by Jack Whyte
Her eyebrow went high, but neither in scorn, nor in derision. "He has no interest." I said nothing, and she smiled. "You do not believe me, do you? But why should I lie? What would I gain by it? Would it make you think me less wanton? Nothing could do that, could it? But that wantonness is what brings you here, so I accept your disapproval. Do you like this?" She ran her fingers through the bush of red-gold hair.
"Do that again," I whispered, almost choking.
"What? This?" She did it again, lingering long with that probing finger buried deep inside her before withdrawing it and offering it to me to taste. As I shook my head in refusal, I heard Dom returning. I watched her suck her finger clean again, knowing exactly how that hot mouth would feel around me, and then Dom walked back into the room, his head already bowed over the document he held unrolled between his hands. Cylla casually moved away from the revealing light of the doorway and I bent over the plans Dom laid out on the table, seeing nothing but the image of Cylla's mouth sucking on her finger.
That image, and the memory of her red-gold pubis stayed with me for days.
The ultimate move in the game, its final stage of depravity, happened in the late spring of the year of the raid in which I was wounded, mere weeks after Caius told me of the amazing and impossible report that Claudius Seneca had been seen in Rome. Cylla arrived at the entrance to my smithy one morning and asked if she might speak with me alone. This was unprecedented. She had never approached me so openly before. I quaked with apprehension as I stepped outside into the bright sunlight to speak with her, but she put my mind at ease immediately by handing me a package of drawings, the design for a smelting oven I had lent to Dom some time earlier and which he had promised to return that day.
"Dom asked me to return these to you. He has gone into Aquae Sulis."
I blinked at her, my eyes still smarting from the bright sunlight. "Aquae Sulis? Why didn't you go with him? You usually do, don't you?"
"Yes, but not this time. I have no need." I looked closely at her, but there was no glitter in her eyes. I relaxed, but she went on.
"Publius, I have a suggestion to make. I know you have no wish to go beyond looking. You enjoy looking. We both know that. Now I would like you to look in a different way. Would you like that? I think you would."
I felt myself frowning and stepped further from the doorway of the smithy, leading her by the elbow around the corner into a narrow, brick-paved passageway between some storehouses. When I felt sure we were far enough removed from the door to avoid being overheard, I asked, keeping my voice low, "Cylla, what are you talking about? What could be different? What more is there to look at? I know you as well as any man could know you, using only his eyes. How can you improve on that?"
"Cylla."
"What?"
"Cylla. My name. You said it. You never use it."
"No, I never do, do I?"
"Use it again, now."
She smiled, but it was a strange smile. Had I not known her so well, I might have thought it was an uncertain smile, almost tremulous. I said nothing, and she went on.
"We are here in your domain, Publius, and not playing the game."
"So?" I was confused, unable to understand what she was saying.
"So, after — what? — seven years of not saying my name, would you please me on this summer day by calling me by my name again? Just once more?"
I was surprised and, in consequence, more cruel than I care to remember. "Humph!" I grunted, feeling uncomfortable at this departure from the norm. "We were speaking of looking, Cylla....Well, Cylla, I have watched you make love to yourself in every way, with everything from vegetables to the finest beeswax candles. What more is there to see?"
She gazed at me in silence for long moments and I tried to divine what she was thinking from the strange expression on her face, but then she laughed her old laugh and her eyes began to shine.
"Do I hear censure, Publius? Disgust? Come now, you love all of it. Cylla, your wanton Cylla, thrills you and excites you more than she disgusts you, does she not? No," she answered her own question, her voice becoming lighter with mockery. "No, perhaps not more than she disgusts you, but much more violently, far more pleasurably. I've seen you grow hard in spite of your disgust and your dislike of what you think of as your weakness, Publius, and I've watched you spill by hand the seed you would never give to me in any other way. But there is more."
"How? How can there be? What more?"
"Come to my house today and see."
"No. Not while Dom is away."
She gazed at me again. "I wonder if you will ever see what a fool you are in this, Publius. You will not betray your friend in his absence. You prefer to wait until he is nearby."
"That's enough, Cylla! Enough!"
She paused, then nodded. "Very well, then we shall choose another venue. Out of doors. In the woods."
"No! Against the rules. Not alone." I was growling through my temptation.
"I will not be alone. You will."
"What? What d'you mean?"
"What I said. I will be accompanied."
"My God, you're mad! Accompanied by whom? And what makes you think I would ever consider such a thing?"
"By a man. A lovely, stripling boy who cannot hear or speak, but lacks in nothing else."
"You are mad!"
She laughed again. "Mad? How? Because I invite you to watch? But I love having you watch me at my games, Publius! No one watches me better or more intently, more ravenously than you do. I truly thought you might enjoy watching someone else take for himself the pleasures you deny yourself. There would be no danger of discovery. You could watch and remain unseen! Think of it, Publius. The boy is deaf. He will not hear you approach to stand among the bushes, and he will make no sound, and I will bind his eyes so he is blind to all but the pleasures I will shower upon him for your pleasure." She paused, watching me closely, and when I said nothing she continued. "He is but a boy, Publius, though he performs like a stallion. He will be an instrument of pleasure, no more than that — a silent, unseeing, Unhearing instrument, manipulable as any of the others I have used in the past. Except that he will use me as a mare, and I will use him to exhaustion. Think, Publius. He will not see you there. But I will. And you will finally see me used as the slut I am in your eyes — ravaged and ridden, stretched and clutched, sweating and writhing, kneeling over a living, piercing phallus, impaling myself as I look over his head, watching you watching me, both of us wishing it were you in me." Her voice softened. "No broken rules, Publius, no departures from the game. It will still be only you and I. But I shall cover his eyes tightly when it is done, because I want you, Publius Varrus, to watch a man's seed seeping from the body of your playmate at least once. Think of it, Publius. For your eyes and for your lusts alone, and none to know of it save I."
"Sweet Christ!"
She cut me short. "No preaching, Publius! I will be there, with the boy, by the third hour after noon. You know the standing stone at the south-east corner of our land. A pathway leads into the woods from there. Count your steps and keep them short as mine. A hundred and twenty paces from the edge of the forest there, you will see a holly tree on the left of the path. Directly behind that tree, some forty paces further off the path, there is a clearing with a mossy bank fit for the bedding of a god. Don't be afraid of making noise. Remember, the boy is deaf and mute. I will be listening for your approach, but I will not wait for long. With a naked youth and a long, strong phallus nearby, I find I grow wet very quickly and must scratch my itch." She paused and leaned closer to me, sniffing deeply. "You are grimy and sooty and sweaty and smelly. I like that. The juice is trickling from me, down my thigh, right now. I want to lean, or sit somewhere and do things for us. Is there a place nearby?"
"No, for the love of God!"
"No. For the love of lust. What about your smithy? It looks dark."
"Are you mad? Equus is in there, and a dozen other people."
"What's that place?" She nodded
towards a door.
"Nothing. A storeroom."
"Show me."
"No! Cylla, for the — "
"Then I shall look myself."
She walked forward and pulled the door open. The room was tiny, with barely enough space for a man to enter and reach the shelves that lined the interior. She stepped inside and turned to face me, pulling the bottom of her beautiful, light-blue gown up over her long, clean-muscled legs. I groaned in despair and excitement. This time she was really going to go too far, but I had already seen the glistening evidence of her arousal on the inner surface of her thighs; she had not been exaggerating. Her fingers were already busy and her knees began to give way as her back slid down the shelf-lined wall. In the dimness of the hut's interior her eyes looked glazed, so intense was her excitement. She reached out one hand to me, wet with her body's fluid. I had never known any woman who could get so wet so quickly. I glanced from side to side in fear, but there was no one to be seen. And then Cylla began to moan, deep in her throat, something I had never known her do before.
"Stop that!" I hissed.
"I can't," she moaned. "It's being here, so close to your place. Step closer. Let me smell the smoke on you."
Terrified of being discovered, but completely incapable of resisting, I stepped closer and she closed her eyes, inhaling deeply and then whimpering in her throat as she gained release. I knelt down on one knee, no longer caring who might happen by. "Show me! Show me how wet you are."
"How wet do you want me?"
"As wet as you can be."
She stuck her tongue between her lips and smiled, and then squatted lower and squirted a strong jet of urine to splatter on the floor of the hut. As I gazed in utter fascination, she straightened up slowly, clutching her skirts high around her waist and simply allowing the stream of urine to run down her legs and soak her sandals.
"Is that wet enough for you? You see? There are still new things to look at. Give me your hand." I shook my head. "Then give me something, a cloth."
I straightened up and handed her the kerchief I wore around my neck, and she dried her thighs, rubbing the cloth thoroughly in the wetness of her crotch before handing it back to me. I raised it to my face and sniffed it. She stepped from the hut.
"Your turn. You need to do it. I'll watch. If anyone comes, I'll warn you and you can take something down from a shelf for me." Her eyes were fixed on my crotch. "Do it, Publius. Now!"
I did, and it took only seconds with her hungry eyes on me and the vision of what I had just watched her do. When it was over she nodded.
"The third hour. But no sooner. It would not please you to meet us on the path by accident. I will be listening for you. Remember: forty paces behind the holly tree."
Then she turned and was gone, leaving me to attempt to reconstruct my day and to struggle against the temptation she had dangled in front of me for that afternoon.
IV
I rode hard all the way to Cylla's tryst that afternoon, cursing myself and debating my own sanity with every beat of my horse's hoofs, and at the end of my journey I tethered the animal to a sapling just inside the forest's edge, about fifty paces from the entry to the path that would take me to the clearing. The sun had passed into the fourth hour of its afternoon journey and it threw my shadow directly ahead of me as I walked. By that stage I was numb; I knew only that I was lost in a wilderness beyond my understanding and completely beyond my control, but it was that last, pusillanimous thought that finally stiffened my spine and gave me the strength to stop in my tracks and turn around. I knew that if I went into the woods to that clearing, if I took even one step along that pathway, I would have forsaken the last remnants of my pride and honour; if I stooped so low as to watch Cylla with another man, I would be betraying not only my family and all I held dear, but my own manhood, giving up total possession of my immortal soul to Cylla's beast as well as to my own.
My horse stood cropping the sparse grass beneath the trees where I had tethered him, and I leaned my full weight against his side for a spell, smelling the clean, equine odour of him. He smelt exactly like a horse, exactly as he should, sweaty and wholesome, and there was nothing false or specious about him. He was a horse, full of a horse's strength. He had no truck with anything that was not fit for horses. When he rutted, he rutted straightforwardly, without subterfuge, and only with a mare who was in season; otherwise, he did as horses do.
I had a ludicrous vision of him gazing in fascination at another stallion rutting with a mare, and I began to laugh, quietly at first, and then with more and more abandon and less and less sanity as I was struck by the ridiculous folly of what I was imagining and I saw myself clearly for what I had become.
I ended up sitting on the ground between his legs, laughing uproariously and then suddenly weeping; like the sensible animal he was, my horse moved away, eyeing me uneasily, which made me laugh and weep the more.
I regained my senses eventually and felt better than I had in a long, long time. And I knew, with the clarity of absolute certainty, that Cylla's game had ended. I had found my direction again, after years of wandering lost, and it had been pointed out to me by a horse! How many times had Equus called me a horse's arse? Now I knew Equus was wrong, but it had taken a horse to show me what I was, or should be: I was a man, and a maker of weapons; a smith and a soldier. I had no business with unmanly, lesser things, and from this day I would avoid them and regain the strength of my manhood.
I saw the fallen, rotting tree that I had noticed earlier, the reason for tethering my horse where I had. When you have a leg like mine, you watch always for easy means of mounting. I led him to it, climbed upon his back and pointed him away from the forest, down towards the stream among the bushes in the bottom of the valley. The trees here were sparse and small, no more than saplings; you could almost gallop among them.
On the bank of the stream, this time by an ancient, mossy stump, I dismounted again, took off my sandals and light leggings and then sat down, dangling my bare feet in the gurgling water. I watched tiny fish darting in the stillness of a lazy eddy by my side and let the soothing sound and touch of the cool waters wash me clean. And when I dressed again and left for home, it was without regret for Cylla or the game she was playing in the forest glade.
On the way home I was acutely conscious of the beauty of the day and of the scenery around me. The sprouting, unformed leaves had not yet lost their fragile newness and the moss of winter and spring was still bright green and moist; flowers bloomed among the grasses everywhere I looked and the air seemed full of butterflies and bees. At one point, I heard a crashing in the bushes and my horse shied nervously, scenting the bear that had already scented us and gone. I gentled him and then kicked him to a trot to get out of the area and leave the poor bear in peace; I had no quarrel with any animal that day. In this way, it took me far longer to get home than it had to arrive.
As I prepared to dismount outside the forge, I heard my name being called and turned to see one of the household servants running towards me, waving his arms. I stayed on my horse and waited until he ran right up to me, gasping for breath, with the news that Luceiia had been looking for me "for hours" and had sent him to the forge to wait for me and make sure that I went straight to her on my return.
As I strode into the villa, wondering what could be amiss, Luceiia came hurrying to meet me, her face pale, and I braced myself to hear bad news of the children or of Caius.
"Thank God you're here! Have you seen Domitius?"
I was taken off guard. "Domitius? Dom? No, he's in Aquae Sulis. He left this morning. Why?"
It was Luceiia's turn to frown and look nonplussed. "What do you mean, in Aquae Sulis? He was here less than an hour ago, looking for you."
My heart thudded and seemed to miss a beat. "Dom? No, he couldn't have been. He's away."
Luceiia was close to anger, impatient with my thick-skulled slowness. "Publius, listen to me! You have to find him. He is distraught. Something terrible has happened.
I don't know what, but I'm afraid for Dom. He was wild, Publius, and there was blood on his clothes."
"Blood?" I was having difficulty taking in her words. "What do you mean, blood? How much blood? Whose? Tell me, Luceiia, in the name of God!"
She threw her hands apart in a gesture of helplessness. "I don't know, Publius! I don't know anything, except that something was very, very wrong and there was nothing I could do for him. He would not talk to me. He wanted only you and no one else. He was out of his senses, Publius — completely, totally undone. He burst into the house and I heard him shouting your name. When I came out to see what all the commotion was about, he was upstairs, rushing from room to room, all the while shouting for you.
"I went to him and told him you were out, but I don't think he even heard me. He looked awful, Publius. His hair was standing on end and his eyes were..." She broke off and raised a hand to her mouth as though to stop the words she knew would come out next. "Oh, Publius, I have never seen such eyes — filled with so much pain and rage and grief."
My mouth had gone dry and I could hear my heart beating in time to the dread wings fluttering in my gut.
"Then what? What did he say?"
"Nothing. Or almost nothing. He stopped shouting and looked around, blinking his eyes as though he didn't know where he was. Then he looked at me, and his face — I don't know how to describe it, Publius — it darkened, and he asked me, 'Did you know?' Then he looked around him again, and up at the skylight, and then he ran down the stairs and away, shouting your name."
"And no one followed him? You simply let him go?"
"At first, yes. We were all amazed, and he had a horse outside. I regained my wits as soon as he had gone and sent Paul the groom to follow him, but by then it was too late; Paul could not find him."
"Blood, Luceiia. You said there was blood. How much and where? Was it his own?"
She shook her head in an abrupt negative, as though dismissing my question. "I couldn't tell. He wore a cloak, fastened to the neck, covering him completely. I only saw a glimpse of his tunic, and it looked black. It was not until I saw his legs and feet, as he went out the door into the sunlight, that I saw it for what it was. Publius, his legs were covered in blood."