nurses present.

Of course, I could have been sent back to the priory. Those who survive the disease, do 
not get it again, nor can they give it to others, according to the physicians.

Knowing this, I became braver, going into districts where every house bore the red mark of
the plague, bringing food, water, medicines, cleaning the homes, smoking them to purge 
them of the Plague.

Then back to the cathedral to continue my rounds.

Finally, the load of the sick dumped on our steps became lighter and lighter, until finally, 
the cathedral was emptied out, the last ill person staggering out on the arms of his happy 
wife.

I was present when the cathedral was re-sanctified.

My gorge rose at the idea of going back to the priory. There was only one person there I 
would have cared to see again, and that was Sister Eulalia, if she were still there.

After the magnificent consecration ceremonies, Father Robert took me to one side.

"It is time to consider your future life, my daughter. What is it you wish to do?"

I smiled at him.

"I do not wish to return to the priory," I said.

"Would you do an old, foolish man a favor?" he asked.

"I would do anything for you!" I exclaimed.

"Go back. Go back and do your duty until you are sixteen. I understand from Sister 
Margaret, that you will be sixteen in two summers."

"That is true," I replied.

There wasn't much else I could think of to do.

I looked at the kindly man who had meant so much to me.

"Very well. I will return as you have suggested. But what is to happen to me when I am 
sixteen?"

Father Robert looked at me and smiled.

"Wait and pray until then. It is not for us to know the workings of God's will, nor for you to 
know what your womanhood will bring you. Wait and pray and be patient."

"I shall do as you have asked, Father," I replied, kissing his hand. He caressed my silken 
hair. Sister Margaret and I had long since dispensed with the elaborate wimple and veil, and 
wore only white linen cloths on our heads, soaked in vinegar to protect us from the evil 
vapors of the plague.

Now my hair was free, and flowed down my back. I was wearing a simple gray dress 
provided by one of the grateful parishioners of the parish with a white bodice and white cuffs.

The following morning, I gathered my few belongings, and made my way to the great 
walled priory again. I started down the steps with a heavy heart, and suddenly was aware of a 
crowd gathered.

I looked up. They were all pressing flowers and gifts of food into my arms. Some of them 
kissed the hem of my robe.

I blushed as I made my way through the silently adoring crowd, feeling their love wash 
over me in waves.

From feeling terribly lonely, I felt suddenly a kinship with them. I smiled and they returned 
the smile. They wished me well in half a dozen different tongues.

Father Robert accompanied me to the gates of the priory.

"Remember, watch and pray. You shall see me again," Father Robert said, as he rang the 
bell.

The old hunchback answered it. He looked at me with rheumy eyes and blinked with 
disbelief.

"Sister Margaret?" he asked, as he swung the door open.

"She has gone to her Eternal Reward," I said. I turned and took Father Robert's proffered 
hand and brought it to my lips again.

"God go with thee," he said, smiling.

"And with thee," I replied.

I heard the gate clank behind me, and again my heart felt like lead. But the coldness must 
perforce diminish. I had six months of living memories, six months of devotion, and the 
resultant love of the people to warm me, and I had also Father Robert's promise that he would
see me again.

I suspected that perhaps he had some plan for my life that I could not formulate for 
myself, nor fathom from his intimations. But I had made a promise to him.

I resolutely entered the priory, determined once again to survive to the best of my ability.

I made my way to the prioress's study, having divested myself of the gifts with which I was 
laden.

She partially rose from her chair, her eyes widening.

"So! You have survived."

I was appalled. If anything, she looked more insane, more possessed, more evil than ever.

Her eyes burned with a feral glint that struck the fear of the devil into my newly-baptized 
soul, finally. The devil I had had trouble believing in, since men themselves were so condignly 
evil in themselves. I couldn't picture how God would need a devil with men to do the devil's 
work.

"Yes, Abbess Fredericka. I have survived," I said.

My travails had done nothing to alter my comeliness. I had always suspected that I was 
handsome, although the nuns and the prioress insisted on calling me "ugly" and "misshapen."

Once on the outside, I had found a mirror, and discovered that I was every bit as beautiful 
as the most beautiful women I had encountered. My hair was gold, the color of straw. My eyes
were green, and large, filling my face. They were thickly fringed with dark brown lashes.

My complexion, from being deprived of the sun, had turned pale instead of its 
remembered tan, and it was like alabaster. My nose was straight and fine, my lips full and pink
and ripe.

My tall body was thin and strong, and my breasts were ripe, my hips full and firm.

The prioress sat down in the chair again.

"Sit!" she said.

The chair which she indicated was the same one in which I had sat when I first came to the 
priory. As was my wont, I held my peace, and kept my own council.

I did not tell her I had been baptized. I told her as little as possible, answering her 
questions directly and readily.

"I suppose you have been corrupted by the world, or else disgusted by it, and are happy to
return."

"I love the world, Abbess Fredericka," I said. "I met more goodness in the Paris streets than
I had ever expected."

"All the more reason to do penance here, then," she replied.

Her new program for me was incredibly stringent, and it included flogging once a week, 
said flogging to be applied by her.

As usual, I was required to service her with my mouth. I did it readily enough, knowing that
two years was not really that much time, considering the length of time I had already survived.

Sister Eulalia managed to reach my cell one evening, and she came bearing a gift--a pear!

We embraced. She wept at my safe return, and she wept at the loss of Sister Margaret, 
whom she had loved as I loved her.

"But she died happily," I said, caressing her hair, as I held her. "She died loving God, and 
her fellow creatures. She died for them."

"Greater love hath no man... " Sister Eulalia said through her tears.

"Yes. She is with God, there is no doubt in my mind."

"What is it with you?" she asked, when she had recovered somewhat from her grief, "that 
Abbess Fredericka assigns you to solitude and prayer, and penance? How have you offended 
her?"

"She says she wants to bring me closer to God, to purge me of the evil of the world which 
might have tainted me."

There was a note of sarcasm in my voice. Like Sister Margaret, however, Sister Eulalia's 
basic goodness did not perceive it.

"Oh, never! You, too, risked your life for love of your fellow man," she cried, protesting.

"Nevertheless, I must resign myself to what has been laid out for me," I said, smiling at her.
"Now, go to bed. The fires die, and the night is fast approaching morning. I do not wish you to
be caught."

Sister Eulalia left. We had several other clandestine interviews, but not many. The prioress, 
who appeared to be getting more and more demented as time passed, kept me pretty much 
in seclusion, until yesterday.

At that time, she sent for me, and told me that I was to be baptized. My instinct about 
people, honed by the months I spent among them, especially when they were in extremis, at 
which time people reveal much more of themselves, told me that there was something wrong 
in the manner in which she couched her announcement.

"You should keep vigil tonight, and tomorrow you will receive your last test," she said to 
me, her voice quavering with an excitement that I recognized immediately was sexual in 
nature.

"You will give me my last test?" I asked, not without sneering mentally at the bestial nature
of that test.

"No, that will be Father Malachi's chore."

I froze, and I have remained frozen ever since. The dawn creeps upward. The hand that will
open the latch on my door will not be the dimpled, strong, competent hand of a loving Sister 
Margaret. It will be some minion of the demented prioress.

No, I doubt very much if she is possessed of the devil. I think she is genuinely insane, and I
think there is good reason to believe that one day she will lose her mind altogether. Her 
sexual excesses have told on her brain, and she no longer has the control of her body she 
should.

But I dread this interview with Father Malachi. A thousand biting pangs of fear war with 
each other in the pit of my belly.

For I have not told them that I am already baptized, and that I was allowed to keep my 
own name, any more than they have been informed that I have lost my maidenhead.

And I fear the outcome of this "last test."

There it is. The click of my latch. It is one of the new postulants. I shall put my pen down. I 
may never lift it to paper again.



* * *



My hand wavers, but true to my promise, I have survived. Survived, but to face what 
further horror!

I am locked in my cell, to await the decrees of the mad prioress and the demented Father 
Malachi.

The postulant who entered my cell took me to the room with which I was now familiar. She
left me at the door, looking at me with some fear in her eyes.

"I am to leave you here, and return," she said, handing me a lighted taper which "stood in 
a scone beside the door.

"Go quickly," I said, my voice hoarse with my own anxiety. I waited until I heard her 
footsteps on the stairs leading up to the warmer reaches of the priory, and then resolutely, I 
opened the door, and stepped inside the tall, vaulted room.

Father Malachi and Abess Fredericka were standing on either side of the fireplace.

"Come forward," the priest commanded.

I stepped forward. Before the fireplace, they had erected what looked suspiciously like an 
altar.

"Strip!" the prioress commanded, as she took the candle from my hands.

I obeyed, by now denuded of my last maidenly refuge, shame. I was resigned to the fact 
that no one would respect my body.

I saw the evil gleam in the priest's eyes, and my worst suspicions about him were' 
confirmed. Here was a man as depraved as the prioress.

"Lie down here, on your stomach," the prioress said.

I lay on my stomach on the altar, as I had been commanded. The priest stepped forward, 
and clamped my wrists into leather bonds which were attached to the wooden top of the 
altar, and then he spread-eagled my legs and did the same.

Again I felt the juices in my body rise up and flow, and this time, I surrendered to the 
sensation. Those passional urges had been my salvation after all these years of abuse.

I looked up and saw the prioress holding aloft, a goatskin bag which was filled. I didn't 
know with what. From the end of it dangled a tube which was the cured intestine of some 
animal, and the tubing was surmounted by a glass bulb, which was hollow and elongated.

I gasped. A clyster bag! But I did not need an enema!

My mind boggled at the depths of this insane woman's sexual perversion! I knew in a 
blinding flash what she intended to do.

"Today you will be baptized," she said, "if you pass this test. This is boiling holy water. We 
will purge you of the last devils that remain in you," she explained.

I struggled with my bonds, too late to be effective, since I was securely tied to the alter.

I felt my ass muscles contract, protesting against the anticipated pain of the hot water.

The priest and the prioress stood at the foot of the altar, and the priest leaned forward 
and roughly spread my ass cheeks, revealing the puckered brown flower of my asshole.

I winced, and then bit my tongue. I must survive, and it was vain to waste my strength 
crying out. These merciless fiends would never listen to me.

I felt the glass bulb pressing against my rectal opening, and then the prioress thrust it 
inward brutally.

I felt my asshole walls spreading, as she inserted the bulb fully into my anus.

I clenched my fists, and pressed my burning forehead against the rough wooden floor of 
the altar, waiting.

"Ahh!" I gasped when I felt the first surge of the hot water boiling into my bowels.

I clenched my asshole against the glass bulb, trying to prevent the water from seeping into
me, but I couldn't stop it. I felt the hot, searing flow of the liquid pouring into me, bloating 
me, surging upward through my bowels in a burning wave.

My body stiffened with the excruciating pain, and trembled. I felt the sweat pearling on my
smooth white skin, felt my belly bloating, swelling with the unnaturally heavy load.

The prioress emptied the hot contents of the goatskin bag into my bowels. I thought I was
going to explode with the heavy load which filled me. In addition, the fact that I was lying on 
my belly increased the pressure.

The water swirled around in my intestines, and I tensed my ass muscles, to restrain the 
load which sought its way out.

My belly began to cramp as she removed the glass bulb. I grunted, and listened to the 
heavy breathing of the perverted pair.

"Now you will answer my questions," Father Malachi intoned.

He began to quiz me on my grasp of religion, going deeper and deeper into the fine 
points, as I struggled with the swirling, burning weight of the hot holy water, which surged 
through my belly.

I could feel my face blushing. My ass muscles cramped with my efforts to restrain the 
flood. I was desperate not to humiliate myself by allowing the heavy load to explode from my 
bung hole, and soil me, embarrass me more than I had been embarrassed.

My hands and feet were cramped with the tension as I clenched them, throwing every 
ounce of strength into the effort to withhold the load which wanted to burst out of me.

And still I answered his tedious, tendentious questions.

Finally, he stopped. He had apparently had enough. I had had more than enough and I 
was in agony!

"I am satisfied. She is ready. Just one final trial, and then she is worthy to be one of us."

That last remark chilled me to my bone, but then I remembered the good Father Robert. If 
he were still alive, he would come for me. He said he would, and I trusted him more even than 
I trusted myself.

The prioress released my hands.

"You may relieve yourself behind that screen," she said, indicating a large carved screen in 
the corner of the room.

I rushed for it, listening to the lewd laughter of my tormentors, as I reached the chamber 
pot just in time. The liquid contents gushed out of me violently, and I gasped, and trembled at
the profound relief. It was so great that I even experienced a small orgasm.

 By the time I had washed myself with the linen cloth hanging near the chamber pot, I 
realized that my pussy was creaming. I needed to relieve myself, and some of my anxiety was 
allayed when I remembered that I was pretty sure Father Malachi would perform that service.

"Lie down again," the prioress directed, when I appeared from behind the screen. "This 
time on your back," she said.

I did as she told me and again my limbs were spread-eagled, my swollen pussy meat 
glistening, exposed to the lewd gaze of my captors.

Father Malachi dropped his trousers, which was not a shock, since I had expected it, and 
even welcomed it.

"We must not have any pride in virtue in this institution. To that end, I will deflower you, as 
I deflower all the candidates for membership in this priory."

I was now too old and too sophisticated to believe him, but I felt a great surge of pity for 
all those poor innocent creatures on whom Father Malachi had performed that rite.

"You are hereby sworn, under pain of excommunication, to total silence on this matter. It is
your penance, and you must live with it," the hypocritical priest said, as he mounted the alter, 
and pressed his raging manhood against my creaming, alive pussy.

He thrust inward, grunting. His cock slid further into my hot, wanting tunnel of love.

At first, the look on his face was one of unbridled lust. As he thrust in further, much to my 
pleasure, the look changed to bewilderment, as he did not encounter my hymen. I fervently 
prayed that he would not desist from his intention.

His rammed his prick into the hilt, and then the expression turned to one of surprise, and 
then anger.

The anger did not displease me, since he started to pump his prick in and out of my 
honeyed hole with an insane fury which just suited my hunger.

I felt my hips arching upward, as he lunged inward. I looked down over the luscious 
expanse of my body, and watched his cock, gleaming with my juices, appear, only to 
disappear once again, as he slid it in, until he was buried balls deep in my pussy.

His balls slapped wetly against my ass cheeks, as I arched them upward, seeking to drive 
his prick deeper and deeper into my hot little hole.

The friction of his throbbing shaft against my aching pussy walls increased my sexual 
temperature, until I felt positively delirious with the erotic fever which consumed me, and 
caused me to surrender to his cruel cock.

I closed my eyes, and felt my pussy walls give way before the powerful onslaught of his 
fleshy spear.

He fucked me as if he wanted to kill me, driving his prick deeper and deeper into my hot 
and hungry womanhood.

His fucking was so violent, that I started to feel the initial spasms of a powerful orgasm 
rippling through my body.

I started to whimper, as the hot pleasure mounted. My cuntal walls closed in around his 
wildly-pumping prick, tightly. The soft inner flesh of my womanhood rippled with the growing 
ecstasy which suffused my body, and turned my twat into a delicious turmoil of excitement.

I felt the spasms intensify, as the priest slammed his prick into me over and over again.

I felt as if his great rod were growing like a lusty snake, cleaving through my whole body 
to emerge from my mouth.

High-pitched mewling sounds came from my passion-constricted throat. At one point, I 
opened my eyes, only to find the prioress rubbing her own womanhood, her eyes alight with a
bizarre lusty gleam, her skirts hauled up above her belly, her hand gleaming with the juices 
which flowed from her hot cunt.

Then I closed my eyes again, secure in my sexual power, as the priest slammed into me, 
wreaking a delicious havoc in my hot, aroused womanhood.

I cried out with passion, and my body arched up off the altar, as the priest continued to 
slam his massive prick into me. My orgasm started to mount, the hot wild waves of pleasure 
surging through me in a wild carnal storm that drove me delirious.

At the peak of my orgasm, I felt his hot spunk pouring into my pussy. The hot wet kiss of 
his gism only heightened the impact of my prolonged, and powerful, orgasm. My body 
twitched and jerked in my bonds as if I were a puppet on tangled strings.

He emptied the seething, slimy contents of his hairy, wrinkled twin sacs of flesh into me, 
and then his body collapsed on top of mine, but only for a moment.

When he had recovered some of his passion-spent breath, he pulled his cock out of my 
pussy, and grasped it at the base. He shook it at the prioress, who stared at it, licking her lips.

"Oh, let me, my love," she gasped, going to her knees, opening her mouth, wanting to 
take his manhood into her hot orifice.

The priest slapped her violently away from him. The prioress sprawled, shocked and 
bewildered, on the stone cold floor, her skirts still above her waist, revealing the glistening 
pink flower of her sex.

"She was not a virgin. Look, there is no blood! How dare you give me a sullied woman?"

"I swear by the child we have had together, that I thought she was a virgin," the prioress 
shrieked, getting to her feet, and storming over to me.

Her words shocked me. So there was some truth to the rumor after all.

Father Malachi pulled up his trousers, and glared at me.

"You will not be baptized, heathen. You will live in the welter of your original sin. Lock her 
in her cell until I decide what to do with her," he commanded the prioress.

I couldn't resist the blow I then delivered. "I have already been baptized," I said.

Then in one brief moment, I thought they would both die of the shock.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I shall give this manuscript to Sister Eulalia, when I have finished it, to be secreted in the 
archives of the priory. I would like someone to know my tale.

I sit now in a low wood-paneled room. It is large and sunny. Bright curtains hang on the 
diamond-paned windows, and through them across a spacial expanse of green grass, I can 
see the villagers passing to and fro. I sit by the table in the large common room of my own 
home.

How is that, you might ask.

I ask myself that question happily every morning I rise before the first light of dawn, to 
light the fires, and prepare the breakfast.

I languished in my locked cell for a week, living on bread and water, fearing for my life.

And then one day, I heard the key turn in the lock, and the prioress stood in the doorway. 
Her mouth was a thin slash of rage, and hatred.

"You will come with me," she said, turning and walking away from the door immediately.

I wondered why she had come herself, rather than send a postulant, and I folded my 
hands, commended my soul briefly to God, and then followed her.

She led me down to her chamber, and I gasped in happy surprise, to see Father Robert 
standing there. He looked older, worn, but that wonderful warm spirit still gleamed in his eyes.

I embraced him, happily.

"I have come to take you to your new home," he said.

"Can I leave?" I asked, looking askance at the prioress.

"You have not taken vows, have you?"

"No, Father," I said.

"Then go pack your things. We shall leave immediately."

"Not one thing does she take but the miserable clothes on her back," the prioress 
exclaimed.

"As you wish. She will be well provided for."

The prioress gnashed her teeth. I saw the whites of her eyes and feared for her sanity.

"Come, child," Father Robert said, leading me out of the room.

For the last time I traversed those long, dim corridors, and stepped out into the bright 
light of day. Outside the gates stood a wagon, and beaming from that wagon was the Bastard 
Leon.

I greeted him happily. He seemed slightly reserved, if happy to see me. We drove to the 
great cathedral where I had served the sick, and where Sister Margaret had breathed her last.

Father Robert took us to his small quarters near the back. The cathedral was once again 
fully staffed, and curates and people rushed about, and milled around in the nave of the 
church, waiting for audience with some of the priests who serviced the place.

"It all looks so different," I said, as I was motioned to a chair.

"I have something serious to say with regard to your future happiness. I discussed it with 
Sister Margaret, after our beloved Leon approached me."

I looked at Father Robert seriously, and then at Leon, who was assiduously studying the 
floor.

"Yes, Father?" I asked.

The priest leaned forward in his chair and gazed at me keenly.

"I am going to ask you a question, and I would hope you would answer me truthfully. Will 
you, my child? Your very soul's well-being might hang on your answer, and I have no desire to 
plunge you into more unhappiness."

"I will tell you the truth," I said.

"Leon approached me to ask if it were possible to have your hand in marriage. That was 
after you had told him you were a heathen."

I gasped and looked at Leon, who was blushing, his handsome face still studying the floor.

"He does not wish to force himself upon you. I spoke to Sister Margaret about it. She was 
truly distressed that you had not been baptized, which would have been the only impediment 
to the marriage, barring your objection, that I could think of. Leon is a good, Christian man, a 
fact which you recognize. Would you be willing to be his wife?"

I paused for a moment, trying to catch my breath.

I looked again at the strongly chiseled features, the powerful body, and remembered the 
generous man who almost depleted his own resources to give food and succour to the sick, 
when the rich had abandoned all of us.

"I would be honored, but Father... " Father Robert raised his hand. He shook his head 
slightly with mild exasperation.

"Are you going to refer to your unfortunate victimization the night you carried the sick 
child here?"

"Yes."

"Daughter, that was not your doing. I have told you that before. Just as it is not Leon's 
doing that he is labeled bastard, and therefore has difficulty finding a good woman to raise a 
family with. He has prospered in his affairs, and is of comfortable, independent means. He can 
provide well for you. He knows."

When I looked at Leon again, I met his eyes. They were grave and kind and there was only 
love and respect in them, and nothing of accusation.

I blushed and turned away.

"I will marry him," I said. "If he will have me."

"He has only waited until you reached the age of consent, and that impatiently. This Sister 
Margaret insisted on, although on her death bed, she wavered, thinking you shouldn't go 
back to the priory at all."

So that was what her long conversation with Father Robert had been all about. In her last 
moments, she was securing my future!

Father Robert rose and smiled at us.

"Goody Renette is anxious to see you again," the priest said, taking my hand and helping 
me to rise from the chair. My knees were trembling.

"You will stay with her while your banns are posted, and then you will be married. The only 
other happiness I want in life is to baptize your first child."

It was a happy three weeks. The people of the neighborhood gathered together to make 
my trousseau. I was lavished with presents from my husband-to-be, who haunted Goody 
Renette's house. The good woman never left us alone together, and I didn't mind a bit. This 
was happiness I could indeed wait for.

I lit candles and said prayers of happiness for my father in whose memory I had made my 
great vow.

Now I sit at the sunny window, writing the final pages of this history. Through the window, 
I see Goody Renette with the midwife, Goody Blanchette, coming to visit.

They wave at me, their arms filled with good things. There is a bottle of good white wine, 
cooling in the well, and cheese, and fresh-baked bread. My husband will come in soon for his 
noontime meal. He will smell of sweet hay, and the sweat of honest labor.

My baby, due in three months, stirs lazily in my womb, and my heart flutters for joy.

In my husband's arms, and in his home, I know what happiness is, and among his friends 
and neighbors, I know what true Christian goodness is.

These people labor with ploughshares and share what they have. They do not, nor have 
they ever, lifted swords against the weak and lowly.

Like my own people, they know the gentle rhythm of the seasons, know the strength of 
resignation when a cruel wind or violent rain wipes out the work of their hands, and they are 
happy.

I bask in it.

On my wedding night, locked in my husband's embrace, I asked him how they got me out 
of the priory. The prioress did not giving willing consent.

Leon laughed, that wonderful full golden laugh of his, his black eyes twinkling.

"Know you not, my pet, that I am the spawn of her and that wicked Father Malachi? It was 
a simple matter to inform them that I wanted you to wife, and that I would spread the story of
their evil ways if I did not have you."

"But the other poor innocents!" I cried.

"Cease worrying your kind heart Alethea," he said, stroking my com yellow hair. "Father 
Robert has had the prioress sent to a retreat home. She is in danger of losing her mind 
anyway. Father Malachi has been sent to a monastery on the Breton Coast."

I sighed with relief, and, feeling my husband's manhood rise again against my belly, I 
surrendered to his strong, gentle arms, content with my fate.

My exile is a sweet one now. I have found my home.

CHAPTER NINE

Tomorrow I am going to the Priory of St. Armand to celebrate Sister Eulalia's investiture as 
the Prioress.

I am very happy for her.

I shall bring our lovely son with us. He is now six months old and the image of his father. 
We have named him Damian. I have told Leon about Damian, and it was his suggestion to 
name him after my former, deceased love.

At first, I was hesitant about doing this, but then he said there would be many sons and 
daughters, and there was no need to name the oldest after him.

Unlike noblemen, there is no question that Leon's hard-won gains will be shared equally 
among his progeny, and not given in their entirety to his eldest. So it is with simple fanners 
like him, like my long-gone people.

When my husband came in to dinner last night, he informed me that Father Robert had 
dropped by to chat on one of his sick calls. Prioress Fredericka had died in some mysterious 
way.

"I feel very sorry for her," I said to him when he told me.

Leon smiled at me, and took me in his arms. I could feel his manhood, hard and ready in 
his trousers, and felt my pussy creaming with anticipatory delight.

He seemed to sense my desire, and he carried me up the stairs to our bedroom and lay be 
on the bed.

His hands were gently, as he removed my gown and cap, and then caressed my breasts. I 
felt all the heat of my desire building in my quivering body. The two years we have been 
married have only increased my desire and my love for him.

Now that he is wedded, and has a child, he is no longer called "Bastard," but "Goodman 
Leon." For that I am happy.

He removed his clothes. His body is hard with work and handsome. I reached my arms up 
to pull him down against my quivering desirous flesh, reveling in the pleasure of his heated 
embrace.

His mouth came down to cover mine, his lips ripe and full and tasting of the wine I gave 
him when he came in. His embrace intoxicated me, and my juices flowed faster and hotter.

I spread my legs for him, and felt his hard, throbbing manly stalk pressed against the 
quivering tight hole of my womanhood.

I moaned, as he thrust inward, spreading my pussy walls wide. I arched my hips upward, 
impaling myself deeply on his throbbing rod, loving the feel of his hot hard flesh in my pussy.

He thrust inward until he had buried his cock balls-deep in my wet and wanting 
womanhood, and then he started to move in me, drawing his massive fleshy stalk out to the 
tip and then thrusting inward again.

His hot and heavy shaft rubbed the itching walls of my inner sex flesh. My heat grew 
feverish, as he thrust in and out of me, pumping his prick with more and more strength and 
speed, as his desire built. I could feel that desire washing over my flesh, melting me, until I was
compliant, and weak with the passion that suffused my body, possessed me utterly.

I ran my fingers over his back, wallowing in the passionate bliss of loving intercourse, 
loving my husband completely.

Each inward thrust sent ripples of ecstasy coursing outward until my overheated flesh 
crawled with the wild sensations which gripped me. I closed my eyes, and felt my husband's 
tongue penetrating my mouth, raking against the roof of my mouth and creating a sweet 
chaos there.

My hips bucked upward against my husband's down-thrusting loins, my humping hips 
matching his thrusts.

I felt my hard little inflamed love button tingling with erotic excitement, as I surrendered to
the warm, strong embrace of Leon.

His prick pierced my womanhood over and over again, and I cried out as the ecstasy 
mounted.

My juices lubricated his rod, and greased my tight little tunnel of love, as I writhed in his 
embrace, as he pumped his prick in and out of me with an increasing frenzy.

I ran my hands down over his muscular back, and then cupped his ass cheeks, savoring the
feel of his rippling muscles as his buttocks rose and fell with a lusty rhythm.

The bed creaked with the increasing violence of our motions, as we made love to each 
other.

His hands moved over my smooth, still firm body. I felt his chest pressing my magnificent 
breasts flat. My nipples puckered with the hot delight of being in contact with his smooth, 
throbbing chest, as his weight pressed me against the mattress of the bed.

I threw my legs up in the air. Leon likes that, when I become so carried away with my 
passion that I lock my legs around his undulating, sweating waist. To him it's like a double 
embrace, and I would do anything-anything!--to please him, to make him happy.

The new position caused my pussy lips to spread wide, and I felt his hairy loins, which were
now wet and matted with the juices which flowed from my well-stuffed womanhood, 
slamming rhythmically against my sensitive little flaps of flesh.

His balls slammed rhythmically against my arching, quivering ass cheeks, as I writhed 
beneath his hard-thrusting body.

He was taking me like a rutting, wild animal, and I squealed with the ecstatic delight which 
surged upward from my well-stuffed womanhood, and seemed to permeate my whole body.

I felt as if my body were swelling with the hot sensations which surged through me, and 
behind my tightly closed eyelids I saw strange flashes of lights in colors I have never seen in 
real life.

My body gleamed with sweat. Our flesh was fused together with the heat which built in us,
with the sweat which poured from our bodies, as we labored in the incipient throes of our 
orgasms.

My husband's arms worked around my body, and he pressed my torso hard against his 
hard-thrusting body, and then his prick slammed into me faster and harder. I could almost 
feel his desire, like a palpable thing, rising, washing over me, as he took possession of me, 
nailed me to his body with his wonderful cock.

I felt a violent shudder course through me, and I knew that I was about to experience the 
strange, violent paroxysms of a pleasure so intense that they were like pain.

It was almost like a little death, something I ardently longed for and that happened 
frequently when I made love to Leon. Leon makes love to me almost every day, and that really
pleases me, because as I know him better, I want him more and more.

I tightened the grip of my arms around his neck, and the grip of my legs around his waist, 
wanting to bury my flesh in his, wanting to become one with him, as I truly am, any way.

"Oh, Leon!" I cried, as I felt the first chaos rippling my womanly flesh.

Leon grunted, and his cock pried more and more deeply into my teeming womanhood. I 
felt his thrusts getting stronger and then my orgasm washed over me like a tidal wave, 
carrying away my reason, and leaving me only a mindless, rutting wild animal.

My body thrashed and jerked against his body, as I suffered the sweet delight of my carnal
upheaval to ride through me like a wild horse.

At the height of the delicious delirium to which I had become subject, I felt my husband's 
seed being planted deeply and copiously in the depths of my rich, warm wet meadow of 
desire.

Each time his cock empties into me, I wish for another child, another flower of our rich, 
fleshy union, and I know it will happen again, just as surely as I suffer the delights of a carnal 
insanity when my husband impales my body on his massive prick.

As my husband's seed flowed into me, it swelled the slimy tide of my dew of desire which 
flowed lavishly out of me, like a copious spring rain, wetting my pussy hairs, and wetting the 
thick pelt which covered his manly loins.

I felt his teeth sinking into the soft column of flesh on my neck, felt the really delicious 
sting as he left his mark on me possessively. He kept thrusting into me until he had spent the 
rich, ripe contents of his fleshy sacs.

Then his body subsided, and he relaxed on top of me, his body covering mine like a 
strong, wet protective blanket. I squeezed my cuntal walls around his still-throbbing prick, and
kissed him, loving him more and more.

And I told him so. He responded by making love to me again, and then we rose from the 
bed to eat our dinner. He had killed a pig, and there was roast pig, and baked apples with 
cinnamon, and fresh beans from our garden.

After dinner, while we enjoyed a glass of mulled wine together, I suckled the baby, and he 
smoked his evening pipe, his feet up on the fender of the hearth, warming them.

I could see his manhood still swollen with desire in his trousers, and my womb curled in on
itself with my own growing desire.

We talked about tomorrow, when Sister Eulalia would be invested as the head of the 
priory.

"What about Father Malachi?" I asked.

"Hmm," Leon said, frowning. His thick dark eyebrows met when he frowned, and I loved 
the expression. He never frowned with displeasure at me. Indeed, he is a most generous and 
loving husband and father.

He reached over, as I finished suckling our son, and took the boy into his big strong arms, 
to cradle him for awhile. The babe is growing well and is almost ready for pap, since my 
breasts are not enough for him.

As Leon caressed his little face with one of his work-calloused fingers, Damian grabbed the
finger to suck on it, and then bit down with his delicate pink gums.

"Owww!" my husband cried with mock pain, laughing and hugging the baby, who crowed 
with delight that he could elicit such a response from this giant of a man.

Having been distracted momentarily, he looked up at me.

"The latest news I have of him, is that he had been locked in a cell. He is, apparently, 
dangerous to himself and to others."

"The wages of sin," I muttered, as I picked up some of the mending which I had to do, to 
keep myself occupied while I savored my husband's company.

"Yes, so it seems. I wonder how we all survive."

I looked at him and smiled.

"Some of us survive on love and hope, like you and me," I replied. "I do not know how the 
wicked survive."

"On the strength of their own evil desires," my husband said.

"Then those of us who are good must desire the good more," I said, wondering if indeed 
this was the answer.

"Yes," My husband responded, leaning forward to plant a wet deep kiss on my mouth, 
"and more children who will be good."

I smiled and blushed, and put the mending by. The babe was put in his cradle, to sleep the
night away, healthy and good as he is, and my husband and I went to bed to enjoy each other
again, and possibly, to make another baby.

The day of Sister Eulalia's investiture dawned bright and clear. We made a happy party, 
Leon, myself, Goody Renette, and Father Robert, as we headed for the Priory.

I must confess to feeling some anxiety. It had been years since I had been inside those 
stone confines, and for me the memory was far from hallowed.

But there was a difference now, and I noted it immediately. Sister Eulalia bustled to meet 
us, and showed us around.

They were now taking in poor girls to school them, and mixed with them were the little 
heathen girls who were still being dragged into the country by the Crusaders. They were no 
longer pariahs.

Instead, they mixed freely with the Christian girls.

"How is it that you can do this?" I asked Sister Eulalia.

"It should have been done long ago. Why should they be deprived of the solace their 
company gives themselves, and why should they not mix freely with good Christian souls? I 
can think of no better way to bring them to belief in the Christian faith."

I had to agree with her.

With the evil Father Malachi out of the way, as well as the former prioress, it appeared that
the old priory would regain its former prosperous status.

I am sitting in my old cell, for memory's sake. I can hear the deep laughter of my husband 
in the garden beneath my window, and the happy crowing of my child.

It would appear that my fortunes will prosper, too, as they have already, and for this, I 
thank the good Lord.

I leave this behind as a testament to my happiness and my good fortune. Perhaps it will 
serve to edify future generations who may come across it.

Deo Gratias!


The End
