The Adventures of a Roman Slave

by Lisa Cach

  A burst of wind hit us, and I yelped as it heeled the boat at a steep angle, the rushing green waters tearing by alongside. I grabbed for a handhold, my heart in my throat, certain I was about to tumble into that frothing torrent. The crew tied down the sail to a small rectangle, big enough to help maintain steerage—you couldn’t steer a boat unless it was making headway against the water—but small enough to keep it from being torn to ribbons. If we were lucky.

  Terix moaned, his lips colorless. He wedged his torso under a canvas cover, between a box and the hull, and his body went limp. Bone crawled to him and collapsed on his legs. “I hope we sink,” Terix said from behind the box. “At least it would be over.”

  “You wouldn’t want a watery grave,” I said with false cheer. “There’d be no end to the sloshing about. Better to survive until dry land, yes?”

  Terix mumbled something with “don’t care” in it, and I decided to leave him alone. If he could fall asleep or pass out, he would escape both his physical misery and the terror of the storm.

  For terror it was. Hard rain came behind the wind, blinding me and forcing even the hardiest of the crew to don clothes. The boat was mostly covered now, and those crewmen not needed for trimming the sail or holding the steering board retreated beneath the canvas protection up forward. My eyes were on the waves that rose above us. It was as if we were in the bottom of a bowl and then rode up the side and to the rim, where we’d hover for an eternal moment, the storm-whipped sea raging to all sides. And then we dropped, the boat shuddering with the impact, water washing over the bow, as we slid in a terrifying rush into the depths of yet another basin between the waves.

  With each blow, the timbers strained, the vessel bending and twisting, and as the slats of the hull separated and came back together, the water gushed in. Men set to bailing with silent ferocity, sparing glances only for Jax and the man at the steering board—and for me.

  The meager light disappeared at sunset, and the storm grew worse. Lightning cracked across a sky of burnt wool, the brilliance stunning my eyes and leaving me blinking away white shadows. Thunder roared, filling my blood with a fear born in some deep, primitive part of myself. I feared that the boat was being shaken apart.

  Hands gripped my shoulders. I turned and saw Jax, his face grim, his eyes burning. He shouted something to me that I couldn’t make out and pried my arms from the lashed-down box I’d been holding.

  “What? What is it?” I shouted.

  “Sorry . . . Help . . . Need . . .” he said, the other words lost to the wind.

  I nodded. Yes, of course, whatever he needed. Was I to help bail? Stuff leaks?

  He dragged me into the darkness under the cover, and I felt the hands of others on me, guiding me forward to a soft, damp spot. The noise was different here, deeper than in the open, and the air felt moistly warm without the wind to snatch it away. I could see nothing but black shapes upon blackness, and yet I knew it was Jax who put his face close to mine, his mouth at my ear.

  “Offering . . . Goddess . . .” he said. “Calm seas.”

  “Offering!” I envisioned a sacrificial blade, and panic drenched me. “Kill me?” I shrieked, imagining him slicing my throat, my blood soaking the timbers in an ancient ritual to save their lives.

  “No!” I felt him shake his head, his cheek against mine. “But . . .” The next several words were lost in thunder. “Willing? . . . Save us.”

  The timbers cracked, like branches bent almost to breaking, their fibers giving way. I would agree to whatever Jax wanted, if it might save us. “Yes, anything! What do I do?”

  “You . . . We . . . Hope enough time.”

  “What?”

  Instead of answering, he pushed me onto my back, and someone found my wrists and pulled them above my head. My belly tightened as I fought the urge to struggle. Jax had said they wouldn’t kill me, but there were worse things than death to be dealt by the hands of men.

  Hands grasped my ankles and pulled my legs apart, while others shoved my skirts up past my waist. I froze in shock.

  This is what they were going to do? Truly? The sea was about to swallow us, our deaths were nigh, and all they could think was to mount me? It was so laughably male I almost couldn’t believe it was happening.

  Maybe that was how they wanted to die. It would be a happy farewell for them but not for me.

  I suddenly struggled against the hands, taking them by surprise. My foot connected with a chin; my fist came free and hit a mouth. “Stop it! Let me go!” I yelled against the roar of the storm.

  The hands fell away; the shadows of the men drew back. I thrashed a moment more, expecting to feel their hold again, but instead, I heard Jax’s voice, his mouth at my ear.

  “Nimia, please . . . Ritual . . . Goddess . . . Calm the seas.”

  A wave crashed over the bow and held the boat down as if trying to drown it. My breath caught in my throat, and I sensed the weight of the sea beyond the thin canvas. There was a sickening tear of cloth and then a rush of water, dousing me; in its icy stream I felt death lay her hands upon me, and I screamed. The men were shouting, and there was a chaos of movement in the dark as the water poured in.

  With a slow heave, the bow rose out from under the wave. The hands of death retreated, draining into the bilge to await her chance. The timbers groaned in agony, and I knew the boat would not survive another blow.

  I grabbed for Jax. “Anything!” I shouted, and tried to pull him on top of me. If he thought his sea goddess needed sex to end the storm, let her have it! I would believe in anything, give myself to any ritual, to save our skins.

  Jax shouted something in his own language, and the hands came back, pulling my clothes off and my thighs wide. So be it! At least it was a distraction from the storm. I tensed, expecting the plunge of a mentula into my tight, frightened passage.

  Fingers opened my folds, and the men began a chant I could not understand, their deep voices rising and falling in a cadence that sounded from another world. A shadow moved between my legs and lowered itself, and then I felt the shock of warm, soft wetness covering my sex. Someone was licking me.

  Another mouth found my breast. A third—Jax’s?—was on my lips.

  I lay rigid with surprise, my body unresponsive. Lips and tongues caressed my nipples, my neck, my belly, my folds; they moved gently, with a care and skill unexpected from the rough men I’d watched sailing the boat. This was a coaxing, a begging for goodwill; they were supplicants. I was far enough removed from the sensations of my body to realize this must be the form their prayers to their sea goddess took. Please me, and the goddess would calm and the seas cease to churn. I was her proxy.

  I hoped their ritual didn’t depend on my enjoying it; we would sink for certain.

  Since leaving Clovis, my fires of lust had turned to ash. I had felt no yearning for another’s touch, no attraction to the men I’d met as Terix and I fled to the coast and sought out Jax. My blood ran cool, my emotions mere whispers of what they had been. Not even music could rouse my interest, and my cithara remained untouched, wrapped in its linens inside a leather pouch.

  Only Terix kept me moving forward, along with a small voice inside me that knew this bleakness would not last forever. I had suffered it before, when my mother and I were captured by Goths, and then again, much worse, when I was enslaved by Sygarius and my mother was lost to me. I now pursued Maerlin and the Phanne not because I felt a need to but because I knew that when I woke from this inner darkness, it would matter to me.

  That was my leap of faith. My life would matter to me again. My body would feel desire and pleasure. I would lose myself in the music of my cithara and see visions of the future. I would hold my son, Theo.

  Someday.

  Not today, though. The mouths laved and teased and plundered, and I felt nothing. My loins remained cold. The tongue swirling around my stamen roused only a distant tingl
e, a dim, sputtering spark too weak to ignite my body.

  Lightning pulsed across the sky, the brilliant flash seeping through the canvas cover and limning the men crouched around me in white light for a solitary instant, catching them in mid-motion and creating the illusion that they were as still as statues. Thunder boxed my ears and beat its fists on my chest. The goddess felt no pleasure.

  “What do you want?” Jax shouted at me. “Tell us!”

  I want to feel alive again.

  “How can we give you pleasure?”

  Cut Clovis from my heart, and cauterize the wound with a white-hot iron.

  “Nimia, you must try!”

  I saw Sygarius in his final moments, gazing at me with fate-accepting eyes. “You are greater than this,” he’d said. “You are not yet all that you will become.”

  And I’d never discover what that was if we drowned.

  “Sing,” I told Jax. “Keep them singing.”

  The men’s strange, chanted song had caught my attention; maybe I could lose myself in that. It might be our only hope.

  The men’s voices rose and fell in rhythm, their words pure sound, without meaning. My ears began to pick out a pattern to the chant, and I opened my mouth and added my voice to theirs, my own song deliberately a few notes off, like one’s reflection seen in a still pond. All was reversed and yet the same, distant and untouchable, but one fingertip could press against its twin.

  Instinct made me sing like that, sensing that the goddess of the sea wouldn’t have the same voice as her worshippers. The combined sound was greater than its parts, the notes vibrating off one another in a way both eerie and seductive. I lost myself to it, sinking into the music.

  For the first time in months, a humming buzz began to fill my ears, and a shimmer of gold began to fill my sight. I kept singing, urging my golden swarm closer. Nothing could tell me I still lived more than a return of my visions. I had thought them as buried as my sexual desire.

  The storm and the chanting men faded from my awareness, and I found myself floating in blue-green water, deep beneath the sea’s surface. A forest of seaweed undulated before me, with shadowy shapes oozing behind its fronds. A school of tiny fish flashed like silver coins as they all turned at once and darted away. A creature as long and flat as a galley’s oar rippled past.

  In the seaweed forest, a huge shadow pushed forward. My heart tripped, a terrible dread seeping coldly through my body. The olive-green strands bent and folded as it came toward me, and then something long and black reached out between the fronds. It looked like a snake and moved as if it were seeking something, prodding and tasting the water. It kept coming—and coming. There seemed an endless length of it, slithering out of the weeds toward me. Behind it, the shadows grew denser until they coalesced into one dark shape. The seaweed parted to reveal an enormous round eye, as tall as me, with a bile-yellow iris around a pupil of fathomless black.

  The creature emerged from the seaweed, revealing itself in all its tentacled horror.

  Kraken, I thought, remembering tales of such creatures. Destroyers of boats, devourers of men, ravishers of virgins chained to rocks.

  As it stared at me with its eye, the iris changed color to the glowing copper my own eyes had when great arousal was upon me. I saw my distorted reflection in the kraken’s pupil, my body naked but for its spiral tattoos, my black hair floating around me in swaying tresses weirdly like the beast’s tentacles. I dared not move.

  The reflection of me did, though. She parted her spiral-tattooed thighs as an eel passed between them, its back stroking her folds as it wiggled through. A thick-lipped fish with a downturned mouth drifted toward her and latched onto one of her nipples, gumming it. A giant sea snail worked slowly up her leg, its muscular foot pushing it toward her loins with steady determination, while over her shoulder the bulbous head of an octopus appeared, its tentacles unfurling around her neck and reaching down to surround her breast and squeeze.

  No creatures crawled over my body, but on the reflected Nimia, the snail reached her sex and covered it. I felt the rasp of a tongue against my stamen, warm and rough, and felt a bolt of pleasure shoot through my loins.

  I was feeling the caresses of the men in the boat, and so was the kraken; only it—she—was transforming their touch into a form she could better understand. And somehow her enjoyment was inflaming my own.

  The snail shell rose and fell with its efforts, its body one large muscle. I felt the wet suction of it on my own flesh and the repeated lashing rasp of a tongue. My stamen was finally waking, quailing from such vigorous use even as I felt the warm swelling of desire spread through my sex. The octopus descended with the grace of a dancer over my reflection’s belly, its arms arching and uncoiling. Two tentacles reached behind the other me, grasping her buttocks and gently parting them as a school of fish swam up behind her. I felt tentative wet touches against that back entrance, like the head of a small fish nudging against it, and small fins fluttering against my skin.

  A queasy mixture of repulsion and arousal made me feel weak, my muscles turning to liquid. Sea creatures I would hesitate to touch were fondling an image of my body, their slimy surfaces making themselves intimate with my most secret places. I wanted to be ill at the sight of that snail over my loins, but at the same time, I felt the mouth of a sailor suckling at my folds and the pleasure of the kraken as she fed off our offering. This desire was not my own, and yet I was feeling it in every tingling crevice.

  Feeling it and wanting more. It almost made me want one of the tentacles to reach lower and—

  It wasn’t a tentacle that was going to penetrate that other Nimia, though. My lips parted, and I watched in fascinated horror, unable to look away, as a dolphin with a curved erection swam up and stood belly-to-belly against her, knocking the snail away. The other Nimia parted her legs, letting him settle between them, the tip of his staff at her sex. The dolphin hunched its tail in a thrust, and at my own entrance I felt a mentula pushing apart my gates and plunging within.

  My passage had grown tight with disuse, making the stretching pressure of entry both strangely delicious and aching. I hoped it was Jax I was feeling, giving me firm, hard, slow strokes in time to the dolphin’s movements. His rod was narrow but long, and each thrust lasted almost longer than I could bear. I wanted it faster, and I also wanted the languid torture to continue forever. The pleasure of being penetrated brought shimmers of gold over my vision again and the humming buzz in my ears. The kraken’s eye and the reflected Nimia faded behind a mist of gold, my last sight of it being the other Nimia, with her hair like black tentacles, wrapping her legs around the dolphin as it pumped inside her with its own smooth, long rod.

  The underwater scene disappeared, and I saw a forest. A brown bear dug at a log with its claws, surrounded by bees. It tore off the bark to reveal a wealth of honeycomb, which it hungrily lapped up.

  There was a crashing in the brush, and a white stag emerged, its head crowned with an immense rack of blood-red antlers. It lowered its head and charged the bear, goring it in its side. The bear groaned and struck a blow to the stag’s skull. The stag withdrew, staggering and shaking its head. The bear lumbered into the brush, leaving a trail of splattered blood.

  I lost sight of the bear, but in my vision I tracked the blood down to the edge of a river. The remains of the bear were there, lying in the shallows, its eyes filmed with death.

  A rolling shape moved beneath its fur, and its body heaved. The wound in its side stretched, blood pouring forth, then tore wide as a yellow muzzle pushed through. A head followed, the bear’s skin splitting apart as a huge golden bear climbed out of the small, flat skin of the dead one. The golden bear shook itself, sunlight sparkling in its fur.

  It looked at me with sorrowful golden eyes and said my name.

  “Nimia,” Jax groaned.

  I opened my eyes and was back on the boat, Jax slowly thrustin
g inside me as another sailor reached between us and fondled my stamen and two others licked my breasts. My sudden awareness of my body and the delicate flicking of fingertips pushed me over the edge, and my passage contracted in a rhythmic gripping of Jax’s rod. He answered with another groan and a hard thrust, then stayed pressed against me, sex to sex, his whole body tense as he spent himself within me.

  My tremors died away, and as they did, the motion of the boat calmed to a gentle rocking. I realized I could see the men around me; moonlight spilled under the canvas cover. The storm was over.

  Jax withdrew carefully from me, and the men drew back.

  I closed my trembling thighs and pushed myself up to a sitting position, my head almost touching the canvas. With shaking hands, I brushed my hair back from my face. I could still see that disturbing reflection of myself in the kraken’s eye, being fondled by an octopus and screwed by a dolphin. It hadn’t truly happened, and yet my body felt as if it had.

  I would never look at seafood the same way again.

  “I don’t understand,” I said to Jax, my voice unsteady, “why that girl you left behind wanted to be the only woman on board.”

  Jax laughed softly. “By the quiet of the sea, I think you do. She wanted that all to herself. The sea never calmed so quickly with her, though. The goddess likes you.”

  He helped me off my makeshift bed and led me toward the stern while the men bailed and removed the canvas cover.

  “That girl is braver than I gave her credit for,” I said. “When I saw your goddess—”

  Jax interrupted, his hands on me tightening. “You saw her? What did she look like? Was she beautiful?”

  “Beautiful?” I saw the immense eyeball of the kraken. “Did your girl never see anything during the, uh, ritual?”

  “No.”

  He would never thank me for the truth of what I’d seen.