I’m not going to enjoy it if I’m being forced.”
“The same way you didn’t enjoy being forced to have sex with Sygarius?” He pulled his finger out, only to replace it with two. It hurt a little as he forced them inside me; I was still so narrow, and unused to intrusion. Yet even as I felt the pinch of entry, my passage seemed to yearn for more. My body wanted to be stretched and filled, no matter what my mind said. The heel of his palm came against my folds, rubbing gently as his fingers thrust within me, finding again that secret spot.
“That . . . was different,” I managed to say. My hips wanted to rock in rhythm with his hand, but I held them still. I didn’t want a vision. I didn’t want to catch sight of the future and have Clovis use it to choose whom to kill next. “Pleasure was Sygarius’s only goal.”
“For his own sake.”
“For mine as well.”
“If that were true, he wouldn’t have kept you a slave. He would have left you free to choose to stay or go, and trusted that he gave you such ecstasy that you would never want to leave.” He eased his fingers from me and unfastened the copper girdle.
“Is that what you think you’ll do? Give me so much pleasure that I forget all else?”
“I know I will.”
His arrogance enraged me, and I struggled to roll away from him. “You are a boy compared to Sygarius, with a boy’s experience of women. You’d stick your rod in me, thrust it with the careless vigor of a rabbit, and think me impressed.”
He grabbed me around the waist and hauled me to him, and in the wrestling struggle that followed he dragged my clothes off over my head. He pushed me belly-down onto the coverlet and held me there with a knee on my back while he stripped off his own clothes. “I don’t know why you’re fighting me, Nimia,” he said, injury in his voice.
My head was turned away from him, my cheek pressed to the wool, my breath coming in pants. My hair was tangled over my face, obscuring my view of the lamplit room. He was too strong for me to fight; my only defense from giving him what he wanted was to distract myself from his caresses. I tried to think of foul things: public latrines; the white horses being slaughtered; leprous beggars crawling in the street.
His knee came off my back, and then I felt him tracing the spiral tattoos over my thighs and buttocks. He traced a line across my buttocks and then toward my gates, pulling my thighs apart to continue his trailing course. He stopped near my entrance, his fingertip hovering there for several moments, and then with both hands he lifted and parted my buttocks. I felt him staring at my loins, examining them, and then felt the vibration of his laughter.
I pushed up on my forearms and looked over my shoulder at him, confused and wary. “What?”
“You, my lovely Nimia, were made to be fucked.” He rolled me onto my back and knelt between my thighs. His mentula stood up, long and thick and eager, a thatch of dark gold hair at its base. But instead of using it, he took hold of my knees and lifted them while spreading them wide, opening my hairless folds to his gaze. His eyes traced a pattern over my sex, and he laughed again.
“I don’t know what you’re laughing about,” I said, embarrassed.
“You’ve never looked at yourself?”
“I have.” I saw fragments of my loins when I plucked the hairs, using a small mirror in my palm.
“But have you looked, at the whole pattern?”
I shook my head, growing curious despite my embarrassment. I knew the patterns of my tattoos where I could easily see them, but viewing the whole of the design would have meant access to a large mirror, and crouching naked in strange positions was sure to raise questions in anyone who saw me.
“Wait here,” he said, dropping my knees and crawling off the bed. His rigid staff bobbed as he moved, and my eyes seemed unable to leave its thick, upright curving length, its skin painted soft gold by the lamplight. My entrance pulsed once in mute pleading.
No, I can’t want him. He’s vicious. Power-hungry. His only thoughts are for getting what he wants. He has no heart.
He returned to the bed with a silver mirror, and an expression on his face of such eager, boyish delight that all my certainties of his badness began to fall away. “Look!” he said, and held the mirror near my loins.
I tilted his hold on the mirror until I could see myself, feeling awkward to be lying there while we both examined my crotch. I saw a spiral of concentric ovals drawn upon my most secret parts, the outermost ring starting above the hood of my stamen. The bottom half of the spiral was out of sight below my sex. “It’s a spiral.”
He shook his head. “Hold the mirror.” When I did so, he gently parted my folds, revealing a line drawn along one side of my inner wings, the line ending in a hook shape that curled around the entrance to my passage. Another line bisected the first, crossing from inner thigh to inner thigh across my stamen. “It must have felt like being burnt with molten iron, to have that drawn on you there,” he said.
Flashes of early memory came to me: bitter herbal potions to lull me; ointments to dull sensation; crying and trying to be brave while my mother, surrounded by the other women of the Phanne, put these first marks upon my body. I must have been no more than three or four years old.
“It’s not a spiral like the other marks; you know that, don’t you?” he said.
I shook my head.
“It’s a labyrinth. Like the one Daedalus built to hold the Minotaur.”
I stared at the design, then holding the mirror with one hand, used my other to press a fingertip lightly against my entrance, then follow the path outward, turning and curving from one side of my sex to the other, until I lost track of the path because it was too difficult to reach.
“It comes out here,” Clovis said, touching the entrance to the maze, above the peak of my hood. He dragged his fingertip down to the sensitive flesh above my stamen and swirled it, making me gasp. “It seems to instruct any man where to start. And where to finish.” He touched my entrance.
“That can’t have been the purpose.”
He took the mirror from my hand and tossed it aside. He settled his length on top of me, his mouth even with my breasts, his torso holding my thighs open. “Why not?” He put his mouth over one nipple and sucked, rubbing his tongue over the pink pebble.
Gods, it felt good. One hand stroked slowly up and down my side, pausing at my hip to knead my curves. His hand felt hungry on me, as if wanting to eat me.
“There has to be more meaning,” I said, struggling to stay present; to not let myself float away on the sensations he was creating. “Any man knows where to start and finish.”
“Even boys who fuck like rabbits?” He nipped my nipple, making me flinch, then soothed the injury with his tongue. “I’ll make you regret those words, Nimia.”
I already did. I could hear the distant buzzing sound that signaled the approach of a vision; an approach that for whatever reason I always saw as a golden swarm of bees coming toward me.
Clovis rolled onto his side, taking me with him and hiking my leg up over his hip. His mouth went to work on my other breast while his hand stroked my buttock and thigh, his fingertips skimming my folds. It was the lightest of caresses, barely a whisper, and all the more devastating for that. His touch teased, making me want more. There was no satisfaction for me in that sweeping pass: only frustration and hunger.
And the growing hum of bees.
I forced my mind to function. The labyrinth: I should think on what it meant. Puzzling on that would surely provide distraction enough . . .
He pressed a fingertip against my opening and held it motionless there, his touch too light to penetrate. It wasn’t enough; I needed more. The moments passed and I felt my entrance pulse, begging him to come in. The buzzing grew, and my vision began to cloud with shimmers of golden wings. I rocked my hips against him, trying to force him inside me.
“There we go,” he said with satisfaction. “There’s no point in resisting.”
“No! I won’t!” I cried, and threw myself into one last desperate struggle to free myself from his touch and the coming vision. I flailed against him, taking him by surprise and gaining space between us. I scrambled off the other side of the bed and was halfway to the doorway when he caught me, pulling me against his naked body, his mentula like a tree limb against my belly, impossibly hard and surely twice the width of my poor small passage.
Clovis reached for something, and then before I knew what he was doing, he was tying my hands behind my back with a thick strap of leather. “Has your time as a slave made you want it like this? You can’t let yourself enjoy it unless you feel you have no choice?”
I shook my head in denial, but I didn’t know if there was truth to his words. How could I? I had so little experience. I’d never lain with a man who loved me, and wanted to share the joining as if sharing a part of himself. “Don’t do this, Clovis. Please.”
“You leave me no choice. My life is on the line, Nimia. I don’t know who I can trust, or which path will lead me to the crown, not the grave.” He backed me to the bed and pushed me down.
I arched my back and whimpered. “I can’t lie on my hands like this. It hurts.”
He grabbed a pillow and wedged it between my hips and my hands, cushioning them both and canting my pelvis upward. My legs dangled uncomfortably off the bed, not reaching the ground. “You can guide my way,” he said. “You can keep me alive. Why don’t you want to do that?” He knelt on the floor between my legs and lifted my feet to his shoulders, holding them there with his strong, warm hands. “I had thought you cared something for me.”
“I was once stupid enough to think you cared something for me. I will never make that mistake again.”
“You call this not caring?” he said, and bent his head to my sex. His tongue laved me, and my vision flooded with gold.
“No! No!” I pushed with my feet on his shoulders, trying to get him away from me. I got one foot free and clouted him on the ear.
A moment later he had both my ankles in his grip, and was winding my copper girdle around them, fastening them tight.
I smiled inside, glad to have my legs together. I’d stopped him.
“You look pleased with yourself.”
“Why shouldn’t I be? You can’t very well pet me if you’ve tied my feet together.”
He chuckled, then laughed outright. “You really don’t have much experience, do you?”
“Enough to stop you.”
“Foolish girl. Then why didn’t you see this coming?” And so saying he pushed my bound ankles up and toward my body, and my knees came apart like butterfly wings, leaving the petals of my flower exposed to the cool night air and his warm breath.
I had no leverage, lying on top of my bound hands. My ankles, being crossed and bound, meant my legs had no direction in which to push or struggle. My muscles were trembling, feeling the strain of holding up my legs, and it was a shameful relief to them when Clovis held my feet against one shoulder, taking the weight.
I was bound and opened, and completely at his mercy.
“I wouldn’t enjoy this so much,” he said, “if I weren’t so certain that you enjoyed it, too.”
I tried to struggle, and got nothing but a twinge in my arm. Clovis ignored my meager effort, and lowered his mouth to my sex.
It took only one stroke of his tongue for the swarm to descend upon me. As his tongue swirled around my stamen, the golden wings lifted, revealing curtains of thin white fabric, glowing with sunlight. They swayed, and I saw I was in a covered carriage, the curtains hiding the view. The buzzing turned to a low rumble, as of wood wheels turning, or the distant threat of thunder.
Clovis sucked on my peak, and then brushed the flat of his tongue against it, and again, and again.
The carriage came to a halt, and the curtains to my side parted. I saw a man with teeth tied in his long brown hair. He was as tall and strong as an oak. He held a sword.
“What do you see?” Clovis asked. “Tell me, Nimia.” The tip of his tongue flicked at my stamen, so quick and light that I flinched with each hit. It was another teasing touch, building my hunger and granting nothing. “Tell me what you see.” He gave me one gentle stroke of his tongue, a promise of the reward I would get for obeying. “Tell me.”
“No,” I cried, though my whole body begged for yes.
He thrust his tongue inside my passage, one deep thrust that was far too little for what I needed, and my whole sex convulsed in need. He went back to my stamen, flicking and teasing, driving me beyond thought with wanting. “Tell me.”
I told him.
He rewarded me with the warmth of his mouth, his lips sucking and pulling, his tongue stroking. He went lower and licked at my outer gates, a blunt warmth that had me spreading my thighs wider, trying to open myself to him. He darted his tongue inside me, thrusting in quick, unsatisfying jabs that had me digging my heels into the back of his shoulder, trying to drag him closer, trying to force him deeper. “Tell me more,” he said.
I told him I saw a huge snake slither out of a stream and come toward the man with teeth in his hair. Thunder rumbled in the distance. He sliced the snake in half with the sword, and it writhed and twisted on the ground, spurting blue blood. The sky darkened, thunderclouds rolling in to cover the sun.
Clovis rose from the floor and pressed my ankles toward my chest. My knees came farther apart, my whole body bound together except for my sex, laid bare to him and his rod. I felt him press the head of it against my entrance. He put his hands on the backs of my thighs and rocked me onto him, impaling me on the head of his member. He slid in on my flood of wetness, my body weeping with gratitude to have him entering me at last. He moved my hips, giving me shallow thrusts that had the tip of him hitting at that place his fingers had sought out so much earlier. “What more do you see? Tell me, Nimia. Tell me.”
I moaned, too caught up in pleasure to answer.
He stopped moving, and held me still, his cock barely inside me. “Speak to me.”
I tried to rock onto him, but he had all the power. He wouldn’t let me. The feel of him just inside me was unbearable; I had to have more. I wanted all of him; I wanted him deep; I wanted to feel as if I were stretched beyond what I could take. “He puts the sword in your hand,” I said, seeing the scene.
Clovis rocked me onto him. He slid in deeper, deeper . . . And then as slowly slid out. Again in, deeper, deeper . . .
“Faster, oh faster. Please,” I begged.
“Tell me more.”
“You hold the sword pointed at the sky.” In my mind’s eye I saw a flash of lightning. Thunder cracked and roared. I cried out, blinded and deafened. “Lightning strikes you! Oh gods, you’ve been struck. Thunder. Thunder.”
In answer, he plunged inside me, thrusting hard as if possessed by a sudden mad fury. He seemed to care no more about giving me pleasure, and seemed himself to be at the mercy of his cock as it raged inside my passage. “Nimia!” he cried out, and in answer to his crazed, uncaring thrusting I felt myself tumbling into waves of my own release. He gripped my thighs, his back arched. I opened my eyes to see his face turned upward, the tendons standing out in his neck.
And then I felt his cock pulse within me, and knew he, too, had found his release.
