Jack Whyte - The Singing Sword

Now Cylla knew beyond doubt that her designs were working. She also knew, with equal certainty, that she could rely on my silence; and she knew, too, that she could count on my complicity in the game that had now begun in earnest.

I had absolutely no regard for Cylla as a person, and that saddens me now. I considered her to be a thorough slut — everyone did, except Dom — and I really believed, in my arrogance, that she was uncaring of my opinion. She seemed, in fact, to revel in the knowledge of my real dislike of her, perhaps because she knew that I would keep coming back in spite of it. Liking and dislike, it seemed to me, had nothing to do with the game.

I never did doubt her enjoyment of the game, however; nor, for that matter, did she doubt mine. But Cylla had an advantage over me: she knew that I felt guilt because, for all my arrogant, self-deluding high-mindedness, I was attracted to her wanton behaviour and could not master my lust. She knew that she held my eyes, if no other part of me, clasped tight between her lascivious thighs; she knew and enjoyed the agonizing depth of my guilt; and she revelled in the knowledge that her depravity drove me to purge myself of my frustrated seed by my own hand, since my then perverted sense of honour would not let me willingly take my lust for Cylla home to Luceiia.

What cowards we men are! Here I am, writing of Cylla's depravity, when it was mine. Eventually, before matters came to a head in a way I could never have visualized, I was existing in a condition that must have approached insanity, and I have often thought, in later years, that the dementia of my lust reduced me, in effect, to the behaviour I might have expected of Claudius Seneca, the man I detested most in all the world.

For several years, at the outset, we barely exchanged words at all. The entire game was in the playing, with Cylla initiating and me reacting, both wordlessly.

The end of that stage occurred early one autumn morning, when I had dropped in at their house with some tools for Dom and had been invited to break bread with them. The three of us were seated at a table in their private quarters. We had eaten sparingly and were talking casually of nothing in particular when I saw one of the signs I had come to recognize in Cylla as she prepared to do something reckless and dangerous. When she became excited her eyes glittered. There is no other word I can think of to describe her look on such occasions; her gaze took on an almost luminous intensity, and her eyes teared over, almost as though she were going to weep, except that there was no hint of anything doleful about her. Her eyes filled with dancing highlights, and she exuded an aura of barely hidden gaiety.

On this occasion, Dom noticed it too. He leaned forward and stroked her cheek in a loving, uxorious caress, and Cylla turned and smiled at him, a smile of utter sweetness, which she then bestowed on me.

"Publius," said Dom, "is she not radiant? I thank God daily for this treasure He has given me. But she seldom looks this happy, and it must be your presence that pleases her so. I must bring you here more often. Don't you agree, my dear?"

Cylla did not speak. She merely smiled at me with that radiant, glittering smile and I writhed in discomfort because both her hands were out of sight beneath the table and I knew she was caressing herself.

I grew red in the face from guilt and fear that Dom might reach out to take her hand, and I moved quickly to stand up and take my leave.

"No," she said, both hands appearing above the table-top, "You must not leave yet, Publius. Dom has something to show you." Dom's face went blank. "Don't you, my dear?" He blinked, and she continued as though speaking to a small boy. "Your plans for the new tessellated floor?"

"Ah! Of course, stupid of me." His face went blank again. "Where are they, my dear? Do you know?"

"Oh, Dom! They are either in your cubiculum or in one of the chests in your bedchamber. Bring them back here and we can spread them on the other table there."

"Yes, of course. Pardon me, Publius. I won't be long."

Cylla's hands were back beneath the table and, as Dom left the room, she made a motion which told me she had parted her skirts to free her legs.

"Look!"

"No, damnation!" I stood up and walked angrily away from the table, angry at her and at myself. "Cylla, how can you do this to Dom?"

"To Dom? I am doing nothing to Dom. I'm doing it for you, look!"

I looked. Her naked legs were spread wide beneath the table.

"For the love of the sweet Christ! One of these days he's going to catch you!"

"Perhaps. But not today. I hid those plans too well. We have some time."

I turned my back on her, fighting to keep down the swelling in my treacherous crotch. I heard her stand up and move towards me until she stood in front of me, the perfect depiction of a decorous, dutiful Roman wife. She moved to the door of the room, looked out into the hallway and then came back to stand between me and the open doorway to the garden, so that her body was clearly outlined through her thin robe against the bright, early-morning sunlight. She stood spread-legged.

"Look, Publius." In my mind, I always hear her speaking in a sibilant whisper. "That's all you want to do, so look, and lust. Feel yourself grow hard and imagine what you could do inside me, how you would surge with spilling seed if only your iron will would let you." She pulled apart the skirts of her robe, revealing the beauty of her warm, soft, firm flesh, and showing me openly for the first time the breath-taking thick bush of red-gold hair at her centre. I gazed and grew hard, my ears straining for the first sounds of Dom's return. The glittering smile never left her eyes.

"Much as you might like to, you will never slide your hard smith's phallus into me, will you, Publius? That would be a sin against your wife. But your wife has been your wife for years now. She is beautiful, but she is familiar territory, no?"

I wanted to tell her not to soil my wife's name with her mouth but, God help me, I could only stare as she dug with one finger deep into her centre, churned it around and withdrew it, extending it to show me how it glistened with her juices.

"This is the unfamiliar, Publius. The illicit. This moisture that you yearn for is the forbidden fruit that keeps men young." She put the finger deep into her mouth, slowly sucked it clean and then held it out to me again. "This is why you look to me, to Cylla — because I can show you all the earthly delights, all the sinful excesses that wives do not deal in."

"Show them to your husband," I croaked, my throat swollen tight.

Her eyebrow went high, but neither in scorn, nor in derision. "He has no interest." I said nothing, and she smiled. "You do not believe me, do you? But why should I lie? What would I gain by it? Would it make you think me less wanton? Nothing could do that, could it? But that wantonness is what brings you here, so I accept your disapproval. Do you like this?" She ran her fingers through the bush of red-gold hair.

"Do that again," I whispered, almost choking.

"What? This?" She did it again, lingering long with that probing finger buried deep inside her before withdrawing it and offering it to me to taste. As I shook my head in refusal, I heard Dom returning. I watched her suck her finger clean again, knowing exactly how that hot mouth would feel around me, and then Dom walked back into the room, his head already bowed over the document he held unrolled between his hands. Cylla casually moved away from the revealing light of the doorway and I bent over the plans Dom laid out on the table, seeing nothing but the image of Cylla's mouth sucking on her finger.

That image, and the memory of her red-gold pubis stayed with me for days.