The Henchmen of Zenda

by KJ Charles

  “But if he unseats him, will Michael have the throne?” I asked. “What happens if the Senate and people conclude that Flavia is red, and thus right?”

  “It’s unlikely. That might happen if Rudolf dies of his disgrace and Michael can be squarely and openly blamed for it, but I wouldn’t like to put a wager on her odds. No, I think this is Michael’s best hope. I’m merely kicking myself that I took his part openly. If I were still of Rudolf’s company, I could have ensured he drank exactly what was required.”

  “Why did you change sides?” I asked. “I heard you were the king’s drinking companion.”

  “For a while.” Hentzau tossed back a mouthful of wine. “He was a bore.”

  “Whereas Michael’s charm is irresistible,” I responded, perhaps unwisely. It was easy to forget that Hentzau and I were not companions, not on the same side.

  Hentzau gave that boyish, unrestrained laugh of his. “Quite. No, I merely felt life might be more interesting on this side of things. I was, I think, probably right. Are you going to pack all evening?”

  “Have you better ideas?”

  We stripped naked this time, Hentzau in his usual careless way, tossing clothes over my floor. He didn’t make any effort to build anticipation; perhaps he didn’t need to. He was as trim and taut unclothed as one might hope, finely muscled without bulk, well proportioned, with a youthful look that belied his experience and doubtless devastated men and women across Ruritania. I have never been a fool for youth, but Rupert Hentzau in his prime was a thing of joy, laughing and confident, angel-faced and devil-eyed, and I found myself hoping he would not cause any angry Elphberg to order his death, whether for treason or insolence.

  I undressed more slowly. I knew I looked well, for those who did not demand smooth youth; I was marked by scars and Indian sun, and Hentzau’s eyes were searching and appreciative as I took my time—coat, waistcoat, shirt, displaying myself to advantage. I should, I thought, teach him the virtues of patience and control. He would need them one day, if he lived long enough to age.

  I sat on my bed and extended a booted foot to him. He laughed, almost incredulously. “Please. Take off your own damned boots. And get on.”

  “Your problem is, you have a handsome face,” I told him. “If you didn’t, you’d have to learn to be a damned sight better at this.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Hentzau, Hentzau. If I had taken your boots off for you earlier, I could have had you writhing on the floor and begging me to do what I wished with you before I was halfway done with your prick.”

  He opened his mouth, briefly silenced, and came back with, “Then why didn’t you?”

  “Because I have patience, and finesse. Which you also lack.”

  “I’ve had no complaints,” he said indignantly.

  “I dare say you’re finished before anyone has time to voice them.”

  He choked. I went on before he could articulate what would doubtless be a strong rebuttal. “I like youthful confidence. We can fuck as you choose, pretty Rupert; you can take what you want and I’ll gladly oblige you. But sooner or later, I will teach you to give, and you’ll thank me.”

  “I prefer the part where you oblige me, old man.” Hentzau looked affronted, and aroused, and decidedly curious, and I wondered when the little fool might see the danger of his own arrogance. Bed was a safer place for that lesson than a duke’s table, and certainly better than a swordfight.

  Not that it was my job to save his neck, but he was lovely, and it would be a shame to see him spoiled.

  I let it go, pulling off my own boots and stripping bare without too much ceremony. I lay back, idly stroking myself, and he strode to the bed and sat over me, straddling my chest. His thighs were very strong, his prick mouthwatering.

  “When you say oblige me . . .” he began.

  “Anything you please.”

  As before, a flicker of uncertainty. I reached for him, grasping his prick in one hand, his firm arse in the other, and let my hands explore. Hentzau allowed that for a few moments then gave a grunt, thrusting into my hand indicatively.

  “On your back,” I suggested, and rolled him over to pleasure him with my mouth again. He groaned softly, then louder, thrusting into my throat, hands stroking my hair, and I worked him lightly but firmly for a few minutes before he tugged at my hair.

  “Mmm?”

  “A moment, a moment. I want . . .”

  I lifted my head away. “What?”

  Hentzau exhaled. “Can I be honest?”

  “I doubt it, but carry on.”

  He grinned briefly. “How can I put this? I’ve more skills with women than men. By quite some way. I haven’t done much more than handling, truth be told. You are in every way a more experienced swordsman than I.”

  I snorted. “I’m glad you admit it. What on earth did you do at school, if not fuck?”

  “I didn’t go to school. I had a tutor. And I have always preferred women to men, so I have always concentrated my energies there.”

  “But you’re desperate now for the lack of quim?” I suggested.

  “No, that’s not it at all. Let’s say my horizons have broadened with the years, but my experience has yet to catch up. Think of me as an explorer, a Columbus, gazing out over a New World.”

  “Preparatory to slaughtering all the natives?”

  “Shh.” He smiled, a rueful smile that mocked, for once, only himself. “Educate me, Jasper. I feel I have much to learn.”

  Oh, I educated him. I showed him how to suck a man, and put that clever mouth to good work; I took full liberty with his body, stroking and touching his skin, making him explore me in return till his fingers were confident and his mouth sure. I brought him to the edge of climax with hands and mouth till he whimpered for satisfaction, and told him he could have his completion only once he had brought me to mine, and the squirming eagerness with which he sucked me off showed that I had a bright pupil. I came in his mouth, and he coughed and swallowed and smiled at me, lips wet and shining, and I found myself wondering what it might be like to kiss them.

  I did not do that. I turned face down and had him rub himself off against me, braced over me and sliding his prick along the crease of my arse, feeling the tickle of hair against my neck when he bowed his head, and cursed Michael again that he was sending us off in all directions the next day for the sake of a poxy tin crown.

  Hentzau collapsed against me when he was spent, and I put an arm over him, rather than lie on it and numb the nerve.

  “You’re damned patient,” he said once he had his breath back. “I begin to understand what you mean about waiting.”

  “I feel sorry for your women.”

  “There is no need, I assure you. It’s only that— Well. I suppose I imagined men would want to do it differently, that’s all. Faster. Less attentively.”

  “Thrust, grunt, spend?”

  “Well. Yes.”

  “It has its place. But if one can take the time, why not?”

  “True. You don’t kiss,” he observed.

  “No.”

  “Or do you not kiss me?”

  “I don’t kiss.”

  “You know, that seems to me much of a piece with thrust, grunt, spend,” he said thoughtfully. “Affections are for women, that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t kiss because I don’t care to,” I said. “I fuck attentively, if that’s the word you want to use, because I do care to. You can find plenty of men who like to kiss, and I have no doubt many women who’d prefer not to. Don’t make assumptions; they get you killed.”

  “That seems a little harsh.”

  “I meant in a swordfight, but it probably applies to the bedroom too. I could tell you stories.”

  “I have no doubt. Do you fuck? I mean . . .” He made a gesture with his hands. I gave him a blank look. He repeated the gesture with extra movements, glowered at me, and said, “Buggery.”

  “Thank God, I thought you meant knitting. I do, yes. Either part
.”

  “But not tonight?”

  “When you want to fuck me, you can say so,” I told him. “And when I want to fuck you, you’ll know because I’ll have made you want it so much you’ll be pleading for it.”

  Hentzau laughed aloud, startled, but I rather thought intrigued. “And you call me arrogant.”

  “A swordsman should know his own skill.”

  “True enough. Ah God, was that the clock striking one?”

  “I fear so.”

  “Hell’s teeth. I must go to bed.” He rolled away and sat up, stretching, then rose and began to gather up his scattered clothes, making them into a bundle under his arm.

  “For God’s sake, dress,” I said as he headed for the door.

  “Why? There are no women in the Tower.”

  “There are several men, and you and I are not supposed to be fucking.”

  “Oh, pshaw, what is that to anyone? Do you think de Gautet cares?”

  “Michael cares.”

  “Be damned to him,” Hentzau said. Out of bed, his usual arrogance seemed to be restored at once. “He can give commands when he’s king.”

  “But—”

  “This isn’t England, Detchard. You won’t be flogged or hanged or whatever they do for fucking in that damned rain-soaked moralising land of yours. It’s not a crime here, neither of us has a reputation to lose, and Michael needs every man he can hold to him. Goodnight, sweet schoolmaster. It’s been a pleasure.”

  On which he walked out, arse-naked, carrying his clothes under his arm and his boots by the heels so as not to mar their leather with thumbprints. I lay back on my bed and stared at the ceiling.

  A moment later the door reopened and Hentzau stuck his head in. “Are you going to tell me what you were up to that night? I meant to seduce it out of you, but I forgot.”

  “Will you fuck off,” I said, casting around for something sharp-edged and heavy to throw, and the sound of his laughter echoed down the corridor, unrestrained, as he walked away.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  If I were asked for advice on committing treason, the best I could suggest is that you get on with it. Those weeks of work and waiting, necessary as they were, seemed some of the longest of my life. I am not a nervous man and would find it a sad anticlimax to die of old age, but I could undeniably feel the headsman’s axe poised above my neck as the messengers went back and forth.

  In some ways Michael had the hardest task. Where his men were at work, he was at play, or at least play-acting. His role was to show himself as duke and to convey that he pledged his loyalty to the crown of Ruritania, no matter his feelings as to the man who wore it. He was gracious to the Red loyalists, and even lovingly rebuked those who shouted, “Michael for King.” At least he had me thrash an insolent republican, which provided a break from the monotony. (I have no quarrel with democrats in principle, except that they are as much frauds and liars as the rest. It is often said that mankind will not be free till the last king is strangled with the guts of the last priest; if you ask me, the man who ordered the strangling would promptly step forth to proclaim himself Lord Protector, and it would all begin again.)

  In public Michael was calm, gracious—one might almost say regal. In private he strode up and down and bit his nails; he thanked me for my cool head and then cursed me for my damned phlegmatic cold-blooded Englishness in the next breath. Letters flew back and forth. Hentzau galloped from Strelsau to Zenda with the most incriminating messages, and I have no doubt enjoyed himself hugely. Antoinette asked Michael if she could go to see the child to be out of his way; he cursed her roundly for wasting his time with domestic trivia, and slapped her face to boot.

  “God, I want him dead,” she said in a rare moment that we could walk together. “God, I hate him.”

  “If you told Rudolf’s party of the plans afoot here, you could see him beheaded,” I pointed out.

  “And you too, probably. But that wouldn’t get me Lisl back. He has told me I will only see her again if I obey him; I have no idea where in the world she is. I don’t know what to do. I should have had you hunt for her from outside. Except he had me watched in Paris, he says; maybe a watcher would have been seen. I’m coming to believe he watches me all the time. It’s what he wants me to think, but—”

  “Stop,” I said, not liking the way her voice was rising. “Wait. If he pulls this coup off, he’ll have no leisure for foolery, and I imagine he’ll want you gone. If he fails, I’ll see about persuading the others to flee, and then I’ll take the bastard apart.”

  So we waited, and worked, and then quite suddenly we heard that Rudolf had demanded the day of his coronation be brought forwards, causing vast inconvenience to his subjects, whose preparations all had to be completed in a rush. He was ripely cursed around the country for this, but it made no odds in the Tower; our preparations were well in hand. Michael fretted that his brother suspected a plot. For myself, I was simply relieved that it was time.

  We had learned that the king was determined on a carouse before his coronation, but that his keepers had succeeded in persuading him against his preferred haunts of brothels and drinking dens. He was to go hunting, and he was to do it in the forests outside Zenda. This was a favoured location of his on the few occasions he hunted, supposedly because it was the most convenient chase to Strelsau, in fact because it irritated his brother. He would be attended only by his manservant and his regular nursemaids: the stern Colonel Sapt, a loyalist of the late king, and the more personable Fritz von Tarlenheim, who caroused freely and posed as Rudolf’s friend.

  “They will be at the hunting lodge, all three, no other companions,” Michael said. “The bottle has been sent.”

  “So near to Zenda, though.” Krafstein’s nerves were showing. “It is cursed ill luck. If something goes wrong, with him so close by—”

  “If something goes wrong the duke will be blamed, were the king next door or at the other end of the country,” Lauengram pointed out.

  “It will not go wrong,” Bersonin said. He was entirely calm, demonstrating what I can only describe as post-coital satisfaction at having poisoned his bottle. I have rarely met a man who so loved his work. “I have judged the dose carefully. One glass alone will have a strong effect, and more will not kill him. He can drink half the bottle if he chooses. It will succeed.”

  The king was to spend the night at a hunting lodge, a rude little place run by the mother of one Johann, Michael’s gamekeeper. He would sleep there; in the morning Sapt and von Tarlenheim would come to Zenda to meet Ruritania’s Second Regiment, known as the Duke’s Light Cavalry, who would provide the king with a guard of honour to take him to the station. Michael had begged that distinction for his regiment in the most courteous terms, to show, he said, that his sword and his men were at the king’s service; it was led by a noble major of unquestioned loyalty to the crown. The party would ride to the station at eight o’clock to meet the special train; the king would be in his palace at Strelsau by ten, and the parading started at noon.

  If we succeeded, the king would be disgraced and displaced and Michael would rule. If we failed, Red Rudolf would be crowned God’s anointed, and if we utterly buggered it, we would probably be dead by the end of the week. It made life interesting, I suppose.

  We were all on edge the night before. Michael had gone to Strelsau to await his brother and get himself well out of the way, leaving Antoinette behind. He believed he might be able to form an alliance with Flavia even now. She disliked him but she despised Rudolf, the more since his attempt on her lady-in-waiting, and she would no longer be permitted to refuse his hand. She might well accept Michael as the lesser of two evils if she saw a chance to be rid of her kingly cousin.

  Michael took only Lauengram and Krafstein with him. We foreigners would give the wrong impression for a man who wanted to present himself as Ruritania’s true son, and Hentzau’s reputation as a carouser with the king was not something with which the duke wished to be associated.

  So we
waited. I walked a while with Antoinette. She went to bed early; the four of us played a few desultory hands of cards and retired rather than sit in one another’s company.

  Hentzau came to my room. I did not so much as let him disrobe, but sucked him off as he stood till he staggered and gasped. We heard footsteps in the hall, pausing outside the door, which I assumed to be the creeping thing Bersonin; Hentzau only laughed, and begged to return the favour in the coarsest terms. It passed the time.

  And then it was morning. We were all up by six. We dressed as a duke’s gentlemen should and rode down to Zenda town, where the regiment was lined up in rows in the square, in its truly ridiculous dress uniform, trappings and medals shining in the sun, horses stamping. The people watched admiringly, and went about in their own best clothes, for it was a national holiday. Bunting flapped in the breeze, some of it in the king’s colours, much of it in the duke’s. There were baskets of flowers everywhere, and it was a bright, sunny day that was bidding fair to be hot.

  “It’s quarter to eight,” Hentzau said from his position next to me. “How is it that the king’s men are not here?”

  He said that loudly, very much for the benefit of those around us. I replied in kind, remarking, “Perhaps they slept late,” and heard sardonic laughter from our listeners, all of whom knew what it meant when the king slept late.

  I should have liked to talk to him properly, for all the good speculation would do. We did not know how Sapt and von Tarlenheim might proceed with an obviously intoxicated king on their hands, whether they would seek help in Zenda or attempt to get him to the railway station and into Strelsau unobserved. At least they had not turned up as though all were well, or indeed to wail that the king was dead.

  Eight o’clock struck, and the people waited. The half hour chimed, and they waited still. By nine the horses were restive, the sun was promising discomfort, and the mutterings were loud. They aren’t coming. No message sent. Insult. Dishonour. Disgrace.

  “This is a damned discourteous way for a king to treat his soldiers,” Hentzau said to the square in general, and there was a stirring of applause.