He opened the slash of his robe and forced her hand inside. He must have freed his member from his breeches and hose as he walked up the stairs to confront her, she realized. It was bare and stiffly erect, as magnificent as a lance raised aloft. She wrapped her fingers around its hot, familiar length.
“Suck it,” he whispered in her ear. “Kneel and suck it, my beloved strumpet. My beautiful whore.”
The words made her knees turn to water. She slid to the floor, looking up at him beseechingly. His palm-print burned on her left cheek. “Here?” she said. “Before the Holy Virgin?”
His gaze did not leave her face. It was weighted with so much hunger that it could not rise from her to the statue on the altar behind. “Here,” he ordered. “Now. Do you think your sins hidden from her eyes when we fuck elsewhere? Pigsty or church, it makes no odds to such shameless lechery.”
He was right. She had listened to the Holy Word and knelt to receive the Host in this very chapel, picturing all the while Lancelot’s hands mauling her pale breasts, or his cock plunging into her sex—or his mouth arising from between her open thighs, bruised and glistening with her juices, his eyelids heavy. The more she’d tried to stop those wild imaginings, the more they’d haunted her, more vivid than any vision of Heaven or Hell the priest had tried to invoke. Father Aldous’ words had not been able to compete with her memories. She’d wanted Lancelot too much—hoped and prayed and wept only for his return.
Now he was here, his cock inches from her face; a thick, musky-scented pillar flushed darker than the veined and weathered hand he gripped it with. With the other hand, he guided her head to him. Those most sinful prayers of hers were answered. His heavy balls, usually well-defined in their loose pouch, were gathered now into a single corrugated clench, bulging with intent. She kissed it, feeling the tickle of wild hairs upon her lips and cheeks. She kissed the base of his shaft and felt it twitch with joy. Then she laid on kiss after kiss, ascending his length, each one a declaration of love for his heat and his hardness and his strength. By the time she reached the helm of his cock it was slick with an exuded oil like the Holy Chrism. She wet her lips upon it and felt the burn. One last, passionate, sucking kiss upon that warrior’s helmet—and then she could resist no longer, and she engulfed him in her mouth, drawing him deep. She was so hungry for that bulk, that taste; now she swallowed him like she could eat him up and keep him inside her forever.
Lancelot made a deep and bestial groan, one that sounded like it had been drawn from his innermost being. His cock butted the back of her mouth and she adjusted her angle, pushing him flatter, straightening her throat. Sucking him deeper in, right down. “That,” he gasped, wrapping his big hands about her elaborate golden braids. “That’s what no virgin can do. Oh Christ have mercy. You are magnificent.”
He’d taught her how to do that—or she’d learned herself, under his insistent tutelage—how to take him in her throat without gagging or resistance. Now that sensation itself was almost enough to send them both into crisis. Cut off from air and light, Guinevere lost all thought too; everything but the hunger that made her swallow deeper, deeper, deeper.
“Ah!” He pulled out, like drawing a sword from a mortal wound. Trails of thick wet hung between them, connecting turgid cock and open lips. Guinevere gasped for breath, wiping at tears and spit. She was still dizzy and unfocused as he pulled her to her feet, backed her up, lifted her, and dropped her to sit upon a hard surface. It was the stone slab of the chapel altar itself, she realized with a lurch.
“We cannot!” she gasped.
“Cannot? Can. Will.” Lancelot rucked up her long skirts and pushed her thighs up and apart. There was no chivalry, no delicacy. They had not that luxury. His fingers found the slippery well-head of her sex and pushed within, gauging her readiness from the ease with which he entered, and the eagerness of her bitten-off cry. She had to brace her hands on the cold stone as he guided his cock to that target and rammed inside her.
This was the consummation. This was the moment of transfiguration. She wrapped her legs about his hips as he began to thrust.
“I would fuck you before the Holy Virgin,” Lancelot grunted, as he piled on stroke after stroke. “Before all the Hosts of Heaven. I’d fuck you on the Round Table, in front of your husband and all his Knights.” He looked down into her slack-jawed face, seeing the roll and flutter of her eyes. “And I’d make you climax in front of them all, my pretty whore. Just … like … that.”
He did.
In the midst of her throes she felt him withdraw. He never spent inside her. He did not dare. She heard his stifled breath and she grabbed hold of him and pulled herself up to brace her head against his breastbone. She looked down between them in time to see him direct his cock and shoot his seed against the insides of her skirts, white pennons against the saffron-dyed fabric.
Reaching, Guinevere caught the last of his seed upon her fingers, cleaning it off his twitching cock.
“My Guinevere,” he whispered, arms about her.
She licked it from her hand: wanting the taste, wanting him inside her. She wanted him so much that, even in the rush and glow of her climax, her heart felt like it was breaking.
♦♦♦
Arthur came to her room that night. He visited her three times a week, on the same days each time—unless it was a high holy day. Not often enough to look uxorious, not seldom enough to be accused of neglect.
Guinevere watched from the bed as he disrobed. He was a lot older than her, of course—there was gray in his brown hair and his close-cropped beard now, and the first brushing of silver upon his chest. But he was still a handsome man. In the days before Lancelot, she’d thought him the fairest-looking man at Camelot, with those clear eyes the color of gull’s back, rimmed by curiously dark lashes that made his stare more intense than any other’s. Maybe that was why he drew men to him so: that stare, that look. He’d been a warrior in the early days, but his prowess in the council chamber was far greater than that on the field. He had a way of making people listen to him—and more than that, to listen to sense. A way of making men think with their heads, not their bollocks.
When they first married, she’d been deliriously happy, and very much in love.
Now … now, he was still handsome. Even as she sat there with the stains of her lover newly-washed from her thighs, she still felt that admiration and pride as she watched her husband. She still loved him, too. How could she not? Arthur was gentle and attentive and fond. He would put an arm about her warmly, or kiss her, even in public. He asked her opinion and listened to her answers. And he was the greatest king Britain had ever known—just and moderate, wise and peaceful. The land prospered. Hot-headed young nobles like Sir Mordred might chafe against his disinclination to make war, but who listened to them any more?
“Good even, my wife,” he said with a tender smile as he came to the bed.
His only fault—if it was his fault, and not hers—was that in seven years of marriage he had sired no heir. But the people had faith. God would not forever deny that blessing to a king so devoted to the Good.
Only Guinevere knew the truth: that a man without a little sin is not man enough. Arthur was too perfect. There was no lust in his loins when he looked at her, or at any woman. Three times a week he came to her and did his marital duty, but though his body obeyed his commands, his soul was too chaste. There was no fire, no desire, in his embraces. And so he had never kindled the spark of life in her womb, however much they might both wish it.
“Welcome, husband,” she said, making room for him beside her. She’d sent her ladies-in-waiting away, as she did every night. She was ashamed to think of the women realizing how brief and passionless were their couplings.
It had confused her, at first, and it remained a torment. She would have loved for him to rut upon her as Lancelot did, all sweat and savage need. She would have wept for joy to carry his child. But she dare
d not show her disappointment, not to Arthur. She couldn’t even let him know she realized there was anything missing. Why should she hurt his feelings? Her husband did not deserve condemnation; if anyone did, it was her.
Arthur’s cock was semi-erect as he stretched out beside her, but she knew by now this wasn’t from eagerness, but from him working himself hard before entering her chamber. If it were not taken care of quickly, the shine would go off the helmet he had buffed so assiduously.
“Would you like me to …?” she suggested.
“Please.”
Going down on elbows and knees at his side, she took his length in her mouth. She wished it were Lancelot’s cock—that always responded to such administrations with brutish enthusiasm.
Thinking about Lancelot always helped her slurp and suck with vigor. She remembered again their tryst in the chapel, and it brought a bloom of warmth to her lower belly. She pictured his great proud weapon presented in her face, the way it strained and leered at her as if it had a will of its own, like some demonic serpent. She remembered the way he plopped her on the holy altar and stuck his cock in, as if it were no more than a bar table in a squalid inn somewhere, and she no more than a farthing whore not even worth the time to take to his bed. The blasphemy made her flush all over. She would like to be his favorite whore—no, not a whore, for that would mean she would have to spread her legs for other men, and she wouldn’t like that, would she? His doxy then; some lower-class girl he’d take to his bed for as long as it amused him, as other knights did. If she were not Queen, she would be able to sleep with him every night. She could sit on his knee in the Great Hall and serve him wine and eat from his trencher, and he’d grope her tits and slap her ass in front of all the other men and give her a shove in the direction of the courtyard, following her out with a swagger as they laughed and urged him on.
“What do you think about when you do that?” asked Arthur.
Guinevere surfaced abruptly, shocked. Arthur never spoke to her while they were in congress. “Your pleasure, lord,” she answered.
“Is it the thought of my pleasure that does this,” he said, placing his one finger in the open split of her sex and running it over her clit. “Or something else?”
She was sopping wet, and the touch on her clit, however accidental, was like the ember that ignites the phoenix fire.
“Sir Lancelot,” she said, caught off guard. Her eyes rounded in sudden horror. She peered up toward Arthur, trying to judge his expression. “I mean,” she stammered, “his tale of the rescue of that maiden from the great wyrm. I would like to be a maiden, my lord, bound like that to a stake. I would like you to ride up on your charger, all in your armor, and fight the beast for my sake, and rescue me from dire peril.”
Abruptly, Arthur sat up. Guinevere caught a glimpse of his cock and realized, confused, that it was no longer couchant but rampant, before he turned her with a jerk of his head and a grasp of her hips into her usual position for sex: on hands and knees. He was behind her in a moment, kneeling up, boring his stiff length into a hole that was only too wet and willing to receive it. He felt, to her, bigger than he’d ever been before. The thrust of his shaft was pure pleasure. She realized she was so aroused that if only she were allowed to reach between her own legs and play with the pearl that nested in the oyster there, she would easily be able to climax.
But she couldn’t do that. It would betray a lack of innocence, a sophistication of technique, that she couldn’t possibly admit to.
So Guinevere dug her fingernails into the sheet and remembered the first time she and Lancelot had sinned together—the single memory that was sure to inflame her more than any other. She had been several years into her lukewarm marriage when Lancelot joined the Round Table, journeying to Camelot from his domain over the sea. That fateful day, she had been sitting with him in the rose garden, in a small pavilion among the blooms, and they’d been playing chess—a game he’d taught the Court and which had swept the nobility. A ferocious downpour had sent her ladies-in-waiting running for cover, terrified for their silken dresses, but the two of them had remained in their precarious shelter, cut off from the castle by a curtain of pouring rain.
Guinevere had already been aware of her strong attraction to the man who had claimed the honor of being Queen’s Champion, having bested every other Knight of the Table at the jousting lists. She’d been both absorbed by the chess game and giddy with pleasure. It hadn’t mattered to her that he’d been much the stronger player. In fact she liked that. They’d played three games, wagering small sums of gold to sharpen the interest, and she’d only won the first time because he let her. His fingertips had brushed hers on a number of occasions and she had been hard-put not to giggle.
Then he’d announced, “Knight takes Queen. Mate.” He’d looked her in the face, and at that moment they had both known. Heat had flashed through her body like a lightning strike. She’d reached out to lay her king over in surrender, but her hand had shaken so wildly she did not dare touch the board. He’d seen that too. Suddenly, without a word, she was aware of the danger she was in.
She’d sprung to her feet and backed off, knocking over her stool like a child in a panic. He’d followed, instantly, closing on her as she backed up against a wooden pillar. Rain struck the back of her neck but she’d barely felt it. He’d loomed over her, his eyes holding hers, his intention implacable. But his voice had been pitched soft.
“I win again,” he’d said. “You owe me a forfeit, my queen.”
She’d nodded, running the tip of her tongue across her lip in a frantic effort to wet it so she might speak. She could feel her voice all bundled up into a croaky snarl in her breast.
“Lift your skirts. Show me.”
Maybe he’d meant only as far as the knees—that would have been shameful enough, but it hadn’t occurred to Guinevere until later that there might have been some escape. She’d bunched up the floor-length front of her dress, hand over hand, revealing the secret path of her thighs, all the way to her sex. He’d glanced down briefly, no change of expression visible on his face, then pinned her gaze again.
“Open them.”
She’d obeyed. She hadn’t questioned the necessity. His face was so close to hers that she’d been sure he was going to kiss her. But he’d put his hand down between her slightly parted thighs, and cupped the dark gold nest of her sex in his palm, running his fingertips into her cleft. He’d found her as wet as if she’d been caught in the cloudburst.
She’d nearly died of the pleasure and the terror of that touch.
All he’d done was stroke her. Stroke her soft and needy sex, caress her clit with one moistened, expert fingertip, back and forth, utterly patient, while his face hovered over hers watching every nuance of expression. She’d arched her shoulders against the wet post and gasped and quivered and shaken, completely in his power, until she spent with a gush and a helpless cry and a sudden rush of tears. It was the first time a man had ever brought her to climax.
And he hadn’t kissed her. Not that time.
But from that moment on, she’d known she was his to do with whatever he desired. The more shameful, the better.
On hands and knees in the royal marital bed, her husband holding her hips and thrusting into her from behind, Guinevere relived her adulteries until she blossomed, opening up, a shudder of pleasure running through her from head to toe. Arthur kept it up for a few more strokes, then withdrew from her and lay down, turning his back as he rolled into sleep.
That was her secret. Nine times out of ten, her husband didn’t even spend when he swived her.
Lying next to him, Guinevere dreamed that night that she was knight in a tournament joust. As she charged down the lists, her lance set, she saw her opponent bearing down upon her on a huge stallion. His shield bore Lancelot’s coat of arms and, as she recognized that, the tip of his lance struck her straight beneath the ribs and ran her throu
gh. The spasms of orgasm woke her, shaking and sweating, and she lay for a long time next to her oblivious King, her face wet with tears.
♦♦♦
“Are you still angry about the freckled wench?” The hawk on Lancelot’s wrist flapped its wings suddenly, restless despite its hood, and Guinevere’s palfrey caught the movement and made a nervous sidestep. With her own wrist occupied by a falcon, it took her a moment to bring her steed under control and calm it. At least this gave her an excuse not to dignify his question with a response. She turned her horse away, arching her neck. There were dozens of people around them in this hawking party, but no one close enough to overhear, so long as they were careful.
Lancelot was not put off. Wheeling his own horse in a circle, he cut her off and passed back alongside her to speak under his breath. “Let me show you exactly what happened, my Queen. They tied her to a stake, naked, to await the wyrm. Her hands over her head. That’s how I’ll expect to find you tonight, when I come to your room. After they ring Compline.”
She widened her eyes at him in what was close to a glare, before she remembered not to draw attention. Lancelot smirked.
“What, my Queen? It’s not the King’s night tonight, is it?”
She bit her lip, and for a moment almost told him that he could not come to her room, that it wasn’t safe. But he’d done it before. The man was ridiculously bold, and telling him wouldn’t prevent it. It was simply up to her to make sure that they weren’t witnessed.
A pulse beat low down in her belly, and she was acutely aware of the press of the padded saddle against her sex. With a slight dip of her chin she acknowledged his instructions. Then she rode away toward the King.
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