A Tale of Ties and Binds - Chapter 6

Chapter 6. A Shaming of Sisters

Stripped of her matriarchal armour and rank, trussed in Celtic knotwork with hands tucked into the small of her back, gagged tightly by a rag in her mouth with another between her lips, and hooded under a rough sack, Penelope suffered the walk of shame. She sat backwards astride a horse with a special saddle designed with a protrusion that inserted deep between her legs and every step was a reminder of its presence. The hood saved her from having to witness the crowds of women, but it did not stop her from hearing them laugh and curse. "Traitor," they called her. She wanted to call out that it wasn't her, that it was the Celt they should be cursing, but all she could do was moan. She moaned for the realm, for the freewomen and slaves, and for herself.

Her legs were untied from the stirrups, so Penelope assumed her escort of the Celt and her soldiers had arrived outside the palace gates. How undignified it was to have the royal guards hoist her from the saddle, only for her to collapse in a trembling climax in their arms. They half escorted her and half dragged her up the steep hill, through the many gates, along the halls and down the corridors. There was no escaping that irksome feeling of being watched the entire time, and though the walk had been silent, Penelope could feel the judgemental eyes on her naked flesh.

The sound of the throne room doors was unmistakable as they were shoved open. The royal steward sang out in her remarkably loud voice, "The Matriarchs Titania of the Household of the Celtic Knot, and-" but paused when she didn't recognise the other well-armoured woman.

Beside her, Penelope heard her sister inform the steward, "Matriarch Lydia of the Household of the Scylla." Lydia had wasted no time stripping her older sister and matriarch of the armour she wore, and had donned it almost immediately. She had been the heiress to the household only yesterday, but became the Matriarch with a single blow from her shield. The steward repeated the title to the Queen's audience.

The tributes suspended in leather-lined chains along columns whispered amongst themselves. One of them had been Penelope's once, though she wouldn't be able to recognise who even if she hadn't been hooded. One of them was also a spy for the Celt. No doubt she shared a knowing smile with her matriarch as the wrongly accused was dragged before the throne.

The soldiers holding her by the arms came to a sudden halt and dropped Penelope into the thick furs on the floor. The Celt was quick to announce her victory. "Your Grace," she said, "I have captured the traitor as You commanded, and brought her to You bound, gagged and stripped."

After a pause, the Queen's words were like daggers. "I'm disappointed in you, Penelope." If only She knew that the real traitors were in the room. "I see your heiress has already seized on her rights as the new Matriarch. How opportunistic. I will pray to the goddesses that she does not fail Me as you have."

"I promise to cleanse the stain from my household, Your Grace. My sister has left us scarred and embarrassed. Fortunately, Titania has offered to take me under her wing to teach me all that my traitor sister could not."

Was this the plan all along? You betray me to a rival household just so you can don my armour and become the Matriarch in my place. I would have given you anything, little sister. But you took it all instead. And now you have your head nuzzled between the Celt's thighs and she owns you like the fool you are. Penelope mmphed pitifully as a tear soaked through the fibres of the hood.

"I am glad I offered the generalship to you, Titania," said the Queen. "Only the goddesses know what treacherous deeds Penelope might have accomplished with the entire army supporting her. Congratulations... General Titania." And the throne room was filled with a cheer that sent a cold shiver down Penelope's spine. Gagged and hooded as she was, there was no way to warn them that the army was now controlled by the most dangerous woman in Greece. "Just for the formalities: Captain Penelope, I hereby pronounce you a traitor. Your lands, slaves, and titles are now the property of the realm." Her Grace then formally named Lydia the new matriarch and bestowed on her all that She had taken from Penelope. And as easily as a few words, Penelope became a slave for the Queen's harem.

The Celt requested of the Queen that She reconsider that decision. "Perhaps it is best, Your Grace, that the traitor not remain in the court. A crime such as hers is too evil for her to still live in a realm as beautiful as Yours and a palace as noble as this. I would advise You, as General, that the traitor be sentenced to exile."

"Mmmph!" Exile?

The Queen considered the proposal. "While it is true that her crime is great, I would much prefer her to remain in the city where I can keep her in chains under My watch and between My legs. I don't own any slaves with cherry-red hair."

"Your Grace," the Celt's tone was condescending, yet nobody else seemed to hear it, "I can supply You with cherry-haired slaves beyond counting if it is what You wish, from distant and exotic lands where the girls are trained from birth to be as flexible-tongued as is humanly possible."

Around the throne room, the Queen's audience of guards, politicians, stewards and tributes all sighed in unison, all sharing the same erotic fantasy. The Queen giggled at the offer of a team of lingual acrobats dancing around Her body, and agreed. "I shall take your slaves, General. But what do you propose I do with the traitor?"

Through the hood, Penelope could hear the Celt's arrogant giggle. "I shall make the arrangements, Your Grace."

Time had lost all meaning. Sunlight did not penetrate through the heights of dirt and stone into the palace dungeons. Penelope sometimes dreamt about standing in the sun, and the feeling as the warmth kissed her skin. She was free too, in her dreams. There were no chains there, just endless fields of liberty. She could release her frustrations at any time when she managed to get to sleep. She could just slide a finger or two down between her thighs and rub until her legs trembled and she collapsed into the flowers and grass. But reality was bitter, dimly lit, cold and hard, with temptation nibbling away at her, and release just beyond her reach.

The chains that confined Penelope kept her left arm and leg attached to one side of the cell, and her right arm and leg attached to the other, with a wall at her back so she sat upright, and a torturous knob in the stone floor between her thighs. She could feel it there if she stretched herself, but the chains stopped her from enclosing herself around it. It was a cruel and effective way to torture a traitor, to keep them on the edge of release, made worse by the fact that Penelope was innocent.

It was meant to be her glorious victory - surrounded by the Celt's soldiers, with only herself and her younger sister to save the realm. But Lydia had other ideas. Had she planned that for a long time, Penelope wondered, or did she simply seize the opportunity? They were to sing songs about her, the bards and storytellers. All about how she beat the odds and exposed her rival as the spy and the traitor behind the failed attack on the Trojans. But that wasn't to be. Now they would sing different songs about how the Celt saved the realm and threw the Matriarch of the Household of the Scylla into slavery. She could almost hear the tune in her head and wondered how the lyrics went. They would probably be sung in a different tongue before too long.

The Celt had come to see her in the dungeons a few days ago, carrying a torch that had burned Penelope's eyes in the darkness. Or was it only yesterday? She had wanted to gloat. Penelope shifted in her chains as she remembered how that had gone, the knob in the stone brushing temptingly against her skin. "You're my slave now, Penelope. My property," she'd said. Penelope cursed her new mistress and swore to take revenge. The Celt had laughed, as she often did, blonde hair and iron-trimmed and bronze armour sparkling in the torchlight. "I have been cursed more times than I can remember, and yet here I stand, blessed by the goddesses with wealth and power. Nearly every captive I've ever taken has sworn revenge and promised to return to the lands from whence I stole them, but to this day I have not suffered a single slave to ever so much as lift a finger against me or my household." Penelope promised to be the first. "I've enjoyed our little game, Penelope, but I have an army to command and plots to scheme. Enjoy your new life. It's all you have." And she was gone.

Her greatest rival was her only visitor.

The wardens attended her every now and then. They would feed her stale milk and bread as hard as rock, but it was something. They cleaned her with the same milk, all from the same pale. The rag they used would squish against her naked skin and make her shiver in the cold. She once had the candour to ask if the rag was clean, so they rammed it into her mouth so she could find out. It wasn't clean. It oozed a bad taste across her tongue and down her throat. After that, she never spoke to them again and they never spoke to her at all. Sometimes the wardens were feeling particularly frisky and shoved the bread down Penelope's throat too, then slid it back out again. It would make her wonder how Logical Phallusy was being treated back at her former estate, and if Lydia was enjoying her phallic slave as much as Penelope had. Was she permitting the handmaidens and sisters-in-arms to take turns? When they weren't forcing food down her throat, they were forcing her head between their legs. She could do nothing to stop them as they pressed her face deeper and deeper, chained as she was. It only made her angrier and hornier. And the knob in the stone just sat there, mocking her.

She took to talking to herself, if only to hear the sound of someone's voice. If she yelled loud enough, the echo would carry it far across the dungeons and all the way back to her and it sometimes sounded like another woman. She liked to imagine what this other woman's name was, what she looked like, what she might have done to be thrown down there in the dungeons, and if she was innocent of her crime too. If she yelled just the right way, it almost sounded like the other woman had managed to catch the knob between her legs. Penelope envied her; jealous of her own imagination.

Over the first few days, if it had been that long, she prayed to the goddesses for mercy. She later realised how foolish that was. The goddesses are mistresses to the gods and hence have no mercy. They keep the gods locked tight in unbreakable chains in the heavens. Hera was so cruel that she kept Zeus bound in thunderbolts which zapped him painfully every time he thought about another woman, mortal or divine. Every time the sky grew dark and the rain began to fall, you could hear his punishment.

She didn't know how long she'd been waiting in the dungeons, how long she'd suffered the torturous knob between her legs, or the cold or the dark or the food or the baths or the rape or the silence, when a pair of women appeared before her. One was a warden holding a bright torch. The other was a soldier wearing boiled leather armour. Penelope's eyes tried to adjust to the light to find the sigil on the bronze rivets of the woman's skirt, but it wasn't necessary. She was blonde. Anyone native to Greece isn't blonde. She was one of the Celt's soldiers.

She introduced herself as Serena, a slaver from the Household of the Celtic Knot, and "this slave's new owner". She pulled the coils of leather rope from her belt while the warden unlocked Penelope from her chains. Movement felt strange after so long, and the first thing Penelope did was dive her hand between her legs to scratch the itch she'd had for so long. It felt fantastic. Her joy was short-lived, however, when the warden forced her arms into the small of her back and Serena began to bind her in the fashion of her household - intricate knotwork using every anchor point possible, winding and weaving through and over coils to strictly bind their captives. Penelope was too weak to resist, her legs trembling from disuse, and she was snugly bound in no time. The warden gave her a final smack on her arse as what must have been some perverse way of saying goodbye, and then Serena dragged her by the nook of the arm through the dungeon.

It was night outside, and very quiet. Penelope had hoped to be greeted by the warm sun she'd missed so much, but at least it wasn't too cold, and the dry dirt between her toes was a welcome change from the damp stones. She got a better look at her slaver in the starlight and saw that she was likely a younger sibling of the Celt. Serena had the same blonde hair, the same natural beauty, and even the short skirt to tempt her enemies and show them all how brave she was. But she was probably only nineteen, and her stride hadn't quite grown into the arrogance that was common in her household, though her endowments were more than favoured by the goddesses with a pert pair of buttocks and a chest that seemed to resemble the fertility of a Spartan princess.

"Where are we going?" asked Penelope. It was good to be able to speak again.

"Slaves shouldn't ask questions," Serena replied, and promptly gagged Penelope by tying a soft linen rag between her lips. At least it was clean.

Serena led her slave to the palace courtyard where waiting for them was a horse-drawn cart with two steeds, four wheels and a large cage of a wooden frame. It was about two heights in length from front to back, and about a height in width from side to side, but only half a height tall. Serena opened the gate of the cage and helped lift Penelope into a sitting position with her back to one of the wooden posts where she tied more Celtic knots around her slave's waist to keep her still. She then retied Penelope's arms over her head to the top rung in the cage, bound crossed at the wrists, and tethered each of her legs apart to rings imbedded in the boards below.

The slaver closed the gate and tied it shut, then jumped up into the saddle of one of the horses. She cracked her whip and the cart began to roll forward. Penelope tested her bonds with no success. The Celt's younger sister inherited the family looks and tying skills, at least.

Penelope looked up at the palace - a mixture of clay brick and granite towers that let the moonlight bounce through even the darkest of whorehouses and slave markets. She had arrived back in the city only days earlier, a captain of her ship, a matriarch of an influential household, and a general in her monarch's eye. But she would leave the city as nothing but a slave.

Continued in Chapter 7