One sunny day in late autumn, the heralds of yet another suitor for his hand presented themselves in court. Arrived was a Prince of Byzantium representing the power of Rome resurgent in the East. Accompanying him was his entourage of twenty knights and titled relations of the Emperor, senior officers of the famed Varangian Guard. The king greeted them with great favor, for who could resist the power of Rome renascent? Two days later, the niece of the Emperor of Byzantium arrived in great state and fanfare with an escort befitting her importance, beauty and manner.
Dressed in the watered silks of Palermo, the supple leather of Ephesus and the glossy satins of Byzantium itself, she was a bride befitting an Emperor, a representative of Imperial power and arrogance. Thirty years sat lightly on her shoulders together with her long flowing blonde hair. She had a fierce eastern look that so beguiled the king that he immediately decided that his search for a wife had ended.
Her icy manner did not disturb him, the jeweled whip that she carried in her lace gloved hand was clearly an affectation and the high riding boots that she wore lent her an air of authority that he could not deny.
The wedding was one of state. Magnificent and munificent, it lasted for three days of gaiety and dance that ended as the king bore his bride to the marriage bed with great hopes in his heart. It was there, in that field of marital combat that the king discovered that his new queen was a woman who knew not only of the ways of love to beguile him, she rode him like a knight rides a charger. She drained him like a milkmaid squeezes the last drop from the goats and cows and soon she had him devoted under the spell of her stringent and inflexible love.
This was because she was a woman who recognized what she wanted, a woman accustomed to bending men to her will, a woman that knew that the whip and a terse order had its place in the wide field of a king's bed as much as it had on the battlefield where men die screaming as the steel finds their heart. A woman whose object was authority pure, control unabated by law, a woman who understood only her superiority.
So the days passed like leaves falling from the trees. They fluttered unnoticed until a winter of corrupted love filled the king's heart. It was not the love that he had had for his former queen. That had been a pure and unsullied thing that was filled with moments of romance and tenderness. This love was the love of obsession, the feeding of the crows and the grating noise of battle. But, it had its attractions for the king, as he bent gradually under the strong hand of his lordly wife. While she wielded the whip in their bed and rode him to culmination with her boots on; while she chained him to the four-poster that had witnessed the conception of his fair daughter, he thrust into her sumptuous body. All the while, the spurs on her boots gouged his thighs as he screamed with his infatuated passion.
While the king lay under the spell of his Greek bride, as he fell into her potent spell of violent love, the court missed its king. As he lay sleeping with exhaustion from exhilarating floggings that his wife had administered, she ruled his court with a rod of iron. Gone were the balanced judgments of the concerned king, gone were the ceremonials that were inclusive of all citizens and gone was the ear of the king who always had had time to attend to all petitioners.
The new queen, dressed in black leather and with her jeweled whip in her hand administered justice. She was a dark eminence that created favorites in the court and promoted those who were grasping and avaricious. No peasant was ever accorded justice, this was subsumed to the lords of the land who could now administer the law as they wished. Whim and caprice ruled as the queen expanded her power and ensured that no whisper of her comportment reached the ear of the king. Torture chambers that had been filled with the dust of unuse and the spider webs of vacancy became inhabited by the servants of corrupt justice.
The queen took an extraordinary interest in the methods used to extract confessions and so added refinements that she felt increased the loquacity of those who would not betray their friends and family. She spent long hours amusing herself with the persuasions of the rack, the swelling pear and the iron maiden as she enjoyed her nights making sure that her enemies suffered as she decided they should.
So, you may ask, what was the king doing in this troubled time of his kingdom? Why did he not rise from his bed and dispense the justice that he was famed for, far and wide? How was it that this Byzantine Queen, his wife, could govern with such a free hand? The answer lay in the nature of the spell that she had woven about his psyche. It was the drugs that she administered and the games that she played in his bed. Games of dissolute loving that were performed when he was fit to perform, centering on her own waxing pleasures in pain and power. She laid the whip on the royal flesh with a will. Soon it was the only way that the king could experience a climactic pleasure from her body. She addicted him not just to the pleasures of pain and degenerate flesh. She introduced philters and potions into his food and drink, so that he lay in a haze of confusion where the only person that he could bear to see was his naïve daughter and his immoral wife.
Soon the Queen took a lover. A base man who had lost his titles in years gone by for his maleficent treatment of his serfs. He was a man for whom the paths of pleasure and agony ran parallel and in close proximity. She did not treat this squalid lord as she did the king and pursue him through the silk sheets with a whip in her hand, but instead she and her lover cavorted in the presence of the screams of their victims as they were racked with the pain of the torturers glowing irons. A bed they installed in the deepest dry dungeon of the castle, a bed where the rhythm of their love-making chimed with the moans of those that labored on the racks.
Called from the dank depths of the bottle cells and the iron barred holding pens, their victims were brought to suffer in the bed while the Queen and her new consort played their games of sexual passion and anguish. Fluids spurted into the open mouths of those victims, their parts were used for the delight of the Queen and the female victims were penetrated with gross indignity by her vicious devotee. The whip that adorned the king's cringing and needy flesh was used to add piquant highlights to the base servitude, the cancerous perversity that the Queen always required to come to the heights of gratification that she craved. Finally those victims were branded with the mark of slavery and sold to those others that need such victims to feed their sexual appetites.
In the midst of this descent of the court into a web of fearful glances, toadying praise, blackmailed servitude and sexual horror was the roya princess. She was offspring of the former Queen and found herself ever more estranged from her beloved subjects as well as the king, her father. She tried to speak to him, to wake him from his malaise, but the Queen took delight in showing her how powerless her father had become. A moaning shadow of his former proud self. A man who craved the whip, who longed to suck the teats and sex of the Queen who had dissolved his former self. A man who in his delirium believed that his daughter was just another whore presented to him by his iniquitous queen.
One day the princess was stopped in the shadow of the pillars in the royal gardens and shown a piece of paper that had already been presented to the king to sign and confirm. It was a parchment roll that explained that the princess had taken a lover. It was written that he was a gross criminal who murdered the victims of his rapes with the princess' exultant assent. This warrant was but a copy, the original had already been signed. The princess was soon to be constrained and imprisoned. A second paper was filled with the plans that the Queen had for her rival in the court. A list of imagined, but to be realized, tortures, rapes and assaults that would be inflicted on her until at last she was ready to be blinded and handed as amusement to the Queen for her vicious erotic pleasures in the vast bed of agony where so many had already met their doom.
