The Adventures of a Roman Slave

by Lisa Cach

  “Impossible, with my father as king of the Franks.”

  “Mmm?” His hands moved up to cup my breasts, his thumbs playing with my nipples.

  “He’s grown fat and contented, suckling at the teat of Sygarius’s golden purse. His ambition has been bought and tamed.”

  My arousal was suddenly dampened: I was swamped by a distressing sense of my own divided loyalties, of having betrayed both Clovis and Sygarius at the same moment. I’d learned what Sygarius commanded of me by following his script . . . even though I’d followed it spontaneously, and in sincerity. And with the wrong man.

  I should push Clovis away, and end this seduction before it went further. Go to Sygarius and tell him what I knew.

  Or I could stay and feel those hands on my breasts, my thighs, my buttocks. Those lips on my skin, that tongue . . .

  Clovis would never be able to buy me from Sygarius; it was a dream only.

  But if I stayed with Sygarius, I would never learn more about the Phanne. I’d never be free to discover what I was, and who I was meant to be.

  There was only one way out, following a dangerous path from which few emerged alive.

  I’d have to run away.

  The thought sent a terrified thrill through me. My body felt the surge, and merged it with the wonders Clovis was working on my flesh. Fear sought annihilation in desire, burrowing into it, burying itself under sensation. The glory of touch. A man’s hands upon me, arousing me, seeking to please both me and himself.

  All my sense of care and self-preservation vanished in a burst of rebellion. For too long, the will of another had built my hungers and denied them satisfaction. I was a woman with my own mind, my own heart, my own body and needs. I was not a farm animal, to be told when to breed. I was not a dog, to be collared. I was not, in the center of my being, a slave.

  I dug my hands into Clovis’s hair and brought his face close to mine. “Touch me not,” I said, and crushed my lips to his.

  His surprise lasted only a moment, and then he was kissing me back, showing me how it was done. He licked the joining of my lips until they opened, then sucked my tongue to his, their rough lengths rubbing against each other, making promises about what would happen with our loins.

  I clawed blindly at his tunic, seeking fasteners, my hands dropping at last to his belt and jerking, pulling, until I had it free, Clovis chuckling at my eagerness. He drew the tunic off over his head, and my hands dropped to his breeches, engaging in a fresh skirmish against fasteners and barriers.

  “Easy,” he said, laying one hand over mine.

  I grasped his hand and pulled it under my skirts and up my thigh, to the damp, warm cove that waited for him. “Touch me not,” I said, and pressed his fingers into my folds.

  He groaned, and then my fever became his, and he scooped me off the ledge of the basin and onto the hard, cold floor. His breeches came undone, and I shoved them down his hips and reached round to grasp his buttocks once, squeezing hard, before my hands came forward to grip what they’d been longing for.

  Hard.

  Silken.

  Hot.

  Thick.

  “I’ve never touched one before,” I said, astonished at the feel of it in my hand. Astonished by the size, and by how the thickness of it, clasped inside my palm and fingers, made my body ache.

  He shoved my skirts up to my waist, his lips parting as he saw the extent of the tattoos. “Do they go everywhere?”

  “Find out for yourself.” I pulled his rod toward my waiting gate.

  “Easy, Nimia; you can’t be ready yet. You’re a vir—”

  He broke off as I pressed the head of his rod against my gate. “Touch me not,” I whispered. “For Sygarius’s I am.”

  He swore in his language, and gave a short thrust, as if it had been jerked out of him against his will. I felt pressure, but no parting of the doors. I widened my thighs, and put my feet flat on the ground, knees bent, to better press my hips up to meet him.

  “Nimia, I don’t want to hurt you—”

  “Am I wet enough?”

  “Gods, yes.”

  I reached down and grasped his rod, as I’d seen the actresses do in those lessons Sygarius made me watch. I held him steady at my locked gate, and raised my hips. He thrust against me in return, a short thrust. The pressure built to the edge of pain, and then backed off. Clovis groaned. His arms were to either side of me, propping his torso above mine. His hair hung down around his strained face.

  “Take me, Clovis,” I urged. “Steal me. Free me from him. I want yours to be the first prick I feel inside me.”

  The power of his thrust surprised me, my hand flying away as he rammed his rod past the bar on my gate, tearing it asunder. I cried out at the pain and shock of it, and the unexpected immensity of him inside me.

  He held his hips still, and bent his head down to press kisses over my face, murmuring soothing words.

  “It’s all right,” I whispered. “Keep going. I want it to hurt.”

  He stopped his kisses long enough to meet my eyes, his darkened with both passion and confusion. “Why?”

  “I want it seared into my mind. I want it tattooed upon my body like the spirals on my breasts and loins. Indelible. Irreversible. I never want to forget that you were here first.”

  “Gods, Nimia, do you have any idea what your words do to me?” He started to thrust, slowly, his face still showing his strain. “It’s almost impossible to stay in control.”

  “I don’t want your control.” I grabbed his buttocks and pulled him into me, and wrapped my legs around the back of his.

  His hold on himself finally broke and he went wild, pounding into me, grabbing my hip and holding it down with one hand for better leverage as he bucked and thrusted. It hurt at first, his rod feeling as rough as sawn wood, but I didn’t fight it. I relished it as proof of what was happening, and as I let him take me my cunny seemed to soften and accept him. It didn’t feel good—I hadn’t expected it to, not this first time—but it no longer felt so bad.

  I closed my eyes and focused on the wide spreading of my thighs, and the feel of his strength as he pushed and plunged; as he held my hip down; as the force of his body against mine nudged me along the floor, and made my breasts bounce. He was locked in the act, unstoppable; I gave myself over to the storm of his lust. I liked being helpless beneath it, the more so because I’d incited him to it.

  It had been my choice. With a burning inner joy, I reaped what I had sown.

  At last he gave a gurgled cry that sounded like my name, and his body stiffened. He jerkily thrust once more, twice, and held motionless. A moment later, I felt his rod throb as he expelled himself within me. I watched his face as it happened, his eyes closed, his head tilted back. His hair clung to his cheeks and neck, dampened with the sweat of passion.

  When the paroxysm had passed, he opened his eyes and, finding me watching him, gave me a sheepish smile. I grasped his sides and pulled his weight down on top of me. He was heavy enough to nearly press the breath from me.

  I would have gladly suffocated, for the joy of having a body pressing against mine.

  After his breathing quieted, he shifted up onto his elbows. “Next time—”

  I pressed my fingers to his lips and shook my head. I didn’t want his apologies. “When I first saw you, I knew that this would happen.”

  He held my face tenderly between his hands, and met my gaze. “Your eyes . . . they’re glowing. Like Maerlin’s eyes glowed. What does it mean?”

  Passion. Trance. Visions that often come true. But I could not reveal all that to him, lay my soul as open as I had just laid my body. I didn’t understand much of it, anyway. “It means that I am Phanne.”

  He dug his fingers into my hair. I could still feel him inside me, thick and burning. “What are the Phanne?”

  “I . . . I’m not
sure.”

  “But you suspect.”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me.”

  When I didn’t answer, he pushed with his hips, nudging that great branch deeper within me. I squirmed, trying to escape it; with passion fading, a raw soreness was coming to take its place. “Tell me, Nimia,” he said teasingly. “I won’t pull out until you do. You can feel me swelling again, can’t you?”

  I could. And I loved it. I wanted to squirm upon it, the better to feel its growing girth.

  “Your poor little cunny isn’t ready for another battle. Or is it?” He gave an experimental thrust.

  I winced.

  All right, so maybe “loved it” was a little strong at the moment.

  “Better tell me, before I get carried away and forget that I don’t want to hurt you. What are the Phanne?”

  The truth had been dancing at the edges of my awareness for years, growing stronger as my body and mind matured. Hints my mother had let fall; flashes of inexplicable knowledge; the sense that there was something inside me that if I only knew how to reach it and open it to my awareness, all of life would become clear to me, its patterns laid out, its complexities unraveled. Its futures told.

  “And what are you?” he asked. His gaze held intense curiosity, but also a hint of uncertainty. Perhaps having one’s rod deep inside a woman with glowing copper eyes was . . . alarming.

  I smiled. Then I smiled wider when I saw how it did not reassure him.

  “I think,” I said, “that you’ve spectacularly deflowered a seer.”

  His eyes went round and he jerked himself free of my cunny, the rough withdrawal making me grimace. Ow. Definitely not ready for a second battle.

  “Wotan above!” he swore. And then, after looking at me for a moment in consternation, “I didn’t take away your magic powers by fucking you, did I?”

  I giggled, my legs still sprawled wide, the wetness of our joining seeping out my core. It was all wonderfully, deliciously messy and real. I reached down and touched myself, then brought my fingers up to see the thin streak of red blood within the moisture.

  All Sygarius’s years of waiting, watching me ripen on the tree.

  Plucked.

  I rolled onto my side and howled with laughter.

  To say that I am disappointed in you, Nimia, would be to gravely understate the matter.”

  Trembling, I kept my head bowed, afraid of meeting Sygarius’s angry eyes. Afraid of what he knew; afraid of what he might find out. Afraid that someone had heard me with Clovis: they could have been outside the partially shuttered windows, and heard and seen it all. Someone could have been sent down to a cellar for wine, and been drawn to the sounds we made. I had been living in terror for two days that there would be another lesson where I’d again have to display my sex to him, and he would see that all was not as it had been.

  Could you tell, by looking?

  And even if you couldn’t, what promise did I have that Clovis wouldn’t tell someone? He’d said he wouldn’t, but I couldn’t be certain. And whoever he told would tell someone, who’d tell someone, and then the whole villa would know.

  I had cursed myself a thousand times since meeting with Clovis in the pressing room. What had I been thinking? How could I have thought I’d get away with it? The dread of what was going to happen to me, now that I’d given my virginity to the wrong man, had kept me staring into the darkness through the late watches of the night.

  Dark spirits had come to prey upon my imagination in those hours. I’d lain quaking, certain that at any moment Sygarius would throw back the curtain to the room, order soldiers to drag me out of the villa, and then beat me. Whip me. Brand me with a hot iron. Pour molten lead down my throat. Chop off my ears, my nose, my lips, my hands. Bludgeon me to near death, and then hand me over to the legion to be used as their whore until I did die.

  Or maybe he’d skip the beating and hand me directly to the soldiers, telling them to use me as cruelly as they could, but to keep me alive to suffer as long as possible. It might be years before my body wore out, though surely my soul would die early on.

  Worse if it didn’t.

  In the dark hours, such ends seemed to my fevered mind to be the only possible outcome of what I’d done.

  The thought that Sygarius might not find out was too unlikely to entertain. Of course he would find out.

  So I regretted. Deeply. Fervently. Wildly. I wished that reality were a dream, and I would wake up to find myself standing before the pressing room door, not yet decided on whether or not to enter.

  To be given the chance to choose again . . .

  Would I be a good spider and crawl back into the safety of my web?

  Truth be told, it was the consequences of my actions that I didn’t want to face, and that I regretted bringing upon myself. I didn’t regret those hungry moments with Clovis. I’d thrown my virginity at him as if it were a spear, and forced him to take it.

  “My lord,” I whispered. My legs were shaking too badly to stand, and I dropped to my knees before Sygarius. Panic washed over my skin like lashings of rain, drowning me in cold damp fear and leaving me shivering.

  “Such a small thing I asked of you, after all these years.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “So simple to have obeyed.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, and felt the itching salt of tears tracking down my cheeks. “I’m sorry, my lord.”

  He was silent, and I kept my eyes closed, weeping in terror of what was coming next, and trying to wish myself dead where I knelt so that I wouldn’t have to face my fate.

  “It pleases me to see you so upset over your failure,” he finally said, his voice softer, with a deep vibration to it that suggested . . .

  . . . Arousal?

  I took a chance and peeped up at him from under my brows, my eyelashes clotted with tears.

  His dark eyes were lit with sexual fire.

  Which still didn’t mean he wasn’t about to kill me.

  “I warned you that I would have to be cruel to you with the contents of the basket, if you didn’t do as I asked.”

  I blinked away the moisture half blinding me, and wiped at my running nose with a trembling hand, a dim ray of hope breaking through my cloud-covered skies of despair. He was berating me for my lack of results with spying on Childeric? “He is too often with other men,” I said. “And the one time I spoke to him when he was alone, he only grunted in response. He does not seem to think me worth speaking to.”

  “Once. You spoke to him once, and gave up.” The annoyance was back in his voice. Irritation. I had not performed as expected.

  I wanted to please him. I wanted his gaze to be gentle upon me. Perverse as it was, in that moment I wanted nothing more than to have him smile at me with those crinkles in the corners of his eyes. “I didn’t give up,” I said. “I changed tactics. I talked to his son, instead.”

  Sygarius stiffened, and he stared at me, hard. “Clovis. Far more appealing to a girl your age than a rough old dog like Childeric.”

  I wet my lips in nervousness. “A boy,” I said. “Clovis is a puppy compared to his father, with the same lack of thought and self-control.” Such a lie. I remembered Clovis’s face above mine, straining to maintain control as I forced him to take me. Would any man have done better?

  Sygarius’s next words were deadly in their quiet. “Did he touch you?”

  “He . . . tried.”

  Sygarius growled low in his chest, and sat forward. “I’ll—”

  “He failed,” I quickly added. “I was too fast for him. And then I showed him this,” I said, laying my fingers on the torc. “He cared enough for his own skin not to try to touch me a second time.”

  He hardly looked appeased. If anything, he looked more unhappy. “Are you attracted to him?”

  Dangerous, dangerous ground. I
understood now: he was jealous.

  I’d known girls to flirt with one man in hopes of making another jealous. And I’d heard of the beatings that came to some of those girls when they succeeded too well.

  Sygarius would know if I lied about Clovis’s looks being appealing; he knew too well that Clovis held the beauty of youth, while he did not. I chose my words carefully. “You taught me that I would be attracted to a swan, if the mood was right,” I said. “Clovis is handsome, I cannot say otherwise. He is young and well-built, and has a roguish charm. But my lord, I fear your friend Childeric has spawned a simpleton. I’ve had better conversations with a lump of bread dough.”

  My words surprised a chuckle out of Sygarius.

  I smiled inside. Instinct had told me that Sygarius would eagerly believe any words that tore Clovis apart for inexperience, ignorance, and stupidity—areas in which Sygarius believed himself far superior to any “boy.”

  “I shouldn’t think it a laughing matter, my lord,” I said with mock seriousness. “It must be a terrible burden to Childeric, to know that his heir is unleavened by wit. What will become of his kingdom should he die?”

  Sygarius waved away the concern. “The Franks choose their kings by a process of murderous elimination. If Childeric dies, a mere boy like Clovis will find his throat cut before the next dawn.”

  I jerked, the thought of someone cutting Clovis’s throat cutting through me as if it were my own life at stake.

  “Childeric is too canny to let anyone pick him off the vine, though,” Sygarius went on, not noticing my lapse. “Too canny by half. Which is why I need to know where his loyalties lie.”

  I gathered my wits back together. “His son was of some help there, my lord. He said his father had grown . . . I think his words were ‘fat and contented,’ suckling at the teat of your golden purse. He said you’d tamed him.”

  Sygarius let out a bark of laughter. “Spoken like every hotheaded young puppy, too stupid to see the wisdom of his elders. It’s enough to make me grateful I am yet to have a son. Although that may change, soon enough.”

  “My lord? Is Lady Lydia . . . ?”