The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy

by Karen Mercury

Dagny tossed her head. “Dagny Edvarda Ravenhurst, and if you think you are dealing with a fellow pirate or a spy, you can think again, Captain.”

  “No. I merely wanted to determine whether you were yourself, recovered from being sunstruck.” He didn’t smile. “But I see that, as usual, you quite possess the entirety of your wits, as well as most of those around you.”

  Dagny flung the dirty lettuce into the pond, and grabbed a fresh handful to sponge his superbly muscled chest. She rubbed slowest and applied pressure over his erect nipples, pleased to see a flicker of sensitivity appear in his inscrutable eyes. She avoided the filthy bandage wrapped around his waist. “I am not in possession of anything resembling wits when I’m in your presence, Tomaj,” she said in a low voice. At this, his penis, above which she perched lightly with a back so straight her quim was planted squarely over the great length of it, stiffened and elongated, a feat she knew to be unusual underneath cool waters.

  Gripping her shoulder sternly, he shifted, with the only result that he even further nestled the urgent head of his prick between her lips, and she smiled, leaning forward to slap the handful of water plants into the attractive hollow of his armpit. He gasped slightly, then uttered, “The king is dead.”

  She stilled the properly respectful amount of time, then continued her ministrations, glancing coquettishly at his almost painfully lean belly, coruscating whitely under the lace-leafs of ouvirandra. “Does it matter to me? I know it matters to you, because he is your friend, but I fear my animal appetite for you has quite overcome any sense of mourning I should be obligated to feel at the moment.”

  Tossing the handful of plant sponge, she entwined her hands behind his neck and kissed him, flicking the tip of her tongue against his mouth, as he had teased the chocolate bonbon down in Fort Dauphin. As she slid his upper lip ever so gently between her teeth, he at last responded, supporting her skull in his hand and drawing her up and over him. Splashing her legs like a great white fish, she swiftly altered her mounting of him from sidesaddle to astride, lifting her feet behind her so that they settled one atop each of his knees, and driving her quim even harder down over his erection.

  They kissed with slovenly abandon for many long moments, the tip of his lovely aquiline nose mashed against her face, snorting puffs of hot, eager moisture against each other until Dagny heard the giggling of petty lurchers in the undergrowth—no doubt some of the guards, soldiers, and children who endlessly followed in Tomaj’s wake. Dagny paid them no mind—she’d rutted in public before, to be sure, and in much less isolated spots than this—indeed, for Malagasy, it was customary and even more proper than to be seen eating food.

  She felt that only through enticing Tomaj with her sex could she ever hope to secure his love completely. It was the only way she knew.

  Tomaj held her back, panting with such lust his chest heaved and fell. “Dagny …” Why was he filled with sternness? Why was he stopping her—was she so utterly heinous? “I’m familiar with your life in New York. I don’t condemn you for doing what you could in order to protect your family—no, my dearest malala, I don’t condemn you at all! So don’t protest … I just cannot be like the men who came before me.” He laughed slightly, in his mania. “Me, a sordid pirate king, picking and choosing my own behavior so carefully! But you see, it’s only from respect for your sublime person that I must refrain from swinging you on that creek bed like a common tail—”

  She shut him up with a fiery kiss that had him releasing her handful of hair and instead massaging her skull with his fingertips. Withdrawing slightly, she spoke against his mouth. “No, Tomaj. I will not allow you to get away, there’s no time for that. I know I’m not a common tail, so there’s the end of that.”

  Her hand shot out and grabbed the sooty formerly butter-colored cravat that was draped across ferns. Plunging it beneath the water, she cinched both of his wrists at the lumbar of his back and proceeded to knot them together in a manner that would do a seaman proud. Oh, seamen had so many words for knots!

  She didn’t know what she did, and she spoke rapidly against his mouth to cover her lack of knowledge, and to take his mind away from her hands. “Tomaj, Tomaj.” She slurped the tip of his splendid nose. “I shall adore you, love you, and work side by side with you, neither one of us more exalted than the other …”

  Her handiwork done, she yanked down the neck of her chemise and allowed the tips of her breasts to swing before his mouth, and he gobbled eagerly, licking with happy cat licks that sent tremulous shivers to the core of her. Delving her hands into the water, she hitched her thumbs under the waist of his China silk drawers and yanked, allowing the penis she straddled to bob freely.

  She caressed the lush pelt of his head to her chest as he skillfully nibbled and licked at her tender erect nipples, conjuring such a sudden surge of blood to her womb she feared she might climax before she mounted him.

  No man had ever licked her—anywhere, least of all guzzled at the soaked distended lips of her sex as though he slaked his thirst at a flagon of wine. Nor would she have wanted them to. Consorting with men in this manner had always repulsed her, and now here, after many years of eschewing men and instead studying the marvels of the natural world, was a man of such majestic sustenance she wanted to suck the roots of his very hair, to burrow her face beneath his arm like a happy boar, to slide her hand down the plane of his abdomen to grip the root of his superb penis. He may be a pirate, she thought, but he is certainly more refined than I.

  Whimpering like a puppy, she rocked her hips fore and aft so that she slid the expanse of his member. Unused to such a prodigious penis, she had no doubt she could accommodate him, for she was as wide open as the sky above. Propping herself up with her hands upon his strong silken shoulders, she bent to touch her nose to his while bucking back and forth, pleased with the dazed almost pixilated way he panted, his tongue still trembling with lust.

  “Dagny Edvarda …”

  “Pellegrin Tomaj,” she agreed, at last capturing the head of his penis between her thighs and positioning herself.

  “You are the muse of my life, and I shall love you until all’s blue,” he whispered.

  She kissed his delicious mouth lightly. “Good.” Plunging her pelvis, she impaled herself upon his impressive length. She inhaled loudly with shock at how deeply he was embedded in her, filled nearly to her navel with his penis, but she flexed her thighs against his hips and bore down again and again until she became accustomed to him.

  Oh, what joy to see the many helpless shadows of bald thirst that passed over his stately face! With hands bound behind him, Tomaj was free only to slew his bewitchingly muscled hips up into her with prodigious sloshing sounds so loud Dagny feared they might attract fishermen. How was it possible a man of slender build could be possessed of such astonishing musculature? His hips were capable of bucking off the most rapacious crocodile, and the sinews of his ribs so powerful the serratus muscles, well developed in practiced swordsmen, were defined to an extent she’d never witnessed. Yet to view him from the side, one would laugh at his slightness, his towering long-limbed elegance, and think him prone to falling over in the slightest wind, and good only for posing for romantic paintings.

  He didn’t take his eyes from her face as she ruthlessly humped him, only nipping at her chin and mouth, and lunging up into her while murmuring guttural things in German. Dagny’s hands slid from his moist shoulders and she fell forward onto him to grasp slimy rocks, laying his torso back among feathery ferns.

  How she would dearly love to die like this, here with him clenched between her thighs, the thick muscle of his penis wedged deep inside of her, him murmuring guttural poetry that she was sure bespoke his adoration of her—or at least his adoration of her quim—and she lowered her mouth to lick his face.

  “You’re a man,” she breathed, “who knows how to use his tongue.”

  With an abrupt jerk, he came in a great gushing spending that splashed her womb with his warmth. Covering him with her torso
, she was content to founder atop him like a shabby formless mushroom, while he arched up into her with a power that, in former years, would have frightened her with its intensity.

  She must have taken a caulk again. She only knew it was nearing candle-lighting time when she next opened her eyes, fluttering her eyelids with the innocent incomprehension of the virgin. Oh, how wonderful. I’ve been restored to my youth, to a time before anything bad happened.

  She lay still impaled atop the count, his profile happy and quiescent, his lashes in the lowering sun casting shadows across his lustrous face. She slid off him and into a lower pool where she floated upon a bed of water lettuce. He jumped awake, reaching out for her.

  She laughed.

  Perhaps realizing she wasn’t drowning, he laughed, too, looking up to the bower above with starry eyes, and flung an arm helplessly. His hand landed on his bare chest.

  “Wait.” Dagny frowned, raising herself on an elbow, festoons of lacey ouvirandra draped from her shoulders. “How long have your hands been unbound?”

  He positioned his fingertips against his forehead and continued smiling at the trees. “Ah,” he said, with the thickest Hungarian accent he’d been known to use. “Perhaps since …” His free hand splashed the water, and withdrew a sodden yellow cravat, which he held up into the air for all to see.

  “Oh!” Dagny sat on her haunches, water streaming from her nipples, and whipped the fabric from him. “You pirates are all the same. You know all the damned knots.”

  Laughing fully now, Tomaj raised himself, locking his hands around his knees, gazing down at her as upon a beloved family pet. He’d never looked more handsome. His nose arched, and his eyes had the insouciant joy of the man who has just been well fucked. “Rahanoriana no lany ny ala atsinana.”

  Dagny knew some Malagasy, but couldn’t piece it together. “What does that mean?”

  “There will be no end like the eastern forest.”

  “Oh. We live in the eastern forest.”

  “Aye. And there’s no end to it… aye?”

  “Yes. And you must be famished right now. Will you come back to my cottage and have some dinner?”

  “Aye.” He still smiled.

  They looked at each other for a long time, until Dagny felt naked and fat, though her breasts had slid back beneath the bodice of her chemise. “And where is Hector?”

  “He’s fine. He’s lying on your stuffing table.”

  “Stuffing … ? No! Hector isn’t a fish, you silly goose. Hector is your cabin boy.”

  “Ah.” Getting to his feet, Tomaj reached a hand down to her. “Hector, is it? I always wondered what his given name was. When I found you asleep on the fish, Hector was sprawled in the sand with a brandy decanter in his hand. I had the men carry him in another filanzana behind the fish, back to your cottage.”

  “Ah, good.” Dagny allowed Tomaj to raise her. She slid a bit on the mossy rocks, but Tomaj was there to steady her. In a joyous silence, they halfheartedly donned the remainder of their damp clothes.

  Bushes rustled, ferns moved airily in the evening stillness, and the men of Tomaj’s retinue emerged from their hiding spots to creep behind them. Dagny took Tomaj’s arm, and they went back up the footpath.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IN WHICH TOMAJ IS CONFUSED WITH A DEAD FISH

  TOMAJ HAD NEVER BEEN INSIDE THE COTTAGE MONsieur Boneaux loaned to Dagny. He felt ill at ease inside a building owned by that swab, but Dagny soon put things to rights, lighting candles, closing the curtains, and laying the cloth on the dining table. She materialized ingredients for a decent dinner: a wedge of roasted bullock (leaving the boar in the refrigerator, as Tomaj avoided swine), smoked fish, the ubiquitous rice, this time in the form of a pudding, and even some pastries someone had been baking for Zeke’s establishment. They allowed Bellingham to sleep (Dagny insisted Tomaj move him to a settee), and they enjoyed some Bordeaux, the Frogmore origins of which were suspicious, but Tomaj wasn’t of a mind to complain.

  When the food was quite scoffed, Dagny bade him stand, and gently removed his grimy, smoky clothing, placing all into a bundle that she put onto the back porch for the laundress. She unraveled the filthy bandage and washed his wound with a decoction of plantain and witch hazel. In buff, he was perfectly clean from the dip in the pond, and he balked at dressing in Zeke’s small clothes. Sal’s rigs would strangle him about the waist and balls, so he settled for Sal’s glorious embroidered banyan robe that wasn’t too restrictive, feeling utterly salacious with nothing underneath as Dagny seated him again at the table preparatory to shaving his face.

  “This razor should be sharp,” she observed, touching the blade with her thumb experimentally. “Sal shaves every day, he’s meticulous as you know, and I often see him sharpening it.” She placed the razor on the table next to a pot of eucalyptus lemon oil, knowing he eschewed the clove oil that Ramavo was known to swim in.

  Standing behind him, she twisted his hair up into a pigtail, rolled it into a bun, and stuck it through with one of Sal’s chopsticks, keeping it off his neck. “You know I must trust you highly to allow you to brandish that straight razor near my person. I’ve never allowed Ellie or any other girl to do that.”

  Despite the turmoil of the island the past couple of days, it felt snug and secure inside her cottage. Tomaj relaxed into the decadence of allowing a woman to groom him.

  “I’m honored then, my exalted Hungarian count,” she said.

  His head lolled back between her breasts—she, too, had changed into only a thin silk negligee—and her closeness caused his cock to jump. He cinched the unruly thing under the sash of the robe as Dagny dipped her fingers into the oil and delicately massaged it into his throat. He pillowed his head while she rubbed the medicinal-smelling oil over his clavicle, beneath the silken cord of his emblem. Her rough thumbs on his pectorals engorged his prick into a stiff hopeless erection that he didn’t attempt to cover with a palm.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she whispered, “but I’ve not heard of many Jews of the nobility. The ones I was acquainted with in New York were usually fleeing some sort of persecution, not being elevated to nobility.”

  “That is—” Tomaj gasped when her nimble fingers smoothed the oil over his nipples. “Ah, that is true, my malala. However, the Jews of Hungary, in the year I was born, petitioned King Leopold for equality, which he granted. So, no, we weren’t escaping persecution.” He sighed.

  “Just one moment, the water’s boiling.”

  While Dagny went to the kitchen, Tomaj slumped lower in the chair. He didn’t like discussing this Jewish business and he hoped Dagny would just forget about it.

  She returned holding a steaming towel in a pair of tongs, placing the towel on a tray on the table. “They accepted Jews so fully they give them titles?”

  Tomaj chuckled to himself. Dagny was direct and perseverant like no woman he’d ever known. “Not normally, no. But in my case … I was eighteen, a captain of Hussars.” She’d sunk into another chair before him, where she perched with one elbow on the table, slack-jawed. “Napoleon was in possession of Vienna. I had a mission to send barges down the Danube to cut the bridges … Did you read about this? In 1809? No? I’d been riding for days with the Austrian cavalry. The Frogs crossed the Danube and charged us at Esseling … Ah, you were still a child, a Quaker in Pennsylvania, where they don’t read papers. At any rate, we at last drove them out—Boney’s first great defeat. My brother interrupted the celebration dinner given by Archduke Charles to bid me return to the castle in Nagycenk, that my father had beaten my mother nearly to death.”

  “What?” Dagny whispered, her fingers on the steaming towel apparently insensate to pain. “Why?”

  He closed his eyes again, not wanting to see her pity. But he’d told her too much now, and couldn’t change the subject by discussing Radama’s murder, or shaving implements. “Because he’d found her menorah, and she’d confessed that her mother was a Croatian Jewess.” It felt all right to tell Dagn
y these things. She wasn’t a woman who would judge.

  He glanced back at her. Her jaw was still askew, so he asked mildly, “By the by, where is Salvatore? No one has apparently seen him in quite a few days and I’m beginning to fret what with these Kwangtungmen still evidently somewhere in the vicinity of the Indian Ocean. I’d heard he—”

  “Is that the same menorah that you have? That I saw last night?”

  “Yes, the same. We were exiled to New York along with every other ordinary refugee. That’s when I begged her to teach me Judaism—I wanted to know the power of a religion that was capable of causing so much hatred and murder.” He turned to her with a smile he hoped was carefree, but his words came out defensive and angry. “Now, my dear, will you finish the job with the razor?”

  “Oh, my love! I’m terribly sorry!” Leaping to her feet, Dagny took the towel that no longer burned with steam, and laid it gently across the lower part of his face, pressing softly against his mouth and chin. “Why, that is just horrendous … to throw away a wife and child whom you love based upon something that is obviously so inconsequential that you didn’t even know about it for twenty years!” Tomaj was glad he wasn’t able to speak. He wasn’t accustomed to discussing things like this—this was womanly talk.

  “Or perhaps he didn’t love you … I’ve often thought that was the case with my father, who threw me to the wolves when I was fifteen … When I returned home much later to care for him, he had softened a little, or at least was willing to let me read in his library and work in his laboratory, and I think knowing he was nearing death assisted in encouraging him to allow me to learn … But, no, the more I’ve thought about it over the years, the more I’m firmly convinced. He didn’t love me.” She said it petulantly, with a pouting conviction, as though she debated the merits of different hats.

  When she removed the towel, he said, “Dagny, tell me. Has Sal gone to my mines?”

  She didn’t answer immediately, smoothing more oil into the hinges of his jaws with her fingertips, so he could ask no more questions. “Yes.”