‘Too late,’ the dragar laughed, ejaculating deep inside her. ‘Too late.’
Marcellus signaled his men into position at the top of the dungeon stairs. Overcoming the jailors as they’d opened the cell doors to deliver fresh water had been an easy enough affair, but now they would be dealing with the dragar’s soldiers, the crack troops of his palace guard. Truthfully he’d needed more time for reconnaissance, but Tesra’s cries had come to him, even in the bowels of the abyss below the palace.
As had those of Persistrata. ‘Go to her,’ had said the image of the goddess, delivering into his hands by her own miraculous power his own recovered sword, that which had been taken from him on the island.
To their credit, and perhaps his own as well, the men did not question his plan of attack. He took only volunteers, saying that the mission would be dangerous and likely suicidal. Of all those able to walk, not one refused to follow.
‘Better to die as men than live as dogs,’ had said the old man, his countenance greatly improved by a night with the blonde slave girl.
Marcellus’ plan, such as it was, involved fighting their way level by level to the uppermost chambers of the palace, where the dragar was holding Tesra prisoner. Marcellus estimated the odds at a hundred to one or better, in the enemy’s favor. Then again, they did not have Nephisis and Persistrata on their side.
‘Now!’ commanded the pirate king, pushing on the heavy wooden doors, the men pouring up the stairs at his back.
‘Earthquake!’ cried a soldier, running down the corridor in which they found themselves. Indeed, the palace had begun to shake quite unexpectedly.
The work of the sea god, Marcellus determined. He who commands not only the waters of the deep, but also the great lands below them. ‘This is our chance, men, make for the upper floors!’
They met little resistance along the way. The whole of the building was shaking and the guards were on the run. Amidst the falling columns and smashed treasures they made their way to the dragar’s private rooms. One after another they searched them, finding nothing.
‘She is gone,’ shouted the big man, just barely protecting Marcellus from a falling statue.
‘No,’ cried Marcellus, though he feared the man might be right, ‘she is still here. We must look again. The dragar is a wizard. She may be more carefully hidden than we can imagine!’
Tesra’s body was in convulsions beneath the emperor. Everything around her was vibrating ferociously and she did not think it was of the dragar’s doing. The dream he had placed her in was crumbling and now she was witnessing shards of nightmare, images of her island under attack by the dragar’s soldiers, the temple in flames, the sisters run down by soldiers, thrown onto their backs and raped. She saw Marcellus as well, hung by a rope, swinging dead from a gallows, the vision having come true that he would die at the dragar’s hand.
Oh, her poor love, and her poor sisters too. Before her inner eyes she could see the faces of women crying out, their bodies invaded, their resistance crushed, whips cracking on their backs, cocks pounding at every orifice till at last they explode filling their wombs with the dreaded seed. There is more thunder and more shaking, screaming everywhere and now the women are running too. As they flee past her she sees the lumps in their bellies, their hands on the horrible swellings. The look in their eyes bespeaks the horror. They have been impregnated.
‘Come with me,’ the dragar called to her, his voice mesmerizing as the hiss of a snake. ‘Sit beside me and rule the world.’
‘No,’ she defied. She wanted Marcellus. She could feel his heart beating. Could it be he was close at hand? Lifting upon inner wings she sought to fly and reach him. But the dragar made a final attempt to keep her. Sleek and black and fast he took off after her in the guise of a bird of prey. Tesra flaps for her life. She wants to go back home. But she knows if she takes him there he will bring ruin to her sisters. And death. She has no choice but to go down, even into the flames if that is what it takes to stop him. The bird of prey seized her neck but it could not hold on. With a mighty screech it let go and veered off.
It is gone, she thought. Or was it?
Tesra called out Marcellus’ name and pulled at the fastenings on her wrists. Opening her eyes she saw she was back in the white room where it all began, naked and bound to a chair.
‘Do not leave me,’ she heard the dragar cry, seeking to pull her back into the dream, sounding more slave than master.
‘Tesra, are you in there? Can you hear me?’
The earthquake stopped.
It was he, Marcellus, on the other side of the wall. The real one, and though Tesra could not speak to answer she wept with joy all the same.
Marcellus was sure she was behind this stretch of wall, as surely as he knew his own heartbeat. ‘It must be a hidden door,’ he called out. ‘I feel her presence. Fetch a battering ram.’
The big man brought a downed column from the wreckage, and in short order they had smashed enough of the stucco for a man to fit through.
‘I go in alone,’ said Marcellus. The big man looked at him. ‘You will stay.’ He put his hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘That is an order.’
The room inside was dark, despite the hour of the day. He drew his sword, stepping over the rubble. From behind the old man handed him a torch. Holding it forth in front of his face he beheld her. Tesra was sitting on a chair, naked, her wrists and ankles tied to it. She was wearing a mask of some sort.
‘Give me a moment,’ he pulled off the mask, ‘and I shall free you.’
The face of Rodrigo grinned at him. ‘Yes, free me, please.’
Marcellus took a step back. There was wizardry afoot. Offering prayers to Persistrata and Nephisis both, he placed his sword at the creature’s neck. ‘Release her,’ he said to the face of Rodrigo as though Tesra were inside it, and in a way she was, which is why he must coax her out.
‘To the pits of fire with you,’ spat back Rodrigo, whose real body was laid in a coffin at the top of a mountain half an ocean away.
Marcellus lifted the sword overhead, preparing to strike. ‘Then I will slice you open and retrieve her myself.’
The room exploded upon contact of metal and flesh. Several men cried out from the hallway. Marcellus was blown backwards, landing on a soft carpet of green. A moment later he stood. They were no longer in the white room but a green forest.
Tesra was cowering at his feet, clinging for dear life. ‘Oh, master, thank you!’ she cried.
‘The girl is mine,’ said a tall and most ugly giant, who had broken his way through the trees. ‘I have filled her with my seed and she will bear my children.’ The giant, obviously, was the dragar. And this jungle was some sort of sorcery.
‘You have many children already,’ Marcellus noted, his sword at the ready.
‘None like she will issue. None capable of seeing all that will happen in the world before it transpires. None capable of building me a new empire, more powerful even than the realm of the gods.’
So that was the emperor’s game. Cosmic domination. An old story among men of his kind. The question, though, was how to stop him?
‘Am I to take it, dragar,’ he asked calmly, ‘that you have already impregnated this slave of mine?’
‘I have,’ he offered eagerly. ‘Indeed I have.’
Marcellus closed his eyes. The goddess was communing with him, telling him much that he needed to know. ‘No, dragar, begging your pardon, you have not. Touch her womb and see for yourself.’
The dragar snorted. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Come here, girl, I shall prove it. With one touch I will know.’
‘Go to him,’ said he to Tesra in a tone he hoped would remind her of her promise to trust him above all others. ‘Now.’
She obeyed. How he admired her strength, to be able to walk with such courage
back into the clutches of a creature such as this. And all without having the slightest notion how Marcellus would yet save her or himself.
The pirate king waited till the exact moment of contact between them before acting. Encircling her waist with just one of his huge hands the giant lifted her from the ground, in readiness to be probed by the index finger of his other hand, and as soon as the tip of the finger touched her belly and the giant’s eyes slid shut in concentration, Marcellus slung the sword, like a knife, landing it hilt deep in the giant’s forehead.
The giant went stiff, his eyes wide with amazement, as much over the results of his analysis as the fatal wound he now bore. ‘Impossible,’ he gasped. ‘She is not yet pregnant.’
It had been the hands of the goddess that had guided his throw. As the giant began to stagger Marcellus ran forward, catching the girl as he released her. The ground was shaking again. Lightning was tearing into the trees. Falling to the jungle floor Marcellus covered Tesra’s body with his own, waiting for the storm to pass. The winds were fierce, and at a certain point he and Tesra were separated.
In a few moments everything was silent again and they were back in the white room. Marcellus heard screaming. He found her on the other side of the room, pinned beneath the dragar, who was making one final attempt at impregnation. The pirate king pulled the man off and threw him to his back. Before he could leap up Marcellus fell down upon him, grasping his throat with both hands.
‘Please,’ the dragar begged, his voice reverting to that of a small boy, ‘let me go. I won’t hurt anyone.’
Marcellus was not fooled by the ruse, and sure enough the body of the dragar turned into that of a lizard creature. ‘Do not seek to provoke me,’ Marcellus warned. ‘Or I will squeeze the life from you.’
The emperor turned human again, this time into an old man, the oldest Marcellus had ever seen. ‘Oh no,’ he cackled, a fearsome, death rattle of a croak, ‘it is I who will squeeze. Forever. Behold, my power... eternal...’
The emperor’s body began to convulse. Foam poured from his mouth. He was like a man possessed. Smoke poured forth from him, but Marcellus did not let go. The dragar shrieked and began to dissolve, his flesh wasting before the pirate king’s eyes, and at last there was nothing left beneath Marcellus but dust.
‘Marcellus, what is happening to me? Help me!’ It was Tesra. By all the gods and goddesses she looked ready to explode, her belly fully swollen with child. What black magic had the dragar worked?
He ran to her side, cradling her. ‘It will be all right, hold still.’
The child came of its own accord, at her feet, covered in warm afterbirth, drenched in fluid, gestated miraculously in a matter of minutes. Marcellus bent to retrieve it, severing the umbilical with his knife. It was alive, its mouth and hands and fingers moving wildly in sheer joy of life. So beautiful and yet...
‘It is his,’ said Marcellus, more statement than question.
‘No,’ smiled the very tired, very pleased Tesra, ‘it is ours.’
He cocked his head. ‘How is it possible?’
‘You were with me first, were you not, before I ever laid eyes on the dragar?’ He nodded in the affirmative. ‘Then it is you who first had me and you who fertilized me. Therefore, I and the baby are yours.’
‘You were already pregnant and you did not tell me?’
‘You were otherwise preoccupied, master.’ She took their child into her arms. ‘Besides, I did not know at the time what was happening. Persistrata has only now explained it all to me. The dragar sought to possess my womb, but was able only to accelerate the process already begun by you.’
‘That is a poor excuse,’ said he with mock sternness, ‘for keeping the father of your child in ignorance. We shall tend to your punishment later on.’
‘Yes,’ Tesra lowered her eyes, her cheeks glowing delightfully, ‘my lord.’
‘All attempts to butter me up,’ he further informed her, enjoying the game immensely, ‘shall fall on deaf ears.’
Tesra gave him a gleaming smile, laying her head back against his shoulder. Indeed, he would torture her richly and with delight, as soon as they found a nursemaid.
‘Sir,’ called one of his rag-tag pirates, having entered through the makeshift door, ‘word has come to us of a rebellion, from the palace guard. They demand a new dragar.’
Marcellus had expected as much. ‘We shall lay low till it blows over.’
Goragno, son of Malato frowned, hesitating.
‘Speak,’ growled the pirate king, no malice intended, ‘the wench grows cold.’
‘Word of your exploits has spread, from the times before and of today, as well. There is talk that the emperor’s guardsmen wish to crown you dragar.’
Marcellus laughed heartily. ‘Just my luck,’ he muttered. ‘Tell them I shall meet with them presently, when I have finished some rather more pressing business.’
A short while later, the baby safe in the arms of one of the royal nursemaids, Marcellus sequestered himself with the nymph, who for a woman having just given birth, was remarkably recovered.
‘At last,’ he announced, ‘the battle I have been waiting for.’ Without preamble he tossed her down onto the silk-covered bed, her shapely body lost in the sea of thick fabric.
‘You are rough with me,’ she teased, ‘my dragar.’
Marcellus frowned, flipping her onto her belly. ‘You shall pay for that,’ he promised.
‘I hope so,’ she sighed, wriggling her body, her bottom well exposed.
He gave no answer, save the thundering crack of his palm against her deliciously vulnerable cheeks.
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Dream Captive Page 23
