The tall woman, a forest no longer, prowled among trees that the audience only saw in their mind’s eye. Her movements were sensual and catlike, but they also conveyed a masculine menace. Veraine was forced to admire her skill, though half his mind was more concerned with Vandi’s talents.
‘He sees Goppi asleep.’ This comment was unnecessary, as with lightning speed the tiger-dancer turned from pacing the floor to looming over the supine form of the sleeping girl. She fell on her, breast to breast, catching her weight at the last moment on toe-tips and hands. Goppi’s eyes shot open in an agony of fear. The tiger-spirit bared her teeth.
Goppi convulsed, and in a single movement had slid from under her assailant and was lunging for the edge of the circle. But she did not reach it. A supernaturally strong hand seized her and pulled her back, bringing the two dancers into a clasp. The tiger gripped her fragile garment at the throat and ripped it from her, leaving her naked to the avid view of the audience. The pieces of torn silk fell to the floor. Still Goppi was not prepared to submit without a struggle and she fled again, and once again the tiger leaped and seized her. The two dancers began an extraordinary interplay that was partly dance and partly an undisguised display of sex. Every time the tiger-dancer had the other woman in her arms she pressed up against her, crushing her victim’s round arse against her groin, thrusting against her thighs, mouthing her breasts. Goppi fought, but her strength was insufficient to resist her bestial attacker. The tiger bit her throat and squeezed her breasts and groped with inhibited directness between her thighs, while Goppi twisted and shook and mimed her distress. Eventually the tiger flung the naked girl flat upon the carpet and straddled her, pinning her wrists beside her head. Goppi arched her back, but this only brought her unprotected nipples up to the tiger’s cruel lips. Goppi gasped and grew still.
Without releasing her, the tiger bent and nuzzled her body, then began to lick the whole length of her torso. Her rough tongue left glistening trails on the abused flesh. The tiger’s arse twisted in the air as if her tail was lashing. Then the music and singing stopped, all but the drum, and the beat of that drum carried on as the tiger-dancer spread her victim’s thighs, lowered herself between them and began to thrust. It was a parody of ravishment, the tiger’s penis invisible and non-existent, but the drumbeat pounded on and the tiger’s arse flexed and clenched, and if there was a slack cock in the audience Veraine could not believe it belonged to any man who was not a eunuch. Vandi’s hand gripped his own shaft like she was trying to hold it down.
The drumbeats built to a crescendo, the tiger-spirit threw back its head and spasmed, and suddenly Goppi cried out. In the wake of her cry there was silence. For a moment the tableau was frozen, then the tiger dancer bowed her head, rose up and slunk away, hips rolling in feline contentment. There was a smattering of applause, but most of the men were too wrapped up in themselves to praise the performers.
Veraine glanced sideways and saw that Rumayn was sat very still, a look of terrible concentration on his face. Veraine was instantly certain that under the rumple of silk skirts, the Irolian had managed to slip his cock up the wet hole of the girl in his lap. But now she stopped wriggling, and the immobility must have been an agonising strain. Veraine’s own member felt like a lead cosh. He looked back at the stage. Goppi had not moved.
Slowly it dawned on the audience that there was something wrong. The Goppi-dancer still lay with her legs splayed, her thighs slightly raised. Veraine was close enough to see not just the sheen of sweat on her belly and the flush of blood in her cheeks, but also the wetness coating her thighs. Her breasts were heaving and they looked swollen. Her eyes were half-lidded, as if in pain. It was not pain. Helplessly, her hands slid over her hips to her groin.
‘Somebody put the girl out of her misery,’ Sron called. He spoke in Irolian and it was doubtful anyone understood a word, but the gist was obvious and several other men made similar suggestions. The Goppi-dancer, her sopping cunt spread wide for anyone to see, pressed down on her mons and gave a little moan.
The other dancer stepped back into the arena, looking around hesitantly. Masculine cries of encouragement greeted her. She looked down at her erstwhile victim with a strange expression on her face, then turned away. Swiftly she crossed to the musicians, snatched the drumstick from its owner’s hand and returned to kneel over the Goppi-dancer – whose eyes at last focused. The tall woman reached in with the stick and ploughed Goppi’s wet furrow from top to bottom, bringing it out shiny with sex-juices. Goppi gasped and bucked her hips, and did it again when the tiger-dancer slipped the wooden stem in and stirred her cauldron like a boiling pot. Something was certainly boiling.
Next she took the stick, nine inches long and polished smooth with loving use, and fed it into Goppi’s mouth. The small woman opened her throat and took right it to the back, while every man in the room felt his cock jump with jealousy. Then she brushed it down over the girl’s lips and tapped it on her breastbone, as if softly beating a drum. The real drummer, forgotten in his corner, patted out a heartbeat on his hourglass-shaped damaru in time to the beat. Slowly she worked her way down the girl’s supine body in time to the drummer’s fingers, from breastbone to belly and navel and pubis. There she stayed, beating out an insistent and quickening pulse. The Goppi-dancer jerked and spread and thrashed, but it was as if she were being nailed to the floor by that drumstick striking her barely concealed clitoris. She pressed the soles of her feet together, thrust her pelvis up and came with a shuddering cry.
This time, the applause was loud and enthusiastic. The Goppi-dancer had to be helped off the stage by her partner.
‘You liked that,’ Vandi observed, her hand squeezing Veraine’s tumescent length. ‘Do you want to take me somewhere private?’
Veraine had to clear his throat before he could speak. ‘I want you to find me Jilaya.’
A little surprised, Vandi released him and left the couch. Veraine tried to collect his wits and ignore the fumbling going on at his left, where Rumayn was exploring the depths of frustration.
Vandi returned in a short time with her mistress, and Jilaya kneeled down to come face to face with him. Her expression was polite but cool. ‘Can I help you, General Veraine? Do you require a private room with Vandi?’
‘I want a room,’ he said in a low voice. ‘But I want you to go with me.’
A flicker of surprise showed in her eyes, but her lips stretched in only the tiniest of cold smiles. ‘I own this house,’ she said, ‘I don’t work the floor. I retired a long time ago.’
‘Well, that’s what I want,’ he said reasonably. ‘How much does Vandi cost?’
‘A gold sunwheel, unless you’re going to leave bruises. That will cost you a lot more.’
‘I will pay you seven,’ he offered. ‘No bruises.’
She said nothing, but after staring hard at him for a moment she stood and turned and with the smallest flick of her wrist indicated that he should follow her. He picked up his sword and walked out of the room without a glance at Vandi.
Jilaya led him down a long corridor with many doors opening off it, then up a short flight of stairs at the end. She paused outside the door there. ‘I’d like to see your money first,’ she said. ‘It’s a rule of the house, I’m afraid.’
He opened his pouch and laid out seven small gold coins in her hand. She smiled and opened the door for him. The room within was no working room, but a beautifully furnished bedchamber. The walls were painted with huge sprays of flowers and, to judge from the several large items of wooden furniture present, all inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a large amount of money had been spent on the contents. ‘My room,’ Jilaya said.
Veraine glanced around. Jilaya obviously was fond of fur; the whole floor was covered in thick pelts rather than the more usual carpets. ‘You’ve done well for yourself,’ he observed.
She smiled. ‘I worked hard for it. And I came into some money.’ A small boy, probably only seven years old, was curled up asleep at the foot of the bed
. Jilaya clapped her hands sharply and he woke up with a start. ‘Leave us,’ she ordered. The boy fled. She closed the door behind him and fixed her guest with an appraising look. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, why did you want me?’
‘You remind me of a dream I had.’
This seemed to amuse her. ‘Different. Would you like some wine, General?’
‘No.’
She nodded acknowledgement and reached up to loosen her dress.
‘Turn round,’ he said softly. She raised an eyebrow but obeyed, turning her back on him as she removed her sash and tugged her dress down over her arms. He watched her brown shoulders come into view, then he stretched out a hand and tugged the silk scarf from her head. As she dropped her dress on the floor he stroked the length of her hair from crown to tip, twisting it softly round his fingers. It burned in his hand, the red of fresh-peeled chestnuts. Then he laid his hands on her waist. Her body was well kept for a woman of her age, and if her arse was a little broader than Vandi’s would have been, then it did not matter to Veraine.
‘Don’t move,’ he said. He stripped off his own clothes with soldierly efficiency, then pressed himself against her back, burying his face in her hair even as his hands reached for her heavy breasts. She smelled of patchouli oil, not honey, but the illusion was sufficient for the moment. His cock had quickly hardened again and he pressed it between her buttocks, searching for the heat and wetness of her cleft.
‘Like it up my arse?’ she said. ‘So it is true what they say about Irolian men.’
‘If it were true,’ he grinned, squeezing her breasts together, ‘then I wouldn’t be here at all, would I?’ But she was so short compared to him that without crouching he was finding it hard to angle anywhere lower than the small of her back. He grasped her firmly around the middle and lifted her feet right off the floor, her weight resting easily on him, so that he could tuck himself into the slot between her thighs. His cockhead skidded up and down in that slippery groove.
‘Wah!’ she gasped. ‘You take my breath away, General, but I’m sure we could find a more comfortable position. Perhaps on the bed.’
He slid inside her quickly, like a blade into a wound, then pulled out again as smoothly and set her carefully on the floor. The thick fur of a tiger was under his feet, the tiger’s pulse throbbing in his veins. She turned around and looked at him from under her dark lashes; her expression suggested she was pleasantly surprised.
‘Very nice,’ she complimented him. ‘Nice enough to eat. Shall I?’
Veraine spread his hands politely. ‘If you insist,’ he mocked. He took one step over to the timber-framed bed and set himself on the edge of the thick mattress. Jilaya lowered herself between his splayed thighs.
She was a masterful fellatrix. From the moment her lips brushed his swollen cockhead he felt himself enraptured, captivated by the near unbearable pleasure she was able to wring from every nerve in his skin. She tickled and caressed and probed with lips and tongue-tip, then took his length right down her throat and held him imprisoned there. Her mouth was like hot velvet, rough and then smooth in turns, demanding then gentle. She teased, and then she punished. Where her mouth could not reach because it was busy elsewhere, there she sent her fingertips stroking and tormenting. In moments she had roused him to an apex of desire, then her grip would clamp around his root and she would curb him in tightly, forcing him to back down; only then he would realise that this was no peak of pleasure, but a plateau on the slope of some sky-piercing mountain which she was forcing him to ascend stage by stage. She made him sweat and she made him keen with frustration. He had never experienced a mouth as muscular and capacious and clever as hers. It was a vampire’s mouth, draining the world dry of its reality until there was nothing tinder the sun but that rapacious orifice.
Veraine felt himself grow deaf and blind to everything else, and he did not care. In a moment of pause he caught up handfuls of her hair and spread the glowing locks over his thighs. Her head rose and fell on his turgid member. His fantasy was solidifying about him. He tried to imagine it was the Malia Shai’s face he glimpsed sucking and nuzzling, her full lips swollen and dark around the pillar of his flesh. The superimposition was surprisingly easy; perhaps only because Jilaya had the same skin tone, perhaps because of some angle of her brows or flash of her eyes that brought to mind the goddess he wanted. Veraine could picture that cool, passionless avatar flushed and straining as she nursed upon his cock. His balls were filled to bursting. He fell back upon the bed, white lightning building from his loins up his spine.
Jilaya paused and pulled her mouth from him. Her cruelty made him gasp, and suddenly cool air rushed into his empty lungs. In a moment she was straddling him, her body dipping to meet his, but his head had cleared somewhat as she let go and he was not helpless any more. ‘Turn around,’ he told her, before her sex and his could meld.
She raised her eyebrows, letting the moment hang with great deliberation. But she swung around the other way and kneeled down over him with her back turned to his face. ‘You really are an arse man,’ he heard her observe.
He was not going to argue with her. Her backside was not something he wanted to deny anyway. As it slid up and down, her buttocks squashing on his stomach then rising just clear of him, he found the diminution in sensation more than compensated for by the view she offered him. He reached down and laid his hands on her hips and cheeks. She was hardly Jilaya at all to him. All he could see was a tumble of red-brown waves that came down from her head to the mid-point of her spine, the swell of her hips and arse from that point a perfect flow of curves. He traced the small bumps of her lower vertebrae with one finger, then pushed her forward slightly and spread her cheeks with his palms. Looking down the length of his body he could see, framed by her thighs, his cock sliding into her wet sex, her stretched labia, the wetness of her curls, the little brown bud of her arsehole pouting at him. He teased that hole with his thumb and was rewarded by feeling her quiver. His cock went in and out of her with the implacability of a boulder cleaving the torrent of a river. He would not let the river sweep him away.
He ran his fingers through her hair. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said, as he had in the dream. He was talking to the woman in his head, and did not particularly mean Jilaya to hear.
She swivelled her hips, breaking the rhythm of her ride with deliberate malice. ‘You’ve got a thing about my hair, haven’t you?’ she grunted.
‘It’s a rare colour,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t you like it?’ He was deliberately prolonging the chase now, savouring the sensations and the scene before him. And he was not going to let her choose the moment.
‘They say,’ Jilaya replied, reaching down between her own thighs and stroking his tight bollocks, ‘that it means your mother was a slut who showed her arse to the sun.’
Veraine smiled slowly. ‘So what about your children?’ he asked. ‘Did they get it from you?’
Her rhythm faltered slightly. ‘My eldest daughter did,’ she said.
‘Does she work here?’ For a moment he entertained himself with the thought of having the daughter next, after he had finished with Jilaya. Then he felt her spine stiffen under his hands. She stopped riding him.
‘What’s up?’ he said to her back. His thumb pressed against her arsehole.
‘I lost her when she was a baby.’
‘Lost her?’
‘She died.’ Jilaya thrust down on him and clenched her inner muscles with the resignation of the professional.
‘Right.’ His imagination was running out of control, and he was so drunk on his own pleasure that he did not guard his tongue. ‘Are you sure you didn’t sell her to the temple? I bet they’d have paid you enough to buy a place of your own. Like this.’
She moved fast, but his reactions were faster. She was off his cock and in mid-air but he caught her round the waist and impaled her again, his teeth bared against her ear. ‘I haven’t finished yet,’ he admonished. She swung her elbow back to jab him and he rolled
her easily over, dropping her face down on the bed and following her weight with his own. For a few moments she braced her arms under her and tried to push against him, but he was far too heavy and it was like trying to fight a rock. He spread her cheeks and in three or four hard thrusts he took himself to the edge of orgasm and over, spending his seed in her quim as if he were hurling some weapon.
Slowly he came back to himself, his own breath ringing loud in his ears. Jilaya lay under him like a log. Even when he rolled away from her she did not move. He raked his nails across the flushed skin on his chest and stared at the roof.
Under the buzz of his satisfaction he felt guilt prick at him, like a thorn in the sole. He should not have baited her about her children, he thought; it was a cruel thing to do to any woman, and an unworthy one. He turned his head to look at her, groping towards an apology. Then she rolled on to her back and he saw her upturned face, blank as a mask. It was a familiar face. He saw her, and his stomach turned over.
Jilaya sat up without a word and slowly put her clothes on. Veraine felt like there was a stake through his guts, pinning him to the bed. When she had finished she looked at him for the first time. ‘Let yourself out, General,’ she said. Her voice was flat, without any trace of emotion. ‘You’re not welcome in the House of Jilaya. Don’t come back.’
5 The Slave
There were no fish left in the tank now. It did not stop Veraine staring into the water, but it was not fish he was looking for. He often sat, as now, in the garden courtyard between the Inner and Outer Temples. He liked it because it was almost always deserted, and because it was cool in the daytime. He liked the trees and bushes that gave it an air of peace and ease a thousand miles removed from the harsh desert and harsher city around it. And he liked the pool, because he could parade the pictures in his mind’s eye across its milky green depths.
At this moment he was supposed to be working, but those pictures kept interrupting. He had intended to allocate work details, apportioning men between building duties and foraging, training and maintenance, but the wax tablet rested idly in his fingers as he sat on the pool’s edge. Messengers had ridden in from the east, bringing the intelligence of the day. The bridge over the Amal Bhad had been severed. No more pilgrims would be arriving, and no further supplies or military aid. They were cut off from the Eternal Empire.
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