At the Pleasure of the King

The King pretended to listen to prophet by staring at the flecks of food that were caught in the old man's dry beard. For a desert ascetic, he sure ate enough roasted lamb for three strong soldiers on his monthly visits to the palace. Lamb. That's what the old fraud was nattering on about again, the same tired story of the poor man's lamb.

"This is a lesson I have already learned," the King interrupted, "in more ways that you could ever understand. Give me something new or get out. I am tired today."

"You are always tired of hearing the truth. It's why you surround yourself with fawners and poets." The old man spat on the polished floor like he was standing in the dirt under some provincial judge's tree. The King had known him long enough to see it for what it was: not a lack of manners, but a blatant act of disrespect.

I've have enough of this for two reigns. Execute him. His tongue lashed against the roof of his mouth like a spirited horse's does against the bit. His lungs burned to give them breath. His fingers plucked against unseen lyre strings to sing the man's death. The King dug the heels of both hands into his closed eyes until he could see the night sky behind his lids. "Escort Nathan out. Feed him a good meal. Equip him for another month in the mountains."

"I am not done with you, you unruly shepherd!" Furious spittle joined the crumbs of leftover bread under the ancient man's chin.

"No," the King said as he traced the line of a leather thong tied around his wrist, one salvaged from a sling he'd made many years ago, "but I am very nearly done with you."

The old prophet knew the King's moods. He knew how far to tread on the man's considerable piety and when to back away from trampling the hem of his finely-woven ego. He turned on his heel and left, trailing a stream of curses and muttered proclamations.

The King's body was heavy, like he'd been riding along the border all day, even though it was only a short time past the noon meal. He felt every step from his throne to his chambers tearing up through the bones of his feet. Every scrape of the butt of a spear, every crisp salute of a palace guard he passed banging against a bronze breastplate lanced into his ears and down his neck.

When the door of his chambers closed him into privacy, he didn't bother waiting for the slaves to undress him. It was a custom he still found irksome, except for the help in putting on his armor. He pulled the cords tying the gemstone-weighted ephod he wore for official palace appearances free with such force that he snapped two of them before letting the whole thing slump against the side of his bed. He remembered trembling teenage fingers tying it on for the first time in solitude. He remembered a time when it hadn't felt like the hood blinding a hawk.

The finely dyed and embroidered robe followed into the pile, crowned with the ridiculous gilt sandals he hated most. Shoes were honest things with a clear purpose. It made no more sense to him to cover them in leaves of gold than it did to gild the blade of a sword. He was told he must wear them, though, because most who were granted audience remained low to the ground. All the ever saw of the King from whom they begged favor were his royal toes. He'd have liked to have landed a golden kick in the ribs of the old prophet today, but even great kings answer to one higher still. Dressed only in the simple woven linen robe he preferred in private, the King eyed the deep bathing pool at the other end of his chambers. He considered his greatest comforts.

"Kariel," he called out for his harem master, who was lurking at the edges of the chamber, as usual. "Bring me Bathsheba."

"Sire," the slim man materialized from an alcove behind a curtain, "she is still striped from your last time together. One of the others, I will bring you. There are two concubines you have not even sampled yet."

"No. I know my own taste. I know what I need."

"Please," Kariel spoke with uncommon concern, "there are others who will tolerate that kind of treatment, some who will beg for it. I know your taste, too, Your Majesty. It's why you have me to watch over the harem. Let her rest a few days more. I fear you will be most displeased by the marks."

"Bathsheba. Now."

"Yes, my King," he replied before ducking back into the alcove. He knew what moods not to test.

The King made the most of his time by setting a reed basket with some of the implements of love play at the edge of the bathing pool before dragging a heavy wicker screen from the entrance to the terrace closer to the pool's edge. Two footmen tried to help him before following his pointed command to leave him be for the rest of the afternoon and to take the rest of the servants with them. He knelt behind the screen, hidden from the alcove that lead to the women's quarters. Kariel did not return; beauty walked in his place.

Bathsheba wore a simple robe like his, suited to the heat of the city in summer and being sure her husband wouldn't call for her again so soon. A thin veil, the green of a calm sea, draped over her hair and down across her high breasts, highlighting more than it hid. Her feet were bare.

"How like a deer you are," he said softly through the slats of the screen, "every step trembling as you approach the pool. Every muscle tensed with grace."

"An admirer has found me," she said as she walked to the edge of the bath. The roof was cut away above it to allow light and water to collect inside. "Some poet, I think."

"No," he replied, "only the night sky."

"It's true," she inclined her head towards the screen. The wicker was covered in a powder ground from lapis lazuli studded with golden stars. "All I see are stars. If it were the true night sky, though, I'd see the moon."

She pushed the veil off her forehead with both hands. It whispered as it pooled on the floor at her feet. She had not even had time to kohl her eyes before she was summoned, so they were ringed only with her own black lashes. Her lips were as red and full as the skin of a pomegranate.

"The moon is hiding, Lady. It's ashamed to show itself in the same night as you. Your beauty's overthrown the heavens themselves."

"Ah, so the moon is jealous, then?" She unpinned the linen shift at each shoulder but did not let it fall. "I know someone it should meet. They have much in common."

She turned her back to the screen before lifting the heavy black waves that trailed down between her shoulders. She twisted them together, folded them over, and secured them with the golden pins from her dress. The back of her neck made him stiff as bronze under the light weight of his robe. She let the two halves of her dress fall to where they caught against the swell of her hips. Across the sand-pale skin of her back, fine purple lines, at least two dozen, cut at all horizons across her spine. The far edges of each lash mark were dawning yellow. When he'd seen the welts a few days ago, they had been the raised red script of his lust, to have her through breaking. She hadn't made a sound while he carved them into her body, though he heard her breath exploding out of her nose like the snort of a horse under heavy chariot.

She bunched the fabric at her waist and dropped it to the floor with her veil. Her round buttocks bloomed with the marks of his hungry mouth. The half-moons of where his teeth had been were still nearly black, the oval of where he had sucked in her flesh mottled purple and green. Her skin was a wondrous garden of the colors his desire could raise.

The King reached under his robe to run his fingertips along the fevered length of his cock. "Turn around," he said through the slats of the screen.

"Turn around?" she asked, peering over her shoulder with half a closed-lipped smile while her feet remained set. "To what? Expose my breasts to the night? You see what happened last time," she said as she ran one pale hand down from her waist to cup one spotted cheek, "it just so happened that the night was full of wolves."

"You need a shepherd, then," he closed his fist around his burning length and stroked it to the tip, "to keep the wolves away."

"Shepherds are more trouble than wolves." She stepped backward into the pool, her legs disappearing in water to her knees. "But if you were really the night sky, you would know it. You would see what they get up to alone in the hills after the sun goes down."

One of the things he loved best about Bathsheba was that she had two different beauties, one as cool as the shadows themselves when she was in them and one that shone forth only under full sunlight. Her black hair cast back copper light when she stepped into the column of light over the pool. Rings of green lit her brown eyes. It was like watching spring come to the slopes of a mountain. The full range of colors in her bruises was even more spectacular. She turned to face the screen at last.

Her breasts, when he'd first seen them, had been pointed and angular, the tips completely subsumed by her brown areolae and nipples smaller than the end of his smallest finger. Motherhood had left her waist unchanged for the most part and widened her hips half a hand's breadth, but it had worked a wonder on her breasts. They still sloped sharply down from her clavicles but swelled beneath to a roundness too full to hold in one of his hands. Her areolae had grown darker and her nipples lengthened and thickened. If he woke up desiring her in the night but did not want her wakened in the women's quarters, he sucked the first digit of his middle finger between his lips.

Her magnificent breasts, which only saw the sun under the open skylight of her baths, were flecked with small, dark marks, like the reverse of the night sky behind which he crouched. It was impossible to tell what had left each individual bruise; unlike her back and buttocks, her breasts swayed with every strike of the reed or of his hand. They melted into his mouth, against his teeth. Had he wrapped them in silk cord last time until they turned the color of her lips. It was a game they often played, usually with his tongue buried in the heavy curls between her legs while she struggled against the conflicting intensities of pleasure and pain. Remembering and seeing the evidence that he'd possessed her so thoroughly and so recently made his cock pulse hot in his fist.

She stepped down into the nadir of the bathing pool, the water covering her to mid-thigh. She scooped her palms together under the surface and rained shining streams of water over her shoulders, over her belly. Drops ran down her sides and down the steep angle of her breasts. He watched one drop, clinging precariously along the bottom edge of her right nipple, always filling, stretching, and threatening to fall back into the pool. He hung all of his self-control on that one drop, holding his exhalation until the swollen prism grew too heavy and splashed down.

Breath and action rushed out of him at once. He ripped free of his simple robe as he stood, his cock curving up before him, red and ready to take her. He shoved the screen aside with enough force to send it clattering in protest against the smooth stone until it skidded to a stop against a support column. She looked at him with no hint of surprise: her full lips curved into a smile in miniature, her eyes looked steadily at him through lowered lashes. She didn't even flinch when the flying screen banged into the floor.

The King charged into the bathing pool. He bore her down with his weight until she sat heavily on the first step, the water up to her waist. He led with his mouth, latching onto the nipple that had dripped the single drop that destroyed the last vestige of control he had over himself while he watched her bathe. He sucked it greedily into his mouth, not stopping at the nipple but taking in as much of her breast as would fit, digging his teeth into her soft, pale skin once more. He dropped to his knees in front of her, his hands kneading and pulling at her breasts, tugging their womanly fullness into the long, pyramid shapes of her more maidenly days. He moved his mouth from one nipple to the other, sucking each nub in against his teeth. He lusted most to hear her, a moan of pleasure, even a cry of pain, anything that would show him she was experiencing passion, too.

She was silent.

He pushed her knees further apart in the water and entered her roughly with two fingers. Her channel was hot and slick with more than just the water of bath. He gave her no time to even adjust her seating on the step, his forearm frothing the water between them as he stroked into her. He dropped his other hand from her breast and blurred its fingers in bubbling water, rubbing furiously at her erect clit. He found a rhythm he could hold that gave no quarter but did allow him to look up at her face past her breasts, which bounced with every brutal smack of the flats of his fingers against her black pubic hair. She stared down at him intently, her breath short and shallow through her nose, but still she didn't so much as sigh.

He pushed a third finger into her, struggling to keep them going inside her tight walls despite all the wetness within and without. She closed her eyes tightly and set her jaw. Her nipples tightened into harder points even than he had raised with his mouth and teeth, and the grip of her orgasm stopped the pounding of his fingers inside her.

The only sounds in the chamber that the King could ascertain over the pounding of blood in his ears was the sloshing of bath water and his own breath, which deepened and grew into frustrated, furious grunts.

"Why?" he demanded, pulling his hands from between her legs. "Why won't you moan for me or say my name?" He pressed the palms of his hands against her cheeks and crushed his lips to hers. "Why?" he whispered, pressing their foreheads together. "I can feel your body taking its pleasure, my love, what am I not unlocking in your heart?"

With his head shading her face from the light that poured in overhead, her beauty went back to its cool phase, the one he'd first known her by. She was as imperious as a stone angel. "What do locks mean to the King?"

"What indeed." A heat flashed in him like the summer sun hammering down against his breastplate, the real one that had stopped a dozen arrows, not the one he wore to play at being a warrior in the safety of his own court. It flashed low into his belly, into his neglected cock that had only grown harder at the sight of her coming, her defiance. He stood and turned her roughly over onto her belly against the polished floor, her legs dangling down into the bath, and her womanly fruits spread tantalizingly open before him.

There had been other times, other baths, when she'd held that position half the night to tempt him away from maps and troop maneuvers. He tapped and rubbed her swollen clit with the tip of his cock. A slight shift in her hips told him that she wanted more of what she was in no mood of late to ask him to do.

It mattered not at all what she wanted. He wanted to hear her respond to him, to give him any animal sound that betrayed the beating heart under her measured words. What do locks mean to the King?

He reached into the reed basket beside the pool for a jar of thick ointment. He rubbed it along his shaft and wiped the oily residue from his fingers against the wrinkled opening of her ass. Stretching her wide with a hand on each full cheek, he probed her tight opening before pushing past her two twitching rings of muscle. Once his smooth head was clear and he was wrapped tightly in her, he gave no quarter.

His hips slammed into her, the wet skin of their thighs sticking together and peeling apart with each savage thrust. He dug his fingers into the hollow places on the front of her pelvis to drag her back into him with even greater force. She fit his hands so well. She was made for him by the Master -- he knew, because she also came with so much trouble and it was the Master's way of teaching those He loved.

The King panted over his bride's bare back, feeling the boiling seed rise inside him. Except for the sighs of breath he compressed out of her with deep thrusts into her ass, she was silent. Fury burned hotter in him than the need to come. There were many ways to claim her, but one he wanted far more than others.

He stayed buried in her ass while he pulled her up off the floor. He rolled their hips to the side together so that he was sitting at the edge of the bathing pool and she was impaled in his lap. He rocked her back against his chest, the temporary reprieve from mad thrusting slowing the charge of his semen. He bit her shoulder hard enough to leave another of those blooming marks; she made no sound. He pinched and slapped at her breasts; she spread her legs over his knees and ground her ass against him, but didn't so much as gasp.

The King dropped his hands lower, to her spread center. She was slick with desire and her previous orgasm. He speared two fingers inside her, expecting more of her steely silence while he fucked her to yet another orgasm.

She gasped.

He was so uncertain of the sound over the swish of her feet trailing into the water that he thrust his fingers into her again, deeper. She tried to strangle something that might have been a moan before it left her lips, but he was sure he'd heard it that time.

He wrapped one arm tightly around her waist to keep her from moving away from him as he blindly felt around in the basket beside him. He drew out a carved and oiled wooden phallus, a good approximation of his own. She spread her lips with her fingers so he could push it inside her.

The intimacy of feeling the wood enter her, separated from the throbbing length of his own cock by only the thin wall of muscle, drove a bellowing moan from his lungs. She answered with a hiccupping sigh, an answering moan of pleasure she was desperately suppressing.

"Don't lie now, love," he murmured against the side of her neck, "your body's already betrayed that I've found what you want." He set a slow tempo of deep thrusts and long drags out to the edges of her clasping lips. To his greatest pleasure of the day, she shifted her weight forward across his lap so she had more mobility in riding the real cock he had buried in her ass and the simulacrum he was holding inside her. Her hips rolled, rippling the marked skin of her back.

"Two men," he marveled, watching and feeling on every level as she set her own pace of filling herself over and over. "Is that's what's kept you holding your pleasure back from me all this time?"

"Yes," she gasped. All resolve to remain silent had gone to ash against the licking flames of her desire.

"Why?" he insisted, grabbing her hair tightly in the fist that wasn't thrusting the phallus with greater urgency inside her clenching pussy.

"Guilty," she moaned. "Can't...ahhh...can't take pleasure from what we've done."

Her confession should have made his blood colder than the winter wind. Instead it kindled a roaring, singular drive in him to make her come so hard she forgot to be ashamed. If he could give her that, perhaps he could have it for himself one day, too. He thrust up to meet her with both cocks, her steady rhythm deteriorating into a frenzied staccato of their grunts and splashes.

"Husband and lover," he hissed in her ear, holding it close to his lips with the hand curled in her hair. "You wanted them then and you want them now."

"Yes!" Her back arched against him. Her toes pointed rigid from her knees to the bottom of the pool.

"Suffer, confess, and be free."

Her orgasm was a shuddering scream that started low in her belly and rippled out from her throat and pelvis alike. She tossed her head as she thrashed against his cock but he held her tight against him. The pins dropped from her hair, pinging against the stone floor. That sound, that last metallic drop, freed his own orgasm to tumble out into her clenching ass.