He needed to face Dagny now. He could not continue looking away from her because he feared her death. He kissed the inside of her wrist and said quietly, “I cannot afford to lose you. I need to teach you how to defend yourself. Your teachers will be me, Youx, Zaleski, or Broadhecker—no one else. After all, a ship’s naturalist needs to be able to defend herself. I can’t keep you hidden in my cabin all day long.”
“Ship’s …?”
Taking her by the hands, Tomaj pulled her unsteadily to her feet. “I shall not take you to the Straits of Malacca, nor the South China Sea,” he said as he assisted her to the foot of the bed where he tossed some large silk cushions, and allowed her to sit on the floor. “I will not take you into the Red Sea or even the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, for there are some sambuk men who remain annoyed with me. But anywhere I deem it safe, I want you to sail with me, on voyages of discovery.”
Positioning her shoulders so she faced a wall mirror, Tomaj settled in behind her, placing his left hand on her shoulder that was laid bare by the delicate sleeve of a summer frock. He could not resist leaning in to breathe of her neck, and she displayed her naked throat to him with utter trust.
“And where is it safe?” she asked. “Certainly not the Mozambique Channel, since Youx is finished there.”
He had not really figured that out yet. “Australia,” he whispered, touching his lips to the sensitive spot just beneath her ear. “The Gold Coast. New South Wales. The Brazil.”
“I should like that.”
“Now,” he sighed, drawing a cutlass he’d materialized and touching the blade to her throat. “I’m holding this knife against your throat. What do you do?”
She elbowed him in the gut a little harder than was necessary for demonstration.
“All right,” he chuckled, and instantly grabbed both her wrists in his left hand, pinioning them to the small of her back by kneeling on her hands. “Now, I’m holding this knife against your throat.”
“Um,” she said, squirming. “I can’t do a thing. If I move, I press myself into the blade. Or I make you mad, and you slice my throat.”
“Exactly.” Tomaj didn’t remove the blade. “You can’t stop me from doing a damned thing. I can even … bite you.” He took a deep juicy bite from her throat that made her smile, and gooseflesh appeared on her shoulder.
“But I wouldn’t want to do a damned thing,” she whispered. “So what is the point?”
Tomaj licked her earlobe, wriggling his tongue behind her earring and down her jawbone. In the mirror, he saw her eyes slide shut. “Ah. The point is, if you have a broken leg, don’t let yourself get into a situation where someone would hold a knife to your throat.” His arm fell to his side to release the cutlass, and returned to slip her bodice of tulle down over both shoulders. He was pleased to see that beside the light demi-corset he’d given her, she wore no additional chemise, and she seemed proud of the abundant display in the mirror, arching her back to rub her shoulder blades against his chest.
“I just was in such a situation, on the Chinese junk,” she whispered petulantly.
“Don’t say such things,” Tomaj murmured. “I don’t want to think about it.”
Squiggling a lascivious frisson with her shoulders against his chest, Dagny rolled her head back and spoke against his mouth. “I’ve been waiting for you to take me for a month … aching for you … pleasuring myself, touching myself, trying to create the feelings you give me when you pet me.”
“Ah, my malala. I’ve been aching to pet you.” He kissed her, coarsely grasping her breast above the stiffness of the corset, and taking a fistful of her behind in the other hand. She kissed him sloppily, with the vigor of a hungry woman in the prime of passion, gasping and nearly crying from want.
Rising to his knees behind her, Tomaj slid both hands down her armpits to lift her breasts from their casing. He stroked her bare back with the entirety of his erection, so stiff it was painful, and he feared he might come off inside his trousers.
Breaking the kiss with a messy sucking sound, Tomaj drew himself up so she could view herself in her feminine glory, holding the heavy breasts in his hands. But she screwed her face up, writhed, grabbed a footstool, and raised herself on her one good knee. Lunging her behind against his crotch, she wrapped her free arm around his neck and cried out, “Tomaj! If you don’t take me now I shall go insane!”
That was all the instruction he needed to launch into a grand fuck, the intensity of which was so overwhelming it later took him hours to piece it together.
He raised her skirts over her uplifted behind, all subtlety and romance gone out the window. His cock was out, lunging and drooling like a satyr as he plunged into her without ceremony. No sense of propriety stayed him as she drove him on with her hand gripping his bare hip. She moaned loudly with wanton abandon, her succulent breasts swinging lewdly.
Tomaj grasped her hips and held her tight. He didn’t want to come off yet, but she was having none of it, as she slapped her pelvis back against him so deeply he nearly lost it, and cried, “Stop! Stop, stop!”
Holding her tightly against him, he fumbled with all the layers of fabric at her lap until he came to the slit in her drawers. “Oh, ah, that’s good,” he murmured as he stroked the distended length of her wet clitoris. On her knees arched like a cat on a fencepost, she turned even more crazed as he frigged her—he already felt the powerful contractions surrounding his prick, and she reared up against him to claw at his shoulder.
“Take it off, take it off,” she gasped. “I want to see you.”
Dagny wanted to watch him in the mirror, so he stripped the damnable shirt from his torso. She clutched the footstool, avidly looking over her shoulder, her bad leg supported in his palm. When he diddled the stiff projection of her slick clitoris, she sobbed, throwing her head back between her shoulder blades. She uttered a heart-wrenching cry before she stopped breathing, and that’s when she went off like a powder keg around his fingers and his cock in a stupendous display.
He’d never felt a woman come so strongly. Her lovely pussy near about bit his cock off at the base as she lunged forward onto the footstool, ceased to breathe, only uttered choked strangling sounds. Tomaj didn’t have to move—merely the robust contractions clutching the length of his prick brought him off, and for a long time all he saw was stars. Her powerful muscles sucked him dry as he struggled to gasp air. His frigging slowed as she jumped with contractions.
After many long minutes, he gripped her by the waist and laid her upon the pillows, his prick still buried in her. She panted hoarsely as though she choked on a lungful of afyuni. They remained entwined while they gulped air, then Tomaj stood and fetched the champagne glasses. He kicked the cutlass across the floor, not bothering to button his trousers, staggering from lack of air, as if in their fevered rutting they had sucked all of the air from the room.
It took a long time to pour fresh champagne. His eyes wouldn’t focus on the rim of the glass. When he turned around, Dagny had covered her shoulders with her gown and limped toward him. He caught her by the elbow and sat her onto the bed. She blushed when she accepted the champagne, and would not meet his gaze.
“I apologize,” she whispered, glancing with downcast eyes at his bicep.
“For what?” He hadn’t even bothered shoving his cock back into his China drawers.
“For being so … so forward.” She sipped champagne, and her eyes moved up to his throat. “I have never—never, never—acted in that manner before. Have never had to.”
“No need to apologize for that!” Tomaj said warmly, stroking her underneath her chin. “Don’t ever apologize for that, Miss Ravenhurst!”
Sighing, Dagny tilted her head. “All right … Count Balásházy. I won’t.” She turned timid again and looked down when she said, “But about that. Are you not worried that I might become … bamboozled? You don’t seem concerned about that.”
“I should think not,” Tomaj agreed. “It’s not a foremost concern of mine.”
“But if I… if I get knocked up, you’d have to … marry me. And I know you don’t want that.”
“Whenever did I say that?” The force of his reaction surprised even Tomaj.
“The day I met you. You said no man is married beyond Gibraltar, and that marriage was a pointless frippery.”
“I did, then? Perhaps. It sounds like something I may have said, back then. But things are different now, and I don’t find the concept nearly as loathsome.”
Dagny smiled. “That’s all right, Tomaj. I didn’t mean to entrap you into a conversation of marriage. I was merely wondering … Should you not perhaps withdraw your handsomely long … and thick … and masterful penis before you quite fill me with your dangerous seed? That’s all I’m saying.”
At last stuffing his cock back into his drawers, Tomaj stood, turning his back to Dagny while he buttoned himself. “Spill my seed? No.” He fiddled about lighting the lamp, so she couldn’t see his face. “That is ha-sh’cha’tat zerah, and forbidden by Jewish law.”
Her voice teased. “But you’ve spilled your seed in my mouth.”
Tomaj frowned at the tinder pistol. The gunpowder wasn’t igniting. He probably had to knap the flint.
“Or I could wash with vinegar, but that is oftentimes nasty and painful, and I have known it not to work.”
“No!” Tomaj shouted. “There will be no washing or seed-spilling! It simply isn’t …” Frustrated, he tossed the tinder pistol down and turned to Dagny. “It isn’t necessary.”
Her face was blank with true innocence. “Not necessary?”
Walking back to the bed, Tomaj picked up the cutlass out of defensive habit. Sitting beside her, he thumbed the blade and sighed. “I’ve come to the conclusion it is I who am somehow at fault. The medal I wear? Radama gave it to me because I had dozens of ramatoas, and no children.” He dared to look at Dagny then. Her anger had probably not shown on her countenance yet, for her face remained open and kind.
“Dagny. I’ve screwed hundreds of women, with no precautionary measures taken. Never once has anyone approached me with news of a child. Madeline and I … “ But he had no wish to discuss Madeline, so he looked back at the cutlass.
“Darling,” she said gently. “That’s impossible. Perhaps it’s just been your bad luck. Or,” she shrugged, “good luck, depending upon how you look at it.” Scooting close to him, she placed her face against his bare shoulder and stroked his chest. “It must have been your wife’s fault. That’s all there is to it.”
Tomaj laughed sadly. “You’re a naturalist. Have you never taken note of a certain male who cannot sire?”
“Well, yes, of course, but I’ve always known it to be the female’s problem, and the male always leaves to seek greener pastures. I’ve never studied one in captivity. I’ve never had a laboratory that would permit that, but even then, the deduction would be the same. That the female was barren.”
Tomaj got up to fetch his glass. “I’ve had the same lemurs in captivity for years, in my glass-house.”
Dagny’s eyebrows raised. “Yes! That’s right, you have!”
He sliced the cutlass through the air as he sipped. “The lemur I keep aboard Stormalong? He was many years in my glass-house. Always hot as monkeys. He’d hump every female in sight, but after awhile, when they failed to conceive …” He examined the cutlass in the dimming light. “They all eventually became irate with him, and kicked him out.”
Dagny had her hands to her face. “Oh, how sad! But that’s still no proof of anything.” Tomaj returned to the bed and allowed her to rub her face against his shoulder. “Tomaj. If it doesn’t worry you, then it doesn’t worry me, and together we shall not worry.”
She was so loving that he turned and touched his nose to hers—for some unfathomable reason she seemed to adore his colossal nose. He kissed her, quite ready for another go at it, this time perhaps more leisurely, perhaps in the bath-house. He’d have to have Ellie and the girls heat plenty of water …
Youthful boots ran down the hallway, and Bellingham utterly ignored the sentries at the door in order to burst in cheerfully.
“Avast, Cap’n!”
Tenderly stroking Dagny’s hair, Tomaj ripped himself away and jumped to his feet, brandishing the cutlass. “Mister Bellingham! How many times have I told you to remain on the other side of the door until I call you in?”
It appeared that Bellingham didn’t fear him, for he just laughed and shrugged, holding an open palm in Dagny’s direction. “But you’re not doing anything, sir!”
Dagny leaned on an elbow to see around Tomaj. “Not anything that you notice, dear Hector,” she teased.
At this, Bellingham blushed and looked to the floor, so Tomaj asked, “What is it?”
Bellingham brightened. “Them American whalers is here, bound from New Zealand and Japan, sir! Hellish fine vessels all moored in the anchorage, most of them’s handing round them ‘porpoise balls’ down in Harmony Row—remember those? Whale brain fritters mixed with potatoes—and we’re all set for a bang-up banyan party tonight! That Ian McKendrick is down in the drawing room, that addlepated archduke what gouged out old Steamy Phillips’s eye that time with the marline spike, remember?”
Laughing, Tomaj went to the armoire to find his embroidered muslin shirt. “McKendrick is overly fond of eye gouging,” he told Dagny. “Whalers are a brutal lot, but there are some loyal hands among them.”
Bellingham shuffled through Tomaj’s shirts in the armoire. “He’s got a keg two mouthy coves brought up from Harmony Row, what he says contains some turtle soup he owes you, sir. What’s that about?”
Tomaj paused for a moment, fingering a shirt of fine India long-cloth. Then he remembered, and laughing felt good. “He came to me here at Barataria one day a couple of years ago, piping his eye because he thought he was set to die.” Bellingham laughed ghoulishly, too, carried away on a wave of jocosity, though he hadn’t been there that day. “I finally got to the bottom of the matter, which was that he was pissing green piss.”
Now that Bellingham understood, he fell against the door in a paroxysm of glee. Tomaj, too, had to lean against the armoire, overcome with the memory, while Dagny pulled herself to her feet gripping the bedpost and cried, “What? What on earth is so humorous about pissing green piss? Tomaj!”
It took many long minutes before he was able to tell her in between gasps, “We’d been feeding him turtle soup, telling him it was a cure for the Egyptian pox.”
Dagny stomped her good foot. “Ooo! You fellows are the brutal ones! Imagine! Pirates calling whalers brutal!”
These were the most joyous days in the sordid lives of Dagny and Salvatore Ravenhurst. Living at Barataria with the motley collection of pirates, missionaries, planters, and whale hunters, Dagny fell into a sort of tropical serenity, waking when she wished, sleeping when she wished, eating when she wished.
When at home (home! She had never had a proper home before, and the word rolled around her mouth with pleasure), there were long, languid soaks in the bath-house, though Dagny forbade Ellie and other ramatoas from attending Tomaj. “I’m from America, not Turkey,” she explained, and he seemed satisfied with this.
They spent gracious quiet afternoons in the glass-house, where Tomaj finished his sketch and began the painting of Dagny. Hector was a frequent guest with his own artist’s wood cabinet, displaying a particular inclination for watercolors of lemurs posed on tree limbs, although all of his lemurs seemed to have the same face that Hector liked to call “insouciant.” The aye-aye flourished in the glass-house and was a particularly favorite subject for Hector’s paintbrush.
Tomaj expressed no desire for any more cruises, whether to the South China Sea or elsewhere. Youx had brought back from Zanzibar a cargo of copra that smelled up the entirety of Mavasarona Bay even more odiferously than the whale heads called “cases,” or the “horse-piece” blocks of fat that were dropped into the whaler’s blubber room. Everyone for forty miles around turned out the day the whalem
en towed the sperm whale carcass back out to open waters. Dagny liked to think they towed it because she protested so stridently to Tomaj about the stink, but it was probably only because it would attract sharks into his bay. He told her that normally they would merely let what remained of the carcass sink, because whale hunters had developed a modern method of doing most of this butchery out at sea. When in the Arctic, she heard, they completed the entire operation on an ice floe to prevent the whale from spoiling. There they would float for days until they were finished, and their ship picked up the entire mess.
Zaleski returned from Zanzibar bearing Arabic gifts, and there was a grand mêlée. For Sal, he had a braided headband he called an aghal that held in place a long sheet that flowed to one’s ankles. Zaleski tried to give an elaborately inlaid hookah to Tomaj, but Tomaj politely added it to the pile of censers and shoes with turned-up toes that had gathered around Sal, saying he no longer wished for the “spirits of dead Buddhas to inhabit his brain.”
The veteran harpooner, Ian MacKendrick, happened by at that instant. He was evidently gripped with a vision of his own captain, a tyrant who wasn’t allowed onto the parklands of Barataria. The captain had been accused of various insults against the crew, and had been confined to the “run” of the vessel, which, as Dagny understood it, was a tiny locker under the floor of a cabin where no one could sit upright.
MacKendrick, who through his camaraderie with Tomaj had been allowed to roam freely about Barataria clutching a sort of Red Indian cutlass, raised his sword and rushed into the banyan party, slashing wildly, shouting, “You’ve taken the Columbia River from us, and now you come to take the Indian Ocean! Is there a man here who will not stand with me in saying the Columbia is the only place in the Pacific where we can touch American soil, yet we have still to fear the lawless aggressions of British freebooters?”
The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy Page 34
