Chapter 23

Hi, folks! My name is Matilda. I am queen of Slobovia. Can you possibly imagine a dumber name for a queen? Or a dumber name for a nation? About all I can say is that we — my country and I — sort of go together.

Now what, you are wondering, is this idiot doing in this book? (A very good question, might I add. After all, to this point it’s been a sort of dialogue between King William and Queen Katherine.) Well, I’m not really too sure of the answer to that one, either. What I do know is that I arrived at the palace on the day Leila, Mike, and Susan were scheduled to depart for the north. For some reason, Queen Katherine seems almost to love me, so she invited me to assist in preparing Leila for her trip.

At this point a few words of background are in order. First, who am I? As I mentioned, I am Matilda, Queen of Slobovia. As a daughter of the King and Queen of Bosnia, I knew only privilege from my first moments on earth. There have been no changes since ... until I came to Essex. (That’s right, too. The name of this kingdom has never been mentioned. For that matter, it was only a few pages earlier in this combined narrative that you, dear reader, learned that the king’s name is William. He is, of course, William, King of Essex.)

Anyway, Essex borders Slobovia on the east. And Slobovia operates pretty much like the rest of the European monarchies: high taxes, huge standing armies and no freedom for its citizenry. The fact is, I guess, we never thought of our countrymen as citizens at all. We just thought of them as peasants or serfs, good for only one thing: to earn money which we would confiscate and spend on our own pursuits. (We really prefer to say that we levy taxes. After all, it sounds so much nicer than saying we confiscate their money.)

With one small exception, my entire lifetime has been spent in a sybaritic existence. The sole exception occurred less than a year after Gus and me — that’s King Gustav IV of Slobovia — were married. Like a number of other women in my position, I was only sixteen when I was wed. The exception I referred to was the birth of our son and only child, Wilhelm (he hates his name), who was born when I was only seventeen. We never really saw very much of him, as a matter of fact. He was raised by a progression of people beginning with a wet nurse, then a nurse, a governess, and finally a tutor.

He disappeared at the age of fifteen and we haven’t seen or heard from him since. From time to time I find myself wondering where he is, what he’s doing, and — indeed — if he’s even still alive. Bill — his preferred name — was a truly delightful young man. Often I wonder where his looks and intelligence came from. I should add that I’m a big fat ugly slob, so they certainly didn’t come from me.

In an earlier note about me, Kate stated that I was beautiful. When I read it — Kate allowed me to skim through the earlier material — I wondered what sort of strange and wonderful substance she had been smoking. Or else she became confused as a result of one of her endless fuck sessions with Bill. (But that’s not accurate, either. But more on that later.) Let me describe myself. I am thirty-six years old, five feet ten inches tall — that’s right, five-ten! — and weigh about 195 pounds ... when I’m on a diet. My hair is sort of blonde, I guess, and quite long, reaching to the crack of my ass. My eyes are blue. I suppose my bone structure is okay. My tits are ... bountiful. Remarkably, my nipples are very small surrounded by small areolae. A more accurate depiction of my appearance would be fat, as in “fat slob.” (As I reread this material, I rather like that characterization of myself. I am the chief female slob of Slobovia. Don’t you agree that it has a certain je ne sais quoi?)

But I was telling you about my life in Slobovia. I am both a sybarite and a hedonist. Gus has little or no interest in me, nor I in him. My life revolves around my pleasures, one of which is periodically to visit the slave auctions, a regular feature of life in Slobovia. In the opening pages of this narrative, Bill described his visit to the Essex auction on the day he first met Kate. About the only difference between Essex and Slobovia is that its young women are more beautiful than ours. Aside from that, though, the two slave markets are quite similar in both design and operation. Of course when I visit the slave market, I don’t make the same mistake Bill did. I’m always accompanied by at least a troop of cavalry and a platoon or two of infantry. The last time I visited our market was the day before I left for Essex for my first extended visit.

The Slobovian slave market works the same and the people behave the same. With the troops holding back the crowd — early in the day, composed primarily of weeping parents — I inspect the young women and provide help and coaching. Boy, am I ever a big help!

Let me describe my last visit. My help consisted of ripping off a young woman’s undergarments to fully bare her body. When her hands moved instinctively to cover her breasts and loins, I pulled them away to get a good look. With the riding crop I always carry, I lifted her chin from her chest and then used it to lift each of her tits. She was about seventeen, and her tits still had the wonderful firmness of youth. The girl was one of the more attractive young women in my country, with a slender body and full tits. She had lovely wavy chestnut hair, gorgeous green eyes, and a very full and dense pubic patch.

When I pinched her nipple, she jerked away and I slapped her across the face. My coaching consisted of telling her how to roll her hips back to provide buyers with the best look at her cunt, and how to tell a buyer how lush and firm her tits were. I reminded her at the same time to be sure to ask prospective buyers to give both her tits and her ass a good hard squeeze. When I ran my fingers through her pubic patch and then moved my finger up and down her slit, she seemed upset. Yet her cunt did become nice and wet in no time. For some inexplicable reason, my coaching seemed to serve only to redouble her tears. Then I reminded her that this was her only opportunity to make some real money for her parents. After all, she would sell herself into slavery only once.

That comment did seem to have some effect. With an almost superhuman effort of will, she actually followed my advice. Before the auction, when the prospective buyers were inspecting the human wares, she was the most aggressive girl in touting her charms. She brought the highest price of the day, too.

Of course it hadn’t penetrated my thick head that there were far more young women offered for sale than there used to be, or that the mood of the citizens seemed particularly ugly. Did I make any connection between the number of girls selling themselves into slavery and my husband’s newly-established 70-percent-plus tax rate? Don’t be silly. Of course not. After all, what possible connection could there be?

But then my education — such as it was — essentially ended when I was about ten years old. Education? My education consisted primarily of getting tutors fired, but usually only after I had both mentally and physically abused them. One young woman — Jean something-or-other, I think — who seemed particularly interested in trying actually to get me to learn something — ended up in the torture chamber. There I watched in delight as she was whipped, then repeatedly raped, and then the cycle repeated. I have no idea how many cycles she went through. But I do know she was thrown out of the castle about ten days later far more dead than alive.

As far as sex is concerned, whenever I see an attractive man and I have the urge, I order him brought to my quarters. His marital status never concerns me in the slightest. If I want him, he is brought to me. His choice is to perform or spend an interminable length of time in the dungeons. They all perform. More often, though, rather than taking them myself, I would have them take one of my slaves in my presence. What I often did was play a game of mix and match: having a very handsome young man take a particularly old and ugly woman, or vice versa.

Occasionally, I would have a young woman take a series of my soldiers, one right after the other, until the girl’s sex organs — and asshole — were just masses of blood and gore. Only one girl died as a result of the sexual abuse she absorbed in such a session. Most are far tougher than they think they are. And besides ... I’m certain that the girl who died had a congenital heart defect that caused her death, and the palace physician agreed with me.

If, by now, you’re getting the impression that I’m a rotten person, it’s only because I am.

But then I met Kate. The first time I met her was during the meeting of the Reigning Monarchs Association that was described earlier in this narrative. While our husbands were meeting in Slobovia, a few of us wives met in Essex. When I met Kate for the first time, I truly did not believe my own eyes. To say that Kate is beautiful is to say the Matterhorn is large. Both statements are true, but both are totally inadequate to describe the reality. At the time of my first visit, I had the opportunity to see Kate’s body nude. Her beauty literally blows the mind.

While staying with Kate, I got the first real exercise of my life. While I tried to move exercise equipment set at one-tenth of her weight loadings, she moved hers with apparent ease. However, it couldn’t have been nearly as easy as she made it look because muscles bulged all over her body with each movement. Yet an instant later, there was only her smooth, satiny flesh with no apparent muscles at all.

In her note, she described my meeting Leila for the first time and how I studied her body. She also described how I volunteered to be a royal slave in Essex if Bill would only service me a single time each month.

This brings us to the beginning of my story. As I said, I arrived on the day Leila was preparing to leave for the palace of the Duke of the North. Kate greeted me warmly upon my arrival and then to my surprise invited me up to the royal apartments. There I found Leila with her daughter, the duchess, waiting for us. In truth, it was my first meeting with Leila. Previously, she had been a pony harnessed to a cart and acted the part. Today she was ... There are no words I can use to describe that woman.

When Kate and I entered, both women rose to greet us. I was first introduced to Susan Hastings, Duchess of the North. When I had a good look at her, I just let out a low whistle of admiration. “Kate, this girl is utterly stunning!” Then to Susan I asked, “To what do you owe your surpassing beauty?”

“Thank you, Your Majesty, for your lovely compliment. But with respect to beauty, what little I have — what very little I have — I owe to my mother. Of course I constantly berate her for not being willing to give me more than one percent of what she has...” The girl paused, and then looking into my eyes with hers as large as saucers, she asked, “Do you really think it would have been too much to ask for her to give me ten percent? Or at least five? Is that really too much to hope for?”