Immaculate

by Addison Cain

  Not a word of this made sense. “Mama?”

  At that she came to me, bending down to cup my cheek. Almost tender, she swore, “I have dedicated my life to assuring you are worthy of this honor. I, and my mother before me, took God’s seed, and did so with honor. Our line is sacred, holier than even the highest bride of Christ. But you must succeed where the rest of us have failed. You must bear a son. Do not fail me.”

  Chapter Five

  Gowned in gossamer, my scrubbed body oiled as if for my wedding night. I listened to my mother tell a tale that set my stomach churning.

  I had been chosen, she’d said, to serve a great purpose.

  Open for him, be a gracious hostess to his glory. Abide the pain, that pain I deserved for being born female.

  When I cried and told her such honors belonged to my future husband… she laughed.

  And yes, she struck me out of eyesight of the pope’s humble servant.

  Both cheeks were left pink. My lips were left enticingly swollen. As if I had bitten them the way my serving girls had bitten them when trying to win the notice of the handsome stable hands.

  No argument I might design swayed her.

  She called me a coward, a heathen, and a whore.

  I said that fornication outside of marriage was a sin.

  That earned a laugh.

  “This will not be fornication. There will be no slathering lips upon your flesh or groping hands. All that will belong to your husband, who will be paid handsomely to never speak of your condition. Or, mayhaps it will be as with your father and he will be so drunk he cannot tell the difference between wine spilt on the sheets or blood.”

  I was the oldest child, born in their first year of wedlock. I adored my father. And in one night learned that he never belonged to me.

  He would not shelter me should I fail.

  My mother would drown me.

  I was to stop weeping at once. “You are the daughter of a holy pope. Immaculate in both conception and upbringing. Why weep that Duke Arermici did not father you? You know he keeps a whore, right? A mistress the same age as you. He buys her jewels. Already she’s fat with his bastard!”

  No, my papa would never.

  But my mother never lied.

  When I looked upon her with pity, she raised her chin all the higher. “I am a daughter of God’s holy church. Above a duke in all ways. Just as you will be above the fat Doge of Venice. You do not need man’s love. God will sustain you.”

  In all the years this woman had reared me, she had never spoken so frankly.

  A knock came to the door, her eyes widening just a touch. “Do not disappoint me, daughter. You know what will happen if you fail.”

  ***

  In the morning, I had admired the inlaid marble floors, the frescos, the glory of our holy church’s wealth. Now, padding across those same floors barefoot, so terrified my bladder was begging to be emptied, I felt a ghost of my former self.

  Dead was my joy. Dead was my anticipation.

  A ghost indeed.

  In the same ornate chapel I had confessed in only hours ago, I was told to kneel.

  I did. I did because otherwise I would be stripped of my clothing and cast in the street to be rutted by vagrants.

  I did because I was the coward my mother claimed.

  It would hurt, she’d said. I would bleed.

  I had even overheard her praying there would be a great deal of blood. A fragile smear was not enough. Not after her years laboring over me.

  I’d paid little attention to the guard who had collected me. All I had noticed was the handsome Cardinal and his retinue were the ones awaiting my arrival.

  Kneel, he had said.

  Kneel I had done.

  Head bowed, my rosary clutched between fingers gone white, I prayed for absolution.

  A rich baritone bade, “Now is the time for confession.”

  But I had only confessed hours ago.

  “What are your sins, child?”

  I had to be pure. Blameless. This my mother had said over and over.

  But what was there to confess?

  In a moment of rebellion, I hissed, “I feel hatred toward my mother and disgust for the pope.”

  “And your heart must be heavy…”

  It was, it was so heavy my eyes overfilled. “I cannot help but think of the rape of Tamar, King David’s daughter.”

  Yes, I knew the unspoken story. Not only could I read, but my papa had gifted me with my own priceless copy of the scriptures. I had read them front to back, devouring the wisdom and trials of those who had lived long before me.

  “Ahhh.” Cardinal Beluni nodded. “Raped by her prince half-brother and cast out by his hate once his lust was filled.”

  As if to drive my statement home, I muttered Tamar’s own words, “Don’t force me. Such a thing should not be done in Israel! Don’t do this wicked thing.”

  The cardinal countered, “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor.”

  “Yes!” I agreed with all my heart.

  Hooded eyes glanced down upon me. “The pope will not rape you.”

  I thought of the man, his wretched smell and hideous body. I thought of the lies, the shame, my fear, and gagged. “My husband will not have me if you do this. God says, ‘And he shall take a wife in her virginity. A widow, or a divorced woman, or a woman who has been defiled, or a prostitute, these he shall not marry. But he shall take as his wife a virgin of his own people.’ You would send me to him ruined.”

  “Blessed,” the cardinal countered. “Filled with God’s love.”

  I wanted to die. To run screaming from the room. But I was the coward my mother had labeled me. Because more than anything, I was afraid I would already be sentenced to hell. “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.”

  A voice soft as a feather poured over me. “There will be no fornication. What is to be done is outside blame for you and His Holiness. I swear to you, child, you will leave the room as pure as you entered it.”

  Had the Virgin Mary wept as I did?

  As if Beluni could read my thoughts, he urged, “We are not done with your confession.”

  I wanted so dearly to feel clean. So dearly that I was willing to spill out my guts to anyone who might listen. “I am wicked, and feel hatred for holy men.”

  “And…”

  I began to cry, something my mama had made me swear on the lives of my brothers I would not do. “I am frightened.”

  “Did Lady Arermici not give you wine?

  Beyond communion, I had never tasted it. “Wine is not permitted, Your Eminence.”

  “It is tonight.” His voice had grown tight again, the drop in tone sending all my hairs to stand. “I offer you a goblet of the blood of Christ.”

  “But I have not yet been forgiven for my sins.”

  He spoke the Latin benediction quickly, failing to ascribe penance before thrusting a golden chalice into my hands. “Swallow it now. Every drop.”

  I did as I was told, noting an astringent flavor that tasted as poisonous as the cardinal’s soul.

  “Rise, my daughter.”

  His drugs worked quickly, my legs too weighty to shift.

  Chapter Six

  I had never known such suffering.

  Or such disgust.

  But not one word of rejection could be voiced aloud. Not with Cardinal Beluni’s palm clamped over my screaming mouth.

  His hands were not the worst of them.

  After carrying me to the pope’s apartments, after the Swiss Guard shut the door and holy men tore robes from my flailing arms, I grasped what really was to be done.

  How much my mother had left out.

  Before I had a chance to hide my naked body, priests I had never seen before took me in hand. Around the room, every cardinal who
had seen my earlier disgrace waited.

  Many openly prayed.

  Watching.

  Beady eyes under miters, for they were dressed in their most holy finery.

  Upon the grandest bed I had ever beheld was the prostrate naked body of flabby infirmity. The pope had been prepared for me.

  A youthful male who had yet to earn his priestly collar had taken a worm of flesh from between the pope’s legs, pumping up and down that ragged flesh. I saw the gray mat of hair it was nestled in. Saw the way it twitched as soft hands stretched it higher.

  One look at my bared body, and that rod of flesh jerked and plumped.

  His Eminence was vile, and he was watching as my drugged limbs struggled vainly in the hands of many.

  These priests, my captors, did not waver. Each knew their part in my degradation.

  Legs forcibly spread wide over the Holy See’s boney form, I was forced to straddle him. My secret sex bumping that rod of quickening flesh.

  I had seen pigs rutting once, and still remembered the shame of viewing that male’s appendage jerk into the female’s oinking body.

  And I knew why she’d shrilled.

  Chanting crowded the air, the waft of freshly lit incense creating a cloud around our shamefully bared bodies.

  Where the Holy Father lay still as a board, I writhed. I think it excited him, my fight to protect my virginity, for his eyes looked upon my small chest where brown nipples had puckered and red marks grew from clinging grips along my ribs.

  Six men held me open, held me bent, exposed me to be ruined.

  The young one pored oil upon the elder’s shaft, pointing that glistening organ toward my thatch of dark hair.

  “Push her down.” That was Cardinal Beluni. That was the devil ordering this evil.

  NO!

  I lurched, but drugged and small, I was impaled in one horrid shove downward no matter my struggles. Flesh tore on that feeble member. A scream burst from my throat, so piercing even Beluni’s fist could not suppress my cry of pain.

  Agony, a quantity of blood that would have impressed my mother, flowed from between my thighs, over the hairy stomach of a wide-eyed leper.

  And leper he was.

  The sores that had been hidden by that man’s white cassock were numerous. Many were open and weeping, their puss smearing my skin where I was pressed down upon him.

  And then I was lifted, salvation awaiting as the cause of my pain retreated from my womb. Beluni had promised me God’s work would be quick.

  Lies.

  On a sob, I was pushed down again.

  For ages this torture continued.

  The priests made me their puppet, used me upon the old man.

  And the pope, blameless, they said—because he laid there and allowed his cock to be used in my cunt.

  Yes, I knew those words. I had younger brothers up to all manner of mischief.

  I thought of the chambermaid I’d spied in the halls long ago, of her tears.

  I thought of my brother who had used her.

  I thought of the mother who had brought me here so I might be torn upon the pope’s staff.

  I thought of my father and the whore he kept.

  I thought of the servants I’d watched starve over the years.

  All this while my eyes tracked over the old man licking his lips while he watched my tits bounce from my forced movements up and down his shaft. And then my eyes fell upon the golden crucifix over his bed.

  My lord and savior suffering on the cross…

  He too had been impaled by a spear and bled.

  In that moment, I gave up.

  Sagging in the hold of so many, I felt another pair of hands take my hips. My pelvis was rolled forward and back even as my whole torso was continuously raised up and down.

  Lewd, my cunt on display, torn and full of a doddering ancient ready for the grave.

  I gagged on vomit, and then heard a noise that would haunt me to death.

  The pope, in a voice laden with sickness, called out for Jesus.

  My hips were slammed down, the burn of his member jerking against my savaged walls.

  Every last person in the room began to rejoice.

  Except myself. In that moment my true innocence had died.

  Lifted from his body, I was made to lie down beside my holy godfather. My legs held together, stinging warmth seeping out from where he had pumped me full of foulness.

  For once, it was not Cardinal Beluni who gave me an order. It was the Spanish Cardinal, his face no longer hateful but passionate as he looked over my naked body. “Do not spill his seed. Our God in heaven must see his son reborn.”

  The force of the cough that ripped from the pope’s throat brought several in the room to assist him. But after he’d coughed up what ailed him, he waved them off, then turned to me. Naked, the flesh of his chest hanging like empty breasts of an old woman, he pressed a kiss to my cheek.

  “You are worthy of my love.”

  Chapter Seven

  No chances would be taken, assuring the blessed event.

  Nightly I was dragged, no longer fortified with poisoned wine, to be mauled and manipulated over the hideous body of God’s highest servant. It didn’t matter if I fought back or screamed.

  No higher power came to save me.

  By the seventh day, I would no longer look at or speak with my mother. If she tried to approach, I tore at my hair.

  Cardinal Beluni took note of this, blaming the duchess for not caring properly for me. In breadth of an hour, she was packed off back to my father, and I was given the peace of solitude in my rooms.

  I’m ashamed to say I was grateful.

  Though it ached when hard male flesh invaded my soft body, it was nothing compared to the pain the first night, or even the shredded aches on the second or third.

  Every morning I was roused by nuns, dressed in a fine gown, and sat to be painted by the most famed artist in Rome. My days were spent being captured in oil, the canvas that housed my sorrow large and dashed with soft colors.

  The painter lied.

  He showed me softly smiling, but I would never smile again.

  No treats tempted me, no offerings from dressmakers or the jokes of clowns fetched to rouse me made a difference.

  How could I smile knowing the truth?

  There was no God.

  All of this opulence was a falsehood, an act of pretender Pharisees who gathered suffering peoples’ coin. I had wealth beyond measure, so they took my virtue instead.

  By the passing of the first new moon, I could no longer count how many times the pope’s crooked shaft had been forced inside me. For now, it was not only in the evenings I was taken to be seeded. The cardinals had to be sure a babe was planted in my womb, so I had been made to ride him like a horse upon his throne between meetings, in his study. And the three of the most horrible times, in my own rooms.

  He always remained perfectly still until those last grunting moments where his hips thrust with the power of ‘God’s’ release. It was the Holy Spirit, the priests claimed. I was not to resist but allow it.

  That slithering man flesh could not be out of me fast enough. Nor did I care if his ejaculation leaked to splatter the bedding.

  I would never be clean of it.

  “Did you not care for His Holiness’ gifts?”

  The serpent himself had arrived. Always attending me. Always demanding I kneel and confess before I was to be raped.

  Nothing I said shocked the cardinal. Not my desire to see them all dead, not my dreams of choking the pope until his eyes bled as he bludgeoned my internal organs with his cock. When Beluni came, it was always for the same purpose. I was to be taken to the old codger, stripped naked before the cardinals gathered to watch, grabbed by the hands of priests I was beginning to recognize, and bred.

  Knees accustomed to the cold marble floors, I bowed my head and began the unavoidable ritual. “It has been four hours since my last confession.”

  Beluni stroked my curl
s. “Let me ease your immortal soul.”

  The place between my legs was still sore after this morning’s session. And I hated that not even sunlight could save me from the old man’s lusts now. He’d developed a taste for it. Calling for me at all hours. “I hate you, even more than I hate the pope.”

  “And?”

  “I wish to see you tormented in the fires of hell.”

  His touch had grown bold over the weeks, the backs of Beluni’s manicured fingertips tracing my jaw. “You could not be more perfect. The enraged Madonna brimming with virtue.”

  I would be carted off to my new husband so well used the pope’s seed would still leak down my thighs for months. An old rag in pretty lace trim. “What is to be my penance?”

  My forward demand to end this farce made Beluni arch a sculpted brow. “Do you plead for the whip? I prefer softer penance for the mother of God’s son.”

  He misunderstood my sigh. No amount of pain would wash this sin away. “If that is your will, Your Eminence.”

  As if to offer some comfort, he cupped my cheek and swore, “Your work is almost done. God has told me so.”

  Every word from this snake’s mouth was poison, yet I cast my eyes to his lips and licked my own.

  Our eyes met and he murmured, “Et ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”

  I made the sign of the cross and rose.

  “You have been summoned to his apartments. He ails and longs to see the Vessel of God at his side. Comfort your godfather.”

  More like bend over him, sweating from the exertion of not vomiting from the disgusting sight of his rotting body.

  One would think a man so ill would die, but even wheezing between each breath, the vile creature managed to rise to the challenge of breeding his papal whore.

  The guards collected me upon the cardinal’s order. It had been weeks since they had been required to drag me.