Submissionette 01: Slaves & Novices

It was still the early morning hour of the day of her first submission, but Mirabella Lucinda was already awake. She lay in her bed wrapped in her linens, watching the rising sunlight through drawn, heavy curtains. Soon, the birds would begin to chirp, followed by the foot traffic that always passed just below her bedroom window. It was a small bedroom, and moist—all cold stone and rough wood—but it was still palatial compared to what she had expected as quarters for a slave, and downright exquisite compared to what became of slaves in her own part of the world. And, regardless, if she performed well tonight, if she wasn't a complete "ass about it" (the words of her Matron, Olive) she would soon move into the rooms in the mysterious building right next to the King's stables, the mysterious domain of the Submissionettes.

Mirabella turned onto her side, pulled the covers over her head, and groaned. She knew she wasn't going to get any more sleep.

"Remember to have a proper night's rest," Olive had told her. "That's my only advice."

So much for that.

Matrons were retired Submissionettes—though Mirabella could hardly picture Olive frolicking in a bed with a fair-haired lord, let alone being lusted over to the point of obsession—who acted as mentors for the Novices. Each Novice had her own Matron, but each Matron had several Novices.

Speak of the devil:

The door to Mirabella's bedroom slammed open and a squat, bosomy woman with long, black hair strode in.

"Up, up, up, rise and powder your cheeks! They won't powder themselves."

Mirabella exhaled into her pillow.

Olive placed her stubby hands on her wide hips.

"Did you get a good night's rest?"

"Yes, Matron."

"Good. Now..."

* * * * *

The grey dress fit too tightly in all the wrong spots and Mirabella could hardly walk right in it. After making several dozen rounds around the dressing room, she collapsed into a wicker chair.

"Careful! Don't crumple it."

"I can't move in this, let alone walk like a person."

"You're not supposed to walk like a person. You're supposed to walk like a lady."

Mirabella angled her eyebrows.

"None of that. It's unbecoming. A lady must always be in control of her emotions and her body language. She must be calm, collected—"

"Prim and proper, gentle and bending, like the most delicate of trees in a warm summer wind on an island of chamomiles and daisies."

"Novice Mirabella Lucinda!"

Mirabella huffed. "I apologise, Matron. We don't have ladies where I come from."

"Or so you've told me, though I don't quite know if I believe you. Now stand and take another stroll around the room. I need you to appear relaxed."

Mirabella started.

"Slowly," Olive said, making the word sound its meaning, "with long, lazy movements and an emphasis on the hips. Chest forward, neck arched."

"I don't see the point. I'm not a serving girl."

"Right now you're slave. By tomorrow morning, you may be a Submissionette. But," her thin lips, pronouncing, twitched, "a Submissionette is also a type of serving girl. And, I will add, there is nothing wrong with being a serving girl."

Mirabella stuck out her arm, as if holding a plate full of soup bowls. "There."

"No, my dear girl. A Submissionette is both the server and what's being served. You are the vessel and what's in it. Hence, walk accordingly."

The material of the grey dress tightened and slackened, pulled and pushed, and sometimes pinched. It was like skin across Mirabella's backside and as fluffy as clouds on her shoulders. Across her bare breasts, it felt coarse, making her nipples tender. And despite there being a fair amount of the dress, it caused her an indescribable, irrational, feeling of being naked. In the dress, she was an obvious object of attention.

* * * * *

The procession began at the city gates.

There were twenty one Novices altogether and—Mirabella did a quick count—six Matrons. The Matrons were all dressed in black with white trim. Each Novice wore a dress of the same uncomfortable cut but of a different colour. Mirabella's was grey, but the others were not so restrained. Still, rather than feel jealous of the canary yellow and the violent purple, Mirabella instead took solace in the hope that hers might be the least visible colour of all in the murky, urban twilight. Not that she imagined escaping. Escape was impossible and the punishment was far worse than submission. She simply didn't enjoy being the centre of attention. She preferred to be the looker than the looked-at, the predator rather than the prey. It was one of the first lessons they taught the children in her own lands: vision is power.

The bells rang, followed by the banging of drums and the blast of a single trumpet.

When the trumpet finished, they were off.

They walked in two rows, one composed of ten female bodies and the other of eleven, followed by the six Matrons walking solemnly side-by-side, and with a small honorary Kingsguard bringing up the rear. The guards were a formality. None of the girls would attempt an escape, and no one in the spectating public would lay a hand on any of the girls. But the knights' polished breastplates shone beautifully and their broadswords reflected the flickering flames of the torches they carried, so who would be the one to suggest they stay home?

The Novices kept their heads down. They were forbidden from looking up, from meeting eyes with the faces of the citizens of the kingdom that had captured them—had defeated their men in open battle.

"Whore!" a woman shouted. "Nah good wenches, the lot of yuh!"

Only words were allowed.

Only humiliation.

More voices joined in. Some merely hooted and grunted in approval, while others slung insults of their own.

"I bet yuh got so much peckerwood in yuh cunnies yuh cunnies is stretched out looser than a Rabillian's tongue!"

"I'd put it in yer outhole faster than I'd put it in your dirty moutheses!"

Not all of the spectators were uneducated.

"I dare say, Edward," a masculine voice said, "but that girl in the burgundy dress, she does resemble an awful lot your sister Mathilde."

"Defend!"

The clang of swords. The crack of a fist against a jaw.

Outbursts of cheers and laughter.

"You sluts!"

Despite the violence and the cursing—or perhaps because of those very elements—the atmosphere was festive. There were lute players and jugglers, and firecrackers and moonshine vendors. Mugs clanged against mugs and the smell of hops drifted between their marching rows, and throughout it all, even as she unconsciously counted her steps, counted the distance to the Submissionettes' quarters where her final test would be, Mirabella concentrated on walking forward and not looking up.

"The march of shame—or the amble of embarrassment as we old girls like to call it," Olive had told her with a chuckle and not without a sense of nostalgia, "may be the last day of the month of humiliation, but it's also the beginning of your obedience. If you can't keep your head down walking the roads, you sure as heathens won't be able to keep your head down with an inebriated lord and his imagination on your back."

"Has anyone ever failed the march?" Mirabella had asked.

"Aye, there's usually one who fails."

Back in the present, surrounded by a volley of new insults and the increasing pressure of surrounding, invisible chaos, still staring obediently at her own shoes, Mirabella heard sobbing.

It was coming from the girl in a sky blue dress to her left. Her sobs were gentle but rhythmic, and the girl was mumbling something under breath, something that sounded like, "No, please, stop, no, please, I'm not, I wouldn't, no..."

"You'd take a donkey in the arse!"

"I wouldn't, no, please..."

According to Mirabella's count, there were only some five hundred steps to go. It wasn't a lot—one hundred times five steps, and five steps were nothing, and one hundred times nothing was nothing—but the crowds were packed now, she could feel their presence, their heat, their wrath, half good-natured and half genuine, and she didn't begrudge them the former for the Submissionettes did live in better conditions than most of the commoners in the city.

A voice cut in: "Such a hoity-toity ass, dressed like thinkin' she is better than us when it's us she's serving, born in some savage land beyond the black desert, where they still do the worship, and now she is processing through our own city in front of our own eyes and the eyes of our future generations."

And someone spat.

And the spit landed on the cheek of the girl in the sky blue dress.

Or so Mirabella imagined. She'd bit her teeth and kept her head as down as a cartographer's south.

The girl in the blue dress raised her voice. "I'm not, I'm not. I am not better. I am not worse. I can't take it anymore. I just," and the rest of her sentence turned into babbling, which was just as suddenly yanked out of the marching row, and the crowd erupted, and the member of the Kingsguard who had done the deed returned to his customary place behind the matrons, having performed his only work of the evening.

Mirabella swallowed hard.

She heard the blue dress torn to shreds and the girl's' first shrieks.

Thirty steps to go.

"Ain't so special now is we!"

"I'm not—"

One who failed the walk of shame was stripped immediately of her Novice status. She became an ordinary slave. To hit—or worse—a Submissionette, even one in training, was a grave offense and punishable by public flogging, imprisonment and even castration. To do anything to a slave was permissible, with any compensation being in money and only to the slave's owner. However, it took time to get an owner...

* * * * *

The doors of the Submissionettes' quarters opened.

The ground underfoot turned from cobblestones to pristine white flatstones and both rows of Novices, now neatly symmetrical with ten girls each, entered the building.

The Matrons followed.

The Kingsguard did not. Only lords, or nobler, were permitted inside.

The Kingsguard shut the doors, silencing the chaos still raging outside, and the echoing quiet of the vast interior almost made Mirabella's head explode.

"Novices!" a deep female voice boomed. "At attention. Heads up."

Mirabella obeyed.

Her neck thanked her for it so very much.

As for the room, she identified it immediately. She hadn't see it before, of course, but she'd read about it and had been told about it many times by Olive. The Hall of Submission. It was as grand, golden, and vast as she'd imagined. Encircled by a second floor balcony, it was otherwise empty. There was no furniture and there were no decorations apart from the beautiful architecture. It all served some great goal, Mirabella was sure.

Rather than trying to figure it out, however, she tried to find Olive—to at least sneak a quick, good luck smile—but the Matrons were gone, having been ushered through the Hall and further on.

The only person in the room other than the twenty trembling Novices was Bercamille Lisbon, known otherwise as Headmistress Harrow.

She was tall and thin and dressed in a long, one-piece robe of what appeared to be shortly-cropped blood red fur that curved into a high collar at one end and flowed out perfectly onto the floor at the other. The entire outfit was held tightly in place by a thick black leather belt. The Headmistress' boots, as far as Mirabella could tell, were of the same black material, right down to the subtle lustre.

"Novices, you stand this evening in the great Hall of Submission. You have entered it as slaves, but you may leave as Submissionettes."

Mirabella felt the discomfort of her dress again. Here, in the Hall, its grey was no longer as hidden as it had been in the streets. Here, canary yellow and violent purple were the better camouflage.

"All of your preparations," Headmistress Harrow continued, "have culminated on this, the most important night of your young lives. Your preparations, I am certain, have been adequate, but your fates are ultimately in your own hands. Consider this as you also consider the great mercy and privilege being bestowed upon you, foreigners all, by the King himself, the glorious, and may he live eternally, Roybert the Third."

Headmistress Harrow bowed her head and so did the Novices.

When the moment of adoration was over, the Headmistress assumed her normal, impeccable posture and said, "But, before each of you enters her own room to be submitted by her own lord, there is one final lesson you must be taught."

Mirabella's breath caught in her throat. A final lesson? Olive had not said a word about this. Was it a new development? Perhaps it was meant to be unexpected. For a second, Mirabella shuddered, thinking that everything she'd been told had perhaps been an elaborate lie devised by someone with a peculiar sense of torture, before the following words put her mind at ease:

"This lesson is not something you must do, Novices. It is something you must see. The lesson is one of humility. The enemy is pride."

Somewhere, there was clicking of shoes, and then a sneeze.

Three men walked down the length of the Hall of Submission, toward Headmistress Harrow, whose demeanor remained unchanged. One man was clean, refined in his manners and well-dressed. His hair was cut short and his skin was clear. The other two men—the men flanking him, staring at both the Headmistress and the Novices, their tongues wagging, and their cotton trousers barely containing their erections—were his direct opposites: dirty, coarse, primitive.

All three men stopped several paces from the Headmistress, who turned to face them and bowed. "Lord Caternine, it is my great pleasure."

"Thank you, Headmistress."

Lord Caternine was holding the men by their shoulders.

The Headmistress turned back to face the Novices. "Novices, this is the honourable Lord Caternine. Greet him as you have been taught."

"Good evening, Lord Caternine," Mirabella and the other Novices said in at least somewhat of a chorus.

The dirty men looked as ready to leap forward as rabid dogs.

"And these two men with Lord Caternine are beggars. They were apprehended two nights ago while asking for alms in an area restricted by law. They are lowborn and they are worthless, not even able to provide for themselves or their families without resorting to the solicitation of pity from men and women whose means may be just as meagre as theirs, yet who work harder and possess a finer moral code."

The men either didn't understand the Headmistress' words, or didn't care. Although Lord Caternine dug his fingers deeper into their shoulders, Mirabella got the distinct impression that it wasn't simply the fear of bruising that kept the men obedient.

"Yet pride is a vice. We must be humble. To obey, we must set aside our own value of ourselves and realise that what we do may have greater value for our lords. A lord's pleasure, Novices, is immeasurably valuable."

"Headmistress," Lord Caternine said suddenly—and stiffly, as if reading from a script, "it would give me great pleasure to see you submit to these men and to let them do to you all that I may do to you, for you are mine and you belong to me, and I authorise these men to exercise these of my rights by acting as my agents."

"Yes, Lord Caternine." She was facing him again. "I do as you command."

Headmistress Harrow let her arms drop to the sides of her body.

Lord Caternine let loose the beggars.

They lunged like hungry, uncoordinated wolves at a composed and regal lamb, whose calmness was hardly reflected in the gaze of Mirabella and the other Novices, watching through clenched eyes as the Headmistress' red fur robe fell to floor just seconds before the beggars' greedy hands fell upon her exposed, pale flesh, upon which their desperate clawing left tender red marks without leaving any impression upon her face, which was focused on Lord Caternine.

"Do you want it?" she asked. Her voice was strained. The beggars were forcing her to the floor.

"Yes."

Mirabella glanced at the Novice to her right. She was biting her lower lip. The Novice to her left was squeezing the material of her dress at her hips, unconsciously probably. Mirabella herself was rubbing her fingers against her thumbs. She stopped as soon as she realized. It was an old, nervous habit. If the Headmistress could submit so willingly to these—Mirabella found no word more suitable than beasts—then surely she could watch the submission without rubbing her thumbs.

The corner of Lord Caternine's mouth twitched.

His pupils shook.

One of the beggars had pulled his soiled pants to his knees and was waddling, his cock hard, around the Headmistress' kneeling body.

The Novices were breathing in unintentional unison: long, deeply held breaths followed by loud exhalations.

The other beggar had grabbed the Headmistress' breasts and was squeezing them as if they were the first and greatest pair of breasts he'd ever squeezed.

"For you, my lo—" the Headmistress managed to say between her ragged breaths, before the beggar's hands escaped from her breasts and crawled into her mouth. His fingers must taste vile, Mirabella found herself thinking, but the Headmistress didn't even recoil.

The waddling beggar pushed the Headmistress' back, causing the other beggar's fingers to push into her throat. She gagged slightly, the beggar withdrew his fingers—watching the Headmistress' saliva run down his skin before shoving his fingers into his own mouth to enjoy the taste—and let her upper body fold forward until her cheek was on the floor and her ass raised high off the ground.

The beggar behind her slapped his hands onto her waist and waddled into a good fucking position.

The beggar in front lowered himself to floor, turned onto his side and slid his cheek along the floor until his face was inches away from the Headmistress' face, at which point he extended his long, thin tongue and inserted it between the Headmistress' lips. By some accounts, it could have been considered a kiss. For the beggar, no doubt, it was the richest pair of lips he'd ever kissed. By the way he sucked and lapped up the insides of the Headmistress' mouth, while his body writhed in pleasure on the floor and his hand rubbed its knuckles against his crotch, it was obvious he'd taken a liking to the taste of upper class spit.

The Novice beside Mirabella with the clenched fists suddenly let go of the material and covered her face with her hands. She started to shake.

"Novices," Headmistress Harrow managed to say after the kissing beggar had had his fill, "heads up, hands down." Even in this situation and said in this, such a quivering voice, she sounded commanding and in control.

But the Novice refused to lower her hands.

The beggar with his fingers all over the Headmistress' hips slapped them again, and then crawled onto the Headmistress' body like a small dog. He started fucking with jerky, powerful thrusts.

The motion caused the Headmistress to lose what remained of her awkward balance and she shot out her arms to keep it.

This startled the kisser, who leapt backward, eliciting a gasp from the closest Novices.

But the beggar didn't so much as look in their direction. Instead, he undid his rope belt, stepped out of his baggy pants and, straining the surprising musculature of his legs, tore off his crumpled shirt and reengaged with the sex.

The Novice started sobbing into her hands. Her body trembled.

Perhaps she was remembering a memory. Perhaps the stress of the entire Novitiate had finally caught up with her. Perhaps she couldn't handle that what was happening to the Headmistress could—and would—also happen to her, and she knew she wouldn't be able to handle it nearly as well. Mirabella couldn't decide, but she did at least keep her own body under control. Her head was up and her hands down.