But even after the last spasms had died away, the girl’s mouth continued to enfold him, her tongue and lips now working gently, lingeringly, up and down and around, while her palms caressed his sweat-soaked, trembling body in circular motions. And slowly, ever so slowly, his utterly spent body began to recuperate and he felt a feathery tickle of desire returning to his damp loins.
The girl became aware of these developments, too. and commenced again her earlier activities, but Bass pulled away from her in a swift, abrupt movement. Rearranging her slender body and limbs, he knelt between her splayed legs, grasped her buttocks in his two hands, and lifted her up to where his tongue and lips could have easy access to the tangle of curly blond hairs and the red-pink labia that they failed to conceal.
Oblivious to the girl’s moans—first soft, then lou and still louder—whimpers and, finally, piercing screai he busied lips and tongue and now-nibbling, now-pinchi teeth upon her hot, wet flesh. When at last he lowered body to the bed again and drew his shoulders out from beneath her legs, she just lay there, eyes tight shut, gasping and breathing in great, ragged breaths, the entire length of her jerking with muscle spasms.
He allowed her the time to recover to a point at which she was once more breathing almost normally ana nad all but ceased to jerk and gasp, then he once more lifted her flat buttocks, but this time to place a pillow beneath them. Her eyes came open—pools of tears misting over dark-blue irises—as she felt his weight upon her, and her mouth opened as if to speak, but by then he was slowly entering her body, damp and hot as live steam to his swollen flesh. Not until morning did he recall how she had whimpered and sobbed, gaspingly, that first time he entered her, tensing her body and sinking her blunt little nails into his shoulders.
Bass was awakened at dawn by Nugai, who had borne in a tray which held Bass’s specially made teapot, softly steaming with the familiar herbal tea that the talented Kalmyk brewed so artfully that Bass found it not much dissimilar to the green teas of his own world and time and relished it and its sovereign restorative powers.
Grinning so widely that it seemed his broad face must surely split, the short, powerful man said, “Good girl, yess? His Grace much less tense seems today.”
“Mind your own misbegotten business, you grinning yellow ape!” snapped Bass, then he relaxed, smiling himself, and said, “Sorry. Nugai, I didn’t mean it, you know that. Yes, a good girl. You know, since the Lady Krystal and I … well, I’d forgotten until last night just how good and satisfying it all can be. There is simply no substitute for good sex shared with a willing and responsive partner.”
Nugai nodded, still grinning, though not so widely as earlier. “Nugai will wake up girl and take her back elowstairs, yess?”
Bass shook his head. “No, Nugai will go into the other rooms and waken my squires and tell them to set up the bathtub in here again, then Nugai or one of them will go slow and get servants up here with enough water for two baths. For food, his Grace will have bread, cold bacon, cheese, and some hard-boiled eggs, this gray dawn. Enough to feed His Grace, four squires, two pages, two Kalmyks . . . and one small female.”
As the door softly closed behind the cat-footed Kalmyk, Bass slipped from beneath the coverings and fumbled for the chamberpot . . . and that was when he took notice of the profusion of dried bloodstains adorning the front of his nightshirt.
“What the hell . . . ?” he thought. “Did the little minx really bite me? Or did I . . . ? Wait a minute, that first time that I … that we … and she … God in heaven, don’t tell me she was a virgin’?”
Affairs of his bladder forgotten, he raised his gown and found more dried blood—his public hair was matted with it—but not one break in the skin anywhere on him to account for it. That was when he gently peeled back the sheet and blankets from off the still-sleeping Ita. There were streaks and smears of blood on the backs of her thighs and on her lower buttocks, all of the lower parts of her body he could see, since she was sleeping curled up on her side. However, the sheet just beyond her and his third pillow looked as if someone had been slaughtering hogs on them.
Weak-kneed, he sank down onto the edge of the bed once more. “My sweet Jesus,” he muttered to himself, “what kind of a ravening beast has living in this world made of the Bass Foster that used to be? How old is this poor child, sixteen? Maybe only fifteen? And last night I … but wait a minute, if she was a sheltered virgin, how the hell did she have her felatio down so pat, huh? How . . . ?”
Then there came a knock upon the door, and he hurriedly drew the covers back up over the stirring, naked, bloody girl and over his own bloodstained lap as well, before he bade the knocker enter.
Righ Ronan seemed a little puzzled by Bass’s words, and had they two not been speaking English, Bass would have thought he had said the wrong thing in the Gaelic and Mediaeval French he was trying hard to learn quickly. He repeated himself.
And Ronan replied, “Your Grace of Norfolk, I have no bonaghts, this is the principal reason why my borders are ever so vulnerable to the inroads of that unhung bandit and oathbreaker who chooses to style himself King of Ulaid these days. The Airgialla army, such as it is, is all in Connachta, with that of my patron, the Ard-Righ. I would have thought you knew, since you serve him too.”
With a sinking feeling, Bass began to wonder just what the overjovial Brian VIII was up to with him and his squadron. Did the Ard-Righ really think that he was dumb enough to try to take on the whole Ulaid army—said to number a couple of thousand, foot and horse—with only an unsupported squadron of galloglaiches, a hundred and twenty Kalmyks, and six light field pieces? It would be suicide, pure and simple. Before he’d do it, he’d reboard his ships and head back to England, and if Arthur wouldn’t have him for deserting Brian, he’d sail to the Empire and look up Emperor Egon and lay claim to his Mark of Velegrad and to bloody hell with Ulaid, Brian, Arthur, and their bloodthirsty games of statecraft.
Later, after he had left the Righ, he voiced some of these same bitter thoughts to Wolfgang, Sir Ali, and Baron Melchoro, where he had found them all lounging in the reception room of his suite, dipping cups of wine from out a keg they had found and appropriated somewhere in the palace or the town below.
“Be not rash, me in gut Freund und Vasall,” said Wolfgang, shaking a big forefinger at Bass. “Brian a most devious man most assuredly iss, but gut troops he still values, and to fritter them avay he vould not. No, a gut mind he knows you haf, Herzog Bass, and to use it he thinks you vill, faced with such an impossibility, militarily.”
Melchoro put in, “Bass, this Ulaid cannot be attacked from the sea without anticipation of far heavier losses of ships and men than we could endure, nor can we do more than hit-and-run raiding with our available land force, all mounted, as it is. Despite the impression left you by Brian’s words, Airgialla has no available foot to support us. Therefore, we must devise some other means to achieve the ends desired by our employer. Yes?”
Bass thought to himself, “Von Clausewitz of my world and time called war diplomacy by other means … or was it Bismarck? Anyway, if that’s so, then isn’t diplomacy war by other means? Maybe if we have no way of shooting this chicken-raiding fox, we can trap him or go into his den and smoke him out.”
To Sir AH, he said, “Go find my squires, will you. Send one to fetch those two Italian knights up here, tell another to seek out Nugai, and yet another to try to find Sir Conn and Sir Colum. As for the fourth . . . Melchoro, do you know where Don Diego might be just now?”
The column crossed from Airgialla into Ulaid northeast of Armagh, near to the southern shore of Lough Neagh, taking the road that skirted the lough and following its way through croplands and wastes. Although gates of small castles and hilltop palisades slammed shut and hastily armed men appeared on wall walks, with the smoke spirals of slow matches plain to be seen, no one of the mounted men made any move toward these pitiful defenses, for this was not a raid they rode, but a diplomatic mission.