The Lost Prince--A Ponygirl Epic

CHAPTER FOUR—CHANGE OF LIFE

By the time he was drying off the wind had picked up outside and was whistling loudly through the cracks in the stable walls. He found a clean loincloth and tied it around his waist as he walked to a window and peered out. Even through glass ripply with age the coming sandstorm was easy to spot. Ten minutes out, maybe, coming from the west as they always did.

There wasn't a clean robe inside the stable for him to wear, so he entered the living quarters wearing just the loincloth. The lingering smell of food got his stomach rumbling, but their visitor had already finished eating. When he came through the door she was sitting at the small table while Orr cleaned and put away her dirty dishes. It looked like they'd been having an intense discussion, but all talking between them ended as Daka entered the room. Orr looked at him with a strange expression on his face that Daka couldn't read.

"Come here, boy," she told him. "All cleaned up?" She turned on the small bench seat and motioned him to stand before her. "Take that thing off," she directed, waving at the loincloth.

Unsure of what was to follow but well trained to obey commands Daka untied the clean loincloth and exposed himself to the noblewoman again. In the stable was one thing, with the dirt and the cleaning stall and water hose, but here, at the eating table, her beautiful face and swollen breasts just inches away from his organ . . . .

If she noticed it stiffening in her face, and there was no way she couldn't, she gave no sign. She grabbed his ownership tag and lifted it in her palm into the light so she could read it. His name, his owner's name, and the location of the water depot in case he ran away and had to be returned.

She kept her face completely neutral, but as the organ unfurled to full staff in front of her she realized she'd underestimated its size. Thick and long and uncut. Hooking a finger through the big ring she lifted the organ, and pulled back on the foreskin with her other hand, checking the crevices. She lifted his penis further, checking its underside, then had Daka turn around and pull his cheeks apart. Satisfied that his hygiene was acceptable, she directed him to cover himself up and find a fresh robe. Orr busied himself at the sink and pretended not to have noticed.

Daka hurriedly tied the loincloth around his waist, his cock an iron bar that tented the fabric, and hurried off to find a robe. When he returned the wind had increased to such force that even their visitor noticed the change.

"Dust storm," Daka said to her querying look. "Have to wait until it's over before moving on again, milady."

She frowned and moved to the window. The front of the storm enveloped the depot house a few seconds later, and the sunlight coming in the window was cut to a quarter of what it had been. The sand was a hissing rattle against the window glass.

The woman stared out the window at the featureless brown swirls. "There's no way to travel in this? I was hoping on leaving soon."

"No milady. The wind's so fierce it'll make your skin raw in just a few minutes, and there's no way to tell direction. If you're ever out traveling and get stuck in one, best to stop right where you are, hunker down, and ride it out. Try to keep going and you'll lose the road and likely as not drive right off a cliff."

"How long will it last?" she asked, thinking of her plans.

"No way to tell," Orr said. "Ten minutes or two days, it's anybody's guess. But normally just an hour or two."

"And it's fifty-seven miles to Emerson."

"Yes milady, hilly the last twenty."

"Right." She did the mental calculations, then sighed. She wasn't going out in that , no matter how pressed for time she was. Either she'd make her rendezvous or she wouldn't.

"Looks like I'm here for a while," she sighed. Orr finished the dishes and stepped out from behind the counter, clasping his hands in front of him, ever the helpful depotmaster. Sitting at the table, her entire right leg and part of a buttock were revealed to him through the slit in the closerobe. She seemed unmindful of it. The woman's eyes roamed the shelves covering nearly one whole wall of the room. "Is that a chess set?"

"Yes milady."

"Do you play?"

"Yes milady," Orr replied. "Would you like me to set it up?" She nodded and he grabbed the small wooden box. He emptied the pieces onto the scratched worn wood, then turned the box over and set it down on the table. Chessboard squares were inlaid into its surface and he began setting the pieces up.

"Can you play chess?" she asked Daka.

"Yes ma'am, but I'm not nearly as good as he is."

She turned back to Orr. "Are you good?"

"This far into the Wash, it's rare that I even find someone to play against, much less anyone with formal schooling, and—"

She cut off his attempts to convince her he was a dunce. She'd seen the light in his eyes.

"Let me say this," she told him, with a steady gaze. "I'll be much more upset it I find out you've thrown the game than if I am honestly defeated."

Orr pursed his lips and nodded, lining the pawns up.

The woman's eyes lifted to the hundreds of books on the shelf, noting classics, science textbooks, a wide range of subject matter. She stood and peered at them more closely.

"Have you read any of these books?" she asked Daka as she sat back down at the table. Orr took his place opposite her and studied the board.

"Yes milady."

Well, at least he can read , she thought. "Which ones?"

"All of them, milady."

Her eyes jerked up in surprise and met Orr's steady gaze. After a few seconds she gave a nod of her head, and then the game began.

There were no chores left to be done inside the building, and besides, he knew bustling around would only annoy Orr (who was bent over the chessboard), so Daka grabbed a book and sat in the corner. The tome was one of his favorites, an old thick volume of fantastic fables he never tired of.

For a long time the only sounds from inside the depot were the click of chess pieces and the rasp of turning pages. The wind howled and whirled mightily around them, sand clicking against the windows like hail. Daka checked on the ponies once, only to find they'd fallen asleep in their feed bags standing up. He unhooked the bags so they could breathe properly. Neither so much as twitched.

Orr won the first game handily, boxing in her king with a deft series of seemingly random advances. The lady frowned, but seemed more unhappy with her own performance than the end result. The second game was more closely fought, but in the end she lost again.

"Maybe I should be playing you," she told Daka as Orr reset the board for a third game. She noticed the old man glancing at her chest from time to time and briefly considered resting her silk-clad bosom on the table before the board to distract him from his game. Then she grew disgusted with herself for even thinking such a thing. And her being noble born, what would her clanmates say?

As they neared the finish of the third game, another closely fought battle, each player with only a few pieces left on the board, Daka set down his book and walked to the window. Outside the wind seemed strong as ever, the swirling sand making it impossible for him to see beyond the far side of the road. The dust storm was nearly two hours old.

"Halfway over," Daka said to no one in particular, still staring out the window.

"What?" Distracted, the woman looked up from the board where her long-battling queen was running out of options.

"The dust storm's halfway over, milady," he repeated.

"Now how do you know that? I thought you said there was no way to tell how long it would last."

"There isn't, but somehow he always knows when it's half over," Orr told her. "I think it has something to do with the storm perhaps having an 'eye', with reduced atmospheric pressure that he senses as it passes through. Checkmate, milady."

A very unladylike torrent of profanity spilled past her full lips as she shook her head. She knocked over her king after a glance at the board told her she had lost yet again.

"Pardon me," she said. "I have better manners, but sometimes I forget myself. Reduced atmospheric pressure, you say?" She glanced over at Daka. "Interesting."

"Another game?" Orr said carefully.

"I think not. I think we've established that I'm not much of an opponent for you." She stood up and moved away from the table.

"Do you have somewhere I can get some rest?" she asked. "I'll be traveling through the night, so if I've got another two hours until the storm breaks I want to catch some sleep."

"Yes milady. There's a bed in that room there with a serviceable mattress."

"Boy," she told Daka, "let my girls sleep as long as possible, but I want them in harness by the time the wind's died down enough for us to move."

"Yes milady."

Daka stepped into the dark bedroom and let his eyes adjust to the light. When he could see well enough not to trip over anything he moved to the side of the bed.

"Milady?" he whispered at the form on the mattress. "Milady? The storm's—" He reached a hand out to touch her shoulder, and yelped as the bed exploded in a rustle of flying fabric and a gleaming flash. Daka stood frozen, heart hammering wildly, as he felt the blade against his neck. There was a pause, then with a huff she let go of the front of his robe.

"Has the storm passed?" she asked, sliding the blade back into a boot. She was barely more than a silhouette in the dim room.

Daka swallowed. "In just a few minutes, milady. Your mounts are in the leathyrs, ready to be hooked to the carriage."

"Good. You'll find some skins in the carriage. Fill them up with water and check the wheels for cracks."

"Yes milady," he said, scurrying off. He'd already checked the wheels when he'd wiped down the carriage. As he hunted for the skins on the floor of the deep carriage he touched his fingers to the spot on his neck where he'd felt the prick of the blade. They came away speckled with blood, already thickening.

The ponies were huffing and stamping their legs, eager to be off. Their bit-reins were reattached and loosely tied to one of the center stable beams. In their hoofboots the two mares were again taller than he, although not by much. Daka looked out the window and saw the wind had died down to infrequent gusts, although the horizon was still a hazy brown from all the airborne particles.

With a clank Daka set a pail on the concrete at High's feet. She squatted over it briefly, releasing only a small splash of urine that echoed loudly off the metal. She moved over to let Low do the same. Daka rolled open the stable doors and kicked at the ridge of windblown sand that had accumulated against them. After emptying the bucket out around the corner he pulled the carriage out, then led the ponies out by the reins and hooked them to the T-bar. He double-checked all their lacings and buckles, making sure their leathyrs were tight so they wouldn't chafe, then made final adjustments to their blinders and bits. The mares stared blankly ahead through it all, hardly glancing at him. He'd heard rumors that high-gen ponies were in fact dumber than the stringy mares he usually saw, that the intelligence was being deliberately bred out of them, but until now he'd never given those stories much credence. These two just stared off into the distance most of the time, hardly giving him a glance even when he'd been washing them. Perhaps it wasn't a lack of intelligence with High and Low, maybe it was just excellent training.

He led the team around to the front of the depot building, the mares staying in step automatically. He described a big circle with the ponies and carriage to get them pointed in the right direction on the road, then ran the reins back and set them in the carriage.

The front door opened and their mysterious visitor emerged. Her hair was freshly brushed, a new hint of color on her lips, and she raised the hood of her newly donned outer robe to protect her face from the sandy gusts. Orr stepped through the doorway behind her and watched Daka.

"Milady," Daka said. "Your carriage is ready."

The top half of her face was in shadow below the robe's hood. All he could see was her mouth with its full, sensuous lips and slightly pointed chin. The chin turned his way and her head cocked slightly.

"You're going with her, boy," Orr called out to him. Daka looked at the old man, the confusion plain on his face.

"She's bought you," Orr told him. "She's your Mistress now, do as she says."

Daka's mouth hung open. "But—" he began, looking from Orr to the woman and back to Orr.

Her mouth was still all he could see of her face, and now her lips were tightly pursed. "Get in the carriage," she told him sharply, then turned her head to look at the horizon to the west.

"But . . . I'm . . . ." He looked around wildly, at the two figures with no sympathy or compassion on their faces, at the depot building, the attached stable, and the garden beyond.

"Who'll tend the garden?" he pleaded desperately to Orr. "And work the stables? You're—"

"Get in the carriage, boy," Orr growled. "You're not too big now to be whipped."

"Get in before I lose patience," his new owner told him in a tone that said he would very much like that not to happen.

Numbly, Daka climbed into the carriage and sat on the front edge, not willing to retreat into the shadows of the carriage and its padded bench seat. He stared at nothing, his mind stalled with shock. He'd lived at the depot his whole life, perhaps once a year traveling to JoTown for supplies, and once traveling all the way to Emerson, but the depot and the Wash were all he knew, all he'd ever known.

The carriage shifted as the noblewoman, his new owner, his Mistress , climbed aboard. She prodded him with a boot, wanting him to take a seat on the bench. Daka looked at her, then turned and looked out at the man who, although his owner, had been the closest thing to a father he'd ever known. But Orr was gone, already back inside, door shut firmly behind him. Blinking, Daka moved to the bench seat and sat with a thud.

The woman sat down beside him. She picked the reins up and snapped them, and they moved away from the depot with a jolt as the ponies broke into a trot.

For an hour he said nothing, stared at nothing, as the carriage wended its way westward along the dirt road and the soft breeze pushed his hair back. His new Mistress was not without compassion, and knew what he must be feeling. She kept the reins and kept her eye on the uninteresting landscape passing by, ignoring the boy beside her. Finally, it was his background as a stablehand that brought Daka out of his reverie, got his eyes to focus. On the ponies.

This wasn't the first carriage or coach he'd ridden in, far from it. He was often called to drive a team down the road and back to get them warmed up and settled into their leathyrs. But he'd never handled a team that had been so trained to move as one, as these had, still running in step after twenty-nine miles. Daka stared at them, mesmerized.

They might as well have been machines. On and on they ran, mile after mile disappeared beneath their hoofboots, without sign of tiring. Even in the hot Wash sun it took an hour of running before they broke a sweat. They stayed in step perfectly, over uneven ground and through turns, like they were two halves of the same being. Their muscular legs were pistons, forward, back, forward, back, buttocks clenching and releasing as they ran seemingly without effort across the dusty plain. Their gait was quick, their form textbook, the clip-clop of their hooves so closely in sync Daka could shut his eyes and swear he heard only one pony.

"I see you're back among the living," his Mistress said. "Take the reins," she directed him, handing them to him. She leaned back against the bench seat.

"Just hold them slack, let them take the lead," she admonished him. "They are not second-generation garbage-wagon mounts."

"They're magnificent." Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop.

"Eleventh generation purebred stock. Their name is Lei."

"Which one?"

"Both of them. That's their name."

"Ohh . . . kay." He stared at the running figures six feet ahead of the carriage on the T-bar. Naturally slim-hipped – built to run – the corsets narrowed their waists enough to give them heart-shaped behinds. Two identical, perfect rumps, muscled cheeks clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing, as they ran ever westward. Daka had seen thousands of ponygirls in his life, had scrubbed down half of them, rubbed oil into their sore thighs, inserted and removed tailplugs from hundreds if not thousands of mounts, yet for all that, he could count on one hand the number of times he'd been aroused by a mare.

Daka hoped his robe concealed the erection that had appeared without warning, and tried not to look at the mounts in hopes his tumescence would fade. He ascribed it to his unusual situation; when limbering up a depot visitor's team he rode behind stringy, spiritless, usually mismatched mounts for ten or at most twenty minutes at a stretch. This day he'd been treated to an unrestricted view of two extraordinary specimens as they ran in perfect rhythm for hours on end, never seeming to tire, hardly sweating. He still couldn't hear their panting over the sound of the carriage on the gravel road.

Daka could feel the gaze of his new owner on him, but nervously kept his eyes on the western horizon. This road was far less familiar to him than the way to JoTown, and he dared not make an error.

"What do you remember of your life before the depot?" she asked him in her soft voice. He snuck a glance and saw she was leaning back into the corner of the cab, at ease and relaxed. The longer she stared at him with those intense eyes the more nervous he got.

"Nothing, milady," he said, talking to the reins in his hands.

"You don't remember how he came to buy you, or who your parents were?"

"No milady. The water depot is all I've ever known." There was a lump in his throat and he had to cough and look away. When he glanced at her again she was nodding.

"I am going to a meeting," she told him, abruptly changing the subject. "At an estate outside of Emerson. You are to remain with my team. They have a large stable there, and I want you to make yourself available to the Stablemaster. Do not speak unless spoken to, and follow all orders without question. I will hear of it if you misbehave, and have no doubts, punishment will be severe." The steel in her voice convinced him she wasn't bluffing, not that he'd ever suspected she was, or had planned on acting up.

"We could be there one day or three. You might see me while we're there, or you may not. It is of no concern to you. Just obey the Stablemaster and when it is time for us to go you'll be informed."

Go where? He wanted to ask, but knew it wasn't his place. When she wanted him to know she'd tell him.

"And never take your robe off in front of anyone other than ponies!" she stated sharply. "Unless I tell you, I want you to keep yourself robed around the others. If a Mistress enters the stables while you're washing a pony, I don't care if you're drenched with water, put your robe on."

"Yes milady," Daka said automatically, not understanding.

"In front of the Stablemaster is acceptable, but no others," she said firmly. "Am I clear?"

"Yes milady." He paused a few seconds. "Milady? Shouldn't you be removing my old owner's tag?"

In the deep shadow of the carriage he though he saw her smile.

"They have a metalsmith at the estate," she purred. "Don't worry, we'll get you properly hooked up."