Dark Enchantment (21 page)

So Maarten did, and Mercy did not try to resist. She buried her flushed face in the rumpled quilt. Her behind was as pale and round as a full moon.

‘Spread her thighs.’

He did. The smell of sex was thick and heady and made him want to plunge himself into her swollen slit. Shame and lust roiled in his ballocks, threatening to spume forth.

‘Now kiss her brown eye for me.’

Maarten looked up, startled.

‘Do you think I’m going in dry, friend? That’s hardly the action of a gentleman. Get her wet and open. Use your tongue.’ His smile had not lost its menace.

So Maarten obeyed, bending to press his face between her cheeks and kiss that which he’d never touched before, tasting her sharp meatiness, testing the muscular pucker of her hole. He had no masculine dignity left to guard now, after all, having
given
his wife up to the stranger. He had only shame and submission and a wild, sickened arousal. Still he was shocked by how easily she opened to his tongue, as if she had been waiting years to surrender her most filthy self to invasion. He could not push his tongue in far enough to fill her. He rose gasping from her slippery cleft.

‘Good. Now, Goodman Gansevoort, you must moisten me too.’ Nicholas Scratch ran his thumb over the turgid head of his cock. ‘Come here.’

Maarten’s head swam. If sodomising a woman was a sin for which one might burn, turning to a man would be to invite the very wrath of God. And to suck this fiend for the purpose of buggery and adultery combined …

Maarten’s cock twitched even as his stomach roiled. He wet his lips. Eyes burning, he crawled into position and opened his mouth, for the first time in his life, to another man’s member. It was solid and hot and slightly sticky; he tasted first his wife’s familiar tang, then the alien taint of a man’s seed. He shut his eyes and sucked. His stiff throbbed.

‘Good.’ The stranger’s voice was almost tender. ‘This is what you are good for, is it not? Now, friend, put me to your wife. As if I were a bull to a virgin heifer: you have done such things before, I’m sure. Guide me to her with your own hand.’

Turning to Mercy, Maarten saw that she was watching over her shoulder, taking in all his humiliation avidly. Nicholas got up behind her on the bed and Maarten took that thick length in his unsteady hand and angled the cock to the dark well of her anus, prick and ass cleft both lubricated with his saliva, her hole pliant and receptive, blossoming open under his duress. She wailed as the stranger’s cock penetrated her, and the sound made his heart soar.

‘Now watch, friend. See how it is done.’

He would have given anything to have been the one fucking that upturned ass, gripping those pale hips, shafting that tight forbidden hole. At that angle her bottom looked as round as a pumpkin, her waist tiny, her hair a tumbled harlot’s mess. But he could only watch. She was all receptive femininity, but she was responding to a greater male than he.

‘Yes! Yes!’ she screamed in her ecstasy.

He watched as Nicholas fucked her then pulled out, leaving snail trails of pearly spend upon her quivering ass. Mercy collapsed face down.

‘May I?’ he whispered, bewitched by the pink gape of her still-dilated hole. His cock was a rod of iron in his hand.

Nicholas shook back his hair. ‘No. But you have one last task. One you are worthy of. You may clean her up, Goodman. Clean my seed from your beloved wife, with your tongue.’

Eyes blurring, he bent to his appointed task. His wife oozed another man’s cream from both orifices, and he could do nothing else than lap it up. His tongue got lost amongst her deep soft folds. The taste and the slippery mess of it were unforgettable, burning his mind. It disgusted and excited him to the depths of his soul. He could not understand his arousal or bear to think about it, but nonetheless it was stronger than his Christian conscience. When he felt Nicholas’s hands on his backside, pulling down his loosened breeches, he sobbed in relief. Of course this was how it had to end; this was the ultimate humiliation. Having already surrendered his wife without a fight to another man, having lusted over her dishonour, having helped that man in plundering her body in the foulest of ways – this was the deepest sin that was also its own chastisement. He felt his buttocks being parted by firm hands. He felt the wetness as Nicholas spat onto his anus. He felt the blunt probing of that cock – that perfect, inhumanly virile cock – and he did not clench
against
it as it bored into him. He groaned out load, not bothering to disguise his pain or his surrender: he had no pride left. On hands and knees, sweat springing out from every pore, he yielded, deep rhythmic groans issuing from his chest. He was aware that Mercy had twisted over beneath him and was staring.

Of course, he told himself, it must be most gratifying to her, to see her wretched husband fucked by her lover. His prick jerked, dripping.

He was aware that she had reached to grip the stiff prong of his hanging cock and fondle his balls. The tugging on his stiff was an immense relief. He felt himself opening out internally, the rush of blood through his veins, and – even as a part of him was appalled that he should stoop so low as not just to be buggered, but to enjoy his sodomisation – he let loose in a gush, spurting over his wife, adding the sin of Onan to every other.

Then he collapsed forwards over her, his legs too weak to hold him against the pounding from above. Nicholas Scratch bore him down, thrusting ruthlessly, then erupted inside him, his semen as cold as the icy depths of hell.

She looked into both their faces as the two men came. Her husband’s face was twisted, almost unrecognisable, his eyes closed as if to hide his soul, but her master’s face was wide-eyed and exultant. His participation in the pleasures of the flesh would always be halfway to a joke for him, she thought, an ironic critique of his original nature. But they were both wonderful, and the sight of them together made her sorely used quim tingle. In their spasms they pitched forwards over her, and as the weight of both men slammed down they were so heavy that Mercy thought the breath would be crushed from her chest.

But then her master threw back his head, laughing, and turned to light: a cold blue celestial light that filled the room, illuminating in that brief moment
everything
. The cobwebs hanging in the corner. The rat droppings by the skirting board. The knobbly knuckle on her left hand where a cow kick had broken the bone years ago. The slackening billows of her belly, and the dirt in the ingrained lines on Maarten’s flushed face. Every dust mote hanging in the air; every particle of their frail mortality.

Then in another heartbeat her master was gone and they lay once more under kindly candlelight, alone in their marriage bed.

Maarten made a noise of shock and tried to look over his shoulder, but Mercy threw her arms around him. ‘He’s gone, husband. Gone.’ He let out a long breath. She held him tight to her, talking softly and slowly as she might to a frightened child. ‘Away over the black tree tops and under the moon, gone to fright the sheep in the fields and curdle the milk in the byres, gone to pinch the flesh of maidens black and blue, gone to whisper in the ears of sleeping men and find who will listen to him and open their eyes. He dances under the full moon on the hilltops among the stones raised by the Indians, and comes at the call of those who dare face him. He is here, and then he is gone. He opens our guarded souls like a man prising oysters. For he is the light-bringer, and what he illuminates is our secret selves, our hidden dreams, those things we do not admit even to ourselves. He takes away our pride and gives us truth in exchange. Not shame, husband, truth. It is up to us whether we can live with it.’

She paused, her heart pounding in her throat, but Maarten did not reply. He lay slack and heavy against her, his breathing slow. She bit her lip. He had fallen asleep, taking the easy plunge into darkness, fleeing from the light and the
shock.
It might not last long, but at least he had neither sprung from the bed, nor struck her, nor raged against himself, nor fled in horror and recrimination. He had fallen asleep, exhausted. And that, she told herself, was a good omen.

The Red Thread

WHEN I AWAKE
the boat and all its sailors have gone. I am completely alone. I scramble up the scrubby hillside behind the beach and look out across the dark waves. Yes, there is the black sail, diminishing into the distance. I wave my arms and scream and call him back, but it’s no use and I know it. They haven’t forgotten me; I was in full view on the sands all the time. The Prince of Athens has abandoned me on this island.

I put my head in my hands and weep.

I had grown up with the fact of Asterion’s imprisonment. It was an unquestioned part of my small world: the monthly presentations of the tributes, the nightly feedings, the sudden muffled sound of him roaring in frustration or fury from beneath any random floor of the palace. It was not something that seemed strange to me as a child, or that moved me either to fear or to pity. In fact I liked it. People tell me that even when I was very small I used to lean over the edge of the central well, the one point in the palace where one could look down into the basement below, and watch for him. It was the one place he could look up from too, to see the blue sky and the sun, or the stars after which he was named. Everywhere else, the Palace Below was in darkness. So he would often be visible in the crescent shadow, squatted on his haunches, gazing back up at us.

I would giggle and reach out to him even as a baby in my mother’s arms, they tell me.

When the oracle first advised my father to lock Asterion up for the protection of us all, he had his finest craftsman design the place of incarceration. The rock-hewn cellars beneath every palace room, where grain and fleeces and water were stored safe from the burning sun of summer, were all knocked together to make a single basement. Everything of value was removed. Cisterns were sunk. Trapdoors were nailed shut and plastered over. By the time the workers had finished Asterion had a palace all to himself, as extensive as the King’s own palace above it, but one that existed in eternal night. Only two entrances were left open: the central light-well in an inner courtyard, which had once been a pit in which dogs were set on bears, and a door at the back of the palace compound that opened onto a steep stair. That is still the route down which prisoners are driven.

There is one other entrance to the Palace Below, but I’m the only one who knows it.

They had to force Asterion into his new realm with spear points and torches, they say. Even then, when he was only entering into the full strength of his youth, he was too dangerous for any one man to control, and he harboured a particular aggression towards the King. They shut the door behind him and threw oaken bars across it and set guards, yet for days if you passed that door you could hear him thudding his head against the wood.

This was all before my time, of course. I’ve only picked up palace gossip.

Every night the royal family assembles about the central well. It is my father’s one act of contrition. A rope has been run over a roof beam and with this is lowered a basket containing bread and wine and cheese, and a bushel of whatever fruits are in season. Asterion has a hearty appetite. Sometimes he will speak, asking for things he desires: a
blanket,
a lamp, a songbird in a cage, a wreath of the wild roses that grow on the hills, more straw for his bed. His voice is deep, as you might expect from such a broad chest, but surprisingly melodic. My father is not unkind, though he never agrees to send down any palace slave. He learnt that lesson long ago, and if Asterion wishes to be entertained with the lyre then the musician stands at the top of the well and Asterion must stand beneath, out of reach. The only humans who enter the Palace Below are the youths given in tribute by Athens, which was laid siege to years back by my father’s armies and capitulated rather than burn.

I too go below, of course. I have no memory of the first time it happened, though the story is familiar from countless retellings. I had as a very small child been in the habit of lying upon the edge of the pit and talking to Asterion, or singing to him, or recounting the stories of gods and heroes that our tutor had had us learn. Asterion did not deign to speak to me, but that did not seem to matter. I was never in the least afraid of him. One day my nurse turned to find me gone. There was panic, and a search, and eventually guards were sent into the basement in a squad, armed to the teeth and bearing torches. Asterion has always been wary of fire, though impervious to so much other pain. They found him and me together in an antechamber under a guttering lamp. I was sat upon his broad knee, singing to him the song of Europa. I must have thought, in my naivety, that the theme would appeal to him. The guards stopped, aghast. One swipe of Asterion’s huge fist would have been enough to kill me outright; they could not snatch me from danger. But Asterion only glowered and lifted me from his knee, setting me on my feet before he shambled away into the darkness.

My nurse was torn apart between horses in the
agora
, for that carelessness.

I must have fallen, or jumped, that first time. He must have caught me. Later on I know I used the rope to shin down.

I’m certain that that was the time the King realised that I was my mother’s true child, as wilful as she. According to the family historians she was a daughter of Helios the sun god, and that thread of divinity has come down the bloodline. We are not constrained like other people. We are not afraid. My father was only a king, and knew better than to set himself against the gods. He consecrated me to Artemis, thinking that would save him from finding me a husband, and let me grow up how I would.

So the years wore on. Nothing changed in Asterion’s world. Every year a ship with black sails would arrive from Athens and the tribute would be offloaded, seven young men and seven young women a part of it. Every full moon one of those captives would be taken to the back stairs and sent down into the Palace Below. The noises they made would be covered up by the playing of musicians. It made no difference to Asterion what time of year it was, because where he lived it was always dark and always cool.