Escorted by a youngish knight of about the age of the Righ, in point of fact a quasi-legitimate half brother of the new-crowned monarch, who had been awarded the singular honor because he remained sober enough to walk and speak coherently, Bass and his party—four squires, two pages, and his two Kalmyks, Nugai and Yeuh, these last being combination bodyguards and bodyservants and both most accomplished at either task—were led up stairs and along corridors to a suite of rooms large enough to accommodate them all. While palace servants who had come along behind bearing the baggage set themselves to striking fire and lighting lamps and tapers, Nugai and Yuen, looking very grim and businesslike, padded around and about all the rooms, especially the largest, wherein their lord would abide the night.
Their jobs done, the servants would have departed, had a word from Bass not sent several racing off to fetch back water, both hot and cold and in such quantities that they began to silently wonder if the foreigner nobleman was not either drunker than he seemed or a little mad or both.
In their absence, two of the squires set themselves to unpacking, brushing, and otherwise caring for Bass’s clothing and effects, while the other two began to undress him. Yueh took the pillow-sword from its sheath, checked the point and both edges for sharpness, then resheathed it and put it in the sword rack built into the bedstead, before going about the making of the bed with Bass’s sheets and blankets and pillows.
By the time the palace servants had returned with buckets of cold well water and lazily steaming caldrons of hot, two of the squires had brought up their lord’s copper bathtub along with the small chest containing the lengths of cloth he used for washcloths and towels and the casket of fine milled soap that Sir Peter Fairley had had manufactured for him in York; the stuff did not lather very satisfactorily, to Bass’s way of thinking, but neither did it take off skin and often bum it as did much of the contemporary so-called soap, and the scent of the fresh crushed lavender with which it was infused reminded him of the aftershave he once had used years ago in another world and time. The very innovative Sir Pete was now working to formulate a decent shampoo, but had not yet gotten it to the production stage, he had averred when last he and Bass had talked.
“Bass, it ain’t as if I ain’t trying, see, but it’s just so many hours in a day, too. And right often, too, I got plans to do suthin’ of the next day and bang. I wakes up with a idea’s been slipping away from me for weeks and i knows if I don’t git on ‘er pronto, she’ll be gone under again.
“See, from the time I’s just a kid, 1 read whole bunches of books and all ’bout old guns, muzzleloaders and cap-and-ball revolvers and cannons and I don’t know whatall. Then, after I come back from the Nam and was trucking and had me some money to spend, I bought some reproductions—both percussion and flintlock, too, and even a minychure cannon, a Napoleon twelve-pounder that shot a fifty-caliber ball—and shot ’em alone and at matches with a muzzleloaders’ club. That’s why I knows so much about old guns and how they was made and all: but Bass, old buddy, knowing it, having it somewheres in your head, and being able to remember it when you wants to is two diffrunt things . . . and it don’t all the time work out and come up when I want it and what I need to remember when I want it.
“Like them friction primers for cannons, see, I knows they had the bastards back around the time of the Civil War and I knows they was a whole lot simpler to make and use than what I done come up with here, but I can’t up to right now remember just what the damn fuckers looked just like exac’ly or exac’ly how they worked, so I just had to to play around till I come up with somethm’ that I know is I too damn complicated and all, but at least it works mosta the time.
“So you and me and Buddy, we’ll just have to wash our hair with the soap until I gets the time to work on mixing up the right stuff to make shampoo. I got me a idea, too, on making up a batch of paste to go underneath armpits, stuff like they use to make before sprays and sticks come along; if I can put powdered talc in it. it might cut down on sweat-staining shirts and all. Then too, ol’ Carey Carr, he ain’t worried ’bout no shampoo, ’cause he’s losing his hair fast, but he does want some kind of shaving soap that’ll lather up stiff and thick, and I’ll work on that one, too, whenever J got the time or can make time.”
When he had made use of the chamberpot, bathed, and been dried and draped in his silken nightshirt, Bass sat on the edge of the high bed, sipped at one of his cordials, and chatted with Yueh. wondering idly just to where the usually faithful Nugai had wandered off with the young knight who had guided them all up from the feasting hall. At length, when he had finished the sweet, spicy draught, he bade Yueh good night and slipped under the bed coverings, his damp hair bound up in a guilted silken drawstring cap. He composed himself and was teetering upon the very verge of sleep when he heard a soft noise just outside the door to this room, where Yueh and Nugai would sleep each night that they remained here.
After a few moments, Nugai opened the door and padded in, trailed by a smaller, slighter figure draped in a voluminous hooded cloak. Since first he had been given to Bass’s service by Reichsherzog Wolfgang, years back, Nugai’s English had vastly improved, although his accents of German and his own harsh guttural language still surfaced on occasion, especially in his construction of phrases and sentences.
His yellow-brown face split in a white-toothed smile, he said, “Pliss, Your Grace, custom iss here to giff guest bedwarmer. When to refuse I tried, the Irischer knight to misunderstand did and offered his own bed services for His Grace this night, so better I thought it to accept young woman. She called Ita. So long in coming we were because to wash I made her to do, as Nugai knows His Grace wants womans to be. Nugai also to examine her hair and body and find no fleas or lice on her, also no sores she hass and teeth not rotten. Cannot send her away. Your Grace, or Righ Ronan offended will be iss said.”
“Oh, all right, Nugai, put her over on the other side of the bed—it’s wide enough to sleep me and four or five women in. But sleep I mean to do, and sleep only and that damned soon. Get you to sleep, too … unless you brought up more of them for you and Yueh,” said Bass, a little exasperatedly.
Again, he was almost asleep when he felt hesitant, starting and stopping movement on the rope-springed bed. Then a soft, warm body was pressed against his back and a tiny hand crept over his hip to seek between his legs and find what it sought there. He willed himself not to respond, but his body knew its needs far better than did his conscious mind. His duties in King Arthur’s service had kept him much apart from Krystal, his wife, and, of recent months, whenever they had been together and had tried sex, she had not seemed to take much if any enjoyment from it, so it had often been unfulfilling for him as well. And so, hating himself, but uncontrollably driven, he rolled onto his back and drew her slim, light body up onto his own.
Taking her head between his hands, he kissed her eyelids, then her silken-skinned throat, then at last her lips, soft as rose petals, teasing the sharp tip of her small tongue with his larger one. Leaving her head, his seeking hands found first her breasts, now pressed between them, then her creamy-soft buttocks, which he kneaded powerfully, as the kiss lengthened and deepened and both of her own hands kept up their maddening work between his trembling legs.
At last, she tore her lips and mouth away from his, then slid down the length of his body, pulled up his nightshirt, and began to apply her tiny tongue and soft lips and little nibbling teeth to his penis and scrotum, all the while pulling at his chest and pubic hair, pinching his nipples and rolling them between her fingers.
Bass’s agony was exquisite. He felt as if he had been suspended in boiling lava, and it took the still functional, still rational part of his mind long seconds to realize that the man he could hear groaning … in pain? . . . was he. And when, after short, endless, eon-long minutes of suffering unbearable pleasure wrought upon his flesh by this so-welcome torturer, he ejaculated, it seemed that, he feared that, he prayed that, it never would cease, that all his blood and life and being would escape in pain and joy through his spasming urethra.