Unfettered III

by Shawn Speakman (ed)

  “Yes, Father,” I answered.

  I spoke too eagerly. I realized as much when my father frowned. No face could match Marcus Crassus’s for skill at expressing disapproval. “I see that my words are just words to you. And here I’d told these men that you esteemed your father above all other men and would listen with reverence.”

  “We told you he would listen with only half a mind,” one of the senators said.

  “It is that way for all of us,” another man added. “Just have him take the blood.”

  My father bowed his head and beckoned the priestess forward with his fingers. She came, moving with the chaste reverence Vestals always displayed. Her face was as pretty as I’d thought. Soft-edged, large brown eyes and a bloom of lips that I couldn’t help admire, but her gaze was candid in a way I wouldn’t have expected. She looked at me like a man would. Like someone that could take my measure and judge me.

  She asked, “Are you worthy of my blood?”

  For a moment, I thought she was offering me her virginity. But there was nothing like that sort of submission in her eyes. “I hope that I am, priestess.”

  She made a fist and twisted her right wrist around, showing it to me. Her other hand came up between us. Her two smaller fingers were curled; the two longer ones straight. A cap ring tipped the end of one. It narrowed to a sharp, barbed point. She placed the tip of the barb on her wrist and sliced it across her flesh. For a moment, nothing happened. And then a line of crimson appeared. It beaded at the center of the slash and began to flow. The priestess held the bloody wrist out. “Drink.”

  I drew back a step, horrified at how fast the blood pulsed from the wound and splashed to the floor.

  My father whispered sharply, “Do as she says.”

  I started to protest, but the priestess snapped out her undamaged hand and grabbed me by the neck. I felt the point of the finger ring press against my skin. I tried to twist away, but the grip of the girl’s arm was like iron. “Drink.” She slammed her bleeding wrist against my lips.

  For a few moments, writhing in the priestess’s grip, I was terrified by her strength. Blood found its way into my mouth. It coated my teeth. It poured past them onto my tongue. I gagged, choking on the warm, metallic liquid. My lungs burned and my head began to swim. The world fogged around me as I moved toward unconsciousness. Before I fell into it, my throat opened. I began to drink. Blood. It was liquid, but swallowing it was like gasping for air after being under water, luxurious and complex like no wine had ever been. I hung, limp in the priestess’s grip, drinking it in and breathing through my nose. I had never sucked at life so fervently. Breathing and drinking. Drinking and breathing. I could barely tell the two actions apart.

  I lost sensibility. When I regained myself, I had crumpled to my knees. At some point the priestess and the others had departed. My father had me disrobe. He draped clean garments over me, a simple night tunic. He had me wash my face and hands in a basin of water, and made me rinse the blood from my mouth. He pushed my body through these motions, a closer intimacy than we had ever shared.

  “You did not comport yourself well, Publius. What matters is that it’s done. You’ve got the blood in you. You won’t feel the change immediately, but it will come soon. The first yearning comes fast.”

  I almost asked what yearning he meant. But didn’t I already know? Hadn’t that been what I’d just felt and given in to? “No,” I said. “I won’t drink like that again.”

  “When the hunger is upon you, you will feed it. Come.”

  I trudged behind him, sullen, feeling more like a boy than I had before becoming a man. I was repelled by myself, but at the same time the salt taste that lingered in my mouth made me yearn for more. My belly, full of a virgin’s blood, felt strangely like the contented center of my being. How much had I drunk? And what of the priestess? I felt so full of her blood that I couldn’t imagine she had any left inside her. My front teeth ached, no doubt from the violence the priestess did me. How was it possible that she was so strong? My father had said that others were going through the same thing, but I couldn’t believe that. Whatever had happened was a humiliation all my own. I was sure I would never talk about it with my friends or anybody else. Perhaps I could tell Thana. She was just a slave, after all. Her judgement of me didn’t matter. Having formed the thought, I quickened my pace to catch up with my father.

  Stepping into my room and coming around from the screen of my father’s broad shoulders, I at first didn’t understand what I saw. A naked girl hung from a chain in the center of my room. The chain had been run through a hook in the ceiling. It pulled her arms taut above her head. Her toes just barely touched the floor.

  Thana. I rushed to her, trying to lift her up to take the strain off her wrists, whispering her name to wake her. I cradled her head in my hands. Unconscious, her features had all the form of beauty but seemed strangely lifeless, unanimated.

  My father walked up beside me. “You should know by now that nothing that happens in my house escapes my notice. I know you like this girl. There is reason to, as I know well.” He pinched her chin and turned her face to the light. He made a sound low in his throat. The touch of his finger on her chin and that sound told me everything I needed to know. Instantly, I hated him. I pushed him away. He allowed it. “You’ve become too attached to her. That ends today, on the very day you become a nobilis. Three days hence, after you’ve done with her and recovered, I will take you to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and you will make offerings to the god. Believe me, Son, you will worship him like you never have before.”

  I shouted for the slaves to help me.

  “They will not come,” Crassus said. “Publius, leave this girl to hang. When your hunger tells you what to do, obey it. She will feel nothing. She’s in the hold of a potion that will keep her until you are ready for her. You may rage, but I’m being more generous than I need to be. My father did not offer me my first in such a civilized manner.” He turned to leave.

  “But . . .” I stammered. “But what am I supposed to do with her? I won’t do it, but what?”

  Marcus Crassus did something very unusual for him. The edges of his lips rose. The creases of his face deepened. He smiled, his teeth looking particularly fearsome in the lamplight. He said, “When the yearning comes, you’ll know what to do.”

  As soon as I was alone, I got Thana free. I set a chair upon a chest. Standing on it, I could lift the chain enough to free it from the hook. She collapsed on the floor. I picked her up and carried her, chain dragging on the stones, to my bed. I laid her out and pulled a woolen blanket over her. I went to find a key to unlock the wrist cuffs. I got only as far as the door. It had been blocked from the outside. I banged on it, shoved it, kicked it, but it did no good.

  Back in bed with Thana, I lay next to her. I watched her sleeping face and stroked the light strands of her hair. I apologized for her treatment and promised that on the morrow we would leave for one of the country estates. My father couldn’t stop me now that I was a man. We would live unwatched and do as we wished and all of this would be forgotten. I would finish my education and begin to make a name for myself. If my father wouldn’t support me, I would build my own fortune. Marcus Crassus had done it. Why not Publius Crassus? Perhaps I would buy her—it would only take the right price—and free her someday. My mind was a tumult of schemes and plans. If I became a rebel—an outcast even—I wouldn’t have to live up to the impossible standard. In that, Thana might free me.

  I loved her all the more in the light of it. I adored the shape of her lips and flare of her nostrils. Her skin pulsed with life. It glowed like coals in a low fire, giving off heat without flame. I closed my eyes and touched the tip of my tongue to her naked shoulder. I would know her from any other woman simply from the touch of my tongue. Opening my eyes, I noticed the pulsing of the artery running up her neck. For the first time since I’d arrived in the room, lust stirred low in my abdomen. I climbed from the bed and sat down in a chair a little
distance away. I would not force myself upon her, not when she was asleep from some potion. I sat watching, the fingers of one hand feeling my front teeth. They throbbed dully. Strangely, I could feel the touch of my fingers on the enamel.

  A little later I was back in the bed again. I tugged the blanket down and studied the curves of her breasts. She mumbled and moved her head from one side to the other. I could hear her heartbeat. I could see the tremor of it in her soft flesh. I leaned down and pressed my ear against her chest. The heat of her brought my excitement back. That and the sensation that with each beat of her heart I could sense blood surging through her entire body, sliding down arteries, warm and full of life. I could feel the way it filled her. I understood the mechanics of her body like never before. I understood all of her, because I understood the beauty of the blood that gave her life. I had to be closer to it.

  That was why I lifted the blanket and slipped on top of her. She wouldn’t mind, I thought. I loved her, and she loved me too. She would wake and kiss me, and I would tell her of the things I’d decided. I wanted to be with her, that was all. I was sure she would want that as well. When this mad night is over, I thought, everything will be set right.

  It wasn’t.

  That was why, a few days after that night, I sat in the gardens waiting for Gaius Julius Caesar to arrive. My father had tried several times to speak to me. I’d railed against him every time. What happened was his fault, and I hated him for it, all the more for the smug manner in which he named my emotions as absurd, unmanly, and not suited for a nobilis. “You must get over this, and soon,” Marcus Crassus had said that morning, before leaving to survey an estate he’d just purchased near Casilinum.

  I sat stiff, the sun of midmorning turning my skin hot. Though I was some distance from the nearest slaves, I could sense them. The man that pruned the bushes down in the terrace below annoyed me, just by being there and by the fact that I knew he was there, though I couldn’t see him. It was as if I had a sense of perception that I’d not had before. Not sight, because I didn’t have to set eyes on them to know where they were. Not smell, for it wasn’t through my nose at all. Not sound either. Somehow, I sensed their movements through the heat of their bodies, and through the blood that gave them life.

  A voice beside my ear startled me. “I think you’ll find,” it said, “that only another nobilis will ever manage to sneak up on you from now on.”

  It was Julius, crouching just behind the bench I sat on. He grinned, an expression that on him always made him look like he’d just completed a sexual conquest and was pleased with himself. He mussed my hair. “How goes it with Little Monkey? I understand you’ve come into your blood and are a man now.”

  “Don’t call me that anymore,” I said.

  “Little Monkey? I’ve always called you . . .” Julius craned his head back and studied me. “All right. You’re a boy no more. Shall I call you by your full name from now on?”

  “Publius will do.”

  He pulled a face of exaggerated concern. “Publius, why do you look so glum?”

  Normally, his humor was infectious. Not today, though. There was too much on my mind. I needed to unburden myself. I couldn’t do that with my father, much to the man’s annoyance. With Julius it was different. Though a protégé of my father’s, he’d long been like an older brother to me. With him, it was possible to say the truth.

  “Something is wrong with me,” I said. “I did something horrible to Thana.”

  “I presume that’s the name of your slave girl.”

  “The way I took her . . . I didn’t intend to. It just happened. I wouldn’t have . . .”

  “Of course you wouldn’t have, Publius. You’re a kind lad. Too much so, I think.”

  “Kind? Julius, I forced myself on her. She wasn’t even awake at first, but I—”

  Julius knocked on my knee with the knuckles of one hand. “She was a slave. Awake or sleeping doesn’t really matter. Some girls are rather more engaging when asleep, actually.”

  “Stop making light of it!” I slid away, turned on the stone, and faced him. “They made me drink a priestess’s blood. She gripped me and made me do it.”

  “Vestals are surprisingly strong, aren’t they? Sometimes I think we’ve got it all wrong. We should give our women the blood and send them off to war like Amazons. Then we men could play at sport, eat and drink, and bugger slave girls. Or boys, for that matter.”

  I pressed on. “But afterward, with Thana. She awoke to my touch and was scared, at first, confused. I wanted her badly, like I’ve never wanted anything or anyone. She gave in and joined me, and when I was about to have my pleasure I . . .”

  I knew the word that came next, but it seemed so feral and animal that I didn’t want to admit it. As I thrust inside her, working toward climax, I became more and more aware that my motions matched the rhythm of her pulse. I saw it in the artery of her neck, right there beneath my panting mouth. I kissed it, ran my lips over it, touched it with my tongue and felt the surge of blood and the glorious warmth of it. The two of us were completely in unison, even the beating of our hearts. I ran my tongue across my teeth and found them different than before. Still sore and sensitive, but also reshaped. There were two small, sharp protrusions that hadn’t been there before. They were hidden behind the screen of my other teeth. Noticing them for the first time, I knew what they were for. And, knowing, my orgasm began.

  “I bit into her neck,” I said.

  “Of course you did.” Julius crossed his hands on his lap as if he heard such confessions regularly enough that it bored him.

  “I mean really bit her, like an animal!” I said. “I sucked at her neck. These teeth . . .” I tried to show them, but they weren’t easy to see. I knew because I’d tried to find them in a hand mirror and had failed. “I don’t understand it. I hate now to think of what I did. She thrashed and screamed out, but I didn’t care. So long as I drank her blood my pleasure went on. It was like nothing else ever had or ever would matter more than that feeling.”

  “There is no pleasure to match it,” Julius said. “It rose with each swallow, didn’t it? And dipped with each pause. But it went on so long it seemed it would never stop. It was so complete that you were lost to anything but thirst and pleasure. It lasted so long that when it finally subsided, you were too overcome to regret the flagging of ecstasy. Have I got it right?”

  Miserable, I nodded that he did.

  “Then have heart, Publius.” Julius gripped me by the shoulder and spoke for the first time without any humor edging his words. “You experienced the same thing we all do on the night we become nobiles. There is nothing wrong with you. The blood of Jupiter is within you. It needs to be replenished. If you think fondly of this slave girl, then remember her fondly because she was your first.”

  “My first? I’ll never do that to another—”

  “Ah, but you will. Listen, you seem to be very slow in realizing that a great mystery has been solved. All your life, you’ve marveled at the things nobiles were capable of. Now, you are one. The blood of Jupiter has made you what we nobiles all are: the masters of the earth. You may have thought your father just talking hyperbole, but he wasn’t. Tell me, do you see things differently than you did before? Colors are brighter. Images sharper. Sometimes, when you are close to someone, it seems like you can see the blood flowing beneath their skin. Am I right?”

  I didn’t answer, though each thing was true.

  “You can sense living beings around you even when you can’t see them. You will find that you are faster than you ever were before. Stronger too. Next time you train you’ll be a greater warrior than any seasoned foot soldier. When I was a boy, I used to catch ill for no reason at all. A walk too long in the cold. A night spent away from my own home. I was weak. The most miserable years of my life were the ones just before I reached maturity. I despaired forwarding my family name. We’re patricians, but hardly distinguished ones. How was I—sickly and with a feeble constitution—going
to build our fortunes?” He smiled. “I see you may have had some of the same thoughts. Neither of us need to have feared.”

  “Why did my father not prepare me? Why didn’t he ask me if I even wanted this?”

  “That is the way it’s done. If you were told ahead of time, you might not believe. You might talk out of turn and reveal it to others. That’s something you must never do. You see now why you’ve been sworn to secrecy? If word of this spread to the populace . . . Or to foreign powers . . . All of us—Vestals and citizens—would be in grave danger, no matter our individual powers. We keep our secret to preserve our lives and our status. Once a boy becomes one of us, he shares the covenant. It’s done. There is no going back. That, Publius, is the Roman way. And believe me, you will find your life much improved. Crassus wanted me to say as much to you.”

  “For you to say the things he can’t be bothered to?”

  “Do you have to curdle every kindness?” I had a response to that, but Julius spoke over me. “Here is what you should know. You are still mortal, but you have powers beyond other men. You’ll grow into them. Enjoy it, but don’t grow too cocky. You have the blood of a god in your veins, but that does not make you a god. You may lose your head. You may take an arrow to the heart. Things like that will kill you just the same as any man. You may lose limbs and can die from such a thing like any man. But unlike any man, you can heal from grievous injuries. If you take blood from others, you recover quickly. You’ll be the match for any normal man, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to fear them. You still have the appetites you always had. Food and drink sustain you, but only blood strengthens you.”

  I stood and paced. Two maid slaves passed on the terrace above and entered the house. I could sense them in the room adjacent. It was faint, but even the stone didn’t stop me from knowing where they were. It was, I acknowledged, an incredible thing. I didn’t know yet if it was a gift I was willing to kill for. “Who are all these others that I’m supposed to drink from?”