by Lisa Cach
Sygarius never forgot anything: likely it was deliberate.
That did not bode well.
My flow dribbled away to nothing, and the next day I was told to bathe. I dressed in the simple ivory gown I’d been given, and tied a belt of braided red cords around my waist. My hair had only regrown a hand’s width since Terix cut it off, so it only brushed my shoulder blades. I left it loose: Sygarius probably wouldn’t look kindly on my hair arranged in one of the Frankish braided styles that I’d learned from Audofleda (she and I had forged a friendship over the giggly, feminine delight of arranging our hair).
I paced the gallery around the garden, so lost in my own tension and imaginings that I didn’t hear Sygarius arrive. It was only when I sensed someone ahead of me in the gallery that I looked up and saw him, standing with his hands clasped behind his back and his feet spread, watching me with his emotions hidden behind an impassive mask.
I stopped, and stared at him. Waiting. Too scared to say anything, and risk setting a foot wrong.
“Little bird,” he said softly, “you’ve come home.”
Come home? Been dragged home, against my will; assuming any slave ever called her master’s houses “home” to begin with.
“I knew you would,” he said. “One way or the other.”
He gestured toward the small dining hall, furnished with the usual trio of couches and small tables. I lay on one couch, and he on the nearest, our heads close together. The servants brought food and wine, and Sygarius began to eat.
“Not hungry?” he asked me.
I shook my head. Anything I swallowed would land like molten lead in my gut.
“At least have wine.”
I sipped, and in a short time felt its soothing effects.
Perhaps Sygarius noticed, because he chose that moment to begin. “Why did you run away, Nimia?”
I had to be careful here. Very careful. “Terix told me that a note had been left for you, claiming that Childeric had taken my virginity. I was frightened of how you would react.”
“Did Childeric take your virginity?”
I looked him full in the eyes, knowing that this I could answer truthfully. “No.”
“Then why run?”
“I was a slave. I did not think I would be believed.”
“You are a slave. And you might not have been believed, but you broke your faith with me when you fled.”
Faith? What faith? I was a slave. “I was scared. I wasn’t thinking.”
He pressed a fingertip to the center of my brow. “You don’t think much, do you?”
I bit the insides of my lips and lowered my eyes so he wouldn’t see the spurt of anger there.
“Do you remember your virgin’s blood, at our joining?” he said.
I froze, remembering the small sack of blood that Terix had hidden inside my cunny, to fake virginity. But . . . had Sygarius not figured out that the blood had been a trick? I slowly, carefully shook my head, no. “There was a drug in the wine I drank. My memories are . . . confused.”
He sighed. “And because you were scared, and not thinking, you fled. All this could have been avoided, Nimia, if you’d stayed. I saw through the note immediately; I knew you had been a virgin. The note had been a poorly planned attempt to seed dissent between me and Childeric. Clovis was probably responsible for it, the hotheaded idiot.”
Ah, but Clovis hadn’t known of Terix’s clever trick. Clovis’s plan would have gone differently if not for Terix and a little sack of chicken blood.
“Why abduct me from the church?” I mustered the courage to ask. Ah gods, how much did he know? “If you had told me all this when we met there, I would have gone with you.”
“Because you wished to live a Christian life?” he said, and snorted.
I hesitated. Which untruth would he most likely believe? That I wanted to become a Christian, or: “It was the only way I could think to have Remigius set up a meeting between us. He dotes on Clovis. He would not have helped me otherwise.”
That made him think. He chewed a slice of pear, swallowed, and then looked at me, evaluating me. He shook his head. “I cannot believe you to be full of guile. Are you as innocent as you appear, Nimia?”
“Innocent of what, exactly?” Easy enough to act confused on that score: there were too many layers of lies to choose from.
He changed the topic. “I hear that you gave a prophecy to the Salian Franks, about Clovis’s crowning. And that it came true as you said.”
“Then you also heard that I was dressed up as a Frankish goddess, and Terix was dressed as a priest.”
He laughed. “Yes.”
“It was a play, scripted by . . .” I fumbled, not wanting to admit any of Clovis’s cleverness to Sygarius. There was power in being underestimated. “By Basina.”
His brows rose. “Basina of Thuringia, Childeric’s wife?”
“She’s a frightening woman,” I said with full sincerity. “Devious. Murderous.” I widened my eyes. “I heard a rumor . . .”
“Yes?”
I lowered my voice, as if there were anyone to hear. “That she killed her husband. She heard of the nonsense I spouted—you remember, my ramblings that the Franks thought predicted his death—and took advantage of the opportunity. Got him drunk and smothered him in their bed, then slept beside his corpse the rest of the night.”
Sygarius’s eyes took on a faraway look. Moments passed, and then his eyes narrowed and he nodded. “She’s always been the power behind the throne. The brains. I never saw it . . . She’s a woman, after all. One doesn’t expect cleverness from a woman.”
Gods rot him. I widened my eyes again and clung to a tress of my hair, feigning witless innocence. “The Franks are different, my lord. They’re not civilized. The men are such simpletons, even a woman can best them. Look at how I managed to sneak away to meet you, with not a one of them knowing.”
He cast a sharp look at me. “Your plot was discovered.”
I shook my head. “No! No one followed me to the church, I am sure of it.”
He waved his hand. “Long before that. There were soldiers—my soldiers—planning to ambush me should I have arrived.”
I blinked as if confused. “What has that to do with the Franks?”
“They were hired by the Franks, Nimia. By Clovis. Do you see now? Someone discovered your plans to meet me, and the Franks used it as an opportunity to capture me.”
“But, but . . . that’s so dishonorable!” I said in feigned shock. “That is not how warfare is conducted, surely? I knew Clovis was weak, but to refuse even to meet you on the field of battle? To resort to trickery to defeat you?”
“He knows he doesn’t stand a chance against me should there be open war. He is but a boy, who relies on his mother to do his thinking.”
I made a noise of disgust, and tried to keep buried my burgeoning glee that Sygarius believed my act of stupidity and ignorance. Someday I should like to give him a lesson: you will be undone by a woman, if when you look at her you only see what you expect to see.
“Are we at peace then, you and I?” I asked softly, and reached out to touch his hand.
He looked at my hand on his, frowning, until I withdrew it. When he met my eyes, the openness of moments before was gone, replaced with stern control. “I wish it could be so, but it cannot. Not yet. You fled from my villa, and must be punished. And I can’t trust you, little bird. You fly off in fear. Better to keep you here, where you’re safe from yourself. And better to have you settled, with a child. My child. A child will clip your wings.”
“Wh-what do you mean to do with me?”
“I will fuck you until you’re with child.”
I pulled my chin in. He had said it like it was a threat. I tried a tentative smile. “I have not found joining with you to be a punishment.”
“This will be. I o
pened the doors to the erotic pleasures of your body, Nimia, and you repaid me by running away. Your punishment shall be sex without pleasure, until you are with child. We shall start now.”
“Now?”
“I won’t pet you, I won’t arouse you. I shall fuck you.”
I felt knocked off balance. This, I hadn’t expected. As he stood up and gestured me to do the same, I felt a tremor of fear run through me. “It will be a dry ride for you,” I said, trying for bravery.
He laughed. “I only have to say it—‘I’m going to fuck you’—and you grow moist for me, don’t you, Nimia? You can feel it already, the warmth and swelling in your cunny. The gathering wetness. I’m going to fuck you.”
As he spoke, I realized to my horror that he was right: I could feel it. My greedy sex was tingling, not caring who he was or what his plans were. All my loins cared about was his mentula, and that he meant to thrust it inside me.
My response confused me: why should I react thus? Were all women so easy to arouse, even when frightened or angry? Sygarius had told me once that they were.
And yet.
It seemed more than that, with me.
I remembered my mother telling me that it was the way of the Phanne that the women lay with as many men, of as wide a heritage, as they could; that that was part of how the women gained their power.
I thought of the labyrinth tattooed upon my sex, its center the very entrance to my womb.
Perhaps I was doomed to forever give in to the sexual commands of men. My body would open to them—nay, it would demand that they enter—even when my mind protested. And when they came inside me, I was sometimes rewarded with a vision . . . that I could rarely understand.
I felt a pang of regret that my attempts to reach Britannia had been blocked. I needed to find my people, if I was ever to understand myself.
“Strip, and lie on your belly at the edge of the couch,” he ordered.
“If I won’t?”
“I’ve never struck you, Nimia, but I will.” He said it lightly, as if discussing the weather, and that scared me more than anything. “You will earn yourself an injury if you’re stubborn with me. You’re too smart to suffer that, when you know that the end result will be the same: I will fuck you.”
I took off my clothes and lay down on the couch, my hips at its edge.
“Don’t ever make me repeat an order to you again.”
I had too much pride to nod or voice my obedience. My silence was subservience enough.
“Part your legs.”
I did. I could feel him looking at my cunny, and the cowering part of me wanted to peep over my shoulder to see his expression, and beg reassurance from his gaze. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing my uncertainty, though, so instead I shut my eyes.
“I won’t touch you anywhere but your sex, but that I will have hard and fast, and without care for how you like it. I will fuck you, Nimia—not make love to you, not seduce you. I will plow you until I spill my seed, and then I’ll pull out of your tight little hole, and leave.”
My cunny, traitorous creature that it was, pulsed.
Sygarius chuckled.
I felt the burn of shame on my cheeks.
Then I felt the blunt end of his mentula, up against my outer gates. He pressed, and my skin pulled; there wasn’t enough moisture out there for him to slide inside. He pressed again, a shallow thrust, and then again. My lips tightened in a bitter smile. For once my body was on my side. I clenched my gates against his attempted intrusion, and felt a small ray of hope that I could keep him out.
“One lesson I did not think to ever need to teach you, Nimia,” he said as he continued his dry, surface-stretching thrusts, “was that even if I come to you before you’re ready, you will become slick and welcome me in a few moments.”
I was about to voice a denial, but then he proved himself right. I felt the head of his rod slip inside me—whether from his own drop of wetness or mine, I did not know—and force my gates wide. My clenching served me ill, for it gave me pain as he drove his great girth into me. I flinched, and tried to relax my cunny.
He was true to his word, plunging hard within me with fast strokes meant to bring on his release in the space of a dozen breaths. Before I had time to either grow sore or feel the first brush of pleasure, he was done. I felt the throb of his release. He kept me impaled on his staff for several breaths, as if making sure that every last drop had been spent.
He pulled out quickly, making me flinch again. “I’ll be back on the morrow, and for every day after, to fuck you until you carry my child. Only then, dear Nimia, will I let you touch me, or seek your own pleasure.”
I lay belly-down on the couch, head turned to the side and hair over my face, not moving. Stinging tears dripped from my eyes, dampening the upholstery beneath my cheek.
I heard his departing footsteps, and the door closing at the front of the house.
Only then did I push myself up on shaking arms, and go to the bath to wash warmth into my chilled body.
Come back Sygarius did, day after day, using me with a cold lack of caring I had not thought him capable of, not with me. Nor did he talk to me, except to taunt me, and that was worse than the fucking, for it left me without even his emotional warmth.
He knew how to manipulate me, and my body’s responses. “Strip, Nimia, and get on all fours,” he’d order me. “Stay there until you’re wet for me.” And he would lounge in a chair behind me, waiting, periodically leaning forward to shove a fingertip in my cunny to test my progress.
When I was wet to his liking, he told me to lie on my belly and part my legs. Again I would be left waiting while he lounged; it might be only a moment, or it might be ages before he finally stood up, lifted his tunic, and plunged inside me. The waiting heightened my arousal, my gates pulsing with hunger, at the same time that I felt ignored. Less than human. A vessel. A slave. He was making clear that my feelings did not matter.
With each of his visits, even as my body was trained to the routine and my cunny began to swell and moisten the moment I heard his voice at the door, I began to despise him. I had not hated him before: how could I have hated a man who showed me that I was the focus of all his sexual fantasies, and that he would deny himself for years so that our eventual joining should be perfect? That was the Sygarius I had known before.
This Sygarius made me yearn to take a sword in my hands and strike off his head. I remembered Ragnachar with his fist in Danoweg’s hair, holding up the head for all to see, the blood dripping from Danoweg’s severed neck. I wanted to do the same to Sygarius.
The days passed, and Clovis did not come.
And Sygarius fucked me, fucked me, fucked me.
I endured Sygarius’s visits for six days.
On the seventh and eighth days, he didn’t come, and the guards were on edge. The servants showed whites around their eyes, and scuttled about their work with only half their attention, leaving floor rags forgotten in puddles on the mosaics, and my soiled dishes attracting flies in the summer heat. No one would tell me what was happening, although I suspected.
Attack.
The night of the eighth day, I was jolted from my uneasy sleep by a servant’s hand on my shoulder. “Wake up, wake up! You must dress, quickly—he’s here.”
“Clovis!” I said, my mind still sleep-befuddled.
“He is sacking the city. It is terrible; what will become of us?! We must flee. Thank the gods that Master has come.”
My heart fell. I threw on the white gown and a pair of sandals, and jogged after the servant to the atrium at the front of the house. Sygarius was there, wearing armor, his skin filthy with sweat and dirt. He grabbed my wrist without so much as a greeting, and dragged me out the door into the dark street.
The servant’s hopes of rescue by her lord were for naught. Sygarius spared not a look for thos
e he left behind; I would that he had done the same for me. I felt a growing sense of panic, and that I was losing my best chance for freedom. I struggled against his hold, and he rewarded me with a punch to the gut that knocked the wind from me and left me dangling, stunned, from his grip. Tears stung my eyes. He’d hit me.
A small mounted guard of two soldiers waited for us. Sygarius hoisted me onto a horse and mounted behind me, his arm coming hard around my frozen, breathless waist. I cringed at his touch. If I’d had a dagger, I would have stabbed it into his arm, even if it meant stabbing my own gut at the same time.
Sygarius put his heels to the horse’s flanks, and we were away. I could hear the shouts and crashes of an army let loose in a frenzy of looting and destruction, and smoke was heavy in the air. Orange glowed above several rooftops, signaling fires below.
My breath came back in gulps. “What happened?” I asked.
Sygarius let loose a stream of invective. “He won this battle; but a battle is not the war. No it is not. I would have had him, if Gararic’s Franks hadn’t joined him at the last moment; they’d sworn to help me. Two-faced barbarians, all of them. I knew better than to trust them.” We careened around a corner, and I sank my fingers into the horse’s mane. Sygarius leaned forward, forcing me to do the same as he kicked the horse into a full gallop down a straight and empty street.
“Where are we going?” I gasped, suddenly more terrified of our speed and the danger of falling, than of the infuriated man behind me. I’d never ridden a horse like this, recklessly, hooves pounding, and so fast it felt like flying.
“Retreat,” he growled in my ear.
And then I heard, above all other sounds, a howl. Baying, deep, and somehow triumphant.
Bone?
Up ahead, standing at the intersection of another street, was the shadow-shape of what could only be an enormous hound. He tilted back his head and gave another baying call of triumph, and then he began to run.
Straight at us.
“What in Hades?” Sygarius said.