Dark Enchantment (27 page)

‘Open it up, bitch!’ Darius snarls through clenched teeth.

It’s a lot like the first time I was buggered, it turns out: the pain, the awful feeling of invasion, the fearful desperate clenching of my muscles that is overcome by implacable force, the pop and slide and dilation as the cock has its way. The noises I’m making over Darius’ fingers don’t sound human, and the soldiers not occupied with their exertions grin and mock.

‘Give it to her!’ Rurik urges from behind me. ‘Get it in there!’

‘Fuck. Fuck.’ Milo is panting hard. ‘I’m in. Fuck.’ He is: I can
feel
my anus stretched wider than it’s ever been, like a mouth open in a silent scream.

‘Go on then,’ answers Teodric dryly. ‘Fuck her, lads.’

I’ve run out of cries. I cling to Darius’ broad torso helplessly, unable to believe there’s a cock up my sex and two more up my arse – two cocks pressed tight together, skin to skin, in my slippery grip; cream and honey and Alain’s jism lubricating their unyielding stiffnesses as they begin to move over each other, inside me. And as they move they press against Darius, who heaves beneath me, grinding my mound.

‘Does that feel good, whore?’ Teodric asks, lifting my chin. But I have lost the power of speech. My eyes can’t even focus on his face. He smiles, satisfied with me at last.

‘Nobody’s using this end,’ points out Jaffez.

‘True enough. Hold her up, Darius.’

Darius props me from beneath with one hand and with the other grips my braids and pulls my head back. Now I really am pinned immobile. My mouth sags open.

‘Three at the back there,’ muses Teodric. ‘Don’t see why she shouldn’t take three cocks up here too. And, Alain, you’d better come or I’m revoking your whoring privileges until the Spring Festival.’

‘Yes, sir,’ he drawls.

They close in, kneeling up over Darius’ head with the terrible uncaring intimacy of fighting men. Jaffez is first in, plunging his cock into my mouth. I’m unable to suck so I just take him, moaning, and he gets off a few strokes before making way for Alain, who yields in turn to the Captain. So they carry on, working and squeezing their own cocks while they are waiting to make use of my open throat, and all the while the other three fuck me arsewise and cuntwise with slow, rolling strokes. My eyes are watering, the tears running down my face. I can barely draw breath. It is all I can do to keep my mouth moist.
I
am being squeezed out of existence by all this hard male flesh crushing me. I am full as I have never been full before. My gingered flesh flares to every thrust. In my mind’s eye they are not only six individuals but one huge Man that possesses and forces and ravishes my every orifice, their grunting and panting the voice of a single monstrous beast, the scent of their bodies mingling, their cocks one omnipresent cock, inescapable as the oblivion to which it is driving me.

My breath escapes as a long wail.

‘Look, she’s coming,’ says Captain Teodric, far over my head. ‘The slut is coming, lads.’

‘Oh gods,’ groans Jaffez, spurting into my mouth.

His copious gushes nearly drown me, but there is no let-up when he pulls back because Teodric is coming next onto my slack tongue, salty and sour. Someone – I can’t tell if it’s one or both men, but they are both thrusting frantically – is coming in my back passage and my arse is awash and I think it’s both Milo and Rurik together, clawing at me. Even Alain squeezes out three thick white gobbets of spunk onto my lips. And all the time I am still coming, and I do not care if they tear me to pieces with their lust and their need for release, because mine are greater still.

I get fucked a few more times that night, but to be honest I barely register the subsequent occasions, slipping as I am in and out of consciousness. Eventually I pass out face down in Jaffez’s lap, with his hand sunk to the wrist inside me. They let me sleep after that, curled on the rug in my usual spot, the Captain’s booted foot resting on my head.

Deep in the early hours someone – it’s Milo, I recognise the scent of his skin – picks me up and carries me through to my own chambers. I bob back to the surface of awareness in intermittent glimpses: darkness then light then darkness again. He
lays
me between clean sheets, unravels the scarlet harness from about my abused flesh, strokes my face with his fingertips, then leaves me to sleep it off.

I would have him demoted from the Elite, if it were not for the cruel thrashings he subjects my arse to so often.

In the morning my maidservants will come and wake me. They will not remark upon the rope imprints in my flesh or the encrustations upon my skin; my personal attendants are all mute now, by birth or surgery. I cannot bear the twittering of female chatter, and the executions necessary to quell gossip became tedious. They will lead me through to the bath of warm water they have prepared and I will soak away the aches, bruises and scents of the previous night. Then I shall be dried with towels of softest lambs’ fleece, and perfumed and clothed in cloth of gold and finally masked. I shall ascend my palanquin and be carried through to my throne room, flanked by my faithful and devoted janissaries. Zoë Eiparthanos, Ivory Empress, ruler of half the world.

Tomorrow I will once again have the lives of millions in my hands. I will have executions to order, punishments to inflict, military strikes to plan. I must receive the embassies of distant kingdoms, discern the twists of treachery, judge the innocent from the guilty, issue orders for new towns to be founded and temples to be built. I must tax the loyal and quell the disloyal. I must save and I must lay waste. I must decide every moment which of a thousand scheming ambitious men to trust with the business of empire, and while my trust means wealth, my slightest doubt means death. So they lie to me. They lie and lie and lie, and still I must judge and decide.

How can anyone bear such responsibility? How can anyone wield such power without going mad? It is like a cloak of fire that, wrapped about the shoulders, will burn the wearer to ashes.

The answer is that such great power must be burned off before one bursts into flames. My Imperial Elite see to that. Nightly they drag my incandescent form to earth and pin me there. They reduce me to mere matter in the crucible of their lust. They remind me what it is to feel helplessness and fear and pain and relief as all my subjects know them; they remind me that I am mortal. Neither god nor demon. Human.

Most loyal, most necessary of men: my janissaries.

Darkling I Listen

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death

John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

THE YOUNG WOMAN
sat before the white marble tomb of the Elerin family, and as she spoke to the ghoul she drew spirals in the sand with a twig. Exploring ants clambered in the furrows left by the stick and she watched them incuriously. A mane of dark hair almost hid her face. She wore an unbleached shroud that sagged from one shoulder, exposing the smooth brown skin beneath and part of the curve of one breast. In contrast the ghoul squatting before her was naked, its livid hairlessness mottled like a bruised toadstool, and being a ghoul it shifted uncomfortably in the light although the sun was setting and the clouds stained pink, blinking rapidly over sensitive pupils that refused to contract. It was almost blind in daylight, even crouched here in the tomb’s shadow; only its interest in the girl’s tale staved off its nervousness.

‘Once upon a time,’ she said, wriggling her bare toes in the dust, ‘there was a maiden who lived with her father in a wagon. The wagon was pulled by two mules. Her father was a great traveller and had been all over the world. The girl was only fourteen, so she had not been so far, but she lived in the wagon and was happy, even though they were a long way from their own home.’

It was a young ghoul, much smaller than the woman, and had no memory of its humanity in the days before it was stolen from its mother; nonetheless, it had a liking for stories and games that marked it out from its larger brethren whose pastimes were of a more peculiar nature. Ghouls, as is well known, do not breed amongst their own kind – though they can quicken a human womb, living or dead – and they have a habit of acquiring other people’s children.

‘She had a talking bird in a cage that hung from the front of the wagon, and a small yellow dog that ran along beside the wheels when they were on the road, and with the company of these and her father she didn’t miss her mother, who had died a long time ago. She didn’t remember her mother at all. The wagon was painted dark blue, with stars in yellow on the boards and the awning.

‘The maiden’s father was an astrologer and a worker of small magics. He could make fire turn all sorts of colours, and pull the little yellow dog out of an empty bag, and persuade the mules to speak in funny voices. But mostly he read the stars, and told people’s futures from their birth hours. That was how he made his living and looked after his daughter. I don’t think he was very good, because otherwise he would not have come to Krisilith. Or maybe he would not look at his own star chart. I don’t know for sure.’

She stubbed out the small life of one of the ants and dragged her twig into a new series of loops.

‘They rode into Krisilith along the coast road, coming down from the cape of Het where the Baron himself had asked the astrologer to read his stars. The maiden was excited – she liked travelling to new places. She asked her father about the city, because he was a scholar and knew everything, even foreign lands. He said that Krisilith was famous for three things: firstly because it was the biggest seaport on that coast,
secondly
for the sweet sticky breads that they made there, and thirdly because there were really two cities in Krisilith, one for the living and one for the dead. He said that the living city was built all around the skirts of a hill, and on the hill were stone houses for the dead people, and a palace for the dead barons, and empty marketplaces and courthouses and chapels and public baths and even a library in which they kept copies of the writings of poets and historians. Everything empty and silent. The houses had beds and tables and chairs in for the dead people to use. And the living people would come in the daytime to pay social calls and leave food and drink for their relatives, but they would never go there at night, and though they treated their ancestors to the best they had, they never gave them any shoes, just in case the dead people should decide to pay a visit to the living for a change.’

The ghoul made a noise that sounded a great deal like a snigger.

‘That all sounded very strange to the maiden, who tried to imagine the dead people coming out of their houses at night and going about their normal business under the moonlight just like other people.’ She tilted her face up into the last warm fingers of light. Her bronze-coloured eyes were rimmed by dark shadows, the face that caught that sun a little too thin for her age and the line of her mouth a little too hard, an observer might have decided. ‘Among the maiden’s people, in the dry mountains far away, the way with the dead was to bury them in a sandy place and pile rocks upon the grave, to give them a narrow bed alone and not a city. But this was another country and another people, and if they had strange ways what of it? It was not so odd, she thought, as the raft villages in the swamps of Iol, or the rock mazes of NaBrith in which the priests danced and chanted.

‘So they rode into Krisilith in their wagon, and the maiden looked all around her with fascinated eyes. She saw the tall red-stone houses and the white awnings stretched between the roofs to shade the narrow streets from the sun. The people of the city hurrying up and down the choked streets and pressing around the wagon were sandy coloured with big hands, and they wore stiff dark clothes that looked too tight and hot for them; they stared a great deal at the wagon and the man and the maid who must have looked very strange and foreign to them. Some followed the wagon to the marketplace and asked where they had come from and what was their news. The astrologer was pleased to have made such an entrance, and he stood on the box of the wagon and told all who would listen that he was a reader of men’s fates and that he had been recently patronised by the Baron of Het. Then he paid for a room in a fine inn and locked himself away with his daughter to await the first summons.’

The sun slipped behind a ribbon of cloud low on the horizon as the young woman spoke these words and at once the air darkened. The ghoul relaxed visibly and glanced around it, before reaching under the doorstep on which it sat and feeling around in the space beneath. The girl paid no attention, even when the ghoul retrieved a withered human hand and began to gnaw pensively upon it, chewing off the skin and crunching the small bones between its teeth.

‘That was the way the astrologer worked,’ she continued. ‘When word got around, then the wives of rich men would send to him, wanting to know if their husbands would prosper, or whether they would find love. Then when the women were all talking of his fame and his fine and accurate predictions, then the merchantmen and the nobles would stoop to consulting him. This was what he expected. But this time in
Krisilith
the well-dressed servants were slow to appear. And when he asked the innkeeper some questions in the privacy of his room, it became known to him that the chief priest of the city had spoken out against astrologers and alchemists, accusing them of witchcraft and poisoning, and crying for such blasphemous enquiries to be silenced.

‘“Perhaps this is not a good place for us to stay,” sighed the man to his daughter as they ate their dinner together, but hardly had they dropped the bones to the yellow dog than a soldier entered at the door and presented a summons to him. The astrologer was to go at once to the castle and there read the stars for the old Baron of Krisilith, who had taken to his sickbed. The maiden’s father swept his charts and papers into a bag and hurried off at once with the soldier, leaving the girl to wait. She did not dare to leave the inn alone, so she sat on the balcony and watched the lamps of the city glimmering in the dark lanes.