Claiming Crystal (4 page)

The other stable people, maids and servants watched briefly before their better manners made them hurry away, and soon Crystal and her suitor were left in privacy with the sunshine and the grasses and the flower petals that were blowing off the gardens, pollinated with beautiful clouds of dandelion and fragrant garden debris. She scarcely glanced at the spectacle before he kissed her on the lips, and against his warmth and the sun's warmth she fairly melted.

Titillation was a wonder, but there were greater things than wonder.

She removed his pants and he pulled off her dress like an eager man of the morning who throws aside the curtains to greet the light. He pressed himself against her and then gently laid her to the grasses, and the sensations of his touch and the ground and the sun and the leftover taste of the man in her mouth made her lose the strength in her thighs and body, going loose, limp, submitting herself in a way that she never had when bedding the servants. But it was not until he entered her that she lost her voice too, and simply arched her body towards the light like a growing flower blooming its every seed to soak up every inch of what sated it.

There was heat and there was wetness, and both were so exquisite that her body suddenly found strength enough to reach for what she wanted, and then the wild man was mounted and the awoken woman came against him with such thrust that her necklaces were thrown a single swing into the air before the man tore them off and threw them into farther grass. The chastity chain broke with a ring of freedom that played instruments with every cord in her body, and then she was taking him into her in every way that she could, enjoying his mouth and his throbbing desire. She grabbed at his strong legs and then pressed herself against his strong body, elated by the contrasting sensations of her softness pressed to a hardness that was its couple.

‘God,’ he gasped. ‘Goddess,’ he managed to correct, and then he returned her favors in kind. He let go of her chest and he lifted himself from her body, and he slipped his tongue from hers and swallowed the intermixing tastes that salivated his mouth like puddles of syrup suckled from the sweetest oasis. He let go of everything of hers that he had taken in his hands and body, and then he began to give, offering himself to her with such a surprising vulnerability that she felt herself becoming dizzy with the ecstasy of the coupling, itself heightened by her newly awoken senses, which enjoyed the lovemaking with such tingling and shivering pleasures that she could scarcely find her thoughts anymore. The animals had taken over, their bodies become meat, their chests and thighs and deeper places become objects, and they began to teethe on each other, licking and tasting and kissing and taking and giving, taking and giving, receiving one another and then seizing one another in a slow back and forth of thrusting tugs.

If the man had retained his stoicism when she first disrobed him, the excitement of the experience was beginning to warm his exterior and his expression, and Crystal found herself warming as well, the cold set of her body already melted and wet – the man sliding himself against her as if he intended to wash his body in her sweat.

She had always found that the pleasures of sex came from a deeply profound experience that was quite simply the sensation of slowly but surely awakening into life; the dulled senses of everyday drudgery and ceremony prodded from their complacency into an effervescence that was not precisely youthful but exactly beautiful, and truly exacting in the experiences that they created at the tips of their sensors and delicacy. She felt the man atop her becoming something different than a man, and she thrilled in this because she knew from the hungry look in his eyes that she had become something different than a woman as well. Sex was transformation, and they were the transformed, lifted from whatever classes life had placed them in, ascended from whatever circumstances they had been born into by their parents, and in this Crystal began to become familiar with this man even though she did not know him.

He pushed himself into her, deeper and deeper, fast at first but slowing down as he became engulfed and satisfied. His touch changed from the needy thrusts of a boy into the intoxicating massage of a man who was not so needy, and wished instead to experience every corner of her. He gasped into his broach chest, and then she felt the warmth of his climax but knew that he would not be finished with her for some time. There was good reason why women of Crystal's lineage were prized as lovers, prostitutes or wives, and it was because of this prize that they were celebrated and traded and competed for. It was this objectification which now fell away from her as the man came closer still, as if needing to become a part of her body; as though his own was not worthy of the time, and he needed something of her beauty to justify his very existence.

These profundities were not petty. The great poets of the time wrote more about sex and love than they ever did about marriage and youth, and that was because the transcendent experience of these couplings changed people into something more than people. Crystal had already forgotten that the man inside of her, atop her, against her, celebrating her – that he was a simple stable lad who had been hired by her family to tend to their wild horses, and he was no more suited to marry her than one of the servants she had taken such routine boredom in bedding. But the more she heard herself whimpering for his closeness to come closer still, welcoming him deeper and deeper inside of her so that her very heart could feel the beating of his firm member, the more she realized that she too was a simple woman who had little experience in the world and no true status to separate her from suitors like him (who were not suitors at all).

It did not matter that he had not been invited to her ceremony. Nor did it matter that her family would surely want to have words with her once they realized she had chosen someone with no money, wealth or reputation to trade, and that was the essence of lovemaking – the excising of all unrelated matters, and the focusing on a single enlivening experience until the vastness of an enormous world became small enough to cup to a breast and cradle like an infant.

She did not realize that he had wept until she tasted the salt of his tears. She did not realize that she too had wept until he carefully daubed her eyes with a strong laborer's hand, and then he kissed each eye as if bedding them for sleep. He whispered something to her she did not hear, and finally made to pull away from her. She reached for him, wrapping her arms around his back, eager for him to stay and suddenly fearful and lonely about the idea of their broken connection, but he soothed her hands with his and kissed them each with that same loving warmth. Crystal would have been embarrassed of herself had she the mindfulness to remember herself, but she was taken away on the wings of love and she could not see such grounded things during her flight. She wanted more of him. She asked for more of him.

‘
Whatever you command,’ he told her once more, ‘but I fear that we have not acted with discretion.

‘
Look,’ he said, gathering his clothes and nodding in the direction of the hold where her family kept her in precious condition for the vaulted day when they might sell her for a fortune. Crystal turned and saw lines of men bustling back and forth, gathering guards, amassing servants, and then she saw the briefest suggestion of golden jewelry and crown and royal garbs, and she began to quickly gather her clothes along with the sorry horse trainer she had chosen out of a selfish lust that would have shamed her before her awakening.

‘
What of your chastity chain?’ the man asked, picking up the broken links of the jewelry her father had gifted to her on her first puberty, when he had explained to her that he would not marry her off at this age the way that other fathers married off their daughters.

She was struck for a moment by the beautiful way the sunlight caught the chain and sparkled in his hand. Despite his background as a laborer, the man certainly had the elegant beauty of a nobleman. She fleetingly wondered if perhaps he truly was some rogue who escaped the confines of his family and could be traced back to an incredible fortune on the other side of the world, but Crystal was too thoughtful to fall for this kind of romance. Her family employed enough spies and messengers to know every relevant noble name throughout the kingdom and the greater world. If they had told her that he had no highborn name, then he truly was just a man talented with horses and sex.

And that did not matter to her. A single look at the beauty of the chain against the beauty of the sun still rising against the side of his beautiful male sculpt was enough to make her forget herself in the dizzy fluster of a younger girl.

Her father had given her the chastity chain after her first bleeding, and it had been one of the few times in which they met face to face. He had explained that she was special, and because of her lineage she must be contained in mint condition, and then he presented the chain and told her it was a symbol of that promise and prosperity. That was the last day she had seen him privately, and certainly the last day he had spoken to her, but she had received numerous summonings from him through messengers and maid mothers in the years between. When he failed to show to her suitor's ceremony she had come to wonder if she would ever see that elusive man again.

She wondered no more.

The lord of this kingdom strode out from the crowds of guards and began making his way through the field towards her and her mate, a stern look on his face to hide any revulsion. The man beside her had managed to dress himself with a beautiful grace, and looked quite presentable by any standards, but she remained on the grasses at his feet, naked and blushing from the rush of heat and joys that she had experienced against him. Even her eyes were dilated, and she breathed with a rasp of exhausting that was more delectable than it was tired, as if she savored her exhaustion the way of an jouster after his triumph.

She glanced up at the nameless man, and was relieved to see him smirking at the entire scene. It seemed that not everyone was afraid of her father, and his courage gave her the strength to stand and gather up what remained of her gown and lay down over her female parts. Her father was practically storming towards them both, and she might not have had the time to regain her modesty if three of her maid mothers had not rushed in front of the lord and halted him in his tracks, begging her case for forgiveness and insisting that the stable man forced himself upon her.

‘
It was not Crystal's fault,’ they pleaded with the lord. ‘That man is not even an official suitor! She came to him to demand that he leave the province of the kingdom because he snuck into her ceremony last night, and she did not take any guards with her – the foolish woman! She is headstrong, as you know, and she did not count on the man being as strong as he is. He has taken your daughter's chastity without her permission!’

Crystal only heard some of this. She only watched the darkening expression on her father's face, and the numerous expressions of concern that were growing on the faces of the guards in response to this. It suddenly occurred to her that that the lord might execute this man if she did not speak for him, and when she turned to tell the rogue as much she was dismayed to find him still watching the unfolding conflict with an expression of bemusement that was charmingly contrasted with the fear in the faces of all the other men who watched what has happening, knowing the rages that could possess a father upon discovering such a thing.

‘You must go,’ she told him.

The man who had been hired to clean the shoes of the broncos simply shrugged, returned to the wild horse and resumed his duties.
‘I could run nowhere a man of your father's statue wouldn't find me,’ he replied. ‘Let him come. Things happen as they must.’

Crystal made a step towards him, intent on lecturing some common sense into that fool's head, when she came to understand the meaning underneath his words and bemused expression. This man was speaking like someone who had just experienced something of such profound and moving joy that he no longer feared death, and indeed Crystal found herself overtaken by a similar calm – her body washed and rinsed of the tensions that made her fret over petty matters.

‘Yes,’ she heard herself say. ‘Things happen as they must.’

She returned to face her father, who had broken through the maid mothers and resumed his approach.

‘Let him come.’

II

Crystal did not hear her father's words, as if he had come to her to speak a new language through the muffled sounds of a murky ocean, addressing her with news that she must follow and never deny. Crystal was not necessarily afraid of her father, but she feared his actions, and she feared the things he would make her do for the sake of his legacy.

She glanced at the roguish man beside her, his attentions on the bronco, his soft brown eyes still amused even when her father's tone of voice rose to startling levels of authority. The maid mothers who had tried to stop him backed away, and some of the guards even shifted in their armor, uncomfortable with the slightest sound of royal outrage. They knew that heads could fly and men could be ruined by the whims of her father's bad moods.

What followed was a further extension of the indecipherable, and Crystal did not grasp what had transpired until she was reflecting upon it later in her bedroom, surrounded by guards and being instructed on a very particular set of principles by the head house servant. Her father simply pointed to the rogue and then he was surrounded by guards, as if the orchestrations of her family's power was sorcery, and the lord need only lift a finger to summon men to any corner of the globe he deemed unfit for his view. Crystal did not see the rogue arrested or beaten, only surrounded, and then she too was gathered up by her father's men and dragged away into lonelier places than the morning sunrise across the farmlands outside the vast kingdom of mortar, stone, and towers.

She might have called out the wild man's name, if she had known it.

As such, she called to no one, and heard nothing except what her father ordered. She left with the impression of the man’s strange and endlessly amused smile flashing its white charm against the morning light.

****

The words came to her with time, as if some proclamations were so powerful that they could not be processed immediately, requiring time to sit and soak, their latent meanings dripping down their sides like flavorings down the cooked breast of a festival gander.

‘
This man you have chosen is not one of your official suitors. He filled out no papers. He signed nothing. He has no worth to his name, and this is a marriage that has been explicitly arranged in order to ensure worth.’

The words did not come to her directly in her father's voice, but through the servant who echoed him as he lectured Crystal in her bedroom exactly the way he had lectured her throughout her adolescence. Her mother had handed mothering off to the most trusted and educated maids, while her father had handed his fathering off to a plethora of faces who became the voices that lectured, instructed, taught and listened.

‘You must choose one of the suitors who made offerings to you,’ the servant insisted. ‘The man we hired for the horses broke the law by trespassing into the ceremony, and your father, our lord, does not reward trespasses against the laws of this kingdom.’

‘
I will do what is asked of me,’ Crystal murmured dully, albeit respectfully, and the servant regarded her for several moments to make sure that his wishes, and by extension the wishes of his lord, were not being made light of.

‘
Good,’ he said. ‘You will.’

****

The lord of the kingdom had reasoned that his daughter had been distracted during the ceremony by the criminal entrance of an unworthy man who did not belong there, and so he summoned several of his preferred suitors to make their presentations to Crystal once again. ‘You must excuse her distraction,’ he said through the mouths of his many speakers employed variously in servants, helpers, and guard hands. ‘She is young. You must remember her lineage, because that will be your prize for making this engagement.’

Crystal was not told their names, nor their faces, as if being promised that these special suitors could make their impression upon her regardless of her own expectations. They needed no announcement to make their mark. They needed no arrangements to draw her eyes. She would not know them, but the people her father had hired to speak for him assured her that each suitor would make himself memorable for her, and that with each memory, the image of the criminal rogue would fade from her mind. That man, she was promised, would go on to other things and forget her as surely as he forgot the favors he must owe higher borne men - to live this long with his foul behavior without being thrown into some stockade, or losing his head. She was reminded again and again that he stole himself into her ceremony, disrespecting the guards and the kingdom as a whole, and he ate from the table that had been prepared by a visiting prince. It seemed that nothing offended her family so much as his bad manners.

When Crystal brought up her right to make her decision on this day, the extensions of her father's will corrected her by explaining that the marriage was an agreement for the family. A woman of Crystal's lineage was worthy of celebration on this holy occasion, but because she was worthy her family had many interests in mind, and these interests should be tended to with the delicacy of jewelers who carefully counted the angles and the sparkling shine of the sun within a prism of a rather large crystal.

‘
This decision is more important than what you want alone,’ came the endless tirade. ‘You must ensure your family's continued wealth and a healthy suitor for your own children, that you may give birth to another woman with your gifts.’

And so Crystal was excused to her private confines that made up her eternal prison, to a
wait the mysterious presentment of more anonymous men trying to win her favor with shows of wealth and winning paperwork. She was greeted several times in the interim by several of the servant men, who wished to inquire about her present company, and she declined three before the fourth one broke down her reservations and she took him underneath the sheets to work out her frustrations with the bucking intensities of a fucking that was the farthest thing removed from lovemaking. She would have frightened herself, if she was a woman delicate enough to be frightened, and as it was she seemed to frighten the man, who quickly gathered up his clothes once she had climaxed and scurried out of the room the way of rodents who feared the boots of giants. The fervor of her awakening had flamed out at him like the burst of a fire, and he had run from it, as many men choose to do when the true passion of female loins showed themselves in untamed glory.

Crystal sighed.

She longed all by herself, and found herself once again wondering about the fantasies of an unwatched life walked down the roads less traveled.

She had lost all sense of suspense for her new suitors and was therefore su
rprised when the first suitor introduced himself as forwardly as he did, striding into her private quarters, evidently having wooed the servants or guards or maids, showing the hand of his authority as deftly as any magician. It was rare that a stranger was allowed into the corridors outside her bedroom, much less the room itself, and that alone spoke to his stature.

Of course she needed no names to place these men. Their behaviors placed them immediately.

Crystal would have normally been put on the defensive should another tall man such as this come into her room, but the suitor struck her differently. His body and presentment was vulnerable in the charming way of younger men and boys, who did not have the ego, and the weight of that ego, holding down their motions with the slow toddles of people under stone.

‘
Are you to be my first guest?’ she asked coyly.

He did not reply.

Again she would have normally become suspicious about the silence of any man, but this one remained with boyish behavior that did not intimidate her, only stroked her curiosity like a needy hand exploring the nether regions of her body. His face was more feminine than stout. His shoulders were slender, not broad, and his body looked rather beautiful in the way that a woman's body looked rather beautiful. His cock was not exposed, for he had donned a beautiful robe that looked more like a dress, and he wore it with practiced elegance, slipping a view of his strong thighs and muscles, insinuating his health and vigor with the sophistication of a woman who was well trained in the arts of seduction.

Again and again his appearance returned to a bewitching femininity.

Crystal had always believed seduction to be for the female orientation alone, since men need not seduce, only present themselves and demand that someone preferable fall to her knees to pleasure him between the legs. She had rather low impressions of most men, but that was not to say Crystal favored her own fender, having equally low impressions of most women, and all of that was simply to restate that she had grown up with difficult people in difficult straits.

This suitor wore seduction with his garb, and seemed to understand it with the instinct of an old whore – at a riper age than proper. If not for the royal angles of his face she would place him for one of the male whores who paraded around the lands of this kingdom strutting cocks and mouths to the gentlemen who favored that, or oppositely, the wealthier women who had the means and the money to pay for things they did not dare bring to their official husbands.

The man surprised her with a bizarre display that tempered its exoticisms with eroticisms. His hands were on her immediately, not threateningly but soothingly, and he began to massage her towards her bed, plying her muscles and body to succumb underneath his fingertips and slowly but surely lowering her down into the nest of sheets. Within moments he had laid her down with hands that were so suggestive they were practically hypnotic.

Crystal still found herself wondering if the vulgarity on display was something that should have frightened her, or at the very least turned her off to the prospects of this seducer and his strange feminine ways, but in the moment it was exotic, not frightful. The awakening of her second puberty had transformed even the excitement of danger into something pleasurable and titillating, and she felt herself warm with the itch of a need that was deeper than any cock could plunge. She found herself excited by the display for the fact of this suitor's foreign nature – as if this man came from the same distant land as the rogue, where men did not behave as men she knew behaved, and all was wonder and newness again.

‘Very well,’ she said into the sheets. ‘Perform for me,’ and the selfish hungers that had characterized her awakening returned to seat themselves in her flesh.

The first thing the suitor did was introduce a line of ten other men and women Crystal did not recognize. The second thing he did was speak, and his voice was melodious; no less feminine than his behaviors.

‘They have come from my stables,’ he declared proudly, ‘but they are not my slaves. I do not keep slaves. It is not my custom.’

Crystal turned her head to scrutinize the hosts. They were dressed better than servants, better even than house servants, and they had the pride of people who were not owned (or at least of people who did not know the faces of their political owners, wherever they might be in the local kingdom
.)

‘
They have come here to service me because I asked them to,’ the seducer said plainly, and then he clapped his hands and one by one began to move down the line of twenty people, working each one like a cow, stroking them into arousal and then pleasuring them into climax, which he pooled inside of golden chalices that were filled rather quickly.

Crystal blinked.

What was happening? she thought to herself. Surely her father would not have arranged her the presentation of a suitor with this kind of lechery on his mind.

Once the cups were filled, the suitor placed the chalices upon a corner table, promising a later use, and then he returned to his workmanlike masturbations of the people he had brought along with him to impress a woman he hoped to own despite his protests against the custom of ownership. These people were all the same at the end of the day, and Crystal was cynical with the homogeny that overwhelmed anyone of royalty.

One by one he touched the men in the waiting line, and some he even kissed on the lips. They did not seem turned off by these bodily affections, and most even returned them in kind (and in heat), reaching for the seducer before his polite slap made sure their hands remained at their sides and they did not break whatever illusion he was creating for his dearest crystal jewel. He milked cocks to pour their liquids to fill the cups, and then he was facing the women, kissing their nipples and their fingers, licking every point of their bodies from the perk of their shoulders to the perkiness of their breasts.

Crystal had never seem such a display of vulgarity anywhere in her kingdom. She noted how he had closed and locked the door of her room, and even closed the latched window the maid mothers and house servants could look through. He had arranged a privacy.

Perhaps he was misbehaving.

The suitor changed his masturbations when he stepped before one woman in particular, a deeply brown athletic sort whose body seemed fit for the races and palace games. She looked at him with shining eyes, and then she threw herself upon him and began to bite at his body, as if to eat her lust away with large swallows of his taste and the slight touches of sweat that had appeared on the outlines of his frame during masturbations
where he had worked, milking and arousing people into this peculiar erotic leaking. He reached a hand into her, but it was not like any reaching Crystal had seen before from the clumsy servant men she had taken to her bed and fooled around with, despite neither of them having the slightest clue of what to do once their clothes were off. The seducer moved with the grace that she often admired in the jousters and archers she sometimes watched outside the windows of her confines, performing for her father, trying to impress the king with their skills. The seducer moved like a man practiced in seduction.