by Kim Fielding
“B-better?” Gray asked, holding his arms out.
“Um, yes.”
Gray spun around. “D-do my back?”
The answer should have been no. Brute knew that. But Gray was standing there, right in front of him, and his back really was filthy. And it wasn’t as if Brute had never touched him before. At least those were the rationalizations he made as he dumped the dirty water into the slop pail and poured fresh from the ewer. He took the soap and began moving it across the other man’s shoulders. This close, and with the dirt gone, he could see that Gray’s skin was rubbed raw at the edges of his collar and manacles, and no doubt on his ankles around the cuffs as well. At least the bruises and scrapes Brute had spied when he’d first arrived had faded away, leaving him to wonder if the wounds had been caused by something more than Gray being forced to sleep on the hard floor.
“Wh-what’s wrong?”
Brute realized he’d been growling slightly. “Nothing. Sorry.” He scrubbed a little harder at Gray’s shoulder blades.
When Brute reached Gray’s lower back, Gray shifted his stance to spread his legs a little and Brute froze. “Umm….”
“Y-you don’t have to. I c-c-can—”
“It’s fine,” Brute said firmly. He was a grown man. He could manage to scrub a dirty prisoner without acting like an idiot. Even if that prisoner had a surprisingly pleasant ass.
By the time Brute reached the prisoner’s feet, Gray was considerably cleaner and fresher smelling, and Brute was uncomfortably hard. He was just feeling thankful that Gray couldn’t see the way the fabric of his trousers was straining when Gray made a strangled sort of sound and half turned back to him. Gray was erect too, and his shaved face was colored by a blush. “S-s-sorry,” he said with an embarrassed smile. “D-d-didn’t think the damn thing even w-w-worked anymore. It….” He made an accurate grab for Brute’s soapy hand and ran his long fingers over Brute’s wide ones. “C-calloused. F-f-felt good.”
Brute didn’t pull away, and for several minutes they simply stood there, hand in hand, their breathing sounding very loud against the walls of the cell. Brute wasn’t even especially surprised when Gray bent his head and, avoiding the soapy hand, pressed his lips to Brute’s thick forearm. “Th-thank you, Brute.”
“It’s not my name.” He clearly was no master of his own tongue.
But Gray only tilted his head. “What?”
“Brute. It’s what they call me. What everyone calls me, ever since… since I was a boy. But it’s not my name.” Sometimes he almost forgot that. He thought of himself as Brute, in fact, and the last person to call him by his given name was his mother, right before she died. She’d hugged him and kissed his hair and called him a good boy, and then she’d poisoned herself from her flask.
“Wh-what is your name?” Gray’s voice was soft.
“Aric. I’m Aric.”
Gray smiled. “Hello, Aric.”
Somehow after that, the newly rechristened Aric extricated himself from Gray’s gentle grip. He used the remaining wash water to rinse the floor a bit and replaced the soiled quilt with a fresh one from his shelf. He fetched dinner for himself and Gray and they ate in silence, and then Aric bolted the cell. Everything around him seemed sort of fuzzy and unreal, the edges of everything as soft as his prisoner’s name. He opened the top dresser drawer and pulled out the little fabric purse containing a small hoard of coppers, the remnants of a sweets spending spree he and Warin had enjoyed a few days earlier. He tucked the purse in his pocket and walked out of the chamber, out of the tower, out of the palace. His feet knew where to go: to the dingy little corner of Tellomer where the molly houses and brothels were tucked away.
Chapter 10
ARIC had heard stories about Tellomer’s brothels since he was a young boy. He heard rumors that his mother had once worked in them. After Aric’s parents died, on the rare occasions when drink put his great-uncle in a good mood instead of an evil one, the old man babbled on about the whores he’d had in Tellomer, and how he impressed the ladies with his size and skills. Even at a tender age, Aric doubted that.
When he grew older, Aric heard men at the White Dragon talking to each other about the bawdy houses, teasing or bragging or offering advice. It was those overheard conversations that taught him that boys could be found for sale, and that gave him hope that, given enough coins, someone might be willing to temporarily overlook Aric’s brutish body and repulsive face.
It had taken him a long time to save enough—enough coppers, enough courage—but finally Aric made his first journey into Tellomer during the Festival of the Harvest Moon. His heart hammered in his chest for the entire journey, and when he arrived at the city walls, he was overwhelmed at the sheer size of the place and hadn’t any idea which way to go. There weren’t any signs pointing to Tellomer’s seediest corner—and if there had been, he couldn’t have read them—and he was too embarrassed to ask any of the few people on the street. So he wandered aimlessly for a long time, instinctively veering away from the posher parts of town, until he stumbled upon a narrow street that looked somehow both furtive and inviting. The crudely painted signs hanging on the houses at the end of that street had been made with illiterate men like him in mind, and they left no doubt about what sort of business was transacted inside the houses.
Aric had wandered up and down the street uncertainly, half fearing that even with his purse full of coins he’d be turned away. And then he saw a man exiting the most run-down of the houses, pausing to steal a kiss from a jaded-looking young man before scurrying furtively away. The man had been ugly—although not as ugly as Aric—and fat, and he’d had gouty nodules on his ears.
Aric had taken several calming breaths and knocked on the door of that house.
The house was kept by a blocky man with a badly scarred face and thin tufts of dark gray hair. He stood in the open door, looking Aric up and down with deep skepticism. “What?” the man demanded.
“I, um….” Aric swallowed. “I want… um… sex.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Girl or boy?”
“Boy. Or, um, man.” Because, although any contact would have been good, what he really craved was a big, strong body against his. Someone he wouldn’t have to worry about breaking.
The man gave him another long look. “Forty coppers.”
Aric fought back despair. He didn’t have that much. “It’s supposed to be fifteen.” At least so said the men at the White Dragon, when they were laughing together over their exploits.
“Fifteen’s what we charge men. Not ogres.” The man spat into the street. “Thirty. And if you hurt my boy, I’ll have you hung by morning.”
“I won’t hurt anyone,” said Aric, who possessed exactly thirty-three coppers.
The man—who Aric later learned was called Redwald—waited impatiently for Aric to count out three coins and hand over the rest, then led him into a dingy, dirty room that was crowded with ancient furniture. A few young men wearing very little were lounging around the room, playing cards or drinking, and they looked at Aric with varying mixtures of amusement and alarm. Aric wasn’t sure how this bit was supposed to go. Did he choose the one who appealed to him most, or did the whores have some sort of turn-taking schedule?
Redwald solved Aric’s dilemma by pointing at a sullen-looking man who might once have been pretty but now looked… used up. “Odo. This one’s yours.”
“No!” Odo cried. “I already had three today.”
“Well, this will make four, won’t it? Now get off your ass and get to work, before I pound that ass myself.”
Aric had put out his hand. “Wait! I don’t want… don’t want you to force anyone.”
Redwald snarled at him. “Do you fucking want a slut, or what?”
Aric stood there without answering until Odo rolled his eyes and heaved himself to his feet. “I’ll take him,” he said to Redwald in a flat tone. “But I want the rest of the fucking night off.”
The blocky man shrugged, which Odo mus
t have taken for agreement because he stomped toward the stairs. “Well? Follow me,” he ordered without looking back.
The room he took Aric to was tiny and dark and smelled like sex. Still not bothering to glance Aric’s way, Odo loosened his trousers and climbed onto the narrow, blanketless bed. He propped himself on elbows and knees so that his backside was hanging nearly off the edge of the bed, and said, “Get on with it.”
His ass was bony, and he was offering it with the same tenderness that Cecil showed when slopping food onto Aric’s plate at the White Dragon, but excitement still pooled low in Aric’s belly. Tentatively, he reached out and touched one pale cheek.
Odo looked over his shoulder and sighed. “I’m not a fucking maiden you have to seduce. Just fucking ram it in and get it over with.”
Aric had some vague ideas of how sex between two men was supposed to go, ideas he’d mainly gleaned from the more drunken conversations in the tavern. “Don’t I have to…. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I’ve been fucked by three other men this afternoon. I’m ready.”
So Aric had dropped his own trousers and taken a step closer to the bed. But Odo’s eyes widened. “Holy fuck! That’s not a dick—it’s a damned tree trunk.”
A strange mixture of pride, embarrassment, and disappointment had washed through Aric. “I don’t…. Sorry.” He expected to be turned away.
Instead, though, Odo grabbed a small bottle from the floor next to the bed and poured some of the contents onto his fingers before handing the bottle to Aric. “Put some of this on that monster of yours,” he ordered, then lay down on his back and stuck his own oily fingers inside himself. Astonished to be witnessing such a thing, Aric simply stood there with the bottle in hand until Odo huffed at him. “Hey! You’re supposed to be slicking up, remember?”
“Oh. Sorry.” Feeling stupid for apologizing again, Aric followed orders. And then Odo was back on all fours, waiting.
The feeling of being inside another man had been astonishing, but it was hard to ignore Odo’s little grunts of pain, or the way his hands were fisted on the mattress. Odo’s cock was soft and uninterested in the proceedings. “Am I…. Does it hurt?” Aric asked.
“Of course it fucking hurts. You try ramming a tree trunk up your ass and see if it hurts. Look, just fucking move and get it over with, okay?”
To the relief of them both, it took Aric very little time to climax. When he was through, Odo scrambled away, wiped quickly at himself with a rag, yanked up his trousers, and stalked out of the room without another word.
Later that day, as he trudged home in the darkness, Aric swore to himself that he wouldn’t return to Tellomer. But the months passed and his loneliness grew heavy on his shoulders—heavier than any of the burdens he carried for Darius—and when the next festival arrived, he found himself again on the road to Tellomer with thirty coppers in his purse.
HE HAD been nothing but an overgrown boy when he first visited the brothel. Now he was a man, dressed in good-quality clothing and wearing fine boots, and he knew exactly how to get to the hidden little street. He strode confidently through the city, hardly glancing at the people who moved around sluggishly or drooped in wilted heaps wherever they could find a bit of shade. He ignored the way sweat ran down his face and neck, the way it made his shirt stick to his back. He even ignored the busy vendor who was selling fruit juices from the back of a cart.
The city smelled. Not as bad as Gray had, perhaps, but this stink was more variable. Sewage and animal waste and fish and sweat and rotting food. It was almost enough to make him wish for his old job. Hauling loads would be miserable on a day like this, and if anything the heat would be worse away from the sea, but at least the air would smell fresher. Here in Tellomer, the odor only grew worse as he passed the crowded shacks and the miserable beggars. Two very young naked children played desultorily with cornhusk dolls. A scraggly dog scratched at fleas. A wizened old woman whose back was bent nearly in two made a sign in Aric’s direction to ward off evil.
Somehow the bright sun didn’t quite seem to reach the narrow street that was his destination. The shadows didn’t make the air any cooler, however. It was as if the entire neighborhood were permanently shrouded under heavy wool. There were more people on this particular street than he was used to seeing, but that was because he had always come here during the festival. He supposed that in the evenings and through the night this district probably became very lively indeed. Today, though, there were men of various social stations slowly walking down the cobbles, while boys and girls and men and women leaned out of windows or lounged in open doorways, most of them looking more cranky and bored than seductive.
A bosomy woman with improbably colored hair called out to him from a doorstep. “Ho! Giant! Need a little woman to chase away some of the heat?”
He couldn’t help but smile. “How much?”
“Twenty-five. And that’s with a discount, because you really ought to pay at least two men’s worth.”
“That’s very generous of you. But I’m afraid you don’t have what I’m looking for.”
“Oh?” she said, her eyebrows arched. Then she rucked up the front of her yellow dress, revealing a pair of slightly bowed legs and a fairly impressive dick below a pot belly. “Are you sure?”
Aric barked a surprised laugh. “Maybe another time.”
She let her dress fall back into place. “I can’t guarantee the special offer will still stand.”
Nobody was visible outside his usual brothel, and he would have wagered a silver coin that the windows of that building hadn’t been opened in years. Aric knocked three times before Redwald opened it. The man never seemed to change from year to year. Even his clothing appeared to be the same, perhaps slightly dirtier and more threadbare each year. He looked surprised to see Aric, especially after taking in Aric’s new attire. “Come up in the world, have we?” Redwald said.
“A bit.”
“And got maimed in the process.”
Aric shrugged.
Redwald held out his hand. “Thirty coppers.”
“I’ll give you twenty.”
“What’s this? Now that you have more coins jingling in your pockets you think you should pay less?” Redwald coughed out something that might have been intended as a laugh.
But Aric simply shrugged. “I’ll give you twenty. Or I can go somewhere else. I think there are other houses on this street that would be glad for my coppers.”
The brothel master glared but stepped aside, and when Aric handed him twenty coppers, Redwald counted them twice and then tucked them away in a purse. His boys had been watching the interchange with mild interest and ill-hidden amusement. As usual, most of the faces were new to Aric, but he thought he recognized two or three from previous years. Redwald surveyed the room and seemed about to say something, but Aric stopped him by pointing at a young man who was sprawled in an overstuffed chair. “Him, please,” Aric said.
Maybe Redwald would have objected, but the man rose from the chair gracefully and gave a half grin. “This looks like a challenge.”
“Watch out, Petrus,” said a small redhead on the other side of the room. “He’s hung like a stallion.”
Petrus’s grin didn’t falter. “I always did like to ride.”
Amidst the guffaws and catcalls, Petrus and Aric made their way upstairs and down the hall. Petrus walked in front, giving Aric a good opportunity to look at his tall, wiry body and butterscotch-colored hair. Then Petrus swung open one of the identical doors that lined the corridor. “Welcome to my castle,” he said with a small flourish.
The room was the same as all the others Aric had visited upstairs: tiny, sparely furnished, musty-smelling. It was almost unbearably hot as well. But he didn’t take much time to catalog his surroundings, because without hesitation or even a hint of shame, Petrus pulled off his ragged shirt and stepped out of his trousers, leaving himself entirely bare and available for inspection. “You like what you bought?” he asked.
“I know. Which is lucky, because I’m not really any good at much of anything except fucking.” Petrus seemed cheerful enough about his admission, his mouth still quirked at the corners. “Everyone has a talent, I guess.”
“So why are you here?”
“Instead of one of the better houses, you mean? I used to work at some fancy places, but I’m getting kind of old for it. I figured here at least I can still earn for a while, put away a few more coins before I’m done.”
It hadn’t occurred to Aric that whores might plan for the future. “And then what?”
“Then I’m going to go home to Racinas and build myself a house. Maybe find a wife and have a few kids. Farm a little plot of land.”
“I know someone whose family’s from Racinas.”
Petrus shrugged. “It’s not such a wonderful place. Boring. Tellomer’s a lot more exciting. All Racinas has to boast about is fertile land, a lot of sheep, and the Vale of the Gods. But it’s my home.”
“The what?”
“Vale of the Gods. Sacred place with very fancy magics, blah, blah, blah. It’s a sort of tourist attraction for the mystically inclined. Now me, I’ve always been more about the pleasures of the flesh.” He winked and then wiggled his hips slightly. “C’mon, stallion. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Aric snorted a laugh and unfastened his trouser button. He’d become very adept at it despite his lost hand. He let his trousers fall to his knees and then pushed his breechclout down as well. Petrus whistled. “Good gods. The rumor was no exaggeration.”