He gestured towards the two naked women hanging from the post by their wrists.

"By rights," he said, "they should be flogged to the blood for their subversion, but I have been petitioned to show mercy by their guardians at the temple of Isis and certain noblewomen of this city. Accordingly they are condemned only to serve in the mills for a month, together with the rest of their gang, who did nothing to stop them and, indeed, seem infected with their pernicious poison. I only hope I do not live to regret my leniency."

A look of relief briefly crossed the faces of the two at the post at his decision, followed by a smirk of triumph, though their chain companions showed some apprehension at their own sentence. The Commandant had not finished, however.

"Moreover," he went on, "I am ashamed to hear that many of you seemed to feel that they might be listened to without protest, thus encouraging them in their folly, and exposing yourselves to their poison, when you should have cried shame on them and refused to let them pollute your minds. For this dereliction of duty, all those gangs found to have listened without protest will serve two weeks in the mills, to give them time to reflect on their ingratitude and folly."

The mills! Claudia had never been there, but she recalled only too clearly what Lavinia had said at their first meeting about her own punishment for selfishness in sex, and was not cheered.

Nor were her spirits lifted when her gang, along with the others, arrived at the place of their punitive labour. The mills ground all the corn for the city, crushed seed for oil, worked the pumps that lifted water from the river to the higher parts of the town via an elaborate system of lead pipes, letting it flow from ornamental fountains where all could come to fill their pots and jars. They were housed in a set of gloomy halls, bare stone walls contrasting with the decorated marble facades and interiors of all other public buildings. This was a strictly utilitarian institution, a place of grinding labour and aching toil.

Pumps and mills were driven by great wheels, similar in construction to those built to make use of a free flowing river but, in this case, the flow of water over the treads of the wheels was replaced by an endless succession of bare female feet, ceaselessly climbing the wooden stair that, just as remorselessly, lowered them back to the level from which they had started. In order to maintain one's position on the stair, and there were compelling reasons why they should wish to do so, the women must march upwards at the pace of the wheel, be they never so weary. Limbs would ache until they felt they must drop if they moved one pace more. The air was filled with the groans and gasps of labouring women and fetid with the smell of their hot and unwashed bodies.

Claudia's flesh crept as she was marched, naked as ever, into this dim and stinking world of sweating flesh and creaking machinery. The half-naked guards, with their long whips of plaited leather, left no doubt that the fate of a shirker here would be hard. In the event, she found that Lavinia had exaggerated nothing; in fact the reality was even worse than she had supposed.

Each of the great wheels that lined the dimly lit hall was wide enough for a chain gang to stand on it at one time. It was a feature that owed nothing to chance and everything to a conscious provision for the disciplining of refractory women. Her group was brought to line up facing one such great wheel, and they prepared to mount together, on command. First, though, they were to receive their 'motivators'.

A guard passed down the line, slapping his hand down on one shoulder of each naked woman waiting to be set to the mill.

"Squat!" he commanded, and Claudia bent her knees until she sat on her heels.

"Put your hands on the ground in front of you!" and she leant forward to place her palms on the grimy stone paving of the mill building. The action lifted her buttocks slightly, and as her hands took her weight, her breasts dangled between her out stretched arms. Suddenly she flinched. A hand had invaded her anal cleft, seeking out her dimple.

"Be still!" It was the guard's voice that growled at her, and presently she felt something wet and cool slapped into the groove, then thumbed brusquely into the tight anal orifice.

She whined in protest at the humiliating invasion, but the guard silenced her again, telling her she'd be grateful for the attention in a minute. He was not lying. What came next was a hard metallic nose nuzzling at the lubricated aperture. It found its target, made an initial lodgement, then she grunted sharply as it was thrust deep into her bowel.

"You wouldn't have fancied that dry, I imagine," the guard responsible for her preparation observed, and she shuddered anew at the thought of that thick iron hook being forced into an ill prepared and reluctant sphincter.

Even so, it was no easy burden. She felt as if she was filled from butt to gills, her anus already aching from its rude stretching. She felt it even more when the guard gathered up the slack of the chain to which it was attached and yanked upwards, forcing her to her feet. Her hands went behind her in desperate defence of her ravaged rectum, but there was no way in which she could have relieved herself of its grip, even without the guard to prevent it.

As it was, he used his cruel purchase on her gut to force her forward onto the wheel and up the stair of wooden treads, until she stood just above the level of the axle, where her weight would have its greatest driving power on the mill. The chain from the hook on which she was impaled ran over a pulley in the roof, and the guard hauled on the free end, until the tension in the chain kept the hook, and her, firmly in place. He moved back and secured the free end to a ring. Now she was in one sense free, her arms with no fetters, her ankles only restricted by the chain that fastened her loosely to her neighbours on the gang, something she had become so used to as to ignore most of the time.

Those others had been given the same preparation as herself and stood now, with iron-stuffed rectums, like so many gaffed fish on a river bank, or skinned rabbits hung up on butchers' hooks, grasping the wooden rail that ran across at chest level to maintain their balance the better. They braced themselves at a warning call from the guards, and the man in charge released the brake that had held the wheel steady while they were mounted.

Claudia gasped in pain and panic. All around her she heard answering grunts from her neighbours. It felt as if the earth had fallen away from beneath her feet as the wheel moved and the tread dropped, letting her weight fall even harder onto the hook in her anus. Shocked by the pain, as the tip of the hook pressed against her entrails, she staggered up onto the next step, relieving the anguish in her belly, but the wheel was turning, the new step was falling in its turn, and she had to climb again and again and again and again...

It was an endless and unrelenting progression, marching up a slope that had no crest, doomed to climb and climb and go on climbing, until the overseers called a halt.