Divine Torment

by Janine Ashbless

  And all the time he stared into her eyes, searching for any response in those brown depths. She stared back with the fathomless unreadable regard of the desert.

  ‘Believe me now?’

  Then he released her, letting his hand rest heavy upon hers. She did not pull away. He felt her fingers beneath his, lying on his prick. He could have cried out for the torment and the pleasure of that touch.

  And finally something broke in her gaze, and he watched her face stir and twist with emotion, her lips shuddering with words that could not be sounded. Her gaze flinched from his and she pulled her hand away and, standing, backed off across his chamber.

  He watched her go in despair. He had unburdened himself of the words imprisoned within him, words he knew he should never have spoken. They had swollen inside him for weeks, and now they had fallen. When the door smacked to he was left with an emptiness in his chest and the feeling that he had broken irrevocably something precious.

  Cursing, he loosened his clothes and freed his cock, unable to resist its demands any more than he had been able to hold back the acid torrent of words. His balls were clenched with their burden. The hot skin under his grip felt like satin sliding over the wood-hard length beneath. He pulled back the foreskin, saw the angry purple of the glans and the moisture gathering at the slit. Two firm strokes and his scrotum was knotting like a fist. Pain stabbed his shoulder. He closed his eyes, picturing the Malia Shai’s full lips, the soft ripe curve of them descending towards his swollen prick, the hint of moisture within, the little pink tip of her tongue preparing to lap at his burning cockhead, and with that the cauldron seething within him boiled over, the contents spouting and frothing like scalded cream over his fingers, his thigh, his twitching belly. He plunged headlong into the agony and the delight with a moan of despair.

  She sat in the shrine of Lappa Han with a scroll of ancient poetry stretched between her hands. She liked the shrine because she liked Lappa Han, finding the Sun Lord’s warmth a comfort to the dark spaces within her even when it hurt her flesh. She liked the way this room had windows on all but one of the eight sides, so that it was continually filled with the golden glory of the sunlight. Often she sat and read here, when there were no rituals to perform.

  But this particular parchment was a scroll she couldn’t decipher, written in a language so old and obscure that only two of the most ancient priests in the temple could remember it in any depth. Upon the occasion of her first menstruation they had read the text aloud to her, one declaiming, one translating. She had never heard it since. The elaborate letters of the ancient tongue seemed to flicker in front of her eyes, and the painted pictures looked faded and dusty. A fly walked across the scroll, and she watched it as if it were pointing out the significant passages of the text.

  I am looking for something hidden, she thought.

  The fly washed its head with crooked forelimbs.

  I am looking at a black insect on a fawn page. There are darker brown marks on the page. The fly walks across the little patterns. The patterns are words, I know that. The words are a poem. The poem is a hymn of praise to the power of the universe written one thousand years ago by a man who is remembered now only for this poem. I know this. But when I look, there are only brown marks on a brown page. What gives those marks meaning?

  The fly paraded fussily across the parchment and up onto her thumb. She did not move.

  I feel the fly tickling across my thumb onto the back of my hand. The sensation is like a line of light drawn across a dark place; I can’t ignore it. The feeling is there. It is an insect, so I should be irritated and flick it away. But if it were not an insect, if that same sensation were a fingertip drawn across my skin by a man, would it be pleasure I felt instead of irritation? It depends which man. The meaning is not in the feeling, it is in my response.

  The fly circled her wrist.

  Sometimes a look is a look. He looks at me. I look at him. What we see are only bodies. They have no meaning until we bring it to being in our minds. Then a glance is not just a glance: it is a plea, a demand, a theft, an attack. Sometimes a feeling is only a feeling. I feel warmth, and solidity, and pressure. For him it is desire in all its agony. What is it for me?

  The fly tickled its way up the tender skin of her inside arm.

  He is not the master of his flesh. He has not learned that significance is a habit of mind. I was taught long ago that it is not necessary to give meaning to sensation. Pain does not matter any more than pleasure. Lust is not more significant than an insect itch. The marks on the scroll do not have to be words. If you look at them, they are just marks.

  But, she thought, the poem was beautiful.

  I do not want it to be lost when the priests die.

  I want to read it.

  The door creaked open and the fly shot off her wrist, vanishing into the interlaced sunbeams. Rasa Belit was framed in the doorway.

  She eased herself down from her familiar perch on the plinth of Lappa Han’s statue and let the scroll roll closed.

  ‘Malia Shai,’ he said, pacing slowly into the room. She stepped forward to meet him, tilting her chin so that she could look him in the face. He bulked over her.

  ‘Has something happened?’ She took in the pouches under his eyes, the deep-carved grooves down to the corners of his mouth, the wide nostrils.

  ‘I wanted to speak to you in private, my Malia Shai. It’s my privilege as your high priest, and though your temple is full of people praying, I hoped . . .’ He was staring at her, and there was moisture at the corners of his lips. ‘I hoped that you would hear me. Honour me with your attention, my mistress.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘People are dying in the city, Malia Shai. The sickness runs through them like fire through dry grass.’

  ‘I know that.’

  His black nostrils flared as if he were inhaling her incense. ‘The thunderous weather makes them worse, my goddess. People pray for the Rains. The wells are running dry. The Horse-eaters wait outside to butcher us all and the fear is driving men mad. The suffering in your city grows day by day.’

  ‘What do you expect from me, Rasa Belit?’ she asked. ‘Mercy?’

  He licked his lips.

  ‘What has mercy to do with me?’

  ‘Ah, no.’ He drew in his breath over bared teeth. ‘You are a cruel and bitter goddess. There’s no kindliness in you.’ He began to circle her slowly.

  She was aware that she had a familiar physical reaction to his presence, a tightening of the skin across the mouth and nose and fingers. She was taken aback to identify it for the first time as revulsion.

  ‘You are a dark and bloody mistress,’ he murmured at her shoulder, very close to her. ‘Men cry out to you, but they might as well be dashing themselves upon the rock face. Your heart isn’t softened. You feed upon their pain. I don’t ask for mercy.’ He was behind her now, his words whispered over her crawling nape. ‘I ask only to worship you.’

  He slid his hand upon her waist.

  This was not the first time. She knew what he wanted.

  She pulled away, turning upon him. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she told him.

  He fell flat on his face, his yellow bulk plastered to the flagstones. ‘Mistress of lamentation! Mother of suffering!’ He grasped her bare ankle and she could feel the dampness of his palms. ‘I’m not worthy to stand before you, but let me worship, let me crawl as a snake at your feet.’

  She wanted to flinch away from him, but she did not. She felt distaste creeping over every inch of her skin, but she was not the slave of her skin. She was the goddess Malia, and she was not subject to fear or disgust, not to any emotion. She was a goddess, and it was her divine place to be worshipped.

  Trembling, Rasa Belit hunched forward and lowered his hot lips over her big toe. She stared down at the back of his head, feeling the power knot in her belly. It was not often that she remembered her power, but at moments like these she felt it stirring within.

  ‘Queen of torments,
’ he huffed, showering her toes with eager kisses, ‘I lie before you suppliant, as one of your million victims.’ His lips were wet and tickling. He smeared them up over the arch of her foot, then licked hungrily at her instep.

  With a slow indrawing of breath, she shifted her weight to the other leg and allowed him to raise her foot from the floor. He moaned, ‘Blessings, blessing, my goddess,’ and sent his tongue darting into the little crevices between her toes. The sensation teased. When he swallowed those digits into his mouth and began to suckle loudly upon them, she felt a wet shiver crawl up her spine. There was an unsettling intimacy in the way his wet mouth caressed her unwashed feet, in unseemly disregard for dirt or humiliation or propriety, for anything but the presence of her flesh. He tasted the dust of the floor as eagerly as he tasted her skin. His tongue was everywhere on the sensitive pads of her foot. The ragged hem of her dress flapped in his eyes.

  His own feet were clawing at the flagstones, his calves knotting as he pawed the ground. She stared down at the heaving of his broad back and buttocks.

  ‘My queen, my life,’ he murmured indistinctly. ‘You are beauty itself. You hold the world between your breasts.’ This last word came out as a groan. He released her foot slowly and pressed his lips to her inner ankle instead. His tongue began to scour at her shin and lower calf.

  She stared at the filigree screen of a window. If this tickling were flies, it would be disgusting. If it were a puppy licking her it would be amusing. If it were Veraine it would be devastating. But it was none of these; it was Rasa Belit, and if she listened to her flesh it would be telling her that it felt like power flowing into her marrow with every stroke of his tongue. She despised him, and that made her feel as strong as mountains.

  ‘Get behind me,’ she told him. ‘You are not fit for my gaze.’

  Floundering, he hastened to obey her decree, whispering, ‘Mistress, mistress,’ as he shuffled round on his belly to the back of her calves. She spread her legs a little further. He lavished long strokes of the tongue and brief, sucking kisses on the smooth muscles of her braced calves. He nuzzled up under the hem of her skirt, not daring to lift it with his hands, and his lips mumbled on the sensitive flesh behind her knees.

  She approved of his obedience. She gathered her skirt at either side and pulled it slowly up so that the whole of her thighs was exposed up to the round curve of her arse. This wrenched a cry of numinous awe from her priest: ‘Goddess!’ and he pressed his face into one soft globe, cupping the other and kneading it fiercely with his large hand. She leaned into his pressure, feeling his nose jabbing into the mass of her arse-cheek.

  ‘You are the divine light,’ he gasped, pulling back to breathe at last. ‘You are the face of heaven.’ He parted her cheeks reverently with his palms and slipped between them. She felt his tongue rasp, wet and slippery, down the crack of her behind from the small of her back, down over the tender skin hidden beneath, to lap and wriggle at her tight and quivering anus. A shudder rippled out to her hips. A heavy wetness was swelling in her sex.

  ‘Blessed are your victims,’ the priest breathed as he surfaced. ‘Blessed are those whose torment delights you, my Malia Shai.’ His hand, invisible to her, suddenly cupped the fuzzy mound of her mons from below. A little moisture leaked onto his palm. He pressed the heel of that hand into the yielding wetness of her yoni. ‘You are beautiful beyond mortal flesh. Trample me beneath your bloodied feet, my cruel mistress. I would die for you.’ He withdrew his palm, and she heard the slobbering as he licked her juices from his palm.

  ‘Oh, I would have you eat my soul. I have offered you my life, my goddess. My manhood was laid upon your altar. I want to taste your blessing.’

  ‘You serve me only as you should,’ she replied huskily. ‘What priest does less?’

  He hunched onto one side, his head between her legs, and began to kiss the inside of her thighs from the knee up. ‘I offer you the lives of men,’ he murmured. ‘Even the worst of men. Even the Irolian bastard. No man loves you so much as I do. Bless me with your outpoured essence, Malia.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, easing her thighs apart so that he might fit between them. With her skirts bunched in her hands she could see the dome of his close-cropped head jutting into view beneath her tousled mound. His scalp shone through the fuzz of hair. ‘The Irolian?’

  ‘I tried to offer him up. He thinks he can bend you to his purposes, my goddess. He thinks he can ally you to his filthy empire. He blasphemes. I sent a man to spill his life on the stones.’ His lips were grazing on the tufts of her pubic hair.

  ‘You failed.’ Her loins were wet with his kisses.

  ‘I am mortal, mother of pestilence. I am weak. Do not have mercy upon me. Strike me down.’

  ‘I will,’ she promised.

  His face was parting her labia now, his whole torso straining with the effort of lifting him into position and holding him there. His mouth and nose were thrust into her wetness, her juices smeared on his face. She sank a little on her hips to allow his tongue to probe deeper into her yoni, into the slippery hole that thirsted to be filled yet that his touch was so inadequate to satisfy.

  The men of a thousand nations could not satisfy her. Their carcasses were flung into the soil, yet the earth was forever hungry, never satiated.

  He had ceased to articulate anything more than gasps and groans. His tongue flailed and whipped like a dying snake. By chance he rubbed the sweaty, cunt-juice-smeared ridges of his face against the feverish knot of her clit, and as this made her wetter he gobbled ever more fiercely.

  She was going to drown him. She grabbed his prickly scalp in her hands and held him up against her, grinding her sopping cleft down on his mouth. She would like to sink to her knees. She would like to pin him beneath her and wriggle till he choked. But instead her legs had locked and she was straining upwards, and the degraded mass of grunting priest gobbling at her muff was enough to ignite her mortal flesh into the tumbling fireball of orgasm.

  Once the explosion had started she lost all her senses, and only came back from the flames when Rasa Belit slipped from her hands and crashed to the floor. She heard the sound of his head as it bounced off the stones and she stared down at him between her feet. The priest’s face, slippery with her juices, was screwed into a red knot, his whole frame shaking. She saw foam beginning to work its way out at the edges of his mouth.

  She stepped away from him. His hands were dug into his groin, his legs juddering on the floor. She could not tell if it was ecstasy or agony that was wracking him, but the fit was more violent and prolonged than any orgasm. She watched for a while then, as the spasms seemed to slow, she turned and walked out of the shrine of Lappa Han.

  8 Spoils of War

  Veraine nodded one last time to his officers, then lifted the heavy bronze helmet up over his head and settled its weight upon him. Through the eye-slits he saw the foot soldiers begin to shuffle slowly forward, though it was only their white tunics that made them visible. Little moonlight shone through the massing clouds, and no one carried a torch.

  He felt his horse shift restlessly beneath him, but the beast’s hooves were muffled in rags and made little noise on the stones. Even the scrape of the feet of the Eighth Host was no more than a whisper. No man spoke out loud; they knew too well how their future depended on stealth now. This manoeuvre had been practised over and over since their arrival in Mulhanabin. Now it had to be perfect.

  The horses had been fretting all day; it was as if they knew of the impending battle just as well as their riders.

  The city gate was narrow for the number of men who were trying to exit through it, so deployment was slow. Veraine stifled his impatience and kept his senses alert. There were lookouts based on the rooftops higher up the city; a horn note from them would signal that the Horse-eaters had woken and were aware of the attack about to take place. But so far the messages had been reassuring: the barbarian camp slept peacefully, Irolian preparation had apparently gone unnoticed and to p
lan.

  He remembered the faces of his officers when he had announced the attack the previous morning; the satisfaction and relief mixed with the anticipation in their eyes.

  ‘We attack two hours before dawn,’ he had told them. ‘We aim for the tent with the biggest golden sun-standard; a quick strike right into the heart of their army. If it’s not their king then it is certainly one of their princes. The tents don’t have external guy-ropes so we can get horses between them.

  ‘I’ll lead the cavalry. The rest of the men will be under Loy’s command; they hit the main face of the enemy in two wedges that will form a defensive block around the cavalry when it has to withdraw. If they manage to mobilise their men, we pull back inside the city as rehearsed. But in the dark, without horses or bows, the Horse-eaters will be at their weakest. They like to fight in open country, not skirmishing on foot. We should be able to tear a hole in their throat.’

  The officers had to a man nodded eagerly. Only Rumayn had voiced any protest.

  ‘General,’ he had stammered, ‘You haven’t a hope of destroying the Horse-eaters! They outnumber you like a wolf pack around a guard dog. And you were sent here to hold the city, not engage the enemy in open battle, surely? Can’t you just sit tight in Mulhanabin? The Rains will break any day now.’

  ‘Tell him what you told me an hour ago, Chath,’ Veraine had instructed, ignoring the grim looks directed at his adviser by the other soldiers.

  The chief of surgeons, a grizzled, hard-faced man, had said, ‘As you wish, General. I have eight soldiers in my hospital suffering from the plague. As I told him, two died last night. The others are likely to die within days.’