Dark Enchantment (13 page)

‘Morgan …’

‘Is your cock hard?’ he rasped.

‘Yes,’ I admitted. My erection was a burning brand pressed against the frigid, soaking cloth and body.

Morgan jammed himself in to the hilt and held himself there. ‘Get it out. I want to see it. You can’t just sit there pretending to be holier-than-thou.’

I was shaking, but I obeyed, wriggling back a little from our prisoner and lowering her to the rug, then using my knees to pin her arms down as I divested myself of my lower garments. My cock sprang out stiffly, delighted to be free of its prison. My conscience and my body were at war, and my body was by far the stronger.

‘That’s better. Now put it to her mouth. See if she’ll lick it like a good girl.’

I moved in, pressing my erect length to an angle where she could reach it.

‘Lick his cock.’

She gaped, her expression as mindlessly carnal as ever.

‘Lick my friend’s cock, you little whore,’ he ordered, his fingers closing cruelly over her left nipple.

She gasped, then tilted her head back, tongue presented to lave the underside of my shaft.

I writhed inwardly, in shame and pleasure. Her mouth was cold, of course, but that was no discomfort by now. Her slick chill sent shivers up my spine.

‘Good girl. You do speak the King’s English then.’ Morgan gave her an encouraging stab with his weapon. ‘By God, you’re a real find.’

He slapped her breast, making it quiver, and the noise of skin on skin was loud and satisfying. She did not protest. Then he did it again, harder. The third time he raised his hand I saw it clench to a fist, and I grabbed his wrist as it swept in.

‘Morgan!’ I shouted, shoving him backwards.

He dumped the girl from his lap and lurched to his feet furiously. Only the fact that I rose to face him made him hesitate about striking me back, I think.

‘What? What have I done wrong now, you milksop?’

‘Is that your idea of how a gentleman fornicates? With his fists?’

‘I’ll do what I damn well like!’

‘Not in front of me you won’t. What sort of a friend would that make me?’

He squared up to me. ‘You blithering idiot, Thorpe. Don’t you understand? We can do anything we want to her – she’s the perfect harlot. She’s not a real person. She doesn’t have any feelings.’ There was the slightest hesitation before the word ‘real’, I noticed.

‘But you are,’ I countered, ‘and
you
are supposed to have feelings.’ I was breathing hard. ‘You are supposed to be a gentleman.’

His knotted brows rose. I think he was as shocked by my standing up to him as by my rebuke. His mouth opened, and
then
he looked down suddenly. While we stood shouting the girl had crawled between us and now she was sucking at the semi-turgid length lolling from his open trousers, her eyes closed in rapture.

‘Oh,’ Morgan groaned.

She was completely naked now. I had a perfect view from behind of the viola curve of her ivory back. The wind went out of my sails.

‘I suppose she’s willing enough …’

‘She loves it,’ Morgan said in a much more moderate voice, as she climbed the length of his body, pressing her pale flesh to the dark tweed of his clothes. ‘Can’t you see that, Thorpe? She wants it badly. She needs what I’ve got.’

Alyse kissed his throat, squirming her hips against his, her white hands delving up under his shirt.

‘Fine. Just, there’s no need for …’

He took a handful of her dark hair and pulled her head back so he could gaze into her eyes. If there was anything there except hunger, neither of us could see it. ‘Do you want me to give you a good fucking,’ he asked softly, ‘my pretty little whore?’

She mouthed at the air as if her lips missed the shape of his cock between them. Morgan’s gaze slid to me. There was implacable intent in it. ‘Stay or go,’ he said grimly. ‘But if you stay to look after her then you’re having some too, Thorpe. This isn’t a theatrical revue.’ He pushed her from him, straight into my arms. ‘Now put her on the bed.’ He began to unbutton his jacket.

There was only a mattress with blue-striped ticking now that the counterpane had been stripped from the daybed. I’d taken two steps towards it with the girl before I thought to question what I was doing. I stopped, crushed by the moment, and as I did so her hand drifted over my prick and sent the
blood
surging through my frame like a tidal bore. Her fingers furled about my shaft, stroking the sensitive skin. I looked back at Morgan, who was stripping off his damp shirt.

‘What position do you want her in?’

He smiled. ‘Hands and knees. I’m going to make a sally through the postern gate, old chum, like I said.’

So I drew Alyse onto the bed and arranged her on hands and knees. She was completely compliant. Morgan came up behind her.

‘Stick your prick in her mouth, Thorpe. I saw this in a Rowlandson cartoon once, you know. I’ve always wanted to try it.’

‘You should wet your cock with spit beforehand,’ I muttered, as I fumbled my own aching prick to her mouth, ‘and use your fingers to open her up first.’

She took me without complaint, of course, her throat cool and clinging.

‘Not to worry,’ he laughed. He found the furrow he’d ploughed once already, rubbed his cock-head up and down in it vigorously, then struck home with a single thrust. Alyse was pushed up on my member all the way to the root. When Morgan withdrew his shaft was shiny with her juices. ‘Well greased, you see.’

Then he grabbed her bottom and bored straight into her nether passage with the efficiency of a navvy driving a piling into its socket. If she’d been a normal girl she would have shrieked, I swear, even though my member was filling her mouth. She only moaned a little and her throat clenched around me. I discovered over the next few minutes something I should have guessed: that she did not need to draw breath. The import of that might have given me pause, had I not been fixated on the sight of her dark hair under my hands and her white body with its soft splayed bottom lifted
to
view, and my friend Morgan thrusting between her cheeks with that darkly flushed cock. He was a sand-pale man, but his hands looked swarthy on the pallid swells of her buttock cheeks. His face was locked in a grimace of concentration until the end, when it opened up wide-eyed as if he saw all the glories of heaven. Yet his language was far from holy, as he thrust and spat and mashed her body beneath his. At that I felt his climax entering her and racing through every channel of her body until it reached my cock and ignited my crisis too, and we both filled her simultaneously from front and back.

I forget what happened in detail after that, except that we forged on to make use of her willing passivity in every way that we could think of. Perhaps there is that darkness in every man’s heart; that powerlessness makes it crueller. Perhaps I’m worse than other men, though I do not think so. Mere orgasm became a side issue to the dredging of Morgan’s carnal imagination. We rooted her together and separately, at every conceivable angle, without respect or subtlety.

And we never conquered her. After every bout she would crawl over for more, little moans of need fluttering pitifully in her throat. Until finally, as she lay supine with her head tilted back right over the edge of the mattress while Morgan shafted her throat in weary wonder, I slipped down exhausted between her thighs and parted the folds of her labia, burying my nose in the wet ringlets of her hair, while my tongue sought her pearl.

‘What’s that?’ Morgan mocked me. ‘Something your Parisian mistress taught you?’

I ignored him, and felt Alyse rise beneath me like a river in flood, her body undulating under my hands, her thighs first opening wide so that she could press me closer then clenching
around
my head until the blood boomed in my ears. For a moment she did not feel cold at all. And as she bucked and twisted and shuddered and her wetness filled my mouth and nose it seemed to me that I was being swept away by a current, wrapped in weeds and tumbled among stones, into the deep.

When I woke it was almost dawn, that time when the light is dim and grey. It shone in through unshuttered windows. I opened crusty eyes and tried to swallow, but my mouth was parched. I’d fallen asleep at the edge of the bed and the wooden frame was denting my cheek painfully. Something passed in front of me: white cloth, hanging in folds. Someone walking past the bed. I reached out and my fingers brushed linen. She’d worn a linen shift, I remembered blearily, and Morgan had ripped it.

But this cloth was dry to the touch.

I clutched the fabric, felt the smoothness of a thigh beneath my hand. Then, in silence as ever, Alyse knelt down by the bed so that her face came down on a level with mine. I stared. I wanted to apologise, but was too ashamed.

She smiled, faintly.

I became aware then how cold I was, in the unheated room on a bare mattress, wearing only my shirt.

Her dark eyes no longer spoke of hunger. They were no longer vacant. A knowingness haunted her smile. She laid a single cool finger on my lips, as if bidding me to keep a secret. Then she stood again, and her white shift and pale face faded away into the light of morning, becoming one with the panes of the window where the dawn mist was pressing up against the glass.

With a shudder I rolled over. ‘Morgan!’

But Morgan did not answer. He lay on his back beside me,
his
eyes fixed on the ceiling overhead. He was quite cold. There was a hole in his bare chest where his heart should have been – a black bloodless hole with withered edges, filled to the brim with water.

The Scent of Hawthorn

Northern Italy, Autumn AD 695

THE VILLAGERS WERE
paying more attention to his horse than to him, noted Herrick as he rode in. He wasn’t completely surprised. Around here in the butt-end of the mountains strangers were few but horses of Bastion’s size and mettle were fewer still, and Herrick himself was wrapped in a hooded leather travelling cloak against the wet sleet, which had only just ceased for the first time that day, and it hid his armour and his sword. He looked, he supposed, fairly nondescript except for his height, but there was nothing nondescript about the black stallion he rode. So they judged him by the horse.

They looked worried.

By the time he reached the heart of the village there was quite a crowd. Herrick looked for a church among the stone huts – priests could be useful if co-operative, or trouble if they pinned him for an Arian and not an adherent of the Church of Rome – but couldn’t see one. He noted, though, that the houses seemed to be in poor repair, and some were obviously empty. He laid the fold of his cloak back over one shoulder to reveal the chain-mail hauberk beneath and a wave of consternation and fascination rippled through the watching villagers. Without a word he dismounted, patting the horse’s shoulder. For the briefest of moments he felt the urge to lay his head against Bastion’s neck and just give up on the entire enterprise, but it was too late for that. Besides, deep down in his belly the
old
embers still burned. This was his time. He straightened his shoulders.

Three paces brought him to stand before the horse, facing the small crowd. Herrick was taller than any man in it. He removed his helmet and ran his hand across the close-cropped mat of his hair, sending a mist of condensation droplets dancing over his head. He was letting them get a good look at his face, at the blunt features and the commanding eyes. Then he folded his arms. ‘Where is your priest? Or your
capo
?’

A middle-aged man neither more nor less damp and grubby than the other villagers pushed to the front of the audience. ‘We have no priest here in Estoli. I am Antonius, the headman. What do you want?’

‘I am Herrick of Turin. In lands to the south of here that name is well known. But whether you have heard of me or no, I am a knight of the Court of Pavia and a Companion of the King’s Household. I’ve fought in eighteen battles since my fourteenth year. I’ve slain a manticore upon the shore of Dalmatia and fought alongside comrades to slay a hydra in the ravines of Arcadia. I have come here to kill your monster.’

The village had no inn for travellers; wedged up against the mountains’ feet it was not on the route to anywhere else, nor did outsiders come to trade – and if they should, Herrick doubted that they would find anything worth buying in bulk. But there was a stable to shelter Bastion alongside the miller’s gelding, and a hall set aside for meetings and for drinking in after the long work in the fields, and they led him there. The beer was cloudy, barely fermented and flavoured with sage, which made everything taste of regret.

They had heard of Herrick, or at least professed to. He was famous. They wanted to know everything, their appetite for
vainglory
immense. Because it was a part of his duty he obliged with stories of war and triumph, with an account of the battle of the Adda River and the subsequent re-ascension of King Cunicpert to his stolen throne, then a description of the victory over the renegade Ansfrid outside the walls of Verona. Nobody thought to ask why, if he was a favoured companion of royalty, he should be here in the dripline of the mountains taking an interest in their woes.

‘Now tell me your story,’ he instructed from where he sat in the best place by the fire, a wooden flagon of beer in one hand. He hadn’t removed his armour, though the straps of his greaves were biting into the backs of his calves. Their faces swam in front of his eyes, indistinguishable one from another in the firelight. He was twice the bulk of some of the village men and seemed to himself twice as solid, sat there under their avid stares, all in iron. He wondered if it was only his armour that made him real. ‘In Pavia we heard there was something in your area slaying men. Tell me about your monster.’

‘You mean the dryad.’

There was muttering then. Some of the people thought it was bad luck to name the demon at all. Herrick was a little taken aback.

‘A dryad? A tree-woman?’

‘You think that sounds harmless?’ Antonius raised his hand to quiet the chatter. ‘This used to be a prosperous enough place to live. There was farming, as now, and mining of lead seams in the forest on a small scale, and animals to hunt and timber to send downriver. Then …’ He looked around at his people.