by Lisa Cach
The audience burst into laughter.
Yes, until Priapus laid eyes on sleeping Lotus, and the great red cock sprang free of his cloak. The laughter went on in waves as Terix clowned about, stroking his beastly mentula—as the Romans called it—thrusting his hips, and pantomiming the naughty, naughty things he planned to do with sleeping, unsuspecting Lotus. I felt the shadow of the fake cock over my face, accompanied by another roar of laughter.
Some jokes needed no translation. The Frankish and Roman men were one in their appreciation of a giant penis and a helpless nymph.
I smothered a smile, knowing how funny Terix could be, his face contorting into exaggerated imitations of lust, scheming, and surprise. He had no shame and thrived on attention; coupled with his quick, raunchy wit and a certain air of vulnerability, his charms were impossible to resist—as many a girl had discovered. Laughter had a way of leading to thighs spread and Terix between them.
Never my thighs, though. Terix valued his balls too highly to risk having them snipped off by an angry Sygarius.
Nor could I think of him as other than a friend; a brother. The boy I’d grown up with, in slavery. I assumed he felt the same way about me, for all that there were moments when his eyes spoke of less innocent desires.
But that was just Terix. He’d hump a goat if it were handy.
I felt his weight on the end of the couch.
We’d come to my favorite part of the pantomime, as it aroused me to a strange degree. I’d never admit that to Terix, of course.
Priapus was hoping to take full advantage of Lotus before she woke and his hands carefully lifted the hem of my gown, dragging the sheer fabric slowly up my calves. Inch by inch, my legs were bared. I could feel the held breath of the audience, hoping along with Priapus that he would reach his goal—even though they’d heard this story before, and knew how it ended. But maybe this time . . .
Terix tugged on the fabric and I feigned a sigh in my sleep, turning so that my hips were flat on the couch and my legs slightly spread. I felt the give of the couch as he placed his knee carefully between mine, not touching. One hand pulled my skirts farther upward, to my thighs. I could feel the change in air temperature as the cloth neared my loins and cooler air rushed in. A few more inches, and my cunny would be exposed for all to see.
My inner passage clenched in arousal. I felt swollen, eager, and I slit my eyes open again to gaze upon Clovis. His eyes were locked to my loins, his posture tense and tilted forward, as if halfway to pushing Priapus aside and taking his place. His face was flushed, his lips parted, and though his tunic covered his groin, I thought I detected a sword at the ready.
Terix’s hand hovered over my waiting sex. Clovis watched; Sygarius, I knew, watched; every soul in the room, male and female, watched; all hoping against hope that Priapus would make it to his goal. As did I. My cunny throbbed with unspent desire, and at that moment I ached for Terix’s hand to complete its journey. Let him touch me; let me know what it was to be petted and stroked and made love to; let me feel the warmth of another body against my own. At that moment, I felt that I’d need no more than the faintest touch against my sex to feel rapture.
It wasn’t to be.
“EEE-aa! EEE-aa!” Donkey brayed, and punctuated it with farts, as donkeys are wont to do. “EEE-aa!” fraap frapp. “EEE-aa!” fraap fraap.
The noise woke Lotus. I opened my eyes. Gasped at the horrific sight of Priapus’s giant red staff looming above me, ready to spear me.
The audience howled with laughter.
A mad scramble and then Lotus was free, dashing from the couch and the meadow, running off scene through the curtains.
“EEE-aa!” Donkey said, with satisfaction. Fraap fraap.
I hid in the shadows of the curtain, smiling at the laughter of the audience, watching as Priapus turned on Donkey in a rage. Grasping the base of his cock as if it were a club, Priapus whacked Donkey over the head with it. Donkey ran, braying, pursued by furious Priapus, penis-club beating the beast until Donkey fell down, rolled onto his back, and expired with a final, lonesome fraap fraap.
Sygarius led the applause. Donkey leapt up and removed his mask, and I dashed back out to bow with my fellow actors and musicians. I peeked up from under my brows at Clovis . . .
Only to find he was gone.
Found you.”
I spun round, holding my filmy Lotus costume up over my bare breasts. I had just taken the gown off in the small room I shared with three other girls; three girls who were off attending to guests.
Clovis stood in the doorway, one hand holding back the curtain. The flickering light from the lamp in the wall niche reflecting like fire in his pale eyes. My tongue froze in my mouth, and I gaped at him, too surprised to move.
“Tell me your name,” he said.
I stared mutely at him, my mind as frozen as my tongue. He was here. Alone. With me. Talking to me. For all the looks we’d exchanged, and all I’d thought about him these past hours, I hadn’t imagined my fantasies becoming real right now. In months, maybe; sometime in the hazy future, for sure.
Faced with Clovis in the flesh, I didn’t know what to do.
“I know your ears work,” he said, stepping into the room and closing the distance between us. He grasped my chin between thumb and forefinger, and pulled down. My lips parted, and he narrowed his eyes at my mouth. “That’s a tongue I see in there. And yet, no words.” He released my chin. “Are you addled?”
“Momentarily,” I said. It wasn’t how I’d imagined him touching me. He spoke Latin fluently, with an accent—a certain crispness alternating with a lilt—that made me go soft.
He chuckled. “A passing affliction, then.” He waited a few moments, watching me with his head cocked. “Has it passed yet?”
No, it hadn’t. If anything, it was getting worse. He was close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off his body. He was taller than I’d realized, too; I came up to somewhere beneath his shoulder, and the sense of his size in the confines of the small room—with me nude and a bed behind me—was doing strange things to my limbs. “You should not be here, talking to me, my lord Clovis,” I finally managed to say.
“If you know who I am, then you also know that no one tells a prince who he can or cannot talk to.” He bent his head down, bringing his face closer to mine, and lowered his voice. “You should be humbled by my great condescension in speaking with you, a mere actress.” His eyes crinkled at the corners.
The words sounded only half in jest. Arrogant prick! I raised my brows and aped the hauteur I’d often seen Lady Lydia do so well. “A man with a princely heart would respect the modesty of even a woman assumed to have none, and would let her put on her clothes.”
“Where did you get such a strange idea of how princes behave?” His fingertips touched my cheek, then light as a feather brushed down the side of my neck. I shivered, my eyes half shutting. My body had been longing for such a touch from a man. I wanted him to go on; I wanted him to kiss me. To pull my gown from my hands. To push me back on the bed.
“I’ve only seen these in treasure troves,” he said, touching my torc. “No one wears them anymore.”
I shut my eyes fully, a shudder of disappointment shaking me as I was reminded of my position. “Is reading part of princely behavior?” I asked, and pulled my hair back to fully expose the front two sides of the torc. I kept my gaze lowered, my usual pride at being specially marked giving way to a sick shame at being owned.
“Touch me not,” he read, “for Sygarius’s I am. He’s collared you like a dog. You’re a slave?”
I nodded.
“And his concubine.”
“No!” I looked up at him. “Not yet, anyway. Soon.”
“You mean he’s never touched this?” His fingertips brushed over my shoulder, and then his warm hand spread over my upper arm, moving downward in a slow stroke.
“More likely he’d kill you. Or sell you to a brothel. He needs my father and me, if he hopes to remain dux of this province.”
I grasped the gown more tightly to my front, lustful feelings suddenly chased away by cold fear. Gods, he was right. I would bear the brunt of Sygarius’s wrath for this folly, not Clovis.
I heard voices outside the room: other servants. My eyes went wide, my heart thumping. “Go!”
“It would hardly serve you to have me step out of your room with witnesses present. Besides, I haven’t gotten what I came for.”
I laid my hand over my torc. “It would be the death of me!”
“You are a beautiful little wench, and I won’t deny wanting to push your thighs apart and lick your cunny until you scream—”
“Wh-what?!”
“—but what I came here to see,” he said, slipping his hand off my arm and brushing the back of his knuckles against the side of my breast, “is this.” I felt him tug the cloth to the side, and looked down at my chest to where he’d revealed a spiraling swirl of tattoo. “I’ve only seen such a design once before.”
A flood of emotion went through me. He’d seen my tattoos before. Hope. A fierce longing I’d thought long dead. “Where?” I demanded. “On whom? When?”
He grinned. “So many questions! And yet you never answered mine.”
“Yours? What question?”
“Perhaps you are addled, if you’ve forgotten already.”
I searched back through the few minutes of our conversation, frantic to find the answer, scared he might saunter from this room without telling me anything. My mother. The Phanne. He’d seen one of my people. I had to know what he knew. “My name, that’s what you want? Nimia. It’s Nimia. When did you see tattoos like mine?”
The voices of the servants had faded, but suddenly there were quick footsteps outside the room, and then the skittering sound of the metal rings on the rod as the curtain over the doorway was jerked back. I shrieked.
“Nimia, you—” Terix froze as Clovis slowly turned to look at him. “Jupiter’s prick, Nimia,” Terix whispered. “What in Hades?”
“Close the curtain, Terix. Gods’ sake!” I said. “Do you want the whole villa to see him here?”
Terix stepped into the room, letting the curtain fall closed behind him. “The whole villa will. Your absence has been noticed, my lord,” he said to Clovis. “If it had been anyone but me sent to fetch Nimia . . .” He made a face, expressing the dire consequences.
I grabbed Clovis’s arm before he could turn and leave. “You have to tell me. Where did you see my tattoos?”
“This apparently isn’t the time to explain.”
My voice was tight with desperation. “You must tell me.”
Clovis bent his head toward mine again, and then brushed a slow, barely there kiss across my mouth. It was the lightest of contacts, yet it left my lips on fire. “I’ll be here a few days more. Find somewhere we can talk without being disturbed.”
I nodded, though I knew what that kiss meant: There would be a cost to the information I sought. “I’ll send Terix to let you know when and where.”
“Me? I thought I was your friend. Get me my balls cut off, you will.”
I hardly heard Terix’s grumbling. My eyes were all for Clovis. He was looking down at me with a bemused expression.
“Do you know, I’ve suddenly had the strangest feeling about you.”
I warmed inside. He felt it, too; he knew, as I did, that we were meant to be together.
“I’m convinced you’re going to be critical to achieving my ends. What a useful little slave girl you’re going to be.”
And with that, he turned and left. The curtain billowed from his passage, and then fell still. I gaped at the empty space, my inner warmth turning cold. Useful little slave girl.
“Nimia,” Terix said. His expression was serious for once, which was a measure of how dangerous the situation was.
“What?” I turned my anger and confusion on him.
“You can’t meet with him in private. You know you can’t.”
“We’re just going to talk.” It sounded defensive, even to me; I heard the whine in my voice.
“Talk is not all you want from him.”
“It’s all I’ll take. Did you hear him? He thinks I’ll be useful,” I snorted.
“He wants to get you alone and fuck you. Hades only knows if he’s truly seen your tattoos on anyone else. He’s using that as bait, and will make up some story to keep you begging him.”
“Did you ever think that maybe I’m the one who’s in control of this? Of course he wants to fuck me,” I said, and flung out my hand in a sweeping gesture toward the rest of the villa. “Half the men in the garden room want to fuck me. I’ve kept myself untouched all these years, though, and that won’t change now for a barbarian princeling who thinks I’ll be useful. And I’ll know if he’s lying.”
Terix shook his head. “Rant all you want. Your cunny has already decided for you. If you let yourself be alone with him, Nimia, you will give him what he wants.”
I scowled. “I don’t know what he wants.” Beyond sex; every man wanted sex. There was nothing special about his desire for me . . . but there was something special about mine for him, which seemed grossly unfair at this moment.
Terix rolled his eyes.
“Why did you come looking for me?” I asked, changing the topic.
He grimaced in surprise. “Fuck me up the ass! I forgot: attend Sygarius in the usual place. You’re to have a lesson.”
I sat in the wooden chair and shrugged out of the top of my gown, letting it fall to my waist; my bare breasts tightened at the touch of cool air. I flipped my long, heavy hair back over my shoulders, knowing that Sygarius didn’t want it concealing his view of my breasts. I put my arms on the arms of the chair, and my feet over its lion paw feet; I curled my toes, feeling the lumpy shape of the carving under my soles. The position forced my knees apart, and even though my thighs were covered by my skirts, my cunny felt open and exposed.
And then I waited.
I was in Sygarius’s bedchamber, waiting as I had been taught to do during my four previous visits. In front of me was an empty couch, flat except for a rolled arm at one end. On the other side of the couch, another wooden chair faced me, and waited—like me—for Sygarius.
The first time I’d come here, my stomach had been as unsettled as the wine in a dancing drunkard’s goblet. I hadn’t known what to expect: what might be done to me, what I might be expected to do, what questions I might have to answer. I had been afraid of making a fool of myself, either through my ignorance or by revealing my sexual cravings.
Although why that last should have the potential to embarrass me, I still hadn’t figured out. I couldn’t bring myself to be as open and cheerful about my lusts as Terix was. Desire seemed such a private thing, meant to be concealed. Revealing too much of it, too honestly, would leave me vulnerable to harm.
I couldn’t reason with myself otherwise. No matter what wise points I made, or how cleverly I argued that only good would come from showing Sygarius that I was hungry to experience a man’s touch, I wouldn’t listen to myself or be persuaded to be more frank and open.
That first lesson, I had come into the room to find it empty except for Linnaeus—Sygarius’s scribe, a tall, narrow man with flabby pale flesh, hunched shoulders, and a head that was bald except for a fringe of overlong pale hair that went around the back of his skull, from ear to ear. His eyes and mouth both turned down at the corners, and he had the disturbing habit of curling his tongue over his upper lip while he was thinking. Which w
as often. And usually of evil things, I’ve no doubt.
Linnaeus had directed me to my chair, and told me I was to stay in it unless Sygarius told me otherwise. These lessons were demonstrations, he explained; actors in masks and wigs would play them out on the stage of the couch.
At a signal from Linnaeus, the actors had come in: three men and three women, all lightly clad, all wearing masks over the top halves of their faces, and the women wearing long wigs of different colors: blonde, brunette, red. I’d wondered—and continued to wonder—if I knew them. Was the blonde a servant I’d seen in the laundry? Was that man with the broad shoulders and dusky skin one of the regular villa guards? Or were they from the city of Soissons proper, and not a regular part of the household?
The actors had stood in the shadows and waited for Linnaeus to direct them; they must have rehearsed beforehand how the lesson would go. Sygarius had entered, taken his seat across from me, and then in his low, steady voice explained to me what it was for a man and a woman to come together.
What a lesson that first one had been! And they’d only gotten wilder.
The first lesson had been on foreplay, starting with kissing, and tender touches of fingertips to the face, the side of the neck, through the hair; moving on to hands smoothing down the length of a back, a thigh; lips caressing a hand, tongue teasing the center of a palm; gentle fondling of breasts, and a nipple surrounded by the warm wet heat of a mouth. Hands on asses, stroking, fondling, teasing, parting. A woman’s hand on the thick rod of a man, sliding up and down, her other hand cupping his weighty balls. Rubbing the damp tip of that rod against her nipples. The tender stroking of a woman’s folds, and a fingertip circling round, pressing at, and then entering her gate.
