The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 12: Over 40 outstanding pieces of short erotic fiction (Mammoth Books)

by Jakubowski, Maxim

  “Have you belongings?” Not that a slave could possess anything, but a craftsman’s tools might be assumed to be included in the bargain. My “tools” were bits of exotic clothing and jewelry and jars of unguents in a small woven bag, and tucked beneath them a few more arcane objects rolled in a length of embroidered silk.

  I hid my joy and followed my new mistress meekly. The woman champion! A princess, some said, from a mountain kingdom to the north. A sorceress, others muttered, who could turn men to stone. I neither believed nor cared. All that mattered was that she was strong and skilled and brave, nothing like those coarse women brought into the Emperor’s games as titillation for a jaded court.

  She swung me up easily onto her horse and mounted behind me. I clutched my bag and concentrated on balancing, since my narrow skirt kept me from riding astride. I longed to lean against her bound breasts, to tune myself by touch to the resonance of her thoughts and desires, but tried instead to show that I had not lied about my ability to sit a horse.

  “Have you a name, girl?” The cool voice made me tremble.

  “My master called me Gazelle.”

  “What did your mother call you?”

  “Shebbah, Mistress.” Mistress. The word was full and sweet in my mouth.

  “Well, Shebbah, I will be in disgrace when we get home. You are not quite what I had in mind, but no doubt something can be arranged.”

  I did lean against her then, searching through her body toward her emotions. Did she not intend to keep me? Why then had she purchased me? But her mind was bound as tightly as her breasts.

  She swung me down before a modest house. An ageing manat-arms limped out to take the horse; he frowned, but the lady forestalled him. “I know, Rafen, I know. Hecanthe will give me a tongue-flogging. The sooner you get the horse stabled the less of it you’ll miss.”

  The room seemed dim after bright daylight. A lamp beside a low couch lit the sharp features of the woman lying there. Some other presence loomed in the shadows to my left, and I would have turned that way if her snapping black eyes had not gripped me.

  “What’s this?” But she knew already exactly what I was. “You go for a strong wench to cook and clean, and come back with this . . . this little yellow-haired ‘bird of paradise?’”

  Despite her servant’s garb it was clear enough who ruled this household. I knelt and looked full into her keen old eyes, hiding nothing of myself. “I am stronger than I look, Grandmother, and my skills are not only those of the harem.”

  “Indeed.” She too could reach out with her mind, and recognized what she found. “You might do, after all.” Then, more loudly and a bit harshly, “Did you think to distract the Emperor, Domande, with this little sweetmeat?”

  “If only it were that easy.” My lady’s voice was weary. “The Emperor desires my humiliation, not my flesh. Even his taste is more refined than that!” The note of buried pain spoke more than she herself knew. “Offering a more appealing bedmate would be pointless. He has ordered me to attend him tomorrow night; I will slay him if I go to him; therefore I must leave.”

  She had shed the cloak and the helmet with its champion’s crest. In tunic and clinging hose she had the strength and grace of a lioness; when she stretched and ran her fingers through her short hair, I could not believe that anyone, of any sex, would fail to take pleasure in the touch of that smooth, taut body.

  Bronze curls clung damply above amber-green eyes. Her finely sculpted face could have topped the statue of a young god; or as easily, softened by flowing hair, a seductive goddess.

  “What then?” Hecanthe asked sharply. “A gift to placate that one, since you imagine you have wronged him?” Her eyes flicked toward the shadows. “If ever he returns to matters of the flesh!”

  A presence seemed to advance from the darkness, but there had been, could be, no movement. The man was made all of grey stone.

  It was no statue, no creation of any carver, but a naked, crouching figure of muscle and bone frozen in the moment of rising from a fall.

  I looked wildly from Lady Domande to the old woman. Whose power had wrought such a curse? Hecanthe smiled grimly, but her mistress forgot us both as she contemplated the stone face.

  “This is the young man’s own doing,” the old woman assured me. “It was triggered by yet another attempt on the Emperor’s part to humiliate her. She blames herself, but that is mere foolishness.”

  “I could have let him win,” my lady muttered without shifting her gaze. “For Nyal the stake was freedom. For me the prize was only his servitude, which he might have known I would refuse. We had often talked, in the training fields, of our far-off homes; I knew how hotly he burned for his liberty.”

  “You never in your life ‘let’ someone win,” the old woman said caustically.

  “He should have won! He is stronger, with skill close enough to my own; there was a moment when he had me, and loosed his grip for fear, I think, of hurting me, and I took advantage of the lapse. It was ill done.”

  “It was ill done to let the Emperor goad you into wrestling naked in the first place!”

  Lady Domande shrugged dismissively. “If I claim right to compete with men on equal terms I have no right to refuse such a match, which was known in ancient times. And besides, I expected Nyal to win, to gain the freedom the Emperor dangled before him. I was prepared to be beaten – but when it came to the point I couldn’t just let it happen!”

  “Oh, gods forbid!” The old woman’s voice was brittle with irony. “Girl! You, girl!”

  I struggled to attend her, my mind still pulsing with images of those two magnificent bodies coupled in naked combat.

  “Is it too much to hope that you might teach our lady something of a woman’s proper weapons? And of what may be won with them?”

  “One may always hope,” I answered meekly, but Lady Domande swung around toward us.

  “Shebbah will have little chance for such lessons, since I leave before daybreak, and she stays to care for you, Hecanthe.”

  “No, my lady, she goes with you.”

  “Impossible! Who . . .”

  “Leave Rafen to care for me until my hip is mended. Surely you would not part us after all these years!” There was a gleam of mockery in her eyes as the old man limped in from the stable yard. “Your delicate flower will, I think, do well enough for you. Girl!” And her hand flashed upward with a glint of steel.

  I caught the spinning dagger in the air. So long ago . . . But the reflexes were still there. My fingers’ dexterity and strength had only increased in six years of plucking harp strings and drawing melodies of sensuality from human flesh.

  “What can you do with that toy, girl?”

  “I can gut fish, fowl, or man. I can chop meat, bring down a hare, or carve secrets slowly out of an enemy.” I fell to my knees before my lady. “I can serve and protect to the last flicker of my life, if you will only accept my loyalty. Please, Mistress, take me with you!”

  “Well.” She was disconcerted at such a display of obeisance. “More to the point, perhaps, is whether you and I together can lift that stubborn lump of stone. I will not leave him here for the Emperor’s mages to probe, however much he may deserve it.”

  She stood surveying the rigid figure. “I would not have kept him slave!” Her voice was low and rough with pain. “What did he think I would require, that being stone seemed less terrible?”

  With a mixture of longing and reluctance she put her hands on his broad shoulders and gestured with her head toward his loins. “You grasp him there below. A pretty little thing like you may lure him out of his sulking!” It was a joke, but a bitter one.

  As I touched the cool, hard curve of his buttocks I felt something more than stone. He was aware. Aware, at least, of my mistress; an unmistakable current flowed between them.

  He was not truly as heavy as stone; we lifted him without much difficulty. Indeed, I think she could have done it alone, though he was broader and slightly taller than she. I noted that before
he had hardened into stone one part of him had already hardened in the flesh, and most impressively.

  Wrestling in the public glare of the arena with my gloriously naked mistress – could embarrassment turn a man to stone? I was tempted to try whether skillful stroking could turn that great stone cock back to flesh, but the undercurrents in my lady’s emotions deterred me.

  I sighed. My dreams of a mistress who would demand the pleasures I could give, whose strong body would press mine into breathless submission, needed some adjustment. Matters promised to be more complex than that.

  We left, as she had said, before dawn, Nyal wrapped and bundled awkwardly onto the packhorse. We bound other gear around him to obscure his form, but the arrangement was unwieldy at best.

  “If there is pursuit, Domande, you must leave him behind. Shebbah, I charge you to be sure of that.” Hecanthe transferred to me some of her scolding authority.

  “If there is pursuit, it will be your fault for not persuading the Emperor’s minions that I keep to my rooms with a fever.”

  “They will think that your ‘fever’ is fueled by dalliance with your new little love slave,” Hecanthe said wickedly. “The tale of your purchase will doubtless spread to the Emperor’s ears, and both infuriate and inflame him. Was that what you had in mind?”

  A flush rose from my lady’s smooth, strong throat to her face as she glanced not at me but at the laden packhorse. I sighed again.

  “Go on now,” the old woman said, relenting. “I know why Shebbah caught your eye. She looks very like the portrait of your mother.”

  “Yes . . .” My lady looked at me as though she had not really seen me before. “You may be right. She is the beauty I should have been.”

  I stifled a moan of anguish as my fantasies retreated further. Her mother! My horse pranced nervously and I concentrated on keeping my seat.

  We traveled for more than a week at a pace painful after six years of soft living. Even my mistress showed strain, more from weariness of thought than of body. She was wary of pursuit, and, after we had left the well-traveled highways, not always sure of our route.

  “Have you been to this place we seek, Mistress?” With no one else for conversation, she had come to treat me more as companion than slave, but her deeper emotions remained as closed to me as though she too had been stone.

  “I was conceived there, if that counts.” Her smile was wry. “Perhaps it does, because I have a growing sense that this is the right valley at last, and the right river, and that just around the bend where the forest comes close to the water we may find our refuge.”

  And so we did, though “refuge” might have been too grand a word. It had once been a nobleman’s hunting lodge, but even so long ago as my lady’s conception it must have been a ruin.

  The main hall had barely enough roof to shelter the horses, and only the kitchen offered any hope of habitability. I set to work at once to clean and sweep and unpack our meager supplies while my mistress set off with her bow and quiver.

  There was, at least, a store of dry wood, and the chimney was not too plugged to draw. The place had once been well furnished; I found and scoured a huge kettle and a copper bathing tub and had water heating when my lady returned with a brace of hares.

  The room had warmed by the time our meal was done, its unaccustomed comfort as mellowing as wine. “What do you think, Shebbah, should we unbind our companion?”

  The question was rhetorical. Now that her mind was on him she would not be distracted.

  “Will we be here long, my lady? You had spoken of a messenger.”

  “It could be forever.” Her expression made me wish I had kept silent. “I sent to discover whether . . . whether my father the King,” she gave a grim half-smile, “would grant me asylum from the Emperor.”

  “Surely . . .”

  “Nothing is sure, except that my father the General will do his best to persuade the King, and may well succeed.” Her greenish eyes held a glint of bitter humor. “Besides devotion to the kingdom, they share a weakness for delicate blonde women. Like you. Like my mother. If I had grown to look like her . . . But she died while I was a babe, and even in his grief the King could not be blind to how little I resembled him. He did not cast me out, he merely turned his back.”

  “And the General?”

  “He took pity, when I grew tall and awkward and lonely, and trained me as he would a son. He is proud of me now, I think, and loves me in his way, but he will be angered that I did not handle the Emperor more adroitly.”

  She was beginning to droop now with weariness and the weight of painful memories. I could not bear to see that beautiful, proud head bowed in sorrow.

  “Come, Mistress, I will unbind your stone gladiator, and then you must let me unbind you, and bathe you, and ease you.”

  “You must be as tired as I, Shebbah.”

  “Please, Mistress, your ease will be my ease.” She couldn’t comprehend how truly I meant that. Longings suppressed by the hardships of travel were rising in me now. If only she had inherited her sire’s weakness for small blonde women!

  I sensed deep-buried tremors of longing in her, too, but as I unwound Nyal’s wrappings the heat of her gaze brushed past me to his cold form and I marveled that he did not melt under it.

  She watched him broodingly while I filled the tub. I sprinkled in some herbs from my precious silk-wrapped store, and thought, as I inhaled the sensuous musk, that even stone might be stirred by such a mist.

  “Come now, my lady, let me slip off your tunic.” She raised her arms, unresisting. “And unbind your breasts . . . ah, Mistress, how can you be so cruel to such beautiful flesh?” I stroked the creased skin under her arms, then, very lightly, the silky curves of full breasts freed at last from confinement. Her nipples tautened, and so did mine.

  “Legend says that women warriors used to cut them off, the better to wield their weapons. At least I have stopped short of that.”

  “I am very, very glad,” I murmured, drawing her toward the bath. I intended to make her very, very glad, as well.

  She stood before the fire and pulled off her hose. I ached to do it for her.

  Her body in the firelight was golden, and so beautiful I could scarcely breathe. I felt a pulsing emanation from the stone figure in the corner; he too was aware, and aroused, and I wondered how long he would hold his rigid form, or whether indeed it was under his control.

  “What herbs are these?” She bent over the tub, breathing in the vapors. The long lines of smoothly muscled legs flared into taut, rounded buttocks, firm as any athlete’s but just full enough to be unmistakably a woman’s.

  “A secret blend, my lady, with special soothing powers.” I slipped out of my own clothes and set them aside.

  “Soothing? Are you sure?” She sounded doubtful, but stepped in, and sat with bent knees as I poured more water and watched it sheet over her strong shoulders and swirl around the curves of her lovely breasts. The herbs were, in fact, more stimulant than relaxant, and I too felt their effect, but it hardly needed that to make my own breasts swell and a sweet ache build in my loins.

  I had to close my eyes and struggle to focus, to remember my art and my role. To give pleasure, to seek out my mistress’s longings and fulfill them, to show her joys she had never imagined; to be slave to her desires, even those she scarcely knew herself.

  “Let me massage your neck, Mistress, and your back, to rub away the tension.” She leaned forward compliantly. Short bronze curls wrapped around my fingers as I kneaded the stress out of nape and scalp. My hands moved over shoulders and then upper back, and as I worked my fingers into the firm muscles there I could feel the heavy pull of her breasts against the skin.

  “Does that ease you, Mistress?”

  “Mmmn. Don’t stop.” But I knew already what she felt. At last she had opened to that sensual link that was my greatest skill, and I felt with her the stirrings of her pleasure.

  My breasts pressed against her wet flesh as I reached farther
down, and she arched against the pressure of my hands on her lower back. Then gently, slowly, I stroked her sides and around to her belly and below and let my fingers tangle lightly in darkhoney curls.

  “Do you call this easing?” My head was against her back now, and her voice vibrated through her body into mine, but there was no anger in it.

  “The wilder the journey, the greater the ease at the end,” I murmured. “If you will just let me show you the way, Mistress.”

  She tensed slightly, then grasped my arm and drew me around to face her.

  “Do you think me so untouched, Shebbah?” Her look was a challenge. I met her gaze and said nothing, and after a moment she glanced away. “I was as curious as any other, but the ‘journey’ was always brief and disappointing. I found better use for my body in feats of arms.”

  “Let me show you, Mistress, how much more it can be.”

  She leaned back, and now her eyes were deep amber pools reflecting the fire. “Why not? Why should I not know what it is to be a woman?” She let one sidelong glance stray toward the stone figure. I could sense its mounting tension. Soon there would come a shattering, or eruption; but not, I hoped, too soon.

  “Not just ‘a woman,’” I said, slipping into the water and kneeling astride her thighs, “but a transcendently beautiful woman, indescribably desirable. Yes, it is true,” as she started to shake her head, “and you must feel your own beauty to let your pleasure flow.”

  It was all I could do to keep from rubbing my throbbing ache against her wet thighs; only my training kept my focus on her sensations, not my own. I longed to kiss her full lips, but her head was tilted back and I knew she was open not to intimacy but to pure erotic stimulation. Even so, the mind is the body’s most sensuous organ.

  “Such beautiful breasts.” I cupped and gently pressed them and flicked my thumbs across the nipples. “So swollen with pleasure, yearning, aching for more and more.”