The Adventures of a Roman Slave

by Lisa Cach

  I took my time approaching Pyrs, whose mouth hung open beneath the squirrel tail on his lip, his arms hanging loose and helpless at his sides. He looked too frightened to move.

  Internally, I sighed. I felt sorry for the boy, and would make certain that he enjoyed himself, but I was not feeling the least bit of sexual excitement at the thought of bedding him. Even as I swayed my hips and undulated my arms and danced around him to the hooting appreciation of the men; even as I took his hand and led him up onto the dais; even as I gave all outward appearance of being a seductress eager to devour her juicy bit of prey, I felt a seeping boredom.

  There was no new challenge here, no thrill. The boy required no effort, and the role of seductress was too familiar. The thought of spending years at this “college,” reenacting this scene time and again, made my soul shrink. No rewards of silken garments or golden diadems could be worth the tedium. Unless Tanwen lacked all imagination, I couldn’t see how an intelligent, ambitious woman like her could stand it, either.

  “The first thing every man needs to learn,” Tanwen said, “is how to undress a woman, and what better way to learn than to watch it done?”

  This was a cue to the acolytes, who were paired up, two to a man. They giggled and gave the men taunting orders as they offered themselves for disrobing. Pyrs gaped at the scene before him, blushed, and turned to me. He reached a trembling hand toward me, but Tanwen stopped him. “Better to watch how it’s done, the first time,” she said.

  Tanwen gestured into the shadows at the curtain, and two acolytes came out to join us. Without a word or a glance at my face, they unhooked the chain at my waist and unclasped the brooches at my shoulders. My airy gown fell to the floor, leaving me nude except for my necklace and my hair. Pyrs’s gaze flicked back and forth between the swirling spirals of tattoos over my breasts and my sex, as if unable to decide which deserved his attention more and afraid that one or the other would disappear before he got his fill of looking.

  The acolytes reached for his clothes next, making him jump. He cast a frantic look out into the hall, but Druce’s men had already forgotten him, their hands too busy and their pricks too stiff to bother watching a boy fumble through his first time. When Pyrs was naked and his rod exposed in all its pale and purple eagerness, Tanwen had him make himself comfortable on the couch, amid the cushions and furs.

  “Now you all know better than to go plunging forward the moment she gets her skirts out of the way,” Tanwen said to the hall, though I doubted any man was listening. “She needs her passage slicked. Best to use your tongue for that, and I don’t mean for talking . . . Although compliments are a nice start. Let’s show young Pyrs how it’s done.”

  Below us, the men’s faces disappeared as they tasted their way across acolyte bodies, with the acolytes themselves returning the favor. I watched for only a moment, for then the acolytes on the dais with me urged me onto the couch, spreading me out on my back near where Pyrs sat with his cock sprouting from between his thighs like a gopher from a hole. The women ran their hands over my breasts and down my thighs, and one bent to take one of my nipples into her mouth. It felt perfectly fine, but I’d seen this acolyte feeding the ducks and shared a word or two with her over the past days, and there was nothing about her to arouse me. Her mouth was a mouth, with no one of intrigue behind it.

  I tilted my head back and caught Tanwen’s eye. It didn’t help my condition that she was watching.

  She read something of my mood. “This is where your lesson begins,” she said for my ears only.

  “I feel nothing.”

  “You don’t have to: that’s what the acolytes are for. Men love watching women touch each other. Touch Pyrs, and use his arousal for your own. Let it flow into you.”

  I reached over and lay my fingers on his knee. He jerked, then settled, and I closed my eyes and tried to push through the point of contact with my mind, trying to reach inside him.

  “Open yourself to it,” Tanwen said. “It’s not an invasion of him, it’s an opening of yourself.”

  My powers felt muddy; distant. I couldn’t feel him, couldn’t sense anyone beyond myself. Then I felt soft hands pushing my thighs apart, and a delicate mouth settling over my folds. The flick of a tongue, rough and light at once. A spark of pleasure flared through my sex, and as it did I felt the first tingle of Pyrs’s arousal, coming through my fingertips.

  The tongue again, pointed, its tip tracing up the edge of an inner fold to the apex, then dipping in quick dashes against the hidden nub, coaxing it out of hiding. The mouth lifted and I felt fingers gently spreading me apart and pulling up on my mound, laying me open like a butterfly. Tanwen murmured, and I felt Pyrs move under my hand and the cushions shift; I opened my eyes and found him leaning close, watching intently as the acolyte lowered her head again. My palm was full on his thigh now, and the tingle of his excitement was turning into something heavier, richer, more liquid. I heard the distant hum of my golden swarm.

  “Keep your power at a distance,” Tanwen said. “Hold it back. Let the pleasure in your body build, for with it comes greater strength.”

  The acolyte had been trained well, running the tip of her tongue up and down my folds without obscuring my sex from Pyrs’s view. I closed my eyes again as she swirled her tongue around my stamen, petting it, adoring it, with a devotion beyond a chore assigned. Her partner sucked at one breast, then caught my nipple between her teeth and rubbed her tongue against its end. I sent my mind down to the wet points of contact between us, wanting to know what they were feeling. The moment I opened my awareness to them, a liquid heat of desire flowed in, hot and golden as molten metal. It flowed up through my belly and down through my breast, then washed up against the tide flowing in from Pyrs. Together the three engulfed my own small pleasure and transformed it. I drank in their longings, their arousal, and then instinctively fed it back to them in a tight, controlled stream that was not quite enough for their hunger. The acolyte at my breast whimpered, and tried to suck more of my breast into her mouth; the one at my sex slid her long, agile tongue into my passage, pressing it as deeply as she could, her hands gripping my hips to bring me closer. They drank pleasure from me as if dying of thirst. Pyrs groaned and tried to bring his rod to my mouth; I felt it pressing at my lips before Tanwen got control of him, making him sit back.

  With even more trouble, she got the acolytes detached from me. “Enough,” she hissed at them, and with a shock of frozen mental steel cut them away from me. Deprived of me, they fell on each other, hands sliding up each other’s bodies with loving familiarity, fingers searching, mouths seeking.

  “Take hold of his rod, and feel his desire. His pleasure at your touch.”

  I no longer cared that Tanwen watched; was barely aware of her presence, beyond her voice.

  I got onto my knees beside Pyrs and wrapped my hand around him. He was hot and silken, yet hard as stone. He looked at me with pleading in his eyes, and his hips jerked in involuntary thrusts inside my hand. I squeezed harder, the molten river of his pleasure as delicious to me as the fine stream I fed back to him.

  “Keep him on the edge of release. The longer you hold him there, the more your power builds. Hold your own pleasure back as tightly, for your climax is when all power escapes. Keep it inside you, where you can use it. Ride along the thin edge of the cliff, and don’t topple over.”

  I leaned forward and kissed Pyrs, hard, forcing his mouth open. For a moment he did nothing in response, and then his hand was at the back of my head, his head tilting for a better angle, and the shy, awkward boy showed himself for a young man who’d been down this path, at least a time or two before. His tongue thrust inside my mouth, the pressure of his kiss holding my jaw open as he ravaged what he could of me. I let him, sucking on his tongue in return, drawing from it another molten stream of desire.

  Was this what Maerlin did to women? I had just enough awareness to wonder. How had I not
known it was possible?

  I knew the answer as soon as I asked myself the question: I hadn’t known I had to open to get this. I had to let down barriers and accept, in a way I’d never thought to try. There were times it was difficult enough to open my body to allow physical pleasure to flourish. How much harder to do this, letting another’s emotions inside me, letting them swamp my own and take over.

  And how unexpectedly delicious. I felt I could dine on Pyrs’s lust until dawn, and beyond. In my hand, his rod felt as if it had grown yet thicker, if such were possible. I felt the pain of his unspent lust, the unbearable fullness in his staff that begged the warm, wet friction of my passage to release it. The more I fed on his passion, the more that seemed to form inside him to meet my need. He seemed a bottomless well of it, and yet I knew that could not be true. He would have no strength left to breathe, or for the beating of his heart, were I to draw down all I needed to satisfy my appetite.

  “It’s time to take his seed,” Tanwen said. “Mount him slowly, and hold tight to your control. When he spends himself, feel it inside you. Push back through his desire, and find his mind. Tie your sense of him to his seed inside you, so you know how to find him again. His seed is your trail home, and you must know how to recognize the markers.”

  I pushed Pyrs onto his back, breaking our kiss as he lay down. I stroked my thumb over the head of his shaft, swirling the slick drop of moisture I found there. His whole body shuddered with a pleasure that verged on pain, and if not for the mental grip I held on his loins, he would have spent himself.

  “Please,” he said, his voice hoarse. It was the first word he’d spoken to me. “Ah, gods . . . please.”

  I straddled him, my hand still around his cock, and then slowly, carefully guided him through my gates. I lowered myself, allowing in just the head, moving up and down on it to slick my juices upon him. He grabbed at my hips, trying to impale me and end his suffering. I tightened my passage, squeezing my gates on the end of his staff and earning a tidal wave of his molten pleasure as my reward. Behind that wave, however, were flickers of emptiness; moments of darkness where his mind faded. He was coming to the end of his endurance, and would pass out—or worse?—if I continued without giving him relief.

  In the corner of my vision, I saw someone join Tanwen and whisper in her ear. Tanwen caught my eye and nodded her approval, encouraging me to go on; a moment later she was hurrying from the dais, disappearing behind the curtain.

  I was too caught up in my mind and body to care. Tanwen existed outside the golden wall that I’d built with the lust of Pyrs and the acolytes as bricks, and my humming swarm as the mortar. All that mattered was the cock straining to enter me, the tendons in Pyrs’s neck standing out with the force of his effort to break through my hold. His need was so great, his rod so full, it seemed he might die if he was thwarted any longer. I sank myself upon him in one long, slow motion, and then released my hold on his body. His hands dug into my flesh, his pelvis thrust upward, and I had one deep stroke of his rod inside before he spent himself.

  I closed my eyes and went inside myself, focusing on those hidden spurts of his life-force, and doing as Tanwen said and trying to link the fluid inside me to the young man who was barely conscious, his hands falling away from my hips, his head rolling to the side.

  “Gods and goddesses, above and below, thank you,” he muttered, and then his eyelids fluttered closed, his mouth dropped open, and out of his throat came a great, gasping snore.

  I gave him one more squeeze with my passage, trying to steal a last moment of pleasure from his still-hard mentula. It was no good, though, without a yearning body behind it. With a soft whine of frustration I dismounted and crawled to the edge of the couch to look out into the hall. Some of the men and women were still joined together, hips thrusting, breasts bouncing. One man was in a triangle with his acolytes, each one with their mouth on the genitalia of another. As I watched, he shoved one finger in an acolyte’s cunny, another finger in her arse. She flinched in surprise, then began to shudder with pleasure and did the same to the acolyte she was tonguing; who in turn pushed her fingertip deep between the warrior’s butt cheeks as she sucked his cock, her other hand gripping his sac.

  My sex throbbed with unspent desire, and I felt an aching hunger for what they were having. I turned my gaze to another couch, and saw a strong man of about thirty, his rod half-full, lying back on one elbow as he ate from the plate of delicacies on the low table beside him. His acolytes were collapsed on each other, giggling and drinking, their hair mussed. One of them reached over to walk her fingers up his calf, teasing and inviting, and he shook her off with a quick scowl of annoyance.

  He felt the force of my gaze and raised his eyes.

  I sat on the edge of the couch, feet set wide on the floor, and parted my knees wide. The relative cool of the hall stroked the burning heat of my folds as they opened to him, and even across the distance, and through the woodsmoke and incense, I imagined he caught the scent of my desire. I still wore my dark mask, my black hair a tangled shawl to my hips, my tattoos something from a world far beyond his own.

  He stood as if in a dream and walked toward me, his mentula thickening with each step until it stood out before him as rigid and dangerous as a pike. He vaulted onto the dais, and before he could touch me I turned, crawling onto hands and knees at the edge of the couch, offering up my sex from behind.

  Sygarius had taken me this way for weeks on end, as a form of punishment. He’d made me yearn for the slightest gesture of his affection, the merest caress meant to please me, even as with every touch, every penetration, he taught me to hate him. Some part of me needed now to relive those joinings. I missed Sygarius, yearned sometimes for the certainty that came from being his, a gold torc around my neck declaring it so, even as I loathed the memory of him. He lived inside me, a ghost of a lover past, never to be exorcised. Maybe his seed had become a part of me, as Tanwen had said.

  The warrior gripped my hips with one hand, used the other to position himself, and with one burning hard thrust seated himself to the hilt. I felt his balls brush against my stretched folds, a whisper of hair and flesh before he was withdrawing, his other hand also on my hip now to get the firmest grip. He moved me as if I were a toy, my weight nothing to him, my purpose none but to hold his rod.

  I opened myself, and let his excitement flow in. It added another layer to my fortress, the walls of it humming with suppressed power. I felt as if lightning raced across my skin, burning and flaring and seeking the one tall mast, tree, or tower that could bring its forces shooting to the ground.

  I fed the warrior a thin stream of magnified desire, and felt him swell within me. His breath came in grunting gasps as he bent over me, his legs shifting for better leverage. He slammed himself against me, his fingers digging grooves into my flesh, his angle changing in pursuit of more sensation from my wet cunny. He was thick and strong, and fucked with purpose and a single-minded determination that had the sweat dripping off him as he chased a victory that I held out of his reach. All the while I felt, It’s not enough.

  There was no one here to master me, as Sygarius had done. And even he had admitted in the end it had been an illusion. He’d sensed I would come to this, a power uncontrolled; he’d only held me as long as he did because I was too young to know my own strength.

  More, more, where is there more? Build the wall. Build it higher; so high it shall never come down.

  I pushed my mind into the warrior’s, and suggested how good it would feel to change position. He thought it his own idea as he looped an arm under my hips and lifted me and turned around to sit on the edge of the couch, me in his lap, his cock still inside me. He spread my thighs outside of his, my muscles feeling the strain of the wide position. It weakened me, made me feel helpless in the way I wanted, and I had to lean forward, one hand on each of his hairy kneecaps, to keep my balance. Only my toes touched the dais, enough to support
me but making it hard to move on my own; he leaned back on his hands to get the leverage he needed and thrust up into me. I threw my head back and took it, the new angle hitting a spot inside me that made the world shimmer in my vision.

  More. More.

  There was a whole hall of more.

  I felt eyes on me and lowered my gaze. Druce was staring at me, transfixed.

  I reached one hand down and pinched the nub of my sex. Behind me, the warrior cried out as a bolt of pleasure went through him; I clamped down hard on his passion, penning it, making him hurt with the need to spend it.

  Druce came to me with the same sleepwalking stance as the warrior. When he was on the dais I took his hand and reached into him with the power coursing through me, breaking through his own will and awareness and finding that primitive part of him that could not resist the lure of a woman’s folds. I made him crouch down before me, and as I slowed the warrior’s thrusts to a gentle pace that had him groaning in agony, his body clenched as tight as a strung bow, I put my hand on the back of Druce’s smooth head and guided him to where he was needed.

  Once there, I let him find his own way, his tongue rough, his lips greedy in their sucking pressure. He had more eagerness than skill, missing his target—if he even knew there was one—more often than he hit it. I liked the unpredictability: for a moment he’d suck hard at the right place, his tongue rasping against my stamen hard enough to make my whole body shudder, and then the next moment he might as well be licking the base of the warrior’s cock, for all I could feel of him.

  I began to feel from the warrior that same flickering I’d gotten from Pyrs: an emptiness, a flagging of his energies, a warning that the well was running dry.

  But I need more . . .

  My golden wall was curving inward both above and below, shaping itself into a sphere with me at its center. I wanted to keep building it. To finish it. To close the roof off with a golden brick and then . . . I didn’t know. I only knew that I wanted it.