The Château

"To master others is power. To master oneself is strength." (Laozi,

The Book of the Way

)

It is easy and natural for us women of the Chaînerie to feel a good deal of pride in our obedience and humility, in our unconditional devotion to those men, our Masters. As I have learned and relearned many times, being a slave, the property of men, to be owned willingly and joyfully, is not for those weak of body or of spirit. It takes strength and courage to submit yourself so completely to the authority of others. Being powerless, you must be strong to endure the pain and the shame, the torment and torture, the degradation and disgrace, which are the everyday condition of your servitude. You must be self-reliant, even self-centred, because, in the end, all you really have (all anyone has) is your perception of yourself, the qualities you discover within -- what you are, what you are not, what you can be, what you need to be.

Indeed, the slave must be stronger than her Master. Yet for the men of the house, the lesson is not so different. It takes many of the same qualities to command obedience as to give it, for if it is simple enough to act the tyrant, it's a lot harder to be a true Master. While exercising his rights and indulging his whims, he must have full control of his passions. He must know his slave's limitations as well as he understands his own. While demanding her submission, he must be sensitive to her limitations and her boundaries. In guiding and training and restraining her, he must discipline himself.

It is, obviously, easier for the Master than for his slave, and his learning curve is her hard path; but that is the privilege of manhood in the Château, and it is each woman's duty and joy to make it so.

Although all in the Château seek a personal realization in their respective and complementary roles, while there cannot be a "top" without a "bottom", and the master-slave relationship is in many ways a symbiotic one, it is by no means an equal partnership... nor for that matter a partnership at all. One sex has the power and the other cedes total control. For service and obedience may give fulfillment to the slave, but it is her Master who is being served and obeyed. It is the slave whose unconditional self-sacrifice, faith and trust seals the bond of ownership and obligation. She is willing to surrender and suffer for his pleasure, because her pleasure is focused solely, absolutely and unreservedly on his. Nevertheless, it is pleasure that she feels, as she derives hers from his.

So what matters is that your bondage and servitude should never be easy. It is not necessarily about passive acquiescence. The control you assert, as a slave, may only be over your own responses, both physical and emotional, and in your vulnerable position these can be manipulated; but in the end our reactions, as much as our actions, are what define who and what we are. And in that light, it is not through comfort and complacency that you challenge yourself, define and explore your limits and vulnerabilities, discern and assess your innermost desires, discover and draw upon your own resources, expose yourself to new experiences and open your mind to fresh insights. Your bonds become your liberation, your subjugation a gift (both given and received), your service a self-fulfilment and a fruition of all your hopes and dreams and fears. And it is in the most intense moments of pain and shame, which you do not choose and cannot escape, that you feel the greatest serenity, because you have met your demons head on and they have not conquered you.

This is what gives you a sense of pride.

Yet that feeling was the hardest thing to get used to after I entered the Château, something I had not fully experienced in Lydia's apartment. For your natural condition as one of the slaves is the unending humiliation. You feel it in your willing and abject submission to the Masters, whose sole qualification for having dominion over you is that they have possessed, from birth, what you do not. You are embarrassed by what proclaims that fact, the naked display of your womanhood, debased by the chains and other symbols you wear on your body which mark you as the property of men. You cannot feel pride in any of this. But what you can be proud of is that you do feel the shame, and are strong enough to bear it. And so, each excruciating torment, each degradation, each violation of your dignity replenishes the well of your strength and spirit.

There is a feeling of accomplishment that you have given up a major part of yourself. Every moment of your existence in the Château, every action, every chore no matter how routine, every gesture no matter how trivial, is an expression of selfless devotion to your Masters. It is humiliating, exhausting, exasperating, infuriating to be so utterly subservient and obedient, subordinating your wants and needs to their desires and demands. But always it is energizing and powerfully erotic, a permanent orgasm. Everything we do, every sensation we felt, is subsumed in our servitude and defined by our womanhood.

So arrival in the Château for the first times is like entering a mysterious valley, full of shadows, haunted by ghosts, stalked by strange beasts. It is an adventure both terrifying and exhilarating.

I stole a peek at the women whose journey was only just beginning. We had once again been assembled, every female in the house, to pay homage to our two newest Masters. The men had taken their places in the dining hall; and to form a backdrop for their banquet those of us not serving (thirty altogether) were arranged with half on each side of the room. The thermostat had been turned down, as it often was, for no particular reason except that the cold air on our bare bodies raised goosebumps and nipples. It reminded us (once more, as if we ever needed it) that comfort was solely the Masters' privilege.

We were kneeling with our thighs spread and arms folded behind our backs, our torsos arched backwards, chest and hips thrust forward. In this pose it was difficult to avoid gazing at the men seated before us. I could only stare at the ceiling or off to the side. (We weren't permitted to close our eyes, since that would be as disrespectful to the Masters as looking directly at them.) My body and arms ached from the stress of my posture, my knees from the slate floor under them. We had been gagged once more, and ooze dribbled into my throat as well as down my chin and onto my breasts. The rising pain and my hunger pangs, as well as the chill, made it impossible to zone out. I could not blank my mind nor focus my concentration elsewhere than on the discomfort and the tedium as, over the next two or so hours, our Masters unhurriedly ate their meal and were entertained by the new slavegirls, who had served it.

It was only now, minus her blindfold, that I recognized the statuesque, thirty-something blonde. Her eyes were suitably downcast but nevertheless darting about nervously, impatiently, excitedly. Her ball-gag hung on its strap around her neck; her wrists were cuffed in front, with just enough slack in the connection to allow her to perform her serving duties. Her ankles were shackled, but she could shuffle around the table and to and from the kitchen. She had not been one of those depilated or branded that afternoon, but there were plenty of marks on her skin that had not been there when I first spied her from the window in the tower. I was startled when I put a name to the face. It was one seen and heard often in the news. The sisterhood was expanding its domain, from the halls of academia to the chambers of commerce and into the corridors of political power.

Despite the hardship, it always felt nice to be on show like this, exposed and helpless; and it was not just our posture that swelled our chests. It was that pride. There is no more exquisitely delicious manifestation of your potency as a sexual being than to be so desired that satisfying the desire becomes all that you are and everything you do. My parted knees touched those of the women on either side of me, but the closeness I felt to my sisters was much more than merely the physical contact. We were so different, and so alike.

To my left, sandy-haired, freckle-faced Annabel restlessly scuffed her toes on the tiles. A brash and lively girl, she had been introduced to the Chaînerie by her lover, Juliette. She felt no attraction to men, but had agreed to serve them because she was servile to Juliette, who served men because she sometimes desired that which a woman could not provide. But when her inamorata departed the house, Annabel chose to stay on. She discovered that, in her own frame of reference, when men are our superiors every woman is an equal; and though she found delight in submission and servitude, it was the love of one of her own kind that she needed.

On my right side was Mei-Ying, tiny and fragile, a porcelain-complexioned, genuine Chinese doll. Since she rarely speaks, except to a Master, I've found out almost nothing about her. She is our resident physician, and why she gave up the medical profession to join the sisterhood I have no idea, except that she had done no more or less than the rest of us. (But she and Sabrina are the only women who live permanently in the Château.) While she is the smallest of us, she is as well the most stalwart. I have never seen her flinch, never heard her cry out. After an especially rigorous session of games with the Masters, she will tend to her fellow slaves without any consideration of her own state. And on this evening, as always, she maintained her almost mystical stoicism. While Annabel fidgeted, Mei-Ying never moved a muscle, never made a sound. She seemed able to retreat behind some impenetrable barrier.

From her right came a soft, drawn-out moan. Nicole, with the girl-next-door charm and femme fatale looks, does not have the ability to withdraw into herself the way Mei-Ying can. I'm glad I am also that way. I have long since decided that I want to feel the full magnitude and unmitigated consequences of my slavery, to experience its pure, invigorating, clarifying intensity. It's why I still go back to the Château.

Nicole, and Corinne kneeling directly opposite us across the room, had been reluctant additions to the house at first. Nicole was (and perhaps still is) a competition surfer. She has the classic beach-girl looks -- pretty, straw-blonde and blue-eyed, slim but sturdy. She's high-spirited and gregarious, and gets into more trouble with the Masters than any other slave. She had, it was said, been installed in the Château as collateral on a debt. One story had that it was owed by her fiancé, another that it was her brother's. She came and stayed willingly, accorded no special status or exemptions or concessions. While they were both in the house she served the man who brought her in no more or less than she did the other Masters, even though it was his debt that she paid off; and after it was settled she stayed on, while he departed. In joining the sisterhood, she freed herself from one bond and found a more enriching commitment.

Corinne was one of the few married women in the sisterhood. For obvious reasons, marital ties do not accord well with the rights and privileges the Masters enjoy over all the women. But her husband found gratification in sharing what he owned, and consented that she be common property. She, in turn, consented to be shared. (In my most recent visits to the Château I have not seen her; and I wonder if she has found and taken another path.)

Next to Corinne was Olivia, who suffered the curse of being a beautiful woman loved by two men and loving them equally. Masters Jeremy and James might have come out of the pages of the Victorian novels Olivia devoured. Jeremy could have been the incarnation of Heathcliff, dark and brooding, fervent and beguiling, restless, dangerous and unredeemed. Master James was the embodiment of Edgar Linton, charming and cheerful, easy-going and even-tempered, sympathetic and sincere. It had been, for a while, a suitable arrangement. One man offered excitement and unbridled passion, the other promised safety and genteel romance. Master James lacked a forceful spirit; but Olivia understood that it takes a truly strong man to show real tenderness. Master Jeremy was domineering; but Olivia believed that only the weak need fear the audacious and assertive. And they ended up all together in the Château. The two men engaged in some sort of competition for her allegiance. This was before my time, so I don't know the details or the outcome. But they return to the Château every few months, as we all do, where Olivia belongs to all the men.

(At other times I saw Lucy and Camille. On my second visit I was surprised, but only a little, to see Vanetta. She was the manageress of the restaurant where we'd farewelled Lucy as she left the apartment to enter the Château. It was not her first sojourn here, I could tell. She still maintained her no-fuss, no-nonsense attitude, like Mei-Ying never revealing her thoughts, rarely showing her emotions. And it amused me that one of the Masters was one of the waiters she commanded in their workplace. So more than any of us, with the possible exception of Lydia, she lived in and navigated her way through two different, separate yet compatible worlds.)

That night, kneeling beside Olivia was Desirée. She appeared to be in a sort of half-trance, her head lolling to one side, then rolling slowly to the other, her eyes half-shut, the lids fluttering, little blobs of foam glistening at the edges of her gag. She has not changed much since that time, not so very long ago, when she managed the Wooden Pony Club; but now on the few occasions when she spoke it was in a humble voice. Her glossy dark hair had been severely cropped. Her eyes, still sparkling, were never raised in the presence of a Master.

It was Desirée who had set me on the path which led to the Château; and ever since I have wondered what course my life might have taken had she not offered me that waitressing job, or if I'd declined.

When I encountered her for the first time in the house, a few days after my arrival, she was in the yard with two novitiate Masters, being led with a bridle through the gardens on an endless figure-eight course. The tallest of the slaves, she towered over most of the men as well; and so she wouldn't be able look to down on her handlers she had been strapped into a leather harness which forced her to stoop. Her arms were locked outstretched in a heavy wooden yoke fixed tightly about her neck. A luxuriant mare's tail poked from -- out of -- her rear end. Grunting and frothing through a bit-gag, she trotted unsteadily around the flower beds, steered and goaded with riding crops. Broad pink streaks criss-crossed her back and backside. I wondered at the time what offence she had committed. (Probably none. I was still new, and had not yet learned the ways of the Château.) She glanced up and saw me looking, and her expression -- surprise at my being there, embarrassment at her present degraded state -- unnerved me.

Desirée is so much like Lydia, tough, confident and self-possessed, and if I had known her from elsewhere than the Wooden Pony Club, I would have been mystified by her presence in the Château. But that's the point. Desirée is like Lydia, and not so unlike the rest of us. For whomever it is that selects the females for the Chaînerie -- certainly not the Masters, probably Lydia, but maybe some éminence grise or covert camarilla, lurking sub rosa in the shadows of our proclivities and passions -- has not picked the low-hanging fruit. But such conceit can be hazardous when you're a slave. It is not wise to remind the Masters that we're special.

I could describe all the women in the Château, had I the time and my esteemed readers the forbearance. But what matters is that though our stories vary, we are each and all part of the sisterhood of slaves.