Sablesword
TMF Master
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2001
- Messages
- 801
- Points
- 18
Balint sat in the tickle stocks, with Idalia grinning at him. Only it was night, a time when the stocks normally stood unused. And Idalia’s upper-body skin was dark, as dark as the skin of the human sorceress Nandi. Or she was Nandi, transformed into a centauress like Idalia. Or perhaps both at once, somehow.
The stocks held his ankles over a cubit apart, yet his bare feet were somehow side by side, with his large toes tied together.
The dark-skinned centauress began to chant. Not an incantation of twisted Words, of the sort Balint had heard Nandi use before, but a child’s nonsense rhyme about a goat and a duck. Blue flame flared up from her fingers, but neither her flame nor her fingers touched Balint. She stood back, well back, out of reach – and Balint felt the little hands. Dozens of little hands, tickling his soles. Both his helpless soles, from heels to toes. Tickling and tickling and tickling his vulnerable feet.
Rain began to fall, heavily, drenching both Balint and Idalia/Nandi. Rain was good, even if Balint couldn’t remember why, at the moment. But the blue flame continued to burn, and the unseen little hands continued to tickle.
Balint woke up.
He looked up at the cloudless sky and down at the short, brown grass. He’d been napping in the shade of the stone wall separating two fields, and why not? Tomorrow was the day of the Anzaretic Sacrifice, a holiday where people normally prayed to Anzar and her rain-nymph maidens for dry weather that would spare the hay. This summer – well, late spring – there was no hay. The grass was short and brown on Balint’s side of the wall, and he knew the other side was the same. The only hope for a hay-cutting here would be late in the season, provided that the weather broke and an unusually wet summer came to balance the unusually dry spring.
So Balint wouldn’t have to buy a lamb for tomorrow. But the day after tomorrow he would have to renew his pass tokens. He climbed to his feet.
As Balint brushed the dust from his tunic, he heard a familiar voice.
“Ho, Balint, you lazy flatfooter,” Kratos Shortmane said, leaning on the top of the stone wall from the other side. “I have a letter for you.”
“Ho, Kratos,” Balint said. “I wish I could say I had some wine for you, but times are dry. No haying. No work of any sort, in fact.” He pointed upward, at the blue sky, carefully avoiding the words no rain.
The drought hadn’t yet reached the point of drying up wells and streams, so there was still water for drinking and even the occasional bath. But Balint’s purse had dried up along with the grass and the crops. So no wine, and a good thing he wouldn’t need to buy that lamb for tomorrow.
“It won’t last,” Kratos said. “My older sister saw a vos-hawk flying from the south, on the sea-wind. That’ll bring us rain.”
“I hope so,” Balint said.
Kratos extended a folded tablet. “I’ll stand you a crater of wine when the rain comes. With rainwater in it, like you humans insist on. In the meantime, Mute Drela has sent you this letter, and you’d better take it.”
“Thank you.” Balint took the tablet, recognizing it as one of the three folding tablets used by the centauress Dreopolle of Thracobex. Mute Drela, who could listen but not speak, who used her tablets to communicate and send letters, and who even the local centaurs considered to be a strange female.
Kratos departed, and Balint opened the tablet. Inside was the letter, written on the tablet’s inner wax surface. The beeswax alone cost as much as a sheet of papyrus, but unlike papyrus, wax could be erased and rewritten on any number of times. And Mute Drela did a lot of writing.
Greetings: To my human friend Balint of Isgaul, now dwelling near Naranos. Your soles are mine. Meet me at the Flatfoot Male Oak. I am: Dreopolle of Thracobex, student of Aclina the Wise.
By law and custom, humans in the centaur Land were subject to bouts of merciless tickling. Near the borders with the various human realms, a system of pass-tokens was in place, mostly to ensure that no human got overlooked for his (or her) regular tickling. Centaurs in the hinterlands had fewer humans to keep track of, and so had more informal and irregular customs. A centaur could simply tell a human woman, “Your soles are mine,” at any time, and a centauress could say the same to a male human. And it would be so. Despite having lived in Naranos for a number of years now, and despite the exasperation of the local borderland centaurs like Kratos, Drela still held to the customs of Thracobex, the central-western part of the centaur Land she’d come from.
Balint began a trudge to the oak that Drela has specified in her letter. The centaurs would frequently escort humans to the tickling stocks, sometime making a great show of it. Balint had experienced this himself, with Kratos, Idalia, or various other centaurs. But as often as not, a human well-known to the centaurs was expected to show up on his own.
Not that Balint was one of the few humans who could admit to actually enjoying their merciless tickle session. A gift of the gods, that was, and the centaurs took it as such. By tradition, they treated the tickles they inflicted as a faux torment rather than a real one. They were gleefully merciless about it, but not cruel or mean, and if the goddess Prophesy was satisfied with the results, then so were they.
Instead, Balint belonged to the much larger group of humans who enjoyed grumbling about their tickle sessions. They grumbled about how the centaurs who had tickled their soles before knew all their weaknesses, and about how other centaurs eagerly sought out those weaknesses when presented with their helpless soles for the first time. They grumbled about the cringing anticipation before each session, and about the embarrassing tickle-drunk afterwards.
But Balint and the others didn’t try to evade their required tickle-sessions – not really, not seriously – and they never ever begged for the centaurs to stop their tickling. Humans didn’t want to offend the goddess Prophesy either. Besides, although most of the humans in the centaur Land refused to admit it – even to themselves, in many cases – once a tickle-session had begun, they didn’t want the tickling to stop.
Balint arrived at the familiar oak, with the stocks underneath its spreading shade, the sundial set beyond that shade, and the sign that gave the reason for it all. Alja Kentaros mor kental velator velex bartaros mel Uru, nor Kentaros yonvel morkap i patalos, read the prophecy in the curlicue script that the centaurs used: “If the Kentaros should ever fail to visit merciless tickling on foreigners who enter the Land, then will the Kentaros suffer betrayal and ruination.”
In the hinterlands, Balint knew, centaur villages often didn’t bother with the Prophesy sign. They also frequently used the same set of stocks for both human men and human women (although never for both at the same time). Drela had some strong opinions about that: Separate stocks under separate oaks were a fine thing, she thought, especially here near the border where humans were more common. Posting that sign, however, was pretentious twaddle. She wrote arguments that everyone knew the Prophesy, or at least ought to know it.
The latest human victim sat on the brown grass beside one of the stocks, grinning foolishly with tickle-drunk as he fumbled with his sandals. Balint didn’t recognize him. A visitor or newcomer then. No doubt they would meet again later.
Cora, the centauress who had inflicted his tickling, looked down with smiling patience. She considered him for a moment as he stood, staggering, before allowing him an arm over her back. With this support, Cora’s tickle-victim moved slowly back toward Naranos proper.
That left Balint alone with Mute Drela. “You got me,” he said as he handed back her tablet.
“Mmmm!” Drela made the only noise that she could, and waved the tablet at one of the stocks. Once Balint had removed his sandals and sat down, she was quick and efficient about securing him. His back was to the post at the rear, with his hands tied behind it, and his ankles were held side-by-side, so that it didn’t require dream-logic for a cord to tie his large toes together.
Drela offered the traditional ladle of water as normal, and was just slightly sparing with the water splashed on his dry feet. A tickling centauress would normally apply a scrubbing brush at this point, but Drela being Drela, she used a rough cloth instead. The centaurs insisted that this initial bit wasn’t properly a part of the merciless tickling, but the humans all knew that it tickled anyway. It always tickled Balint, and Drela using a cloth instead of a brush didn’t change this. Balint laughed, as always, and as always Drela shook her head at that premature laughter.
The cloth set aside, Drela begin the merciless tickling in earnest. Balint felt her start with a finger-tickle, using both her hands on both of Balint’s bare soles. Her fingers touched and wiggled and expertly danced, teasing and tickling his soles, and secured as he was, Balint could do nothing but squirm and laugh.
Drela’s fingers sought out all of Balint’s tickle-sensitive nerve endings. At her level of skill, she had a style of her own, a style Balint recognized from previous encounters. A style that made him laugh and laugh in response to the tickle-things her fingers were doing to his trapped and vulnerable feet. To his heels and to the balls of his feet. To his toes and to his arches. And Drela kept it going, and kept it going, and kept it going, mercilessly, just as the Prophesy demanded.
Balint sensed when Drela found the tempo: Just fast enough to keep the tickling merciless and just slow enough make it last. It was part of her expertise, as was her ability to go on, and go on, and continue the tickle, without pause, without missing a touch. To claim his soles as her own tickle-toys.
And this was just the beginning, Balint knew that Drela had other tickle implements to apply as well.
But right now was the time of the fingers. Centauress fingers skilled at tickling human male soles. Fingers that sometimes moved in patterns that Balint could anticipate, and that sometimes moved in ways he couldn’t. And in both cases the anticipation made his bare soles feel even more sensitive.
Now Balint felt the tempo slow. It didn’t stop; he could still feel Drela’s tickling fingers. They continued to touch his helpless soles, with their reduced tempo being merciless in its own way.
“Mmmm!” Drela said.
“Heeheehee heeheeheeheee!” Balint answered.
The tickle tempo slowed further, almost to a stop. Almost. Then it increased again. And it kept going. It kept going. Balint knew that he’d start to become tickle-drunk if it kept going much longer, and it felt like it was going to keep going forever.
The finger-tickling ended, and the feather-tickling began. The pause between was just long enough for Balint to catch his breath, and to see the feather Drela held up, before he felt her apply it.
It wasn’t the vos-hawk feather that most centaurs preferred. Drela was different, and she liked to use the wing feather from a gold-leg gull. She had proven its effectiveness in tickle contests where other centaurs had used vos-hawk feathers, and now she demonstrated that effectiveness on Balint.
Balint felt her apply the tip of the feather to the bare skin of his soles. Touching and teasing and tickling. It was a single feather, and she could only apply it to one foot at a time, touching and teasing and tickling. It didn’t matter. Drela was patient, and she was skilled, and she continued her merciless tickling of Balint by touching and teasing him with her preferred feather. Over and over again.
As the touch and tease and tickling continued, Balint grew more and more aware of his feet. It was the first sign of the tickle-drunk. He was aware of his soles, of their bareness and vulnerability, held helpless in the stocks with their large toes tied together. Of how they seemed to be growing more and more sensitive to the soft tickling of Drela’s feather, and of how that soft tickle forced him to laugh.
The tease changed. The feather’s firm-soft tip continued to tickle, but in a different way. Balint felt Drela apply little strokes and wiggles now, replacing the teasing touches. Those strokes and wiggles make him squirm, as well as laugh, as the single gull-feather teased and stroked and wiggled and tickled, over and over and over again.
Balint was definitely tickle-drunk now, even if he knew he’d become more so under the sweet whip of that feather. Or of whatever tickle implement Drela would choose next. Balint wondered, as best as he could under the laughter-forcing distraction of the feather, just what that next implement would be.
He found out. Drela produced a pair of stones, mounted on a pair of sticks. Smooth round stones, river-polished and then polished further by a craftsman. And dabbed with oil for extra slickness. Balint didn’t know what they were called. Drela had never told him – or rather had never written down their names for him. And the other centaurs didn’t know what they were called either – other than being “the weird things that Mute Drela uses.” But Balint did know that Drela was as expert with them as she was with her fingers or the gull-wing feather.
The pair of slick, oil-dabbed stones tickled Balint’s soles all over. They didn’t tickle much like Drela’s fingers, and even less like her gull-wing feather, but they did tickle. Oh yes, they tickled voraciously in the centauress hands of Mute Drela. Oh yes! They slid and wiggled and stroked and twisted, cool against the bare and sensitive feet held in place by the stocks, and their every touch tickled. All over. Everywhere. Balint squirmed and laughed, and laughed and squirmed. The vigorous teasing touch did not quite make him howl with laughter. Not quite. But he definitely felt himself growing even more tickle-drunk. And by the time Drela switched to yet another set of tickle-tools, Balint suspected that he’d be tickle-drunk enough not to mind.
Then Drela applied a clever twist and a clever wiggle that focused all of Balint’s attention on the tickling. The tickling that poured into him through his bare soles. Balint thrashed now, instead of just squirming. He struggled as he laughed. He knew he couldn’t escape, and his futile attempts to do so only made him even more aware of his feet. Feet trapped in stocks designed to not allow escape. And being tickled. Mercilessly.
The tickle of the two stone-things continued. Drela kept it up, seemingly without effort. She would pause only to switch implements, and she would slow only for long enough to let Balint catch his and to let him recover just enough to appreciate the next bout.
The tickling slowed. Then it stopped. “Mmmm!” Drela said. Balint looked up to see her holding up a pair of olivewood spoons.
Wooden spoons were a common tickle-implement among the centaurs, but Drela, being Drela, had made the craftsman carve little prongs into the ends, like the prongs of short and blunted wooden forks. She grinned as she wiggled them, one in each hand.
Balint grinned back. He was thoroughly tickle-drunk now. Enough so that he didn’t mind the further tickles to come. Enough so that a small part of him actually wanted more tickling. His grin grew wider. Perhaps the little prongs were like claws; the blunt claws of a wooden animal, bred for tickling. And then Balint’s tickle-drunk maunderings ended. Drela had focused his full attention on his helpless soles once again.
His soles were so well-tickled by now that they might not have responded to a softer touch. Then again, they might have. It didn’t matter, though. Weird Drela’s weird spoons did tickle, the nubby prongs feeling a little like a stiff scrub brush. It took expertise to make such implements tickle properly – but Dreopolle of Thracobex had that expertise. As she gleefully demonstrated to Balint of Isgaul.
Tickle tickle tickle tickle. Tickle tickle tickle tickle. Balint howled. His soles felt soaked with a river with tickling. And Drela kept up the pace, applying carefully placed tickle strokes with an implement in each hand. Tickle tickle tickle tickle.
Balint could see her gleeful grin, out at the end of his world, and could feel her unceasing work, much closer. Tickle tickle tickle tickle. His struggles were weaker now. Drela found it harder to make him squirm, but she could still make him laugh. And she did so with her tickle tickle tickle tickle.
The tickling stopped. Half a minute later, Balint realized that the tickling had stopped. He was massively tickle-drunk now, oh yes.
Drela was out by the sundial, frowning at it. There wasn’t any sunlight. The sky was completely overcast, dark with clouds, and Drela wouldn’t be able to read the time. She considered the sundial for another half-minute before trotting back to where Balint sat, still secured in the stocks.
“Mmmm!” she told him. And resumed the tickling.
Balint giggled instead of laughing. The tickle he felt now was a slow one. A gentle tickle, even, with the wooden claw-spoons being applied with a light light touch. He felt that touch alternate between each of his soles in turn, rather than Drela applying a tickle to both soles at once, as she had been doing before.
Slowly. Lightly. A tickle that made Balint titter and giggle, rather than howl. Deeply tickle-drunk. Tickle mad in fact; he definitely didn’t want Drela to stop. He’d been tickled too much, today, and too much tickling was just right.
Drela stopped. She looked up. Balint looked up too, and saw only the oak-leaves that provided shade to the stocks. He looked back down at Drela, and saw her set her weird tickle-spoons aside.
Then the rain came, soaking them both.
(end)
The stocks held his ankles over a cubit apart, yet his bare feet were somehow side by side, with his large toes tied together.
The dark-skinned centauress began to chant. Not an incantation of twisted Words, of the sort Balint had heard Nandi use before, but a child’s nonsense rhyme about a goat and a duck. Blue flame flared up from her fingers, but neither her flame nor her fingers touched Balint. She stood back, well back, out of reach – and Balint felt the little hands. Dozens of little hands, tickling his soles. Both his helpless soles, from heels to toes. Tickling and tickling and tickling his vulnerable feet.
Rain began to fall, heavily, drenching both Balint and Idalia/Nandi. Rain was good, even if Balint couldn’t remember why, at the moment. But the blue flame continued to burn, and the unseen little hands continued to tickle.
Balint woke up.
He looked up at the cloudless sky and down at the short, brown grass. He’d been napping in the shade of the stone wall separating two fields, and why not? Tomorrow was the day of the Anzaretic Sacrifice, a holiday where people normally prayed to Anzar and her rain-nymph maidens for dry weather that would spare the hay. This summer – well, late spring – there was no hay. The grass was short and brown on Balint’s side of the wall, and he knew the other side was the same. The only hope for a hay-cutting here would be late in the season, provided that the weather broke and an unusually wet summer came to balance the unusually dry spring.
So Balint wouldn’t have to buy a lamb for tomorrow. But the day after tomorrow he would have to renew his pass tokens. He climbed to his feet.
As Balint brushed the dust from his tunic, he heard a familiar voice.
“Ho, Balint, you lazy flatfooter,” Kratos Shortmane said, leaning on the top of the stone wall from the other side. “I have a letter for you.”
“Ho, Kratos,” Balint said. “I wish I could say I had some wine for you, but times are dry. No haying. No work of any sort, in fact.” He pointed upward, at the blue sky, carefully avoiding the words no rain.
The drought hadn’t yet reached the point of drying up wells and streams, so there was still water for drinking and even the occasional bath. But Balint’s purse had dried up along with the grass and the crops. So no wine, and a good thing he wouldn’t need to buy that lamb for tomorrow.
“It won’t last,” Kratos said. “My older sister saw a vos-hawk flying from the south, on the sea-wind. That’ll bring us rain.”
“I hope so,” Balint said.
Kratos extended a folded tablet. “I’ll stand you a crater of wine when the rain comes. With rainwater in it, like you humans insist on. In the meantime, Mute Drela has sent you this letter, and you’d better take it.”
“Thank you.” Balint took the tablet, recognizing it as one of the three folding tablets used by the centauress Dreopolle of Thracobex. Mute Drela, who could listen but not speak, who used her tablets to communicate and send letters, and who even the local centaurs considered to be a strange female.
Kratos departed, and Balint opened the tablet. Inside was the letter, written on the tablet’s inner wax surface. The beeswax alone cost as much as a sheet of papyrus, but unlike papyrus, wax could be erased and rewritten on any number of times. And Mute Drela did a lot of writing.
Greetings: To my human friend Balint of Isgaul, now dwelling near Naranos. Your soles are mine. Meet me at the Flatfoot Male Oak. I am: Dreopolle of Thracobex, student of Aclina the Wise.
=O+O+O=
By law and custom, humans in the centaur Land were subject to bouts of merciless tickling. Near the borders with the various human realms, a system of pass-tokens was in place, mostly to ensure that no human got overlooked for his (or her) regular tickling. Centaurs in the hinterlands had fewer humans to keep track of, and so had more informal and irregular customs. A centaur could simply tell a human woman, “Your soles are mine,” at any time, and a centauress could say the same to a male human. And it would be so. Despite having lived in Naranos for a number of years now, and despite the exasperation of the local borderland centaurs like Kratos, Drela still held to the customs of Thracobex, the central-western part of the centaur Land she’d come from.
Balint began a trudge to the oak that Drela has specified in her letter. The centaurs would frequently escort humans to the tickling stocks, sometime making a great show of it. Balint had experienced this himself, with Kratos, Idalia, or various other centaurs. But as often as not, a human well-known to the centaurs was expected to show up on his own.
Not that Balint was one of the few humans who could admit to actually enjoying their merciless tickle session. A gift of the gods, that was, and the centaurs took it as such. By tradition, they treated the tickles they inflicted as a faux torment rather than a real one. They were gleefully merciless about it, but not cruel or mean, and if the goddess Prophesy was satisfied with the results, then so were they.
Instead, Balint belonged to the much larger group of humans who enjoyed grumbling about their tickle sessions. They grumbled about how the centaurs who had tickled their soles before knew all their weaknesses, and about how other centaurs eagerly sought out those weaknesses when presented with their helpless soles for the first time. They grumbled about the cringing anticipation before each session, and about the embarrassing tickle-drunk afterwards.
But Balint and the others didn’t try to evade their required tickle-sessions – not really, not seriously – and they never ever begged for the centaurs to stop their tickling. Humans didn’t want to offend the goddess Prophesy either. Besides, although most of the humans in the centaur Land refused to admit it – even to themselves, in many cases – once a tickle-session had begun, they didn’t want the tickling to stop.
Balint arrived at the familiar oak, with the stocks underneath its spreading shade, the sundial set beyond that shade, and the sign that gave the reason for it all. Alja Kentaros mor kental velator velex bartaros mel Uru, nor Kentaros yonvel morkap i patalos, read the prophecy in the curlicue script that the centaurs used: “If the Kentaros should ever fail to visit merciless tickling on foreigners who enter the Land, then will the Kentaros suffer betrayal and ruination.”
In the hinterlands, Balint knew, centaur villages often didn’t bother with the Prophesy sign. They also frequently used the same set of stocks for both human men and human women (although never for both at the same time). Drela had some strong opinions about that: Separate stocks under separate oaks were a fine thing, she thought, especially here near the border where humans were more common. Posting that sign, however, was pretentious twaddle. She wrote arguments that everyone knew the Prophesy, or at least ought to know it.
The latest human victim sat on the brown grass beside one of the stocks, grinning foolishly with tickle-drunk as he fumbled with his sandals. Balint didn’t recognize him. A visitor or newcomer then. No doubt they would meet again later.
Cora, the centauress who had inflicted his tickling, looked down with smiling patience. She considered him for a moment as he stood, staggering, before allowing him an arm over her back. With this support, Cora’s tickle-victim moved slowly back toward Naranos proper.
That left Balint alone with Mute Drela. “You got me,” he said as he handed back her tablet.
“Mmmm!” Drela made the only noise that she could, and waved the tablet at one of the stocks. Once Balint had removed his sandals and sat down, she was quick and efficient about securing him. His back was to the post at the rear, with his hands tied behind it, and his ankles were held side-by-side, so that it didn’t require dream-logic for a cord to tie his large toes together.
Drela offered the traditional ladle of water as normal, and was just slightly sparing with the water splashed on his dry feet. A tickling centauress would normally apply a scrubbing brush at this point, but Drela being Drela, she used a rough cloth instead. The centaurs insisted that this initial bit wasn’t properly a part of the merciless tickling, but the humans all knew that it tickled anyway. It always tickled Balint, and Drela using a cloth instead of a brush didn’t change this. Balint laughed, as always, and as always Drela shook her head at that premature laughter.
The cloth set aside, Drela begin the merciless tickling in earnest. Balint felt her start with a finger-tickle, using both her hands on both of Balint’s bare soles. Her fingers touched and wiggled and expertly danced, teasing and tickling his soles, and secured as he was, Balint could do nothing but squirm and laugh.
Drela’s fingers sought out all of Balint’s tickle-sensitive nerve endings. At her level of skill, she had a style of her own, a style Balint recognized from previous encounters. A style that made him laugh and laugh in response to the tickle-things her fingers were doing to his trapped and vulnerable feet. To his heels and to the balls of his feet. To his toes and to his arches. And Drela kept it going, and kept it going, and kept it going, mercilessly, just as the Prophesy demanded.
Balint sensed when Drela found the tempo: Just fast enough to keep the tickling merciless and just slow enough make it last. It was part of her expertise, as was her ability to go on, and go on, and continue the tickle, without pause, without missing a touch. To claim his soles as her own tickle-toys.
And this was just the beginning, Balint knew that Drela had other tickle implements to apply as well.
But right now was the time of the fingers. Centauress fingers skilled at tickling human male soles. Fingers that sometimes moved in patterns that Balint could anticipate, and that sometimes moved in ways he couldn’t. And in both cases the anticipation made his bare soles feel even more sensitive.
Now Balint felt the tempo slow. It didn’t stop; he could still feel Drela’s tickling fingers. They continued to touch his helpless soles, with their reduced tempo being merciless in its own way.
“Mmmm!” Drela said.
“Heeheehee heeheeheeheee!” Balint answered.
The tickle tempo slowed further, almost to a stop. Almost. Then it increased again. And it kept going. It kept going. Balint knew that he’d start to become tickle-drunk if it kept going much longer, and it felt like it was going to keep going forever.
The finger-tickling ended, and the feather-tickling began. The pause between was just long enough for Balint to catch his breath, and to see the feather Drela held up, before he felt her apply it.
It wasn’t the vos-hawk feather that most centaurs preferred. Drela was different, and she liked to use the wing feather from a gold-leg gull. She had proven its effectiveness in tickle contests where other centaurs had used vos-hawk feathers, and now she demonstrated that effectiveness on Balint.
Balint felt her apply the tip of the feather to the bare skin of his soles. Touching and teasing and tickling. It was a single feather, and she could only apply it to one foot at a time, touching and teasing and tickling. It didn’t matter. Drela was patient, and she was skilled, and she continued her merciless tickling of Balint by touching and teasing him with her preferred feather. Over and over again.
As the touch and tease and tickling continued, Balint grew more and more aware of his feet. It was the first sign of the tickle-drunk. He was aware of his soles, of their bareness and vulnerability, held helpless in the stocks with their large toes tied together. Of how they seemed to be growing more and more sensitive to the soft tickling of Drela’s feather, and of how that soft tickle forced him to laugh.
The tease changed. The feather’s firm-soft tip continued to tickle, but in a different way. Balint felt Drela apply little strokes and wiggles now, replacing the teasing touches. Those strokes and wiggles make him squirm, as well as laugh, as the single gull-feather teased and stroked and wiggled and tickled, over and over and over again.
Balint was definitely tickle-drunk now, even if he knew he’d become more so under the sweet whip of that feather. Or of whatever tickle implement Drela would choose next. Balint wondered, as best as he could under the laughter-forcing distraction of the feather, just what that next implement would be.
He found out. Drela produced a pair of stones, mounted on a pair of sticks. Smooth round stones, river-polished and then polished further by a craftsman. And dabbed with oil for extra slickness. Balint didn’t know what they were called. Drela had never told him – or rather had never written down their names for him. And the other centaurs didn’t know what they were called either – other than being “the weird things that Mute Drela uses.” But Balint did know that Drela was as expert with them as she was with her fingers or the gull-wing feather.
The pair of slick, oil-dabbed stones tickled Balint’s soles all over. They didn’t tickle much like Drela’s fingers, and even less like her gull-wing feather, but they did tickle. Oh yes, they tickled voraciously in the centauress hands of Mute Drela. Oh yes! They slid and wiggled and stroked and twisted, cool against the bare and sensitive feet held in place by the stocks, and their every touch tickled. All over. Everywhere. Balint squirmed and laughed, and laughed and squirmed. The vigorous teasing touch did not quite make him howl with laughter. Not quite. But he definitely felt himself growing even more tickle-drunk. And by the time Drela switched to yet another set of tickle-tools, Balint suspected that he’d be tickle-drunk enough not to mind.
Then Drela applied a clever twist and a clever wiggle that focused all of Balint’s attention on the tickling. The tickling that poured into him through his bare soles. Balint thrashed now, instead of just squirming. He struggled as he laughed. He knew he couldn’t escape, and his futile attempts to do so only made him even more aware of his feet. Feet trapped in stocks designed to not allow escape. And being tickled. Mercilessly.
The tickle of the two stone-things continued. Drela kept it up, seemingly without effort. She would pause only to switch implements, and she would slow only for long enough to let Balint catch his and to let him recover just enough to appreciate the next bout.
The tickling slowed. Then it stopped. “Mmmm!” Drela said. Balint looked up to see her holding up a pair of olivewood spoons.
Wooden spoons were a common tickle-implement among the centaurs, but Drela, being Drela, had made the craftsman carve little prongs into the ends, like the prongs of short and blunted wooden forks. She grinned as she wiggled them, one in each hand.
Balint grinned back. He was thoroughly tickle-drunk now. Enough so that he didn’t mind the further tickles to come. Enough so that a small part of him actually wanted more tickling. His grin grew wider. Perhaps the little prongs were like claws; the blunt claws of a wooden animal, bred for tickling. And then Balint’s tickle-drunk maunderings ended. Drela had focused his full attention on his helpless soles once again.
His soles were so well-tickled by now that they might not have responded to a softer touch. Then again, they might have. It didn’t matter, though. Weird Drela’s weird spoons did tickle, the nubby prongs feeling a little like a stiff scrub brush. It took expertise to make such implements tickle properly – but Dreopolle of Thracobex had that expertise. As she gleefully demonstrated to Balint of Isgaul.
Tickle tickle tickle tickle. Tickle tickle tickle tickle. Balint howled. His soles felt soaked with a river with tickling. And Drela kept up the pace, applying carefully placed tickle strokes with an implement in each hand. Tickle tickle tickle tickle.
Balint could see her gleeful grin, out at the end of his world, and could feel her unceasing work, much closer. Tickle tickle tickle tickle. His struggles were weaker now. Drela found it harder to make him squirm, but she could still make him laugh. And she did so with her tickle tickle tickle tickle.
The tickling stopped. Half a minute later, Balint realized that the tickling had stopped. He was massively tickle-drunk now, oh yes.
Drela was out by the sundial, frowning at it. There wasn’t any sunlight. The sky was completely overcast, dark with clouds, and Drela wouldn’t be able to read the time. She considered the sundial for another half-minute before trotting back to where Balint sat, still secured in the stocks.
“Mmmm!” she told him. And resumed the tickling.
Balint giggled instead of laughing. The tickle he felt now was a slow one. A gentle tickle, even, with the wooden claw-spoons being applied with a light light touch. He felt that touch alternate between each of his soles in turn, rather than Drela applying a tickle to both soles at once, as she had been doing before.
Slowly. Lightly. A tickle that made Balint titter and giggle, rather than howl. Deeply tickle-drunk. Tickle mad in fact; he definitely didn’t want Drela to stop. He’d been tickled too much, today, and too much tickling was just right.
Drela stopped. She looked up. Balint looked up too, and saw only the oak-leaves that provided shade to the stocks. He looked back down at Drela, and saw her set her weird tickle-spoons aside.
Then the rain came, soaking them both.
(end)
