House of Dark Delights

by Louisa Burton

  “Elic,” Paullia repeated as she lathered up the washrag again. “What a lovely name.” Gesturing to herself, she said, “Woman.” She pointed to Adiega, and then to herself again. “Woman, woman. You?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Dusios?” she asked.

  He looked dismayed that she knew this. “Álfr ok dusios,” he said.

  “I think he’s saying he’s both an elf and a dusios,” said Adiega. Elic watched her closely as she stood at the edge of the stream, cutting off tangled chunks of hair and setting them aside to be burned. She’d planned to trim it close to the scalp, but since he appeared to be free of lice and fleas—perhaps his kind were immune to them—she decided to leave it brushing his shoulders.

  “Let’s get those ears clean. Ear,” she said as she ran the washcloth around it.

  “Ear.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Eyra,” he said.

  “That’s your word for ear?”

  “Eyra.”

  Paullia scrubbed and rinsed and scrubbed and rinsed, trading the names of body parts with Elic as Adiega snipped his hair. Feeling more at ease now that Elic hadn’t managed to rape and kill them both, she washed it, then trimmed and shaved his beard.

  “Ooh, Adiega, look how handsome he is without all that nasty hair,” Paullia said, standing back to take him in. “Makes you wish you were one of those uxelli matrons he’s going to be siring babes on, doesn’t it?”

  “Not me,” said Adiega, noting with amusement how Elic was looking back and forth between them as they spoke, although he couldn’t understand a word they were saying. “The only man I want to…you know…do that with is Bran.”

  “Then do it!”

  “I’m not like you, Paullia. I can’t feel right about it unless I’m married.”

  Paullia was kind enough not to mention the fact that a marriage between Adiega and Bran was looking unlikelier by the day.

  “Chest,” Paullia said as she ran the soapy cloth over Elic’s upper torso.

  His gaze lowered to that part of Paullia’s body. What with her standing knee-deep in the stream and pouring bucket after bucket of water, her dress had gotten soaked through, conforming all too well to her feminine contours.

  “Brjóst,” he said, his voice pitched a bit lower than it had been, that hungry look returning to his gaze.

  “Brjóst,” she repeated, trailing a hand lightly over her right breast.

  Elic met her gaze. She smiled into his eyes.

  Paullia trailed the washcloth down his belly to his masculine organ, which she proceeded to wash with exceptional thoroughness, Elic straining toward her as he grew fully erect. She closed her soapy fist around him and stroked.

  “Betr,” he murmured, thrusting into her hand.

  “What are you doing?” whispered Adiega. “Are you crazy?”

  “I’ve never seen a man get so hard so fast,” Paullia said. “What I wouldn’t give to feel this inside me.”

  “That Lothar fellow will come in and see you,” said Adiega as she darted a wary glance at the corridor.

  “Just warn me if he starts heading this way.”

  “Paullia, please,” Adiega begged.

  “You’ve never seen a man expel his seed, have you?” Paullia asked. “You should watch this. It’ll be an education for you.”

  “Ekki,” Elic groaned. He was twisting his body as if trying to make Paullia let him go.

  “Um, Paullia,” Adiega said. “I think he wants you to stop.”

  “Of course he doesn’t want me to stop,” said Paullia as she stroked him harder, faster.

  “No, I think that’s what ekki means—‘stop,’ or ‘no.’ He’s grimacing.”

  “They do that.”

  “Ekki, ekki!” Elic was quivering, his expression pained. “Ekki!”

  Startled, Paullia released him, saying, “I…I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Elic, I…”

  He shook his head, his breath coming fast, his face flushed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Late that night, Adiega was awakened by straw crackling in her sister’s pallet on the floor beside hers in the cooking hut. At first she thought Paullia was just restless, but then she heard a low, masculine moan, and she realized her sister wasn’t alone. It wasn’t the first time Paullia had brought a man to her bed while Adiega was sleeping—or trying to sleep; it wouldn’t be the last.

  Looking over, Adiega saw the moonlit form of a man rearing over her sister, blankets covering him to the waist, the muscles in his back and arms straining with every thrust. He was very tall and clean shaven, with unbraided blond hair.

  Elic? By the gods, it was him. How could this be happening? How could he have gotten free? As Adiega and Paullia had taken their leave of him this morning, the three Germani were securing their barrier of wooden stakes over the entrance to the Cella by means of iron bands encircling the natural columns to either side of it. In addition, one of them, Lothar said, would be standing guard at all times.

  Elic’s thrusts grew swift and hectic as Paullia clutched at him, her breath coming in high-pitched little pants. He stilled, a strangled groan issuing from his throat as Paullia bucked beneath him.

  He settled on top of her, rubbing his face on her hair.

  She let out a deep, satisfied sigh. “That was lovely.”

  “Líka©i,” he murmured.

  Sitting up in bed with her blanket clutched to her chest, Adiega said, “Paullia, Elic can’t be here. He must have escaped from the Cella. We’ll get in terrible trouble if he’s found here.”

  “Oh, we woke you up,” her sister said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, Adiega.” Elic gave her a disarming smile as he left her sister’s pallet and came to hers.

  “Stop it,” said Adiega as Elic tried to get under her blanket. “Paullia, tell him to stop it.”

  “Why?” she asked as she snuggled under her blanket. “He’s wonderful, and I won’t tell Bran. It’ll be our little—”

  “What?” cried Adiega.

  “Shh! Someone will hear you.” Giggling excitedly, Paullia said, “Can you believe he wants to do it again so soon?”

  “Get him off me!” Adiega exclaimed.

  “Oh, just let him,” Paullia said. “You’ll thank me tomorrow.”

  “Ja, let him,” Elic echoed as he yanked at her covers. “Let him.”

  “No!” She yelled, pushing him away as hard as she could, but he was surprisingly strong for such a thin man. “Get away from me!”

  Footsteps came running. The door banged open.

  Vlatucia’s three Germani hauled Elic off of Adiega, knocked him unconscious, and dragged him away.

  Four

  ELIC SPENT the next day chained to the Dusivæsus statue by a neck manacle, a blanket wrapped around his nakedness, watching his three hulking guards build a most curious structure right there in the cave chamber they called the Cella. They constructed it from the ground up, cutting and weaving willow branches for hours—no easy task for them, given their thick, clumsy Germani fingers. At first, Elic thought it was just a simple human figure, but then he saw that telltale bulge take form between the legs, and he realized it was destined to be an exact replica, a little larger than himself, of Dusivæsus.

  Late in the afternoon, when the wicker dusios was nearing completion, there appeared in the entrance of the Cella a tall, sour-looking woman of middle years accompanied by a young man carrying a bucket, with a green, folded garment that looked like a cloak tucked under his arm. He was somewhat shorter than she, and with hair so dark that Elic would never have taken him for a Galli had he encountered him anyplace else. No hand emerged from his right sleeve; Elic wondered if he’d lost it in some farming accident or battle, or if he’d been born that way. The woman wore mannish clothes, with a gold torka around her neck of the type Gallico chieftains often wore.

  The guards sprang to their feet when the woman—whom they greeted as Vlatucia—entered the Cella, stepping carefully over th
e shattered remains of the wall of wooden stakes that Elic had kicked down last night so that he could get to the woman called Paullia. The guard he’d punched unconscious had awakened sooner than Elic had expected and fetched his comrades. He had hoped to bed Paullia and be many luegae from here by the time the man woke up, but it was not to be.

  All day, as he’d sat on the statue’s platform watching those three brutes build their wicker effigy, all he could think was, I should have killed the bastard. Not that he had the stomach for killing. He hadn’t taken a single life in all his many years of existence, and he hoped he would never have to. But it felt good to think it.

  Vlatucia barked something to the guards, who swiftly retreated—so swiftly, in fact, that one of them left the knife he’d been using on the floor not too far from Elic’s right foot, amid a scattering of willow branches. The branches helped to disguise it, but they did not conceal it altogether. Please, Frøya, don’t let them start casting their eyes around the floor.

  “Bran!” The woman nodded toward the bucket the young man was carrying and said something.

  Bran approached Elic warily, setting the cloak on the platform next to him, and also the bucket, the contents of which he emptied out: a washrag, a comb, and a dish of soap.

  Elic picked up the soap dish and hurled it against the cave wall, where it shattered.

  Vlatucia pointed to the mess and said something to Bran, who started toward it, then hesitated, as if unsure that he wanted to obey that particular order. Vlatucia snapped at him. He glanced very briefly at Elic, clearly embarrassed to be seen by him in such a position of servility, and then he turned toward the entryway and called out, “Lothar!” One of the guards came in, cleaned up the broken soap dish at Bran’s behest, and left.

  Vlatucia, clearly vexed by Bran’s defiance, snarled something at him, then pointed to the low flames crackling in the fire pit and issued yet another order. The young man took out a tiny purple leather pouch from inside his tunic and sprinkled a few grains of glittery black powder upon the fire while murmuring an incantation. The flames immediately turned a bright, searing green with purplish tips.

  Bran made a go-ahead gesture to Vlatucia, who turned to Elic and said, “It is called Powder of Tongues. It comes from somewhere far to the east.”

  Elic sat up straight on the platform, surprised by the fact that he’d understood her, even though she’d spoken in the Gallitunga. He knew enough about spellcasting to know that a powder alone, although it might focus or enhance an enchantment, couldn’t effect such potent magic without the intervention of an extremely gifted magus.

  “The powder is extremely hard to come by even in its native land,” she said, “and quite expensive, so we have only a very small supply, most of which my son has just poured onto that fire so that I can explain some things to you. When those flames return to their normal color, which won’t be long from now, you won’t be able to understand me anymore. If you waste that precious time by throwing things, like a temperamental little child, I will have you beaten, which is a pastime my Germani approach with great artistry and relish.”

  “Can you understand me, too?” he asked.

  “I can.”

  “Why was I brought here?” One moment he’d been tracking the scent of deer through the woods. The next, he was in a hole in the ground, looking up at the faces of the three Germani guards.

  “We need to perpetuate our druidic line, and you’re our only hope for doing that.” She went on to explain about her clan’s need for gifted offspring and the role they had in mind for him. “I can’t imagine you would find much to object to in the arrangement,” she said. “As I understand it, dusii exist to mate.”

  “Yes, but on our own terms,” he said. “I choose the women I lie with.”

  “Actually, I do,” she said, “at least until the Vernae leave this place. If you’ve planted enough babes in enough wombs by that point, I may let you stay here.”

  “What if I refuse to fuck who you tell me to fuck?” he asked, enjoying the scalding blush that crawled up her throat. The young man, her son, looked to be fighting back a smile—understandable, given the way the she-bitch treated him.

  “You can’t help but have noticed our new friend.” She looked toward the wicker effigy, as did Bran.

  Elic took advantage of their having turned away to extend his right leg, cover the knife with his foot, and slide it back.

  “If you refuse to”—she lifted her chin and leveled her gaze at him—“fuck whom I tell you to fuck, then you will be enclosed in that effigy and I will have it lit on fire. Don’t do yourself the disservice of doubting that. Bran, tell him.”

  “She’ll do it,” he said, with an expression that seemed to meld shame and disgust. “She’s done it before.”

  “It is the punishment I favor for those who defy my authority, inasmuch as it tends to have a quelling effect on the defiance of others.” With a glance at Bran, she said, “Most others. And of course it is a particularly apt punishment for one such as yourself. By the way, you will also be burned if you continue spreading your seed around to every vassa who captures your fancy. You broke out of here last night to lie with my serving women.”

  “Not both,” he said. “Just the one.” Though he would have gladly taken the other, too, had she been willing.

  “There will be no more such nocturnal escapades,” she said. “You are to service my hand-chosen couples only.”

  “When is this coming off?” Elic asked, tugging on the neck manacle.

  “It isn’t.”

  Bran said, “Is it really necessary, Mother? He knows he’ll burn unless he does exactly as you—”

  “If you weren’t such a child,” she replied, “you wouldn’t ask that. Acknowledging a threat and taking it seriously are two different things. I can’t take the chance that he’ll decide to make a run for it the moment we let down our guard.”

  Elic knew better than to argue with the likes of her. “How many couples am I to…‘service,’ as you put it?”

  “We have ten highborn couples with gifted wives, but my two daughters are with child, so that leaves eight. You are to transfer seed between four couples per night until the wives conceive.”

  “That would be eight changes of gender in one night,” he said. “I can’t handle it, especially undernourished and weak as I am now. It’s too much of a strain on my body. I’ll do the men first, then the women. That way, I only have to endure The Change twice.”

  “Impossible,” she said. “The offspring must be those of the husband. If you collect all the seed at once, different men’s seed will get mixed up together.”

  “In such a case,” he explained, “the seed tends to seek the womb in which it’s meant to take root.”

  “Do you have a different name in your female form?” Bran asked.

  His mother looked at him as if it were an absurd question, but of course it wasn’t.

  “She’s had several names,” Elic said. “You may call her Elina.”

  Pointing to the flames in the fire pit, Bran said, “The colors are fading, Mother. You’ve very little time left.”

  She said, “These couplings will take place in the nemeton—our sacred oak grove—every night until we leave. You are to bathe beforehand. I shall have some more soap sent to you.”

  Elic had never encountered a people so obsessed with cleaning themselves. It couldn’t be healthy. “I’ll need a razor to shave with,” he said.

  “Do you think I’d really allow you to get your hands on a blade?” she asked.

  You allowed me to get my foot on one, he thought with a smile.

  After Bran and Vlatucia left, Elic sat on the floor in front of the platform and considered the name so precisely carved into it: DVSIVÆSVS. Great and Worthy Dusios. Funny, he didn’t feel so great and worthy when the lady chieftain of the Vernae was telling him who to fuck, where to fuck, and when to fuck if he wanted to avoid a fiery death.

  Taking the knife he’d just filche
d, he started scratching out a better, more appropriate name on top of the first, using the runic alphabet of his homeland.

  The slow, measured thudding grew steadily louder as Bran guided the procession of four uxelli husbands, naked beneath their hooded cloaks, into the nemeton.

  Artaros sat on the square boulder at the edge of the clearing, beating on his goatskin hand drum, a bronze ewer and cup on the stump next to him. Between the old druid and the altar, flames leapt from the herbs burning in the fire pit, to which Frontu was lying so close, as usual, that it was a wonder his fur didn’t singe.

  A tall, astonishingly beautiful woman—Elic’s female incarnation, Elina—stood next to the altar. She wore the green cloak, its hood lowered to reveal her honey-blond, roughly chopped hair. Around her neck was locked the iron manacle Vlatucia had insisted upon, its chain wrapped around one of the boulders supporting the altar.

  Setting down his drum and beater, Artaros filled the cup from the ewer and offered it to each husband in turn, instructing them to drain it completely. It was a brew Artaros called Lightning and Clouds, which he’d formulated both to excite one’s sexual appetite and to blur one’s memory. As Artaros had explained it, husbands and wives who weren’t in the habit of straying might need a little help in overcoming their natural reluctance to couple with someone other than their spouses—but there was no need for them to remember, the next day, the things they’d done the night before in the nemeton.

  Artaros gestured for Bran to depart, for his role in these ceremonies was solely that of escort for the husbands and wives. He was to wait at the head of the path and listen for a series of rapid drumbeats. This would be his signal that the husbands had all taken their turns with Elina, at which point he was to gather them up and walk them back to the village, returning with the four matrons. In the interim, Elic would have transformed back into a male so as to transfer the husbands’ seed to their wives.

  Halfway down the path, curiosity overcame him. He veered off into the dark forest and circled back to within a few yards of the firelit nemeton, where he heard Artaros chanting incantations of fertility while beating on his drum. Peering between the trees, Bran saw Epillus Brocagni open his cloak and lift Elina, now naked, onto the altar as the other three husbands watched from the perimeter of the clearing.