Jack Whyte - The Singing Sword

"Stop that!" I hissed.

"I can't," she moaned. "It's being here, so close to your place. Step closer. Let me smell the smoke on you."

Terrified of being discovered, but completely incapable of resisting, I stepped closer and she closed her eyes, inhaling deeply and then whimpering in her throat as she gained release. I knelt down on one knee, no longer caring who might happen by. "Show me! Show me how wet you are."

"How wet do you want me?"

"As wet as you can be."

She stuck her tongue between her lips and smiled, and then squatted lower and squirted a strong jet of urine to splatter on the floor of the hut. As I gazed in utter fascination, she straightened up slowly, clutching her skirts high around her waist and simply allowing the stream of urine to run down her legs and soak her sandals.

"Is that wet enough for you? You see? There are still new things to look at. Give me your hand." I shook my head. "Then give me something, a cloth."

I straightened up and handed her the kerchief I wore around my neck, and she dried her thighs, rubbing the cloth thoroughly in the wetness of her crotch before handing it back to me. I raised it to my face and sniffed it. She stepped from the hut.

"Your turn. You need to do it. I'll watch. If anyone comes, I'll warn you and you can take something down from a shelf for me." Her eyes were fixed on my crotch. "Do it, Publius. Now!"

I did, and it took only seconds with her hungry eyes on me and the vision of what I had just watched her do. When it was over she nodded.

"The third hour. But no sooner. It would not please you to meet us on the path by accident. I will be listening for you. Remember: forty paces behind the holly tree."

Then she turned and was gone, leaving me to attempt to reconstruct my day and to struggle against the temptation she had dangled in front of me for that afternoon.

IV

I rode hard all the way to Cylla's tryst that afternoon, cursing myself and debating my own sanity with every beat of my horse's hoofs, and at the end of my journey I tethered the animal to a sapling just inside the forest's edge, about fifty paces from the entry to the path that would take me to the clearing. The sun had passed into the fourth hour of its afternoon journey and it threw my shadow directly ahead of me as I walked. By that stage I was numb; I knew only that I was lost in a wilderness beyond my understanding and completely beyond my control, but it was that last, pusillanimous thought that finally stiffened my spine and gave me the strength to stop in my tracks and turn around. I knew that if I went into the woods to that clearing, if I took even one step along that pathway, I would have forsaken the last remnants of my pride and honour; if I stooped so low as to watch Cylla with another man, I would be betraying not only my family and all I held dear, but my own manhood, giving up total possession of my immortal soul to Cylla's beast as well as to my own.

My horse stood cropping the sparse grass beneath the trees where I had tethered him, and I leaned my full weight against his side for a spell, smelling the clean, equine odour of him. He smelt exactly like a horse, exactly as he should, sweaty and wholesome, and there was nothing false or specious about him. He was a horse, full of a horse's strength. He had no truck with anything that was not fit for horses. When he rutted, he rutted straightforwardly, without subterfuge, and only with a mare who was in season; otherwise, he did as horses do.

I had a ludicrous vision of him gazing in fascination at another stallion rutting with a mare, and I began to laugh, quietly at first, and then with more and more abandon and less and less sanity as I was struck by the ridiculous folly of what I was imagining and I saw myself clearly for what I had become.

I ended up sitting on the ground between his legs, laughing uproariously and then suddenly weeping; like the sensible animal he was, my horse moved away, eyeing me uneasily, which made me laugh and weep the more.

I regained my senses eventually and felt better than I had in a long, long time. And I knew, with the clarity of absolute certainty, that Cylla's game had ended. I had found my direction again, after years of wandering lost, and it had been pointed out to me by a horse! How many times had Equus called me a horse's arse? Now I knew Equus was wrong, but it had taken a horse to show me what I was, or should be: I was a man, and a maker of weapons; a smith and a soldier. I had no business with unmanly, lesser things, and from this day I would avoid them and regain the strength of my manhood.

I saw the fallen, rotting tree that I had noticed earlier, the reason for tethering my horse where I had. When you have a leg like mine, you watch always for easy means of mounting. I led him to it, climbed upon his back and pointed him away from the forest, down towards the stream among the bushes in the bottom of the valley. The trees here were sparse and small, no more than saplings; you could almost gallop among them.

On the bank of the stream, this time by an ancient, mossy stump, I dismounted again, took off my sandals and light leggings and then sat down, dangling my bare feet in the gurgling water. I watched tiny fish darting in the stillness of a lazy eddy by my side and let the soothing sound and touch of the cool waters wash me clean. And when I dressed again and left for home, it was without regret for Cylla or the game she was playing in the forest glade.

On the way home I was acutely conscious of the beauty of the day and of the scenery around me. The sprouting, unformed leaves had not yet lost their fragile newness and the moss of winter and spring was still bright green and moist; flowers bloomed among the grasses everywhere I looked and the air seemed full of butterflies and bees. At one point, I heard a crashing in the bushes and my horse shied nervously, scenting the bear that had already scented us and gone. I gentled him and then kicked him to a trot to get out of the area and leave the poor bear in peace; I had no quarrel with any animal that day. In this way, it took me far longer to get home than it had to arrive.

As I prepared to dismount outside the forge, I heard my name being called and turned to see one of the household servants running towards me, waving his arms. I stayed on my horse and waited until he ran right up to me, gasping for breath, with the news that Luceiia had been looking for me "for hours" and had sent him to the forge to wait for me and make sure that I went straight to her on my return.

As I strode into the villa, wondering what could be amiss, Luceiia came hurrying to meet me, her face pale, and I braced myself to hear bad news of the children or of Caius.

"Thank God you're here! Have you seen Domitius?"

I was taken off guard. "Domitius? Dom? No, he's in Aquae Sulis. He left this morning. Why?"

It was Luceiia's turn to frown and look nonplussed. "What do you mean, in Aquae Sulis? He was here less than an hour ago, looking for you."

My heart thudded and seemed to miss a beat. "Dom? No, he couldn't have been. He's away."

Luceiia was close to anger, impatient with my thick-skulled slowness. "Publius, listen to me! You have to find him. He is distraught. Something terrible has happened. I don't know what, but I'm afraid for Dom. He was wild, Publius, and there was blood on his clothes."

"Blood?" I was having difficulty taking in her words. "What do you mean, blood? How much blood? Whose? Tell me, Luceiia, in the name of God!"

She threw her hands apart in a gesture of helplessness. "I don't know, Publius! I don't know anything, except that something was very, very wrong and there was nothing I could do for him. He would not talk to me. He wanted only you and no one else. He was out of his senses, Publius — completely, totally undone. He burst into the house and I heard him shouting your name. When I came out to see what all the commotion was about, he was upstairs, rushing from room to room, all the while shouting for you.