Jack Whyte - The Singing Sword

The ultimate move in the game, its final stage of depravity, happened in the late spring of the year of the raid in which I was wounded, mere weeks after Caius told me of the amazing and impossible report that Claudius Seneca had been seen in Rome. Cylla arrived at the entrance to my smithy one morning and asked if she might speak with me alone. This was unprecedented. She had never approached me so openly before. I quaked with apprehension as I stepped outside into the bright sunlight to speak with her, but she put my mind at ease immediately by handing me a package of drawings, the design for a smelting oven I had lent to Dom some time earlier and which he had promised to return that day.

"Dom asked me to return these to you. He has gone into Aquae Sulis."

I blinked at her, my eyes still smarting from the bright sunlight. "Aquae Sulis? Why didn't you go with him? You usually do, don't you?"

"Yes, but not this time. I have no need." I looked closely at her, but there was no glitter in her eyes. I relaxed, but she went on.

"Publius, I have a suggestion to make. I know you have no wish to go beyond looking. You enjoy looking. We both know that. Now I would like you to look in a different way. Would you like that? I think you would."

I felt myself frowning and stepped further from the doorway of the smithy, leading her by the elbow around the corner into a narrow, brick-paved passageway between some storehouses. When I felt sure we were far enough removed from the door to avoid being overheard, I asked, keeping my voice low, "Cylla, what are you talking about? What could be different? What more is there to look at? I know you as well as any man could know you, using only his eyes. How can you improve on that?"

"Cylla."

"What?"

"Cylla. My name. You said it. You never use it."

"No, I never do, do I?"

"Use it again, now."

She smiled, but it was a strange smile. Had I not known her so well, I might have thought it was an uncertain smile, almost tremulous. I said nothing, and she went on.

"We are here in your domain, Publius, and not playing the game."

"So?" I was confused, unable to understand what she was saying.

"So, after — what? — seven years of not saying my name, would you please me on this summer day by calling me by my name again? Just once more?"

I was surprised and, in consequence, more cruel than I care to remember. "Humph!" I grunted, feeling uncomfortable at this departure from the norm. "We were speaking of looking, Cylla....Well, Cylla, I have watched you make love to yourself in every way, with everything from vegetables to the finest beeswax candles. What more is there to see?"

She gazed at me in silence for long moments and I tried to divine what she was thinking from the strange expression on her face, but then she laughed her old laugh and her eyes began to shine.

"Do I hear censure, Publius? Disgust? Come now, you love all of it. Cylla, your wanton Cylla, thrills you and excites you more than she disgusts you, does she not? No," she answered her own question, her voice becoming lighter with mockery. "No, perhaps not more than she disgusts you, but much more violently, far more pleasurably. I've seen you grow hard in spite of your disgust and your dislike of what you think of as your weakness, Publius, and I've watched you spill by hand the seed you would never give to me in any other way. But there is more."

"How? How can there be? What more?"

"Come to my house today and see."

"No. Not while Dom is away."

She gazed at me again. "I wonder if you will ever see what a fool you are in this, Publius. You will not betray your friend in his absence. You prefer to wait until he is nearby."

"That's enough, Cylla! Enough!"

She paused, then nodded. "Very well, then we shall choose another venue. Out of doors. In the woods."

"No! Against the rules. Not alone." I was growling through my temptation.

"I will not be alone. You will."

"What? What d'you mean?"

"What I said. I will be accompanied."

"My God, you're mad! Accompanied by whom? And what makes you think I would ever consider such a thing?"

"By a man. A lovely, stripling boy who cannot hear or speak, but lacks in nothing else."

"You are mad!"

She laughed again. "Mad? How? Because I invite you to watch? But I love having you watch me at my games, Publius! No one watches me better or more intently, more ravenously than you do. I truly thought you might enjoy watching someone else take for himself the pleasures you deny yourself. There would be no danger of discovery. You could watch and remain unseen! Think of it, Publius. The boy is deaf. He will not hear you approach to stand among the bushes, and he will make no sound, and I will bind his eyes so he is blind to all but the pleasures I will shower upon him for your pleasure." She paused, watching me closely, and when I said nothing she continued. "He is but a boy, Publius, though he performs like a stallion. He will be an instrument of pleasure, no more than that — a silent, unseeing, Unhearing instrument, manipulable as any of the others I have used in the past. Except that he will use me as a mare, and I will use him to exhaustion. Think, Publius. He will not see you there. But I will. And you will finally see me used as the slut I am in your eyes — ravaged and ridden, stretched and clutched, sweating and writhing, kneeling over a living, piercing phallus, impaling myself as I look over his head, watching you watching me, both of us wishing it were you in me." Her voice softened. "No broken rules, Publius, no departures from the game. It will still be only you and I. But I shall cover his eyes tightly when it is done, because I want you, Publius Varrus, to watch a man's seed seeping from the body of your playmate at least once. Think of it, Publius. For your eyes and for your lusts alone, and none to know of it save I."

"Sweet Christ!"

She cut me short. "No preaching, Publius! I will be there, with the boy, by the third hour after noon. You know the standing stone at the south-east corner of our land. A pathway leads into the woods from there. Count your steps and keep them short as mine. A hundred and twenty paces from the edge of the forest there, you will see a holly tree on the left of the path. Directly behind that tree, some forty paces further off the path, there is a clearing with a mossy bank fit for the bedding of a god. Don't be afraid of making noise. Remember, the boy is deaf and mute. I will be listening for your approach, but I will not wait for long. With a naked youth and a long, strong phallus nearby, I find I grow wet very quickly and must scratch my itch." She paused and leaned closer to me, sniffing deeply. "You are grimy and sooty and sweaty and smelly. I like that. The juice is trickling from me, down my thigh, right now. I want to lean, or sit somewhere and do things for us. Is there a place nearby?"

"No, for the love of God!"

"No. For the love of lust. What about your smithy? It looks dark."

"Are you mad? Equus is in there, and a dozen other people."

"What's that place?" She nodded towards a door.

"Nothing. A storeroom."

"Show me."

"No! Cylla, for the — "

"Then I shall look myself."

She walked forward and pulled the door open. The room was tiny, with barely enough space for a man to enter and reach the shelves that lined the interior. She stepped inside and turned to face me, pulling the bottom of her beautiful, light-blue gown up over her long, clean-muscled legs. I groaned in despair and excitement. This time she was really going to go too far, but I had already seen the glistening evidence of her arousal on the inner surface of her thighs; she had not been exaggerating. Her fingers were already busy and her knees began to give way as her back slid down the shelf-lined wall. In the dimness of the hut's interior her eyes looked glazed, so intense was her excitement. She reached out one hand to me, wet with her body's fluid. I had never known any woman who could get so wet so quickly. I glanced from side to side in fear, but there was no one to be seen. And then Cylla began to moan, deep in her throat, something I had never known her do before.