‘Take a look at those beauties!’
Her pale skin was marbled with blue veins and her nipples were only tinted with colour, but they stood stiff and responsive to his touch, beaded with running droplets of water. She reached out for him, her slim hands stroking his face, but he slapped them away, grimacing.
‘Your hands are like ice! What about the rest of you, girl?’
Cold hands: warm heart, my mother used to say. It was one of her store of comforting adages such as Unlucky at cards; lucky at love. But I was by no means certain that the heart beneath those pert, ripe breasts was either warm or beating.
Morgan threw back the counterpane and completed the sundering of the dress with swift movements, laying her bare all the way to her pubic mound. She was as slender and as pallid as I’d anticipated, her private fleece curled to ringlets by water. He slipped his hand between her thighs and she writhed her hips as she parted them willingly for him. Then she uttered a moan – a real moan, a soft, thrilling sound – and arched against me. Despite my soaked and freezing clothes my cock stiffened at the unmistakable noise of a woman’s desire. Morgan had gone still. His eyes met mine.
‘What?’ I demanded, my voice unsteady.
‘Cold all the way through,’ he whispered, and his lips curved cruelly. I could see the muscles working in his wrist. ‘But wet there too. Gloriously wet. And she’s no virgin.’
Alyse’s hands reached for him again, pleadingly. He pulled back in annoyance.
‘Hold her arms out of the way, Thorpe.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘What do you think? Hold her tight.’
I am ashamed to say I obeyed him. The pressure of his will – his will, his lust, hers, mine, I could no longer distinguish them – was a force I could not resist. I took the girl’s wrists and pinned them back out of the way, while Morgan unbuttoned his trousers and released his straining length. His face was flushed but the crown of his member was plum purple, the colour of rage. I remembered that back at school I had always admired the size of his masculine equipment and the confidence with which he had handled it. But now, looking down the body of this slender girl, it suddenly seemed to me monstrously ugly and threatening. How could such a solid thickness fit into such a slip of a lass?
I was about to find out. Pumping his rod a couple of times as if to charge it, Morgan settled his knees apart, then pulled her up towards him, lifting her onto his thighs. With me holding her arms, she was stretched between us, her breasts and belly taut. He guided his prick as he pushed into her quim, as if it were his fist that were pressing home. I heard her gasp. Morgan’s movements were deliberate and slow.
‘Cold to the core,’ he said through clenched teeth, eyes rolling. Then: ‘God but it’s good.’
He began to pump into her, pushing deep then pulling back all the way. I could see the gleam of her juices on his shaft. I breathed deep, thinking that I should be able to smell her, but as she had no heat she had no sexual musk, as cold and scentless as a river-washed rock. Yet she was capable of sensation. She struggled a little against my grip and gasped at every thrust, eyelids fluttering closed over glazed eyes. Her lips were parted and moved silently as if pleading. And as if in a trance of my own I watched Morgan’s merciless plundering of her body with a look on my face that I knew was only partly pity.
‘You like this. You like watching me fuck, don’t you, Thorpe?’ His eyes were narrowed, his throat as red as if he had a rash.
‘You should be gentler,’ I whispered, registering the way his fingers were biting into her flesh. Would he leave bruises? Was she able to bruise? Did she feel pain?
‘You think so?’ He laughed in his throat, his rhythm slowing. ‘I suppose there is no hurry. We can take our time. We can do what we like with her.’ That thought seemed to evoke others of interest, judging by the glitter in his eye. ‘Ever fucked a girl in the arse, Thorpe?’
I opened my mouth. He didn’t wait for my reply.
‘Yes, of course you have: Paris, eh? French girls will let you shovel around in the coal hole, won’t they? Not like good English girls.’ He slapped Alyse’s thigh thoughtfully. ‘I could fuck this one up the arse though. She’d love it.’
‘You don’t have to behave like a barbarian, you know,’ I complained weakly.
‘What? Am I embarrassing you?’ His hand indicated his crotch.
‘Just show some … restraint.’
‘You don’t like what I’m doing then? Really? Isn’t your cock hard, watching me fuck her?’
‘Morgan …’
‘Is your cock hard?’ he rasped.
‘Yes,’ I admitted. My erection was a burning brand pressed against the frigid, soaking cloth and body.
Morgan jammed himself in to the hilt and held himself there. ‘Get it out. I want to see it. You can’t just sit there pretending to be holier-than-thou.’
I was shaking, but I obeyed, wriggling back a little from our prisoner and lowering her to the rug, then using my knees to pin her arms down as I divested myself of my lower garments. My cock sprang out stiffly, delighted to be free of its prison. My conscience and my body were at war, and my body was by far the stronger.
‘That’s better. Now put it to her mouth. See if she’ll lick it like a good girl.’
I moved in, pressing my erect length to an angle where she could reach it.
‘Lick his cock.’
She gaped, her expression as mindlessly carnal as ever.
‘Lick my friend’s cock, you little whore,’ he ordered, his fingers closing cruelly over her left nipple.
She gasped, then tilted her head back, tongue presented to lave the underside of my shaft.
I writhed inwardly, in shame and pleasure. Her mouth was cold, of course, but that was no discomfort by now. Her slick chill sent shivers up my spine.
‘Good girl. You do speak the King’s English then.’ Morgan gave her an encouraging stab with his weapon. ‘By God, you’re a real find.’
He slapped her breast, making it quiver, and the noise of skin on skin was loud and satisfying. She did not protest. Then he did it again, harder. The third time he raised his hand I saw it clench to a fist, and I grabbed his wrist as it swept in.
‘Morgan!’ I shouted, shoving him backwards.
He dumped the girl from his lap and lurched to his feet furiously. Only the fact that I rose to face him made him hesitate about striking me back, I think.
‘What? What have I done wrong now, you milksop?’
‘Is that your idea of how a gentleman fornicates? With his fists?’
‘I’ll do what I damn well like!’
‘Not in front of me you won’t. What sort of a friend would that make me?’
He squared up to me. ‘You blithering idiot, Thorpe. Don’t you understand? We can do anything we want to her – she’s the perfect harlot. She’s not a real person. She doesn’t have any feelings.’ There was the slightest hesitation before the word ‘real’, I noticed.
‘But you are,’ I countered, ‘and you are supposed to have feelings.’ I was breathing hard. ‘You are supposed to be a gentleman.’
His knotted brows rose. I think he was as shocked by my standing up to him as by my rebuke. His mouth opened, and then he looked down suddenly. While we stood shouting the girl had crawled between us and now she was sucking at the semi-turgid length lolling from his open trousers, her eyes closed in rapture.
‘Oh,’ Morgan groaned.
She was completely naked now. I had a perfect view from behind of the viola curve of her ivory back. The wind went out of my sails.
‘I suppose she’s willing enough …’
‘She loves it,’ Morgan said in a much more moderate voice, as she climbed the length of his body, pressing her pale flesh to the dark tweed of his clothes. ‘Can’t you see that, Thorpe? She wants it badly. She needs what I’ve got.’
Alyse kissed his throat, squirming her hips against his, her white hands delving up under his shirt.
‘Fine. Just
, there’s no need for …’
He took a handful of her dark hair and pulled her head back so he could gaze into her eyes. If there was anything there except hunger, neither of us could see it. ‘Do you want me to give you a good fucking,’ he asked softly, ‘my pretty little whore?’
She mouthed at the air as if her lips missed the shape of his cock between them. Morgan’s gaze slid to me. There was implacable intent in it. ‘Stay or go,’ he said grimly. ‘But if you stay to look after her then you’re having some too, Thorpe. This isn’t a theatrical revue.’ He pushed her from him, straight into my arms. ‘Now put her on the bed.’ He began to unbutton his jacket.
There was only a mattress with blue-striped ticking now that the counterpane had been stripped from the daybed. I’d taken two steps towards it with the girl before I thought to question what I was doing. I stopped, crushed by the moment, and as I did so her hand drifted over my prick and sent the blood surging through my frame like a tidal bore. Her fingers furled about my shaft, stroking the sensitive skin. I looked back at Morgan, who was stripping off his damp shirt.
‘What position do you want her in?’
He smiled. ‘Hands and knees. I’m going to make a sally through the postern gate, old chum, like I said.’
So I drew Alyse onto the bed and arranged her on hands and knees. She was completely compliant. Morgan came up behind her.
‘Stick your prick in her mouth, Thorpe. I saw this in a Rowlandson cartoon once, you know. I’ve always wanted to try it.’
‘You should wet your cock with spit beforehand,’ I muttered, as I fumbled my own aching prick to her mouth, ‘and use your fingers to open her up first.’
She took me without complaint, of course, her throat cool and clinging.
‘Not to worry,’ he laughed. He found the furrow he’d ploughed once already, rubbed his cock-head up and down in it vigorously, then struck home with a single thrust. Alyse was pushed up on my member all the way to the root. When Morgan withdrew his shaft was shiny with her juices. ‘Well greased, you see.’
Then he grabbed her bottom and bored straight into her nether passage with the efficiency of a navvy driving a piling into its socket. If she’d been a normal girl she would have shrieked, I swear, even though my member was filling her mouth. She only moaned a little and her throat clenched around me. I discovered over the next few minutes something I should have guessed: that she did not need to draw breath. The import of that might have given me pause, had I not been fixated on the sight of her dark hair under my hands and her white body with its soft splayed bottom lifted to view, and my friend Morgan thrusting between her cheeks with that darkly flushed cock. He was a sand-pale man, but his hands looked swarthy on the pallid swells of her buttock cheeks. His face was locked in a grimace of concentration until the end, when it opened up wide-eyed as if he saw all the glories of heaven. Yet his language was far from holy, as he thrust and spat and mashed her body beneath his. At that I felt his climax entering her and racing through every channel of her body until it reached my cock and ignited my crisis too, and we both filled her simultaneously from front and back.
I forget what happened in detail after that, except that we forged on to make use of her willing passivity in every way that we could think of. Perhaps there is that darkness in every man’s heart; that powerlessness makes it crueller. Perhaps I’m worse than other men, though I do not think so. Mere orgasm became a side issue to the dredging of Morgan’s carnal imagination. We rooted her together and separately, at every conceivable angle, without respect or subtlety.
And we never conquered her. After every bout she would crawl over for more, little moans of need fluttering pitifully in her throat. Until finally, as she lay supine with her head tilted back right over the edge of the mattress while Morgan shafted her throat in weary wonder, I slipped down exhausted between her thighs and parted the folds of her labia, burying my nose in the wet ringlets of her hair, while my tongue sought her pearl.
‘What’s that?’ Morgan mocked me. ‘Something your Parisian mistress taught you?’
I ignored him, and felt Alyse rise beneath me like a river in flood, her body undulating under my hands, her thighs first opening wide so that she could press me closer then clenching around my head until the blood boomed in my ears. For a moment she did not feel cold at all. And as she bucked and twisted and shuddered and her wetness filled my mouth and nose it seemed to me that I was being swept away by a current, wrapped in weeds and tumbled among stones, into the deep.
When I woke it was almost dawn, that time when the light is dim and grey. It shone in through unshuttered windows. I opened crusty eyes and tried to swallow, but my mouth was parched. I’d fallen asleep at the edge of the bed and the wooden frame was denting my cheek painfully. Something passed in front of me: white cloth, hanging in folds. Someone walking past the bed. I reached out and my fingers brushed linen. She’d worn a linen shift, I remembered blearily, and Morgan had ripped it.
But this cloth was dry to the touch.
I clutched the fabric, felt the smoothness of a thigh beneath my hand. Then, in silence as ever, Alyse knelt down by the bed so that her face came down on a level with mine. I stared. I wanted to apologise, but was too ashamed.
She smiled, faintly.
I became aware then how cold I was, in the unheated room on a bare mattress, wearing only my shirt.
Her dark eyes no longer spoke of hunger. They were no longer vacant. A knowingness haunted her smile. She laid a single cool finger on my lips, as if bidding me to keep a secret. Then she stood again, and her white shift and pale face faded away into the light of morning, becoming one with the panes of the window where the dawn mist was pressing up against the glass.
With a shudder I rolled over. ‘Morgan!’
But Morgan did not answer. He lay on his back beside me, his eyes fixed on the ceiling overhead. He was quite cold. There was a hole in his bare chest where his heart should have been – a black bloodless hole with withered edges, filled to the brim with water.
The Scent of Hawthorn
Northern Italy, Autumn AD 695
THE VILLAGERS WERE paying more attention to his horse than to him, noted Herrick as he rode in. He wasn’t completely surprised. Around here in the butt-end of the mountains strangers were few but horses of Bastion’s size and mettle were fewer still, and Herrick himself was wrapped in a hooded leather travelling cloak against the wet sleet, which had only just ceased for the first time that day, and it hid his armour and his sword. He looked, he supposed, fairly nondescript except for his height, but there was nothing nondescript about the black stallion he rode. So they judged him by the horse.
They looked worried.
By the time he reached the heart of the village there was quite a crowd. Herrick looked for a church among the stone huts – priests could be useful if co-operative, or trouble if they pinned him for an Arian and not an adherent of the Church of Rome – but couldn’t see one. He noted, though, that the houses seemed to be in poor repair, and some were obviously empty. He laid the fold of his cloak back over one shoulder to reveal the chain-mail hauberk beneath and a wave of consternation and fascination rippled through the watching villagers. Without a word he dismounted, patting the horse’s shoulder. For the briefest of moments he felt the urge to lay his head against Bastion’s neck and just give up on the entire enterprise, but it was too late for that. Besides, deep down in his belly the old embers still burned. This was his time. He straightened his shoulders.
Three paces brought him to stand before the horse, facing the small crowd. Herrick was taller than any man in it. He removed his helmet and ran his hand across the close-cropped mat of his hair, sending a mist of condensation droplets dancing over his head. He was letting them get a good look at his face, at the blunt features and the commanding eyes. Then he folded his arms. ‘Where is your priest? Or your capo?’
A middle-aged man neither more nor less damp and grubby than the other villagers pushed to the f
ront of the audience. ‘We have no priest here in Estoli. I am Antonius, the headman. What do you want?’
‘I am Herrick of Turin. In lands to the south of here that name is well known. But whether you have heard of me or no, I am a knight of the Court of Pavia and a Companion of the King’s Household. I’ve fought in eighteen battles since my fourteenth year. I’ve slain a manticore upon the shore of Dalmatia and fought alongside comrades to slay a hydra in the ravines of Arcadia. I have come here to kill your monster.’
The village had no inn for travellers; wedged up against the mountains’ feet it was not on the route to anywhere else, nor did outsiders come to trade – and if they should, Herrick doubted that they would find anything worth buying in bulk. But there was a stable to shelter Bastion alongside the miller’s gelding, and a hall set aside for meetings and for drinking in after the long work in the fields, and they led him there. The beer was cloudy, barely fermented and flavoured with sage, which made everything taste of regret.
They had heard of Herrick, or at least professed to. He was famous. They wanted to know everything, their appetite for vainglory immense. Because it was a part of his duty he obliged with stories of war and triumph, with an account of the battle of the Adda River and the subsequent re-ascension of King Cunicpert to his stolen throne, then a description of the victory over the renegade Ansfrid outside the walls of Verona. Nobody thought to ask why, if he was a favoured companion of royalty, he should be here in the dripline of the mountains taking an interest in their woes.
‘Now tell me your story,’ he instructed from where he sat in the best place by the fire, a wooden flagon of beer in one hand. He hadn’t removed his armour, though the straps of his greaves were biting into the backs of his calves. Their faces swam in front of his eyes, indistinguishable one from another in the firelight. He was twice the bulk of some of the village men and seemed to himself twice as solid, sat there under their avid stares, all in iron. He wondered if it was only his armour that made him real. ‘In Pavia we heard there was something in your area slaying men. Tell me about your monster.’
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