Chapter 3

It was a dreadful night though. Every part of me seemed to ache or throb or both. Fit and all as I very definitely was, my muscles felt as though they would never move again and being forced to sleep standing up, also felt as if they weren’t being rested. Added to that, the position of my feet, still kept pointing straight down as if standing on my toes by the inner shape of the hooves, made my calf muscles remain in tension. I thought it was going to take weeks before they would adjust. It didn’t - it was only a few days, but that’s what it felt like.

Then there were the chains that kept us upright - by means of our nipple rings; and the floor chains that kept our feet spread wide apart ... Of course I knew we wouldn’t be tethered in this appalling way every night. I could see the ponies in the stalls over the way were permitted to curl up in the straw in the corner of their stall and that this was therefore all part of our initiation - no doubt designed to cow us into instant submission...

If that was the aim, it certainly worked. The initial ‘welcome’ with the two dozen strokes of the paddle, the rings, the removal of our back teeth and our bridles and bits, our hooves and all the rest of it - the tails, the morning enemas and sloppy defecation process, the exercises and the training ... all of these had had their effects on our minds as well as our bodies. I don’t know if the prince or his trainer had a degree in psychology and particularly an understanding of Pavlov’s mental conditioning theories but his ideas certainly worked with us three.

That night I yearned to be allowed to sleep as those in the stalls opposite me were, curled up in their straw, but no, we had a few days more of the horrible standing sleep position and I did doze a bit.

Notwithstanding that poor sleep, they still made us perform in the gym and on the track however and the grooms and trainers were careful all that first training day to ensure we properly raised our knees as we clopped around the gym or the training track on our horses hooves.

The next day was the worst. We were going to be branded like animals. The prince had underlined to us that we were indeed animals now. We were ponies. Human ponies, yes, but ponies nevertheless. We were not permitted to talk - ever. The rings in our tongues went some of the way to ensuring this but more were the threats that hung over us like the Sword of Damocles. One peep out of any of us and he or she would lose his tongue, torn out of our mouths by the roots and might also possibly suffer a severing of our vocal cords at the vet’s hands. Oh no. I had no intention of even whispering (had I been able) to either Black Beauty or Muscles.

The permanent hooves and tails also underlined to us our new status. We didn’t wear them only at races or even at practice. They were, we were told - and could see it in every single one of the other ponies - now permanent additions to our bodies. We would learn to walk, or rather to clop around on the hooves, and the giant cones inside our rectums kept the tails eternally attached to us.

I hated them most of all, I think. I had never had anything pushed up into my bottom before and while the part that rested within my anal sphincter wasn’t all that thick, the plastic cone inside my rectum was huge. It made me feel as if I wanted to go - all the time. I supposed I would get used to it, eventually, but on that first day it was a dreadful feeling. So was the tail itself, hanging down from the crack of my cheeks. As I walked it swished from side to side, dragging the hairs at the end of the tail proper with it. This much I could see with every one of the other, nearly a hundred slaves, on that human pony stud farm as they walked, trotted, pranced or galloped about. Those tails became, in my mind, a real part of every one of us and gradually I began to accept that we really were different from the real humans there.

More Pavlovian psychology, perhaps, I don’t know. I do know that as the weeks and then the months passed, I began to think of myself - and Muscles and Black Beauty, and all the other ponies as human animals ...

The next morning we were duly cleaned out but we were not fed. Once more we had to line up on the concrete, lean forward and grasp the rail while the duty groom shoved his nozzle into each of us in turn, the chemicals in that liquid turning our faeces into a stinking brown soup that spattered all over our legs as we painfully ejected it out of us - and then suffered countless repeats until the water spurting out of our anuses was clean and clear - and then the huge syringe injected a dose of paraffin, after which the tails were reinserted.

The rest of them were then fed - but not us. We were to be branded and they didn’t want us vomiting up the oat mush and perhaps choking as the branding iron burned into the muscles of our bellies.

We three were taken to the branding room. This was another of the small rooms off the corridor near the gymnasium, one with a door into it. Inside was a metal table that was bolted to the floor and which boasted straps at strategic locations. There was also a brazier and out of the glowing coals three handles poked up and a small glass-fronted cupboard with a few jars and bottles on its shelves - as well as half a dozen more branding irons.

I shuddered as I was led into this room and took in the macabre features. It was all very plain. We were about to be branded! I could hardly believe it. In this Twenty-first Century, human beings were actually branded on their flesh with red-hot irons and somehow, which was not very clear at that time, the brands turned into the beautiful golden marks that were evident on every one of the other slaves there.

Beautiful? Yes, I used that word, didn’t I? I thought back to the other ponies outside the now closed door of that room. Yes, they were beautiful. I had to admit it. Far from desecrating the pristine flesh of the slaves’ bellies, the marks somehow added to their overall beauty!

And yet the very idea of using a glowing red-hot iron to brand a human being was barbarous. Savagery at its worst! But, as Prince Azeem had told us, we were no longer human. For the rest of our lives, we were now ponies in his eyes and those of the people of his country. Branding was still practised on animals - we were animals. Voila! There you were. What was the argument all about?

Muscles and I were locked to the usual rings at buttocks height on the wall - yes, by thumb-cuffs behind our backs while the magnificent body of our friend, Black Beauty, was pushed up onto the steel table and his ankles (or should I say fetlocks) were strapped down to its bottom corners. More straps went over his thighs, waist, chest, neck and then his arms were drawn up to the top corners and they too were buckled down tight.

The vet now checked his body to see that it was tight and wouldn’t move for I realised what the prince had said to us would be right. If he was able to buck his waist up as the iron touched his flesh, it would blur the mark - and that would never do.

Being satisfied he couldn’t move a muscle, the vet now moved over to the brazier. It was one of those iron things on legs formed with horizontal and vertical straps so that air could get in to keep the coals burning brightly. Through the blackness, I could easily see the red and yellow brightness of the central part of the fire and I shuddered again as I imagined just how hot the irons on the tips of those handles must be. My thoughts were confirmed when he withdrew the selected handle and I stared in horror at the glowing brand on the end.

It was a bright vermilion red and the vet examined it critically, blowing off a tiny ember that had stuck to the iron and then brought it back over to the table. The groom assisting him had gone to the cupboard and brought back a jar which he now held out to the vet to check and the vet nodded to a little glass jug into which the groom now poured a quantity of the greenish-brown crystals that glittered as they flowed into the jug.

The vet now moved up to Black Beauty’s middle and the handsome black boy now raised his head off the table and stared down his body at the dreadful tip of the implement in the vet’s hand - but then, brave man that he is, he merely dropped his head back onto the metal table and closed his eyes. I marvelled at his bravery and hoped I would be the same. I also noted that he now gritted his teeth - the muscles of his jaws stood out starkly and I smiled as I realised he was going to try not to scream.

The vet now positioned the brand, ensuring it was the right way up - and still Black Beauty didn’t utter a peep. The muscles all over his body were tense though and I thrilled as I looked at him. I loved Sebastian in a way I knew was as deep as any love by one human for another could be; but I also loved these two boys - the one now lying on the table and the other standing beside me, watching. Both of them were as beautiful as a human male could possibly be and while I didn’t love them as soul mates like I did my fiancé, they were still closer to me than anyone else in the world.

Now as I watched Black Beauty’s body preparing itself for the worst pain he would ever feel in his life, my heart went out to him - and my libido smashed up into top gear! How could I lust after him as he was about to be tortured? I have no idea but I did. The sight of him lying there, bound down tight and about to be branded, was a sight that is indelibly etched into my brain - and what followed with Muscles was the same.

Then, as if in slow motion, the vet began to lower the iron. He was careful. Ultra-careful. He would have only one chance to make this a perfect brand and I suspected the prince’s wrath, if he muffed it, would be extraordinary.

The last few seconds seemed to take an eternity. It was as if the action was taking place frame by frame. Down came the iron, now slightly cooled, cherry-red tip getting closer and closer to the warm, chocolate-brown and so velvety flesh of the boy’s lower belly.

And then it touched! I saw the muscles all over Black Beauty’s body stand out even more - and sweat beads instantly formed on his skin. His eyes opened - and stared straight up at the ceiling over his head and his jaws clamped even harder together.

Both the prince and the vet stared at him in amazement. It seemed that no slave before had ever been able to keep silent as the iron touched - and then sank in through the various layers of skin to the muscle below - but Black Beauty had!

The vet was careful. He exerted exactly the right pressure for exactly the right length of time. I think it was about three or four seconds - a lifetime if you are being branded, but then he quickly withdrew the iron and handed it to the groom who now gave him the little jug.

I stared in awe at the horrible mess on Black Beauty’s belly as the vet now began to pour the crystals into the crevices he had made in his flesh. And as I watched, I saw the crystals begin to coalesce with the flesh and sort-of melt into the wonderful golden marks that the others all wore.

Before my very eyes, that dreadful blackened mark turned into the same beautiful golden brand that adorned every slave in the stables.

Black Beauty now turned his head towards Muscles and me - and he smiled. Yes, really. He must have been in agony but I knew he was exultant that he had beaten the prince in a small way. He had been able to take the worst pain so far dished up to us with a quiet equanimity.

For his part, Prince Azeem was magnanimous. He patted the boy on his chest and shoulder as he helped to undo the straps that had held him down so tightly. “Well done, boy. I have never before seen any pony take a brand without screaming. Not that I blame them, mind. The pain is extreme, I am aware of that, but you were able to overcome that pain ... Again, well done!”

They brought Black Beauty over to us and while Muscles was released from the ring, the black boy was locked to it. I stared from his serene face down to the now bright gold mark on his belly. It really was beautiful, writhing there as Black Beauty moved his body and I yearned to reach out and touch it. Of course that was impossible but he gave me a tiny wink with his left eye to tell me he was all right.

I couldn’t believe it - then. He had just been branded and yet here he was, standing up beside me as if nothing had happened.

I now watched as Muscles underwent a facsimile of Black Beauty’s ordeal and then he too was returned to us, to take my place at the wall.

I was now strapped down in his place and as they went about their macabre business I too resolved to stay silent. Muscles had taken a leaf out of Black Beauty’s book and had gritted his teeth as our friend had; now it was up to me to make it a hat trick.

Could I do it, I wondered. I knew the pain was going to be appalling. But I had inured myself to pain in other areas - in my athletics training, for example, and at the viscount’s stables back in England. I would try my very hardest to do the same now.

It wasn’t going to be easy, though. I was well aware of that. Like most people, I have suffered burns of one kind or another and I knew how horrible they were. This one would be worse than any of them.

For those of us who have been burned with hot metal, say the hot plate of a stove, we know that the second your hand touches the hot metal, you scream and withdraw it. But even a half second burn lasts for days, the pain throbbing right into your very brain until, after perhaps three or four days, it begins to ease. What I was facing was three or four seconds - up to eight times longer - and the metal was going to be even hotter!

The vet had allowed the bright yellow-red brand to cool to a dull cherry-red but it was still extremely hot and as it burned into the flesh of my belly, I knew it was going to hurt like hell (no pun intended).

It did. It was indeed the worst pain I have ever felt I my whole life. I watched in fear - I was unable to close my eyes as Black Beauty had, as the glowing iron dropped down towards my belly.

I stared down my body, aware of my breasts as they lay flattened across my chest by the position of my arms up above my head; down further along the stretched array of my well-developed abdominal muscles to my naked mound, to the soft and now so naked lips of my vulva and the narrow slit between them. Down further I could see the shapely curves of my thigh muscles and below them again the horrible fetlocks and hooves that now seemed a real part of my anatomy.

But while I could see these parts of me and was aware of them, my eyes were inexorably drawn to the iron getting ever closer to my naked body. I suppose, like all people, I always hoped for a miracle - right up to the very last moment. A stay of execution, perhaps, a last minute reprieve. It wasn’t to be. But even down to the last millimetre before the iron actually touched my skin, I hoped.

Of course I could feel the heat long before this. The radiant effect of the glowing metal warmed and then burned my flesh long before the iron actually touched.

That was nothing though compared to the effect when it did touch. I had tensioned every muscle in my body (and was vaguely aware that the prince was gloating over me, his soft hands gliding all over my now fully tensioned body) and had also gritted my teeth in readiness for the pain.

I am glad to report I didn’t scream. I wanted to. Oh how desperately I wanted to give full vent to the appalling agony that pervaded my very soul as that iron pressed into my flesh. It was dreadful and it took every last ounce of my willpower to hold on; to keep my jaws clamped shut and my eyes screwed up tight as I felt that iron sink in through my skin to the muscle below.

I opened my eyes then and stared down at the smoking, sizzling flesh around the glowing iron as it moved slowly down - and then was quickly removed. I couldn’t see the brand clearly of course but then my mind was fully employed in coping with the pain. It was still dreadful, even after the iron was handed silently to the groom in exchange for the little jug.

And then, miracle of miracles, as the vet carefully poured the tiny crystals into the furrows left by the branding iron, the pain abated - very rapidly, until, by the time he had finished filling the tiny trenches with the powder, it had receded to no more than a dull ache.

I stared across at my two companions in awe - and relief, and smiled as I saw them grin back at me. I don’t know what is in that crystalline mixture but apart from its gold effect, it also killed the pain of our branding - almost totally. I almost bounded to my feet as they undid the straps that had held me down to tightly.

If it hadn’t been for the bit in my mouth and the tiny chains that still held my tongue down to my tits, I would have yelled out my thanks to everyone around. That dreadful agony was gone! And now I wore the beautiful mark on my belly the same as the other slaveboys and girls there.

“I think their tongue chains may now be removed,” said the prince slowly, but as I watched his eyes I knew it was a test. One word out of any of us and they would be back - or worse, our tongues might be torn out and our vocal cords cut. I pulled my tongue back into my mouth at least as far as the little ring on the end of it allowed and felt a wash of gratitude to the prince pass over me.

Weird? Of course, but then pleasure is relative and after what we had gone through over the last few days, being allowed to put my tongue back in my mouth was equivalent to the news that I had just won the lottery.

We were fed then and were then allocated to the morning session in the gym, our recent branding now forgotten as we worked on weights, on the rowing machine, shinnied up and down the ropes and then moved on to the gymnastics equipment for the rest of the morning.

Whatever we did, we did at full blast. As I said earlier, it was no wonder every single one of us slaves there had the most beautiful body imaginable. We did nothing else, after all. We were being trained at racing and as show ponies and everything else was sublimated to that one aim.

I won’t go into the details of the morning. I’m sure you get the picture. Suffice to say they worked every muscle in my body and when, at noon, we were allowed to return to our stalls to rest, I really needed it. And yet after two hours in the sleeping erect position, I was quite ready for the afternoon session on the track. I know my earlier training at the viscount’s stables must have helped but while our training there had been hard, it was nothing compared to the level of physical output required of us at the prince’s farm.

Nevertheless, my body quickly adapted to the new workload, as evidenced by the fact that the two-hour rest, even though standing up and with my body clipped to the various restraints already detailed, was quite enough to prepare me for the afternoon on the track.

Once more I now walked, trotted and pranced around that track while my groom alternately whipped me to harder endeavour or used the reins attached to my bit, to pull me back.

All afternoon I pranced around, remembering to raise my knees either to the trotting position with my thighs parallel to the ground, or the prancing position, with them pulled up even higher. I knew of course that these gaits were humiliating; that they showed off our bodies, males and females alike, in their best form, our sheer athleticism blatantly exposed to the lecherous stares of the men who crowded around the fence of the training track; and that, no matter whether our hands were secured in the doubled up position with our elbows pulled close behind our backs or with them clasped up behind our heads with elbows pushed right back behind our shoulders, our upper bodies and our sexual organs were also openly displayed to all.

I wondered, as realisation sunk in that we were sexual objects to these men, why there were so many males amongst us for our spectators were exclusively male but then it sank in to me. Arabs have none of the prejudices we Europeans do against homosexuals. For an Arab to indulge with fellow boys after puberty is seen as quite normal and even after he marries, he may continue to enjoy the sexual companionship of other males while still fathering a horde of offspring.

To me, this was a much more sensible approach than our Victorian one. I am not sexually drawn to women but I can understand those who are and I have a number of friends of both sexes who were quite openly gay. Here, all that was happening was that these upper crust men were indulging themselves (and their inferiors) with a quite open display of the best of both sexes under the guise of athletics - albeit a quite bizarre form of it.

I also realised that humiliation of races seen as antipathetic to those of the Middle East was a part of our raison d’être. We English were particularly despised because of our hegemony over that area in the Twentieth Century but so were other non-Islamic nations and races. Shaming us by turning us into human ponies and using us openly and publicly as such was a real pleasure to them.

As I came to this realisation, I marvelled at the sanctimony of our leaders - that they could pretend that none of this existed while buying Middle East oil at exorbitant prices. It had been the same with other areas of the Middle East, too. Not perhaps as dreadful a practice as what we were experiencing but close ...

But as I watched the other fifty-odd slaves in our group similarly trotting and prancing (and some galloping) around the track, hooves clip-clopping on the track, tails waving madly, mouths bared in the grimaces forced on them by the bits and (for the most part) hands clasped up behind their heads to show off their upper bodies better, I realised how magnificent we all looked.

We were stark naked. Our bodies were all absolutely splendid. We were branded, bitted and hooved. Our genital organs were on open display and some of the males, those who had been trained for it, were erect and swinging madly from side to side as they ran; the others still swinging but less rigidly.

You may be wondering how we could walk, trot and prance with our feet in the ballet-dancer position? You must remember that they were held in that pose very rigidly by the hooves. Our feet were slipped down into them and the insides were shaped so that our feet remained absolutely vertical. They didn’t have laces. Instead, there were these clips with levers on them that once hooked to their counterparts and pushed over, gripped our feet very tightly. Neither could we remove them. Once all the levers were pushed over, a little rod went down through a hole in each clip and once pushed right through, a tiny but very strong padlock was locked to the rod. Until it was removed, the rod could not be extracted from the levers and they were now also locked shut.

It took a little practice to learn to walk and trot with our feet in this position but it didn’t take long and I think, once I got used to it, I was able to run as fast in that position as normally. Of course I don’t know for they never told us our times.

Now they also had us run with our hands clasped up behind our heads. We had to interlace our fingers behind our heads, tension our biceps muscles and then force our elbows right back so they were behind our shoulders - try it! It hurts, doesn’t it? And then we had to run all morning or afternoon in that position. Remember, we had to keep them that way at all times while racing or training. It wasn’t easy, like so many of the things they made us do there, but with practice, human beings can be made to do almost anything and after a few days whilst suffering a whip or cane to my back or haunches every time my knees dropped below the standard or my elbows strayed forward, I, and Black Beauty and Muscles soon learned.

We had one more night of sleeping erect, again with our tits clipped to the dangling chains, thumbs locked to the ring behind our backs and our hooves spread very wide, and then, the next night, we were mercifully allowed to sleep in a more normal human style, with my clit ring padlocked to the chain.

We still had to wear the bridle with their intrusive bits and the hooves on our feet and the tails poking horribly out of our bottoms, but we could at least curl up on, or in, the straw and sleep more naturally.

A few days later we were introduced to a new innovation in the gymnasium.

You will remember my first introduction there had been in the lunging ring? Well, they now had another one they had built right next to it. The lunging ring required the trainers to hold us by long lunging reins attached to our bridles while we trotted (or whatever) around the outer edge of the ring; this one did away with the need for the trainers. Over the centre of the ring, which was about twenty feet in diameter, there was a device like a huge overhead electric fan except that instead of fan blades, this machine had four long metal pipes, each about eight feet long.

Dangling from the ends of these were light chains with a clip at the very end. We had to stand under these and at the command, raise our heads up and back so they could clip the chains to our nose rings.

The trainer in charge then selected the speed: walk, trot, prance or gallop and we were then led, literally by the nose, round and round the edge of the new ring while our groom walked or ran beside us, lashing at our thighs or buttocks when we failed to keep our knees up high enough or our elbows strayed forward of their proper place.

Pain is perhaps the best teacher of all, as schoolmasters of a hundred years ago well knew, and Prince Azeem’s men used it abundantly. Believe me if you know that your already very sore buttocks or thighs (top or bottom) are going to be caned if you fail to achieve perfection, you soon learn to comply.

Prince Azeem came to watch us try out this new device and Black Beauty, Muscles and me were among the first to show how effective it was. It certainly freed up his trainers to concentrate on the track work outside and we found that after a week or so, one groom was enough to watch the four of us and I heard him say that it was so good, another would be installed over the lunging ring so that eight of us could be worked on the pair of them at a time.

I have said there were always people around, watching us as we were trained and this was as much the case inside the gym as outside on the track itself. Now as we showed off his latest training idea, there were dozens of men standing around, most dressed in traditional Arab clothing and staring in at us stark naked human ponies. At this practice we wore absolutely nothing - unless you count the hooves and tails as apparel and I certainly didn’t. As I said, I gradually came to think of them as a real part of my body.

You are astonished? I can understand why but you have to remember that we were being not so subtly brainwashed into thinking of ourselves in that light. For the first week we had been forced to sleep standing up. We had been denied the right or the means of speaking. We had been shaved bald apart from a ponytail at the very top of our heads. We had been pierced and ringed in noses, tongues and nipples and tails inserted more or less permanently into our rectums. And finally we had been hooved and then branded as ponies. All these things, together with the rigid training in the gym and on the track were designed to make us think of ourselves as ponies - and the tails and hooves were a very important part of that.

Over the next weeks, as my body became accustomed to them, I almost forgot I had the huge (ever larger) dildos there after they had been shoved into my bottom after our so horrible defecation process and I eventually got so used to walking in the hooves that if they had been suddenly removed I would have had to learn to walk normally all over again, so you can see those things, horrible and all as they were at the beginning, soon came to be accepted by us all.

The speech thing was never ever relaxed. We were never allowed to speak to each other and not even to our trainers unless something really essential, say to explain a symptom if we were ill occurred, but such events were a rarity for we never got sick. I suppose our training and the healthy mush we ate night and morning combined to ensure we didn’t get sick. Certainly I was never permitted to speak and I don’t think Black Beauty or Muscles were either.

After a few weeks, we were judged ready to be tried out in a minor race. All three of us but not just us ...